Babel Tower (37 page)

And they all cried out, Culvert was in the right, nothing would be taken from Mavis’s children if they were removed from her exclusive company, but much would be given
as well as
what they had.

And while the company were exploring the new Dormitories, which were opened by the Lady Paeony, who cut a pink ribbon with a pair of scissors, Colonel Grim and Turdus Cantor made their way to the battlements and looked out over the plain. And the company exclaimed over the ingenious sleeping accommodation, the huge circular cushioned beds, decorated with embroideries of lambs in the fields playing sweetly with lion cubs and spotted leopards. And Colonel Grim said to Turdus Cantor, “I see a troop of horsemen approaching. Where is our watch?” And Turdus Cantor said, “Your eyes are better than mine, I see nothing. I am not sure we have a watch, for there is not always a Companion who desires to stand at the post since no one ever comes.”

And the company exclaimed over the pretty cupboards for play-things and chamberpots and clothing, all decorated with painted butterflies and smiling lizards.

And Colonel Grim said, “I see a banner with a bleeding tree. The Krebs are riding across the valley in full daylight. They do not usually
travel by day. I think you should hurry down and alert Culvert and the others, for it may be they mean to attack us. For there is no way out of the valley to the north now the bridge is cut.”

The company had no armed guard and no organised defence for the Tower, which would in fact be difficult, even for a large force, to break into, once the great gates were closed and the bridge down. But everyone bustled to and fro, like insects disturbed in a nest, and found out what swords, pistols, pitchforks, muskets, spits, carving knives and so forth could be brought to bear, as the company of the Krebs approached closer—for Colonel Grim’s clear eyes had seen well, they were indeed the Krebs, riding fast and furiously, about a hundred strong, and chanting as they came, in a language no one could interpret.

Their horses were low and ugly, with rough black hair and starting manes; they galloped close to the ground, in a cloud of dust, surprisingly fast. The faces of the riders could not be seen, for they all wore flat leather helmets, with a kind of leather prow projecting over their noses. They wore also black leather jerkins, supple and polished, matt here, glistening there, and leather breeches, also black, so the whole troupe was a moving, singing black shadow, above which sparkled a cloud of silver spear-points on black spears, like monstrous metal midges. Their shoulders were very broad, and their arms very long, but their torsos were squat and their waists narrow, and their bow legs, wrapped round the bellies of their horses, short.

The people of the Tower stood behind their battlements, brandishing their ramshackle collection of weapons, men, women, and a few children. The Lady Paeony declared it was a pity they had not had time to prepare boiling oil, and the Lady Coelia said they had precious little oil to spare, and would be hard put to it if the Krebs took it into their heads to encamp below the Tower and lay siege to it. And when the Krebs came nearer they began to blow great horns, great ramshorns, and circle around before the closed gates.

Then Culvert called down from the battlements, “Do you come here in peace?”

And a high, grinding voice, unaccustomed to the tongue of the Tower, answered thickly, “Neither in peace nor in war. We bring you a thing.”

“It is a trick,” said Narcisse. “They wish to make us open the door.”

“We wish to exchange this thing for things you have. For wine and flour and sugar to make a feast. It is our feast day.”

“Show us your thing,” cried Culvert.

“You must come down and see,” said the Krebs.

“It is a trap,” said Narcisse.

“I think not,” said Colonel Grim. “It is true that periodically they have great feasts, and like to season their sour beer and their rootcakes with our more refined provisions. Let us go down, Culvert, and see their thing. Fabian will stand over the bridge with a musket, and Narcisse with another, to cover our sally, and we will see this thing.”

“We have enough flour and wine for ourselves, and none to spare,” said the Lady Paeony.

“And how much shall we have if the Krebs take a dislike to us and camp there to starve us out?”

So Culvert and Colonel Grim went to the mouth of the bridge, and told the Krebs to show their thing to be exchanged.

And they brought a great leather sack, tied with leather ropes.

“Open it up,” said Colonel Grim. “So we may barter.”

And the Krebs opened the mouth of the sack, and kicked the sack several times, two of them, with their small, sharp, booted feet.

And out crawled a man. He came out with difficulty, his long grey hair matted with blood, his face a mask of blood, his arms bound, and his ankles, so that he could only slide like a snake out of the mouth of the bag. He was gagged too, with a leather strap between his teeth.

“He is a friend of yours,” said the Krebs. “Or so he said when we took him.”

When they turned their faces up to speak they could be seen to be covered with dark hair, fat faces with mouths lost in the hair, and small glittering black eyes.

“We cannot see him for blood,” said Culvert. “Let us see him.”

“He is a friend of yours, he says,” repeated the Krebs. “If you will not acknowledge him, we will kill him for spying. As you please. Also we will take his ransom as your food parties arrive, for we know where they are and when they will come. But our feast is now, and we would like wine now.”

“Stand him up, and untie him,” said Culvert.

So the Krebs undid the leathery knots, and helped the man roughly to his feet, jostling him, and leaving his hands tied.

He was a tall man, in a long black cloak. His eyes shone dark in his bloody face.

“Can you see me, Culvert?” he said. “Through all this muck and mire? I am not a gift you would have chosen, but I would be grateful if you would accept me, for the alternatives are not pleasant.”

His voice, though racked by pain, was dry and precise.

And Culvert laughed.

“You are right,” he said. “You are a gift I would never have chosen, for you and I shall never agree to the world’s end. But I can do no other but accept you, old enemy, for I will not have your death on my head.”

