I thought - Well, what is all this about death instinct; life instinct: was it not Kammerer's salamanders that had been able to stay alive, and other people's that were dying?
I tried to talk to my mother about this. I could not let her know that I had been going through the drawers of her desk.
'Did you ever see Dr Kammerer again?'
'No, why do you ask that?'
'I expect a lot of people fall in love with him, don't they - '
'Why do you say that too - '
'I remember your saying that you thought his salamanders must love him.'
'What I think I said, surely, was that he must love them.'
'What do you think he does to make things love him?'
'Perhaps he just makes people think he loves them!'
'But then why do people talk about dying for love - '
'Hey, hold on, what have you been reading - '
My mother had become dreamy again; glowing; as if she was listening to music round some corner.
I thought - Dr Kammerer himself couldn't have sent her those cuttings from Vienna?
Then suddenly - She couldn't have been meeting Dr Kammerer in London?
She said 'Perhaps what you think is love isn't true. Or perhaps sometimes you love, or want to love, and then there is no set-up, or framework, in which you can.'
I said 'I see.' Then - 'Can't you make a framework?'
She said 'How?'
I said 'I don't know.' Then - 'Do you think Dr Kammerer made one?'
She said 'For whom?'
I said 'For his salamanders.'
That autumn, in my evenings and weekends away from school, I set about preparing my experiment with my salamanders. My idea was: how can animals be expected to live - let alone reproduce; let alone be recipient to a chance mutation - if they are kept in glass boxes like those which contain sandwiches in a railway station. Kammerer had perhaps loved his salamanders: but what was love? I wanted to provide for my salamanders a suitable setting. Was it not something like this that my mother's psychoanalysis books were suggesting too - that settings are important, but human beings for the most part are no good at providing settings for love: they liked running things down, displaying jealousy and envy. Well perhaps I did too: but if I saw this, could I not provide at least my salamanders with some setting in which love could operate?
I obtained materials from Miss Box and constructed a glass case that was larger than the ones in which she and my father had kept
their salamanders. I went out each evening to gather objects which would be fitting for my salamanders' setting. I found clean white sand and stones shining with crystals: I picked out sticks that were shaped and polished like ivory. I put on the sand some shells and even a starfish. I thought - Why should not landlocked salamanders have a glimpse of something outlandish from the sea? I collected red earth, and alpine plants, and one or two very tiny and expensive trees: I made a shelter of wire and bark and moss and leaves and coral. I constructed a mountain stream out of Plasticine and silver paper and a hidden electric motor and a pump: I bought (with money borrowed from my mother) a lamp that shone like the sun. I was aiming to produce for my salamanders a setting that would be surpassingly etherial and strange. I looked down on my creation from above. I thought - I think I am God, and this is my Garden of Eden.
The two salamanders that I was going to pick up when my garden was ready were another breed of lowland salamanders, known as Salamandra salamandra, or Fire Salamanders: their usual habitat was dark and damp woods. They stayed for the most part during the day under rotting bark or leaves; they came out in the evenings to get food. I learned what I could about them from books lent to me by Miss Box: my father, when he overheard me talking to Miss Box, would smile and look away (I thought - His feelings about Miss Box are what are called 'paradoxical'?). My plan had been originally to make for these lowland salamanders something that could be called an alpine setting. But my enthusiasm had now gone beyond this: I wanted to make for them something beautiful like a setting for jewels, or the inside of a painting. Then I would see how my salamanders might stay alive! The inside of a painting, it seemed to me, was to do with what is immortal.
The breeding habits of these lowland salamanders was that they mated in the spring and then fifty or more tadpole-like larvae were born in water the following year. I had been told by Miss Box that the two salamanders designated for me had been together for some time. I did not know if they had mated: I assumed they were male and female. The point of my experiment had at one time been to see whether these lowland salamanders, in their new setting, might produce offspring in the manner of alpine salamanders - which was to give birth not to larvae but to two fully formed offspring. But this was what I had put out of my mind: my plan now was not to expect, but just to let things occur on their own. I thought - Things
grow, develop on their own, don't they; once you have provided a setting.
The day came when my garden (in the books it was called an 'aquaterrareum') was ready: I bicycled in to Miss Box to pick up my salamanders. They were two small bright lizards about six inches long: their skin was mainly black but had golden patches and hoops. They seemed to sit, or lie, or stand, completely still, even when I was transporting them in a cardboard box on my bicycle from the laboratory. And then, when they were in the bright fair world that I had constructed for them, they were, yes, like jewels! they were so beautiful.
I had set up my aquaterrareum in my bedroom: I wanted it here rather than in the room with my chemistry set next door because I wanted to be with my salamanders at night. I do not know why I felt particular about this. Perhaps I felt - What strange influences, chances, flit about beneath the moon at night.
My salamanders sat or stood or lay sometimes parallel, sometimes apart, sometimes with their noses close together like an arrow. I hardly ever saw them move. They would be, yes, on the silver sand, by the stones like gold or diamonds, like things made immortal by a painting.
