Both were well worth listening to, though it cannot be denied that Mr. Puffinlow tended, as the bottle went round, to drop into too serious and too persevering a vein. His talk was still good and various, but it lacked the sparkle of Mr. Cumber-batch’s, and it would sometimes rather tiresomely revert, as the evening went on, to persons and themes already satisfactorily disposed of.
Thus, on the evening which we are considering, Mr. Puffinlow had already, before the end of the fish, referred three times to ‘my poor dear Uncle,’ and no sooner had they got to work on a divinely tender duckling and the youngest and greenest of young green peas than Mr. Puffinlow introduced ‘my poor dear Uncle’ for the fourth time.
‘Green peas,’ he said, ‘really delicious green peas, such as these are, always bring back to me my poor dear Uncle.’
‘My dear Puffin,’ said Mr. Freddie Cumber-batch, ‘in the name of all the saints, don’t spoil these peas – nobody can touch Arnaud at peas – exquisite, superb, one of the greatest moments of my life – I shall congratulate him afterwards – don’t spoil them, Puffin, by allowing any thought whatever to intrude. Let your Uncle, by all means, recall green peas, but don’t, for the Lord’s sake, let green peas recall your Uncle or anything else in the world or out of it. Let them recall simply and solely green peas, and again green peas, and yet again …’ Mr. Cumberbatch completed this lyrical outburst by lifting, with eyes ecstatically upturned, a forkful of peas to his mouth. ‘Younger,’ he sang, ‘tenderer, even than the duckling! Let us regard them, Puffin, simply as things in themselves, unrelated to anything else whatever.’
‘I doubt,’ objected the measured voice of Mr. Lipscombe, ‘that it is possible to regard anything as a thing in itself. It is only when we relate it to something else that we become aware of it at all.’
‘Quite! Quite, Lippie!’ yapped Mr. Cumber-batch, who hated metaphysics at dinner-time. ‘Quite! Quite! Quite! Quite!’
‘And that again,’ began Mr. Puffinlow, ‘recalls to me my poor dear Uncle. For he-he was a scientist, you know, a great scientist – was accustomed, so he said, to regard knowledge as an end in itself. The mere discovery of truth, he maintained, produces a satisfaction unrelated to anything else whatsoever.’
‘Absurd, Puffin! Quite absurd, my dear boy!’ said Mr. Lipscombe, drawing in his lips until his mouth became no more than a slit.
‘Well, if you will allow me,’ persevered Mr. Puffinlow, ‘I will tell you the story of my poor dear Uncle’s great discovery. He set himself, you must know, in middle life to demonstrate practically the truth of the theory that you can knock down a bridge with a peashooter. It is something to do, I take it, with the rebound. You fire your first pea, and then, with your second, you catch the bridge on the rebound-the rebound, you understand, from the shock of the first; for every action, as Ariosto discovered, has its equal and opposite reaction. Well, if you fire your peas in a certain manner-with a certain specific periodicity, I may say,’ – Mr. Puffinlow blew out his cheeks and looked challengingly from one of his friends to the other – ‘down, eventually, comes your bridge.’
‘All very well in theory,’ barked the Colonel, ‘but for practical purposes try a couple of pounds of dynamite.’
‘Exactly, Colonel! Exactly!’ conceded Mr. Puffinlow. ‘But remember, please, that my Uncle was interested simply in the attainment of knowledge for its own sake; or so, in spite of Lippie here, he supposed. Well, as it chanced, my poor dear Uncle was very fortunately placed as regards the carrying out of his experiment; in fact, I have often wondered since whether it was not the place which first suggested the possibility of the experiment, rather than the idea of the experiment which first … er … which … Whether, in short, the first factor, the prime … er … What I am trying to say is …’
‘Give it up, Puffin! Give it up!’ snapped Mr. Freddie Cumberbatch, uncontrollably irritated. ‘You make me giddy by this waltzing on one leg. The sooner we are through with your story, the sooner we shall be able to give our undivided attention to this Château-Lafite – wonderful, Colonel, isn’t it? Quite wonderful! And just the right temperature. The bottle is with you, Puffin.’
‘Well, in point of fact,’resumed Mr. Puffinlow, ‘at the bottom of a large field on my Uncle’s estate-a very large field it was: a twelve-acre field, to be exact – rose a viaduct which carried a railway across the valley. The railway had long been disused. It was part of a scheme to exploit a valuable deposit of fire-clay, but no sooner were the railway and the viaduct completed than they unfortunately discovered – you remember it, Freddie: you had shares in it yourself …’
‘Let it pass, Puffin. Let it pass. You have said that the viaduct was there. Never mind the how or why, but for God’s sake get your Uncle to work on it.’
