Antic Hay, Page 29

  Mr Gumbril received them on his balcony with courtesy.

  ‘I was just thinking of going in to work,’ he said. ‘And now you come and give me a good excuse for sitting out here a little longer. I’m delighted.’

  Gumbril Junior went downstairs to see what he could find in the way of food. While he was gone, his father explained to Mrs Viveash the secrets of the birds. Enthusiastically, his light floss of grey hair floating up and falling again about his head as he pointed and gesticulated, he told her; the great flocks assembled – goodness only knew where! – they flew across the golden sky, detaching here a little troop, there a whole legion, they flew until at last all had found their appointed resting-places and there were no more to fly. He made this nightly flight sound epical, as though it were a migration of peoples, a passage of armies.

  ‘And it’s my firm belief,’ said Gumbril Senior, adding notes to his epic, ‘that they make use of some sort of telepathy, some kind of direct mind-to-mind communication between themselves. You can’t watch them without coming to that conclusion.’

  ‘A charming conclusion,’ said Mrs Viveash.

  ‘It’s a faculty,’ Gumbril Senior went on, ‘we all possess, I believe. All we animals.’ He made a gesture which included himself, Mrs Viveash and the invisible birds among the plane-trees. ‘Why don’t we use it more? You may well ask. For the simple reason, my dear young lady, that half our existence is spent in dealing with things that have no mind – things with which it is impossible to hold telepathic communication. Hence the development of the five sense. I have eyes that preserve me from running into the lamp-post, ears that warn me I’m in the neighbourhood of Niagara. And having made these instruments very efficient, I use them in holding converse with other beings having a mind. I let my telepathic faculty lie idle, preferring to employ an elaborate and cumbrous arrangement of symbols in order to make my thought known to you through your senses. In certain individuals, however, the faculty is naturally so well-developed – like the musical, or the mathematical, or the chess-playing faculties in other people – that they cannot help entering into direct communication with other minds, whether they want to or not. If we knew a good method of educating and drawing out the latent faculty, most of us could make ourselves moderately efficient telepaths; just as most of us can make ourselves into moderate musicians, chess players and mathematicians. There would also be a few, no doubt, who could never communicate directly. Just as there are a few who cannot recognize “Rule Britannia” or Bach’s Concerto in D minor for two violins, and a few who cannot comprehend the nature of an algebraical symbol. Look at the general development of the mathematical and musical faculties only within the last two hundred years. By the twenty-first century, I believe, we shall all be telepaths. Meanwhile, these delightful birds have forestalled us. Not having the wit to invent a language or an expressive pantomime, they contrive to communicate such simple thoughts as they have, directly and instantaneously. They all go to sleep at once, wake at once, say the same thing at once; they turn all at once when they’re flying. Without a leader, without a word of command, they do everything together, in complete unison. Sitting here in the evenings, I sometimes fancy I can feel their thoughts striking against my own. It has happened to me once or twice: that I have known a second before it actually happened, that the birds were going to wake up and begin their half-minute of chatter in the dark. Wait! Hush.’ Gumbril Senior threw back his head, pressed his hand over his mouth, as though by commanding silence on himself he could command it on the whole world. ‘I believe they’re going to wake now. I feel it.’

  He was silent. Mrs Viveash looked towards the dark trees and listened. A full minute passed. Then the old gentleman burst out happily laughing.

  ‘Completely wrong!’ he said. ‘They’ve never been more soundly asleep.’ Mrs Viveash laughed too. ‘Perhaps they all changed their minds, just as they were waking up,’ she suggested.

  Gumbril Junior reappeared; glasses clinked as he walked, and there was a little rattle of crockery. He was carrying a tray.

  ‘Cold beef,’ he said, ‘and salad and a bit of cold apple-pie. It might be worse.’

  They drew up chairs to Gumbril Senior’s work-table, and there, among the letters and the unpaid bills and the sketchy elevations of archiducal palaces, they ate the beef and the apple-pie, and drank the one-and-ninepenny vin ordinaire of the house. Gumbril Senior, who had already supped, looked on at them from the balcony.

  ‘Did I tell you,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘that we saw Mr Porteous’s son the other evening – very drunk?’

  Gumbril Senior threw up his hands. ‘If you knew the calamities that young imbecile has been the cause of!’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Gambled away I don’t know how much borrowed money. And poor Porteous can’t afford anything – even now.’ Mr Gumbril shook his head and clutched and combed his beard. ‘It’s a fearful blow, but of course, Porteous is very steadfast and serene and . . . There!’ Gumbril Senior interrupted himself, holding up his hand. ‘Listen!’

  In the fourteen plane-trees the starlings had suddenly woken up.

  There was a wild outburst, like a stormy sitting in the Italian Parliament. Then all was silent. Gumbril Senior listened, enchanted. His face, as he turned back towards the light, revealed itself all smiles. His hair seemed to have blown loose of its own accord, from within, so to speak; he pushed it into place.

  ‘You heard them?’ he asked Mrs Viveash. ‘What can they have to say to one another, I wonder, at this time of night?’

