by Ann Harries
‘There was once an emperor of China who loved nothing more than the song of the nightingale in his forests. One day his enemies presented him with a mechanical nightingale made of pure gold. It sang the same mechanical song over and over again, but the emperor was seduced by its golden beauty and drove away the real nightingale. Eventually the mechanical bird broke down. The emperor became ill with longing for the real bird, whose song, he realised too late, sustained his spiritual life. The real bird returned and sang to the emperor on his deathbed and miraculously restored his health.’ He swung round to face me with a dreadful intensity. ‘I too am a dying man, Wills. I spoke yesterday about dawn choruses and suchlike, but I, like the Chinese emperor, am in need of a nightingale. Last month my doctor assured me I had only a year or two left to live – mind you, I’ve heard that story before, but then I had youth on my side. That is why I sent for you at once.’
I looked at him incredulously. ‘But it is very unlikely that the nightingales will sing until springtime – if, indeed, they survive in this alien environment.’
The vipers’ tongues flickered in his moist eyes. ‘But, Wills, you are the world’s leading authority on the nightingale’s song. You have written books, performed experiments. You know more than anyone in the world what makes a nightingale sing. My advisers were unanimous about that. But in my mind your greatest asset is that you too have been touched by disgrace! As a result you are not merely a cold Oxford scientist. You have suffered! You will understand my position.’
I remained silent as a surge of emotions did battle in my breast. Was this an invitation for me to speak of my collapse? If so, my host did not know his man. I cleared my throat, and wondered if the Northampton Castle, due to sail that afternoon, might have an empty cabin.
‘So you are relying on me to restore your health?’ I glanced at the potions at his bedside: clearly the drugs he was taking for his heart had affected his brain.
‘I’m relying on you to get those birds to sing,’ replied he. ‘There is something about birdsong that purifies the system. My mother used to tell me that as we listened to the nightingales and blackbirds in the little forest across the meadow.’ He glanced demurely at the floor. ‘It was she who told me the blackbird could hear worms moving in the earth. I used to crawl on my hands and knees in the mud to listen for worms: I fancied I could hear them too.’ He looked up at me, his lower lip quivering. ‘I’ve become quite the expert at hearing the worms crawl, you could say.’
‘B-but – are you aware that a nightingale sang on the mountain slopes just last night?’ I was flustered.
He frowned. Then remembered. ‘Oh, you mean little Maria? Yes, I got her mother to make a clay nightingale. I pay Maria sixpence a week to play in the evenings, before sunset. She’s been ill over the last week. Measles, I believe. So she’s started again?’
‘I have to confess that I was completely taken in by the whistle. It sings as well as any bird in my cages, and is probably more reliable.’ I tried to control the panic that had gripped my stomach by breathing deeply, in the manner demonstrated to me by my physician.
He shook his head vehemently, like a spoilt child. ‘No, Wills, I want the real thing! Remember the story I’ve just told you. Imitations aren’t good enough. In any case I want the whole mountainside flooded with British birdsong. That’s after all what I’ve paid you to provide.’
It seemed to me that we had spent long enough on this topic. I dropped my gaze to the box among his papers. ‘Is there a golden nightingale there?’
A cunning smile spread over his features. ‘Better than that, Wills. There is a diamond nightingale in here. It is the most precious thing I own for it represents the consummation of my achievements … yet it can never see the light of day! This may come as a surprise to you, Wills, but you are the first man to see this bird, apart from myself and the man who made it.’
‘You pay me an extraordinary compliment,’ I murmured uncomfortably.
‘It is essential that you understand the importance of this project. Look.’
He stubbed his cigarette into a full ashtray, picked up the box (his hands shook a little) and opened it. If I had expected to be ravished by the brilliance of gigantic diamonds, I was to be disappointed. The model of the small bird he now held in his hands appeared to be made from a reddish clay, and was studded with about a hundred opaque stones. It could have been the work of a child.
‘You say this is a diamond nightingale?’
‘Made out of the clay in which they were found.’ He was clearly enjoying my confusion. ‘Ever heard of the model compound system up on the diamond fields, Wills?’
