CHAPTER XXII

 

SHEARWATER sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.  The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved, against a brake, carefully adjusted to make the work of the pedaller hard, but not impossibly hard.  From a pipe which came up through the floor issued a little jet of water which played on the brake and kept it cool.  But no jet of water played on Shearwater.  It was his business to get hot.  He did get hot.

       From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.  Inside that little wooden house, which might have reminded Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of mind, of the Box in which Gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate life were the same every time he looked in.  Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle of the nightmare bicycle, pedalling, pedalling.  The water trickled over the brake.  And Shearwater sweated.  Great drops of sweat came oozing out from under his hair, ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like raindrops.  His thick bullneck was wet; his whole naked body, his arms and legs streamed and shone.  The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a waterproof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the centre of the sheet at the focal point where all its slopes converged.  The automatically controlled heating apparatus in the basement kept the temperature in the box high and steady.  Peering through the damp-dimmed panes of the window, Lancing noticed with satisfaction that the mercury stood unchangingly at twenty-seven point five Centigrade. The ventilators at the side and top of the box were open; Shearwater had air enough.  Another time, Lancing reflected, they’d make the box airtight and see the effect of a little carbon dioxide poisoning on the top of excessive sweating.  It might be very interesting, but today they were concerned with sweating only.  After seeing that the thermometer was steady, that the ventilators were properly open, the water was still trickling over the brake, Lancing would tap at the window.  And Shearwater, who kept his eyes fixed straight before him, as he pedalled slowly and unremittingly along his nightmare road, would turn his head at the sound.

       ‘All right?’ Lancing’s lips moved and his eyebrows went up inquiringly.

       Shearwater would nod his big, round head, and the sweatdrops, suspended on his eyebrows and his moustache, would fall like little liquid fruits shaken suddenly by the wind.

       ‘Good,’ and Lancing would go back to his thick German book under the reading-lamp at the other end of the laboratory.

       Constant as the thermometer Shearwater pedalled steadily and slowly on.  With a few brief halts for food and rest, he had been pedalling ever since lunchtime.  At eleven he would go to bed on a shakedown in the laboratory and at nine tomorrow morning he would re-enter the box and start pedalling again.  He would go on all tomorrow and the day after; and after that, as long as he could stand it.  One, two, three, four.  Pedal, pedal, pedal … He must have travelled the equivalent of sixty or seventy miles this afternoon.  He would be getting on for Swindon.  He would be nearly at Portsmouth.  He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford.  He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling through the green and golden valleys where Constable used to paint.  He would be at Winchester by the bright stream.  He would have ridden through the beechwoods of Arundel out into the sea …

       In any case he was far away, he was escaping.  And Mrs Viveash followed, walking swayingly along on feet that seemed to tread between two abysses, at her leisure.  Pedal, pedal.  The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood … Formidably, calmly, her eyes regarded.  The lids cut off an arc of those pale circles.  When she smiled, it was a crucifixion.  The coils of her hair were copper serpents.  Her small gestures loosened enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her voice they had fallen in ruins about him.  His world was no longer safe, it had ceased to stand on its foundations.  Mrs Viveash walked among his ruins and did not even notice them.  He must build up again.  Pedal, pedal.  He was not merely escaping; he was working a building machine.  It must be built with proportion; with proportion, the old man had said.  The old man appeared in the middle of the nightmare road in front of him, clutching his beard.  Proportion, proportion.  There were first a lot of dirty rocks lying about; then there was St Paul’s.  These bits of his life had to be built up proportionably.

       There was work.  And there was talk about work and ideas.  And there were men who could talk about work and ideas.  But so far as he had been concerned that was about all they could do.  He would have to find out what else they did; it was interesting.  And he would have to find out what other men did; men who couldn’t talk about work and not much about ideas.  They had as good kidneys as anyone else.

       And then there were women.

       On the nightmare road he remained stationary.  The pedals went round and round under his driving feet; the sweat ran off him.  He was escaping, and yet he was also drawing nearer.  He would have to draw nearer.  ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’  Not enough; too much.

       Not enough – he was building her in, a great pillar next to the pillar of work.

       Too much – he was escaping.  If he had not caged himself here in this hot box, he would have run out after her, to throw himself – all in fragments, all dissipated and useless – in front of her.  And she wanted none of him.  But perhaps it would be worse, perhaps it would be far, far worse if she did.