And no one had any knowledge of the stranger, save Culvert. But they found out food enough, and drink enough, to satisfy the Krebs, and the stranger walked painfully but proudly across the bridge into the Tower. And Culvert said to the assembled people:

“Let me make known to you my old childhood playmate and student companion, Samson Origen. Let me say also, in front of him, as he stands there covered in blood and dust, that he comes as the serpent into our Paradise, for he is the world’s great nay-sayer, and there is nothing in the world on which he and I agree. There is no human being worse fitted for our project, or more opposed to our aims, and so we must welcome him with tender loving care and overwhelm him with sweet reason, and seduce him with reasonable pleasures, or he will have us all shivering and chastising ourselves in monastic cells, not because that is our secret delight, but because we must have no delight under the moon. Is it not so, old enemy? Do I misrepresent you?”

“I will keep quiet,” said Samson Origen, “for the present, I promise you.”

And then he fainted away on the cobbles where he stood, and further philosophical dispute had to be postponed.

Frederica stands on a small platform at one end of a large studio, lit from above. She is dressed in a short black woollen dress and a knitted jacket in black, as long as the dress. Her hair is loose and long: her sharp face looks out from between its curtains. The students sit in chairs with swinging notepad arms, the men in dark jeans, the women in shirts and smocks mostly in dark, fruity colours, slightly acid. They have pale lips and eyes made up like sinister dolls, with long lashes and a bruised look. They are professional waifs. Some are taking notes and some are doodling. Frederica is speaking passionately about paper lanterns on a dark lake, primroses and ruddy sea with crabs, white storks and turquoise sky, and the great sinister cuttlefish “that stared straight from the heart of the light.” Everything for
Lawrence, she says, is loaded with
meaning.
She describes the shattered circle of the reflected moon. She talks of the white flowers of evil, the
fleurs du mal,
floating on the sea of death. She is teaching a ten-week course on “The Modern Novel.” Art students read with difficulty; choose some
short books,
said Richmond Bly. She has chosen
Death in Venice, La Nausée, The Castle,
all of which are still to come. She has begun with Lawrence and Forster because that was where, in Cambridge, she ended. “The novel is the one bright book of life,” said Lawrence, and Lawrence was the point of perfection towards which the novel had been heading, it appeared then. Men asked her if she was “a Lawrentian woman.” The sixties are slowly gathering speed, and the sixties do not find Lawrence daring: he has been admitted to the Establishment with the Lady Chatterley trial in 1961. Daring is
Naked Lunch,
is Allen Ginsberg, is Artaud. Frederica by a pure trick of time feels
involved
in
Women in Love,
which is a book about which she feels a fierce ambivalence (it is powerful, it is ridiculous, it is profound, it is wilfully fantastic). Its existence is part of the way she sees the world. It matters to her that these students should see it.

She does not yet know them very well. Later, she will distinguish; potters notice different things from textile designers, painters use language more flamboyantly and more loosely than graphic designers, sculptors are either silent or voluble, industrial designers dislike the culture of the book, jewellers are fey, theatre designers read as though books were blueprints for structures of images. At this early stage, she is a little afraid of them. She is there presenting herself as a
literary critic,
and these students are
artists.
Instinctively, she does not offer them critical categories or moral judgements. She tries to seduce them into seeing that books are complicated formal structures. For they do not like books for the most part. For them, brightness and meaning are elsewhere, are in the studio, in the pub, in bed.

A novel,
Women in Love,
for instance, she says, is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches. It is made in the head and has to be remade in the head by whoever reads it, who will always remake it differently. It is made of people whose fates are more interesting to its maker than those of his friends or lovers—but who are also an attempt to understand his friends and lovers probably. The people are made of language, but this is not all they are. A novel is also made of
ideas
that connect all the people like another layer of interwoven knitting—
Women in Love
is a novel about decadence, about love of death, about thanatos as opposed to
eros. The ideas are made out of language but that is not all they are. This novel is made of visual images—the lanterns, the moon, the white flowers—which you might think were like painted images, but they are not, for they have to be
unseen visible images
to be powerful. They are made out of language but that is not all they are. We must all imagine the broken moon, and she takes her power from
all our imaginings
and their sameness and their difference. She is trying to make the painters and sculptors see how a novel is a work of art and is not a painting. She is trying to understand something herself. A young woman smiles at her: a young man in glasses writes furiously. They are listening.
The group is listening.
She has them: the knitting is a fishnet.

At the other end of the studio, on another platform, another group of students is arranged, less formally, lying on the ground, squatting on the floor, round the model, Jude Mason, who has been reading to them from what appears to be a blood-red ledger. He is partly dressed: below his spare haunches he is naked: he sits on the edge of the platform, his knees drawn up amongst his long grey veil of hair, his balls poised on the dust between his dirty feet. He wears a dirty velvet jacket in a faded speedwell blue, a skirted jacket, from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in style, with filthy lace cuffs and a kind of jabot or cravat. Under this jacket, and beneath the cravat, he is unclothed, his body lean like dark metal. He calls out now, in a sawing voice, “You should teach them Nietzsche. Man in a little skiff on the raging sea of Maya, of illusion, supported by the
principium individuationis.
”

Frederica is angry. The thread of the class attention is broken. Anything she can say will sound school-mistressy or piqued. So will silence. She says, “I am talking about Lawrence.”

“I know. I can hear. Bits of it are not uninteresting. The knitting idea is not at all bad, writing does resemble that despised art. Continue. We may yet join your circle.”

Frederica stares angrily at him. All imagined retorts sound petulant. He smiles, a self-satisfied,
smart
smile on his drawn, sinewy face.