“Well,” I said “he sounds all right.” I poured a drink and resumed my inward brooding upon Iolanthe. I told Benedicta a bit about the marvels of the dummy—it, her?—and how it had given me quite a turn to see the faithfulness of the copy. She looked at me curiously, seriously, and said nothing. “I wonder if I could raise Julian!” I said. “I would like to have a talk with him about her. He hasn’t seen her as yet himself. I wonder if he knows what’s in store if she really works down to the last rivet.”
“Try the Casino in Divonne. Anyway he always leaves his number wherever he goes.”
The night switchboard at Merlin’s took not much more than half an hour to trace him. That characteristic voice, full of the illustrious melancholy of a dispossessed potentate …. “What is it Julian—you sound so sad?” He sighed ruefully. “Yes. I am losing so heavily. It gets more and more mysterious. I wonder what I have done to shift the axis, so to speak, of my luck? It was always in perfect working order. I lost at Divonne and am continuing to lose down here in Nice, where it is snowing if you please.” He paused and in the background I could hear the yelping of croupiers. “Consult Nash” I said and he sighed again. “It would be useless. He could tell me why I played but not why after always winning I have started losing—why the bung-hole has dropped out my luck. I have done everything, changed my game more than once. Damn it all.”
There was another long pause; of course Julian had always been of a melancholy and introspective cast of mind, but he had never given himself, his views, so freely to anyone. “It’s your fault for taking Abel apart” I said. “He might have suggested an answer.” You can’t hear a smile on the telephone but I did—a world-weary sad smile. “It was another gamble. I had to try to suck you dry in case you never came back, to ensure the perpetuity of the firm!” A fine light irony played about the phrase. “Like Rackstraw” I said and he nodded invisibly. “The vulture always waits” said Julian. I heard the puff puff of his cigar. I stayed silent, feeling that perhaps there was something he wanted to get off his chest before listening to whatever I myself wanted to say to him. But he said nothing, and an operator asked if we were still talking: actually we were. All his loneliness and despondency were leaking down the wire like a low-tension current: also a certain anxiety. I felt he was glad to have even this mechanical contact with someone.
“Felix” he said hesitantly, as if he were feeling slowly, blindly along the Ariadne-thread of an idea he wanted to express. “How lucky you are not to be a gambler. We constitute a different tribe, you know, belong to a different totem. I realised tonight that I am only really at home in a casino; I really have no foyer, no hearth of my own, except here. When I go from here I don’t go anywhere in particular. A hotel isn’t a home; and my so-called home is only a hotel. Now be a good boy, don’t quote Freud. The matter is much more fundamental than that.”
Pause for breath. “When you see all these pale, exhausted faces in the light of dawn, after their fruitless love-affair with the wheel or the dice or the pack: this sterile love affair, because even the winners express a haggard lost feeling—why, you realise that masturbation isn’t the real clue. The gambler is really dicing with death, as the popular saying goes. Just as all dancers are simply persuaders to the act, so gambling is a sort of questioning, an act of divination. How weary of it we all are, yet it is the only situation which enables us to feel vicariously alive, this side of death.”
I said nothing; the sorrow in his voice was absolutely overwhelming. He went on very slowly, like an exhausted climber reaching for handholds, languid for lack of oxygen. “But then what is the question that the gambler put to himself by the act of gambling? What does he hope that the dice will tell him? Well, think of the strange symbolic pilgrimage he is forced to make to the casino when he can find one—as characteristic as that made by other men to a brothel. He enters, reveals his identity by producing a passport or other document; he fills in a carte d’admission. Then he passes in front of the ‘physionomiste’, a ‘scanner’ who subjects his face, hands and body to a close scrutiny. This is as intensive as a police check though he does not touch you. My various faces must be on record somewhere in somebody’s mind. A scar, a tattoo mark, a blemish—that is what they look for, this race of ‘scanners’.
