by Hughes, Rhys
“What have you been up to? What have you seen?” he demanded.
“Duw, I seen it wave at me out of the window,” wailed the spotter. “And I don’t like it. It wasn’t a tidy boyo.”
Pin sent the man on his way with a shilling and frowned. The window indicated was the one next to his own; the compartment into which darted the faceless shape. There was nothing there now. Can rats wave? At least the fellow had not seen fit to throw a stone. Dismissing the incident, the engineer made his way through the dark streets to his lodgings.
The place which the reader is asked to consider is Lladloh. It is different now from what I remember it to have been. An ancient mortuary chapel, with a cemetery shaped like a goat’s tear; tall trees smothering domestic buildings; crooked lanes made not with cobbles but flint nodules, so that pedestrians with hobnailed boots light their way without recourse to expensive public illumination. There was a glum black windmill just after you left the station, which looked like it had lost a joust with a deluded knight... Also shops of dull red brick, with roofs of dirty straw... but why do I encumber you with these commonplace details? Is it because dots are a good substitute for effective writing? Or because I am writing a guide book...?
Walk away from the mill and turn down the road on the left. It runs parallel to the railway, and if you follow it, it descends into a smelly sort of hollow, at the bottom of which can be found the village square. Here Pin encountered the nameless tavern which was to be his home for as many weeks as it took for him to revolutionise the power ratios of steam engines and redeem himself as a tutor of merit. As he walked, he had the traditional feeling of being followed; but he resisted a growing urge to look over his shoulder and spoil the story.
Before dropping into the urban pit, he cast a glance at the site of the Eisteddfod. Not all was quiet at this late hour; flickering lamps of paraffin moved to and fro, as if the stall-owners were preparing for the morning’s entertainments. For any reader who is interested, let me state that the Royal National Eisteddfod is the major Welsh festival, and must not be confused with the International Eisteddfod, which has a permanent site in Llangollen. The Royal is a nomad, whose venue is proclaimed one year and a day in advance by the Gorsedd of Bards. It is fundamentally a cultural tournament, with overblown pageantry and a wealth of aesthetic events, including Druidic competitions. The Grand Pavilion is a marquee worthy of a Mongol Khan, so large that fifty-six blows of square-headed iron mallets are needed to secure each peg.
Pin was made welcome at the squalid inn, was installed in the large double-bedded room of which we have heard, and was able to arrange his materials for work in crab-apple-pie order upon a narrow table standing in the wide end of the room. There was a single window which looked over the filthy street. After resting awhile on a chair, Pin returned to the bar for a strong nightcap. The tavern’s interior was far too spacious to be illuminated, as it was, by a dozen or so candles. The engineer made a remark to the barman to the effect that atmosphere was one thing; seeing where you were going was quite another.
The barman, who went by the name of Emyr James, was affable. “These are not our preferred arrangements. The generator which provides us with electricity has been broken for many years.”
“Well,” said Pin, “but it appears to me at that rate, sir, that you must be little better than a Cimmerian.”
“Perhaps I am,” the barman answered; “but the laws which govern our generator are really not at all perfectly known. No mechanic has managed to fix it; thus the village exists without electric light or heating. In view of this, and the fact it seems likely to turn rather colder, would you like any extra blankets on your bed?”
Pin declined the offer and ordered a glass of porter. “As an expert with engines, I wonder if I may be of assistance? What sort of generator do you use? Pour this pint first.” Interval.
“About that generator you were asking. It’s rather a curious one. I have it in my cellar. As a matter of fact, I was polishing it yesterday. Beautiful model, astounding performance. Man-sized but with a water-tube boiler and a double Kylchap exhaust. Delivers a pressure of 666psi, more in summer. Fully portable—in a wheelchair.”
Dr Pin was stupefied by these specifications, at which he was tempted to laugh, but his incredulity was greatly modified with another pint, and the reaction to his next question. He wondered aloud whether a certain Noisette had manufactured the device.
In front of the hearth, seated on a Gothic chair with a candle set in either arm, an ample and malignant youth with brass-rimmed spectacles quietly laughed with unimaginable cynicism.
