The Four-Gated City

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Doris Lessing. The Four-Gated City

Dedication

Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Three

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Four

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Appendix

I: Appeal

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Author’s Notes

About the Author

By the same author

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Copyright

About the Publisher

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The Four-Gated City

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This then was what she had discovered, had been given, rather; and was so reluctant to give up. This was why she did not want to choose this slot or that, this or that job, this or that person, to become a tactful assistant to Henry and John Higham; or an addition to the people across the river. If only she could go on like this, walking for ever through the interminable, damp, hostile street of this doomed city, all cracked and thinned and darkened by war – if only she could stay here, in this area of herself she had found … her mind was swinging slowly from light to dark, dark to light. Into it came impressions: a tree, an intensely variegated mass of light; a brick wall picked out in a flood of glowing orange by a slant of light from a window; a face that looked out briefly from behind glass before a curtain twitched across. Her mind was a soft dark empty space. That was what she was. ‘Matty’ was an intolerably tedious personage she could think of only with exhausted nausea and fear that she might ever again be afflicted by her. Martha – well, ordinary Martha too had moved away, could be looked at: she did well enough, was not important. As for ‘Hesse’, it was a name acquired like a bracelet from a man who had it in his possession to be given to a woman in front of lawyers at the time of the signing of the marriage contract. But who then was she behind the banalities of the day? A young woman? No, nothing but a soft dark receptive intelligence, that was all. And if she tried – but not too hard, a quick flash of effort, a light probe into a possibility, she could move back in time, annulling time, for the moment of the effort, and stand in another country, on another soil. Walking down damp smelling pavements under the wet London sky in the summer of five years after the war, she was (but really became, as if nothing had intervened), Martha Quest, a young girl sitting under the tree from where she could see a great hot landscape and a sky full of birds and clouds. But really, not in imagination – there she sat. Or she was the Martha who had pushed a small child under leafy avenues with the smell of roses coming off town gardens. But really, there she was: she was, nothing to do with Martha, or any other name she might have had attached to her, nothing to do with what she looked like, how she had been shaped. And if she were able to go on walking, as she was now, day after day, night after night, down this street, up that, past houses, houses, houses, passing them always, with their shuttered and curtained eyes behind which a dull light hid, if she were able only to do that …

And now, into the quiet, came something she had forgotten – one always did forget. She had forgotten what could happen when the dark deepened and one thought it would remain, being so strong. It was as if behind the soft space was a maniac ready to dance inwards with idiotic words and phrases. Words and phrases and fragments of music were niggling at the back of her mind somewhere. But she had really forgotten that this idiot was there, who accompanied the gift of the quiet swinging dark, and whose words did not seem to mean anything. They came out of dark, floated for a while on the space and went on into dark. Then the words of songs and tunes – yes, of course, during the past few weeks she had become familiar with this phase, or stage. First, the quiet empty space, behind which stood an observing presence. Then, into the quiet space, behind it, an enemy, a jiggling fool or idiot. Humiliating! Absurd! Again and again she had won, with such difficulty, the quiet; and then encountered this silliness. She had resisted it. Again and again she had descended from the quiet because of this silly enemy. Tonight, she did not resist: she was too tired. And besides, she was remembering that she had made a discovery, found a new thought – rather a thought had floated in with the silly words and bits of music: that somewhere in one’s mind was a wave-length, a band where music jigged and niggled, with or without words: it was simply a question of tuning in and listening. And she had made the discovery, and then forgotten it, that the words, or tunes, were not all at random: they reflected a state or an emotion. Because the words of the songs, or the phrases, had a relevance: one could learn from them, if one did not shy off, indignant, annoyed, because of the banality, the silliness, the jumble of this band of sound just behind (beside?) the empty space. For, as Martha had told the wave-length, or the station, before tonight (and had forgotten that she had), you have a very poor sense of humour, you have no taste at all. For instance, a couple of weeks before, walking by the river, first achieving the quiet, then reaching or being afflicted by the band of sound, she had discovered that far from not caring about having no money, and reaching the end of what she had, she was worried, frightened in fact, because the tune that jigged there was ‘the best things in life are free’ over and over and over again, like a sardonic, squalling baby, grinding into her day-time consciousness that she must stop now, must look for work, must get back a condition of earning money. And because night after night she had reached this place, and been informed over and over again by this appallingly frivolous and silly voice that she was in fact scared stiff, she had taken the decision to put her life into responsibility, to leave the drifting and floating. So why resent the method if the information was of use? How did she want useful information to be given? In crashing chords no doubt, or with trumpets? That particular part of her brain did not work like that, and if she resented it, shied off, fled away, made a decision to descend, resisted, she also lost information she needed. The most interesting discoverings were made through banalities. Now, jiggling away there on the edge of the empty space was the announcement that she was tired and wanted to go home. True: but her feet had been telling her that loudly for more than an hour. It was not her feet, her body that were tired – but another part of herself: she understood that in fact she was under great strain: and in a flash of foreseeing, realized the plunge into inert exhaustion that would follow this height. But who, what, was tired, that she needed to be told she was?

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