“Once past this barrier he is admitted to the temple of the supreme Game which he craves; and here everything speaks to him of the past, of a vanished epoch. An old-fashioned anachronistic décor, whole surfaces of dusty unspringing carpets such as one would find only in abandoned Edwardian hotels or in late spa hotels at Vichy, Pau, Baden. The fuzzy chandeliers, broken-down salons de luxe festering away in their desuetude. Even the costumes of the croupiers and often the gambler’s own partake of this strange out-of-dateness. It is as if everything had become stuck fast like an atrophied limb—death in aspic. The formulae too are all part of this strange marvellous stereotype, as superannuated as a half-forgotten liturgy. It smells like a page or two of Huysmans. Yes, but all this is deliberate; this atmosphere is anxiously preserved, conserved, watched over. And the premises themselves should if possible smell airless and ever so slightly dusty. You do not want fresh air in a casino. The ritual forbids it. The air must rest, tideless, scentless, and only just breathable. The gambler feels at home then like a fish in water of the right temperature. His nostrils breathe this warm welcoming balsam. He knows what he must do, he simply must.”
In this slow near-soliloquy I felt once more all the rancour and despair of his inner loneliness welling up in him—though why for the first time he should choose to allow me to be a party to it I could not tell. Somewhere a bell rang and voices buzzed to the tune of the big wheel. Julian appeared to be listening to it all with half an ear even as he was talking to me. So much of it I remembered myself, too, from my one brief flirtation with the law of probability—is there such a thing? Poking the cat with my foot I shared Julian’s curious muse in silence for a moment.
Yes, he was right: the weight of the ritual, the entering, the form-filling…. Then the decision between les Salles Privées and the cuisine…. On which front to attack the demon of hazard, he whom Poincaré called “the real mathematician of genius”? Ah, those long interior debates on the thirty-seven slots in the wheel (alchemy?), eighteen red and eighteen black with the somehow inevitable white zero. A sort of Tarot of probability instead of a calculus … (perhaps Abel?). But behind the silence of Julian I heard a voice calling, as if from a cloud, “Vingt-et-un rouge, impair et passe.” And I saw the lean face of the arbiter, the chef de partie, sitting up there on his throne, his baby-chair, overlooking the celestial game, impervious to human feelings of gain or loss, a sort of God. And then I thought, too, of all the gambler’s fevers and follies. In that expensive and beautifully cut suit of his, in the breast pocket, he carried a typical talisman, a rabbit’s paw.
“Change your talisman” I said. “Why not get a fox’s paw, or the dried paw of a great lizard, or a human hand?”
“Fatal” he replied drily. “You know it.”
Julian was a heavy staker in the Salles Privées and richly merited the French slang word for the breed, flambeur, inflamer: the flame of pure desire, the mathematical desire to know. Not to be, but to know. And of course he had always won. The croupiers had always passed him his mound of golden ordure which for him symbolised so much more than a unit of value. Negligently but voluptuously he must have fingered it always, before throwing it back into the melting-pot—for only with gold can one make gold, whatever the wizards may tell you. I remembered too that when numbers run in a series they are said in gambler’s slang to be en chaleur, on heat.
“None of this can have anything to do with what you wanted to talk to me about,” he said “and I apologise. I was in rather a reflective mood this evening. What did you want to tell me about, Felix?”
“Iolanthe. I went to see her with Marchant today, and I’m still a little groggy with surprise. It is the most astonishingly life-like thing I’ve ever seen. A
nd if everything he tells me is true it will be rather unique. But I haven’t read the specifications in detail yet. I’ll do that this week. But there were one or two things which struck me about her, it.”
“I’m delighted that you are excited” he said, and sounded almost moved himself. “But” I went on “I felt that I wanted to go over some of the points with you in case we hadn’t fully understood your idea—I suppose, for example, the male will be much the same?”
“Same what?”
“Fair without, false within. I mean I found myself wondering why we were copying the outside with such fidelity when the inside is an artificially arranged thing with simply a stress, strain, flexion index.”
“It’s not entirely true—what about the brainbox?”
“But they will never eat, excrete or fornicate….”
