by Flynn
"Well then, if them girls was ten I would be littler, wouldn't I?"
"Could be."
"If I was the only one I wouldn't be littler or bigger, would I? I'd just be me, wouldn't I?"
I nodded my agreement. I could feel the tide coming in again, I could feel her working up to something, so I tried one last sentence before I was submerged.
"Look, Tich, you don't use words like bigger or lovelier or smaller or sweeter unless you've got some other thing to compare them with."
"Then you can't then, not always." There was a note of confidence in her voice.
"Can't what?" I asked.
"Can't compare, 'cos," and Anna fired her salvo of big guns, " 'cos Mister God. There ain't two Mister Gods so you can't compare."
"People don't compare Mister God with themselves."
"I know," she giggled at my efforts to defend myself.
"So what are you getting all fuzzed up about then?"
" 'Cos, 'cos they compare themselves with Mister God."
"Same difference," I replied. "Ain't."
I reckoned I had won this particular exchange since my questions had forced her into a wrong move. After all, she had agreed that people didn't compare Mister God with themselves, so it followed that they didn't compare themselves with Mister God, and I told her so. Preparing to move to the top of the class on this particular exchange, I launched my unsinkable man-o'-war with, "You said people did compare. You should have said that people didn't compare."
Anna looked at me. I hurriedly manned the guns. I knew that I was right but I was going to be prepared, just in case. Anna looked, and my unsinkable man-o'-war just disappeared. I can remember feeling bad that she had handcuffed herself with her own arguments, feeling bad that it had been to some extent my fault and feeling bad that I had enjoyed winning this exchange. She moved close to me and put her arms around me and buried her head in the base of my chest. I thought how tired she must be with all this thinking, how disappointed she must feel because she "hadn't got it." All the doors of my storehouse of comfort and love opened wide and I hugged her. She gave a little wriggle to signify that she understood.
"Fynn," she said quietly, "compare two with three." "One less," I murmured in a fug of contentment. "Um. Now compare three with two." "One more."
"That's right, one less is the same as one more." "Uh-huh," I grunted, "one less is the same as— Hey!"
Suddenly she was ten yards away, doubled up with mirth and hooting like a banshee. "It isn't the same," I yelled after her. "It is, too," she bellowed.
I chased her home through the stalls and barrows of the market street. I didn't catch her. Being so much smaller than me, she got through places that I couldn't squeeze through physically, or for that matter, mentally, either.
That evening, sitting on the railway wall watching the trains go by, I said, "I suppose that was a bit of your famous glass?"
She made a noise that I took to be yes. After a little pause I continued with, "How many bits of glass are you lumbered with?"
"I got millions, but they're all for fun."
"What about the bits you can't get rid of?" I went on.
"I have."
"Have what?"
"God rid of them."
The complete matter-of-fact tone with which she uttered this last statement robbed me of my next sentence. Buzzing around in my brainbox were such ought-to-be-said sentences as Pride goes before a fall and The devil rides the backs of those who are certain. I had this nice adult feeling that I ought to take her down a peg or two; she ought not to make such remarks. After all, the only reason such corrective remarks were jostling around in my head was that it was good for her. I wanted to say these things for her benefit. It was my duty to say such things, and this gave me a nice warm virtuous and comforting feeling. The angel flew on his way without fetching me -the usual crack on the skull so I knew that I was safe. I'd got the green fight, so I could proceed. My stew of platitudes, proverbs, and general good advice had got to the "fast-rolling boil stage," so I opened my mouth to deliver all this wisdom. Trouble was, it didn't come out. Instead I asked, "You reckon you know more than Reverend Castle?"
"Nope."
"He got bits of glass?"
"Yes."
"How come you haven't got bits of glass?"
