by Roald Dahl
It was a carefully selected list, containing as it did the most distinguished men, the most brilliant and influential women in the top crust of our society.
I was well aware that a dinner at my house was regarded as quite an occasion; everybody liked to come. And now, as I watched the point of my pen moving swiftly over the paper, I could almost see the ladies in their pleasure picking up their bedside telephones the morning the invitations arrived, shrill voices calling to shriller voices over the wires… ‘Lionel’s giving a party… he’s asked you too? My dear, how nice… his food is always so good… and such a lovely man, isn’t he though, yes…’
Is that really what they would say? It suddenly occurred to me that it might not be like that at all. More like this perhaps:
‘I agree, my dear, yes, not a bad old man… but a bit of a bore, don’t you think?… What did you say?… dull? But desperately, my dear. You’ve hit the nail right on the head… did you ever hear what Janet de Pelagia once said about him?… Ah yes, I thought you’d heard that one… screamingly funny, don’t you think?… poor Janet… how she stood it as long as she did I don’t know…’
Anyway, I got the invitations off, and within a couple of days everybody with the exception of Mrs Cudbird and Sir Hubert Kaul, who were away, had accepted with pleasure.
At eight-thirty on the evening of the twenty-second, my large drawing-room was filled with people. They stood about the room, admiring the pictures, drinking their Martinis, talking with loud voices. The women smelled strongly of scent, the men were pink-faced and carefully buttoned up in their dinner-jackets. Janet de Pelagia was wearing the same black dress she had used for the portrait, and every time I caught sight of her, a kind of huge bubble-vision – as in those absurd cartoons – would float up above my head, and in it I would see Janet in her underclothes, the black brassière, the pink elastic belt, the suspenders, the jockey’s legs.
I moved from group to group, chatting amiably with them all, listening to their talk. Behind me I could hear Mrs Galbally telling Sir Eustace Piegrome and James Pisker how the man at the next table to hers at Claridges the night before had had red lipstick on his white moustache. ‘Simply plastered with it,’ she kept on saying, ‘and the old boy was ninety if he was a day…’ On the other side, Lady Girdlestone was telling somebody where one could get truffles cooked in brandy, and I could see Mrs Icely whispering something to Lord Mulherrin while his Lordship kept shaking his head slowly from side to side like an old and dispirited metronome.
Dinner was announced, and we all moved out.
‘My goodness!’ they cried as they entered the dining-room, ‘How dark and sinister!’
‘I can hardly see a thing!’
‘What divine little candles!’
‘But Lionel, how romantic!’
There were six very thin candles set about two feet apart from each other down the centre of the long table. Their small flames made a little glow of light around the table itself, but left the rest of the room in darkness. It was an amusing arrangement and apart from the fact that it suited my purpose well, it made a pleasant change. The guests soon settled themselves in their right places and the meal began.
They all seemed to enjoy the candlelight and things went famously, though for some reason the darkness caused them to speak much louder than usual. Janet de Pelagia’s voice struck me as being particularly strident. She was sitting next to Lord Mulherrin, and I could hear her telling him about the boring time she had had at Cap Ferrat the week before. ‘Nothing but Frenchmen,’ she kept saying. ‘Nothing but Frenchmen in the whole place…’
For my part, I was watching the candles. They were so thin that I knew it would not be long before they burned down to their bases. Also I was mighty nervous – I will admit that – but at the same time intensely exhilarated, almost to the point of drunkenness. Every time I heard Janet’s voice or caught sight of her face shadowed in the light of the candles, a little ball of excitement exploded inside me and I felt the fire of it running under my skin.
They were eating their strawberries when at last I decided the time had come. I took a deep breath and in a loud voice I said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to have the lights on now. The candles are nearly finished. Mary,’ I called. ‘Oh, Mary, switch on the lights, will you please.’
There was a moment of silence after my announcement. I heard the maid walking over to the door, then the gentle click of the switch and the room was flooded with a blaze of light. They all screwed up their eyes, opened them again, gazed about them.
At that point I got up from my chair and slid quietly from the room, but as I went I saw a sight that I shall never forget as long as I live. It was Janet, with both hands in mid-air, stopped, frozen rigid, caught in the act of gesticulating towards someone across the table. Her mouth had dropped open two inches and she wore the surprised, not-quite-understanding look of a person who precisely one second before has been shot dead, right through the heart.
In the hall outside I paused and listened to the beginning of the uproar, the shrill cries of the ladies and the outraged unbelieving exclamations of the men; and soon there was a great hum of noise with everybody talking or shouting at the same time. Then – and this was the sweetest moment of all – I heard Lord Mulherrin’s voice, roaring above the rest, ‘Here! Someone! Hurry! Give her some water quick!’
Out in the street the chauffeur helped me into my car, and soon we were away from London and bowling merrily along the Great North Road towards this, my other house, which is only ninety-five miles from Town anyway.
