Stop Press Page 6

  Timmy looked. So did Winter. At the tail-end of the train Bussenschutt was descending, in his bearing the annoyance of a man who steps out of a first-class carriages and fails to find a porter within hail. The porters were all farther up the platform where a largish group of people, the majority apparently known to each other, was already standing amid little piles of luggage. In a yard beyond stood a row of cars; a chauffeur with an old and roomy saloon of the sort that discreetly wealthy people keep to meet trains at country stations, a disguised gardener with another of the same and a stable lad with a yet older and roomier tourer. Decently calculated noticeableness was given to the assemblage by the fact that the whole of it, with the exception of the stable lad, was in that delicate shade of cream known to conservative coach-builders as Queen Anne’s white. And towards it, with the enhanced cheerfulness of travellers who realize that now somebody else is going to pay, moved the group of people who had got off in front.

  ‘You see,’ said Timmy, ‘we print the junction on our notepaper and have people met.’

  ‘But this’, said Mr Eliot, ‘is the through carriage. That’s why I moved along.’

  ‘In about five minutes they’ll back us into the siding.’

  ‘The only trouble is that the heating goes off. But nowadays the wait is only half-an-hour till they hitch us on to a local train.’ Mr Eliot produced a pipe which was almost the twin of Timmy’s. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  Winter, who suddenly felt he had been travelling all day, drew his overcoat about him and made an affable noise. Toplady said: ‘Not at all. Are there many stops?’

  ‘Warter,’ said Timmy, ‘King’s Cleeve, and Wing.’

  ‘Low Swaffham,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘Pigg, Little Limber, Snug, Cold Findon, and Rust. It means that by the time we arrive Belinda will have settled them all nicely in.’ He filled his pipe and turned to Winter. ‘I wonder if you happen to have a match? I meant to pick some up in my club.’

  ‘Wing,’ said Timmy – and braced himself against the opposite seat. ‘It’s a curious thing about trains, but the slower they go the quicker they stop.’ He pause. ‘Listen – I can still hear the dogs. Those awful women must have had the same idea as ourselves.’

  ‘I’m afraid’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that this is a very tedious train. I wonder if we ought to close the window?’

  Curling and uncurling his toes within his shoes, and finding a satisfactory ambiguity in the ejaculation, Winter said ‘Pigg!’ Mr Eliot rubbed with a glove at the window, saying ‘Pigg?’ as if surprised that they had got so far. And Timmy, chanting ‘Pigg, Pigg, Pigg – oh, Hugo, I must take you to Pigg!’, wriggled on his seat in the obscure enjoyment of some sentiment of childhood.

  Winter felt pervasively numb. He had ceased, against his better knowledge, to believe in any mystery of the Spider, or in the existence of Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike along the corridor, or even in the enviable crowd and guests who had been conveyed to the Eliot home so much more expeditiously that himself. It was only a little past midday, but interminably the train seemed to have been travelling through an England enfolded in cold, in half-light, and in gloom. ‘No,’ he said, resuming his literary conversation with Mr Eliot and speaking so emphatically that Toplady started. ‘I think that books are a mistake, and that more books are more mistaken still. One’s sole legitimate satisfaction in contemplating the production of literature is in the knowledge that the process has a mathematical limit; that there will come a point, just as there will with music, at which it will be possible to produce only what somebody else has produced before.’

  Mr Eliot knocked out his pipe. ‘That’, he said amiably, ‘is pretty much the position already.’

  ‘But I am speaking exactly. The human vocabulary is limited and can be arranged only in a finite number of ways. The combinations must eventually exhaust themselves. Consider’ – said Winter – ‘an observer from a planet with somewhat different habits from ours prowling about and watching writers at work.’

  Toplady, who plainly thought this an unprofitable thing to consider, reached for The Times.

  ‘Consider this detached observer viewing the ceaseless labour of writers in shuffling and rearranging words. Might be not rationally suppose that this matter of the possible combinations was the end on view?’

