by Paul Ableman
While Gore recruits his memory, his uncle thumbs expertly through some dossiers that have finally been produced. One of these, I notice with interest, is a dossier about the war and it also has another claim on my attention as being about a certain “Fugitive—female” whom I can not help associating with a princess I once knew. The Commissioner discerns my interest and, with a tolerant smile, edges the file towards me.
“Of course, I can’t permit you to inspect official records,” he remarks, pointedly looking towards a predecessor “living in a picture” on his wall.
I take up the dossier casually but Gore, clearly having recovered his militancy, strikes it from my grasp, shouting:
“Don’t touch it!” He glares at the Commissioner who merely makes the slightest movement of his head, as if to say “Youth? Will it ever succeed to, if not the wisdom, at least the composure, the—” But Gore continues angrily, “It’s all contaminated, everything you can see. And everything out there.” His gesture is sufficiently sweeping to include about half the sidereal universe but I assume that he is referring to three messengers idling near a ledge.
What emerges unmistakably is that Gore feels a considerable degree of hostility towards his uncle.
“And all that he stands for,” supplements Gore.
“What do you suppose I stand for?” asks the Commissioner mildly, warding off requests for his presence.
“Nothing really,” admits Gore, making another of his bewildering reversals, “but you know how this departmental stuff affects me? It’s merely different generations, conventions and so forth at bottom. If you like I’ll pace, relatively peacefully, about this chasm, possibly venting my feelings sometimes in a glower but nothing more, while you conclude your arrangements.”
He does as he has suggested and the Commissioner tells me briefly about the latitude he is forced to display and then bids me a cordial farewell. It is only much later, when, Gore having suggested some refreshments, we have descended into the latest and most fashionable post of refreshment, that I remember Arthur’s affairs. At first, I feel that I should return immediately but Gore prevents me.
“No,” he insists. “We’ll dispatch a message.”
Now Gore’s regular circle gathers about us and, as the brave music throbs out, cheer us on in the composition of our fantastic message. Modifications are suggested and the final wording that is transmitted to the Commissioner reads: “I forgot to raise the matter of the thing you can do for Arthur. He wants you to grant him a license.” We sit and wait for the answer and now Gore’s circle, well aware of Gore’s delight in rich things and his attempt, at this late stage, to live for pleasure, ask him about a brocade couch.
“About its acquistion,” presses one, a youth who has been introduced to me as “a long story.”
“Has it been acquired?” asks another, a young woman called Fay.
At first, Gore does not answer them other than by humorously pursing his wine-stained lips. Then a young, brusque soldier, leaning possessively over a girl, turns to me and asks: “Did he buy that couch?”
But the girl immediately silences him with the assertion that I could not possibly know. There are impatient murmurs from the group which Gore silences by springing to his feet.
“All right,” he cries. “You want to know about the couch? Look to the door.”
Everyone turns and loud are the gasps of surprise when two men appear, bearing into the notorious cavern a large root. After the initial exclamations, however, everyone looks either depressed or restless and Gore can only with difficulty be persuaded even to acknowledge the circumstance. Thereafter, he ignores the root completely, oblivious, or affecting to be oblivious, to the fact that it is having a damaging effect on the dancing. Finally, a very active young girl, probably tired of being jabbed in different parts of her body by protruding bits of the root, marches purposefully over to us and inquires, with anger clearly raging just below the surface of her controlled manner, if Gore has any plans for disposing of his “bloody root.”
Gore looks at the ungainly thing which, in the center of the small floor, is clearly providing a formidable obstacle to the dancers. He looks round the narrow, ill-lit room but there does not appear to be any vacant space large enough to accommodate it. At first, I feel that he is going to respond to the girl’s challenge by flying into a rage but actually in the end he merely asks mildly:
“What on earth can I do with it?”
And, again to my surprise, the girl answers equally mildly, looking away towards the rinsed walls as if she were not seeing them but some bait. She licks her lips and shakes her head slightly, movements which, I surmise, are designed to recall herself to the immediate situation.
“There appears to be nothing you can do with it,” she then says. “That’s certainly the appearance of it. It’s certainly different in here with that thing.”
We naturally assume that this last remark refers to the root but something that happens immediately afterwards makes me realize that she means an ordinary brick, pale and rinsed, that has been forced into a bulge by immense pressure.
“Look, I’m going to dance some more,” she informs Gore. She bends and kisses him rather perfunctorily, and then returns to the dance floor.
“She dances well, don’t you think?” asks Gore. “Shall I go on about bits of philosophy? The best bits? Not current events. That’s where we’re likely to bump into dear Uncle. Funny that he hasn’t replied. Patriarch.”
Gore now becomes increasingly restless. We leave much of the wine and proceed to the stairs. The girl, who, in her gay gyrations, has become very skilled at avoiding the root, breaks away from her panting partner and approaches us.
“My wife,” Gore introduces her.
“I’ll come with you,” she announces. “I might as well.”
And so the three of us go out together and walk down the street towards a prong. It is, in fact, in its immediate vicinity, not perhaps the most suitable place, that the Commissioner’s emissary catches up with us.
