by Mervyn Peake
And so, at speed, threading the groups lit here and there with lamps, the dog-pack all of a sudden and seemingly with no warning doubled its speed until it reached a district where there was more light than is common beneath the river. Scores of lamps hung from nails in the great props or stood on ledge or shelf, and it was beneath a circle of these that the hounds drew up and lifted their heads to the dripping ceiling, and gave one single simultaneous howl. At the sound of this a tall spare man with a minute fleshless head, like the head of a bird, came out of the lamp-stained gloom, his white apron stained with blood, for in his arms he held seven hunks of crimson horse-flesh. As he approached them, the hounds quivered.
But he did not give them to the dogs at once. He lifted the dripping things above his head, where they shone with a ghostly, almost luminous red. Then forming his mouth into a perfect circle he hooted, and in the silence the echoes replied, and it was at the sound of the fourth echo that he tossed the crimson steaks high into the air. The hounds, taking their turn, one after the other, leaped at the falling meat, gripped it between their teeth, and then, turning in their tracks, galloped, with their heads held high, across the great sheet of water where they disappeared into the wet darkness.
The man with the bird-like head wiped his hand on his apron’d hips and plunged his long arms up to the elbows in a tub of tepid water. Beyond the tub, twenty feet to the west was a wall, covered with rank ferns, and in this wall was an arched doorway. On the other side of this door was a room lit by six lamps.
FIFTY-TWO
Here, in this fern-hung chamber, set about with cracked and broken mirrors to reflect the light of the lamps, are a group of characters. Some lie reclined upon mildewed couches: some sit upright on wickerwork chairs: some are gathered about a central table.
They are talking in a desultory way, but when they hear the bird-headed man begin his hooting, the sound of their conversation subsides. They have heard it a thousand times and are blunted to the strangeness of it, yet they listen as though every time were the first.
At one end of a rotting couch, with his great bearded chin propped up by knuckly fists, sits an ancient man. At the other end sits his equally ancient wife with her feet tucked up beneath her. The three of them (man, wife, and couch) present a picture of venerable decrepitude.
The ancient man sits very still, occasionally lifting his hand and staring at something that is crawling across his wrist.
His wife is busier than this, for here, there and everywhere run endless threads of coloured wool, until it seems she is festooned with it. The old lady, whose eyes are sore and red, has long since given up any idea of knitting but spends her time in trying to disentangle the knots in the wool. There were days, long ago, when she knew what she was making, and yet earlier days, when she was actually known by the clickety-clack of her needles. They had been a part, a tiny part of the Under-River.
But not so, now. Entanglement, for her, is everything. Occasionally she looks up and catches her husband’s eye, and they exchange smiles, pathetically sweet. Her little mouth moves, as though it is forming a word; but it is no word but a movement of her withered lips. For his part, there is no seeing through the long, hairy fog of his beard; no mouth is locatable … but all his love finds outlet through his eyes. He takes no part in the disentangling, knowing that this is her only joy, and that the knots and interweavings must outlive her.
But tonight, at the sound of the hooting she lifts her head from her work.
‘Dear Jonah,’ she says. ‘Are you there?’
‘Of course I am, my love. What is it?’ says the old man.
‘My mind was roving back to a time … a time … almost before I … almost as though … what was it I used to do? I can’t remember … I can’t remember at all …’
‘To be sure, my squirrel; it was a long while ago.’
‘One thing I do remember, Jonah, dear, though whether we were together … oh but we must have been. For we ran away, didn’t we, and floated like two feathers from our foes? How beautiful we were, Jonah, my own, and you rode with me beside you into the forest … are you listening, dearest?’
‘Of course, of course …’
‘You were my prince.’
‘Yes, my little squirrel, that is so.’
‘I am tired, Jonah … tired.’
‘Lean back, my dear.’ He tries to sit forward so that he can touch her, but is forced to desist, for the movement has brought with it a jab of pain.
