The Warlow Experiment

by Alix Nathan

  But oh! Ach! His eyes sting with the staring and the fire is smoking, but here at the end he laughs in disgust, disbelief. THE SA RA GOY – a fox-rat thing with an open belly full of squirming bodies. Ach! THE FLYING OP OSS UM.  THE RING- TAILED MAC AU CO. Oh! THE OR AN OUT ANG, OR WILD MAN OF THE WOODS. Aah!

  He turns the pages with horror, with laughter. Hoots with amazement. THE BA BOON! Fixes finally on THE DOG-FACED BA BOON in its cloak of hair, staring greedily at a fruit in its hands. Be them men? Be them devils?

  * * *

  —

  EARLY ON A MORNING too cold for anything except a brief outdoor inspection, Powyss decided to try a prolonged listening session.

  ‘Jenkins, has Warlow breakfasted?’

  ‘No, sir. No dishes have been sent up from yesterday.’

  ‘Sleeping it off I suppose.’

  ‘Sir.’ He invariably failed not to notice Jenkins’s disapproval of the whole Warlow affair.

  Later, when he gathered Warlow was up and about, he cleared aside the books and papers that disguised his listening hole and knelt upon the Ottoman, notebook at the ready.

  So often he detected smell before sound; sometimes only smell, no sound worth recording. There it was, Warlow’s breakfast. He’d always kept food smells out of the library, the room being well away from kitchen and dining room. Still, for the experiment he had to tolerate it.

  He wrote the date, time, recorded smell but no sound and gradually his eyes closed with boredom. He dreamed that he was arriving at the Royal Society (only it wasn’t the Royal Society but some grand building in Paris) and was due to deliver his paper on the experiment at 10 o’clock. Rooting in his bag he found nothing but blank paper. The room was crowded with expectant men and he was forced to extemporise to mutterings and gasps from the audience. He raised his voice to drown them out, shouting above the hubbub and woke suddenly to real calls and jeers from below.

  Warlow was making a whole string of noises though the words, unfortunately, were too indistinct to make out. There was a considerable variety of tone and he scribbled down everything he heard as fast as he could. Hums of appreciation or enjoyment, gasps of astonishment or disbelief, perhaps, guffaws, hoots, prolonged bouts of laughter that ceased abruptly.

  The man must be directly below, sitting at the table. Was he dreaming? Remembering some past incidents? Or was he reading a book? He ran through the books he knew to be there. Crusoe? Possibly, but no, it was hardly funny, nor that shocking. There was only one writer who might make you laugh and gasp: Voltaire. Warlow was reading Candide.

  * * *

  —

  THERE’S TAPPING. He’s counted three meals so it must be evening. Strong dark meat he didn’t recognise, boiled celery, plum dumpling. Pint of porter. Cake from Christmas.

  Scratches his scalp, beard, now down to his chest. Thinks he imagined the sound, but it’s there all right. Tap, tap. Other side of the nailed-up door.

  He doesn’t move. Mustn’t reply. To get his reward he must speak to no one. Then it stops.

  Is it Hannah? No. Powyss said him’d take care of them. And what’d her want to say to him? Her’s glad, very glad he’s gone, he’s sure of that.

  Days later it happens again. In his new boots he creeps over to the door. Pushes his hair away, presses his ear up against the wood.

  Quiet, all quiet. Can he hear breathing? Or is it in his head? One of them flying creatures?

  A woman’s voice. Whispering.

  ‘Mr Warlow? John? I know you’re there. Other side of the door, aren’t you?’

  He jerks back, accidentally scratches the door with long nails.

  ‘I can hear you’re there.’ He thusts his fingers into his mouth, gnaws.

  ‘I know you’re there, John. You poor man. Aren’t you afeared? Aren’t you lonely, all on your own?’

  He’s breathing hard. Mustn’t reply. He’s got used to saying his thoughts out loud. Likes the sound of himself: he’s his own friend. Don’t speak now! Perhaps it’s a trap. To make him talk, lose the money.

  ‘John?’

  A young voice. Who is she?

  ‘John? Listen to me. It’s Annie. I work in the house and in the kitchen.’

  He doesn’t know her.

  ‘You’ll be so cold in there, John. It does snow now, right hard. There be drifts. The sheep are lost.’

