The Twilight of the Vilp

by Paul Ableman

  “Drugs are being served on the promenade deck, sir. Passengers will be interested to know that the ship has just struck a submerged yak. Water is pouring in through a vein above the navel and the miniature pumps are pounding.”

  “Do we founder?” asked Bill coolly.

  “Every day of our lives,” replied Sonya, drawing his wan face down towards her navel.

  What had that man Pidge said? The one who had given him a lift in the Stony Mountains?

  “The blight is getting worse, lad.”

  That’s what he’d said. Then he’d pulled a Canning Diffuser from the dash of the borer and offered Bill a fix.

  “Only homebrew, lad,” he’d apologized.

  Bill had spent months with Pidge, in the palatial laboratory amongst the beanfields. He’d been happy there, watching the peasants ploughing with their yaks. Then one day Princess Sonya Guildenkrantz, Pidge’s lab assistant, had entered his room, naked from the waist down and asked him if he’d taken her copy of Miniature Pumps.

  “Is that really what you came for?” Bill asked her, as he slowly laid aside the mortar in which he’d been pounding down some fresh drug …

  THE MIXTURE AND THE BAG

  Chapter 1

  Professor Guthrie Pidge tested the seven hundred and twenty-sixth compound. With the delicate precision of the trained scientist he poured a single drop of NX-12 or tri-metro-polyasterisk into the Petri dish and observed the results closely. There was no immediate reaction and, while waiting for one, Pidge allowed his thoughts to wander.

  Sonya was doing well. She already knew the difference between a Canning Diffuser and a miniature pump. True, he sometimes caught a wistful expression on her face, when she was tuning a rheostat or performing some other chore, and then he knew that visions of lost splendour were floating before her. He knew all about those visions. In the early days she had talked of little else, the great schloss above the loch, full of liveried flunkeys, Monte Carlo in the spring, Naples later in the spring, a swift hop on some aristocrat’s luxury yacht across to Oran or Casablanca, Oslo in the early summer, the flash of skis under the shining peaks, a swift hop in some aristocrat’s private train to Saint Petersburg (as she would always think of it) for the season, with the yashniks crooning throughout the summer night and the grumbling but tender-hearted chef preparing her special favourites, bluish, delicious little notchkis which she washed down with Siberian champagne.

  Professor Pidge stiffened. Activity in the Petri dish! With fingers which he disciplined not to tremble he swiftly prepared a slide and poked it carefully into the great, humming nuclear microscope. He touched a button and a screen was flooded with light. In brilliant detail, Professor Pidge could observe the results of his latest test The blight was thriving! Even as he shuddered, it shot out huge, groping tentacles which churned angrily about, seeking beans. Making a mental note that NX-12 might have military applications, Pidge emptied the Petri dish cautiously down the sink and poured a gallon of foaming cleanser after it. He then prepared to test the seven hundred and twenty-seventh compound.

  Some time later, as he began to pour a single drop of compound seven hundred and thirty-two into a Petri dish, his alert senses became aware that someone had entered the laboratory. Much too devoted a scientist to allow his concentration to be deflected, Pidge nevertheless registered, in the brief glance which he was able to spare, three interesting facts. The first was that it had been Sonya who had entered the lab, the second that she had not been alone and the third that she was naked from the waist down.

  “Kindly put your skirt on, Sonya,” growled Professor Pidge, as he allowed the trembling drop to plop down into the sinister blight.

  “Skirt?” echoed Sonya in astonishment and then, glancing down at her white, exposed limbs and impudent navel, she groaned, “Liveried flunkeys! Now you’ll know I’ve deceived you.” She turned angrily on the young man with her, “Peasant dolt! Why didn’t you remind me to put on my skirt?”

  The young man contemplated her, expressionlessly. “I must have had too much drug,” he apologized. “It makes me slack about details.”

  “Exactly who is your companion, Sonya?” asked Pidge, able, now that the latent phase of the experiment had been reached, to devote more attention to the others.

