“No, I haven’t——”
“But you could give me a description?”
“Not a very good one. It was dark green—not one of the usual makes—might be French——”
“And the name and address of the owner, if you please, sir.” By this time, the sergeant was in official slow motion, every syllable shod with lead.
It would have been folly to refuse, so Ravenstreet rattled off the name and address as fast as he could, then went on: “I’ve been here too long already. Now if you saw him, tell me which way he went.”
But the sergeant was trying to write in his notebook. “I’ll have to have that name and address again, if you please, sir.”
Ravenstreet repeated them impatiently. “Now come along, Sergeant. This is urgent.”
“What’s urgent about it?”
“That’s my business.”
“I wouldn’t take that tone, sir. After all, it might turn out to be our business too. And I don’t think you need to hurry now. I’d just been telephoning ahead about him when you came up. Passed us driving like a lunatic—I thought he was mad drunk—car nearly out of control—full speed and all over the road. I don’t think he’ll get much farther if he keeps to the main road. They’ll stop him. However, he went that way. Just a minute, sir. I think I’d better have your name and address too.”
When they were on their way again and he had explained to Perperek why they had been delayed so long, he said rather wearily: “I feel that happened in the maddening way it did just because I was after poor little Sepman. It was all in his particular atmosphere, if you see what I mean. I’m pretty certain he himself was always running up against men like that sergeant—that that was a typical bit of Sepmanism—of the world he hated and yet somehow created.”
Perperek agreed, enlarging obscurely on the theme that we attract to ourselves certain types of persons and events. Ravenstreet neither understood nor even caught half of what he said, preferring to give most of his attention to the road. There was more traffic now, most of it heavy commercial stuff. Ravenstreet was far from feeling sleepy but he felt tired and depressed. Just before they reached the next main crossroads they had to stop: the lorries ahead had been halted; there was no sense in trying to pass them. He lit a pipe, Perperek one of his pungent cigarettes. The bloom and faint far glitter of the night was lost to them here; they might have been in a tunnel with their throbbing engines.
“It’s more than likely that by this time Sepman’s trying to explain himself to the police. What he’ll say, I can’t imagine. I didn’t know what to say to that sergeant. Hard to explain anything to a policeman’s notebook.”
“Always I tell lies,” said Perperek indifferently. “To police—to official peoples—always lies. When I am young—not so many. Now—more and more and more. Of all machines man makes now—State is biggest—stupidest—asks more and more, gives less and less. Is like a cancer. You feed him—he grows—you don’t grow. Of all men, these men of State—politicals, officials, expert foreign affairs, expert business, expert war, expert monkey nonsense—are most stupid, most far away from truth, from wisdom. Better be peasant—be circus clown—be drunk merchant—perhaps do no good but do little harm. Now we move again—eh?”
“Looks like it,” Ravenstreet grunted, reaching for the starter. “I’m beginning to feel there’s something futile about this rescue party. By this time either Sepman’s beginning to behave sensibly or he’s beyond our control, probably under arrest for trying to hit a policeman.”
“Or is much worse,” said Perperek gravely. “Now I think much worse. When I see him before dinner I say to myself ‘Is bad.’ And wife too I say ‘Is bad too.’ Is not like other two. We make nothing happen for him. Is not necessary to make happen. Is there already—something bad—all fixed.”
Ravenstreet waited a few moments before replying; they were now approaching the crossroads. “Oddly enough I felt something like that about him last night, when he was trying to tell me what he’d do when he was rich. I suddenly felt—and I don’t pretend to be good at this sort of thing—he’d never escape, that he hadn’t a hope. But I can’t tell you why, of course. I might have interfered tonight, when he started that scene with his wife. Normally I would have done, but somehow I felt they just had to play it out. Your influence perhaps, Perperek.”
“We catch you at right time, I think. Last year, no—next year, perhaps no—too much business, too much common sense, no time for foolish old men.”