“Never mind him,” whispered Emyr; “that’s just Mr Homunculus, local poet, embittered and drunk as a study-toad.”
But the youth suddenly muttered: “Poor Noisette! Lots of hobbies, a comfortable home, all his time to himself. Took his work so seriously he lost himself in it! Never found his way out!”
“Hush!” warned Emyr. But Pin was not at all deterred by the cryptic utterance. He was pleased to receive confirmation of his belief that the village of Lladloh was indeed the home town of the legendary inventor. I can imagine him rubbing his palms together once he returned to his room after consuming a third glass. Before he went to bed, he took out of his suitcase the whistle he had stolen from Parkins. Crushed seashells still clogged the mouthpiece, and the pea was a pearl, but he managed to clear it out with his toothbrush. Tidy as ever in his habits, he stepped close to the window to throw the brush out. Opening the casement, he noticed a belated wanderer coming down the hill into the square, wearing something in the manner of a djellaba, trotting with swiftness and irregularity, a startling and terrifying speed. Then Pin closed the window, surprised at the odd cloaks people wore at Lladloh.
Later, he thought he heard voices conversing outside his door. Emyr was ushering a late arrival into a room. They talked as if they were old acquaintances who had been reunited.
In the morning, Pin woke and dressed, putting the finishing touches to his corset, when one of the maids came in. “If you please,” she said, “would you like extra oil on your cogs, sir?”
“Ah, thank you,” said Pin, casting a glance over the spare parts he had arranged on his cankerous dressing-table. “Yes, I think I would like some. They seem likely to turn rather rusty.”
“Are you employed at the Eisteddfod, sir?” she asked.
“Dear me. My arrival here has nothing to do with the festival. I’m a scholar exiled from his college for some minor offences. For example, my Wankel engine was caught in the act.”
“Really? How very absurd!” said the maid, departing to giggle with her colleagues, while Pin set forth, with a stern determination to enjoy an ethnic breakfast. And sure enough, he ate a double helping of chunky cawl with a plate of bara-brith, followed by a Red Dragon Pie* which is usually baked for half-an-hour at 180 degrees centigrade. Onions, beans and carrots are the chief ingredients, topped with potatoes. But I’m not writing a recipe-book—unlike Dr Pin, who is.
He left the dive and returned up the hill to the Eisteddfod. He was disappointed to learn of a hefty entrance fee for the privilege of being admitted into the festival. Pin’s experience on this occasion was a very distressing one. Transactions were conducted in Welsh and he was snubbed by a mob of language activists, who delighted in spelling out words they thought unfamiliar to him—such as c-o-b-l-y-n coblyn, and the like. I heard the whole story from him some months later. He wandered through the dirt and muddy puddles, finally coming to the entrance of the Grand Pavilion. Then, with a nervous shrug, he disappeared into the maw of the cyclopean tent—where the Bardic recital was in progress.
For an hour he endured the strict rhythms and soft mutations, until the Arch-Druid, Barrington Burke, announced the competition’s winner. In Pin’s phrase, Mr Burke, dressed in a gown of crumpled linen, was so Arch he was practically Ctesiphonic. Pin left the marquee in bewilderment and horror, emotions I can figure to myself, for I have in the flesh thirty years back seen the same thi
ng happen; but the reader can hardly imagine how dreadful it was to him to see first prize awarded to a poet whom he had known to be an empty talent. He sauntered in search of the exit, was set upon by charity fund-raisers and was forced to pause and feel in his pockets. But he only drew out the whistle.
“Well, that’s curious,” he said; “I remember that before I started this morning, I intended to leave it behind.”
But the fund-raisers would not accept it as a substitute for money, and after an alternative pocket was ransacked, his redundancy payoff was further depleted. In disgust, he decided to return to his lodging, where he might be more assured of solitude. As he neared the tavern, he caught sight of something playing tricks in his room—a hint of bundled up and twisted bedclothes moving about on their own behind the glass. “Now,” he thought aloud, “if this is one of the servants going into my room when I am away, I can only say that—well, that I don’t approve of it at all.” Unless, he amended, it was a frisky maid.
