Gay Hunter (extract)

She looked round the room and its sham antique oak, all solemn lines of fiddley curlicues. A great sloped mirror showed herself. Being still very young, she looked at that self with attention, but not too much. The room was deserted but for the waiter bringing the soup. Then she saw Houghton enter.

He had changed from hiking-dress—perhaps he had carried that lounge suit in the rucksack. It certainly looked a trifle crumpled. And as certainly it improved his appearance. Gay drank soup and looked at him with a faint interest—he had good shoulders and a straight back, and the cool hauteur and rangy straightness of the English Army officer of myth and rumour. As good almost as meeting an ancient Mayan in the flesh.

Funny how much better the lounge suit was than the hiking-shirt and shorts. But she’d thought that often of the feeble attempts at rationalisation in clothes that men and women made. The scantier the garments, the more feeble and ridiculous and lewd the wearers looked. The Victorians were perfectly right and logical, bless their padded bottoms. Either you clothed yourself or you went naked. To sling shorts or the various pieces of a bathing suit over this and that portion of your anatomy was to make those portions suspect and taboo….

Houghton was standing beside her. He was stiff. “I understand the waiter would like us to share a table and save him work. Lazy old devil. Do you mind?”

Gay shook her head, eating tepid fish. “I don’t think so. “She turned away her eyes from another fasces badge, in the lapel of the lounge suit collar this time. “How’s the headache?”

He sat down, half in profile. It was a stern, good, absurd profile. “Gone for the time being; but no doubt it’ll come back. …No, damn you, I told you I didn’t want soup. A chop, man.”

This was to the waiter. He shook a little, old and servile. Gay gently restrained herself from flinging the remains of the tepid fish at the correct, absurd profile. She had often to restrain herself over bodily assault in matters like that. The damned horror of any animal addressing another like that! Then she saw the twist of Houghton’s face. Poor idiot.

She said: “There’s a stunt in sleep-making that my father and I used to use when we went digging down in Central America. Ever hear of a man J. W Dunne?”

“Eh? . . . No.”

“He’s not a quack doctor or a psychoanalyst. He wrote a book called An Experiment with Time, and Father got hold of it. If you develop the trick you can get to sleep quite easily—unless you grow too interested in tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.”

But Gay was not discouraged. It was two or three years since she herself had tried those experiments at the edge of sleeping to peer into the doings of the next day or so. Father had given it up. He had said it was dangerous without elaborate precautions—funny father, the sternest and best of materialists!—salt of the earth, the materialists, though there was all this half-witted outcry against them these days from the sloppily superstitious Quakers who masqueraded as physicists…Well, this was how…

The old waiter sighed, peering round the edge of the door. That young ‘un from America was at it with the gentleman. Bit sharp, the gentleman, but you supposed he couldn’t be blamed. You were getting old, and a bit deaf, though it made you run cold to think of that, and that the boss would get to know… He looked again. Still at it, she was.

Houghton said, “Sounds rubbish. How can you look into the future—into a time that doesn’t exist?”

Gay shrugged. She was a little bored herself, by now. This bleak militaristic intelligence always bored her—made flirting with ship officers and gendarmes impossible. Kind of people who never thought of the thrill of a kiss as the moment before lips touched, but just the contact and crush and a greedy suction… “The point seems to be that events don’t happen. They’re waiting there in the future to be overtaken.”

He said “Rubbish,” again grumpily; then jabbed at his chop and was suddenly loquacious.

“By God, there would be something worth while if one could have a glimpse of the future—project oneself into it for no more than a blink. All this modernist botching of society and art and civilisation finished, and discipline and breed and good taste come into their own again. Worth while trying half a night of sleeplessness to see that.”

Gay had been about to rise and have her coffee on the verandah; but now she could not, looking at him with bent brows.

“Is that what the future is to be?”

“Of course it is. Service, loyalty. Hardness. Hierarchy. The scum in their places again.” His face twitched. “England a nation again.”

“And beyond that?”

“What would  there be?   Some dignity in history; the national cultures keeping the balance…”

Gay whistled. “Poor human race! Is that its future? Well, whatever’s awaiting it, I know it isn’t that.”

“Some Amurrican Utopia instead, with every nation denationalised and the blah of your accent all over the globe?”