My mother came up to look at my aquaterrareum. She had that expression on her face that my father sometimes had when it was as if he could not make up his mind whether to be deprecating or impressed. She said 'That's beautiful!'
I said 'Yes.'
'What are they called?'
'Adam and Eve.'
'What good names!'
I said 'I think they might also be what are called "hopeful monsters".'
She said 'What are hopeful monsters?'
I said 'They are things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them.'
She said 'So you have made an environment that might be ready for them!'
I said 'Yes.'
She put her arms round me and hugged me. She said 'You are my hopeful monster!'
I thought I might say - But hopeful monsters, don't you know, nearly always die young.
- Because the Gods love them?
Then - But was God ever with his mother, by that garden, looking down?
Much of my spare time that winter was spent in collecting food for my salamanders: I got worms from the herbaceous borders, slugs from underneath stones, insects from behind the bark of trees. I dropped these like manna into my salamanders' garden. I once put a long black centipede in and it crawled over their still tails: I wondered - But have I introduced a snake into their garden! Then -Poor snake! But my salamanders paid no attention to it, and after a time it died.
I seldom saw my salamanders eat. Sometimes at night I imagined I had glimpsed a tongue flashing out; but it seemed to have travelled faster then light. I thought - Perhaps their tongues move in the jumps that Hans used to talk about; the jumps of those particles that are on one level and then instantaneously they are on another.
I had one or two letters from Hans: my mother also had one or two letters from him. We would eye each other's letters over the breakfast table.
Throughout that winter I cared for my salamanders; then in the spring they s
eemed to be spending more and more time within their shelter; there would be just their tails sticking out, like fishes that have managed to crawl up on to dry land. I thought - They can do whatever they want! I am not that fussy old God of the Garden of Eden.
Except when I was at school I was on my own a lot of that summer. My mother was going up to a new series of lectures in London; my father was working in Cambridge. Then halfway through the summer term there was a fire in my day-school and the school was closed. It was thought to be not worth while to send me anywhere else, because I was due to go to boarding-school anyway in the autumn.
So I went out on my bicycle and explored the countryside. I still collected food for my salamanders, though I was now not caring about them quite as much, since I knew I would have to leave them when I went away to school. However I felt that in some way just by riding about the countryside I was keeping in touch with my salamanders: I too was finding myself in a strange world; I thought it beautiful, but there now seemed to be something frightening growing in myself. I wondered - In learning about myself, might I not be discovering something for my salamanders -
- What is going on here might be connected to what is going on there -
- For something interesting to happen, should not that old God in Eden have been trying to find out more about himself, rather than hanging about and nagging his salamanders?
On my journeys on my bicycle I came across a country house that was empty and had fallen into disrepair: there was a lake and a boathouse and a punt: I could push myself across to an island where there was another rotting boathouse with a loft which had a table and a few broken chairs. Here it seemed that a hermit might once have lived: there was a crucifix with one arm dangling away from the wall. I felt as if I might have come to some aquaterrareum prepared for myself; the inside of a picture, yes; but of something rotting like that which was going on in my own head. I would sit cross-legged on the floor and close my eyes and try to breathe slower and slower; I had read about this in a book I had borrowed from my mother; I felt I needed to find some stillness, or suffer some explosion.
That summer it was as if there were some blockage inside me: there was an ache in my groin, stomach, heart; it shot up into my head. Well, what do adolescent boys do about sex? Oh we have been liberated from ghostly fears about masturbation, have we not! But how dispiriting can be this lack of haunting. Which is worse, to suffer from a lack of spirit or of sex?
It was as if I were one of those primitive organisms in which food and waste-matter go in and out of the same hole: nourishment and shit become confused; this seemed to be happening in my head. What I required, I felt, was one of those rods that plumbers use to unblock drains; you push it up, give it a few twists and tugs, then out comes all the slime and shit.
I thought - So indeed what is wrong! This is pleasure. Get it out, get it out.
There was a beam, and the half-broken chairs, and bits of old rope in the boathouse. I thought I might stand on a chair and put a bit of rope round my neck. Then, if I gave it a jerk, some blood and energy might be freed: machinery might start up again, like that of an outboard motor.
Once the chair broke - then the rope. I thought - I am ill: I am mad! Call this a quantum jump: for life, for death. Then - This is ridiculous.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and hoped - Cannot a bird like a
woodpecker come down and make holes in my skull, my brain, through which messages might flow or, in a wind, make music.
Once when I got back from one of these trips to the boathouse I found my mother sitting on a chair in the hall staring straight in front of her. She had just come back from London. I thought - She has been, do you think, in whatever might be her form of boathouse -
She said 'Good heavens, what's happened to you!'
I said 'I fell through the floor of a boathouse.'
She said The things you do!'
I said 'I was collecting food for my salamanders.'
I did notice now that my mother was sad. But children have little capacity for bearing in mind that their parents are sad.
