I Hear Voices

by Paul Ableman

  “Susan told me about the palace—”

  “Palace?” repeats Arthur, looking puzzled and dabbing his face. “Oh, the palace—well, perhaps I was a little hasty. I may have made it sound more definite than it really is. Still, it’s very much in my mind, but I don’t want you scheming and conspiring with Susan to try and rush me.”

  “I don’t want to rush you, Arthur,” I point out.

  “Don’t you?” he asks, genuinely surprised at, although he does not disbelieve, this assertion. “I assumed—somehow—”

  Susan and Maria enter and both display amusement at his bizarre appearance, half-dressed as he is and snowing lather onto some bits of property.

  “How funny!” exclaims Maria, laughing boisterously.

  “He is funny,” agrees Susan. “He is an old—” but she does not laugh with the same vigor as Maria. Indeed, she reveals, in the way her glance picks out the bits of lather, that she has only partially surrendered to the humorous aspect of the situation and that, beneath the merriment, there lurks an indignant housewife. This incomplete abandon is noticed by Maria who seems to find it quite disproportionately offensive. A resentful look comes over her face and she marches to the window and both paints everything in the darkest colors and sharpens all the domestic references she can think of into needles with which to prick Susan.

  I wonder if Arthur is about to convene a family conference, feeling that its immediate auspices would be bad, but, at this point, they all three withdraw to the doorway and stand there whispering and casting distressed, sidelong glances at me. I strain to hear what they are saying since, although I am very far from being morbidly suspicious, it does occur to me that this quaint and irregular behavior can only bode something contrary to my interests.

  I fancy I hear Arthur say something like “the very last thing” and then, as if he had suddenly remembered a message, he hurries away. Maria and Susan remain a while longer and exchange a few quiet remarks but they seem to be reserving their real thoughts, or still to be assembling them, for, when they depart, they do so slowly and a little uncertainly. They seem rather to wander away as Orelle wandered in the palace grounds. As soon as they have gone they forget the charming legend of Orelle, but she remains somewhere in their minds. They retain the notion of the dark turrets overlooking Orelle’s innocent stroll. They remember the dark, stacked boxes and the storage lights behind. They shudder a little over the threat of suffocation. Then a voice explains:

  “Points, points—(this is your geometry master). Points are lovely things to explain. Points are like the loveliest of entertainments. Not like friendly family charades—nothing so amateur. Not like the disciplined precision of a classic performance. But a bit like both. Points are like dancing. Orelle, daintily, lightly, bewitchingly clad in shimmer and glitter, spins out of the past. Behind her, but toiling far back where the dusty road winds over the distant hills, white-coated technicians cut off each epoch in turn. And Orelle, Points, the Lady of Points, spins on past the palace grounds and the local sorting office. She goes anywhere and her two chaps follow on with their shears, slitting away each epoch. Points are a convenient abstraction.”

  I get up to straighten the cupboard for the tenth time. I wedge it firmly and then get dressed and go down.

  “I suppose Arthur’s gone?” I ask Maria.

  She goes on polishing strenuously for a few moments without answering. I begin to turn moodily away, when she stops me.

  “He left a message,” she says, approaching me with rags and polish. She wipes back her hair with the back of her hand. “He says not to forget that matter. What is it?” she asks inquisitively. “What are you doing for Arthur?”

  “I’m getting him a license,” I explain. “I’d better go down and see him now. I want to get this out of the way so that I can get on with something else.”

  “Something else for Arthur?” asks Maria. “Something else important?”

  “Not for Arthur,” I advise. “But very important. At least, sometimes it seems important, and sometimes I forget all about it and sometimes other things—”

  “You find the days passing,” says Maria dreamily. “I know.”

  “I find the days passing too,” says Susan rather gruffly, issuing from the kitchen with a soiled child hanging from her arm.

  “I’m sure you do, Susan,” I agree, although I feel convinced that she does not mean it in the somewhat romantic sense that Maria did and, in fact, only made the point to demonstrate an equivalence of sensibility with her rival.

