Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  They arranged to meet at a downtown restaurant for dinner and Charles took a cab to keep an appointment with an eye-doctor. This had been the main purpose of his visit to London.

  The eye-specialist, who was one of the leading consultants in this specialty, possessed a large, brilliantly-lighted residence, eloquent of wealth, health, and a beacon-like eyesight. Within, it was sumptuous. The young woman who answered the door (one of the doors of Death, after all) breathed an expensive friendliness. The strains of “Cosi Fan Tutte” came down from halcyon regions above, also brilliantly lighted, at the summit of a vast staircase. “How fortunate it is,” thought Charles—as he passed into the costly and cosy waiting-room (which was actually warm) and took up a copy of Life—“how fortunate it is that I only suffer from astigmatism.”

  This was one of the many eminent specialists who had refused to take service under the State. “Cosi Fan Tutte,” Charles approvingly reflected, “does not belong to the same dimension as the Welfare State!” But when he found himself in the presence of the large preoccupied man, with a shock of white hair, he received no response to the first of his disparaging remarks about socialized medicine. The man he had come to consult went down in Charles’s estimation. “Whatever did Williams want to send me to this old fool for?” he grumbled internally.

  His was a routine eye-test, “no thrills”, as they say in Harley Street when no pain is to be inflicted. The massive and clumsy frame used for tests was stuck upon his nose. The big anguished-looking red-faced man then delicately placed lenses out of a box in the empty sockets of the frame. He dropped one of these, which later was discovered in the cuff of Charles’s trousers. The lenses of course were revolved and Charles was asked what he could see. There was sometimes an embarrassing absence of rapport between what Charles saw and what the doctor thought he ought to see.

  The doctor, twisting the lense slowly towards him would comment, “Now that is better like that, isn’t it?” Charles would answer, “I’m afraid not.” “Not?” the doctor would ask with surprise. He then would place another lense in one of the sockets and say confidently, “Now that is clearer, isn’t it?” When Charles would answer “No, that is worse” the doctor would observe gruffly, “No, it can’t be worse. Let us try again. Now I will put back the one that was there before. Remember what it looks like through this. Now”—and snatching one out and placing the disputed one once more in position (and it was during one of these lightning exchanges that a lense flew out of the doctor’s hand and nestled in the trouser cuff)—“now is that not better? You can see better with that can’t you?” “No, sir, I am afraid not. I cannot see so well.” This happened more than once. Charles naturally concluded that the great specialist was no magician. The doctor, on his side, decided that Charles was one of those insufferable patients who always try and put the doctor in the wrong. At the end of the test he was even less talkative than before.

  When Charles said, “I suppose I shall have to wait months for these bifocals,” the doctor said: “Probably. That, however, is not my affair.” “You could not,” Charles asked, “use on my behalf, sir, one of the priorities they give you?” But the only answer he got to that was: “It is dispensing opticians who are the people to talk to about that, not doctors.” Meanwhile the specialist was making out the prescription for the spectacles. “Do you mind where you go?” he asked Charles. “You don’t mind where it is?” A curious question. However, Charles declared himself indifferent, and the specialist said, “Then go to Davis and Merks. You have on this envelope their address.” And Charles saw that the name “Davis and Merks” was printed on the envelope. (The old devil gets a rake-off, mused Charles.) “I will telephone them and see what I can do.”

  Charles would of course have preferred one of the spacious and dignified Wigmore Street Opticians’ saloons, where a staff of impeccably mannered male mannequins still fit spectacles upon one’s nose as though it were a historic nose and as if Debrett were their bible. But he sat in Davis and Merks modest premises in an insignificant side street for a long time before he realized the sort of place he had been sent to—before it dawned upon him that the treacherous old eye-doctor (obviously playing a dirty game, with one foot in both camps, but his left foot having precedence over his right foot) had sent him to a National Health Service shop.

