“But it is the truth?”
“No, it’s not the truth.”
“Then why were you so disturbed?”
“Because you’re so clumsy and male and dogmatic. I’ll discuss it—but don’t come too close to me. Stay in your chair.” She sank down on the pad. Her composure returned.
“It is my work I’m guarding. That’s all that matters to me. Last night at the party, how many of the people there were failed artists, writers? Two out of three, I’d bet. Painters whose vision died, writers whose words wore thin—”
Her eyes were on him. Arnold knew now what she had divined in his mind, just as he had divined the nature of her work in hers. Was it so apparent still, the reek of failure as strong about his mind as in hers the spiky fragrance of creativity? Her words took him back six or seven years to the time when the only thing that mattered in his life had been the quest for words. The pattern of words that caught a moment of experience in its net—a moment that linked it with all eternity and the experience of all men. Word over all, amen. The shape, the touch, the savour of words; the sudden illumination of a humble, drab word when it was placed in just the right setting, the right light. The process of sifting, rejecting, testing. The appearance of those words, his words, in a thin volume from an obscure press. The ripples going out, earning him a small reputation in quarters where words still mattered.
Then one grey morning, or had it been in the midst of a party—had that moment, too, come when the soul was most jostled and most alone?—the sickening sense that it was all futile. That the battle would never be won—that words were not the deep language of the universe but only the drunken dialect of an incestuous village.
“From the time I started painting,” Claire went on, “I knew the danger. And I knew the reason. The world hates artists, really. It needs them—Lord, how it needs them!—but it hates them. Hates their independence, the fact that they’re outside the rat race, that they’re free to comment, to follow their own vision. Once the artist had a place in society—perhaps then all men were artists. But no longer. Oh, society will find a place for him, hand him fat cheques to decorate its buildings or to hang his pictures behind the pointless faces on a TV screen—but it will do its utmost to corrupt him. The cheques aren’t honest wages; they’re bribes. Now you understand why I keep my work away from the world? Until it’s developed enough strength in its own integrity to stand against the corruption.”
Arnold understood, although it wasn’t the way he saw what had happened to him. That had been a personal thing, a measuring of himself against the task and the conviction that he was inadequate. But might not that have been the process working as she saw it? Writing advertising copy had been more rewarding than writing verse. A man had to keep alive. He had told himself that the words he used to promote the sale of vitamin pills were not the same words that he used in verse. But weren’t they? Even if they weren’t, couldn’t one word taint the next like apples in a barrel? He thrust the thought aside.
“But you can’t reject the world. For better or for worse, we’re part of it.”
“Pah, the old social realism dogma. It’s permeated art for ages. Even when people denied it in their work, they still paid lip service to it. Of course an artist is part of his day and age. But he’s not a mouthpiece for it. He can show the strength of his vision—and portray the world—just as surely in his rejection of it as in acceptance.”
“But if you reject it, how do you live?” Arnold immediately regretted the question. “There I go again, being clumsy. Please don’t answer.”
“Why not? I have a small private income.”
“Oh.”
“You mean, I’m lucky? I am lucky. I’m lucky, too, that I can put paint on canvas. You thought I was falsely modest about my work. But, you know, you’ve got a beautiful talent for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. I have a gift, and I know it. My life is to use it, explore it. I don’t care who knows it, but I don’t see why anybody should want to know. I’m only talking like this because—because of what happened between us. The only thing that matters to me is that I’m not going to be deflected from it by anyone—anything.”
“But have you never stopped to think that—well, that a degree of involvement might be good for your work?”
“Involvement? I said I had a small private income. You should see me haggling with shopkeepers. No thank you, I’m involved enough.”
Arnold had the feeling that he had been diverted from his object. He was grateful for knowing more about her, but only if that knowledge helped him to approach her. But he seemed no nearer.
“I shouldn’t have pried into your private life. I told you, I don’t want that. I want to get this thing nailed, that’s all.” He noticed her slight grimace but he went on, though he felt as heavy-footed as a bear. “Look, I’m thirty. I work in a pint-sized advertising agency that lives on the crumbs that the bigger boys let fall from their tables. Probably I’m trying to reassure myself that, while I may have sold my soul, I haven’t sold it to the highest bidder. But the fact remains that I’m a parasite on a parasite on a parasite. I had just about accepted that fact—” which was he recognized now, the truth of it—“then this comes along. One of us—or both of us—has this talent, gift, knack, whatever you like to call it. Something happened to us that never happened before to anybody. Or if it did, I never heard of it.
“But, however it happened, it happened. And it happened to us. How can you sit there and forget it? It’s something unique. We owe it to ourselves to find out more about it. We owe it to the world.”
“Oh, so that’s it. You want to be famous.”
“Hell, no. I mean—what do I mean?—I mean that we owe it to the fund of human experience.”
“But just what do you want? For us to form a mind reading act? Or do you want to find yourself—to see what you really look like to somebody else?”
Something sharp and crystalline exploded in him.
“Now who’s being clumsy! My God, is that all you see in it?”
