by A. S. Byatt
What is important, she thought, is to defend reason against unreason.
Chapter 24
Jonty Surtees believed in the logic of history. He believed that the Revolution must come, and therefore could come, that the old order must be overthrown, and therefore would be overthrown, and that he must and would help it along. He believed, and often said, that Socrates and Jesus were political activists, who in their time asked awkward questions, taught the young to ask awkward questions, and were killed by the then Establishment. He had studied the logic of destabilising institutions, and knew that you used whatever forces were to hand—if they wanted to believe they were elves and wizards marching on the Dark Tower, that was fine by him—at this stage—as long as they marched. He didn’t think the new forms of government desired by Greg Tod and Waltraut Ross, still less by Nick Tewfell, bore much relation to the true anarchy he felt was right for human life, but they weren’t there yet, for the moment he needed to work them all up. He told them that now was the moment for the Act that followed talk. They sat around in a fug of scented smoke and stared through blurred vision, and felt the logic of his smile, his voice, his urgent body movements. Avram Snitkin kept falling asleep and had to be shaken awake. Nick Tewfell stared with a kind of horrified fascination at the three shrouded figures. Deborah Ritter gave Maggie Cringle some hashish fudge and stirred a nourishing pot of bean soup. We go tomorrow, said Surtees. We let him get into the building, and then we march on it.
“And—those?” said Nick Tewfell.
Surtees pulled the covers off, like a magician unveiling sawn women. They were horribly life-like effigies, squat Eichenbaum, pale Pinsky, and the unmistakeable long lined face and lanky figure of Gerard Wijnnobel. About one and a half times life size, with papier mâché masks.
“We shall burn them in front of the Maths Tower, the Evolution Tower, and the Language Tower,” said Surtees. “Since the students are having their demo against compulsory maths and languages.”
It was text-book revolution, a rallying point.
Tewfell said, he feared there were not enough protestors to make fires in three places.
Surtees said little did he know. There was an army of protestors, coming to join the cause, from Essex and the LSE and further-flung places. They were rolling up the A1 in buses and vans as he spoke. They would need signs to carry. There would be music.
“They will send for the police,” said Nick Tewfell.
“Precisely. And when the pigs come in, we have won. If we make them send for the pigs, and use force, they show themselves for what they are.”
He flared with conviction. Whatever in Nick Tewfell was reluctant felt shame and humiliation. All they did was talk. Now they would act . In the beginning was the Act. He looked at the lolling simulacra of authority, and felt loathing. His mind was full of threatening cold-voiced authorities and blundering lackeys. And pigs. Which were disgusting.
Deborah Ritter, handing out fudge, said “Come on, we need a hand with the bloody paint.”
Gerard Wijnnobel gave Theobald Eichenbaum a glass of wine, in his study, and asked if he had seen the brown pamphlet. Eichenbaum put down the glass, and sat with his hands on his knees, block-like.
“Several people, most of them anonymous, have made it their business to see that I have seen it. So I have seen it.”
Wijnnobel waited.
“The original paper—the language of the original paper—was an error of judgement and a failure of imagination. For which I have been lucky enough not to have to pay. This version is a distortion, both of Galton’s work and of my own. We both make it very clear that human crowds—herds—become mindless under domineering dictators. Galton gives some statistics of the prison population—of people suspected of speaking against the state—under Napoleon III. He liked statistics. They are not pretty figures. He also talks about fanatical priesthoods. They do not, of course, translate these passages. I could argue that what I wrote was a coded attack on our leaders. But it was not. It was simply unthinking folly. I did not then know—though I should have known—how a word or two can inflame exactly such a crowd as I loathed and loathe. I am a scientist. I had insufficient respect for the power of words.”
Wijnnobel said “Niko Tinbergen was in a concentration camp in Holland.”
“I know. I am sorry. Efforts were made to get him released. He would not consider it. He would not.”
“I think there is going to be trouble, if you speak. I think there was always going to be trouble, and they are waiting for you.”
