Psalm At Journey's End

JASON'S STORY
The same day In the English Channel, on the way to Cherbourg, 17:10




As soon as Jason came up on deck, tired after having played half the afternoon, he was faced with the sunset, the scarlet sphere in the west just above the horizon. The sky was quite clear, like a sheet of glass polished clean by the wind.
Some of the emigrants had begun singing on the afterdeck. One man had produced his accordion and was playing a jig. A crowd soon gathered around him, happy, almost crazed now that the journey had at last begun. Jason could never understand the joy they felt. He could see that what was happening was something magical to them, something unfathomably beautiful, terrible, and great. They were leaving Europe, leaving home, and commending themselves to the journey. They sailed in limbo between one home and another--a home they knew nothing about. Many would never see the old continent again. Jason knew New York sufficiently well to realize what they would encounter there.
Jason felt a kind of monotonous meaninglessness about it all. He did not understand the joy flushing their faces, or the shadows of pain flitting across as the refrain accentuated a particularly beautiful feature of the Cornish hills, or wherever they came from. He was outside both, both the longing for the new and the longing for the old home.
Or was it that he didn't want to understand?
He was filled with that brilliant light--there it was again, again overcoming him. The sun itself was heavy and sated, coloring the sea. The singing and laughter from the emigrants became a tinkling sound, bouncing like a ball up to the skies and across the surface of the sea. Then it came to him, all over again, his thoughts that morning, his thoughts of that other morning. The crimson sunlight--do you rememberit? Do you remember the morning when the sun poured in on you like a river of malice? The voices from the afterdeck become part of the memory, of the image vibrating inside you, of the morning when the right times came to an end.




It was a late September day. Through the high leaded windows, the sunlight spread over the oak paneling and floor of the ancient hall of his boarding school. Everything was bathed in this sunlight; the darkness up in the beams was like lumps of congealed blood.
Loud voices of boys echoed from the corridors, a group of them occasionally passing through the hall, chattering eagerly, laughing, on their way to a class. This was the oldest part of the school, heraldic shields and portraits of admirals above the paneling and two suits of armor over by one double door, two lances by the other.
A fairly tall red-haired boy was standing facing the windows, his face buried in his hands, not moving, as if outside the space around him. He did not notice the comings and goings in the hall.
All he could see was that crimson sunlight. He could see it through the fingers over his eyes. He could see it was no longer ordinary light but something else much more powerful, something that hurt. It went right into him.
Everything else was nothing but a distant accompaniment, an undertone. A cold chill rose from the stone floor; a chilling softness pulled him down. I'm going to fall, he thought. I want to fall. But he didn't, for the light held him and would not let him go.
A piece of paper protruded from the top pocket of his blazer, and that had also turned red.
Jason is standing on that stone floor, weeping.
Always, he would weep for that morning. That light would continue to dawn in him; that day would never begin. He would remember the letter, remember the headmaster's stiff phrases before letting him off lessons for the rest of the day. He would remember a Jason who was no longer himself but another Jason, the old Jason, thanking the headmaster politely and leaving his study, then disappearing.
He got no farther than the hall before the tears came. That was when he saw the crimson light pouring in through the Gothic windows. He doesn't know how long he has stood there quite motionless. He is fifteen. But he is ageless.




Three years earlier, his father had applied for a post as regimental medical officer in India, near Madras. Dr. Coward was seriously overworked and it was supposed to be good for him to get away. Interesting, epoch-making work was being done in his field there and he wanted to take part in it. The pay was also good, and besides, Jason was going to boarding school that year. He was sent away--much against his mother's wishes and in reality probably against his father's. Two years had gone by since his parents had left for their three-year stint. Then this morning Jason had been summoned to the headmaster's study after morning prayers and he thought the delayed birthday letter from his parents had come.




A group of boys spot that immobile figure in the hall, exchange glances, then go nearer.
"Carrot-top," says one of them.
"Gingerknob!"
They are sharp and malicious. They exchange smiling looks as Jason just goes on standing there so strangely, paying no attention to them.
"Sleepwalker," says one.
"Deaf as a post," says another.
Jason really is as if deaf that morning. He doesn't come to life until one of the bigger boys plucks up courage and punches him in the back. He stumbles forward, half turns, and looks up at them, his eyes vacant.
They are in a semicircle around him. In the red light their faces seem to have a kind of veil over them, their bodies black as soot.
The boys exchange looks again. It would be an achievement, an unparalleled deed to beat someone up right there in the middle of the hall. That would enhance their reputations for years to come.
Jason didn't tattle; he had that much sense at the time.




Things have not been entirely easy for Jason at school, though some boys have a worse time. But an image appears inside him, like a spark, distant and still. Something his father had once shown him when theywere in the woods. He had shown Jason an anthill, the brown ants working away in it, industrious and orderly. His father had told him about its organized construction, the beautiful natural hierarchy prevailing in ant society, the whole anthill like a great organism. For a while they stood there observing the ants together. "Observing." That was his father's word. To his father the whole world was comprised of things to contemplate, each phenomenon nothing but an image of something else. But then--then his father had gone over to another anthill about a hundred yards away and fetched a small black ant on a matchstick. Now we'll make another observation, he had said. Look what happens when I put this little fellow in with the others. And Jason observed and saw the alien ant attacked by the resident ants the moment it landed among them. They went straight for it and bit it to death despite its stout attempts to defend itself. Then it was unceremoniously stowed away, perhaps in a storage space, or to be used for building material.
"That's because it has a strange scent," his father had said. Jason nodded. "The human body's defenses against infections are also thought to work like that. The organism, the entity, fights and rejects what does not belong to it. It reacts to it as if to an alien scent."
Jason had found out what that meant during his last three years at school--having a strange scent, as if there were something about him, and that something soon separated him out. That was clear without any doubt whatsoever to both Jason and the other boys. Perhaps part of the explanation was that he had grown up an only child, almost exclusively in the company of his parents. Perhaps it seemed strange to the other boys that Jason used adult language, many of his words taken from science, books, and experiments. Perhaps they picked on him because he played the violin and sang in the school choir, or they had found out that Jason had gone to school in the wrong part of London. But none of that, alone or together, provided him with any reasonable explanation for why it was he. There seemed to be something else, something about and inside him, behind all the rest ... Jason didn't know.
Never tattle, his father had said, just before his parents left for India. Those were the words his father had sent with him to boarding school, and Jason had stuck to them.
He had done so once, and then not even about anything that hadto do with himself but something they had done to a smaller boy by the name of Rider. He had been given a dunking one very cold winter morning, for no particular reason, as if out of pure high spirits. Rider had come down with pneumonia and there had been a huge commotion. Jason had reported the culprits without giving a thought to the consequences to himself. He had not regretted his act, not even after the long series of reprisals: his books smeared with mud, homework essays torn up, the strings of his violin cut halfway through so that they broke one after another during a school concert when he had a solo part. Jason also had a small collection of natural history objects he had found in his free time. One morning when he had forgotten to lock his study door, he found most of them ruined, birds' eggs and beetles crushed and strewn over his worktable.
Nevertheless, he did not regret what he had done. He thought he had acted rightly and wrote to tell his parents about it all, though he toned it down slightly and left out their acts of revenge. In his reply, his father had agreed. So Jason walked with his head high--unfit a few months went by and he came on the same Rider busy filling his inkwell with sand. He would never forget Rider's eyes as he caught him red-handed, a frightened, abject look, but with not a hint of shame. Then Jason realized that the other boys had not made him do it.
That was when Jason had hit out. He punched Rider in the face, hard, dizzy with anger and disappointment, and was beaten by the headmaster for striking a younger boy. That had been almost a year ago now. The ridicule and tormenting had been harder to bear. It also seemed as if the other boys sensed that Jason was weaker now, and they allowed themselves to do more unpleasant and bolder things than before.
Jason was looking forward to his parents' return--in just six months. He longed for every letter and wrote to them once a week. When he received a letter--his mother wrote vividly about all manner of things, large and small, and his father told him about his work and the alien countryside--Jason felt he was almost out there himself in that distant country. He could feel the heat, smell the strange pungent scents, see the emaciated cattle in the streets. He could hear the grasshoppers on the soft nights--then everything around him retreated, school, the endless games, the shouting, the torment--they all ceased to exist,and he yearned. The letters helped, and today--when he had been summoned to the headmaster--he had been expecting a birthday letter.




They surrounded him and he just stared at them. The look he gave them was the look of a stranger. He was somewhere else then. A sweet and tempting voice inside him whispered that he should just let them go ahead, just let them beat him up, so everything would be neutralized, so he would be obliterated and eliminated at their hands. It made no difference now. He almost longed for their blows. But something in him--that something again--resisted. He was able to feel the reality around him, his own incomprehensible existence--like great circles spreading all around--and he sensed that everything would break and he would be swallowed up and gone if he let them do it. So when the first boy raised his clenched fist to hit him, Jason put his hands up to his own face, dug his nails fiercely into his skin, and dragged his hands down his cheeks, scoring them deeply. Then he did the same thing again, this time starting farther up.
The boys stopped as if frozen, staring at him, seeing the streaks of dark blood suddenly running down Jason's cheeks and throat. In stunned silence, they saw him do it again, without a word, not a sound coming from him, his lips pressed so tightly together they turned white, his eyes narrowed to slits and behind the tears nothing but two black pupils.
Frightened, they backed away.
"What's he doing?" a boy whispered. Once again, Jason scored his face, feeling nothing now but the pain in his cheeks and the tears, salty, mixing with the blood. He could just see the other boys still standing around him. Who were they? Why didn't they go away? Why couldn't they leave him in peace with the sun, let him stay there alone, just looking? He did not claw at his face again, but turned back to the window, then forgot them all. The sun had risen a little farther and the light was now pouring through the window even more fiercely, straight into his face, making the scratches smart. That was good, that burning, somehow right.
Jason was sobbing now, uncontrollably.
At that moment, Saunders, the biology master and Jason's housemaster,happened to come through the double doors, a gray-bearded, absentminded man who seldom really noticed what was going on around him. But something about the little group over by the window, the motionless boys, must have startled him, because he stopped to look. He frowned, then went over to them. They didn't notice him until he spoke.
"What's going on here?"
They turned and stared at him, frightened, but Saunders knew they were not frightened of him--he was not particularly frightening, so it must be something else. He glanced fleetingly at them, noting which boys they were, the childish faces, quite soft, still so unmarked that a shock went through him every time he caught them at some devilment. Whenever he saw those faces, it always puzzled him. Saunders was a scientist, an adherent of Darwin, and he did not believe in the biblical original sin. But occasionally he thought there must be a kind of biological original sin. Something must have gone wrong with the human race when even its children could ... Then Saunders noticed the figure facing the window and from his red hair recognized a boy from his own house, Jason Coward. Good at biology, too. He bit his lip and cleared his throat harshly.
"Away with you!" They hesitated for a second or two, as if paralyzed.
"Away with you!" he snapped. They left, slowly, and not until they were out of the hall did Saunders turn his attention to Jason, who had not moved. But then he turned around and Saunders saw the boy's cheeks glistening with blood.
He took Jason with him back to the house, where his wife bathed his cheeks and dressed them. He canceled his lessons and spent all morning talking to Jason, trying to bring him back to reality. Then he went to see the Headmaster.
Long before the sun was in its zenith, the whole school knew from the jungle telegraph that Coward--that funk with red hair--had gone mad.




