The Oracles

by Margaret Kennedy

  In vain did he tell himself that he was a lucky man, that many would envy him, and that he led, upon the whole, a pleasant life. He felt like one who strolls across some urban common, and strives to believe it larger than it is. The prospect is very pretty, very rural, if the real countryside can be forgotten. There are houses, miles upon miles of houses, on every side; but it is possible, by an adroit choice of paths, to saunter for twenty minutes without seeing one. There are not so very many other people about, and only a curmudgeon would object to the sight of them. The couples lying in the grass are quiet enough. The troops of hooting boys, wheeling bicycles through the birch spinneys, have a perfect right to be there. Nor are the wider views entirely ignoble; space, distance, can bestow charm of a sort upon gasometers and chimneys and a smoky horizon. But there comes a moment when the cheated soul rebels. Every bush has a rubbed, worn look. Every path has been trodden too often. There are no secrets in such a place; there is nothing to be discovered and cherished as a private memory. Better a corner in the dullest field, so it is far away and solitary. A hedgerow, a haystack, the green shoulder of a down, may be remembered for ever, recalled at will. But this! This is merely an exercise ground for prisoners. It is pleasant. It is pretty. And the waves, the waves are breaking on some far, deserted beach, where nobody ever goes. Ah, to be there!

  To get out of East Head for the afternoon was at any rate agreeable. Dickie liked driving over the hills and he looked forward to an hour with Pethwick, whom he admired. In their few meetings they had discussed little save business, yet he always got the impression that they had touched upon something larger. There was a spacious energy about the old engineer which stimulated him. Pethwick had been all over the world. He had constructed railways over mountains and through jungle swamps; he had contended with floods, fires, earthquakes, strikes and epidemics. He had carried out great projects in the teeth of enormous difficulties, had ruled armies of lawless men, and must have known how to be tough upon occasion. Yet he gave a strong impression of kindness and geniality.

  That this charm of manner had always been Pethwick’s most telling asset was an explanation which did not occur to Dickie. Petulant surveyors and rebellious coolies had, in their time, succumbed to it. As an engineer he might not have been exceptionally brilliant, but his projects were carried through successfully because the people working with, and for, him were always in good tempers.

  Dickie’s own temper improved as soon as he found himself in the library at Brinstock. He addressed himself to the business in hand with more gusto than he had felt for any of his work just lately. There was, after all, nobody else in the district who could give Pethwick sounder advice or look after this sale better than he. He would have been sorry to let it appear that East Head was ill served in such matters. His eye brightened and he talked briskly.

  Some excellent sherry was brought to them when they had finished their business. They relaxed and chatted a little. Pethwick displayed and explained some of his treasures, a haphazard collection of objects which had caught his fancy in various parts of the world. They were attractive in themselves but not very tastefully disposed. Most of the things in the library came from central Africa, where Pethwick had spent several years among the Dandawa, for whom he had a great affection.

  ‘They’re such sensible people,’ he said. ‘On the whole they had more sense than any people I’ve ever met, but nobody gave them credit for having any. When I was there a tremendous howdydo was going on about a sacred fish they had—a row among the whites, I mean, not the Dandawa. Nobody had seen it; they kept it hidden away somewhere. But it was said to be a carved stone fish that they’d had for a very long time, and it had all sorts of magic powers. They said that they had brought it with them over the mountains and that it had originally flown down from the sky. Well, this started no end of a rumpus among the archaeologists and ethnologists. It’s probable that the Dandawa did originally come from over the mountains, and there are remains of temples over there, at least four thousand years old, in which carvings of this fish constantly keep cropping up. I’ve got some photographs in the other room; I’ll show you. You see, it was the wrong fish. The kind of fish nobody thereabouts could have seen; a sort of dolphin. Who made it? Why a dolphin in central Africa? The whole ethnological set-up seemed to be tottering. Such controversies! You didn’t know whom to believe. Nobody, of course, thought of believing the Dandawa, who went on saying that it had come out of the sky. And how right they were! A geologist turned up and managed to have a look at it. He was coal black himself; otherwise he’d never have had a chance. He said it was a small meteorite. And not so very like a fish either. It had got stylised in those carvings. The Dandawa, of course, had never said it was a fish.’

