The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [268]
The doctor in flinging open the door of his cabinet had revealed as rare and delicately chosen a group of wines as he had ever selected from his cellar.
The Countess moved her great head through the air.
‘A jug of goat’s milk, Prunesquallor, if you please,’ she said.
What there was in the doctor that loved beauty, selectivity, delicacy and excellence – and there was a good deal in him that responded to these abstractions – shrank up like the horn of a snail and all but died. But his hand, which was poised in the air and was halfway to the trapped sunlight of a long-lost vineyard, merely fluttered to and fro as though it was conducting some gnomic orchestra, while he turned about, apparently in full control of himself. He bowed, and his teeth flashed. Then he rang the bell, and when a face appeared at the door –
‘Have we a goat?’ he said. ‘Come, come, my man – yes or no. Have we, or haven’t we, a goat?’
The man was positive that they had no such thing.
‘Then you will find one, if you please. You will find one immediately. It is wanted. That will do.’
The Countess had seated herself. Her feet were planted apart and her heavy freckled arms were along the sides of her chair. In the silence that followed even Prunesquallor could think of nothing to say. The stillness was eventually broken by the voice of the Countess.
‘Why do you have knives sticking in your ceiling?’
The doctor recrossed his legs and followed her impassive gaze which was fixed on the long bread-knife that suddenly appeared to fill the room. A knife in the fender, on a pillow, or under a chair is one thing, but a knife surrounded by the blank white wasteland of a ceiling has no shred of covering – is as naked and blatant as a pig in a cathedral.
But any subject was fruitful to the doctor. It was only a lack of material, a rare enough contingency in him, that he found appalling.
‘That knife, your ladyship,’ he said, giving the implement a glance of the deepest respect, ‘bread-knife though it be, has a history. A history, madam! It has indeed.’
He turned his eyes to his guest. She waited impassively.
‘Humble, unromantic, ill-proportioned, crude as it looks, yet it means much to me. Indeed, madam, it is so, and I am no sentimentalist. And why? you will be asking yourself. Why? Let me tell you all.’
He clasped his hands together and raised his narrow and elegant shoulders.
‘It was with that knife, your ladyship, that I performed my first successful operation. I was among mountains. Huge tufted things. Full of character; but no charm. I was alone with my faithful mule. We were lost. A meteor flew overhead. What use was that to us? No use at all. It merely irritated us. For a moment it showed a track through the fever-dripping ferns. It was obviously the wrong one. It would only have taken us back to a morass we had just spent half a day struggling out of. What a sentence! What a vile sentence, your Ladyship, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Where was I? Ah, yes! Plunged in darkness. Miles from anywhere. What happened next? The strangest thing. Prodding my mule forward with my walking-cane – I was riding the brute at the time – it suddenly gave a cry like a child and began to collapse under me. As it subsided it turned its huge hairy head and what little light there was showed me its eyes were positively imploring me to free it from some agony or other. Now agony is an agonizing thing to happen to anyone, your Ladyship, but to locate the seat of the agony in a mule in the darkness of a mountainous and fever-dripping night is – er … not easy (Lytotis), ha, ha, ha! But do something I must. It was already upon its side in the darkness – the great thing. I had leapt from its collapsing spine and at once my faculties began to do their damndest. The brute’s eyes, still fixed on mine, were like lamps that were running out of oil. I put a couple of questions to myself – pertinent ones, I felt at the time – and still do; and the first was: IS the agony spiritual or physical?