Gormenghast (9 page)

       In holding the views of their Master on such enormous themes they had developed a fear of their colleagues and a prickliness of disposition which, as Perch-Prism had cruelly pointed out to them more than once, was inconsistent with their theory of non-existence. 'Why are you so prickly,' he used to say, 'when there ain't no pain or prickles?' At which the three, Spiregrain, Splint and Throd, would all at once become a single black tent as they shot into conference with the speed of suction. How they longed at times for their bearded Leader to be with them! He knew all the answers to impertinent questions.

       They were unhappy men, these three. Not with native melancholy, but in views of their theories. And there they sat: the smoke wreaths coiling round them, their eyes moving suspiciously from one face to another of their heretic brethren, in jealous fear of a challenge to their faith.

       Who else had entered? Only Cutflower, the dandy; Crust, the sponger; and the choleric Mulefire.

       Meanwhile The Fly Had been standing in the corridor with his knuckles between his teeth, and had been emitting the shrillest of whistles. Whether they caused the sudden appearance of the few stragglers at the end of the corridor or whether these characters were in any case on their way to the Common-room, there was no doubt that The Fly's shrill music added speed to their steps.

       Smoke hung above them as they approached the door, for they had no desire to enter Fluke's fug, as they called it, with virgin lungs.

       'The "Yawner's" here,' said The Fly as the Professors came abreast, their gowns fluttering. A dozen eyebrows were raised. It was seldom that they saw the Headmaster.

       When the door was closed upon the last of them the leather room was, indeed, no place for anyone with asthma. No flowers could flourish there unless, indeed, some gaunt and horny thing - some cactus long inured to dust and thirst. No singing birds could thrive - no, not the raven, even; for smoke would fill their thin, sweet windpipes. It knew nothing, this atmosphere, of fragrant pastures - of dawn among the dew-bright hazel woods - or rivulets or starlight. It was a leather cave of sepia fog.

       The Fly, his sharp insect face hardly visible through the smoke, swarmed up the high chair, hand over hand, and found Deadyawn asleep and his water-bottle stone cold. He prodded the Headmaster in the ribs with his little bony thumb just where Taurus and Scorpio were overlapping. Deadyawn's head had sunk even lower during his sleep and was barely above the tray. His feet were still tucked under him. He was like some creature that had lost its shell, for his face was disgustingly naked. Naked not only physically, but naked in its vacancy.

       At The Fly's prod he did not wake with a start, as is the normal thing: that would have been tantamount to a kind of interest in life. He merely opened one eye. Moving it from The Fly's face, he let it wander over the miscellany of gownsmen below him.

       He closed his eye again. 'What... are... all... these... people... for?' His voice floated out of his soft head like a paper streamer. 'And why am I' he added.

       'It's all very necessary,' answered The Fly. 'Shall I remind you, sir, yet again of Barquentine's Notice?'

       'Why not?' said Deadyawn. 'But not too loudly.'

       'Or shall Bellgrove read it out, sir?'

       'Why not?' said the Headmaster. 'But get my bottle filled first.'

       The Fly climbed down the chair-rungs with the cold bottle and threaded his perky way through the group of masters to the door. Before he reached it he had, aided by the poor visibility in the room but mainly by the exceptional agility of his small thin fingers, relieved Flannelcat of an old gold watch and chain, Mr Shred of several coins, and Cutflower of an embroidered handkerchief.

       When he returned with the hot-water bottle, Deadyawn was asleep again, but The Fly handed Bellgrove a roll of paper before he climbed up the wheeled chair to waken the Headmaster.

       'Read it,' said The Fly. 'It's from Barquentine.'

       'Why, 'me'?' said Bellgrove, his hand at his jaw. 'Damn Barquentine with his notices! Damn him, I say!'

       He untied the roll of paper and took a few heavy paces to the window, where he held it up to what light there was.

       The Professors were by then sitting on the floor, in groups or singly, like Flannelcat among the cold ashes under the mantelpiece. But for a lack of wigwam, squaws, feathers and tomahawks there might have been a tribe encamped beneath the hanging smoke.

       'Come along, Bellgrove! Come along, man!' said Perch-Prism. 'Get those teeth of yours into it.'