While he was in the act of rushing into the building, and demanding an explanation from the barman, he was detained on the threshold by the youth who had chuckled at him in the bar. Mr Homunculus, as Emyr termed him, snatched Pin’s sleeve and hissed: “So you’re interested in Kingdom Noisette? Come with me, sir, into the cellar.”
“I’ll go down in a moment. It’ll be a pleasure, both to you and to myself. First we must get to the bottom of this: what do you know about Noisette and where his designs came from?”
“Honest, sir, I don’t know the source of his inspiration, or how he arrived at the finished product—that nobody could guess. But I’ll go as far as to say this, that he’s not a hundred feet from this place. Quite whole, in a perfectly undecayed state.”
“You’ll forgive me, I hope,” started Pin, “if I sound impertinent, but are you quite sure he’s near here? I thought it was just an example of his work which was kept in the cellar.”
“Right down there, sir. That’s the truth what I’m telling you, that is; if you don’t believe me, ask the barman.”
Saying nothing, the engineer followed the youth under a low archway and down a steep spiral staircase. Half aloud Pin counted the steps as he went down, and he got as far as the thirty-eighth before reaching the floor of the cellar. It was very dark and there was some foulness of air which nearly extinguished the matches he lit in sequence. The dank room under the tavern went some little way back, and on the right and left of the entrance, he could discern rounded objects which might be barrels. A taller shape loomed straight ahead; he reached out and touched something curved, that felt—yes—more or less like skin. This discovery made it absolutely certain to Pin’s mind that he was on the right track. Putting both hands out as well as he could, he pulled it to him, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than expected.
Bumping into an unseen obstruction, it tottered and then slipped on to Pin’s chest, and wrapped its arms round his neck. He was conscious of a most horrible smell of garlic, and of a cold kind of face pressed into his own, and of moving slowly over it, and of several—I don’t know how many—pistons or crankshafts or pendulums rotating against his body. He would have screamed out like a beast, but Homunculus, running quickly up the steps, returned with a lantern, and the vista was illuminated in the fashion of supernatural melodrama. By this time, of course, Pin realised he was in the presence of an automaton.
But what he actually saw impressed him, as he told me, more than he could have conceived any machine or device capable of impressing him. It is useless to try to convey by words the effect which this apparatus had upon him. However, the main traits of it I can at least indicate. He saw at first only a frock-coat and top-hat; presently it was seen that these covered a body of Victorian severity, almost a disciplinarian, with very bushy side-whiskers standing out like brooms. The hands were of a rugged texture, suited to holding spanners; while the tongue, lubricated with burning spittle, was able to lash pupils and tutors alike. One remark is usually made by those who have seen the original: “Ee oop!” But for Pin, the most astonishing aspect of the encounter was his sudden grasping of the fact that Kingdom Noisette and his work were one and the same thing! He had a great deal of use for this insight.
“My life upon it,” he said; “but the secret of increased efficiency and reduced emissions is here.” Turning to Homunculus, he added: “You be off, and don’t think any more about it. And, by the way, congratulations on winning the poetry chair at the Eisteddfod!”
It was in a somewhat pensive frame of mind that Pin returned to the bar and proposed to Emyr the buying of the generator from the citizens of Lladloh for a reasonable sum. “As it is broken, I am sure you will quote a small price. How much do you ask for it? Will you take two hundred and fifty shillings? This is not confounding.”
“I will not. The contraption is not for sale.”
“My silly barman!” Pin cried again and again, “deal with a gent if you can get on the track of one. Your generator is worth much less than two hundred and fifty shillings, I assure you—much less. Consider its uselessness. What do you want for it?”
“Nothing—nothing in the world. Sir is not welcome to it. We still hope that, one day, it will be mended.”
Even an engineer’s conscience is sometimes stirred, and that of Pin was tenderer than an engineer’s. He confessed that he knew how to fix it and was willing to do so, on the condition that he was allowed to borrow it for a week or two. Emyr could hardly disguise his delight at the news and immediately assented to Pin’s terms. The engineer requested that the generator be hoisted from the cellar—whether by ropes or chains wasn’t an issue—and placed at his disposal. The barman, anxious to learn what had made Pin so confident of success, offered him a cognac on the house, which Pin accepted without loosening his tongue.
