Strange Stories Page 12

A switch clicked.

  The house really was magnificent. Obviously, beyond all financial reach.

  “Looks like a model for Pentonville Gaol,” observed my father.

  “It is beautiful,” I said. “It’s what I want.”

  “It’s the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw.”

  “I want to pretend I live in it,” I said, “and give masked balls.” My social history was eager but indiscriminate.

  “How much is it?” asked my mother. The bazaar-keeper stood resentfully in the background, sliding each hand between the thumb and fingers of the other.

  “It’s only second-hand,” he said. “Tenth-hand, more like. A lady brought it in and said she needed to get rid of it. I don’t want to sell you something you don’t want.”

  “But suppose we do want it?” said my father truculently. “Is nothing in this shop for sale?”

  “You can take it away for a quid,” said the bazaar-keeper. “And glad to have the space.”

  “There’s someone looking out,” said Constantin. He seemed to be assessing the house, like a surveyor or valuer, “It’s full of dolls,” said the bazaar-keeper. “They’re thrown in. Sure you can transport it?”

  “Not at the moment,” said my father, “but I’ll send someone down.” This, I knew, would be Moon the seedman, f who owned a large canvas-topped lorry, and with whom my father used to fraternise on the putting green.

  “Are you quite sure?” my mother asked me.

  “Will it take up too much room?”

  My mother shook her head. Indeed, our home, though out of date and out at elbows, was considerably too large for us.

  “Then, please.”

  Poor Constantin got nothing.

  ***

  Mercifully, all our rooms had wide doors; so that Moon’s driver, assisted by the youth out of the shop, lent specially for the purpose, could ease my birthday present to its new resting place, without tilting it or inflicting a wound upon my mother’s new and self-applied paint. I noticed that the doll at the first-floor side window had prudently withdrawn. For my house, my parents had allotted me the principal spare room, because in the centre of it stood a very large dinner table, once to be found in the servants’ hall of my father’s childhood home in Lincolnshire, but now the sole furniture our principal spare room contained. (The two lesser spare rooms were filled with cardboard boxes, which every now and then toppled in heart arresting avalanches on still summer nights.) On the big table the driver and the shop boy set my house. It reached almost to the sides, so that those passing along the narrow walks would be in peril of tumbling into a gulf; but, the table being much longer than it was wide, the house was provided at front and back with splendid parterres of deal, embrocated with caustic until they glinted like fluorspar.

  When I had settled upon the exact site for the house, so that the garden front would receive the sun from the two windows, and a longer parterre stretched at the front than at the back, where the columned entry faced the door of the room, I withdrew to a distant corner while the two males eased the edifice into exact alignment.

  “Snug as a bug in a rug,” said Moon’s driver when the (perilous walks at the sides of the house had been made straight and equal.

  “Snugger,” said Moon’s boy.

  ***

  I waited for their boots, mailed with crescent slivers of steel, to reach the bottom of our creaking, coconut-matted stair, then I tiptoed to the landing, looked, and listened. The sun had gone in just before the lorry arrived, and down the passage the motes had ceased to dance. It was three o’clock, my mother was still at one of her schools, my father was at the rifle range. I heard the men shut the back door. The principal spare room had never before been occupied, so that the key was outside. In a second, I transferred it to the inside, and shut and locked myself in.

  As before in the shop, I walked slowly round my house, but this time round all four sides of it. Then, with the knuckles of my thin white forefinger, I tapped gently at the front door. It seemed not to have been secured, because it opened, both leaves of it, as I touched it. I pried in, first with one eye, then with the other. The lights from various of the pointed windows blotched the walls and floor of the miniature entrance hall. None of the dolls was visible.

  It was not one of those dolls’ houses of commerce from which sides can be lifted in their entirety. To learn about my house, it would be necessary, albeit impolite, to stare through the windows, one at a time. I decided first to take the ground floor. I started in a clockwise direction from the front portico. The front door was still open, but I could not see how to shut it from the outside.

