The Day Boy and the Night Girl | Page 4

belong to the general scheme,

she could not fail at least to imagine a flicker of relationship between
some of them, and thus a shadow of the reality of things found its way
to her.
There was one thing, however, which moved and taught her more than
all the rest -- the lamp, namely, that hung from the ceiling, which she
always saw alight, though she never saw the flame, only the slight
condensation towards the center of the alabaster globe. And besides the
operation of the light itself after its kind, the indefiniteness of the globe,
and the softness of the light, giving her the feeling as if her eyes could
go in and into its whiteness, were somehow also associated with the
idea of space and room. She would sit for an hour together gazing up at
the lamp, and her heart would swell as she gazed. She would wonder
what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then
would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it. She
never looked thus at the lamp except when she was alone.
VIII. The Lamp
WATHO, having given orders, took it for granted they were obeyed,
and that Falca was all night long with Nycteris, whose day it was. But
Falca could not get into the habit of sleeping through the day, and
would often leave her alone half the night. Then it seemed to Nycteris
that the white lamp was watching over her. As it was never permitted to
go out -- while she was awake at least -- Nycteris, except by shutting
her eyes, knew less about darkness than she did about light. Also, the
lamp being fixed high overhead, and in the center of everything, she
did not know much about shadows either. The few there were fell
almost entirely on the floor, or kept like mice about the foot of the
walls.
Once, when she was thus alone, there came the noise of a far-off
rumbling: she had never before heard a sound of which she did not
know the origin, and here therefore was a new sign of something
beyond these chambers. Then came a trembling, then a shaking; the
lamp dropped from the ceiling to the floor with a great crash, and she
felt as if both her eyes were hard shut and both her hands over them.
She concluded that it was the darkness that had made the rumbling and

the shaking, and rushing into the room, had thrown down the lamp. She
sat trembling. The noise and the shaking ceased, but the light did not
return. The darkness had eaten it up!
Her lamp gone, the desire at once awoke to get out of her prison. She
scarcely knew what out meant; out of one room into another, where
there was not even a dividing door, only an open arch, was all she knew
of the world. But suddenly she remembered that she had heard Falca
speak of the lamp going out: this must be what she had meant? And if
the lamp had gone out, where had it gone? Surely where Falca went,
and like her it would come again. But she could not wait. The desire to
go out grew irresistible. She must follow her beautiful lamp! She must
find it! She must see what it was about!
Now, there was a curtain covering a recess in the wall, where some of
her toys and gymnastic things were kept; and from behind that curtain
Watho and Falca always appeared, and behind it they vanished. How
they came out of solid wall, she had not an idea, all up to the wall was
open space, and all beyond it seemed wall; but clearly the first and only
thing she could do was to feel her way behind the curtain. It was so
dark that a cat could not have caught the largest of mice. Nycteris could
see better than any cat, but now her great eyes were not of the smallest
use to her. As she went she trod upon a piece of the broken lamp. She
had never worn shoes or stockings, and the fragment, though, being of
soft alabaster, it did not cut, yet hurt her foot. She did not know what it
was, but as it had not been there before the darkness came, she
suspected that it had to do with the lamp. She kneeled therefore, and
searched with her hands, and bringing two large pieces together,
recognized the shape of the lamp. Therefore it flashed upon her that the
lamp was dead, that this brokenness was the death of which she had
read without understanding, that the darkness had killed the lamp. What
then could Falca have meant when she spoke