  ‘Not all of ’em,’ he thinks, though he mustn’t say. Her’s a housemaid; what does her know of sheep?

  ‘You’ll be so cold.’

  He wants to tell her he’s right warm. And not to send any more fish. But no.

  ‘Oh, I hear someone coming. Quick!’ And she’s gone.

  Back again the following day. Tapping again. He’s there at the door, eyes wide in the dark. Candle left behind.

  ‘I know what you look like, John. What you looked like. I did see you once. I reckon you look different now. I reckon you’ve long hair and a beard?’

  He listens to her waiting.

  ‘You can answer me, John. I’ll not tell of it.’

  Her’s just the other side, he thinks. He’s pressing up against the door. Is her pressing up against it, too? Pressing.

  ‘John. I could tell you things, John.’

  He groans to himself. What things? He likes the sound of her voice. Her closeness. But maybe it’s the voice of the devil. Ah now! Isn’t that what they say? The devil speaks in the voice of an angel to tempt you. Temptation! That’s what it is!

  He moves away from the door, tiptoes back. His boots are soft. That’s good. Gets behind the table to protect himself. It may break in, this devil. Thinks of the shape behind the door. Black it is, with cloven hoofs. Like the great hairy bull in the picture book. But standing on two legs, holding the end of a long tail. Fierce with flames and horns. And bubbies he’d like to squeeze and a lovely voice.

  He says the name of Jesus three times. Then three times more. Three more. All his fingers except the littl’un.

  Our Father, save me from infernold divils!

  There’s a scuffling, a man’s voice.

  ‘Come away! Stupid girl!’ He recognises Jenkins. ‘What are you thinking of? He’s not allowed to speak.’

  ‘It’s cruel. Poor man! So lonely, all by himself. And his wife…’ Her words shut off as by a hand.

  ‘He agreed to it. Didn’t have to, did he? He must abide there.’ All this shouted for his hearing. More scuffling. Steps retreat. Silence.

  He sits down, sweating. Lights a pipe. No devil.

  For some time he’s buoyed by the episode. Recalls it again and again. The girl is thinkin of him! Her’s kind. Young. Pretty no doubt. Annie. Pretty name. Strong too, liftin buckets, pans in the kitchen, sure to. He pictures her reddened by steam. Sleeves rolled above the elbow. Dress hitched. Meeting him in Horseshoe Copse. Eager. Greedy.

  For he’ll be famous when he comes out. Powyss said so. He’ll be a wonder. Them’ll all want him. And Hannah? Tired her is. His mother was tired out in the end. When he comes out most like Hannah’ll be dead. Once he wanted her. But that were long afore. This Annie’ll wait for him. Will she? When he has fifty pound a year she will.

  Yes, these thoughts buoy him up for days.

  * * *

  —

  JENKINS MARCHED ANNIE along the snow-cleared path to Powyss, occupied in the hothouse with Price. There, despite drifts blown up against one side, the atmosphere was pleasantly warm. Powyss, separating seed with a quill, waved them away, telling Jenkins to deal with her as he thought fit. Price gaped then sneered.

  Jenkins knew it would be hard to replace the girl with another so fair, so shapely. In his mind he sifted through the young women of Moreham one by one, rejecting each, particularly if they were ill favoured. Not a single one was as dimpled as Annie, who in time might be persuaded of his worth despite the
ir great age difference. He could do with a wife. Must be obedient, not like that Croft girl.

  Yet she must be punished. She needed beating, but he knew Powyss wouldn’t allow it. Soft, he is, not a proper master at all. Now if he were master, he’d keep strict order. Get rid of Price and Catherine Croft with her cheek. He reckoned if he made Annie give up her garret bed and sleep on a truckle in the kitchen, she’d be down at the nailed door all over again, so he settled for no pay for half a year and fifteen minutes of shouting and threatening to make her sob and snivel. He enjoyed that.

  Catherine was not surprised. If Annie had looked like her she’d have lost her employment right away. But she wouldn’t turn bitterness into a habit. Especially when she thought of Christmas, how she’d sat on Abraham Price’s lap playing Pop and, to her great surprise, he’d reached into her clothing when no one was looking. She never knew he had an eye for her. Thought he, like the rest of them, looked only at Annie. She’d enjoyed it till she saw Cook wake up from her gin-and-water doze and felt obliged to slap him. Later, Cook nodding again, he was forfeit and must take off his jacket, then waistcoat, then shirt and she saw how white his chest was below his sunburned face and neck. He stood up in front of them all and looked as though he’d crow like a cock.

