“We know the sex-taste of female birds better that we know the sex-taste of women. Only the most beautiful in the hen’s eyes survives, so when you admire a peacock you know you have the same taste as a pea-hen. But women are more mysterious than birds. You’ve heard of beauty and the beast, haven’t you? They have rogue-tastes. Just look at me and my leg. You won’t find Miss Kamsgate by going round the world preening yourself like a peacock to attract a beautiful woman—she’s our daughter and she has rogue-tastes too. She isn’t for someone who wants a beautiful wife at his dinner-table to satisfy his vanity, and an understanding wife in bed who’ll treat him just the same number of times as he was accustomed to at school—so many times a day or a week. She went away, our daughter did, with a want looking for a want—and not a want you can measure in inches either or calculate in numbers by the week. They say that in the northern countries people make love for their health, so it won’t be any good looking for her in the north. You might have to go as far as Africa or China. And talking of China . . .
5
Sometimes I think that I learned more from Javitt—this man who never existed—than from all my schoolmasters. He talked to me while I sat there on the floor lay upon the sacks as no one had ever done before or has ever done since. I could not have expected my mother to take time away from the Fabian pamphlets to say, “Men are like monkeys—they don’t have any season in love, and the monkeys aren’t worried by this notion of dying. They tell us from pulpits we’re immortal and then they try to frighten us with death. I’m more a monkey than a man. To the monkeys death’s an accident. The gorillas don’t bury their dead with hearses and crowns of flowers, thinking one day it’s going to happen to them and they better put on a show if they want one for themselves too. If one of them dies, it’s a special case, and so they can leave it in the ditch. I feel like them. But I’m not a special case yet. I keep clear of hackney-carriages and railway-trains, you won’t find horses, wild dogs or machinery down here. I love life and I survive. Up there they talk about natural death, but it’s natural death that’s unnatural. If we lived for a thousand years—and there’s no reason we shouldn’t—there’d always be a smash, a bomb, tripping over your left foot—those are the natural deaths. All we need to live is a bit of effort, but nature sows booby-traps in our way.
“Do you believe those skulls monks have in their cells are set there for contemplation? Not on your life. They don’t believe in death any more than I do. The skulls are there for the same reason you’ll see a queen’s portrait in an embassy—they’re just part of the official furniture. Do you believe an ambassador ever looks at that face on the wall with a diamond and tiara and an empty smile?
“Be disloyal. It’s your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it’s the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living, boy, and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent—and never let either of the two sides know your real name. The same applies to women and God. They both respect a man they don’t own, and they’ll go on raising the price they are willing to offer. Didn’t Christ say that very thing? Was the prodigal son loyal or the lost shilling or the strayed sheep? The obedient flock didn’t give the shepherd any satisfaction or the loyal son interest his father.
“People are afraid of bringing May blossom into the house. They say it’s unlucky. The real reason is it smells strong of sex and they are afraid of sex. Why aren’t they afraid of fish then, you may rightly ask? Because when they smell fish they smell a holiday ahead and they feel safe from breeding for a short while.”
I remember Javitt’s words far more clearly than the passage of time; certainly I must have slept at least twice on the bed of sacks, but I cannot remember Javitt sleeping until the very end—perhaps he slept like a horse or a god, upright. And the broth—that came at regular intervals, so far as I could tell, though there was no sign anywhere of a clock, and once I think they opened for me a tin of sardines from their store (it had a very Victorian label on it of two bearded sailors and a seal, but the sardines tasted good).
I think Javitt was glad to have me there. Surely he could not have been talking quite so amply over the years to Maria who could only quack in response, and several times he made me read to him from one of the newspapers. The nearest to our time I ever found was a local account of the celebrations for the relief of Mafeking. (“Riots,” Javitt said, “purge like a dose of salts.”)
Once he told me to pick up the oil-lamp and we would go for a walk together, and I was able to see how agile he could be on his one leg. When he stood upright he looked like a rough carving from a tree-trunk where the sculptor had not bothered to separate the legs, or perhaps, as with the image on the cave, they were “badly executed.” He put one hand on each wall and hopped gigantically in front of me, and when he paused to speak (like many old people he seemed unable to speak and move at the same time) he seemed to be propping up the whole passage with his arms as thick as pit-beams. At one point he paused to tell me that we were now directly under the lake. “How many tons of water lie up there?” he asked me—I had never thought of water in tons before that, only in gallons, but he had the exact figure ready, I can’t remember it now. Further on, where the passage sloped upwards, he paused again and said, “Listen,” and I heard a kind of rumbling that passed overhead and after that a rattling as little cakes of mud fell around us. “That’s a motor-car,” he said, as an explorer might have said, “That’s an elephant.”
I asked him whether perhaps there was a way out near there since we were so close to the surface, and he made his answer, even to that direct question, ambiguous and general like a proverb. “A wise man has only one door to his house,” he said.