But Jason was not mad. He was weeping over the letter. Jason was on the threshold of adult life, and this morning was to remain inside him for many years to come, returning to him night and day, for yearsand years. The letter--black writing on white paper and bathed in red light. He was to call on God to ask Him the meaning of that letter. He was to be filled with an uncontrollable, mindless rage, and that rage was to assume different forms and take him far far away from the life apparently staked out for him.
Everything changed.
Children are often said to forget easily and go on living with greater ease. They said that about Jason, too. In reality, he became another person. The event went so deeply into him that the memory of it changed his whole constitution, his whole way of life. The memory seemed almost physical.
Later he would perhaps admit to himself, to his own sound judgment, that much worse things can happen to a person. Nevertheless, that morning sliced Jason's life in two. Afterward he was another person, someone he did not know.
It was not a birthday letter but a very short, very formal statement to say that both Jason's parents, John Coward and Mrs. Alice, née Clarke, had died at their residence in Vellore, near Madras, of an unspecified disease. The department sent its deepest condolences and most respectful regards.
Dear Jason [his father wrote],
Things are much the same here. It's hot today and some of the soldiers are laid up with "Vellore tummy." Nothing much to worry about, the officers say, but I'm giving them solid quinine treatment to make sure. Everything here goes bad at the moment.
There are interesting light phenomena in the night sky, something to do with the heat, I suppose. A kind of heat lightning, but much stronger, with unusually varied shades of colour.
Your mother sends her love. She has gone off on an outing today. A certain Mrs Johnstone has involved her in evangelical work. Mrs John-stone is a masterful elderly lady to whom the natives listen with amazing patience. I hope your mother can contribute to spreading some general health rules among the people through these activities. We had some nasty epidemics after the last monsoon, as I told you.
While we're on to religious matters, I saw an interesting cosmogony the other day in an old abandoned temple: the god Shiva clinging to the universe--the sun and all the celestial bodies--with his four arms andan indescribable, sardonic smile on his lips. He is the destroyer and the creator as far as I can make out. But I don't have time for more profound religious studies.
I hope your schoolwork is going well. Your mother and I are expecting you to do well in your exams. For your next letter I am giving you the task of writing a short account of the zebu, a species of cattle with a hump of fat over their top vertebrae. They are used a lot as draught animals here. With much love from your ...
The following weeks were a great strain on Jason. His aunt and uncle were already his temporary guardians in his parents' absence abroad, and now some kind of permanent arrangement had to be made. Then there was the will. Colleagues and friends had arranged a memorial service for Jason's parents, who had been buried in India, and the occasion seemed suitable for a gathering to decide Jason's future.
Jason sat in the front pew with his aunt, his eyes rigid and mouth clamped shut, the long red scars still on his cheeks as he listened to all those words about Dr. Coward, this Dr. Coward who had been such an outstanding man. The name finally seemed quite alien to Jason, so alien he almost managed to forget whom they were talking about. This man, who with his indefatigable industry and strength had been an example, a model and inspiring force to his colleagues, honored, highly honored to have been allowed to meet this man, deeply shaken by his sudden death and grateful before God, now assembled here to remember this man and his wife--Jason could see from surreptitious glances that one or two of the deeply shaken colleagues were glancing at their watches. His Aunt Mabel was staring vacantly ahead with a pained expression. She was his father's sister. She and his father had grown up together in his grandfather's vicarage in a town on the river Severn, where they had played together, talked together, but Jason could see nothing of his father in her. All the circumstances and people around him seemed utterly alien. None of this was really happening to him.
He listened to the words in numb horror, finding that all those moving words, those consoling and warming words, were making not the slightest impression on him.
The gathering afterward was held in his old home and consisted of his guardians, a relative, and some friends of his parents, one of themthe solicitor in charge of the family's affairs. They had to plan Jason's future and decide what should be sold to ensure means for his upbringing and education. They found the boy much more amenable and unsentimental than they had feared. Indeed, almost too amenable.
The living quarters of the house had been closed in the absence of the occupants--covers on the furniture, pictures taken down off the walls, rugs rolled up, and small articles packed away in chests and bags. The adults now held a council of war in the living room, and to ease the situation, a decanter was unearthed and sherry handed around in his mother's small, heavy glasses. Jason was in his school clothes, sitting stiffly in a chair by the piano, his cheeks scarlet. On the way from the hotel in which they were staying, Aunt Mabel had asked him if he was feverish. Now they were all there, finding it hard to start, so there was much clearing of throats and scraping of chairs.
Jason looked around the room. It seemed to him a caricature of his childhood home, only vaguely familiar, alien, no longer his.
First of all, said Mr. Scott, the solicitor, a means had to be found to best ensure Jason's future. Dr. Coward had not been wealthy; there were still some outstanding debts on the estate and the insurance was at most modest. But if they made the right dispositions with regard to the sale, and between them agreed to appoint an economical, permanent and--er--considerate guardian ...
They all turned to look at Jason, anxiously, gravely. Jason nodded, equally gravely.
"He's taking it very bravely," Aunt Mabel said quietly. She was standing over by the window; the white lace curtains were drawn back and the autumn light gave a pale, pleasant glow to the faces in the room.
"The ground floor is already rented, and we could of course arrange to rent the whole building, to ensure a steady income. However, there are both practical and financial responsibilities involved in owning property ... On the other hand, if the house was sold and the sum realized invested ..."
Jason was observing. He was observing the room they were sitting in, and his observations told him it was fundamentally just any old room, nothing special about it at all, a living room like thousands of others. He thought about his own room upstairs. He knew it wasempty, but had been up to take a look. He had vaguely recognized the bed and bedside table; it had been like looking at an old photograph of himself. The sky outside the dormer window was bright. Then he had closed the door behind him.
Uncle Ralph, his mother's cousin, coughed discreetly and looked at his watch. The solicitor was taking his time before coming to the point. Jason observed his relative looking at his watch. He was observing it all and basically understood that this was an almost everyday event, one of those things that happen in life. Honorable, industrious people suddenly finding themselves morally and personally responsible for an orphan. Something one doesn't expect, but gentlemen that they were, they were taking the responsibility, spending their time on it, and if they looked at their watches, they did so discreetly; that was understandable. Life goes on. All this suddenly seemed to Jason understandable to the extent that it reaffirmed his decision to put no obstacles in the way of anything or anyone. He said practically nothing during the negotiations. Jason was in reality a talkative boy, and if they had known him well, his silence would have been noticeable. Though--"in reality"? What did that mean now? What was reality now? They knew nothing about him; that was all. That was to Jason's advantage.
So when it came down to it, it was all quite painless. Dr. Coward, good old John, would certainly have wished his son--apart from personal memories--to have chosen individual pieces of furniture, pictures, and larger objects ... perhaps some things from his father's practice ... The solicitor was sure of that. So if Jason wished to keep anything for himself ... There is, for instance, a wall clock here ...
But the wall clock was soon disposed of, as were the dining-room furniture, the winged leather chairs, the china cabinet, the linen cupboard and its contents. The dignity of the assembly acquired a strained, frenzied undertone as they continued on their mission. Such an amazing number of objects--furniture and objects make a home. A home consists of objects. Jason observed--coolly. He saw that a home is a kind of dollhouse, a kind of equipped shoe box in which miniature furniture is kept, and then it is peopled with a father and a mother, a child or two, and a dog. So--a home. But some things were missing now, including their bull terrier, Ernest; Ernest, whom Jason had had before he went away to school. Ernest and his cold wetnose were horribly missing. Jason had been told that Ernest was going to a good home, but Jason knew they were lying, and he knew his father knew he knew. So, no Ernest, now gone to a good home. Nothing was left but a few objects and Jason, and Jason did his best not to disturb them. It all seemed as simple as a shoe box to him. Fewer and fewer things remained. Soon the silverware was sold, although Aunt Mabel and her husband, the vicar, had wished to redeem a few things from the estate, as did his mother's cousin Ralph--Jason had no objections. He was so compliant, Mr. Scott the solicitor asked Jason whether he understood what he was agreeing to. Perhaps Jason would, after all, like to keep some of the paintings? They could be stored--perhaps later on in life Jason would regret he had let them go so easily. No? Well, all right, then.
Jason hesitated only once, and that was when they came to the brass-bound chests and cases from the basement and suddenly a case lined with velvet was in front of him, a telescope. Lenses from Chance's in Birmingham, a two-and-a-half-inch refractor with a theoretical resolution factor of two arc seconds.
Jason turned pale when he saw it.
"Well now?" said the solicitor kindly. "A beautiful instrument. Is it yours?"
Jason looked, memories rushing through him like shooting stars.
"No," he said, looking away.
The adults exchanged looks.
"It must have belonged to Father," said Jason, pulling himself together. "I've never been particularly--interested in astronomy."
"But perhaps you might be in the future?" That was Scott again, looking searchingly at Jason with his shrewd lawyer's eyes.
"An instrument like that might bring in a lot of money," Jason said lightly.
A comforting numbing atmosphere descended. There was talk of Jason's future and what was left of Dr. Coward's medical equipment and books. Then Aunt Mabel's husband, the Reverend Chadwick, a thickset, buttoned-up man with a lilting voice, spoke. He took a practical view of things.
"I presume," he said, "that in time young Jason will take up medicine." They all nodded. Jason saw the clergyman as if through glass, at a distance that was not an insignificant part of infinity. Then he looked down at his own hands.
"Taking that fact into consideration, and the fact that--if I may say so--medical studies are both time-consuming and costly, and also that medical textbooks and instruments are expensive, then--er--to look on it in practical terms ..." The Reverend Chadwick looked across at Dr. Falls, who was taking part in his capacity as a friend and colleague of the father. "Dr. Falls, perhaps you could go through--if I may say so--with a truly practical eye--all the instruments and books that must be here in the practice and in the house in general and extract both the most elementary as well as the most precious instruments and books, so that these may be kept for Jason's future vocation, so that increasingly costly and unnecessary new purchases at that point in time will not be required."
Dr. Falls nodded briefly at this pronouncement. Jason kept looking at them all, looking and looking without taking in what he was seeing. A voice, almost that of a stranger, came to him from far, far away: Yes, I know he's married to my sister, my dear, but I can't stand those sermons of his.
"This," said Aunt Mabel, holding up a large brown bound book. "Are you keeping this, Jason?" She sounded hopeful.
Jason glanced at the book. It was the picture Bible, his mother's illustrated Bible.
"Yes," he said. "I'll keep that to read."
His aunt tentatively stroked his head.
Dear Jason [his mother wrote],
I hope all is well with you. I am sitting here writing to you in peace and quiet in the afternoon heat. Your father can't be tempted away from his work. I am afraid he doesn't work any less hard here than he did in Whitechapel. They are now trying to isolate a microbe of some kind. He's sure to tell you about it.
Yesterday evening I experienced something I really wish you could have taken part in. It was a reddish-violet evening, with those misty mellow colours that are impossible to describe but that give the impression of eliminating all distance. Since early morning the pilgrims had been on their way down to the river; it was Dasehra, the tenth day of the festival of Durgapudja, which is celebrated for Durga, "the impassable," "the maiden from the mountains," Shiva's consort. On this day her idol and other idols are lowered into the river. I know nothing more about it. Your father had fetched me from church and we came home together,across the market where spices, vegetables, plaited wreaths, and multi-coloured powders and perfumes were being packed into baskets and jars. Then a group of musicians in the middle of the square started playing. We stood there listening for half the evening. Their music, Jason--it's not only very strange but really impossible to describe. I have heard it said at the mission that it is abominable and ought to be counteracted because of its powerful heathen content. And it's true it sounds strange. It is centred on one central note, which I am intentionally avoiding calling the base note; it's more a kind of mid-note. Then the music is spun round that. It is like the misty rosy dawns we get out here, apparently without end or any real beginning. The little orchestra your father and I listened to last night played so that the actual darkness began to come alive. According to beliefs here, as far as I have understood the Brahmin story of the creation, life began with a primaeval sound, an Ur-note, from which everything else is resolved. It was so strange last night walking though the streets with my soul filled with that amazing flowing resonance ...
Take great care of yourself and don't get cold.
With love
Yes, it is all going so smoothly. He is so amenable. Objects glide past him. He lets them go as if they had never been his, as if he had never been in touch with them. It all turned out as he had thought. It was agreed the Reverend Chadwick and his wife would be his guardians, and he would spend his school holidays at the vicarage in Devon as before. His other relative, Cousin Ralph, worked in the City and was unmarried, so it would not be appropriate for him to have a ward in the house. But Mr. Scott arranges to place some money with the broker before he puts on his coat and top hat and an expression of trusted reliability, raising his hat and leaving. Dr. Falls wishes Jason good luck and assures him he is ready to be of assistance at any time; he will keep in touch and if possible help with his education when the time comes. Then he disappears just as the memory of a handclasp leaves the hand. They depart, all of them.
Objects, objects and time all glide away from him. A house with a brass plate on the door. A stove with a clock on the mantelpiece above, a clock that has counted seconds of grace, seconds of childhood. A red plush couch someone has rested on, a piano which stillremembers. It is easy, easy. He is someone else now. Jason knows he is someone else. He seems to have extended himself into something new over these weeks. His schoolmasters and fellow pupils meet him with diffident looks. He does not know them. It is easy. He hurls himself over his schoolbooks, almost desperately, as if searching for something.
From now on he is homeless.




