Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  As soon as we reached the major road, which had very little traffic on it, Rosalia put her foot down and kept us going flat out, to gain time for us to ditch our car without being seen. But when we reached the top of a rise I looked back and down and saw the two cars keeping pace with us. And we were all out and they were probably just cruising along, if they were police cars. Only the light, which was murky now, as if the ochre and violet had been mixed into a dirty mess, was in our favour, so long as it didn’t try a darker shade while we were in the rain forest. When we reached the entrance we found there was space for a dozen cars in the inky shadow of the trees, but only two others were there and no people to be seen at all. Rosalia ran the car as deep into the dark as she could, hastily locked it, and then we made for the entrance to the forest. We even trotted the first fifty yards or so of the path, where it was fairly wide and still easy to see. But after that we might have been picking our way through some Amazonian jungle. The path kept branching off and we had to make sure we always kept to the right, as Mitchell told us to do, otherwise we might be wandering round there all night, half barmy. As we went down, towards the sound of falling water, it grew darker and darker. We’d no torch and when we were in doubt about the path I had to keep striking matches. We seemed to be among giant ferns and all manner of antediluvian stuff. It smelt like a hothouse and was nearly as warm. We came to a bridge, over the roar and spray at the bottom, and stayed there a moment or two.

  ‘I wish we hadn’t come this way, darling,’ said Rosalia. ‘I’m frightened.’

  So was I, but this wasn’t the time to admit it. ‘Nothing to worry about, ducky,’ I told her. ‘Except I’m in a hell of a sweat.’

  ‘Oh – look – they’re coming down.’ She was right. There were torches flashing about up there, the way we’d come, and I thought I could hear some shouting.

  As soon as we’d crossed the bridge and started climbing, thunder began growling at us. It was darker than ever and soon we had an argument about whether we’d missed a turning to the right. I thought we hadn’t and Rosalia thought we had, and when we went back, only a few paces, it was proved very conclusively she’d been right. Nature, another female, did it, for after a terrific clap of thunder the whole forest glared with quivering lilac light. The rain couldn’t get through as easily but in the few places where it could, it hit us with solid rods of water. Getting a match alight was now something of a highly-skilled performance. Once we turned to the right on a path that wasn’t there, and found ourselves walking into a wall of leaves. If Rosalia had burst into tears at that moment, I think I’d have burst into them with her. However, she didn’t, being a great-hearted lass, but cursed and blinded along with me. And then, as so often happens, just when we felt we’d never make it, we made it. We were out, back on the blessed road again. The lights of a car winked at us through the jiggling rods of rain. We climbed in just as the thunder began growling again, as if something was baulked of its prey.

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ said Mitchell. ‘We’re in for a storm. Now for the old man on the mountain.’

  19

  I don’t know quite what I’d expected to find up there, but I felt at once I hadn’t found it. The first half-hour or so seemed nothing but a letdown. Of course there was nothing to see outside the bungalow. It was dark before we got there, and the storm still rolled and rumbled around. I felt I was high up, that’s all. The big back room into which Mitchell took us was warm and comfortable – and we needed the warmth because we’d both got soaked in the rain forest and had begun to feel cold and rather shivery in the car with Mitchell – but it might have been any back room, part kitchen and storehouse, part living-room, in this type of bungalow. Pat Dailey was there, looking exactly as he’d done in the morning, except that he wasn’t sweating now and was wearing an old grey cardigan. It had a lot of holes and burns from sparks and hot ashes dropped from his pipe, which he was smoking now in that careless volcanic way some old men have. While Rosalia and I dried ourselves by the big wood fire, Mitchell made some coffee and cut some sandwiches for us. The old man still had a bottle of whisky by his side. He amused himself teasing Rosalia, perhaps because she’d not been able to hide her disappointment, even disgust, at the first sight of him.

  ‘Why would ye want to know all about this Saturn over the Water?’ he asked her, with obvious mockery in his deep but wheezy voice. ‘Are ye hoping to save the world?’

