The Weird Part 29

'I'm lost!'

These lonely words rose in my heart as I came to my senses and left my contemplations behind. Immediately I became uneasy and began to look frantically for the road. I backtracked in an attempt to find it. Instead, I became all the more turned around. I ended up in an inescapable labyrinth of countless paths. The paths led deeper into the mountains and then disappeared into the brambles. I wasted a great deal of time. Not once did I see a single soul not even a woodcutter. Becoming increasingly upset, I paced about impatiently like a dog trying to scout out its way. At long last, I discovered a narrow but clear path marked by feet and hooves. Following it intently, I descended little by little toward the base of the mountain. I figured I could relax once I made it to the base of one of the mountains and found a house.

I arrived at the foot of the mountain some hours later. There, I discovered a world of human habitation beyond anything that I could have antic.i.p.ated in my wildest dreams. Instead of poor farmers, I had come upon a beautiful, prosperous town. An acquaintance of mine once told me about a trip he had taken on the Trans-Siberian railroad. He said the pa.s.sengers would travel for days and days through desolate, uninhabited plains that stretched as far as the eye could see. As a result, when the train finally stopped, even the tiniest station looked like one of the most animated, prosperous cities in the world. The surprise that I felt was probably similar to what my friend had experienced. There in the low, flat plain at the base of the mountain stood rows and rows of buildings. Towers and lofty buildings shone in the sun. The sight was so impressive that I could hardly believe such a marvelous metropolis really existed there in the remote mountains.

Feeling as if I was seeing an image projected by a magic lantern onto a screen in front of me, I slowly approached the town. At some point, though, I crossed over into the projection and became part of the mysterious town itself. Starting down a narrow alley, I pa.s.sed through some dark, confusing, cramped pathways, but then suddenly I walked into the center of a bustling avenue, almost as if I were emerging from a womb into the world. The city that I saw was so special, so unusual! The rows of shops and other buildings were designed with an unusual, artistic feel. They acted, as it were, like the building blocks for the communal aesthetic that pervaded the entire town. The whole place was beautiful, but the beauty did not seem to have been consciously created. The artistic feel had evolved naturally as the town gradually weathered and developed an elegant patina that reflected its age. This elegant depth spoke with grace and gentility of the town's old history and the long memories of the townspeople.

The town was so tightly knit that the main avenue was only a dozen or a dozen and a half feet across. Other smaller streets were pressed into the s.p.a.ce between the eaves of the buildings so that they became deep, narrow pa.s.sages that wound about like paths in a labyrinth. Roads descended down flagstone-covered slopes or pa.s.sed under the shadow of second-story bay windows, creating dark tunnels. As in southern climes, flowering trees grew near the wells located here and there throughout the town. A ubiquitous, deep shade filled the whole place, leaving everything as tranquil as the shadow of a laurel tree. What appeared to be the houses of courtesans stood in a row, and from deep inside an enclosed garden came the quiet sound of elegant music.

On the main avenue, I found many Western-style houses with gla.s.s windows instead of the sliding wooden and paper doors found in j.a.pan. A red and white striped pole stuck out from the eaves of a hairdresser's shop, along with a painted sign that read in English, 'Barbershop.' There were also traditional j.a.panese-style inns and shops that did laundry in the neighborhood. Near an intersection stood a photography studio with gla.s.s windows that reflected the sunny autumn sky with the lonely stoicism of a weather observatory. In the front of a watch shop sat the store's bespectacled owner working quietly and intently.

The streets were thronged with bustling crowds, yet the people created little noise. A refined, hushed silence reigned over the place, casting a pall that was as profound as a deep sleep. The town was silent, I realized, because there were no noisy horse-drawn carriages charging by, only pedestrians. But that wasn't all. The crowds were also quiet. Everyone both men and women had an air about them that was genteel and discreet, elegant and calm. The women were especially lovely and graceful, and even a bit coquettish. The people shopping in the stores and stopping in the street to talk also spoke politely in harmonious, soft voices. As a result, instead of appealing to the sense of hearing, their voices seemed to present meaning in an almost tactile fas.h.i.+on, something soft to the touch. The voices of the women had the especially sweet and rapturous charm of a gentle stroke pa.s.sing over the surface of one's skin. People and things came and went like shadows.

