The Limits of Vision

by Robert Irwin

  Inside the long chamber their heads are more or less level with the rafters. The noise is enough to drive one out of one’s mind. There is the clanking of chains and buckets coming up from the wells. There is the cranking of the gears that drive and turn the long wooden spoon-like objects that stir the mud in the vats. Rejected sludge gurgles as it trickles out of bungholes at the bottom of the vats. And, more distantly outside the main chamber, there is the perpetual din of people shouting, doors slamming and keys turning. Here in the long gallery of the Savonnerie we are spectators at the beginning of the Great Incarceration of Dirt. These pioneering reformers are going to have it shut up in bags, bins and sewage tanks. The deputy has to cup his hands and shout to make himself heard. When he is heard one of the great wooden spoons is made to rise from a vat up almost to the level of the horrified gaze of the visitors; wrapped around the ladle-end is a woman’s soiled shift.

  Down goes the spoon again into the central mudbath. Attendants recommence their experiments, squirting jets of water into the vat and running electric currents through the water. The men tend to the vats and the electric batteries. The women, heavily muscled launderesses, keep clear of the danger area and are employed in the grating of large cakes of soap. Meanwhile Dickens is warming to the deputy. He finds the young man’s attentions extremely flattering. Why, the deputy claims to have been put on the road to his present career by reading Great Expectations! That scene with Miss Havisham and the dusty bridal feast!

  ‘I tell you I know key passages by heart and can recite it from memory,’ shouts the deputy. And he does so:

  ‘“… was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long table with a table-cloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired …”’

  The deputy could have continued, but he is interrupted by the Superintendent.

  ‘The Devil’s supper!’ quips the Superintendent, pointing at the long spoons rotating in the vats. No one laughs, and the Superintendent moves on to tell Dickens all about his wife and his lovable brood of infants.

  Dickens loses interest in the talk. He gazes down at the turbid shapes being stirred in the mud, seeing in them images of insanity, poverty and crime. He is working presently on the ending of Edwin Drood. It has become necessary for the Superintendent to rejoin the party now, for his presence is obligatory before the latest technique for extracting filth can be demonstrated. He makes signals, and two of the launderesses move to open the large wooden double door at the end of the chamber. Through the doors the visitors can see a smaller room, well lit by gas. In the centre of the room is a leather armchair. Strapped to the armchair is a lunatic. The director claps his hands, and jets of water spray down on the lunatic. Everybody laughs. The lunatic squirms. Sluice channels carry his filth and urine down to a small experimental vat in the main chamber. The filth will mix with water. Then the water will be boiled off and we shall have the distilled essence of madness and fear.

  The lunatic has his eyes shut and is dazedly trying to shake his head away from the water. Behind his shaking head a dark patch can be detected on the leather chair-back. It is not the first time that this chair has been used for this experiment and the leather has suffered somewhat. The dark shape on the chair-back is the black exospore of common household mould, Mucor. Mucor is sending dark thoughts to the famous author in the gallery, in demented determination to secure for household mould a central role in the ending of Edwin Drood. Perhaps he will be successful. Dickens’s mind is turning over …

  The Superintendent claps his hands again, and the two launderesses struggle to close the doors. The one on the left, Nelly, has a husband, Valentine. Valentine does not work in the Savonnerie, but he has secured for himself a place in a ships’ chandler’s in the Docks area. While Dickens (and Mucor) work on the ending of Edwin Drood, Nelly is thinking about what she will do when the day’s work is over. She and Valentine will take the train to Denmark Hill (LBSCR) and visit the Lava Rink. Friday night is roller-skating night for Valentine and Nelly. The management have just acquired the new Plimpton skates with rubber pads which give assistance in changing the direction of the (wooden) wheels. Nelly also likes to flirt with the skateboy while she is having her skates strapped on. But for now she can only dream of the night’s giddy pleasures when she will step out with Valentine.

