‘Not that.’
‘It is a difficult pancake,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘a very compound crux. Wait till we try again.’
This time he screwed down the rollers of the mangle till they were whining and till it was nearly out of the question to spin the wheel. The light that appeared was the thinnest and sharpest light that I ever imagined, like the inside of the edge of a sharp razor, and the intensification which came upon it with the turning of the wheel was too delicate a process to be watched even sideways.
What happened eventually was not a shout but a shrill scream, a sound not unlike the call of rats yet far shriller than any sound which could be made by man or animal. Again I thought that words had been used but the exact meaning of them or the language they belonged to was quite uncertain.
‘“Two bananas a penny”?’
‘Not bananas,’ I said.
MacCruiskeen frowned vacantly.
‘It is one of the most compressed and intricate pancakes I have ever known,’ he said.
He put the blanket back over the mangle and pushed it to one side and then lit a lamp on the wall by pressing some knob in the darkness. The light was bright but wavery and uncertain and would be far from satisfactory for reading with. He sat back in his chair as if waiting to be questioned and complimented on the strange things he had been doing.
‘What is your private opinion of all that?’ he asked.
‘What were you doing?’ I inquired.
‘Stretching the light.’
‘I do not understand your meaning.’
‘I will tell you the size of it,’ he said, ‘and indicate roughly the shape of it. It is no harm if you know unusual things because you will be a dead man in two days and you will be held incognito and incommunicate in the meantime. Did you ever hear tell of omnium?’
‘Omnium?’
‘Omnium is the right name for it although you will not find it in the books.’
‘Are you sure that is the right name?’ I had never heard this word before except in Latin.
‘Certain.’
‘How certain?’
‘The Sergeant says so.’
‘And what is omnium the right name for?’
MacCruiskeen smiled at me indulgently.
‘You are omnium and I am omnium and so is the mangle and my boots here and so is the wind in the chimney.’
‘That is enlightening,’ I said.
‘It comes in waves,’ he explained.
‘What colour?’
‘Every colour.’
‘High or low?’
‘Both.’
The blade of my inquisitive curiosity was sharpened but I saw that questions were putting the matter further into doubt instead of clearing it. I kept my silence till MacCruiskeen spoke again.
‘Some people,’ he said, ‘call it energy but the right name is omnium because there is far more than energy in the inside of it, whatever it is. Omnium is the essential inherent interior essence which is hidden inside the root of the kernel of everything and it is always the same.’
I nodded wisely.
‘It never changes. But it shows itself in a million ways and it always comes in waves. Now take the case of the light on the mangle.’
‘Take it,’ I said.
‘Light is the same omnium on a short wave but if it comes on a longer wave it is in the form of noise, or sound. With my own patents I can stretch a ray out until it becomes sound.’
‘I see.’
‘And when I have a shout shut in that box with the wires, I can squeeze it till I get heat and you would not believe the convenience of it all in the winter. Do you see that lamp on the wall there?’
‘I do.’
‘That is operated by a patent compressor and a secret instrument connected with that box with the wires. The box is full of noise. Myself and the Sergeant spend our spare time in the summer collecting noises so that we can have light and heat for our official life in the dark winter. That is why the light is going up and down. Some of the noises are noisier than the others and the pair of us will be blinded if we come to the time when the quarry was working last September. It is in the box somewhere and it is bound to come out of it in the due course inevitably.’
‘Blasting operations?’
‘Dynamiteering and extravagant combustions of the most far-reaching kind. But omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export.’
‘And policemen and cows, are they all in waves?’
‘Everything is on a wave and omnium is at the back of the whole shooting-match unless I am a Dutchman from the distant Netherlands. Some people call it God and there are other names for something that is identically resembling it and that thing is omnium also into the same bargain.’
‘Cheese?’
‘Yes. Omnium.’
‘Even braces?’
‘Even braces.’
‘Did you ever see a piece of it or what colour it is?’
MacCruiskeen smiled wryly and spread his hands into red fans.
‘That is the supreme pancake,’ he said. ‘If you could say what the shouts mean it might be the makings of the answer.’
‘And storm-wind and water and brown bread and the feel of hailstones on the bare head, are those all omnium on a different wave?’
‘All omnium.’
‘Could you not get a piece and carry it in your waistcoat so that you could change the world to suit you when it suited you?’
‘It is the ultimate and the inexorable pancake. If you had a sack of it or even the half-full of a small matchbox of it, you could do anything and even do what could not be described by that name.’
‘I understand you.’
MacCruiskeen sighed and went again to the dresser, taking something from the drawer. When he sat down at the table again, he started to move his hands together, performing intricate loops and convolutions with his fingers as if they were knitting something but there were no needles in them at all, nothing to be seen except his naked hands.
‘Are you working again at the little chest?’ I asked.
‘I am,’ he said.
I sat watching him idly, thinking my own thoughts. For the first time I recalled the wherefore of my unhappy visit to the queer situation I was in. Not my watch but the black box. Where was it? If MacCruiskeen knew the answer, would he tell me if I asked him? If by chance I did not escape safely from the hangman’s morning, would I ever see it or know what was inside it, know the value of the money I could never spend, know how handsome could have been my volume on de Selby? Would I ever see John Divney again? Where was he now? Where was my watch?
