The Opal, and Other Stories Page 19

  13th October

  I must write down exactly what happened today, so that nothing can take root in my recollection that never actually happened.

  For some time I have had the feeling (I’ve got rid of the dreams, thank goodness) that someone has been following behind me, on the left.

  I could, of course, have turned round, to convince myself I was imagining it, but that would have been a great mistake, because by doing so I would have implicitly admitted the possibility of there really being something there.

  This has been going on for some days and I have been on my guard. When I came down to breakfast this morning I had this tiresome feeling again, and then suddenly I heard a crunching noise behind me. Before I could pull myself together I had swung round in fright, and for a split second I saw absolutely clearly the dead shape of Richard Erben, grey against grey, before the phantom slipped behind me again in a flash. But it’s not so far away that I can’t feel it there, as before. If I stand quite straight and turn my eyes to the left as far as they will go, I can see its contour just on the edge of my vision. If I turn my head, the figure moves back to the same extent.

  It’s obvious that the noise can only have been made by my old cleaning woman, who is always bustling about the doorways, never still for a moment.

  From now on I shall only let her come in when I am not at home. I categorically want nobody near me any more.

  How my hair stood on end! I think that must be caused by a contraction of the skin on the head.

  And the phantom? My first thought was that it was an echo of the earlier dreams, quite simply, and that its visible manifestation occurred as a result of the sudden fright. Fright - fear, hatred, love are simply forces that divide the ego, and are consequently able to make one’s own thoughts visible when they are otherwise quite unconscious, so that they reflect themselves in one’s perceptive capacity as if in a mirror.

  I haven’t been able to mingle with other people for a long time now.

  I have to watch myself carefully. I mustn’t let it get any worse.

  It’s unfortunate that all this had to happen just on the thirteenth of the month. I really ought to have made a point of putting up a strong defence against that stupid prejudice against the thirteenth right from the start, since I seem to be affected by it too. Though there’s nothing in that quite unimportant circumstance anyway.

  20th October

  I wish I could pack up my bags and go somewhere else. The old woman has been fussing round the door again. I’ve heard the noise again. Behind me and to the right this time. The same affair as before. This time on the right-hand side I can see the uncle I poisoned. And If I push my chin down on my chest and squint at my shoulders I can see one on each side. I can’t see their legs. As a matter of fact, I have the impression that the figure of Richard Erben is clearer, as if he is closer to me. The old woman will have to go. Things are getting more and more suspicious, but I shall go on for a few more weeks being nice to her, so as to allay her doubts.

  I shall have to put off moving for a while too. People would notice, and you can’t be too careful.

  Tomorrow I’ll repeat the word ‘murderer’ for a few hours. It’s started to make me feel uncomfortable, so I must get used to the sound again.

  I made a remarkable discovery today; I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed that I’m walking on the ball of my foot more than I used to, which makes me sway a little. The phrase ‘to put a firm foot forward’ seems to have a deep, inner meaning - indeed there seems to be some psychological secret contained in words altogether. I must be careful to use my heels more.

  God, if only I didn’t forget overnight a full half of what I intend to do during the day! Purely as if sleep just wiped it away.

  1st November

  I deliberately said nothing last time about the other phantom, but it still won’t go away.

  It’s horrible, horrible. Is there nothing I can do to fend them off?

  Once I quite clearly worked out two ways of escaping visions of that sort. I chose the second and yet I always find myself on the first. Was I mentally deranged then? Are these two figures splinters from my ego, or have they got an independent existence?

  No, No! If that were the case I would be feeding them with my own life! So they really exist! Dreadful! But no, it’s just that I see them as independent entities, and what one sees as reality is ... is ... Oh, merciful God, I’m not even writing normally! I’m writing as if someone were dictating it to me. That must be the result of writing in code, which I always have to translate first before I can read it properly.

  Tomorrow I shall write out the whole book again in my normal script.

  Oh God, stay with me in this long night,

  10th November

  They are real beings.

  They told me about their death-throes in my dreams. Jesus protect me, ah, Jesus, Jesus! They’re going to strangle me! I looked it up, and it’s true, Curare works like that, just like that. How would they know that, if they were merely apparitions?

  God in Heaven, why did you never tell me that people live on after death? I wouldn’t have committed the murders.

  Why didn’t you reveal yourself to me when I was a child? I’m writing again just in the way people talk; and I don’t want to.

  12th November

  Now that I’ve written out the whole book again I can see clearly that I’m ill. A steady spirit and a clear head is what’s wanted.

  I’ve asked Dr. Wetterstrand to see me in the morning, to tell me exactly where I went wrong. I’ll tell him everything in the minutest detail, he will listen to me quietly and tell me what I don’t yet know about suggestion.

  For one thing he can’t possibly believe that I really have killed someone. He’ll just think I’m mad.

  And I’ll make sure he doesn’t get the chance to think about it anymore when he gets home.

  A little glass of wine will do the trick!

  13th November

  0.50

  The Invalid

  The day-room in the sanatorium was crowded, as usual; everyone sitting there motionless, waiting for their health to arrive.

