by Mervyn Peake
But no. None of this happened. None of it. Bellgrove was all this. There was no gap in the long tally of his spineless faults. He was constructed as though expressly for the starlings of Gormenghast. There he was, but no one approached him. His hair was white as snow, but it might as well have been grey or brown or have moulted in the dank of faithless seasons. There seemed to be a blind spot in the mass-vision of the swarming youths.
They looked this great gift-lion in the mouth. It snarled in its weakness, for its teeth were aching. It trod the immemorial corridors. It dozed fitfully at its desk through the terms of sun and ice. And now, it was a Headmaster and lonelier than ever. But there was pride. The claws were blunt, but they were ready. But not so, now. For at the moment his vulnerable heart was swollen with love.
‘My young friend,’ he said, his eyes still on the ceiling of the fort and his chin tucked into the pit of his neck. ‘I propose to talk to you as man to man. Now the thing is …’ (he lingered over the last word) … ‘the thing … is … what shall we talk about?’ He lowered his rather dull eyes and saw that Titus was frowning at him thoughtfully.
‘We could, you see, young man, talk of so many things, could we not, as man to man. Or even as boy to boy. H’m. Quite so. But what? That is the paramount consideration – isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir. I suppose so,’ said Titus.
‘Now, if you are twelve, my boy, and I am eighty-six, let us say, for I think that ought to cover me, then let us take twelve from eighty-six and halve the result. No, no. I won’t make you do it because that would be most unfair. Ah yes, indeed it would – for what’s the good of being a prisoner and then being made to do lessons too? Eh? Eh? Might as well not be punished, eh? … Let me see, where were we, where were we? Yes, yes, yes, twelve from eighty-six, that’s about seventy-four, isn’t it? Well, what is half seventy-four? I wonder … h’m, yes, twice three are six, carry one, and twice seven are fourteen … thirty-seven, I do believe. Thirty-seven. And what is thirty-seven? Why, it’s just exactly the halfway age between us. So if I tried to be thirty-seven years young – and you tried to be thirty-seven years old – but that would be very difficult, wouldn’t it? Because you’ve never been thirty-seven, have you? But then, although your old headmaster has been thirty-seven, long ago, he can’t remember a thing about it except that it was somewhere about that time that he bought a bag of glass marbles. O yes he did. And why? Because he became tired of teaching grammar and spelling and arithmetic. O yes, and because he saw how much happier the people were who played marbles than the people were who didn’t. That’s a bad sentence, my boy. So I used to play in the dark after the other young professors were asleep. We had one of the old Gormenghast tapestry-carpets in the room and I used to light a candle and place my marbles on the corners of patterns in the carpet, and in the middle of crimson and yellow flowers. I can remember the carpet perfectly as though it was here in this old fort, and there, every night by the glow of a candle, I would practise until I could flick a marble along the floor so that when it struck another it spun round and round but stayed exactly where it was, my boy, while the one it had struck shot off like a rocket to land at the other end of the room in the centre of a crimson carpet flower (if I was successful), or if not, near enough to couch itself at the next flick. And the sounds of the glass marbles in the still of the night when they struck was like the sound of tiny crystal vases breaking on stone floors – but I am getting too poetic, my boy, aren’t I? And boys don’t like poetry, do they?’
Bellgrove took off his mortar-board, placed it on the floor and wiped his brow with the biggest and grubbiest handkerchief Titus had ever seen come out of a grown-up’s pocket.
‘Ah me, my young friend, the sound of those marbles … the sound of those silly marbles. Forlorn, it is, my, boy, to remember the little glass notes – forlorn as the tapping of a woodpecker in a summer forest.’
‘I’ve got some marbles, sir,’ said Titus, sliding off the table and diving his hand into his trouser pocket.
Bellgrove dropped his hands to his sides where they hung like dead weights. It was as though his joy at finding his little plan maturing so successfully was so all-absorbing that he had no faculties left over to control his limbs. His wide, uneven mouth was ajar with delight. He rose to his feet and turning his back on Titus made his way to the far end of the small fort. He was sure that his joy was written all over his face and that it was not for headmasters to show that sort of thing to any but their wives, and he had no wife … no wife at all.
