The Third Policeman

by O'Brien, Flann;

  Recent research has not thrown much light on Kraus’s identity or his ultimate fate. Bassett’s posthumous Recollections contains the interesting suggestion that Kraus did not exist at all, the name being one of the pseudonyms adopted by the egregious du Garbandier to further his ’campaign of calumny’. The Leben, however, seems too friendly in tone to encourage such a speculation.

  Du Garbandier himself, possibly pretending to confuse the characteristics of the English and French languages, persistently uses ‘black hair’ for ‘black air’, and makes extremely elaborate fun of the raven-headed lady of the skies who deluged the world with her tresses every night when retiring.

  The wisest course on this question is probably that taken by the little-known Swiss writer, Le Clerque. ‘This matter,’ he says, ‘is outside the true province of the conscientious commentator inasmuch as being unable to say aught that is charitable or useful, he must preserve silence.’

  Chapter 9

  I was awakened the following morning by sounds of loud hammering1 outside the window and found myself immediately recalling – the recollection was an absurd paradox – that I had been in the next world yesterday. Lying there half awake, it is not unnatural that my thoughts should turn to de Selby. Like all the greater thinkers, he has been looked to for guidance on many of the major perplexities of existence. The commentators, it is to be feared, have not succeeded in extracting from the vast store-house of his writings any consistent, cohesive or comprehensive corpus of spiritual belief and praxis. Nevertheless, his ideas of paradise are not without interest. Apart from the contents of the famous de Selby ‘Codex’,2 the main references are to be found in the Rural Atlas and in the so-called ‘substantive’ appendices to the Country Album. Briefly he indicates that the happy state is ‘not unassociated with water’ and that ‘water is rarely absent from any wholly satisfactory situation’. He does not give any closer definition of this hydraulic elysium but mentions that he has written more fully on the subject elsewhere.3 It is not clear, unfortunately, whether the reader is expected to infer that a wet day is more enjoyable than a dry one or that a lengthy course of baths is a reliable method of achieving peace of mind. He praises the equilibrium of water, its circumambiency, equiponderance and equitableness, and declares that water, ‘if not abused’4 can achieve ‘absolute superiority.’ For the rest, little remains save the record of his obscure and unwitnessed experiments. The story is one of a long succession of prosecutions for water wastage at the suit of the local authority. At one hearing it was shown that he had used 9,000 gallons in one day and on another occasion almost 80,000 gallons in the course of a week. The word ‘used’ in this context is the important one. The local officials, having checked the volume of water entering the house daily from the street connection, had sufficient curiosity to watch the outlet sewer and made the astonishing discovery that none of the vast quantity of water drawn in ever left the house. The commentators have seized avidly on this statistic but are, as usual, divided in their interpretations. In Bassett’s view the water was treated in the patent water-box and diluted to a degree that made it invisible – in the guise of water, at all events – to the untutored watchers at the sewer. Hatchjaw’s theory in this regard is more acceptable. He tends to the view that the water was boiled and converted, probably through the water-box, into tiny jets of steam which were projected through an upper window into the night in an endeavour to wash the black ‘volcanic’ stains from the ‘skins’ or ‘air-bladders’ of the atmosphere and thus dissipate the hated and ‘Insanitary’ night. However far-fetched this theory may appear, unexpected colour is lent to it by a previous court case when the physicist was fined forty shillings. On this occasion, some two years before the construction of the water-box, de Selby was charged with playing a fire hose out of one of the upper windows of his house at night, an operation which resulted in several passers-by being drenched to the skin. On another occasion5 he had to face the curious charge of hoarding water, the police testifying that every vessel in his house, from the bath down to a set of three ornamental egg-cups, was brimming with the liquid. Again a trumped-up charge of attempted suicide was preferred merely because the savant had accidentally half-drowned himself in a quest for some vital statistic of celestial aquatics.

  It is clear from contemporary newspapers that his inquiries into water were accompanied by persecutions and legal pin-prickings unparalleled since the days of Galileo. It may be some consolation to the minions responsible to know that their brutish and barbaric machinations succeeded in denying posterity a clear record of the import of these experiments and perhaps a primer of esoteric water science that would banish much of our worldly pain and unhappiness. Virtually all that remains of de Selby’s work in this regard is his house where his countless taps6 are still as he left them, though a newer generation of more delicate mind has had the water turned off at the main.

  Water? The word was in my ear as well as in my brain. Rain was beginning to beat on the windows, not a soft or friendly rain but large angry drops which came spluttering with great force upon the glass. The sky was grey and stormy and out of it I heard the harsh shouts of wild geese and ducks labouring across the wind on their coarse pinions. Black quails called sharply from their hidings and a swollen stream was babbling dementedly. Trees, I knew, would be angular and ill-tempered in the rain and boulders would gleam coldly at the eye.

  I would have sought sleep again without delay were it not for the loud hammering outside. I arose and went on the cold floor to the window. Outside there was a man with sacks on his shoulders hammering at a wooden framework he was erecting in the barrack yard. He was red-faced and strong-armed and limped around his work with enormous stiff strides. His mouth was full of nails which bristled like steel fangs in the shadow of his moustache. He extracted them one by one as I watched and hammered them perfectly into the wet wood. He paused to test a beam with his great strength and accidentally let the hammer fall. He stooped awkwardly and picked it up.

