THE GHOST

(SPRING 1941.)

The Venetian mirror was, she thought, put together in
two pieces; they were of one period and the glass was flawed.
The frame was silver-grey. The surface of the old glass was
grey-green. It was or was not one of the outstanding treasures
of the room, she stood in.

Her back was to the window. Outside she felt the cool,
translucent green of young-spring branches. The man who stood
behind her loomed disproportionate. She felt his presence, she
knew he was there, but his being there was as impersonal as the
wave of cold green that would be, she believed, reflected in the
old glass, if she moved slightly to the right. As she stood,
she saw nothing in the mirror.

Then it occurred to her in the bright daylight, that if
she moved forward or moved a half-pace to the right, placed her-
self directly before the frame, she would perhaps see nothing
at all. It occurred to her that this might be, to use the new
phrase they had coined, a "booby-trap".

Or you would look in the mirror and there would be your
face, your contour, the blue voile of the shaped turban, the
slightly worn nap of the blue cloth jacket, the soft woven-wool
pattern of the Persian design of the scarf, knotted at your
throat. The face would be angular, with the lines and plages

2.

refined down, not so much distorted as conventionalized and de-
personalized by fatigue. You would see that face, recognize it
and at the gentle persistence of the mannered voice going on and
on, as if frightened not so much for himself as for you, you would
frown slightly at the reflection, with the glass flaws lending
plausibility to the reflection - for that dot-dot-dot like a
ripple on static grey-green of the clouded lagoon, *would stand
between* you, facing the mirror and the slightly unfamiliar reflection.

Like Euclid, you could step forward and by drawing a mental
straight line, you could prove angles, an angle of incidence (was
it *not*?) that correlated or equalled, an angle of reflection?
Then having proved that a dot-dot-dot was a flaw in seventeenth
century, miraculously unbroken glass, and made, as it were, a
perfect little fence or hedge between self and reflected self,
and that there was a self standing on a square of carpet and a
self in the natural order of things, reflected, at its proper dis-
tance, you could answer the voice, play the game that it was so
anxiously playing. He thinks I am quite mad. He does not however,
know it.

If I step forward and look straight into the glass and
there is no reflection, I will have to tell him. He will be
kind about that. He will say,"yes, yes, I wondered if it would
work that way. I think that last occasion that it manifested

3.

was in my grandfather's time, about 1860, May it was, just this
time of the year. As a matter of fact, do you mind stepping
over those portfolios, I brought you here particularly to show
you this set of Chinese paintings; I don't know that the frame
for that second one, the violin or zither with the melon, goes
as well with the slightly stripey parchment colour, as the un-
varnished oak of the one hanging - or didn't you notice it -
to the left of the dolphin table you so admired, at the turn of
the stairs."

He would say something like that, but there would be more
of it, more carefully and particularly, yet very quickly pro-
nounced, with several careful dates, "would it be, do you think
1790 or the second empire "- but that was the little dancing
figures, that repeated themselves in porcelain on a circle of
glass on the dining-room table, around the heap of striped rose
and white camellias. When she had spoken of the flowers, at
lunch-time, he had said, "yes, yes, they recall some specially
artificial period, don't you think, I can't decide whether it's
1790 or the second empire."

She would see the face, angular, and not so much chizzled

4.

as worn away, whittled away or gnawed into by fatigue. Or not.
She would see a skull; that stone skull, crowned with heavy raw
un-cut priceless jewels in the Harachin on the hill in Prague,
was the one of which she now thought, standing on the strip of
carpet before the Venetian glass that was not broken but fitted
in two sections; the lower one about a third or a quarter the
width of the upper.

The glass was evidently fitted like that, the two pieces
matched. There was the clear dark line, drawn like an ink-line
on a piece of slightly tinny silver paper. This separated the
upper section of the old glass from the lower. But for almost
an infinitesimal segment of a second, as she stood on the carpet
and heard the voice going on, she knew that the black line would
dissolve, that she would stand there and turn and answer the
voice or that she would step slightly to the right and face the
glass; she would face the glass and she would or she would not
see the direct reflection, through the long narrow window at her
back, of the meticulously outlined branches of the beech-trees.
The leaves would be reflected ridiculously and meticulously in
the flawed silver of the Venetian mirror. They were drawn, each
leaf separate with ridiculous painstaking care; the colour,
criticising, you would say, was ridiculous; there was too much
gold in the young green, the leaves were too perfect, the trunks

5.

of the tall trees were too amber and the spring shadows that
May morning - for it was still morning by the sun - too
insistently differentiated.

