The Oracles (12 page)

‘Very likely. Which reminds me; there was some grocerdom at the party on Sunday. Our Mr. Pattison in a natty lounge suit, looking rather puzzled. Why was he there?’

‘Conrad asked him.’

‘Is that so? You seemed to be oiling him in a marked way.’

‘I think it’s time that the town began to realise
something
of Conrad’s importance.’

‘I see. They won’t dare shriek as soon as they’ve got it into their heads that Conrad is a Good Thing. That’s the trouble with grocers. They can’t even shriek honestly. Anybody can bully them. They haven’t even the guts to stand up for what they think they see.’

‘They’re beginning to acquiesce,’ allowed Martha.

‘Then they get what they deserve.’

‘Quite. I mean, look at your Pavilion! Think of all the opposition there was at first. Now they’re getting used to it.’

‘Just like them,’ said Wetherby, looking at his watch. ‘Well, I must be off!’

He took another long stare at the Apollo.

‘If only it had gone to Gressington,’ he sighed. ‘I really think you ought, you know.’

‘I don’t believe Conrad despises grocers,’ exclaimed Don suddenly. ‘I don’t believe he despises anybody.’

‘Man! Where’s his integrity if he doesn’t? Must go. Goodbye, Martha. Thanks for the drinks. Don’t bother to come to the door with me, Don. A little grocerish, that. I’ll find my way out.’

He strode from the room and shut the door smartly behind him.

‘You heard?’ exulted Martha. ‘He thinks it’s a masterpiece. And he’s given me a figure too. I shall keep two hundred in mind when I get to work on our grocers.’

‘If they’re honest grocers they won’t give you tuppence.’

‘Now, Don! I must please count on your support. It’s everything that I can quote Alan. They have got it into their thick heads that he knows what he’s talking about. I might bring half a dozen famous critics down here, to praise the Apollo, without making anything like the same impression.’

Don wondered if any famous critic would have come to East Head at Martha’s bidding. But he held his peace. It was not worth a squabble. And yet … He looked again at the Apollo.

‘You’re quite sure,’ he said slowly, ‘that Conrad … that it is … that he really did it?’

‘Why! My dear Don! Who else could have done it?’

‘
A
SLIGHT
chill and
anno
domini
, that’s all,’ said Dr. Browning over the telephone. ‘This changeable weather tells on old men. Nothing to worry about. I’ve sent him to bed for a day or two. Your wife was round there this morning arranging things with his housekeeper.’

Dickie had just returned from Weston and had an afternoon appointment at Brinstock, but he drove round at once to see his father. He found the old man
somewhat
petulant at being kept in bed, where he had nothing to do, while a great deal was waiting to be done in his garden. Christina had brought him some books to read, but he never read books in the daytime, except
occasionally
on wet Sundays. All this coddling was nonsense.

He cheered up at the sight of Dickie, however, and listened with eagerness to all the latest news. The most surprising item concerned Mr. Pethwick, who had decided suddenly to leave East Head and end his days with a married daughter in the Argentine. The sale of Brinstock House was to be put into Dickie’s hands; he was going over that afternoon to discuss it, since
Pethwick
was immobilised with lumbago.

‘I wonder Christina didn’t tell me about that,’ said Mr. Pattison. ‘She might have known I’d be interested. You say he rang you up yesterday? I wonder she said nothing.’

‘I don’t think I happened to mention it,’ said Dickie.

This was an extraordinary statement, and he knew it. Pethwick’s departure should have been the main conversational dish at supper last night. He had meant to tell her, but had suddenly, in a fit of irritation, decided to keep the news to himself. He had told her about Sir Gregory’s objections to the sewage disposal scheme, and she had said that it was just like Sir Gregory to object. He had told her about Prescott’s tenant, and she had said that it was just like Mr. Prescott not to mend the roof. It seemed to him that he could not bear to hear her say that it was just like Mr. Pethwick to go to the Argentine. This phrase, so frequently upon the lips of Christina and her friends, had always annoyed him. It was the inevitable comment, whatever anybody did, good or bad, wise or foolish. The pattern of events must never be disturbed by conduct which might be called unexpected or unusual. People in East Head were always found to be just like themselves. To be told so, much oftener, was more than Dickie could stand.

His father was looking at him—sharp old eyes peering out of a strangely wasted face. He’s aged, thought Dickie. Aged since I saw him last. He’s ill.

‘Is the doctor coming again tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘I believe so. I didn’t think Christina was looking quite her usual self, by the way. Is she all right?’

‘Quite all right. She’s very well.’

‘Not another …?’

‘Oh no. Not yet.’

‘Nothing wrong at all?’

‘Why no, Dad. What could there be?’

