Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (18 page)

It had been built in the Austrian city of Steyr, in the year 1914. Brass headlamps as big as searchlights, connected to a drum of acetyline by whorls of tubing, looked out into the square with glassy, round eyes. The car’s thick-spoked wheels were clamped in place by hubs that projected a clear four inches: there were roomy brass handles to the four high doors, brass screws and hinges on a windshield that operated in four sections, and a brass bulb horn whose tubes swirled in tight horizontal layers, until they opened out into a gorgeous trumpet mouth like a French huntsman’s
corne
de
chasse.
Behind, were maroon leather seats, set with the height and
dignity of canonical stalls, stuffed to bursting, and patterned in the stiff, plump lozenges of old stained-glass. The hood was slashed by rakish wind-vents: the mechanic raised it on both sides and hung the edges to a long hook in the garage ceiling. Revealed was a massive engine in which each element was first countersunk as deeply as possible and then concealed in its hermitage by a roof of cast-iron. The mechanic bowed over the engine; the two priests watched in silence.

From a toolbox on the running-board the mechanic took a wrench as thick as his wrist, unbolted one of the iron roofs and displayed a medieval carburetter. He then took a small bottle from his pocket and poured half of it into the carburetter—at which the tall priest raised his eyebrows, suggesting that although he was not familiar with anything more mechanized than a pyx, no one could convince him that the car would run far on that. He even had the temerity to murmur something to the mechanic, who looked at him coldly and made no answer. At this point, the other priest, unable to resist temptation any longer, leaned forward timidly and pressed the bulb of the giant trumpet with fingers and thumb: it emitted no more than the faintest sigh, and the mechanic looked at this priest, too, with disdain. Then he adjusted, with much tugging and grimacing, two great levers on the steering-wheel marked PETROLEUM and MAGNETO; after which he muttered something to the dignified priest. This priest made no reply; he merely looked haughtily at his dowdy colleague, who hastily produced a grubby handkerchief. The mechanic snatched the handkerchief and stuffed it into the mouth of the carburetter.

From a binding of leather straps that belonged to the days of horse-carriages, the mechanic released a big crank, which he drove into the front of the car with a grunt. Then, with the air of a Titan, he raised himself up, looked full into the sun’s eye, swelled his chest, slowly rolled his sleeves to the
elbow, spat richly into each hand, ponderously rubbed his gluey palms together, straddled his legs, and with an immense groan bowed down his frame and grasped the handle of the crank….

There was a thunderclap that shot half the tourists in Mell off their pillows. It was followed by a medley of snaps and cracks, and jinglings from the open tool box: the high seats, the splashboards, the suspended hood leaped into a trembling jig, jumping feverishly on the springs, jerking from side to side: a moth fluttered out from the floor-carpets, and the nearer area of the garage floor became alive with scurrying swirls of dust, old match-ends, brittle flower petals, scraps of newspaper, all racing for shelter from gusts that seemed to fly out of every vent from crank to exhaust. A fine haze of blue smoke mounted over the rear seats, fell into a draught and drifted out into the sunshine. “Bravo!” cried the tall priest, delicately clapping his finger-tips. The mechanic gave a loud roar, and gestured with one big hand—at which the dowdy priest nervously fingered his way to the carburetter, grasped the sodden handkerchief between finger and thumb and twitched it high into the air with the gesture of a triumphant magician. At this, the engine seemed about to die of indignation; it caught its breath, and then redoubled its roar until the walls shook. The mechanic flew to the levers and worked them grimly down the steering-wheel: the engine followed him, diminuendo, until it was firing with such moderation that Morgan could hear the soft smacks of the pistons and the suctions of air. The tall priest stretched out his hand and tapped the mechanic approvingly on the shoulder; but the sullen man only tore from its moorings behind the engine an immense oil can, and went his round, opening a score of secret trap-doors and squirting in floods of lubricant. Then he replaced the hood and climbed behind the wheel, arranging one foot on an accelerator as gawky and broad as the foot-brake
on a hay-waggon. Next, he bore down on the clutch, grasped the great ball on the top of the gearshift, and worked the stick in and out of a collection of wide gates, inscribed: ZURÜCK, VORWAERTS EINS, VORWAERTS ZWEI, VORWAERTS DREI, NEUTER. With his right hand he discovered outside the door a yard of outside brake, which he thrust forward to the length of his arm. The whole impressive contraption roared again and moved ponderously into the sunshine, where it bounced with dignity over the cobbles and turned down a side street in rolls of smoke. As it disappeared, three children sprang from nowhere and attached themselves to its high, green back. Morgan smiled; the priests smiled; and the dowdy one took a leaflet from his pocket and handed it to Morgan with a little bow. They went away, and he was alone again.

