Boxer, Beetle (15 page)

‘The fact is, however, that Jews are also often very cunning and good with money, and I’d say very few Anglo-Saxon men are cunning and good with money in quite the same vicious way. A shame to lose that entirely. It comes in useful. So what to do? I believe that, under certain conditions, there is a way to use advanced selective breeding to separate the good qualities from the bad ones so that only the bad qualities need be sloughed off. You keep the Jew’s cunning – double it, in fact – but not his general vileness. Of course, the method is exceptionally complex, and, for it to succeed, the scientist or despot in charge would need to be able to plan, in advance, every single sexual pairing over at least a dozen generations – which is what I’m attempting to achieve with my insects.’

‘Couldn’t you have got some other Jew, then? Lot of us about. Nearly as many as beetles.’

‘I didn’t choose you as an experimental subject because you’re Jewish. I chose you because of your physique. If every soldier in the British Army were as strong and tough as you, then we’d be feared all over the world. But equally if every soldier was also as stunted as you, then we’d be a laughing stock. You’re like the crippled but clever dog, you see, or the greedy but cunning tribe. So what to do? Let you breed, or not? The orthodox eugenicists would say that you should not be allowed to. That your bloodline should be terminated because of a silly flaw you were born with, even though you have so much else to offer. But isn’t that unfair?’ Erskine was talking loudly and his hands were fists. ‘Very unfair? And cruel and stupid?’ He quietened. ‘So my theory differs. I call it lemniscate breeding, after the Latin for “ribbon”, because of the way an inherited trait may curve away from the general population and then back towards … well, anyway, that’s the essence.’

‘But I wouldn’t get to choose who I fucked?’

‘No. But you wouldn’t complain, because you’d be lucky to have the chance to take a wife at all. If you were weak as
well as short – if you had nothing else to offer – there’d be no question of it. Or at least there wouldn’t if things were run with any sense, which at present they are not.’

‘Works out nicely for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Works out nicely for you, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want a wife?’ said Sinner.

‘Yes.’

‘Kids?’

‘I am the heir to Claramore. Of course I shall get married and have children of my own. It’s quite obvious what you’re insinuating, Seth. But the theory is not merely self-serving. I can acknowledge that I’m not especially handsome or athletic or warlike, and it doesn’t matter a jot. First of all, I have my intellect. Second, and more importantly, I come from a good family. Eugenics is a radical science, yes, but we are in England, not Russia, and no one is going to start interfering with England’s good families. That would be against the founding spirit of the endeavour. I have nothing to fear from even the crudest programme of racial improvement. This theory is about the masses. Which is why I’m testing it first of all on the beetles I brought back from Poland. I want to see if I can breed a strain in which every undesirable quality is eradicated and yet every desirable quality is amplified. No compromises, no sacrifices. Do you begin to understand now?’

Sinner nodded.

‘I’m glad. It’s not often that I have the opportunity to discuss all this.’ As soon as he’d said it, Erskine realised how laughable it was to be treating Sinner as someone you could possibly ‘discuss’ anything with. ‘I’m going to my club,’ he added abruptly. At his club, he read in the newspaper about a New Yorker called Albert Fish who had been sent to the electric chair for the kidnap and murder of a little girl called
Grace Budd. At the age of twelve, living in an orphanage, Fish had begun a sexual relationship with a telegraph boy, and his homosexuality had soon developed into sadomasochism and coprophagia, and after that into murder and cannibalism. He was known as the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire or the Gray Man. Once a girl in the crowd at the Oxford–Cambridge boat race had referred to Erskine as ‘that grey man’.

The next day Erskine got a letter from his father, who for nearly a year had been planning a sort of political conference at Claramore. Now the date was set at last, for the beginning of August. Eminent men were to come from all over the world, and Erskine himself was to be allowed to give a short lecture on eugenics. Reading on, his great excitement was replaced by relief when he deduced that Evelyn had not yet said anything to his father about his suspicious ‘valet’; but then his relief was replaced in turn by dismay when his father, in a postscript, threatened to cut off his son’s funds if Erskine didn’t keep a promise that he had made nearly two years ago. He had a tiresome project to complete, and the final deadline was now the conference. For at least a month, then, the boxer and the beetles would have to be left mostly to their own devices. It was time to write the history of Pangaean – the Erskine dynasty’s greatest pride, and greatest embarrassment.

