I made my way down through the house. Everything seemed known to me, in an odd, remote sort of way, the smell of must on the air, the faded stair carpet, the muddy ancestral portraits lurking in the shadows, that hat-stand and those mounted antlers in the hall, the grandfather clock hanging back in the shadows. It was as if I had lived there long ago, not in childhood but in a stylised antiquity, in the big frowsty mansion at the back of my mind that is the past, the inevitably imagined past.
After opening two or three wrong doors I at last found the drawing room. On a rug in front of the fire the child was playing with a set of wooden building bricks. Her grandfather was seated in an armchair, leaning forwards with his elbows on the armrests and his fingers laced before him, smiling down on her bemusedly. Night had fallen, with what seemed remarkable swiftness, and the curtains were drawn, and the shaded lamps with their forty-watt bulbs cast a misty glimmer over the heavily looming furniture and along the striped and faded wallpaper. I noted the vast mirror over the fireplace with its ornate chipped frame, the faded hunting prints, a chintz-covered sofa lolling exhaustedly on its hunkers, worn out it seemed after so many years of being sat on. All this too I knew, somehow.
“Such a fascinating age,” Mr. Plomer said, twinkling at me and at the child. “All of life before her.” He invited me to sit, indicating an armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace. “You have no motor car of your own with you,” he said, “is that right? We must find a bed for you, or”—his mild gaze did not waver yet I seemed to catch a glint in it, a sharp, bright knowingness—“or is Polly looking after that?” Well, he wasn’t a fool, he must have guessed what Polly was to me, and I to her, despite the obvious disparities between us, age being not the least of them — I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a better idea of our relations than I did. A flaming log subsided in the fireplace, sending up a spray of sparks. I said I should call for a taxi but he shook his head. “Not at all, not at all,” he said. “You must stay, of course. It’s merely a matter of airing a room for you. I shall speak to Janey.” He twinkled again. “You mustn’t mind poor Janey, you know. She’s not as terrible as might seem from her manner.” I nodded. I felt heavy-limbed and slack, sunk in a half-hypnotised trance by the old man’s mild, almost caressing tones. The child at our feet had assembled a tower of bricks, and now she knocked it over, giving a satisfied chuckle. “Surely it must be her bedtime,” the old man murmured, frowning. “Perhaps, after all, you should go up and speak to her mother?” I nodded again but made no move, asprawl and helpless in the armchair’s ample and irresistible embrace. I thought of Polly sitting on the side of the bed, her head bowed and her shoulders shaking. “But I haven’t offered you anything to drink!” Mr. Plomer exclaimed. He rose stiffly, wincing, and shuffled to a sideboard at the far end of the room. “There’s sherry,” he said over his shoulder, his voice emerging hollowly from the dimness. “Or this.” He held up a bottle and read from the label. “Schnapps, it’s called. A gift from my friend the Prince — Mr. Hyland, that is. Do you know him? I’m not sure what schnapps is, but I suspect it’s rather strong.” I said I would prefer sherry, and he came back carrying two glasses hardly bigger than thimbles. He sat down again. I sipped the unctuous sweet syrup. I was so tired, so tired, a wayfarer stalled halfway along an immense and torturous journey. I recalled a dream I had dreamed one night recently, not a dream really, but a fragment. I was at a railway station somewhere abroad, I didn’t know where, and couldn’t tell what the language was that the people around me were speaking. The station resembled a Byzantine church, or perhaps a temple or even a mosque, its domed ceiling plated with gold-leaf and the floor-tiles painted in bright, swirling patterns of blue and silver and ruby-red. I was waiting anxiously for a train that would take me home, although I wasn’t at all sure where home was supposed to be. Through the station’s wide-open doors I could see refulgent sunlight outside, and billows of dust, and milling traffic with vehicles of unfamiliar make, and crowds of olive-skinned people moving everywhere, headscarved women clad in black and men with enormous moustaches and piercing, pale-blue eyes. I looked about for a clock but couldn’t see one, and then it came to me that my train, the only train on which I could have travelled, the only one my ticket was valid for, had departed long ago, leaving me stranded here, among strangers.
“He was walking on the castle wall in a storm,” Mr. Plomer said. I gazed at him blear-eyed from under leaden lids. In his left hand he was holding a book, a quaint little volume bound in faded crimson cloth, open to an inner page from which it seemed he had been reading, or was about to read. Where had it come from? I hadn’t seen him get up to fetch it. Had I dozed off for a minute? And the dream about the train, had I been remembering it, or dreaming it anew, or for the first time, even? The old man was regarding me with an eye benign and bright. “The poet was lodging at a castle owned by his friend, a princess, and walked out on the battlements one stormy evening and heard the voice of the angel, as he said.” He smiled, then lifted the book close to his eyes and began to read aloud from it in a soft reedy singsong voice. I listened as a child would listen, in rapt incomprehension. The language, since I didn’t know it, sounded to my ear like so many hawkings and slurrings. After reciting a few lines he broke off, looking sheepish, the dabs of pink glowing in the hollows of his cheeks. “Duino was the place,” he said, “a castle on the sea-coast, and so he called the poems after it.” He closed the book and set it on his knee, keeping a finger inside it to mark the page. Thick-tongued, I asked him to tell me the meaning of what he had read. “Well,” he said, “since it is a poem, much of the meaning is in the expressing, you know, the rhythm and the cadence.” He paused, making a faint droning sound at the back of his throat, and looked up to consider the shadows under the ceiling. “He speaks of the earth—Erde—wishing to become absorbed into us.” Here he singsang again a phrase in German. “Is not your dream, he says — says to the earth, that is — to be one day invisible. Invisible in us, he means.” He smiled gently. “The thought is obscure, perhaps. Yet one admires the passion of the lines, I think, yes?”