The leaflet was written in English (I suppose by now, Morgan thought, they are able to recognize an American when they see one). At the top of it was a murky engraving of Mell cathedral, silhouetted against a pageant of stars and stripes. Underneath was written: “On July 4th, share your American Day of Independence with Tutin Province’s Festival of St. Bertha (W).” In the centre of the page was a woodcut of George Washington, holding a nun’s hand. Half a dozen medieval waves separated the general’s highboots from the nun’s invisible feet; Washington wore the uniform of a sergeant of the Polish cavalry; St. Bertha’s eyes were cast down, but she was smiling with a nun’s exorbitant innocence.

I never heard of St. Bertha (W), Morgan said to himself, but I do know that this is the happiest day of my life, my day of independence.

Overhead, two strings of national flags had appeared, covering the square with a St. Andrew’s cross.

He walked down the nearest street, which quickly turned into an alley of thatched cottages. They had no front lawns, no
front porches, no doorsteps, not even a sidewalk: they stood in the road itself, and their doors touched the dust. At one open window a man in a singlet was holding a starched white collar up to the light and removing yesterday’s grime from it with the crumby side of a crust of bread.

I shall never forget one single thing that I see this morning, Morgan thought. It is all marvellous, beautiful, and a thousand times more wonderful than my dreams ever dared to make it.

Suddenly the town came to an end; the street’s last cottage presented a bare wall to the open country. On the other side of the town lay fields of Willi Morgenstern’s potatoes and the lake of thick black water where tourists took the cure; but the landscape on this side was the scrubby land of gold-country—brown rocks blown over with dust, and ugly as sin. Half a mile away loomed a purplish mass which turned out to be a grove of firs; when Morgan reached it his shoes were thick with dust. A low stone wall surrounded the grove, which lay away from the dusty road like a green island. It looked so clean and fresh that Morgan vaulted the wall, and for half an hour he followed a winding path, feeling the moss under his feet and moving hypnotically in and out of the broken patches of light formed where the sun struck through the leaves. He walked in a daze of shock and joy, thoughtless, drained of every desire to fight or think. The sharp, spontaneous jumpings of his nerves and will, the beady eye with which he examined his mother and summed up prospective enemies, the instinct to leap into any gap that promised a better foothold, the wild determination to reject opposition, the painful grinding of the entrails as he screwed up his courage, the shattering trembling that possessed him from head to toe in moments of defiance, the contemptible struggle between cowardice and audacity, the enthusiasm for a love and beauty in which the absence of struggle and the prevalence of serenity so disarmed him as to make him weak with joy—all these
emotions, that usually kept him keyed to a pitch of incessant, vigorous excitement until he collapsed into lethargy, were now so smoothed away that he felt need for neither triumph nor submission and was conscious only of a limitless, patient capacity.

But he had barely subsided into this floating cradle of serenity when a cloud seemed to descend and settle over his brain, as though weights had suddenly been attached to the corners of his mind. It was a most familiar cloud: it arose out of his little bottle of white pills. His calming drug was doing its work as usual—but where, before, he had hated its intrusion, now he thought: Now that I am free, I can and shall deal with this.

He sat down under a tree, and began to think about his life as though it were all finished and done with, and himself quite another person.

He went back six years, to the moment when a kindly specialist, writing a prescription for him, had said: “Now, my boy, we are going to get you well saturated with some stuff.” He had not understood the phrase, but it had had a comforting, relaxing sound. In the following weeks he had been slowly absorbed into the new, saturated world.

It was a swimming world in which everything was dim, mis-shaped with blur, and distant: a paradise for lethargic fishes. He was a boy in a huge diving-suit with lead-weighted feet, parting his way with superlative waste of effort through heavy water, peering ahead to pick out obstacles (such as people), and to make discoveries (such as his own feet), hearing faint calls and warnings from the normally-dressed, moving with the concentrated watchfulness that seems to the diver himself the utmost in catlike delicacy, and to the onlooker, in the boat on the surface, the perversion of a man into the world’s clumsiest pickled freak.