“The Holy Father,” she announces, breathless from hurrying, “is disposed to grant your request.”
“You were wrong about him,” I admonish playfully. “You said his number was up the last time I saw you.”
“I know,” she admits. “I was quite wrong. Let’s not talk of it.”
“Why,” I ask her, “do you call him the Holy Father?”
“I don’t know,” she replies. “I don’t know at all. Can anyone explain why there are no taxis?”
I notice that Mrs. Gore is staring rather oddly at the new arrival as if her experience of the world had not prepared her for this sort of prim, ironic woman. Gore, on the other hand, looks as if he would like to protest.
“No, look here—” he protests. “Just because you work for that—damn it, a civil question. What’s he up to now? Why does he call himself that?”
“I’ve no idea,” returns the woman, in a rather cool, ironic fashion that indicates both that she is not telling the truth and also that her failure to do so, on this occasion, fails to conflict with her principles.
Gore manages to master his hostility for some time, during which we pass a number of places. Later, however, he finds himself unable to remain in the woman’s company.
“No, thank you,” she has refused, courteously but, admittedly, a little patronizingly, when Mrs. Gore, a little drunk and rather tending to be disconsolate and mumble, has tried to burden her with some garden produce and, when this has proved unacceptable, some intimate female things that she attempts to transfer in coy secrecy so that Gore and I will not notice.
“Oh, for God’s sake, take them!” urges Gore, with rather excessive irritation. “You can chuck them away later. Can’t you see, she wants you to have them.”
“Well, don’t force them on her,” protests Mrs. Gore. Surprisingly, she looks at Gore reproachfully and I get the distinct feeling that something central has occurred. This impression is heightened by a curious phenomenon. We
are standing at an angle where a number of streets cross. Gore is standing a little way away, absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in a poster. Three people approach from one direction and then a number of people from a different direction. After that, it is quite still. No vehicles, no people pass and there is only a background sound that might not be the sound of motors and crowds but any indistinct, permanent note such as wind or ocean. We all notice this lull, even Gore who, in contradistinction, I feel sure, to the way in which he would have chosen to react, can not help pricking up his ears and looking towards us.
“Did something central occur?” I then ask Mrs. Gore.
Her answer coincides with the return of people to our vicinity and of the urban clamor of early evening to our ears.
“Yes it did,” she confirms. “And the funny thing is, it’s never happened before, certainly not when I married this chap,” she nods in a rather grim, but possibly affectionate way, towards Gore who has returned to the study of his poster. “Still, I don’t know if it’s anything central, really, but something different, certainly, outside the run—a different way of—a different—I don’t know—I suddenly saw things the way she must.” Here Mrs. Gore indicates, with a not very polite movement of her head, the emissary. “But why should I suddenly? I don’t know. I’ve met lots of different people. Now I’ll have to think about this and try and digest it. Then there’s a bit more. The thought also came to me, just as a subsidiary of the perception if you understand—what do I want with her perspective? If it would complete anything—but would it—what about all the others I didn’t get—anyway, that’s why I wanted her to have the lettuce.”
I now look eagerly at the emissary, hoping that she will realize what a central moment this is and respond appropriately, but, although perhaps a flicker of real understanding does play in her eyes, this is quite unable to make headway against her instinctive reaction, which is simply to preserve her air of irony and sophistication. She merely says something humorous and barbed about eccentric gifts. And it is at this point that Gore, who has apparently been paying attention all along and noting what has been taking place, now rather glum and subdued himself, comes over and removes his wife. He does not say anything to the emissary but gives her a look at once contemptuous and astonished and then takes his wife by the hand and leads her away between the buildings, under the gleams.
“I had to wait,” the secretary now explains. “Though it’s got rather later than I’d thought, and I suppose there’ll be no taxis.”
She does, however, see a taxi but it turns a corner.
“I couldn’t have taken that one anyway,” she sighs. “I have to explain at greater length. Your message arrived and the Commissioner—”
“The Holy Father?”
“The Commissioner asked me to find you and convey the following suggestions.”
“You called him the Holy Father before.”
All right,” she agrees rather sharply. “I must have been wrong again. I seem to keep making mistakes when I’m talking to you. Anyway, he suggested that you visit him again at your earliest convenience and then, contingent upon the satisfactory outcome of a further short, but rather more penetrating and exploratory interview, he’ll see what can be done.”
“Do you think anything can be done?” I ask her, less in the hope of learning her opinion than to see if I can derive, from the character of her reply, any clue as to the curious mistakes she keeps making. However, she disappoints me, simply nodding absently and murmuring “yes” while she devotes most of her energy to signaling another taxi that is discharging three scholars further up the road. When the scholars have finished settling their account with the driver, the latter acknowledges the woman’s signals and drives towards us. She urges me to get in and takes me a good way but without, during the trip, adding materially to what she has already said. When we are passing some temporary specifications, it occurs to me that she is probably brooding about her treatment of Mrs. Gore and reproaching herself or congratulating herself but not wholly convinced that whichever she is doing is justified.
