The Oracles

by Margaret Kennedy

  ‘Ivy!’

  He leapt to his feet and looked as though he was going to run away.

  ‘Because he always mattered most to you, didn’t he?’

  More than Maddy did, she thought. More than I shall. But that’s natural, sometimes, when two men are great friends. Like David and Jonathan.

  ‘He’s not dead?’ she pursued.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You quarrelled?’

  He looked puzzled, as though genuinely uncertain of the answer to that. After a while he said:

  ‘I wrote him a letter. He didn’t answer.’

  ‘Probably got lost in the post,’ said Ivy.

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Anyway … I shall never see him again. Don’t talk about it, Ivy.’

  ‘All right, I won’t. But it’s something you’ve got to get over, isn’t it? You can’t do that by all this Benbow business, and pretending that half your life, almost, never happened at all.’

  He nodded, turned away, and set off walking very fast along the ridge of the hill. She made no attempt to go after him. This dangerous moment had not gone off too badly. He might refuse to think. He might prefer to remain but half a man for the rest of his life. In that case she would still marry him, but she must face the fact that she was marrying a kind of cripple. To look after him would be better than nothing, since she loved him, and half a loaf is better than no bread. She still hoped, however, for a nobler fate than that.

  She must wait. She sat on the hill and watched a threshing machine at work in a field below. The whirring noise of it came up to her on the still air, and faint shouts from the men who tended it.

  Plans for the future occupied her mind. She owned a cottage in the village which was let furnished; she had lived there until the death of her child, after which she had gone to her parents for the sake of company. This little house would do nicely for herself and Benbow. Her tenant, a retired schoolteacher, was leaving, anyway, in the New Year and would probably be ready to turn out at Michaelmas if it suited Ivy better. Those children must be brought to Coombe Bassett. Benbow could go on working for her father, who would welcome the prospect of keeping so good a man. There would be some trouble at home; her mother would violently oppose the project, but the storm would blow over if everybody was sensible.

  They would be a little short of money. She would lose her widow’s pension if she remarried, and she could no longer earn large wages by going out, at intervals, to resident posts. But she had a nice little sum laid by and would be getting allowances for the two younger children. Daily work in the village might be possible; there were several ladies who would be glad to employ her. Serafina and Dinah would be in school and off her hands for most of the day, but if Joe was only four she must leave him with her mother when she went out to work. A lot of fuss her mother would make, but she would take him all right, and spoil him, probably, to a shocking degree.

  They would get along perfectly well. Many a family of five had less to live on than the wages Benbow was getting. Moreover, if he took it into his head to turn any more door-stops into cats, there might be some profit in it. He had, she gathered, sold such things before, or, rather, the lost Frank had sold them for him. She would not go on at him to do any more unless he felt like it; if he did, she might show them to Mr. Headley and ask his advice about selling them. Mr. Headley knew about such things and valued good work; he would know what sort of shop would be likely to buy them.

  But if he gets quite all right again, she thought … and realised that all these plans were made for a Benbow who was not quite all right. Should that other return, that whole man whom she was so anxious to recall, she must pay for it by some measure of uncertainty as to the future. For that man’s needs she could not prepare so confidently, nor could she foresee the life which they might lead. She only knew that she would be ready to follow him anywhere, and would rather do so, to the ends of the earth, than make a home in Coombe Bassett for Benbow who dared not face the past.

  He had gone quite far away, to the end of the ridge. Now he was striding back in a great hurry. She thought that he must have decided to tell her everything, but when he got nearer she saw that she had been wrong. There was no resolution in his face. He was excited and harassed; he must have looked like that before he ran away. She had never seen him in such agitation. He flung himself down on the grass beside her, gave her a wild look, and exclaimed:

  ‘I must tell you something. I’ve never spoken of it to anybody. I’ll tell you, Ivy. I’ll tell what was driving me … driving me …’

  He looked round suspiciously, as if afraid that they might be overheard. Then he confided, almost in a whisper:

  ‘Something very horrible and dangerous is happening. We have enemies. Hidden enemies. Nobody knows about it. Nobody is going to notice in time.’