“That’s just rudeness.”

He coloured, stiffly. “I’m sorry.”

Gay said: “Even tomorrow won’t show a glimpse of anything as bad as that. Or beyond it. If we sat down tonight and tried to glimpse the future, we’d find most things we expect haven’t happened…”

“All right. Let’s put it to the test tonight, according to the formula of this chap Dunne that your father developed. Lie and try a glimpse into the future—and see if it’s your Utopia or a sane history that the future’s going to hold.”

Gay said: “Of course that’s just fantastic. You can see only a little of your own future­—through a glass darkly.”

He was holding his head again. He was really ill, Gay thought. He said, with the rudeness of pain and unease: “Afraid, like most softies, eh?”

Gay knew it was silly, but also the project was a little intriguing. She shrugged. “All right. Let’s. But—if we manage to see anything at all—how are we to know when we compare results that each is speaking the truth?”

“I’m not a liar.”

Gay nodded, rising. “Lucky man. Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

IV

The heat grew more stifling as the night wore on. Ascending to her room at eleven, Gay found the warmth swathing the place like a thick close blanket. “Like Coleridge’s pants, in fact.” Coleridge provided one of her gayest memories:

‘As though the earth in thick fast pants

were breathing’

“Poor planet, how it must have perspired! And I feel a bit like it myself.”

She took off her dress and step–ins and kicked off her shoes and sat with her hands clasping her brown knees, and looked out at the hot, stagnant night of the Wiltshire Downs. Below, she heard the old waiter closing up for the night, and the sound of heavy footsteps enter the room next her own. She thought: “The haughty Britisher with the headaches,” and sat remembering their pact. The foolishest thing—especially as she didn’t feel in the least in the mood for trying a neo–Dunne test to-night… She picked up the newspaper she had brought unread from the smoking-room and opened it and began to read. The night went on. At midnight she heard the clocks chime below, and woke to the lateness of the hour with a little start:

What a world! Hell ’n’ blast, what a world!—as Daddy used to say in moments when it vexed him overmuch. The cruelty, the beastliness, the hopelessness of it. Not for herself—she stretched brown and clean, and looked down at herself and liked herself and thought of her lovely job among the remains of the Antique Americans and her plan for a couple of babies, not to mention a father for them, and for reading a million books and seeing a million sunrises. But she was only one, and a fortunate one... All the poor folk labouring at filthy jobs under the gathering clouds of war and an undreamed tyranny—what had they to live for? Even she herself—would she always escape? Unless she hid from her kind in the busy world of men, sought out some little corner and abandoned life like the folk at Rainier, like the hermits of the Thebaid. Those children of hers—would they escape the wheels and wires of life any more than the children of others? Or their children thereafter, and so on and on, till the world was one great pounding machine, pounding the life out of humanity: making it an ant-like slave-crawl on an earth turned to a dung-hill of its own futilities. She thought of Houghton next door—he was more than Houghton, he was the brutalised and bedevilled spirit of all men, she thought. And for them  and their horrific future they expected women to conceive and have fruitful bodies and bear children…

Suddenly the night outside seemed to crack. Sheet lightning flowed low and saffron down over Pewsey, lighting up the Downs, and flowing soft in the foliage of the trees. Gay went to the window and watched. The earth looked a moment like a sea of fire, as though that Next War’s bombardments were opening their barrage. It was hotter than ever.

She got into her sleeping-suit, put out the light, and lay down with only a sheet covering her. So doing, the view of the night vanished, for the windows were high in the wall. She stretched her toes and put her right arm under her head in the fashion that always so helped her to sleep, and closed her eyes.

Half an hour later she had tried most positions conceivable and inconceivable. But the newspapers were haunting her from sleep. She got up and drank a glass of water—tepid water that seemed to have dust in it. Low down over Upavon the thunder was growling dyspeptically. She lay down again, throwing off the sheet this time, and lay open-eyed, staring into the darkness, young, and absurdly troubled, she told herself, a little whipper-snapper absurdly and impudently troubled over a planet that wasn’t her concern… Except that she hated the thought of those babies of hers, in the times to be, coughing and coughing up their lungs as the war-gas got into them…

It was only then that she remembered again her pact with the Fascist, Houghton.

