Complete Short Stories Read Free Page A

magnificently ill-tempered. The doctors can do nothing with him. He wants shooting, really.’ Crossley began talking about the doctor. ‘A good–hearted fellow and, for a mental-hospital physician, technically well advanced. He actually studies morbid psychology and is fairly well-read, up to about the day before yesterday. I have a good deal offun with him. He reads neither German nor French, so I keep a stage or two ahead in psychological fashions; he has to wait for the English translations. I invent significant dreams for him to interpret; I find he likes me to put in snakes and apple pies, so I usually do. He is convinced that my mental trouble is due to the good old “antipaternal fixation” – I wish it were as simple as that.’
    Then Crossley asked me whether I could score and listen to a story at the same time. I said that I could. It was slow cricket.
    ‘My story is true,’ he said, ‘every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is “true”, I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and thereforetrue. If I were always to use the same formula, it would soon drag and become false. I am interested in keeping it alive, and it is a true story, every word of it. I know the people in it personally. They are Lampton people.’
    We decided that I should keep score of the runs and extras and that he should keep the bowling analysis, and at the fall of every wicket we should copy from each other.This made story-telling possible.
    Richard awoke one morning saying to Rachel: ‘But what an unusual dream.’
    ‘Tell me, my dear,’ she said, ‘and hurry, because I want to tell you mine.’
    ‘I was having a conversation,’ he said, ‘with a person (or persons, because he changed his appearance so often) of great intelligence, and I can clearly remember the argument. Yet this is the first time I haveever been able to remember any argument that came to me in sleep. Usually my dreams are so different from waking that I can only describe them if I say: “It is as though I were living and thinking as a tree, or a bell, or middle C, or a five-pound note; as though I had never been human.” Life there is sometimes rich for me and sometimes poor, but I repeat, in every case so different, that if I wereto say: “I had a conversation,” or “I was in love,” or “I heard music,” or “I was angry,” it would be as far from the fact as if I tried to explain a problem of philosophy, as Rabelais’s Panurge did to Thaumast, merely by grimacing with my eyes and lips.’
    ‘It is much the same with me,’ she said. ‘I think that when I am asleep I become, perhaps, a stone with all the natural appetites and convictionsof a stone. “Senseless as a stone” is a proverb, but there may be more sense in a stone, more sensibility, more sensitivity, more sentiment, more sensibleness, than in many men and women. And no less sensuality,’ she added thoughtfully.
    It was Sunday morning, so that they could lie in bed, their arms about each other, without troubling about the time; and they were childless, so breakfast couldwait. He told her that in his dream he was walking in the sand hills with this person or persons, who said to him: ‘These sand hills are a part neither of the sea before us nor of the grass links behind us, and are not related to the mountains beyond the links. They are of themselves. A man walking on the sand hills soon knows this by the tang in the air, and if he were to refrain from eating anddrinking, from sleeping and speaking, from thinking and desiring, he could continue among them for ever without change. There is no life and no death in the sand hills. Anything might happen in the sand hills.’
    Rachel said that this was nonsense, and asked: ‘But what was the argument? Hurry up!’
    He said it was about the whereabouts of the soul, but that now she had put it out of