The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe-2
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Ignited by the tossed butt of a still-smouldering cigar that lodged in the cracks of the uneven floorboards, the theatre at Rid where Mrs Poe had made her last appearance buro the ground three weeks after her death. Ashes. Although Mr Allan told Edgar how all of his mother that was mortal had been buried in her coffin, Edgar khe somebody elses she so frequently became lived in her dressing-table mirror and were not strained by the physical laws that made her body rot. But now the mirror, too, was gone; and all the lovely and untouchable, volatile, unreal mothers went up together in a puff of smoke on a pyre of props and painted sery.The sparks from this flagration rose high in the air, where they lodged in the s<samp></samp>ky to bee a stellation of stars whily Edgar saw and then only oain still nights of summer, those hot, rich, blue, mellow nights the slaves brought with them from Africa, weather that ferments the music of exile, weather of heartbreak and fever. (Oh, those voluptuous nights, like something forbidden!) High in the sky these invisible stars marked the points of a face folded in sorrow.
NATURE OF THE THEATRICAL ILLUSION; everything you see is false.
sider the theatrical illusion with special refereo this impressionable child, who was exposed to it at an age when there is no reason for anything to be real.
He must often have toddled on to the stage wheheatre was empty and the curtains down so all was like a parlour prepared for a séance, waiting for the moment when the eyes of the observers make the mystery.
Here he will find a painted backdrop of, say, an antique castle -- a castle! such as they dont build here; a Gothic castle all plete with owls and ivy. The flies are painted with segments of trees, massy oaks or something like that, all in two dimensions. Ar<bdi>9９lib.</bdi>tificial shadows fall in all the wrong places. Nothing is what it seems. You knock against a gilded throne or horrid rack that looks perfectly solid, thick, immovable, and you kick it sideways, it turns out to be made of papier maché, it is as light as air -- a child, you yourself, could pick it up and carry it off with you and sit in it and be a king or lie in it and be in pain.
A creaking, an ominous rattling scares the little wits out of you; when you jump round to see what is going on behind your back, why, the very castle is in mid-air! Heave-ho and up she rises, amid the inarticulate cries and muttered oaths of the stagehands, and down es Juliets tomb or Ophelias sepulchre, and a s<s></s>uper scuttles in, clutg Yorricks skull.
The foul-mouthed whores who dandle you on their pillos and tip mugs of sour painst your lips now gregate in the wings, where they have turned into nuns or something. On the invisible side of the plush curtain that cuts you off from the beery, importuobacco-stained multitude that has paid its pennies on the nail to watch these transdent rituals now e the thumps, bangs and clatter that make the presence of their expectatio. A stagehand swoops down to scoop you up and carry you off, protesting, to where Henry, like a good boy, is already deep in his picture book and there is a poke of dy for you and the er of a handkerchief dipped in moonshine and Mama in and train presses her rouged lips softly on your forehead before she goes down before the mob.
On his brow her rouged lips left the mark of .
Having, at a<s></s>n impressionable age, seen with his owhe nature of the mystery of the castle -- that all its horrors are so much painted cardboard ahey terrify you -- he saw another mystery and made less sense of it.
Now and then, as a great treat, if he kept quiet as a mouse, because he begged and pleaded so, he was allowed to stay in the wings and watch; the round-eyed baby sahelia could, if necessary, die twiightly. All her burials were premature.
A couple of brawny supers carried Mama on stage in Act Four, ed in a shroud, tipped her into the cellarage amidst displays of grief from all ed but up she would pop at curtain-call having shaken the dust off her graveclothes and touched up her eye make-up, to curtsy with the rest of the resurrected immortals, all of whom, even Prince Hamlet himself, turned out, in the end, to be just as un-dead as she.
How could he, then, truly believe she would not e again, although, in the black suit that Mr Allan provided for him out of charity, he toddled behind her coffin to the cemetery? Surely, one fine day, the spectral an would return again, climb down from his box, throw open the carriage door and out she would step wearing the white nightdress in which he had last seen her, although he hoped this garment had been laundered ierim since he last saw it all bloody from a haeme.
Then a transparent stellation in the night sky would blink out; the scattered atoms would reassemble themselves to the entire and perfect Mama and he would run directly to her arms.
It is the mid-m of the eenth tury. He grows up uhe black stars of the slave states. He flinches from that part of women the sheet hid. He bees a man.
As soon as he bees a man, affluence departs from Edgar. The ９9ｌiｂ? and pocketbook that Mr Allan opeo the child now pull themselves together to expel. Edgar shakes the dust of the sweet South off his heels. He hies north, up here, to seek his fortune in the places where the light does not permit that chiaroscuro he loves; now Edgar Poe must live by his disordered wits.
The dug was snatched from the milky mouth and tucked away ihe bodice; the mirror no longer reflected Mama but, instead, a perfect stranger. He offered her his hand; smiling a tranced smile, she stepped out of the frame.
"My darling, my sister, my life and my bride!"
He was not put out by the tender years of this young girl whom he soon married; was she not just Juliets age, just thirteen summers?
