The Education Of Epitome Quirkstandard

by A. F. Harrold

  Following the gesture of his monk-guide he walked up the shallow steps of the yellow stone building and was ushered along a short hallway, little more than a deep doorway, into what he could only describe as an inner sanctum. He felt the temperature, which had been quite moderate outside in the sunshine, drop a

  few degrees and his first breath misted in the shade. His guide gestured him to sit on a reed mat that was laid on the swept stone floor.

  In front of him, on a broad dais, sat an ancient old man. He was covered by a voluminous sky-blue robe, which rested on and around him as if it had been dropped in his vicinity from a great height and that it was only by the merest of good fortunes that the head-hole had landed square above his head, allowing him to poke out and look around.

  For a minute everything was still. Simone heard the footsteps of his monk-guide vanish out of the little building behind him and then there was only silence. A silence that he didn’t feel it would be right for him to break first. The two men stared at each other for what seemed like minutes until finally the little man spoke.

  ‘You have come a long way, Englishman.’

  ‘Um, yes. You’re right, I have, sir,’ replied Crepuscular.

  He had met fakirs and wise-men many times in his Indian life but none of them had been quite like this. It wasn’t that he would have said they hadn’t been wise, or even capable of strangely unnatural sleights of hand. He’d learnt all sorts of things from them, and had spent many long evenings listening entranced to the stories they told. One old man had cured his corns simply by rubbing a handful of elephant dung into his hair and chanting secret chants and another had taught him how to make bread. But none of them, it seemed to him now, had ever been quite like this old man. He felt, even after only seven words, that there was something undeniably special about this little fellow.

  ‘Do you realise, I wonder,’ the old man said, ‘how far you still have left to go?’

  His eyes were like deep pools of water. Like deep wells, somewhere in them stars were reflecting.

  ‘I’m just going home, sir.’

  Again, unhurried silence.

  ‘Every step you take is a step both further away from and closer to that home.’

  ‘How’s that? … Sir?’

  ‘Listen.’

  The Little Master held up one of his tiny hands. Layers of robe fell away to allow it access to the open air. From somewhere outside, somewhere distant, came the faint sounding of a clear deep horn. It was like a sound heard whilst dreaming, present but also absent, changed around maybe as it rolled around the steep walls of the lush valley. It was at once soporific and encouraging. Crepuscular wondered if maybe the altitude was making him dizzy.

  ‘The note from the horn is a series of vibrations. Did you know that?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I did. What do you mean vibrations?’

  ‘Vibrations in the air.’ He paused. ‘Englishman, picture the air divided into units, each so small that you cannot see it, but each one existing all the same, mindless of you or your belief in it or not. Sound is merely a connective series of these tiny units rubbing against each other, knocking into each other, do you see? Eventually this pattern, this sound, reaches your eardrum which is no more than a membrane attuned to these patterns of vibration, a stretched skin that can translate the hum into sound. Can you see that?’

  Crepuscular tried to visualise this.

  ‘Can I see that?’

  ‘Yes, that was my question.’

  ‘No, I can’t see it. But I can hear it.’

  Silence.

  Then a grin spread across the flat tortoise face of the Little Master.

  ‘I like that,’ he said, ‘I like that a lot.’

  For a moment he giggled, to himself – a high childish giggle, his eyes flashing. Crepuscular smiled.

  ‘Vibrations,’ he prompted when the laughter died down.

  ‘Yes, vibrations. As they travel away from the horn, away from their origin, they diminish in size and intensity. Do you hear that? Each subsequent vibration grows smaller as they use up the energy that began them. So the further away from the mouth of the horn the quieter the sound gets. But they are always finding their origin in the blowing of that one horn, blown by that one man, at that one time. They can never be anything else, no matter where or how they end up.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘So, however far away that note sounds, however quiet it gets, it always carries with it the imprint of its origin, of its home if you will, and as it echoes, as it bounces from one mountain to another, sometimes it must, by chance, by fate, by luck, come back to exactly where it started. But it can never return home, as such. The conditions under which it began its brief life, the precise conditions of its creation have passed away, have moved on, have changed into something else. The man who blew it has moved on maybe, his horn packed away, perhaps it has started to rain, maybe he has an appointment somewhere else. Or maybe he is still there, but is pursing his lips differently, making new noises, starting new sounds off on their own quests. And the echo, the original note, grows smaller and fainter until eventually it is absorbed into stillness. Coming home is never, shall I say, coming home exactly. Do you see?’

