Fowlers End (7 page)

It happened in 1915 when I was a child. Airplanes were a novelty in those days, and I was fascinated by the German Gothas over London. They looked like a series of Ts floating in clear sky. For the first, and last, time in my life I was overwhelmed by a desire to fly. So I found a six-foot length of four-inch squaring and nailed to it two planks for wings, and a board for the tail. The propeller I cut out of the lid of a biscuit tin and fastened with one of my mother’s hat pins. For armaments I carried a double-barreled cap pistol and a five-pound dumbbell which I proposed to
drop on the gas works. For a helmet I borrowed my father’s bowler hat and for goggles my mother’s pince-nez. But when I straddled the thing, it wouldn’t fly. Something was seriously wrong here. Then I remembered that airplanes had wheels. I took my sister’s perambulator apart and fitted my machine with an undercarriage. It moved, then; but still it would not fly. So I took it to pieces, carried it up to the roof and reassembled it. As I calculated, all I needed was a good start. Shouting “Bang! Bang! Bang! I’m a German!” I took off. It seems that I described half a parabola on account of the steep slope of ou
r roof, and went right over our garden fence into a neighbor’s cucumber frame. I landed flat on my face. The dumbbell, which I was still firmly grasping, hit me on the nose. The wings folded and beat me about the ears, and my jaw was broken. “Never do a thing like that again,” said my father; and I obeyed him. To this day I cannot look at a dumbbell without a sense of frustration, of grievance; and if, sometime, when things get too tough for me and I have a nervous breakdown and am found throwing dumbbells and crying “Bang! Bang! I’m a German,” the psychiatrists will know exactly where to lo
ok for the first causes.

However, from the age of seven, after my face healed I looked not unlike that ancient pugilist Buckhorse, who, in his old age, having no face left to spoil, let anybody
knock him down for a shilling. Later, when I filled out into a fine figure of a man, I improved and resembled old George Cook. My stature and physique I must have inherited. After the incident of the airplane I was not allowed to touch dumbbells, Indian clubs, hammers, nails, or wood; and I was followed every time I climbed the stairs.

They gave me an abacus to play with; I took a fancy to the red beads and swallowed them, and I felt so bad about the anxiety I had caused my family that I did not dare to say anything about it. For all I know they are in my system to this day, or else they were digestible beads. I looked in vain for their reappearance with a view to putting them back on the wires, but they never turned up.

I begged in vain for a bicycle. My father settled for a very low-built tricycle because it was impossible to fall off it. Even then my mother would not allow me to take it out of the playroom on the first floor. All the same, I rode it downstairs and through the front door, which was closed at the time. Carpenters had to be called to saw me out of the lower panel. As a result of this mishap I have an evil-looking scar which almost encircles my neck; this is always good for conversation—the politest woman in the world cannot help asking me how I came by it. I never tell the same story twice.

My beauty, again, was not enhanced by the Affair of the Bicycle Pump. Needless to say, with my record, I was not allowed to let off fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day and dance around a bonfire with the other boys. So I decided to make a little firecracker for myself. Somewhere or other I picked up an old nickel-plated bicycle pump, which struck me as being the very thing for the casing; the next thing was to find something to put in it. Now my father used to own a duck gun and I remembered having seen a box of fifty cartridges in one of his drawers. I cut open these cartridges and emptie
d the whole fifty into the barrel of the pump, ram
ming the powder and the shot down hard with the piston. Then I made a fuse out of cotton string rolled in gunpowder, and attached it. With this firecracker I decided to surprise and delight the local police force on November the fifth. So I put it against an outside wall of the police station, set light to the fuse, and waited around the corner. The cracker was a success, only the wall came down and I was cut about the forehead with flying glass.

Everybody said it was anarchists. I kept my mouth shut about that one.