“I am going to speak about how we have weakened our courage, and denatured our children, under domestication. I cannot not speak because I once wrote wrongly. That would be compounding a wrong with a wrong.”
“I cannot guarantee that there won’t be—trouble, greater or smaller.”
“Are you asking me not to speak?”
“No. How can I? I believe in the right to speak and be heard.” He laughed, briefly. “I do say, I cannot guarantee how well you will be heard.”
The auditorium was packed. The visible breath above the ranked heads simmered. The notice on the door, announcing Theobald Eichenbaum’s lecture “Domestication and Dehumanisation, Instinct versus Culture, Ontogeny and Phylogeny,” had been smeared all over with something brown. Nevertheless, the Vice-Chancellor and the ethologist appeared promptly on stage. Eichenbaum had chosen to dress in brown—a slightly dusty, crumpled brown suit, and an illfitting cream-coloured shirt, out of which his walnut-brown thick neck rose into the fan of his beard and the white bush of his hair, which glittered in the stage lighting.
Wijnnobel said very directly that he knew that Professor Eichenbaum’s passionately-held views were controversial. They were also not simple. Those who disliked his stance in the nurture-nature argument must surely admire his stance against environmental poisons, about which his early warnings were proving to be accurate prophecies. A university was a place for discussion and debate, and he was glad so many people had gathered to hear someone who was both an independent thinker, a true experimental scientist, and an uninhibited polemicist.
When Wijnnobel sat down, they heard the drums. Eichenbaum stomped heavily to the rostrum and took the microphone in his hand.
“I am going to talk to you about packs, and groups, and shoals, and herds, and individuals—” he said.
This was in fact all, or almost all, that was heard of the final paper of the Conference as the hall erupted into howling and baying, and, outside, Jonty Surtees’s marchers swarmed across the campus, singing, shouting, dancing and making music. They had been organised to come in waves, from all sides, from the encampment and up the road from the village. They wore all sorts of costumes—there were maenads and tin soldiers, masked executioners and carnival demons, elves and witches and wizards and huge commedia dell’arte cockerels. There were drumbeats and clashing cymbals, pan-pipes and guitars. There were banners—Down with SKOOL, Mao Thought Is True Thought, Free the Grass, Feel the Rain, Free Speech Is a Fetishism, Smash the Establishment, No More Grammar, No More Maths, No More Vivisection.
They sang
We are One We are Many, We are Many We are One.
We are gun we are bullet, we are bullet we are gun.
We can kill and resurrect you, we are god when you are gone
They also sang
The metal men in coats of white
In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes
Make metal death with metal claws
Black out the sunshine from the skies
The children dance in forests free
They smell the sunshine and the rain ...
They also sang the war song of Tolkien’s tree-men, the Ents.
Though Isengard be strong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door!
Theobald Eichenbaum settled on his feet, gripped the microphone, and raised his voice.
“Our culture,” he said “has infantilised its
young people, and set generation against generation as though they were different breeds—”
It was doubtful whether anyone heard him. Things had begun to be thrown. Eggs, good and bad, fruit, books, a few stones, and a strange floating series of bunched flower-charms, wreaths of bryony and nightshade, drooping grasses and bindweed, corncockles and wilted poppies.
The marchers burst into the auditorium. Jonty Surtees, businesslike in blue denim, and Paul-Zag, in silver, carrying his guitar with red and yellow streamers, stood high at the back. Paul strummed and sang “We are one, we are many, we are many, we are one.”
Surtees stepped down between the rows of seats. He advanced on Eichenbaum, who briefly had the advantage of being above him and holding the microphone. The lighting had the auditorium in darkness, and a spotlight on Eichenbaum’s mask of pure rage. He leaned over and growled at Surtees.