The years passed slowly, school and exams, holidays at his uncle and aunt's comfortable but rather quiet and distant home in Devon.
Jason was someone else.
In the beginning this had a strange effect on him at school. At first it was thought Jason had been thrown off balance by the tragedy, but the change in his behavior did not abate, instead grew stronger, more manifest. So fiercer measures were necessary and the cane was brought out. None of the masters found it compatible with their principles to punish a pupil who had just gone through so much, but there was soon no other way out. Jason took his punishment without a murmur, his attitude almost arrogant, considering the kind of things he had started doing. When corporal punishment turned out to be useless, letters had to be written, letters to Jason's aunt and uncle. Gradually the number of these letters increased and the contents were such that Mr. Scott eventually heard about it. Jason's behavior was increasingly giving cause for anxiety.
How to describe and explain what was happening to him? When Jason went back to school, there was a distance between him and everything else, a chilling, incomprehensible lightness that meant no one or nothing ever really reached him--a wall of glass. He quietly avoided everyone's eyes. He made himself invisible. Invisible to his masters, impervious to both praise and reprimand. Coolly, indifferently, he accepted good reports, and with a distant, almost contemptuous expression, he looked at the headmaster before the latter carried out a beating. An element of something unassailable and dangerous had crept into him. When Jason spoke in class, his eyes were dark and grave. He seldom allowed himself a smile, and any smile soon dissolved. His masters simply disapproved, detecting an outlandish, disrespectful defiance. He never participated in either good things orbad. What had happened to Jason was incomprehensible. He would now be the one to take the initiative if on some rare occasion he found it to his liking. Now it was he who planned and took the lead in some prank or vandalism. He himself seemed unclear about this new ringleader role, as if he had done nothing to bring it about and couldn't be bothered with it. The distance between him and the other boys remained just as great. They were afraid of him, anxious, because there was something about him, something large, indifferent, and dangerous, something looking down on them. He had a quiet way of asking them for things; often one look was enough for them to obey. He himself slid away and apparently found no enjoyment in the pranks he carried out.
In the course of the next year or two, Jason grew a great deal and became a large, strong youth.
To Jason himself, everything seemed simply a continuation of the same sense of having a strange scent, of something in him separating him from the others. But now it was as if that something in him had changed, had matured and hatched out and was thrashing about with dark wings, a cold distance, and a quiet, savage despair. He also discovered he enjoyed this distance from everything and everyone. He could manipulate others into doing what he wanted, and they would grovel to him. He relished the lack of effort, physical or emotional, it took to dominate them. It was easy, easy. A strong, tough rebellious streak slowly materialized in him--almost a hatred. Hatred of the school and the masters, the pupils, his uncle and aunt and their peaceful vicarage. He did not belong with them! He was homeless, and that was how it should be. That was right. But they had to notice him, feel that he was there.
He always seemed to be attacking himself to see whether the glass wall would break. But it held. Old Saunders, his biology master, grew tense when Jason suddenly got up in class and asked questions that were outside the curriculum but never irrelevant, questions drawn from his own reading, and put so unyieldingly Saunders had to scratch his beard in despair. Jason used his own cleverness as a weapon. In reality, that weapon was equally directed at himself, but no one understood that.
He was calm for long periods of time, turned in on himself, relaxing in that distance from things. But then an unease would come overhim, rippling the outside surface, and he would turn to mischief again. As if numb, with almost no idea what he was doing, he would draw a mustache on one of the portraits of admirals in the hall, or seized with icy rage after a beating, he would hurl a stone through one of the leaded windows in the headmaster's study. He did things others would never even think of. He released the biology lab's collection of white mice in chapel before morning service and set off firecrackers during choir practice. Even his favorite subjects were not allowed to escape.
At the same time--at the same time, he was silent, almost dreamy. He was a clever pupil, accurate and industrious, and he worked hard. He played the violin with more enthusiasm than before, and a new note had come into his playing. But what was to be done with him ... ?
The pranks he carried out had a perfidious and premeditated character about them; he was not always caught, but Jason's hand could be sensed behind them. It was never clear just who had cut all the branches off the rosebushes in the school garden so they never flowered that year, and no one could prove who had put horse dung in the Communion chalice early one Sunday morning.
The latter caused turmoil in the school for several weeks. All the free periods were canceled and the headmaster spent hours trying to get the culprit to confess, or to get others to testify against him. The case was finally abandoned for lack of evidence, but from that day on, a state of war was declared between the masters and Jason. There was no more talk of a rebellious pupil; instead it was a direct attack on the values this venerable school was founded on, values society itself, the Empire itself, were built on. The danger was that this kind of activity could give the school a bad name, for naturally the stories would go back to the parents during the holidays.
The other pupils were afraid of him.
But Jason seldom did anything to them. He never attacked, so to speak, an individual; his assaults were directed at loftier and larger targets; the other pupils were apparently beneath his contempt.
But there were exceptions.
For instance, that business with young Denton.
Dear Jason [his father wrote],
I happened to be talking to an old officer in the bar the other evening and he told me about the Sepoy Rebellion in 1857. Fat, purple in theface, and trembling behind his white moustache, he told me about when he was a young subaltern and was sent to Delhi to carry out the required cleaning-up operations and acts of vengeance. He told me of events no one could comprehend, human actions beyond all good and evil, things we would normally not be able to credit. Countless gallows along the city streets, and women and children tied in front of the gun barrels before orders were given to fire.
The Denton affair happened on a Sunday a few weeks before the end of term. A cricket match was being held and the boys not taking part were in their Sunday clothes, a welter of straw boaters and whites and a mildly festive atmosphere prevailing on the cricket field. A lot of parents had come down to watch the match and there was an air of semiofficial end of term and a preview of the summer holidays. The masters were in a good mood; the match was going well for the school and also sufficiently protracted to allow the spectators to think and talk about many other major and minor matters while they were being entertained--the actual game providing diversionary spells. In between, people were strolling about. Mothers and sisters were escorted around, and a pleasant buzz of voices and laughter spread all over the school grounds.
In one corner by the rose garden a conversation had arisen, a kind of discussion, the contents of which none of the boys present considered particularly important, a fact which later made it difficult to reconstruct what really happened.
Denton was a pupil at the school in a form above Jason: tall, elegant, distinguished, scion of one of the foremost and oldest families in the country. He had grown up in a castle, and his father was not only an earl but was also in the cabinet. Young Denton was in every respect a rare bird. He had been sent there and not to the grandest public schools because he was actually academically gifted and Jason's school was known for its good academic results. Young Denton mixed easily with the other boys, did not lord it over them, and was friendly and natural. But of course it was known who he was and he also knew it himself, so relations to both the other boys and the masters were affected by that. Jason and Denton had no particular antagonism between them; on the contrary, Denton seemed to be one of the boys Jason got along with best. So what happened was doubly incomprehensible.
This little group of pupils had started talking, a very youthful and self-confident conversation marked by the participants as yet having no particular skills at flying, having hitherto done nothing but flap their wings. They were also in a good mood. Jason was standing on the edge of the crowd in his dark Sunday suit, listening but taking no part. They were discussing class differences in society, particularly those with no property. That was a theme of the day. None of them had the slightest idea what they were talking about, so it was no wonder a number of ill-considered things were said.
Denton was ordinarily reserved and friendly, though no less self-confident. His interests lay in quite a different direction from the subject of conversation, and the comments he made were founded on the limited experience and impressions his upbringing had provided. So when he made a few remarks suggesting that the poor in the big cities had no one but themselves to blame for their situation, and that many of them were of doubtful morals, had no education, and possessed neither initiative nor responsibility--in short, many of them were good-for-nothings who deserved their degradation, it was clear this young aristocrat drew his conclusions partly from what he had heard from his father. Just because of this, the other boys were keen to hear more, and then a dark shadow suddenly appeared between their ranks and stood facing Denton. It was Jason Coward. Jason was heard to say something to Denton in a low voice, and the latter was heard to reply with a one-syllable word ... Then everything happened very quickly. Jason grabbed the older boy and hit him in the face and the solar plexus. Then, white-faced, his teeth clenched, he lifted his victim as high as his shoulder and flung him with all his strength face-first into a thorny rose bush. Slowly and deliberately, he walked over to the bush, seized Denton's jacket, heaved him halfway up, and was about to throw him back among the thorns when someone at last intervened and brought Jason down to the ground.
Attracted by cries of pain, people came running up: members of the staff, parents--and Lady Violet, the victim's mother.
"Let go of me," snarled Jason to the four boys holding him down. "Let go! I'll get him! I'll get the bastard! Let me go."
That was how a good cricket match came to an end halfway through.




" ... and you can thank your Creator, young man, that he didn't lose his sight. Have you seen the length of those thorns?" Mr. Scott had come down from London to straighten Jason out and if possible prevent his expulsion.
"Yes," said Jason. "It's a species of wild brier, Rosa canina, if I remember rightly, according to Crépin's system."
"Yes, quite. Now just calm down a little, will you. I have been told your behavior here has become scandalous. In general! Neither I nor your aunt and uncle can understand what has got into you. I must say I am disappointed. What would your father have said?"
Jason looked down, but said nothing.
"I've had a talk with the headmaster. You should be pleased this happened after your exams. You've done brilliantly in them this year, the headmaster tells me. Coward is a good pupil. But expulsion is now imminent, young man. In your last year. What would John have said?"
Jason still said nothing, but let his gaze roam out the window into the high summer day, the blue sky and the great white cumulus clouds above the hills.
"What have you got against young Denton, by the way?"
"Nothing."
"Nonsense. Don't lie to me. You don't throw a fellow schoolboy, an aristocrat at that, the son of a member of Her Majesty's government, into a thorn bush for no reason whatsoever. Had he insulted you? Are you too proud to answer back?"
"He hadn't insulted me," said Jason.
"But for God's sake, it must have been something."
Jason mumbled something.
"What did you say?"
"Let's say it was a political matter," Jason said. "He said something about the poor deserving their poverty. I asked him to take it back and he wouldn't. So I thought I'd teach him a lesson."
Mr. Scott was quiet for a long time.
"Good God," he said finally. "I think you mean it." He looked closely at Jason, trying to form a picture of this sturdy seventeen-year-old in front of him, what kind of person he could have become since he had sat there that day, watching in silence as his childhood home dissolved before him.
"You've changed a lot," he said, "since I last saw you."
"No," said Jason. "Not fundamentally."
Scott appeared to understand.
"Maybe so," he said, looking Jason straight in the eye. "But listen carefully now, Jason. You're young. You're inexperienced and hotheaded. I have spoken to Denton's parents. That has cost me time and energy, but I have succeeded. They are willing to let this pass because the boy escaped injury and because no one wants a scandal. The earl simply asks that you apologize to his son. Very noble of him. The headmaster was not so easy. He wanted to expel you, Jason."
"I understand," said Jason.
"You don't look as if you mind," said Scott harshly.
"Mind? I said I understood. Why should I mind?"
The solicitor looked at Jason, and their eyes met. Those eyes, he thought, those eyes.
"I don't think you understand anything," he said wearily. "But I have spoken to the headmaster and he is willing to allow you to stay on for your last year, on probation, young man, on probation. One more minor thing and you are out on your ear. Even if it's in the middle of term. Do you understand that, then?"
"Yes," said Jason. "I understand."
"Please bear it in mind."
"Yes," said Jason.
"I hope you will use your holiday to think things over. I have advised your foster parents to ..."
"My aunt and uncle," said Jason.
"I have advised them to let you use up some of your energies during the holidays. I hope you will mature over the summer."
Jason looked at him, and this time it was Scott's turn to look down.
After this conversation, Jason's rebellious attitude changed, at least outwardly. It took another direction and was no longer quite so visible.




He spent the summer holidays at home at the vicarage in Devon, away from school. At home. He never really felt at home there, although his aunt and uncle were friendly enough. But they also felt he was more like a guest, a lodger, than a foster son. They never really talked to each other. He was careful to please them, rising atcockcrow, eating his porridge, spending long sleepy Sunday mornings in church as the Reverend Chadwick preached away in his singsong voice. Or he spent time on his books, his natural history. He read Darwin and he also read the illustrated Bible. He reads and reads, but finds no answers. He listens to Chadwick's sermons, walks around the church looking at the stained glass, looking at the beautiful little granite font and the ornamental pulpit. He finds no answers. He walks across the moor and along the river, searching but finding nothing. He searches through his uncle's theological books and finds nothing there, either. Nothing, apart perhaps from a little verse, translated from Sanskrit.
He copies it out in large, even letters onto the frontispiece of his edition of Origin of Species.
Shiva, you are without mercy Shiva, you are without heart


Why, why did you let me be born wretched into this world, in exile from that other?


Tell me, Lord, have you not one single little tree, a single little plant created just for me?
In the faint light of the summer night he looks at the cheap print above the end of his bed in his room, an angel on a cloud looking down at him. He thinks about his mother's quiet voice as she turned the pages of the illustrated Bible, and he remembers his father's white knuckles in church on Sundays.
He remembers his conversation with Saunders, that terrible crimson morning when his tears would not stop. Saunders had eventually brought him back to earth in the only way he knew how. They were in Saunders's study, among flasks and tubes and innumerable examples of animals and plants. Saunders had not known what to do with Jason, but he had noticed that despite his distress, the boy's eyes kept straying to a skull lying on the desk, the skull of a saber-toothed tiger,an unusual rarity Saunders was studying, a complete cranium, brilliantly white, lying beside the padded case.
He carefully picked up the skull and put it down in front of Jason.
"Would you like to take a closer look?"
Jason fixed his eyes on the smooth, almost sculptural object. It was good to look at, and for some reason it calmed Jason down. Saunders held it up against the light so Jason could get a better view of it--the intricate, curved bone formation, the great eye sockets, the blunt nose section, and the powerful jaws. The teeth attracted Jason in particular, those two saber-like teeth arching out of the mouth in a great curve. He recognized them as incisors like his own, but grown out, and far too large. Saunders opened the jaws and pulled slightly at the saber teeth so that they became a little longer. He let Jason hold the skull for a while. It was as good to touch as it was to look at, and Jason grew considerably calmer, the very feel of these objects providing him with firm ground beneath his feet, bringing him back to earth. For a moment he sat there feeling the cool, smooth bone, feeling a kind of gratitude toward Saunders for finding him there in the hall and now sitting here not knowing how best to console him. Without thinking, Jason asked a question relevant to his subject.
"Can you show me the mid-jawbone?"
Saunders smiled with relief, took the skull, opened the huge jaw, and showed Jason how the mid-jawbone, os intermaxillare, was clearly interwoven with the other upper mandibles.
"Until seventy or eighty years ago," Saunders began cautiously, trying to lead Jason's thoughts away from his hurt, "it was thought humans had no intermaxillare as animals have. That was evidence, so to speak, that people did not stem from apes. All other animals, the primates, too, have. But human beings haven't. That is ... that's what it looks like at first glance." He fetched another skull, a rodent of some kind, from a glass-fronted cupboard.
"This is a beaver," he said. The skull was surprisingly small and had two long rust-colored front teeth that could be pushed in and out of the jawbone. Saunders pointed out the most important bones and found the same ones in the skull of the saber-toothed tiger, but shaped differently. "You see," said Saunders, "there it is. The little os intermaxillare. But look here now." He went over to a cupboard and brought back a human skull. "Can you find it on this?"
Saunders was absorbed in it now and was pleased to have Jason there. He could not cope with tears. Bones were his territory, not emotions. Bones and specimens. Saunders was a good teacher, often made fun of because of his eternal explanations and digressions, all produced in a rapid, gravelly voice; it was as if it lay too far back in his throat. Wicked tongues maintained his intermaxillare got in the way. But he could arouse enthusiasm, because he himself was so obviously enthusiastic about his subject. Among specimens, flasks, and tubes, he looked like Dr. Faustus, with his beard and the fringe of hair at the back of his round pate, a survivor from the Age of Enlightenment. His medicine for chaos was natural history, and that suited Jason.
"Where is it in a human skull, then?" Jason was counting out the sutures in the skull but, of course, found nothing, although he knew perfectly well it was there. Then he let Saunders have the pleasure of showing him where it was hidden.
"There it is," said Saunders, tapping his forefinger inside the roof of the cranium. "Os intermaxillare. When that was discovered, the last scientific argument for the adherents of the biblical story of creation was demolished." He sounded almost triumphant. Saunders was considered somewhat controversial because of his constant overt attacks on Adam and Eve.
Jason had stopped crying, but the feeling of unreality and pain would not release its hold and his cheeks were still smarting; it helped, however, to hear about that bone. "A poet discovered it," said Saunders, "a German. A declared devotee of Adam and Eve, a poet who thought he was a scientist but with the decency to admit to what he had found, although it terrified him. He had found the decisive proof. We are like the primates."
Saunders put the human skull alongside that of the saber-toothed tiger and, suddenly uncertain, glanced at Jason.
Jason was looking at the bone formations on the desk, thinking how many organisms were born and die every day. Then he thought about his parents and a great coldness came over him. He did not realize it until later, but at that moment he lost God.




