I agreed seriously with him; his brooding concern for the national fate was so well grounded and so sincere. I wondered if Goytz was fixed at the anal stage … and Nash? Or Julian, trotting about with that golden turd in the brown paper parcel? I patted Baum’s shoulder in silent sympathy and signalled the steward for another reviver. Benedicta slept, so innocently, so discreetly. If I had to be murdered, I thought, by somebody I would like it to be by somebody like her. Caradoc’s voice poured in upon me, raised half a tone against the massive thrum of the great engines as they pushed us across the skies of France. “I haven’t wasted my exile one bit” he said exultantly. “Although this trip to Stonehenge nearly killed me with cold. I went down with Pulley and a sextant to take some readings and do some drawings. You know my old interest in deducing a common set of principles for all our architectural constructions? It still stands up, and wherever I touch the matter I get verifications, whether the Parthenon or the Celebes—whether ancient or modern, whether Canberra or Woodhenge. It’s as if city-builders had a built-in gyrocompass which pushed them to build in respect to certain cosmic factors like sun, moon and pole.”
He sipped his drink and adopted a pleased and somewhat glassy expression as he divagated about megaliths aligned to the sun as early as 1800 B.C.; about early Pole Stars like Vega and Betelgeuse and their influence upon the orientation of cities and temples. “Why,” he said regally “Pulley and I even discovered a magnetic field at Stonehenge—a certain place near the centre which gave off enough juice to demagnetise a watch, or make a compass squeal with pain. It’s reminiscent of the spot at Epidaurus where the acoustic wave is at its highest and clearest. I hadn’t got anything to leave as a marker but my drawings have it. I don’t know yet what such a thing might prove. And by the way the same goes for St. Paul’s Cathedral—there’s a magnetic spot in the main aisle, about where they’ve sunk that black hexagonal stone. Again I’m not surprised as perhaps I should be. St. Paul’s is of course more an engineering feat than any of the other cathedrals and naturally much less aesthetically beautiful. It was built by a great artificer in conscious pursuit of mathematical principles; it was not a dream of godhead full of poetry or frozen music or what not. No, it belonged to its age; it was a fitting symbol for a mercantile country in an age dedicated to reason, hovering on the edge of the Encyclopaedia and the Industrial Revolution. It is no accident that the business part of the city, the moneyed part, grouped itself round this great symbol of the stock and share. Nor is it an accident that it should in some ways feel strongly reminiscent of a railway station—say Euston or Waterloo. It stands as a symbol for the succeeding ages which produced both. But after St. Paul’s where do we go? The Dome’s rise is like the South Sea Bubble. The Mercantile dream has been shattered. And now the mob has too much pocket money we can expect nothing so much as a long age of bloodshed expressed by the concrete block. It is hard nowadays to distinguish a barracks from a prison or a block of dwellings—indeed I’d go so far as to say it was impossible. They belong to the same strain of thought—Mobego I call it after our old friend Sipple. I wonder if we’ll see him in Turkey? It is quite impossible to predict what might come out of it, though one can almost be sure that some sort of universal death by boredom and conformity is being hinted at. And I won’t live to see what happens after the blood bath….” He mooned on, slowly drumming himself into innocent slumber with his tongue rocked by the soft drubbing and jolting of the huge plane in the aircurrents of the French mountain-ranges.
I wondered what Julian might make of these considerations. Obviously he would have seen the results of Caradoc’s work.
As Benedicta still slept with the new Vogue on knee I started to make my way across to Vibart in order to exchange a word with him, but I was waylaid once more by the pensive Baum who motioned me to sit down with the obvious intention of opening his heart to me. I hoped we would not have to dwell any longer on the English nation and its habits, as I had long since given up worrying about it; fortunately not, it was now the turn of the Jews. “I am wondering” said Baum sotto voce, looking round to see if we might be overheard “if there isn’t a touch of anti-Semitism entering the firm from somewhere. Lately I have been troubled.” When Baum was troubled he had a very troubled look indeed. “From where?” I said, longing to break free from what threatened to be a curtain lecture.