  ‘All mad, you know,’ Mucor addresses me directly. ‘With the best of intentions, but little serious thought, the people at the Savonnerie were stumbling in a sort of half-witted way towards what they hoped would be the washing-machine. All hopelessly misconceived. Evil simply fermented in those huge unsterilized vats. The real technical ancestry of the washing-machine turned out to be quite different. And yet, and yet it was a precursor, the precursor of the Institute of Whiteness, and, when you think of it, is this trivial thing of tin that whirrs and throbs in the corner of your bathroom really worthy of the name of “washing-machine”? I think not. But you are. You are the real machine that washes in this house. You are the mechanical bride. Darwin, Dickens, Beeton – if the Victorians ever invented anything, it is you.’

  Dirt under torture is not a pretty sight. Because of this, or perhaps because of the stench, one of the ladies in the gallery has been seized by spasms of vomiting. The front of her dress, which is of silk, is covered with vomit.

  ‘How do you get vomit stains out of silk?’

  If I were to go for Hornrim with a kitchen knife, it would be hard to take him unawares. Even now, when he is bemused by my question, he retains a combative panther-like alertness.

  ‘I don’t know. But the tie is not silk and the stain is not vomit.’

  He snatches his glasses from his face, snaps them shut and puts them in a case in his pocket.

  ‘I think my visit has been most useful. Perhaps you would be good enough to show me out?’

  Reluctantly I lead him downstairs. I was not expecting him to go so suddenly. I am confused and suspicious.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to come into the kitchen? I could make some tea, and there are still some things I would like you to put my mind at rest about.’ (Household stains, the problem of evil, Hornrim’s own credentials from the Institute of Whiteness.)

  But he moves ahead of me and hurries to the door.

  Mucor hisses underfoot, as if in agony, ‘Don’t let him go, Marcia! If you do he will be back soon with a strait-jacket.’

  ‘I will be back soon,’ says Hornrim. ‘Goodbye, Marcia.’

  ‘Goodbye, Dr Hornrim,’ I cry.

  He smiles faintly. ‘Doctor, anyway,’ and he is gone.

  Mucor does not think that we shall be alone together for very long.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Why am I not a Brillo pad? Or the bit of gunge at the bottom of the pan that I am using the Brillo on now? I might have been a Brillo pad or not existed at all. It all seems so arbitrary, this assignment of who I am. There is only one ‘Marcia’ in the world and the chances of my being the same as that ‘Marcia’ seem infinitely small – particularly when I consider the number of Brillo pads there are lying around, perhaps waiting to take my identity. Of course, as a Brillo pad I would not have self-consciousness. That is irrelevant. I would unconsciously exist as an unselfconscious Brillo pad. To be this hard-working, chemically treated mesh-work of wire!

  Experimentally I declaim to the empty kitchen, ‘I am a Brillo pad!’

  There is a sudden rustling behind me. It is the sort of sound which, at the instant y
ou hear it, makes you go cold all over. You fancy a rat dropping on to the meat in the larder or something worse. Then you realize that it is a piece of paper that has been lying in awkward tense folds on the kitchen table all day and has arbitrarily chosen that precise moment to rearrange its folds and rest in new crumples that are more in conformity with the force of gravity. I spin round. Where I should have seen a piece of crumpled paper I find myself staring at a grinning face.

  ‘You are a Brillo pad. You are the dirt at the bottom of the pan – or, as the Hindus would have it, “Thou art the bowman and the bow. Thou art the slayer and the slain. Therefore Arjuna draw thy bow and fear not!” But I am surprised to hear the doctrines of the Bhagavad-Gita falling from your lips, Marcia.’

  ‘Oh, Teilhard! Is that you? Then it must be tea time.’

  He nods and smiles. Flustered, I rattle on, ‘Oh, I do feel a fool, fancying myself a Brillo pad and talking to myself. I didn’t realize you were here. I thought you were still in the Gobi. How was the Gobi? Did you bring the dig to a successful conclusion? Can you help me with the tea things?’