He is lying in bed in the little vicarage bedroom, listening to the birds singing. He has been searching and searching. Everything he has readconfirms this--there is no God, nothing behind it all--and nothing afterward. It is a difficult thought, but at the same time joyous; a liberating thought, but a joy and a freedom beyond the threshold of pain.
Incurable homelessness! A song of the spheres portraying seconds and years. He lies there in the darkness thinking, thinking until the birds start singing outside. Then he falls asleep, a deep, dreamless repose.
Dear Jason [his father wrote],
India was the end and I barely remember it. I left it all on a very warm morning. It torments me that I held out a shorter time than your mother. But no doubt she was thinking about you and clung harder to life.
You see, I've come to Saturn. All the elements of the cosmos space are visible from here, beautifully arranged. Everything can be seen through, from the heavy saturated chaos of the clouds of gas to the crystalline formations. Combinations are made and dissolved. Here there is a bridge of ice in the heavens.
I was extremely overworked, you must remember, and I was in much worse shape than I ever let on to you or Alice. That last year in London I was plagued with pains in my left arm, which was why I found it so difficult to walk on our last trip with the telescope.
Here I am now, noting a faint, strange irritation at not being able to see the results of the last bacteria cultures we were producing in Vellore--although that was probably what finished me off, so I was able to see the results after all. I have never been cautious. I must say I miss your mother, Jason, and I am sorry if she was in pain. I am afraid I did not take enough care of my health in India, either. But what can one do when one has no God and work is the only thing that appears to provide any meaning to it all? You are old enough now for me to be able to talk to you about this, Jason. I suppose you are with my sister and her husband now, if I am not mistaken. Mabel's and my father was also a vicar, as you know, and she still has a great deal of that in her. But for me God went out of my sight on the way somewhere in all that insane and endless work for the committees. Don't think I didn't know it was meaningless all the time. But I did my best. I gave it all I had, and occasionally tried to find my way back to my faith on the way. Jason--you will soon be adult and will understand this now--I probably never really had any God at all, but just imagined one, an inheritedghost in many ways resembling my father. A kind of Admiral Lord Nelson of a God, terrifying and slightly foolish--that is the prevailing image of him, I think, and it does not take much for that to die. I never found another God. What was left? A belief in reason, in science. Contexts can be seen in science, images which speak to you and provide some understanding. Finding a place in that understanding is perhaps a meaning, I don't know. Your mother thought differently about these things. I wish she were here now, in me and around me.
I am in the elements of the universe now, just as I always was from the beginning of time. Life starts somewhere in the chaos of elements around me, protozoa, corals and bryozoans, invertebrates. Coelenterates and fungi. Organisms that are almost entirely calcium, entirely mineral. Almost. Slowly, the aeons glide past, periods of time unfathomable to anyone alive. Slowly, small worms appear, annelids and invertebrates. Trilobites and crustaceans, and in the still primaeval sea, the vertebrates appear, remaining in the depths, first as primitive agnates, eels and lampreys, then fish of various unknown and macabre kinds. In the depths and in time they sank and decayed, and nothing is left of them except an occasional impression in stones, in stones now found in deserts and on high mountain peaks. The first amphibians crawl clumsily over shores of unknown continents, plant life clings to stones and rocks, and birdless forests block the sun in uninhabited lands. Insects swirl in the air. And then, in a majestic, bloodthirsty, and mighty heave, the spinal columns of the vertebrates rise as monstrous lizards and fabulous creatures; dragons flinging their fearful bellows up to a steaming sky. The mountains shudder, innocent small furred animals tremble in their holes and dens. The monstrous lizards writhe in their convulsive strength and power; then something happens and they curl up and fall, fall in on themselves; slowly they become birds, birds as light as undreamt dreams. The searing roars become birdsong, whimpering flutes on warm nights. The poets who will listen to them are not yet born, and Mozart is still only a possibility in the sea of distant not yet created forms of life. So is a homeless young man falling asleep to the sound of birdsong. Small mammals leap through the grass. Soon he is there, a new warrior in the forest, more powerful than all others; he is naked and carrying a spear; he thinks and worships, thinks and worships through the centuries. Now he is here, he who will grasp a spear just as he will later grasp a plough, an executioner's axe, a pen.
My dear Jason, you will by now have come far enough to be able to understand my thoughts. I am on Saturn, or nowhere. Chance is en graved on all objects. Who has said we are the last creatures to rule the world? Is Man now the aim and final meaning of all things? Seen from here, Man and microbe may come to be one. So whatsignificance does it have whether I raise a stethoscope or a sword to my neighbor? Or whether I hold up a stolen emerald or a test tube of microbes to the sun? So I was working on microbes when I had to disappear. Beloved Jason, I greet you from Saturn and wish you well. Your ...
"Why are you dropping all those bits of paper in the river?"
A thick branch hangs far out over the water and Jason is sitting on the middle of it dropping a fine shower of white paper, torn-up letters and photographs, into the swirling current, which takes them with it.
She is standing on the bank looking up at him.
"What are you doing, Jason?" she says. "Tell me. Don't be so superior. Tell me!"
"Oh," says Jason. "Just something I want to get rid of for good." He is not looking at her.
He pulls another letter out of his pocket, glances at it, folds it four times, and slowly and precisely tears it to shreds.
"They're letters," she says gently.
"Yes, Chippewa," says Jason. "They're letters." If she asks what kind, he thinks, I'll hit her.
"And photographs," she says.
"Yes, Chippewa."
She doesn't ask any more but looks up at him with her dark searching eyes. He goes on for a while, tearing up papers and photographs and following the pieces with his eyes as they reach the water, are dispersed, and float away like petals. A few words in careful handwriting are visible, an and, an I, a we. Meaningless words now, dissolved into individual elements of language, atoms of language; interjections, verbs, articles. The photographs similarly--thick, brownish pieces shower down from his fingers into the water, though in contrast to the scraps of letters, they sink almost immediately. A nose, a throat, a patch of skirt. They sink into the darkness and are gone.
She is still standing on the bank looking at him, wondering.
"There," he says as the last fragments disappear. "Now they're gone." He turns to look at her and she can see he has been crying.
"Chippewa," he says. "Mary ..." Her real name is Mary and she lives next door to the vicarage. "Mary ..." His voice is low, almost pleading.
"Yes?"
"Don't look now," says Jason. "You mustn't see what I'm going to do now. Because ..." He wants to say she won't understand, but she has already turned around and has her back to him.
"Like this?" she says.
"Yes," whispers Jason. Then he bends down over the water again, fumbling in his pocket for something, an object, a thing; it lies in his hand like a golden egg. He can hear it ticking even above the roar of the river. Then he throws the old watch far out into the water and it vanishes without a sound, leaving circles on the surface of the water. The river is flowing fast.
He climbs back onto the bank. She still has her back to him.
"You can turn around now," he says. "There's nothing left to see. Nothing but the river."
She turns around and he sees her peering out over the water.
"It's nice here," she says.
"Yes."
"Are you miserable?" she asks cautiously.
"No, Chippewa."
She nods briefly. For a moment it is quiet; then she smiles shyly.
"My father sometimes says you can't go out into the same river twice."
"Must be something he has read."
She looks uncertainly at him.
"Yes. It's the same river," she says.
"Yes," he says. "It's the same river. It's only water all the time. The same river. Always the same river."




She had been around during the holidays ever since he first came here. Chippewa. Mary, the shopkeeper's daughter, ordinarily neat and tidy in her gray school uniform, and nevertheless what his aunt with an extreme euphemism referred to as "a healthy country girl." At first he had been wrong about her, thinking she was different from whatshe was. He ran away from her, just as he avoided all settled people, just as he turned away from everyone who had a place, a home, security.
But she was not like that. She was as wild as the birds on the moor, unpredictable as the wind and the snow; not like other children, never coming home on time from her long, lone walks, playing hooky from school because the day outside called to her. She would refuse to answer when spoken to, and she worried her parents profoundly when she came home wet and muddy from the rain, having fallen into the river, been riding a colt, climbing trees and grazing her limbs. One holiday after the death of his parents, he had noticed her following him and had called out to her: Go away, Mary. I don't want to play with you. For he thought she was like the others, and a girl as well. He thought she did not understand. But she gave him a dark look and said, Don't call me Mary, because that means bad luck. Call me Chippewa, because that's the name of a terrible murdering Red Indian tribe who scalp people.
After that they often went off together on rambles across the moor, along the river, and up into the hills. They never said much to each other, parting and meeting without words, and they never played together except running races and fighting. They were like two stray animals.
But this summer something happened.




"Did you know a storm is raging on Jupiter? It's red and looks like an eye."
It is high summer; the moor is below them and ecstatic birds chatter in the trees and brambles.
"You're strange," she says slowly. "You're the strangest person I know."
"Do you think there's life on other planets?" says Jason. "The same elements are all over the universe, so why not life?"
They have walked a long way that day, and she stretches out alongside him in the heather.
"They say in biology ..." Jason begins, but her look stops him.
"Are those the things you go around thinking about?" she says gravely.
"They say in biology ..." Jason says, slightly more quietly.
"Lean over this way. I'll show you something."
He leans over toward her. It is still for a long spell. She is like the birds. A storm is raging on Jupiter. She runs her hand over his head. He is seized with an amazing feeling, almost like anxiety, almost as if he were going to cry.
She presses him against her mouth. When I was little, I wanted to eat everything I saw. I wanted to eat flowers and I wanted to eat stones. Once I ate a little china ornament. It disappeared, and they wondered where it was. It was a dog. I wanted to taste everything in Dad's shop and I wanted to eat the most beautiful insects. When I was seven, I ate a flower and was poisoned. Then I stopped doing that.
He moans from above her. How strange you are. It's as if nothing can penetrate you. Give me your mouth, like this; I want to taste you, taste you all over me.
She was mad, or that's what they said in the town, a girl who would never be under control, crazy, respecting nothing--that was true, he knew that. Now it grows in them, like anxiety, like rage. The heather scratches their faces and she laughs--it's like when they fight, uninhibitedly. He can spit on her and she can bite him. She helps him undo his clothes; then she tastes him as if he were made of smooth china. They say in biology ... Venus creeps across the sun ... clamps herself to him, quite still now, moist and alien against his own body. Then he heaves himself up and forward--someone's calling--one of them, he doesn't know which.




Later they walk slowly up through the hills; it is getting late. They rest at one place, and she lies with her head against his throat and is no longer a savage Red Indian, just a child who has run away from home. He suddenly thinks about the shopkeeper, plump and narrow-minded, standing behind his counter looking like a sausage. The shopkeeper's daughter--it does not sound like fun.
They don't talk. He looks at her, studying her features: the disquieting, rather plain face, the untidy hair. They said she was mad and mumbled in horror about what would come of such a ... Jason is seized with a kind of obscure need to console her, to hold her and run his hands over her hair. He does not really understand what hasjust happened; it could be rage, it could be wild grief. He doesn't know. But he knows what he is feeling now, and that frightens him.
She raises her head and looks at him. She is Chippewa again.
It's late, he whispers.
There's a little barn up here, she whispers.
They get up. For the first time she takes his hand and leads him, guiding him through the woods, her hand rough and warm. When they reach the barn, he knows what is happening. Now he knows. And he hears quite clearly that it is she who is calling; and perhaps it is to him she is calling, as she clutches, clutches at him.




Jason went back to school a little while later. She said goodbye to him on his last evening--otherwise their farewells have been just as brief and silent as before. She briefly holds his hand, rather awkwardly, and looks at him. That's all. He is leaving, will be away, and she is going back to her moor, alone.
Then she says something.
"Do you also think I'm crazy?"
He shakes his head. "Not really. No more than I am."
"Jason," she says, a strange note in her voice, "it's such a long way into you." Then she turns around and starts walking.
"Anyway," she says. "Anyway, I know what you threw in the river that day."
"What?"
"What, Chippewa?"
...
But she has disappeared into the darkness.




Christmas holidays. Snow on the ground. His aunt's agitated voice when he comes through the door: Goodness, how you've grown. I hardly recognize you each time. You'll soon grow out of ...
Uncle Chadwick, the practical one, droning on about things: And school, young man, have you taken note of what Mr. Scott said?
Jason feels profoundly alien toward them, but finds it easier to mumble dutifully, Yes, yes, things are better. That pleases them. Hecan see that pleases them. And it's true, there has been nothing to remark on that autumn. But whether that is Scott's doing ...
At church on Christmas Day he looks cautiously around at the congregation.
Then turkey and Christmas pudding.
Something does not fit, something is wrong.
By the evening he thinks he has waited long enough and can ask.
"And Chipp ... Mary? The shopkeeper's Mary?"
There is a silence. The vicar harshly clears his throat, then gets up and goes into his study as if he had not heard.
"Oh ..." Aunt Mabel says gently, stirring her hot punch. "Well, that was a terrible story ..."




Jason, Jason. What is the matter with you, that things like this happen to you?
You are falling, falling now, falling through the distances in space, falling and waking, just as you did when you were small, but this is no dream. Outside the vicarage the snow is on the ground. You are freezing into ice, Jason. You walk across the moor alone and know it is the last time. You never want to walk there again.