When Lydia Erskine’s pregnancy became conspicuously visible late in 1881, her husband felt nervous and decided he needed a project of his own. And that was why, four months later, on the same day that the Jews were driven out of the village of Fluek, the adverbs were driven out of the English language.

‘What’s the use of them?’ said Erasmus Erskine. ‘If we set grammatical rectitude aside, is there any difference between “The horse galloped swiftly” and “The horse galloped swift”?’

(This, anyway, is how I’m almost sure that Philip Erskine was almost sure that it must have happened.)

‘No,’ replied Richard Thurlow. ‘But there is a difference between “Coldly, he threw his wife’s love letters on to the fire” and “Cold, he threw his wife’s love letters on to the fire”.’

The two friends sat drinking coffee in the drawing room of Claramore Hall. Above their heads, Philip Erskine’s grandmother was in her seventh hour of labour, and exactly a thousand miles away Seth Roach’s grandmother was dressing her two sleepy daughters while her four-foot husband waited at the door of their cottage, the smallest man in Fluek standing guard with a scythe against the smallest pogrom in Russian Poland.

‘Very clever, Thurlow, I’m sure, but once again you’ve missed the point by a furlong. In a true philosophical language, there would be no such ambiguity because there would be no word that meant both “of a low physical temperature” and “unemotional”.’

Ever since the collapse three years earlier of
Ultima Thule
,
the London archaeological periodical of which he had been sole patron and publisher-in-chief, Erskine had not really known how to occupy himself; it was this that had led to his belated experiment in courtship and marriage, but after that he was still bored. Thurlow had tried to persuade him to take up poetry, but he found it to be a frivolous parasite on human endeavour, and after he was not permitted to stand in the general election as the Conservative candidate for North Hampshire he began to feel much the same of politics. As Lydia bloated, he kept returning in his mind to certain points of discussion at the last ever
Ultima Thule
editorial meeting, which was convened in March 1879 at the United Universities Club.

The explorer Ferdinand Silkstone, on his return from India, had asked to publish an article in the magazine about the legendary sunken kingdom of Kumari Kandam, claiming that on the Coromandel coast near Madras he had discovered a network of undersea caves which showed evidence of habitation by some advanced civilisation at least twenty thousand years past. At two o’clock that day, because Silkstone had not yet arrived at the meeting with his article, they were speculating with great excitement about the Tamil ancients of Kumari Kandam. How might they have spoken, for instance? Marcus Amersham, the editor of
Ultima Thule
, believed they would have had a melodic tongue of wonderful elegance, which reminded Gibbs, the treasurer, of a French musician called François Sudre who had invented an entirely new mode of communication called Solresol based on the seven notes of the scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. After that of course they began to talk about the Royal Society of the seventeenth century, whose members were mad for
a priori
constructed languages, and Dodson, the secretary, even brought up St Hildegard, a twelfth-century abbess of Rupertsberg in the diocese of Mainz who had invented a language of nine hundred words in order to talk to angels. Then Silkstone arrived.

Silkstone was a cheerful burly man whose laughter could have torn the stitches out of a straitjacket. He spoke for about an hour. Afterwards, everyone but Erskine broke out into applause. The explorer gave his thanks and left. And then the row began.

Erskine alone thought they ought to see more evidence before they published the article: Silkstone’s story had been contradictory and his sketches imprecise, and he had not brought back a single ancient artefact, supposedly because they were all too fragile. Amersham, Gibbs and Dodson, meanwhile, were convinced that Silkstone’s sensational findings would finally give
Ultima Thule
the upper hand against their smug rival
The Journal of the British Ethnological Society
. In the end Erskine, unpersuaded, felt he had no choice but to withdraw his money from the magazine in protest, which meant of course that there could never be another issue. He had not spoken to Amersham or Gibbs or Dodson since that day, and almost every night for three years he had lain awake in bed wondering if Silkstone could have been telling the truth after all. Kumari Kandam’s failure to make an appearance in
The Journal of the British Ethnological Society
was only partial vindication, since its editors were famously narrow-minded. Could he have inadvertently suppressed the greatest archaeological revelation of the age? Thurlow thought it was ridiculous but Erskine knew he could never be certain. And his former colleagues were still very well respected, whereas everyone had forgotten him down here in Hampshire.