What a boring old man he would have been to an adult mind, but a child has a hunger to learn which makes him sometimes hang on the lips of the dullest schoolmaster. I thought I was learning about the world and the universe from Javitt, and still to this day I wonder how it was that a child could have invented these details, or have they accumulated year by year, like coral, in the sea of the unconscious around the original dream?
There were times when he was in a bad humour for no apparent reason, or at any rate for no adequate reason. An example: for all his freedom of speech and range of thought, I found there were tiny rules which had to be obeyed, else the thunder of his invective broke—the way I had to arrange the spoon in the empty broth-bowl, the method of folding a newspaper after it had been read, even the arrangement of my limbs on the bed of sacks.
“I’ll cut you off,” he cried once and I pictured him loppin off one of my legs to resemble him. “I’ll starve you, I’ll set you alight like a candle for a warning. Haven’t I given you a kingdom here of all the treasures of the earth and all the fruits of it, tin by tin, where time can’t get in to destroy you and there’s no day or night, and you go and defy me with a spoon laid down longways in a saucer? You come of an ungrateful generation.” His arms waved about and cast shadows like wolves on the wall behind the oil-lamp, while Maria sat squatting behind a cylinder of calor-gas in an attitude of terror.
“I haven’t even seen your wonderful treasure,” I said with feeble defiance.
“Nor you won’t,” he said, “nor any lawbreaker like you. You lay last night on your back grunting like a small swine, but did I curse you as you deserved? Javitt’s patient. He forgives and he forgives seventy times seven, but then you go and lay your spoon longways . . .” He gave a great sigh like a wave withdrawing. He said, “I forgive even that. There’s no fool like an old fool and, you will search a long way before you find anything as old as I am—even among the tortoises, the parrots and the elephants. One day I’ll show you the treasure, but not now. I’m not in the right mood now. Let time pass. Let time heal.”
I had found the way, however, on an earlier occasion to set him in a good humour and that was to talk to him about his daughter. It came quite easily to me, for I found myself to be passi
onately in love, as perhaps one can only be at an age when all one wants is to give and the thought of taking is very far removed. I asked him whether he was sad when she left him to go “upstairs” as he liked to put it.
“I knew it had to come,” he said. “It was for that she was born. One day she’ll be back and the three of us will be together for keeps.”
“Perhaps I’ll see her then,” I said.
“You won’t live to see that day,” he said, as though it was I who was the old man, not he.
“Do you think she’s married?” I asked anxiously.
“She isn’t the kind to marry,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you she’s a rogue like Maria and me? She has her roots down here.”
“I thought Maria and you were married,” I said anxiously.
He gave a sharp crunching laugh like a nut-cracker closing. “There’s no marrying in the ground,” he said. “Where would you find the witnesses? Marriage is public. Maria and me, we just grew into each other, that’s all, and then she sprouted.”
I sat silent for a long while, brooding on that vegetable picture. Then I said with all the firmness I could muster, “I’m going to find her when I get out of here.”
“If you get out of here,” he said, “you’d have to live a very long time and travel a very long way to find her.”
“I’ll do just that,” I replied.
He looked at me with a trace of humour. “You’ll have to take a look at Africa,” he said, “and Asia—and then there’s America, North and South, and Australia—you might leave out the Arctic and the other Pole—she was always a warm girl.” And it occurs to me now when I think of the life I have led since, that I have been in most of those regions—except Australia where I have only twice touched down between planes.
“I will go to them all,” I said, “and I’ll find her.” It was as though the purpose of life had suddenly come to me as it must have come often enough to some future explorer when he noticed on a map for the first time an empty space in the heart of a continent.
“You’ll need a lot of money,” Javitt jeered at me.
“I’ll work my passage,” I said, “before the mast.” Perhaps it was a reflection of that intention which made the young author W.W. menace his elder brother with such a fate before preserving him for Oxford of all places. The mast was to be a career sacred to me—it was not for George.
“It’ll take a long time,” Javitt warned me.
“I’m young,” I said.
I don’t know why it is that when I think of this conversation with Javitt the doctor’s voice comes back to me saying hopelessly, “There’s always hope.” There’s hope perhaps, but there isn’t so much time left now as there was then to fulfil a destiny.
That night, when I lay down on the sacks, I had the impression that Javitt had begun to take a favourable view of my case. I woke once in the night and saw him sitting there on what is popularly called a throne, watching me. He closed one eye in a wink and it was like a star going out.
Next morning after my bowl of broth, he suddenly spoke up. ‘Today,” he said, “you are going to see my treasure.”
6
It was a day heavy with the sense of something fateful coming nearer—I call it a day but for all I could have told down there it might have been a night. And I can only compare it in my later experience with those slow hours I have sometimes experienced before I have gone to meet a woman with whom for the first time the act of love is likely to come about. The fuse has been lit, and who can tell the extent of the explosion? A few cups broken or a house in ruins?
