The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  “Aye, this be tougher than drivin’ about in a car.” The old man smiled. “Ach, ye made a good try.”

  Nicholas smiled. Now he stopped, got down as far as he could through the mud to the claw of the root, gripped it, forced it around, and then heaved. After a fearful struggle he at last tore it up with a jerk that threw him on his back. Now all he had to do was to wrench away the secondary roots, and he took a long breath and looked at the stump.

  “Come out, you—bastard!” said Nicholas, astounding Blake, who jumped aside as the heavy root was slung up out of the trench. Nicholas got out and felt good. His clothes were ruined.

  The old man looked at the root. “Aye, ‘twas a good bit job, but ee wouldn’t be able to do that alter a day’s work.”

  “Wouldn’t I?” Nicholas paused. “Blake, get my wallet out of the inside pocket.” He turned to the old man. “Go on, get your overcoat.” The old man obeyed the command in Nicholas’ voice and went down to the bush where his overcoat was bundled. “Take out a fiver, Blake. My hands are muddy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Drive him to his house, let him change his clothes, then take him over to the Roebuck and tell Mr. Hillson to give him the same lunch that I have. Come back for me at five o’clock.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t tell him who I am, Blake.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  The old man came back with his coat.

  “Have you any lunch in your pocket?” asked Nicholas. .

  “Aye, a wee bit bread and cheese.”

  “Leave it there. I’m going to finish this drain. You can do my job for the rest of the day.”

  “But, sir...”

  “Never mind. Do as I tell you. Blake will look after you. I want a holiday. You call this work. I call it pleasure.”

  “But, sir, I be planning the lie of this drain all the morning, and...”

  “That’s all right. A blind man could see how to cut this drain. Go on, Blake.”

  Blake nodded at the old man who was too bewildered to resist. Then he looked back at Nicholas. Unaccountably Blake found that he had winked at his master. He saw him take up the grubber, having spat on his hands. He knew that the drain would be done at five o’clock. Blake suddenly realized that it was raining like hell. He had forgotten it.

  Nicholas watched the car vanish around the corner of the lonely byroad and looked about the landscape. There was not a house in sight. He was alone with his labor. He felt alone as a cow does that goes away by herself to calve in the corner of a field, alone as a man does who goes into the wilderness to let his soul in the pangs of birth come out before his eyes alone. Out here in the whisking rain and the skirling wind he was alone with something to do. He stuck the grubber in the soil and went and folded up his overcoat about the bread and cheese wrapped in a red handkerchief and laid it under a bush. Then he stood and examined the lie of the drain. He wondered why the old man had cut it so deep and then he realized that the flooding came from a blocked underground drain at the level of which he must junction with this cutting, and he saw also that this drain, the way it slanted, would clear once and for all this boggy corner of the field and make it plowable. The old man had reckoned it all out and was not going to temper it in a temporary job and let perhaps a fortnight’s rain turn the subsoil into a winter sponge.

  Nicholas was slightly surprised to find how he could understand the old man’s mind and see it mapped out here in the field. He pulled off his collar and tie and stuffed them into his pocket. In an indifferent way he felt that those who knew him might think he was doing something odd. He did not care a damn. This was about the first thing he had really wanted to do, and he was discovering that once something really got its hands about one’s heart, all doubts and problems had gone. They were gone away with those clouds and blown away with those shocked leaves, and somewhere at the other side of the hill were Muriel, and Sidonie, and the Chinese room, and the anonymous letters, and they had lost all their meaning. The only thing here and present was that drain, and now, by God, he must get down to it, and he’d better cut a stick, not having the old man’s training, so that he could keep it at the same depth all the way up.

  Now, the root out of the way, he could take the spade for a while, and he picked it up and found the handle was a skinned limb that had not been planed, and he felt for the natural holds between the knots, and familiarized his hands with it as a blind man might try to apprehend the face of somebody with his fingers. Then he rubbed his hands on his buttocks, and spat on them, feeling that in some way he was consecrating them to labor.

  He got down in the drain and began to dig.

  He found there was a sensual delight in the slicing of the moist clay, and he cut clean oblongs and piled them on one parapet of the trench, feeling that later on they would be useful to build a fence or clamp into a dam, because, he knew in some way, this drain ought to be closed by large stones upon a floor of flagstones, and, realizing that, he made four-inch shelves on each side a foot above the bottom to support the flagstones. Each time he came to a root or a stone the beauty of the job was spoiled, but he packed each empty warren of a root with clay, and remedied the gapped shelf with this plastic stuff that one could shape on the potter’s wheel. Under an old cart track, he ran into a gravel bottom of flints and clinkers once laid on the surface to bear the wheels and now sunk down, and here he had to use the pick arm of the grubber, and for the first time felt the sting of point on stone going up through his arms and down his spine. This was something, by the Lord, that one could take a shoulder swing at, and something that one smacked one’s teeth at, and cursed, and basted, until one felt the pick was a geologic hammer making the bones of the world fly in splinters. This, by the Lord, was something like work, and Nicholas felt the salt of sweat pickle his eyes and the handle beginning to stick to his hands as if it were scalded onto the skin. He stopped for a moment and felt the hinge of his back bending as in a cramp, surveyed his foreground, and, as the old man might have, spoke aloud to himself: “Christ, the bloody carts on this track must have been a mile wide!”

