Tales and Imaginings (2 page)

At this, Midgley became incomprehensible to the layman; his squeezed fingers and closed eyes indicated the tiny germ of doubt with which the experimenter unavoidably infects the experiment, the grain of subjectivity on which the pearl of knowledge forms itself. His brow bowed to Heisenberg, who, it appeared, if he knew where he was, didn’t know how fast he was going, and vice
versa. Above, Einstein revolved on a disc in space, tracing the trajectory of a moonbeam. Not all Midgley’s million meters could masticate to exactitude the stubborn quantum-nut; so much at least
condensed
for me from the fog of mathematics he raised around us. By the time it had cleared, my mind had turned to other things. ‘What time is it, and what time is sundown?’ These questions were within
the scope of Midgley’s instruments; the difference between the two answers was a mere five minutes. When I told him that Persimmon was taking me to the Happy World and then to an opium den, Midgley began to fill his pockets from drawers and trays of
handily-sized
implements. ‘I’ll accompany you to the Happy World, but not the opium house; it’s full of smoke, and I hate blurred things. The old Chinaman who runs it is very persuasive, too; he has a First in mathematics. I should be careful if I were you.’

I drew the curtains. The day’s sunshine had baked the city into a fragrant golden cake. ‘Hurry up then, if you’re coming; my hair is brushed, my tie is straightened, the world like a roulette ball is about to plop into one of various nights; adventure sings in the streets. Let’s go!’

‘You’re already talking like Persimmon,’ Midgely sighed, and as we rattled down the stairs he offered advice: ‘Don’t be led astray by your enthusiasm for the oriental. Preserve the objective viewpoint always.’

‘The objective viewpoint?’ I said. ‘I’ll try it!’

Down a capillary vesicle of a phosphorescent leaf three microbes hurry. From a mile above, Persimmon, Midgley and another, each in his own way, watch themselves pursue dwindling ramifications of the street-plan; Persimmon as final cause of all he surveys, Midgley plotting his world-line with due regard to relativities special and general, the other, through wide eyes and categories indeterminate as yet. There they are, temporarily baulked where the street ends abruptly at the foot of a cliff. The leader of the pack is
casting about to find the little archway leading to a flight of steps up
through the darkening foliage. On closer examination, Midgley, the rearmost of the three, is
a miracle of conscious coordination, his muscles and tendons answering to the readings of his visual cortex with a scarcely perceptible time-lag. It appears he wishes to
communicate
with his companions; his mouth opens; ‘Wait, I must wind up my pedometer!’ Persimmon fills the arch, peering up the stairway Why does he pause? The wind is
rising, the shadowy
tangles
of creeper that mask the cliff-face shift and rattle. The stairway with its wattle roof forms a little tunnel through limply flapping leaves, leading up and round a dark shoulder of rock. Against each roof-post lies a bundle, sprouting a hand like a sickly flower.
Persimmon
shouts ‘Have your small change ready!’ and sets off at a great pace, dealing out a coin to every second beggar. The second member of the party, myself a long time ago, follows, doing the same for those Persimmon passes over.

At the top I caught up with myself, and found Persimmon on a
terrace
among little trees hung with hourglass fruit each with a rag tied round its middle. Between swaying branches I saw below us the city beginning to map itself in lights; it showed no trace of the grand symmetries Persimmon had evoked. Purple columns of cloud were staggering towards us from the blazing horizon; above, the sky still held huge upsidedown pyramids of green light.

‘Eighty-seven steps exactly‚’ announced Midgley, coming
clicking
round the corner after us.

‘Welcome to the Happy World!’ said an old lady smiling across a turnstile, and issued us with tickets.

A chill gust of wind hurried us past a row of stalls selling incense sticks and small squares of gold leaf, into a courtyard where a fallen Chinese lantern was bowling about in a muddy puddle,
between a little temple and a huge barnlike building of concrete. The first heavy drops of rain struck at our backs. ‘Into the
dancehall
!’ said Persimmon, and ran up the steps towards the great
double
doors, which blew open at that moment, and immediately crashed shut behind us. The dance-hall was racked by distorted music; it coughed and cleared itself like a throat. Through the
darkness
and mucous noises a man reeled towards the door. As he lurched between us he thrust a little booklet of tickets into my hand and shouted, ‘Enjoy yourself with those!’