  There was no conversation: they were all afraid of hearing some account of their neighbour’s illness, or doubts being expressed about their own treatment.

  It was unspeakably desolate and boring, and the dull slogans in shiny black German lettering pasted onto white cards on the walls made you want to vomit.

  A little boy was sitting at the table opposite me. I was obliged to keep staring at him, because otherwise I would have had to move my head to an even more uncomfortable position.

  Dressed in a tasteless style, and with his low forehead, he looked altogether stupid. His mother had sewn bits of white lace to his velveteen cuffs and trouser-legs.

  Time lay heavily on us all - like an octopus sucking us dry. I wouldn’t have been surprised if suddenly all these people had leaped up in unison, without any particular immediate cause, and with a cry of rage had torn everything to pieces - tables, windows, lamps.

  I couldn’t really understand why I didn’t do it; perhaps it was because I was afraid the others wouldn’t join in, and I would have to sit down again shamefacedly.

  Then I caught sight of the lace trimmings again, and felt the boredom becoming even more excruciating and oppressive. I had the feeling I was holding a huge grey rubber ball in my mouth, and it was getting bigger all the time and growing into my brain.

  At such moments of desolation, oddly enough, even the thought of any change is an abomination.

  The boy was arranging dominoes in a box and then feverishly taking them out again, only to put them back once more in a different order. There were no more left over, and yet the box wasn’t quite full, as he had hoped. There was still room for one whole extra row.

  He started tugging roughly at his mother’s arm at last, pointing in frustration at this asymmetry, and saying, simply: ‘Mama, mama!’ His

  mother had just be
en talking to her neighbour about the servant problem and similar serious matters such as concern the feminine mind, and was now gazing blankly, like a rocking-horse, at the box.

  ‘Put the tiles in the other way round,’ she said.

  A gleam of hope passed across the child’s face, and he set about this task once more with laborious delight.

  Another age passed.

  Nearby a newspaper page crackled.

  The sententious exhortations on the cards caught my eye again. I felt I was going to go mad.

  Now! now - the feeling came to me from outside, it jumped at my head, like an executioner.

  I stared at the boy. It was coming over to me from him. The box was now full, and yet there was one tile left over! The boy almost dragged his mother off her chair. She had been going on about servants again, and now she stood up, saying: ‘It’s bed-time now, you’ve been playing long enough.’

  The boy said nothing, but stared about, wild-eyed, the most vivid illustration of a state of desperation I have ever seen.

  I turned in my armchair and wrung my hands. I too had caught the infection.

  They both left, and I could see that it was raining outside. How much longer I sat there, I do not know.

  I dreamed of all the most miserable experiences of my life. They looked at each other with black domino-eyes, as if searching for something or other, and I was trying to lay them out in a green coffin. But every time I tried to do so there were either too many of them - or too few.

  G.M.

  That old bastard Mackintosh is back.

  The news ran through the city like wildfire.

  The memory of George Mackintosh, German-American, who had bade farewell to everyone five years ago, was still fresh in everyone’s mind. His trickery was no more forgettable than his dark hatchet-face, that had turned up on the Parade.

  ‘What’s he up to, back here again?’

  He had been slowly but surely edged out: everybody had played a part in that - the one with an expression of friendship, another using malice and false rumours, all of them using a certain element of circumspect slander. All these little humiliations eventually added up to such treatment as would probably have crushed the spirit of any other man, but which in this case merely persuaded the American to take a trip abroad.

  Mackintosh had a face as sharp as a paper-knife, and very long legs. That in itself is hard for people to stomach who have no regard for racial theory.

  He was truly the object of hatred, but instead of reducing it by taking steps to conform to conventional ideas, he would always stand aside from the crowd, and was always coming up with something new: hypnosis, spiritism, palmistry - indeed, one day he even produced a symbolist reading of Hamlet. That got the good citizens of the town excited of course, especially budding geniuses like Herr Tewinger of the Daily, who was just about to publish a book with the title: What I think about Shakespeare.

  And this veritable ‘thorn in the flesh’ had come back, and was living at the ‘Sun’ with his Indian servant.

  ‘Just passing by?’ asked an old acquaintance tentatively. ‘Of course, but only very temporarily. I can’t move in to my house until August 15th. I’ve bought a house in Ferdinand Street, you know.’

  The whole face of the town fell by an inch. A house in Ferdinand Street! Where did this mountebank get the money? And an Indian servant, too. Well, we’ll see how long he lasts!

  Mackintosh had yet another scheme, of course. An electrical device that could as it were sniff out veins of gold in the ground. A kind of modern divining rod.

  Naturally, most people didn’t believe it. ‘If it were any good someone else would have thought of it already!’

  It was not to be denied, though, that the American must have become incredibly rich in the last five years.

  That at least was the firm and unshakeable opinion of the information office of Messrs. Snooper & Son-in-law.

  It was true. Not a week went by but he bought another house.

  All over the place, too: one in the Fruit Market, another in Lordship Lane - but all in the inner city.

  For heaven’s sake, was he trying to become Mayor or something? Nobody could hazard a guess as to what he was up to.