The sweep of the drive was ordinary, there were country
cows, not long horned elk in the grass. In the woods behind
the house, there were sheds and pig-pens and a walled garden
that any child might pencil carefully, with a well and a bucket,
from a copy in a drawing book. Carefully, any thoughtful child
might draw the house, the steps, the cremulated turrets of the
roof, the separate squares of the stone building blocks.
Carefully, any child might, almost you might say set up the
house, the Hall, from stone bricks; carefully, he might pencil
it in a drawing book from this obvious original. Carefully -
O, nothing of these words formed any thought in her head, as she
stood on the square of carpet. But careful, something whis-
pered; though she was acquainted with the voice, it came from
a cavity. It came from a vacuum, it came from nowhere.

She did not step to the right, she did not test the mirror.
She did not test herself; it was all a charade, a masque here.
Here, it was more than a game of keeping one's head up, it was
more than a trial of unrecorded endurance. There was no note-
book, no text-book, no religious manual, no prayer-book to
show them here how to direct knees, how to conduct hands, how
to correlate elbows. The whole skeleton had become alive, a

6.

skeleton in a cupboard; everyone in London had it.

A curious thing, a mechanical and so far dependable instrumen
tr in the top part of the skeleton; that round ball or
box was like the pine-cone set upon the rod of the god, Hermes.
It was set there, a head, a brain, for the receiving and the
recording of sound, of thought, of vision. That was what the
round pine-apple or pine-cone of the head, was meant for. But
it had been devoted for the last year or year and a half, to
quite another function. It directed, within a body, a set of
bones, it jerked a wrist upward or directed extremely clever
knee-joints and ankles to perform cleverly the act of walking.
It opened lips, cleverly so that you did not hear the wooden
clatter of the lips when talking, of the Ventriloquist's dummy
that you were. The thing talked. You heard it talking. You
forgot to be astonished any more, at its ingenuity.

---

It was important that this doll, this dummy, this record-
ing instrument that received, through delicate sets of receiving
stations, wave-lengths of sound, vibrations of light, should
not be broken. Ironically she thought, or perceived through
that medium for which we have few descriptive phrases or even
defining names, that if only for the recording of the sound of
the voice, speaking as it were off-stage, though in reality

7.

projecting its tones and half-tohes a few feet behind her
shoulder in that small room, it would be a pity if it were lost.
It had endured fifty odd years, a half century and it was not
yet worn out.

Oddly it was only just now, she felt tuned or toned or
weathered or seasoned like a violin. She could record a whisper
or a breath, could differentiate good or bad, kindness or in-
difference, intolerance or mere casual acceptance. She was
there for recording - who was it had once called her a Re-
cording Angel?

Indifferent, tied to death, she knew the ultimate in-
difference. It was there in that glass. What she saw, would
see, might blaze such a heady trail of realization that even
she might be blinded by it. That sort of blinding would
cauterize her brain. It would be a flash, a white-hot searing
iron and then no more, not ever any more, pain. It was some-
thing she had earned, as she had on several other separate
occasions, earned the right to escape. She had this time, not
died once in London, but fifty times at least, as many times
put it, as she had years to the mere calendar record of her
life. Say one death for one year and the other two or three
casual deaths that had happened before this particular epoch of
war-years, could be discounted as little experiments in dying.

8.

Say she had been burnt to death in the last year, and
smothered and broken by falling masonry; once or twice, she
might have been smashed on a pavement while leaping from the
lap of flames across her own carpet; once or twice she might
have died miserably half-conscious in a shelter with the bombs
still falling outside. Of being crippled for life, she had no
fear. Someone had told her that someone-in-the-know had told
her, that they were going mercifully to "put out" more or less
hopeless cases; they would not have room nor time for cozening
the living-dead. That was a comfort; no mattress grave, at
any rate.