  ‘You mean I can’t go home?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ chuckled the Little Master. ‘You can go home all right, and I can see that you will. Oh to be in England, now that spring is here! Ha-ha! But just do not expect it to be home as such, for, always, remember that you yourself are no longer you. It is a simple lesson. Perhaps the simplest lesson of all and we have all had to learn it once.’ He paused and drew a deep breath. ‘Some of us,’ he continued, ‘have learnt it many times over.’

  An impression of weariness crept into the room for a moment. But in less than a second he regained his air of authority, his eyes regained their liveliness and their well-like depth and he looked up at Crepuscular.

  ‘Thank you Little Master,’ he said, without knowing where the appellation had come from, but it seemed to fit. ‘I wonder if I might stay here for a night or two, just to gather my strength up and get my bearings, before I head off again, you know, for England.’

  ‘Of course you may stay. Stay as many nights as you like. That is what we are here for, we are a hostelry for those lost in the mountains.’

  ‘Oh, no. I wasn’t lost,’ Crepuscular blurted, suddenly feeling defensive.

  ‘You are right, of course,’ replied the Little Master, ‘I know you weren’t lost. But others have been lost and others will be lost. And suffice it to say, that had you been … well, no one remains lost for very long in these mountains. Not once we find them.’

  After these words the Little Master closed his eyes and bowed his head. He looked as if he had fallen asleep in just that single moment, but he remained sitting upright. Crepuscular sat quietly where he was until he felt the hand of the first monk touch his shoulder.

  ‘Come with me, please.’

  Simone stood up and, still facing the Little Master, bowed. As he turned to leave he noticed something about the room that, inexplicably, he hadn’t noticed before. The inner sanctum had no ceiling. Looking up he could see the deep blue of the high Himalayan sky, streaked with the thinnest white lines of clouds. As he watched a few snowflakes drifted down from heaven towards his face.

  Before he left he looked once more on the Little Master who remained unmoved on the dais, cross-legged with his hands folded in his lap, his eyes closed in prayer, meditation or sleep. He smiled again.

  He followed the monk-guide out into the warm valley and along a broad dirt road to a cluster of houses at its northern end. It was here that the mountain ridges rose and met at a triangular point as the valley floor sloped upwards to meet them. The wide southern end of the valley, he saw looking down the length, was open and sloped down toward the clouds. The late afternoon sunlight still poured across the land, though the mountains on his right pointed a few long fingers of shadow across the fields.

  He wa
s shown his lodgings. The room was sparse, but that was nothing new to Crepuscular, and the bed was firm, but for a man who had spent the previous fifteen years sleeping underneath a desk and then the last week or so tucked up with a yak, it felt like collapsing into a warm pit of feathers. Fortunately he wasn’t allergic to the thought of feathers.

  *

  The next morning he met some of the monks and visitors over an early breakfast in the large refectory. Some had been, unlike him, lost in the mountains, and some had simply been passing through, and still others had actually sought this valley out after having heard a traveller’s tale or having had a particularly impressive dream. Conversation was quiet and pleasant and slow. Nobody spoke with their mouths full, like they often did in the army, and no one felt in any rush to finish their stories. Crepuscular chewed his muesli and smiled.

  After breakfast there was work to be done and he found himself left all alone. He took the chance to wander round the valley by himself, just for an hour or so, just to get the feel of the place fixed in his memory before he left. It would certainly be something to write a postcard home about, he thought, if only, he also thought, he had someone to write a postcard home to. Or a postcard. Or, for that matter, a home.

