by Paul Ableman
Yours etc.
Clive Witt
The next day a young man came to mend the telephones. Wilhelmina whispered to me that she was sure he had taken a dislike to me.
“Why?” I asked her.
“He thinks you’re Danish.”
I observed the young man and, in the lurid glare of his blowlamp, I realized that he was potentially dangerous. Young men of that type, full of crazed dreams of Danes and glory, generate a tension and this tension is often used for the manufacture of war and disorder. I therefore felt that it was my duty to reason with the youth.
“As a matter of fact,” I informed him, “I’m not Danish but suppose I had been? You mustn’t form preconceived notions but must examine every Dane with a fresh eye, just as if he were a broken telephone. Do you understand?”
“No,” he replied, “I don’t understand, but I’ll tell you one thing: there’s some nice girls in this house.”
“Do you like them?”
“I do—I like them a lot. I’d like to play around with them some time, if that would meet with your approval?”
At this I had an inspiration. I am always alert for educational opportunities for my children and it occurred to me that if one of my sons, a fellow called Kew or Richmond or something similar, failed to become a barber on an airliner, which was his real ambition, he might become a healer of telephones. He could begin his studies immediately. Therefore I informed the young man that he was welcome to come and play around with some of my daughters if he would give my son a brief introduction to the principle and operation of the telephone. He agreed enthusiastically and I began to suspect that Wilhelmina had been wrong, that she had fathered her own obsession about Danes on to this unprejudiced young man. I therefore spoke the word “Dane” and the word “Denmark” several times in a provocative voice but was gratified to find that he did not react. Then I called my son and he came dutifully and gazed at the broken telephone.
“It’s easy really,” the young professional confided. “You just push the voice in here and it gets turned into electricity. There’s a lot of sand and other stuff inside which plays a part in the whole wondrous process. You see this little coil? This jigs up and down. You see this other coil? It does the same. The more voice you push in at this end the higher the pressure and finally some of it gets squeezed right through and comes out at the other end. In the middle you have an operator who shunts the different voices about and this adds an element of mystery to what might otherwise seem just sordid mechanics. Is that clear?”
My son nodded, and then asked:
“What is your favourite part of the telephone?”
“The dial.”
“Thank you.”
I then took Richmond—I’m virtually certain his name was Richmond—aside and asked him what he thought of telephones and those who man them.
“It would be a fine career,” he affirmed.
The young telephone man now asked me about my daughters and I assured him that I had a good selection. He told me that he loved girls and was delighted that he would now have a chance to mess about with some. He said he would visit us soon for this purpose. I noticed that, as he eased himself into his little van, he seemed to be in a dreamy and confused state and this perception was confirmed when he backed straight into my wife’s new car, virtually wrecking it. He waved sadly and drove away.
Things were like that all week, dreamy and confused. The whole house, the whole world, became dreamy and confused. The Times, as always, was full of good things but they were poetic and indistinct, vague profiles of ministers that merged with dim portraits of agitators, fleeting, mysterious visits by nameless dignitaries, production schedules that formed romantic arabesques, brooding bishops, trains that crashed in the night—
In the house the telephone rang wanly. Car salesmen attempted, in hollow, prophetic tones, to sell my wife a new car and she bought seven. My publisher rang to say that his firm had branched out into property, had acquired my present house and would soon dispossess me. Then, with eerie and unearthly change of mood, he invited me to a cricket game and I heard myself wistfully refusing. Meals were reticent and embarrassed affairs at which we ate mutton but were conscious of the mighty presence of beef all around us.
I embarked on a few preliminary notes for my new novel.
Preliminary Notes
Professor Guthrie Pidge descended from the train at Tunbridge Falls, Nebraska and whistled nervously for a porter. Of timid and withdrawn temperament, Professor Pidge had been rendered uneasy by the many drastic events that had occurred on the long train ride from the coast. At the coast he had disembarked from the sub-liner “Swift Fin” at the great metropolis of New Byfleet, with its towering burlesque theatres and its queues of monks and speculators waiting for the soup kitchens to open. Before he had managed to fulfil his fleeting desire to penetrate deeper into this remarkable ambience, the entire secretariat of the Massed Universities of America had swept him away in an Earth-Borer and deposited him on the transcontinental express to Tunbridge Falls, where he was to lecture in Literary Agronomy to thirty-fourth year students. The journey had been a nightmare, or rather a marvel, a marvel and a wonder and yet containing elements of nightmare. The train had travelled on rails. There had been human beings inside it, of varying personality structure. Once a man had risen in apparent distress and said:
“What?”
This word had continued to reverberate in the professor’s mind. “What?” “What?” And then again: “What?” Sheep and steel. Pain and rail and—what! “What?” drummed in the professor’s ears. But what sheep? What steel? What?
“What?” murmured the professor cautiously, and then boldly appended, “is it?”
