The Vicar of Morbing Vile

by Richard Harland

  I attempted a protest. “That sounds more like religion than science.”

  “Precisely!” Mr Caulkiss sawed the air with his hand, like a stick insect latching on to its prey. “Science into religion and religion into science! Break down the old fixed boundaries and categories of thought! That’s what they never dared to do – Schrodinger and De Broglie, Dirac and Heisenberg! So close to the truth! But they could never take the final step. Their minds were still locked into the safe old assumptions of Classical mechanics! The objectivity of science therefore the objectivity of objects! Blindness! Lumpishness! They couldn’t think energy without falling back onto objects!”

  It was very difficult to disagree with Mr Caulkiss. He just stepped right over every objection, leaving me floundering and feeling rather foolish. Everything I said turned out to be based upon assumptions he’d already considered and left behind long ago. He was relentless in his questioning of what other people took for granted. Especially naive were the assumptions of ‘obvious’ common sense and ‘the perceptual fallacy’. For ordinary solid reality he had only the purest contempt.

  I could see how far he’d transcended such naiveties in his own thinking when he showed me his various manuscripts and monographs. The pages were filled with abstract mathematical hieroglyphics. It was a kind of mathematics I’d never come across before, with all sorts of new symbols and almost none of the old. ‘Post-Mathematics’ he called it. Apparently the old symbols had tended to trap and stabilize the very energy he wanted to set flowing.

  He seemed to think that it was all perfectly clear as soon as he explained it. In fact, his explanations were just as abstract and rarified as the hieroglyphics itself. Still he insisted on leaving me his manuscripts to read through during the day, so that he could talk about them the following evening. Fortunately he never listened long enough to realize the depths of my incomprehension.

  “There! You see what I’ve demonstrated? The same flow of energy running throughout the entire universe. But with different degrees of intensity. Lowest energy in what we call inanimate matter, higher energy in the vegetable organism, higher again in the animal organism, and highest of all in the human organism. See how the different degrees are separately tabulated on the Post-Mathematical scale?”

  Most of the manuscripts I was supposed to read dealt specifically with the human organism. Mr Caulkiss leaned over the back of my chair and jabbed his bony forefinger at the symbols on the page.

  “Now that’s a crucial piece of deduction! Why does the human organism seem to act differently to the rest of the world? Because of its higher energy intensity! Because it moves more strongly than the lower intensities surrounding it! Spreading out and flowing against their relative weaknesses! All perfectly explicable and calculable! No need for free will or volition or such simplistic concepts! It’s all in the blood – the human bloodstream!”

  It was always the blood that he kept coming back to. He seemed to regard it as the ultimate example of energy. The circulation of the bloodstream was to him a kind of wonderful perpetual motion. He had yet another argument against ordinary ‘common sense’ views on the subject.

  “I know, I know. People think that the heart pumps the blood and makes it move. But tell me this: what makes the heart pump? What makes its muscles expand and contract? Exactly! Blood through the muscles! Pushing and urging through the walls of the heart! The blood pumps the heart! The blood pumps the blood! It is the source and principle!”

  He halted in the middle of the room. He seemed to be haranguing an invisible audience. With glittering eyes he glared at the chairs, the curtains, the arrangement of wax fruit on the table.

  “So why do the fools deny that simple truth? I’ll tell you why. Because they’re afraid of the concept of energy! They’re afraid of losing control. The idea of the heart gives them a feeling of mastery. Regulating and governing the circulation. They’ll believe anything rather than admit to the independent energy of the blood. Hah! Mere cardiocentricity I call it! Cardiocentric cowardice! Phuhh! Phuhh! Phuhh!”

  He hooted through his nose contemptously.

  “There,” he said, thrusting another manuscript upon me. “Read that! See how I refute the cardiocentrics! First point: I crush them! Second point: I tear them to pieces! Third point: I annihilate the torn-up pieces! O Lord smite down the fools!”