While sipping the spirit, the scholar chanced to notice, in a dusky corner of the room, where the walls and furnishings were blackened with soot, a thing that looked like a band of dark shadow sitting at a table. He was reminded of the bobbing shape on the train, the late wayfarer on the road and the vision of twisted blankets glimpsed through the window of his room. Whatever it was, with a sudden smooth motion, it shifted on its chair and began to reach for the pint of beer on the table. It moved awkwardly, in a stooping posture, and all at once the engineer realised, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away, it became suddenly conscious of its drink and thrust in its hand, as if to gauge the depth of the contents. In a few moments it seemed to know that the glass was empty.
Pin would have liked to have observed this apparition order another pint; but a call of nature required his brief absence. When he returned, and found the shape gone, he was both pleased and disappointed. He asked the barman whether there were any unusual guests staying at the lodgings during the Eisteddfod week; anyone whose extraordinary habits marked him out from the common run of humanity.
“Apart from yourself, none,” opined Emyr. “All present in my tavern are known to me. You are the only stranger.”
Dr Pin finished his cognac, ordered a whisky and soda to dilute it, and made his way to his bed. When he reached his room, the lock of which had been forced, he was alarmed to find his cogs in disarray and all his other possessions thrown about in great profusion, as if an intruder had decided to give vent to his animal spirits. Only the blankets on the bed were undisturbed, and their orderly condition gave the impression that they’d been deliberately avoided. Pin was about to stomp downstairs again, with his boots still on, and complain to Emyr—when he caught a whiff of some feminine scent, a perfume seemingly distilled from a rose garden, and he deduced from this that a frisky maid had been dancing in his room. So he felt at ease once more and went to bed.
The following morning, he arranged the lifting of Kingdom Noisette from the cellar. The burghers of Lladloh rallied round to assist him in relocating the generator to an abandoned
railway siding which connected with the town’s main line. Soon Pin was well on his way to implementing Bradley’s suggestion about returning to St James’s on a modern charger. Around the Victorian cadaver, he constructed a high-pressure, 4-cylinder compound 4-6-4 locomotive. He had just the right number of cogs for this purpose; and although wheels were not available, his cake-tins made very adequate substitutes. One of Emyr’s barrels doubled up as a cabin. Only one component was not to be had anywhere in the village, and at first it appeared that the project would be abandoned, so vital was this missing piece. But inspiration came to the engineer; dipping into his pocket, he saved the day, and the people made a hum, and a deal of applause, and Dr Pin felt himself to be of some slight value.
I possess a copy of the timetable for that particular Eisteddfod. A festival held in Lladloh is generally run backwards, and so right at the end of the week, after the climactic events were finished, only a rather thin crowd remained to taste the minor entertainments. As it was nearing the time to pack up, the pegs of the Grand Pavilion were being loosened, with fifty-six tugs of iron pincers, while Pin finally announced that he too was ready to depart from Lladloh. The staff of the tavern, with some guests, who had gathered to wave him off, were joined by the last of the festival mob, and the engineer revealed his secret. First he unbuttoned Noisette’s coat, and then his shirt, to reveal a broad expanse of hairy chest. Stepping forward, he raised a wooden spoon and dealt a tremendous blow on a hidden panel, which sprang open.
“Here is the reason for the fault!” he exclaimed, holding something rather like a grapefruit and inserting it carefully into the cavity thus exposed. “It’s the beating of his hideous heart!”
The object in question, of course, was the small steam-turbine Pin brought with him from St James’s. Once reunited with its host, it had an incredible effect on the broken device. With steadily mounting velocity, Noisette’s top-hat rose and fell; his sideburns worked like crankshafts. The locomotive, which Pin had mysteriously christened Lost Hearts, began to glide down the siding, bearing its scholastic passenger in reasonable comfort. As he gathered speed towards the main line, he was horrified to note a billowing shape leering at him from the ranks of cheering faces. Abruptly, it broke from the mob and headed to intercept him. He quickly accelerated, but it was too late; with surprising agility, the faceless figure leapt up and joined him in the driver’s cabin. As Pin gasped, one corner of its draperies swept across his face.