       The old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard, crying out, ‘Proportion, proportion.’  He trod and trod at his building machine, working up the pieces of his life, steadily, unremittingly working them into a proportionable whole, into a dome that should hang, light, spacious and high, as though by a miracle, on the empty air.  He trod and trod, escaping, mile after mile into fatigue, into wisdom.  He was at Dover now, pedalling across the Channel.  He was crossing a dividing gulf and there would be safety on the other side; the cliffs of Dover were already behind him.  He turned his head as though to look back at them; the drops of sweat were shaken from his eyebrows, from the shaggy fringes of his moustache.  He turned his head from the blank wooden wall in front of him over his shoulder.  A face was looking through the observation window behind him – a woman’s face.

       It was the face of Mrs Viveash.

       Shearwater uttered a cry and at once turned back again.  He redoubled his pedalling.  One, two, three, four – furiously he rushed along the nightmare road.  She was haunting him now in hallunincations.  She was pursuing and she was gaining on him.  Will, wisdom, resolution and understanding were of no avail, then?  But there was always fatigue.  The sweat poured down his face, streamed down the indented runnel of his spine, along the seam at the meeting-place of the ribs.  His loincloth was wringing wet.  The drops pattered continuously on the waterproof sheet.  His calves and the muscles of his thighs ached with pedalling.  One, two, three, four – he trod round a hundred times with either foot.  After that he ventured to turn his head once more.  He was relieved, and at the same time he was disappointed, to see that there was now no face at the window.  He had exorcised the hallucination.  He settled down to a more leisurely pedalling.

       In the annexe of the laboratory the animals devoted to the service of physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden irruption of light.  The albino guinea-pigs peered through the meshes of their hutch and their red eyes were like the rear-lights of bicycles.  The pregnant she-rabbits lolloped out and shook their ears and pointed their tremulous noises towards the door.  The cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether to crow or cluck.

       ‘When he’s with hens,’ Lancing explained to his visitors, ‘he thinks he’s a cock.  When he’s with a cock, he’s convinced he’s a pullet.’

       The rats who were being fed on milk from a London diary came tumbling from their nest with an anxious hungry squeaking.  They were getting thinner and thinner every day; in a few days they would be dead.  But the old rat, whose diet was Grade A milk from the country, hardly took the trouble to move.  He was as fat and sleek as a brown furry fruit, ripe to bursting.  No skim and chalky water, no dried dung and tubercle bacilli for him.  He was in clover.  Next week, however, the fates were plotting to give him diabetes artificially.

       In their glass pagoda the little black axolotls crawled, the heraldry of Mexico, among a scanty herbage.  The beetles, who had had their heads cut off and replaced by the heads of other beetles, darted uncertainly about, some obeying their heads, some their genital organs.  A fifteen-year-old monkey, rejuvenated by the Steinach process, was discovered by the light of Lancing’s electric torch, shaking the bars that separated him from the green-furred, bald-rumped, bearded young beauty in the next cage.  He was gnashing his teeth with thwarted passion.

       Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets.  The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke.  There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness.  There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air.  There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil.  And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment.  They were all alive.  And on the other side of the courtyard beyond the shed in which the animals slept or uneasily stirred, in the huge hospital that went up sheer like a windowed cliff into the air, men and women were ceasing to be themselves, or were struggling to remain themselves.  They were dying, they were struggling to live.  The other windows looked on to the river.  The lights of London Bridge were on the right, of Blackfriars to the left.  On the opposite shore, St Paul’s floated up as though self-supported in the moonlight.  Like time the river flowed, silent and black.  Gumbril and Mrs Viveash leaned their elbows on the sill and looked out.  Like time the river flowed, staunchlessly, as though from a wound in the world’s side.  For a long time they were silent.  They looked out, without speaking, across the flow of time, at the stars, at the human symbol hanging miraculously in the moonlight.  Lancing had gone back to his German book; he had no time to waste looking out of windows.

       ‘Tomorrow,’ said Gumbril at last, meditatively.

       ‘Tomorrow,’ Mrs Viveash interrupted him, ‘will be as awful as today.’  She breathed it like a truth from beyond the grave prematurely revealed, expiringly from her deathbed within.

       ‘Come, come,’ protested Gumbril.

       In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled.  He was across the Channel now; he felt himself safe.  Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate.  He was escaping, he had escaped.  He was building up his strong light dome of life.  Proportion, cried the old man, proportion!  And it hung there, proportioned and beautiful in the dark, confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts.  Time flowed darkly past.

       ‘And now,’ said Mrs Viveash, straightening herself up, and giving herself a little shake, ‘now we’ll drive to Hampstead and have a look at Piers Cotton.’

 

 

 

Cross-Purposes PREVIEW