  Oh dear! she thought. I oughtn’t to have stirred him up. It was too soon.

  ‘We are all being persuaded to despair,’ he continued, in the same low, shaken voice. ‘We are being convinced that we are worthless. It’s being done very cleverly. People don’t see how clever it is. They think it’s an improvement. Have you noticed?’

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ she replied placidly. ‘Nobody’s tried to convince me I’m worthless. I’d like to see them do it.’

  ‘They don’t say it openly. But it’s going on everywhere, all the time. I began to notice it before Maddy died. Maddy dying, and everything that has happened since, have nothing to do with it really. I didn’t understand what was happening, though, till one day, when I was in a great dark place full of voices. I had felt it before, you understand? I had begun to feel anxious. I had stopped being able to see people; I couldn’t be sure what they were. As if a curtain had come down. I used to think: How can I get out of this? I used to go up to the quarries and watch the blasting, and think: How can we escape from this? Have you ever felt like that?’

  ‘I get in the dumps sometimes.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. After a while I realised that we are all gradually being brought to think less of ourselves. It’s not merely being attempted. It’s succeeding.’

  ‘Honestly, Benbow, I think you’re wrong. People don’t believe they’re worthless. Not the people I know, anyway. What’s wrong with most of them is they think they’re worth a lot more than they are.’

  He considered this with frowning attention.

  ‘A protection,’ he said, nodding. ‘A natural protection. But will it last?’

  ‘Oh yes. People don’t alter.’

  ‘They’re being undermined, though. That’s it. Undermined. Very crafty. Very crafty. Very crafty.…’

  It was of no use to argue. She decided to dispute nothing, and listened to him. He maintained this mysterious manner as though he were revealing some dangerous secret. Between each sentence was a pause while he sought for words.

  ‘It’s done cheerfully. It’s encouraging and reassuring, so that people are ready to believe it. But all the while this terrible idea is being planted in our minds. This idea of ourselves as very small and weak and stupid. This idea that we don’t know what we are doing, and can’t know, and can’t help it. And the bait is this: that we don’t have to be sorry for what we do. We don’t have to think that there are any wicked people. Nobody is strong enough, or clever enough, to be wicked. So there is to be no remorse. No remorse. No guilt. They offer to rid us of our guilt.’

  ‘But who are they then?’ exclaimed Ivy.

  It was nonsense. She knew that it was nonsense. But he spoke with so much conviction that she was shaken.

  ‘I don’t know. They hide. You never see them. But they must be there, or all this wouldn’t be happening. I felt it coming on for years. But I knew it, I knew it, in that fearful place.’

  ‘The place you ran away from when you came here?’

  ‘No. Before that. About a year before Maddy died.’

  He was silent, collecting his thoughts. After a while he resumed:

  ‘They attacked our sad
ness. Although it is natural for people to be sad. They have been always. You can see that if you read history books. And that is a very clever thing to do: to suggest that we can’t bear sadness. Sorrow and guilt. We listen to people who offer to take those away from us, because we think we want to be rid of them. But when we have given up sorrow we have given up all our greatness. Sorrow is our right. There can be no joy without it. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘It says in the Bible: Blessed are they that mourn,’ agreed Ivy with a sigh. ‘But then it says: For they shall be comforted. I sometimes wonder what that means.’

  She thought again of her own unwillingness to forget grief, and his acceptance of it. Their relationship, which had in it so much of comfort, seemed to have sprung from sorrow.

  ‘No joy,’ he said. ‘Only pleasure, perhaps, which is something quite different. Joy and sorrow could not live in that place, but there was a great deal of pleasure, I suppose. Did you go there?’

  ‘I don’t quite know what place you mean, dear.’