  He loosed the pick in his hand and realized that a patch of skin had come away on the handle. “God, I’d forgotten about the blisters!”

  He made up his mind to clear through the track before he took a spell for the bread and cheese. The wind, going high, had blown the rain away, and he could take off his coat, and now he began to experience the real slog of physical work. He was getting tired, but that knowledge did not alter the fact that he must work on until the job was done, and suddenly he knew that he was jailed here in this drain, and that there was no way out until he cut his passage through to the water. He found somehow that a job like this insisted on being done and that that insistence had no bearing on payment or the love of work or anything outside the internal necessity of the job itself to get done. The drain had jailed him in itself as a painting or concerto or novel jails the artist and contains him there in the manual execution. All he knew was that the job somehow had to get completed and would have confined anybody else there in the same way it confined him. Getting tired was not going to be any escape, nor would Blake at five o’clock allow him to get away if it were not done. There he would have to stay and finish it, as certainly the old man would have stayed. Once, as he straightened up to ease his back, he nearly dropped the spade in surprise as he realized that he would not have the slightest notion of leaving this job to rush into a meeting of Dorman’s Royal Flush, although he had come down through the length of England like a man in a panic on yesterday, simply to arrive in time for that conversazione. Then he almost slapped himself in impatience for standing here and wasting time in thought with at least another yard of this cart bottom to get done before lunch.

  His hands had become very sore before he got through the track, and he was dog-tired when he sat down to the bread and cheese. There were four great slices of bread, and a hunk of red cheese, and a pinch of salt in a twist of paper, and there
was a slight taste of tobacco over everything. Nicholas would not have cared a damn, he knew, if there was a taste of urine. All he knew was that four enormous slices of bread now looked to him no larger than a snack for some bored epicure in Lilliput, and certainly not a meal. He ate it as slowly as he could, then went up and knelt down and drank water from a spring. He got his cigarette case, and found his lighter and he hoped it would work.

  Before he snapped his lighter, he paused in thought. Now the only problem in life was whether his lighter would work or leave him stranded here without a smoke. He took a deep breath and snapped it and thanked God for the flame. Then, over his cigarette, he pondered on the fact that the fate of the Indian loan was not his problem at all. It was a headache he had inherited with Bude’s Bank and that did not concern his personal existence or happiness. But the lighting of this cigarette was something important. He wanted it for himself, was doing it for himself, not for a lot of bloody fools in Whitehall or for the satisfaction of the Bude Bank staff, who would probably get more personal kick out of the India loan and his peerage than he ever could. So what the hell was he doing it all for? He was doing it simply as Grierson had been doing his manservanting at Barrington Hall, because he had inherited it, and it had deprived him of all personal volition. Grierson had kicked out of an existence that did not belong to him, so why the hell shouldn’t he? He knew that now was not the time to consider it, but he also knew that what he was doing now would make the decision by itself, and his own decision later would simply be the royal rubber-stamping of a bill and nothing more. It would all have happened here. It irritated him now, even to waste time thinking about it, because he had the immediate labor before him, that was more urgent each moment as the water began to swirl over the corner of the mangold field. And, my God, his hands were red and sore and raw as a baby’s bottom, and, the moment he touched that rough, unplaned handle, they were going to sting and burn and whatever skin was left to peel off would be gone soon.

  He almost leaped from the contact of the grubber. Heavens, this was the hell of a root in front. It seemed to have been sewn into the earth, and it was all knuckles, as if it had to fight its way through the hard soil below the cart track. He dropped into the trend and began to whack at it. After some moments, for this first time, he began to wonder if he could stick this out and bear the scorching on his palms. But his instinct as an oarsman told him one went on through the unbearable to the end, and that it was useless to contemplate giving up. The tears smarted into his eyes as his hands stung fiercely in the hacking. God, it was raining again, and he must put his coat on. Even the silk lining of the sleeve was painful on his skin. He used his handkerchief to insulate his forehand, and wished to God that he had not left his gloves in the car. And then he stood up and saw the old man in his mind’s eye coming back and seeing him working in gloves, and he stuck his handkerchief furiously into his pocket and drove the grubber as much as possible from the palm of his thumb. At last he got the root out and had some ease in cutting with the spade. He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand, and the salt of the sweat stung his now almost skinless palm. By God, this was hell...

  It was hell, and he was enjoying it.

  He kept his eyes off the goal of the drain, and worked on steadily, his sense of the architecture of the drain now becoming almost instinctive, so that he seldom glanced back to confirm his lines with the eye. As he tired, at each sag his body mustered new power in his muscles that now were beginning to breed their own energy, so that they could almost work on without the ordering of the brain, the body excelling in its own genius. Now he had established that rhythm and circulation that goes on inexhaustible as the blood, and he felt that to stop would somehow jar the auto-momentum, and he did not even look at his watch until he found himself within a yard of the end. Then he stood and saw that he would have to cut another short temporary drain above to divert the water while he joined the entrance. He looked at his watch. It was half-past four less a few minutes. He thought he could just do it before Blake arrived, and he hauled himself out and began furiously to hack out another drain to take the erupting flood. That took him fifteen minutes, and he ran to the spring for a drink before he tackled the last yard. He realized that it had again stopped raining and wondered when it had. He threw his coat aside, opened his shirt, and took the spade.