  Did you notice anything?

  No.

  The Hammer, man.

  It looks an ordinary hammer. What about it?

  You must be blind. It fell on his foot.

  Yes?

  And he didn’t bat an eyelid. It might have been a feather for all the sign he gave.

  Here I gave a sharp cry of perception and immediately threw up the sash of the window and leaned out into the inhospitable day, hailing the workman excitedly. He looked at me curiously and came over with a friendly frown of interrogation on his face.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘O’Feersa, the middle brother,’ he answered. ‘Will you come out here,’ he continued, ‘and give me a hand with the wet carpentry?’

  ‘Have you a wooden leg?’

  For answer he dealt his left thigh a mighty blow with the hammer. It echoed hollowly in the rain. He cupped his hand clownishly at his ear as if listening intently to the noise he had made. Then he smiled.

  ‘I am building a high scaffold here,’ he said, ‘and it is lame work where the ground is bumpy. I could find use for the assistance of a competent assistant.’

  ‘Do you know Martin Finnucane?’

  He raised his hand in a military salute and nodded.

  ‘He is almost a relation,’ he said, ‘but not completely. He is closely related to my cousin but they never married, never had the time.’

  Here I knocked my own leg sharply on the wall.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked him.

  He gave a start and then shook my hand and looked brotherly and loyal, asking me was it the left or the right?

  Scribble a note and send him for assistance. There is no time to lose.

  I did so at once, asking Martin Finnucane to come and save me in the nick of time from being strangled to death on the scaffold and telling him he would have to hurry. I did not know whether he could come as he had promised he would but in my present danger anything was worth trying.

 
I saw Mr O’Feersa going quickly away through the mists and threading his path carefully through the sharp winds which were racing through the fields, his head down, sacks on his shoulders and resolution in his heart.

  Then I went back to bed to try to forget my anxiety. I said a prayer that neither of the other brothers was out on the family bicycle because it would be wanted to bring my message quickly to the captain of the one-leggèd men. Then I felt a hope kindling fitfully within me and I fell asleep again.

  1 Le Clerque (in his almost forgotten Extensions and Analyses) has drawn attention to the importance of percussion in the de Selby dialectic and shown that most of the physicist’s experiments were extremely noisy. Unfortunately the hammering was always done behind locked doors and no commentator has hazarded even a guess as to what was being hammered and for what purpose. Even when constructing the famous water-box, probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands, de Selby is known to have smashed three heavy coal-hammers and was involved in undignified legal proceedings with his landlord (the notorious Porter) arising from an allegation of strained floor-joists and damage to a ceiling. It is clear that he attached considerable importance to ‘hammerwork’. (v. Golden Hours, p. 48–9). In The Layman’s Atlas he publishes a rather obscure account of his inquiries into the nature of hammering and boldly attributes the sharp sound of percussion to the bursting of ‘atmosphere balls’ evidently envisaging the air as being composed of minute balloons, a view scarcely confirmed by later scientific research. In his disquisitions elsewhere on the nature of night and darkness, he refers in passing to the straining of ‘air-skins’, al. ‘air-balls’ and ‘bladders’. His conclusion was that ‘hammering is anything but what it appears to be’; such a statement, if not open to explicit refutation, seems unnecessary and unenlightening.

  Hatchjaw has put forward the suggestion that loud hammering was a device resorted to by the savant to drown other noises which might give some indication of the real trend of the experiments. Bassett has concurred in this view, with, however, two reservations.

  2The reader will be familiar with the storms which have raged over this most tantalizing of holograph survivals. The ‘Codex’ (first so-called by Bassett in his monumental De Selby Compendium) is a collection of some two thousand sheets of foolscap closely hand-written on both sides. The signal distinction of the manuscript is that not one word of the writing is legible. Attempts made by different commentators to decipher certain passages which look less formidable than others have been characterized by fantastic divergencies, not in the meaning of the passages (of which there is no question) but in the brand of nonsense which is evolved. One passage, described by Bassett as being ‘a penetrating treatise on old age’ is referred to by Henderson (biographer of Bassett) as ‘a not unbeautiful description of lambing operations on an unspecified farm’. Such disagreement, it must be confessed, does little to enhance the reputation of either writer.