  “He’s a hitch-hiker. I picked him up on the way back from town. You remember, you sent me to buy another gross of Petri dishes. He made love to me amongst the blighted beans. Are you very angry, darling?”

  “To my own astonishment,” returned Pidge, analysing his feelings with a great objectivity. “I am intensely angry. I have always regarded the physical act of sex, mere copulation, as a factor of negligible importance in serious human relationships. Nevertheless, at the moment I feel I’d like to feed you both through a Canning Diffuser.” He glared at the youth. “Who the devil are you, sir?”

  The boy, somewhat recovered from the drug, told the scientist his name and, as he heard it, an expression of awe mingled with astonishment replaced the anger on Pidge’s face.

  “Glebe? Not—not the great Henry Glebe of Bangor?”

  “No—but he’s my dad.”

  “The genius that gave us the earth-borer?”

  “You mean he finished it then? I wouldn’t know—been hitch-hiking about for years….”

  *

  I was not entirely satisfied with these drafts, but nevertheless I felt a keen glow of satisfaction. This was the work I loved, the work that had already won for me enduring fame. I now remembered my children and went to ask Helen, my wife, what had become of them. She agreed that their absence was strange but could offer no explanation for it. I urged her to rack her brains for clues and she willingly obliged. Quite a short spell of racking produced three clues which I immediately investigated. Two of them proved fruitless but the third led me to a house on the other side of our street where I found a daughter of mine. I observed that she was a large girl, quite of marriageable age and I told her of my observation. She was delighted.

  “What’s more,” she chortled, “my husbands will be too.”

  “Husbands?”

  “Those Danes. I married them all in the end.”

  Naturally I congratulated her and asked her if she was happy living with a large number of Danes as men and wife. She told me that she was exceptionally happy and had advised all her sisters to marry as many Danes as they could get hold of. I asked her in what way precisely—I am very keen on my children developing their powers of analysis—Danes were superior to other men. She explained that they were economical with cattle feed.

  “If we ever get any cattle,” she pointed out, “this would be an inestimable blessing.”

  We spent a long afternoon together. I quizzed my daughter closely as to her plans for her cattle and she gave me intelligent and interesting answers. For example, she proved well-aware of the advantages of short-horn cattle, for when I asked her in what way she considered them better than long-horn cattle, she replied immediately:

  “They have shorter horns.”

  “And where will you store these short-horn cattle?”

  “In the left-luggage office of the nearest station.”

  “You realize they must be fed?”

  “Oh yes, I realize that.”

  There was no doubt that this girl—I think her name was Melissa—was admirably suited to rearing shorthorn cattle.

  Soon after this several of Melissa’s husbands came home but they were reserved to the point of unfriendliness. I mentioned this to Melissa and she explained that one of them, who was called Sven, had a famous collection of model fjords. She admitted that his seemed an inadequate reason for being unfriendly to one’s father-in-law and she called her husband and remonstrated with him. Reluctant to intrude on their mutual remonstrances, I stole away leaving my daughter, I felt convinced, in capable hands.

  The next day was an exceedingly busy one for me. I contacted the nearest cattle breeders’ society and ordered a small herd of short-horn cattle for my
daughter. I wrote to my solicitor asking him to contact my publisher and, in the strongest terms, demand compensation for the damage to my living room, pointing out that not only was the room now disagreeably cool in the evenings but that numerous small animals and insects, which we are normally glad to accommodate in our spacious garden, had developed the habit of using our living room as their own. I telephoned a reputable firm of private detectives and asked them to institute an immediate search for a large number of missing children, normally resident at 44 Cob Lane. The youth to whom I spoke sounded familiar and, after a while, suddenly asked:

  “Is that you, dad?”

  The form of address made me suspect that it might be a son and a moment later he identified himself as Rupert, not a name that struck an immediate chord although I accepted his earnest insistence that he was one of my progeny. Naturally it was a bit of a shock to hear his voice rushing at me from the office of a firm of private detectives. I asked him what he was doing there and he told me that he was trying to steal something.