"Well now, gentlemen, now that we are to take up the question of heredity and reproduction, we had better start with the rats."
University Medical Department 2; the professor cheerful and morning-brisk at the lectern.
"Everyone knows rodents reproduce themselves very rapidly, but just how rapidly this occurs in rats you will soon find out after I have briefly sketched for you the life cycle of the rat--its biography, if I may put it that way."
His students murmur with amusement.
"If we look at the common rat," he says, taking a rat out of a cage beside him, "there's not much about it to inspire respect. It doesn't look particularly repulsive. From its characteristics, it seems a pleasant little animal, moist nose, whiskers, peering eyes ... Its tail is slightly unpleasant but ..."
The students laugh.
"But this little animal is more dangerous to man and society than the largest and strongest predator. Here in England we know of two types of rat, one the black rat, Rattus rattus, which earlier was the common variety but which has now been overtaken by the common brown rat, Rattus norvegicus. This species is generally about nine inches long, light brown in color, mixed with gray, its neck and abdomen dirty white, its paws pale skin color--as is its tail, which is as long as its actual body. This rat lives almost everywhere. Along riverbanks it eats frogs, fish, and small birds, but it also takes rabbits, young pigeons, and so on when it can get at them.
"However, it can also live off a vegetarian diet and does immeasurable harm to grain crops in the fields and barns, as well as in stores of fruit and vegetables. It bites very fiercely, and the wounds heal with difficulty. Its bite is very painful because of those long, sharp, unevenly shaped teeth.
"The rat is extremely fertile. Were it not for its astonishing appetite, the number of rats would soon be out of control. For lack of other food, they eat each other, and the large male rats, which often live alone, are feared by the other rats, the worst enemies they have. They eat smaller members of their own species. That is an excellent example of the principle of the survival of the fittest, as well as of self-regulation by a species. Please take note of this.
"It is an interesting fact that skins of rats that have been eaten by other rats can be found in rat holes, and these skins are often inverted during the eating, in other words, inside out ... even toes and tail."
The professor picks up an inside-out rat. His students laugh, somewhat uncertainly, at such a grotesque sight.
"The female is fertile all year round, and twelve litters in the course of a year is nothing unusual. She carries her progeny for scarcely a month and is accessible for reproduction as soon as the dear little things see the light of day. On an average, she gives birth to sixteen young in each litter, and she has been known to go on feeding them until the very moment the next lot drop out of her. She is a living spawning ground, and the male rat's urge to reproduce is almost as uncontrollable as his hunger.
"The young are sexually mature after five or six months, so if you reckon on a lifetime of four years, one pair of rats can theoretically produce issue amounting to three million in that short period of time.
"The consequences of such fertility--if allowed to continue unhindered--are obvious. We have accounts of whole villages on the plains of Spain ruined by rats, fertile fields becoming deserts, and Plyny the Elder tells of how Augustus once sent a whole Roman legion to Majorca and Minorca, where these small vermin had practically taken over the islands. They were wading in rats there and the legionaries' task was not pleasant.
"So we should be grateful for the rats' tendencies to cannibalism and civil war. The male has an astonishing thirst for the blood of his own issue, and the female knows that, so does her best to hide her young in places where the father can't get them--until they're big enough to defend themselves against him. Nonetheless, the male often finds his young wherever the female has hidden them. He often kills her, too, to get hold of them. And he eats as many as he can.
"There is a great deal more to say about these interesting animals, but that will have to suffice. As we now move on to the question of heredity, I must ask you to note the following ..."




The university. They dissected rats and corpses, at first with uncertain hesitant movements, then with skilled indifference. To Jason, this time took on a vaguely nightmarish light, flickering and dim, the light from the gas lamps burning on dark evenings in the pathology room. In the half-light, young men in waistcoats and shirtsleeves were smoking as they folded back abdominal membranes and pleural sacs, revealing secrets no one ought to see and no one understood. Naked gray limbs lay on the slabs, all with that characteristic chilly skin, old and young, men, women, and children. At first they just lay there; then they were opened up and slowly taken apart, until finally nothing was left. That was the secret. And the smell--the sweetish smell of formaldehyde and disinfectant, mixed with the nauseous odor of decomposition--clung to his clothes, his skin, his very nostrils.
In the evenings, filled with images of the day, Jason went back to his room, an anonymous attic in a poorish part of London. He often picked up his violin the moment he got inside the door and went on playing until almost midnight, ignoring the fact that he should be reading or preparing for the next day. He never knew what he was playing, using no score, just playing everything he knew, wildly andunsystematically. Then he played what he didn't know, mindlessly, just pure notes, until someone banged furiously on the ceiling or the wall, or his landlady, Mrs. Bucklingham, came up to demand quiet. Mrs. Bucklingham was a stout, shuffling busybody. She smelled of frying and damp wool. She was always angry with one or several of her tenants, and Jason suspected her of going into his room to snoop around when he was out in the daytime. She ruled her lodging house despotically, and one wit had already renamed the place Bucklingham Palace. Whenever she came up to him, tut-tutting and shaking her fist, Jason looked at her as if she were already one of the ugly nameless bodies in the mortuary, and with a medical man's sober, somewhat cynical mind, he saw her in front of him, stripped and sliced open, the layers of white fat folded to one side while someone fingered her liver. That was Jason's revenge. He caught himself regarding the whole world in that way: his fellow students, the professors, the washerwomen who came and went in his street, the vegetable sellers, the animal tamers, and the countless street girls. It was all there in front of him like a bad dream, all of it, the homeless children of the slums, born into a quagmire of hopelessness, filth, and ignorance, roaming the streets munching on cabbage leaves they picked up off the ground. As soon as they were old enough, they would be victims of itchy crotches, coupling and producing issue. Toil and beg for food, man, bite your nearest and pray to God. Look at microbes in your microscope. Chat and smile. Everyone chats and smiles, chats about nothing, shouts and drinks himself silly occasionally or all the time. Then they die one fine day, old or young, they die, are tucked up into the earth with laurel wreaths or are found in the gutter and taken to the mortuary for dissection. That's what it's like. Swarming lives, with no meaning, no number.
Occasionally he could see himself quite clearly, lying there with his abdomen slit open, grinning teeth behind gray lips, white slits of eyeballs visible between rigid eyelids.
If he did not go home and take up his violin, he might go out into the abyss of the city for a night or two. There was a lot to do there. That was how Jason discovered a great deal about himself, did things he would never have imagined possible, things that filled him with a faint, wondering self-contempt.
His studies did not go well after the enthusiasm of the first termhad worn off. He thought of the illustrated books of his childhood, the glass cupboards in his father's surgery, the experiments and the telescope, and what had attracted him to medicine became more and more indistinct. A sense of honor, that was true, a kind of duty to the memory of his father--he was doing what was expected of him. Also, the medical profession would provide him with a livelihood. But beyond that? What was it all about? What had attracted him to science and medicine? His own disposition? The fact that his father had been so good at explaining and bringing things alive? Yes, but there had to be something else. What were his own motives, his own thread through it all?
It did not occur to him until later that he was in a situation few scientists ever seriously approach with the same gravity. Science is principally driven by the sheer need for understanding, and that is enough in itself, the driving force behind much monotonous research work. It fills the weary slow days and nights in laboratories with flames, with meaning. Next comes its usefulness, the practical dividend of penetrating nature, controlling it, and modifying it. Jason was asking for something more than that, and it was presumably inappropriate to ask about your own place in that picture.
He also believed a doctor should serve people, cure them, with compassion.
Compassion. Jason had lost his God early, that was true, but now, at this time, human beings also disappeared from Jason's view of the world, and with that human qualities such as unselfishness, enthusiasm, and compassion also vanished. Things no longer had anything to say to him. The orangutan and the amoeba--they were all the same to him. Flowers in the ground or people in the wretchedness of their cities. He saw the sick and the decrepit in the hospital vainly clinging to life. He dissected rats and cut up corpses. Death was all around him. He walked through foggy streets and saw the wretched of the city, saw them eating, saw them starving, saw the heart desperately hammering through the shirtfront of a boy dragging a heavy cart behind him. He listened to lectures. He saw organisms fighting and collapsing, rattling in the wards. He studied the construction of the organs. He studied the sex of a whore he slept with, that strange flower of flesh; he was seized with loathing.
In that way he shut everything out, denying himself impressions, unable to take anything into himself.
This awful state--for he was perfectly aware of its awfulness--was something he had experienced since the incident with Chippewa. His time at the university had simply confirmed it, and it was nothing he had learned from books, nor had he ever seen it described. When he read about the early great thirst for knowledge and those creative people, he had the impression they had been obsessed by something to an unfathomable extent--an idea, a longing, a hope, something that drove them on. He saw it in a number of his fellow students, too: Christian ideas, philanthropic ideas, socialist ideas, or a straightforward simple desire for a secure position, ambitions for a career. Or both. He was not like any of them. He was an idealist with no ideals. He was empty of enthusiasm, empty of compassion. He wished for calm rest, no thought, no questions, no being. He shrieked out all his pain and suffering into the arms of a little street girl. She had been frightened and had wanted to leave him, and then he hit her. What would Chippewa have done? Perhaps she would have let him shriek, or would have shrieked back, or held on to him hard. Hold me tight!
He occasionally pulled himself together, going to socialist meetings, for instance, trying to make ideals appear, make himself feel compassion.
But the rhetorical fervor of the many speakers and lecturers glanced off him. He understood them, he understood their intellectual point, but not their emotion. Distant and sick, he noted their integrity and realized it stemmed from the same rationalistic attitude to life he himself had, but nonetheless was passionately inspired by compassion, a will to fight injustice. But they did not move him.
He hauled himself out of his lethargy with a violent effort of will and applied himself to the curriculum for a few weeks--then collapsed again, unable even to find the energy to open his books. For a few days it was as much as he could do to drag himself off to lectures, leaving his reproachful books on the table--an unpleasant lump came into his throat each time he looked at them.
This was when his bad dreams began; anguished, incoherent images leaving him sweating and wide-awake, images that meant nothing, but which filled him with fear all the same. A bare branch dripping with raindrops. Two quiet horses in driving mist--but beneath it all a fear, unknown and invisible. That was what his nights were like, while in the daytime he had periodic fits of rage.
Ah, but his friends! His friends Munroe and Hugo, they understoodhim, or at least he could sit with them for hours or days, drinking, going to pubs, thinking up pranks at the university. Munroe and Hugo did not reject him if one evening he started smashing things or lashing out.
At the university Jason made friends for the first time, and naturally they were the two most hardened of the lot--Munroe and Hugo, two hopelessly lost men who were always on the verge of being thrown out of the halls of Aesculapius for their behavior; who stuffed their cigar butts into the nostrils and ears of the dead when smoking in the pathology room. Hugo, small, perfidious, and dark; Munroe, thickset, violent, and careless. They were noisy and troublesome friends, and Jason loved them, not least because with them he could laugh--laugh and laugh, laughing everything off.
His two friends were always teetering on the edge of expulsion from the university, and Jason was soon teetering with them, so no wonder things worked out as they did. If one event had not become the decisive factor, another would have. Jason could see perfectly well the way things were going, but he did nothing to stop it. This inevitability had been obvious over the course of his last year as a medical student--stemming from his state of mind about the profession he had chosen, to which he no longer felt drawn. He was twenty-one and was swept along on the current of carousing and apathy, fights and rebelliousness--inexorably drawn to a break with all the certainty of a sleepwalker, as if led by alien forces, as inevitably as if it were written in the stars.




