Sleep Has His House

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IT is not easy to describe my mother. Remote and starry, her sad stranger’s grace did not concern the landscape of the day. Should I say that she was beautiful or that she did not love me? Have shadows beauty? Does the night love her child?

WHAT A FEARFUL thing it can be to wake suddenly in the deepest hours of the night. Blackness all round; everything formless; the dark pressing against the eyeballs; the darkness a black thumb pressed to the starting eyeballs distended with dread. At first I don’t know what I am to become. I am like an embryo prematurely expelled from the womb. I remember nothing, know nothing: I haven’t the least idea what is making me tremble all over like a person suffering the effect of shock. It happens to be the cruellest shock of all I am suffering from: the brutal violence of the birth shock.

I must find myself, I cannot drown in so black a sea, and I begin to strike out, threshing about desperately, this way and that, in pursuit of the images which appear, transparent as the shadows of icicles, incorporated in the night-plasma. Floundering among the waves, my head just above water, the most shapeless water, I plunge into a picture: but at once the outlines disintegrate, coldly ... coldly ... no frost flower decorating a window-pane vanishes more inexorably in the sun. Into the ephemeral images I dive, one after the other: sometimes one crystallizes into a brief sharpness—never to permanence. At last I dive with extraordinary accuracy into my own body, which I see laid out, high and dry, above the receding tide. I am lying there like a long white fish on a slab. Is it a bed or a bier that I’m lying on? Or have I really been washed up on some beach or other?

I feel the sides of the thing I’m lying on with my hands. Yes, it’s a bed, no doubt of that. I’m myself, alive on a bed, not drowned or exposed in a morgue. Nor am I a fish on a fishermonger’s marble slab.

So far so good. But what bed it is that I’m lying on I’m not able to say. What room is this? I look round for a window. Is it there ...? Or there ...? Or perhaps over there, where, in any case, I feel a door ought to be? There’s not a single gleam, not a glimmer, to give me a clue. The whole room is as black as pitch. In fact, I’m not at all sure that it is a room. Something suggests to me now that I’m on board ship; I might be floating adrift on some tranquil sea. And yet there’s no sound, no motion, nothing to indicate either sea or land. Like a ghost train my life streams through my head, and I don’t know which point of the compass I’m facing.

How dark it is. The moon must have stolen away secretly. The stars have thrown their spears down and departed. There seems to be nothing except primordial chaos outside the window. Utterly still, utterly alone, I watch the darkness flower into transient symbols. And now there is danger somewhere, a slow, padded beat, like cushioned paws softly approaching. What an ominous sound that is to hear in the night.

THE first place I remember was warm and sunny. I remember the fiowers that grew there, and trees smelling of summer. The sun always seemed to shine in that country. I don’t remember seeing my parents often. A Japanese houseboy looked after me most of the time. He was kind and told me many beautiful stories. He drew pictures to please me, plants and zmagical fishes.

UP, UP, up swings the little boat, gently, languidly climbing the enormous swell, like drifting thistledown, scarcely seeming to move. The tiny boat hardly seems to be moving at all, but up it climbs on the huge blue undulation, up, up, towards the solemn clouds standing in tall arcades, far too bright for the eyes. In a dazzle of utter blue, the boat climbs to the wave’s shoulder. And down, down, down, it begins to travel, with emerald facets glittering on the blue. The descending swell bums translucent, a fiery barrow, entombing the amethyst shades of sea-lions, over which the little boat glides with blithe unconcern.

Painted ultramarine, with embossed eyes vigilant for water demons, the boat itself is the centre, the focal point, of a vast sea dream. And it is dreamlike and noticeable that the boat is oarless, sailless, motor-less, moving apparently of its own volition and without any help from the yellow man who sits in the stem, smiling down at his drawing of coloured inks. Held in fingers the colour of old piano keys, his brush traces the lines which are finer than hairs. The smooth progress of the boat does not disturb the accuracy of his touch. Intent, with the sun glistening like a second reflected sun on his bowed head, he placidly continues to map out a spidery complex of strokes, paying no attention to the course on which he is being carried. And now the swells rear into monsters plunging thunderously to the shore; but the boat has passed the protecting reef and floats on the shallow water. Here through a sparkling window the sea-floor can be seen, coral citadels, battlemented with shells of peculiar shapes and colours, parks and thickets of weed and gardens of lacy crimson sea-fern. The inhabitants of these subaqueous regions pass under the boat serenely on their mysterious business. Some are beautiful creations, some grotesque, some delicate as spun glass, others clumsy like the outcome of a bungled experiment; some baleful, some amusing, some benign; some fearsome or weird in their exaggerated strangeness. They are equipped with every conceivable variation of colour, texture and form: with frills, fans, fringes, spines, tentacles, filaments, helmets, swords; with appendages like trailing banners; with veils, periscopes, carapaces, suckers, pincers, razors, nets. This is clearly the source from which the yellow artist in the boat draws his inspiration. The picture is finished. He holds it up and smiles at the complicated fantasy evolved by his brush-strokes. He smiles, the smile growing unclear as a breaker shatters its glassy curve on the reef, and a miniature rainbow, a storm-dog, slowly dissolves in spray over his head.