  There was a room to the right of the hall, leading into two other rooms along the right side of the house, of which, again, one led into the other. All the rooms were decorated and furnished in a Mrs. Fitzherbert-ish style; with handsomely striped wallpapers, botanical carpets, and chairs with legs like sticks of brittle golden sweetmeat. There were a number of pictures. I knew just what they were: family portraits. I named the room next the hall, the occasional room, and the room beyond it, the morning room. The third room was very small: striking out confidently, I named it the Canton Cabinet, although it contained neither porcelain nor fans. I knew what the rooms in a great house should be called, because my mother used to show me the pictures in large, once fashionable volumes on the subject which my father had bought for their bulk at junk shops.

  Then came the long drawing room, which stretched across the entire garden front of the house, and contained the principal concourse of dolls. It had four pointed French windows, all made to open, though now sealed with dust and rust; above which were bulbous triangles of coloured glass, in tiny snowflake panes. The apartment itself played at being a cloister in a Horace Walpole convent; lierne vaulting ramified across the arched ceiling, and the spidery Gothic

  pilasters were tricked out in mediaeval patchwork, as in a Puseyite church. On the stout golden wallpaper were decent Swiss pastels of indeterminate subjects. There was a grand piano, very black, scrolly, and, no doubt, resounding; four shapely chandeliers; a baronial fireplace with a mythical blazon above the mantel; and eight dolls, all of them female, dotted about on chairs and ottomans with their backs to me. I hardly dared to breathe as I regarded their woolly heads, and noted the colours of their hair: two black, two nondescript, one grey, one a discoloured silver beneath the dust, one blonde, and one a dyed-looking red. They wore woollen Victorian clothes, of a period later, I should say, than that when the house was built, and certainly too warm for the present season; in varied colours, all of them dull. Happy people, I felt even then, would not wear these variants of rust, indigo, and greenwood.

  I crept onwards; to the dining room. It occupied half its side of the house, and was dark and oppressive. Perhaps it might look more inviting when the chandelier blazed, and the table candles, each with a tiny purple shade, were lighted. There was no cloth on the table, and no food or drink. Over the fireplace was a big portrait of a furious old man: his white hair was a spiky aureole round his distorted face, beetroot-red with rage; the mouth was open, and even the heavy lips were drawn back to show the savage, strong teeth; he was brandishing a very thick walking stick which seemed to leap from the picture and stun the beholder. He was dressed neutrally, and the painter had not provided him with a background: there was only the aggressive figure menacing the room. I was frightened.

  Two rooms on the ground floor remained before I once more reached the front door. In the first of them a lady was writing with her back to the light and therefore to me. She frightened me also; because her grey hair was disordered and of uneven length, and descended in matted plaits, like snakes escaping from a basket, to the shoulders of her coarse grey dress. Of course, being a doll, she did not move, but the back of her head looked mad. Her presence prevented me from regarding at all closely the furnishings of the writing room.

  Back at the north front as I resolved to call it, perhaps superseding the compass rathe
r than leading it, there was a cold-looking room, with a carpetless stone floor and white walls, upon which were the mounted heads and horns of many animals. They were all the room contained, but they covered the walls from floor to ceiling. I felt sure that the ferocious old man in the dining-room had killed all these creatures, and I hated him for it. But I knew what the room would be called: it would be the trophy room.

  Then I realised that there was no kitchen. It could hardly be upstairs. I had never heard of such a thing. But I looked.

  It wasn’t there. All the rooms on the first floor were bedrooms. There were six of them, and they so resembled one another, all with dark ochreous wallpaper and narrow brass bedsteads corroded with neglect, that I found it impracticable to distinguish them other than by numbers, at least for the present. Ultimately I might know the house better. Bedrooms 2, 3, and 6 contained two beds each. I recalled that at least nine people lived in the house. In one room the dark walls, the dark floor, the bed linen, and even the glass in the window were splashed, smeared, and further darkened with ink: it seemed apparent who slept there.

