Читать книгу Prelude to Eternity - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

THE BEGINNING OF THE JOURNEY

“Well,” said Quentin Hope, as the train drew away from the platform, while the crowd left behind cheered and waved, “here we are in the very bosom of a mechanical miracle, participating in the latest glory of English science. Long live the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy!”

“”If ever there were a Ship of Fools…,” Escott began, pitching straight in with evident relish—but he was immediately interrupted by Lady Phythian, who had obviously been present at more than one of Hope and Escott’s showpiece arguments and was nursing a faint hope of being able to derail this one.

“I must be mad to have let young Langstrade talk me into this,” the dowager pronounced, striking a melodramatic pose. “At my age, given my delicate health, the excessive speed is sure to prove fatal!”

Lady Phythian certainly did not seem to be in delicate health, in Michael’s non-expert opinion. She was short of stature, but her embonpoint was robust, and her lungs were obviously in very good order indeed. In truth, she was not so very old, although she gave an impression of antiquity. She was probably no more than sixty, if that, but widowhood had conferred a particular stamp of authority upon her attitude and manner as well as her perceived status. As daughters and wives, however rich or aristocratic, Englishwomen were necessarily subservient, but if and when they became widows they acquired an independent authority that was somehow beyond challenge. Michael’s mother had responded to her own widowhood by assuming an exaggerated concern for his well-being, but Lady Phythian had given birth to two sons and a daughter, and had married them all off successfully, so her widowhood had given her a far more general imperiousness reminiscent of the mythical Britannia in whose name the Admiralty ruled the waves.

Michael knew, by virtue of society chatter, that Lady Phythian had been relatively humbly born, as Ariadne Potts, but that she took great pride in the facts that her grandmother had been an Asherson, and that her husband, the late Viscount Phythian, had been a cousin of the Lowthers—a family that included the Earls of Lonsdale as well as several baronets of no particular significance. She had once been the evident social superior of her close friend Millicent Houghton, although the latter had overtaken her when her husband, Harold Langstrade, had been elevated to the peerage as the first Earl of Langstrade, reconnecting his surname to the Yorkshire village from which his ancestors supposedly hailed, and whose ancient manor he had bought from the Lords Office. Michael was not at all surprised, therefore, that Lady Phythian seemed to be looking down at him as he sat by her side, even though he was a head taller than she was. There was no hostility or contempt in her gaze when she deigned to turn in his direction, though; she was evidently reserving her judgment as to whether he was to be placed in the same “naughty boy” category to which she had long ago consigned Hope and Escott.

Michael guessed that the dowager’s objection to high-speed travel was more a matter of conformity to expectation than genuine terror. He knew that there were legions of diehard conservatives in the land, who swore that nothing on Earth would ever tempt them to step aboard a carriage pulled by a steam locomotive. Such people were wont to opine that the human body had not been designed—whether by God or Evolution—to withstand the stresses of movement at such terrifying velocities, and that, in any case, such a mode of transportation had none of the camaraderie, romance and history of a journey by road. No one in his right mind, such skeptics stoutly maintained, wanted to live life at such an insane pace that a journey that had always taken at least two days was now crammed into a mere four and a half hours. He suspected, however, that Lady Phythian was not of that company. There was a slight twinkle in her eye when she made her dramatic gesture, and she pronounced her complaint as if she were reciting a line in a play.

“Reassure yourself, Lady Phythian,” said Hope, serenely. “Destiny is on our side. The Commonwealth has long enjoyed the Empire of the Oceans, and now it has the means to exercise the same authority on land. Just as John Dee’s telescope and Cornelius Drebbel’s submarine paved the way for England to rule the waves, Dick Trevithick’s Cornish Engines will make us masters of the Earth’s surface, and its bowels too!”

Lady Phythian frowned at the use of the word “bowels” in a mixed carriage, but she was insufficiently quick off the mark to seize the initiative again by means of a further melodramatic pronouncement. Escott was not about to be forestalled for a second time.