For hours Javitt made no further reference to the subject, but after the second cup of broth (or was it perhaps, on that occasion, the tin of sardines?) Maria disappeared behind the screen and when she reappeared she wore a hat. Once, years ago perhaps, it had been a grand hat, a hat for the races, a great black straw affair; now it was full of holes like a colander decorated with one drooping scarlet flower which had been stitched and restitched and stitched again. I wondered when I saw her dressed like that whether we were about to go “upstairs.” But we made no move. Instead she put a kettle upon the stove, warmed a pot and dropped in two spoonfuls of tea. Then she and Javitt sat and watched the kettle like a couple of soothsayers bent over the steaming entrails of a kid, waiting for a revelation. The kettle gave a thin preliminary whine and Javitt nodded and the tea was made. He alone took a cup, sipping it slowly, with his eyes on me, as though he were considering and perhaps revising his decision.
On the edge of his cup, I remember, was a tea-leaf. He took it on his nail and placed it on the back of my hand. I knew very well what that meant. A hard stalk of tea indicated a man upon the way and the soft leaf a woman; this was a soft leaf. I began to strike it with the palm of my other hand counting as I did so, “One, two, three.” It lay flat, adhering to my hand. “Four, five.” It was on my fingers now and I said, triumphantly, “In five days,” thinking of Javitt’s daughter in the world above.
Javitt shook his head. “You don’t count time like that with us,” he said. “That’s five decades of years.” I accepted his correction—he must know his own country best, and it’s only now that I find myself calculating, if every day down there were ten years long, what age in our reckoning could Javitt have claimed?
I have no idea what he had learned from the ceremony of the tea, but at least he seemed satisfied. He rose on his one leg, and now that he had his arms stretched out to either wall, he reminded me of a gigantic crucifix, and the crucifix moved in great hops down the way we had taken the day before. Maria gave me a little push from behind and I followed. The oil lamp in Maria’s hand cast long shadows ahead of us.
First we came under the lake and I remembered the tons of water hanging over us like a frozen falls, and after that we reached the spot where we had halted before, and again a car went rumbling past on the road above. But this time we continued our shuffling march. I calculated that now we had crossed the road which led to Winton Halt; we must be somewhere under the inn called The Three Keys, which was kept by our gardener’s uncle, and after that we should have arrived below the Long Meadow, a field with a small minnowy stream along its northern border owned by a farmer called Howell. I had not given up all idea of escape and I noted our route carefully and the distance we had gone. I had hoped for some side-passage which might indicate that there was another entrance to the tunnel, but there seemed to be none and I was disappointed to find that before we travelled below the inn we descended quite steeply, perhaps in order to avoid the cellars—indeed at one moment I heard a groaning and a turbulence as though the gardener’s uncle were taking delivery of some new barrels of beer.
We must have gone nearly half a mile before the passage came to an end in a kind of egg-shaped hall. Facing us was a kitchen-dresser of unstained wood, very similar to the one in which my mother kept her stores of jam, sultanas, raisins and the like.
“Open up, Maria,” Javitt said, and Maria shuffled by me, clanking a bunch of keys and quacking with excitement, while the lamp swung to and fro like a censer.
“She’s heated up,” Javitt said. “It’s many days since she saw the treasure last.” I do not know which kind of time he was referring to then, but judging from her excitement I think the days must really have represented decades—she had even forgotten which key fitted the lock and she tried them all and failed and tried again before the tumbler turned.
I was disappointed when I first saw the interior—I had expected gold bricks and a flow of Maria Theresa dollars spilling on the floor, and there were only a lot of shabby cardboard-boxes on the upper shelves and the lower shelves were empty. I think Javitt noted my disappointment and was stung by it. “I told you,” he said, “the moit’s down below for safety.” But I wasn’t to stay disappointed very long. He took down one of the biggest boxes off the top shelf and shook the contents on to the earth at my feet, as though defying me to belittle that.
And that was a sparkling mass of jewellery s
uch as I had never seen before—I was going to say in all the colours of the rainbow, but the colours of stones have not that pale girlish simplicity. There were reds almost as deep as raw liver, stormy blues, greens like the underside of a wave, yellow sunset colours, greys like a shadow on snow, and stones without colour at all that sparkled brighter than all the rest. I say I’d seen nothing like it: it is the scepticism of middle-age which leads me now to compare that treasure-trove with the caskets overflowing with artificial jewellery which you sometimes see in the shop-windows of Italian tourist-resorts.
And there again I find myself adjusting a dream to the kind of criticism I ought to reserve for some agent’s report on the import or export value of coloured glass. If this was a dream, these were real stones. Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life. The gold of dreams is not the diluted gold of even the best goldsmith, there are no diamonds in dreams made of paste—what seems is. “Who seems most kingly is the king.”
I went down on my knees and bathed my hands in the treasure, and while I knelt there Javitt opened box after box and poured the contents upon the ground. There is no avarice in a child. I didn’t concern myself with the value of this horde: it was simply a treasure, and a treasure is to be valued for its own sake and not for what it will buy. It was only years later, after a deal of literature and learning and knowledge at second hand, that W.W. wrote of the treasure as something with which he could save the family fortunes. I was nearer to the jackdaw in my dream, caring only for the glitter and the sparkle.
Strangeness Page 31