“I see what you are. Do you know what the nastiest kind of herd is? It is rats, it is rats, tame rats in an enclosure. Do you know who you are, Pied Piper with a crowd of denatured children draggling behind you—”
Jonty Surtees, limber, surefooted, vaulted up on to the platform and struggled with the Professor, who resisted for a moment, having the advantage of weight, and rootedness, but only for a moment. Surtees twisted the microphone out of his hand, and cried into it “No one’s going to listen to you, old man, no one wants to hear you.” He whirled round, raising the microphone above his head, in a trail of sparks. “Freedom begins, here, and now,” he shouted, and felled Eichenbaum with an efficient blow from the microphone, which filled the hall with a shriek, and a groan, and gave up the ghost.
Wijnnobel in the front row said to Hodgkiss “We must get the police.”
“We have to get out of here, first. We cannot get out, at the moment.”
Fighting had broken out, most of it merely the result of those outside trying to pour in, and those inside—at least those who did not suddenly feel combative—trying to get out. There was pushing, and trampling, and worse. Hodgkiss climbed up on to the stage, ignoring Surtees, and bent to check Eichenbaum’s breathing. Surtees was smiling.
“Why?” said Hodgkiss, mopping Eichenbaum’s face with a handkerchief.
“How stupid can you get?” said Surtees. He jumped down, and vanished into the crowd.
It was, the University ruefully recognised, very well organised. The gibbets were set up outside the Evolution Tower, the Language Tower, and the Maths Tower. By the time the authorities had fought or wriggled their way out of the Theatre, the effigies were burning brightly, amongst a stink of petrol and a lot of noise, musical and unmusical. Wijnnobel, hurrying to meet the police, who had been called, but had some distance to come, stood momentarily at the back of a dancing crowd that was watching him burn. His own long face looked down on him through greasy smoke and sullen flames. The University health-centre team hurried past him in the opposite direction, presumably to collect Eichenbaum, and were not opposed.
We come, we come, with horn and drum: ta rûna rûna rûna rom!
Small fires and battles were breaking out all over the campus.
Someone threw a petrol bomb through a window of the Language Tower.
Wijnnobel had managed to lock himself into the Dean’s office and speak to the police, and the fire brigade, on the phone. The police asked if they would have trouble getting in, and the Vice-Chancellor said yes, they would, they should come prepared. There were a great many more protestors than the University alone could have provided.
It was Frederica Potter who noticed the flames in the windows of the old house, of Long Royston. Curtains were flaring, flames crawling up them, although there was no crowd encamped outside. It took a little time to find the Vice-Chancellor and a group of staff, who began to run across the lawns. Frederica ran too, followed by Wilkie. The front door was open. There were very small fires in the hall—slowly burning neat heaps of books, which Frederica recognised. Skoob. An art-form.
Someone had set fire to the bed-curtains in the Elizabethan bedrooms. The beds were burned, and the ceiling, with its painting of the Death of Hyacinth, had fallen in on the bed. People brought fire appliances, and succeeded in dousing the flames, though more damage was done to the ancient embroideries and carvings. People gathered, including Matthew Crowe, in a velvet dressing-gown and slippers.
“Has anyone seen my wife?” asked Wijnnobel.
Crowe said “She was here, Gerard, she was here.”
Wilkie said “She was seen—I’m sorry, Vice-Chancellor—she was seen—marching in with them. When they marched in. With one of the singing groups.”
Wijnnobel stood in the burned bedroom.
“She had better be found. I had better find her. Has anyone seen her recently?”
No one had. Frederica said, she knew who burned little heaps of books, like that. It was a habit of Paul Ottokar’s. There was one at the foot of the bed. Lady Wijnnobel, she did not say, had been marching behind Paul-Zag. But she knew that the Vice-Chancellor knew.
“There are many, many things that need attention,” said Wijnnobel. “Of which the whereabouts of my wife is only one, and not the most important. But I should be very glad to know if anyone can find her—and even more glad if they can persuade her to come—here—to come—back, home.”