‘I’m afraid we academics …’
‘The compound system is one of my Great Thoughts, conceived on the mountain slopes. What do you do with hundreds of thousands of natives from all over Southern Africa, all wanting to work on the mines so that they can buy guns? And drink? They bring their women with them and next thing you’ve got is whole families of Kaffirs outnumbering the Europeans, wandering about the town at their own sweet will, drinking at Kaffir canteens, smuggling out uncut diamonds which they sell without a qualm to the illicit diamond buyers, the scourge, the IDB scum of the earth!’
Mistaking the distaste which had settled on my face for outrage at his views, he attempted hasty placation. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I like the natives – but they’re children with simple minds. Primitives. They’ve got to be disciplined and they’ve got to be watched or they’ll play right into the hands of the IDB scum. They’ve got to be outwitted.’ He threw his massive head back and turned his lips down in an imperious smile. ‘That’s where the closed compounds come in, Wills. Once the miners enter into contract with us, they know that they have to stay in the compound for the length of their contract – two or three months, perhaps. We provide them with everything they need – food, beds, a hospital, baths –good God, man, we’ve even given them a swimming pool!’
‘I’m wondering what this little nightingale has to do with the compounds,’ I smiled primly.
The Colossus smirked.
‘How long does your food take to pass through your body, Wills? We estimated five days, that’s going by British standards. A pair of leather mittens were a further security. Then we let them go home.’
I gazed down at the creature in his hands, my stomach heaving as comprehension dawned.
‘Yes, Wills, all these stones have passed through the bodies of my miners. They’ll never be released on the market, or go to Amsterdam to be cut. Yet they are my most precious stones, known only to me – and now to you as well.’ As I was bereft of speech, he continued, all the while staring at the little model in his hand, his flushed features working, ‘I thought this imitation was good enough for me, Wills. But, like the dying emperor, I want the real thing now.’ He stretched out his hand and grabbed my arm with a sudden urgency. ‘That’s why I’ve brought you here, Wills, all expenses paid. I’ll pay you more, man, if you can get those birds to sing. Look round my house – there are priceless antiques – yours for the choosing, Wills!’ He waved at the safe. ‘You can have the egg, the pistol – all I ask is that you save my life.’
I was trembling. ‘You ask too much,’ I quavered as I made my way to the door. ‘There was no mention of this in the instructions. I am not a well man myself.’
He paused, then spread his lips into a powerful smile. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Wills. Do you play bridge whist? Wonderful game. I’ve only recently been converted. It takes your mind off all your problems, quite remarkable.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve never been one for games of any kind,’ I said faintly. ‘Now I must attend to the birds. Good morning.’ And I slipped out of the door before he could pounce again.
But he had already reached for the telephone.
To slit open the throat of a nightingale – under careful laboratory conditions, of course – is to embark on a voyage of discovery infinitely more thrilling than those of the early Portuguese and Span
ish navigators who inevitably misunderstood the territory they observed. For I have chartered the voyage of song: under the bright flare of the hanging gaslight I have pegged out a rosy fabric on my dissecting table and found within it the two independent chambers of the syrinx wherein the nightingale can sing with two or more voices, controlling the antiphonal flow of his melody with six minute pairs of muscles; pumping, pumping, pumping music into the wet air of Europe, and filling the ice-blue eyes of the Colossus with pink tears. Yes, I have carved open the breast that Oscar set against the Rose’s thorn until it penetrated ‘her’ heart and the rose became crimson as the eastern sky; and within that breast I have found a strong set of bronchial tubes admirably adapted to regulate, reverse and rotate the passage of air that attempts to escape the labyrinthine columns and chambers of the syrinx.
Oh Oscar! Why didn’t you consult me before immortalising your sexual solipsism! You would reply, of course, that gender identity has its ambiguities, whatever the scalpel might reveal; that in the body of every male there lurks a female unseen by anatomists, and only this age of elaborate respectability represses the man in the woman. Such paradoxes have bubbled from your lips ‘like water from a silver jar’, to use your simile, and you have now paid the ultimate price for the indiscipline of your tongue: it is your breast, dear Oscar, that has been pressed against the thorn of the public, and the red rose of your love has been tossed into the gutter in the cart-wheel’s path!