V

Dreams, and a floating edge of mist. (But you must not dream. You must stay just on the edge of sleep, concentrating. So that you might awake and jot down your impressions of the pictures.) She tried to rouse herself, but a leaden weight seemed pressing now on her eyelids.Yet again she told herself not to dream.

Outside the lightning flashed, forked lightning as she knew through her closed eyelids. But now the dream-pictures were mist-edged no longer, they were jagged like the lightning. She knew herself caught in a sudden flow of images she had never tapped before—slipping and sliding amidst them like a diver going over Niagara. Something suddenly snapped and the pictures ceased…

Bombardment. The sky burst and showered the earth with glowing meteors. Great-engined monsters roared athwart the earth. Tribes fled and hid in dim confusion and climbed out again to the burning day. Great temples rose to insane creeds, and gangs of red dwarfs laboured at titanic furnaces. Peace flowed and flowered with winking seasons, season on season. Then again the sky broke and flared with terror. Now faster and faster went her fall over and into an unthinkable abyss, in a wink and flow of green and gold and jet. Ceaseless and ceaseless.

Then something smote athwart the rapids, and the pit opened and devoured her.

2. The Incredible Morning

I

SHE OPENED her eyes and saw that it was not yet dawn. There was a pale light all abroad the great stretches of the Wiltshire Downs, forerunner of the sunlight, but only a ghost of its quality. A little rain was seeping away into the east. She heard the patter of its going, light-footed, through the darkness into the spaces where the east was wanly tinted. She sat up.

Close at hand a curlew called.

She was aware that she was still dreaming, for the window of the room in the ‘Peacock’ was set high in the wall, so that, lying in bed, as she lay now, she could see nothing of Pewsey or the Downs beyond. This was a fragment of night-time dream. Drowsy, she lay back again, cuddling her face in her arm, and reaching out her left hand to draw up the sheets about her. Her fingers strayed uncertainly, finding no sheet. With a sleepy irritation she sought further, and then sat up again. There was no sheet. But something else had led her to sit erect. Her hand had touched her own skin.

She was naked.

She put out her hand in the dimness and touched the bed. It was not a bed. She was lying on a bank of earth—a grassy bank. It was wet with dew. Her back and legs were wet and chilled with the dew. She sat erect, very rigid, her hands behind her.

The curlew called again, very close at hand. Wings flapped in the dimness, darkness-shielded, and there came a splatter of something in a hidden pool. Gay put up her hand to her mouth and bit it.

She gave a cry at the realness of the pain. What was it?

Where…?

Hell ’n’ blast, she knew! Sleep-walking! Not that she had ever sleep-walked before, that she knew. But that was what it must be. She had got out of her room and out of the ‘Peacock,’ and wandered out to the country beyond Pewsey. What a mess!

She rubbed her chilled self and put up a hand to push back the hair from her forehead. Soon be quite light—probably not yet four o’clock. She must get back. With a little luck she might get back unseen. The labourers’ wives would just be stirring to light their morning fires.

She stood erect; and instantly sat down, gasping. There was something strange in the morning air that caught at her lungs, icily as though she had swallowed a mouthful of snow. Now she became aware of another fact—the rate at which her heart was beating. It was pounding inside her chest, insanely, and the blood throbbing in her forehead with the rapid beat of a dynamo. Sleep-walking and nightmare—Oh, what a fool!

She sat with her head in her hands, giddy, till the world about her began to quiet into unquivering outlines. Her heart was easing to normal pulsations. Through her fingers she saw the dawn coming on Pewsey.

And there was no Pewsey.

II

She sat in a great dip of the Downs, grassy and treeless, houseless, without moving speck of life, that she could see, north, south, east or west. In the coming of the sun great hummocks at a distance shed themselves of shadows, they seemed like great tumuli as the light came upon them. A wind was coming with the light, and blew cold with dew. But it changed and grew warmer, blowing upon her naked body, blowing her hair about her face. Below the little incline on which she sat a stream that wandered through the great hollow in the Downs lost itself in a reed-fringed stretch of water: she saw that it was a marsh-fringed loch, stretching its reeds away to the foot of the tumuli.

She began to weep, terrified and lost, watching that bright becoming of the day. Hell ’n’ blast, she was mad—mad, or in a nightmare still. Where was her room and her clothes and that report on Toltec pottery?