  ‘Have you seen his visiting cards at all? Look here, it’s the very limit! Just a monogram, no name. He says he doesn’t need to be called by a name anymore, he has money enough!’

  Mackintosh had gone off to Vienna, and (so it was reported) was spending his days in conclave with a series of parliamentary deputies queuing up to see him.

  What deep plans he was hatching with them was altogether unascertainable, but he evidently had a hand in the new draft law concerning amendments to prospecting rights.

  There was something about this in the papers every day, presenting arguments for and against, and it was beginning to look as though the law, which would permit free prospecting rights even in urban areas (apart, that is, from the usual excavations of course), would soon be brought into effect.

  The whole business looked most peculiar: the general opinion was that some big coal firms must be behind it.

  Mackintosh on his own surely had no such great interest in the matter - he was probably only a front for some conglomerate or other.

  Whatever the case, he soon came back home and seemed to be in the best of spirits.

  Nobody had ever seen him behaving so affably.

  ‘He's really doing well - he bought another piece of real estate only yesterday - the thirteenth’ said the Chief Executive of the Land Registry at the table reserved for public officials in the Casino. ‘You know the one, on the corner, the ‘Despairing Virgin’, diagonally across from the ‘Three Absolute Idiots’, where the Central Inventory Commission for the Regional Inundations Inspectorate has its city offices.

  ‘The man will overreach himself yet,’ observed the surveyor. ‘Do you know what he’s asking for now, gentlemen? - He wants to demolish three of his houses - the one in Pearl Alley, the fourth on the right by the Gunpowder Tower, and Requisition No. 47184/II. The new designs have already been approved.’

  Mouths fell open.

  The autumn wind swept through the streets : nature was drawing a deep breath before settling down to sleep.

  The sky is so blue and cold, the clouds so full and cheeky, the scene so idyllic, as if the dear Lord had had the whole thing painted by Wilhelm Schulz ... How pure and beautiful the town would be if only that frightful American in his mania for destruction hadn’t polluted the clear air so much with brick-dust. But to think that such a thing has even been approved!

  To pull down three houses - well and good, but all thirteen together: that’s beyond a joke!

  Everyone’s coughing, and it hurts like the devil when you get that damned dust in your eyes.

  ‘It’ll be some kind of monstrosity he puts in their place. ‘Neomodern’ of course, I bet,’ they said.

  ‘You can’t have heard right, surely, Herr Schebor! What? He’s not going to build anything? Is he mad - why on earth did he put in the new building plans?’ ‘Simply to get provisional permission to demolish!’

  ‘Now you know the latest, gentlemen’, panted Vyskotschil, aspiring castle-builder, quite out of breath. ‘There’s gold in the city, yes, gold. Possibly right under our feet.’

  Everyone looked down at Vyskotschil’s feet, flat as pancakes in his patent-leather boots.

  The whole neighbourhood of the Parade came running.

  ‘Who said something about gold?’ cried the broker Lowenstein.

  ‘Mr. Mackintosh says he has found gold ore in the ground under the house he pulled down in Pearl Alley,’ confirmed a man from the Ministry of Mines. They’ve even wired for a Commission to come down from Vienna.’

  A few days later George Mackintosh was the most celebrated man in town. There were photographs of him in all the shops - with his angular profile, his mocking expression and his narrow lips.

  The papers were full of biographical details, the sports
correspondents suddenly knew all about his weight, his chest size and his biceps, even his lung capacity.

  It wasn’t difficult to get an interview with him, either.

  He was back at the ‘Sun’, gave everyone admittance, offered them the most marvellous cigarettes and told, with delightful generosity, what had led him to destroy his houses and to dig for gold in the cleared site.

  With his new apparatus, his own invention, which could indicate the presence of gold in the earth by the variation in an electric current, he had by night thoroughly investigated not only the cellars of his own buildings, but those (having secretly gained access to them) of all his neighbours as well.

  ‘Look, here are the official reports of the Mining Ministry, and an opinion from the eminent Professor Upright of Vienna - who incidentally is an old friend of mine.’

  And indeed there, in black and white, and authenticated by the official stamp, was confirmation that on all thirteen sites purchased by the American George Mackintosh gold existed in the familiar form in admixture with sand, in proportions which suggested that an immense quantity was certainly present, especially at deeper levels. This kind of distribution had so far been proved to exist only in America and Asia, but Mr. Mackintosh’s opinion that what we had here was an old, prehistoric river bed could be agreed without further ado. A precise valuation was, of course, impossible to put into figures, but that this was a hidden deposit of metal of outstanding proportions - perhaps even unexampled, could not be doubted.

  The American’s plan of the probable extent of the gold-mine was particularly interesting, and had won total acceptance from the Expert Committee.

  It now became evident that the former river-bed ran from one of the American’s houses to the rest through a complicated series of bends via other properties until it disappeared beneath Mackintosh’s corner house in Zettner Lane.

  The proof that this was the case and that it could not be otherwise was so simple and clear that it was obvious to everyone, even those unwilling to believe in the ability of the electric machine to identify metals accurately.