Ravenstreet crossed and kept going to the north-west, maintaining a steady forty now. “You’re quite right. Everything was nicely flattened out so that I couldn’t pretend I was too busy and too sensible to bother about you. A year ago I certainly wouldn’t have listened for ten minutes. I’m not sure about next year. In fact I’m not sure about anything. Again, perhaps thanks to you three. Hello, what’s this?”
There was an open space to the right of the road, and in this space eight or nine cars and lorries were parked, all turned away from the road, they combined headlights, full on, brilliantly illuminating the patch of ground ahead of them. Ravenstreet pulled up behind one of these parked cars, and walked forward with Perperek. The lighted ground finished abruptly, with a jagged edge that showed tufts of grass, bright and metallically green against the sudden darkness. Here was the rim of some deep old quarry. There was a police inspector shouting instructions into the void.
“What’s happened?” Ravenstreet asked a lorry driver, who was leaning against one of his giant front wheels and having a smoke.
“Two more ’ave ’ad it, mate, that’s what’s ’appened.” The driver was a small beaky fellow, like an embittered gnome. “Two-seater goes off the road an’ straight over the bloody edge to Kingdom Come. Man an’ a woman inside. They’re bringin’ what’s left of ’em up now—an’ we’re all throwin’ a bit o’ light on the subject. An’ I’ll tell yer something else, mate, while I’m at it. Keeps ’appenin’ all the flamin’ time nowadays. Fellers go over an edge. Fellers go smack through shop winders. Or try knifin’ or coshin’ each other. Or run away with school kids an’ fill ’em with gin. Read the Sunday papers—they’re full of it. ’Alf the fellers on the road today are goin’ mental. If I told yer a quarter of what I see, yer’d never believe me. Well, there’s two ’ere isn’t goin’ to worry no more.”
“Is Sepman, I think,” Perperek whispered, as they moved away.
“That’s my guess too,” said Ravenstreet, “though I suppose the odds are against it. But something tells me it’s the Sepmans. Better stay here while I tackle that inspector.”
The period that followed, scooped out of the dead middle of the night, always seemed to Ravenstreet, both then and there and afterwards in recollection, to be time borrowed from Hell. There was first, underlying everything, the sick realisation that this indeed was what had happened to the Sepmans. Then, built uneasily on this ghastly foundation, was an immense bewildering pagoda-like structure of slow-motion official procedure, of questions and answers, names and addresses and dates, of notebooks and forms and licked pencils and broken-nibbed pens, of irritable and suspicious fuss in the open above the quarry, of elephantine questioning in the front room of a policeman’s cottage, of dubious queries and impatient answers and yawns and stares and cups of sepia tea and tobacco that began to taste like straw in the comparative glare and stale atmosphere of the police station of the town some miles away, where the inspector finally insisted upon conveying them. Common measurements of time were meaningless during this period. The night, it seemed, was not moving toward daylight and sanity. A man might never escape it. His very name and addresses, any hint of his concerns, began to appear idiotic, and might well be received suspiciously. It was only down below, where the dark, sick horror still crawled, that Ernest Sepman and Nancy Sepman had any reality, for on this surface of dreary fantasy, where their names were scratched interminably on hairy paper, they were already unlikely spectres or perhaps characters in some insane plot app
arently devised by himself and the incredible Perperek, whose powers of resistance against this nightmare, however, appeared to be far greater than Ravenstreet’s. Indeed, Ravenstreet began to feel grateful to Perperek, who at first seemed likely to complicate the situation, for being there with him, never leaving his side throughout the whole crazy labyrinth. Finally, however, this æon of idiot darkness wore itself out, and they were free to go, to taste a night that still had no dawn in it but was at last moving again toward another day, with a warning that they might be summoned to attend the inquest. They moved off at last, at no great speed, though the road was empty now, for Ravenstreet felt deathly tired.
