The Mark on the Wall
PERHAPS it was the middle of January
in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to
fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the
fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three
chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have
been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I
was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the
first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for
a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag
flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the
cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an
automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark,
black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little
way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.... If
that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have
been for a miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls,
powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. A fraud of course, for the
people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way—an
old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because
one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to
leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he
said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas
behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to
pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden
of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made
by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if
I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain;
because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me,
the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To
show how very little control of our possessions we have—what an accidental
affair this living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a few
of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most
mysterious of losses—what cat would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron
hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the
hand organ—all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots
of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that
I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this
moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end
without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely
naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back
like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life,
the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup
of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red light. Why,
after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless,
speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass,
at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and
women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do
for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark,
intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of
an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become
more definite, become—I don’t know what....
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be
caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from
the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on
the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three
times over, only fragments of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can
believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane.... I want to
think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to
rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense
of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the
surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of
the first idea that passes.... Shakespeare.... Well, he will do as well as
another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the
fire, so— A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down
through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in
through the open door,—for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s
evening—But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me
at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly
reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very
frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe
genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts
directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like
this:
“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how
I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in
Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles the
First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked—(but, I
don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps.
And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own
mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should
catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection.
Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from
idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the
original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all?
It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the
image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all
about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by
other people—what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A
world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground
railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the
gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more
and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one
reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will
explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of
reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for
granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these generalizations
are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls
leading articles, cabinet ministers—a whole class of things indeed which as a
child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from
which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation.
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks,
Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and
habits—like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour,
although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for
tablecloths at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry
with little yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may see in
photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths
of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how
wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday
walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half
phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a
sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I
wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the
masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which
establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since
the war half a phantom to many men and women, which soon—one may hope, will be
laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the
Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an
intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists....
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from
the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a
perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the
wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth
tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs
or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like
most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of
the bones stretched beneath the turf.... There must be some book about it. Some
antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name.... What sort of a
man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay,
leading parties of aged labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and
stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which,
being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the
comparison of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns,
an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to
make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that
great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the
Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic in accumulating evidence on both
sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in
the camp; and, being opposed, indites a pamphlet which he is about to read at
the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his
last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that
arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with
the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many
Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that Nelson
drank out of—proving I really don’t know what.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at
this very moment and ascertain that the mark on the wall is really—what shall
we say?—-the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago,
which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of
housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first
view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I
gain?— Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as
well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the
descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing
herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And
the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty
and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world.
A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A
world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of
policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices
the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging
suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is drown here,
rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with
their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections—if it were not for
Whitaker’s Almanack—if it were not for the Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is—a
nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This
train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere waste of energy, even some
collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against
Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the
Lord High Chancellor; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of
York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the
great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so
Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging you; and if you can’t be
comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the
wall.
I understand Nature’s game—her prompting to take action as a way of
ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes
our slight contempt for men of action—men, we assume, who don’t think. Still,
there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by
looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have
grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once
turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of
shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a
midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent,
worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality,
worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than
ours. That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to
think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they
grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in
meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers—all things one likes to think
about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint
rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all
green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the
stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes of mud
upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself:—first the close
dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow,
delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing
in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the
iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling,
all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and
how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious
progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green
awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red
eyes.... One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the
earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep
into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million
patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in
ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea,
smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree.
I should like to take each one separately—but something is getting in the
way.... Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs?
Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing.
Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval
of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying—
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though it’s no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse
this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don’t see why we should have a
snail on our wall.”
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.