  ‘I’d like to help if I can,’ said Rosalia. ‘And of course I’m curious.’

  ‘Is that all now, m’dear?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I don’t want my husband to go running off – ’

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, now. Ye have no husband – except for the night in odd motels, maybe – ’

  Scarlet-cheeked, Rosalia glared at him. ‘I was talking about Tim. I won’t have him entangled all the time in this Saturn over the Water. We must have a life of our own. I won’t have him – ’

  But the old rogue broke in again. ‘Ye won’t have him this – ye won’t have him that – now wait, wait, wait, m’dear. Let an old man tell ye something, young woman. A husband who does exactly what ye tell him to do and nothing else, that’ll be a husband ye soon won’t be wanting at all. Did ye take to this young man here because ye could tell him what to do? Ye did not. Did ye now?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Suppose we drop this, Mr Dailey,’ I said. ‘Are you willing to tell us, if you can, what we want to know?’

  ‘I’m willing to tell ye what I think ye ought to know – to give ye what we might call your allowance – your ration – of knowledge. There’s never been a greater mistake made on this earth, young man, than supposing that everybody’s entitled to any kind of knowledge, no matter the state of mind and soul. Would ye say a child of four should know how to make dynamite? Ye would not. Yet what else has been happening?’

  ‘I get the point,’ I said. ‘We’ll only ask for our ration. But one thing puzzles me, Mr Dailey. Do you see many people up here?’

  ‘I certainly do not, young man.’

  ‘Then why should we be allowed to come up here and see you? Especially me. After all, Rosalia does own the Institute now and can take it away from them. But I don’t own anything. And really I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘Ye haven’t – no. Except to tell an old man to drop it when he was trying to amuse himself.’ He said this quite good-humouredly, though. ‘Maybe your friend Mitchell can explain while he’s giving ye something to eat and to drink. I’m going in the other room and will see ye there later.’ And he shuffled out.

  ‘I can’t bear him,’ said Rosalia. ‘And I don’t see how he can tell us anything worth knowing.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Mitchell as we joined him at the table.

  ‘As a matter of fact, ducky, he did say several things to you – ’

  ‘I’m not talking about those things. And he could have guessed.’

  ‘He could but he didn’t,’ said Mitchell. ‘Now about you, Bedford. That afternoon your cousin, Mrs Farne, talked to you in the hospital at Cambridge, I was trying to see her myself. But I was told she was allowed only one visitor – and she’d sent for you. So I followed you on to that solicitor’s office and then on to the station. It was I who suggested to Merlan-Smith that he had you to dinner while somebody – not me, I was telling you the truth when I told you it wasn’t me – stole that last page of Farne’s letter. I wanted them to have that. I wanted them to start wondering and worrying how much you knew. We wanted you in there – whatever you thought you were doing – because power could follow you in, Bedford. You may have done very little directly, as you say yourself, but more or less through you, a whale of a lot’s been done. Enough to tear the organisation apart – I mean of course this section of it, from Merlan-Smith and Magorious in London right down to Steglitz in Charoke. We couldn’t focus the destructive force from inside. We tried at the Uramba Institute with Semple, Farne, Rother and Barsac. We needed somebody fro
m outside, coming from an unexpected direction, to use as a penetrating focus point. And when I was looking at you in that train from Cambridge – you remember, Bedford? – I was deciding it ought to be you.’

  ‘You talk as if Tim was just a sort of – of puppet,’ said Rosalia indignantly.

  ‘Then I’m giving you the wrong idea,’ said Mitchell. He looked at her steadily, gravely. ‘If we’ve minds and wills of our own – and most people haven’t – we’re never just puppets. But we’re never entirely free agents either – on any level.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘And the way things fell out, I can see how this power might work. I just thought I was lucky, that’s all. Somebody did something for me at the right moment. Now I see it might have been worked, though I don’t know how. Who made the arrangements? Who turned the power on, so to speak?’