“How you do it, I don’t know,” he told Perperek. “Part of the magic, I suppose. But I ache with tiredness, right down inside. Not just because I’ve been kept up late. I’m used to being kept up late—my business has kept me up round the clock many a time. But this is different. It’s been altogether too long and too thick a day. And don’t forget, Perperek, it began with the Sepmans at breakfast in their own house and ended with them as bones under a sheet and two names on a lot of forms. Remember what that sour little brute of a lorry-driver said when we first arrived at the quarry? Two more have had it. We’re all beginning to look like names on forms and loads of meat.” He paused, managed an apologetic laugh of a sort, then added: “Forgive this. I ought to be able to do better, even at this hour.”
“Is perhaps good you talk. I like to hear—any things. If you are feeling hurts—is better. Never matter what foolish talk. Not to feel hurts is bad thing—dead inside then—moch troble after for peoples dead inside.”
Ravenstreet considered this as they rolled down the vacant green tunnel of a side road. “I’m not dead inside. Raw and bleeding, I’d say. There are a lot of men I liked much better than I could ever like Sepman and yet even when they died shocking deaths somehow I didn’t feel it as much. To be honest, I didn’t like Sepman. A little of him was quite enough. But I began to feel sorry for him hours before he crashed down into that quarry. Now I feel worse about him. The poor ugly little man thought he had a chance—but he never had, never would have had, not a hope, I suspect. I know—I know—he was a skilled chemist—probably not too badly paid—with a better job than most men have ever seen—pretty wife, nice bungalow, all the rest of it. But he’d just enough fire in him to turn it all into ashes. Just enough and no more. He ought to have had more or been taught to expect less. As it was, he felt perpetually cheated and frustrated. I thought last night he was the typical cheated, frustrated man, who somewhere inside didn’t give a hoot if everything went crashing into a quarry. I believe there are millions of ’em now—not throw-outs and misfits, on their way to prisons and asylums—but responsible citizens, educated types, skilled technicians, who feel just about what he felt—and they’ve been hurriedly fed with coronations and royal visits, parlour games on TV, films that look better than life, news jazzed up by Mervil’s editors, breathless sporting events, all the fun of the fair; but when they’re not irritated and restless, they’re yawning, with one bit of them wondering all the time what it would be like to rev the old car up to sixty and then make for a quarry. They think perhaps it would save a lot of fuss and grief. Yes, I know you say it wouldn’t, and you might be right—I’m not sure. But it’s a dead certainty they wouldn’t believe you. Did you try Sepman with any of your more peculiar beliefs, Perperek?”
“We have little talk—not much. He know better of course. Clever science man. Know just enough to build walls round himself—not enough to make door and windows. These peoples now, I think, have terrible way of life—perhaps worst ever.”
Ravenstreet attended to his driving in silence for a minute or two. Already the rich darkness was thinning out in the eastern sky. “That’s all right, Perperek. But we can’t all be magicians and find ancient wisdom in Central Asia and practise Yogi tricks and raise our levels of being and knowledge and all the rest of it.”
“Is true. Not for all. Not for most. But if no life of wisdom, then next best is life of tradition—like peasant, Eastern merchant, many peoples. Is something there for each part of man, of woman. Some true things felt. Some little wisdom perhaps—and much contentment. But this Sepman life is nothing—all a waste—confusion and anger and sadness. Perhaps soon, after moch of this, even insect life seem better. Is then safe from hurt feelings for ever. That is what we fear—why we come to talk—to do some little things. But you have seen, my friend Rav-en-street, have helped us too.”
“I wouldn’t like to think I helped the Sepmans into that quarry——”
“No, no—is wrong thinking. I tell again, we do nothing to them. They destroy themselves——”
“But only after I asked them to pay me a visit—with Prisk there——”
“Today, tomorrow, next week, next month—it must happen soon, they destroy themselves—is no real will for life, only for death. You think I am not sorry for them—I am old man made of metal. Is not so. All the time I do this work is because I am sorry. But in different way from you. You think all over with poor little Sepman and foolish pretty little Mrs. Sepman—no chance, never again. I know is not so—many chances—not tick-tock but time alive. So for me is less important. We speak more about these things?”
