THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR
Lewis never did raise a tower in the Wilderness. His towers were in
the air. A wish, with him, was seldom father to any deed. I think he
expected the wish of itself to create; or if not, he was at least
always angered when the nature of things proved to be against him.
He would not have been unduly astonished, and would have been wildly
grateful, if he had seen looming through the fog next morning a tower
such as he desired. But except on paper he never did. As he drew it,
the tower was tall and slender as the tallest and slenderest factory
chimney, more like a pillar for St Simeon Stylites than a castle in
Spain. It would have been several times the height of the elms in the
Wilderness which he had furiously refused to take into his service. It
was to be climbed within by a spiral staircase, each step apparently
having its own little window. Thus it was riddled by windows.
Now, if this idea had come to Philip he would have executed it. As it
was, Lewis’s drawing delighted him. He liked all those windows that
made it look as if it were a dead stem rotting away. “But,” said he, “I
know a house better than that, with a window for every day of the year.
It would be just the thing for you, Lewis, because it is built without
hands, without bricks, stones, cement, or any expense whatever.... It
was only a dream,” he continued, one day as he and I were going down
the long street which took us almost straight out into Our Country. But
he did not really think it no more than a dream. He had seen it many
times, a large, shadowy house, with windows which he had never counted,
but knew to be as many as the days of the year, no more, no less. The
house itself was always dark, with lights in some of the windows,
never, perhaps, in all.
The strange thing was that Philip believed this house must actually
exist. Perhaps, I suggested, it was hidden among the trees of our
woods, like several other houses. No: he dismissed this as fancy.
His house was not a fancy. It lay somewhere in a great city, or at
the verge of one. On his first visit he had approached it by long
wanderings through innumerable, unknown and deserted streets, following
a trail of white pebbles like the children in the fairy tale. In
all those streets he passed nobody and heard no sound; nor did this
surprise him, in spite of the fact that he felt the houses to be
thronged with people. Suddenly out of the last narrow street he came
as it were on a wall of darkness, like night itself. Into this he was
stepping forward when he saw just beneath and before him a broad,
black river, crossed by a low bridge leading over to where, high up,
a light beamed in the window of an invisible building. When he began
to cross the bridge he could see that it was the greatest house he had
ever beheld. It was a house that might be supposed to contain “many
mansions.” “You could not make a house like that one out of this whole
street,” said Philip. “It stretched across the world, but it was a
house.” On the other side of the river it seemed still equally far off.
Birds flying to and fro before it never rose up over it, nor did any
come from the other side. Philip hastened forward to reach the house.
But the one light went out and he awoke.
Philip used to look out for this house when he was crossing the
bridges in London. He scanned carefully the warehouses and factories
rising out of the water, in long rows with uncounted windows, that
made him wonder what went on behind them. With this material, he said,
a magician could make a house like the one he was in search of. Once,
when he got home in the evening from London, he was confident that his
house lay between Waterloo Bridge and Hungerford Bridge, but next time
he was there he was dead against any such suggestion. A factory on the
edge of a tract of suburb waste fulfilled his conditions for an hour at
another time. He had been thrilled, too, by a photograph shown to him
by Mr Stodham--of an ancient palace standing at the foot of a desolate
mountain in the remote South.
When we were walking together towards the country Philip used to look,
as a matter of course, down every side street to right or left, as he
always looked up dark alleys in London. Nor was he content to look
once down any one street, lest he should miss some transformation or
transfiguration. As we began to get clear of London, and houses were
fewer and all had long front gardens, and shops ceased, Philip looked
ahead now and then as well as from side to side. Beyond the wide,
level fields and the tall Lombardy poplars bounding them, there was
nothing, but there was room for the house. Fog thickened early in the
afternoon over our vacant territories, but we saw only the trees and a
Gypsy tent under a hedge.
Next day Philip came home feverish from school, and was put to bed in
the middle of the pale sunny afternoon. He lay happily stretched out
with his eyes fixed on a glass of water near the window. It flickered
in the light.... He saw the black river gleaming as when a candle for
the first time illuminates a lake in the bowels of a mountain. There
was the house beyond the river. Six or seven of its windows were lit
up, one large one low down, the rest small, high up, and, except two of
them, wide apart. Now and then, at other windows here and there, lights
appeared momentarily, like stars uncovered by rapid clouds.... A lofty
central door slowly swung open. A tiny figure, as solitary as the first
star in the sky, paused at the threshold, to be swallowed up a moment
later in darkness. At the same moment Philip awoke with a cry, knowing
that the figure was himself.
After this Philip was not so confident of discovering the house. Yet
he was more than ever certain that it existed, that all the time of
the intervals between his visits it was somewhere. I told him the story
about Irem Dhat El’Imad, the Terrestrial Paradise of Sheddad the son
of Ad, King of the World, which Aurelius had read to me. Philip was
pleased with the part where the geometricians and sages, labourers
and artificers of the King search over all the earth, until they come
to rivers and an illimitable plain, and choose it for the site of the
palace which was three hundred years building. But he said that this
story was not true. His own great house never disappeared, he said;
it was he that disappeared. By this time he had become so familiar
with the house that he probably passed hardly a day without a sight
of it, sleeping or waking. He was familiar with its monotonous front,
the many storeys of not quite regular diminishing windows. It always
seemed to lie out beyond a tract of solitude, silence, and blackness;
it was beyond the black river; it was at the edge of the earth. In
none of his visits could he get round to the other side. Several times
again, as on that feverish afternoon, he saw himself entering through
the lofty doorway, never emerging. What _this_ self (for so he called
it, touching his breast) saw inside the door he never knew. That self
which looked on could never reach the door, could not cross the space
between it and the river, though it seemed of no formidable immensity.
Many times he set out to cross and go in at the other door after the
other self, but could not. Finally he used to imagine that if once he
penetrated to the other side he would see another world.
Once or twice Philip and I found ourselves in streets which he thought
were connected with his first journey, but he vainly tried to remember
how. He even used to say that at a certain number--once it was
197--lived some one who could help. When another dream took him along
the original route of streets he told me that they were now thronged
with people going with or against him. They were still all about him as
he emerged from the streets in sight of the house, where every window
was blazing with lights as he had never seen it before. The crowd was
making towards the light across the hitherto always desolate bridge.
Nevertheless, beyond the river, in the space before the house, he
was alone as before. He resolved to cross the space. The great door
ahead was empty; no other self at least had the privilege denied to
him. He stood still, looking not at the door, but at the windows and
at the multitudes passing behind them. His eyes were fixed on the
upper windows and on each face in turn that appeared. Some faces he
recognised without being able to give a name to one. They must have
been people whom he had encountered in the street, and forgotten and
never seen again until now. Apparently not one of them saw him standing
out there, in the darkness, looking up at them. He was separated from
them as from the dead, or as a dead man might be from the living. The
moment he lowered his head to look towards the door, the dream was over.
More than once afterwards, when Lewis had ceased to think of his tower,
Philip saw the hundreds of windows burning in the night above the
black river, and saw the stream of faces at the windows; but he gave
up expecting to see the house by the light of our sun or moon. He had
even a feeling that he would rather not discover it, that if he were to
enter it and join those faces at the windows he might not return, never
stand out in the dark again and look up at the house.