This addition provided relief but no sooner had the disturbing, if trivial, irritant been thus successfully overcome than another appeared. A child turned and looked at him and then looked away. At the moment of impact of the child’s glance, the professor had just settled his mind on a possible subject for a lecture, the relationship between the term “paddy”, as applied to oriental rice plantations, and early border ballads. Several interesting parallels had presented themselves to the daring scholar when the child turned and instantly obliterated all thought of scholarship in his mind as a deep, ominous “what?” boomed once more through the corridors of his mind.
He was travelling on the “Sapphire Express”. All the paintwork, the upholstery, the carpeting, every physical aspect of the interior was a radiant sapphire in hue. The lighting was also sapphire. The explanation is keenly interesting. The company psychologist, after exhaustive research, had ascertained that seals and penguins have the most equable temperaments. These live in a “sapphire” ambience. Therefore, to pacify the passengers as far as possible and minimize risks to company property from brawls and rowdiness, travellers were rendered seal-like and only fish was served in the dining car.
At the other end of the carriage, someone barked loudly and a flapping sound accompanied yet another of the cows as she waddled slowly down to the toilets. Once again the young cub turned and gazed briefly at the professor. Tapping his flipper irritably against the arm-rest, the latter turned to gaze out at the floes as the terrible word “What?” rasped once more down the glaciers of his mind.
And now, after the strange beguilements and metamorphoses of the journey, he stood on the platform at Banbury Wells, New Michigan, whistling cheerfully for a porter.
The porter soon arrived. As is customary in the United States, he was a Negro, wearing the ceremonial leopard skin and carrying a razor-sharp spear. With a courteous:
“Good evening, sah.”
He plunged his spear into the professor’s plasto-pig suitcase and slung it over his shoulder. Brooding a trifle anxiously on his expensive collection of methodist micro-chants, which were in the suitcase, the professor followed the porter and, padding lightly, they slunk out of the station into the surrounding jungle….
And now, after the diverting and agree
able transcontinental journey, the professor stood nervously on the platform at Banbury Falls, New Texas, signalling myopically for a porter. The porter soon arrived. As is generally the case in the United States, the porter was a Negro, wearing a grey, glistening suit that shone like matutinal rime in Connemara. Thrusting the plasto-pig suitcase into the professor’s arms, with the chuckling admission that he had recently sprained several ligaments at tennis, the porter at once engaged the professor in serious literary discussion. Urging the feeble and overburdened professor up the platform with hearty, good-humoured blows from his allegedly damaged arm, the porter discussed the relevance of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse to the falling demand for phosphates in certain Latin-American countries. Soon they reached a trim little earth-borer, in which there proved to be barely room for the professor, the porter and the great plasto-pig.
“Hold tight!” yelled the porter gaily. Then he engaged the gear and, grinding horribly, the machine disappeared beneath the surface of the earth….
The Sapphire Express eased silently to a halt in the little academic township of New Sorbonne, Minibraska. Ben Tupp, the old Negro porter, glanced anxiously along the platform. There were never many passengers for New Sorbonne and those that there were could usually be divided into two categories: men and women….
Few passengers ever descended at New Sorbonne for the simple reason that few passengers wanted to descend there. The descendants of the first few passengers to descend at New Sorbonne were still there and had embraced the Methodist faith. Fortunately, the sapphire mines provided them with a livelihood and thus they managed to safeguard their autonomy. Who then was this evil-looking professor descending from the great earth-borer?
Ben Tupp frowned and thought to himself:
“Lear has much to offer poultry farmers.”
And then, with a resolute shrug, he approached the myopic man who stood, frowning impatiently, beside a huge, plasto-pig trunk.
“Sah-viss, bass?” he inquired winningly.
“It’s good of you,” sighed the professor. “Affectingly good of you. I’ve had a strange trip, something of an exhausting journey, full of original elements. Not previously, never before, had I quitted my own dear land, a little angle of the world, surrounded by sounding seas in the Far East, er—east of here, that is. There was the crossing—I elected to travel by sea as a recuperative measure after an exhausting term at my last appointment in my own dear Angle. We crossed on a strange new vessel, a veritable sea-borer that shot like a shark beneath the waves. Through crystal ports we inspected swathes of seaweed but little else. We dined on sherry and pork but the craft was stable. Then—the overpowering first impression of New Bangor, your greatest metropolis, its towering burlesque theatres threatening to ravish the sky with their mighty neon girlies. Before I had even begun to acclimatize myself, however, a delegation from the Corporate Brains of America whisked me off to the station and embarked me on the splendid locomotive agent from which I have just descended. Signs of fatigue, indications of exhaustion, are not, I think, inappropriate under such dynamic circumstances.”
Ben Tupp nodded sagely. This man was a good man. At first Ben had thought he was a bad man because his myopically narrowed eyes presented a superficially sinister impression. But now Ben saw for sure that he was a good man.
“You sure is for sure a good man, bass!” he murmured reverently.
And thus, on the empty platform of the little university town of Great Pogo, Georgeasota, a strange bond was forged between these two, the kindly, unlettered Negro porter and the famous English scholar….