“Not now, Perperek, if you don’t mind.” Ravenstreet spoke draggingly. “Driving this car at this speed along these empty roads may look easy—and in a way it is easy, too easy, for you begin to imagine the car will find its own way—but I’ve got only about enough energy and interest left to see us home, so I’d better concentrate on that.”
The sun was still invisible when they turned into the drive, but there were broad washes of primrose and pale cinnamon in the east, the garden and the house were hazily emerging from the last ebb of night. No lights were to be seen in bedroom windows. Ravenstreet hoped every man there was miles deep in sleep; he wanted no questions. Too weary to garage the car, he left it at the front door, tasted the chill sweetness of the air for a moment, then dragged himself indoors. And there in the hall were Wayland and Marot, already listening to Perperek.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Wayland, looking untidier than usual but in no way worn, “we sat in your small study, after making ourselves plenty of coffee. The doctor cleaned and bandaged Prisk’s face and gave him a sedative. I think Mervil and Karney probably gave themselves sedatives. They’ve all been asleep some time. You look both exhausted and unhappy, Ravenstreet.”
“I suppose I am. Whatever you fellows have got hold of, you’re certainly tougher than I am. I was glad Perperek was with me. I’m turning in now.”
Wayland considered him gravely. “I hope you can sleep. But you may feel too shaken-up or sad—or both. Is there anything we can do for you, my dear Ravenstreet?”
“I think not, thanks.” He turned to go.
“There might be, I think.” But this was Marot. “Wayland will come and see perhaps?”
Ravenstreet saw them making for the small study again, apparently ready for more talk, still another session of their conference, even at this hour. An indomitable trio, whatever else they might be. He undressed slowly, eating a couple of biscuits without really tasting them. His thoughts, if they could be called thoughts, moved slowly too, groping about in some place of darkness and pain. He seemed to see himself stumbling along a narrowing cul-de-sac. Perhaps Sepman, over the edge for ever (no matter what these fellows might believe), had won after all. He stretched himself out between the unexpectedly cold sheets, shivering a little, but before he could switch off his bedside lamp, there came a tap at the door and Wayland entered.
“You won’t feel worse if you talk for a minute or two.”
“No, I shan’t,” he admitted.
Wayland sat on the edge of the bed, smiling down at him. A strange fellow; superficially the least fantastic and fabulous of the three, the most obviously sympathetic, yet in some odd way the most unreal; as if a being from another planet were masquerading, with
infinite cunning and resourcefulness and yet without complete conviction, as a trim, leathery, cranky elderly English gentleman.
“I think you’ve lost the idea of time alive,” said Wayland rather reproachfully.
“I never quite got it. Oh—yes—something happened the other night when Marot did whatever he did—compelled me to remember, I suppose. And I’ll admit that what came back, fresh as paint, was alive all right—but it turned out to be an experience I hadn’t wanted to remember, had most conveniently forgotten.”
“I told you next morning it wasn’t memory, something recaptured from brain cell traces,” said Wayland, with a gentle impatience characteristic of him. “You were brought to recognise what exists. It is always there. It is really you—as you can’t help being, and from which there’s no escape, only certain possibilities of change, a new creation of one’s life. If you think you can sleep at once—and would rather do that, out of your weariness and despair—then I will go. But we’re anxious to help you, after what you’ve done for us. So if you feel you can’t sleep and are dreading the thoughts that will crowd in on you, because you’ve no hope, no feeling that life can be lived as you wish it to be lived—then I could try to bring you again into time alive.” He added, with a smile: “Not by putting you into an hypnotic trance, as I think you still imagine, but by pulling you out of the trance you are always in——”
“My own work, I think you said before——”
“Reinforced by many powerful influences, hardly ever leaving you free. But forget theory. Think of yourself—your life—stop anywhere along the way you feel you have come—no, you needn’t look at me. Forget I’m here. Think of yourself—all that has been—and still is—Charles Ravenstreet——”
He was falling, falling, falling asleep. And then he woke up once again in time alive. . . .
CHAPTER TEN
Time Alive Again
The Magicians Page 15