Read Online The Mysterious Commission by Michael Innes - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Innes
Ads: Link
him among the swells. Not among the small swells of his own time and country. With them, after all, he was pretty well on equal terms already. But among the real swells. It was a breathtaking thought.
He didn’t sleep well that night. An artist doesn’t, when verging on a manic condition. Even when he dozed, a brush was still in his hand, achieving incredible things. And the church clock – or was it stable clock? – was tiresome. He had never been able to understand what use to anybody was a contraption that went banging away like that all through the hours of darkness. The owls and bats, after all, didn’t presumably seek to be told the time. Perhaps the performance was for the benefit of poachers and burglars. It was nothing but a damned nuisance to honest men.
He’d thought to relax by taking a bath not long after dinner, and in his bath he’d heard the thing strike nine. There was that flat effect on the last stroke. He heard it again in bed: at ten the penultimate stroke went wrong, and at eleven the antepenultimate. He told himself that this phenomenon reminded him of something, but he was quite unable to determine what it was. The point worried him unreasonably, and it was almost fretfully that he waited for midnight. Light, however, came to him before then. It came to him out of The Waste Land , the poem with which the obscurely apocalyptic voice of T S Eliot had so deliciously troubled Charles Honeybath’s generation when young. In The Waste Land one is told something about St Mary Woolnoth, which is in Lombard Street, London, among (it is to be supposed) the bankers. It is therefore known as one of Sir Christopher Wren’s City Churches, although it is in fact by Wren’s pupil, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is scarcely one of Hawksmoor’s successes, since it looks like a gaol upon the roof of which some inexplicable atomic catastrophe has landed an undistinguished classical temple. But it is not this that is commemorated in the celebrated poem. It is the fact that St Mary Woolnoth keeps the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine . In an annotation the poet assures us that there can be no mistake, since the phenomenon is one which he has often noticed.
Although in a drowsy and somewhat confused state, Honeybath didn’t fall for the error that he was actually in Eliot’s Unreal City, and flowing up the hill and down King William Street, now. He was deep in the country; there could be no doubt about that. It was simply that he was in contact with the effects of a similar mechanical deficiency to that commemorated in the poem. And not even precisely similar. Strictly read, The Waste Land asserted that only twice in the twenty-four hours – to wit when the striking of nine o’clock was in question – was the dead sound perceptible. ‘The final stroke of nine’ was quite unambiguous. Whereas here it was any ninth stroke that went wrong. There must be a missing tooth, or something of the kind, on some wheel or cog.
Honeybath in his muzzy state was so proud of working out this nice discrimination that he failed for some moments to reflect on its irrelevance. But there was something, he presently saw, that was very relevant indeed. Not many clocks in the south of England could be relied upon to behave in this way eight times out of twenty-four.
Set out from Paddington, plod along the line of the Great Western Railway, allow yourself (like Sir John Betjeman) to be sufficiently Summoned by Bells, and you would infallibly run to earth the residence of Mon Empereur , otherwise known as Mr X.
6
Several unremarkable days succeeded. Honeybath was now in a position to advance his painting in a number of regards without the presence of his sitter, and he achieved long hours of concentrated labour which once more left him without any very urgent impulse to quarrel with his situation. He had, in fact, fallen into a routine. The extent to which this was so became clear to him only when certain
He didn’t sleep well that night. An artist doesn’t, when verging on a manic condition. Even when he dozed, a brush was still in his hand, achieving incredible things. And the church clock – or was it stable clock? – was tiresome. He had never been able to understand what use to anybody was a contraption that went banging away like that all through the hours of darkness. The owls and bats, after all, didn’t presumably seek to be told the time. Perhaps the performance was for the benefit of poachers and burglars. It was nothing but a damned nuisance to honest men.
He’d thought to relax by taking a bath not long after dinner, and in his bath he’d heard the thing strike nine. There was that flat effect on the last stroke. He heard it again in bed: at ten the penultimate stroke went wrong, and at eleven the antepenultimate. He told himself that this phenomenon reminded him of something, but he was quite unable to determine what it was. The point worried him unreasonably, and it was almost fretfully that he waited for midnight. Light, however, came to him before then. It came to him out of The Waste Land , the poem with which the obscurely apocalyptic voice of T S Eliot had so deliciously troubled Charles Honeybath’s generation when young. In The Waste Land one is told something about St Mary Woolnoth, which is in Lombard Street, London, among (it is to be supposed) the bankers. It is therefore known as one of Sir Christopher Wren’s City Churches, although it is in fact by Wren’s pupil, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is scarcely one of Hawksmoor’s successes, since it looks like a gaol upon the roof of which some inexplicable atomic catastrophe has landed an undistinguished classical temple. But it is not this that is commemorated in the celebrated poem. It is the fact that St Mary Woolnoth keeps the hours with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine . In an annotation the poet assures us that there can be no mistake, since the phenomenon is one which he has often noticed.
Although in a drowsy and somewhat confused state, Honeybath didn’t fall for the error that he was actually in Eliot’s Unreal City, and flowing up the hill and down King William Street, now. He was deep in the country; there could be no doubt about that. It was simply that he was in contact with the effects of a similar mechanical deficiency to that commemorated in the poem. And not even precisely similar. Strictly read, The Waste Land asserted that only twice in the twenty-four hours – to wit when the striking of nine o’clock was in question – was the dead sound perceptible. ‘The final stroke of nine’ was quite unambiguous. Whereas here it was any ninth stroke that went wrong. There must be a missing tooth, or something of the kind, on some wheel or cog.
Honeybath in his muzzy state was so proud of working out this nice discrimination that he failed for some moments to reflect on its irrelevance. But there was something, he presently saw, that was very relevant indeed. Not many clocks in the south of England could be relied upon to behave in this way eight times out of twenty-four.
Set out from Paddington, plod along the line of the Great Western Railway, allow yourself (like Sir John Betjeman) to be sufficiently Summoned by Bells, and you would infallibly run to earth the residence of Mon Empereur , otherwise known as Mr X.
6
Several unremarkable days succeeded. Honeybath was now in a position to advance his painting in a number of regards without the presence of his sitter, and he achieved long hours of concentrated labour which once more left him without any very urgent impulse to quarrel with his situation. He had, in fact, fallen into a routine. The extent to which this was so became clear to him only when certain
Similar Books