  Hatchjaw, probably displaying more astuteness than scholastic acumen, again advances his forgery theory and professes amazement that any person of intelligence could be deluded by ‘so crude an imposition’. A curious contretemps arose when, challenged by Bassett to substantiate this cavalier pronouncement, Hatchjaw casually mentioned that eleven pages of the ‘Codex’ were all numbered ‘88’. Bassett, evidently taken by surprise, performed an independent check and could discover no page at all bearing this number. Subsequent wrangling disclosed the startling fact that both commentators claimed to have in their personal possession the ‘only genuine Codex’. Before this dispute could be cleared up, there was a further bombshell, this time from far-off Hamburg. The Norddeutsche Verlag published a book by the shadowy Kraus purporting to be an elaborate exegesis based on an authentic copy of the ‘Codex’ with a transliteration of what was described as the obscure code in which the document was written. If Kraus can be believed, the portentously-named ‘Codex’ is simply a collection of extremely puerile maxims on love, life, mathematics and the like, couched in poor ungrammatical English and entirely lacking de Selby’s characteristic reconditeness and obscurity. Bassett and many of the other commentators, regarding this extraordinary book as merely another manifestation of the mordant du Garbandier’s spleen, pretended never to have heard of it notwithstanding the fact that Bassett is known to have obtained, presumably by questionable means, a proof of the work many months before it appeared. Hatchjaw alone did not ignore the book. Remarking dryly in a newspaper article that Kraus’s ‘aberration’ was due to a foreigner’s confusion of the two English words code and codex, declared his intention of publishing ‘a brief brochure’ which would effectively discredit the German’s work and all similar ‘trumpery frauds’. The failure of this work to appear is popularly attributed to Kraus’s machinations in Hamburg and lengthy sessions on the transcontinental wire. In any event, the wretched Hatchjaw was again arrested, this time at the suit of his own publishers who accused him of the larceny of some of the firm’s desk fittings. The case was adjourned and subsequently struck out owing to the failure to appear of certain unnamed witnesses from abroad. Clear as it is that this fantastic charge was without a vestige of foundation, Hatchjaw failed to obtain any redress from the authorities.

  It cannot be pretended that the position regarding this ‘Codex’ is at all satisfactory and it is not likely that time or research will throw any fresh light on a document which cannot be read and of which four copies at least, all equally meaningless, exist in the name of being the genuine original.

  An amusing diversion in this affair was unwittingly caused by the mild Le Clerque. Hearing of the ‘Codex’ some months before Bassett’s authoritative ‘Compendium’ was published, he pretended to have read the ‘Codex’ and in an article in the Zuercher Tageblatt made many vague comments on it, referring to its ‘shrewdness’, ‘compelling if novel arguments’, ‘fresh viewpoint’, etc. Subsequently he repudiated the article and asked Hatchjaw in a private letter to denounce it as a forgery. Hatchjaw’s reply is not extant but it is thought that he refused with some warmth to be party to any further hanky-panky in connection with the ill-starred ‘Codex’. It is perhaps unnecessary to refer to du Garbandier’s contribution to this question. He contented himself with an article in l’Avenir in which he professed to have decyphered the ‘Codex’ and found it to be a repository of obscene conundrums, accounts of amorous adventures and erotic speculation, ‘all too lamentable to be repeated even in broad outline.’

  3 Thought to be a reference to the ‘Codex’.

  4 Naturally, no explanation is given of what is meant by ‘abusing’ water but it is noteworthy that the savant spent several months trying to discover a satisfactory method of ‘diluting’ water, holding that it was ‘too strong’ for many of the novel uses to which he desired to put it. Bassett suggests that the de Selby Water Box was invented for this purpose although he cannot explain how the delicate machinery is set in motion. So many fantastic duties have assigned to this inscrutable mechanism (witness Kraus’s absurd sausage theory) that Bassett’s speculation must not be allowed the undue weight which his authoritative standing would tend to lend it.

  5 Almost all of the numerous petty litigations in which de Selby was involved afford a salutary example of the humiliations which great minds may suffer when forced to have contact with the pedestrian intellects of the unperceiving laity. On one of the water-wastage hearings the Bench permitted itself a fatuous inquiry as to why the defendant did not avail himself of the metered industrial rate ‘if bathing is to be persisted in so immoderately’. It was on this occasion that de Selby made the famous retort that ‘one does not readily accept the view that paradise is limited by the capacity of a municipal waterworks or human happiness by water-meters manufactured by unemancipated labour in Holland.’ It is some consolation to recall that the forcible medical examination which followed was characterized by an enlightenment which redounds to this day to the credit of the medical profession. De Selby’s discharge was unc
onditional and absolute.

  6 Hatchjaw (in his invaluable Conspectus of the de Selby Dialectic) has described the house as ‘the most water-piped edifice in the world.’ Even in the living-rooms there were upwards of ten rough farmyard taps, some with zinc troughs and some (as those projecting from the ceiling and from converted gas-brackets near the fireplace) directed at the unprotected floor. Even on the stairs a three-inch main may still be seen nailed along the rail of the balustrade with a tap at intervals of one foot, while under the stairs and in every conceivable hiding-place there were elaborate arrangements of cisterns and storage-tanks. Even the gas pipes were connected up with this water system and would gush strongly at any attempt to provide the light.

  Du Garbandier in this connection has permitted himself some coarse and cynical observations bearing upon cattle lairages.

  Chapter 10

  When I awoke again two thoughts came into my head so closely together that they seemed to be stuck to one another; I could not be sure which came first and it was hard to separate them and examine them singly. One was a happy thought about the weather, the sudden brightness of the day that had been vexed earlier. The other was suggesting to me that it was not the same day at all but a different one and maybe not even the next day after the angry one. I could not decide that question and did not try to. I lay back and took to my habit of gazing out of the window. Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day – mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely.