I awoke this morning with the sort of feeling a healthy child awakes
with on Christmas Day. That is to say, I awoke with delight at the
idea of getting up. I was in a strange bed in a strange city. I had
arrived in the strange city late overnight, and had had to take what
lodging I could find. Until I lay down in my bed I had no idea how
uncomfortable a bed could be. It was as cold as charity and as hard
as a tax-gatherer. The bolster was the shape of a large round
sausage, and the pillow was the shape of a sausage also. They were a
relentless pair of ruffians, cold-hearted, passionless brutes, stolid
and unresponsive, deaf alike to appeal or rebuke. I coaxed them with
the flat of my hand, and they scowled unmoved; I smote them with my
closed fist, and they took no more notice of it than if their name
had been Dempsey.
I did not know that I could hate any inanimate thing so much as I
hated that pillow and that bolster. I did not know that such oceans
of blind anger were bottled up within me. I banged them against each
other with savage joy. I threw them on the floor and danced and
stamped on them. I knelt on them; I sat on them; finally I kicked
them, not in the hope of doing them any good (hope had by this time
died within me), but for the simple delight of kicking the
abominations.
Then, warmed with these various exercises, I put the things back and
got into bed. It was as I expected. The mattress was a fit
companion for the pillow and bolster. It lay like a newly ploughed
field, every furrow deeply graven, every ridge with the edge of a
dulled razor. It was not a field of warm loam or generous greensand
that yielded to the touch. It was a field of stubborn Essex clay,
cold and dank and merciless. The expanse was enormous. It seemed
that during that measureless night I travelled miles to and fro
across the field in search of a furrow into which I could wedge
myself. I tried it on the east side, and I tried it on the west, and
I tried it all between. I tried it longitudinally; I tried it
latitudinally; I tried it diagonally. The way with a bed like this,
I said to myself, is not to get in the furrows, but to lie across the
ridges. But when I did that I felt like a toad under the harrow,
when "ilka tooth gies him a tig," and I resumed my search for a
furrow that would give me a welcome.
In the intervals I slept and had wild dreams in which I met Apollyon
straddling across my path. He came at me with fire belching from his
nostrils, but I gave him a mighty thwack with a bolster I happened to
be carrying, and he fell with an awful thud and split his head open
on a ridge of the ploughed field where the combat occurred. I
daresay I slept more than I imagined, for I share Lord Granville's
view on the subject. Believing that he was a victim of insomnia, he
took a house in Carlton House Terrace, within sound of Big Ben, and
was comforted to find that, in spite of nights which seemed to pass
without a wink of sleep, he only heard the great bell once or twice.
I did not do so well as that. As I fought with the furrows I heard
all the night sounds of the strange city without--the ringing of tram
bells, the jolting of wagons, the songs of revellers, and so on--die
down until all was quiet. I dozed and wakened and wakened and dozed,
praying for the dawn as fervently as ever Wellington prayed for
Blücher. Once I dreamed that I had gone into Hell, and heard the
cries of the souls in torment, and waking I found that the strange
city without was coming to life again with a jangle of hoots and
whistles and screams. Perhaps, I felt, my dream was not very far
wrong. I lay and listened to the mad chorus. I had never imagined
that there could be so many whistles whistling with such different
notes, high notes and low notes, clear notes and foggy notes,
shrieking and growling like a whole menagerie of wild beasts
hungering for blood. Intermittent noises began to be heard in the
corridor. People were moving about. There was a swishing sound from
the next room. A church clock outside began to strike, and I counted
the strokes as a miser counts his money--one, two three, four, five,
six, SEVEN. It seemed too good to be true. I punched the pillow to
make certain I was awake, and, under the comfortable assurance that
release was at hand, fell to sleep again in my furrowed field. When
I woke next, the room was light. I leapt from bed and kicked the
pillow joyfully across the room. But the bolster I subjected to no
such indignity. After all, it had done me a good turn with Apollyon,
and I called the account square.
Two hours later I am in the train fleeing from the strange city. I
had never been to it before, and I daresay I shall never go to it
again. But I shall always remember it as the City of Dreadful Night.
I feel now that I, too, have been with Æneas into Hell. Perhaps it
is unfair to the strange city. I daresay love and peace and beauty
dwell there as abundantly as in most places. But I am content to
leave the discovery of them to others.