The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (89 page)

The old, old man in whose metaphysical net the three disciples, Spiregrain, Throd and Splint were so irrevocably tangled, leaned forward in space as though weighing on the phantom handle of an invisible stick. It was a wonder he did not fall on his face.

‘Always draughty in this reach of the corridor,’ he said, his white hair hanging forward over his shoulders. He struck his thighs with his hands before replacing them at a point in space where a stick would have been. ‘Breaks a man up – wrecks him – makes a shadow of him – throws him to the wolves and screws his coffin down.’

Reaching down with his long arms he drew his thick socks over the ends of his trousers and then stamped his feet, straightened his back, doubled it forward again, and then threw a look of antagonism along the corridor.

‘A dirty, draughty reach. No reason for it. Scuppers a man,’ he said. ‘And yet’ – he shook his white locks – ‘it isn’t true, you know. I don’t believe in draughts. I don’t believe I’m cold. I don’t believe in anything! ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I can’t agree with you, for instance.’

His companion, a younger man, with long, hollow cheeks, cocked his head as though it were the breech of a gun. Then he raised his eyebrow as much as to say, ‘Carry on …’ but the old man remained silent. Then the young man raised his voice as though he were raising the dead, for it was a singularly flat and colourless affair …

‘How do you mean, sir, that you can’t agree?’

‘I just can’t,’ said the old man, bending forward, his hands gripped before him, ‘that’s all.’

The young man righted his head and dropped his eyebrow.

‘But I haven’t
said
anything yet: we’ve only just met, you know.’

‘You may be right,’ replied the old man, stroking his beard. ‘You may very well be right; I can’t say.’

‘But I tell you I haven’t
spoken
!’ The colourless voice was raised, and the young man’s eyes made a tremendous effort to flash; but either the tinder was wet or the updraught insufficient, for they remained peculiarly sparkless.

‘I haven’t
spoken
,’ he repeated.

‘Oh,
that
!’ said the old man. ‘I don’t need to depend on that.’ He gave a low, horribly knowledgeable laugh. ‘I can’t agree, that’s all. With your face, for instance. It’s wrong – like everything else. Life is so simple when you see it that way – ha, ha, ha, ha!’ The low, intestinal enjoyment which he got out of his attitude to life was frightful to the young man, who, ignoring his own nature, his melancholy, ineffectual face, his white voice, his lightless eyes, became angry.

‘And
I
don’t agree with
you
!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t agree with the way you bend your ghastly old knacker’s-yard of a body at such an absurd angle. I don’t agree with the way your white beard hangs from your chin like dirty seaweed … I don’t agree with your broken teeth … I …’

The old man was delighted; his stomach laughter cackled on and on … ‘But nor do
I
, young man,’ he wheezed … ‘nor do I. I don’t agree with it, either. You see, I don’t even agree that I’m here; and even if I did I wouldn’t agree that I ought to be. The whole thing is ridiculously simple.’

‘You’re being cynical!’ cried the young man; ‘So you are!’

‘Oh no,’ said the old man with short legs, ‘I don’t believe in being anything. If only people would stop trying to
be
things! What
can
they be, after all, beyond what they already are – or would be if I believed that they were anything?’

‘Vile! vile! VILE!’ shouted the young man with hollow cheeks. His thwarted passions had found vent after thirty years of indecision. ‘Surely we have long enough in the grave, you old beast, in which to be
nothing
– in which to be cold and finished with! Must life be like that, too? No, no! let us burn!’ he cried. ‘Let us burn our blood away in life’s high bonfire!’

But the old philosopher replied: ‘The grave, young man, is not what you imagine. You insult the dead, young man. With every reckless word, you smirch a tomb, deface a sepulchre, disturb with clumsy boots the humble death-mound. For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless. Have you not seen them coming over the hills at dusk, the angels of eternity? Have you not?’

‘No,’ said the young man, ‘I haven’t!’

The bearded figure leaned even further forward and fixed the young man with his gaze.

‘What! you have never seen the angels of eternity, with their wings as big as blankets?’

‘No,’ said the young man. ‘And I don’t want to.’

‘To the ignorant nothing is profound,’ said the bearded ancient. ‘You called me a cynic. How can I be? I am nothing. The greater contains the less. But this I will tell you: though the Castle is a barren image – though green trees, bursting with life, are in reality bursting for lack of it – when the April lamb is realized to be nothing more nor less than a lamb in April – when these things are known and accepted, then, oh, it is then’ – he was stroking his beard very fast by this time – ‘that you are on the borderland of Death’s amazing kingdom, where everything moves twice as fast, and the colours are twice as bright, and love is twice as gorgeous, and sin is twice as spicy. Who but the doubly purblind can fail to see that it is only on the Other Side that one can begin to Agree? But here, here …’ he motioned with his hands as though to dismiss the terrestrial world – ‘what is there to agree
with
? There is no sensation here, no sensation at all.’

‘There is joy and pain,’ said the young man.

‘No, no, no. Pure illusion,’ said the ancient. ‘But in Death’s amazing kingdom Joy is unconfined. It will be nothing to dance for a month on end in the celestial pastures … nothing at all. Or to sing as one flies astride a burning eagle … to sing out of the gladness of one’s breast.’

‘And what of pain?’ said the youth.