“From Count Banubula” he said surprisingly enough, suddenly staring me in the eye in a challenging manner. “Banubula?” I said with genuine puzzlement. Baum nodded with compressed lips and went on slowly, with emphasis. “Yesterday I overheard something in the senior boardroom which made me pause, Mr. Felix. He was there addressing a very large group of salesmen. I don’t know what the meeting was about or where they were selling but what he was saying was this: I made a note.” Always meticulous, Baum produced a pocket diary with a note in shorthand. He cleared his throat and read in a vague imitation of Banubula’s aristocratic drawl the following: “‘Now the foreskin, as everybody knows, is part of the poetic patrimony of man; whether firmly but gracefully retracted or in utter repose it has been the subject for the greatest painters and sculptors the world has known. Reflect on Michelangelo, his enormous range….’” Baum put the book away with pursed lips and said, “That was all I heard because they closed the door, but I was very struck. I wondered if all those salesmen were Jews and whether he was….” I drained my drink and took the dear fellow by the forearm. “Listen,” I said, “for Godsake listen Baum. Michelangelo was a Jew. Everybody was a Jew: Gilles de Rais, Petrarch, Lloyd George, Marx and Spender, Baldwin, and Faber and Faber. This much we know for certain. BUT THEY HAVE ALL KEPT THEIR FORESKINS. What you don’t know is that Banubula himself is a Jew. So am I.”
“He is not. He is Lettish” said Baum obstinately.
“I assure you he is. Ask anyone.” Baum looked mollified but in some deeper way unconvinced. He said: “Now that this work of his is so delicate that it is on the Top Secret list one doesn’t quite know what he is doing. I hesitate to accuse the firm of course; but with a Lett one never knows where one is.” He looked overwrought. I took my leave of him in lingering loving fashion, smoothing out his sleeve and assuring him that everything would be all right. “Above all resist the impulse to become anti-Lettish” I said, and he nodded his acquiescence, though his face still wore a twisted and gloomy expression. He buried himself in his papers with a sigh.
Nor did Vibart seem the less gloomy as he sat looking sideways and down across the clouds to where somewhere slabs of blue sky were beginning to fabricate themselves. “Ah Felix” he said moodily. “Come and sit down; you never answered my letter.” I admitted the fact. “It was hard to know what to say; I was sorry. One couldn’t just be awkwardly flippant—and flippancy has been our small change up until I ran away, got banged on the head, and wound up in the Paulhaus munching sedatives.”
“I had to tell someone” he said. “And I was hoping that you would stay mad and locked up with the information. But it didn’t work.”
“Heard about Jocas?”
“Of course.”
“Are you coming to see him? Or are you on some other mission and just using the firm’s transport?” Vibart peered sideways at me and shot me a quizzical twisted look. He said nothing for a long time; then he replied with considerable hesitation. “I deliberately made an excuse to come, a publisher’s excuse. But I wanted really to see him once more in the flesh.”
“But you know him, have met him.”
Vibart sighed. “I knew him without really recognising him as the man who had completely altered my life. I suppose it is a common enough experience—and always a surprising one. But what puzzles me is that in getting me my job with the firm he knew full well that I would be transferring myself to London and taking her with me. Why did he, then, feeling as he did and she did? Why not let me moulder away for another four-year spell in the Consular, rising by slow degrees to a Chancery and some trite Councillorship in Ankara or Polis? When I suddenl
y heard the truth I closed my eyes and tried to remember this benign little man’s face. ‘So that was him,’ I said to myself ‘all the time that was him.’ All right, it’s not good grammar; but the surprise hit me between the eyes. And death was the result. It’s so very astonishing that I don’t believe it yet. But I want just to look at him for once—my only link with Pia now on earth, Felix. My Goodness, what a sublime trickster life is, what a double-dealer.”