These days, however, although he was still preoccupied with certain details of that meeting, it was not so much with Kumari Kandam as with the notion of a universal artificial language – a language without irregularities, idiosyncrasies or ambiguities. The point was not just to bring together men of different nations, but to clear their heads in the process: there would be no room for fallacy or paradox in a language where every word bore a perfect Adamic relationship to its object.
Excavating the past was enjoyable enough, but to construct one of these languages would be to invent the future.

‘But Erskine, no one wants to speak a brand-new language for the same reason that no one wants to live in a brand-new castle,’ said Thurlow in the drawing room of Claramore. ‘A language needs its secret passages and bricked-up dungeons. Otherwise poets like me would have no profession.’

‘A good thing too,’ said Erskine. And then they heard a baby’s scream.

Feeling that he could have no useful influence on his heir until the boy was at least eight or nine, Erskine began his project in earnest. He was determined to construct the language without any contaminating influences from any existing languages except perhaps Latin and Greek; but it was much harder than he’d anticipated, and he got himself in hopeless tangles with even the most basic syncategoremata, often rushing down to dinner very late to find his wife chatting happily with Thurlow. He was even forced to consider putting the adverbs back in, but concluded that he had left himself no room for them, on the same day in June 1882 that Sinner’s grandfather returned with his wife and daughters to Fluek, where they were told by local officials that, according to Tsar Alexander III’s new Temporary Regulations, no Jews were allowed to settle in the countryside of Russian Poland. When they explained that their family had lived in Fluek for generations and they had only been absent for a few months to escape the pogrom, they were asked to point out where they had lived – which they couldn’t do because their house had been burnt down and their land taken over. So they left Fluek again and went north to the city of Bialystok, where their third child, Sinner’s father, was born on the same day in January 1890 that Erskine completed the 998-page first draft of the
Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon
.

Thurlow had continued to discourage his efforts. He kept bringing up Volapük, which was at that time the most
popular artificial language in Europe, with two hundred thousand speakers, and which had just held its Third International Congress at a hotel in Paris, where even the waiters and porters had conversed only in the appropriate tongue. He pointed out that Volapük had been created by a German parish priest called Johann Martin Schleyer who was not only a talented poet and musician but who also had at least a basic familiarity with eighty-three languages – whereas Pangaean was being created by Erasmus Erskine, who hated poetry, hated music and knew only English, Latin, Greek and a little French. Erskine retorted that Schleyer was a Catholic. Thurlow also noted that Volapük, based largely on English, could be picked up in a few weeks – whereas Pangaean, which had thirty participatory valences, forty derivative conflations, fifty adjunctive modalities and sixty-nine consonantal mutations, was so complex that even Erskine himself could not pretend to be fluent. Erskine retorted that the language was not intended for sluggards. Over those eight years Pangaean was the cause of many arguments, and by the time Thurlow published his celebrated verse cycle
Ischys and Coronis
Erskine was so angry with his old friend that he refused even to have a copy in the house. This upset Lydia, who was very fond of Thurlow, one of their only friends in Hampshire; she demanded that the two men reconcile in order that the handsome Old Wykehamist could carry on coming to dinner.

But far worse than his old friend’s niggling was Erskine’s discovery that Marcus Amersham, of all people, was working on an artificial language too. Orba, as it was called, already had a social club devoted to it in Yorkshire, whose members were at work translating the Bible. At the back of every pamphlet on Orba, Amersham included eight promissory forms. They read: ‘I, the undersigned, promise to learn the international language proposed by Professor Amersham, if it appears that ten million people have publicly given the same promise.’ On the other side was space for name and
address. When Amersham, who was not really a professor, had received 10 million promissory notes, he was going to publish a book with all the names and addresses of the signatories. Whenever Erskine felt especially frustrated about the popularity of Orba, which sounded to him like nothing more than hissing and oinking, he would sit down with his wife for three or four hours and try to teach her the basics of trans-relative participants or sequential iconicity, but although she seemed enthusiastic about the basic premise of an artificial language, her progress was very disappointing, and he began to wonder for the first time in their marriage if he’d chosen the right bride. He bitterly regretted that he had not developed Pangaean in time to bring up his son to speak it as his first language. The same firm that had printed
Ultima Thule
was now printing thousands of copies of the
Reduced Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon
to be given away in tobacconists.