She closed her eyes, sticking them fast, gripping her head in her hands. Then she dropped them and opened her eyes. She gave a low cry.

A great beast had come snuffling up the hill from the reeds and stood not a yard away from her, gigantic in the half-light, with pricked ears and a drooling tongue. Its musk smell smote her like a blow. It had the bigness of a bear, though the shape of a wolf. It gave a low wurr and dropped one ear.

Gay screamed, piercingly.

At that the beast backed away, growled blood-curdlingly, then turned, clumsily, and trotted away. Gay watched it with a breathless disbelief as it entered the reeds. A grunt and yap emerged. The reeds ceased to wave and move. Gay’s frozen silence went.

“Lost, lost—oh, I’m lost!” She screamed the words, knowing that someone would come and shake her awake and help her—the chambermaid, perhaps. She stared about her wide-eyed, waiting that coming. The day brightened and grew.

No smoke. No sign of a house or of human habitation. She raised her eyes to the east and saw against it a moving dot. It grew and enlarged, coming earthwards and nearer. She held her breath.

It was a great bird the size of a condor, and something of the same shape, with a crooked beak and immense pinions that beat the air with the noise of a river paddle-boat. It might have been twelve feet from wing-tip to wing-tip. It planed down close to the earth, to the spot where Gay stood and glared, uttered a raucous and contemptuous “Arrh,” and wheeled up into the sky again.

A condor in England!

Gay began to talk to herself. At the first word the silence of the deserted countryside seemed to intensify, listening. Breathtaking and terrible.

“I don’t care! This isn’t real, but I won’t go mad! I won’t, I…” She realised she was dreadfully thirsty, her lips grimed as with ancient dust. She glanced down at her body and saw it the same, covered evenly as with a thin sprinkling of soot. With a desperate courage she looked towards the loch. The beast…?

She picked up a stone in each hand and ran down into the water. It caught her and almost choked her, deep. She dropped the stones and splashed and swam, gasping. Something in the water caught at a foot, slimily, but she kicked it away. When she swam back to the shore again and climbed, gasping, from the icy embrace of the water, and wrung that water from her hair and wiped it from breasts and body and legs, she felt as though she had sloughed more than the covering of brown soot-dust. Wiping the water from her eyelashes, she raised her head again, knowing that surely the icy dip would have restored her sanity as it had cleansed her body. Around her were the unfamiliar, treeless, uninhabited hills. Then she saw something white rising up from the foot of the incline where she herself had awakened. It elongated and stretched, cruciform-wise. It was suddenly rigid. It was a man, naked as herself, and staring at her with dazed and astounded eyes.

It was Major Ledyard Houghton.

III

Her first impulse was to turn and run. But that was one too ridiculous to follow. Absurdly, she remembered a story from some Victorian romance of the heroine, nude, discovered by a man, and the modest female covering her face with her hands to hide her identity…She giggled and sank down on the grass.

“Thank goodness there’s someone else in this mess. But however have we got into it?”

“Damned if I know. I woke and saw you swimming down there… if I am awake.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve thought it all out for myself, and you can take the results on trust. But I do wish you’d sit down.”

“Why?”

Gay clasped her knees with her hands. “So that we can talk. And you’re rather—undraped.” He had an exceedingly white skin. It turned a rich crimson, face, neck… Gay turned away her eyes, politely, from survey of its further possibilities. He slumped down in the grass.

“Oh, damn it!”

He leapt up again. He had sat on a gorse-bush. Gay put up her hands to her eyes and giggled helplessly.

Giggling, she heard him say, hardly, “If you’ve got hysterics, you can get out of them. I’m off to see what’s happened.”

He was. He had jumped to his feet again. He had broad shoulders and shapely hips, except for one with a great scar, like that of a branding-iron, across it. Gay stared at the scar, herself standing up. “Where can you go? … And where did that happen to you?” He stared over his shoulder, angry and ludicrous. “Eh? What? What happen?” He coloured again, richly. “War-time wound.”

“I see. And where are you going?”

“To find…” he stared around, “some house.”

“Does it look as though there are any?”

