The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [443]
He was in the posture of some earthish dancer, but he soon tired of this strange display – this throw-back to some savage rite of the world’s infancy. He had given himself up to it for those few moments, in the way that an artist can be the ignorant agent of something far greater and deeper than his conscious mind could ever understand. But as he strutted, his knees bent, his feet turned outwards, his body and head erect, his elbows crooked, and his hands clenched, he had enjoyed the novelty of what he was doing. He was amused at this peculiar need of his body; that it wished to stamp, to strut, to rear on tip-toes, to sink upon the heels – and all because he was a murderer – all this intrigued him, titillating his brain, so that, now, as he ceased to stamp, and sank into a dusty chair, the muscles of his throat went through the contractions that form laughter – but no sound came.
He shut his eyes, and in the darkness, it seemed to him that he was in peril and he opened them again with a start and sat forward in his chair, glancing about the room. This time as his gaze returned to the skeletons he was revolted. Not with what he had done to bring them to this state – but that they should pollute this room; that they should show him their ugly skulls and hollow bones.
He rose from his chair in anger. But he knew in his heart that he was not angry with them. He was enraged with himself. For what had seemed amusing a few moments ago was now a source, almost of fear to him. In looking back and seeing himself strutting like a cock about their bodies, he realized that he had been close to lunacy. This was the first time that any such thought had entered his head, and to dismiss it he crowed like a cock. He was not afraid of strutting; he had known what he was doing; to prove it he would crow and crow again. Not that he wished to do so, but to prove that he could stop whenever he wanted, and start when he wished to, and be all the while in complete control of himself, for there was no madness in him.
What he did not realize was that the death of Barquentine, and the nightmare of the fire and the vile waters of the moat and the long fever that followed had made a difference to him. Whatever he now believed about himself was based on the assumption that he was the same Steerpike as his former self of a few years earlier. But he was no longer that youth. The fire had burned a part of him away. Something of him was drowned for ever in the waters of the moat. His daring was no longer a thing that fanned itself abroad; it had contracted into a fist of brimstone.
He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples, any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this, had been cauterized and drowned away.
As he had entered this second apartment, he had propped the broken pole against the wall on his left. He now felt himself gravitating towards it. He no longer stamped or strutted. He was himself again, or perhaps he had ceased to be himself. At any rate, the three watchers recognized again that familiar walk, with the shoulders hunched and the cat-like footsteps. When he reached the pole he ran his hand along its side. The scarf was still about his face. His dark red eyes were like small circular pits.
As his hand strayed over the surface of the pole, rather as a pianist will fondle a keyboard, his fingers came across a fissure in the wood, and as they played about it they found how easy it would be to tear from the beam a long and narrow splinter. Abstractedly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, a score of disquieting impressions had taken the place of the surety within him, he prised the splinter away, using, at the last, the whole strength of his arm as it arched, in its tension, from the pole. He did not look at it, and he was about to throw it away, for the tearing of it from the pole had been his only interest, when, his gaze having