The shunting engine on the railway line marshalled its charges with a blast of steam and a whoop: a couple of toots of warning, a rheumatic squeal of its joints, and it shoved. The trucks woke up and passed the message down the line: Ting-bong-tibang-bing bong-bang-ti-clank. It reached the end of the line and then back to the engine came the message, "OK, we're all awake, quit that blasted whistling." I grinned as I thought that the tank engine and Anna might be related in some way. They both had the same sort of technique. The engine shoved the trucks and Anna shoved me into asking the kind of questions she wanted to answer.
She didn't need to think about the answer to my question How come you haven't got bits of glass? She'd had it ready for a long time, simply waiting for the right moment to deliver it. She didn't make a fuss about delivering it, either: "Oh, 'cos I ain't frightened." Now, that's probably the most missable sentence that can be uttered. Missable because that's what it's all about. Missable because it is too damned expensive. Missable because the price of not being frightened is trust. And what a word that is! Define it how you like, and I'll bet you'll miss the main point! It's more than confidence, more than security; it doesn't belong to ignorance, or for that matter, to knowedge either. It is simply the ability to move out of the "I'm the center of all things" and to let something or someone take over. And as for Anna, she had simply moved out and let Mister God move in. I'd known about this for a long time.
I like mathematics. I see it as the most beautiful, most exciting, most poetic, and the most sublime of all activities. I have, and have had for many years, a little plaything, a toy, something I like to consider and something which sparks off ideas in me. It is simply two circles of heavy copper wire linked together like two links of a chain. I play with this so often that at times I am quite unaware that I have it in my hands.
On one occasion I was holding it so the circles stood at right angles to each other.
Anna pointed to one of the circles and said, "I know what that is—that's me. And that's Mister God," she said, pointing to the other. "Mister God goes right through my middle and I go right through Mister God's middle."
And that's how it was. Anna had grasped that her proper place was in God's middle and that God's proper place was in her middle. That might be a little difficult to come upon for the first time, but the taste of it gets nicer and nicer; and of course Anna's " 'Cos I ain't frightened" was completely without blemish. This was her structure, her satisfactory picture of how things were, and I envied her.
It wasn't very often that Anna was taken completely off her guard. But on one particular occasion I actually saw a spoonful of raisin pudding and custard arrested in midair. It happened like this. Ma B. had a pudding shop. Ma B. was one of nature's miracles; she was taller when she was lying down than when she was standing up. I suppose it was because she ate her own puddings.
Ma B. had reduced the English language to real basic stuff. She had the use of two sentences: "What's yours, ducks?" and "Fancy that!" What Ma B. lacked in the way of the melody of the language, she made up for by orchestration. "Fancy that!" could be orchestrated to signify surprise, indignation, horror, or any feeling or mixture of feelings appropriate to the moment. When Ma B. wheezed out, "What's yours, ducks?" the request for "two of meat pud and two of peas pud" was often followed by such juicy bits as, "What do you think of Missis So-and-So's eldest?" This is where "Fancy that!" came in so handy. Perhaps Missis So-and-So's eldest had upped and died, and "Fancy that!" was suitably draped in black; or perhaps Missis So-and-So's eldest had gone off with the lodger, and "Fanc"y that!" was another way of saying "I knew it all along"; but "Fancy that!" it always was. As for "What's yours, ducks?" Ma B. was n
o snob. "What's yours, ducks?" had a universal quality about it; it applied equally to 225-pound dockers, vicars, tram drivers, kids, and dogs. Danny had a theory that Ma B. had eaten so much of her own suet puddings that her vocal chords had got gummed up and the only two utterances that could find their way out were "Fancy that!" and "What's yours, ducks?" Ma B.'s pudding shop sold every kind of pudding; meat puds, suet puds with or without fruit, dumplings with or without fruit—every conceivable kind of thick pudding, Ma B. sold. As an incentive to buy her wares, the sauces were free: jam sauce, chocolate sauce, custard, and gravies of all sorts in great cauldrons. The only time that this suet pudding heaven-of-happiness was ever marred (and it happened two or three times an hour) was when some little urchin tried to swipe a free bit of pudding. Ma B. shifted her 280 pounds and brought the ladle down with a crash, but the little hand had long since gone. Ma B. wasn't a very good shot with her ladle. Not only did the waving of this lethal weapon shower everybody with custard or whatever sauce she had last used it for, but the blow often landed on and did some lasting damage to an innocent suet pudding on the counter. Those in the know stood well back or even sat at the seating provided for area, as the notice on the shop window read.