“Steam will be the nation’s ruin,” Hope’s rival stated, sententiously. “Using powerful engines to pump water out of mines will only encourage miners to dig deeper, so that the inevitable collapses will be all the more disastrous when they occur. Using those same engines to power mills has already thrown tens of thousands of craftsmen out of work, and reduced the remaining mill-workers to mere mechanical hands, rude slaves of machinery. The displaced and dispossessed will accumulate into a revolutionary rabble the likes of which England has not seen since the monarchy was toppled. Locomotives are direly dangerous even now, while they run on tracks and carry goods and innocent passengers, but when they’re adapted for use in war—their engines fitted with cannon and their carriages filled with artillerists—they’ll be so destructive that indiscriminate mechanized massacre will become routine. Enjoy your mechanical honeymoon, Hope—it can’t and won’t last.”

“The days of warfare are numbered, Escott,” Hope affirmed, confidently. “The Pax Romana was a feeble affair compared to the Pax Anglica. The world has never seen an alliance like that between the First Sea Lord and the President of the Academy, and their association will make certain that social progress advances hand in hand with technological progress. We are privileged to be alive at the dawn of the Euchronian Era, and hands that are idle today, or reduced to mindlessly repetitive labor because their old skills have become redundant, will not need the Devil to find them clever work. The march of science will do that, infallibly and triumphantly. Future generations of laborers will not be akin to slaves, even in careless metaphor; they will be true collaborators with machinery, participating in a marvelous complementarity of skills. Steam is brute force, but electricity is art, and electricity will be the foundation of the next technological revolution—as witness the telegraphic systems that control the signals distributed along the railway.”

Michael observed that the Monticarlos had already lost the thread of the argument; although they both spoke conversational English with commendable fluency, and hardly any accent, the terms in which Hope and Escott were pontificating were too esoteric to be easily comprehensible. Carmela whispered something to her father in Italian, as if to start up a second, rival conversation, but the violinist frowned at her and shook his head, instructing her not to be impolite.

Having heard such exchanges a dozen times before, Lady Phythian obviously had no desire to listen to another, but it seemed that she had already despaired of any possibility of controlling such disobedient individuals. For the moment, she contented herself with making her disinterest in the argument manifest, turning away from Michael and Hope alike to gaze loftily out of the widow, as if she were indeed Britannia reviewing her estates.

Michael was now convinced that Hope and Escott had only been eager to invite him to join them in their carriage in order that they might obtain a relatively fresh audience for their eternal quarrel rather than to invite any contribution to their discussion, but he did not hold it against them. The same chatter that had informed him so fully of Lady Phythian’s history and character had filled in their background for him. They had gone on from Eton to Balliol, and then—having come into their respective inheritances within a matter of months—had set out to make the Grand Tour together. Instead of following the customary route to Italy, however, they had decided to design their own itinerary, which would take them to even remoter cradles of civilization: to Greece, to Egypt, and finally to Crete, where they had spent a full year exploring the ruins of Knossos, the ancient capital in the vicinity of Makro Teikho, whose recently-excavated remains had become a playground for the assiduous antiquarians of England and the German States. It was there that they had met the present Earl of Langstrade, who had then been known as “young Harry Langstrade” to distinguish him from his father—who had only recently become “Old Harry Langstrade of Langstrade” instead of mere “Old Harry Langstrade”—and who had not yet met his wife-to-be, Emily Hale.

According to the gossip, it was the Grand Tour that had completed the opposition between the two traveling companions, perfecting its universality. It had been the three years of their “educational odyssey” that had extended Hope’s innate optimism into a wholehearted philosophy of progress, and Escott’s natural pessimism into quasi-apocalyptic gloom. It had also stretched Hope’s Whig sympathies into near-radical enthusiasm for political reform and Utopian—or, as he preferred to call it, Euchronian—social planning, while elaborating Escott’s Toryism into a near-mystical appreciation of the lost glories of the past. It had even been their years in and around the Mediterranean, so it was said, that had made Hope so plump and Escott so thin, because the former had thrived on native diets they had encountered there, whereas the latter had never been able to reconcile his stomach to their unfamiliarity.