You have no watch.
That was true. I felt my brain cluttered and stuffed with questions and blind perplexity and I also felt the sadness of my position coming back into my throat. I felt completely alone, but with a small hope that I would escape safely at the tail end of everything.
I had made up my mind to ask him if he knew anything about the cashbox when my attention was distracted by another surprising thing.
The door was flung open and in came Gilhaney, his red face puffed from the rough road. He did not quite stop or sit down but kept moving restlessly about the day-room, paying no attention to me at all. MacCruiskeen had reached a meticulous point in his work and had his head nearly on the table to make sure that his fingers were working correctly and making no serious mistakes. When he had passed the difficulty he looked up somewhat at Gilhaney.
‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked casually.
‘Only about timber,’ said Gilhaney.
‘And what is your timber news?’
‘The prices have been put up by a Dutch ring, the cost of a good scaffold would cost a fortune.’
‘Trust the Dutchmen,’ MacCruiskeen said in a tone that meant that he knew the timber trade inside out.
‘A three-man scaffold with a good trap and satisfactory st
eps would set you back ten pounds without rope or labour,’ Gilhaney said.
‘Ten pounds is a lot of money for a hanger,’ said MacCruiskeen.
‘But a two-man scaffold with a push-off instead of the mechanical trap and a ladder for the steps would cost the best majority of six pound, rope extra.’
‘And dear at the same price,’ said MacCruiskeen.
‘But the ten-pound scaffold is a better job, there is more class about it,’ said Gilhaney. ‘There is a charm about a scaffold if it is well-made and satisfactory.’
What occurred next I did not see properly because I was listening to this pitiless talk even with my eyes. But something astonishing happened again. Gilhaney had gone near MacCruiskeen to talk down at him seriously and I think he made the mistake of stopping dead completely instead of keeping on the move to preserve his perpendicular balance. The outcome was that he crashed down, half on bent MacCruiskeen and half on the table, bringing the two of them with him into a heap of shouts and legs and confusion on the floor. The policeman’s face when I saw it was a frightening sight. It was the colour of a dark plum with passion, but his eyes burned like bonfires in the forehead and there were frothy discharges at his mouth. He said no words for a while, only sounds of jungle anger, wild grunts and clicks of demoniacal hostility. Gilhaney had cowered to the wall and raised himself with the help of it and then retreated to the door. When MacCruiskeen found his tongue again he used the most unclean language ever spoken and invented dirtier words than the dirtiest ever spoken anywhere. He put names on Gilhaney too impossible and revolting to be written with known letters. He was temporarily insane with anger because he rushed ultimately to the dresser where he kept all his properties and pulled out a patent pistol and swept it round the room to threaten the two of us and every breakable article in the house.
‘Get down on your four knees, the two of you, on the floor,’ he roared, ‘and don’t stop searching for that chest you have knocked down till you find it!’
Gilhaney slipped down to his knees at once and I did the same thing without troubling to look at the Policeman’s face because I could remember distinctly what it looked like the last time I had eyed it. We crawled feebly about the floor, peering and feeling for something that could not be felt or seen and that was really too small to be lost at all.
This is amusing. You are going to be hung for murdering a man you did not murder and now you will be shot for not finding a tiny thing that probably does not exist at all and which in any event you did not lose.
I deserve it all, I answered, for not being here at all, to quote the words of the Sergeant.
How long we remained at our peculiar task, Gilhaney and I, it is not easy to remember. Ten minutes or ten years, perhaps, with MacCruiskeen seated near us, fingering the iron and glaring savagely at our bent forms. Then I caught Gilhaney showing his face to me sideways and giving me a broad private wink. Soon he closed his fingers, got up erect with the assistance of the door-handle and advanced to where MacCruiskeen was, smiling his gappy smile.
‘Here you are and here it is,’ he said with his closed hand outstretched.
‘Put it on the table,’ MacCruiskeen said evenly.
Gilhaney put his hand on the table and opened it.
‘You can now go away and take your departure,’ MacCruiskeen told him, ‘and leave the premises for the purpose of attending to the timber.’
When Gilhaney was gone I saw that most of the passion had ebbed from the Policeman’s face. He sat silent for a time, then gave his customary sigh and got up.
‘I have more to do tonight,’ he said to me civilly, ‘so I will show you where you are to sleep for the dark night-time.’
He lit a queer light that had wires to it and a diminutive box full of minor noises, and led me into a room where there were two white beds and nothing else.
‘Gilhaney thinks he is a clever one and a master mind,’ he said.
‘He might be or maybe not,’ I muttered.
‘He does not take much account of coincidental chances.’
‘He does not look like a man that would care much.’
‘When he said he had the chest he thought he was making me into a prize pup and blinding me by putting his thumb in my eye.’
‘That is what it looked like.’
‘But by a rare chance he did accidentally close his hand on the chest and it was the chest and nothing else that he replaced in due course on the table.’
