Prose Passage #2

“Silently, surreptitiously, as the unacknowledged autumn changed to winter outside, a warmth and glow suffused the House of Correction, a glow so inappropriate to the season that the Countess herself felt the effects of the palpable change of temperature within, so she would sweat, yet she could not, no matter how hard she looked, detect a single visible change in the mechanical order she had laid down and, even though she gave up sleeping altogether and introduced a hysterical randomness into her revolvings, so that she sometimes made herself quite giddy and sometimes stuck sock-still for almost an entire minute by the authority of the clock, she never saw one suspicious thing.

      She never thought the guards might turn against her; did she not keep their contracts in a locked iron box in her watch-room? Had she not bought them? Were they not forbidden to discourse with the inmates? Did not the forbidden thing itself forbid?

     Her white eyes were now veined and rimmed with red. As she went round and round, she drummed nervous tattoos on the arm of her chair.

     The notes, the drawings, the caresses, the glances – all said, in various ways, ‘if only’, and ‘I long…’ And the clock ticked the time of another lifetime, another place, above the gateway that grew each day larger in their imaginations until the clock and the gateway that had signified the end of hope now spoke to them of nothing but hope.

     So it was an army of lovers who finally rose up against the Countess on the morning when the cages opened for the final exercise hour, opened – and never closed. At one accord, the guards threw off their hoods, the prisoners came forth and all turned towards the Countess in one great, united look of accusation.

     She took out the pistol she kept in her pocket and fired off shot after shot that banged but did not reverberate as they ricocheted off of the bricks and bars of that echoless chamber. Her firing scored one bull; she stopped the clock, shot the time right out of it, broke the face and stilled the tick forever, so, henceforth, when she looked at it, it would remind her only of the time that her time ended, the hour of their deliverance. But that was an accident. She was too stricken with surprise to aim straight, she wounded nobody and was easily disarmed, chattering away with outrage.

     They locked up her door, took away the key and threw it into the first snowdrift they encountered when they opened the gate. They left the Countess secured in her observatory with nothing to observe any longer but the spectre of her own crime, which came in at once through the open gate to haunt her as she continued to turn round and round in her chair.

(Carter 217-218)