James Blaylock - The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives

He climbed back into the room, rewrapping the plaster casts and closing them up in the drawer. Then, pulling on his coat, he strode out across the meadow once again like a man with a will, noticing only when he was halfway to the River Nidd that he still wasn’t wearing any shoes.

He returned late that afternoon in an improved mood, although he felt agitated and anxious. He had spent three hours with Lord Kelvin. The great scientist had come to understand that tragedy had turned St. Ives into a natural fool. He had even patted St. Ives on the head once, which had been humiliating, but to some little extent St. Ives had been grateful for it — a sign, he realized, of how dangerously low his spirits had fallen. But things were looking up now. His efforts weren’t doomed after all, although he was certain that he was running a footrace with Parsons and the Royal Academy. When they were sure of themselves, they would merely break down the silo door — come out with a dozen soldiers and checkmate him. The game would be at an end.

The idea of it once again darkened his thoughts. His elation at having swindled Lord Kelvin out of certain tidbits of information suddenly lapsed, and he slumped into his chair feeling fatigued and beaten. He seemed to swing between two extremes — doom and utter confidence. Middle ground had become the rarest sort of real estate. What he needed, desperately, was to be levelheaded, and here he was atilt again, staggering off course.

Tomorrow, though, or the next day, he would set out. Right now he would rest. Lord Kelvin had taken pity on him this afternoon. That was the long and the short of it. One look at St. Ives’s face, at his disheveled clothes, and Lord Kelvin had been ready to discuss anything at all, as if he were talking to the village idiot. The man had a heart like a hay wagon, to be sure. St. Ives’s wandering over without any shoes on had probably done the trick. Kelvin had finally warmed to the subject of time travel, and St. Ives had led him through a discussion of the workings of the machine itself as if he were a trained ape.

That was clever, he told himself, going out shoeless was. He half believed it for a moment. Then he knew that it hadn’t been clever at all; he had gone out shoeless without meaning to, and in late autumn, yet. He would have to watch that sort of thing. They’d have him tied down in Colney Hatch if he wasn’t careful. He was too close to success. He couldn’t chance a strait-waistcoat. Seeing things clearly for the moment, he looked at himself in the cheval glass on the desk. A haircut wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Perhaps if a man affected sanity carefully enough…

Almost happy again, he stepped into his slippers and lit a pipe, sitting back and puffing on it. Failure — that’s what had squirreled him up. Too much failure made a hash of a man’s mind…He thought for a moment about his manifold failures, and suddenly and inexplicably he was awash with fear, with common homegrown panic. He found that he could barely keep his hands still.

Immediately, he tried to recite the cottage-pie recipe, finding that he couldn’t remember it. He pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and studied the writing on it. There it was — sage and sweet basil. Not sweetbread. He could feel his heart flutter like a bird’s wings, and he felt faint and light-headed. Desperately, he breathed for a moment into a sack until the light-headedness began to abate. Sweetbread? Why had he thought of sweetbread? That was some kind of gland, wasn’t it? Something the French ate, probably out of buckets and without the benefit of forks.

With an unpleasant shock, he noticed just then that someone had cleaned up his desk. The debris on the floor was separated into tidy piles against the wall. The papers were shuffled, and the books stacked. The glass and ceramic figurines were dusted and lined up together. The neatened desk baffled him for a moment. Then, slowly, a dark rage began to rise in him, and the whole business of an orderly desk became an affront.

He bent down and tossed together the stuff on the floor, mixing it into a sort of salad. Then he kicked through it, sending it flying, winding himself up. He turned to the desk itself, methodically picking up books and shaking out the loose leaves so that they fluttered down higgledy-piggledy. He picked up a heavy iron elephant paperweight and one by one smashed his quill pens, accidentally catching the squared-off edge of the crystal ink bottle and smashing it too, so that ink spewed out across his shirtfront. The shock of smashing the glass made him bite down hard on the stem of his pipe. He heard and felt the stem crack, and quickly let up on it. The pipe fell neatly into two pieces, though, so that the stem stayed in his mouth and the bowl fell down onto the desktop, wobbling around in the ink and broken glass like a drunkard. Furious, he picked up the elephant again and smashed the pipe, over and over and over, until he noticed with a deep rush of demoralizing embarrassment that Mrs. Langley stood in the open door of the room, her eyes wide open with horror and disbelief.

Coldly he put the elephant down and turned to her, realizing without knowing why that she had become an obstruction to him. Somehow, his rage had been transferred en masse to the housekeeper, to Mrs. Langley. He had no need for a house-keeper He saw that clearly. What he had a need for was to be left alone. His desk, his books, his things, wanted to be left alone. Soon he would be gone altogether, perhaps never to return. A page in his life was folding back, a chapter coming to a close. The world was rife with change.

And this wasn’t the first time that she had cut this sort of caper. He had spoken to her about it before. Well, the woman had been warned, hadn’t she? There wouldn’t be any need to speak to her about it again. “As of this moment, Mrs. Langley,” he said to her flatly, “you are relieved of your duties. You’ll have three months’ severance pay.”

She put her hand to her mouth, and he realized that his eye was twitching badly and that every muscle in his body was stiff with tension, his hands opening and closing spasmodically. He gestured toward the window, the open road. “ Must you stare so?” he demanded of her.

“He’s gone stark,” she muttered through her fingers.

He clenched his teeth. “I have not gone stark,” he said. “Understand that! I have not gone stark!” Even as he said it, there flickered across his mind a vague understanding of what it meant — that he had gone mad, utterly. He wasn’t quite sane enough to admit it, though, to hold on to the notion. He was too far around the bend to see it anymore, but could merely glimpse its shadow. He knew only that he couldn’t have Mrs. Langley meddling with his things, chasing after him with a dust mop as if he wanted a keeper. He watched her leave, very proudly, with her head up. She wasn’t the sort to forgive easily. She would be gone, up to her sisters. Well…For a moment he nearly called her back, but was having difficulty breathing again. He put his head into the sack.

After a moment he sat back down in his chair and contrived to rearrange the four objects amid the clutter on the desktop. His hand shook violently, though, and he accidentally uncorked the glass shoe, spilling out half the sugar crystals. Then he knocked the Humpty Dumpty over twice. He concentrated, making himself breathe evenly, placing the objects just so. Surely, if he could get them right, he would regain that moment of indefinable satisfaction that he had felt a few hours past. It would settle him down, restore a sense of proportion. It wouldn’t work, though. He couldn’t manage it.

He forced himself to concentrate on the desktop again. There was something in the arrangement that was subtlely wrong. The figurines stood there as ever, the dog with his head on the shoe, the Humpty Dumpty gazing longingly at the ballerina. But there was no pattern any longer, no art to it. It was as if the earth had turned farther along its axis and the shadows were different.