“We are perhaps asking for too much at this stage. Let’s go step by step. I wasn’t hoping for reality so much as for the perfect illusion which is probably more real than reality itself is for most people; hence my choice of the screen-star symbol. As for fornicating, I suppose they can go through the motions, though it will be without result, sterile; but they will try to illustrate an aesthetic of Beauty, which is always in the eye of the beholder as ‘The Duchess’ tells us. Eh?”
“Eunuchs!”
“If you wish; but did Aphrodite eat and excrete? I am not enough of a classical scholar to quibble about it. After all these are only serious toys, Felix, serious toys.”
“But Marchant insists they are so perfectly adapted from the point of view of responses that they could, according to him, be turned loose in the real world without danger of being discovered for what they are.”
“Why not, Felix? They will probably be more real than most of the people we know. But of course I have no intention of setting them free; first of all, Iolanthe’s face is world-famous. We mustn’t run the risk of their getting damaged. No, I thought of them living in seclusion quietly somewhere where we could work-study them; they are far the most advanced things of their kind, after all?”
“Hum. And who will the male doll be based on; we only have legs and the outline of a pelvis as yet. Eh?”
He yawned briefly and then went on in the same even tone. “You can guess how much I would have liked to aspire to the role myself—but it would be too Pharaonic, a sort of embalmer’s picnic. So I have stepped down in favour of Rackstraw.”
“Rackstraw?”
“We will confer a vicarious immortality on him; he will end as a museum piece in some colony of waxworks. But of course I mean Rackstraw as he was once, not as he is now. Once again, we have all the information we need about him. Any objections?”
“No. But the whole thing seems bizarre.”
“In one sense I suppose it is; but then Felix, it’s only a gambler’s idea. I remember you once insisting that habit grooves the sensibility, that even movements repeated endlessly generate comprehension, just as an engine generates traction, or sticks rubbed together, fire. What I wonder is this: will perhaps this creature of human habits one day, simply by acting as a human being, REALISE she is a dummy?” The capital word was practically hissed into the telephone. “As much, I mean, as the original realised she was Iolanthe? It’s a gamble, and like all prototypes our models may prove too clumsy for us to practise divination on or by them. But then if one does not live on hopes in this life what else is there to live on?”
“I see.”
“Good night Felix” he said. “Wish me a run of luck will you? I am in mortal need of it.”
The line went dead. I sat for a long moment before hanging up from my end. Benedicta was laying out our dinner before the fire, ladling out soup into the bright earthenware pots which looked Italian. I was in a state of unusual and rather violent excitement—though I honestly don’t know why. Of course in part it was all the implications of this extraordinary project; but I had seen others, far more theoretical, where the issues were much more in doubt. And of course, with one half of my mind, I could not help thinking of it as a bit infantile. Was it though? At any rate, whatever the cause, I ate in very perfunctory fashion while I dipped here and there into my brief—the dossier.. It was all as beautifully and methodically laid out as the specifications for a new aircraft. The only question was: would it fly, how would it handle etc. etc.?
“Benedicta,” I said “I must go out for a walk. I simply must.” She looked at me with surprise. “In this weather? It would be foolhardy, Felix.” But I was already groping for a heavy sweater and the stout ski-gear I had acquired in Switzerland. Seeing I was serious she sprang up at once and joined me. “I’m coming with you; I am not going to risk letting you fall into the lake or break your head against a tree. It’s all too new this, Felix, to be risked.” I felt a bit of a swine, but was really extremely glad to have her beside me as a sort of thinking generator. It had stopped snowing, everything was hushed back into whiteness—apocalyptic flocks of solid cumulus which had filled out the world and blotted out the edges of things. No moon, but an infinity of white radiance which turned the sky into an upturned inkwell. We found a stout storm lantern in the kitchen for want of a torch, and let ourselves off the dry balcony as gingerly as swimmers entering the sea splashlessly. The forest had still some edges left which were a help in judging our general direction—as if someone had spilled Indian ink over a lace shawl. Within a few yards we divined rather than felt that we were upon the ice of the frozen lake. The snow was so dry it screeched underfoot. Somewhere in the sky wild geese cranked out to one another.
