Pylos’s first official act was to name his new department. The interim titles that had been used — ‘Economic Relief of Under-Privileged Territories’ and ‘Mission for Under-Developed Lands’ — were well enough in their way, but they combined a note of condescension with initials which, when contracted, proved somewhat unfortunate. Pylos consulted with senior members of the Designation and Terminology Branch, seeking some descriptive but trenchant phrase, some phrase that would neither patronize nor minimize. No agreement was reached until Miss Graine, clearing his tray one afternoon, offered her suggestion. So it was that DALTO came into being — the Department of Aid to the Less Technically Oriented.
Nevertheless, Pylos intended to rid himself of Miss Sadie Graine. It was the case of Ashmole-Brown that brought matters to a head.
In creating the staff of this new department, heads of existing departments had been asked to nominate those staff members in their ranks most fitted to initiate a programme of aid to the world’s less-privileged. Many departments having naturally recommended those they could no longer tolerate themselves, a strangely assorted (and not wholly unsympathetic) crew was gradually assembled on a hithertounused floor of the building, and as DALTO reached its full complement of personnel, the remainder of the Organization’s staff were able to close their expurgated ranks with a sigh of relief.
It was from this background that there advanced upon Achilles Pylos, a few weeks after his arrival at the Organization, the case of Ashmole-Brown.
Until he was assigned to the new department, Ashmole-Brown had been working away at his cluttered desk in the Department of Social and Anthropological Questions. Within a matter not of weeks but of days after the formation of DALTO, the contents of that small office, including Ashmole-Brown, had been completely transferred to the freshly partitioned premises three floors below. His papers were rushed through by hand, an unusual circumstance which in itself would have denoted emergency. To Ashmole-Brown it made not the slightest difference whether he was on the thirty-first or the twenty-eighth floor: his work was everything to him, and he pushed on with it, oblivious of change, his head bent to his swelling manuscript, his hand moving evenly from line to line. He was to be seen on his way to the Organization library, a closely written list in his hand; or returning, his head already lowered as if in anticipation of the next page, each arm bowed with a load of the heavy books so soon to be exchanged for others. His desk, his window-ledge, his bookshelves, even his grey-tiled floor, were piled with flagged volumes and curling documents. Whatever else Ashmole-Brown might be, he was no slacker: there could be no doubt that he was hard at it.
Hard at what? This was the question that had so perplexed the Social and Anthropological officials and, the answer eluding them, had finally resulted in the frenzied transfer of Ashmole-Brown to DALTO. Ashmole-Brown had been hired, long ago, to undertake a study — that much was certain. But why? And by whom? He had a contract in which the nature of the study was defined at length, and its terms of reference by no means precluded the incorporation of Ashmole-Brown in DALTO: they would scarcely have prevented his inclusion in any public institution, so liberally studded were they with the many-faceted gems of the sociological lexicon. Even to the most experienced decodifiers, the central message of this contract seemed indecipherable. Ashmole-Brown alone was certain of his task.
And did Ashmole-Brown then refuse to divulge the theme of his labours? Far from it. He liked nothing better. Jovially, he would seat the inquirer (and at first there had been a succession of these, some of them officially propelled) on his single extra chair — depositing the displaced pile of books onto the floor — and explain by the hour. He would show references to illustrate points, or drag out, from under a teetering stack, some document or article he had found invaluable. It all seemed to hang together at the time — the visitor would find himself murmuring, ‘Most interesting’ and even ‘Fascinating’ — but no one had yet emerged from such an interview with a coherent tale to tell. Ashmole-Brown’s presence became a public confession of failure — a living expression of what his colleagues in Social and Anthropological Questions called the inability to communicate. Was he not using up official time and space? Was his rounded back in its antiquated tweeds not turned to two potentially useful windows? Might not the fluorescent light that shone down on him have shone more profitably on another? The Social and Anthropological Department, as a group, had experienced a meaningful, rewarding, and fully integrated sense of release when Ashmole-Brown was shunted off to DALTO.