  When he had cut the last piece of clay, and cleaned out the bottom, that came in just two inches below the gravel floor of the underground drain, Nicholas had a feeling a man might have who has joined two continents in an undersea tunnel. It was something done. This was a new drain. Not a new investment of old money. It was his drain. Not somebody else’s drain. He had made it, built and smoothed up the sides, made those exact and intelligent ledges to take the flagstones. Somebody called Maclew might own for an hour or a hundred years this land that was once his grandfather’s but this drain was his, just as it would have been the old man’s drain if he had made it. And the old man would know that very well. Bit by bit, plow sod by plow sod, seed by seed, sapling by sapling, fence by fence, stone by stone, building, sowing, opening gaps in nature, directing the flow of water, the old man had made England his own. Not England, the earth itself. That was owning land. He did not own Barrington. Forsyte and Cantlebye did. One could not own anything one bought, only what one made. Deed and lease signified nothing. That was what old Christian Bude knew, whose tough hands would not be bleeding now after this labor. That was what old Jock knew when he pensioned himself off back into the real ownership of...

  He looked up and saw the car sliding into a pause. Good Lord, he had been daydreaming. Had the old man come back? Nicholas smiled. He had done the job. The recognition of that from the old man was more important than a peerage. All one wanted to be a successful peer was a double seat to one’s pants as there were no beds in the Lords.

  Blake came down and did not touch his cap, and in some way showed more respect by not doing it. He said nothing but walked to the edge of the drain and looked along it. He stood for a moment and then said: “Are you going to let the water in now?”

  “Yes.”

  Nicholas found that it was now quite natural to work under the eyes of Blake. He took away the shield of sods, and the water rushed down into the new drain, and Nicholas felt all the blood rushing through his body and for a terrible instant thought it was going to rush out through his eyes.

  Blake kept watching the water in a silent way. Then he turned and said: “He wanted to come back, but he was—kind of sleepy, and I put him down at his house.”

  “Yes.” Nicholas paused. “Was he all right?”

  “Yes. I didn’t take him to the Roebuck. I thought he’d only be out of place. We had a steak in the Shorthorn Arms and plenty of beer. Then we went and looked at a football match in the rain, and what with the beer and all he got tired. So I put him down.”

  “You did the right thing. I knew it was silly about the Roebuck.”

  Blake was somehow more sure of himself. He knew he had been sensible. Nicholas pulled on his coat and found his pipe. He sat down on the bank of the drain and said: “I think I’ll have a pipe.” He paused. “I’d like to see the water come clear. Oh, Lord, this looks in a mess.”

  Nicholas looked at the tobacco pouch and sighed.

  “Have some of mine. It’s cut flake, but you won’t mind it in the open air.” Blake looked at the water and said in a considering way, “They ought to stop the water and put the flagstones down on Monday before the ledges get washed.”

  “I was thinking that.”

  “I’ll drop over tomorrow and tell old Hampton you’ve cut the ledges.”

  “Does he know who I am?”

  “Yes. He found out in Morton Syme. They know your car.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Nicholas pulled at his pipe, and Blake smoked his in a leisurely way.

  Blake had sat on a large stone and had speculated on whether his master had managed to get it out. He said: “Was this stone in the w
ay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Humph.”

  Nicholas was looking quietly at Blake. He realized he had just met him for the first time. They were silent for some time, and then Nicholas said: “It’s getting clear now.”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat in complete silence for some time after that, and then Nicholas said: “I can see bottom now. I think we might go.”

  Blake got up. Nicholas went along and fetched his overcoat, and Blake did not offer to help him. They walked up to the road together when Nicholas had put the tools where old Hampton would find them. Just before they got to the road Nicholas stopped and looked back.

  “You know, Blake, this used to be our land.”

  “I know.”

  When they got out on the road, Blake opened the door of the car for him and said: “Home, sir?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Nicholas knew very well why Blake had not called him “sir” or commented on the drain. He was treating him as a man, not an amateur who had just enjoyed a prank.

  “Coat, sir? Apt to chill after work.”

  “Very well.”

  Blake was closing the door on him when he paused and suggested: “Like to keep this to ourselves, sir? We can go in the stable yard, and you can cross over the bridge straight to your room.”

  “Yes.”

  Blake got in and, Nicholas thought with a sigh, had become the smooth and debonair chauffeur to Nicholas Bude, the great banker, again.

  When they got home, nobody was about, and Blake said: “If you’d like to put those clothes on your window sill, sir, when you’ve changed, I could get rid of them for you. Beyond cleaning or anything now. Leave your shoes, too. I’ll clean them and put them back in your room.”

  “Thank you, Blake.”

  “Oh, here’s your change, sir.”

  Blake gave him the change out of the fiver. Something told Nicholas not to offer it to him. it?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”