by Mervyn Peake
Bellgrove took a dignified and ponderous step into the centre of the room.
‘So I am “Bloody Bellgrove” to you, am I, Mr Fluke? That is what you think of me, is it? That is how your crude thoughts run. Aha! … aha! …’ (His attempt to sound as though he were musing philosophically upon Fluke’s character was a pathetic failure. He shook his venerable head.) ‘What a coarse type you are, my friend. You are like an animal – or even a vegetable. Perhaps you have forgotten that as long as fifteen years ago I was considered for Headship. Yes, Mr Fluke, “considered”. It was then, I believe, that the tragic mistake was made of your appointment to the staff. H’m … Since then you have been a disgrace, sir – a disgrace for fifteen years – a disgrace to our calling. As for me, unworthy as I am, yet I would have you know that I have more experience behind me than I would care to mention. You’re a slacker, sir, a damned slacker! And by your lack of respect for an old scholar you only …’
But a fresh twinge of pain caused Bellgrove to grab at his jaw.
‘Oh, my teeth!’ he moaned.
During this harangue Mr Opus Fluke’s mind had wandered. Had he been asked he would have been unable to repeat a single word of what had been addressed to him.
But Perch-Prism’s voice cut a path through the thick of his reverie.
‘My dear Fluke,’ it said, ‘did you, or didn’t you, on one of those rare occasions when you saw fit to put in an appearance in a classroom – on this occasion with the gamma Fifth, I believe – refer to me as a “bladder-headed cock”? It has come to my hearing that you referred to me as exactly that. Do tell me: it sounds so like you.’
Opus Fluke stroked his long, bulging chin with his hand.
‘Probably,’ he said at last, ‘but I wouldn’t know. I never listen.’ The extraordinary paroxysm began again – the heaving, rolling, helpless, noiseless body-laughter.
‘A convenient memory,’ said Perch-Prism, with a trace of irritability in his clipped, incisive voice. ‘But what’s that?’
He had heard something in the corridor outside. It was like the high, thin, mewing note of a gull. Opus Fluke raised himself on one elbow. The high-pitched noise grew louder. All at once the door was flung open from without and there before them, framed in the doorway, was the Headmaster.
ELEVEN
If ever there was a primogenital figure-head or cipher, that archetype had been resurrected in the shape of Deadyawn. He was pure symbol. By comparison, even Mr Fluke was a busy man. It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another.
Entering the room immediately behind the Head a tiny freckled man was seen to be propelling Deadyawn forward in a high rickety chair, with wheels attached to its legs. This piece of furniture, which had rather the proportions of an infant’s high chair, and was similarly fitted with a tray above which Deadyawn’s head could partially be seen, gave fair warning to the scholars and staff of its approach, being in sore need of lubrication. Its wheels screamed.
Deadyawn and the freckled man formed a compelling contrast. There was no reason why they should both be human beings. There seemed no common denominator. It was true that they had two legs each, two eyes each, one mouth apiece, and so on, but this did not seem to argue any similarity of kind, or if it did only in the way that giraffes and stoats are classified for convenience sake under the commodious head of ‘fauna’.
Wrapped up like an untidy parcel in a gun-grey gown emblazoned with the signs of the zodiac in two shades of green, none of which signs could be seen very clearly for reason of the folds and creases, save for Cancer the crab on his left shoulder, was Deadyawn himself, and all but asleep. His feet were tucked beneath him. In his lap was a hot-water bottle.
His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only difference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar.
His hands rested limply on the tray in front of him at the height of his chin. As he entered the room he opened one eye and gazed absently into the smoke. He did not hurry his vision and was quite content when, after several minutes, he made out the three indistinct shapes below him. Those three shapes – Opus Fluke, Perch-Prism and Bellgrove – were standing in a line, Opus Fluke having fought himself free of his cradle as though struggling against suction. The three gazed up at Deadyawn in his chair.
His face was as soft and round as a dumpling. There seemed to be no structure in it: no indication of a skull beneath the skin.
