Seven Gothic Tales (38 page)

He sat for a while in silence.

“But what particularly pleases me about dreams,” he went on, “is this: that there the world creates itself around me without any effort on my part. Here, now, if I want to go to Gazi, I have to bargain for a boat, and to buy and pack my provisions, to tack up against the wind, and even to make my hands sore by rowing. And then, when I get to Gazi, what am I to do there? Of that also I must think. But in my dreams I find myself walking up a long row of stone steps which lead from the sea. These steps I have not seen before, yet I feel that to climb them is a great happiness, and that they will take me to something highly enjoyable. Or I find myself hunting in a long row of low hills, and I have got people with me with bows and arrows, and dogs in leads. But what I am to hunt, or why I have gone there, I do not know. One time I came into a room from a balcony, in the very early morning, and upon the stone floor stood a woman’s two little sandals, and at the same moment I thought: they are hers. And at that my heart overflowed with pleasure, rocked in ease. But I had taken no trouble. I had had no expense to get the woman. And at other times I have been aware that outside the door was a big black man, very black, who meant to kill me; but still I had done nothing to make him my enemy, and I shall just wait for the dream itself to inform me how to escape from him, for in myself I cannot find out how to do it. The air in my dreams, and particularly since I have
been in prison with Said, is always very high, and I generally see myself as a very small figure in a great landscape, or in a big house. In all this a young man would not take any pleasure at all; but to me, now, it holds such delight as does making water when you have finished with wine.”

“I do not know about it, Mira; I hardly ever dream,” said Lincoln.

“Oh, Lincoln, live forever,” said old Mira. “You dream indeed more than I do myself. Do I not know the dreamers when I meet them? You dream awake and walking about. You will do nothing yourself to choose your own ways: you let the world form itself around you, and then you open your eyes to see where you will find yourself. This journey of yours, tonight, is a dream of yours. You let the waves of fate wash you about, and then you will open your eyes tomorrow to find out where you are.”

“To see your pretty face,” said Lincoln.

“You know, Tembu,” said Mira suddenly, after a pause, “that if, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others.

“Those fine roots are the dreams of the tree. As it puts them out, it need no longer think of its bent taproot. It keeps alive by them—a little, not very long. Or you can say that it dies by them, if you like. For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.

“If you want to go to sleep at night, Lincoln, you must not think, as people tell you, of a long row of sheep or camels passing through a gate, for they go in one direction, and your thoughts will go along with them. You should think instead of a deep well. In the bottom of that well, just in the middle of it, there comes up a spring of water, which runs out in little streamlets to all possible sides, like the rays of a star. If you can make your thoughts run out with that water, not in one direction, but equally to all
sides, you will fall asleep. If you can make your heart do it thoroughly enough, as the coffee tree does it with the little surface roots, you will die.”

“So that is the matter with me, you think: that I want to forget my taproot?” asked Lincoln.

“Yes,” said Mira, “it must be that. Unless it be that, like many of your countrymen, you never had much of it.”

“Unless it be that,” said Lincoln.

They sailed on for a little while in silence. A slave took up a flute and played a few notes on it, to try it.

“Why does not Said speak a word to us?” Lincoln asked Mira.

Said lifted his eyes a little and smiled, but did not speak.

“Because he thinks,” said Mira. “This conversation of ours seems to him very insipid.”

“What is he thinking of?” asked Lincoln.

Mira thought for a little. “Well,” he said, “there are only two courses of thought at all seemly to a person of any intelligence. The one is: What am I to do this next moment?—or tonight, or tomorrow? And the other: What did God mean by creating the world, the sea, and the desert, the horse, the winds, woman, amber, fishes, wine? Said thinks of the one or the other.”

“Perhaps he is dreaming,” said Lincoln.

“No,” said Mira after a moment, “not Said. He does not know how to dream yet. The world is just drinking him in. He is going to its head and into its blood. He means to drive the pulsation of its heart. He is not dreaming, but perhaps he is praying to God. By the time when you have finished praying to God—that is when you put out your surface roots; that is when you begin to dream. Said tonight may be praying to God, throwing his prayer at the Lord with such energy as that with which the Angel shall, upon the last day, throw at the world the note of his trump, with such energy as that with which the elephant copulates. Said says to God: ‘Let me be all the world.’

“He says,” Mira went on after a minute, “I shall show no mercy,
and I ask for none. But that is where Said is mistaken. He will be showing mercy before he has done with all of us.”

“Do you ever dream of the same place twice?” asked Lincoln after a time.

“Yes, yes,” said Mira. “That is a great favor of God’s, a great delight to the soul of the dreamer. I come back, after a long time, in my dream, to the place of an old dream, and my heart melts with delight.”

They sailed on for some time, and no one said anything. Then Lincoln suddenly changed his position, sat up, and made himself comfortable. He spat out on the deck the last of his
Morungu
, dived into a pocket, and rolled himself a cigarette.

“I will tell you a tale tonight, Mira,” he said, “since you have none. You have reminded me of long-gone things. Many good stories have come from your part of the world to ours, and when I was a child I enjoyed them very much. Now I will tell this one, for the pleasure of your ears, Mira, and for the heart of Said, to whom my tale may prove useful. It all goes to teach you how I was, twenty years ago, taught, as you say, Mira, to dream, and of the woman who taught me. It happened just as I tell it to you. But as to names and places, and conditions in the countries in which it all took place, and which may seem very strange to you, I will give you no explanation. You must take in whatever you can, and leave the rest outside. It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.”

Twenty years ago, when I was a young man of twenty-three, I sat one winter night in the room of a hotel, amongst mountains, with snow, storm, great clouds and a wild moon outside.