I realized right away that the atmosphere of the town was an artificial creation whose existence relied on the subtle attentions of its inhabitants. It was not just its buildings. The entire system of individual nerves that came together to create its atmosphere was focused on one single, central aesthetic plan. In everything from the slightest stirrings in the air, there was strict adherence to the aesthetic laws of contrast, symmetry, harmony, and equilibrium. These aesthetic laws entailed, however, extremely complicated differential equations that, requiring tremendous effort, made all of the nerves of the town quiver and strain. For instance, even uttering a word slightly too high in pitch was forbidden, for it would shatter the harmony of the entire town. When the inhabitants did anything when they walked down the street, moved their hands, ate, drank, thought, or even chose the pattern of their clothing they had to give painstaking attention to their actions to make sure they harmonized with the reigning atmosphere and did not lose the appropriate degrees of contrast and symmetry with their environs. The whole town was a perilously fragile structure of thin crystal. A loss of balance, even for a moment, would have dashed the entire thing to smithereens. A subtle mathematical structure of individual supports was necessary to maintain stability, and a complex of individual connections governed by the laws of contrast and symmetry strained to support the whole.

However frightening this might be, such was the truth about the town. One careless mishap would mean the collapse and destruction of the entire place. Trepidation and fear had stretched the nerves of the whole town dangerously thin. The plan of this town, which seemed so aesthetically inclined on the surface, went beyond a mere matter of taste. It hid a more frightening and acute problem.

This realization suddenly made me extremely anxious. The air surrounding me was electrically charged, and in it I felt the anguish of the inhabitants' nerves stretched to the breaking point. The peculiar beauty and dreamlike serenity of the town had now become hushed and uncanny. I felt as if I were unraveling a code to discover some frightening secret. A vague premonition, the color of a pale fear, washed over my heart, though I could not quite understand what it was trying to tell me. All of my senses were fully alert. I perceived all of the colors, scents, sounds, tastes, and meanings of the things surrounding me in infinitesimal detail. The stench of corpses filled the air, and the barometric pressure rose with each pa.s.sing instant. All of the things that manifested themselves around me seemed to portend some evil. Something strange was about to happen! Something had to happen!

But the town did not change. The street was full of elegant people going to and fro, walking quietly without making a sound, just as they had moments ago. From somewhere in the distance, I heard a continuous, low, mournful note that sounded like the stroking of the strings of a koky. Like someone haunted by a strange omen in the moments before a great earthquake, I experienced an anxious premonition mere steps away from me, a person falls...and the harmony on which the entire town is based collapses, throwing everything into utter chaos!

I struggled with this horrifying vision like someone having a nightmare and trying frantically to awaken. With each pa.s.sing second, the sky turned bluer and more transparent. The pressure of the electrically charged air rose higher and higher. The buildings bent precariously, growing long and sickly thin. Here and there, they distended into bizarre, turretlike forms. The roofs became strangely bony and deformed like the long, thin legs of a chicken.

'It's happening!'

The words escaped my lips as my chest thumped with fear. Just then, a small black rat or something like it dashed into the center of the road. I saw it with extraordinary delineation and clarity. What on earth was going on? I was seized by the strange, sudden notion that it would destroy the harmony of the entire town.

Right then...the whole universe stopped dead, and an infinite quiet settled over everything. What next!?!

An unimaginably strange and horrifying sight appeared before me. Great packs of cats materialized everywhere, filling all the roads around me! Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, and more cats! Everywhere I looked there was nothing but cats! Whiskered cat faces rose in the windows of all the houses, filling the panes like pictures in frames.

I shuddered. I held my breath from fright and nearly pa.s.sed out. This wasn't the human world! Was there nothing in this world but cats? What on earth had happened? Was this world real? Something had to be wrong with me. Either I was seeing an illusion or I had gone mad! My senses had lost their balance. The universe was collapsing around me.

I was terrified. Some final, frightening destruction would surely be closing in on me. I closed my eyes, and fear rushed through the darkness inside me.

But, suddenly, my senses returned. As my heart began to slow its furious beat, I opened my eyes again to examine the world of reality that now surrounded me.