The decisive event happened one evening in the pathology room, and it began innocently enough. Together with Munroe and Hugo, Jason had ensconced himself there with some medicinal spirits. Munroe had acquired the keys, and they secretly let themselves in after everyone else had left. To them it seemed an unusual place for an unusual evening.
"I can't stand this smell," mumbled Jason. "I'll never get used to it."
"My dear chap," growled Munroe good-humoredly, "you'll soon have something else to think about apart from the smell. Here." He handed Jason a bottle.
Hugo fished a couple of candle stumps out of his trouser pocket and lit them. Then they sat down, a bit expectantly, passing the bottle between them as they watched the shadows flickering over the walls and ceiling.
After they had emptied the first bottle, they began the evening's program.
First they walked around from corpse to corpse, looking down at them. There were a lot there, for at the time the students were concerned with accidents and violent deaths, so the curriculum covered such causes of death and what the human body looked like afterward.
One was a man rather like Admiral Lord Nelson in appearance, but he had also landed underneath a brewer's dray, so by now he looked more like that gentleman after the Battle of Trafalgar.
They also examined gunshot wounds and some fairly undramatic knife wounds. Owing to a series of disciplinary matters the previous year, Hugo was repeating the course, so he had been through the material before and was able to lecture Jason and Munroe with a knowledgeable air. He also had the pleasure of demonstrating a neck after hanging and the hanged man's face with all its characteristics. Jason and Munroe followed with interest. There was also a case of poisoning, and several nasty injuries. The three of them were drinking all the time, but when they came to a fisherman, they lowered the bottle and stood in silence for a few minutes, looking down at this man who had drowned in the Thames. Jason noticed Munroe's rigid face and he could feel his own stomach churning.
"Why does he look so bloody awful?"
"Because he drowned, Jason," said Hugo matter-of-factly. "That's what they look like."
"Blown up?"
"Yes. Haven't you seen a drowned corpse before? They're the worst. The absolute worst."
"Christ!" Jason looked at the purplish, grotesquely swollen body and cautiously touched the leathery skin. "Why is it so hard?"
"I'm not quite sure. Probably a chemical reaction between the layers of fat in the tissues, so the fat changes consistency and turns hard."
Munroe interrupted, his eyes rigid.
"And how long ... Excuse me ..." Words failed him and heclapped his hand over his mouth and left the slab to lean over in a corner.
Jason went on staring at the drowned man and completed Munroe's question. "How long had he been in the water?"
"Difficult to say. Over a week, I should think. Maybe two. That's why he's so swollen."
Jason raised the bottle and took a gulp.
"The water penetrates the tissues by osmosis and stays there," said Hugo. "No, he doesn't look too good."
"And the face?"
"Yes. No. Christ no. Drowned ..."
"Is it a simple death?"
"Easy, do you mean? Drowning?"
Jason took another gulp and looked questioningly at Hugo.
"Well," said Hugo. "First of all the air passages fill with water and the drowning person tries to hold his breath but can't. He breathes in deeply and respiration stops for about ninety seconds. Then some more deep breaths follow and water is drawn into the lungs; he loses consciousness, and after a few spasmodic terminal breaths, death occurs. Four or five minutes. It can be quicker because of the shock. You're conscious, or semiconscious, for the first few minutes of the process."
"Do they float up again?"
"Gradually. The characteristic floating position is with the abdomen and face down in the water, buttocks and back of the head above the surface, the limbs hanging loose."
"I see."
"But an easy death ... Why do you ask?"
"Oh, nothing," said Jason. "Just that I heard a story once about someone who'd drowned." He stopped and reached for the bottle, drank deeply, then went on somewhat indistinctly. "Ugh, it was really rather a terrible story. As I said, really terrible. A young girl, fairly young, only a child really, drowned herself in a fast-flowing river. Quite without warning. No one had any idea she was going to do it, neither the parents nor the vicar. Or even that she could have such a thought in her head. She just walked into the river one late November day and disappeared into the swirling currents. I can see her floating, half above, half below the surface, her eyes open because she wanted to see what it was like, I suppose."
Hugo looked closely at Jason as he took another swig at the bottle.
"I wonder if it was an easy death," Jason went on. "A terrible story, that's what they said, a terrible story. I think she had loosened her hair--it was brown and must have floated out freely in the water, and she had a gray skirt on. At first they searched for her everywhere when she didn't come home, but then they began to drag the river. They found her a few days later farther downriver, caught in a tangle of branches and twigs. They carried her home in the rain. Do you think--do you think she looked like that?" Jason nodded at the swollen creature on the slab.
"No, Coward. Not very likely. Not after only a few days."
"I suppose not," said Jason quietly.
"Why ... I mean, did she do it on purpose?"
"At first they thought she'd fallen in as she was walking along the river. But she hadn't."
"No?"
"You mean, how did they find out? Well, it's not really certain, but I suppose it must have been when they were washing her and getting her ready for the coffin. As she was lying there on a slab and they were drying her, they noticed. She was thin, sparrow-like, and it showed. She was four months along."
The air around Jason was sober and clear now, though he had begun to snivel.
"And then?"
"And then," said Jason, "they put her in the coffin and buried her."
"I mean--the father?"
"Her father was the shopkeeper," said Jason.
"The child's father."
"The child's father, the father of the child. They thought all kinds of things. Maybe some goatherd, they said. Or a traveling salesman. Or a Gypsy. Or a tinker. So many people get the blame for things like that, except the actual culprit. It was a local boy, nothing more dramatic. They ought to have realized that. Perhaps they did actually sense it. Anyhow, he told them himself when he came back from school and heard what had happened. He announced it loudly to anyone who cared to listen. Then he was thrown out of his home, right in the middle of Christmas Day. It was an extremely Christian and moral place."
"Not everyone would voluntarily own up to such a thing."
"There was a huge commotion." Jason took another gulp.
"Why do you think he told them?"
"He shouldn't have. Not to avoid the commotion, but because it was his concern, not theirs. And the dead girl's concern, inasfar as the dead can have 'concerns.' He ought to have realized no one would understand. His confessing was a pathetic gesture."
"But pathetic things can be honestly meant."
"Yes," said Jason gravely. Then he emptied the bottle and dropped it on the floor. "Hurrah!" he cried.
Hugo shushed him, then they laughed.
A few minutes later, Jason went quite wild. The other two drank to keep up with him, and then things started developing. Their evening in that dismal place became frightfully amusing and amazing, frightfully frightfully amusing, all of it foggy to Jason, an indistinct whirlpool, a wild dance of impressions and happenings, and the dance went like this:
DANCE MACABRE
First they drank a bottle --it was frightfully funny Then they played with corpses --it was frightfully funny They laughed at a gassed old lady --and had quite a bit of fun And engraved their initials --scalpels are versatile tools Then they sniffed at formaldehyde --and Jason was dreadfully sick And put a toe in the keyhole --it fitted the hole so well Then they exchanged a few organs --absurd objects on a woman Then drank yet another bottle --Jason made a speech to the dead But then came a great apparition --but it was only the caretaker They danced around and around him --and had such frightful funThen came two men with helmets --and the dance went gaily on Then came two men with helmets --then it was thanks for the dance.
The next day it was made known that Coward, Jason, Hugo, Paul, and Munroe, Peter had been permanently suspended from the University of London. Owing to the particularly grave nature of their offenses, all other universities were notified of their activities and the British Medical Association was also informed.




Raindrops run down a bare twig.
Two colts stand in the mist.




You are walking along the river and I can see you. It is late autumn, soon winter, fog and rain and moisture everywhere. You like this weather. You like being soaked through. You walk along the riverbank and look around. The sky is low and gray, the first snow soon to come. If you like, I can hold your hand for the last bit, hold your hand as I once did; it was rough and warm in mine. Your face is quite open as you walk, raindrops running down it. Are you sad? Are you happy? Such foolish words, "sad," "happy," limited adjectives covering nothing. Aren't there other states of mind for which there are no human words, beyond an unconditional positive or negative? Walk along the river, see the water flowing by, swollen and fierce from all that rain. The water hides everything. Your face is quite open. If you like, I shall hold your hand for the last bit. Your face. Your chin is pointed and protrudes, your forehead is too high and round. You have an amazing face. Let me hold you now. Rain, rain, eternal rain. Speak to her as she walks, tell her the horses are close together in the meadow, heads over each other's back, protecting each other from the rain. The laughing sound of running water, of drops falling, of whirlpools pulling; can you hear it now? I don't even think you're sorry. I think you're walking along the river because you want to, because that's what you're like, and I don't think you consider anything else but what is right for you. But all the same--all the same, I wish you wouldlisten. Listen to the rain if you can. I would like to hold your hand. You are not mad. I know nothing about you, and yet there's no one I know so much about as you. Here is my hand, if you like. Don't be afraid. I won't talk. I am calm. I imagine you thought about me. So foolish. Consolation. I imagine myself pressing your hand a little. The river bends here, and there is a dark branch hanging out over the river. Your hand.




It was suffocatingly hot in his attic room. He was lying in bed and could not wake up. Indistinct, vile images slipped through him, great moths with brown dusty wings and slimy, bulging egg sacs landing all around him. He seemed to see rotting human limbs, thighs, calves ... He forced himself to sit up and stared around the swaying room. The bright glare from the skylight was like a question, but half-asleep, he could find no answer. When he got up to open the window for some air, everything turned black before his eyes. He swallowed a few gulps of cold tea, staggered back to the bed, and flopped down onto it.
He lay like that for a long time, not knowing what was wrong with him, shuddering now and again; people came into the room, people he knew far too well, but he pretended not to. Then they left. Then he was up, trying to shave, but his hand was so unsteady he cut himself. Maybe he was feverish. Then it was dark again.
He woke once and saw two people he did not know in the room, two men in top hats standing in the harsh morning light, staring solemnly at him. He pretended not to see them, turning away, but they did not disappear. Then he realized they were real.
"Don't you recognize us, Jason?"
Yes, yes. It is someone familiar.
"It's me, Mr. Scott, your solicitor. And Dr. Falls. I don't think you've seen him since--since that little gathering."
Ah yes.
"You look wretched, my boy. Perhaps you'd take a look at him later, Dr. Falls."
As long as he doesn't cut me up.
"I've spoken to your foster parents. About what's happened. But they have no wish to have anything more to do with you. Not after that episode. The girl."
What girl?
"Compensation also had to be paid to the girl's father, as you know. You'd hit him so hard, he lost his hearing. You disgraced your aunt and uncle. Why should you hit him, may I ask?"
No, it's more than I can comprehend.
"To tell the truth, he should have hit you."
He did, too, insofar as a sausage can find the strength to hit anyone. Blows.
"But I see you're ill and I won't make things worse by scolding. You are twenty-one and no longer under the protection of your aunt and uncle, or me. But I--and Dr. Falls--have talked it over, and we would like to help you. What you've done is shameful, but we still honor the memory of your father."
How delightful.
"We'll try to get you reinstated at the university, Jason. We'll stand behind you. We'll say the other two put you up to it. They have both been sent away to sea by their parents. We'll try to get you back into the university, Jason. There's not much money left, to be sure, but we're willing to endorse a loan if you see it through. Are you listening, Jason? Then answer me. Say something. You haven't even said good morning. Dr. Falls, I think you'd better take a look at him."
"Good morning," said Jason as the doctor leaned over him.
"Good morning," said the old doctor kindly. "What's the matter with you?"
"I don't want to do medicine," said Jason faintly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I don't want to go on with medicine."
The two men looked at each other.
"I can't believe my ears," said Scott.
"I am sure you mean to be kind," said Jason, with little conviction. "But it just won't work. I can't stand it. I wish to give it up."
The doctor looked at him in a friendly way, a question in his eyes. Then he examined Jason and prescribed a tonic.
"At least it's a choice," he said.
"Now, really!" said the solicitor.
"Yes," said Jason. "It's true. I'm quite certain I don't want to go on."
"Then there's no point in our staying here," said Scott, offended.
"What do you want, then, young man?" said the doctor.
"For the moment, just to lie here. I want to be left in peace. It'd be kind if you left me in peace now."
"All right," said Dr. Falls. He got up, and Scott hastily left, but the doctor turned in the doorway.
"You're very unlike your father," he said.
Jason smiled, happily.