  ‘If we got a meteorite in East Head,’ said Dickie, ‘there would be no mystery about it. We shouldn’t worship it. We should be told exactly what it was, in a very dull way, and then it would be put into our local museum, where children would be brought to see it against their will.’

  Pethwick laughed and struggled out of his chair.

  ‘That’s what I mean about the Dandawa,’ he said. ‘They get the best of both worlds. Come and see the things in the other room.’

  He led the way to a large room on the western side of the house, explaining that it had been a drawing-room but that he used it for a dumping-room.

  ‘I don’t like living among a great clutter of things,’ he said. ‘So I bring two or three at a time out of here into the library, where I can look at them, and change them every month or so.’

  Dickie followed him into the room and was immediately struck by something which stood in the window. A fan of fire seemed to be bursting from a shattered rock. It stood upon a pedestal of green marble, but the split rock was black, and the quivering light which sprang from it shifted and changed as they came into the room.

  ‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘That? Oh, that’s Conrad Swann. I wanted to show you that too. Funny thing! I bought it a month or so before he came to live in East Head. I saw it in an exhibition and took a fancy to it.’

  Dickie went close to it and discovered that the light came from whorls of clear glass.

  ‘My housekeeper loathes it,’ continued Pethwick. ‘She has to dust it, and wipe it over with medical spirit, to keep the glass perfectly clear. Those curves always catch the light in some way, and it’s always different, according to where you stand, and what kind of light there is, and where it comes from. Sometimes it’s quite a blaze when the afternoon sun gets it. I like it best when it’s just a faint shimmer.’

  ‘It has such a lot of power and force,’ said Dickie.

  He retreated to a far corner of the room, so that he could see another arrangement of this darting radiance, this conquest of the airy—the impalpable.

  ‘What I like,’ said Pethwick, ‘is the dynamics of the thing. That’s what attracted me. It looks right, and it actually is right; it’s exactly what would happen. Those lumps of rock would, I think, go spinning off in this orbit. I asked Swann about it when I met him once, but he’s no hand at explaining himself. I couldn’t gather that he cared much about dynamics. He admitted he’d watched a lot of blasting. He said he’d lived near some quarries once, and watched a lot of it, whenever he got a chance to get where he could see it. So I told him that he’d got it right. And he said, yes, he thought he had. Meaning he’d got what he meant to get. He may have heard of gravity, but I don’t believe he’d lost much sleep over it. Getting it right evidently meant something quite different to him.’

  ‘It’s not exactly like an explosion, though,’ said Dickie. ‘It’s not just crude violence. It seems to be … governed by a law.…’

  ‘Of course it would be,’ said Pethwick. ‘Everything is governed by a law.’

  Dickie made a sound of argeement, but he was not sure that they meant the same thing. This law, he felt, had something to do with music. There was so much going on, in this creation of Swann’s, that i
t seemed to burst into a kind of music as he looked at it. He had received the same impression before, generally from pictures. But he did not venture upon any explanation, and merely asked what Swann called it.

  ‘Nothing. But he told me that he had watched the blast explosions because he was very much interested, at that time, in the resurrection of the dead! So I call it the Resurrection when I tell Mrs. Soames to dust it. I can’t just call it “that thing”.’

  ‘Is it thought to be good?’ asked Dickie.

  ‘Good? Oh, I see what you mean. How does it rate? I don’t know. I’m not up in these things. I’d never heard of Swann when I bought it, but he seems to be coming to the front. I just bought it because I liked it.’

  ‘You … er … didn’t get advice?’