One of the four men, who are playing cards on the marble table, turns round at the sound of a little gasp, but cannot make out where the sound comes from. He tuns back to a perusal of his hand. Another to have heard the sound, is an all-but-naked infant who crawls towards the rotting couple dragging its left leg after it, as though it were some kind of dead and worthless attachment.
When the infant reaches the couch where the old couple sit silent again, it stares at them in turn with a concentration that would have been embarrassing in a grown-up. There it heaves itself up and keeps its balance by grasping the edge of the couch. In the eyes of the ragged infant there seems to be an innocence quite moving to behold. A final innocence that has survived in spite of a world of evil.
Or was it, as some might think, mere emptiness? A sky-blue vacancy? Would it be too cynical to believe that the little child was without a thought in its head and without a flicker of light in its soul? For otherwise why should the infant turn on, at the most sentimental moment, his tiny waterworks, and flick an arc of gold across the gloom?
Having piddled with an incongruous mixture of nonchalance and solemnity the infant catches sight of a spoon shining in the shadows beneath the couch and dropping to his little naked haunches he rights himself and crawls in search of treasure. He is the essence of purpose. His minute appendage is forgotten: it dangles like a slug. He has lost interest in it. The spoon is all.
But the dangler’s done its worst … in all innocence, and in all ignorance, for it has saturated a phalanx of warrior ants who, little guessing that a cloudburst was imminent, were making their way across difficult country.
FIFTY-THREE
The child, and now the father and mother, refugees from the Iron Coast, sit opposite one another at the table. The father plays his cards with a mere fraction of his brain. The rest of it, a scythe-like instrument, is far away in realms of white equations.
His wife, a heavy-jaw’d woman, scowls at him out of habit. As usual he has won enough token money to correspond to a dozen fortunes. But there is no money down here in the Under-River, nor anywhere else for them, as far as she can see. Everything has gone wrong. Her uncle had been a general long ago; and her brother had been presented to a duke. But what was that to them now? They were real men. But her husband was only a brain. They should never have tried to escape from the Iron Coast. They should never have married, and as for their son … he would have been better unborn. She turns her heavy-jaw-boned head to her husband. How aloof he seems: how sexless!
She rises to her feet. ‘Are you a man?’ she shouts.
‘Delicious query!’ cries a voice, like a cracked bell. ‘“Are you a man?” she says. What fun! What roguery! Well, Mr Zed? Are you?’
The brilliant, articulate, white-eyelashed Mr Zed turns his eyes to his wife and sees nothing but Tx¼ p¾ = ½–prx¼ (inverted). Then he turns them on the willowy man with the cracked voice, and he realizes all in an instant that his last three years of constructive thought have been wasted. His premises have failed him. He had been assuming that Space was intrinsically modelled.
Realizing that this gentleman is way over the horizon, Crack-Bell tosses his hair from his forehead, laughs like a carillon, gesticulates freely to his partners across the table, in such a way as to say ‘O, isn’t it marvellous?’
But his partner, the sober Carter sees nothing marvellous about it, and leans back in his chair with his eyes half-closed. He is a massive, thoughtful man, not given to extravagance either in thought or deed. He keeps h
is partner under observation, for Crack-Bell is apt to become too much of a good thing.
Yes, Crack-Bell is happy. Life to him is a case of ‘now’ and nothing but ‘now’. He forgets the past as soon as it has happened and he ignores the whole concept of a future. But he is full of the sliding moment. He has a habit of shaking his head, not because he disagrees with anything, but through the sheer spice of living. He tosses it to and fro, and sends the locks cavorting.
‘He’s a card he is, that husband of yours,’ cries Crack-Bell leaning across the table and tapping Mrs Zed on her freckle-mottled wrist. ‘He’s an undeniable one, eh? Eh? Eh? But oh so dark … Why don’t he laugh and play?’
‘I hate men,’ says Mrs Zed. ‘You included.’