After that, he lived at the bottom of the pit of London for a year or two. He quickly used up all the remaining money, and his credit worthiness rapidly disappeared. Soon he was chalking his cuffs to keep up a façade for Mrs. Bucklingham. He pawned his textbooks and his remaining instruments. He had no means, nor had he given a thought to any way of earning a living that might suit him. What he saw at the bottom of London is a more or less blank page in Jason's memory. He was living in the silent calm of afterward. Slowly his odd state of mind retreated and he no longer had fits of rage. He first found a way of earning a living by chance, an idea someone gave him. It all happened because Munroe was on shore leave and unexpectedly appeared at Jason's rooms one winter afternoon. Jason was truly pleased to see him, for except for Mrs. Bucklingham, he had spoken to no one for a long time.
Munroe appeared to be on top of the world, strong now and calmer from being at sea. He took Jason with him out on the town, stood him dinner and many tankards of ale, and they talked about Hugo for a while, where he might be in the world (though they were never to find out what happened to him). Then Munroe told him all about life at sea. (Jason was never to see Munroe again after that evening.)
Because Munroe was off again the next day and because Jason had spent over a year with no one to talk to, something happened. Jason changed. That evening he broke his silence and talked to Munroe, talked and talked to his friend, who was to go back to sea, taking Jason's story with him. Hesitant at first, then more openly and freely, he told him about his life. He told his friend that he was a stranger to himself, that he was someone else, that all his adult life he had been someone else whom he didn't know.
Munroe listened to him, asking few questions. Jason did not know whether he understood, but that did not really matter, either.
Something seemed to come to an end that evening, merging into something else, so what happened later seemed right. They slipped out into the city, drank some more, talked together, and got soundly and properly drunk, going from pub to pub; then they went to a music-hall show and laughed at the performance.
Afterward they went to the rat fights. Jason had been unwilling, but his friend dragged him along, so before he could protest, a confused Jason found himself in evil-smelling premises, a famous pit in Fleet Street where Billy, the legendary terrier, had once fought. Now they were featuring a new terrier who, at its best, was supposed to surpass old Billy. The new dog's name was Jacob and he was depicted on the posters snarling and foaming at the mouth, his jaws full of rats.
The atmosphere around the pit was already heated; the early rounds were over and the pit cleared of mutilated rats. A lot of bickering was going on over whether the previous dog had killed twenty-eight or twenty-nine of the gray creatures in its prescribed twelve minutes. The twenty-ninth rat had revived during the cleaning-up operations, but by then bets had all been settled and those who had bet on twenty-eight and not twenty-nine were shouting with annoyance--they had been cheated, they yelled, glaring angrily at the fortunate winners counting their gains. The spectators who had laid no bets because they had no money, or because they had already lost it all, were also yelling--largely to add to the hullaballoo. Bookies were strolling calmly around in the chaos of raging drunks, taking new bets as if nothing had happened, calming tempers, saying this was nothing to squabble about; people should be spending their time betting on Jacob, whose round was just coming up. Good money to be made. Place your bets, gentlemen, quickly now, more gains to come! Men drank, laid bets, and yelled at each other, while the two men in charge of the pit calmly prepared it for the next bout, their high boots and leather gloves protection against rat bites. Otherwise they looked like two bank clerks with no jackets or ties: one small and fat, with a bald patch, smiling sweetly all the time; the other thin, with dark greased hair. Both were sweating profusely in the heat and were noticeably sober, for their rather special task required them to be both watchful and resourceful to avoid being injured. Jason was dragged over toward the pit, almost passing out from the extreme heat and the stench in the overcrowded place; the air was thick with tobacco smoke and thesmell of sweaty drunken men mixed with the smell of vomit, dog excrement, and ... another smell, penetrating and sweetish, nauseating, rising from the pit itself, from the worn, shiny boards where the fights took place. The sounds of music and dancing were coming from the pub next door, and for a brief suffocating moment Jason thought he was about to lose his self-control, but his friend's hand on his shoulder calmed him.
"Haven't you ever been here before?"
Jason mutely shook his head. He would like to have struggled out, but the crowd around the pit was getting more violent now that the men who had been quenching their thirst in the pub next door were back--the high point of the evening was clearly approaching. They were jammed up against the railing by pressure from behind and the impossibility of retreating finally made Jason stay. Something else was also clear to him--he wanted to see this spectacle, yes, study it, enjoy it thoroughly. In his present frame of mind, he thought he could see the truth about mankind in what was going on around him; hundreds of men stacked behind each other, old and young, some in rags, others in suits and boaters, none paying any attention to anyone else, just waiting for the rats to be let loose and the betting money to change hands. Even under the ceiling, in a special gallery, people were fighting like drunken lions for the best seats. He was surprised to see a few women among the crowd of men, most surprised to see a very well-dressed young tady--no more than twenty at most--accompanied by two black-clad men in top hats, perhaps servants or coachmen. The two men kept the nearest people away from the young woman, who was staring dully down into the pit with cold eyes. Jason just had time to see that she was very beautiful before a hum of expectation ran through the crowd. Then everything became deathly quiet and all eyes turned to the top end of the pit.
There Jacob made his entrance. He was a strange little dog, much smaller than Jason had imagined, black and white, with a short tail and pointed ears. He padded around the pit for a while, sniffing--apparently innocent and with no evil intent. But to Jason there was something ominous about him, and he did not wag his tail. He looked like Ernest, Jason's childhood dog. At a distance, he could have been the same dog. Yet the difference was obvious, terrible, though Jason could not pinpoint exactly what it was.
His friend nudged him to make him pay attention. Then Jason saw one of the two men in the pit had stepped over the rail and brought in a large metal cage. The other man had grabbed Jacob by the collar and was holding on firmly, and at that moment Jason realized where the screaming was coming from.
There must have been over a hundred rats in the cage, all of them screaming--not squealing, screaming. Jason shuddered with revulsion. Then, with a practiced hand, the man grabbed bundles of rats by their tails and flung them out into the ring.
The dog's behavior immediately changed. He started growling, very quietly, pulling at his collar, his ears flattened. When enough rats had been thrown into the ring, the man let Jacob go.
Jason could scarcely credit the uproar that now arose among the rats, most of them great huge sewer rats, scurrying away from the approaching dog, scrabbling at the wooden walls around the pit, climbing on top of each other to get up and out, but the horizontal boards along the pit walls prevented them. The rats were screaming all the time, the sound so loud it almost drowned the rising yells of delight from the crowd.
Jacob was no longer growling but silently racing from rat to rat, killing them with a snap of his jaws. If he refused to let go, one of the two pit masters was soon there to snatch the rat out of his mouth. Some of the rats tried to fight back, but the dog was so quick, they never managed to sink their sharp teeth into him. The dog was moving purposefully and soundlessly, except that little snap at each rat, and he cleared the arena at amazing speed. At the other end, more rats were now being released.
Jason was transfixed, staring at what was happening. He could see that this dog in no way resembled the Ernest he had had as a child. The difference was that the pit bull had something about him that was almost human. He was a cold, calculating systematician with four legs and a tail, a tail that did not wag but curled back up like a scorpion's. To Jason the dog seemed to be thinking--while Ernest and most other dogs just lived, played, fought, and ate. That was what was so horrible. The rat killings themselves were repulsive, yes, frightening--but their hideousness lay in the dogs' manner.
Half the twelve minutes had not yet passed. One man was heaving dead rats in great numbers out of the ring into a fenced-off area wherea boy stood counting them, marking off each rat on a board with a piece of chalk. The little fat man kept supplying more rats for Jacob to catch, and the dog spent no more than a few seconds on each. As the fight stood then, it looked like a new record for Jacob, and the crowd was roaring with excitement--the boldest betting on a hundred and fifty or more. The pit bull, with crimson stains down his neck and on his nose, tirelessly continued the hunt.
Then events took an unexpected turn. When Jacob had just over three minutes left, he spotted an unusually large white, probably albino, sewer rat crouching quite still in front of him in the middle of the pit. The dog leaped at the rat, but the rat simply swerved and stopped a little farther away. In contrast to the other rats, it didn't seem to want to escape. Again, the same thing happened; Jacob, provoked, hurled himself at the rat and the rat leaped away like a white ball to another spot. Now Jacob forgot all the other rats and took up the chase. The crowd roared as if possessed--this was new and unexpected. For a long time it looked as if the lightning-fast white rat would be too smart for Jacob. Jason found himself staring as if bewitched. The great white rat bared its teeth at the dog for a moment and Jason found himself screaming--from then on he was yelling with all the others, forgetting himself, venting all his rage and aggression like the rest of the crowd, not knowing whether he was yelling for the rat or the dog.
For a moment it looked as if Jacob had caught his opponent, but then it turned out that the situation was the opposite--the white rat buried its teeth into the skin of the dog's neck, and Jacob was shaking and rattling it violently to get it to let go. It snarled and swirled around and around and the crowd's excitement rose to a new frenzy. Even the phlegmatic pit officials thumped their clenched fists into their palms and cheered. For a while it looked as if the rat would never let go. That would have been the sensation of the year, the champion dog defeated by a rat! But Jacob shook himself again and snapped at the dangling rat.
A calm and friendly voice in Jason's ear said, "Do you see Jacob wrestling with the angel."
For a second Jason was paralyzed. He stopped yelling and turned around to see who had spoken, but discovered no one. All he could see were bawling, cheering spectators, far too excited to be able tosay any such thing. Nor was it his friend, because he was on the other side of Jason, yelling just as loudly.
As Jason turned back to the pit in confusion, he saw the dog had shaken the rat free. It floundered on its back a moment too long--then the dog pounced.
Seconds later the gong sounded; the twelve minutes were up. The crowd cheered Jacob wildly as he trotted somewhat wearily out of the ring. Rats were thrown out and counted at a furious rate, the two pit masters looked exhausted. The boy with the chalk carefully recorded every rat--no rat was to revive this time. The result was lower than expected because of the unexpected finale, but was incredibly high all the same--seventy-nine rats killed in twelve minutes. The crowd roared again, though it was hard to say whether from disappointment or delight.
"Are you feeling unwell?" Jason's friend was staring at him.
"What?" Jason looked up at him without understanding.
"Are you ill? Shall we go?"
"Yes," said Jason, nodding. "Let's go."
They struggled out toward the exit. The bookies were now settling the bets, and in passing Jason noticed one of them handing over a large bundle of notes to one of the servants he had seen with the young girl. She must have guessed right and won the jackpot.
They came out on the street.




Jason found the girl in the snow that same evening.
He was walking home alone, unsteady and shivering, for a gust of cold air had come with the first snow, now dancing around him like small white moths, visible in the light of the gas lamps and windows before vanishing into the darkness again. If the cold continued all night, there would be quite a lot of snow the next morning. He was freezing and stumbled to his knees once on the slippery cobblestones, the layer of filth normally on them now a mass of ice.
Because of the snow, it was even quieter than usual for this time of night. He met a few lone night wanderers, a couple of girls, a few drunks, and a policeman with a long, curled mustache, the tips of it white with snow. As he approached his own street near Tottenham Court Road, he was filled with a vague feeling--a dread, a fear ofbeing alone. It gathered inside him and gave him a nasty urge to cry. It was as if the snow and the cold, desolate winter street and what had happened that evening had opened a forgotten dam of childhood inside him. A childhood fear of the dark and of being alone.
There were almost no lights in the windows along the street; the panes were like drooping gray sails. He thought of the ships down on the Thames he had seen as a child in the fog and the rain. An image from the past suddenly came to him sharply--the plague ship. The ship had been quarantined; it had had cholera on board. The most terrible sufferings had been endured below those dead, drooping sails the crew had been incapable of furhng--and then the sober yellow epidemic flag at the top of the main mast. The ship had been tied up for one long spring off St. Saviour's Dock, and passersby had stopped on the Whitechapel shore to gaze over at it. Spring never seemed to get that far. One of the harbormaster's boats went out at regular intervals, taking with it coffins and a gentleman who went on board the ship. That was the doctor. When the little boat returned, the coffins were again on it, but this time filled. As a boy, Jason had had nightmares about that ship long after it suddenly vanished one day.
He saw it again as he walked through the now thickening snow and as the distances between streetlights grew longer. He undeniably lived in the slums, perhaps was even one of their many faceless people, but that had never been the intention. He thought about his father and mother--they had presumably imagined something better for him.
Yes, he was one of the faceless. If he went down to Waterloo Bridge tonight and allowed himself to be carried off by the fierce currents of the Thames, what would that matter? Nothing at all, either to God, in whom he did not believe, or to people, whom in darker moments he did not believe in, either. Mrs. Bucklingham would perhaps report him as missing, and after a few weeks, perhaps no more than two, they would pack up his belongings and take them away. The couch was hers, Mrs. Bucklingham would probably say, and in a few years a yellowed photograph or two would be the only witnesses to his having a face, before they, too, were washed away in the current: fire and war would always appear.




When night falls people become as lonely as snowflakes floating down from a gray city sky. Now and again we fall past a streetlamp and are visible, a brief moment apart, real--we can be seen. We exist. Then we vanish into the gray darkness and the earth draws us to it.




If only I weren't so drunk, he thought, I wouldn't torture myself with such thoughts. Think about something else, Jason. Think about an amusing evening, a nice girl.
But that happy evening seemed to him nothing but a skin, an illusion, a thin wax film on a blackened dead face.
Think of a song. Yes, that was it. He could sing a song to keep him warm as he walked. He started on "Londonderry Air," but it was no consolation that evening. Then he tried "Greensleeves," but that was so gloomy. He stumbled on the cobblestones, fell again, and lay there for a few moments in the mud and snow, incapable of getting up. Then he was suddenly afraid of lying there forever, and he felt them coming, the tears he had no wish to let fall. He swore. If only he were not so drunk.
He got to his feet again; then a song came to him that consoled him. It came all by itself and conjured away the picture of the plague ship.
Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to thee For those at peril on the sea.
He suddenly felt a little lighter. He remembered the hymn from the choir in Bethnal Green Road and recalled the carol services.
O Christ, whose voice the waters heard And hushed their raging at thy word,
Yes, that helped, and it was good as he alternately hummed the second and third parts and imagined himself the soprano. He rounded the next corner and went on:
And walkedst on the foaming deep, And calm amid its rage didst sleep.
Then he stopped. A body was lying in the snow in front of him beside some dustbins. He took two steps toward it, then stood quite still. It was a girl, one of the countless girls, the nameless creatures found all over the city. She was poorly dressed in a ragged dark skirt and a jacket, her feet bare and a pale bluish color against the snow--not even a kerchief around her head, her dark hair drawn back in a disheveled knot.
Jason pulled himself together, went all the way over to her, and was just about to bend down when it occurred to him that she might be dead. He felt a reluctance to touch a corpse--the plague ship again came sailing by--but nonetheless, he bent down and shook her.
Her face was in the snow. As he turned her over, the knot of hair loosened and he brushed it off her face, then squatted down and propped her up against his knees. She was very thin, even emaciated, and she had snow in her eyes and on her forehead. Although it was dark, Jason could see that her pallor matched that of the snow.
She's dead, he thought, turning cold at the thought. But she was not stiff; no, in fact, she was quite soft and supple as she lay against his knees, as pale as the snow. Rigor mortis usually sets in between half an hour and an hour later, he thought, and even quicker when it is cold. He fumbled for her throat--she was cold but not icy, and he could just feel her pulse, a faint but clear, regular throbbing.
Thank goodness, he thought, you're not dead. He brushed the snow out of her eyes and ears, then gave her cheek a few slaps. There was no reaction. He slapped her again and shook her. A few small signs of life appeared: her eyelids flickered, her mouth drew back, and a tiny sound came out of it, not a groan, no more than a small gasp.
Jason was pleased, though at the same moment he thought, What shall I do if someone comes past? A policeman? They'd think ... hell.
"Up with you, girl," he said quite loudly.
But there were no more signs of life. He shook her hard.
"Wake up now: You can't lie here."
This time she made an attempt to open her eyes, even to focus them. But instead she rolled up her eyes, showing the whites. Jason began to worry that she was ill or dead drunk, in which case it was going to be difficult to get her onto her feet. Perhaps there was a slight smell of gin? Perhaps she had stumbled and fallen, then simply stayed there, just as he had been afraid to do. Or perhaps someone had hit her and tried something nasty, a common enough occurrence, but had then been disturbed. He looked up at the narrow strip of sky above the roofs. It was still snowing, the clouds a reddish gray from the lights of the city.
When he looked down again, he met a pair of large gray eyes staring vacantly and fearfully up at him.
"Ah," he exclaimed. "Are you feeling better?"
She did not reply, but just stared, snow falling and melting onto her cheek.
"Don't you know where you are?" he said matter-of-factly, wanting to be on his way.
"In heaven," she said.
"What? No, you're not in heaven. You're lying in the street, in Barnhart Alley. I found you."
"Oh," she said.
"I didn't think you were alive. Did you fall?" But she did not answer and her eyes closed again. He peered at the thin plain face, the sunken dark eyes and sharp cheekbones and nose. She might be seventeen or eighteen at the most, but she seemed very old, almost ancient. Those eyes--eyes otherwise found only in the very old, those who no longer know the world, who have forgotten what their names are and are waiting to die. He remembered his own grandmother, who had died when he was six. She had had eyes like that, glowing like pieces of coal in two deep round hollows. She could never remember who he was from one day to the next. Jason had been afraid of her.
The eyes of this thin, confused girl in the snow were like that, the eyes of an old person, her forehead and upper lip already showing faint lines of pain, her lips gray, almost purple in the dark. And something about her reminded him of ...
Suddenly all London's street girls--whom he had otherwise seenonly as wretched bundles of rags--suddenly they all seemed to meet in this frail sparrow lying across his knees and become real, visible creatures and in her acquire a face. Then he realized that not only old people had eyes like that; the same look could be seen in the eyes of small children when frightened or serious. Come on now, you must wake up, he thought. You'll die of cold if you stay here. You must not freeze to death.
She had meanwhile gone far away again, and by now it was really cold, well below freezing, the snow blowing. Jason worked hard to bring sufficient life back into her so that he could force a few drops of brandy from his hip flask between her lips. He had stopped thinking about cholera or that she was filthy. He had also given up worrying that someone might come; indeed, he had stopped thinking altogether and was no longer drunk. The less willing she was to get to her feet, the more eager he became, a feeling of joyous apprehension running through him, for he was still frightened and he was soaking wet and dirty. You've got to get up, he thought; then he said so aloud.
That was when he heard a peal of laughter from the street the alley ran into. Someone was standing out there laughing at them, but he couldn't be bothered to see who it was. The laughter was malicious, and he could not make out whether it came from a man or a woman. It came again several times, wheezing and hawking, evil and spasmodic, as if it hurt. Jason ignored it and worked feverishly to get the girl up and away--but she would not cooperate. He then resolutely lifted her up in his arms and set off at a good steady pace down Barnhart Alley without looking back. That would have been risky, anyhow, for the alley grew darker the farther down it he went. Behind him, the laughter faded into a last brief cackle, then ceased. He could hear no footsteps retreating. The snow was now like a carpet on the streets and he could scarcely hear his own footsteps, but he could hear the sound of his heart thumping with exertion and himself panting. Once, the girl's body started slipping and he had to heave her up in his arms so that her head fell onto his shoulder. He could just hear her faint breathing. She smelled of something, a harsh odor, perhaps a cheap perfume or hair lacquer.
Once at Bucklingham Palace, it was a matter of not waking Mrs. Bucklingham. May her ears be as filthy as the rest of her, he thought. May her ears be blocked up.
Not until he had got the front door open and carried the girl into the entrance hall did it occur to him he was taking her home. For a moment the absurdity of what he was doing dawned on him. He hadn't meant to, and worse than that, it was foolish of him. What might she get up to in his room? Or what would Mrs. Bucklingham do if she woke and found them? The girl ought to be elsewhere, someplace where she would be undressed and given a bed, food, and clothes. A pair of shoes. What if she died in the night? What if she developed pneumonia? She should have been in a home.
But he had never heard of any such home.
So he carried her up the stairs and into his own room. Finding his way easily in the dark, he put her down on the couch he usually slept on, found the matches on the table, and lit a lamp and the gas fire. He took the lamp over to the couch and looked down at her. She seemed less lifeless now, but that could have simply been the warm light from the lamp. Her eyes were still tight shut. He felt her hand --it was still very cold--and then he noticed she was soaking wet. Pneumonia, he thought again. With the same frightened resolution as before, he undressed her, carefully and matter-of-factly, as a parent might a child, then hung her clothes up to dry. She was wearing nothing but a blouse and skirt under her jacket, not even stockings.
Then he dried her with an old scarf. She was horribly thin. He could count her ribs and see bruises here and there. Naked, she seemed more like an overgrown child and there was almost nothing to indicate she was a grown woman. Her breasts scarcely showed, and her hips and thighs were as slim as a boy's. Her sex was disheveled, compressed like a tiny dead chicken ... A word came to him--"abandoned."
He tucked a blanket around her and put a pillow under her head, then made up a kind of bed on the floor in front of the fire, locking the door before he started undressing. He blew out the lamp and crawled under the blanket. He looked up at the skylight for a moment--it was still snowing.