  I sat on an orange box and looked. My house needed painting and dusting and scrubbing and polishing and renewing; but on the whole I was relieved that things were not worse. I had felt that the house had stood in the dark corner of the shop for no one knew how long, but this, I now saw, could hardly have been true. I wondered about the lady who had needed to get rid of it. Despite that need, she must have kept things up pretty thoroughly. How did she do it? How did she get in? I resolved to ask my mother’s advice. I determined to be a good landlord, although, like most who so resolve, my resources were nil. We simply lacked the money to regild my long drawing room in proper gold leaf. But I would bring life to the nine dolls now drooping with boredom and neglect...

  Then I recalled something. What had become of the doll who had been sagging from the window? I thought she must have been jolted out, and felt myself a murderess. But none of the windows was open. The sash might easily have descended with the shaking; but more probably the poor doll lay inside on the floor of her room. I again went round from room to room, this time on tiptoe, but it was impossible to see the areas of floor just below the dark windows... It was not merely sunless outside, but heavily overcast. I unlocked the door of our principal spare room, and descended pensively to await my mother’s return and tea.

  Wormwood Grange, my father called my house, with penological associations still on his mind. (After he was run over, I realised for the first time that there might be a reason for this, and for his inability to find work worthy of him.) My mother had made the most careful inspection on my behalf, but had been unable to suggest any way of making an entry, or at least of passing beyond the hall, to which the front doors still lay open. There seemed no question of whole walls lifting off, of the roof being removable, or even of a window being opened, including, mysteriously, on the first floor.

  “I don’t think it’s meant for children, Liebchen,” said my mother, smiling her lovely smile. “We shall have to consult the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

  “Of course it’s not meant for children,” I replied. “That’s why I wanted it. I’m going to receive, like La Belle Otero.”

  Next morning, after my mother had gone to work, my father came up, and wrenched and prodded with his unskilful hands.

  “I’ll get a chisel,” he said. “We’ll prise it open at each corner, and when we’ve got the fronts off, I’ll go over to Woolworth’s and buy some hinges and screws. I expect they’ll have some.”

  At that I struck my father in the chest with my fist. He seized my wrists, and I screamed that he was not to lay a finger on my beautiful house, that he would be sure to spoil it, that force never got anyone anywhere. I knew my father: when he took an idea for using tools into his head, the only hope for one’s property lay in a scene, and in the implication of tears without end in the future, if the idea were not dropped.

  While I was screaming and raving, Constantin appeared from the room below, where he worked at his books.

  “Give us a chance, Sis,” he said. “How can I keep it all in my head about the Thirty Years’ War when you haven’t learnt to control your tantrums?”

  Although two years younger than I, Constantin should have known that I was past the age for screaming except of set purpose.

  “You wait until he tries to rebind all your books, you silly sneak,” I yelled at him.

  My father released my wrists.

  “Wormwood Grange can keep,” he said. “I’ll think of something else to go over to Woolworth’s for.” He sauntered off.

  Constantin nodded gravely. “I understand,” he said. “I understand what you mean. I’ll go back to my work. Here, try this.” He gave me a small, chipped nail file.

  I spent most of the morning fiddling very cautiously with the imperfect jemmy, and trying to make up my mind about the doll at the window.

  ***

  I failed to get into my house and I refused to let my parents give me any effective aid. Perhaps by now I did not really want to get in, although the dirt and disrepair, and the apathy of the dolls, who so badly needed plumping up and dispersing, continued to cause me distress. Certainly I spent as long trying to shut the front door as trying to open a window or find a concealed spring (that idea was Constantin’s.) In the end I wedged the two halves of the front door with two halves of match; but I felt that the arrangement was makeshift and undignified. I refused everyone access to the principal spare room until something more appropriate could be evolved. My plans for routs and orgies had to be deferred: one could hardly riot among dust and cobwebs.

  Then I began to have dreams about my house, and about its occupants.

  One of the oddest dreams was the first. It was three or four days after I entered into possession. During that time it had remained cloudy and oppressive, so that my father took to leaving off his knitted waistcoat; then suddenly it thundered. It was long, slow, distant, intermittent thunder; and it continued all the evening, until, when it was quite dark, my bedtime and Constantin’s could no longer be deferred.

