“Yes, one
must
be certain,” he replied.
He got one wall finished, and then …
He came to another wall.
“What time
is
it?”
He looked at the mantel clock. An hour gone. It was five after one.
The doorbell rang.
Acton froze, staring at the door, the clock, the door, the clock.
Someone rapped loudly.
A long moment passed. Acton did not breathe. Without new air in his body he began to fail away, to sway; his head roared a silence of cold waves thundering onto heavy rocks.
“Hey, in there!” cried a drunken voice. “I know you’re in there, Huxley! Open up, dammit! This is Billy-boy, drunk as an owl, Huxley, old pal, drunker than two owls.”
“Go away,” whispered Acton soundlessly, crushed.
“Huxley, you’re in there, I hear you
breathing!
” cried the drunken voice.
“Yes, I’m in here,” whispered Acton, feeling long and sprawled and clumsy on the floor, clumsy and cold and silent. “Yes.”
“Hell!” said the voice, fading away into mist. The footsteps shuffled off. “Hell … ”
Acton stood a long time feeling the red heart beat inside his shut eyes, within his head. When at last he opened his eyes he looked at the new fresh wall straight ahead of him and finally got courage to speak. “Silly,” he said. “This wall’s flawless. I won’t touch it. Got to hurry. Got to hurry. Time, time. Only a few hours before those damn-fool friends blunder in!” He turned away.
From the comers of his eyes he saw the little webs. When his back was turned the little spiders came out of the woodwork and delicately spun their fragile little half-invisible webs. Not upon the wall at his left, which was already washed fresh, but upon the three walls as yet untouched. Each time he stared directly at them the spiders dropped back into the woodwork, only to spindle out as he retreated. “Those walls are all right,” he insisted in a half shout. “I won’t
touch
them!”
He went to a writing desk at which Huxley had been seated earlier. He opened a drawer and took out what he was looking for. A little magnifying glass Huxley sometimes used for reading. He took the magnifer and approached the wall uneasily.
Fingerprints.
“But those aren’t mine!” He laughed unsteadily. “I
didn’t
put them there! I’m
sure
I didn’t! A servant, a butler, or a maid perhaps!”
The wall was full of them.
“Look at this one here,” he said. “Long and tapered, a woman’s, I’d bet money on it.”
“Would you?”
“I would!”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes!”
“Positive?”
“Well—yes.”
“Absolutely?”
“Yes, damn it, yes!”
“Wipe it out, anyway, why don’t you?”
“There, by God!”
“Out damned spot, eh, Acton?”
“And this one, over here,” scoffed Acton. “That’s the print of a fat man.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t start
that
again!” he snapped, and rubbed it out. He pulled off a glove and held his hand up, trembling, in the glary light.
“Look at it, you idiot! See how the whorls go? See?”
“That proves nothing!”
“Oh, all right!” Raging, he swept the wall up and down, back and forth, with gloved hands, sweating, grunting, swearing, bending, rising, and getting redder of face.
He took off his coat, put it on a chair.
“Two o’clock,” he said, finishing the wall, glaring at the clock.
He walked over to the bowl and took out the wax fruit and polished the ones at the bottom and put them back, and polished the picture frame.
He gazed up at the chandelier.
His fingers twitched at his sides.
His mouth slipped open and the tongue moved along his lips and he looked at the chandelier and looked away and looked back at the chandelier and looked at Huxley’s body and then at the crystal chandelier with its long pearls of rainbow glass.
He got a chair and brought it over under the chandelier and put one foot up on it and took it down and threw the chair, violently, laughing, into a corner. Then he ran out of the room, leaving one wall as yet unwashed.
In the dining room he came to a table.
“I want to show you my Gregorian cutlery, Acton,” Huxley had said. Oh, that casual, that
hypnotic
voice!
“I haven’t time,” Acton said. “I’ve got to see Lily——”
“Nonsense, look at this silver, this exquisite craftsmanship.”
Acton paused over the table where the boxes of cutlery were laid out, hearing once more Huxley’s voice, remembering all the touchings and gesturings.
Now Acton wiped the forks and spoons and took down all the plaques and special ceramic dishes from the wall itself....
“Here’s a lovely bit of ceramics by Gertrude and Otto Natzler, Acton. Are you familiar with their work?”
“It
is
lovely.”
“Pick it up. Turn it over. See the fine thinness of the bowl, hand-thrown on a turntable, thin as eggshell, incredible. And the amazing volcanic glaze. Handle it,
go
ahead.
I
don’t mind.”
HANDLE IT. GO AHEAD. PICK IT UP!
Acton sobbed unevenly. He hurled the pottery against the wall. It shattered and spread, flaking wildly, upon the floor.
An instant later he was on his knees. Every piece, every shard of it, must be found. Fool, fool, fool! he cried to himself, shaking his head and shutting and opening his eyes and bending under the table. Find every piece, idiot, not one fragment of it must be left behind. Fool, fool! He gathered them. Are they all here? He looked at them on the table before him. He looked under the table again and under the chairs and the service bureaus, and found one more piece by match light and started to polish each little fragment as if it were a precious stone. He laid them all out neatly upon the shining polished table.
“A lovely bit of ceramics, Acton. Go ahead—
handle
it.”
He took out the linen and wiped it and wiped the chairs and tables and doorknobs and windowpanes and ledges and drapes and wiped the floor and found the kitchen, panting, breathing violently, and took off his vest and adjusted his gloves and wiped the glittering chromium.... “I want to show you my house, Acton,” said Huxley. “Come along.... ” And he wiped all the utensils and the silver faucets and the mixing bowls, for now he had forgotten what he had touched and what he had not. Huxley and he had lingered here, in the kitchen, Huxley prideful of its array, covering his nervousness at the presence of a potential killer, perhaps wanting to be near the knives if they were needed. They had idled, touched this, that, something else—there was no remembering what or how much or how many—and he finished the kitchen and came through the hall into the room where Huxley lay.