One thing, however, had been overlooked. Ashmole-Brown’s contract — his famous contract — contained a renewal clause. The contract in its present form had but short time to run, and the question of its renewal was presently brought to Mr Pylos’s attention by Miss Sadie Graine.
Pylos was busy with affairs of the less technically oriented when Miss Graine came in with Ashmole-Brown’s file. He waited for her to lay the papers on his In-tray and depart, but when she stood expectantly by the desk he knew that it was some matter to which she attached importance. Raising his head — not without some intrepid show of irritation — he invited, and received, the history of Ashmole-Brown. Miss Graine was at this time becoming more vocal, and she left no doubt as to the correct course to be followed. She would not, she explained, have bothered Pylos with the case had it not been for the rank of Ashmole-Brown. This — as Pylos saw from the cover of the file — though temporary, was substantial.
Alone again, Pylos laid aside the less technical and examined the dossier. The Organization kept two sets of files on its personnel. One of these recorded the halting progress of the staff member on his Organizational journey and, as has been noted, was uncompromisingly official in character: this was known as the Personal File. The other, known as the Confidential File, contained only personal details and was available to an authorized few. (Nothing can describe the repugnance felt by the staff for the existence of these Confidential dossiers. They believed, not unreasonably, that secret files could only contain facts, or fictions, that exposed or defamed them, and the knowledge that an extensive system was devoted to the accumulation of such records caused distress of a natural and well-founded kind.)
Pylos found that he had been given both files on Ashmole-Brown, bound together with a rubber band. Neither was large, and few minutes were required to read them. Ashmole-Brown had come in with the century, had been educated at a college in the north of England, where he had written a thesis on the legend of Perceforest, and had since been employed at universities and in the government. During the war he had spent some time in the Royal Navy until invalided out for allergies. He had served on government committees. His hobby seemed to be linguistics, and his single publication was a pamphlet entitled ‘The Abuse of the Superlative in North America’. The only damaging item was a letter, in the Confidential file, in which a department store asked the Organization’s assistance in obtaining payment of a small account one year overdue.
Ashmole-Brown was respectable. But was he respectable enough to stand up for? — to stand up for (though Pylos did not say it, even to himself) against Miss Sadie Graine? What if Ashmole-Brown should be around for years, a perpetual testimony to Pylos’s administrative naïveté? If the name of Oxford or Cambridge had appeared in the file, Pylos would have taken heart on behalf of Ashmole-Brown. But Ashmole-Brown was not endorsed by either of these infallible bodies: his background was unmistakably red-brick in texture, and Pylos wavered.
It is not usual in the Organization for a department head to visit the offices of his staff. On taking up his appointment, Pylos had made an inaugural progress through his little domain, attended by Chai and Choudhury, and by his Chief of Missions, Rodriguez-O’Hearn. He had genially shaken hands and asked unexacting questions. He had stopped to chat with a filing clerk here, a secretary there; had spoken Greek with a Greek, and French with a Congolese. The staff had stood around their hastily tidied desks, and all but the most disillusioned had smiled. Pylos had peered
into a Chinese typewriter and worked a Fotofax machine. He had admired the magnificent views from windows and refrained from commenting on the gloom of the windowless areas, which were more extensive. Within half an hour he had been safely back in his own room, his duty done. Since then, he had attended a departmental party, and made a token appearance in the staff cafeteria. What more could possibly have been asked?
The Chief Coordinator’s decision to call on Ashmole-Brown was therefore a departure. Even Miss Graine looked startled, although she at once picked up her telephone and confirmed that Ashmole-Brown was in his cubicle at the far end of the corridor. Scattering a trio of gossiping girls, bringing alarmed heads up from drinking fountains as their owners prepared for flight, Pylos strode forth. Ultimately entering a labyrinth of partitions, he was shown into a narrow room by a wide-eyed secretary.
The only person who did not seem surprised was Ashmole-Brown.
Ashmole-Brown went through his usual chair-clearing process and, when Pylos was seated, settled himself back behind his desk. He was a broad, awkwardly-jointed man. His sagging tweeds and forward-flopping hair were of the same pepper-and-salt combination; even the round eyes shining out through the round lenses were densely speckled. The cheeks had retained their hectic schoolboy flush. The mouth was large, even generous, and presently said as if it meant it, ‘Great pleasure to see you here, sir. Great pleasure.’