  When he first went in he sat beside a woman in a fur coat with a well-dressed youngster. They seemed to him quite nice people until the fur coat spoke. He was deeply shocked to hear the accents of the Harrow Road. There were a couple of bald men who looked like clerks in his father’s office. Although deploring the presence of what Mr. Orwell called “Proles”, and wishing that the eye-doctor had better taste in opticians, he was still a long way from understanding the dirty trick that had been played on him. The eight tables, at which client and shopman sat face to face gazing into one another’s eyes, were huddled together, and at each were two figures, their intent faces a foot or two apart. Charles became increasingly fascinated in the problems of a young charlady having her spectacles adjusted at the nearby table. Charles watched the expressions in the assistant’s face and studied the extraordinarily expressive fat little back of the youthful charlady.

  A mirror stood upon the table, placed there that she might gaze into it. As she studied the revolution her personality must endure, the addition of a pair of ultra-gay spectacles doing strange things to her face, alarm and doubt were expressed by her back muscles. As the quizzical eye of Mr. Charles Dyat was trained upon this bauble, this festively-coloured nose-toy, he reflected, “That’s what gets their silly votes! God, why did those dratted fools of Tories never think of spectacles—coloured like sugar-sticks? Thirty million pairs of cheap specs would have won for them a hundred seats!” But now came the buxom young char’s leisurely (everything luxuriously leisurely) terminating of the proceedings. Time was made for slaves and slaveys—and Britons were no longer slaves. She poked several short black neck-curls back under her bulbous tammyish cap. And oh with what delicate restraint the assistant advised her: “Always clean them with water—with—well, tap-water.”

  The little shy respectful hesitation before actually referring to anything so plebeian as a tap—and then the little laugh of comradely complicity. “Why not, after all?” he might almost have said. “A little lady like yourself is broad-minded enough not to mind my mentioning the tap over the sink!”

  At the street-door there was another leisurely palaver, shopman all smiling charm, as he deferentially yet a little flirtatiously held the door open. Charles heard him reassuring her. They would, she would find, quieten down with use. Yes, the canary-yellow would no longer, er, be quite so painfully canary (no longer scream at you, my dear, “I’m cheap!”—Charles supplemented these adieux under his breath).

  The shop was emptying and refilling all the time and Charles missed his turn twice because of his absorption in the tap-water episode. It was now that he began to say to himself that there was something wrong about this place—something terribly wrong! After all, there were too many people in it, to start with.

  A dark baldish individual, Charles noticed, was sitting alone at a table. He walked over and sat down in front of him. Charles did not like the face of this man, nor did Charles’s face appeal to the assistant—who made no pretence that he was a “younger son” who had gone into trade, who obviously would say tap-water without a modest pause beforehand. But he was not uncivil. It was a skimpy table, it was close quarters; Charles silently handed him the “Davis and Merks” envelope.

  “Bifocals,” said the assistant, staring at the prescription.

  “Yes. Bifocals,” Charles repeated.

  “You know, don’t you, sir, that the earliest you can expect these, or any bifocals with as large a reading segment as this, is three months?”

  “Three months!” Charles scowled.

  “That is the earliest.”

  “Oh, dear.” Charles looked disagreeable. “What is the smaller reading segment you spok
e of?”

  He was shown a bifocal with a round spy-hole for reading at the bottom, of about the diameter of a lead pencil.

  “Why does it take so long to get these glasses?” he asked angrily. “Is it a result of the National Health Act chaos?”

  A tough look came into the spectacled eyes opposite his own. “It is nothing whatever to do with the National Health Service.”

  “Oh, you deny that!” Charles said disagreeably.

  “I don’t deny anything. I tell you what the situation is regarding bifocals. It always has taken a long time.”

  Charles reached over and took the prescription from the assistant’s hand—not without a certain difficulty.

  “This is mine—excuse me!” He pulled.

  “You cannot get them made quicker anywhere else.”