  ‘No need to be embarrassed. No need at all. A Brillo pad is perfectly good to think with. Professional philosophers often take their examples from the mundane and the familiar …’ He stands lost in thought. He is not making a move to help me with the tea things. ‘They say that they do this to make their problems easier to understand, but I sometimes wonder if their aim is not rather to make the familiar seem strange to us. The expedition was a wash-out, by the way. We lost everything in the storms. Even before the dust began to rise, Mucor was at work. You must remember. Oh, how we missed you, Marcia! The Mongols are an admirable people but they are not famous for their washing up. I confess that I found tea with scones in the Gobi something of an ordeal. You must picture it. It is summer. In the summer the Bactrians are in full moult and very irritable from skin sores. The fire is being got. ready and the second cameleer is melting a great pat of camel-dung into the fire to get it going. Once it is going, he returns to kneading the dough for the scones. No washing of hands, for he estimates that the fire purifies all things. Meanwhile the first cameleer has been picking the scabs off the Bactrians. Now he returns and scoops his hand in the butter and off he goes to smooth the butter into the camels’ open sores. No washing of the hands for him either. Then back he comes and, when the scones are ready, the two cameleers spread the butter on the scones with their fingers. Oh, how much I prefer your English teas! I need not say that, before it was time for the rising of the Great Winds, half the expedition was laid low with food poisoning.’

  Now I am ready to move off with a tray-load of stuff into the living room. Teilhard follows me, talking all the time.

  ‘Then when the Great Winds blew up we had no strength to resist and the sands covered what we had uncovered. I was bitter of course. I freely confess it to you. I wept. But as I stood watching the yellow clouds whipping over my work, a great peace came upon me. What was I doing in the Gobi? How had I thought that I should find some great Truth in this oriental wasteland? Was it not my running away? As the poet Novalis says, “Where are we really going? Always home!” So I have returned. And, you know, science is not enough. There must be the spirit too. As I stood looking on the dust storms and listening to the mockery of Mucor in the howling of the wind, the words of Blake came to me:

  The Atoms of Democritus

  And Newton’s Particles of light

  Are sands upon the Red Sea shore

  Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

  ‘Do you know Blake, Marcia?’

  ‘I know Blake. Hello, William.’

  Blake nods affably to show that we are indeed well acquainted with one another. Squeezed in with Blake on the sofa are Leonardo and Dickens. The two chairs by the window have been taken by Charles Darwin and his talented nephew Sir Francis Galton. (That’s a surprise! I shall need more cups.) De Hooch has perched himself as far away from Blake as he can get. Teilhard, finding nowhere else to sit, descends to a cross-legged position on the floor.

  I introduce those who do not already know one another. I am feeling for once a bit one up on Teilhard, who is gazing in awe at Blake, Leonardo and Dickens. To do him credit, though, he is honest about it.

  ‘When one is young, one thinks to oneself that when one shall have been acknowledged a genius, there shall be the end of it. But here in your living room, Marcia, I am conscious that I am only at the foothills of genius. A relative nobody in the pantheon of geniuses. My mind has really more in common with yours, than with theirs, Marcia. Let us hope that they will speak slowly so that we can understand. To be a third-class genius … it is not a pleasant feeling.’

  I smile sympathetically.

  ‘Well, that’s all the introductions done. I think that we are going to need another pot and some more cakes. Would anyone like to come and help me in the kitchen?’

  They all look shiftily at one another. All these geniuses and not one of them knows how to make a pot of tea! So out I go on my own. When I come back I find Darwin examining the cake that is already on the table. It has a little bit of mould on one of its edges.

  ‘My dear, your cake has acquired an entrancing cryptogamic fungus. I last had just such a mould on cake when we were at anchor off Tierra del Fuego. How singular is the relationship between parasitical moulds and the cakes on which they grow in distant parts of the world!’

  He assures me that it is quite harmless to eat, but I recognize the mould for what it is, a focus for the thoughts and words of Mucor. Dickens meanwhile is engaged in telling Galton how he has recently been inspired to conceive of the ending for Edwin Drood.

  ‘Ooh, I hope you are not going to put me in it!’ exclaims Galton. No, he is not.

  This is what we hear:

  ‘… Will you not join us in a game of cards?’ Trapman’s manner of address towards the prisoner is polite and even ceremonious.

  When Necker sees that the prisoner makes no response, he laughs and calls to his fellow gaoler, ‘Deal out the cards for the two of us then, Mr Trapman! Soon enough the Governor will give this fellow ’is deal suit.’