But the diver was on land, in the grounds around the house which framed his torpid routine. He groped in the park, which
was often hung over with mist, the lawns sodden with
rain-water
, the tree-tops out of sight, the gravelled paths crunching under foot with the soggy dullness of damp grit. On the days when the sun shone, the trees admitted it in glaring patches that hurt his eyes; the humidity of yesterday’s evaporating, warm rain-water, the sound of bees, and the pressure of thick scent from the flowers kept him in a prolonged apathy that was almost more numbing than the intervals of mist and rain. Now, resting in the grove, thousands of miles away, it seemed to Morgan that he had only slept or dreamwalked for six years; there had been times when he had scarcely been able to tell which he was doing. From time to time, spoons and forks entered his mouth and information had been pressed to his ears. But much of the time, whether sleeping or walking, he had dreamed of the day when he would tug the rope and be raised out of his humid underworld into paradise.

From where he sat now, he could see paradise close enough to touch. It was the opposite of most paradises, in that it was as bare and fruitless as a desert. The air was so fine that it sang. His home was St. Jerome’s cell, with nothing to stumble over, since it contained only a table, a chair, a bed, and a lion manicured into perfect smoothness. Through the window he could see one thousand miles across ground as flat as a table-top to a horizon that was marked by one sharp, clean pencil-line. There was one tree—a deliberate joke, to emphasize the fact that there were no others—no bushes, nothing that was heavy or bulging or flabby or woolly. In paradise, unconsciousness of any kind was utterly forbidden; slowness of mind and stupidity were obscenities punishable by death. Except when it slept (like a diamond resting in a black box) the mind worked with a swiftness and clarity that suggested electrified geometry. The stark-naked body contradicted all laws of gravity and was as buoyant as a balloon. He would dance where others merely walked; his gestures would be so free
that he would appear mad; when he shook hands, he would crack the other man’s bones. When an idea struck him, it would raise him into the blue sky: the quantities of fresh air he would engorge would give him an energy that was frightening to predict: he might at moments become a light-weight engine, of intensely-concentrated power but without a governor, racing at such a flighty speed that his only danger would be of breaking up into thousands of flying bits. With a magic syringe he would clear his mind of all clogging, numbing debris of somnolence and dullness; with a magic sword he would cut away ruthlessly the whole world of cotton puffiness, padding, congestion, and envelopment in eiderdowns.

He looked at the trees, at the fresh morning sky, at the bright greenness of the moss and grass. He felt strength and confidence pouring into him. I have left it all behind, he told himself in triumph—the crushing, stuffy weight of hot, damp love, watchfulness, obedience, days and nights of torpor, endless sleeps, and responses without sharpness or fire.

All that is left now is for me to throw away my pills—and my new self and my new life begin.

He looked at the sky and was filled with joy.

When he was calmer, he set his jaw and rose to his feet. He walked back by the path he had come, hardly noticing the things he passed, and for once supremely happy at walking in a dream.

But when he saw the stone wall in front of him again, he jumped at it like a tiger.

*

He was still in this divided state of near-tears and laughter, singing to himself, and full of malice on account of his secret plot against his pills (whose bottle now seemed to hold everything in the world that was dangerous to him) when he crossed the square again and went upstairs to see Divver. But
as he knocked on his guardian’s door, he composed his face and hid his secrets, so that he entered Divver’s room wearing adolescence’s most commonplace disguise—a gawky body topped by a head that was bent inquisitively and protected by a grin so sheepish as to be almost inane.

Divver was lying in bed at the other end of the room. His head was propped up on the pillows with his hands behind it, a cigarette with a long ash slanted out of his mouth, scattered ash was spread over his open pyjama top, and his exposed chest, which was full in the sunshine, was covered with grey as well as black hairs. His face looked grey too, in patches of morning stubble. The remains of his breakfast still rested across his legs, ashes and butts mixed with smears of coffee and drying yolk of egg. Morgan was first of all shocked that any human being could coat up such a brilliant morning with so much shabby inertia and decay; then, when it struck him that this shabby creature was Divver, his own guardian, he was shocked again, because it was like meeting a stranger, a man who was hardly related to the Divver who laughed so heartily in Pembroke County and walked the deck on the Atlantic with the immense disdain of a seasoned traveller. And since Morgan too, below his disguise, was changing into another person, they sat opposite each other in a state of peculiar disbalance. They were still upheld for the most part by the pointed vigour that had carried them away from home, but they were already changing into wanderers, men who may depend on nothing but the stability and extent of their self-confidence. In Divver’s case the amount of such confidence seemed small: he looked at Morgan in a tired, heavy way, as though he had reached an old end rather than a new beginning.