  He strode up and down in a state of self-delight, convulsed with secret laughter, whacking his hands against his thighs.

  “Sheer logic!” he cried. “Every argument requires a brain to think it. But no brain functions without blood to flow through it. So therefore let them try arguing against me after they’ve had strokes or cerebral haemorrhages! Then we’ll soon see what is the mightiest principle in the universe!”

  He shook his fist triumphantly in every direction. He was completely carried away. But he soon exhausted himself. The breath snorted in and out of his nostrils and his Adam’s apple bobbed painfully up and down. He staggered and clung to the back of my chair. For someone who believed so much in energy, his own body seemed sadly depleted.

  “But of course they can’t be persuaded by logic,” he said at last, resuming in a lower voice. “That’s why I’m working on another kind of proof, Mr Smythe. A practical proof they can see with their own eyes.”

  He snapped his fingers and nodded towards Melestrina on the other side of the room. She went out into the hall, then came back a moment later carrying a large scroll of paper.

  “These are the design plans,” said Mr Caulkiss. “You see how it works?”

  Melestrina unrolled the paper and pinned it up on the wall beside the fireplace. It was a labyrinth of blue lines, sprinkled with various Post-Mathematical symbols.

  “That’ll show them! Once and for all! Now they’ll have to bow down before the truth! Now they’ll admit their error – or else!”

  “Is this something you’re constructing?”

  “Something I’ve already constructed, Mr Smythe. It’s in my laboratory. I’ve done everything except a few final adjustments. But I need your help. Will you make a contribution towards the greatest scientific achievement of the century?”

  “Me? How?”

  “I’ll show you how later. When you’re fully recovered in health. All I need for now is your promise.”

  “You mean, my promise to help?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh yes. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Hah!” Mr Caulkiss looked around with glittering eyes, at Melestrina and Craylene and Mr Quode. “I have his promise!”

  Then he set off again, striding back and forth, refuting some scientist here, challenging some fallacy there. He was interminable. I’m sure he would have gone on all night, if the others hadn’t finally reminded him about my bedtime.

  As for the design plans on the wall, I never did manage to make sense of them. They seemed to represent a machine of some kind – but what it was or how it worked I couldn’t begin to guess. And how could a machine prove anything about Mr Caulkiss’s bizarre theories?

  But I didn’t worry too much about it. Nor did I worry about the promise I had made to help Mr Caulkiss. I imagined that he wanted me to help him in his laboratory, like a lab assistant. I had no idea of what I’d really let myself in for.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Twenty

  Though Craylene and Melestrina came into the parlour after dinner, they didn’t talk very much. Noone could talk very much as long as Mr Caulkiss was delivering his monologues. Sometimes Melestrina burst out with strange loud exclamations, but they seemed to be more for dramatic effect than any communication of meaning.

  “Prithee, good heart, speak on!” she would cry, when Mr Caulkiss paused momentarily for breath. Or, when he had triumphantly out-argued his enemies:

  “Why then, I see the right of it!”

  Or sometimes:

  “By heaven, this thing shall be!”

  She accompanied these exclamations with dramatic poses
, modelled and held for up to ten minutes at a time. There was her pose of wide-eyed interest, goggling towards Mr Caulkiss, mouth rounded in an ‘O’, bosom lifted and beseeching. There was her pose of sheer contempt, like an amplification of Mr Caulkiss’s own contempt, lip curled, head thrown back and hands on hips. And then there was her pose of massive determination, arms folded, one leg forward, bosom jutting and eyebrows lowered. Determination was the pose she did best. But I couldn’t help thinking she must have been a very hammy actress.

  As for Craylene, she said very little in the evenings. Sometimes she just got up and quietly left the parlour. Then I could hear her footsteps pattering along the hall and descending the steps down into the cellar. The others paid no attention. It was evidently a regular routine.