‘Dance tickets‚’ said Persimmon. ‘You’re supposed to buy them from the old dame in the pajama trousers over there.’

We advanced into the gaunt hall, and sat down at one of the
little
iron tables round the dance-floor. The doors had opened again, and jammed. Rain was already leaping and roaring on the steps
outside
. At the far end of the room was an empty bandstand, and a flight of steps up to a balcony. A few bulbs burned feebly among the roof-girders, where the loudspeakers howled and shuddered. Apart from some silent beer-drinkers and a few couples dancing, the only people there were half a dozen girls sitting in a dark recess under the staircase. A ragged boy brought us small cups of bitter black tea, and the fat old woman in floppy cotton trousers moved towards us sluggishly. ‘Since you have tickets, you must dance,’ said Persimmon. ‘Tell her which girl you’ve set your heart on.’

I pointed at one of the girls in the obscure depths of the hall; the old woman bent down with a grunt to sight along my arm, her chin resting on my shoulder for a moment, and then trudged wearily across the dance-floor. We watched her in the distance pointing back at us. The girl appeared to argue with her for a minute before walking towards us.

As she came, the tormented loudspeakers fell silent, the doors slammed shut and the damp draught ceased. She approached through a profound stillness. ‘Observe the complicity of the
inanimate
!’
whispered Persimmon in my ear. But the cracked music started again and the doors flew open as she stood before us. She hugged her bare shoulders, and smiled equally upon us all. I placed a chair for her so that I was between her and the other two.

‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked; her answer was too quiet to be heard above the music, and I waved to the tea-boy, who brought us four more cups of tea, leaving the three empty cups on the table. Midgley, stirring his tea in a spiral movement from bottom to top, was discussing the girl in whispers with Persimmon: ‘To a certain degree …’ I heard him say, as he switched his eyes towards other girls at random in a comparative way. Not knowing what to say to the girl, I gestured towards the dance-floor. She picked up my booklet of tickets, tore one out and placed it under her saucer; then she slipped her little finger through my watch-strap and led me onto the dance-floor. As we began to dance she looked up at me for the first time; there was a question in her eyes to which I had no answer. I glanced around at the people sitting at the tables,
embarrassed
because I danced badly and there were so few couples on the floor; however nobody was looking at us except Midgley. The evening had already fallen quiet outside; the girl had put aside her question and was dancing, her mind far away, to a music that had changed, softened, as if its waves now reached us only after perhaps a year’s passage through the air of a scented country.

We walked back to our table hand in hand; we felt suddenly happy. ‘You make a lovely couple‚’ said Persimmon. As we sat down I said to Midgley, ‘Two hundred and thirty-six steps exactly.’

Later we danced again, and Persimmon led the fat lady in
cotton
trousers onto the floor; the girls at the dark end of the hall came forward to admire the ponderous graces of yesteryear. Then he persuaded them to come and sit with us; some of the morose onlookers were moved to join us, and it seemed that a party was being formed, wordless, but with tentative laughter, when
Persimmon 
smashed his cigarette into dust and fumes in his saucer and jumped up. ‘It’s getting later and later! If we are to smoke opium, we must go immediately.’

‘I won’t come‚’ said Midgley. ‘I have to go home and make some notes.’

‘I’ll catch you up in a moment‚’ I said. They went out, deep in conversation.

‘Will you come again?’ whispered the girl.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Remember to ask for me.’

‘What’s your name then?’

‘Nit. My name is
Nit.’

‘Nit?’

‘Remember Nit. Ask for Nit. Please; will you remember?’

‘How on earth did she get such a name?’ I said to Persimmon as we descended the covered stairway. It was quite dark now; the beggars had gone, leaving their mats rolled up and tied with string to the wooden posts.

‘No doubt its an abbreviation of something suitably exotic‚’ answered Persimmon, ‘or perhaps an American sailor gave it to her. I see you were hoping for one of those names that make Chinese novels read like a perfumery. A pretty girl, anyway; you must have good eyesight. You will find that after a day or two in your pocket her name will be quite amenable to the palm of the hand. Don’t trouble to tell me if I prophesy correctly.’

