Cards of Identity (21 page)

After an eternity of this I raised my swimming eyes, though still keeping my head inclined. This gave me the look and posture of a man who comes back from the pub on a dark night and cranes hopefully in the direction of the nail on which his door-key hangs. To my horror I recognized the sign of The Jolly Waggoners in Kelmscott Way, a mere mile from our starting-point. Three miles to go, and already I
was having to recite to myself snatches of poems by character-building authors! I glanced at Vinson.

He was not an athletic type; pacing a room or bar-parlour was his limit. Now, in the high, hard, leather boots of the Badgeries he was suffering torture. But how can I describe his expression as he hobbled along, towing away at the whispering badger? Though his eyes were swirling round and round he never for a second raised them or unbent his head from the painful angle of reverence. It was enough for him to know that he was pursuing a symbol while drawing a token. He paid not the slightest heed to his surroundings: even when the stretchers with their limp bodies began to flit past like dead leaves from some enormous oak, Vinson hobbled on. So strong were his principles that if at that moment he had heard a scream for help from the lips of a loved one, he would only have set his teeth and pressed ahead.

Soho Square is a one-way roundabout and as we trudged round it my annoyance was relieved by the sudden arrival of my second wind. With two miles to go I suddenly was light-headed and relaxed and as we crossed over Oxford Street and headed up gloomy Rathbone Place all my confidence came back. The authorities had chosen this narrow thoroughfare for the procession because most of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road were being relaid at the moment of the Lord Royal’s death – though, to be fair to the Lord Royal, I must say that it is a rare moment when they are
not
being relaid. But somebody had miscalculated the amplitude of obsolescence, and one of the coaches of Dukes’ Provender, filled with emblems of bread, had encircled a hydrant with its leather spring, and overturned. The coach was being followed in the procession by a unit of artillery marching backwards with reversed brass cannon, symbolizing a famous siege in which, the gun-breeches having over-heated, the charges were laid in the muzzles, giving rise to the famous command: ‘Men! Backs to the enemy!’ Bread, coach, cannon, and gunners were now hideously involved, making a taut bottle-neck for the tail of the procession which was wound-up in a snarl of symbols all the way back to Old Compton Street, where the whores were out in full strength. Efforts were being made to move the blockage from the narrow street; meanwhile, we were being detoured around it. The jam was appalling: crowds three deep filled the pavements; and what with policemen, grunting workmen,
and frantic cats, we had no more than six feet of passageway. Moreover, we could see ahead the luckier members of the procession moving smoothly ahead towards Euston station: the thought of being
left
behind
on the way to the grave caused considerable panic. Indeed, Vinson was the only marcher who paid no attention whatever until, without warning, he found himself marching reverently into a large heap of synthetic bread surmounted by a fainted gunner. This conjunction was too much, even for Vinson. He raised his eyes to see what was happening in the material world.

If he had not done so, if he had stuck to his symbols through thick and thin, I might never have met Dr Bitterling. As it was, I saw a look of horror come into his eyes, which were fixed on something in the pressing crowd. He shouted: ‘No, no! Not that!’ and following his eyes I saw
her,
of all people, standing in a rear rank of the crowd with a small bomb clutched in her raised hand.

Vinson was not afraid of death. On the contrary, as we have seen, he was greatly attached to it, and to have been fatally bombed during a distinguished funeral was all he could have asked of life. What he saw, quicker than I did, was that the bomb was a stink-bomb and that she was aiming it
not
at
him
but
at
the
badger.

Oh, Gods, are there any limitations to the ingenuity of a woman’s revenge? This particular one was planned on at least three levels of cynical rage: first, the normal one of punishing a man by harming not him but that which he most loves; second, the highly-intellectual one of reducing the pure, token badger to the revolting status of a stinking real one; third, the ironic one of showing Vinson how well she had profited by his tuition in symbolism. I understood none of this, of course, at the moment itself, but Vinson grasped the revenge on all three levels in the space of as many seconds. And then, seeing his duty, he did it instantly. Stretching his arms wide apart, he fell flat over backwards, intending to shield the danger with his body. But this was the moment when one of the Pikemen, pushed behind us, had chosen to lay his weapon in rest. The back of Vinson’s head landed on its point with a splintery crack.

