Mysterious Kôr

Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon’s capital—shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could see every slate in the roofs, every whited kerb, every contour of the naked winter flowerbeds in the park; and the lake, with its shining twists and tree-darkened islands would be a landmark for miles, yes, miles, overhead. However, the sky, in whose glassiness floated no clouds but only opaque balloons, remained glassy-silent. The Germans no longer came by the full moon. Something more immaterial seemed to threaten, and to be keeping people at home. This day between days, this extra tax, was perhaps more than senses and nerves could bear. People stayed indoors with a fervour that could be felt: the buildings strained with batteneddown human life, but not a beam, not a voice, not a note from a radio escaped. Now and then under streets and buildings the earth rumbled: the Underground sounded loudest at this time. Outside the now gateless gates of the park, the road coming downhill from the north-west turned south and became a street, down whose perspective the traffic lights went through their unmeaning performance of changing colour. From the promontory of pavement outside the gates you saw at once up the road and down the street: from behind where you stood, between the gateposts, appeared the lesser strangeness of grass and water and trees. At this point, at this moment, three French soldiers, directed to a hostel they could not find, stopped singing to listen derisively to the waterbirds wakened up by the moon. Next, two wardens coming off duty emerged from their post and crossed the road diagonally, each with an elbow cupped inside a slung-on tin hat. The wardens turned their faces, mauve in the moonlight, towards the Frenchmen with no expression at all. The two sets of steps died in

Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Elizabeth Bowen. Copyright © Elizabeth Bowen 1980.

opposite directions, and, the birds subsiding, nothing was heard or seen until, a little way down the street, a trickle of people came out of the Underground, around the anti-panic brick wall. These all disappeared quickly, in an abashed way, or as though dissolved in the street by some white acid, but for a girl and a soldier who, by their way of walking, seemed to have no destination but each other and to not be quite certain even of that. Blotted into one shadow he tall, she little, these two proceeded towards the park. They looked in, but did not go in; they stood there debating without speaking. Then, as though a command from the street behind them had been received by their synchronized bodies, they faced round to look back the way they had come. His look up the height of a building made his head drop back, and she saw his eyeballs glitter. She slid her hand from his sleeve, stepped to the edge of the pavement and said: “Mysterious Kôr.” “What is?” he said, not quite collecting himself. “This is—

‘Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand, Thy lonely towers beneath a lonely moon—’ —this is Kôr.”

“Why,” he said, “it’s years since I’ve thought of that.” She said: “I think of it all the time—

‘Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand, The fever-haunted forest and lagoon, Mysterious Kôr thy walls——’

—a completely forsaken city, as high as cliffs and as white as bones, with no history——” “But something must once have happened: why had it been forsaken?” “How could anyone tell you when there’s nobody there?” “Nobody there since how long?” “Thousands of years.” “In that case, it would have fallen down.” “No, not Kôr,” she said with immediate authority. “Kôr’s altogether different; it’s very strong; there is not a crack in it anywhere for a weed to grow in; the corners of stones and the monuments might have been cut yesterday, and the stairs and arches are built to support themselves.” “You know all about it,” he said, looking at her. “I know, I know all about it.”

“What, since you read that book?” “Oh, I didn’t get much from that; I just got the name. I knew that must be the right name; it’s like a cry.” “Most like the cry of a crow to me.” He reflected, then said, “But the poem begins with ‘Not’—‘ Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand—’ And it goes on, as I remember, to prove Kôr’s not really anywhere. When even a poem says there’s no such place—” “What it tries to say doesn’t matter: I see what it makes me see. Anyhow, that was written some time ago, at that time they thought they had got everything taped, because the whole world had been explored, even the middle of Africa. Every thing and place had been found and marked on some map; so what wasn’t marked on any map couldn’t be there at all. So they thought: that was why he wrote the poem. ‘ The world is disenchanted,’ it goes on. That was what set me off hating civilization.” “Well, cheer up,” he said; “there isn’t much of it left.” “Oh, yes, I cheered up some time ago. This war shows we’ve by no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it. I don’t see why not. They say we can’t say what’s come out since the bombing started. By the time we’ve come to the end, Kôr may be the one city left: the abiding city. I should laugh.” “No, you wouldn’t,” he said sharply. “You wouldn’t—at least, I hope not. I hope you don’t know what you’re saying—does the moon make you funny?” “Don’t be cross about Kôr; please don’t Arthur,” she said. “I thought girls thought about people.” “What, these days?” she said. “Think about people? How can anyone think about people if they’ve got any heart? I don’t know how other girls manage: I always think about Kôr.” “Not about me?” he said. When she did not at once answer, he turned her hand over, in anguish, inside his grasp. “Because I’m not there when you want me—is that my fault?” “But to think about Kôr is to think about you and me.” “In that dead place?” “No, ours—we’d be alone here.” Tightening his thumb on her palm while he thought this over, he looked behind them, around them, above them—even up at the sky. He said finally: “But we’re alone here.” “That was why I said ‘Mysterious Kôr’.” “What, you mean we’re there now, that here’s there, that now’s then? . . . I don’t mind,” he added, letting out as a laugh the sigh he had been holding in for some time. “You ought to know the place, and for all I could tell you we might be anywhere: I often do have it, this funny feeling,