  ‘Mostly’ – and Mitchell jerked a thumb at the door – ‘he did.’

  ‘That man?’ Rosalia couldn’t believe it.

  ‘That man. And now I’ll see if he’s ready for us. If you want some more food or coffee, help yourself. But we haven’t too much time.’

  ‘I hope we weren’t just part of their arrangements,’ Rosalia said as soon as Mitchell had left us. ‘And I hope this is the last of this anti-Saturn life. What I want is some ordinary life with you, darling. Where we know where we are. I don’t feel this place is anywhere. We might be in outer space or somewhere. What’s that?’

  ‘Thunder again. Rolling around these mountains.’

  ‘It sounds creepy. Kiss me before he comes back.’

  The room where the old man was sitting was very different from the one we’d just left. It was big and three of its walls had shelves from floor to ceiling. The remaining wall, where the windows must have been, was covered with curtains that appeared to be made of black velvet. But there was no light at that end of the room, and when we sat facing it, in deep armchairs close beside the old man, we seemed to be staring into complete darkness. There was some light above our heads, not bright but enough to let us see one another’s faces. The thunder hadn’t gone but it sounded very remote in here, and we hadn’t to raise our voices. But before he told us anything, before we saw anything, while we were just sitting waiting for something to happen, I found I was in a most peculiar state of mind. (Rosalia felt exactly the same, she told me afterwards.) Part of me seemed to be drifting away, as if I might be about to fall asleep, yet in the centre of this drift and dreaminess another part of me seemed tremendously alert, intent on missing nothing that might happen.

  ‘I’ve already warned ye,’ Dailey began, rather sleepily, ‘that ye can’t be told everything ye may want to know. But ask a question – then I’ll see what I can do for ye.’

  ‘The Charoke place has gone,’ I said. ‘Rosalia has the Institute. Do you know what’ll happen to Osparas?’

  ‘I do. And I’ll show ye if ye’ll just keep still and quiet for a minute. Look straight ahead as hard as ye can.’

  I stared until my eyes began to ache, and then, just as I was about to pack it up, I saw the Emerald Lake again, not steadily and clearly but in confused flashes, like a film shot anyhow and not properly cut, and then Osorno erupting, the terrible flow of lava, the buildings crumbling and vanishing, people trying to escape, the earth swaying and opening. There was no sound, just these flashing and sometimes flickering glimpses, but I knew beyond any doubt and question that I was seeing what would happen, what was already happening in some different time order.

  ‘That’ll be the end of Osparas, the end of these few links in the chain that you’ve known.’ Dailey’s voice sounded different, clearer, not so hoarse and whisky-sodden.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dailey,’ Rosalia said shakily. ‘I didn’t believe in you. I was stupid, I’m sorry. Because of course you must have known what I was feeling. Please – is it true – I must know – that these Saturn people, even my grandfather, want a war to happen – are trying to make it happen?’

  ‘It is true.’ And now his voice was so different I had to look at him. Everything that had been there before, that belonged to Pat Dailey of Surfers’ Paradise, the drunken old fraud, was still there – the tangled dirty beard, the creased boozer’s face, the watery eyes, hadn’t gone – but now I knew they were something put on like an actor’s make-up, and that sitting here with us was somebody different from anybody I’d ever known, another kind of man.

  ‘Watch now,’ he said. ‘But remember this is not like the end of Osparas. It is what could and may happen, not yet what will happen. So it is a vision of a vision – out of any order of time yet – among possibilities. But it is what they would like to bring about. Watch now.’

  There was an even longer interval of staring at blackness, and the images when they did come were jerky, confused and shadowy, but even so I could see great cities in ruins, landscapes of utter desolation, the dead in rotting heaps –

  ‘No, no, no.’ Rosalia jumped up and turned her face away from the dark curtains. I went across to her, for Dailey had put her on the other side of him, and she rested against me, trembling. ‘How could they be so wicked?’ she was saying. ‘How could they?’

