Green Shadows, White Whale

by Ray Bradbury

  Shaw listened and moved quietly among the men as if they were worn statues in an old museum.

  “Send for the priest,” I whispered.

  “No!” said a voice. “The priest is here!”

  Shaw wheeled to point his beard at the far end of the bar, where Father O’Malley, hidden till now in the private cubby, lifted his gray head, like Lazarus summoned.

  “You.” The priest fixed the old playwright with a gaze like Job accusing God. “Look what you’ve done!”

  “I?” Shaw flushed with guilt whilst protesting innocence. “I?”

  “You,” said Father O’Malley, honing his razor to shave the beard, “and your devil’s signs, your self-conscious blathering and annunciations. The Luciferean mottos. Those.”

  Shaw turned to glance at the places where STOP, CONSIDER, THINK, and Do were lodged.

  The priest came in a slow dead march along the bar, amidst the dead buried alive in their own fell silences.

  His hand snaked out with his empty glass. “Refill the élan vital, Finn.”

  “One élan vital, whatever in hell that is!” I hurried the life force into the clenched grip of the still gliding priest.

  “Now, then,” the priest breathed confessional spearmint breath on Shaw’s beard, “Mr. Smarter than Punch and wiser than Ecclesiastes. Mr. Irish shipped to London and spoiled en route … what have you to say for yourself and these enfeebling signs that have numbed and beaten us deaf and mute?”

  “If this be the Inquisition,” said Shaw, “fire away.”

  “You’re dead!” Father O’Malley paced Shaw, like a beast circling his prey. “What does the first sign mean?!”

  Only the frozen eyes of the stricken men at the bar twitched to find that sign: STOP!

  “It means,” said Shaw, “we do not stop often enough in life to cogitate, be still, let things happen to us.”

  “If it’s a woman in your path, best not,” said the priest.

  “Yet,” interrupted Shaw, “life runs us so fast our thoughts are lost.”

  “The bicycle,” murmured Doone, “and other devices have done us in.”

  “Doone!” The priest dug his grave.

  Doone lay down in it.

  “You’ve come to Ireland to preach dismay and teach chaos. You have pretended at intelligence, but the sum is silence! No advice, please, from Lucifer!” said the priest.

  “Slowly,” cried Shaw. “I must note this!” said Shaw, scribbling on his pad.

  Slowly, slowly, as if roused from a great hibernation, Doone leaned to watch Shaw’s adroit pen skip, trace, and glide.

  “Jeez,” whispered Doone. “That ain’t half bad.”

  “You’re damn tootin’ it ain’t,” said the priest, reading Shaw’s scribble. “Well, now. I think that’s the gist. The world is not ready for the likes of you and Gilbert Keith Chesterton! Them blasphemous signs! STOP! CONSIDER! THINK! Do! What the hell do they mean that has shut the gab here?”

  Shaw underlined the words as he spoke. “It must be obvious that before you can THINK you must STOP for enough time to CONSIDER what to THINK, and then, with no delay, DO ! DO! ”

  “Sure, that’s how women and other things get done!” said Doone, eyes shut.

  “Doone!”

  Doone fell back.

  “Continue,” said Father O’Malley, with deadly sweetness.

  “I am halfway there.” Shaw added vinegar to the above. “I may in a moment of blind intuition have bought this rag-bag mix to teach the A.C. is against the D.C. Creative Current.”

  “A.C.? D.C.?”

  “Alternating current, which means STOP to CONSIDER. CONSIDER what to THINK. THINK. And then DO. Or direct current: DO and then THINK and CONSIDER and STOP for a rest.”

  “Again,” said the priest.

  “Gladly,’ said Shaw. “Alternating current gives you varieties of creativity in art, dramatics, painting. But the one I recommend most is DO. The deed is father to the thought. DOING leads the mind into discovery.”

  “It sure as hell does!” The priest glowered.

  “Time to THINK after the creative act,” said Shaw.

  “By then it’s too late,” said Doone. “For the woman, that is. Sorry, Father.”

  “You are not forgiven, Doone. Shaw, I am waiting for your summation.”