the first minute or two when I’ve come up out of the Underground. Well, well: join the Army and see the world.” He nodded towards the perspective of traffic lights and said, a shade craftily: “What are those, then?” Having caught the quickest possible breath, she replied: “Inexhaustible gasses; they bored through to them and lit them as they came up; by changing color they show the changing of minutes; in Kôr there is no sort of other time.” “You’ve got the moon, though: that can’t help making months.” “Oh, and the sun, of course; but those two could do what they liked; we should not have to calculate when they’d come or go.” “We might not have to,” he said, “but I bet I should.” “I should not mind what you did, so long as you never said, ‘What next?’” “I don’t know about ‘next,’ but I do know what we’d do first.” “What, Arthur?” “Populate Kôr.” She said: “I suppose it would be all right if our children were to marry each other?” But her voice faded out; she had been reminded that they were homeless on this his first night of leave. They were, that was to say, in London without any hope of any place of their own. Pepita shared a two-roomed flatlet with a girl friend, in a by-street off the Regent’s Park Road, and towards this they must make their halfhearted way. Arthur was to have the sitting-room divan, usually occupied by Pepita, while she herself had half of her girl friend’s bed. There was really no room for a third, and least of all for a man, in those small rooms packed with furniture and the two girls’ belongings: Pepita tried to be grateful for her friend Callie’s forbearance—but how could she be, when it had not occurred to Callie that she would do better to be away tonight? She was more slow-witted than narrow-minded—but Pepita felt she owed a kind of ruin to her. Callie, not yet known to be home later than ten, would be now waiting up, in her house-coat, to welcome Arthur. That would mean three-sided chat, drinking cocoa, then turning in: that would be that, and that would be all. That was London, this war—they were lucky to have a roof—london, full enough before the Americans came. Not a place: they would even grudge you sharing a grave—that was what even married couples complained. Whereas in Kôr.. . In Kôr.. . Like glass, the illusion shattered: a car hummed like a hornet towards them, veered, showed its scarlet tail-light, streaked away up the road. A woman edged round a front door and along the area railings timidly called her cat; meanwhile a clock near, then another set further back in the dazzling distance, set about striking midnight. Pepita, feel-

ing Arthur release her arm with an abruptness that was the inverse of passion, shivered; whereat he asked brusquely: “Cold? Well, which way?—we’d better be getting on.”

