Titus Awakes

2

Titus Among the Snows

TITUS AWOKE FROM a haunted sleep. The uncanny light of whiteness began to permeate his brain. Snow fell silently. Its gentle falling was cruel, condemning him to continue in his solitude, and his hunger. The door of the barn could not be moved. The owl had frozen to death. It seemed to Titus that he was the only creature in the world left alive, and as the brilliant whiteness hit the barn, he saw around him the small corpses of birds and mice, food for what he knew would be his own incarceration.

Despite his hunger and the aching cold in his limbs, a warmth of love glowed in his memory: the withdrawn magnitude of his mother whom he could not love, but whose mental elegance chastened him – his dead sister Fuchsia, passionate, ugly and beautiful all at the same time, loving him to the point of pain, for herself and for him. Nannie Slagg, so petulant and so pathetic to all but herself. Dr Prunesquallor, whose wit did not hurt. Bellgrove, his schoolmaster, trying to muster a dignity he did not possess, and then, because physical love bears with it the power to deny all other love the ‘Thing’ – callous, cruel, mocking and alone, done to death by a flash of lightning before fruition, but leaving Titus so vulnerable that he carried the scar for the rest of his life.

He thought back to Muzzlehatch, a man whose hurt when his animals were destroyed by science rendered a brilliant mind oblique and nulled by shock. The pain of his mental collapse and death was more than Titus could withstand. Juno he had not loved, but with what heart he had left, he wished that he had been able to. Everything she offered Titus was generous and without intent. She gave. He received, but could not return. He was a blind man who could not hear – a deaf man who could not see. A stump of a man who did not know how to use what little he had left of his human frame. And so, with the cruelty of youth, the cruelty of a man who knew that he was loved, he left her, and never gave her another thought.

Cheetah he hated, but with less virulence than the hatred he felt for Steerpike.

Titus was engulfed by loneliness. Despite his past, and the emptiness the future promised, he did not want to die, alone, in an unknown barn, surrounded by rodents which lay, almost beautiful in the translucent light, with their claws drawn up to their frozen faces so pitifully.

He searched the barn for the smallest shred of comfort; his eyes were as sharp as had been those of the dead owl, which still clung frozen to its rafter.

The wind howled and the tears of self-pity froze like intemperate glaciers on his cheeks. As he stretched, knowing that the thrushes, starlings and woodland creatures that had entered the barn before his incarceration crept closer to him, he heard a sound that was not animal. At this strange, unexpected screeching of the barn door being feebly pushed, his frozen body gave a leap and what was left of his heart pumped chilled blood through his whole being.

He was unable to lift himself, to call out, to come to the aid of whatever it was that trespassed on that silent atmosphere. He opened his mouth to whistle his presence, but nothing came from the pursed lips. He watched, mesmerised, as the barn door slowly – gratingly – with the shriek of pain and the difficulty of a cripple, slowly opened and let in the freezing snow.

The grating of the door was an echo of the chalk on the blackboard, so long ago when he was a boy at school. Another screech, and another and another, until the hideous sound was no longer bearable. Like the breaking of the waters, it was pushed with the imperative need of a baby to escape from its mother’s womb, and the dark birth lay prostrate.

Titus knew that here was another human, whether male or female he could not tell. He dragged himself across the frozen dust to the shapeless lump. His hands and legs were bound with rags, his head wrapped with whatever he had been able to twist round it, and his body, bound with straw and other matter, now twice its normal size. All he knew was that he must close the door and shut out the blizzard.

If he had not known that there was another living being whose life depended on him, he might have loosened the small and dwindling grasp he had on life. With the ungainliness that comes from disease he dragged himself nearer the door and the miraculous hexagonal snowflakes and what might in normal circumstances have taken half a second, now took what felt like an hour.

To force the door shut again took reserves of his energy that were fast dwindling. He had never possessed personal vanity, only a supreme arrogance of the importance of his inheritance, which during his wanderings grew more powerful. Forsaking this birthright, Titus entered this new world of his own free will. Anyone from his past would neither have recognised him nor cared for what they saw; a neuter, covered in rags. He dragged himself across the other heap of humanity, gradually stretching his arms to push or pull at the barn door. All he could hear, through the woollen filth that covered his ears, was so muffled – it must have been from another world. Panting, he at last reached the door and lay, arms outstretched. He pulled at a cord attached to the door, but the cord was frozen and so brittle that it snapped. Tears of frustration froze on his cheeks. With one great effort Titus pulled the door closed, letting in a gust of snow.

So much effort could only have one result – exhaustion.