  “I have perforated the piano roll; you need but run the tune!” Shaw raised his thin fingers as if each were a spigot from which caprice might flow. “Do and DO again to discover what in blazes you’re THINKING. Hide three signs and keep only DO at hand. Direct current! Or, alternating current, play scales amongst the four. Now pause, chew the cud, maunder, then dive deep then hop, skip, run, leap, rise, create!”

  “Shaw!” mourned Father O’Malley, having lost the way.

  “Why, Father,” said Shaw, “I was inspired on the road this fine rainy morn to DO. Buy these bits of Rorschach test and further DO by having Finn place them in sight lines all about.”

  “Why?” droaned the priest. “Why, why?!”

  “Why, Dublin and all of its streets and pubs are a stage and all of its souls cast into the world as actor-playwrights. I am one, shipped to London to write my vaudevilles and charm the sheep. I thought that if every Irish soul hid a dancing bear, how brilliant if I held the hoop! One brandy pushed me to act.”

  “And,” said Father O’Malley, “see what it’s done.”

  Shaw and Doone and the priest looked along the mortuary statues of the dear men frozen for eternity in a blizzard self-made.

  “It’s enough,” whispered Doone, “to make your socks crawl up and down your ankles. Listen!”

  “The devil’s job of confusion.” said Father O’Malley.

  “Angels confuse, also,” said Shaw. “Witness the kind wives who, out of the fineness of their hearts, cause these chaps to run here, biting their fists and hard at drink, trying to understand that unfathomable sex!”

  “Women,” whispered Doone, “is the fourth Ghost, the next one over from the Holy Trinity!”

  “Doone!” said the priest. Spluttering, he shifted gears.

  “And look at your shoes!”

  All, waking slowly, looked.

  “That,” Shaw said, “is the latest boot from the London last.”

  “That,” said the priest, “is the latest cloven hoof from Dante’s infirmary!”

  “Splendid!”

  “I want no praise from the playwright who helped the poor French maid out of her armor and into the flames!” said Father O’Malley.

  Shaw bent to his pen, scribbling fast.

  “And your face, sir,” said the priest. “Is there not something of Mephistopheles in your waxed beard and mustache in tines, while you part your hair in horns!”

  “Horns.” Shaw wrote it down. “As a young critic weighing Faust and Mephistopheles, I found in the operatic Satans admirable roles. I deviled folks impiously. Continue, Father. What next?”

  “Here goes!”

  And there ensued a rain of fiery hailstones that wakened the last of the sleeping men.

  The voice of the priest, once down, now rose to those peaks which Berlioz scaled, a symphony of outrage later known as the “Defilement of Shaw.” The good father, atop his mania, planted the Church’s beehive banner and lapsed into silence.

  The faggots having been gathered to burn the Maid and take Shaw with, the playwright with the beard of Lucifer waited for the charcoals to die.

  “Now,” said Shaw.

  Striding with a musical critic’s quickstep, he moved to the dart-game board, seized the darts, spun about, paced off the proper paces, turned, and, with one eye shut, flung a dart.

  “Sssst …” The breath leaked from all.

  Pok! It was Freya’s dart, striking Baldur the Beautiful and killing him, bull’s-eye on.

  All the hands moved to applaud if the priest gave permission. He gave none.

  Shaw tossed the other darts slowly.

  “My father drank,” he said. “Nights dragging him
out of pubs, I practiced darts. Bull’s-eye! So! Your cries of blasphemy?” said Shaw. “Twattle!”

  Shaw snatched up the brandy glass.

  “I suppose I might do a temperance lecture. …”

  The men leaned toward him, making hidden fists.

  “I could say that the hard stuff plus the soft plus these signs have melted their brainpans into their shoes.”

  More leaning, more fists.

  “But,” said Shaw, “I will not.”

  The men’s fists, out of their pockets, were mere hands again.

  Now, tossing dart after dart, Shaw pointed his beard and fired the volleys:

  “No, Father, it is not the machinery of ideas, as caught in these plaques, that has slowed the wits and stopped the glotti of these Irish bog warriors and conquerors of their spiteful, neglected wives. No, no. If that were true, then all of Ireland could have been conquered from my car, with a packet of plaques delivered here, and a toss of concepts and dire ideas planted there, seeding all Eire’s pubs with darkness and stilling the air as if a final death had come upon the world.”

  “Ah, Jaisus,” someone whispered, in awe, “say that again.”