  Mr Eliot considered carefully, a light cloud of perplexity on his face. ‘Yes, I see what you mean. I can conceive an attitude from which all the writing that ever was might appear as a fragment of some pointless mathematical labour. Only your observer would soon see that the combination were being pursued in a very haphazard manner.’ And Mr Eliot looked enquiringly at Winter, seeming to wonder if he were making the right responses in this eccentric conversation.

  ‘Exactly!’ Winter, turning up the collar of his coat, nodded with an exaggerated air of logical keenness. ‘So why not organize and concentrate? Students of language have demonstrated the possibility of putting a linguistic instrument adequate to every operation of the human intellect upon a single sheet of notepaper. A steady drive for say a couple of centuries with that – a steady working out, regardless of the distractions of seeming sense and nonsense, of the possible combinations of such a rational language–’

  ‘Little Limber,’ said Timmy.

  ‘Snug,’ said Timmy.

  ‘…And the intellectual frailty’, said Winter – who had persuaded himself that he must talk or freeze – ‘of believing that by feeding the flux of experience once more through the typewriter, twisting it here and there with exhausting and boring prestidigitation into the casually pleasing effects which are called art–’

  He stopped. Mr Eliot was listening with the politest attention, but rather – Winter suddenly saw – as a matter of duty than of pleasure. It was not that Mr Eliot was incapable of following a fantastic argument; it was simply that this sort of thing was not his pigeon. Emancipated from his own popular literary labours Mr Eliot was serious. Sustained by the sense of a serious environment – of reasonably conducted dons and of daughters who studied early printers’ devices – he could be spontaneously gay. But faced with levity where he expected the solemnities of literary discussion he became perplexed and his gaiety faded; his whole personality faded visibly, as figures on a stage fade into insubstantiality at a touch on a dimmer. Winter, made aware of this oddly physical effect and divining something of the mechanism at work, was conscious too that he had rashly proceeded farther in his absurd theme than was tactful or even decent. This amiable and volatile gentleman, in whose house he was going to stay in obscure and somewhat uncomfortable circumstances, was the manufacturer of thirty-seven romances. And Winter, to beguile this chilly and trundling tail-end of a journey, had been presenting him with an extravagant vision of the profession of letters as an ant-like activity, one of the ultimate futilities of the human spirit. Mr Eliot, it was true, had begun the debate, but on the most unpretentious level. There had been no call for aggressive pyrotechnics in reply. Appalled by a sudden sense of his sins – a sense pointed by the positively cliff-like symbol of dissociation into which the so correct Toplady had erected The Times – he tumbled into apology. He had been talking, he was sure, most tedious nonsense. He even stopped curling and uncurling his toes, as if that too were an offence against the bread and salt he was presently to consume.

  There was a slightly awkward pause. It was terminated by the voice of Toplady. ‘Old Findon?’ he asked.

  ‘Cold Findon,’ said Timmy.

  ‘A tedious train,’ said Mr Eliot. But this time he spoke as if he meant it. He peered despondently through the window – a different being from the gentleman who had so childishly and delightedly eluded his guests. ‘How melancholy the winter landscape can be.’

  Winter peered too. A cottage, a haystack chopped like a half- consumed loaf, an unstartled Jersey cow – these had as background bare fields cross-hatched with hedgerows and beyond them a gentle grassy swell – the fringes of downland country – crowned with a grove of oaks. And on the other si
de the face of nature stretched away in similar severe neutrality – waiting, Winter thought, for such as Mr Eliot to pump in something of their own changing chemistry. Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.

  ‘I am interested’, said Mr Eliot, ‘in what you have been saying about writing. It reminds me of a passage in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels – the one filled with the pedants and people of barrenly ingenious mind.’ He paused to smile at Winter – evidently he was not guileless and continued in careful résumé. ‘You will remember the professor who had perfected a machine for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations? It was an enormous mosaic of words; what you have called a whole human vocabulary. The professor’s pupil manipulated levers, the whole mosaic fell into a new order, and the result was noted down. In time the device was going to give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences. The satire, at its most obvious, is directed at the professor and his nonsensical invention. But it is meant, perhaps, to hit at the arts and sciences too – to hit, just as you have been so amusingly doing, at the whole business of writing. Writing is a matter of shoving the words about and might very well be done by a machine.’