‘We have invented the idea of pain in order to indulge ourselves in self-pity,’ was the reply. ‘But Real Pain, as we have it on the Other Side, that
will
be worth having. It will be an experience to burn one’s finger in the Kingdom.’

‘What if
I
set fire to your white beard, you old fraud!’ shouted the young man, who had stubbed his toes during the day and knew the validity of the earthly discomforts.

‘What if you did, my child?’

‘It would sting your jaw, and you know it!’ cried the youth.

The supercilious smile which played across the lips of the theorist was unbearable, and his companion had no strength to stop himself as he stretched out his arm for the nearest candle and lit the beard that hung there like a challenge. It flared up quickly and gave to the horrified and astonished expression of the old man an unreal and theatrical quality which belied the very real pain, terrestrial though it was, which he felt, first of all, against his jaw and then along the sides of his head.

A shrill and terrible scream from his old throat, and the corridor was at once filled with figures, as though they had been awaiting their entrance cues. Coats were thrown over his head and shoulders and the flames stifled, but not before the excited youth with the hollow cheeks had made his escape, never to be heard of again.

The old man was carried to his room, a small dark-red box of a place, with no carpet on the floor, but a picture over the mantelpiece of a fairy sitting in a buttercup against a very blue sky. After three days he recovered consciousness only to die of shock a moment later when he remembered what had happened.

Among those present at the death-bed in the small red room were the three friends of the old fire-blackened pedagogue.

They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck against one another and were tilted indecorously.

And yet it was a moving moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their master lay dying below them. Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?

Under their black leather mortar-boards their heads dislodged the innocent air, remorselessly as though their brows, noses and jaws, like the features of a figurehead, were cleaving paths for them through viewless water. Only in their hanging gowns, their flat leather mortar-boards and the tassels that hung like the grizzly spilths that swing from turkeys’ beaks, had they anything in common.

Flanking the death-bed was a low table. On it stood a small prism and a brandy bottle which held a lighted candle. This was the only illumination in the room, yet the red walls burned with a sombre effulgence. The three heads of the Professors, which were roughly at the same height from the ground, were so different as to make one wonder whether they were of the same genus. In running the eye from one face to the next, a similar sensation was experienced as when the hand is run from glass to sandpaper, from sandpaper to porridge. The sandpaper face was neither more nor less interesting than the glass one, but the eyes were forced to move slowly over a surface so roughened with undergrowth, so dangerous with its potholes and bony outcrops, its silted gullies and thorny wastes, that it was a wonder that any eye ever reached the other side.

Conversely, with the glassy face, it was all that an eye could do to keep from sliding off it.

As for the third visage, it was neither maddeningly slippery, nor rough with broken ravines and clinging ground weed. To traverse it with a sweep of the eye was as impossible as to move gradually across the glazed face.

It was a case of slow wading. The face was wet. It was always wet. It was a face seen under water. And so for an eye to take an innocent run across these
three
, there lay ahead this strange ordeal, by rock and undergrowth, by slippery ice and by a patient paddling.

Behind them on the red wall their shadows lay, about half as big again as the professors themselves.

The glassy one (Professor Spiregrain) bent his head over the body of his dead master. His face seemed to be lit from within by a murky light. There was nothing spiritual about its lambency. The hard glass nose was long and exceptionally sharp. To have said he was well shaved would give no idea of a surface that no hair could penetrate, any more than a glacier could sprout grass.

Following his example, Professor Throd lowered
his
head likewise: its features were blurred into the main mass of the head. Eyes, nose and mouth were mere irregularities beneath the moisture.

As for the third professor, Splint, when he, following the example of his colleagues, bent his head over the candle-lit corpse, it was as though a rocky and barbarous landscape had suddenly changed its angle in space. Had a cloud of snakes and parrots been flung out thereby on to the candle-bright sheets of the death-bed, it would have seemed natural enough.

It was not long before Spiregrain, Throd and the jungle-headed Mr Splint became tried of bending mutely over their master, who was, in any case, no pleasant sight even for the most zealous of disciples, and they straightened themselves.

The small red room had become oppressive. The candle was getting very low in the brandy bottle. The fairy in the buttercup over the mantelpiece smirked in the flickering light, and it was time to go.

There was nothing they could do. Their master was dead.

Said Throd of the wet face: ‘It is grief’s gravy, Spiregrain.’

Said Spiregrain of the slippery head: ‘You are too crude, my friend. Have you no poetry in you? It is Death’s icicle impales him now.’

‘Nonsense,’ whispered Splint, in a fierce, surly voice. He was really very gentle, in spite of his tropical face – but he became angry when he felt his more brilliant colleagues were simply indulging themselves. ‘Nonsense. Neither icicle nor gravy it was. Straightforward fire, it was. Cruel enough, in all faith. But …’ and his eyes became wild with a kind of sudden excitement more in keeping with his visage than they had been for years … ‘but look you! He’s the one who wouldn’t believe in pain, you know – he didn’t
acknowledge
fire. And now he’s dead I’ll tell you something … (He
is
dead, isn’t he?)’ …

Splint turned his eyes quickly to the stiff figure below him. It would be a dreadful thing if the old man was listening all the time. The other two bent over also. There could be no doubt about it, although the candlelight flickering over the fire-bitten face gave an uncanny semblance of movement to the features. Professor Splint pulled a sheet over the corpse’s head before he turned to his companions.