‘Right, Freddie! Right! Quite right! Well, my poor dear Uncle approached the directors and asked them – laying before them, of course, the probabilities, should his experiment succeed-if he might shoot peas at their viaduct. The directors, thinking that he was a harmless lunatic, readily gave their permission, and my poor dear Uncle got to work without further delay.’
‘Well, thank God for that, Puffin!’ said Mr. Freddie Cumberbatch.
‘Yes,’ went on Mr. Puffinlow, ‘he got to work without further delay. But the job was not so simple as it may at first appear. In the first place, a common peashooter, fired by a man, would, of course, be incapable of accurate timing and fine adjustments. Automatic peashooters were needed, you will see at once, which would fire continuously for long periods and at exactly regular intervals – at intervals, moreover, whose timing could be altered by some simple mechanical device; for the question of the speed of firing demanded, in itself, endless and untiring experiment. Again, the question of the place of impact arose. At what spot in the viaduct should the pea be fired? High up? Low down? In the middle? Two-thirds of the way along? Twenty-five twenty-sixths … ?’
‘In short,’ snarled the Colonel, ‘when the devil and where the devil!’
‘Precisely, Colonel. To put it generally, when and where. But that was not all. The pea itself was a tremendous question. Was it to be an Early Pea, the later and larger Marrowfat Pea, the Chick Pea, or perhaps the Sweet Pea? And was it permissible to include beans, which, after all, are a kind of pea: unless, on the contrary, it is the pea which is a kind of bean? And, to go farther, what was to be done about the laburnum, and the acacia, the wistaria, and the locust or carob, which bear flowers suspiciously like pea flowers and subsequently, in fact, produce pods containing seeds so similar to peas that incautious persons have before now eaten them as such, in some cases with disquieting consequences? Well, my poor dear Uncle was resolved – true scientist that he was – to leave no stone unturned, or rather no pea unshot, until he had discovered the one whose size, shape, weight, and consistency would have the most deadly effect upon the viaduct. He determined to do the thing thoroughly and on a grand scale – so grand a scale, as it turned out, that of his very considerable fortune two and fourpence halfpenny alone remained at the time of his death. For, in the first place, he set up a little Small Arms factory where peashooters of an infinite variety and complexity could be rapidly turned out, and, in the second place, he turned the rest of his estate into a vast pea-garden in which flourished every imaginable kind of pea and bean, together with vetches, laburnums, acacias, wistarias, carobs or locusts, and innumerable other pea-bearing or quasi-pea-bearing growths. These gardens throughout the warmer months were, to us children – I am speaking of between fifty and sixty years ago – a veritable fairyland. Even the viaduct itself was soon so heavily wrapped and festooned in wistaria that it seemed possible that, even if my Uncle’s peashooters should succeed in shaking it off its foundations, it would still be held in position by these powerful growths. In summer-time the scent of the place was, as you can imagine, delicious: the more so that my poor dear Aunt (for my poor dear Uncle was married) was devoted to flowers and delighted in filling her fine old house with bowls of the choi
cest blooms. She had, besides, the happy idea of starting a duck-farm, and many an evening I have sat down, while staying there, to ducklings and green peas unequalled – there is no use in your looking incredulous, Freddie: I say unequalled – even by these we are now enjoying. Ah! Happy, happy days! Can you wonder, Lippie, is it surprising, Colonel, that green peas should recall to me my poor dear Uncle? And yet it should rather be my poor dear Aunt that they recall, for my Uncle, great scientist as he was, cared – like Galileo – for none of these things. The ducklings meant nothing to him, and the peas nothing more than the promise of inexhaustible ammunition. He seldom, if ever, came near the fine, flower-scented old house, for he had built himself a bungalow a few yards from the base of the viaduct, in which he took up his permanent abode so as to be perpetually on the scene of his great work. And the great work went on ceaselessly day and night. All night through, the peashooter which was in action at the time clicked uninterruptedly under the supervision of the mechanic on duty: all night through, spent peas dropped like a gentle hail from the viaduct to the earth beneath, where they sprouted, flowered, seeded and brought forth ammunition a hundredfold for the great cause, while complicated instruments, whose names it would be useless for me to mention, recorded the smallest movement in the viaduct. So sensitive were these instruments – believe me, Lippie – that the expansion or contraction of the viaduct produced by a change of temperature of one degree was easily detected on a revolving chart, while the settling of a starling on the parapet would be registered graphically in a series of vibrations which looked to us children like a panorama of the Pyrenees.