FIFTY-FOUR
‘Jonah dear, are you all right?’ said the old, old lady.
‘Of course I am. What is it squirrel?’ The old man smoothed his beard.
‘I must have dropped off to sleep.’
‘I wondered … I wondered …’
‘I dreamed a dream,’ said the old lady.
‘What was it about?’
‘I don’t remember … something about the sun.’
‘The sun?’
‘The great round sun that warmed us long ago.’
‘Yes, I remember it.’
‘And the rays of it? The long, sweet rays …’
‘Where were we then …?’
‘Somewhere in the south of the world.’
The old lady pursed her lips. Her eyes were very tired. Her hands went on and on with their disentangling of the wool, and the old man watched her as though she were of all things the most lovely.
FIFTY-FIVE
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’ cried Crack-Bell, throwing his head back and laughing like crockery.
‘Steady on,’ said Sober-Carter, the heavy man. ‘You would do well to keep quiet. Life may be hilarious to you, but They are on your trail.’
‘But I haven’t got a trail,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘It petered out long ago. Don’t let’s think about it. I am happy in half-light. I have always loved the damp. I can’t help it. It suits me. Ha, ha!’
‘That laugh of yours,’ said Carter, ‘will be the death of you, one day.’
‘Not it,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘I’m as safe down here as a fig in a fog. To hell with the fourth dimension. It’s now that matters!’ He tossed a mop of hair out of his eyes and, turning on a gay heel he pointed to a figure in the shades. ‘Look at her,’ he cried, ‘why don’t she move? Why don’t she laugh and sing?’
The shadow was a girl. She stood motionless. Her huge black eyes suggested illness. A man came through the door. Looking to neither right nor left he made for the dark girl where she stood.
She gazed expressionlessly over the shoulder of the man as he approached her with long, spindly strides. It seemed as though, knowing his features as she did, his high flinty cheekbones, his pale skin, his glinting eyes, his cleft chin, she saw no reason to focus her sight. When he reached her, he stood aggessively, like a mantis, his knee bent a little, his long-fingered hands clasped together in a bunch of bones.
‘How much longer?’ she said.
‘Soon. Soon.’
‘Soon? What sort of word is that? Soon! Ten hours? Ten days? Ten years? Did you find the tunnel?’
Veil turned his eyes from her, and rested them for a moment on each of the others in turn.
‘What did you find?’ repeated the girl, still looking over his shoulder.
‘Quiet, curse you!’ said the man Veil, raising his arm.
The Black Rose stood unflinchingly upright, but with all the coil and re-coil of the flesh gone out of her. She had been through too much, and all resilience had gone. She stood there, upright but broken. Three revolutions had rocked over her. She had heard the screaming. Sometimes she did not know whether it was herself or someone else who screamed. The cry of children who have lost their mother.
One night they took her naked from her bed. They shot her lover. They left him in a pool of blood. They took her to a prison camp, and then her beauty began to thicken and to leave her.
Then she had seen him: Veil, one of the guards. A tall and spindly figure, with a lipless mouth, and eyes like beads of glass. He tempted her to run away with him. At first she believed this to be a ruse, but as time elapsed the Black Rose realized that he had other plans in life, and was determined to escape the camp. It was part of his plan to have a decoy with him.
So they escaped, he from the cramping life of official cruelty; she from the pain of whips and burning stubs.
Then came their wanderings. Then came a time of cruelty worse than behind the barbed wire. Then came her degradation. Seven times she tried to escape. But he always found her. Veil. The man with the small head.
FIFTY-SIX
One day he slew a beggar as though he were so much pork, and stole from his blood-stained pocket the secret sign of the Under-River. The police were in the next street. He crouched with the Black Rose in the lee of a statue, and when the moon dipped behind a cloud he dragged her to the river-side. There in the deep shadows he found at last what he was looking for, an entrance to the secret tunnel; for with a cunning mixture of guile and fortune he had learned much in the camp.