Callie was no longer waiting up. Hours ago she had set out the three cups and saucers, the tins of cocoa and household milk and, on the gas-ring, brought the kettle to just short of the boil. She had turned open Arthur’s bed, the living-room divan, in the neat inviting way she had learnt at home—then, with a modest impulse, replaced the cover. She had, as Pepita foresaw, been wearing her cretonne housecoat, the nearest thing to a hostess gown that she had; she had already brushed her hair for the night, rebraided it, bound the braids in a coronet round her head. Both lights and the wireless had been on, to make the room both look and sound gay: all alone, she had come to that peak moment at which company should arrive—but so seldom does. From then on she felt welcome beginning to wither in her, a flower of the heart that had bloomed too early. There she had sat like an image, facing the three cold cups, on the edge of the bed to be occupied by an unknown man. Callie’s innocence and her still unsought-out state had brought her to take a proprietary pride in Arthur; this was all the stronger, perhaps, because they had not yet met. Sharing the flat with Pepita, this last year, she had been content with reflecting the heat of love. It was not, surprisingly, that Pepita seemed very happy—there were times when she was palpably on the rack, and this was not what Callie could understand. “Surely you owe it to Arthur,” she would then say, “to keep cheerful? So long as you love each other—” Callie’s calm brow glowed—one might say that it glowed in place of her friend’s; she became the guardian of that ideality which for Pepita was constantly lost to view. It was true, with the sudden prospect of Arthur’s leave, things had come nearer to earth: he became a proposition, and she would have been as glad if he could have slept somewhere else. Physically shy, a brotherless virgin, Callie shrank from sharing this flat with a young man. In this flat you could hear everything: what was once a three-windowed Victorian drawing-room had been partitioned, by very thin walls, into kitchenette, living-room, Callie’s bedroom. The living-room was in the center; the two others open off it. What was once the conservatory, half a flight down, was now converted into a draughty bathroom, shared with somebody else on the girl’s floor. The flat, for these days, was cheap—even so, it was Callie, earning more than Pepita, who paid the greater part of the rent: it thus became up to her, more or less, to express good will as to Arthur’s making a third. “Why, it will be lovely to have him here,” Callie said. Pepita accepted the good will without much grace—but then, had she ever much

grace to spare?—she was as restlessly secretive, as self-centered, as a little half-grown black cat. Next came a puzzling moment: Pepita seemed to be hinting that Callie should fix herself up somewhere else. “But where would I go?” Callie marvelled when this was at last borne in on her. “You know what London’s like now. And, anyway”—here she laughed, but hers was a forehead that coloured as easily as it glowed—“it wouldn’t be proper, would it, me going off and leaving just you and Arthur; I don’t know what your mother would say to me. No, we may be a little squashed, but we’ll make things ever so homey. I shall not mind playing gooseberry, really, dear.” But the hominess by now was evaporating, as Pepita and Arthur still and still did not come. At half-past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the slighted room. Callie recollected the fuel target and turned off her dear little table lamp, gaily painted with spots to make it look like a toadstool, thereby leaving only the hanging light. She laid her hand on the kettle, to find it gone cold again and sigh for the wasted gas if not for her wasted thought. Where are they? Cold crept up her out of the kettle; she went to bed. Callie’s bed lay along the wall under the window: she did not like sleeping so close up under glass, but the clearance that must be left for the opening of door and cupboards made this the only possible place. Now she got in and lay rigidly on the bed’s inner side, under the hanging hems of the window curtains, training her limbs not to stray to what would be Pepita’s half. This sharing of her bed with another body would not be the least of her sacrifice to the lovers’ love; tonight would be the first night—or at least, since she was an infant—that Callie had slept with anyone. Child of a sheltered middle-class household, she had kept physical distances all her life. Already repugnance and shyness ran through her limbs; she was preyed upon by some more obscure trouble than the expectation that she might not sleep. As to that, Pepita was restless; her tossings on the divan, her broken-off exclamations and blurred pleas had been to be heard, most nights, through the dividing wall. Callie knew, as though from a vision, that Arthur would sleep soundly, with assurance and majesty. Did they not all say, too, that a soldier sleeps like a log? With awe she pictured, asleep, the face that she had not yet, awake, seen—arthur’s man’s eyelids, cheekbones and set mouth turned up to the darkened ceiling. Wanting to savour darkness herself, Callie reached out and put off her bedside lamp. At once she knew that something was happening—outdoors, in the street, the whole of London, the world. An advance, an extraordinary movement was silently taking place; blue-white beams overflowed from