  But one time Craylene was in the parlour while the other three were absent. It was an evening when Mr Caulkiss had been seized by a revolutionary new idea in mid-speech and had to hurry away to his laboratory to get it worked out. Then Melestrina decided to take Mr Quode off upstairs, leading him by the hand and declaiming in a deep hoarse voice:

  “The time demands and chamber calls: upstairs! Let pleasuring be taken now between the male and female!”

  So Craylene and I were left alone. She was sitting on the piano stool, very dainty and upright and smiling at nothing in particular.

  “Do you play the piano?” I asked, by way of polite conversation.

  “Oh no!” She jumped up from the piano stool as if stung. “Mr Quode does that, for Melestrina’s performances. I only – ”

  She broke off with a titter.

  “Yes? What do you do?” I thought she might tell me about her trips to the cellar.

  Another tiny titter. Then she fluttered across the room towards me. With her came an overpowering smell of sweet perfume, like sugared roses. She stood in front of the fireplace. She was so small that the top of her head rose barely to the level of the mantelpiece.

  “You’re asking me what do I do?!” She batted her eyelashes at me – jerking the whole front of her face up and down at the same time. “Really you shouldn’t, you know. I don’t ask you!”

  “But there’s nothing to ask about me. I just sit here all day getting bored.”

  She tut-tutted and tsk-tsked. I could see her little pink pointy tongue flicking in and out between her pursed lips. “Getting bored! That’s not right! You ought to have a commitment!”

  “What sort of a commitment?”

  “Like mine.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Ah, now you’re asking again! Naughty!”

  She fluffed up in a kind of playful outrage. She marched off, made a complete tour of the parlour, and returned to her original place again.

  “Don’t you know how to have a commitment?” she cried. “What did you ever do before?”

  “Before when?”

  “Before you came here to us!”

  “I was writing a Ph.D. I told you. About nineteenth century responses to Darwinism.”

  “Yes, but was it really important to you?”

  “Important? I don’t know. I know I was getting very bored with all the reading and research.”

  “Thought so! Thought so!” She nod-nodded her head. “You were lost and aimless. No purpose in life. I was exactly the same.”

  “You?”

  “Before I came to Morbing Vyle. I was bored with everything. I didn’t know how to have a commitment. I didn’t know – ”

  “What?”

  “How to give! I clung to my self all the time! I couldn’t let go! I didn’t know how to love and care!”

  “Ah, love and care! Is that what you believe in?”

  “Oh yes! I love! I care! I have such tender feelings!”

  “Who for?”

  “For the Little Ones!”

  “The Little Ones?”

  “Suffer the Little Ones to come unto thee!”

  “Do you mean Panker?”

  “Ah! Ah!” She performed a tiny hop, sending out clouds of perfume and face powder. “That’s asking! Naughty again!”

  “But you can tell me! Who are –?”

  But my questioning was suddenly cut short. Mr Caulkiss strode back into the room, talking at the top of his voice. He had finished working out his new idea, further revolutionizing his own revolution. His triumphant monologue drowned out all other conversation.

  So that was as much as I learnt about Craylene’s beliefs. Whenever I tried to talk to her afterwards, there was always someone else present in the parlour. All I got from Craylene was a coquettish smile and a lot of fluttering. Once when I tried a direct question about the ‘Little Ones’ she fluttered right up off her chair and out of the room.

  It was very frustrating. Of course, Craylene’s beliefs sounded less strange than Mr Quode’s or Mr Caulkiss’s: ‘love’ and ‘care’ and ‘giving’ – more like the ordinary modern version of Christianity. But I still had the impression that she was holding back on something very important.

  It wasn’t just Craylene either. I had the same feeling with all of the inhabitants of Morbing Vyle. They wanted to convert me to their brand of religion, but they didn’t want to come right out and tell me what it was. Odd and erratic as they seemed, yet they were all very consistent in that respect. More and more, I sensed that their brand of religion had some special ingredient. And then finally I was given a clue.