The next two days I spent in gloating. I mooned around in a dream of ecstasy, half drowned in my own complacency and filled with a sense of pleasure so great that it constantly gave me pins and needles all along the lower parts of my legs. It wasn’t until this morning when Gladys Ponsonby called me on the phone that I suddenly came to my senses and realized I was not a hero at all but an outcast. She informed me – with what I thought was just a trace of relish – that everybody was up in arms, that all of them, all my old and loving friends were saying the most terrible things about me and had sworn never never to speak to me again. Except her, she kept saying. Everybody except her. And didn’t I think it would be rather cosy, she asked, if she were to come down and stay with me a few days to cheer me up?
I’m afraid I was too upset by that time even to answer her politely. I put the phone down and went away to weep.
Then at noon today came the final crushing blow. The post arrived, and with it – I can hardly bring myself to write about it, I am so ashamed – came a letter, the sweetest, most tender little note imaginable from none other than Janet de Pelagia herself. She forgave me completely, she wrote, for everything I had done. She knew it was only a joke and I must not listen to the horrid things other people were saying about me. She loved me as she always had and always would to her dying day.
Oh, what a cad, what a brute I felt when I read this! The more so when I found that she had actually sent me by the same post a small present as an added sign of her affection – a half-pound jar of my favourite food of all, fresh caviare.
I can never under any circumstances resist good caviare. It is perhaps my greatest weakness. So although I naturally had no appetite whatsoever for food at dinner-time this evening, I must confess I took a few spoonfuls of the stuff in an effort to console myself in my misery. It is even possible that I took a shade too much, because I haven’t been feeling any too chipper this last hour or so. Perhaps I ought to go up right away and get myself some bicarbonate of soda. I can easily come back and finish this later, when I’m in better trim.
You know – now I come to think of it, I really do feel rather ill all of a sudden.
The Great Automatic Grammatizator
‘Well, Knipe, my boy. Now that it’s all finished, I just called you in to tell you I think you’ve done a fine job.’
Adolph Knipe stood still in front of Mr Bohlen’s desk. There seemed to be no enthusiasm in him at
all.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’
‘Oh yes, Mr Bohlen.’
‘Did you see what the papers said this morning?’
‘No sir, I didn’t.’
The man behind the desk pulled a folded newspaper towards him, and began to read: ‘The building of the great automatic computing engine, ordered by the government some time ago, is now complete. It is probably the fastest electronic calculating machine in the world today. Its function is to satisfy the ever-increasing need of science, industry, and administration for rapid mathematical calculation which, in the past, by traditional methods, would have been physically impossible, or would have required more time than the problems justified. The speed with which the new engine works, said Mr John Bohlen, head of the firm of electrical engineers mainly responsible for its construction, may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. In three minutes, it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible) would fill half a million sheets of foolscap paper. The automatic computing engine uses pulses of electricity, generated at the rate of a million a second, to solve all calculations that resolve themselves into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For practical purposes there is no limit to what it can do…’
Mr Bohlen glanced up at the long, melancholy face of the younger man. ‘Aren’t you proud, Knipe? Aren’t you pleased.’
‘Of course, Mr Bohlen.’
‘I don’t think I have to remind you that your own contribution, especially to the original plans, was an important one. In fact, I might go so far as to say that without you and some of your ideas, this project might still be on the drawing-boards today.’
Adolph Knipe moved his feet on the carpet, and he watched the two small white hands of his chief, the nervous fingers playing with a paper-clip, unbending it, straightening out the hairpin curves. He didn’t like the man’s hands. He didn’t like his face either, with the tiny mouth and the narrow purple-coloured lips. It was unpleasant the way only the lower lip moved when he talked.
‘Is anything bothering you, Knipe? Anything on your mind?’
‘Oh no, Mr Bohlen. No.’
‘How would you like to take a week’s holiday? Do you good. You’ve earned it.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, sir.’
The older man waited, watching this tall, thin person who stood so sloppily before him. He was a difficult boy. Why couldn’t he stand up straight? Always drooping and untidy, with spots on his jacket, and hair falling all over his face.
‘I’d like you to take a holiday, Knipe. You need it.’
‘All right, sir. If you wish.’
‘Take a week. Two weeks if you like. Go somewhere warm. Get some sunshine. Swim. Relax. Sleep. Then come back, and we’ll have another talk about the future.’
Adolph Knipe went home by bus to his two-room apartment. He threw his coat on the sofa, poured himself a drink of whisky, and sat down in front of the typewriter that was on the table. Mr Bohlen was right. Of course he was right. Except that he didn’t know the half of it. He probably thought it was a woman. Whenever a young man gets depressed, everybody thinks it’s a woman.