‘I don’t know. I just got the impression …’

Mr. Pattison sighed and turned his head wearily upon the pillow. He looked towards the window, where a slow white cloud was sailing behind the branches of a copper
beech. A mournful remoteness fell about him as he gazed, as though he could no longer see these things as he once had. He might already have taken farewell of them.

He
is
going
to
die
, thought Dickie, and remembered that it was only a chill. Browning had said that there was no need to worry. But a whisper of uneasiness remained.

‘I can remember my father planting that tree,’ said Mr. Pattison, ‘when I was a lad. It’s twice your age. Fancy that now!’

He mused for a while and then he said:

‘Women! It doesn’t do to criticise them. They get ideas. They start thinking you don’t love them any more.’

‘Did you never criticise Mother?’

‘Not I! Once I got to understand her. They take a bit of understanding, don’t you find?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Dickie, without conviction.

‘I don’t mean I wouldn’t speak up if she did anything I didn’t like. If she fed me prunes and tapioca too often I’d say so. But … well … you can’t change them. If they think you want them to be different, then they start thinking you’d rather have married another woman. Then there’s trouble.’

‘Honestly, Dad, there’s no trouble between Tina and me.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I just wondered. There’s a way a woman goes round smiling when she’s got a grievance.… If you want your own way about anything, don’t start trying to convince her that it’s the right way. That only makes them stubborn. She’ll take a lot of trouble to please you, yes, and give in to you, because she loves you, not because she thinks you’re right.’

‘I’ve been married nearly two years,’ Dickie observed.

‘I took longer than that to find out what I mustn’t say to your mother. I’ve been through it all, remember.’

Dickie made no reply to this save that he must be getting along to Brinstock.

He left the house in a rebellious mood. The assurance that his father had been through it all before him was depressing. He was only too conscious of treading a well-worn path; older people were always claiming to have preceded him upon it and insisting that nothing done, felt, thought, or said, by him could be in any way original. They knew every inch of the road, and could foresee everything that lay before him until he finished the journey in his coffin.

In vain did he tell himself that he was a lucky man, that many would envy him, and that he led, upon the whole, a pleasant life. He felt like one who strolls across some urban common, and strives to believe it larger than it is. The prospect is very pretty, very rural, if the real countryside can be forgotten. There are houses, miles upon miles of houses, on every side; but it is possible, by an adroit choice of paths, to saunter for twenty minutes without seeing one. There are not so very many other people about, and only a curmudgeon would object to the sight of them. The couples lying in the grass are quiet enough. The troops of hooting boys, wheeling bicycles through the birch spinneys, have a perfect right to be there. Nor are the wider views entirely ignoble; space, distance, can bestow charm of a sort upon gasometers and chimneys and a smoky horizon. But there comes a moment when the cheated soul rebels. Every bush has a rubbed, worn look. Every path has been trodden too often. There are no secrets in such a place; there is nothing to be discovered and cherished as a private memory. Better a corner in the
dullest field, so it is far away and solitary. A hedgerow, a haystack, the green shoulder of a down, may be remembered for ever, recalled at will. But this! This is merely an exercise ground for prisoners. It is pleasant. It is pretty. And the waves, the waves are breaking on some far, deserted beach, where nobody ever goes. Ah, to be there!

To get out of East Head for the afternoon was at any rate agreeable. Dickie liked driving over the hills and he looked forward to an hour with Pethwick, whom he admired. In their few meetings they had discussed little save business, yet he always got the impression that they had touched upon something larger. There was a spacious energy about the old engineer which stimulated him. Pethwick had been all over the world. He had constructed railways over mountains and through jungle swamps; he had contended with floods, fires, earthquakes, strikes and epidemics. He had carried out great projects in the teeth of enormous difficulties, had ruled armies of lawless men, and must have known how to be tough upon occasion. Yet he gave a strong impression of kindness and geniality.

That this charm of manner had always been
Pethwick’s
most telling asset was an explanation which did not occur to Dickie. Petulant surveyors and rebellious coolies had, in their time, succumbed to it. As an engineer he might not have been exceptionally brilliant, but his projects were carried through successfully because the people working with, and for, him were always in good tempers.

Dickie’s own temper improved as soon as he found himself in the library at Brinstock. He addressed
himself
to the business in hand with more gusto than he had felt for any of his work just lately. There was, after all,
nobody else in the district who could give Pethwick sounder advice or look after this sale better than he. He would have been sorry to let it appear that East Head was ill served in such matters. His eye brightened and he talked briskly.

