N I N E
But to withdraw one's steps and to make a way out
to the upper air, that's the task that is the labour
—Virgil
Burns, locking up after his students have gone, anticipates Ella's question seconds before she delivers it to the others as they dawdle on the street corner only yards away. He shakes his head. Exposing the students to your tantrums won't help anything—neither you nor them nor the project. It just makes you look as though senility is right behind you, pulling faces and drooling toothless for their entertainment. Anyway, what is it, exactly, that's eating you?
He returns to his study—a desk at the window and three walls of books on shelves so high he has to keep a footstool to reach the top. Not that he has reason to return to the tough-bound uppermost volumes, or those on the lower shelves for that matter, but the stool gets used by the lady who cleans and keeps house for him three days a week, since he happens to think that dust gathering on the ridge of untouched and out-of-print books symbolizes in too sharp a sense the slouch of old age into weak-mindedness and dotage. So he pays someone to come in and keep his books free of dust and his windows clean, so that the outer condition might at least reflect the preferred impression of the inner. So what's all this raving at the students, he asks himself.
It is early, still dusk, the students having been chased away by an infantile temperament, by his inexcusable tantrums, who was it this time, yes, Ella, who he hopes will forgive him quickly but who he knows is more sensitive than she pretends. He sits in his chair and takes his notes out of the top drawer, determined to log his observations even if the students are proving restive, but leave them, give 'em a break, they're young and full of it whatever it is, while he is feeling increasingly tired as he turns the pages and the pencil in his hands begins to scuttle across the blank folio leaves at high speed depositing a fine trace of graphite in erratic bursts of what must be English but looks something like a fusion of bastard Arabic and auto-didactic shorthand, and which for an account of an evening's research in which nothing is supposed to have happened and nothing is purported to have been done still manages to break across the page like the waves of the sea under a bracing wind.
He scribbles like one in the grip of a spirit, but it's nothing like that, being only too conscious of anything he might commit to paper and anyway too self-possessed to admit the intrusion of any second authority, from the spirit world or otherwise, to come between him and his outpourings. Tired, tired indeed, but hands still scuttling across the page at speed laying down a pattern of new ideas, complete and half-complete thoughts, perceptions, reminders, references and observations, all of this operating independently and at a level beneath or above his reproach of his own behaviour, where he looks even now for a reason for his irritation and finds, depressingly, none other than that general malaise for which physicians have never found a satisfactory term other than old age.
Burns pauses and gazes out of his open window, blinking at a darkening horizon, dusk leaking from an unseen puncture in the silk and sable canvas, falling with defiant slowness but relentlessly enough, like the minute hand on the clock. He switches on an Angle-poise lamp which throws a ring of yellow light around his notes. He breathes in the sweet air of the summer evening and his hand automatically begins to scuttle back and forth across the white expanse of the page.
Not as if, he reflects, he doesn't prefer the company of the young students to that of the dry or childish presence of his academic colleagues. Because it is true he does prefer the buzz of youth and always has, three cheers for that, and what's more always dreaded turning into the crabbed old stick he felt himself becoming. And certainly these four were no worse than any others, and on the contrary he felt a special warmth for all of them, believing,—and perhaps this was the secret of what it was that was actually driving him harder and causing him to want to push them faster—believing, in a way that could never be more than intuitive, that there really might be something happening with these four, something in the chemistry that existed between them, something which he had sensed in the earlier seminars and the close comparisons in the nature of their results, just a spark, nothing rational, not yet anyway, but a spark and a shadow of apprehension—let's not call it fear— which had surprised him one day on recognizing the undercurrents in their respective commitments to this dreaming business.
And there was another problem, since the project had originally been double-bottomed, a smuggler's suitcase, the lucid dreaming project the ostensible reason for the seminars (and always a legitimate area for study, the dreaming project, since it was yielding up fascinating data) while Burns's other interest was a certain interactive study in the evolution and dynamics of the group. This covert study had of course never been made known to the seminar dreamers in the interests of protecting behaviour from the influence of observation, the spy hole staying open as the group reduced to four participants for the same parallel purposes; but now the dreamwork study had begun to eclipse the other. This had also taken Burns by surprise, shocking him in that his impatience with another's small disinclination towards scientific method had caused him to cancel a whole evening's work on dream research.
But he knew that the current halt in progress, the vacuum in dreaming, was only a temporary arrest, a block that would be overcome by a little effort, put there by some external factor like the change in dynamics from the original large group to the group of four, or something happening between the four themselves. Whatever the block was, it would dissolve, and dreaming, strong dreaming, would resume. He had, he assured himself once again, a feeling about this group.
Burns's hand stops its mechanical movement across the page, and he drops his blunted pencil. He coughs, recovers, and presses a thumb and forefinger to his tired eyes. Always, and always at night before concluding his notes, he thinks, in an abstracted tender way, of his wife Lilly. It has been over a decade since she died, leaving a huge absence in his life, and one which he has only ever filled with a devotion for work of the kind he used to reserve for her. He leans back in his chair and breathes deep the sweet night air carrying in the scent of the trees and bushes outside his window, and he thinks of her as she always was, and smiles to himself to think that if she were alive now she would come in and put her hand through his hair and her arms around him and reproach him for letting the students tire him so; and he would confess to her that he'd been irritable with them for no apparent reason, and she would find an excuse for him and tell him that the students ought to be grateful anyway for receiving the attentions of such a good man. Many evenings after working like this in his study, and even more frequently of late, Burns rewards himself with thoughts of his dear wife, and never allows himself to consider his reveries an expression of loneliness.
Burns shaves his pencil and writes a conclusion to his notes, hand moving more slowly across the page now as exhaustion steals over him. Then a trace of a woman's perfume comes into the room, one he recognizes, and he's dimly aware of a presence behind him; and then a voice, sweet with loving care and lilting gently, like the point where song takes over from verse, but saying only what he so often hears now, always the same question which so lovingly framed commands the answer it seeks, "Isn't that enough work for tonight, L. P.?"
"Yes, my love," and he obediently puts down his pencil and returns his notebook to the top drawer of his desk.
Shadows thicken outside. Burns gets up and lowers the sash window, fastening the clasp at the top. On his way out he switches off the light. Talking to myself, he thinks with a brief smile, those kids will think me more senile than then they already do, and he closes the study door behind him.