The dream foreground which reappears is obscured by mantles of nostalgic melancholy. A soft antique rain falls. Twilight. The colours lavender to pigeon and pearl grey with the delicate green of a weeping willow tree on the left. Behind the willow hangs the suggestion of a cascade. In the middle distance, centrally placed, a small hill with a tomb—a simple shrine, it looks like—at the top.

The remote voices of antiquity whisper quietly together: the willow; the rain; the cascade. Presently a shadow moves on the lower slopes of the hill; at first a blur, gradually becoming distinguishable as the back view of a fox, belly close to the ground, long brush extended, cautiously stealing upwards. It moves along so secretly that it appears to creep like a snake. When it has almost reached the top, the fox stops, turns its head, and looks slowly from side to side. With its head turned, it crouches there for a while in furtive forlornness, then suddenly disappears. In its place stands a young girl with long and very lovely hair who clasps her grave-clothes with one hand, runs to the tomb and vanishes inside.

Immediately the light changes and brightens, the rain stops; there is a stir of suppressed excitement, an impression of movement, although no new shapes appear. The mists in the foreground weave and divide, expanding, convolving, coagulating, in the middle air where they remain suspended and faintly vibrant, transfused with rosy light which grows stronger and stronger as if the sun were rising behind them. As brightness culminates, the mist breaks into countless shimmering flakes, a swarm of petals speckles and flutters the air, a charming group of cherry trees is nodding gracefully in full flower.

Plangent music is heard as a crowd of courtiers enters, escorted by attendants who at once retire unobtrusively into the background, while the ladies and gentlemen arrange themselves under the cherry trees as if for the opening movement of a ballet. These are people of brilliance and distinction; it is impossible to imagine anything more decorous than their behaviour, at once natural and ceremonial, or more elegant than their elaborate garments in which, down sleeve and skirt, fold chimes with fold in every imaginable harmony of texture and hue. A sort of masque is now played out among them, with much gallantry on the part of the gentlemen and many exchanges of formal gifts, each with its appropriate message, sprays of blossom concealing love notes, caskets no less sparkling then the epigrams they contain. From time to time someone sings or plays on the lute or the zithern, or recites a poem fitting the situation of the moment. There is nothing in the least stilted about all this, and one gets the impression that it is not really a charade that is taking place, but a recognized ritual of conduct, the genuine expression of cordiality among these cultured and decorative exquisites.

Several moon-faced children are moving about here and there, and they are made a great fuss of, caressed and petted by everybody. The whole party is continuously in a state of fluidity, groups forming and breaking and re-forming with different units, so that the effect is that of a dazzling and constantly changing colour design, like those boxes of coloured beads which can be shaken into innumerable shining patterns. Two figures only remain static, the hub around which all this brilliance revolves. Perhaps it is Prince Genji himself with long hanging sleeves, the bright scarlet of his under-robe showing through the flowery tissue of his mantle, who is smiling so enigmatically at the First Princess in her clove-dyed silk dress.

Gradually the picture starts to fade out. Light, which has all the time emanated from some point behind the cherry trees, for several minutes has been imperceptibly fading and is now no longer rosy; the blossom-cloud has lost its lamplike glow and is mere pale flowering cherry. There is a general lowering of tone and tempo so that the figures of the courtiers seem less alive, their clothing less gay, their voices less melodious, as they slowly disperse. The music lingers a little while after the last one has vanished; but the notes diminish and dwindle into the tinkling of a child’s musical-box.

Silence. Livid swaths of light fall as if cut by a scythe. The trunks of the trees are obliterated, but the blossom can still be seen, a compressed blizzard, pallidly churning and milling. The unobserved and forgotten guards in the distance now suddenly assume drastic importance as they begin to converge on the centre. They wear bulky dark clothes and their faces are obscured as by masks or helmets. Each is an incipient catastrophe, intensely ominous in his stiff hierarchic motions.

A loudening rush of noise like escaping steam hisses out of the spinning mass in mid-air and seems to draw the figures together. As they finally gather in a compact group under this pallid magnet, they are caught in a funnel of dead lead-grey light flaring down from it, and for the first time are to be seen in detail. They are small, dressed in some indeterminate uniform, their faces under their helmets formally, flatly, impersonally evil. They are looking straight ahead, as if posed for a picture. Their expressions set, childish and racially inaccessible. After a while darkness steadily and methodically plucks them out of sight one by one.

The ashy remnant of what was once cherry blossom continues to rain through the blackness while the accompanying noise expands, spouts and crackles into an ear-splitting engine-roar. As this shattering thunder becomes quite unbearable, it explodes into silence. At the same instant the whirling formlessness bursts into a shower of leaflets which are catapulted in all directions. They drift downwards, and there is a momentary glimpse of them sucked and eddying madly in the up-draught of a flaming jungle village, fired palm trees ablaze and streaming. Vacuum.

LATER we crossed the sea to a colder country where my mother was