Some people professed surprised that the two men had remained friends once they had returned to England to enjoy life as consummate amateurs, but they had always represented themselves as inevitable dialectical elements of a greater unity, like the north and south poles of a magnet. Now that he was able to listen to them holding forth at close range, as it were, Michael was able to appreciate the truth of that judgment. Had only one of them been present, his ideas would have been mere philosophical pontifications, overblown and essentially tedious, but because they were together, their contrasted ideas obtained a kind of vibrancy from a cut-and-thrust combat that was almost akin to music in its rhythm and resonance. Instead of being tedious, they seemed alive and electric, spitting sparks at one another like the various kinds of apparatus that had been built and exhibited to demonstrate the telegraphic principle.

For the moment, however, Michael was glad that the duty the two men had sought to impose upon him by means of their invitation was not particularly burdensome. Although he continued to lend a reverent ear to the erratic course of their flamboyant dispute, the painter soon allowed his attention to wander. His eyes strayed to the window, while his mind relaxed into a pleasant reverie, the principal image of which was Cecilia Langstrade’s lovely face. How he longed to paint her cornflower-blue eyes and silky blonde hair! How he longed, in fact, to reach a far greater intimacy with that face than mere paint could ever permit!

Michael did not have the faintest idea what the probability was that he would ever achieve that kind of intimacy. That Cecilia liked him a great deal he had no doubt, but they had only met on formal social occasions, surrounded by crowds, and the letters they had exchanged had so far been rather tentative in their affectionate tone. He was very hopeful that the weekend house-party at Langstrade Hall would give him more than one opportunity to speak to her in private, far more confidentially than the formality of a letter would allow, and he was also very hopeful that such circumstances would confirm and enhance her manifest regard for him—but the small steps he might be able to take between a Thursday evening and a Tuesday morning were a long way short of the social ground that he would eventually have to cover if their relationship were to mature.

In theory, differences in social status were far less important nowadays than they had been in his late father’s day—and if Mr. Hope could be believed, the erosion of that importance could only accelerate in future—but the fact remained that the Langstrades were now fully-fledged members of the aristocracy, while the Laurels were not. Horatio Laurel’s highly distinguished naval career had won him sufficient social status to launch Michael into Society—in which circles a painter had to move if he were to have any chance of making a living—but could not give him “quality”. The Langstrades’ elevation to the aristocracy had, by contrast, provided the family with an inalienable certificate of quality, and the fact that it was recent inevitably served to make the present Earl even more conscious of that status than he would have been had he been the thirty-second instead of the second. The fact that the first Earl had insisted on regarding the entitlement as a re-elevation rather than a simple promotion, and as a long-belated recognition of an ancient due, was a further complication. Michael had no idea how the second Earl might react to the possibility of acquiring a mere painter as a son-in-law, even if Cecilia could be completely won over to the prospect.

The first Earl of Langstrade had been appointed to the peerage at the behest of the Academy, for his contributions to industry. He had been one of the pioneers of mechanization in textile manufacture even before the advent of steam engines, and had become famous in political circles for his stout resistance to Richard Arkwright’s monopolistic maneuvers—a resistance that had become known as the Second War of the Roses, even though Arkwright’s enterprise was based in Derbyshire rather than Lancashire. The first Earl had, however, always been insistent that his family had been aristocrats long before the Norman Conquest or the “Saxon Tyranny” that had preceded it. He claimed to be a direct descendant of Celtic Longstrides, who had fought for centuries to keep the Viking invaders of his beloved dales at bay before being trapped between two implacable forces in the series of contests that had divided England between Norse and Germanic invaders.

Indeed, Old Harry’s antiquarian fantasies had extended far beyond that, asserting that the settlers in Britain who had become the Celts had been the descendants of Cretans who had escaped the catastrophic destruction of the Minoan civilization in the volcanic upheaval that had been responsible for the mythical Deluge, and that the Longstrides were the descendants of the greatest of all the ancient world’s engineers: Dedalus. In Old Harry’s contention, the revolution he had helped to bring about in the textile industry had been an extrapolation of family tradition, the modern mechanical loom being merely “a recapitulation of the Labyrinthine principle”.