  “Shh,” said all, and Shaw went on.

  “No, the wits here are not frail, and I have not reaped them, junked the chaff, to save the seed to use in Hell. It is you, sir, who roil the baptismal-font water, who has caused this calamity at Finn’s.”

  “I?” cried Father O’Malley.

  “You, sir, who down the years told these men not to THINK on certain things—”

  “Women’s underwear,” Doone whispered.

  “You told them never to STOP, never CONSIDER, but especially never DO, ” said Shaw. “So, between the storms of old-maid aunts, crazed mothers-in-law, and turnip wives telling them to THINK about DOING things around the yard, and your telling them not to THINK or DO yet others, the fell confusion you speak of, Father, arrived here today. Over the years it was only the alcohol that gave them a false sense of freedom and let their tongues wag in escape from the high dudgeons of the Church or the coal-scuttle raillery of the hearth. Then I let loose my abominable signs in a moment of one-brandy meanness and the Fifth Horseman of the Irish Apocalypse arrived.”

  “Silence?” I asked.

  “Yes, Finn,” said Shaw.

  “So there’s enough blame to go around, is there?” inquired Father O’Malley over his ale.

  “Home, church, pub, booze, signs,” said Shaw. “The sum of it would poison an elephant and kill a herd. I will confess my guilt, Father, here today if you will do the same with a nod. You need not speak it aloud. And you will surely not get the women at home to admit their guilt as sharp as the elbows they hide like knives in their shawls. And as for Mr. Finn and his pub …”

  “Ah, hell.” I pulled the lever. “Guilty.”

  “The Irish,” said Shaw quietly. “Here they come out of fog, here they stand lost in mist, there they go off in rain. The Irish.”

  “Yes …?” was the whisper through all the pub.

  Shaw paused, nodded, and went on. “Do they stand in Dublin midstage and act fresh lines each day? Who’s the Prompter and where’s the Book? Forty years on, I’ll know your faces as you talked forever. I’ve caught your sound. What do you have in this island place? Poor on poor and the ships off to Boston and the young away, leaving the old to stare in pub mirrors at their Arctic souls, asides of philosophy beneath their tongues.

  “The Irish. From so little they glean so much: squeeze the last ounce of joy from a flower with no petals, a night with no stars, a day with no sun. One seed and you lift a beanstalk forest to shake down giants of converse. The Irish? You step off a cliff and … fall up!”

  Shaw was done.

  “He shoved his skinny hands into his jacket pockets and stood astride the astonished silence.

  “Napoleon,” said Father O’Malley quietly, “out of Moscow, made not such a gentlemanly retreat. Have the Irish ever been better punctured or painted?”

  “I humbly think not,” said Shaw. “But then I am no longer Irish.”

  “To hell you’re not,” said the priest, and looked all about at the porcelain signs.

  “I think,” mused Shaw, “I will not STOP anymore to CONSIDER or THINK. For now it’s DO, which means go.”

  “But what will you be DOING up the road ten miles? Ruining logic and wrecking souls?” asked Father O’Malley.

  Shaw nodded to the signs. We trotted swiftly to fetch them one by one, into the carpetbag. There went STOP, CONSIDER, and DO. But Shaw saved out THINK.

  Then, as if it were a hard-boiled egg, he cracked it on wood, then moved swiftly to place the broken bits of THINK in the priest’s hands and close his fingers on the biblical tablet shattered, no more to plague Egypt, or Finn’s.

  Shaw said, “To the deliverer out of darkness, these sinful shards. I bare my neck to receive the ax of the conqueror. May he be merciful.”

  That perplexed the priest, caught in this downpour without a bumbershoot.

  “Go on. Father,” said Doone, “be merciful!”

  “Ah, what the hell,” said the priest at last, pale but willing, “Shaw, you did not know what you were doing.”

  Shaw dropped the bag.

  There was a nice explosion, muffled within the sack, not unlike a chandelier crashed in the dark.

  “There goes a whole factory of philosophy,” I said.

  “Drinks all around!” said Father O’Malley.

  “Father, that’s the first you’ve ever bought!” I cried.

  “Shut your lip and pull the levers.”

  I laid out a last brandy for the playwright.