  Later that afternoon, just after he’d packed his few possessions into his rucksack and negotiated with the man in the stores about taking some food for the trip, he started up the path that led out of the valley, on the opposite side to the path he’d followed in. His sandals were comfortable and having rested properly for a night he felt able to take on any journey the world threw at him.

  However, after climbing the steep path for several hundred yards he turned around, strolled back into the valley, located the barber, had his head shaved and became a student of the Little Master.

  Each day he attended a morning lesson, after spending several hours doing what needed to be done in the fields from dawn, followed by more fieldwork in the afternoon. There was nothing magical about this valley, it only remained viable through the hard work that everyone put into it. Crops didn’t grow easily and required constant, but not cloying, care and attention. It was a delicate business. It would often be late in the evening before he found his way back to his small room, but however tired he was he rarely missed the opportunity, just before bed, to practise his writing by recording his experiences, his thoughts and his memories in the journal he had begun to keep. He kept track of what he believed he had learnt and was learning from the Little Master and attempted to record what was most important about his previous life by the thick slow river in India.

  Three years, almost to the day, after he had first turned that corner into the deep green valley, he took, for the second time, that other path that led out of it and continued his long journey home.

  The climb had grown smooth as it neared the mountain pass at the top and the light lay lazily and long across the late afternoon, and just before turning the final corner and heading out of that place forever he turned around.

  Below him lay that glorious emerald valley, surrounded by the grey and white and black of the rock. Glittering in the sun he made out irrigation channels

  shining like silver threads, and there in the middle of everything sat the yellow-gold temple sitting solid and heavy. He thought, or maybe he just daydreamt, that he could make out a tiny figure in an open space at the temple’s centre waving up at him. He didn’t really believe that it was who he wished it to be, since his Little Master had been absorbed into stillness a fortnight before, but he smiled all the same, waved and walked on.

  Chapter 9

  Horses & Bottles

  By the time lunchtime came round Epitome had worked his way through five more pamphlets. Rodney Crepuscular, who was left in charge of the shop while his father went upstairs to write and his brother went off to do other business elsewhere, even sold him a small notebook and a pencil, with which he tried to make notes about what he was reading. Quirkstandard felt this was the appropriate thing to do, but since he didn’t really understand what was important or what needed noting (taking, as he did, an indiscriminate pleasure in reading everything from anecdote, description, explanation to copyright notice) his notes were almost certainly rubbish.

  Each time he finished a pamphlet he’d sit back with a big sigh and look up at the shelves that surrounded him and wonder where to go next. He made a neat stack of the pieces he’d read on the desk, as he had been asked, so that a Crepuscular could count them up later on and work out the fee. It wasn’t that they were pennypinching, but that Simone approved only of a scrupulous honesty and wanted to make sure that they only charged the exact amount due, especially knowing as he did that Epitome Quirkstandard would probably happily pay whatever they asked. That, he saw, was all the more reason to be precise and correct.

  Quirkstandard began his reading that morning with Simone Crepuscular’s autobiographical piece, What I Did In India. This had been the first pamphlet that he published and he remained justifiably proud of it. That had been in 1901 when he was freshly arrived back in England after nearly forty years of being elsewhere. After seeing the vastness of the rest of the world he had been surprised to find that the Shangri La of his childhood was just a tiny place, suffocating in mourning, swathed in black crêpe and sobbing gently into its handkerchief. This hadn’t been what he’d been expecting.

  Not only was the England Simone returned to much altered, but of course he himself was very different too. For a start he had two young sons in tow, who had to be fed, which required him to find some form of gainful employment. He briefly considered joining the Circus, but at the age of fifty-one he found that, sadly but honestly, it no longer held the thrill for him that it once had. He sat by the ringside with a chair in one hand and whip in the other and couldn’t bring himself to tell the lions what to do for other people’s amusement. He looked at these proud beasts with their prinked and perfumed manes and polished rubber dentures and felt that teaching them tricks was actually a slightly tawdry thing to do. It was all the ringmaster could do to convince him to not let them loose as he handed in his letter of resignation and left the big top for good.