We made our way slowly across the lake to the little island in the centre, now piled up like a wedding-cake of whiteness. At the far end of the lake itself a solitary figure, a gamekeeper, moved about in the greyness absorbed in a task which could only be gradually identified as we approached him. With a crowbar and hammer he was knocking holes in the ice and pushing something down them—to feed fish perhaps? We called out a greeting but he was completely absorbed and did not hear us. We skirted the little islet—and gained the further shore, lengthening our stride at the feel of terra firma. “Science is only half the apple,” I told myself aloud “just as Eve is only half Adam.” Blundering along thus the mechanised philosopher could hardly help falling over the odd tree trunk, or banging his head on a branch or two. But gradually we became accustomed to the light and were able to move about with as much certainty as one might have done by day.
A distinct violet shimmer in the light where it caressed the shoulders of the little hills. On a branch one old and perished-with-cold-looking owl, fluffed out in his mink like some run-down actor. (The margin of error in the case of such a talking mummy was, of course, enormous.) “There is little that I can guarantee about her once she is buttoned up and launched. I can’t even say for certain that she will be good, for example, or bad; only that she is more likely to be clever than stupid.” So we struggled on down the avenues of shrouded elms, along the firebrakes which once we used to ride down, and over the frozen gudgeon. Gradually the warmth came to our bodies despite wet boots and wetter trouser-bottoms. Sometimes she looked at me for a moment without speaking. So we passed the little crooked pub called The Faun which was locked and barred at this hour; a bedroom window glowed like a jewel. Our boots rang musically on the frozen tarmac of the road as we traversed the hamlet. Then from one of the dark barn-like houses we were surprised to see a deep red flame spring up, and spit out a great gush of brilliant sparks; it spurted and subsided, spurted and subsided, and we heard the massy ring of the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil, and the wheeze of his bellows. In the shadow of his smithy, bobbing his shadow about on the roof, moved the huge creature, stripped to the waist and sweating profusely. We stood to watch him for a moment but he worked on methodically without giving us a glance. Perhaps he did not even know we were there.
On we went, up into the white night, and it was only when we reached the old crown of Chorley with the famous “view” from its summit that Benedicta said: ??
?By the way, I meant to tell you before. I have completely surrendered, made away, all my share in the firm. I now own nothing but what I stand up in, so to speak. I am a public charge. All that stands between me and starvation is your salary. Do you mind?”
We stood up there gazing at each other smiling—like a couple of explorers on an ice floe, oblivious of everything but the extraordinary pleasure we were deriving from the new sensation of harmony, of comprehension and trust. “How marvellous” I said. “Is that what Julian meant about you having betrayed him?” Benedicta nodded: “Only partly, though. He was also thinking of the young German Baron; I was supposed to make him sign on the firm’s strength, but I did the opposite and the firm didn’t get him. It was the first time I had deliberately set my face against Julian—he didn’t like it; but so long as he needs you he can do nothing.”
* * * * *
“O! O! O!” Marchant was humming under his breath as he worked on Iolanthe. “You great big beautiful doll! I’m so very glad I found you. Let me get my arms around you.” A low current was discharging itself through her throat and she stirred slightly in her sleep, turning her head from side to side, then yawning and smiling. Marchant still adhered to his superstitious convention of keeping her covered while she was in pieces; so that we were working on different sections at the same time. We would see her whole, so to speak, only when she came to be launched; by that decisive stage it would be hard to make rectifications without totally dismantling the power box with all its hair-fine infratopes—it would be as if we were forced to begin again at the beginning. God knows how long she had cost already, probably years of amazingly detailed work. I had a great reunion with Said, who was very smart in hefty British tweeds and who had assumed the habits and the dignity of the uniform with his usual equanimity. It was good to feel that all that infinite patience and delicacy was really making its mark on a world which could reward him as I had never been able to when I began work with him in the Greek capital.