Pylos commented civilly on the evidence of Ashmole-Brown’s industry, waving his hand towards the voluminous stacks — and in this way bringing one or two loose papers to the floor, where they were allowed to lie. He then said, with a serious levelling of voice, ‘Mr Ashmole-Brown, I should like you to tell me something about your work.’
Ashmole-Brown beamed. ‘Mr Pylos,’ he said, ‘I have worked — laboured, I may say — at this opus of mine for nearly four years, and I marvel, sir, I marvel, that today of all days you should choose to make this inquiry. I marvel.’ He paused to do so. ‘For today — this very morning — I reached a significant point in my journey. There is light, Mr Pylos — light at the end of the tunnel. The end of my pilgrimage is in sight.’
Pylos expanded with relief. ‘I am delighted to hear it,’ he said. ‘That is, we all, I am sure —’
‘Quite, quite.’ Ashmole-Brown was radiant. He tilted back his chair. He took off his glasses and, holding them by the stems, twirled them round and round, allowing his eyes to sparkle unconfined.
‘And how would you estimate the — ah — usefulness of your work?’ Pylos inquired. ‘At this stage.’
Ashmole-Brown pursed his lips reflectively. His glasses rotated more slowly between his fingers. ‘It is sound,’ he said judicially. ‘Yes, I would say — it is sound.’
‘Sound?’ Pylos frowned. ‘Not more than sound?’
‘No more — yet no less. Sound, sir. Sound is the word I should choose.’ There was silence while Ashmole-Brown politely declined to add another adjective. He broke into smiles again. ‘The completed work, however, has become — if not a reality — no longer a myth. In another three years, I should say — yes, another three —’
‘Three years more?’
‘Give or take a few months, naturally. My path lies plain before me. There is, as I say, light: light at the —’
Here Ashmole-Brown gave an exultant twirl to his glasses and they spun out of his hands, hit the desk and fell to the floor. After a moment’s surprise he dropped forward in his chair and fumbled short-sightedly on the floor around him. His speckled back heaved above the desk like the dorsal mound of some half-submerged sea-monster. Pylos could hear him breathing in short grunts. ‘Now, where the devil … Ah, yes, yes, here we are.’ Ashmole-Brown hove into sight once more, pinker in the face, holding the glasses in his hand. Pylos saw that one of the lenses was completely shattered.
Ashmole-Brown stared at the glasses for some moments. He then laid them on the desk before him. He seemed to have forgotten that Pylos was there. He shook his head heavily. ‘This’, he said, apparently to himself, ‘will slow me down considerably.’
Pylos stirred in his chair, and Ashmole-Brown gave him a nod of recognition. He took up his glasses again and prodded the shattered side despondently with his forefinger. ‘O piteous spectacle,’ he declaimed. He then held the unbroken side vertically to his eye like a lorgnette and, after squinting through it at Pylos, lifted a half-completed page from the desk and attempted to read. His lips slowly formed the words as he identified them. He put the glasses down, seeming relieved. ‘Dare say I can go on like that for a while,’ he said.
‘But surely,’ Pylos exclaimed, aghast, ‘they can be repaired in a matter of a day or two.’
Ashmole-Brown stared. ‘My dear chap, no sense in that. No sense at all. I’m going on home leave in a few weeks. In England I can get a brand-new pair for nothing.’
After the dismissal of Ashmole-Brown, Pylos felt himself to be full-fledged. It was as if he had passed through some ceremony of Organizational initiation, forged some invisible bond with his fellow administrators. He now settled in to his coordinational duties in earnest. With Miss Graine’s assistance, a pattern was formed — one he was to follow for years, a routine of discussions, decisions and correspondence which his position invested with parochial grandeur.