Jaunty and pert, she stood on the square of carpet now,
in the very-private writing-room of this well-known much pub-
licized critic, poet and novelist. Much photographed, much
caricatured, there was the ridiculous proud head that, in the
years immediately following the last "great" war, she had been
wont to find pompous, self-inflated, frivolous, flippant,
self-conscious and superficial. It had hounded you from the
illustrated papers, you came to associate that Roman profile
with the dentists, the hair-dresser, for those were the only
occasions, while waiting, that you deigned to leaf over this
type of fashionable journal. It put her out, somehow, that
suave, breezy success. She knew actually that this sort of

9.

publicity meant almost life and death to this aristocrat, this poet. He needed the money, they said. He was land-poor and treasure-poor, for his treasures (they were all around her in this house) could not, she believed, be sold, not that he would ever sell them. But even had he wanted to sell them, many of them were not his, to sell. They belonged to the nation and the nation was England and the nation, which she had so loved from the beginning, was poor.

---

The new post-war generation was on the way. It was waiting, outside that window, to crowd them off the scene. They were escapists, they lived in the much-maligned ivory-tower. They had no sense of the "realities", the new voices protested from Arizona and New Mexico, from the Pacific Coast, or from the hide-away of their Pacific coast in England. There was one answer to that, she had it. How many blitz-nights, did you spend in London? This was poor pride.

The effects, it was scientifically stated, of war-shock were not at once, registered. You stiffened, you endured, you waited for the next bout of bombing. Were bombs reality? If so, were the realists, who theorized about the new Britain, the new England, the new World, in the thick of it? Whose fault was it? And if yours and theirs, in what way would they,

10.

would you, record it?

Temperamentally, she herself could now at this moment draw
as it were a film across her eyes; the flawed glass would become
a diviner's crystal. Was that reality? Was what went on here,
these ghosts in this house, tangible presences, real? If so,
she was one of the realities. Did they know, the realists,
the reality of the ghost-world? Shelley was real. Proust whom
they now anathematized was real. The late Mrs. Woolf who
walked into a river, but a few weeks ago, was real. She was
real. Her death was a sign of failure, or not? Having done
her work, one camp protested, she was well out of it. Had she
done her work?

What was her work? What was the work of the artist?
One of them, the most sensational manifestation of the last
post-war generation stood at her shoulder; he would keep out
the unreality (would he?) of the new Britain. What was the new
Britain? What would become of this house? What would become
of the twisted angular beauty, that lady, EIdfrida, his sister
who at this moment was seated in the yellow-brocade chair before
the fire in the room she and her brother had just, some five or
some ten minutes ago left?

In five, in ten minutes he had whirled her through the
hall into several bed-rooms, his work-room, to show her some

11.

rare prints. In her head was the swift succession of impressions, birds framed in dark narrow wood, a bedspread with a rose-shell design of Cupids, butterflies, Psyche, sea-shells. The long mirror in his own (she surmised) bed-room with the carved shells or the real shells arranged and fastened to the mirror frames and gilded. She had wanted to ask him if they were carved shells or real shells gilded, but he had whirled her about in that short time, in that sport space, 'this dancing group was painted by an old Harlequin, don't you like the living quality of the figures, you see being actually a dancer ... he named a French name that left no memory of words but the chime of French, the French syllables like a tune, ran a run of notes in the easy flow of his own prose that he always uttered.'

There was a window looking out over the sunken garden and a topiary tree, and slightly shabby (even from this height) squares of box, around empty garden beds. The statues he said, had been wrapped up all winter. This he said (talking by the window) was a special day, a sort of fête-day for him, it always was, the first spring day when the statues were unwrapped. What are they wrapped in, she asked, simply for the sake of making a dialogue for this engaging monologue and he said (if she remembered) that they were wrapped in old sacking and (did he say?) dried leaves? She would never know just what

12.

he said, for the recording instrument, the mind, no matter how
carefully adjusted, does not retain more than the tiniest frac-
tion of the received impression. And though she could say,
standing in her blue voile turban cap, her dark blue skirt and
jacket, that wrappings had dropped, dead leaves and sacking of
false thought, exaggerated and wrong ways of thinking had peeled
off or dropped off, she could not say just when and where that
had happened. Decorous at least, at least it's all right.
At least Eldfrida, the frightening and fabulously intellectual
beauty, had smiled at her across the table.