it, silting, dropping round the edges of the muffling black-out curtains. When, starting up, she knocked a fold of the curtain, a beam like a mouse ran across her bed. A searchlight, the most powerful of all time, might have been turned full and steady upon her defended window; finding flaws in the blackout stuff, it made veins and stars. Once gained by this idea of pressure she could not lie down again; she sat tautly, drawn-up knees touching her breasts, and asked herself if there were anything she should do. She parted the curtains, opened them slowly wider, looked out—and was face to face with the moon. Below the moon, the houses opposite her window blazed back in transparent shadow; and something—was it a coin or a ring?—glittered half-way across the chalk-white street. Light marched in past her face, and she turned to see where it went: out stood the curves and garlands of the great white marble Victorian mantelpiece of that lost drawingroom; out stood, in the photographs turned her way, the thoughts with which her parents had faced the camera, and the humble puzzlement of her two dogs at home. Of silver brocade, just faintly purpled with roses, became her housecoat hanging over the chair. And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified the lateness of the lovers’ return. No wonder, she said herself, no wonder—if this was the world they walked in, if this was whom they were with. Having drunk in the white explanation, Callie lay down again. Her half of the bed was in shadow, but she allowed one hand to lie, blanched, in what would be Pepita’s place. She lay and looked at the hand until it was no longer her own. Callie woke to the sound of Pepita’s key in the latch. But no voices? What had happened? Then she heard Arthur’s step. She heard his unslung equipment dropped with a weary, dull sound, and the plonk of his tin hat on a wooden chair. “Sssh-sssh!” Pepita exclaimed, “she might be asleep!” Then at last Arthur’s voice: “But I thought you said—” “I’m not asleep; I’m just coming!” Callie called out with rapture, leaping out from her form in shadow into the moonlight, zipping on her enchanted house-coat over her nightdress, kicking her shoes on, and pinning in place, with a trembling firmness, her plaits in their coronet round her head. Between these movements of hers she heard not another sound. Had she only dreamed they were there? Her heart beat: she stepped through the living-room, shutting her door behind her. Pepita and Arthur stood the other side of the table; they gave the impression of being lined up. Their faces, at different levels—for Pepita’s rough, dark head came only an inch above Arthur’s khaki shoulder—were alike in abstention from any kind of expression; as though, spiritually, they both

still refused to be here. Their features looked faint, weathered—was this the work of the moon? Pepita said at once: “I suppose we are very late?” “I don’t wonder,” Callie said, “on this lovely night.” Arthur had not raised his eyes; he was looking at the three cups. Pepita now suddenly jogged his elbow, saying, “Arthur, wake up; say something; this is Callie—well, Callie, this is Arthur, of course.” “Why, yes of course this is Arthur,” returned Callie, whose candid eyes since she entered had not left Arthur’s face. Perceiving that Arthur did not know what to do, she advanced round the table to shake hands with him. He looked up, she looked down, for the first time: she rather beheld than felt his red-brown grip on what still seemed her glove of moonlight. “Welcome, Arthur,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you at last. I hope you will be comfortable in the flat.” “It’s been kind of you,” he said after consideration. “Please do not feel that,” said Callie. “This is Pepita’s home, too, and we both hope—don’t we, Pepita?—that you’ll regard it as yours. Please feel free to do just as you like. I am sorry it is so small.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Arthur said, as though hypnotized; “it seems a nice little place.” Pepita, meanwhile, glowered and turned away. Arthur continued to wonder, though he had once been told, how these two unalike girls had come to set up together—pepita so small, except for her too-big head, compact of childish brusqueness and of unchildish passion, and Callie, so sedate, waxy and tall—an unlit candle. Yes, she was like one of those candles on sale outside a church; there could be something votive even in her demeanour. She was unconscious that her good manners, those of an old fashioned country doctor’s daughter, were putting the other two at a disadvantage. He found himself touched by the grave good faith with which Callie was wearing that tartish house-coat, above which her face kept the glaze of sleep; and, as she knelt to relight the gas-ring under the kettle, he marked the strong, delicate arch of one bare foot, disappearing into the arty green shoe. Pepita was now too near him ever again to be seen as he now saw Callie—in a sense, he never had seen Pepita for the first time: she had not been, and still sometimes was not, his type. No, he had not thought of her twice; he had not remembered her until he began to remember her with passion. You might say he had not seen Pepita coming: their love had been a collision in the dark. Callie, determined to get this over, knelt back and said: “Would Arthur like to wash his hands?” When they had heard him stumble down the half-flight of stairs, she said to Pepita: “Yes, I was so glad you had the moon.” “Why?” said Pepita. She added: “There was too much of it.”

