Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

       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 tired 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.

       'What 'is' it?' said Spiregrain. 'Be quick!' His glass nose sliced the gloomy air as he turned his head quickly to the rugged Splint.

       'It's 'this', Spiregrain. It's 'this',' said Splint, his eyes still on fire. He scratched at his jaw with a gravelly sound and took a step back from the bed. Then he held up his arms. 'Listen, my friends. When I fell down those nine steps three weeks ago, and pretended that I felt no pain, I confess to you now that I was in agony. And now! And now that 'he' is dead I glory in my confession, for I am afraid of him no more; and I tell you - I tell you both, openly and with pride, that I look forward to my next accident, however serious it may be, because I will have nothing to hide. I will cry out to all Gormenghast. "I am in agony!" - and when my eyes fill with tears, they will be tears of joy and relief and not of pain. Oh, brothers! colleagues! do you not understand?'

       Mr Splint took a step forward in his excitement, dropping his hands, which he had kept raised all this time (and at once they were gripped on either side).

       Oh, what friendship, what an access of honest friendship, rushed like electricity through their six hands.

       There was no need to talk. They had turned their backs on their faith. Professor Splint had spoken for the three of them. Their cowardice (for they had never dared to express a doubt when the old man was alive) was something that bound them together now more tightly than a common valour could ever have done.

       'Grief's gravy was an overstatement,' said Throd. 'I only said it because, after all, he 'is' dead, and we 'did' admire him in a way - and I like saying the right thing at the right time. I always have. But it was excessive.'

       'So was "Death's icicle" I suppose,' said Spiregrain, rather loftily; 'but it was a neat phrase.'

       'Not when he was 'burned' to death,' said Throd, who saw no reason why Spiregrain should not recant as fully as himself.

       'Nevertheless,' said Splint, who found himself the centre of the stage, which was usually monopolized by Spiregrain, 'we are free. Our ideals are gone. We believe in pain. In life. In all those things which he told us didn't exist.'

       Spiregrain, with the guttering candle reflected on his glassy nose, drew himself up and, in a haughty tone, inquired of the others whether they didn't think it would be more tactful to discuss their dismissal of their dead master's Beliefs somewhat further from his relics, Though he was doubtless out of earshot he certainly didn't look it.

       They left at once, and directly the door had shut behind them the candle flame, after a short, abortive leap into the red air, grovelled for a moment in its cup of liquid wax and expired. The little red box of a room had become, according to one's fancy, either a little black box or a tract of dread, imponderable space.

       Once away from the death-chamber and a peculiar lightness sang in their bones.

       'You were right, Splint, my dear fellow... quite right. We are free, and no mistake,' Spiregrain's voice, thin, sharp, academic, had a buoyancy in it that caused his confederates to turn to him.

       'I knew you had a heart under it all,' wheezed Throd. 'I feel the same.'

       'No more Angels to look forward to!' yelled Splint, in a great voice.

       'No more longing for Life's End,' boomed Throd.

       'Come, friends: screamed the glass-faced Spiregrain, forgetting his dignity, 'let us begin to live again!' and catching hold of their shoulders, he walked them rapidly along the corridor, his head held high, his mortar-board at a rakish angle. Their three gowns streamed behind them, the tassels of their headgear also, as they increased their pace. Turning this way and that, almost skimming the ground as they went, they threaded the arteries of cold stone until, suddenly, bursting out into the sunshine on the southern side of Gormenghast, they found ahead of them the wide sun-washed spaces, the tall trees fringing the foothills, and the mountain itself shining against the deep blue sky. For a moment the memory of the picture in their late master's room flashed through their minds.

       'Oh, lush!' they cried. 'Oh, lush it is, for ever!' And, breaking into a run and then a gallop, the three enfranchised professors, hand in hand, their black gowns floating on the air, bounded across the golden landscape, their shadows leaping beside them.

FOURTEEN

It was in Bellgrove's class, one late afternoon, that Titus first thought consciously about the idea of colour: of things having colours: of everything having its own particular colour, and of the way in which every particular colour kept changing according to where it was, what the light was like, and what it was next to.

       Bellgrove was half asleep, and so were most of the boys. The room was hot and full of golden motes. A great clock ticked away monotonously. A bluebottle buzzed slowly over the surfaces of the hot window-panes or from time to time zithered its languid way from desk to desk. Every time it passed certain desks, small inky hands would grab at it, or rulers would smack out through the tired air. Sometimes it would perch, for a moment, on an inkpot or on the back of a boy's collar and scythe its front legs together, and then its back legs, rubbing them, scything them, honing them, or as though it were a lady dressing for a ball drawing on a pair of long, invisible gloves.

       Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too original: you would be before your time. They would not know your steps, the other ladies. None would throw out that indigo light from brow or flank - but, bluebottle, they wouldn't 'want' to. There lies the agony. Their buzz of converse is not yours, bluebottle. You know no scandal, no small talk, no flattery, no jargon: you would be hopeless, for all that you can pull the long gloves on. After all, your splendour is a kind of horror-splendour. Keep to your inkpots and the hot glass panes of schoolrooms and buzz your way through the long summer terms. Let the great clock-ticks play counterpoint. Let the swish of a birch, the detonation of a paper pellet, the whispered conspiracy be your everlasting pards.