‘Well, for years nothing of any significance was registered – nothing, that is, which could not be accounted for by temperature, wind, or the visits of birds: and, in point of fact, the first intimation of any success came not from these instruments at all, but from the rough and ready observation of a common rustic. A rather disreputable person, he was. Every evening, for years, he had used a right-of-way which ran through the viaduct field to travel from his cottage to the nearest public-house and, later in the evening, home again. His journey took him past the door of my Uncle’s bungalow, and my Uncle, who was curiously free from class consciousness, was accustomed to pass the time of day with him. Well, one morning about ten years after the experiments began, this individual reported to my Uncle that, while making his way home somewhat later than usual on the previous evening, he had been alarmed to observe that the viaduct was oscillating very considerably. When pressed for further details he became confused, but he was able to declare that the oscillation was so considerable that, when he reached the viaduct and attempted to lean up against one of the piers, the pier swung completely away from him and he fell into a heap of peasticks, where he lay until the small hours of the morning, too terrified to move. At this extraordinary piece of news, as you will readily imagine, my poor dear Uncle and the whole staff were thrown into the liveliest excitement. Here, for the first time, was definite evidence of progress – evidence the more valuable that it came from a plain, unsophisticated, unscientific eye-witness who, it was strongly to be presumed, was entirely unprejudiced one way or the other – one in whom it was to the last degree improbable that, as so often happens in the case of the scientist, the wish was father to the thought, or, shall I say, to the observation.’
‘And we are expected, my dear Puffin,’ asked Mr. Lipscombe with curling lip, ‘to take all this seriously?’
‘As you like, Lippie!’ replied Mr. Puffinlow. ‘Entirely as you like! For the fact remains that exactly eleven days later, at 12.15 a.m., my poor dear Uncle brought the viaduct down.’
Mr. Lipscombe and the Colonel both shot an outraged glance at Mr. Puffinlow, and then, throwing back their heads, shook the restaurant with a volley of derision. But Mr. Freddie Cumberbatch sat smiling and unruffled.
‘It is a fact for which I can vouch,’ he said, ‘that at 12.15 a.m. on August the 13th, 1874, the viaduct came down with a crash. It is true that five years previously it had been condemned as unsafe. The brickwork of two of the piers had developed alarming cracks and no less than five hundred and twenty-five bricks had dropped out of the vaulting.’
‘Spare us, Freddie,’ piped Mr. Puffinlow, with upturned hands and eyes, ‘spare us these tiresome technical details!’
‘In any case they do not matter,’ pronounced Mr. Lipscombe; ‘for the facts remain that Puffin’s Uncle fired peas at the viaduct, that the viaduct fell down, and, doubtless, that the Uncle believed that he had knocked it down. We are now perhaps on the brink of answering our original question, namely, whether it is possible to appreciate anything for its own sake, apart from its relation to anything else. Pray describe to us, Puffin, the reactions of your Uncle to his discovery. How, exactly, did he display his love of knowledge for its own sake? This, at least, you can tell us.’
‘Unhappily not,’ answered Mr. Puffinlow. ‘The end of my story is almost too tragic to relate. For what actually occurred was that the viaduct came down bang on top of the bungalow, in which, at 12.15 a.m., my poor dear Uncle was innocently sleeping. His death was almost certainly instantaneous, and it is much to be feared that he had not the time to appreciate for its own or any other sake this stupendous mass of knowledge which came upon him – I use the expression in its most literal sense – as a bolt from the blue. He lies, to this day, under the ruins. On the top of them we have erected, out of the actual material of the viaduct, a singularly beautiful Maltese cross, designed by my eldest brother, over which, throughout the summer months, climb the sweet peas which he cultivated so patiently.’
Mr. Puffinlow had finished. During the course of the story the four old gentlemen had dispatched their dinner and now, as they drained their second bottle of ‘87, they became aware of an increased activity in the restaurant. Through the constantly swinging doors numbers of well-dressed people were streaming into the room.
‘What is the meaning of this, waiter?’ asked Mr. Lipscombe.
‘Theatre supper, sir. The theatres are just coming out.’
The Colonel took out his watch. It was already a quarter-past eleven.
‘Supper?’ said Mr. Freddie Cumberbatch, in an ecstatic, flute-like voice, glancing about him excitedly like a fox-terrier to whom one has whispered Rats! ‘Supper? But what an excellent idea! Why should we not have supper? Waiter, we will take supper. And bring me the wine-list, please!’
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