The only item of “evidence” supporting the first Earl’s insistence on linking the Langstrades and the probably-imaginary Longstrides with Dedalus was a diagram of a maze inscribed on a piece of parchment that had been found in the ruins of Cribden Abbey, which had once occupied the site on which Langstrade Hall now stood. Just as the old hall had replaced the Abbey, Old Harry had insisted, the Abbey had replaced a pagan place of worship, whose central feature must have been the maze described on the parchment. Although the first Earl had been able to confirm, during his sojourn in the ruins of Knossos, that the design on the parchment bore no significant resemblance to the design of the actual Cretan Labyrinth, parts of which had now been excavated, he had merely concluded that the Cretan Labyrinth had been Dedalus’ first draft, and that the engineer had spent the time in which he had been imprisoned in his own construction by the tyrant Minos dreaming of the new design that he had carried away to England when the volcanic eruption set him free.

The second Earl had inherited his father’s eccentricity along with his wealth, and had thought it his filial duty to complete the grand plans that the first Earl had made, perhaps more in hope than expectation. Michael knew that he ought to be grateful for that, given that it was the expression of Lord Langstrade’s whim that had generated his commission to paint “Harold Longstride’s Keep”, but he couldn’t help feeling slightly uneasy about it. The instructions he had received were detailed, and there seemed to be an awful possibility that his picture would somehow fail to meet the Earl’s expectations. He had been told that he must establish the perspective of the Keep very carefully, taking in both the immediate background of the wall of the reconstructed Maze and the more distant background of Bancroft Scar, positioning a symbolic yew tree within the field of view with the utmost care.

According to what Old Harry had passed off as a family legend, scrupulously handed down over the generations, the mighty Harold Longstride had once emerged from behind a yew tree to surprise and confront Emund Snurlson, the leader of a host of Viking marauders, on a late summer’s day corresponding to the modern August seventeenth, in the year that would now be reckoned as 822 A.D. In consequence of his victory in the ensuing single combat—in which, for some unaccountable reason, Snurlson’s followers had not intervened—the Vikings had retreated and their heroic conqueror had built the “original keep”, in order that the Norsemen should never conquer the shallow valley in which his lands were situated.

Almost everyone except the present Lord Langstrade and his dutiful mother—including his wife and daughter—believed that the legends of Harold Longstride and the Dedalus Maze were the pure stuff of dreams, but that did not matter to Michael. It was in expectation of celebrating the millennial anniversary of Harold’s supposed duel with Emund Snurlson that the new Keep—or the Folly—and its surrounding Maze had been built over the course of the last seven years; Michael, like Signor Monticarlo, Augustus Carp and Gregory Marlstone, had been invited to Langstrade Hall in order to provide an apt commemoration of the occasion. Lady Phythian had been included in the party because she, like the absentee Geoffrey Chatham, had long been a regular visitor to the Hall, while Hope and Escott had been preferred to the present Earl’s other acquaintances because of their auspicious meeting in the ruins of Knossos.

Michael was able to take some comfort in the fact that he seemed, at present, to be the only intended contributor to the supposedly-momentous occasion whose contribution seemed fully assured. Gregory Marlstone’s time machine had already failed to function twice at more widely-advertised and much better-attended exhibitions, and the London newspapers had turned against him in no uncertain terms, branding him a philosophical failure and freely referring to his third intended trial, even in advance, as “the folly in the Folly”. Augustus Carp’s reputation as a mesmerist had also taken a severe knock since he had suffered the sudden loss of his long-time somniloquist, a woman of delicate constitution carried off by the influenza; the replacement he had recently recruited was said to be mediocre at best. To cap it all, Carmela Monticarlo—who usually accompanied her father on the piano when he played sonatas—had sprained her wrist badly, forcing the violinist to restrict his intended program to solo pieces, in the performance of which he was reputed to be far outshone by his more famous contemporary, Signor Paganini.

Taking everything into consideration, Michael thought, as he stared out of the window of the carriage, looking over Lady Phythian’s bulky shoulder, his performance with the brush ought to be the most reliable on offer—but that had to be balanced against the fact that he was far less famous in his own field than any of the other three “performers” was in his, and none of them had the burden of anxiety that arose from being hopelessly in love with his host’s daughter.