The room, at first sight, was an anticlimax. It appeared to be an
empty committee room with a long table, eight or nine chairs,
some pictures, and (oddly enough) a large step-ladder in one
corner. Here also there were no windows; it was lit by an
electric light which produced, better than Mark had ever
seen it produced before, the illusion of daylight—of a
cold, grey place out of doors. This, combined with the absence
of a fireplace, made it seem chilly though the temperature was
not in fact very low.
A man of trained sensibility would have seen at once that the
room was ill proportioned, not grotesquely so but sufficiently
to produce dislike. It was too high and too narrow. Mark felt
the effect without analysing the cause and the effect grew on
him as time passed. Sitting staring about him he next noticed
the door—and thought at first that he was the victim of some
optical illusion. It took him quite a long time to prove to
himself that he was not. The point of the arch was not in the
centre; the whole thing was lop-sided. Once again, the error
was not gross. The thing was near enough to the true to
deceive you for a moment and to go on teasing the mind even
after the deception had been unmasked. Involuntarily one kept
on shifting the head to find positions from which it would look
right after all. He turned round and sat with his back to it . . .
one mustn’t let it become an obsession.
Then he noticed the spots on the ceiling. They were not mere
specks of dirt or discoloration. They were deliberately painted
on: little round black spots placed at irregular intervals on the
pale mustard-coloured surface. There were not a great many of
them: perhaps thirty . . . or was it a hundred? He determined
that he would not fall into the trap of trying to count them.
They would be hard to count, they were so irregularly placed.
Or weren’t they? Now that his eyes were growing used to them
(and one couldn’t help noticing that there were five in that little
group to the right), their arrangement seemed to hover on the
verge of regularity. They suggested some kind of pattern. Their
peculiar ugliness consisted in the very fact that they kept on
suggesting it and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused.
Suddenly he realised that this was another trap. He fixed his
eyes on the table.
There were spots on the table, too—white ones: shiny
white spots, not quite round, and arranged, apparently,
to correspond to the spots on the ceiling. Or were they? No, of
course not . . . ah, now he had it! The pattern (if you could call
it a pattern) on the table was an exact reversal of that on the
ceiling. But with certain exceptions. He found he was glancing
rapidly from the one to the other, trying to puzzle it out. For
the third time he checked himself. He got up and began to walk
about. He had a look at the pictures.
Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was
already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who
held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it
was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skilfully painted
in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that
hair; indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you
tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being
eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of
arms bathing in a flat, sadly coloured sea beneath a summer
sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first
sight most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a
little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was
only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain
unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of
the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the
grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ
and the Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under
the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of
lighting that made each picture look like something seen in
delirium? When once these questions had been raised the
apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme
menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning
of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of
architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which
withered the mind. Compared with these the other,
surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark
had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which
seems innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort
of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.
He turned his back on the pictures and sat down. He
understood the whole business now. Frost was not trying to
make him insane; at least not in the sense Mark had hitherto
given to the word “insanity.” Frost had meant what he said. To
sit in the room was the first step towards what Frost called
objectivity—the process whereby all specifically human
reactions were killed in a man so that he might become fit for
the fastidious society of the Macrobes. Higher degrees in the
asceticism of anti-nature would doubtless follow: the eating of
abominable food, the dabbling in dirt and blood, the ritual
performances of calculated obscenities. They were, in a sense,
playing quite fair with him—offering him the very same
initiation through which they themselves had passed and which
had divided them from humanity, distending and dissipating
Wither into a shapeless ruin while it condensed and sharpened
Frost into the hard, bright, little needle that he now was.
But after an hour or so this long, high coffin of a room began
to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably
not anticipated. There was no return of the attack which he had
suffered last night in the cell. Whether because he had already
survived that attack, or because the imminence of death had
drawn the tooth of his lifelong desire for the esoteric, or
because he had (in a fashion) called very urgently for help, the
built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of
making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this
room’s opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water,
or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this
background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of
the sweet and the straight. Something else—something
he vaguely called the “Normal”—apparently existed. He
had never thought about it before. But there it was—solid,
massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you
could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up
with Jane and fried eggs and soap and sunlight and the rooks
cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere
outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not
thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same
thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was
choosing a side: the Normal. “All that,” as he called it, was
what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from
“all that,” then be damned to the scientific point of view! The
vehemence of his choice almost took his breath away; he had
not had such a sensation before. For the moment he hardly
cared if Frost and Wither killed him.