  “Why do you wish to do that, Desmond?”

  “Rupert.”

  “Precisely. Why, Rupert?”

  “To see if I have an aptitude for crime. I thought if I could filch a gun or handcuffs or something from detectives it would prove I had.”

  “And you no longer want to mend telephones?”

  “Father, I never did.”

  Much as I admired my son’s enterprise in devising this test of his potential criminal talents, I still felt that telephones were his true future. A little persuasion sufficed to convince him of this and he promised to return home immediately, first leaving a note requesting the detectives to locate his brothers and sisters.

  My wife and I had a quiet lunch together. During the meal one of the smaller children appeared. I asked him his name and where he’d been and he replied without hesitation:

  “Michael. Lisbon.”

  I then invited him to lunch with us and he accepted with pleasure. In the afternoon my wife and I went for a stroll in the garden. We had not strolled far before I heard an appalling noise and, glancing along the street, saw that it was my publisher approaching on a bulldozer. He clattered slowly towards us, cheerfully waving his umbrella, and pulled up outside the house. He switched off his engine so that we could talk but, while raising his bowler courteously to my wife, remained seated on the vehicle.

  “Hello, Clive,” he saluted me.

  “Hello.”

  I sensed a certain diffidence between us and contrasted it sadly with the eager, warm collaboration of earlier days. I asked him why he’d come, and he replied:

  “I thought I might drive this bulldozer through another wall of your house.”

  “Why do you want to do that, Geoffrey?”

  He was clearly embarrassed but he attempted to find cogent reasons.

  “After all, old chap,” he concluded, “we must get on with our redevelopment sometime, you know.”

  At this, I was exceedingly annoyed. I advised him that I was consulting my solicitors, that proper, formal redevelopment was one thing but this piecemeal demolition was quite another. I invited him to step into the living room to meet several frogs, fieldmice and a family of slowworms that were currently in residence there. As I talked, I could sense that my words were driving home. My publisher fiddled with his umbrella, gazed vacantly across our garden, frowned thoughtfully at the back of his hand but found nothing to urge in reply.

  “God, Clive,” he murmured, when I came to a pause in my reproach, “you make me feel small.”

  At this, of course, remorse overwhelmed me. After all this was my old friend and publisher whom I had known for years. Between us there had always been a large amount of mutual respect. Could I allow this valuable substance to drain away simply because Geoffrey had, perfectly legitimately, become professionally concerned with my house? I drew my wife aside and asked her whether she thought that we might, since he had come all this way, just let him bump our house once or twice with his bulldozer. She, with her woman’s instinctive tenderness, agreed that we should. I went and told my publisher but he shook his head firmly.

  “No, Clive, you’ve made me see that I’ve been going about this the wrong way. I’m not going to bump your house now. I’m going to re-examine the whole question thoroughly. And, Clive, I want to thank you, old man, for setting me straight about things again.”

  His face registering acute emotion, my publisher started his engine and, with a farewell glance of amity, rumbled away down the street.

  Over the course of the next few weeks, my children trickled back. They came individually and in little groups and they all had interesting explanations for their long absence. By the end of the month the house was full of them again. Indeed, it was fuller than ever before since the detective agency, while failing to locate any of our actual offspring, sent us a number of possibles and these became absorbed into the household. We attempted to weed them out but I suspect that one or two of the present lot, not the least promising either, are actually attributable to the efforts of that diligent firm. They were very reasonable too, charging us, as I recall, only a fiver per child.

  After this a golden period ensued for the entire family. It was high summer. The garden was in spectacular bloom. In whichever direction one looked there was an avenue of glowing petunias or pawpaws or stately cinammon trees. Along these walks, loud with the chatter of parakeets and monkeys, dancing with Thomson’s gazelle and hartebeestes, which bounded across the beds of iceland moss, strolled my pregnant daughters.