On his way across Long Royston, conducting his own grim search for his wife, he heard noises in the antechamber with the museum exhibits. They were noises of breaking glass. He walked heavily towards the sounds, and came upon a group of his own students, breaking up the cases with the handles of placards. Several were drunk, including Maggie Cringle, who, dressed like a heroine of Dr. Who, was jabbing not very effectively at the case which contained the relics of Astraea with a banner that said “What Do We Want? Cultural Studies. An End to Rote-Learning.”
Nick Tewfell was gesticulating in the middle of the group. He was, in fact, being naturally lawful, attempting to get them to stop. He was waving his own placard, which said “Break the Mind-Forged Manacles. No More Compulsory Grammar and Maths.”
Wijnnobel advanced on him. He said
“Stop that! You are an historian. You should know where book-burning leads.”
“This is a revolution,” said Nick Tewfell.
“Against what?” said Wijnnobel, advancing, the dark biting in his mind. Every choice he had made appeared to him to be wrong. He wished to hurt someone. He was not used to the feeling.
“Against you,” said Nick Tewfell, waving his placard.
The Vice-Chancellor waved his arms at the group, like a farmer scattering fowl.
“Get out. You have done enough damage. Get out.”
Most of the students turned and ran. Nick Tewfell turned, and looked back. He wished to hurt someone. He was not used to the feeling. He glared at the Vice-Chancellor, through one of the undamaged glass cases, which contained two pieces of Renaissance glass, donated by Matthew Crowe, a green German beaker made of Waldglas, or forest glass, so named because it derived its green colour from ferns, and an ornate French beaker, with a helical foot, showing the Expulsion from the Garden, with the inscription En-la Sueur—de ton visage—tu mangeras—le payn.
Nick saw the Vice-Chancellor reflected in the glass cube, and multiplied into an army of ghosts. He had two options, as Eichenbaum would have recognised, fight or flight. He chose the first, raised his placard, and brought it down on the glass case, shattering it and the artefacts inside it. His opponent bent and picked up a handful of the finer fragments, closing his fingers on them. He held up his bleeding hand at Nick Tewfell, and gestured.
“Go away. Get out. Go away.”
Many years later, when Tewfell was a minister in Tony Blair’s government, he would still wake at night and remember that moment, the unbroken box, the bright unbroken beakers, the broken box, the splinters of glass, the dark-faced tall man with his bleeding fingers, the strange dancing light in the room, which was the torches outside, and the flaring behind his own eyes. The odd thing was, tha
t the Vice-Chancellor had never said anything to anyone about who had broken the glasses. And for a few years, he had hated him for that. And then, as he grew older, he had almost loved him. He had, he saw, come in a way to resemble him.
In another part of the campus, Deborah Ritter had led a foray to release the imprisoned creatures. The Zoology Research Centre was built round an internal quadrangle, with a lawn. The rescuers surged into the laboratories and opened cages, and pens. They overturned glass tanks, and undid the collar of a solitary sheep, which snorted, and remained immobile. They worked by torchlight, their small fires bobbing and dancing as they smashed padlocks and untwisted wire. A procession of tufted ducks wandered satisfactorily out on to the grass, followed by various rabbits and hares, white and piebald, lolloping and scuttling. Mickey Impey picked up several jars and shook out colonies of worms and beetles on to the grass. Deborah Ritter, with kaleidoscope eyes, approached various banked tanks of white rats. They peered out at her, their own eyes—come and see, she cried—wonderful rosy crystals, opals with crimson fires in fields of white spikes of furry icicles.
Go, you darlings, cried Deborah Ritter, go and live your lives. She tipped them out on to the floor, where they cowered, cringed, and then began to prospect. She poured out a cage of piebald mice amongst them. One rat snarled and several mice bolted. Mickey Impey, opening a box, was met by a shrilling, and a mouthful of yellow teeth, which fastened on his finger. He shook the angry curled creature to the ground. Ten days later his wound began to froth and fester. Then his hand swelled, and his arm and shoulder blew up into bolsters and went blue. He was in hospital for a month, and wrote several poems about night-nurses and moanings in the dark.
