Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a
man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the
saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved against a brake,
carefully adjusted to make the work of the pedaller hard, but not
impossibly hard. From a pipe which came up through the floor issued a
little jet of water which played on the brake and kept it cool. But no
jet of water played on Shearwater. It was his business to get hot. He
did get hot.
From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked
through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was
getting on. Inside that little wooden house, which might have reminded
Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of mind, of the Box in which
Gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate life were the same
every time he looked in. Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle
of the nightmare bicycle, pedalling, pedalling. The water trickled over
the brake. And Shearwater sweated. Great drops of sweat came oozing out
from under his hair, ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his
eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like
raindrops. His thick bull-neck was wet; his whole naked body, his arms
and legs streamed and shone. The sweat poured off him and was caught as
it rained down in a waterproof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds
into a large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the centre of
the sheet at the focal point where all its slopes converged. The
automatically controlled heating apparatus in the basement kept the
temperature in the box high and steady. Peering through the damp-dimmed
panes of the window. Lancing noticed with satisfaction that the mercury
stood unchangingly at twenty-seven point five Centigrade. The
ventilators at the side and top of the box were open; Shearwater had air
enough. Another time, Lancing reflected, they’d make the box air-tight
and see the effect of a little carbon dioxide poisoning on top of
excessive sweating. It might be very interesting, but to-day they were
concerned with sweating only. After seeing that the thermometer was
steady, that the ventilators were properly open, the water was still
trickling over the brake, Lancing would tap at the window. And
Shearwater, who kept his eyes fixed straight before him, as he pedalled
slowly and unremittingly along his nightmare road, would turn his head
at the sound.
“All right?” Lancing’s lips moved and his eyebrows went up inquiringly.
Shearwater would nod his big, round head, and the sweatdrops, suspended
on his eyebrows and his moustache, would fall like little liquid fruits
shaken suddenly by the wind.
“Good,” and Lancing would go back to his thick German book under the
reading-lamp at the other end of the laboratory.
Constant as the thermometer Shearwater pedalled steadily and slowly on.
With a few brief halts for food and rest, he had been pedalling ever
since lunch-time. At eleven he would go to bed on a shake-down in the
laboratory and at nine to-morrow morning he would re-enter the box and
start pedalling again. He would go on all to-morrow and the day after;
and after that, as long as he could stand it. One, two, three, four.
Pedal, pedal, pedal.... He must have travelled the equivalent of sixty
or seventy miles this afternoon. He would be getting on for Swindon. He
would be nearly at Portsmouth. He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford.
He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling through the green and golden
valleys where Constable used to paint. He would be at Winchester by the
bright stream. He would have ridden through the beech woods of Arundel
out into the sea....
In any case he was far away, he was escaping. And Mrs. Viveash followed,
walking swayingly along on feet that seemed to tread between two
abysses, at her leisure. Pedal, pedal. The hydrogen ion concentration in
the blood.... Formidably, calmly, her eyes regarded. The lids cut off an
arc of those pale circles. When she smiled, it was a crucifixion. The
coils of her hair were copper serpents. Her small gestures loosened
enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her
voice they had fallen in ruins about him. His world was no longer safe,
it had ceased to stand on its foundations. Mrs. Viveash walked among his
ruins and did not even notice them. He must build up again. Pedal,
pedal. He was not merely escaping; he was working a building machine. It
must be built with proportion; with proportion, the old man had said.
The old man appeared in the middle of the nightmare road in front of
him, clutching his beard. Proportion, proportion. There were first a lot
of dirty rocks lying about; then there was St. Paul’s. These bits of his
life had to be built up proportionably.
There was work. And there was talk about work and ideas. And there were
men who could talk about work and ideas. But so far as he had been
concerned that was about all they could do. He would have to find out
what else they did; it was interesting. And he would have to find out
what other men did; men who couldn’t talk about work and not much about
ideas. They had as good kidneys as any one else.
And then there were women.
On the nightmare road he remained stationary. The pedals went round and
round under his driving feet; the sweat ran off him. He was escaping,
and yet he was also drawing nearer. He would have to draw nearer.
“Woman, what have I to do with you?” Not enough; too much.
Not enough—he was building her in, a great pillar next to the pillar of
work.
Too much—he was escaping. If he had not caged himself here in this hot
box, he would have run out after her, to throw himself—all in fragments,
all dissipated and useless—in front of her. And she wanted none of him.
But perhaps it would be worse, perhaps it would be far, far worse if she
did.