‘I’m not quite sure she is the girl I pointed at, but …’ I almost lost Persimmon as he turned suddenly at a little archway, and pushed through a crowd of half-naked youths lounging in the mouth of a dark alley. ‘Down here!’ he called. I stepped over
sleeping
children, and almost slipped in mud. On a pile of rags an old woman sat, holding a bowl to her lips and hooking rice into her mouth with one finger. Persimmon was rapping at a door in a
windowless
wall. ‘You look peculiar,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Did you see that man with the forked thumb?’

Persimmon turned on me with a snarl. ‘For opening bottles, do you suppose? What is
your mind full of? Girls, freaks, the quaint decorative surface! You must go deeper! Prepare yourself. And wear a serious inwardly-gazing smile, if you please; these people do not like to be looked at.’

The door opened a bit, and a head appeared so low down I didn’t see it immediately. Persimmon hustled me past the little doorkeeper who was like a bent, rusty key, twisting his neck to look up at us sideways. We too had to duck our heads; we were standing at the top of a short flight of stone steps, close under the ceiling of an enormous room. At first I couldn’t read the dark maze below; I felt warmth and stillness. Lines hung with clothes stretched across the room, and on the ceiling their shadows, thrown by oil-lamps
burning
in a layer of dusk on the floor, stirred like dim memories of the gleaming brown bodies lying motionless below. The room was divided by low partitions into hundreds of almost enclosed spaces. Each of these compartments had a broad bench on either side,
bearing
two or three people; most of them were asleep, their pale
foot-soles
regarding the lamps on the floor between the benches, but here and there were open eyes like black jewels, that did not move as we crossed their vision. In the depth of this scented labyrinth there sat among the fleshless sleepers a great soft pyramidal being with blood-rimmed eyes screwed deeply into his slowly pulsating face. Persimmon introduced me in a whisper; the swing of a sleeve made room for us on the bench; tea was brought.

‘Talk with me for a few moments before you smoke. My life is lonely, I sleep little. In the night, after the doors are locked and the
last pipe is dead, I walk round and study the faces of my guests. They look older when asleep, but whether happier or wiser I do not know. I cannot enter their dreams; they bring back no souvenirs; any memories they smuggle out are buried later. Maybe they eat well there; certainly they will sacrifice food to buy from me. If they have friends or lovers there, here they are solitaries. They lie apart; in all this valley of sleepers not one head on another’s shoulder, not a hand touches casually another’s foot. For most men, I suppose, sleep is merely the soil in which their days grow. One is
accustomed to think of the roots of a tree as the support and sustainer of the trunk, so purposeful, so fulfilled in the midst of its airy and
fantastic
creation of foliage and flower and fruit. One might, however, conceive of the seasonal and aeonal cycles
of the crown, its
breathing
of sunshine, as a servant process, dedicated to an end: the roots’ stubborn, blind, inching exploration of earth. Look around you; here is my head-down forest. I, their forester, loiter above ground, wondering.’

‘You fatten on lop and top, however,’ said Persimmon in a
conversational
tone. Our host closed his eyes, and smoked his cigar thin as a straw. To break the silence I said, ‘I know somebody who has invented a camera for photographing dreams.’

‘Tell him that he has been anticipated, by Daguerre.’

Persimmon stirred restlessly; ‘Slack wisdom! However, my young friend is anxious to see for himself what lies under the
forest
floor.’ Ignoring our host’s sigh, he snapped his fingers to a
figure
standing in the shadows, who came forward with the apparatus of opium. The pipe, a thick wooden cylinder with an octagonal acorn-cup growing from one side, was placed in my hands.
Persimmon
, the expert, opened a little pill-box of brown grease, and picked up a blob of it on the end of a bamboo splinter. He rounded it against a wafer of bone, held it over the lamp till it sputtered, and put it into the cup of my pipe. ‘Come on now, lie down on the
bench and hold it over the lamp. Rest your head on that block. Suck! You’re letting all the smoke dribble out of the corner of your mouth. Suck, before it’s all gone!’

‘I can’t swallow it – it’s so heavy and sweet. It rolls round my mouth like mercury!’