She was through the crowd in a second, screaming: ‘Vinson, my darling, what have they done to you?’ As in a dream, I saw policemen pulling her off and Vinson being carried away with the bread. I was alone; but processions, once started, never stop. The badger was
undamaged. So was I. On we marched, to Euston and the grave.

*

Today, it is I who sit at the auctioneer’s raised table, holding in my hand the ivory emblem of the market-place. And it is she, my darling wife, who sits at my elbow, her slim fingers quickly noting the final bid, her eyes alert for the twitched ear, the flared nostril, the jumping shoulder. And below us, more often than not, sit my four aunts, gazing up at us with expressions of permanent astonishment.

My wife and I look down from our table with secret contempt. Thanks to her having kept the books for my predecessor, we have managed to divert most of his custom to ourselves and we make a very good living from it. But a living is all it is: once the last dirty note has been handed in for the last dirty lot, we lay aside our books and hammer and enter a very different world – the world bequeathed to us by Vinson. His photograph is everywhere in our house, and behind a curtain in the living-room is a full-length oil-painting of him, in the full-dress of Co-Warden of the Badgeries.

Our marriage was inevitable. Far from regarding her as Vinson’s murderer, I think of her as the only person who really understood his teachings. When he died, he took my old identity with him, and my irresponsible attitude to women was part of it. Until his death, I had been able to be promiscuous because I had known that he, with his immovable firmness, was at my side. Once he went, a panic emptiness came over me: I looked frantically for something solid to replace him.

Who should this be but she, my wife? When a woman loses the great love of her life, she marries, if she possibly can, his closest friend. In this way she is able to continue loving the dead man and to build her marriage strongly on a symbolic foundation. This man, she reasons, as she looks curiously at her husband, is a poor fish. But he is the nearest I can get to the big one that got away.

Does this sound as if I had had a rather poor deal in my marriage? I think not. If you consider my reason for marrying her side by side with her reason for marrying me, I think you will find we come out about quits. Dr Bitterling dunks so, anyway, and he is not a man who says silly things.

In the evenings, when our work is done, we explore Vinson’s world. I am still a lazy man and my study of symbolism would soon
falter were it not for the ardour of my wife. Like many other women she has a merciful faculty for forgetting things which would plague the conscience of a man. She can, for instance, describe in full detail – and how frequently she does so! – how Vinson looked as he came marching up Rathbone Place: no detail of the carnage of coach, bread, gunner, and pike has been forgotten. But she has absolutely no recollection of the immediate cause of his death. She believes that he stepped on something slippery at about the time he came abreast of her and that his heart, weakened by over-exertion, gave out at the same moment. Consequently, it is Channing she blames for having killed Vinson – and, through Channing, the whole structure of our present-day society. ‘If the whole world were not rotten for want of abstract and spiritual values,’ she puts it, ‘it would not have been necessary to heap on the shoulders of one devoted man a burden that should be shared by millions.’ I am aware that from a purely factual point-of-view she has not described Vinson’s death accurately; but viewed from the higher levels of thought, her interpretation is pretty fair. I am the only man who saw her raised arm and the stink-bomb in her hand, and already, after a few years of higher thought, the image is becoming vaguer. I now see only what looks like a birch rod with a knob at the end: in a few more years it will have become a tendril bearing a flower. Dr Bitterling says this is quite normal, and that this is an age, thank goodness, when
angst
and guilt are slowly being enveloped by the healing arms of an infinite symbolism.

My wife and I are now applying for membership in the Identity Club for the following reason. Throughout our working day we have no identity whatever. From our dais we look down on the pushing mob of hysterical buyers with a disgust too great for words. If we did not detach ourselves utterly from the spectacle below we could not go on living at all. So great is our contempt that we do not hesitate to be pretty sharp in our dealings: the bidder who tries too eagerly to catch my eye pays dear for his imprudence. And this, we feel, is the proper fate for greedy materialists: it is we who have higher interests and more-devoted principles who glean the pennies from the dirty pockets of the average man.