  ‘They are wrong,’ said the man I must call Dailey, having no other name for him. ‘But remember, it’s not they who’ve built up this mountain of folly. Industrial man seems bent on self-destruction. They are only hurrying him on in the direction he wishes to go.’

  ‘I’m all right now,’ said Rosalia, and I went back to my chair. As Dailey seemed to be waiting for another question, I said to him: ‘Does Saturn over the Water really mean something – or is it just a badge they designed for themselves?’

  ‘It’s not possible even to design a badge without some meaning coming through,’ said Dailey. Though his whole manner of talking was very different now, he wasn’t solemn, portentous, prophetic. He seemed almost casual in his manner, but everything he said appeared to have a great depth of personality and experience behind it. ‘As for Saturn over the Water, it wouldn’t be easy to compress more meaning into four words – would it, Mitchell?’

  Mitchell, who was sitting somewhere on the other side of Rosalia, said there mightn’t be time for even the briefest sketch of what it meant.

  Dailey laughed. ‘He’s warning me to keep it short. So I will. First then – the Water. This is the sign of Aquarius. Now in the Zodiacal or Great Year, which lasts about 26,000 of our years, because of the precession of the equinoxes the earth comes under the influence of each of the signs of the Zodiac. Each age lasts about two thousand years. And the signs are in a reverse order. We are moving now, for we’re at the end of an age, from Pisces to Aquarius, from the Fish to the Water. A fish, you may or may not know, was in the early times of this age the symbol of Christ. So this age that’s ending has been that of Christ. You can also say that the last third of it especially has shown a great development of man’s conscious mind, a sharpening of consciousness, you could call it, and at the same time a worse and worse relation to the unconscious, giving men deep emotional drives they’re unable to control. Those images I was able to project for you – of total ruinous war – showed you what can happen when everybody says one thing and does the opposite. But then we’ve come to the end of one age and haven’t yet entered another. Have you followed me so far, young woman?’

  ‘Yes – except about equinoxes and things,’ said Rosalia eagerly. ‘Do go on. Where does Saturn come in? Somebody like Steglitz doesn’t come from there, does he? Tim says not.’

  ‘Tim’s right. He comes from a doctorate in sociology at the University of Leipzig. Now just forget persons, if you can, for a minute or two. The sign of Aquarius has two ruling planets – Saturn and Uranus. This doesn’t mean we’re talking about two globes of gas but about two different kinds of influences. This new age might be either Saturnian or Uranian – ’

  ‘And you’re a Uranian,’ cried Rosalia, ‘whatever that means.’

  ‘I am, but you won’t know what anything means if y
ou don’t keep quiet, girl. Saturn represents age, weight, authority, a cold exercise of power. So Saturn over the Water means that the world begins again – only in the Southern Hemisphere at first, the Northern being uninhabitable mostly – under the absolute rule of a few, the masters of millions of slaves. And they announce how they will create a rigid system. It’s all there in Saturn over the Water. For water is also an ancient symbol of the unconscious. And if Saturn is over the water, then the masters of this system will not only control men’s conscious minds but also their unconscious. To a limited extent they’re beginning to do it already – as Steglitz could tell you – by increasing the hidden drives towards war. So Saturn, you might say, is already rising above the water. You’re still with me, young man?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘But if that’s Saturn, then what about Uranus? What kind of influences does that represent? Would I prefer them – or are they just as bad?’

  ‘Not if you’re an artist, they aren’t. Uranus, the planet, was found just before the young revolutionaries began talking about liberty, equality and fraternity. And that’s no coincidence. But then you have to wear blinkers to find yourself in a world of coincidences. Now Uranus represents the feminine principle just as surely as Saturn represents the masculine. Its influences work through the sympathetic imagination. Most decent women and all true artists and all the people described by Saturnians as idle dreamers and crackpots – ’ He broke off, then spoke to Mitchell. ‘They’re here. I’d taken my attention off them. Careless of me. But we’ll do what we can.’