Did I write the above? I sometimes wonder if in my scientist’s brain there lurks an artist. I too write books about birds, to my cost.
And now I have three days in which to induce my birds to sing. Perhaps I could bribe a troop of piccanins to whistle in the woods on the day of the Release as the birds struggle out of their cages – to be fed to waiting predators.
Oxford 1874
My first meeting with Oscar occurred in the Succulent House of the Oxford Botanic Gardens. More accurately, Oscar first acknowledged my existence as I tested the reflexes of a set of sticky insectivorous plants newly arrived from some tropical rain forest in Brazil, and allocated to me, as a student of Natural History, to classify. For my part, the conspicuous style of dress and affected mannerisms of the young Irishman had on several occasions offended my sensibilities, for, as undergraduates in the first Michaelmas term, we had been assigned rooms on the same staircase at Magdalen. His great bulk, often the worse for drink, had more than once battered past my considerably slighter and entirely sober frame, causing me to shrink against the medieval staircase panelling so that he might ascend. Now he leant against the greenhouse doorway, resplendent as a tropical bloom in his violently checked tweed jacket, brilliant yellow necktie, tall collar, a large hat with an upturned brim angled over one ear. He was fiddling with something behind his back.
I recognised him at once, of course, but continued tapping the sharp end of my pencil into the jawlike leaf-blades of the Venus’s flytrap. Beside the plant lay my notebook, into which I had ruled (with the same pencil) a grid of taxonomic possibilities pertaining to the two families Nepenthaceae and Droseraceae. By no means did I underestimate the challenge of accurate classification, for in the world of science the greatest discoveries have sprung from the precise observation of minutiae, whose complex relationships with other levels of minutiae in the hierarchies of the natural world reveal themselves only to the meticulously trained eye. Did Mr Darwin himself not spend eleven years in the patient study of the humble barnacle before releasing to the world his cataclysmic theory of descent by modification? And the last work he ever wrote, as if in anticipation of his own death and burial, was a loving study of the recirculation of organic matter: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, in which we learn that, every few years, the whole of the world’s top layer passes through the bodies of earthworms.
The green jaws snapped shut and I moved my pencil to mark a tick in a column. The figure in the doorway stirred with evident interest. No doubt mistaking me for a literate gardener he called out, in admiration: ‘My dear man, would you be so good as to do that again?’
In those early undergraduate days his voice still had an Irish lilt to it. His smiling charm was dangerous. Pretending to ignore him, I nevertheless removed a small fly from my specimen jar of insects with a pair of pincers. In silence I placed the fly upon the sensitive hairs within the plant jaws: the fly struggled; the trap sprang shut and contracted so tightly that the outline of the writhing victim bulged within the lobes.
‘Does this creature have a throat – a stomach? Though green, is it partly human? And if one were to eat this carnivore, would one be eating meat or vegetable?’
I considered my reply. Incapable of the cut and thrust of Oxford badinage, I could, at best, deliver a lecture on plant-trapping mechanisms, the details of which would soon discourage my visitor. Instead, I continued filling my columns with details concerning the habits of insectivorous plants (shape of leaf, activity of tentacles, production of viscous fluid), and heard myself say:
‘You may be interested to know that Mr Darwin feeds his insect-eaters with roast beef and strong tea.’
‘Thereby proving them to be little animals disguised as leaves!’ exclaimed Oscar, suddenly gauche.
Something about his benign presence inspired me to continue this absurd conversation.
‘You may also be interested to know that these plants can count from nought to two.’ My voice was so faint that he would have had to strain his ears to hear me.
‘Indeed? How truly remarkable!’ He bounded over to the tray of plants with wide eyes as if expecting to see each of them equipped with a small abacus.