Titus watched him. What a funny way he put his big flat feet on the ground, as though he were smacking it slowly with the soles of his boots – not so much to hurt it, as to wake it up.
‘My boy,’ said Bellgrove at last when he had returned to Titus, having fought the smile away from his face – ‘this is an extraordinary coincidence, you know. Not only do you like marbles, but I …’ and he drew from the decaying darkness of a pocket like a raw-lipped gulch, exactly six globes.
‘O sir!’ said Titus. ‘I never thought you’d have marbles.’
‘My boy,’ said Bellgrove. ‘Let it be a lesson to you. Now where shall we play. Eh? Eh? Good grief, my young friend, what a long way down it is to the floor and how my poor old muscles creak …’
Bellgrove was lowering himself by degrees to the dusty ground.
‘We must examine the terrain for irregularities, h’m, yes, that’s what we must do, isn’t it, my boy? Examine the terrain, like generals, eh? And find our battle ground.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Titus, dropping to the knees and crawling alongside the old, pale lion. ‘But it looks flat enough to me, sir, I’ll make one of the squares here, and …’
But at this moment the door of the fort opened again and Doctor Prunesquallor stepped out of the sunlight and into the grey gloom of the small fort.
‘Well! well! well! well! well!’ he trilled, peering into the shadows. ‘Well, well, well! What a dreadful place to gaol an earl in, by all that’s merciless. And where is he, this fabulous little wrong-doer – this breaker of bounds, this flouter of unwritten laws, this thoroughly naughty boy? God bless my shocked spirit if I don’t see two of them – and one much bigger than the other – or is there someone with you, Titus, and if so, who can it be, and what in the name of dust and ashes can you find so absorbing on the earth’s bosom, that you must crawl about on it, belly to stubble, like beasts that stalk their prey?’
Bellgrove rose, creaking, to his knees and then catching his feet in the swathes of his gown, tore a great rent in its threadbare material as he struggled into an upright position. He straightened his back and struck the attitude of a headmaster, but his old face had coloured.
‘Hullo, Doctor Prune,’ said Titus. ‘We were just going to play marbles.’
‘Marbles! eh? By all that’s erudite, and a very fine invention too, God bless my spherical soul,’ cried the physician. ‘But, if your accomplice isn’t Professor Bellgrove, your headmaster, then my eyes are behaving in a very peculiar manner.’
‘My dear Doctor,’ said Bellgrove, his hands clasping his gown near the shoulders, its torn portion trailing the floor at his feet like a fallen sail – ‘It is indeed I. My pupil, the young earl, having misbehaved himself, I felt it my bounden duty, in loco parentis, to bring what wisdom I have at my command to bear upon his predicament. To help him, if I can, for, who knows, even the old may have experience; to succour him, for, who knows, even the old may have mercy in their bones; and to lead him back into the current of wise living – for, who knows, even the old may …’
‘I don’t like “current of wise living”, Bellgrove – a beastly phrase for a headmaster, if I may make so damnably bold,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘But I see what you mean. By all that smacks of insight, I most probably do. But what a place for incarcerating a child! Let’s have a look at you, Titus. How are you, my little bantam?’
‘All right, thank you, sir,’ said Titus. ‘I’ll be free tomorrow.’
‘O
h God, it breaks my heart,’ cried Prunesquallor. ‘“I’ll be free tomorrow” indeed! Come here, boy.’
There was a catch in the Doctor’s voice. Free tomorrow, he thought. Free tomorrow. Would the child ever be free tomorrow?
‘So your headmaster has come to see you and is going to play marbles with you,’ he said. ‘Do you know that you are greatly honoured? Have you thanked him for coming to see you?’
‘Not yet, sir,’ said Titus.
‘Well, you must, you know, before he leaves you.’