  Mr Eliot paused and for a moment looked doubtfully at Winter. Then his eye grew abstracted, searching some problematical territory in front of him. ‘Swift’, he said, ‘distrusted what he called vain babbling and mere sound of words. He distrusted the Word; perhaps he feared it.’

  Toplady put down The Times – cautiously. Timmy, who had been fidgeting, was sitting very still.

  ‘Swift,’ said Mr Eliot, ‘the most rational of men, feared the Word because it is magical. He tried never to use it magically; only flatly, barely, rationally. But – because he understood as well as feared – the magic crowded in upon his writing. He shoved the words about and somewhere’ – Mr Eliot gestured diffidently – ‘another world acknowledged a fresh act of creation. Mr Winter: Lilliput and Brobdingnag – would you deny that they exist?’

  The little train rattled sleepily but pertinaciously onwards; the engine whistled; from down the corridor came the subdued whine of a Birdwire dog. But within the compartment silence was absolute.

  ‘It is’, said Mr Eliot, ‘a metaphysical problem.’ He looked up quickly as if there was something encouraging in this reflection. ‘An interesting metaphysical problem. I remember a colleague of yours’ – he glanced at Winter – ‘a New College man and a most distinguished philosopher’ – he turned to the gravely attentive Toplady – ‘putting a very pretty question. Just what is the metaphysical status of a wild animal encountered in a dream? If the dream is vivid or terrifying then there is an obvious sense in which the creature in it is more real than any similar creature observed in the security of the zoo. And the same problem attaches to the creatures of the world of words as to the creatures of the world of dreams. What is their status?’

  From the corridor came some casual sound. Winter found himself starting and glancing half-fearfully out. Fanciful talk in return for fanciful talk – only behind this talk of his host’s was the pressure of urgent thought. The Spider was indeed stirring, if only in his creator’s mind; was asserting himself as something mysteriously more and other than the sum of the words from which he had been built up. His footstep – less solid perhaps than a mortal’s, yet not heard by an inner ear alone – might even now be echoing down some farther corridor of the train; his eye might be bent curiously on Bussenschutt, be frowning at Mrs Birdwire’s dogs. Winter, who had no fancy for notions of this sort, found that he had to brace his mind to get rid of them.

  ‘Yesterday’, continued Mr Eliot, ‘I happened to see the porter at my club for the first time in nearly a year. What has he been doing in the interval? Nobody will doubt for a moment that he has been there at the club and going steadily about his job. But consider Iago or Mr Micawber, creatures incomparably more vital than our porter. What happens when I cease to think of them? I sometimes wonder–’ Mr Eliot broke off, appeared to take a long breath. ‘The problem is a teasing one and perhaps it is just as well that it is a metaphysical problem merely.’ He brought out his pipe again and stuffed it with what was to Winter a deliberately steady hand. ‘I mean that there is no practical problem; these different modes of being never collide. The real world into which we are given and the imaginative world to which our words can give: both perhaps are dreams and they flow, unmingling, side by side.’ He struck a match and the little spurt of flame lit up a face which was questioning and absorbed. ‘But what’, said Mr Eliot, ‘if, after all, there may come a point at which the two dreams cross?’

  Once more the train jerked to a stop. With a shade of uncharacteristic fuss Timmy began handing his companions their possessions. ‘Rust,’ he said. ‘Let’s nip out before the Birdwire pack.’