It did not. The fact seemed to sink into their unevenly beating hearts. It was a land wild and forgotten. No human feet had trodden it, or voices called here, or the busy world of men reached out a hand here for long ages. The sunlight ran its colours up and down the near hills, gay with gorse. Far off a peewit wailed its immemorial plaint. There was no mark of cultivation or sign of human kind. Gay said, very quietly:

“Something has happened to us. I don’t know what. But we’re here, lost, as though we’d been newly born. If we’re going to search out anything, perhaps we’d best do it together.” She shaded her eyes with her hand, looking towards the tumuli. Without much hope: “There might be something to help us in those mounds.”

They set out, almost side by side, across the spring of the grass. In Gay’s mind was a bubbling tumult of thought and speculation, backgrounded by a horrible fear which she closed away. That wouldn’t help, she’d to keep sane; and keep up with the headache man; and be thankful she’d a decent figure under these shy-making circumstances.

She glanced down at it, nicely browned, and felt absurdly cheered. Houghton swung beside her in silence, his neat, thinned Greek profile rigidly towards her, his eyes fixed ahead. She suddenly realised that he was elaborately and painstakingly not looking at her. Also, that he was wishing, with an angry embarrassment, that she would not look at him.

They came in silence to the foot of the great mounds. There were three of them, matted in long, coarse grass. Gay went through the space between the nearer two and saw beyond merely such rolling hill-country, rolling deserted to the horizon’s edge, as lay to the west. She heard Houghton breathing, coming round the corner.

“They’re just hills.”

Gay shook her head. “Mounds, I think. I’ve dug ancient ones in Mexico, and they’ve much these shapes, ruined buildings with a thousand years or so of the blowing of sand and earth on the top of them…” She stopped, appalled. “Oh, God!”

He barked, “Eh?”—it must have been his tribal war-cry ­ staring about him. But Gay was merely looking blankly at the mounds. She said:

“I don’t know much of the Pewsey country,but there were no mounds near the village last night. None marked on any archaeological map. If these have taken years to accumulate, then…”

For the first time their eyes met, and she saw herself globed in the light grey eyes of Houghton—shallow, puzzled eyes, faintly red-rimmed. She saw her face, strained and white, in that reflection, above her brown throat... Houghton looked away.

“Then this can’t be the Pewsey district.”

“But it is. That hill over there—I saw it as I went to sleep last night—if it was last night.” She felt suddenly breathless and sat down. “Listen, what did you do when you went to bed last night?”

“What? Tried the formula of this Dunne rubbish you talked about.”

“Did you have any success?” Gay’s voice sounded far away to herself. “Stuff like nightmare after a bit. Half-dozing, I suppose. The lightning cracked into the stuff and made my headache twice as bad. Then I slipped into the stuff again—damned rubbish. Woke up and saw you.”

“This rubbishy dream stuff—did you have a sensation of going at a tremendous rate—slipping over the brink of a precipice?”

He scowled in thought. “No. Something—like going up a spiral staircase, and lights winking in and out from the windows. Anyhow, what does it matter? What’s it to do with this—blasted insanity?”

“I’m not sure—yet.’ Gay Hunter still felt breathless. That, and queer, as though she was about to be sick. “But I’ve a guess—oh, hell ’n’ blast, it can’t be, it can’t be!”

“All this is rot to me. Look here, if we’re going together, we might as well start. I’m going on—to get clothes somewhere, and back to London, whatever has happened here in Wiltshire.”

Gay stood up, slowly, a queer look on her face. “All right? East?”

“That’s the direction of London, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s the direction of London. Or was.”

“Eh?”

She gripped his naked arm. “What’s that?”

That was a movement in the long grass at a distance of ten yards or so from the mounds—a movement that ended in a tall, blonde woman, unclad as themselves, with a scared, astounded face, rising into full view and staring at them with horrified eyes. Gay blinked her own eyes at the sight. Had the whole damn landscape been showered with undraped females in the night? O Lord, she was going mad…

“Ledyard!”

Houghton stood halted, staring, a dismayed, agonised, smoking-room-story blush in effigy.

“Jane!”

Gay slumped down in the grass, too wearied with surprises even to giggle. “Do introduce us.”

“Eh? What? Oh Lord, Jane! …This is Lady Jane Easterling, Miss Hunter.”