‘He’s a good boy,’ said Bellgrove. ‘A very good boy.’ After a pause he added, as though to get back to firm, authoritarian ground again, ‘and a very wicked one at that.’
‘But I’m delaying the game – by all that’s thoughtless, I am indeed!’ cried the Doctor, giving Titus a pat on the back of the head.
‘Why don’t you play, too, Doctor Prune?’ inquired Titus. ‘Then we could have “threecorners”.’
‘And how do you play “threecorners”?’ said Prunesquallor, hitching up his elegant trousers and squattirig on the floor, his pink, ingenious face directed at the tousle-haired child. ‘Do you know, my friend?’ he enquired, turning to Bellgrove.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Bellgrove, his face lighting up. ‘It is a noble game.’ He lowered himself to the ground again.
‘By the way,’ said the Doctor, turning his head quickly to the Professor, ‘you’re coming to our party, aren’t you? You will be our chief guest, as you know, sir.’
Bellgrove, with a great grinding and creaking of joints and fibres, got all the way to his feet again, stood for a moment magnificently and precariously upright and bowed to the squatting doctor, a lock of white hair falling across his blank blue eyes as he did so.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I am, sir – and my staff with me. We are deeply honoured.’ Then he sank to his knees again with extraordinary rapidity.
For the next hour, the old prison warder, peering through a keyhole the size of a table-spoon, in the inner door, was astounded to see the three figures crawling to and fro across the floor of the prison fort, to hear the high trill of the Doctor develop and strengthen into the cry of a hyena, the deep and wavering voice of the Professor bell forth like an old and happy hound, as his inhibitions waned, and the shrill cries of the child reverberate abut the room, splintering like glass on the stone walls while the marbles crashed against one another, spun in their tracks, lodged shuddering in their squares, or skimmed the prison floor like shooting stars.
TWENTY-TWO
There was no sound in all Gormenghast that could strike so chill against the heart as the sound of that small and greasy crutch on which Barquentine propelled his dwarfish body.
The harsh and rapid impact of its iron-like stub upon the hollow stones was, at each stroke, like a whip-crack, an oath, a slash across the face of mercy.
Not a hierophant but had heard at one time or another the sound of that sinister shaft mounting in loudness as the Master of Ritual thrust himself forwards, his withered leg and his crutch between them negotiating the tortuous corridors of stone, at a pace that it was difficult to believe.
There were few who had not, on hearing the crack of that stub of a crutch on distant flag-stones, altered their directions to avoid the small smouldering symbol of the law, as, in its crimson rags, it stamped its brimstone path along the centre of every corridor, altering its course for no man.
Something of the wasp, and something of the scraggy bird of prey, there was, about this Barquentine. There was something of the gale-twisted thorn tree also, and something of the gnome in his blistered face. The eyes, horribly liquid, shot their malice through veils of water. They seemed to be brimming, those eyes of his, as though old, cracked, sandy saucers were filled so full of topaz-coloured tea as to be swollen at their centres.
Endless, interwoven and numberless as were the halls and corridors of the castle, yet even in the remotest of these, in the obscure fastnesses, where, infinitely removed from the main arteries, the dank and mouldering silence was broken only by the occasional fall of rotten wood or the hoot of an owl – even in such tracts as these a wanderer would be haunted and apprehensive for fear of those ubiquitous tappings – faint it may be, as faint as the clicking of fingernails, but a sound for all its faintness that brought with it a sense of horror. There seemed no refuge from the sound. For the crutch, ancient, filthy and hard as iron, was the man himself. There was no good blood, no good red blood in Barquentine any more than there was in his support, that ghastly fulcrum. It grew from him like a diseased and nerveless limb – an extra limb. When it struck the stones or the hollow floorboards below him it was more eloquent of spleen than any word, than any language.
The fanaticism of his loyalty to the House of Groan had far outstripped his interest or concern for the living – the members of the Line itself. The Countess, Fuchsia and Titus were mere links to him in the blood-red, the imperial chain – nothing more. It was the chain that mattered, not the links. It was not the living metal, but the immeasurable iron with its patina of sacred dust. It was the Idea that obsessed him and not the embodiment. He moved in a hot sea of vindication, a lust of loyalty.