In the “Jolly Buddha”, a country inn in Connemara, Pad Dee Murphy stood in the centre of the packed earth floor, listening. From behind the bar, Lucian Neath, the landlord, observed him warily. Was it the day for Pad Dee to sing? Was it the day for him to fight? Was it the day for him to talk? Upon the answer to this plural query depended the immediate prospects for Lucian, his bar and the four or five other observant loungers in the room.
“Will you be giving us a song, Pad Dee Murphy?” called one of them, a scrawny mahout called Spike.
With a shattering roar the snout of a huge earth-borer thrust up through the rude, earth floor, causing the little tavern to collapse and bury its occupants….
Pad Dee Murphy paused beside the bamboo thicket on the edge of the lagoon and gazed appreciatively around through the Connemara dusk. Inside the thicket two gorillas were planning a cocktail party.
Pad Dee listened contentedly to the sounds of his beloved native land. Not far away, across the lagoon, a priest was saying mass and just behind him the heaving bulk of two copulating elephants jarred the lingering twilight. Just then Pad Dee stiffened. One of the two bull gorillas had emerged from the thicket and seen him. Fierce white teeth emerged as the enormous lips drew back into a snarl, and then the beast raised a hand like a boulder and brought it booming down on his own chest. Suddenly, in Pad Dee’s mind, flamed the words of his dead crofter father: “They’re always dangerous during the cocktail season.”
Pad Dee turned stealthily and then fear gripped him. The beauty of the twilight had lured him further than he had realized and, a shining mote of security, the little earth-borer lay nearly two hundred yards away….
*
I was pleased with these notes and mentally compared my creative powers to the song of the whale or the effortless dance of the telephone. It was a fine thing to be an artist but should I be quite so much of a father? Children roamed everywhere. A few young girls were frolicking indecently with a telephone rectifier in the next room. I decided to speak to my wife about it and located her in the garden, crouched over some nettles. I was about to address her when I noticed a man equipped with various instruments inspecting our house.
“Who is that, Madeleine?” I asked, using a name I often use when speaking to my wife.
“That man?” she queried cheerfully, planting a thistle. “He’s a Danish publisher.”
“Is he?”
I contemplated the intruder and soon noticed that it was, in fact, a man called Arthur Polk who was not a Danish publisher but my publisher. I immediately waved to Arthur and shouted:
“Hello, Arthur!”
He called back at once.
“Hello, Clive!”
“What are you doing?”
“Surveying your house, old chap. With this astrolabe. I’ve also got a plumb bob here which will be useful for determining the verticals.”
“What’s all this for, Arthur?”
“Can’t tell yet. Possibly flats—skyscraper block with a park surround and a gilt spine. We haven’t finally decided. You missed some gripping cricket.”
I felt uneasy. Arthur moved slowly round the house. Watching him I noticed that the hawthorn had come out but that the blackthorn had stayed in. The larkspur was not yet on the wing but the brushwood sheaf around the elm-tree bole was climbing all over the ornamental trellis. I mentioned these things to my wife.
“Possibly it’s spring,” she suggested. Then she smiled. I noticed how girlish she looked, a thing I hadn’t noticed for several decades, and this reminded me of the population issue. I asked her candidly:
“Irene—Madeleine, that is, how many children do we have?”
My wife smiled rather more intensely. She began to look wild and shameless. She was wearing a green dress with holes for her arms and she now exploited this arrangement by entwining her arms around my neck. She smiled suggestively and began to murmur drowsily:
“Well, there’s Wilma and Geoffrey and Boris and Oscar and Joan and Leah and Elmer and Peter and Rachel and Peggy and Susan and—”
It was not long before I realized that my wife was just making up names since none of these, as far as I could recollect, belonged to any children that I had seen about the house. My wife now stroked my neck in an agreeable way and effected close contact between our two bodies. She then began to move her own body in a manner deriving ultimately from ancient gardening techniques designed to en
courage grain to grow. Her arms were very lithe and her face was memorably girlish. It shone before me, framed in a tangle of bushes and shrubs that flourish in that secluded corner of our garden. I now felt something stir within me, or rather just outside me.
The hawthorn was waving sinuously above us. Its great clusters of purple blossom writhed meaningfully towards the blackthorn. The blackthorn responded shyly, putting forth now a creeper and now a feeler which just brushed the hawthorn’s cheeks before withdrawing behind shuttered windows. Meanwhile the whitethorn languished, pale and tearful, a puritanical thorn consumed with secret lust and trying to sublimate it into scholarship. Failing, the whitethorn scribbled malicious little notes to the neighbours while the blackthorn, aroused and radiant, burst from its luxury flat in a gold-trimmed caftan suit. The hawthorn, overwhelmed by its easy victory, led it to a seedy little hotel near the Arab quarter while the whitethorn, using powerful binoculars, watched them through cracks in its curtained windows. Then, biting its lip, the whitethorn retired to its desk where it sat trembling over Etruscan texts. Meanwhile the brushwood sheaf crept softly all over the trellis, which gasped at intervals as if cold water were being dashed upon it and the larkspur smiled an oily, predatory smile as it covertly scrutinized them.