His eyes had filled with tears, but he conjured them away manfully by blowing his nose in a handkerchief and shaking his head. He stamped on the floor and cursed, and then all of a sudden turned quite gay. I recognised this feeling: after one has talked out a problem there is no longer the weight of it upon the heart; one can get almost gay, though the situation remains as desperate or as disagreeable as ever. “Now” he said, putting away his handkerchief with an air of decision and clearing his lungs. “Now then. That’s enough of that.” Poor Vibart and his lovely wife; I felt rather ashamed to have the figure of the reclaimed Benedicta lying asleep in one of the seats back there. But then death …? We were all crawling about like ants on the Great Bed of Ware, choked with our so-called problems; and with this extraordinary unknown staring us in the face. “To hell with death” said Vibart robustly, as if he had read my mind. “It is merely a provisional solution for people who won’t take the full psychic charge.”
“What on earth’s that?”
“To live for ever, of course. Immortality is built-in my dear boy; it’s like a button nobody dares to touch because the label has come off it and nobody knows what might happen if one dared to press it. The button of the unknown.”
“You are romancing, Vibart.”
“Yes: but then no. I am serious.” He shot another look at me, pensive and thoughtful, and settled himself deeper in his seat. “The thing is,” he said “that things turn into their opposite. For example this man wounded me to the heart, and naturally I hated him—hated him long and with concentrated fury. But after some time the hate began to turn into a perverse kind of affection. I hated him for what he had done, yes; but in the end I was also feeling affectionate, almost grateful for the fact that he had made me suffer so much. Do you see? It was something that was missing from my repertoire, a most valuable experience which I might never have had without him. So now I am ambivalent—love-hate. But I am also consumed with curiosity just to see this chap—this demigod who could hold the future and the happiness of a fellow human being in the palm of his hand. Could administer such advanced lessons in suffering and self-abnegation to others—for I presume that in sending me to the firm in England he knew that I would take her away from him. Did he think more of the firm than of her? And was the inner knowledge of this what decided her fate, made her commit suicide, eh?”
What could one add or subtract? These long and furiously debated questions had obviously gnawed him almost away; they were responsible for the new grey-blond hair, thick and dusty, which had given his features a rare glow of refinement. They were equally responsible for his present slimness—for people who don’t sleep well usually get thin. He had never, in fact, looked handsomer or in better physical trim; the weary, well-cut features had lost the last suspicion of chubbiness, had become mature, had settled into the final shape which the death-mask alone could now perpetuate. Vibart was complete. (I found myself thinking rather along the lines of a dummy-builder, occupied with the stresses and strains of false bone and ligament, nylon skin.)
“You know” he said “that we had a child very late in the day? No? Well we did, or rather perhaps they did. At any rate it was too late in the day for Pia for the result was a Mongol—a horrible little thing with flippers. Thank God, it died after a very short time—but there again I am not sure: did it fall or was it pushed? I think Pia did away with it in pure disgust, and I am glad that she did, if she did. And so on. And so on in endless mélopée. Ouf! my dear Felix, here I am chewing your ear down to a stub when you yourself have really been through it. I came to share your distrust and terror of the firm after I had been in it awhile, after I had watched your antics, your long battle in and around the idea of a personal freedom which must not be qualified by this Merlin octopus. I too wanted to react against all this moral breast-feeding and might well have run away like you did, in order to hide myself away and start something uncontaminated, something really my own. But I decided that we were looking at it from the wrong point of view. I mean that in thinking of the Firm as a sort of Kafka-like construct exercising pressure on us from without we were wrong; the real pressure was interior, it was in ourselves, this pressure of the unconscious lying within our consciousness like a smashed harp. It is this which we should try and master and turn to some use in the fabrication of … well, beauty.”
“Lumme!” I said. “Beauty? Define please.”
“In the deepest sense Beauty is what is or seems fully congruent with the designs and desires of Nature.” We both burst out laughing, like people discovering each other for the nth time in the same maze—instead of finding each other outside the exit, I mean.
“Enough of this” I said and he bowed an apology, his eyes full of laughing exasperation. “Anyway, now it’s too late” he went on. “So we must put a firm face on it; here, have a look at this outline will you? Some spy in the industry has unmasked all the activities of the firm in the drug business. Fortunately for us the manuscript was sent to me; they—he must have been unaware that my house was a Merlin subsidiary. So it gave me a chance to look at it and to muse; how much of this do we want out, and what can be done about it if we don’t? That is why I am here; the Polis end of the drug business is shrouded in mystery, simply because business methods are so different; abacus-propelled, old man. So I want Jocas to see and judge. That’s my excuse anyway.”