  It would probably be better to continue working beside Annie than put up with someone new as she’d have had to if Annie had been sacked. Some churchy, canting girl, perhaps. Annie was stupid, easily influenced. She’d shake her out of her mood. She enjoyed making her giggle. Besides, there really was the matter of Hannah Warlow. Between the two of them they could surely find out what was going on with her and Mr Powyss. Something must be happening during those visits, them alone together every week. She’d encourage Annie to make up to Samuel and get him to tell what he knew.

  4

  POWYSS WAS NOT REALLY HAPPY with the listening tube. He’d placed a low stool to listen with greater ease. In fact he rather enjoyed kneeling on his Ottoman rug; thought he began to understand why the Turks did it five times a day; then accused himself of frivolousness.

  The problem was that, apart from that one day, Warlow wasn’t making much noise, and what noise he did make was indistinct. There’d been no repeat of the extraordinary sounds Powyss had recorded soon after Christmas. He’d been cheered at the thought of Warlow reading Candide, wondered how it might influence what he wrote in the journal.

  He could hear him moving about but he couldn’t always determine exactly where the man was. It was a mistake to have sent him a pair of boots instead of clogs. Even the carpet, a sizable Ottoman, was a mistake, for though aesthetically pleasing it dulled sound. As he’d anticipated, Warlow was talking to himself, but he could rarely make out the words, except for occasional oaths. Sometimes a few notes sounded from the organ, or he heard rhythmless surges of noise as Warlow banged his hands up and down in imitation of a real player. There was whistling: bits of tune, always unfinished.

  He’d recorded meals and knew now that Warlow disliked fish and venison and wouldn’t touch sauces or pickles (‘scraped to the side of the plate’ it was reported). Junkets went uneaten; ice cream was returned, pools of delicate scum in porcelain dishes.

  There’d been the matter of clothing.

  ‘Mr Warlow has not sent any more clothes to be washed, sir. Only once since he went down,’ Jenkins reported. ‘That is many weeks ago, sir.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Indeed. Then will you please send down clean linen together with a note. With instructions, Jenkins.’

  ‘Would you like to see the note when it is written, sir?’

  ‘No, but ensure it’s easy for him to understand. I had wanted to avoid notes. Notes from Warlow are admissible. I told him that. But notes to him could easily turn into conversation, which would go against the spirit of the experiment.’

  As to the clothes when they were finally sent up, well, no doubt they’d be feculent – he’d prevent Jenkins from giving him details, though it was clear Jenkins would relish doing so. He recorded the fact of what Warlow had not done, but there was no need for more. It was bad enough that one aspect of the experiment was not functioning perfectly. For his belief that a man could survive without human contact was dependent upon that man living well. The experiment was being jeopardised by Warlow’s stubbornness or stupidity or whatever it was.

  Then there was Warlow’s request for notification of each new month. That meant that his sense of time was weak, his journal-keeping probably erratic and without precise timekeeping, Powyss’s paper would lack yet more strength. Powyss’s longing for praise from the Royal Society lay in a drawer of his mind no longer secret from himself. It was true that the Society’s annual Transactions had been shrinking both in number and in quality. Too many members were merely honorary. All the more important, then, to produce something undeniably good.

  So at present he had little to report to Benjamin Fox. No, he had not cut the pages of the Rights of Man, certainly not read it and he still felt irritated at Fox’s implication that having ‘entered the moral world’ the Investigation might be immoral. It was easier to put aside Fox’s letter than to reply to it.

  And far more satisfactory to take himself off to the hothouse. There his senses rippled like cat’s fur. This year cucumbers and melons were spreading great leaves, pushing out young fruit. He poked among them, counting, pinching out. Along the roof hung bunches of tiny grapes, acid-green.

  Here, too, he recorded: temperature, germination time, quantity of water, production of fruit or vegetables per barrow-load of manure applied at the end of last year, rate of growth in hotbed as opposed to greenhouse.

  Most days he met with Abraham Price.

  ‘The seeds we put to soak, Price, has anything happened overnight?’

  ‘Nothing. Another day, isn’t it.’