At least, even if she had babbled and burbled and screamed
and flung herself or been flung into a epileptic fit (some sign
of release from that nightmare of London) they would have known
how to deal with her. At least, she hadn't talked too much, she
had talked, she had followed every gesture of the butler and
her hand had not trembled when she scooped out the slippery
dressed salad leaves into the crescent-shaped or half-moon plate
that was, she had realized in a panic, shoved away the other
side of the bread and butter plate, too far to be dealt with
properly. But she had successfully conveyed slippery leaves
to a half-moon salad plate that was not, as she had expected
easily at her elbow.

13.

A clock had struck two, very slowly and the salad leaves
had not slipped and slithered from the broad awkward spoons.
The clock had lied, as so much, so much about her, in the dead
leaves and sacking part of her, had lied. The clock had struck
two slowly, and it was by the sun, two hours ahead of the real
time. It was only a week since the new hour had been added to
the one extra hour of summer-time that they had retained all
winter, from last summer.

So, clocks, the infallible, were lying to them. Time
and space were the same thing, accordian-pleated sensations
could be folded close together, then by some miracle, time and
space could be unfolded, and give out a tune. Time and space
here played a tune and expectant of tricks, poltergeist mani-
festation even in broad daylight, she had not been expecting any
personal miracle of readjustment. Really, it did not matter.
Not any way. 1941, by an easy trick, could be resolved to 1914.
Then all those post-war years of Lethe or stagnation, did not
matter.

1941 or 1914 or, if you begin juggling with the figures,
1419 or 1491 made really the same pattern. A small vine-leaf,
an out-size paquerette, a large violet curved earthward; the
numbers could resolve themselves, the curved head of the budded
9 could be plucked from the pattern- what were numbers? As

14.

long ago, as 1914, whispers were getting about, there was a
German, there was a Jew, there was, by 1919 a tea-table topic,
there was time and space, there was Einstein, there was rela-
tivity.

There was a German, there was a Jew. There have been
too many Germans, there have been one or two, too many Jews;
1941 drew itself up; it was protected, either end, by the tall
guardsman, the I and the I protected it at either end, it was
fenced in, it was not left like 1914 with that 4, the cross,
to be taken up, to be carried through the trail of the years.
It was to have been all right afterwards.

What was afterwards? 1918, but that volitable 8 could be
turned about; it was a pair of glasses; it was a cat, you
could point ears and whiskers with a pencil; it was simply
nothing and nothing, 0 and 0, piled one upon the other. It was
a spiral, you were caught in it, going round and round like a
squirrel in a cage. But 1919 opened the door again, you ran
out like quicksilver from a broken thermometer (that scale of
time and hot and cold, was broken). You were out again, you
were scattered like seed from a broken seed-pod. You were to be
sown, like the parable seed, on good grown. You fell - on
what? 1920 caught you back into the circle of eternity. You
were caught again in the 0, the eternal circle. Now indeed

15.

you were to be born, re-born. 1920 witnessed a strange meta-
morphosis.

The mirror that she faced, didn't cloud over. If it had,
even at that, she could have brushed it aside, an optical de-
lusion, I have been so tired. Her lungs seemed to be expanding
with the young-green of the vibrant trees outside, and if she
stepped to one side, no doubt, she would simply see the re-
flected long window at her back. He would be interested, how-
ever. At lunch time, she had been caught glancing up at the
array of pictures like pictures in a famous gallery (they were
pictures in a famous gallery). She had said, as he caught her
glance, turned impolitely away from that little group about the
table, "I like the pink youth."

There was her host at her side, her friend who had brought
her here, was opposite. Criss-cross, beyond the oasis of pink
and white camellias, was the famous face of the lady, Elafrida.
They were talking of the things they talked about, a duck on a
pond, "and I said, look at it, he said, isn't it wonderful, I meant,
that it was like a duck on a screen-painting in the mist against
the reeds, but he said, 'O, I was thinking how good it would be to
eat.'" saying, "famine must have had an effect, don't you think,
on the actual aesthetic ideas of nations, was it the memory of

16.

the siege of Paris - 1870, I mean - that turned the minds of the French to food, made gourmets of them?

Stella had listened to all this, but her eyes were drawn upward, where painted velvet caught the colour but not the texture of the flowers in the table centre. Then the lady Eldfrida's brother who seemed to feel her slightest gesture, followed her glance and as she came back quickly with the remark, I like the pink youth, he had said yes, as if pleased at her choice of portraits, that is the ghost.