The inexplicable vision of all those cats had vanished. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the town. Hollow, deserted windows stretched open their empty mouths. The traffic moved by uneventfully as the white clay of the dull streets roasted in the sun. Nowhere was there even a shadow of a cat. The town had undergone a complete change in feeling. Everywhere there were rows of plain old shops. Walking the dry, midday streets were the same tired, dusty people who live in every country. The mysterious, perplexing town of a moment ago had vanished without a trace. An entirely separate world had appeared, almost as if a playing card had been turned over to reveal its other side. It was nothing but an ordinary, commonplace country town. Wasn't it the same old town of U that I knew so well? There at the barber-shop, facing the midday traffic outside the shop window, was a row of barber chairs that had no customers. On the left side of the dilapidated town yawned a clock shop that never sold anything, its door shut as always. Everything was just like I remembered it a never-changing, humdrum town in the country.

Once my mind cleared, I understood everything. I had foolishly allowed myself to succ.u.mb again to my perceptual malady, to my disturbance of the semicircular ca.n.a.ls. Getting turned around in the mountains, I had completely lost any sense of direction. Though I thought I was descending the other side of the mountain, I went the wrong way and ended up here in the town of U. Also, I had wandered into the heart of it from a direction opposite to that I arrived from on the train. All of my a.s.sumptions as to my whereabouts were completely backward, and my mistaken impressions were showing me a world with the directions all turned around. I was looking at a separate universe of another dimension, at the back side of the landscape where up and down, front and back, and the four cardinal directions were all reversed. As popular parlance would have it, I had been 'bewitched by a fox.'

III.

My tale ends here, but the end of this story is the point of departure for my strange, unresolved enigma. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once dreamed he was a b.u.t.terfly. When he woke, he questioned his own ident.i.ty, wondering if he was the b.u.t.terfly in the dream or the person he was at that moment.

This ancient riddle has remained unsolved across the ages. Is the universe of illusion only visible to those who have been bewitched by foxes? Or is it visible to those with clear intellect and good sense? Where does the metaphysical world exist in relations.h.i.+p to the ordinary landscape? Is it the reverse of what we ordinarily see? Is it in front? Perhaps there is no one who can answer these riddles.

That magical town outside the bounds of the human world remains lodged in my memory. I still remember the vision of that bizarre feline town with the silhouettes of cats appearing so vividly in every window, under all the eaves, and in every gathering on the street. Even today, more than ten years later, I still relive the terror of that day by just thinking about it. I see it all over again as if it were right there in front of my eyes.

People smile coldly at my tale. They say it is the demented illusion of a poet or a nonsensical hallucination born of absentminded daydreaming. Still, I continue to insist that I did see a town of nothing but cats. I did see a town where cats took on human form and crowded the streets. Though reasoning and logic tell me otherwise, I am absolutely sure that, somewhere in this universe, I did encounter such a place. Nothing is more certain to me than this. The entire population of the world can stand before me and snicker, but I will not abandon my faith in that strange settlement described in the legends of the backwoods. Somewhere, in some corner of this universe, a town is inhabited solely by the spirits of cats. Sure enough, it does exist.

The Tarn.

Hugh Walpole.

Hugh Walpole (18841941) was a very popular and prolific English writer who published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, and his high profile as a lecturer brought him a large readers.h.i.+p in the UK and North America. A bestselling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death. Although best-known for his historical novels, Walpole also penned cla.s.sic tales of the supernatural, including 'The Clocks' (1913), 'The Twisted Inn' (1915), 'Tarnhelm' (1933) and 'The Silver Mask' (1933). However, 'The Tarn (1936) a perceptive, clever, and all-too-true weird tale remains our personal favorite.

As Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat and the pleasure, the triumphant, l.u.s.tful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

The low white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long web-like patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey. The clouds pa.s.s in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghost-like armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous colour.

Fenwick's cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.

Fenwick looked at Foster's back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been for ever determined to put things right with everybody. He could not bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friend. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.

For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends; he certainly did not care that people should like him that is, people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt and he had contempt for quite a number of people.

Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. 'What jolly books you have, Fenwick!' How many, many times in the long watches of the night when Fenwick could not sleep had he heard that pipe sounding close there yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it: 'I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronising and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!'

For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick's way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review, the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day, with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be, how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying, 'Yes, yes, Fenwick that's fine! That's fine indeed!' and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.

The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!

Then five years later there was Fenwick's novel, The Bitter Aloe the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavour and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brings out The Circus, the novel that made his name, although, Heaven knows, the thing was poor sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book's good or evil fortunes have talked about The Bitter Aloe, and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the book was still-born, and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.

After that there had been many occasions some small, some big and always in one way or another that thin, scraggy body of Foster's was interfering with Fenwick's happiness.