“I’m sorry—dreadfully sorry. Oh, why did it have to happen to us? Why couldn’t it have happened to two other people?” She buried her face in the pad.
After a while she lifted her face. “Don’t you see? You once tried to reach people with words. I try to reach—” she bit her lip—“no, I don’t try to reach anybody. But, all right, art is a communication. But this is a short-circuiting of everything I’ve striven for—for everything every artist strives for. I read a story once about a mime who carried his art to such lengths that one day he actually became what he was trying to impersonate.”
Arnold could feel the agitation in her, so that his anger dropped away from him. Now he felt only solicitude.
“What happened to him?” he asked gently.
Her big eyes looked up into his.
“He killed himself.”
He moved from his chair, but fell back, knowing that. there was no help for her distress, that this was the crux of the matter for her, that his nearness would only make it unbearable. And then—
It was the same sensation as on the night before. The force bridged the gap, exploding between them, gathering them up into the same alien region.
Only this time it was not utterly alien, so that the shock was not so great. He was left with enough consciousness to recognize what had happened, to reason in a world which at first contact seemed to deter reason.
He was not, this time, merely alone with another mind in another world. His mind and that mind were that world, the strange landscape that crowded around them and stretched away to unknown horizons only the uninterpreted ruins of the old.
A sharp vertigo seized him. Claire had referred to their previous experience as falling into somebody else’s mind, of falling over a precipice. This precipice was only a few feet deep—the physical distance between their two minds—but it might have. been the span of a galaxy. The passage of light-years was condensed into a small part of a second—then cont
act, utter contact.
He was in her mind more actually, more acutely, than she herself had ever been. And he knew that she was in his to the same degree. He knew now how little he had known his own mind, and knew why. From infancy, through adolescence, to what he had laughingly thought maturity, the ego had learned to adapt to the dangers of its environment. It had learned what to reject, what to accept because it could not be rejected, and what, because it could neither be accepted, nor rejected, to suppress. Now he felt a force that probed at those suppressed fears, just as he was probing at those in the mind opposite.
But it was not opposite, it was here. And at the same touching of the hidden, his mind recoiled just as the other mind did.
Find One: this gift has its sense of delicacy. It would not—could not?—grope into certain places. Not without an agreement of minds. It was bilateral; the mind that probed into such places was itself bared.
But, as it withdrew, that questing sense brought back with it intimations of the darker regions such as no mind ever brought back from delving within itself. He wondered, as if in a dream, how much would survive on his return to reality. Would he remember the dark bruise in the bright centre of consciousness? What was it? The agony of birth? The cruciform mark of existence? Or simply the knowledge that that bright centre was only mortal?
In the image of their being, in the cluster about that bright centre, like islands on a map, were other, smaller centres. That region where his mind had turned back, that was one. Another, antipodal to that, hazy with green and gold—
Find Two: there are colours here, emblematical colours
—was a haven from the storms of mind and world. Here was sleep, sanctuary. Because it was the place of peace, which no fact could be allowed to disturb, it was vague of detail. He felt he had not the skill in the use of this power to bring it into focus.
Besides, the other mind merged with his was withdrawing from contact. No, refining it. It was as if the chorus and orchestra had hushed, their complex utterance replaced by the clear voice of recitative.
Claire spoke to him now, her words as precise as if they were being uttered aloud.
“You have had your wish. Just as you surmised, there are stages to this.”
“Yes.” He had never uttered, or heard, the simple affirmative so clear. Without reservation or amplification. He felt that he was standing in a church, answering a catechism.
“Did you see in my mind why I cannot go on? No? Then look.”
She drew the veil from one of the centres that his mind had had no consent to enter. Now consent was being given. There could be no falsehood in this.
Time had meaning again in this directed contact. A long moment passed.
“You see that it is not a power that I am guarding, but truly my work?”
“Yes.”
“You see that, however important this power may be to you, to me it is the enemy of my work?”
“Yes.” And there was accent in the word now, so that he recognized the hopelessness in his mental voice.
“Could you, in my place, sacrifice the greater for the less?”
“No.”
“Because we have made contact, you want us to go on. But, having made contact, knowing that my self is no less precious than your own, can you seek to intrude your will on my will?”
“No but—”
“I catch your protest. You feel that somehow I may be implanting my will on yours, not vice versa. Despite my disavowal, you think that I am the one who generates this power, that I can therefore use it in ways that you do not understand. Look again… do you see?”
“Yes.”
“That, even if the power were mine unconsciously, then I still want nothing more to do with it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see that a danger to my work is a danger to me? That if my work were threatened I might—”
“Yes, yes.”
“Thank you. Forgive this catechism. It is you who wanted to persuade me. I am sorry, believe me. We are different in so many things, but I would not want to hurt you. Any more than I want to be hurt.”
“Then…?”
Abruptly, with a slight flickering of the room around them, as if in a heat haze, they had returned to normality.
The room was dim in the evening light. Obviously it was not light-conditioned. Claire got up from the pad and switched on an old-fashioned ceiling fixture.
In its light they looked at each other. She smiled sadly.