The evening of the arrested raisin pudding, we were seated at the tables. There were six of us. Anna and her two special buddies, Bom-Bom and Tick-Tock; Danny, a young French Canadian; Millie, the Venus de Mile End; and me. We'd got through our peas pud and steak and kidney pud and we were onto the raisin pudding course when the table next to us was occupied by two young men in uniform—French sailors. I don't know what led up to the remark, nor will I vouch for its complete accuracy, but suddenly: "Mon Dieu," said the sailor, "le pudding, il est formidable!"
Anna's spoon stopped in midair. The mouth, open to receive the raisin pudding, opened further with astonishment; eyes that had been glazed with gustatory pleasure were suddenly pried wide open with question marks.
Danny answered the unasked question. " 'S French," he said, with his mouth full.
"What's he say?" asked Anna in a whisper. "He said the pudding was 'orrible," laughed Bom-Bom.
But this was no time for jokes, and Anna did not join in the general laughter. She lowered her spoon to the plate, and as if some colossal offense had been made against her, she said, "But I don't know what he's talking about,"
Now my French is limited to papilliotts being belle, vaches eating grass, and the pleur being wet. In spite of this, I managed to tell Anna that French was spoken in France, that France was another country, and was generally that way, waving my hand in an eastward direction. I managed to convince her that this was no visitation of angels speaking the language of heaven, and that in fact Danny could speak French as well as he could speak English. She digested this bit of information more readily and easily than she digested Ma B.'s raisin pudding.
"Can I ask him?" she whispered.
"Ask him what?" I queried.
"To write what he said?"
"Sure."
With paper and pencil at the ready Anna went off to ask the sailor to "write it down big—about the pudding." Happily, one of the sailors spoke English, so she didn't need my help. Two cups of tea later she came back to our table and even managed an "au revoir" in response to their leaving.
The excitement of this meeting lasted for a day or two. The fact that there were more people in France speaking French than there were people in England speaking English was a bit of a shock.
A few days later I took her to the public library and showed her textbooks of various languages, but by this time Anna had distilled her astonishment and had tucked it in an appropriate corner of her mind. As she explained to me later, it was not really surprising when you got to think about it; after all, cats speak cat language and dogs speak dog language and trees speak tree language. So it wasn't really surprising that the French people spoke the French language.
I had been a little taken aback at Anna's reaction to hearing the French language spoken. She certainly knew of other languages; she could speak rhyming slang and back slang, and used a lot of Yiddish words in her own speaking. She was able to talk to Tick-Tock in sign language. This was necessary since Tick-Tock had been born deaf and dumb. Braille had intrigued her, and my own interest in ham radio had revealed to her the mysteries of the Morse code. What I did not know at the time of this French encounter was that she was already immersed in the problem of Ianguages. Her reaction to the French language had been more on the lines of "What, another one?"
It seems that two questions had germinated in her mind concerning language. The first was Can I make a language of my own? The second was Just what is a language? The first question was well on the way to being solved. One evening I was shown the "working out" of this adventure. One of the many shoe boxes was taken from the cupboard and placed on the kitchen table; it contained notebooks and many sheets of paper.
The first sheet of paper to be taken from the box showed a simple column of numbers on the left-hand side of the page, and on the right-hand side, the word or words corresponding. The fact that it was possible to write "5 apples" with a numeral and "five apples" as a word was, I was told, very important. If all numerals could be written as words, then it followed that all words could be written as numerals. A simple substitution of the first twenty-six numbers in place of the twenty-six letters obviously did the trick, but writing God as "7.15.4" really didn't help very much.