  ‘His deal suit, Mr Necker?’

  ‘’is eternity box, Mr Trapman.’

  ‘His coffin, Mr Necker?’

  ‘That’s it, Mr Trapman. A fine rope cravat for the singing master!’

  (It must be owned that the excess of Necker’s ill-will towards the prisoner fully makes up for any excess of civility on the part of Trapman towards the same.)

  ‘Double demon, Mr Necker?’

  ‘That’s the very ticket, Mr Trapman! Deal out the cards and leave the prisoner to ’is vittles.’

  John Jasper – for it is he – pays his gaolers no heed. It has been well said that when a man knows that he is to be hanged in the morning it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Jasper does not hear the slap of the cards on the table, for all his faculties are engrossed in the contemplation of a stale and musty hunk of bread that is in his hand. See, as he gazes, at what he gazes! A ring of mould has extended itself over a goodly part of the bread’s exterior. A man more optimistically disposed might compare its circle to a fairy ring encountered in the woods, but Jasper’s morbid condition leads him to fancies that have nothing of the fairy in them.

  As he gazes shall he not see the noose and the twisting of its braids and the looping of the knot and the tightening of its knot? The hitching of the knot of death might lead him on to call to memory how he had once schemed to hitch the knot of happiness with the lovely young orphan, Miss Rosa Budd, and had dreamed of pressing the ring of wedlock on her finger. Other memories come unbidden. A napkin ring is the same shape as a wedding ring, but its significance is quite different. There was a napkin ring that rolled across the table when he, Jasper, sprang up to attack and chloroform young Edwin Drood, his own ward and, as he believed, the fiance of that same Miss Budd. Such queer and fantastical rings! How can a wedding ring revolve into a napkin ring and the napkin ring distend
itself into a noose? Very simply; such transformations are commonplace in the thousand false dawns of the opium den. It was in such a den in Limehouse – Jack Chinaman its proprietor – that Jasper has the young Edwin secreted and confined. The deranged choirmaster feeds his young ward opium and seeks to make him sing like a canary in a cage. The den is squalid, the brass opium-pipes are tarnished, and the mesmeric eyes of Mr John Jasper are the only things that glitter in the den’s obscurity. Hypnotism and drugs bind Edwin fast – as surely as if he had been pitched into a well. Unhappy Drood shall be forced to renounce Miss Budd and much else besides.

  Surely he must see the smoke rings ascending from the pipes of the drugged? (The smoke rings are of a yellowish brown, the colour of ivory that has been left in shadow.) Surely he must see where such a ring must end? The opium smoker sees and forgets. The rings darken. Jasper has learnt from the lips of Miss Budd that all his labours have been in vain. Moreover the suspicions of ‘Princess Puffer’ have been aroused by the activities in the den of her neighbour and rival, Jack Chinaman. Drood must be done away with and speedily. Jasper’s scarf encircles Drood’s neck. Its circle tightens. That was swiftly done, but there is the body to be disposed of too.

  Round and round the rings are turning. Jasper hits on the notion of conveying the cadaver to the quicklime pits at King’s Cross, just outside the walls of La Savonnerie. A muscular launderess, hurrying for her train, glimpses two men with sacks talking beside the quicklime pits. That there are two men who so stand with their sacks conversing quietly in the darkening light is a matter of considerable indifference to her and she walks on in the direction of her train, but to one of the men in question, John Jasper – for it is he – this same conference gives rise to the most lively fears. Unhappy mischance that his acquaintance, Durdles, has chosen this evening of all evenings to come up with a sack of Cloisterham grave-dust to sell to La Savonnerie! (But here, reader, there is no fiction; this vile trade in morbid rubbish is openly espoused by philanthropists and such-like folk in the name of science and hygiene and God knows what.) At length Durdles shuffles off and Jasper is able to tip his own deathly load into a quicklime pit. As the sack sinks beneath the surface, it creates eddies and the eddies in turn arrange themselves in a spiralling vortex (counter-clockwise). Ah, must he not see this?