The Song of the Flea (44 page)

Pym, who had slipped off the high wire of tight-strung exhilaration after he had torn up the letter, was falling, now, into a deep and dangerous darkness.
What
the
hell
is
the
use
of
anything,
when
there
are
such
people
in
the
world?
he said to himself. “I beg pardon? Did you say something?” he said to the barmaid.

“I said it was a long time since we’d seen you.”

“Well, you don’t seem to have died of a broken heart in the meantime. The place doesn’t seem to have shut down. You’ve survived. And if you never saw me again as long as you lived I wouldn’t mind betting that you’d live to your dying day. I hope you haven’t been lying awake at night thinking about me. You don’t look as if you’ve been losing your appetite on my account.”

“What’s the matter with you? Got the rats?” asked the barmaid.

“I beg pardon. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“That’s what it is,” said the barmaid, giving him his beer, bread-and-cheese and pickles, “that’s what it is. You’ve got the rats. Rats, rats, long-tailed rats with eyes like pale green gooseberries. That’s what it is.”

“That’s what it is. Rats. Millions of rats. And I don’t mean the nice rats—the brave, clever, honourable rats with long teeth and long tails.”

“Well, cheer up, dear—we’ll soon be dead.”

“The sooner the better,” said Pym.

“What’s the matter, duck? In love?”

“The answer to that is Yes and also No,” said Pym.

The barmaid was a motherly woman. She gave Pym a newspaper and said: “You eat your nice bread-and-cheese and drink your nice beer all up, and look at the cartoon. That’ll make you laugh.”

Pym began to read the newspaper. War was on the way; blitz-war of unimaginable frightfulness. The Old Man was whetting the scythe. Things were happening in Southern and Central Europe—things to turn the stomach. A woman had been sent to prison for six months for burning her two-year-old son with a red-hot poker because he wet the bed. A man in one of the Home Counties had been fined for beating a dog to death. An American heiress who had inherited forty million dollars had bought herself a Russian Prince: he had insisted on a marriage settlement of half a million dollars a year. Four negroes had been strung up, drenched with petrol, and burned in Georgia. The police were looking for the person (unknown) who had raped and strangled, or strangled and raped, an eight-year-old schoolgirl. Four people had perished in a fire.

Pym said: “Good God Almighty! Created in God’s image! The highest form of life! The last word in civilisation! You can keep it.”

“D’you think there really will be a war?” asked the barmaid.

“Yes,” said Pym.

“D’you think there’s anything in what they say about bombs wiping us out of existence—
poof!—
just like that?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. I hope so.”

“D’you think the balloon’s going to go up pretty soon?”

“Yup.”

“I must say I don’t like the look of it. Do you?”

“Nup.”

“Oh well, cheer up—we’ll soon be dead.”

Pym turned two more pages, and came to the little oblongs, the fillers-of-space, in the badlands of the newspaper on the frontier of the Sports Pages. Pym started and cried: “
Hey!
”—and pointed to an inconspicuous paragraph stuck between two grey curtains of sensational bad news that hung from jet-black rods of sombre headlines. It told how Russian scientists had
discovered living organisms in the depths beneath the old Polar ice. “Hey! Look at this!”

“What is it now?” asked the barmaid, with an anxious hand at her throat.

“Didn’t you see this? Good God Almighty, doesn’t anybody ever read anything? Just look and see! See for yourself! Look!” he shouted, jabbing at the paragraph with a violent finger. The landlord came over to look, and the barmaid leant forward, twisting her head to read.

“D’you mean that?”

“Certainly I mean that!”

The landlord looked at the barmaid. The barmaid raised her eyebrows, looking at the landlord. Pym said: “Now this is what I call news! Drinks for everybody—drinks all round! Don’t you get it? Some scientists go to the coldest, deadest, the most desolate place in the world. They go into the cold. They go into the cold in which nothing can live—do you get that? And then they drill down in that primeval cold, into that ancient, primal ice, and what do they find?
Life!
Living things! Almighty God, why do they tuck that away back here? Why isn’t this a front-page headline? Life!”

Then he slapped the barmaid on the shoulder with such force that she fell forward and knocked over his glass, which emptied itself over his knees. But he laughed and said: “Isn’t that a wonderful thing? In that bitter cold? Under all that ice, after all these years? Life, by God!”

Rubbing her shoulder, the barmaid said: “It’s all right.
He
didn’t mean no harm.”

“You’ve had enough. You go home now,” said the landlord.

So Pym went back to Busto’s and worked until dawn, thinking of the marvellous life that survives the frightful cold under the ice in the dead places of the world. Then, after a short sleep, he put on his best suit and went out to talk to Joanna Bowman, and as he walked he whistled a defiant tune.

*

L
ONDON
AND
P
ERCÉ
, Q
UEBEC
, A
UGUST
, 1947