  Only one thing marred the bliss of that fine summer. Someone had taken to grazing a herd of short-horn cattle in our garden and the animals played havoc with our whortleberries. We were all fond of whortleberries and we naturally resented the greedy intrusion of these short-horn cattle. The beasts were never there at night and for a long time I could not ascertain where they came from. Then, one day, we received an invitation to cocktails from a colony of Danish motoring refugees who lived in a large house across the street. No sooner had we entered the living room than the mystery was solved. It was full of short-horn cattle and, in one corner, a peasant girl sat wearily milking one into a Tang vase. I tackled her indignantly but was amazed to discover, beneath the colourful dress of a typical peasant girl from some colourful region, a familiar daughter of mine.

  “Gertrude!” I exclaimed. “So it’s you that’s been ruining our whortleberries!”

  “No,” she protested, “I haven’t touched your whortleberries.”

  At this the child burst into tears, proclaiming that I was a horrid, inconsiderate father and that it was my own fault since I had presented her with those nasty cattle which made the house atrocious and were alienating several of her husbands. Now, of course, a twinge of guilt assailed me since I remembered that I had, with the most benign intentions, given her the herd as a wedding present.

  “But, Gertrude,” I expostulated, “you said you were going to store them in the left-luggage office of a railway station.”

  “Well, I tried to but they said they’d only take them if they were in suitcases and I couldn’t find any big enough. I was nearly desperate and in the end I did graze them on your whortleberries, but only for a few hours a day.”

  I took the unhappy girl in my arms and comforted her.

  “Don’t cry any more, my dear,” I urged her, “and I’ll get you that oscilloscope you wanted.”

  At this Gertrude smiled gratefully at me through her tears and then hurried off to put on a cocktail dress. As soon as she had gone, I rallied several Danish husbands and, with ringing oaths, we chased the short-horn cattle far down the street. Then Gertrude joined us again and we passed an agreeable evening smoking cod’s roe.

  During that happy summer, I once more tackled the problem of the first chapter of my novel and, confident and overflowing with ideas: wrote:

  THE MIXTURE AND THE BAG

  Chapter 1

  Bangor! At last! It was nearly seven year
s since Bill Glebe had left his native town. As he stepped lightly down the main street, his Siamese “booskaws” (sandals of yak leather tanned in the urine of bull pelicans) made a curious plik-plikking sound on the pavement. Of the various citizens whose attention was attracted by this plik-plikking to the tall young man with his mandarin beard, yen staff and Tao robe, striding confidently down the main street, were some who had known him in former years. So transforming, however, had been the effects of conversion to twelve different oriental religions, in addition to the beard, deep tan and exotic costume (which included a Singhalese fetish mask which reached to his navel) that not one recognized him. So he just went plik-plikking along until he reached the cottage. He still had his key, now dangling from a Tibetan prayer string he wore around his neck, and so he let himself in and shouted:

  “Dad?”

  “That you, Bill?”

  “I’m back.”

  He then entered the cosy living room which contained, in addition to sparse furniture, a great many large and small springs, and greeted his father with a ceremonial Ashanti howl. He had not howled long, however, before his father brusquely requested that he cease. His father then asked him why he was wearing a large, ugly mask with blood-red tusks protruding from it. Bill explained that, for an acolyte of the vitality goddess, Koraze-ee, it was mandatory.

  “Goddess, eh?” his father murmured, but Bill could sense that his mind was on other things.

  They took a simple meal together, Bill confining himself to a moderate chunk of hallucinogenic fungus. It was scarcely concluded before Bill’s father beckoned and whispered mysteriously:

  “Follow me, son.”

  The older man then led the younger furtively out into the backyard where he paused and gazed cautiously around. Then the two padded stealthily across the little yard into the garden hut. After opening a massive padlock, Bill’s father led the way into the interior where he indicated a crinkled, silvery machine which had tracks and a screw in its snout.