  ‘And did you feel they were going to wake up?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.

  ‘No,’ said Gumbril Senior with candour.

  ‘When we’ve finished,’ Gumbril Junior spoke with his mouth full, ‘you must show Myra your model of London. She’d adore it – except that it has no electric sky-signs.’

  His father looked all of a sudden very much embarrassed. ‘I don’t think it would interest Mrs Viveash much,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes it would. Really,’ she declared.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact it isn’t here.’ Gumbril Senior pulled with fury at his beard.

  ‘Not here? But what’s happened to it?’

  Gumbril Senior wouldn’t explain. He just ignored his son’s question and began to talk once more about the starlings. Later on, however, when Gumbril and Mrs Viveash were preparing to go, the old man drew him apart into a corner and began to whisper the explanation.

  ‘I didn’t want to blare it about in front of strangers,’ he said, as though it were a question of the housemaid’s illegitimate baby or a repair to the water-closet. ‘But the fact is, I’ve sold it. The Victoria and Albert had wind that I was making it; they’ve been wanting it all the time. And I’ve let them have it.’

  ‘But why?’ Gumbril Junior asked in a tone of astonishment. He knew with what a paternal affection – no, more than paternal; for he was sure that his father was more whole-heartedly attached to his models than his son – with what pride he regarded these children of his spirit.

  Gumbril Senior sighed. ‘It’s all that young imbecile,’ he said.

  ‘What young imbecile?’

  ‘Porteous’s son, of course. You see, poor Porteous has had to sell his library, among other things. You don’t know what that means to him. All these precious books. And collected at the price of such hardships. I thought I’d like to buy a few of the best ones back for him. They gave me quite a good price at the Museum.’ He came out of his corner and hurried across the room to help Mrs Viveash with her cloak. ‘Allow me, allow me,’ he said.

  Slowly and pensively Gumbril Junior followed him. Beyond good and evil? Below good and evil? The name of earwig . . . The tubby pony trotted. The wild columbines suspended, among the shadows of the hazel copse, hooked spurs, helmets of aerial purple. The Twelfth Sonata of Mozart was insecticide; no earwigs could crawl through that music. Emily’s breasts were firm and pointed and she had slept at last without a tremor. In the
starlight, good, true and beautiful became one. Write the discovery in books – in books quos, in the morning, legimus cacantes. They descended the stairs. The cab was waiting outside.

  ‘The Last Ride again,’ said Mrs Viveash.

  ‘Golgotha Hospital, Southwark,’ said Gumbril to the driver and followed her into the cab.

  ‘Drive, drive, drive,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I like your father, Theodore. One of these days he’ll fly away with the birds. And how nice it is of those starlings to wake themselves up like that in the middle of the night, merely to amuse him. Considering how unpleasant it is to be woken in the night. Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re going to look at Shearwater in his laboratory.’

  ‘Is that a long way away?’

  ‘Immensely,’ said Gumbril.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Mrs Viveash piously and expiringly breathed.

  CHAPTER XXII

  SHEARWATER SAT ON his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved, against a brake, carefully adjusted to make the work of the pedaller hard, but not impossibly hard. From a pipe which came up through the floor issued a little jet of water which played on the brake and kept it cool. But no jet of water played on Shearwater. It was his business to get hot. He did get hot.

  From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on. Inside that little wooden house, which might have reminded Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of mind, of the Box in which Gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate life were the same every time he looked in. Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle of the nightmare bicycle, pedalling, pedalling. The water trickled over the brake. And Shearwater sweated. Great drops of sweat came oozing out from under his hair, ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like raindrops. His thick bull-neck was wet; his whole naked body, his arms and legs streamed and shone. The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a waterproof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the centre of the sheet at the focal point where all its slopes converged. The automatically controlled heating apparatus in the basement kept the temperature in the box high and steady. Peering through the damp-dimmed panes of the window, Lancing noticed with satisfaction that the mercury stood unchangingly at twenty-seven point five Centigrade. The ventilators at the side and top of the box were open; Shearwater had air enough. Another time, Lancing reflected, they’d make the box air-tight and see the effect of a little carbon dioxide poisoning on top of excessive sweating. It might be very interesting, but to-day they were concerned with sweating only. After seeing that the thermometer was steady, that the ventilators were properly open, the water was still trickling over the brake, Lancing would tap at the window. And Shearwater, who kept his eyes fixed straight before him, as he pedalled slowly and unremittingly along his nightmare road, would turn his head at the sound.

  ‘All right?’ Lancing’s lips moved and his eyebrows went up inquiringly.

  Shearwater would nod his big, round head, and the sweat-drops, suspended on his eyebrows and his moustache, would fall like little liquid fruits shaken suddenly by the wind.

  ‘Good,’ and Lancing would go back to his thick German book under the reading-lamp at the other end of the laboratory.