This unpleasant effect might have argued an equally unpleasant temperament. Luckily this was not so. But it exemplified a parallel bonelessness of outlook. There was no fibre to be found in him, and yet no weakness as such; only a negation of character. For his flaccidity was not a positive thing, unless jelly-fish are consciously indolent.
This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was almost terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent, the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms. Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men crave: equipoise. In his case an equipoise between two poles which did not exist: but nevertheless there he was, balanced on an imaginary fulcrum.
The freckled man had rolled the high chair to the centre of the room. His skin stretched so tightly over his small bony and rather insect-like face that the freckles were twice the size they would normally have been. He was minute, and as he peered perkily from behind the legs of the high chair, his carrot-coloured hair shone with hair-oil. It was brushed flat across the top of his little bony insect-head. On all sides the walls of horsehide rose into the smoke and smelt perceptibly. A few drawing-pins glimmered against the murky brown leather.
Deadyawn dropped one of his arms over the side of the high chair and wriggled a languid forefinger. ‘The Fly’ (as the freckled midget was called) pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, but instead of passing it up to the Headmaster he climbed, with extraordinary agility, up a dozen rungs of the chair and cried into Deadyawn’s ear: ‘Not yet! not yet! Only three of them here!’
‘What’s that?’ said Deadyawn, in a voice of emptiness.
‘Only three of them here!’
‘Which ones,’ said Deadyawn, after a long silence.
‘Bellgrove, Perch-Prism and Fluke,’ said The Fly in his penetrating, fly-like voice. He winked at the three gentlemen through the smoke.
‘Won’t they do?’ murmured Deadyawn, his eyes shut. ‘They’re on my staff, aren’t … they …?’
‘Very much so,’ said The Fly, ‘very much so. But your Edict, sir, is addressed to the whole staff.’
‘I’ve forgotten what it’s all about. Remind … me …’
‘It’s all written down,’ said The Fly. ‘I have it here, sir. All you have to do is to read it, sir.’ And again the small red-headed man honoured the three masters with a particularly intimate wink. There was something lewd in the way the wax-coloured petal of his eyelid dropped suggestively over his bright eye and lifted itself again without a flutter.
‘You can give it to Bellgrove. He will read it when the time comes,’ said Deadyawn, lifting his hanging hand on to the tray before him and languidly stroking the hot-water bottle … ‘Find out what’s keeping them.’
The Fly pattered down the rungs of the chair and emerged from its shadow. He crossed the room with quick, impudent steps, his head and rump well back. But before he reached the door it had opened and two Professors entered – one of them, Flannelcat, with his arms full of exercise-books and his mouth full of seedcake, and his companion, Shred, with nothing in his arms, but with his head full of theories about everyone’s subconscious excep
t his own. He had a friend, by name Shrivell, due to arrive at any moment, who, in contrast to Shred, was stiff with theories about his own subconscious and no one else’s.
Flannelcat took his work seriously and was always worried. He had a poor time from the boys and a poor time from his colleagues. A high proportion of the work he did was never noticed, but do it he must. He had a sense of duty that was rapidly turning him into a sick man. The pitiful expression of reproach which never left his face testified to his zeal. He was always too late to find a vacant chair in the Common-room, and always too early to find his class assembled. He was continually finding the arms of his gown tied into knots when he was in a hurry, and that pieces of soap were substituted for his cheese at the masters’ table. He had no idea who did these things, nor any idea how they could be circumvented. Today, as he entered the Common-room, with his arms full of books and the seedcake in his mouth, he was in as much of a fluster as usual. His state of mind was not improved by finding the Headmaster looming above him like Jove among the clouds. In his confusion the seedcake got into his windpipe, the concertina of school books in his arms began to slip and, with a loud crash, cascaded to the floor. In the silence that followed there was a moan of pain, but it was only Bellgrove with his hands at his jaw. His noble head was rolling from side to side.
Shred ambled forward from the door and, after bowing slightly in Deadyawn’s direction, he buttonholed Bellgrove.
‘In pain, my dear Bellgrove? In pain?’ he inquired, but in a hard, irritating, inquisitive voice – with as much sympathy in it as might be found in a vampire’s breast.