Objects could be used as substitutes for letters or the names of the objects could be used. A reading primer had shown that "A is for Apple," and of course the implication was that Apple is for A. If Apple is for A, and Pear is for P, and Lemon is for L, and lastly, Elephant is for E, then the word Apple could be represented with the line of objects—Apple, Pear, Pear, Lemon, Elephant.
Sheet after sheet of paper showed that Anna had experimented with words, numbers, objects, and codes until she had finally come to the conclusion that the problem about inventing a language wasn't that it was very difficult; far from it. The difficulty was, how do you choose among so many possibilities? What she did come up with, however, was an adaptation of the Morse code. As this consisted only of dots and dashes, it was pretty plain to see that any two distinct things could be used. As Mister God had been thoughtful enough to provide a left foot and a right foot—well, these could be used to talk with. A hop on the left foot was to be taken as a dot, a hop on the right foot as a dash. Both feet on the ground was the end of a letter. We got quite good at this kind of communication and could converse over quite large distances. For close work the scheme was adapted to treading on a line of a paving stone for a dot and treading in the middle of the stone for a dash. By holding hands and pressing either with the little finger or the thumb, we developed a very intimate and private means of conversing. In all, Anna produced nine different variations of this system.
I got caught up with her enthusiastic approach to this form of communication and produced two buzzer belts. The buzzer belt was simply a belt with two buzzers riveted on to it. When the belt was worn, one buzzer snuggled under the left ribs and the other under the right ribs. The serious drawbacks to this method were, firstly, that the buzzers tickled and made her laugh; secondly, that the whole business of being wired up with bell-pushes, batteries, and connecting wire was a bit tedious; and thirdly, that the first time we used it in the street we managed to trip up a couple of innocent people who, to say the least of it, were not amused—but definitely not—so we scrapped that method.
The question, Just what is a language? was a little more tricky to work out. In the course of her workings out, Anna had come to the conclusion that in the realm of numbers there was one number which was far more important than any other number. This was the number 1—important because any other number could be made up by adding sufficient numbers of ones. True, there was a tricky way out. You could, of course, use signs like 5 or 37 or 574 instead of saying, "One plus one plus one plus one," etc. This method merely saved you time;
it didn't alter the argument hat 1 was the most important number. Like numbers, words also had a most important word and this word, naturally enough, was God. Anna saw the "most important number 1" as the apex of a triangle—only her triangle was standing on that apex! Number 1 had to bear the weight of all the other numbers.
Words were different. Words seemed to stand on piles of other words. These other words served the purpose of explaining the use and the meaning of the word on the top. The word God stood on the top of the pile that contained all the other words, and somehow or other you were expected to climb to the top of this pile to understand the meaning of the word God. This was a daunting idea. The Bible, the Church, the Sunday school were all busy building this colossal mountain of words and it was doubtful if anyone could climb to the top of such a pile.
Fortunately, good old Mister God had, in his wisdom, already solved the problem for us. The solution of the problem did not lie with words but with numbers. The number 1 bore the weight of all the other numbers, so it must be wrong to expect words to bear the weight of the meaning of the word God. No! It must be that God is the word that bears the weight of all the other words. So the pyramid idea of words with God on the top is wrong side up; so turn it upside down. That's better. Now the whole pyramid of words is standing on its apex like the numbers. The apex of the word pyramid is God, and that must be right because now the word God carries the weight and meaning of all the other words.
Anna showed me her workings out. One sheet contained an upside-down triangle standing on the point labeled 1—this was the numbers triangle. One sheet showed a triangle standing on the point labeled god, and the last sheet in the shoe box showed a triangle standing on the point marked anna!
"Ha," I said, "you've got a triangle all to yourself, I see!"
"No. Everybody has got one."
"Oh. What's it mean then?"
"It's for when I die and Mister God asks me all them questions."