       Down generations of boys, buzz, bluebottle, buzz in the summer prisons - for the boys are bored. Tick, clock, tick! Young Scarabee's on edge to fight the 'Slogger' - young Dogseye hankers for his silkworms' weaving - Jupiter minor knows a plover's nest. Tick, clock, tick!

       Sixty seconds in a minute; sixty minutes in an hour; sixty times sixty.

       Multiply the sixes and add how many noughts? Two. I suppose. Six sixes are thirty-six. Thirty-six and two noughts is 3,600. Three thousand and six hundred seconds in an hour. Quarter of an hour is left before the silkworms - before the 'Slogger' - before the plover's nest. Buzz-fly, buzz! Tick, clock, tick! Divide 3,600 by four and then subtract a bit because of the time taken to work it all out.

4/3600

900

Nine hundred seconds! Oh, marvellous! marvellous! Seconds are so small.

       One - two - three - four - seconds are so huge.

       The inky fingers scrubble through the forelock - the blackboard is a grey smear. The last three lessons can be seen faintly one behind the other - like aerial perspective. A fog of forgotten figures - forgotten maps - forgotten languages.

       But while Bellgrove was sleeping - while Dogseye was carving - while the clock ticked - while the fly buzzed - while the room swam in a honey-coloured milky-way of motes - young Titus (inky as the rest, sleepy as the rest, leaning his head against the warm wall, for his desk was flush with the leather) had begun to follow a train of thought, at first lazily, abstractedly, without undue interest - for it was the first train of thought that he had ever troubled to follow very far. How lazily the images separated themselves from one another or adhered for a moment to the tissue of his mind!

       Titus became dreamily interested, not in their sequence but in the fact that thoughts and pictures could follow one upon the other so effortlessly. And it had been the colour of the ink, the peculiar dark and musty blue of the ink in its sunken bowl in the corner of his desk, which had induced his eyes to wander over the few objects grouped below him. The ink was blue, dark, musty, dirtyish, deep as cruel water at night: what were the other colours? Titus was surprised at the richness, the variety. He had only seen his thumb-marked books as things to read or to avoid reading: as things that got lost: things full of figures or maps. Now he saw them as coloured rectangles of pale, washed-out blue or laurel green, with the small windows cut out of them where, on the naked whiteness of the first page, he had scripted his name.

       The lid of the desk itself was sepia, with golden browns and even yellows where the surface had been cut or broken. His pen, with its end chewed into a subdividing tail of wet fronds, shimmered like a fish, the indigo ink creeping up the handle from the nib, the green paint that was once so pristine blurred with the blue of the ink at the pen's belly, and then the whitish mutilated tail.

       He even saw his own hand as a coloured thing before he realized it was part of him; the ochre colour of his wrist, the black of his sleeve; and then... and then he saw the marble, the glass marble beside the inkpot, with its swirling spirals of rainbow colours twisted within the clear, cold white glass: it was wealth. Titus fingered it and counted the coloured threads that spiralled within - red, yellow, green, violet, blue... and their white and crystal world, so perfect, all about them, clear and cold and smooth, heavy and slippery. How it could clink and crack like a gunshot when it struck another! When it skidded the floor and struck! Crack like a gunshot on the round and brilliant forehead of its foe! Oh, beautiful marbles! Oh, blood-alleys! Oh, clouded ones, a-swim in blood and milk! Oh, crystal worlds, that make the pockets jangle - that make the pockets heavy!

       How pleasant it was to hold that cold and glittering grape on a hot summer afternoon, with the Professor asleep at his high carved desk! How lovely it was to feel the cold slipping thing in the hot palm of his sticky hand! Titus clenched it and then held it against the light. As he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger the coloured threads began to circle each other: to spiral themselves round and round and in and out in endless convolutions. Red: yellow: green: violet: blue... Red - yellow - green - red... yellow... red... 'red'. Alone in his mind the red became a thought - a colour-thought - and Titus slipped away into an earlier afternoon. The ceiling, the walls, the floor of his thought were red: he was enveloped in it; but soon the walls contracted and all the surfaces dwindled together and came at last to a focus; the blur, the abstraction had gone, and in its place was a small drop of blood, warm and wet. The light caught it as it shone. It was on his knuckle, for he had fought a boy in this same classroom a year ago - in that earlier afternoon. A melancholy anger crept over Titus at this memory. This image that shone out so redly, this small brilliant drop of blood - and other sensations, flitted across this underlying anger and brought on a sense of exhilaration, of self-confidence, and fear also at having spilled this red liquid - this stream of legendary yet so real crimson. And the bead of blood lost focus, became blurred, and then, changing its hazy contour, became a heart... a heart. Titus put his hands against his small chest. At first he could feel nothing, but moving his finger-tips he felt the double-thud, and the drumming rushed in from another region of his memory: the sound of the river on a night when he had been alone by the high bulrushes and had seen between their inky, rope-thick columns a sky like a battle.