STEP IN THE DARK. Ethel Lina White
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in narcotic. Although the strange metamorphosis of her room seemed positive proof that she was dreaming, some submerged memory warned her to caution, as she tried to explore her surroundings.
Her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, but she found it difficult to locate objects. All the furniture seemed different, and to stand in unaccustomed places. Only the mirror was in its usual place above the old-fashioned marble mantelpiece.
Guided by its glimmer she groped her way towards it. The glass was so dark that at first she could see nothing. Gradually, however, she traced the outlines of tree trunks and bare branches, which seemed very far away.
Instead of meeting her own familiar reflection she was looking into the vista of a snowy forest.
"That proves it is a dream," she told herself exultantly. "Now I'll get up on the roof."
Climbing fearlessly out of the window, she stood poised upon the narrow sill. There was scarcely room for her feet, but she stretched her arms above her head and strained up towards the stars, feeling certain that she would float up into the air.
Although she did not fly, as the breeze blew through her thin sleeping suit, she felt light as a soap bubble. Filled with exhilaration, she swayed out across the narrow gulf of darkness and caught the iron rail of the stair. As she drew herself up without conscious effort she dimly realised that—owing to the drug—she was in a false dimension which was subject to the trickery of time, for she appeared to climb for hours without reaching the top.
She was also subject to frequent black-outs, when she lost all consciousness of her surroundings. Higher and higher she mounted, until the stars were so low that she instinctively moved her head aside, to avoid entangling her hair in a dangling cluster.
Presently, after a blank, she discovered that she had reached her goal, for she was walking along the elevated parapet of her city of the Future. She was so high up that she could not see the lights of the streets below, although she could hear the rising murmur of traffic like the hum of a bee. Drifting lightly along, like a leaf in a breeze, she thought that she had journeyed for miles, when she saw—at right angles to her path—the square of a lighted window.
Thrilled at the promise of fresh adventure, she pushed open the casement, and leaped inside Even as she alighted, she was arrested by the sound of voices.
Suddenly the immunity of a dreamer deserted her and the phantasy grew mercilessly real. As she realised her predicament, if she were caught in the act of entering a strange house, she felt hot with shame. But even as she darted towards the window, she checked her panic flight.
"I've been here before," she told herself.
The marble bust on a pedestal, the white sheep-skin rug, the atrocious daubs on a drain-pipe were all familiar. It was the vestibule where she had stood when the Count had slain her hope with a tender smile of farewell.
The recollection overwhelmed her with so sharp a sense of desolation that she wanted to weep in the hopeless despair of a dream. Then, with a lightning change of mood, her thoughts drifted off on another track.
"Perhaps the dinner-party is still going on," she thought. "We are all of us sitting round the table, on the other side of the curtain...If I peeped through, I might see Gustav again."
Parting the curtain cautiously she looked through the folds with the confidence of seeing a stately and well-bred company posed like statues around a formal white feast.
She was right—for they were still there, sitting at the same table. But a horrible and sinister change had taken place. The lace cloth and the orchids had gone, while the air was thick with a fog of smoke. Around a green roulette-cloth was gathered a circle of gamblers who watched the spinning wheel with greedy eyes.
As she looked at them, Georgia felt that she was viewing a scene through a distorting glass. At first she saw strangers—a gross multi-chinned man and an elderly woman with pendulous rouged cheeks. Then, to her horror, she began to recognise some of the company.
A drunken man with a snowy curling mane and a foolish red face looked like a debased caricature of the dignified Professor Malfoy. Mrs. Vanderpant—incredibly cheapened by the cigar on which she was biting—raked in counters with the clutching claws of a bird of prey. The Count, too, was there—his neck encircled by the arms of the youth, Clair, who had achieved corrupt beauty by the application of powder and lip-stick.
As Georgia shuddered with repulsion, the Count looked up suddenly, so that she seemed to meet his gaze, although he could not see the watcher.
In that moment of horror, she knew why she had been haunted by the picture at the Wiertz Museum. It was because the Count's eyes were blue and shining-like those of two lovely children, who laughed as they burned a butterfly's wings in the flame of a candle.
CHAPTER THREE. THE COUNTESS LEAVES TOWN
Seared with horror at her vision, Georgia rushed back to the open window. Her dominant instinct was flight as she crawled out upon a ledge which encircled a pit of darkness. Although she had no sense of direction, she felt vaguely that it must lead her to the refuge of her room.
She was shivering with cold and her legs were leaden from shock. Her glorious liberty-dream had spun away from her, leaving her stranded in the familiar nightmare of being unable to make progress. She knew that she must advance, yet her will to move was smothered in inertia. As she toiled on, she felt clogged and impotent, like an insect attempting to crawl over a sticky fly-paper.
Her distress was increased by a gradual shrinkage of security. Hitherto, she had been swaddled in the protective cocoon of a dream, when she could not fall; but with her growing sense of altitude there came the threat of vertigo. Although her path was still mercifully obscured, she had recurring flashes of consciousness, when she could feel an iron grille under her bare feet.
Suddenly she slipped and nearly overbalanced on the verge of a stair which wound downwards. It was narrow and spiralled so steeply that her head whirled from continuous turning. Slipping recklessly from step to step in her haste to reach each successive window, she always found the jalousies closed against her entrance.
It was not until she had grown nearly frantic with fear of being shut out that she saw an open casement. Swinging herself across to the sill, she almost flung herself into the black interior of a room. As she stumbled blindly across it she collided violently with a chair, over which was hung a black gown, and then fell heavily across the bed, banging her head on the rail.
She remembered no more until she became drowsily aware of unseen hands which stroked the sheet in position under her chin. Opening her eyes with an effort she met the gaze of a heavily-built woman with shoulder-long dark waved hair, which made her resemble a middle-aged schoolgirl. She wore a neat dark-blue overall, and looked both kind and capable.
"You must excuse," she said in the fluent English of a War refugee; "but you were lying across the bed, with the bedclothes off you, as though you had the nightmare."
Happily aware of sunshine speckling the ceiling, Georgia laughed in her relief.
"I certainly had nightmare," she said. "I dreamed that the room had grown larger."
Then she gave a cry of astonishment.
"It is larger," she gasped.
Although the room was not the vague and vast apartment of her dream, it was twice its former size. The part in which her bed was placed was formally furnished as a sitting-room, with a sofa and chairs upholstered in amber plush, a round walnut table and an ornate chiffonier. Over the marble mantelpiece, instead of the conventional mirror, was a framed painting of a snowy landscape.
The other portion of the room contained her familiar bedroom suite. The bed, however, had been turned around to face another direction, which accounted for her failure to find the electric-light switch.
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