  This question tickled Pethwick. He laughed and asked how anybody could have advised him upon such a point.

  ‘Nobody else can tell me what I like, can they?’

  Dickie scarcely knew what to make of such independence. He had always understood that the man who knows what he likes, and says so, is the lowest kind of barbarian. He hoped to buy some pictures, or something of that sort, when he had rather more money, but he had very little faith in his own judgment. He was by nature modest, and had contracted an almost pathological humility from hearing so often that Art and what the grocer thinks he sees are two quite different things. He had read a good deal of contemporary criticism and had digested this famous precept as thoroughly as even Martha could have wished. He believed himself to be a grocer and therefore assumed that what he thought he saw was of little consequence. Anything agreeable, anything immediately attractive, in a work of art must be suspect until he got permission to like it from somebody who was not a grocer.

  ‘I’ve never been able to care for anything of Swann’s that I’ve seen before,’ he exclaimed. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t because I like him, personally, so much. But this … I envy you!’

  Pethwick, watching him, was also a little envious at the spectacle of so much pleasure. He had never enjoyed it as much as Dickie obviously did; perhaps he had never possessed the same capacity for enjoyment. But this young man, he remembered, went in for that sort of thing. He had been to Italy for his honeymoon. He and his wife were in with the Rawson set; they had been invited to that party.

  A pity, thought Pethwick, and then reproved himself for thinking it a pity. He had wondered a little why a man of such ability should have been content to settle down in East Head, where the services of a first-rate lawyer could seldom be needed. Most of the work must be sheer routine and very little of it could set any serious problems. In some large and important firm he might have found more use for his brains; here he had got as far as he would ever go and would remain exactly where he was for the rest of his life. He had, apparently, no ambition.

  Cultural interests, Pethwick remembered, are a handicap to an ambitious man, since they enhance the value of leisure. A fellow who is determined to get on in the world cannot afford to indulge them beyond a certain point. Dickie, in East Head, could undoubtedly command a great deal more leisure than he could ever hope to enjoy should he find work commensurate with his abilities. If he preferred leisure to success he was probably quite right to choose as he had, especially since his wife shared these tastes. Such companionship must be very delightful, and Pethwick was almost envious of it, although he had lived so very different a life himself. But then his own wife, although lovable, had been an exceptionally stupid woman; the prospect of leisure spent in her company had seldom lured him from his work. Upon the whole, he believed that a man is more likely to get on in the world if his wife bores him, although he had known some very brilliant men who had died of it, who had worked themselves to death rather than endure domestic relaxation. The ambitious man should work in the evening for five nights in the week, and the conversation of his wife should not, therefore, be too great a temptation. But if, rather than talk to her, he works on seven nights, the consequences are sometimes fatal.

  Dickie Pattison would not die in his prime. He would follow in his father’s footsteps, live to a fine old age, do the minimum of work, and enjoy himself very much. He might, moreover, preserve certain virtues, an unworldliness, a fresh enthusiasm, which ambition would have destroyed. How wrong to consider such a choice deplorable! Specialists of all kinds are needed in the world, and specialists in appreciation are rare.

  ‘I’m wondering what to do with it now I’m going to the Argentine,’ said Pethwick. ‘I’m sure my daughter won’t cotton to it. I’m getting rid of a lot of things. Would … would you care to have this?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If you would, I should very much like to give it to you. I’m leaving a troublesome job on your hands. It’s a relief to me to be so sure it will be well done. I’d meant to ask you if you wouldn’t choose something by way of a parting gift.’

  ‘Sir!’ Dickie was incoherent with thanks. ‘I couldn’t tell you how grateful … it’s too good of you … to be able to look at it often.…’

  Pethwick had a pleasant vision of the cultured young Pattisons sitting at their fireside complacently admiring their Swann. He was not to know that this was a most improbable picture. He had not spoken above half a dozen words to Christina in his life, but he had always heard that they were an exceptionally happy couple. He had never seen their lounge. That Christina would be most unlikely to admire any Swann, and that they would have nowhere to put such an acquisition, save on the table where she kept her sewing machine, did not for a moment occur to him.