“You’re tired. Arthur looks tired, too.” “How would you know? He’s used to marching about. But it’s all this having no place to go.” “But, Pepita, you—” But at this point Arthur came back: from the door he noticed the wireless, and went direct to it. “Nothing much on now, I suppose?” he doubtfully said. “No; you see it’s past midnight; we’re off the air. And, anyway, in this house they don’t like the wireless late. By the same token,” went on Callie, friendly smiling, “I’m afraid I must ask you, Arthur, to take your boots off, unless, of course, you mean to stay sitting down. The people below us—” Pepita flung off, saying something under her breath, but Arthur, remarking, “No, I don’t mind,” both sat down and began to take off his boots. Pausing, glancing to left and right at the divan’s fresh cotton spread, he said: “It’s all right is it, for me to sit on this?” “That’s my bed,” said Pepita. “You are to sleep in it.” Callie then made the cocoa, after which they turned in. Preliminary trips to the bathroom having been worked out, Callie was first to retire, shutting the door behind her so that Pepita and Arthur might kiss each other good night. When Pepita joined her, it was without knocking: Pepita stood still in the moon and began to tug off her clothes. Glancing with hate at the bed, she asked: “Which side?” “I expected you’d like the outside.” “What are you standing about for?” “I don’t really know: as I’m inside I’d better get in first.” “Then why not get in?” When they had settled rigidly, side by side, Callie asked: “Do you think Arthur’s got all he wants?” Pepita jerked her head up. “We can’t sleep in all this moon.” “Why, you don’t believe the moon does things, actually?” “Well, it couldn’t hope to make some of us much more screwy.” Callie closed the curtains, then said: “What do you mean? And— didn’t you hear?—i asked if Arthur’s got all he wants.” “That’s what I meant—have you got a screw loose, really?” “Pepita, I won’t stay here if you’re going to be like this.” “In that case, you had better go in with Arthur.” “What about me?” Arthur loudly said through the wall. “I can hear practically all you girls are saying.” They were both startled—rather that than abashed. Arthur, alone in there, had thrown off the ligatures of his social manner: his voice

held the whole authority of his sex—he was impatient, sleepy, and he belonged to no one. “Sorry,” the girls said in unison. Then Pepita laughed soundlessly, making their bed shake, till to stop herself she bit the back of her hand, and this movement made her elbow strike Callie’s cheek. “Sorry,” she had to whisper. No answer: Pepita fingered her elbow and found, yes, it was quite true, it was wet. “Look, shut up crying, Callie: what have I done?” Callie rolled right round, in order to press her forehead closely under the window, into the curtains, against the wall. Her weeping continued to be soundless: now and then, unable to reach her handkerchief, she staunched her eyes with a curtain, disturbing slivers of moon. Pepita gave up marvelling, and soon slept: at least there is something in being dog-tired. A clock struck four as Callie woke up again—but something else had made her open her swollen eyelids. Arthur, stumbling about on his padded feet, could be heard next door attempting to make no noise. Inevitably, he bumped the edge of the table. Callie sat up: by her side Pepita lay like a mummy rolled half over, in forbidding, tenacious sleep. Arthur groaned. Callie caught a breath, climbed lightly over Pepita, felt for her torch on the mantelpiece, stopped to listen again. Arthur groaned again: Callie, with movements soundless as they were certain, opened the door and slipped through to the living-room. “What’s the matter?” she whispered. “Are you ill?” “No; I just got a cigarette. Did I wake you up?” “But you groaned.” “I’m sorry; I’d no idea.” “But do you often?” “I’ve no idea, really, I tell you,” Arthur repeated. The air of the room was dense with his presence, overhung by tobacco. He must be sitting on the edge of his bed, wrapped up in his overcoat—she could smell the coat, and each time he pulled on the cigarette his features appeared down there, in the fleeting, dull reddish glow. “Where are you?” he said. “Show a light.” Her nervous touch on her torch, like a reflex to what he said, made it flicker up for a second. “I am just by the door; Pepita’s asleep; I’d better go back to bed.” “Listen. Do you two get on each other’s nerves?” “Not till tonight,” said Callie, watching the uncertain swoops of the cigarette as he reached across to the ashtray on the edge of the table. Shifting her bare feet patiently, she added: “You don’t see us as we usually are.”