As if all this were not enough, I caught diphtheria (as they insisted) through eating pencils. I always was of a contemplative turn of mind. Even as a child, before committing myself to writing, I took a good mouthful of pencil. Most of my milk teeth had gone in the airplane crash, but I still had my molars, and made the most of them. The paint did not appeal to me much, but I enjoyed the savor of the cedarwood. I did not spit out the lead, having been politely brought up; I swallowed it. Lead, cedar splinters, paint, abacus beads—they all went the same way home. But eventual
ly I contracted diphtheria. Considering this in the light of modern science, I believe I caught it from a gluttonous and feverish little boy who borrowed my pencil one drawing lesson and chewed all the goodness out of it. But our family doctor, a superannuated windbag who did not believe in microbes and diagnosed what ailed you by smelling your breath, swore that diphtheria was created by pencils. Anyway I caught it, and my throat seized up, so that they had to make an incision for me to breathe through. For a year or two after that I could not speak and when my voice came back it came in a sepulchral
whisper which later mellowed into a throaty purr; so that now my voice has something of the quality and timbre of Tallulah Bankhead’s, only it is deeper and more masculine. It is the kind of voice one associates with the most appalling depravity; it goes with
the debauching of pious matrons, the buggering of young noblemen, the reciting of poetry with an ulterior motive, and seduction of convent-bred heiresses. In contrast with my face, it is really arresting.

But it was a long time, I assure you, before I was allowed to handle a pencil after that; and even then they coated my pencils with bitter aloes—the stuff they smear on leashes to discourage puppies from eating them. (Actually, when you get used to the stuff, bitter aloes isn’t bad at all.) But in the meantime I was given crayons to write with, which, being made of wax, grew soft in my hot little hand, inviting me to roll and mold them into interesting and useful shapes. This suited me fine because I was never satisfied with the shape of a thing as it happened to be. Art begins that way.

I owe one of my “redeeming” features to an accident connected with this urge of mine to change the design of things.

Every boy must have a pocketknife. Not me. My mother would as soon have given me a vial of prussic acid, as a knife. So I decided to make one.... Looking back, sometimes, I feel that my life has been wasted. I ought to have been born before the dawn of civilization, I am so inventive and, once my curiosity is aroused (which doesn’t take much doing), so completely devoid of fear. I might have got myself run over in the process, but I bet I would have invented the wheel; and although I should certainly have become a charred tribal demigod, I believe that I might have discovered f
ire. Lacking a knife, I say, I invented one. In those days, we used to play a silly game with pins. You take two pins and place them crosswise on a tramline. The tramcar rolls over the crossed pins and flattens them into the likeness of a pair of scissors.
Now what is a pair of scissors but two knives fastened with a screw?
I reasoned.
If two pins make two knives, one pin therefore will make one knife. An
ineffectual brass knife, it is true; but a knife notwithstanding.
It was not bad for a child of my age, mind you. From pins I went on to nails; and I think I might have made something out of a tenpenny spike if I had not been caught, in the nick of time. The driver braked the tram to a standstill, its front wheels less than a yard from my fingers—other nails having been shaken off by the vibration, I was determined to hold this one down. “Promise me on your honor you will never do a thing like that again!” said my father. “If you do, all your fingers will be cut off and you will be sen
t to a home.” I promised, and I kept my promise.

But my promise did not include trains. Not far from where we lived there was a railway line along which rushed the giant expresses of the South Western Railway, hurtling past at seventy or eighty miles an hour. We boys used to stand on the bridge and watch them as they passed—the idea being to catch in one swift glimpse the names of the huge locomotives and their serial numbers, which we solemnly entered in little notebooks. This was all very well, but when I said that I was going to make a knife,
I
made a
knife.
I found an iron bolt twelve inches long and nearly an inch thic
k. Knowing better now than to hold this down with my fingers under the Lord Wolseley, which was due to come through at 11:45 that Saturday morning, I fastened the bolt to the nearest rail with adhesive tape (which, God knows why, I soaked with iodine). As I calculated, the great Lord Wolseley and the countless steel wheels of all its carriages should do a real swordsmith’s job for me and turn this bolt into a kind of machete. I had been reading the works of Major Charles Gilson at that time, and felt that this was all I needed to get me to the place where the elephants go to die. I crawled down the
bank and waited. My calculations were almost accurate, but not quite. The Lord Wolseley passed dead on time, and its off-front wheel made a spearhead of the end of the bolt, but jibbed at its square
head. This, caught in a flange, sent the sharpened bolt whirling away. The point hit me in the right cheek, half an inch away from the corner of my mouth, and came out at the other side. The result was that my poor mother had a nervous breakdown, and I healed with two fascinating dimples which, as a girl once told me, “illuminate” my face when I smile.