The old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard, crying
out, “Proportion, proportion.” He trod and trod at his building machine,
working up the pieces of his life, steadily, unremittingly working them
into a proportionable whole, into a dome that should hang, light,
spacious and high, as though by a miracle, on the empty air. He trod and
trod, escaping, mile after mile into fatigue, into wisdom. He was at
Dover now, pedalling across the Channel. He was crossing a dividing gulf
and there would be safety on the other side; the cliffs of Dover were
already behind him. He turned his head as though to look back at them;
the drops of sweat were shaken from his eyebrows, from the shaggy
fringes of his moustache. He turned his head from the blank wooden wall
in front of him over his left shoulder. A face was looking through the
observation window behind him—a woman’s face.
It was the face of Mrs. Viveash.
Shearwater uttered a cry and at once turned back again. He redoubled his
pedalling. One, two, three, four—furiously he rushed along the nightmare
road. She was haunting him now in hallucinations. She was pursuing and
she was gaining on him. Will, wisdom, resolution and understanding were
of no avail, then? But there was always fatigue. The sweat poured down
his face, streamed down the indented runnel of his spine, along the seam
at the meeting-place of the ribs. His loin-cloth was wringing wet. The
drops pattered continuously on the waterproof sheet. His calves and the
muscles of his thighs ached with pedalling. One, two, three, four—he
trod round a hundred times with either foot. After that he ventured to
turn his head once more. He was relieved, and at the same time he was
disappointed, to see that there was now no face at the window. He had
exorcised the hallucination. He settled down to a more leisurely
pedalling.
In the annexe of the laboratory the animals devoted to the service of
physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden
irruption of light. The albino guinea-pigs peered through the meshes of
their hutch and their red eyes were like the rear-lights of bicycles.
The pregnant she-rabbits lolloped out and shook their ears and pointed
their tremulous noses towards the door. The cock into which Shearwater
had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether to crow or cluck.
“When he’s with hens,” Lancing explained to his visitors, “he thinks
he’s a cock. When he’s with a cock, he’s convinced he’s a pullet.”
The rats who were being fed on milk from a London dairy came tumbling
from their nest with an anxious hungry squeaking. They were getting
thinner and thinner every day; in a few days they would be dead. But the
old rat, whose diet was Grade A milk from the country, hardly took the
trouble to move. He was as fat and sleek as a brown furry fruit, ripe to
bursting. No skim and chalky water, no dried dung and tubercle bacilli
for him. He was in clover. Next week, however, the fates were plotting
to give him diabetes artificially.
In their glass pagoda the little black axolotls crawled, the heraldry of
Mexico, among a scanty herbage. The beetles, who had had their heads cut
off and replaced by the heads of other beetles, darted uncertainly
about, some obeying their heads, some their genital organs. A
fifteen-year-old monkey, rejuvenated by the Steinach process, was
discovered by the light of Lancing’s electric torch, shaking the bars
that separated him from the green-furred, bald-rumped, bearded young
beauty in the next cage. He was gnashing his teeth with thwarted
passion.
Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast,
unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were
tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were
forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were
ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were
leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were
men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were
changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time
itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment. They were all alive.
And on the other side of the courtyard beyond the shed in which the
animals slept or uneasily stirred, in the huge hospital that went up
sheer like a windowed cliff into the air, men and women were ceasing to
be themselves, or were struggling to remain themselves. They were dying,
they were struggling to live. The other windows looked on to the river.
The lights of London Bridge were on the right, of Blackfriars to the
left. On the opposite shore, St. Paul’s floated up as though
self-supported in the moonlight. Like time the river flowed, silent and
black. Gumbril and Mrs. Viveash leaned their elbows on the sill and
looked out. Like time the river flowed, stanchlessly, as though from a
wound in the world’s side. For a long time they were silent. They looked
out, without speaking, across the flow of time, at the stars, at the
human symbol hanging miraculously in the moonlight. Lancing had gone
back to his German book; he had no time to waste looking out of windows.
“To-morrow,” said Gumbril at last, meditatively.
“To-morrow,” Mrs. Viveash interrupted him, “will be as awful as to-day.”
She breathed it like a truth from beyond the grave prematurely revealed,
expiringly from her death-bed within.
“Come, come,” protested Gumbril.
In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the
Channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at
Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had
escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion,
cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there, proportioned and
beautiful in the dark, confused horror of his desires, solid and strong
and durable among his broken thoughts. Time flowed darkly past.
“And now,” said Mrs. Viveash, straightening herself up, and giving
herself a little shake, “now we’ll drive to Hampstead and have a look at
Piers Cotton.”
PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.