A desolate white light flooded the room through the skylight, a small patch of white sky just visible above a roof--the roofs also white, andthe whiteness of it all floated in and made things seem transparent.
The girl on the couch was lying with one arm hanging slackly down toward the floor. In that light the pale thin arm became almost like glass or thin alabaster. Her forefinger was resting on the floor, the hand curved in a pretty line, a frozen, beckoning gesture.
Jason was asleep. Neither he nor anyone else would ever see the girl's arm in that light, how beautiful it was. Between the two of them, the room opened up and revealed all its objects: a pipe in an ashtray; an empty bottle, emerald green in this light; a pair of worn galoshes; a chipped cup; the violin case, all there, spread out, waiting to be brought back to life. Jason's coat hung above the stove alongside the girl's thin, now lifeless garments, but no one was there to see it all.
Then the girl pulled her arm back. She was cold.




The flower girl woke after a while. Her blanket had slid off and she pulled it back up to her chin. She looked around in surprise, then down at herself, The room and this shabby couch was to her a good place to wake alone. She saw a violin case.
For a moment she lay still, trying to remember what might have happened the night before and what had brought her here. A few random images went through her, but the whole picture eluded her. The last thing she could remember of the day before was that it was snowing. But here she was, warm, quiet, and peaceful, and she thought she was alone. She pulled the blanket even higher under her chin and closed her eyes as she smiled a contented little smile, her lips pressed close together. She lay dozing like that for a while, apparently finding it unnecessary to fathom how she had ended up there. She had woken in strange places before, so no doubt she would soon know.
After dozing for a while, she was woken by the fact that she had to ... she had to pee.
The movement in the room woke Jason. For a moment he wondered why he was lying in front of the stove, but at once he remembered the events of the night before quite clearly. He got halfway up and looked over at the couch. The girl was apparently searching for something, bending over and looking along the couch. Jason cleared his throat and she jerked upright in fright.
"God, you scared me," she exclaimed. "I didn't think there was anyone here."
Jason did not know what to say. She was naked, and he looked away in embarrassment, though it didn't seem to worry her much. Seeing her now when she was herself was quite different from the night before.
"Are you looking for something?" he said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see she was peering under the couch and he suddenly caught on. "The pot's under the window," he said.
She giggled, crossed the floor, and unhesitantly plumped straight down on the chamber pot. Jason could not help seeing her. The girl was looking thoughtful, her gaze turned inward on herself.
She'll cause trouble, Jason thought. I'll have to get rid of her.
"Sorry," she said finally. "I simply had to." She laughed lightly again.
"It's all right," said Jason. "What's your name?"
"Emma," she said. She was standing up again now. "And yours?"
"Jason. Listen, Emma, do you know you were lying in the street freezing to death last night?"
"Was I?" She looked at him with genuine surprise.
"Yes. I thought of leaving you there, but then ... Well, I scooped you up."
"Goodness," she said. Jason had expected all kinds of other reactions--perhaps he thought that this was a strange way of thanking him. But her voice was warm and she said nothing more for a moment as she thought about it.
Suddenly she went straight back to the couch and lay down. "Come on," she said, patting the back of the couch. "It's nice and warm here." Jason involuntarily got up and went over to the couch.
"What?" he said.
"Come up here with me." She glanced solemnly-slyly at him. "You can do it for free, you see, because you've been so nice."
She saw at once that Jason was angry and she looked down at the blanket.
"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to ..."
But Jason was still angry, and she let out a small sob, then a few more, and then she was crying properly, though almost soundlessly.Jason sat down on the edge of the bed, more friendly now. He knew she had not meant it badly.
"Shush," he said kindly. "Stop crying. It's all right." She calmed down and Jason stroked her dirty hand.
"Something to eat?" he said. She was still crying, but her eyes seemed brighter now and she smiled at him.
Jason got up, pulled on his shirt and trousers, and got out bread and marmalade. Then he made tea while the girl put on her dry clothes and fastened up her hair.
As they sat at the little table, Jason asked her about this and that as if making conversation with a guest.
"How old are you, Emma?"
"Sixteen, I think."
"Don't you know?"
"No." She shrugged. "Ain't given it much thought."
"Doesn't your mother know?"
"She's dead."
"Oh."
"But she never told me nothing when she was alive neither."
"I'm sorry ..."
"She was nice, my mum. In her way. But she had such a lot to put up with."
"Yes?"
"She had five more. Kids, I mean. So ..."
"That's a lot of mouths to feed."
"Yes. I was the oldest. So it was best I got out as quick as I could to earn some money."
"And your father?"
She shrugged.
"Mum said he played the fiddle on a boat. One of them big boats."
"He played on a boat?"
"Yes, one of them what goes to America. But I dunno if it's true."
"No." He poured out more tea.
"It's good to have something to eat."
"Were you hungry?"
She nodded.
"Nothing shameful about being hungry," she said. "Betty always says that. Betty's my friend," she added.
"She's probably right. Are you often hungry?"
"We-ell, sometimes. But I doesn't pick bread and cabbage up off the street. Rather go hungry."
There was a moment's silence. Jason could see she wanted to ask something but couldn't get around to it. She had become shy of him now.
"Do you want to ask me something, Emma?" he said.
"Yes. I mean, is you a musician?" She glanced at the violin case.
"No," he said. "I'm a student. That's to say, I was. Until a while ago."
"Student ..." she said. Perhaps she had never heard the word, Jason thought. "Student ..." she said again, distantly.
"Yes, I was going to be a doctor. But I play as well."
"Does you?" she said, rapidly returning to the present. "Does you play on that?" She pointed at his violin case. "How grand. That's the best thing I knows," she said. "Has you ever heard them playing in the pubs and the music halls?"
"Yes."
"Isn't they clever? I been to the music hall once. There were a real stylish gent in shiny black clothes there--them white tie and tails--he played the 'Londonderry Air,' all by himself. It was grand." Her face turned dreamy and acquired a kind of thin veil of light all around it. Jason went to fetch his violin and, without tuning it, played the "Londonderry Air." She sat quite still as he played, her eyes closed, and although he had not taken it all that seriously at first, he found himself gradually playing with more and more empathy. She was a good audience. He was playing more expressively now, with long, light strokes, and he saw the notes slipping right into her, glowing inside her, and he suddenly felt an astonishing lightness and happiness. He ended the ritardando with a quiet G, and put the violin down.
The silence was long, then she opened her eyes.
"I could see that stylish bloke at the music hall quite clear." Jason was disappointed, but she smiled secretively.
"He had a great big mustache and almost no hair on top. But at the sides his hair was thick and bushy." She stopped for a moment, then went on. "Betty said afterward he had gold in his notes. Gold. You know"--she looked down--"I like to think that was my dad.Maybe it was. That he'd come ashore. It could've been him." She looked pleadingly at Jason. "He had a rather lumpy nose, and ..." She started crying again. "So've I," she said, the tears welling.
Jason went over to try to comfort her, patting her cautiously on her shoulder and back. She was sitting leaning forward and he could feel the knobbly spine through her blouse. The tears gradually ceased.
"Couldn't you play a bit more?" But Jason knew she would start crying again, and to his own surprise he noticed that he was not far from tears himself.
"No," he said. "No more now." He could think of nothing else to say. The girl accepted it without question.
"Couldn't you play like that on a boat?" she said after a while. "Like them my dad plays on. You're sure to be much better than him. Better than the bloke at the music hall, too." She smiled happily at him. Jason saw he had become a kind of god to her now, an Ares, a knight in shining armor.
"I'd never be scared at sea if you played for me all the time."
"Have you ever been to sea?" he said.
"No ... but Betty went to Brighton once and she telled me what it's like. Have you?"
"No," said Jason. "No, neither have I."
"It was so big, Betty said. Big and glittery on top, she said. And a bit frightening."
"What?"
"The sea, of course--the ocean." She said the last word very gravely.
"Here's something from me, Emma," said Jason, taking out his last half crown. "You must go and buy shoes and stockings with it. Promise me that? And perhaps some gloves or something for your neck. You'll get it cheap on Petticoat Lane."
He handed her the coin. She did not thank him, just stared wide-eyed at him and down at the coin in her hand. He could not truthfully say why he had acted in that way.
"Promise me?" he said again. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Emma?"
She was looking almost frightened.
"Yes," she said, nodding. "I promise."
Before she left, Jason asked what had happened to her the nightbefore. She had just reached the door and she stopped, gazing ahead of her at an image of the day before. She did not reply.
"Don't you remember?" said Jason.
"Yes," she said gravely, looking at him, and he saw again how gray her eyes were. "But I doesn't want to tell you."
They said goodbye. When she had got down the stairs, she called back up to him so loudly Mrs. Bucklingham was bound to hear it.
"Don't forget you've got to play on one of them boats."




That was how it came about. That was how Jason found a way to earn a living. Something happened to him that evening when he went to a dog-and-rat fight and rescued a frozen girl in the snow. A few weeks later he started playing in the streets and various pubs, with varying success at first, because he was slightly embarrassed and also so out of practice, but then things got better and he enjoyed it. His constant aim was to become a ship's musician, to play in the ship's band.
A year later he met the drunken Russian.




That was Jason Coward's story.




"Excuse me, Mr. Jason."
...
"Mr. Jason ..."
Jason turned around and met a pair of anxious eyes--David's.
"Yes?" said Jason, drawing in a deep breath of sea air. "Can I help you?"
"I ... Alex and Jim sent me up to look for you. We're approaching Cherbourg and ..."
Jason turned back to the sea--quite right, they could already see the coastline.
"Yes, of course," he said. "But we've plenty of time."
"Yes, but Alex ... Petronius ... and ..."
"Well?"
"Petronius claims he's an ox. He keeps making terrible noises andwe can't stop him, and Alex is raging and keeps scolding, and then there's something wrong with Spot--he's in his bunk and we can't wake him up. He's deathly pale and doesn't answer when we talk to him, and Jim and Georges have both tried smelling salts and Georges has poured a bowl of cold water over him to get him back on his feet."
Jason bit his lip. For a moment he stayed where he was, gazing out into the dusk. The images--his dreams and memories--seemed to dissolve into the air around him, then sink and vanish in the ship's wake.
"Sounds as if everything is much as usual," he said quietly.
David did not reply, but Jason sensed that the boy was staring at him.
"Ah well," he said, moving away from the railing. "I'll come and fix things. Don't look so horrified. Have you had anything to eat?"
"No," said David. "At first Petronius clung to me to tell me what it was like to be an ox, and about the martyrdom of oxen as hecatomb sacrifices in the age of Homer. Then Jim and Georges wanted to take me around the ship before we had a meal, but then we had to try to revive Spot, and that was when Alex started to ..."
"Yes," said Jason. "I see." He sighed, put his hand on David's shoulder, and they headed for the entrance. "Listen now, David," Jason said. "You mustn't let them deprive you of your meals. We've still got a long evening ahead of us."
"All right," said David, looking down.
"Maybe you'd rather be back home in Vienna?"
"Yes. No. I mean ..."
Jason looked at him and smiled. "Do you know what I think?" he said, suddenly teasing. "I think you'd thought of running off the moment we got to New York."
David glanced quickly at him.
"But I don't think you should," Jason went on. "I think you should think the matter over while we're on our way. Then perhaps you'll be with us on our way back."
David looked down again, and Jason thought he recognized the expression on the boy's face.
"I don't know what you've run away from," Jason said quietly. "And neither do I want to know. But if you've got a home, then I think you should go back to it."
David stopped.
"But people decide for themselves whether they've got a home or not--don't they?"
"Yes," said Jason. "Maybe so." He smiled faintly. "Come on," he said. "Let's go on down and knock some sense into the others."
They went below.
Translation copyright © 1996 by Joan Tate