He leaned forward and began to read through the half-finished sheet of typing still in the machine. It was headed ‘A Narrow Escape’, and it began ‘The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs…’
Adolph Knipe took a sip of whisky, tasting the malty-bitter flavour, feeling the trickle of cold liquid as it travelled down his throat and settled in the top of his stomach, cool at first, then spreading and becoming warm, making a little area of warmness in the gut. To hell with Mr John Bohlen anyway. And to hell with the great electrical computing machine. To hell with…
At exactly that moment, his eyes and mouth began slowly to open, in a sort of wonder, and slowly he raised his head and became still, absolutely motionless, gazing at the wall opposite with this look that was more perhaps of astonishment than of wonder, but quite fixed now, unmoving, and remaining thus for forty, fifty, sixty seconds. Then gradually (the head still motionless), a subtle change spreading over the face, astonishment becoming pleasure, very slight at first, only around the corners of the mouth, increasing gradually, spreading out until at last the whole face was open wide and shining with extreme delight. It was the first time Adolph Knipe had smiled in many, many months.
‘Of course,’ he said, speaking aloud, ‘it’s completely ridiculous.’ Again he smiled, raising his upper lip and baring his teeth in a queerly sensual manner.
‘It’s a delicious idea, but so impracticable it doesn’t really bear thinking about at all.’
From then on, Adolph Knipe began to think about nothing else. The idea fascinated him enormously, at first because it gave him a promise – however remote – of revenging himself in a most devilish manner upon his greatest enemies. From this angle alone, he toyed idly with it for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes; then all at once he found himself examining it quite seriously as a practical possibility. He took paper and made some preliminary notes. But he didn’t get far. He found himself, almost immediately, up against the old truth that a machine, however ingenious, is incapable of original thought. It can handle no problems except those that resolve themselves into mathematical terms – problems that contain one, and only one, correct answer.
This was a stumper. There didn’t seem any way around it. A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Their own electronic calculator had a marvellous memory. Simply by converting electric pulses, through a column of mercury, into supersonic waves, it could store away at least a thousand numbers at a time, extracting any one of them at the precise moment it was needed. Would it not be possible, therefore, on this principle, to build a memory section of almost unlimited size?
Now what about that?
Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged.
No, he thought, that isn’t quite accurate. In many sentences there are several alternative positions for words and phrases, all of which may be grammatically correct. But what the hell. The theory itself is basically true. Therefore, it stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.
There was no stopping Knipe now. He went to work immediately, and there followed during the next few days a period of intense labour. The living-room became littered with sheets of paper: formulae and calculations; lists of words, thousands and thousands of words; the plots of stories, curiously broken up and subdivided; huge extracts from Roget’s Thesaurus; pages filled with the first names of men and women; hundreds of surnames taken from the telephone directory; intricate drawings of wires and circuits and switches and thermionic valves; drawings of machines that could punch holes of different shapes in little cards, and of a strange electric typewriter that could type ten thousands words a minute. Also a kind of control panel with a series of small push-buttons, each one labelled with the name of a famous American magazine.
He was working in a mood of exultation, prowling around the room amidst this littering of paper, rubbing his hands together, talking out loud to himself; and sometimes, with a sly curl of the nose he would mutter a series of murderous imprecations in which the word ‘editor’ seemed always to be present. On the fifteenth day of continuous work, he collected the papers into two large folders which he carried – almost at a run – to the of
fices of John Bohlen Inc., electrical engineers.
Mr Bohlen was pleased to see him back.
‘Well Knipe, good gracious me, you look a hundred per cent better. You have a good holiday? Where’d you go?’
He’s just as ugly and untidy as ever, Mr Bohlen thought. Why doesn’t he stand up straight? He looks like a bent stick. ‘You look a hundred per cent better, my boy.’ I wonder what he’s grinning about. Every time I see him, his ears seem to have got larger.
Adolph Knipe placed the folders on the desk. ‘Look, Mr Bohlen!’ he cried. ‘Look at these!’
Then he poured out his story. He opened the folders and pushed the plans in front of the astonished little man. He talked for over an hour, explaining everything, and when he had finished, he stepped back, breathless, flushed, waiting for the verdict.
‘You know what I think, Knipe? I think you’re nuts.’ Careful now, Mr Bohlen told himself. Treat him carefully. He’s valuable, this one is. If only he didn’t look so awful, with that long horse face and the big teeth. The fellow had ears as big as rhubarb leaves.
‘But Mr Bohlen! It’ll work! I’ve proved to you it’ll work! You can’t deny that!’
‘Take it easy now, Knipe. Take it easy, and listen to me.’
Adolph Knipe watched his man, disliking him more every second.
‘This idea,’ Mr Bohlen’s lower lip was saying, ‘is very ingenious – I might almost say brilliant – and it only goes to confirm my opinion of your abilities, Knipe. But don’t take it too seriously. After all, my boy, what possible use can it be to us? Who on earth wants a machine for writing stories? And where’s the money in it, anyway? Just tell me that.’
‘May I sit down, sir?’