       'For a classical scholar,' said the irritating Shred, 'for a classical scholar, I have always felt that Bellgrove must be handicapped, grievously handicapped, firstly by the difficulty he finds in understanding sentences of more than seven words, and secondly by the stultifying effect on his mind of a frustrated-power complex.'

       A snarl was heard through the smoke.

       'Is 'that' what it is? Is 'that' what it is? La!'

       This was Cutflower's voice. It came from the near end of the long table on which he sat, dangling his thin, elegant legs. There was so high a polish upon his narrow, pointed shoes that the high-lights of the toecaps were visible through the smoke, like torches through a fog. No other sign of feet had been seen in the room for half an hour.

       'Bellgrove,' he continued, taking up where Perch-Prism had left off, 'stab away, man! Stab away! Give us the gist of it, la! Give us the gist of it. Can't he 'read', la, the old fraud?'

       'Is that you, Cutflower?' said another voice. 'I've been looking for you all morning. Bless my heart! what a fine polish on your shoes, Cutflower! I wondered what the devil those lights were! But seriously, I'm very embarrassed, Cutflower. Indeed I am. It's my wife in exile, you know - ragingly ill. But what can I do, spendthrift that I am, with my bar of chocolate once a week? You see how it is, my dear chap; it's the end: or almost: unless... I half wondered - er - 'could' you...? Something until Tuesday... Confidential, you know, ha... ha... ha...! How one hates asking... squalor, and so on... But seriously, Cutflower (what a dazzling pair of hoofs, old man!) but seriously, if you could manage...'

       'Silence!' shouted The Fly, interrupting Crust, who had not realized he had been sitting so close to a colleague until he heard Cutflower's affected accents beside him. Everyone knew that Crust had no wife in exile, ill or otherwise. They also knew that his endless requests were not so much because he was poverty-stricken but were made in the desire to cut a dashing figure. To have a wife in exile who was dying in unthinkable pain appeared to Crust to give him a kind of romantic status. It was not sympathy he wanted but envy. Without an exiled and guttering mate what was he? Just Crust. That was all. Crust to his colleagues and Crust to himself. Something of five letters that walked on two legs.

       But Cutflower, taking advantage of the smoke, had slipped from the table.

       He took a few dainty steps to his left and tripped over Mulefire's outstretched leg.

       'May Satan thrash you purple!' roared an ugly voice from the floor. 'Curse your stinking feet, whoever you bloody are!'

       'Poor old Mulefire! Poor old hog!' It was yet another voice, a more familiar one; and then there was the sense of something rocking uncontrollably, but there was no accompanying sound.

       Flannelcat was biting at his underlip. He was overdue for his class. They were all overdue. But none save Flannelcat was perturbed on that score. Flannel knew that by now the classroom ceiling would be blue with ink: that the small bow-legged boy, Smattering, would be rolling beneath his desk in a convulsion of excited ribaldry: that catapults would be twanging freely from every wooden ambush, and stink-bombs making of his room a nauseous hell. He knew all this and he could do nothing. The rest of the staff knew all this also, but had no desire to do anything.

       A voice out of the pall cried: 'Silence, gentlemen, for Mr Bellgrove!' and another... 'Oh, hell, my teeth! my teeth!'... and another... 'If only he didn't dream of stoats!'... and another: 'Where's my gold watch gone to?' and then The Fly again: 'Silence, gentlemen! Silence for Bellgrove! Are you ready, sir?' The Fly peered into Deadyawn's vacant face.

       In reply Deadyawn answered: 'Why... not?' with a peculiarly long interval between the 'Why' and the 'not'.