  “I feel them passing,” says little Jane, staring at me for a moment. Then she looks with difficulty back at Susan and asks: “What’s passing? What’s passing?”

  Susan, however, merely shakes the child a little roughly and then carries her into a nearby room to perform some necessary operation upon her.

  “I don’t always feel them passing,” resumes Maria. “But I do at this season. You may say it’s because everything is passing. That’s a possible hypothesis.”

  She looks out through the small, semicircular pane at a small amount of the season and then she looks sharply after Susan and confides:

  “I’m certainly glad Susan likes doing things for that child. She can do it all. I’m glad not to have to. I suppose you think I’m unnatural?”

  “No,” I deny. “I don’t think that. I think you can be malicious sometimes.”

  Maria smiles with concealed malice but does not say anything else. As I go out, however, she calls after me:

  “I can certainly be malicious. At least, I have malicious thoughts often. But still—”

  There is a good deal of time to spare. But still—recent events don’t go far towards reassuring me that we have all that much time at our disposal. As I realize this, and as I review the demands of the situation in my mind, the necessity for haste seems to become increasingly imperative. I look about for some means of speeding things up. Things seem to be speeding in the vicinity. They seem to be accelerating as well. Most of the people I see are keeping up with them, but some are merely being sucked wildly along by the vacuum. Others are sitting back comfortably, imagining that everyone else is speeding so that they may go at a stately pace, but when one looks at them closely one finds that they are making those slight movements of compensation and adjustment which indicate that they too, only more dangerously because they are ignorant of the fact, are speeding.

  “Everyone’s speeding today,” I tell Arthur, when I reach the office.

  He has extremely brilliant planes of colored substance all about and three or four people trying to devise means of exploiting them. Before I have been in the office five minutes, however, he sends for some transporters and has every vestige of these vivid substances removed and decides to restrict his activities for the time being to a sort of special device.

  “A sort of rake or prong,” he explains to various delegates who have come to inspect the new development.

  “Do you mean a sort of sabre?” asks one.

  “Yes, one might say—” begins Arthur, but his aide immediately looks anxious and then tells him something and he smoothly corrects himself. “Not a sabre, of course not. A prong for manipulating various modulors. We do various models, one for jungle clearings that has political implications, and one for bathroom pipes. Here’s the special model.”

  He holds up the special model, smiling a modest and engaging smile of achievement. It is a most attractive model, looking like nothing so much as a prong, in the center of which lies a small, glowing bead. He taps it lightly on the table, but it only makes an ordinary tapping sound and the bead rolls out. He then takes up another one and taps it and it gives out a clear signaling note.

  “A very harmonious model,” he reads from a special sheet of printed information. “It can be used for signaling between any two points. It will convey anything between two points provided certain rules are obeyed. These rules are designed to combat illicit tampering with select channels. This splendid little model also giv
es alarms. You can hear it ringing at Christmas time, if alarms are ever needed at that festive season, as you walk under the pines. Do not stray too far from power mains if, on these occasions, you wish to hear any of our range signaling bell-like notes. Do not, in any case, stray too far from anything if you want to keep in touch. We deal with new mains and systems in a further pamphlet. We would like to see everyone equipped with everything we make. This would be really desirable. There is no doubt of that.”

  There is a scattering of polite applause when Arthur has finished reading and a very chic woman wins an indulgent smile from Arthur and an appreciative laugh from the assembly when she points to a competitor’s prong sticking up somewhere between Arthur’s window and the limits of civilization.

  “You want to stay here, Clara,” calls a wit, “there are no cocktails on that side.”

  There is more laughter and then Arthur distributes prongs and they all go away. Then Arthur turns to me.