  He spent a week, shortly after that, singing sentimental ballads (which matched the mood he was in) in a small music hall near Exeter, but since, as the manager told him, he hadn’t even gone so far as to bring a bucket in which to attempt to carry the tune, that job came to nothing either.

  He eventually found regular paid work in a factory making and labelling bottles for the burgeoning bottle industry (all sorts of people needed bottles at just that time and a bottle factory was exactly the sort of place they went in order to get their bottles and so the bottle factory’s business was booming). Simone worked in the printing room, where the labels were designed and printed before being pasted onto the bottles. Here he learnt how presses worked and how to set type and various related activities and he rather enjoyed it all. So long as he worked a twelve hour shift between set times and did exactly what he was told, he was free to do whatever he wanted, whenever he liked.

  The drawback he found with this sort of work was that as a single parent of two boys of nine and eleven years of age, he didn’t much like leaving them at the factory gates each morning. Other parents took their children into work with them, he noticed, but the rates of pay for minors were insulting, he felt, and besides Crepuscular wasn’t an advocate of child labour. In fact he was something of a soft-hearted father and on more than one occasion (that is to say, twice) he was reprimanded by his foreman for staring out of the window at his boys playing conkers in the street instead of getting on with designing the new label for a bottle that, somewhere much further down the line, would contain an inferior grade tomato ketchup.

  Sometimes, coming out of work of an evening he’d find that his boys had wandered off down the street – a mile in one direction was the town library, and a mile in the other direction were some gypsies who made them nettle tea. Simone didn’t mind the boys doing either of these things
, being broadminded and in favour of wide horizons and stretched brains, but they never left him a note to say which way they’d gone and the time he got to spend with them was limited already, and, besides that, it seemed unfair that they got to have all the fun and adventures while he was shut up indoors. And so he vowed to get a job where they could all stay together, and on making this promise they moved to London.

  While walking to London, Crepuscular realised two things. Firstly, that the long journey he had thought had come to an end when he arrived at the docks six months earlier, hadn’t in fact ended yet at all; and secondly, that the roads in England where much better than roads he had walked on almost anywhere else in the world. Walking with the boys through the mist and fog set his mind racing back over all the adventures (mainly walking, which doesn’t always sound too adventurous, and is rarely all that exciting, but which, if you keep it up for long enough, can become an impressive anecdote all by itself ) he had experienced on his long, long road.

  When he had finally descended the northern slopes of the mountains, so many years before, he had found himself wandering in a strange, vacant desert land that seemed to stretch to every horizon (except the one behind him, that was still darkly ridged with peaks). Knowing very little of the skills required to survive in such a dry and harsh place he just kept on walking in a straight line, assuming that it was better to head somewhere than to stay still. He walked by night and into the early morning, drinking the dew that collected in the beard he had begun to grow and eating insects and lizards who were always surprised to see him.

  Eventually the high dry desert gave way to high dry grasslands and he was able to supplement his diet with some high dry grass. As he kept on walking the desert became a faint memory and he grew used to the rolling heave of the slow slopes of the grassy steppe. It lent itself much better to walking than the long dunes had, and so he began to make good time (not that he had a watch or was keeping track of distance, but all the same he felt better about it). Each evening he’d build a little bivouac out of grass and make some grass soup in his little cooking pot and after dinner he’d lie out on the grass, rolling a blade of grass between his lips and staring up at the immense, starry heaven above him, with all its shapes and constellations looking a bit like grass to him, until he fell asleep. In the morning he’d wake up, rub his face clean with some nice dewy grass and start walking once more toward the rising sun. This was his new method for keeping his bearing (always remembering, of course, to swap over at lunchtime, so the sun was behind him (follow your shadow, Simone, he’d say then)).