“She’s a girl who shows things in funny ways—i expect she feels bad at our putting you out like this—i know I do. But then we’d got no choice, had we?” “It is really I who am putting you out,” said Callie. “Well, that can’t be helped either, can it? You had the right to stay in your own place. If there’d been more time, we might have gone to the country, though I still don’t see where we’d have gone there. It’s one harder when you’re not married, unless you’ve got the money. Smoke?” “No, thank you. Well, if you’re all right, I’ll go back to bed.” “I’m glad she’s asleep—funny the way she sleeps, isn’t it? You can’t help wondering where she is. You haven’t got a boy, have you, just at present?” “No. I’ve never had one.” “I’m not sure in one way that you’re not better off. I can see there’s not so much in it for a girl these days. It makes me feel cruel the way I unsettle her: I don’t know how much it’s me myself or how much it’s something the matter that I can’t help. How are any of us to know how things could have been? They forget war’s not just only war; it’s years out of people’s lives that they’ve never had before and won’t have again. Do you think she’s fanciful?” “Who, Pepita?” “It’s enough to make her—tonight was the pay-off. We couldn’t get near any movie or any place for sitting; you had to fight into the bars, and she hates the staring in bars, and with all that milling about, every street we went, they kept on knocking her even off my arm. So then we took the tube to that park down there, but the place was as bad as daylight, let alone it was cold. We hadn’t the nerve—well, that’s nothing to do with you.” “I don’t mind.” “Or else you don’t understand. So we began to play—we were off in Kôr.” “Core of what?” “Mysterious Kôr—ghost city.” “Where?” “You may ask. But I could have sworn she saw it, and from the way she saw it I saw it, too. A game’s a game, but what’s a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets in you and you can’t laugh it off. I tell you, I woke up just now not knowing where I’d been; and I had to get up and feel round this table before I even knew where I was. It wasn’t till then that I thought of a cigarette. Now I see why she sleeps like that, if that’s where she goes.” “But she is just as often restless; I often hear her.”

“Then she doesn’t always make it. Perhaps it takes me, in some way— Well, I can’t see any harm: when two people have got no place, why not want Kôr, as a start? There are no restrictions on wanting, at any rate.” “But, oh, Arthur, can’t wanting want what’s human?” He yawned. “To be human’s to be at a dead loss.” Stopping yawning, he ground out his cigarette: the china tray skidded at the edge of the table. “Bring that light here a moment—that is, will you? I think I’ve messed ash all over these sheets of hers.” Callie advanced with the torch alight, but at arm’s length: now and then her thumb made the beam wobble. She watched the lit-up inside of Arthur’s hand as he brushed the sheet; and once he looked up to see her white-nightgowned figure curving above and away from him, behind the arc of light. “What’s that swinging?” “One of my plaits of hair. Shall I open the window wider?” “What, to let the smoke out? Go on. And how’s your moon?” “Mine?” Marvelling over this, as the first sign that Arthur remembered that she was Callie, she uncovered the window, pushed up the sash, then after a minute said: “Not so strong.” Indeed, the moon’s power over London and the imagination had now declined. The siege of light had relaxed; the search was over; the street had a look of survival and no more. Whatever had glittered there, coin or ring, was now invisible or had gone. To Callie it seemed likely that there would never be such a moon again; and on the whole she felt this was for the best. Feeling air reach in like a tired arm round her body, she dropped the curtains against it and returned to her own room. Back by her bed, she listened: Pepita’s breathing still had the regular sound of sleep. At the other side of the wall the divan creaked as Arthur stretched himself out again. Having felt ahead of her lightly, to make sure her half was empty, Callie climbed over Pepita and got in. A certain amount of warmth had travelled between the sheets from Pepita’s flank, and in this Callie extended her sword-cold body: she tried to compose her limbs; even they quivered after Arthur’s words in the dark, words to the dark. The loss of her own mysterious expectation, of her love for love, was a small thing beside the war’s total of unlived lives. Suddenly Pepita flung out one hand: its back knocked Callie lightly across the face. Pepita had now turned over and lay with her face up. The hand that had struck Callie must have lain over the other, which grasped the pyjama collar. Her eyes, in the dark, might have been either shut or open, but nothing made her frown more or less steadily: it became certain, after another moment, that Pepita’s act of justice had been unconscious. She still lay, as she had lain, in an avid dream, of which Arthur had been the source, of which Arthur was not the end. With him she looked this way,

that way, down the wide, void, pure streets, between statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonnades. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came; with him trod the ermine dust of the endless halls, stood on terraces, mounted the extreme tower, looked down on the statued squares, the wide, void, pure streets. He was the password, but not the answer: it was to Kôr’s finality that she turned.