  ‘These need tying in, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Perhaps because of the frequency with which they saw each other they often spoke little. Would stand by a tray of seedlings, a dish of seeds, considering; move round a bed of young trees in the orchard nursery, inspecting Price’s recent grafting. When necessary Powyss would issue an instruction or Price would bring him a diseased leaf, point to a barrowful of dug-out suckers.

  They would walk together along a wall of espaliered fruit or a line of cold frames, wordless. Each grew to comprehend the meaning of the other’s various hums, burrs, throat-clearings. In Powyss’s view, Price’s horticultural understanding was a fine one; he knew nothing of the surly Welshman’s life.

  ‘I’m pleased with Magnolia virginiana, Price, though her buds have yet to open. Do you have any worries about her?’ He’d taken to the local use of the personal pronoun for objects when speaking to Price, though Price himself referred to everything as ‘he’. He wouldn’t know that Magnolia couldn’t be masculine.

  ‘No.’

  ‘An American tree, you know, Price.’

  ‘I know that. Tree of Liberty.’

  He’d been taken aback by this remark and the sudden gruff singing that followed, sotto voce, so that he couldn’t make out Price’s words. He recalled the incident when guiltily filing away Fox’s unanswered letter. Fox’s Hampstead garden, small, walled, was entirely political. He had suddenly sprung an interest, begun planting it in 1792 with Tom Paine’s exile to America. He grew only American plants, for they have been born in the soil that now nurtures Paine, he had written, causing Powyss an outburst of derision, which fell away when he realised that one of his favourite books was the enormous volume of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands with its wonderful illustration of Magnolia altifissa. And that many of his own best new plants came from America, such as the delicate Dodecatheon meadia, the Ceanothus americanus. The proud juniper that stood impervious to waves of winter snow.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS A R
ELIEF to put Fox’s letter out of sight. Fox could wait. With his Unitarian colleagues, his radical friends (many of them the same), his reading of newspapers, new books, Fox had plenty to occupy him, didn’t need constant letters from Powyss.

  Powyss’s own reading was extensive. A pile of books and papers waited by his desk. The History of Philosophy from the earliest Times to the beginning of the present Century by William Enfield LL.D. That would probably go straight onto the shelves together with A Catalogue of engraved British Portraits from Egbert the Great to the Present Time. The latest volumes of Annals of Agriculture – Arthur Young’s Travels and Thunberg’s Travels – also remained uncut; perhaps he’d get round to them later. Vol. 1 of Cartwright’s Journal of Transactions and Events on the Coast of Labrador had been recommended by Fox for its account of Esquimaux women visiting London. There were several papers in the last two years’ Philosophical Transactions that he’d intended to study more thoroughly – the remarkable failure of haddocks on the coasts of Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire; Wedgwood’s ‘Experiments on the Production of Light from different Bodies by Heat and Attrition’; and especially Hunter’s observations on bees and Dr Darwin on vegetable respiration. He hadn’t given up on Sprengel’s Secret of Nature Displayed yet. But since the beginning of his own experiment his concentration had gradually slackened. Often, his mind wandered to Hannah Warlow.

  He’d only ever cared for plants. Every woman he’d ever slept with had been paid for, and to care for a woman you bought was like caring for a ripe fruit or a frangipane pastry. The pleasure was soon over, soon forgotten. Years ago, on his travels, he’d invariably encountered the demimonde, for in his youth loss of virginity, the alternation of flattery and mockery, the constant passing over of money were all part of the Grand Tour. He purchased a few moments of ecstasy, a dose of pox and pieces of antique statuary. The glorious trees and light of Rome mingled in his mind with mercury pills. And so it was easier after his father’s death, his mother already dead in his childhood, to create rational beauty at Moreham, unmixed with either expectation or unpleasantness. What Catherine had told Annie was less malice than fact: he’d never taken a woman to bed at Moreham. He disliked the neighbouring women, wouldn’t risk the maids because of the inconvenience of having to sack them and find replacements when they became pregnant. He became entirely absorbed in drawing up plans for the house and carrying out horticultural experiments. It was enough to visit Mrs Clavering’s superior house in Jermyn Street every so often, sometimes treat himself to two or three whores at once, and occasionally, in the privacy of the library, study his collection of small erotic figurines stored in an unmarked drawer.