As if this were not enough, I lost the little finger of my left hand in the zoo. One of my aunts took me there to cheer me up while the wounds in my cheeks were healing. Slipping past the keeper, I tried to make a hyena laugh by tickling his lip. It is lucky for me the beast did not get the whole hand.... But it got me out of music lessons—my unhappy mother had conceived an idea that I might make a violinist, but nothing was further from my thoughts: I didn’t know what I wanted to be, really, unless it might be an explorer.

Which is, in a way, exactly what I turned out to be. Only it didn’t take me long to learn that you don’t need to go to Africa for savagery, to Tahiti for the exotic, or to the moon for monsters. If I want the thunder of the galaxies or the interplanetary cold, I can find them in Beethoven and Sibelius. Just any old bit of ground is vantage point enough for me. I will do my extraterrestrial traveling when my time comes, not in a chromium-plated rocket but naked, out of a good old-fashioned wooden box six feet deep in my own familiar earth. And for this I am in no hurry at all. To put it trit
ely: Man is my Dark Continent, and his heart is my jungle. I actually like people in general, and enjoy being in company—any kind of company.

I get involved in it; I feel that it enriches me, generally. One reads of the love that casteth out all fear: I am inclined to believe that this kind of love is a sort of mysterious absorption of oneself in a state of sublime curiosity that lives on the frontier between conjecture and pure
understanding. Fear is written in every heart, but seldom indelibly. Fear is a mere misprint which you need only recognize to correct.

Many a night have I spent in the rooms of my old friend John Sourbreast, who has a lease in perpetuity in Albany and two thousand pounds a year taxfree all to himself. I remember those nights with pleasure. That was not a sitting room; it was a set in a scene in which, if one were not perfectly comfortable, one ruined the act. There were the richly bound old books, the black walnut Bechstein grand piano licking itself like a contented cat in the firelight, the wonderful rug that came out of the palace of Abdul the Damned, the easy chairs by the fire, and tobacco and drinks ready to
hand. Over the mantelpiece a painting by Sickert of the old Quadrant, seen in wintery slush with a fog coming down; in the foreground a man in a heavy overcoat splashing in the direction of the Cafe Royal to sit on red plush, drink something hot, and play dominoes. I always liked that picture—whatever the weather, you looked at it and said to the man in the overcoat, “Good for you!” And here we used to sit, talking of Life and Death, and Good and Evil. Sourbreast didn’t seem to know which was which. In any case, he was uneasy about the whole damned lot.

Toward about two in the morning he would try me with the Fool’s Mate of metaphysics: “Is God omnipotent?”

To this, for the sake of argument, I would reply,

“Yes.”

“Is God all-powerful?”

“Yes.”

“But is God all good?” “Yes.”

“Yet you acknowledge the existence of evil?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God?”

Then I would counter, “Sourbreast, is it a good thing to torture a horse?”

“No!”

“Or a dog, or a cow?”

“Certainly not.”

“But is it a good thing to die of diphtheria, smallpox, lockjaw, typhoid, et cetera?”

“No, it is not a good thing.”

“Tonight we ate steak. Was it good steak?”

“Excellent.”

“Yet, eating that filet, did it not occur to you that the steer was dragged in agony to the slaughterhouse, where it went down in a whole mess of blood and guts? That this steer was castrated to stay quiet and get fat for your table?”

“Stop it!”

“But the steak was good? It refreshed you, kept you going?”

“Well?”

“That’s the way people are,” I would say. “They wouldn’t touch a dead cow with a barge pole, but oh, how they love her tripes! Without the butchers you’d starve, wouldn’t you? Now tell me, is it good to be a butcher?”

Sourbreast would sigh and say, “They are a necessary evil.”

“Hold hard there!” I’d say. “If a thing is necessary it can’t be an evil. Evil is
unnecessary.
That is why it is evil. You observe, you are the sick calf, or horse, or dog, in the laboratory. You feel only your immediate discomfort. You can’t say to yourself, Out of the misery of this base flesh may come a better life and longer hope for something higher up in the scale of evolution.’Which comes first, the man or the horse?”

Sourbreast always fenced then: “That depends on the man.”