  ‘Oh, it was a horrible place. Horrible! Maddy and I went because I wanted to see the glass. I was interested in working glass. We didn’t know what it was going to be like. They had a lot of little paper windmills everywhere.’

  He shuddered, pulled a piece of bracken, and began tearing it to pieces.

  ‘In the middle of it,’ he said, ‘there was a huge dark place full of voices. Not human voices. We had to creep along and see what was shown, and hear what was told. The first thing we saw was an enormous telescope. It was a cheat. Nothing could be seen through it. If they had wanted us to see more, they might have given us a smaller one, through which we could have looked at the stars. But they didn’t want us to see more. They didn’t mean us to ask for more.’

  This telescope explained everything. Ivy realised that he was talking about the Twentieth Century Exhibition, held in Gressington some three years earlier. She and her parents had gone to see it, in a motor-coach, because everybody seemed to be going. It was reputed to be painlessly educational and designed to cheer people up, since it only exhibited the more hopeful aspects of twentieth-century civilisation.

  Although it was but a small affair, it had attracted a good deal of attention. The largest public park in Gressington had been decorated with sculpture, attractive cardboard cut-outs, kiosks, milk-bars, and sideshows of various kinds. In the centre stood a vast globular construction, a round world, designed by Alan Wetherby, and entitled the Palace of Progress. A complete tour of it took a couple of hours, nor was it possible to curtail the experience, for movement inside it could only take place in one direction. An endless queue, shuffling in by one gangplank and out by another, was obliged to inspect tier upon tier of galleries—up, up, up—down, down, down—before getting away.

  The exhibits were all intended to reassure the Common Man, by presenting him with a gratifying picture of what he was really up to. Most of them were concerned with his conquest of Nature. Egalitarian touchiness was uniformly respected; great names were seldom mentioned, nor were many heroes set up for veneration. All this, it was implied, had been achieved by nobody in particular. The arts, and the unpredictable phenomena of inspiration, received a few vague and somewhat facetious tributes. The inequitable distribution of genius, the erratic proclivities of the Uncommon Man, do not easily lend themselves to charts, graphs, diagrams and working models—the Common Man can be more easily persuaded that he will shortly, thanks to his own ingenuity, set off for Mars than he can be convinced that he ever wrote Hamlet. A discreet cruciform object, in a secluded corner, bore a placard which broad-mindedly complimented him upon his resourcefulness in having invented God.

  Ivy’s impressions of her visit to this place were confused, for she had found it exhausting. She knew that she must have seen a great deal, because she had, for two hours, inspected brightly illuminated objects and listened to very simple explanations by loudspeakers. She remembered best a giant model of the human brain thinking a thought. It had looked uncommonly like tripe and had pulsated in a nauseating way. But she could never forget it because it had provoked her father into making an awkward scene. He had demanded loudly what thought this brain was supposed to be thinking; one thought, he maintained, can be much more important than another, and an exhibit which ignored this point was an insult to the public. He stood there, fuming, while the loudspeaker, again and again, repeated its jocular and condescending little commentary. The people behind wanted to get on and could not, as long as Frank Toombs remained, outraged and stationary, in front of the brain. Some grumbled. Others suggested unseemly and flippant answers to Frank’s question. The thoughts ascribed to this brain were getting quite out of hand when an official turned up and peremptorily moved them all on.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Conrad in surprise.

  ‘I was thinking of Dad,’ said Ivy. ‘We all went to that place, that Palace of Progress, and he was awful! He groused from start to finish. He said it was nothing but a kindergarten and they were treating us all like kids. Well, it was, in a way. Everything done up to look like a sort of toy. But they meant it to be educational.’

  He looked at her doubtfully.

  ‘Who were they?’ he asked.

  ‘The people who got it up? I forget. They were all very famous, educated people. You don’t think they meant any harm, surely? You don’t think they were wicked?’

  ‘I knew one. I met him afterwards. I’m sure he meant harm. It was harmful to treat people like that. Your father was right. It was like a terrible toyshop. That dummy telescope!’