  “Ah, no.” Shaw shook his head, which made his beard ignite. “It was that first shot, an hour ago, that grew my hooves and ran me to pandemonium. Time!”

  Which alarmed the men.

  “No, not closing.” Shaw turned. “Time for me to leave.”

  “It is,” cried Shaw’s chauffeur from the door, dirty of hands and drawn of face. “The damn beast is fixed!”

  Shaw was halfway to the door, practical shoes striking invisible sparks, when Father O’Malley said, “Wait!”

  Shaw waited.

  “You’re not a bad sort,” said the priest lamely. “And my temper is fierce. Your shoes do not resemble hooves. It was just a way of speaking. Have you written us down?”

  “You,” Shaw held up a full page of shorthand, “are immortal! Goodbye, goodbye.”

  Then his Punch and Judy face popped away from the doors and sailed off to the car. I followed to hear the chauffeur say: “Where to?”

  “Hell,” said Shaw smartly. “That will do nicely. Yes, Hell, I think.”

  The chauffeur tossed a map into the back seat. “Will you find it, sir, and shout directions?”

  “Yes!” Shaw laughed. “So long, Mr. Finn, so long, so long!”

  And they drove away.

  Heeber Finn finished and was silent.

  There was a similar silence in the men lined up as audience along the bar.

  Then someone lifted a gnarled hand and a callused palm, to beat it slowly against another of the same. And then one more enthusiast moved his paws and banged the air, followed by some other atheists turned believers, leastwise in Finn if nothing else, until the pub let down dust from the chandeliers and hung its pictures askew.

  Finn poured and I said:

  “Did all that truly happen?”

  Finn froze as if he had put wet fingers to a frosted winter pipe and could not free his hand.

  “I meant to say,” I mumbled, “your facts are right, but were they rearranged?”

  “Rearrange,” wondered Finn. “Is that a course they teach at Berlitz?”

  I lifted my glass. “Here’s to Finn’s. And the inhabitants thereof. And to that devil’s advocate—”

  “Shaw!”

  “Who wandered far,” I said, “but to come home to truth.”

  “God,” said Finn. “You sound like us!”

>   “Drinks,” I said, “all around!”

  Chapter 27

  It was at lunch after a long morning of the Pequod becalmed.

  We were in a Dublin restaurant with two newspaper reporters from London.

  Soup had just been served and I had taken up my spoon, when John, looking deep into his broth, made this remark:

  “You know, it makes me very sad to say this, but I really don’t think that our young screenwriter here has his heart in the writing of the screenplay of Moby Dick.”

  I froze in place.

  The two reporters looked at John and then at me and waited. John did not look up from his soup but went on:

  “No, I just don’t think that our friend here has his heart and his soul in this important film work.”

  My spoon fell from my fingers and lay on the tablecloth. I could not lift my eyes. My heart pounded, and I felt that at any moment I might leap up and run from the table. Instead I stayed with my gaze on my food, as the soup was taken away and the meat served and the meat taken away and the wine poured, which I did not drink, while John talked with the reporters and did not once look at me.

  When it was over I walked like a blind man out of the restaurant and accompanied John up to my room in the Royal Hibernian Hotel. When we got inside I stood, swaying, looking at John, afraid that I might faint.

  John looked at me for a long while, questioningly and at last said:

  “What’s wrong, kid?”

  “Wrong, John? Wrong!” I cried at last. “Did you hear yourself at lunch today?”

  “What, kid?”

  “My God,” I said. “Of all the people in the world I wanted to work for, it was you. Of all the novels in the world I would most want to adapt, it was Melville’s. I have put my heart, soul, and guts in this day after day, with all my sweat and all my love, and now you, at lunch! Jesus! Don’t you ever listen to yourself!?”

  John widened his eyes and gaped. “Why, hell, kid, it was a joke. That’s all. A joke, sure, only a joke!”

  “A joke!” I yelled, and shut my eyes and burst into tears. John stepped forward swiftly and took my shoulders and shook me gently and then put my head on his shoulder and let me cry.

  “Christ, kid,” he kept saying. “It was all in fun. Don’t you see? Fun.”

  It took a full minute for me to stop crying. We talked for a while and John left, telling me to head out to Kilcock that night with my latest pages for dinner, chat, and late-night whiskey.