  Dickie continued to walk round his new possession, gazing at it in ecstasy. He knew that he ought to be going, but it was almost impossible to tear himself away. At length he did so, took his leave, and drove home, transported, exultant, as though some new, and much more agreeable, phase in his life was about to begin. Having learnt to like one Swann, he might make other discoveries. He remembered with pleasure Martha’s message about the Apollo, which he had not, hitherto, particularly wished to see. Now he was most anxious to see it. Now a new planet had swum into his ken. Now, like stout Cortez, he had got a glimpse of the Pacific.

  Since he was alone he gave way to an impulse which always assailed him when he was happy. He sang. All the way home he sang at the top of his voice, a thing which he never did normally save in his bath. He was a member of the Choral Society, but he did not sing very loud there, for fear of making mistakes. The music which he had been hearing for the last half-hour burst from him; it took shape and words from a chorus which the society had sung at the Easter Sacred Concert.

  ‘The grave will not for ever hold me in!

  But when God, my Redeemer, calls …’

  He changed gear and charged the top of Brinstock Hill. He swung over it. His eagle eye fell upon East Head, extended below him, and the Channel, and the far, blue Welsh mountains. How glorious a sight! He was himself the flame bursting from the rock:

  ‘Then haste I forth, then haste I GLORIFIED!

  The God of Heaven to meet.’

  PART IV

  BENBOW

  1

  FRANK TOOMBS and Benbow had gone down to the sports field to see the inscribed stone hoisted into place. In their absence the yard seemed empty and silent. No sound of work or voices disturbed Mrs. Toombs and Ivy as they sat in the kitchen; this circumstance loosened the elder woman’s tongue. She had, so far, merely hinted at her dissatisfaction. Now she gave full rein to it.

  ‘It isn’t that I dislike the poor soul. I don’t. There’s no harm in him and it halves the work for your father, having somebody in the yard that really understands it. These boys, these apprentices, are more trouble than they’re worth. They spoil half they do while they’re learning. But I’d just as soon not have Benbow in the house with us. After all, a tramp’s a tramp.’

  ‘Oh, Mum, he’s not a tramp. Anybody can see he isn’t, now he’s washed and tidy.’

  ‘If he’s not a tramp, who is a tramp, I’d like to know? No money. No clothes
. Won’t say where he comes from. I keep thinking what if he’s been in trouble?’

  ‘What if he has? Though I don’t think it’s that; not the sort of trouble you mean.’

  ‘But there’s something, or why does he act so queer?’

  ‘I don’t think he can help it.’

  ‘You mean he’s not quite right here?’ Mrs. Toombs tapped her forehead. ‘I’ve thought that too, and I don’t like it any better. You don’t want a person like that with sharp tools in their hand. They may be ever so quiet and then break out all of a sudden.’

  ‘I think he’s had a terrible shock,’ said Ivy. ‘But if he stops here quietly, perhaps it will pass off.’

  ‘You think he’s lost his memory or something?’

  ‘Well, he can’t answer questions.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t.’

  ‘I think it’s can’t. He’s happy here and doing a job he likes. That must be good for him. You can’t say he gives much extra trouble. He does every little thing he can for you.’

  ‘Yes. I give him that.’

  ‘Where else could he go? Any other place there’d be a lot of questions asked, and I believe that might set him right back. He’s already looking so much better. And we don’t want a lot of talk in the village about how we came to take him. People would think Dad is crackers.’

  ‘They would, because he is. I never knew him to do such a thing before. Usually he’s so careful who he takes on. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he came into the kitchen and said: “This is Benbow. Give him some bacon.’

  ‘It’s turned out lucky, Mum. We couldn’t have a better man for work. Dad says so.’