“Good-bye,” she calls, when I have descended. She leans towards the driver and then hesitates and then turns to me again. “When I see you next, I’ll try—” but now some newly recalled allegiance again betrays her candor, and she compensates for the broken statement by smiling brightly and saying once more, “Good-bye.”
Later I realize that I may have mistaken the effect produced by a fortuitous resemblance to a celebrated face for that of memory of Mrs. Gore. How ill-equipped I find myself for rooting in these pastures. I have no tusks. Arthur, when I try to consult him, is still concerned about the gulls.
“Yes, do anything you can,” he concedes, setting my egg down hastily and rushing to the window to shoo the bright things away.
“We must do something,” he mutters. He then seems in the grip of a partial resolution and this matures without further external assistance.
He goes off to do something about it, and later I hear the sounds of his departure and the cry of the gulls rising into angry screams and then subsiding again.
Somewhere doubtless they are still screaming. At this very moment. Charley may be listening at this very moment. On some beach, by some ancient sea, looking up from the shells and toys, first towards his mother to make sure she is near and then out towards the glass towers rising from the sea. The sea is calm and between the crystal spires, a large, horned head grins at Charley. It is the head of an old sea god. It puffs two frisking monsters back, with a little effort. It puffs the two whales back as an old prospector might light his pipe. But instead of a broad grin of dominion, a mere sheepish grin of achievement wreathes its face.
I hastily sketch the sea-god and then sketch an imaginary wife on the back. At first, when I consider the sketch, it looks more like the trail of a hare, but then the god puts out his hand and wipes the slate clean, leaving snails upon it. I brush off the snails and draw the sea-god again and call the picture “A new sea god—not Neptune.”
Then I lie and listen to the intermittent cry of some individual gull as it secures a trophy or screams furiously at another gull that has secured a trophy, until a detachment arrives to put a stop to it. Maria comes in and informs me that the detachment, in view of the recent agitation over this sort of thing, has come well supplied with credentials revealing their legal authority, as representatives of the appropriate governmental department, to carry on in this way. She tells me that one of their banners reads “The right way to do it” and another, “We’re setting about this the right way.”
“Perhaps you’d better go and talk to them,” she suggests. “They’re disturbing the neighborhood.”
“No,” I inform her. “I’m deeply enough involved with that department already.”
I pretend, closing my eyes and absently tapping my forehead, to be brooding on Nicene contributions and the tremors of the fiber that resulted, but I can not help being acutely aware of the activity outside. This activity mobilizes a host of more or less reluctant impulses in me, all of which I try to bed securely in resentment. I hear someone shout “Towel” or “Tool” and I can not help trying to interpret the muffled activity, only indistinct reports of which otherwise reach me, in terms of this obscure injunction. My Nicene researches were on the point of fruition. The predominance of the elegiac, the Finn., the Vögel-Finn, a vast range of investigation was at last being wrung for its significance when these blundering gull-men descended upon us. Now renewed anger wells in me as an appalling sample demonstrates the part sheer volume of sound is to play in their activities. A stream of sound is being hosed into the room, mostly of denunciation, interspersed with advocacy, in as many tongues as there were birds not long ago, and also a rending sound as of iron frames being compressed. Now, with the help of the villainous Jones next door, they have decided to drown the world in clamor, until, pierced by a shaft of noise, each individual on earth lies dead and the globe rolls on into more peaceful regions of space. A
t this, I can contain myself no longer and I get up, dress and go down and seek out the leader of the infamous band.
“Only doing our duty, sir,” he informs me, and then, when I have asked him if it is really his intention to dispose of human life in this inglorious fashion, he merely smiles a soothing smile that shows that he is quite unable to appreciate the significance of this notion.
“Is such your intention?” I repeat, insisting on a satisfactory reply.
“We’re chasing the gulls,” he returns.
“But why the sounds? Why those coils and winders of sound that are writhing at either end of your men?”
“Broken gears,” he offers. “We had broken gears on this trip. We’ll complain of it. It’s the service department. They’re all lazy in that department.”
Suddenly a cry goes up from his men, who, to give them their due, have been toiling in a manner worthy of a better cause.
“They’re off.”
“There they go.”
I turn with the rest in time to see the azure gulls lift, circle and then disappear towards Margate.
“They’ll never reach Margate,” says the chief.
“No, they’ll be intercepted,” agrees his lieutenant. “They’ll either be intercepted, or, despairing of us, they’ll melt into the blue of blues, the blue of day, and then they’ll be part of everything.”
At these words I look closely at the lieutenant and discover that he is, in fact, someone I knew before.
“You’re the conductor,” I exclaim.
The lieutenant nods.
“I was a conductor but I transferred to this department, for no very good reason. This is the ‘odd-calls’ department and I thought I might hit something really odd. But so far, I haven’t and between ourselves,”—here he glances sharply at his superior to make sure that the latter is not in a position to overhear—“I preferred the company when I was a conductor. The chief’s an idiot. And I’ll tell you something else:—every chief I’ve had—or could have—is an idiot, and the higher the rank, the more idiotic. It’s a law, an immutable law. Pinnacles are pinnacles of idiocy.”