The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure, and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings and the fault of Foster.

Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day to his amazement he received a telegram: 'Pa.s.sing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday? Giles Foster.'

Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not a.n.a.lyse he had telegraphed 'Come.'

And here the man was. And he had come would you believe it? to 'put things right.' He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that 'Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of a grievance.'

'I didn't like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I'd just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right.'

Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog's who is asking for a bone that he knows that he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to 'say what was up.'

Fenwick simply had said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a d.a.m.ned fool.

'Oh, I'm glad to hear that!' Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick's shoulder. 'I'm glad of that, old man. I couldn't bear for us not to be friends. We've been friends so long.'

Lord! how Fenwick hated him at that moment!

II.

'What a jolly lot of books you have!' Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. 'Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them too, and those open bookshelves it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind gla.s.s!'

Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host's knee. 'Look here! I'm mentioning it for the last time positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you a.s.sured me last night, but I just want'

Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man's hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster's eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smas.h.i.+ng them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, b.l.o.o.d.y sockets, said: 'Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?'

The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

'I am so glad! That's splendid! Splendid! I hope you won't think me ridiculous, but I've always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I've always wanted to know you better. I've admired your talents so greatly. That novel of yours the the the one about the Aloe'

'The Bitter Aloe?'

'Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time.'

'Yes, it ought to have done better.'

'Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end.'

'Yes, my time will come.'

The thin, piping voice went on: 'Now, I've had more success than I deserved. Oh, yes, I have. You can't deny it. I'm not being falsely modest. I mean it. I've got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you've got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only I do hope you'll forgive my saying this perhaps you haven't advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate always raining why, you're out of things! You don't see people, don't talk and discover what's really going on. Why, look at me!'

Fenwick turned round and looked at him.

'Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays, and then I'm three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now that's an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way.'

Italy or Greece or somewhere!

Something turned in Fenwick's breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how pa.s.sionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies and now this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronising He got up, looking out at the golden sun.

'What do you say to a walk?' he suggested. 'The sun will last for a good hour yet.'

III.

As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half-round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster's arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the long silver s.h.i.+eld of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some rec.u.mbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, 'You have some further design in this.'

They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water's edge. Across the lake, tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.

The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pus.h.i.+ng his long, thin body along with little eager jerks as though did he not hurry he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.

'Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all it's a new prize. They've only been awarding it for a year or two, but it's gratifying really gratifying to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn't much. But it's the honour'

Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free-will. Free-will? There is no free-will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.

Foster stopped.

'Why, what is it?'

'What's what?'

'You laughed.'

'Something amused me.'

Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick's.

'It is jolly to be walking alone together like this, arm-in-arm, friends. I'm a sentimental man, I won't deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one's fellow-beings or where is one? You live too much alone, old man.' He squeezed Fenwick's arm. 'That's the truth of it.'

It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your two hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack...crack...crack...

Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one's body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick's hand touched Foster's. Then he drew himself apart.

'We're at the village. This is the hotel where they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I'll show you my tarn.'

IV.

'Your tarn?' asked Foster. 'Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?'

'A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.'

'I should like to see that.'

'It is some little distance up a rough road. Do you mind?'

'Not a bit. I have long legs,'

'Some of them are immensely deep unfathomable n.o.body touched the bottom but quiet, like gla.s.s, with shadows only'

'Do you know, Fenwick, but I have always been afraid of water I've never learnt to swim. I'm afraid to go out of my depth. Isn't that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went further than they meant to. I can see their faces.'

Fenwick considered this. The picture leapt to his mind. He could see the boys large, strong fellows, probably and this little skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still he drew a deep breath.

Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid, and needed rea.s.surance. Indeed the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there, faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question mark, appeared against the darkening hill.

It was a little steep here and Foster puffed and blew.

Fenwick hated him the more for that. So thin and spare, and still he could not keep in condition! They stumbled, keeping below the quarry, on the edge of the running water, now green, now a dirty white-grey, pus.h.i.+ng their way along the side of the hill.

Their faces were set now towards Helvellyn. It rounded the cup of hills closing in the base and then sprawling to the right.

'There's the tarn!' Fenwick exclaimed and then added, 'The sun's not lasting as long as I had expected. It's growing dark already.'

Foster stumbled and caught Fenwick's arm.

'This twilight makes the hills look strange like living men. I can scarcely see my way.'