Then there was an evening when my father came back from Cambridge and he had been opening his letters in the hall and he was a long time reading one letter and he was looking up to the door of the drawing-room as if he were waiting for my mother to emerge. (I wondered - Had he noticed that she was sad?) But then when she did appear, he just said 'Your friend Kammerer has been caught cheating.'
She said 'My friend Kammerer?'
He said 'He's been caught faking the evidence.'
My mother said 'You do really hate people, don't you.' Then she began to go up towards her room.
My father called after her 'Yes, I do dislike people who don't tell the truth!'
My mother stopped on the top step of the stairs and said 'What do you know about truth!' Then she shut herself in her room.
I thought - But could it in fact be Dr Kammerer that my mother has been seeing in London?
What had been happening about Kammerer was, I found out later, both from my father and from press-cuttings in his study -
In the course of experiments with another species of animal called the Midwife Toad, Kammerer had claimed that he had created circumstances in which toads had demonstrably inherited acquired characteristics. First he had induced these toads which normally mate on dry land to mate in water, which other toads do; and in the course of time they had acquired 'nuptial pads' similar to those of other toads - pads on the palms and fingers of the male by which he clings to the body of the female under the water. Then after several generations Kammerer found, or so he claimed, that these pads
acquired by his male toads had become a feature transmitted by heredity.
Now some time later, as a result of examination by so-called 'disinterested' scientists, it had been found that one of Kammerer's mummified specimens that he had used as evidence for the inheritance of these characteristics had been injected on the palms and fingers with Indian ink, so that this had simulated the colouring of nuptial pads, and now anyone might be able to call Kammerer a cheat and a forger with some justification. But in fact there was no evidence that Kammerer had known about the injections of ink: he himself had encouraged the examination of the specimens by neutral scientists and the injections might have been done by a laboratory assistant out of hate or even love of Dr Kammerer - the particular specimen was tattered, and the marks of the pad were fading. But no considerations such as these weighed in the balance against the opportunity that Kammerer's opponents now had publicly to discredit him.
That evening when the news about Kammerer's co-called 'exposure' reached my father and my mother went up to her room - she stayed in her room saying she had a headache and asked for supper to be sent up to her - that evening I talked with my father in a way in which, I think, I had not quite talked before.
'But why is it so important to you that there should not be the inheritance of acquired characteristics?'
'Because it's not true.'
'But you seem to care more than about its not being true.'
'Do I? Well, perhaps it's because if it was, there would be less chance of adaptation.'
'Why would there be chaos?'
'Folly, depravity, lying - they'd be dug in for ever.'
'But might not good things be dug in for ever?'
'No. When it comes to power, bad things win.'
'But couldn't human beings choose for the good things to win?'
'Who would do the choosing? It would be done by the people in power. God help everyone if people in power have more power!'
'But don't you think humans will ever be fitted for that sort of power?'
'No.' Then - 'Leave it to nature. Leave it to chance.' Then -'Though I wouldn't be surprised if, sooner or later, humans wipe themselves out.'
I thought - My father must be going through an especially bad time with my mother?
The day was coming closer when I was due to go to boarding-school. My mother
was still spending much of her time in her room; my father went off each day to Cambridge. I was sad about going to school, mainly because I would have to give up my salamanders. It had been arranged that when I went I would hand them back to Miss Box. I did not like to imagine what would become of them. I had recently taken less and less notice of the garden I had created. I said to them Tm sorry, I'm having a hard time myself, my salamanders.'
They still seemed to be spending most of their time in their shelter. I thought - They are like my mother: or is it that they know I am going away to school?
Then there was a day when my mother had been up to London and my father was in Cambridge and I had been walking round the village saying goodbye to it, and when I got back I saw that my mother had returned from London early; there was her handbag and umbrella in the hall. I went up to her room because I was sad and wanted to talk; but her door was locked. I knocked and called, and there was no answer. Then when I came downstairs Watson was in the hall and she was chewing the inside of her lips which she did when she was anxious. It appeared that my mother had come back some time ago and had gone straight up to her room; she had not answered when Watson had knocked. Mrs Elgin came out from the kitchen and she and Watson both went up to my mother's room and called; the door remained locked. They came back down the stairs and Watson went out into the garden and looked up at the windows of my mother's room; Mrs Elgin said 'Your mother was in a state when she came home.' I said 'What sort of state?' Mrs Elgin said 'Oh you boys, you would never notice anything!' I thought - But I did notice, yes, that my mother was sad. Watson was out on the lawn talking to Mr Simmons the gardener: they were both looking up at the windows of my mother's room. They seemed to be discussing whether or not to get a ladder. I thought -But this is terrible! I said to Mrs Elgin 'You mean, something might have happened to my mother?' Mrs Elgin said 'Oh yes, something has been happening to your mother in London!' Mr Simmons seemed to be going off to get a ladder. Mrs Elgin went back into the kitchen. I thought that what I would do was to go up to my room which was above my mother's and I would try and climb out
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