He cried out.
He had forgotten to wash the fourth wall of the room! And while he was gone the little spiders had popped from the fourth unwashed wall and swarmed over the already clean walls, dirtying them again! On the ceilings, from the chandelier, in the corners, on the floor, a million little whorled webs hung billowing at his scream! Tiny, tiny little webs, no bigger than, ironically, your—finger!
As he watched, the webs were woven over the picture frame, the fruit bowl, the body, the floor. Prints wielded the paper knife, pulled out drawers, touched the table top, touched, touched, touched everything everywhere.
He polished the floor wildly, wildly. He rolled the body over and cried on it while he washed it, and got up and walked over and polished the fruit at the bottom of the bowl. Then he put a chair under the chandelier and got up and polished each little hanging fire of it, shaking it like a crystal tambourine until it tilted bellwise in the air. Then he leaped off the chair and gripped the doorknobs and got up on other chairs and swabbed the walls higher and higher and ran to the kitchen and got a broom and wiped the webs down from the ceiling and polished the bottom fruit of the bowl and washed the body and doorknobs and silverware and found the hall banister and followed the banister upstairs.
Three o’clock! Everywhere, with a fierce, mechanical intensity, clocks ticked! There were twelve rooms downstairs and eight above. He figured the yards and yards of space and time needed. One hundred chairs, six sofas, twenty-seven tables, six radios. And under and on top and behind. He yanked furniture out away from walls and, sobbing, wiped them clean of years-old dust, and staggered and followed the banister up, up the stairs, handling, erasing, rubbing, polishing, because if he left one little print it would reproduce and make a million more!— and the job would have to be done all over again and now it was four o’clock!—and his arms ached and his eyes were swollen and staring and he moved sluggishly about, on strange legs, his head down, his arms moving, swabbing and rubbing, bedroom by bedroom, closet by closet....
They found him at six-thirty that morning.
In the attic.
The entire house was polished to a brilliance. Vases shone like glass stars. Chairs were burnished. Bronzes, brasses, and coppers were all aglint. Floors sparkled. Banisters gleamed.
Everything glittered. Everything shone, everything was bright!
They found him in the attic, polishing the old trunks and the old frames and the old chairs and the old carriages and toys and music boxes and vases and cutlery and rocking horses and dusty Civil War coins. He was half through the attic when the police officer walked up behind him with a gun.
“Done!”
On the way out of the house Acton polished the front doorknob with his handkerchief and slammed it in triumph!
I
n the year
A.D.
400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.
Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, “Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!”
“Yes,” said the Emperor, “the air
is
sweet this morning.”
“No, no, a miracle!” said the servant, bowing quickly.
“And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle.”
“No, no, Your Excellency.”
“Let me guess then—the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue.
That
now is the finest of all miracles.”
“Excellency, a man is flying!”
“What?” The Emperor stopped his fan.
“I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass.”
“It is early,” said the Emperor, “and you have just wakened from a dream.”
“It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too.”
“Sit down with me here,” said the Emperor. “Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight.”
They drank tea.
“Please,” said the servant at last, “or he will be gone.”
The Emperor rose thoughtfully. “Now you may show me what you have seen.”
They walked into a garden across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.
“There!” said the servant.
The Emperor looked into the sky.
And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.
The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning. “I fly, I fly!”
The servant waved to him. “Yes,
yes!
”
The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.
“Tell me,” he said to his servant, “has anyone else seen this flying man?”
“I am the only one, Excellency,” said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.
The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, “Call him down to me.”
“Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!” called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.
The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.
The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.
“What have you done?” demanded the Emperor.
“I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency,” replied the man.
“What
have
you done?” said the Emperor again.
“I have just told you!” cried the flier.
“You have told me nothing at all.” The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the bird-like keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.
“Is it not beautiful, Excellency?”
“Yes, too beautiful.”
“It is the only one in the world!” smiled the man. “And I am the inventor.”
“The
only
one in the world?”
“I swear it!”
“Who else knows of this?”
“No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it.”
“Well for her, then,” said the Emperor. “Come along.”
They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.
The Emperor clapped his hands. “Ho, guards!”
The guards came running.
“Hold this man.”
The guards seized the flier.
“Call the executioner,” said the Emperor.
“What’s this!” cried the flier, bewildered. “What have I done?” He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.
“Here is the man who has made a certain machine,” said the Emperor, “and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he created, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do.”
The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.
“One moment,” said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted his key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.
The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, the birds sang in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.
“Is
it
not beautiful?” said the Emperor. “If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done.”
“But, oh, Emperor!” pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. “I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even
seen
it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, here like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels!
That
is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!”
“Yes,” said the Emperor sadly, “I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?”
“Then spare me!”
“But there are times,” said the Emperor, more sadly still,, “when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man.”
“What man?”
“Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.”
“Why? Why?”
“Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?” said the Emperor.
No one moved or said a word.
“Off with his head,” said the Emperor.
The executioner whirled his silver ax.
“Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together,” said the Emperor.
The servants retreated to obey.
The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. “Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour.”
“You are merciful, Emperor.”
“No, not merciful,” said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb into the sky. “No, only very much bewildered and afraid.” he saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. “What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought.”
He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny faces loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.
“Oh,” said the Emperor, closing his eyes, “look at the birds, look at the birds!”