  Winter, who was grateful for the diversion, jammed on his hat and prepared for undignified haste. He was halted by the finger of Mr Eliot – an aerial and floating finger, raising itself with the suddenly renewed buoyancy of a submarine. ‘In these matters’, said Mr Eliot, ‘there is a technique to be observed.’ He smiled and – as if years had been ripped from him – the smile was Timmy’s. ‘In taxis one jumps in at one door and out at the other. From trains one gets off at the wrong side. And so one eludes – or, if one believes in English, dodges – pursuit. Such manoeuvres are perennially pleasing.’ He looked about the compartment. ‘Timmy, I can’t believe that you really needed to bring such a big suitcase. Winter and Toplady are going to have much less trouble.’ And Mr Eliot – the particular Mr Eliot, Winter felt, who was in charge at the moment – threw open the door beside him and dropped with confidence to the line. Toplady, not without one longing lingering look at the orthodoxy of corridor and platform behind, followed; Winter went next; Timmy stayed to hand down the luggage. In a minute they were all standing in a siding between some sacks of bone ash and a truck-load of pigs. Mr Eliot, on whom the scramble and the cold air – it may have been – had produced once more a delicate glow, inspected the pigs. ‘Gloucester Old Spots,’ he told Toplady; ‘probably my neighbour Gregory’s.’ He glanced round the siding. ‘I think we’ll make for Laslett’s barn.’ They trudged down the siding; from behind them a rising river of sound indicated that Mrs Birdwire and Lady Pike had begun to disembogue. ‘I’m sorry’, said Mr Eliot, ‘that it’s raining so hard.’

  For quite suddenly it was raining very hard indeed. Winter hoped that Laslett’s barn was near at hand. His trousers were flapping wetly against his calves. He read commiseration as well as cautious amusement in the look of a young porter who was respectfully touching his cap to Mr Eliot’s curious procession. Toplady, he conjectured, was carrying on a parenthetical debate with himself as to whether he might usefully stop to put up his umbrella. Timmy had gripped his hat between his teeth and was experimenting with carrying his streaming suitcase on his head.

  ‘I myself’, said Mr Eliot, ‘prefer Lincolnshire Curly Coated.’ He took Toplady’s arm in a friendly way. ‘You will say at once that they are coarse in the bone, but I reply that they are exceptionally hardy and prolific. And in pigs at least’ – from under dripping eyebrows Mr Eliot glanced innocently at Winter – ‘to be prolific is to possess the ultimate virtue.’

  They trudged on. The rain, driven by a veering wind, drifted about them in washes of grey, pattered on their hats, exploded on the rusty metals between which they were walking. Winter, changing his bag from one hand to the other, unwarily stubbed his chilled toes on a sleeper. ‘I usually advise the tenants’, said Mr Eliot, ‘to cross them with Large White. I think we had better climb under here. Be careful of the barbed wire. It is a dreadfully expensive kind and claims to have an extra spike. But most of them prefer Large Black. This is the barn. When the coast is clear we can send Timmy to reconnoitre and probably he will find that someone has come down with a car. How careless Laslett is with grain.’ Laslett’s carelessness, Winter guessed, was to be inferred from an immense flock of sparrows garrisoning the barn.
The birds rose up in a cloud of dust and chaff and agitated droppings as they entered; a moment later they had vanished into the rain. ‘It seems rather hard to turn them out,’ said Mr Eliot. ‘But no doubt they will come back.’

  Winter dumped his suitcase end up near the door, sat on it, and from this position contemplated his host anew. About twenty minutes before he had been entertaining for Mr Eliot sentiments of remorse and commiseration; now he noted that his attitude held something of the mild suspicion with which he was sometimes impelled to regard Mr Eliot’s son. The rural Mr Eliot – the Mr Eliot who bought barbed wire and held convictions on the nuptials of Gloucester Old Spots – had appeared with disconcerting promptness the moment the party touched earth – with something of the slick synchronization, indeed, of a refined manufacturing process. Behind this Mr Eliot there had been, momentarily, the Mr Eliot whose professional concern was with the devices of melodrama, and who was willing to indulge himself with a prank from his own stock-in-trade. And behind this again was the Mr Eliot on whom Timmy proposed to let loose Dr Herbert Chown: a Mr Eliot who was being led by untoward happenings to entertain disturbing notions on the relations of the imaginary and the actual. This, Winter reflected, was the interesting Mr Eliot, the embarrassing Mr Eliot, and conceivably the dangerous Mr Eliot as well. There had of course been a further Mr Eliot: the amiable antiquarian who was the proud father of Belinda. Perhaps there had been others who flitted by unnoticed; certainly there were too many Mr Eliots for comfort.

  At this point Winter’s reflections were interrupted by an icy and spear-like sensation in the back; a moment later this resolved itself into a moist trickling down his spine. He glanced up at the roof and a further aggregation of raindrops caught him on the nose.