Some excellent sherry was brought to them when they had finished their business. They relaxed and chatted a little. Pethwick displayed and explained some of his treasures, a haphazard collection of objects which had caught his fancy in various parts of the world. They were attractive in themselves but not very tastefully disposed. Most of the things in the library came from central Africa, where Pethwick had spent several years among the Dandawa, for whom he had a great affection.

‘They’re such sensible people,’ he said. ‘On the whole they had more sense than any people I’ve ever met, but nobody gave them credit for having any. When I was there a tremendous howdydo was going on about a sacred fish they had—a row among the whites, I mean, not the Dandawa. Nobody had seen it; they kept it hidden away somewhere. But it was said to be a carved stone fish that they’d had for a very long time, and it had all sorts of magic powers.
They
said that they had brought it with them over the mountains and that it had originally flown down from the sky. Well, this started no end of a rumpus among the archaeologists and
ethnologists
. It’s probable that the Dandawa did originally come from over the mountains, and there are remains of temples over there, at least four thousand years old, in which carvings of this fish constantly keep cropping up. I’ve got some photographs in the other room; I’ll show you. You see, it was the wrong fish. The kind of fish nobody thereabouts could have seen; a sort of dolphin. Who made it? Why a dolphin in central
Africa? The whole ethnological set-up seemed to be tottering. Such controversies! You didn’t know whom to believe. Nobody, of course, thought of believing the Dandawa, who went on saying that it had come out of the sky. And how right they were! A geologist turned up and managed to have a look at it. He was coal black himself; otherwise he’d never have had a chance. He said it was a small meteorite. And not so very like a fish either. It had got stylised in those carvings. The Dandawa, of course, had never said it was a fish.’

‘If we got a meteorite in East Head,’ said Dickie, ‘there would be no mystery about it. We shouldn’t worship it. We should be told exactly what it was, in a very dull way, and then it would be put into our local museum, where children would be brought to see it against their will.’

Pethwick laughed and struggled out of his chair.

‘That’s what I mean about the Dandawa,’ he said. ‘They get the best of both worlds. Come and see the things in the other room.’

He led the way to a large room on the western side of the house, explaining that it had been a drawing-room but that he used it for a dumping-room.

‘I don’t like living among a great clutter of things,’ he said. ‘So I bring two or three at a time out of here into the library, where I can look at them, and change them every month or so.’

Dickie followed him into the room and was
immediately
struck by something which stood in the window. A fan of fire seemed to be bursting from a shattered rock. It stood upon a pedestal of green marble, but the split rock was black, and the quivering light which sprang from it shifted and changed as they came into the room.

‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed.

‘That? Oh, that’s Conrad Swann. I wanted to show you that too. Funny thing! I bought it a month or so before he came to live in East Head. I saw it in an exhibition and took a fancy to it.’

Dickie went close to it and discovered that the light came from whorls of clear glass.

‘My housekeeper loathes it,’ continued Pethwick. ‘She has to dust it, and wipe it over with medical spirit, to keep the glass perfectly clear. Those curves always catch the light in some way, and it’s always different, according to where you stand, and what kind of light there is, and where it comes from. Sometimes it’s quite a blaze when the afternoon sun gets it. I like it best when it’s just a faint shimmer.’

‘It has such a lot of power and force,’ said Dickie.

He retreated to a far corner of the room, so that he could see another arrangement of this darting radiance, this conquest of the airy—the impalpable.

‘What I like,’ said Pethwick, ‘is the dynamics of the thing. That’s what attracted me. It looks right, and it actually is right; it’s exactly what would happen. Those lumps of rock would, I think, go spinning off in this orbit. I asked Swann about it when I met him once, but he’s no hand at explaining himself. I couldn’t gather that he cared much about dynamics. He admitted he’d watched a lot of blasting. He said he’d lived near some quarries once, and watched a lot of it, whenever he got a chance to get where he could see it. So I told him that he’d got it right. And he said, yes, he thought he had. Meaning he’d got what he meant to get. He may have heard of gravity, but I don’t believe he’d lost much sleep over it. Getting it right evidently meant something quite different to him.’

‘It’s not exactly like an explosion, though,’ said Dickie. ‘It’s not just crude violence. It seems to be … governed by a law.…’

‘Of course it would be,’ said Pethwick. ‘Everything is governed by a law.’

Dickie made a sound of argeement, but he was not sure that they meant the same thing. This law, he felt, had something to do with music. There was so much going on, in this creation of Swann’s, that it seemed to burst into a kind of music as he looked at it. He had received the same impression before, generally from pictures. But he did not venture upon any explanation, and merely asked what Swann called it.

‘Nothing. But he told me that he had watched the blast explosions because he was very much interested, at that time, in the resurrection of the dead! So I call it the Resurrection when I tell Mrs. Soames to dust it. I can’t just call it “that thing”.’