Now the continent of Europe, of which you have heard, consists of two parts, the one of which is more pleasant than the other, and these two are separated by a high and steep mountain chain. You cannot cross it except in a few places where the formation of the mountains is a little less hostile than elsewhere, and where
roads have been made, with much trouble, to take you over them. Such a place there was near the hotel where I was staying. A road that would admit pedestrians, horses and mules, and even coaches had been cut in the rocks, and on the top of the pass, where, from laboriously climbing upwards, cursing your fate, you begin to descend, soon to feel the sweet air caressing your face and lungs, a brotherhood of holy men have built a great house for the refreshment of travelers. I was on my way from the North, where things were cold and dead, to the blue and voluptuous South. The hotel was my last station before the steep journey to the top of the pass, which I meant to undertake on the next day. It was a little early in the season yet to travel this way at all. There were only a few people on the road as yet, and higher up in the mountains the snow was lying deep.

To the world I looked a pretty, rich, and gay young man, on his way from one pleasure to another, and providing himself, on the way, with the best of everything. But in truth I was just being whirled about, forward and backward, by my aching heart, a poor fool out on a wild-goose chase after a woman.

Yes, after a woman, Mira, if you believe it or not. I had already been searching for her in a variety of places. In fact, so hopeless was my pursuit of her that I should most certainly have given it up if it had been at all within my power to do so. But my own soul, Mira, my dear, was in the breast of this woman.

And she was not a girl of my own age. She was many years older than I. Of her life I knew nothing except what was painful to me to swallow, and, what was the worst of the business, I had no reason to believe that she would be at all pleased should I ever contrive to find her.

The whole thing had come about like this: My father was a very rich man in England, the owner of large factories and of a pleasant estate in the country, a man with a big family and an enormous working capacity. He read the Bible much—our Holy Book—and had come to feel himself God’s
one
substitute on
earth. Indeed, I do not know if he was capable of making any distinction between his fear of God and his self-esteem. It was his duty, he thought, to turn the chaotic world into a universe of order, and to see that all things were made useful—which, to him, meant making them useful to him himself. Within his own nature I know of two things only which he could not control: he had, against his own principles, a strong love of music, particularly of Italian opera music; and he sometimes could not sleep at night. Later on I was told by my aunt, his sister, who much disliked him, that he had, as a young man in the West Indies, driven to suicide, or actually killed, a man. Perhaps this was what kept him awake. I and my twin sister were much younger than our other brothers and sisters. What flea had bitten my father that he should beget two more children when he had got through most of his trouble with the rest of us, I do not know. At the day of judgment I shall ask him for an explanation. I have sometimes thought that it was really the ghost of the West Indian gentleman which had been after him.

My father was not pleased with anything which I did. In the end I think that I became a carking care to him, for had I not been of his own manufacture he would have been pleased to see me come to a bad end. Now I felt that I was ever, as My Son Lincoln, being drawn, hammered and battered into all sorts of shapes, in order to be made useful, between one o’clock and three of the night. During these hours I myself generally had a pretty heated and noisy time, for I had become an officer in a smart regiment of the army, and there, to keep up my prestige amongst the sons of the oldest families of the land, spent much of the money, time, and wit which my father reckoned to be really and rightly his.

At about this time a neighbor of ours died, and left a young widow. She was pretty and rich, and had been unhappily married, and in her trials had consoled herself with a sentimental friendship with my twin sister, who was so like me that if I dressed up
in her clothes nobody would know the one of us from the other. Therefore my father now thought that this lady might consent to marry me, and lift the burden of me from his shoulders onto hers. This prospect suited me as well as anything that I at that time expected from life. The only thing for which I asked my father was his consent to let me travel on the continent of Europe during the lady’s year of mourning. In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married the widow, or, at least, which I had better not let her contemplate at too close quarters while she could still change her mind. As my father knew me to be quick and ardent in love affairs, I think that he also feared that I might seduce my fiancée into too close a relation, profiting by our neighborhood in the country, and, perhaps, by my likeness to my sister. For all these reasons the old man agreed that I should go traveling for nine months, in the company of an old schoolfellow of his, who had lived on his charity and whom he was pleased to turn in this way to some sort of use.

This man, however, I soon managed to rid myself of, for when we came to Rome he took up the study of the mysteries of the ancient Priapean cult of Lampsacus and I enjoyed myself very well.

But in the fourth month of my year of grace, it happened to me that I fell in love with a woman within a brothel of Rome. I had gone there, on an evening, with a party of theologians. It was thus not a dashing place where people with lots of money went to amuse themselves, neither was it a murky house frequented by artists or robbers. It was just a middling respectable establishment. I remember the narrow street in which it stood, and the many smells which met therein. If ever I were to smell them again, I should feel that I had come home. To this woman I owe it that I have ever understood, and still remember, the meaning of such words as tears, heart, longing, stars, which you poets
make use of. Yes, as to stars in particular, Mira, there was much about her that reminded one of a star. There was the difference between her and other women that there is between an overcast and a starry sky. Perhaps you too have met in the course of your life women of that sort, who are self-luminous and shine in the dark, who are phosphorescent, like touchwood.

As, upon the next day, I woke up in my hotel in Rome, I remember that I had a great fright. I thought: I was drunk last night; my head has played a trick on me. There are no such women. At this I grew hot and cold all over. But again I thought, lying in my bed: I could not possibly, all on my own, have invented such a person as this woman. Why, only our greatest poet could have done that. I could never have imagined a woman with so much life in her, and that great strength. I got up and went straight back to her house, and there I found her again, such indeed as I remembered her.