The magnifit tresses f great shadowed eaves above her high forehead were the raven tint of nevermore, black as his suits the seams of which his devoted mother-in-law painted with ink so that they would not advertise to the world the signs of wear and, nowadays, he always wore a suit of sables, dressed in readiness for the funeral in a black coat buttoned up to the stod he never betrayed his absolute m by so much as one flash of white shirtfront. Sometimes, when his wifes mother was not there to wash and starch his linen, he eised on laundry bills and wore no shirt at all.
His long hair brushes the collar of this coat, from which poverty has worn off the nap. How sad his eyes are; there is too much of sorrow in his infrequent smile to make you happy when he smiles at you and so much of bitter gall, also, that you might mistake his smile frimace rue except when he smiles at his young wife with her forehead like a tombstohen he will smile and smile with as much posthumous tenderness as if he saw already: Dearly beloved wife of. . . carved above her eyebrows.
For her skin was white as marble and she was called -- would you believe! -- "Virginia", a hat suited his expatriates nostalgia and also her dition, for the childbride would remain a virgin until the day she died.
Imagihe sinless children lying iogether! The pity of it!
For did she not e to him stiffly armoured in taboos -- taboos against the violation of children; taboos against the violation of the dead -- for, not to put too fine a point on it, didnt she always look like a walking corpse? But such a pretty, pretty corpse!
And, besides, isnt an undemanding, eic, decorative corpse the perfect wife fentleman in reduced circumstances, upon whom the four walls of paranoia are always about to verge?
Virginia Clemm. In the dialect of northern England, to be "clemmed" is to be very cold. "Im fair clemmed." Virginia Clemm.
She brought with her a hardy, durable, industrious mother of her own, to and cook and keep ats for them and to outlive them, and to outlive them both.
Virginia was not very clever; she was by no means a sad case of arrested development, like his real, lost sister, whose life passed in a dream of non-being in her adopted home, the vegetable life of one who always deed to participate, a bud that never opened. (A doom lay upohe brother, Henry, soon died.) But the sloassed and Virginia stayed as she had been at thirteen, a simple little thing whose sweet disposition was his only fort and who never ceased to lisp, even whearted to rehearse the long part of dying.
She was light on her feet as a revenant. You would have thought she never bent a stem of grass as she passed across their little garden. When she spoke, when she sang, how sweet her voice was; she kept her harp in their cottage parlour, which her mother swept and polished until all was like a new pin. A few guests gathered there to partake of the Poes modest hospitality. There was his brilliant versation though his women saw to it that only tea was served, since all knew his dreadful weakness for liquor, but Virginia poured out with so much simple grace that everyone was charmed.
They begged her to take her seat at her harp and apany herself in an Old World ballad or two. Eddy nodded gladly: "yes", and she lightly struck the strings with white hands of which the long, thin fingers were so fine and waxen that you would have thought you could have set light to the tips to make of her hand the flaming Hand of Glory that casts all the inhabitants of the house, except the magi himself, into a profound ah-like sleep.
She sings:
Cold blows the wind, tonight, my love,
And a few drops of rain.
With a taper made from a manuscript folded into a flute, he slyly takes a light from the fire.
I never had but orue love
In cold earth she was lain.
He sets light to her fingers, oer the other.
A twelve month and a day being gone
The dead began to speak.
Eyes close. Her pupils tain in each a flame.
Who is that sitting on my grave
Who will not let me sleep?
All sleep. Her eyes go out. She sleeps.
He rearrahe macabre delabra so that the light from her glorious hand will fall between her legs and then he busily turns back her petticoats; the mortal dles shine. Do not think it is not love that moves him; only love moves him.
He feels no fear.
An expression of low ing crosses his face. Taking from his back pocket a pair of enormous pliers, he now, one by one, one by one by oracts the sharp teeth just as the midwife did.
All silent, all still.
Yet, even as he held aloft the last fierce e in triumph above her prostrate and insensible form in the vi he had at last exorcised the demons from desire, his face turned ashen and sear and he was overe with the most desolating anguish to hear the rumbling of the wheels outside. Unbidden, the an came; the grisly emissary of her highborn kinsman shouted imperiously: "Overture and beginners, please!" She popped the plug of spiritous lineween his lips; she swept off with a hiss of silk.
The sleepers woke and told him he was drunk; but his Virginia breathed no more!
After a breakfast of red-eye, as he was making his toilet before the mirror, he suddenly thought he would shave off his moustache in order to bee a different man so that the ghosts who had persistently plagued him since his wifes death would no longer reise him and would leave him alone. But, when he was -shaven, a black star rose in the mirror and he saw that his long hair and face folded in sorrow had taken on such a marked resemblao that of his loved and lost ohat he was struck like a stock or stone, with the cut-throat razor in his hand.
And, as he tinued, fasated, appalled, to stare in the reflective glass at those features that were his own a not his own, the bony casket of his skull began to agitate itself as if he had succumbed to a tremendous attack of the shakes.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
He was shaking like a backcloth about to be whisked off into oblivion.
Lights! he called out.
Now he wavered; horrors! He was starting to dissolve!
Lights! more lights! he cried, like the hero of a Jacobean tragedy when the murdering begins, for the black star was engulfing him.
Ohe laser light on the Republic blasts him.
His dust blows away on the wind.
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