  “You see?” he asks. “Do you begin to see? How could I have employed you here? How could I have taken you into partnership? Could you do the sort of things you’ve just seen me doing? You’ve been here ten minutes. Perhaps twelve minutes and there’s an illustration of the sort of thing I mean—I regard the two minutes as important, whereas you—but to return. When you came in, I was examining a range of colored planes. The makers wanted me to take these into my factories and carve gigantic colored things out of them and try to sell these colored things. I decided against it. Why? A hundred reasons—but perhaps the decisive one was the weather. Oh you have to live in the real, vital hurly-burly to understand these things. I looked out of this window and saw, above the city, mixed up with the hooting swans and the tearing freights, old, grey October. And then I looked at these dazzling planes of color and something rebelled. The color was a discord, an affront to the season. Now here another man might have said to himself ‘but so subjective and capricious a judgment can surely not be allowed to influence policy.’ I, on the contrary, with my instinctive genius in these matters, said: ‘Some slight echo of this revulsion of mine would sound in the heart of all my potential customers.’ Therefore, in a trice, I rejected the whole project and had it cleared from my eyes and sunk in the rivers of production, weighted with withers and decorations of many kinds. Almost as quickly, I devised a prong and you saw me introduce it, with the appropriate ceremony and skill in human relations, onto the market. There you have fifty reasons, as many reasons as you can divide each reason into, but what was conclusive was what you said when you came in. Do you remember? I remember because I have a special file or compartment in my brain into which I slip data of this sort telling the local watchman to remind me of it each toll of the night bell. Each time the bell tolls, I am reminded of it and try to use it significantly. What did you say when you came in?”

  “I can’t remember, Arthur,” I confess.

  “You said—”

  But I immediately interrupt him, not that I have remembered what I said, but because it suddenly seems to me that all that he has been saying reveals not his superiority but merely his atrocious complacency. For a moment I rebel, a rare and not very successful attempt but one which I find necessary.

  “I said ‘It’s very cold,’” I assert, but then I immediately correct myself. “No, I didn’t, I said ‘Enamel is very cold.’”

  But Arthur shakes his head firmly with a patronizing smile.

  “No,” he contradicts me. “No, what you said was ‘Everyone’s speeding today.’ You’d only just noticed it. It’s extraordinary. It’s almost unbelievable, but it’s true. You’d only just noticed that everyone was speeding. The only way to account for it is to suppose that you’ve spent all your time sitting behind bamboo screens and smoking opiates out of a dossier. It argues mandarin detachment. It argues mandarin complacency. I knew that everyone was speeding. How did I know it? Because I’m speeding and everyone is like me.”

  “I’m not, Arthur,” I point out, but at this he begins to look angry and marches across to the window, puffing out clouds of smoke and, when he reaches it, stands displaying his hands clasped stubbornly behind his back.

  “Yes you are,” he snarls. “You’re exactly like me.”

  “But you’ve just been saying the opposite,” I try to point out, but he interrupts me.

  “You’re exactly like me,” he insists. “Exactly. You must be.”

  But when he turns round a slight furrow of thought creases his brow.

  “Not exactly,” he then modifies. “There are slight differences and those are the reasons why you can’t work here.”

  “Then where can I work?” I ask him, beginning to feel rather dismayed once more.

  “Nowhere, I shouldn’t think,” he retorts unkindly. “There’s no place for you. You’d better make yourself as small as possible. Get away somewhere. Be gone.”

  “But Arthur,” I protest. “You haven’t given me a fair trial. It’s not fair to turn me out like this.”

  “I didn’t say it was fair. I don’t suppose it is, but it’s in the interest of something. Anyway, there’s no place for you here, under any circumstances.”

  “Not even,” I say, playing my last card. “Not even if I get you that license?”

  “You won’t,” he jeers. “You’ve failed already. I had a communication this morning—from that naval chap. Said he wouldn’t give me the license on your request or for any other reason. So you see, there’s no good basing your hopes on that.”

  “Then you’re finished with me?” I ask, suddenly realizing with awe some of the significance of this, but Arthur’s expression softens.