He absented himself for a while and I took a look through his drug dossier which was written in rather a jaunty journalistic vein which reminded me vaguely of Marchant’s minutes—though the paper could hardly have been by him…. “Resin of cannabis is collected in various ways including, in Turkey, running through the fields naked to catch it on the bare skin …. Cigarettes are dosed with the dried tops, the shoots, or the flower-pistils powdered …. As for qat, you must chew leaves or branches of the plant, but smoke while you chew and drink water copiously. In Ethiopia it is mixed in a paste with honey or else dried into a curry powder for use with food. In Arabia the leaf is rolled and smoked. But these are only some of the humbler drugs in which Merlin’s has come to deal. The firm has also a virtual corner in Mexican Morning Glory seed—ololiuqui. But if the oriental end of the firm handles products which give it rather an old-fashioned air, the London end is fully aware of contemporary standards and demands. The pharmaceutical subsidiaries of Merlin have gone further than any other such organisations. Befotenin, for example, is a drug first found in the skin-glands of toads (the Bufo vulgaris) and also in the leaves of the mimosacea of the Orinoco. This is already finding new medical uses as a hallucinatory snuff, though it is still on the secret list of the firm. Merlin subsidiaries are also working on a protein fraction obtained from the blood serum of schizophrenes which has been named taraxein; injections of this substance induce apparent schizophrenia in monkeys. But most disturbing of all the new secret drugs is Ditran—which is calculated to be very much more powerful than LSD or Mescalin….”
Here at last I came upon some marginalia in the characteristic handwriting of Marchant. “Ref Ditran. A single dose of 15 mg. rocks the world, old man; for extreme cases in the Paulhaus they supply multiple doses of 30 mg. intramuscularly. God, you should hear them scream! It is so painful and so terrifying that the cures are often instantaneous as Lourdes and often much more general. The author is also slightly out about LSD. When the syndrome gets out of hand chlorpromazine can save the day with 20 to 50 mg. intramuscular doses repeated every thirty minutes—unless the heart gives out.”
Vibart was back from his wash and brush up. “Well I see nothing wrong about all
this.” He lit a cigar and said: “I don’t know. It’s a question of degree. For example we have launched (under the counter, so to speak) a new cocktail with immense adolescent appeal—equal parts of vodka and Amanita muscaria juice—the hallucinogenic mushroom, no less. It’s called a Catherine Wheel, after Catherine the Great I suppose who used to mushroom herself insensible in between love-affairs. For my part I just don’t know how much of all this should go out or not. We shall see what Jocas thinks, and then what Julian says.” He read in a sententious voice a phrase which went: “‘Since earliest times a change of consciousness has been accredited with great healing power; this was recognised since the Eleusinian Mysteries and long before them.’” Then he snapped the MS shut and thrust it back into his glossy briefcase. “We shall see” he said.
Night was falling over the dark sea, the clouds were straining away westward. We had lost altitude and gained the last frail blueness of the evening; softly we came down with an occasional rubbery bump, as if an air bladder had been as often smacked with the flat of the hand, until we were moving along almost in the water. Under us a fresh spring sea tilted and coiled back on itself, it’s simply lazy gesturing suggesting all the promise of sunshine which could not long be deferred. The lights went on and turned the outer world to lavender and then to dark purple. We were running along a heavily indented coastline with an occasional mountain pushing its snout into the empty sky. Somewhere a moon was rising. In another hour or so we should be skating and strumming across the Bay of Naples, where the captain had elected to stay the night and refuel. But it was not worth going ashore as his plan was to start on the next leg of the flight a good hour before dawn, to gain as much light as possible for the Greek touch-down which he seemed to regard as rather more chancy than the Naples halt. None of this was our affair; we dined early and slept in our comfortable bunks.