During the process of establishment, Miss Graine proved indispensable — so much so that Pylos eventually relinquished all intention of dispensing with her, and even forgot that he had wished to. A man like Pylos, between whose abilities and whose position there lie certain gaps, needs a woman like Miss Sadie Graine. For Miss Graine made it her business to plug those gaps — with flattery of Pylos, with disparagement of his equals, with inequities to his underlings, with whatever unsightly wadding came to hand. It was her daily task to fortify the dikes of Pylos’s self-esteem. The excessive credence he put in her high opinion of himself soon naturally extended to her other views. He came to accept her judgements, and these judgements gradually took on a note of instruction.
For Miss Graine, too, the incident of Ashmole-Brown had been significant. After that she became steadily more vocal, more peremptory. Silence lends stature, and Miss Graine, growing talkative, revealed herself to her colleagues as petty and acrimonious. She condemned unthinkingly, and was open to no rational explanation. (She had a curious habit of saying ‘I’ll admit that,’ ‘I grant that,’ ‘I’ll say that much,’ as if acknowledging that any reasonable admission must be forced out of her.) She quickly made her new power felt, letting it be known that she had instigated the fatal investigation of Ashmole-Brown, and becoming feared as a result. A few tried, with fleeting success, to ingratiate themselves with her; most merely sought to keep out of her way, saying they would not go against The Graine. Keeping out of her way was not easy. She set up in her office an intricate system of files covering the activities of the department, so that Pylos might have immediate access to them. These files were methodically kept: though it were method, however, there was madness in it — or at least obsession, for they duplicated, from various angles, other records kept elsewhere. No one dared to point this out. She also miraculously retained in her head, keeping it otherwise vacant for the purpose, all manner of statistics referring to the less technically oriented as well as to the DALTO personnel.
In assessing Miss Graine’s character, her single status was taken into account — inevitably, but perhaps excessively. For had Miss Graine ever been seriously contemplated as a life partner, had she even been asked — let alone taken — in marriage, her demands on the world might have been different.
Senior members of Pylos’s staff would compliment him on her efficiency, saying ‘What would you do without her?’ As time wore on, a note of wistful speculation crept into this rhetorical inquiry, and it developed the ring of a real question. There was, indeed, no way of knowing what his stature at the Organization might have been, had he fallen under some other influence than that of Sadie Graine. As it was, he came to feel pleasantly important as he trod the Organ
ization’s lobbies or rode its elevators. His dark, portly good looks were recognizable, and he was greeted wherever he went. He gradually formed a circle of acquaintances; not precisely intimates, these were more in the nature of cronies — their talk did not extend beyond shop, but this shop was sometimes talked in their living-rooms as well as their offices. Although exalted in Organizational rank, they were not remarkable men. First-class minds, being interested in the truth, tend to select other first-class minds as companions. Second-class minds, on the other hand, being interested in themselves, will select third-class comrades in order to maintain an illusion of superiority; and it was this way with Pylos.
A lingering adroitness saved him from utter mediocrity, and it was this adroitness, together with the promptings of Miss Sadie Graine, that helped him sense the temper of the Organization and dictated the tone of his dealings with his staff.
There was, for example, his masterly handling of Choudhury’s request for promotion. Although this came soon after the Ashmole-Brown episode, Pylos was already acting with more assurance. When Miss Graine, with lips meaningly tightened, admitted Choudhury to his office, Pylos was prepared. And when Choudhury, with unprecedented eloquence, pleaded his case, Pylos made no outward resistance. As it happened, he had just come from a top-level meeting at which the Director-General of the Organization had enjoined his departmental chiefs to administrative stringency, due to a crisis in Organization funds. Pylos could conceivably have given Choudhury this straightforward and authentic reason for refusal; the fact that he did not shows the velocity with which Pylos was learning the Organizational ropes. He did tell Choudhury that he had discussed the matter of promotions with the Director-General that very morning. The Director-General, he went on, put a certain emphasis on seniority. Years of service, years of experience — age, in short — mattered to him, perhaps more than they did to … (here Pylos gave a rueful, self-indicating smile) … others. Choudhury, for all his outstanding ability, was a comparatively young man. Could he not be patient? At his age, a matter of two or three years — what were they? Could he not take them in his youthful stride? So Pylos appealed, and Choudhury submitted.
People in Glass Houses Page 9