  ∨ The Vicar of Morbing Vile ∧

  Twenty-One

  The revelation was made on a Sunday evening. Sunday evening was different to the other evenings of the week. For a start, their dinner in the kitchen went on much longer than usual. I could hear them singing hymns out there, though I couldn’t catch the words. When they came into the parlour it was already after 8 o’clock.

  They closed the door as they came in. Craylene carried a dainty teacup in her dainty hand, Mr Caulkiss and Mr Quode held glasses of some deep green liqueur. They were in a distinctly elevated mood. Even Mr Caulkiss had a faint ruddiness on his cheeks, even Craylene had a certain boldness of manner. As for Melestrina, she was at her most emphatically dramatic.

  Mr Quode pulled up a chair by the fire and stirred the embers in the grate with a long black poker. Craylene went across to draw the curtains. Mr Caulkiss started to light the candles in the chandelier.

  “Let there be light!” cried Melestrina.

  Soon the whole room was bathed in brightness. Reflections sprang up in the gilt-edged mirror and danced on all the polished surfaces of wood.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real chandelier lit up before,” I remarked conversationally. “It’s very attractive.”

  “Ah,” said Mr Quode, “you are accustomed to elec-triss-ity?” The word came out with a sort of hiss.

  “Yes, of course. No-one uses anything else nowadays.”

  Mr Caulkiss finished lighting the candles. He came across and stood by the mantelpiece.

  “Tell us, Mr Smythe,” he said. “Tell us about the modern world. What new advances have been made? What are the latest technological developments?”

  “That’s a big question,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Start from 1951,” boomed Melestrina. She was leaning heavily against one end of the table. “That glorious year when I, Melestrina Quode, came here to Morbing Vyle. Since 1951 we have received no news of the outside world.”

  “1951.” I considered. “You wouldn’t know about the exploration of space then?”

  Craylene clapped her hands. She was perched on the arm of Mr Quode’s chair. “Tell us, tell us!”

  “It’s done with huge rockets, launching satellites and probes. The probes go out into deepest space and send back pictures of all the planets. The satellites circle the earth and give us pictures of the weather looking down from above.” I saved the best till last. “And in 1969, they actually landed a man on the moon.”

  The reaction wasn’t what I’d expected. They didn’t seem at all impressed. They giggled and snig
gered as though I’d said something ridiculous.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “But yes!” Melestrina thumped her bosom resoundingly with both hands. “Landing on the moon! A very modern thing to do!”

  “Well, maybe it doesn’t have much practical benefit,” I admitted. I considered again. “But there are other things. What about improvements in medicine? Transplants, for instance. Nowadays they can transplant organs from one human being to another. That’s certainly an advance.”

  “Organs?” Mr Caulkiss was interested. “What sort of organs?”

  “Kidneys. Livers. Even hearts. Suppose there’s someone whose heart isn’t working properly. They can give that person a new heart from the body of someone else who’s just died.”

  “Phh-hhh-hhh!” hooted Mr Caulkiss. “Hearts! Organs! Lumpishness!”

  They all burst into open laughter. Melestrina made the whole room vibrate with her mighty “Ho! Ho! Ho!” I looked around in surprise.

  “Perhaps I don’t explain it very well,” I said, when the noise finally died down. “But there’s no need to…”

  “Oh, you explain it perfectly,” said Mr Quode. “Don’t take offence, Mr Smythe. Tell us some more.”

  “I can’t think of any more.”

  “Yes you can! Whatever you like!”

  “Hmm.” I shrugged. “Okay then. How about TV?”

  “Tee Vee!” Renewed gales of laughter. “Hee! Hee! Tee! Vee!”

  “What’s so funny about that?” I was getting irritated. “You don’t even know what it is you’re laughing at.”

  “What is it then, Mr Smythe? Tee Vee?”

  “It’s like having movies in your own home. Almost everyone has a TV set nowadays. You can tune in to different channels for news or entertainment or whatever. You watch the pictures on a screen.”