There was some silence here.
‘Which bed?’ I asked.
‘This one,’ said MacCruiskeen.
1 ‘Le Supreme charme qu’on trouve à lire une page de de Selby est qu’elle vous conduit inexorablement a l’heureuse certitude que des sots vous n’êtes pas le plus grand.’
2 In Lux Mundi.
3 Now very rare and a collector’s piece. The sardonic du Garbandier makes great play of the fact that the man who first printed the Atlas (Watkins) was struck by lightning on the day he completed the task. It is interesting to note that the otherwise reliable Hatchjaw has put forward the suggestion that the entire Atlas is spurious and the work of ‘another hand’, raising issues of no less piquancy that those of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. He has many ingenious if not quite convincing arguments, not the least of them being that de Selby was known to have received considerable royalties from this book which he did not write, ‘a procedure that would be of a piece with the master’s ethics.’ The theory is, however, not one which will commend itself to the serious student.
4 Du Garbandier has inquired with his customary sarcasm why a malignant condition of the gall-bladder, a disease which frequently reduced de Selby to a cripple, was omitted from the list of ‘unnecessaries’.
5 Possibly the one weak spot in the argument.
6 See Hatchjaw: The de Selby Water-Boxes Day by Day. The calculations are given in full and the daily variations are expressed in admirably clear graphs.
7 From a chance and momentary perusal of the Policeman’s notebook it is possible for me to give here the relative figures for a week’s readings. For obvious reasons the figures themselves are fictitious:
Chapter 8
After MacCruiskeen had tiptoed delicately from the room like a trained nurse and shut the door without a sound, I found myself standing by the bed and wondering stupidly what I was going to do with it. I was weary in body and my brain was numb. I had a curious feeling about my left leg. I thought that it was, so to speak, spreading – that its woodenness was slowly extending throughout my whole body, a dry timber poison killing me inch by inch. Soon my brain would be changed to wood completely and I would then be dead. Even the bed was made of wood, not metal. If I were to lie in it –
Will you sit down for Pity’s sake and stop standing there like a gawm, Joe said suddenly.
I am not sure what I do next if I stop standing, I answered. But I sat down on the bed for Pity’s sake.
There is nothing difficult about a bed, even a child can learn to use a bed. Take off your clothes and get into bed and lie on it and keep lying on it even if it makes you feel foolish.
I saw the wisdom of this and started to undress. I felt almost too tired to go through that simple task. When all my clothes were laid on the floor they were much more numerous than I had expected and my body was surprisingly white and thin.
I opened the bed fastidiously, lay into the middle of it, closed it up again carefully and let out a sigh of happiness and rest. I felt as if all my weariness and perplexities of the day had descended on me pleasurably like a great heavy quilt which would keep me warm and sleepy. My knees opened up like rosebuds in rich sunlight, pushing my shins two inches further to the bottom of the bed. Every joint became loose and foolish and devoid of true utility. Every inch of my person gained weight with every second until the total burden on the bed was approximately five hundred thousand tons. This was evenly distributed on the four wooden legs of the bed, which had by now become an integral part of the universe. My eyelids, ea
ch weighing no less than four tons, slewed ponderously across my eyeballs. My narrow shins, itchier and more remote in their agony of relaxation, moved further away from me till my happy toes pressed closely on the bars. My position was completely horizontal, ponderous, absolute and incontrovertible. United with the bed I became momentous and planetary. Far away from the bed I could see the outside night framed neatly in the window as if it were a picture on the wall. There was a bright star in one corner with other smaller stars elsewhere littered about in sublime profusion. Lying quietly and dead-eyed, I reflected on how new the night1 was, how distinctive and unaccustomed its individuality. Robbing me of the reassurance of my eyesight, it was disintegrating my bodily personality into a flux of colour, smell, recollection, desire – all the strange uncounted essences of terrestrial and spiritual existence. I was deprived of definition, position and magnitude and my significance was considerably diminished. Lying there, I felt the weariness ebbing from me slowly, like a tide retiring over limitless sands. The feeling was so pleasurable and profound that I sighed again a long sound of happiness. Almost at once I heard another sigh and heard Joe murmuring some contented incoherency. His voice was near me, yet did not seem to come from the accustomed place within. I thought that he must be lying beside me in the bed and I kept my hands carefully at my sides in case I should accidentally touch him, I felt, for no reason, that his diminutive body would be horrible to the human touch – scaly or slimy like an eel or with a repelling roughness like a cat’s tongue:
That’s not very logical – or complimentary either, he said suddenly.
What isn’t?
That about my body. Why scaly?
That’s only my joke, I chuckled drowsily. I know you have no body. Except my own perhaps.
But why scaly?
I don’t know. How can I know why I think my thoughts?
By God I won’t be called scaly.
His voice to my surprise had become shrill with petulance. Then he seemed to fill the world with his resentment, not by speaking but by remaining silent after he had spoken.
Now, now, Joe, I murmured soothingly.
Because if you are looking for trouble you can have your bellyful, he snapped.
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