  “No, of course not,” he assures me. “I’ll go on looking after you. After all, you’re part of the family, even if your mother only had the most slender of claims on our indulgence, but I think it would be best if you left the economic side of it, the practical side of it, to me. Nor do I think it desirable for you ever again to say anything that has a bearing on that side of it, certainly not to try and influence me in any way. In that case, I might get really cross and wallop you really hard. I might even kill you.”

  Arthur says the last sentence in a light, almost playful manner but his eyes shine slightly and his strength and energy reveal the possibility of the threat’s almost casual achievement. I am, however, this time, not at all intimidated. In fact, for a moment, it suddenly seems to me that Arthur is no more than a strong, mischievous, advanced boy who does not yet realize that no matter with what gusto he brawls and shouts, he must inevitably reach age and deeper vision in the end. Arthur, who is really very intelligent, notices my unexpected reaction to his words and at least a glimmer of the correct reason comes to him.

  “You’re advancing, younger brother,” he says thoughtfully. “There’s something stronger, at least less docile—ductile—I don’t know—”

  But then he hears the routine sounds of his domain acting in the vicinity and my feeble, temporary authority loses its hold. He smiles, however, gaily, rather drunkenly and looks with perhaps slightly increased detachment at his dry papers and machines and waves me out of the office.

  I go out cheerfully enough and for the first time that day I feel genuinely calm.

  “You look fairly calm,” suggests Miss Carpet whom, quite by chance, I pass when my idle footsteps bear me into the park.

  “Yes, I am,” I agree. “I’m very calm this morning.”

  She does not say any more, but she smiles and writes my name down in her social engagements book, doubtless feeling that it will be pleasant to have a record of someone who is genuinely calm to invite amongst the agitated people she normally consorts with.

  I am, however, rather dismayed when, having left the park and walking down a side street lined with tempting commodities, I pass Gore, still amiably seeking pleasure, and he remarks:

  “You look anything but calm, today.”

  “I’m afraid you’re wrong,” I begin, still cheerfully enough. “I am calm, today. I’ve reached a ne
w understanding with Arthur.”

  “Arthur!” he asks quickly, looking up from an exquisite thing he is examining. “Do you know Arthur?”

  “Rather well,” I say, not without irony.

  “Rather well?” he echoes. He darts me a sharp glance of refreshed interest. “And do you find Arthur conducive to calm?”

  “Not particularly,” I admit. “Not just as he is—no.”

  “And yet, having just reached some sort of agreement with him, presumably necessitating direct contact, even negotiation, with the brute, you feel calm?”

  “Yes,” I affirm.

  “I’m glad you feel calm,” he remarks, and his tone seems to be genuinely solicitous. “I never feel calm. The words stick in my throat, like lumps of brute clay—and then there’s this pleasure—this imbecile pleasure—and crime—”

  “Crime?” I ask, surprised at the juxtaposition. “Crime,” he repeats. “It’s part of pleasure, but in a complicated, slow and basically fraudulent way. Look, I was on my way to consult the Commissioner. Do you want to come? He’ll tell you if you’re really calm.”

  We reach Commissioner Brangwill who has the reputation of being a man at the very center of affairs.

  “As a man living in a crystal,” he modifies, when I have explained that I am familiar with this aspect of his reputation. “It’s the same thing. But never mind, the crystal is transparent, nebulous, mental. It won’t topple. It won’t hinder your closer approach. Well—you’d better get used to the atmosphere or you’ll be lost in it. I suppose it’s not every day that you find yourself at the center of affairs?”

  “He knows Arthur,” explains Gore, who has seated himself on a little chair, charmingly carved in the shape of a cherry pip.

  “Yes, he knows Arthur,” agrees the Commissioner coldly.

  “One might fancy,” I remark, since neither of the other two seem disposed to open a discussion, “that this were a rural cottage, and not the center of affairs. You’ve had these chairs carved like cherry pips and eggs.”