with the carpet — behold, the pattern answered that part of the carpet. This piece was laid exactly on the design, and brought it to life.
It was like a child's game, giant-sized; only it was not a game, it was serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work, but to everyone. Then another person bent with a piece chosen from the multi-coloured heap on the trestles, bent, matched and straightened again to gaze down. There they stood, about a dozen people, quite silent, turning their eyes from the patterns of the carpet to the tangle of stuffs and back again. A recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the others… there was no competition here, only the soberest and most loving co-operation. I entered the room, I stood on the carpet looking down as they did at its incompleteness, pattern without colour, except where the pieces had already been laid in a match, so that parts of the carpet had a bleak gleam, like one that has been bleached, and other parts glowed up, fulfilled, perfect. I, too, sought for fragments of materials that could bring life to the carpet, and did in fact find one, and bent down to match and fit, before some pressure moved me on again. I realised that everywhere around, in all the other rooms, were people who would in their turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece — would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasks. I left that tall room whose ceiling vanished upwards into dark where I thought I saw the shine of a star, a room whose lower part was in a bright light that enclosed the silent concentrated figures like stage-lighting. I left them and moved on. The room disappeared. I could not find it when I turned my head to see it again, so as to mark where it was. But I knew it was there waiting, I knew it had not disappeared, and the work in it continued, must continue, would go on always.
***
This time seems now to have gone on and on, yet in fact it was quite short, a matter of months. So much was happening, and every hour seemed crammed with new experience. Yet in appearance all I did was to live quietly there, in that room, with Hugo, with Emily. Inside it was all chaos… the feeling one is taken over by, at the times in one's life when everything is in change, movement, destruction — or reconstruction, but that is not always evident at the time — a feeling of helplessness, as if one were being whirled about in a dust-devil or a centrifuge.
Yet I had no alternative but to go on doing exactly what I was. Watching and waiting. Watching, for the most part, Emily… who had been a stranger, so it seemed, for years. But of course this was not so, it was anxiety for her that stretched the hours. The yellow beast, melancholy, his sorrow swallowed — I swear this was so, though he was no more than animal — in the determination to be stoic, not to show his wounds, sat quietly either at the window in a place behind the curtains where he could easily dodge back and down, or stretched along the wall, in a mourner's position, his head on his forepaws, his green eyes steady and open. He lay there hour after hour, contemplating his — thoughts. Why not? He thought, he judged, as animals can be seen to do, if observed without prejudice. I must say here, since it has to be said somewhere about Hugo, that I think the series of comments automatically evoked by this kind of statement, the ticker-tape remarks to do with 'anthropomorphism' are beside the point. Our emotional life is shared with the animals; we flatter ourselves that human emotions are so much more complicated than theirs. Perhaps the only emotion not known to a cat or a dog is — romantic love. And even then, we have to wonder. What is the emotional devotion of a dog for his master or mistress but something like that sort of love, all pining and yearning and 'give me, give me'. What was Hugo's love for Emily but that? As for our thoughts, our intellectual apparatus, our rationalisms and our logics and our deductions and so on, it can be said with absolute certainty that dogs and cats and monkeys cannot make a rocket to fly to the moon or weave artificial dress materials out of the byproducts of petroleum, but as we sit in the ruins of this variety of intelligence, it is hard to give it much value: I suppose we are under-valuing it now as we over-valued it then. It will have to find its place: I believe a pretty low place, at that.
I think that all this time, human beings have been watched by creatures whose perceptions and understanding have been so far in advance of anything we have been able to accept, because of our vanity, that we would be appalled if we were able to know, would be humiliated. We have been living with them as blundering, blind, callous, cruel murderers and torturers, and they have watched and known us. And this is the reason we refused to acknowledge the intelligence of the creatures that surround us: the shock to our
But people need slaves and victims and appendages, and of course many of our 'pets' are that because they have been made into what we think they should be, just as human beings can become what they are expected to be. But not all, not by any means; all the time, through our lives, we are accompanied, everywhere we go, by creatures who judge us, and who behave at times with a nobility which is… we call it human.
Hugo, this botch of a creature, was in his relations with Emily as delicate as a faithful lover who is content with very little provided he is not banished from the beloved presence. This is what he had imposed on himself: he would not make demands, not ask, not be a nuisance. He was waiting. As I was. He watched, as I did.
I was spending long hours with him. Or I sat at the times when the sunlight was on the wall, waiting for it to open, to unfold. Or I went about the streets, taking in news and rumours and information with the rest, wondering what to do for the best, and deciding to do nothing for the time being; wondering how long this city would stand, eroded as it was in every way, its services going and gone, its people fleeing, its food supplies worsening, its law and order consisting more and more of what the citizens imposed on themselves, an instinctive self — restraint, even a caring for others who were in the same straits.
There seemed to be a new sharpness in the tension of waiting. For one thing, the weather — the summer had come hot and dry, the sun had a dusty look. The pavement opposite my window had filled up again. But there was less interest now in what went on out there: the windows held fewer heads, people had become used to it all. Everyone knew that again and again the street's edge would half-empty as another tribe took off, and we acknowledged with mixed feelings the chance that had chosen our street as a gathering place for the migrations from our part of the city: parents at least knew what their children were doing, even if they did not like it. We became accustomed to watching a mixed lot of people collect along the pavement with their pathetic bits of baggage, and then depart, singing their old wartime songs, or revolutionary songs that seemed as inappropriate as sex songs are to old age. And Emily did not leave. She would run after them a little way with some of the other girls, and then come home, subdued, to put her arms around her Hugo, her dark head down on his yellow coat. It was as if they both wept. They huddled together, creatures in sorrow, comforting each other.
The next thing was that Emily fell in love… I am conscious that this seems a term inappropriate to the times I am describing. It was with a young man who seemed likely to lead the next contingent out and away from the city. He was, despite his swash-buckling clothes, a thoughtful young man, or at least one slow to judgement; an observer by temperament, perhaps, but pushed into action by the time? He was, at any rate, the natural guardian of the younger ones, the distressed, the forlorn. He was known for this, teased for it, sometimes criticised: softness of this sort was superfluous to the demands of survival. Perhaps this was why he appealed to Emily.
I believe her trust in him was such that she even thought of taking Hugo out to the mob for another trial, but this must have gone from her to Hugo, for he felt it: he shivered and shrank, and she had to put her arms around him, and say: 'No, I won't Hugo, I promise I won't. Did you hear? — I promised, didn't I?'
Well, then, so there it was, she was infatuated. It was 'the first love' of tradition. Which is to say that half a dozen puppy loves, each one as agonising and every bit as intense and serious as later 'adult' loves had passed; this love was 'first' and 'serious' because it was returned, or at least acknowledged.
I remember I used to wonder if these young people, living as they had to from hand to mouth, who would never shut themselves off in couples behind walls unless it was for a few days or hours in a deserted house somewhere, or a shed in a field, would ever say to each other:
But Emily was suffering, she was in pain, as one is at that age, as fresh as a new loaf and loving a hero of twenty-two. Who had inexplicably, even eerily, chosen her. She was his girl, chosen from many, and known as such.