  Charles and the assistant darted a nasty look at one another, and Charles left the shop. He made his way as quickly as possible to Wigmore Street, and entered the first luxurious opticians he encountered, Craxton and Dawson, Opticians to H.M. the King of the Hellenes. It was five times the size of Davis and Merks, discreetly lighted—and completely empty.

  “No blasted National Health Service here!” Charles told himself with satisfaction.

  A tall distinguished grey-haired gentleman (he turned out to be the manager in person) approached. They took to one another at once. Both suggested by their demeanour that they had been born in a Palladian palace in a vast park, in which deer drifted from tree to tree: and naturally Marlborough and Magdalen in the clothes of Savile Row defeated with great ease the Secondary School and an Austin Reed suiting.

  There was complete harmony—but alas the reality of popular government in its ultimate totalitarian phase imposed its ugly presence, inasmuch as the manager was sorrowfully obliged to confess that he had no influence whatever with the factory that makes bifocals. That factory is the only one doing bifocals: it has literally tens of thousands of orders to be executed before it can deal with any new order. Nothing any shop says makes the slightest impression. Such was the gist of the manager’s information. Asked whether the National Health Service was responsible for these conditions, the manager answered, a little surprised, that of course that and nothing else was the cause.

  “Why does not the Government set up a second factory?” Charles enquired idly.

  “Why does it not do a great many things!” the manager countered. These two supporters of the old order parted on the best of terms. “Not a gentleman, but a damned sound feller!” was Charles’s mental comment. The manager without realizing what he was doing, wrote “Major Charles Dyat, Tadicombe Priory” against the order though Charles had laid no claim to military rank.

  IV

  Since their return from the cinema in an attempted snowstorm—a fiasco resulting in very dirty soft hail—the two friends had sat in front of the gas fire. A French existentialist film they had gone to see after dinner—“Time the Tiger” was the English title—had predisposed Mark, in the brief halt before re-entering his unmade bed, to a deeper discouragement than he had known for some time. The past fifteen hours pressed on him in this relaxed moment, in the way a crowd pressed on you as soon as you stand still. Mark’s mind was now accessible to the day’s frictions, against which it had been shut firmly all day in spite of Charles’s propaganda. The ’flu, he told himself, still lurked in his bloodstream and perhaps some further toxins as the doctor suspected. He grilled his feet before the red-hot elements superstitiously.

  Charles sat at his side gazing at the steam rising from the water placed in front of the fire. He thought of what “the actor-feller” had said: “Time is not passive—it is like a tiger devouring its prey.” Its prey is us. But its prey is temporal, like Time itself, for we are merely time-stuff, existential ephemera. It is not something timeless it devours (how could Time do that?) nor is it something timeless devouring something temporal. It is Time devouring itself, time eating up time indeed. But is there in reality any devouring? Is not everything we see just something fizzling away like a firework, which we call time? This verbalism has misled us, we create an abstract entity.

  Arguments of this sort had been going on in the film and were now prolonged lazily in his mind. He excogitated dimly an objection to Time seen as a Tiger. Our existence is more like the water, he thought, in that bowl—a small and limited quantity. The active principle is like that fire, which slowly disperses the little body of liquid placed in front of it, until there is nothing left.

  Mark at all times was liable to be visited by the discontents which—both because of inherited stoicism, and of a repressive ideology lately acquired—he daily smothered. This was a very severe attack, not unique. But day’s discontents came not singly, as disagreeable memories—for he would not have admitted them into his memory any more than he had done at the time: they came as an anonymous cafard, an exquisite depression. On the other hand Charles was subject to no attacks of this sort: he was more analytical to start with and a truculent perfectionist. For Charles, life was a silly wrangle over a shrunken shirt: life as he saw it was waiting months for spectacles—so life becomes a struggle to see (which ought not to be the case in the twentieth century): was a struggle to eat—as if we were paleolithic: he thought of life as charged with toxins no blood-test could isolate—he saw life as a struggle not to be poisoned by all the ideas that were injected as anti-toxins into it by malignant quacks: he saw life as a hysterical chemist obsessed by problems of antisepsis. But he never had the rough philosophy or the detachment to say “what is one man’s meat, etc.” The man who was being poisoned was himself, that was sufficient. But at least he knew he was being poisoned, he knew what was poison for him.