  He seemed to be as much aggrieved over the telescope as Toombs had been over the brain. His objections, although more violent and incoherent, were upon the same lines. But Toombs had merely been irritated, whereas Benbow had been deeply disturbed. He looked upon the whole exhibition as evidence of some organised and deliberate attack on human dignity. He complained again that he had never been able to ‘see people’ properly in consequence. He seemed to have brooded over the experience until it had become an obsession. The loudspeakers, in particular, had horrified him.

  ‘Man! they kept on saying. Man! But they were really persuading us that there is no such person. We are not to see him any more when we walk down the street. They pretended to be talking about us, but they were not. Thought and knowledge don’t belong to us any more. All they offered was little jokes and a few hints about what is being done by people with no names and no faces. They hid themselves and shouted, so that we couldn’t ask questions even if we had wanted to.’

  ‘Dad asked questions all right. Don’t get so excited, dear. They were only records. They made records beforehand. See?’

  ‘How could they know beforehand what we might want to ask? They must really believe that we are worthless, imbecile creatures. Those records were made by people who secretly despise us.’

  ‘No. They were very nice ladies and gentlemen. Why should they want to do us harm?’

  ‘I don’t say it was intentional. That’s the trouble. You see, this … this attack was first made on educated, intellectual people. They have lost their faith in man. They sincerely despise him; so now they can’t help spreading it among us—the idea that we are despicable. They find it impossible to connect the thought of us with the thought of anything great. Did you notice the sculpture, outside in those gardens?’

  ‘If I did, I don’t remember it. Time we all got out we were dead to the world.’

  ‘There were groups of men and women and children. Very large. Huge. To hide the fact that we were being made to feel small. They had the faces of idiots, cheerful and trusting, and not worried about anything. They all had very thick legs. Nobody hungry. Nobody sad. Nobody thinking. Nobody noble. And then amongst them these vast Things! Shapes! Thought, they were called, and Knowledge, and Truth, and Courage, and all that sort of thing. But not in human form. No greatness must be shown in human form any more. Only imbecility.’

  ‘You really think they did it on purpose?’r />
  ‘Who is behind it then? Who is the enemy? Who wants to convince us that we are all idiots?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s Satan,’ she suggested, feeling that she had better humour him.

  ‘Satan?’ He looked startled. ‘You mean … you believe in the Devil?’

  ‘I’m Church of England,’ said Ivy cautiously. ‘But they do say he’s the enemy of mankind, don’t they? They’re always talking about the crafts and assaults of the Devil.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. But hardly anybody believes in the Devil nowadays.’

  ‘I think it’s much better than getting suspicious of people and calling them enemies. I must say, I think it’s very unjust of you to have it in, like this, for those poor people just because they went and got up an exhibition.’

  She looked at her watch and added:

  ‘We ought to be going, or we’ll miss the bus back. I’ve been shopping in Beremouth, remember.’

  ‘Would your mother mind if we got married?’

  ‘She’d create from here to Kingdom Come. But I’m not going to marry you, Conrad, until you’re properly back in your seven senses.’

  It was the first time that she had ever called him by his name. They were both aware of the challenge which it implied.

  ‘I am in my seven senses,’ he protested.

  ‘No, you’re not. You haven’t answered two questions I asked you before you started all this about Gressington just to get away from it. And there’s another one. There’s somebody I haven’t heard about yet. Somebody you never mention.’

  He got up again and looked down at Hodden Beach.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll come back by bus,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll try to get to the sea, and walk home tonight.’

  ‘Please yourself. Where’s my handbag? Perhaps it’s just as well we shouldn’t arrive back by the same bus. And I’m never likely to go to Hodden Beach with you, or anywhere else, till you’ve answered my questions. From now on, Conrad, you’ve got to stand on your own legs.’

  ‘Shan’t you bring me tea in the mornings any more?’