He had risen as usual this morning, at dawn. Through the window of his filthy room he had peered across the dark flats to Gormenghast Mountain, not because it shone in a haze of amber and seemed translucent but in order to get some indication of the kind of day to expect. The ritual of the hours ahead was to some extent modified by the weather. Not that a ceremony could be cancelled because of adverse weather, but by reason of the sacred Alternatives, equally valid, which had been prescribed by leaders of the faith in centuries gone by. If, for example, there was a thunderstorm in the afternoon and the moat was churned and spattered with the rain, then the ceremony needed qualifying in which Titus, wearing a necklace of plaited grass was to stand upon the weedy verge and, with the reflection of a particular tower below him in the water, so sling a golden coil that, skimming the surface and bounding into the air as it struck the water, it sailed over the reflection of a particular tower in one leap to sink in the watery image of a yawning window, where, reflected, his mother stood. There could be no movement and no sound from Titus or the spectators until the last of the sparkling ripples had crept from the moat, and the subaqueous head of the Countess no longer trembled against the hollow darkness of the cave-like window, but was motionless in the moat, with birds of water on her shoulders like chips of coloured glass and all about her the infinite, tower-filled depths.
All this would necessitate a windless day and a glass surface to the moat, and in the Tomes of Ceremony there would, were the day stormy, be an alternative rendering, an equally honourable way of enriching the afternoon to the glory of the House and the fulfilment of the participants.
And so, it was Barquentine’s habit to push open his window at dawn and stare out across the roofs and the marshes beyond, to where the Mountain, blurred, or edged like a knife gave indication of the day ahead.
Leaning forward, thus, on his crutch, in the cold light of yet another day, Barquentine scratched savagely at his ribs, at his belly, under his arms, here, there, everywhere with his claw of a hand.
There was no need for him to dress. He slept in his clothes on a lice-infested mattress. There was no bed; just the crawling mattress on the carpetless floor-boards where cockroaches and beetles burrowed and insects of all kinds lived, bred and died, and where the midnight rat sat upright in the silver dust and bared its long teeth to the pale beams, when in its fullness the moon filled up the midnight window like an abstract of itself in a picture frame.
It was in such a hovel as this that the Master of Ritual had woken every morning for the last sixty years. Swivelling about on his crutch, he stumped his way from the window and was almost immediately at the rough wall by the doorway. Turning his back to this irregular wall he leaned against it and worked his ancient shoulder-blades to and fro, disturbing in the process a colony of ants which (having
just received news from its scouts that the rival colony near the ceiling was on the march and was even now constructing bridges across the plaster crack) was busily preparing its defences.
Barquentine had no notion that in easing the itch between his blades he was incapacitating an army. He worked his back against the rough wall, to and fro, to and fro in a way quite horrible in so old and stunted a man. High above him the door rose, like the door of a barn.
Then, at last, he leaned forward on his crutch and hopped across the room to where a rusted iron ring protruded from the floor. It was like the mouth of a funnel, and indeed a metal pipe led down from this terminal opening to where, several stories below, it ended in a similar metal ring, or mouthpiece, which protruded several inches from the ceiling of an eating-room. Immediately beneath this termination and a score of feet below it, a hollow, disused cauldron awaited the heavy stone which morning after morning rumbled its way down the winding pipe to end its journey with a wild clang in the belly of the reverberating bowl, murmuring to itself in an undertone for minutes on end with the boulder in its maw.
Every evening it was taken up and placed outside Barquentine’s door, this boulder, and every morning the old man lifted it up above the iron ring in the floorboards of his room, spat on it, and sent it hurtling down the crooked funnel, its hoarse clanging growing fainter and fainter as it approached the eating-room. It was a warning to the servants that he was on his way down, that his breakfast and a number of other preliminaries were to be ready.