But that was a year ago. A year of semi-darkness. And now she stood there silently in the small room, very upright, her eyes staring into space.
For the first time the Black Rose turned her head to the man standing before her.
‘I’d almost rather be a slave again,’ she whispered, ‘than have this kind of freedom. Why do you follow me? I am losing my life. What have you found?’
Yet again the man cast his eyes about the small, silent assembly, before he turned once more to the girl. From where she stood she could only see the man in silhouette.
‘Tell me,’ said the Black Rose. Her voice, as it had been throughout, was almost meaninglessly flat. ‘Have you found it? The tunnel?’
The bony man rubbed his hands together with a sound like sandpaper. Then he nodded his small head.
‘A mile away. No more. Its entrance dense with ferns. Out of them came a boy. Come close to me; I do not care to be overheard. You remember the whip?’
‘The whip? Why do you ask me that?’
Before answering, the silhouette took hold of the Black Rose, and a few seconds later they were out of the lamp-lit chamber. Turning left and left again they came to a corner of stones, like the corner of a street. A streak of light fell across the wet floor. Her arms were rigid in his vice-like grip.
‘Now we can talk,’ he said.
‘Let go my arm, or I will scream for God.’
‘He never helped you. Have you forgotten?’
‘Forgotten what, you skull? you filthy stalk-head! I have forgotten nothing. I can remember all your dirty games. And the stench of your fingers.’
‘Can you remember the whip at Kar and the hunger? How I gave you extra bread! Yes, and fed you through the bars. And how you barked for more.’
‘O slime of the slime-pit!’
‘I could see for all your coupling, your indiscriminate whoredom that you had been splendid once. I could see why you were given such a name. Black Rose. You were famous. You were desirable. But when revolution came your beauty counted for nothing. And so they whipped you, and they broke your pride. You grew thinner and thinner. Your limbs became tubes. Your head was shaved. You did not look like a woman. You were more like a …’
‘I do not want to think of that again … leave me alone.’
‘Do you remember what you promised me?’
‘No.’
‘And then how I saved you again; and helped you to escape?’
‘No! No! No!’
‘Do you remember how you prayed to me for mercy? You prayed on your knees, your cropped head bent as at an execution. And mercy I gave you, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, oh yes.’
‘In exchange, as you promised, for your b
ody.’
‘No!’
‘Escape with me or rot in lamplight.’
Again he grasped her savagely, so that she cried out in agony. But there was at the same time another sound that went unheard … the sound of light footsteps.
‘Lift up your head! Why all this nicety? You are a whore.’
‘I am no whore, you festering length of bone. I would as much have you touch me as a running sore.’
Then the man with the small skull-like head lifted his fist, and struck her across the mouth. It was a mouth that had once been soft and red: lovely to look upon: thrilling to kiss. But now it seemed to have no shape, for the blood ran all over it. In jerking back her head she struck it on the wall at her back, and immediately her eyes closed with sickness; those eyes of hers, those irises, as black, it seemed, as their pupils so that they merged and became like a great wide well that swallowed what they gazed upon. But before they closed a kind of ghost appeared to hover in the eyes. It was no reflection, but a terrible and mournful thing … the ghost of unbearable disillusion.
The footsteps had stopped at the sound of her cry, but now, as she began to sink to her knees a figure began to run, his steps sounding louder and louder every moment.
The small-skull’d man with his long spindly limbs, cocked his head on one side and ran his tongue to and fro along his fleshless lips with a deliberate stropping motion. This tongue was like the tongue of a boot, as long, as broad and as thin.
Then as though he had come to a decision he picked the Black Rose up in his arms and took a dozen steps to where the darkness was thickest, and there he dropped her as though she were a sack, to the ground. But as he turned to retrace his steps, he saw that someone was waiting for him.
FIFTY-SEVEN
For as long as a man can hold his breath, there was no sound; not one. Their eyes were fixed upon one another, until at last the voice of Veil broke the wet silence.
