‘Oh, God. Are you mad or drunk or what?’
‘Nothing like that. I’m asleep.’
‘Asleep?’ Mason’s nondescript face showed total incredulity.
‘Yes. As I was saying, at first I took you for another real person in the same situation as myself: sound asleep, dreaming, aware of the fact, and anxious to exchange names and telephone numbers and so forth with the object of getting in touch the next day and confirming the shared experience. That would prove something remarkable about the mind, wouldn’t it? — people communicating via their dreams. It’s a pity one so seldom realizes one’s dreaming: I’ve only been able to try the experiment four or five times in the last twenty years, and I’ve never had any success. Either I forget the details or I find there’s no such person, as in this case. But I’ll go on—’
‘You’re sick.’
‘Oh no. Of course it’s conceivable there is such a person as you. Unlikely, though, or you’d have recognized the true situation at once, I feel, instead of arguing against it like this. As I say, I may be wrong.’
‘It’s hopeful that you say that.’ Mason had calmed down, and lit a cigarette with deliberation. ‘I don’t know much about these things, but you can’t be too far gone if you admit you could be in error. Now let me just assure you that I didn’t come into existence five minutes ago inside your head. My name, as I told you, is George Herbert Mason. I’m forty-six years old, married, three children, job in the furniture business… Oh hell, giving you no more than an outline of my life so far would take all night, as it would in the case of anybody with an average memory. Let’s finish our drinks and go along to my house, and then we can—’
‘You’re just a man in my dream saying that,’ said Pettigrew loudly. ‘Two-three-two, five-four-five-four. I’ll call the number if it exists, but it won’t be you at the other end. Two-three-two—’
‘Why are you so agitated, Mr Pettigrew?’
‘Because of what’s going to happen to you at any moment.’
‘What… Is this a threat?’
Pettigrew was breathing fast. His finely drawn face began to coarsen, the pattern of his tweed jacket to become blurred. ‘The telephone!’ he shouted. ‘It must be later than I thought!’
‘Telephone?’ repeated Mason, blinking and screwing up his eyes as Pettigrew’s form continued to change.
‘The one at my bedside! I’m waking up!’
Mason grabbed the other by the arm, but that arm had lost the greater part of its outline, had become a vague patch of light already fading, and when Mason looked at the hand that had done the grabbing, his own hand, he saw with difficulty that it likewise no longer had fingers, or front or back, or skin, or anything at all.
MR BARRETT’S SECRET
I
It must have been in the January or February of the year 1845 that I first became aware of the connection of Elizabeth, my first child and eldest daughter, with the man Robert Browning. Had I had the least intimation of what was to follow, I should have forbidden its continuance in any form, and have prosecuted my interdiction with unswerving tenacity. Nevertheless, full knowledge of the future that awaited Elizabeth and myself would surely have led me to bless that divine provision whereby it is not given to us to see as far as the next tick of the clock.
A letter, addressed to Elizabeth in a strange hand, arrived by the early morning delivery at my house at 50 Wimpole Street, a circumstance in itself very far from unusual. More especially since the publication by Moxon of her Poems in two volumes the preceding August, my dearest Ba (to use her family pet-name) had grown used to receiving correspondence from persons unacquainted with her. Many came from America and other distant parts of the world; the letter in question had been posted in London.
In characterizing just now the style of the writing on the envelope, I used the word ‘strange’ advisedly. It was not only unfamiliar to me; it was peculiar, extraordinary, odd. And yet in its very singularity there was a principle I seemed to recognize from some distant part of my life, from long ago. Possibly, too, I was aware of an indefinable threat or menace lurking in it, remote but real; more likely, however, I am allowing later events to sophisticate those first memories.
Whatever I might have thought, then or afterwards, there was no doubt that Elizabeth was delighted with her letter. I had scarcely finished breakfast before I was urgently summoned to her room on the third floor of the house.
‘Dearest papa!’ she cried, rising from her sofa-bed to embrace me in lively fashion. ‘You will never guess what a marvellous gift I have had in the post this morning!’
‘You are bidden to take tea with our young Queen,’ I suggested, smiling.
‘It’s a trifle soon for such a thing, though doubtless that and much else will come in time. No, I am the recipient of a poem by Mr Robert Browning, a most beautiful and wondrous poem in which he exalts me to the status of a queen, but a queen of poetry and of the making of poetry. Oh, it’s such a poem, darling papa, so full of the loveliest affirmations of devotion, so eloquent, so rich in the spontaneous vitality you know I prize above everything.’
‘And this comes unprompted? As a spontaneous tribute?’ I asked.
‘Not quite, it’s true. You may remember that in my poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” I referred to Mr Browning along with Mr Wordsworth and Mr Tennyson as a man whose writings place him next to the Gods.’
‘So you did. And now he sends you a whole poem by way of return.’
‘Well, there of course,’ said Ba merrily, ‘uncultured fathers and others of a sad literal disposition of mind will insist that the thing’s only a letter, you know, nothing but a rather long and flowery letter, dash it all, the work of some modish popinjay with a fancy for extravagant compliment’, and the dear girl’s voice and demeanour became for the moment a fanciful but truly comical travesty of my own. ‘But this is a letter with the beauty and tenderness of a poem, a true poem. Enough! — you shall see and judge for yourself’, and she made to hand me the closely written pages, but snatched them quickly back and read from them in a high thrilling voice, ‘“I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett”, oh, and, “Into me it has gone, and part of me it has become, this great living poetry of yours”, and a little farther on…’
‘I shall never see to judge for myself,’ I laughingly protested, ‘if you persevere in your recitation’, but I believe she was too much engrossed in those pages to hear me.
‘Yes, he speaks here of, h’m, h’m,“the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought’, and again, “I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart — and I…”, but there I think he goes too far.’
A blush mantled her pale cheek. What had Browning written that she had not cared to let me hear? I know not, for I never saw that letter at last. But some of the phrases in it that I had been permitted to hear, the references to fresh strange music and to affluent language (affluent! a curious epithet, many would say, in this connection), remain lodged in my mind to this day. So did the general kind of expression employed therein. Once again, I felt I had received a warning or a premonition; once again, however, I may in saying so be looking ahead to what then lay in the future.
Certainly, at the time my strongest feelings were pleasure in my dear Ba’s pleasure, heightened by satisfaction that her gifts of versing had been recognized by one I knew to be a poet of sorts, and by a reasonable hope that there might lie distraction from the melancholy and low spirits that had afflicted her increasingly as she grew past her first youth — at this time she was approaching her thirty-ninth birthday. My main concern, however, was as always for her health. This had never been truly sound since, at the age of fifteen, she had fallen victim to a mysterious incapacitating ailment that also afflicted her two younger sisters. As it proved, they were able soon to cast it off, but Elizabeth perhaps never wholly recovered, and within three months she had developed measles. Thereafter she spent much time confined to her room, even her bed, and I have always thought that the resulting seclusion and immobility were what first led her to the writing of verses — a healthier remedy than the opium which she came to consume, sometimes, I fear, in distressingly large doses.