Bellgrove bridled up his lordly head, but did not deign to reply.
‘Let us take it that you are in pain,’ continued Shred. ‘Let us work on that hypothesis as a basis: that Bellgrove, a man of somewhere between sixty and eighty, is in pain. Or rather, that he thinks he is. One must be exact. As a man of science, I insist on exactitude. Well, then, what next? Why, to take into account that Bellgrove, supposedly in pain, also thinks that the pain has something to do with his teeth. This is absurd, of course, but must, I say, be taken into account. For what reason? Because they are symbolic. Everything is symbolic. There is no such thing as a “thing” per se. It is only a symbol of something else that is itself, and so on. To my way of thinking his teeth, though apparently rotten, are merely the symbol of a diseased mind.’
Bellgrove snarled.
‘And why is the mind diseased?’ He took hold of Bellgrove’s gown just below that gentleman’s left shoulder and, with his face raised, scrutinized the big head above him.
‘Your mouth is twitching,’ he said. ‘Interesting … very … interesting. You probably do not know it, but there was bad blood in your mother. Very bad blood. Or alternatively, you dream of stoats. But no matter, no matter. To return. Where were we? Yes, yes, your teeth – the symbols, we have said – haven’t we? of a diseased mind. Now what kind of disease? That is the point. What kind of disease of the mind would affect your teeth like this? Open your mouth, sir …’
But Bellgrove, a fresh twinge undermining his scant reserves of patience and decorum, lifted his huge boot the size of a tray and brought it down with a blind relish upon Mr Shred’s feet. It covered them both and must have been excruciatingly painful, for Mr Shred’s brow coloured and contracted; but he made no sound save to remark, ‘Interesting, very interesting … probably your mother.’
Opus Fluke’s body-laughter did everything except break him in half or find vent in a sound.
By now several other Professors had infiltrated through the smoke from the direction of the door. There was Shrivell, Shred’s friend, or follower, for he held all Shred’s opinions in the reverse direction. But for sheer discipleship Mr Shrivell was a rebel compared to the three gentlemen who, moving in a solid huddle, their three mortar-boards forming between them a practically unbroken surface, had seated themselves in a far corner, like conspirators. They owed allegiance, those three, to no member of the staff, or to any such abstraction as the ‘staff’ itself, but to an ancient savant, a bearded figure of no specific occupation but whose view of Death, Eternity, Pain (and its non-existence), Truth, or, indeed, anything of a philosophic nature, was like fire in their ears.
In holding the views of their Master on such enormous themes they had developed a fear of their colleagues and a prickliness of disposition which, as Perch-Prism had cruelly pointed out to them more than once, was inconsistent with their theory of non-existence. ‘Why are you so prickly,’ he used to say, ‘when there ain’t no pain or prickles?’ At which the three, Spiregrain, Splint and Throd, would all at once become a single black tent as they shot into conference with the speed of suction. How they longed at times for their bearded Leader to be with them! He knew all the answers to impertinent questions.
They were unhappy men, these three. Not with native melancholy, but in views of their theories. And there they sat: the smoke wreaths coiling round them, their eyes moving suspiciously from one face to another of their heretic brethren, in jealous fear of a challenge to their faith.
Who else had entered? Only Cutflower, the dandy; Crust, the sponger; and the choleric Mulefire.
Meanwhile The Fly had been standing in the corridor with his knuckles between his teeth, and had been emitting the shrillest of whistles. Whether they caused the sudden appearance of the few stragglers at the end of the corridor or whether these characters were in any case on their way to the Common-room, there was no doubt that The Fly’s shrill music added speed to their steps.
Smoke hung above them as they approached the door, for they had no desire to enter Fluke’s fug, as they called it, with virgin lungs.
‘The “Yawner’s” here,’ said The Fly as the Professors came abreast, their gowns fluttering. A dozen eyebrows were raised. It was seldom that they saw the Headmaster.