  “Your ears will get accustomed to the noise,” said my father. “Just try to take no notice of it.”

  Constantin looked dubious; but I was tired of the slow, rumbling hours, and ready for the different dimension of dreams.

  I slept almost immediately, although the thunder was rolling round my big, rather empty bedroom, round the four walls, across the floor, and under the ceiling, weighting the black air as with a smoky vapour. Occasionally, the lightning glinted, pink and green. It was still the long-drawn-out preliminary to a storm; the tedious, imperfect dispersal of the accumulated energy of the summer. The rollings and rumblings entered my dreams, which flickered, changed, were gone as soon as come, failed, like the lightning, to concentrate or strike home, were as difficult to profit by as the events of an average day.

  After exhausting hours of phantasmagoria, anticipating so many later nights in my life, I found myself in a black wood, with huge, dense trees. I was following a path, but reeled from tree to tree, bruising and cutting myself on their hardness and roughness. There seemed no end to the wood or to the night; but suddenly, in the thick of both, I came upon my house. It stood solid, immense, hemmed in, with a single light, little more, it seemed, than a night-light, burning in every upstairs window (as often in dreams, I could see all four sides of the house at once), and illuminating two wooden wedges, jagged and swollen, which held tight the front doors. The vast trees dipped and swayed their elephantine boughs over the roof; the wind peeked and creaked through the black battlements. Then there was a blaze of whitest lightning, proclaiming the storm itself. In the second it endured, I saw my two wedges fly through the air, and the double front door burst open.

  For the hundredth time, the scene changed, and now I was back in my room, though still asleep or half asleep, still dragged from vision to vision. Now the thunder was coming in immense, calculated bombardments; the lightning
ceaseless and searing the face of the earth. From being a weariness the storm had become an ecstasy. It seemed as if the whole world would be in dissolution before the thunder had" spent its impersonal, unregarding strength. But, as I say, I must still have been at least half asleep, because between the fortissimi and the lustre I still from time to time saw scenes, meaningless or nightmarish, which could not be found in the wakeful world; still, between and through the volleys, heard impossible sounds.

  I do not know whether I was asleep or awake when the storm rippled into tranquillity. I certainly did not feel that the air had been cleared; but this may have been because, surprisingly, I heard a quick soft step passing along the passage outside my room, a passage uncarpeted through our poverty. I well knew all the footsteps in the house, and this was none of them.

  Always one to meet trouble half-way, I dashed in my nightgown to open the door. I looked out. The dawn was seeping, without effort or momentum, through every cranny, and showed shadowy the back of a retreating figure, the size of my mother but with woolly red hair and long rust-coloured dress. The padding feet seemed actually to start soft echoes amid all that naked woodwork. I had no need to consider who she was or whither she was bound. I burst into the purposeless tears I so despised.

  ***

  In the morning, and before deciding upon what to impart, I took Constantin with me to look at the house. I more than half expected big changes; but none was to be seen. The sections of match-sticks were still in position, and the dolls as inactive and diminutive as ever, sitting with their backs to me on chairs and sofas in the long drawing room; their hair dusty, possibly even mothy. Constantin looked at me curiously, but I imparted nothing.

  Other dreams followed; though at considerable intervals. Many children have recurring nightmares of oppressive realism and terrifying content; and I realised from past experience that I must outgrow the habit or lose my house— my house at least. It is true that my house now frightened me, but I felt that I must not be foolish and should strive to take a grown-up view of painted woodwork and nine understuffed dolls. Still it was bad when I began to hear them in the darkness; some tapping, some stumping, some creeping, and therefore not one, but many, or all; and worse when I began not to sleep for fear of the mad doll (as I was sure she was) doing something mad, although I refused to think what. I never dared again to look; but when something happened, which, as I say, was only at intervals (and to me, being young, they seemed long intervals), I lay taut and straining among the forgotten sheets. Moreover, the steps themselves were never quite constant, certainly too inconstant to report to others; and I am not sure that I should have heard anything significant if I had not once seen. But now I locked the door of our principal spare room on the outside, and altogether ceased to visit my beautiful, impregnable mansion.