       Bellgrove read: Edict 1597577361544329621707193 'To Deadyawn, Headmaster, and to the Gentlemen of the Professorial Staff: to all Ushers, Curators and others in authority -'

       This-day of the –th month in the eighth year of the Seventy-seventh Earl, to wit: Titus, Lord of Gormenghast - notice and warning is given in regard to their attitude. treatment and methods of behaviour and approach in respect of the aforementioned Earl, who now at the threshold of the age of reason, may impress Headmaster, gentlemen of the professorial staff, ushers, curators, and the like, with the implications of his lineage to the extent of diverting these persons from their duty in regard to the immemorial law which governs the attitude which Deadyawn, etc., are strictly bound to show, inasmuch that they treat the seventy-seventh Earl in every particular and on every occasion as they would treat any other minor in their hands without let or favour: that a sense of the customs, traditions and observances - and above all, a sense of the duties attached to every branch of the Castle's life - be instilled and an indelible sense of the responsibilities which will become his when he attains his majority, at which time, with his formative years spent among the riff-raff of the Castle's youth, it is to be supposed that the 77th Earl will not only have developed an adroitness of mind, a knowledge of human nature, a certain stamina, but in addition a degree of learning dependent upon the exertions which you, Sir, Headmaster, and you, Sir, gentlemen of the professorial staff, bring to bear, which is your bounden duty, to say nothing of the privilege and honour which it represents.

       All this, Sirs, is, or should be common knowledge to you, but the 77th Earl now being in his eighth year, I have seen fit to reawaken you to your responsibilities, in my capacity as Master of Ritual. etc., in which capacity I have the authority to make appearances at any moment in any classroom I choose in order to acquaint myself with the way in which your various knowledge is inculcated, and with particular regard to its effect upon the progress of the young Earl.

       Deadyawn, Sir, I would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular...

But Bellgrove, his jaw suddenly hammering away as upon a white-hot anvil, flung the parchment from him and sank to his knees with a howl of pain which awoke Deadyawn to such a degree that he opened both his eyes.

       'What was that?' said Deadyawn to The Fly.

       'Bellgrove in pain, said the midget. 'Shall I finish the notice?'

       'Why not?' said Deadyawn.

       The paper was passed up to The Fly by Flannelcat, who had scrambled nervously out of the ashes, and was already imagining Barquentine in his classroom and the dirty liquid eyes of that one-legged creature fixed upon the ink that was even now trickling down the leather walls.

       The Fly plucked the paper from Flannelcat's hand and continued after a preparatory whistle effected through a collusion of the knuckles, lips and windpipe. So shrill was the sound of it that the recumbent staff were jolted upright on their haunches as one man.

       The Fly read quickly, one word running into the next, and finished Barquentine's edict almost at a single breath.

... would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular those members who confuse the ritual of their calling with mere habit, making of themselves obnoxious limpets upon the living rock; or, like vile bindweed round a breathing stem, stifle the Castle's breath.

       Signed (as for) Barquentine, Master of Ritual. Keeper of the Observances, and hereditary overlord of the manuscripts by                                                  Steerpike (Amanuensis).

Someone had lit a lantern. It did very little, as it stood on the table, but illumine with a dusky glow the breast of the stuffed cormorant. There was something disgraceful about its necessity at noon in summer-time.

       'If ever there was an obnoxious limpet swaddled in bindweed you are that limpet, my friend,' said Perch-Prism to Bellgrove. 'Do you realize that the whole thing was addressed to you? You've gone too far for an old man. Far too far. What will you do when they remove you, friend? Where will you go. Have you anyone that loves you?'

       'Oh, rotten hell!' shouted Bellgrove, in so loud and uncontrolled a voice that even Deadyawn smiled. It was perhaps the faintest, wannest smile that ever agitated for a moment the lower half of a human face. The eyes took no part in it. They were as vacant as saucers of milk; but one end of the mouth lifted as might the cold lip of a trout.

       'Mr... Fly...' said the Headmaster in a voice as far away as the ghost of his vanished smile. 'Mr... Fly... you... virus, where... are... you?'

       'Sir?' said The Fly.

       'Was... that... Bellgrove?'

       'It was, sir,' said The Fly.

       'And... how... is... he... these... days?'

       'He is in pain,' said The Fly.

       'Deep... pain...?'

       'Shall I inquire, sir?' said The Fly.

       'Why... not...?'

       'Bellgrove!' shouted The Fly.

       'What is it, damn you?' said Bellgrove.

       'The Head is inquiring about your health.'

       'About mine?' said Bellgrove.

       'About 'yours',' said The Fly.

       'Sir?' queried Bellgrove, peering in the direction of the voice.

       'Come... nearer...' said Deadyawn. I... can't... see... you... my... poor... friend.'