‘Look in here.’ I pointed to the inside of a hinged trap. ‘Three sensor hairs. If I tickle one – like so – with my fly, nothing happens. But if I touch it again within thirty seconds, the trap will snap shut!’ The plant obliged by swallowing the specimen. ‘It can tell the difference between nought, one, or two taps – more than most mammals can do.’
‘I find this more fascinating than you can ever imagine,’ declaimed Oscar as if to a great hall of enchanted listeners. ‘I have in my head poems – and stories – upon this very topic: a beautiful continuum between plant, animal and man, in which each experiences identical emotional states. My ambition is to erase the barrier between human and non-human animals, and to prove that love and suffering, anxiety and joy, are not unique to the human race.’ He tilted his head towards me, and smiled hopefully.
I allowed this froth of thought to settle in my brain for a few seconds, and was about to dismiss it as aesthetic claptrap, when I became aware that something odd was stirring in my heart. That throbbing organ, the sole function of which had been, till this moment, to circulate the blood in my thin white body, now appeared to be swelling with a sensation that I had never before experienced. I bit my lip to prevent myself from bursting into gales of inexperienced laughter, and, in a flash of euphoria, I understood that the greatest gift one human being can give to another is that of joy. Oscar gave me that priceless gift. He gave it to many, for he was generous with his joy. Through the conduit of his wit the delight that brimmed in his life flowed into even the most melancholy of hearts and caused them to beat briefly with vicarious pleasure.
For fear of fainting, I was forced to grip the edges of the specimen table. My voice trembled a little as I replied: ‘I believe Mr Darwin is preparing a paper on the subject of insectivorous plants. He is said to be impressed by the fact that plant cells possess the same capacity for irritability response as animal cells.’
‘It depresses me tremendously to think I’ll never read it!’ cried Oscar, apparently unaware of the upheaval in my breast. ‘I am far too superficial a person, concerned as I am only with how things look and feel, rather than how they work. I like to pretend to myself that beauty is effortless. Oh, how very differently you and I consider the lily!’ and with a theatrical flourish he produced from behind his back a wilting specimen of Liliaceae anmintionis. My heart st
ill warm with its new emotion, I hovered in the greenery like the Handmaid of the Lord before the Angel Gabriel, while Oscar considered the lily for several minutes in language I can only describe as unscientific.
‘So who cares about your Origins or your Fertilisations,’ he finished, by now on one knee, ‘“for you are one of the most beautiful and most useless things in the world”, according to my mentor Ruskin – who I believe returns from Italy at the end of the month. I wonder if you have met his gardener, a Mr Downes?’ He staggered to his feet, knocked a tray of seedlings off a shelf, and fell to his knees again to repair the damage.
‘Mr Downes is up on the Hinksey Road, laying stone with the Balliol men,’ I replied.
‘Dear Mr Ruskin! I am so very interested in his road-building project!’ He removed a glove to scoop soil and seedlings back into their tray, willy-nilly, then rose to wave his lily at me once again. ‘Which reminds me of why I have brought this useless object into your greenhouse. In obedience to my mentor’s injunction that beauty should be accompanied by toil, a concept horribly foreign to my own instincts, I have decided to grow my lilies myself, needing a constant supply –and I require some information about how to go about this act of gardening.’
With a great deal of anxiety about fragile species near the edges of shelves, I led my visitor past the spectacular Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia reginae) in the Succulent Room, and through the blaze of bougainvillaea in the Temperate Corridor. Here I nearly lost him as he gazed longingly at the riotous Mediterranean blooms. ‘I could make an exquisite buttonhole of these,’ he mourned (for picking the specimens was, of course, forbidden). ‘A miniature work of art, so underestimated by the general public’ We made our way out into the evolutionary beds where species were arranged according to their botanical families. His voice lilted on, effortless and melodious, nourishing the tender shoots of pleasure in my heart. ‘I am convinced that a really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature. This is my sole, though vital, contribution to the world of scientific thought!’ A couple of butterflies shot out of the chrysanthemum bed and hovered over the yellow checks of his jacket.