  Constant as the thermometer Shearwater pedalled steadily and slowly on. With a few brief halts for food and rest, he had been pedalling ever since lunch-time. At eleven he would go to bed on a shake-down in the laboratory and at nine to-morrow morning he would re-enter the box and start pedalling again. He would go on all to-morrow and the day after; and after that, as long as he could stand it. One, two, three, four. Pedal, pedal, pedal . . . He must have travelled the equivalent of sixty or seventy miles this afternoon. He would be getting on for Swindon. He would be nearly at Portsmouth. He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford. He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling through the green and golden valleys where Constable used to paint. He would be at Winchester by the bright stream. He would have ridden through the beech woods of Arundel out into the sea . . .

  In any case he was far away, he was escaping. And Mrs Viveash followed, walking swayingly along on feet that seemed to tread between two abysses, at her leisure. Pedal, pedal. The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood . . . Formidably, calmly, her eyes regarded. The lids cut off an arc of those pale circles. When she smiled, it was a crucifixion. The coils of her hair were copper serpents. Her small gestures loosened enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her voice they had fallen in ruins about him. His world was no longer safe, it had ceased to stand on its foundations. Mrs Viveash walked among his ruins and did not even notice them. He must build up again. Pedal, pedal. He was not merely escaping; he was working a building machine. It must be built with proportion; with proportion, the old man had said. The old man appeared in the middle of the nightmare road in front of him, clutching his beard. Proportion, proportion. There were first a lot of dirty rocks lying about; then there was St Paul’s. These bits of his life had to be built up proportionably.

  There was work. And there was talk about work and ideas. And there were men who could talk about work and ideas. But so far as he had been concerned that was about all they could do. He would have to find out what else they did; it was interesting. And he would have to find out what other men did; men who couldn’t talk about work and not much about ideas. They had as good kidneys as any one else.

  And then there were women.

  On the nightmare road he remained stationary. The pedals went round and round under his driving feet; the sweat ran off him. He was escaping, and yet he was also drawing nearer. He would have to draw nearer. ‘Woman, what have I to do with you? Not enough; too much.

  Not enough – he was building her in, a great pillar next to the pillar of work.

  Too much – he was escaping. If he had not caged himself here in this hot box, he would have run out after her, to throw himself – all in fragments, all dissipated and useless – in front of her. And she wanted none of him. But perhaps it would be worse, perhaps it would be far, far worse if she did.

  The old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard, crying out, ‘Proportion, proportion.’ He trod and trod at his building machine, working up the pieces of his life, steadily, unremittingly working them into a proportionable whole, into a dome that should hang, light, spacious and high, as though by a miracle, on the empty air. He trod and trod, escaping, mile after mile into fatigue, into wisdom. He was at Dover now, pedalling across the Channel. He was crossing a dividing gulf and there would be safety on the other side; the cliffs of Dover were already behind him. He turned his head as though to look back at them; the drops of sweat were shaken from his eyebrows, from the shaggy fringes of his moustache. He turned his head from the blank wooden wall in front of him over his left shoulder. A face was looking through the observation window behind him – a woman’s face.

  It was the face of Mrs Viveash.

  Shearwater uttered a cry and at once turned back again. He redoubled his pedalling. One, two, three, four – furiously he rushed along the nightmare road. She was haunting him now in hallucinations. She was pursuing and she was gaining on him. Will, wisdom, resolution and understanding were of no avail, then? But there was always fatigue. The sweat poured down his face, streamed down the indented runnel of his spine, along the seam at the meeting-place of the ribs. His loin-cloth was wringing wet. The drops pattered continuously on the waterproof sheet. His calves and the muscles of his thighs ached with pedalling. One, two, three, four – he trod round a hundred times with either foot. After that he ventured to turn his head once more. He was relieved, and at the same time he was disappointed, to see that there was now no face at the win
dow. He had exorcised the hallucination. He settled down to a more leisurely pedalling.

  In the annexe of the laboratory the animals devoted to the service of physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden irruption of light. The albino guinea-pigs peered through the meshes of their hutch and their red eyes were like the rear-lights of bicycles. The pregnant she-rabbits lolloped out and shook their ears and pointed their tremulous noses towards the door. The cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether to crow or cluck.

  ‘When he’s with hens,’ Lancing explained to his visitors, ‘he thinks he’s a cock. When he’s with a cock, he’s convinced he’s a pullet.’

  The rats who were being fed on milk from a London dairy came tumbling from their nest with an anxious hungry squeaking. They were getting thinner and thinner every day; in a few days they would be dead. But the old rat, whose diet was Grade A milk from the country, hardly took the trouble to move. He was as fat and sleek as a brown furry fruit, ripe to bursting. No skim and chalky water, no dried dung and tubercle bacilli for him. He was in clover. Next week, however, the fates were plotting to give him diabetes artificially.

  In their glass pagoda the little black axolotls crawled, the heraldry of Mexico, among a scanty herbage. The beetles, who had had their heads cut off and replaced by the heads of other beetles, darted uncertainly about, some obeying their heads, some their genital organs. A fifteen-year-old monkey, rejuvenated by the Steinach process, was discovered by the light of Lancing’s electric torch, shaking the bars that separated him from the green-furred, bald-rumped, bearded young beauty in the next cage. He was gnashing his teeth with thwarted passion.