He turned away and rose to his feet.
“I must go.” He hesitated. “But if you ever feel—” He broke off, feeling absurdly sixteen again, parting from his first girl. “Here’s my phone number.”
And he went, leaving her there in that bare room, down the stairs, into the evening and a world that was more bare by far.
CHAPTER FOUR
Finally, after two weeks, he had to tell somebody. He deliberately chose the least sensitive person he knew. The last thing he wanted in his present state was an emotional orgy. He chose Vic Emery. He called and arranged to meet him in Feeney’s Long Bar. He chose the place deliberately, too. It was old—brown and old—squatting among the sheer glass towers of Holborn like a monument to man’s defiance of the new. More important, it had booths where one could talk undisturbed.
He was the first to arrive. He ordered a beer and sat himself on a stool at the bar. It was seven o’clock, the day’s equinox. The last lingering office husbands had left to catch their trains for the suburbs; the peculiar type of bar-fly that hovered in this kind of place, poised as it was between City and West End, had only just started to appear.
Even so, he felt the presence of people. That had been the only redeeming feature of the days of emptiness since he and Claire had parted—an odd sense which was like a feeble reflection of the power. It was like being in a fog, seeing hooded shapes blundering past that in sunlight would have been people.
No, it was like hearing, rather. Like going into an absolutely dark room and hearing somebody breathing. Only they could have held their breath, been absolutely silent, and with this sense he would have known that they were there, and just where they were. He had not put it to any such test, scorning the pitiful remnant of a gift. But in every street he felt the press of minds about him. Not enough to disturb him, he was disturbed enough. In a better state, he might even have found it comforting.
Sitting here now, sipping his beer, he did put it to the test. He pictured the other bar that lay beyond the great hogsheads ranged behind the counter, and counted the unseen people in it. There were six, their minds like faint nimbuses in the dark brown cloud of this place. Then he felt a nearer presence behind him.
“Ah, my old flagellating friend. Flogged any good slaves lately?”
That could only be one person—Vic. Arnold turned on his stool to meet the familiar broad face. The frame beneath it was broad, too, but with Vic you noticed the face, not only first but last. It looked a humorous one, with a stub nose and full lips, until you remembered—or discovered—that it rarely smiled. If something amused it, it would explode in a gale of laughter. But its usual expression, as now, was of being only on the verge of smiling. It wasn’t until you equated that with the cool grey eyes that you recognized the strain of mockery. Even then, you weren’t sure. With Vic you were never sure what he thought. Arnold had never seen him in a temper or even a mood, though he had heard him say the most outrageous things, particularly to women. And Arnold had never seen that face slapped. When people were with Vic, somehow they accepted his scale of values.
So that now he answered, “No slaves on this coast, effendi. Worse luck. What are you drinking? Bitter?”
“Did I! Left me teeth in her. Christ, how corny can you get. You know, Ash, you’re a bad influence on me. I’ll have a pint.”
Arnold ordered for the two of them and steered Vic to a booth.
Vic took a great gulp of beer and smacked his lips. “What’s up, son?The missus left you?”
> “Vic, you know I’m not married.”
“Aren’t you?” Vic peered at him mock-myopically. “No wonder she left you. Don’t you think it’s time you made an honest woman of her?”
“Vic, will you wrest yourself from whatever plane of unreality you’re currently inhabiting and listen?”
“Certainly.” He sobered. “What is it? Something’s troubling you. Tell your old auntie.”
Arnold shook his head sadly. But he had chosen Vic to be his confidant; he would have to humour him. “All right. But first, you know me well enough, I hope, to know that I’m not given to seeing things—”
“Only after the twentieth drink.”
“Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment not only to my sanity but to my drinking powers. In fact, I’ve never approached the bend, let alone gone round it. But something happened to me—”
“Don’t say you saw a ghost. You sounded like somebody who had, when you rang me. I thought they went out with pointed shoes.”
“It was something of the same order.” He proceeded to tell Vic, as well as he could put it into words, what had happened. He did not try to convey the nuances of the contact; he had not fully grasped them himself, and with every day since the reality of the experience had dwindled. He just told him the bare facts and took care not to include among them Claire’s name.
“Well,” he said when he had finished, “what do you make of it? Tell me honestly. That’s why I arranged this meeting.”
Strangely, Vic didn’t laugh, a prospect for which Arnold had prepared himself. He raised his glass for another swig and his cool grey eyes looked over it. He lowered it.
“She’s a witch,” he said.
That startled Arnold. Witches weren’t in his cosmogony, nor, would he have thought, in Vic’s.
“You’re not serious?”
“As serious as I can be. I don’t mean all that junk about flying on broomsticks. But women are funny. My God, I’m cliché-ridden tonight. No, but they are odd. You think they’re a chattering lot, none of them good for more than a quick lay on a cold night, but there’s depths in every one of them. Let’s face it, they’re more in touch with things that matter than we are. Perhaps it’s having kids… I mean, it comes through them, they’re the line that everything descends on. We’re just the hairy old bees buzzing round the main stem.”
The Silent Speakers Page 3