The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [287]
‘There is joy and pain,’ said the young man.
‘No, no, no. Pure illusion,’ said the ancient. ‘But in Death’s amazing kingdom Joy is unconfined. It will be nothing to dance for a month on end in the celestial pastures … nothing at all. Or to sing as one flies astride a burning eagle … to sing out of the gladness of one’s breast.’
‘And what of pain?’ said the youth.
‘We have invented the idea of pain in order to indulge ourselves in self-pity,’ was the reply. ‘But Real Pain, as we have it on the Other Side, that will be worth having. It will be an experience to burn one’s finger in the Kingdom.’
‘What if I set fire to your white beard, you old fraud!’ shouted the young man, who had stubbed his toes during the day and knew the validity of the earthly discomforts.
‘What if you did, my child?’
‘It would sting your jaw, and you know it!’ cried the youth.
The supercilious smile which played across the lips of the theorist was unbearable, and his companion had no strength to stop himself as he stretched out his arm for the nearest candle and lit the beard that hung there like a challenge. It flared up quickly and gave to the horrified and astonished expression of the old man an unreal and theatrical quality which belied the very real pain, terrestrial though it was, which he felt, first of all, against his jaw and then along the sides of his head.
A shrill and terrible scream from his old throat, and the corridor was at once filled with figures, as though they had been awaiting their entrance cues. Coats were thrown over his head and shoulders and the flames stifled, but not before the excited youth with the hollow cheeks had made his escape, never to be heard of again.
SPIREGRAIN, THROD AND SPLINT
The old man was carried to his room, a small dark-red box of a place, with no carpet on the floor, but a picture over the mantelpiece of a fairy sitting in a buttercup against a very blue sky. After three days he recovered consciousness only to die of shock a moment later when he remembered what had happened.
Among those present at the death-bed in the small red room were the three friends of the old fire-blackened pedagogue.
They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck against one another and were tilted indecorously.
And yet it was a moving moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their master lay dying below them. Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?
Under their black leather mortar-boards their heads dislodged the innocent air, remorselessly as though their brows, noses and jaws, like the features of a figurehead, were cleaving paths for them through viewless water. Only in their hanging gowns, their flat leather mortar-boards and the tassels that hung like the grizzly spilths that swing from turkeys’ beaks, had they anything in common.
Flanking the death-bed was a low table. On it stood a small prism and a brandy bottle which held a lighted candle. This was the only illumination in the room, yet the red walls burned with a sombre effulgence. The three heads of the Professors, which were roughly at the same height from the ground, were so different as to make one wonder whether they were of the same genus. In running the eye from one face to the next, a similar sensation was experienced as when the hand is run from glass to sandpaper, from sandpaper to porridge. The sandpaper face was neither more nor less interesting than the glass one, but the eyes were forced to move slowly over a surface