  At Oxford they had sometimes sat like this, Mark and Charles, at the end of the day: and as their discussions used to start then, so now one started rather suddenly, with Charles looking up and saying:

  “Do you think Time is a tiger, a ferocious beast of prey?”

  It was an undergraduate opening, how people talk when they are young.

  Mark shook his head.

  “No,” he said magisterially, “nothing forcible and palpable like that. More like the bacteria of a disease.”

  “It is rather a fierce malady!”

  Mark shook his head again. “I don’t think so. I know you do.”

  “At least,” Charles said, “it moves at an accelerated tempo at present. Perhaps Time has contracted a fever.”

  Mark looked up, his handsome eyes of a mildly-stern big-dog losing their lethargic droop.

  “A fever. Perhaps.” Mark passed his fingers through coarse dark hair. “Time has certainly shown itself in the tiger class during this century. The immense explosion of technical creativeness has torn the world of two millennia apart.”

  “You call that tiger Time. You are sure the tiger is not Man?” Charles asked.

  “There were men there in the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth century and so on. No, I prefer to say Time. In 1900 the bee was in the clover. God was in His Heaven, all was well with the world. Fifty years ago the scene was amazingly different. The radio, the automobile, the airship and airplane, the telephone, television, the cinema—these revolutionary techniques did not come one at a time with decent intervals in between. Four decades absorbed this stupendous cataract.”

  “The advent of energies out of scale with man, as if a race of giants had been born the size of skyscrapers.” Charles shook his head; “1900: a blessed time.”

  “In some ways, yes,” Mark agreed. “Though neither of us was born yet. We are like the cinema and the telephone in that respect.”

  “I am neither like a telephone nor like the flicks.” And they both laughed. “Tonight,” Charles proceeded, “we have been to a movie play. Forty years ago it would have been living, sweating, actors. Much better!”

  “I too prefer the mime in the flesh: as I prefer a concert hall to a radio,” Mark again agreed. “However, the cinema has its uses and beauties. You woul
d not deny that? At present it is misused in the most disgusting way by Hollywood.”

  “And don’t forget what is done over here.”

  “All right. But once the profit-motive is banished—as it will be in a socialist society, then there will be nothing but an intelligent standard of movie. If nothing else, its educative power will be enormous. Today it miseducates and corrupts. Then it will…”

  “No it won’t,” shouted Charles, “not if you have that pack of vulgar nobodies still there! By education, which you stress, they would mean propaganda. And as for art! In the company of some film magnate they lap up the vulgarest rubbish the cinema can produce. No Hollywood horror would be too stupid for them. One would say that they identify socialism with philistinism.”

  Mark laughed nervously. “You have got that all wrong too, Charlie. That is not bad taste, the minister involved is a man of sensitive culture. Alfred Munnings and he, for instance…”

  “Yes, yes, and Augustus John!” Charles laughed boisterously.

  “Augustus John?” A rather grave look came into Mark’s face. “I don’t know about Augustus John,” he said slowly, “but the responsible officials are not philistines whatever else they may be. No. It is DOLLARS.”

  “Nothing but dollars,” echoed Charles. “You believe that on the sly these great ministers of state slip out to see films of the type we have been to this evening? Who knows, that fat man at my side may have been Bevan.”

  “Highly probable,” snapped Mark. “I know Bevan likes good films.”

  “Don’t speak to me of vermin! There are vermin in all movie houses.”

  “Poor Nye.”

  “You will really have to get a new type of politician, Mark, for your brave new world. Do be serious about it if you must go in for it!… But I have been thinking about what you said—the last forty or fifty years you know and Time going berserk.”