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...