When the door was closed upon the last of them the leather room was, indeed, no place for anyone with asthma. No flowers could flourish there unless, indeed, some gaunt and horny thing – some cactus long inured to dust and thirst. No singing birds could thrive – no, not the raven, even; for smoke would fill their thin, sweet windpipes. It knew nothing, this atmosphere, of fragrant pastures – of dawn among the dew-bright hazel woods – or rivulets or starlight. It was a leather cave of sepia fog.
The Fly, his sharp insect face hardly visible through the smoke, swarmed up the high chair, hand over hand, and found Deadyawn asleep and his water-bottle stone cold. He prodded the Headmaster in the ribs with his little bony thumb just where Taurus and Scorpio were overlapping. Deadyawn’s head had sunk even lower during his sleep and was barely above the tray. His feet were still tucked under him. He was like some creature that had lost its shell, for his face was disgustingly naked. Naked not only physically, but naked in its vacancy.
At The Fly’s prod he did not wake with a start, as is the normal thing: that would have been tantamount to a kind of interest in life. He merely opened one eye. Moving it from The Fly’s face, he let it wander over the miscellany of gownsmen below him.
He closed his eye again. ‘What … are … all … these … people … for?’ His voice floated out of his soft head like a paper streamer. ‘And why am I’ he added.
‘It’s all very necessary,’ answered The Fly. ‘Shall I remind you, sir, yet again of Barquentine’s Notice?’
‘Why not?’ said Deadyawn. ‘But not too loudly.’
‘Or shall Bellgrove read it out, sir?’
‘Why not?’ said the Headmaster. ‘But get my bottle filled first.’
The Fly climbed down the chair-rungs with the cold bottle and threaded his perky way through the group of masters to the door. Before he reached it he had, aided by the poor visibility in the room but mainly by the exceptional agility of his small thin fingers, relieved Flannelcat of an old gold watch and chain, Mr Shred of several coins, and Cutflower of an embroidered handkerchief.
When he returned with the hot-water bottle, Deadyawn was asleep again,
but The Fly handed Bellgrove a roll of paper before he climbed up the wheeled chair to waken the Headmaster.
‘Read it,’ said The Fly. ‘It’s from Barquentine.’
‘Why me?’ said Bellgrove, his hand at his jaw. ‘Damn Barquentine with his notices! Damn him, I say!’
He untied the roll of paper and took a few heavy paces to the window, where he held it up to what light there was.
The Professors were by then sitting on the floor, in groups or singly, like Flannelcat among the cold ashes under the mantelpiece. But for a lack of wigwam, squaws, feathers and tomahawks there might have been a tribe encamped beneath the hanging smoke.
‘Come along, Bellgrove! Come along, man!’ said Perch-Prism. ‘Get those teeth of yours into it.’
‘For a classical scholar,’ said the irritating Shred, ‘for a classical scholar, I have always felt that Bellgrove must be handicapped, grievously handicapped, firstly by the difficulty he finds in understanding sentences of more than seven words, and secondly by the stultifying effect on his mind of a frustrated-power complex.’
A snarl was heard through the smoke.
‘Is that what it is? Is that what it is? La!’
This was Cutflower’s voice. It came from the near end of the long table on which he sat, dangling his thin, elegant legs. There was so high a polish upon his narrow, pointed shoes that the high-lights of the toecaps were visible through the smoke, like torches through a fog. No other sign of feet had been seen in the room for half an hour.
‘Bellgrove,’ he continued, taking up where Perch-Prism had left off, ‘stab away, man! Stab away! Give us the gist of it, la! Give us the gist of it. Can’t he read, la, the old fraud?’
‘Is that you, Cutflower?’ said another voice. ‘I’ve been looking for you all morning. Bless my heart! what a fine polish on your shoes, Cutflower! I wondered what the devil those lights were! But seriously, I’m very embarrassed, Cutflower. Indeed I am. It’s my wife in exile, you know – ragingly ill. But what can I do, spendthrift that I am, with my bar of chocolate once a week? You see how it is, my dear chap; it’s the end: or almost: unless … I half wondered – er – could you …? Something until Tuesday … Confidential, you know, ha … ha … ha …! How one hates asking … squalor, and so on … But seriously, Cutflower (what a dazzling pair of hoofs, old man!) but seriously, if you could manage …’