So once the money is in the bank and my wife and I are at home again, we take up our true identities. Together, we read a passage from some one of Vinson’s favourite books, after which we discuss it and
try to ascertain what he might have concluded from it. Then comes a brief supper off celluloid plates, quickly over. After that, we read again and make notes in our journals. At eleven, we go to bed: that was Vinson’s hour. At the turn of the moon we fill a cow’s horn with an essence of boiled herbs and bury it in the compost-heap. Twice a week we copy out passages from Vinson’s letters in Italianate script. About once a month we secretly abstract, and read, one another’s journals; this is always a painful experience.

And so it goes. We love our way of life but we would like to spread our identities farther afield. We know that there are people like ourselves springing up all over the nation today, that rebirth into symbolic identities is one of the new spiritual values of the times. In your Club we would hope to find dedicated men who, like ourselves and Dr Bitterling, have tried, like Vinson, to put as great a distance as possible between how they live and what they believe. There was a time, they say, when men loved their work and gave their best to it. But those days are gone. We are glad they are gone. Dr Bitterling says we are right to be glad.
And
Dr
Bitterling
is
never
wrong.

*

‘How,’ cried the President, above the applause, ‘we love the beginnings of orations – the expectant silence, the promise, so rarely kept, of novelty! But how much more we love orations’ ends! Like prisoners at last released, we wander free in the world of our own thoughts. We see the speaker resume his seat, and as his last words fade into the past, never to be recalled, we start forward in our chairs, burning to press on him, in the disguise of questions, the ideas with which we have consoled ourselves throughout his address. We applaud him not because he has brought his own history to a close but because he has at last brought our own closer to a beginning. Moreover, there are to be other speakers after him, and the sight of him reseating himself is a sign that their number has been mercifully reduced by one. So I am sure we are all grateful to Dr Bitterling for his address, which, when you come to think of it – if so you ever do – might have been much longer. Has anybody any further compliments to pay?’

‘Obviously,’ said Dr Shubunkin, ‘he worked his fingers to the bone. Well, not quite to the bone; down to the second skin, say. Had he but gone a shade deeper he would have uncovered a perfectly obvious
sexual situation and seen this badger of his in a very different light. Yes, a very different light indeed.’

‘Symbolism is more my field than his,’ said Father Orfe, rising with a hiccup, ‘so I am not speaking lightly when I say I admired the way he got his false teeth into it. Unfortunately, owing to the eminent split in my personality, I was either too drunk or too exalted to follow the history closely.’

‘I liked the part about the auction,’ said Dr Musk. ‘But then one is always excited by description of money changing hands. It’s much more fundamental than sex.’

‘The descriptive passages were good, in their way,’ said Mr Harris, ‘and I say that as one who detests
all
descriptive passages. It was, on the whole, a healthy rebuke of the romantic ideal, though I am bound to say that the best part of it was wasted. I refer, of course, to the aunts – those noble Roman matrons round whom the whole history should rightly have revolved.’

‘I was sorry to see no real
centre
to the corpus,’ said Mr Jamesworth. ‘I cannot deny the
embroidery
.’

‘As an average man,’ said Mr Harcourt, ‘I found the whole thing quite above my head. I have no doubt that people do carry hobbies, such as badgers, to an extreme, but I’m not sure I want to
hear
about such people. Still, an average man is always proud to think that he has sat patiently through a lecture of which he has hardly understood a word.’

‘I thought it was a wonderful address,’ said Stapleton, blushing furiously. ‘It gave a new horizon to the vision. It added a new dimension to the thought. It put another foundation under the ground we stand on; it raised the ceiling above our heads.’

‘I should like to ask Bitterling,’ said Mr Jamesworth, ‘what relative importance, if any, he attaches to aunts? Or were his aunts merely thrown in
,
faute
de
mieux
?’