Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“Exactly that. The Tiadaghton Project expanded and metamorphosed, and in the end became a profit-making enterprise of great scope and breadth. Nearly all of the Robber Barons — the name given to those business potentates who became obscenely wealthy through their industrial and financial rapaciousness — shared a fashionable fascination for this little slice of synthetic Victorian England nestled ironically in their own American backyard. And they poured millions of dollars into its upkeep, guaranteeing Dingley Dell many happy years of solvent patronage.

“It took no time at all for the Robber Barons to fall madly in love with this place and its colourful people. These and the men who came after them drew from their extravagant bank accounts to create from their obsession with Dingley Dell a secret society whose membership was kept deliberately small and select. Through the help of your Moles, mechanisms were put into place for a more detailed accounting and monitoring of the goings-on there — hidden telephones were installed, then wireless telegraphy, remote radio broadcast facilities, then secreted video cameras — or rather — how should I put this? — devices that may capture a moving and speaking image as photography captures a still picture and which transmits that image through the air to some other place. Are you keeping up with me, gentlemen…and Miss Bocker, or have I hopelessly outpaced you?”

“I think, rather, the latter,” admitted Muntle. “But proceed.”

“Suffice it to observe that there are this day a large number of ways for those who administer this present-day version of the Tiadaghton Project to keep abreast of a great deal of what you and your fellow citizens do and say, both through devices which transmit your activities and your conversations, and the reports they receive from their agents.”

“Yet we are safe to speak here?” asked the vicar looking nervously about. “You will confirm that no such devices have been put into this room?”

Miss Wolf nodded. “As a rule — and it is a rule I have never seen violated — monitoring equipment is installed only in public places.”

“And does Dingley Dell still continue to be the hobbyhorse of the very wealthy?” asked Antonia.

“Not so much now as formerly. Many have lost interest and quitted the society. There’s a tribe of pygmies, recently removed to an isolated compound in southern Utah, that is drawing a bit of attention from many of our rich members — the lives of transplanted hirsute and squat-legged African dwarfs being much more entertaining to easily-bored billionaires these days than the now rather prosy and parochial lives of bonnet-wearing, pudding-eating neo-Victorians. Which brings us then to the latest phase of the Project, of which I have not been apprised, and about which, as I earlier mentioned, I know only anecdotally what lies ahead. I should like to think that after the M.P.P.’s and their families have been gotten away, that someone will arrive to make a grand announcement, to lay out a detailed timetable for the evacuation of the valley. I should like to think that continued evacuation would be effected with gentle care and respect, that each Dinglian will be given the requisite vaccinations to guard against those illnesses from which you presently have no natural protection. I should like to think that funds would be allocated for your comfortable resettlement, that some of you will find a home with the Amish or one of the other plainliving Anabaptist denominations. There seem a number of outcomes— positive outcomes that do not allow for only pain and heartbreak and—”

“And extermination,” said Muntle somberly.

“Yes, I know. I regret that I cannot deny that possibility as well.”

“Are these men truly such monsters?” asked Miss Bocker.

“It has happened before,” replied Miss Wolf in a tone of sobriety matching that of her interlocutor. “And there is even a word for it. Genocide. It came with the wholesale slaughter of six million Jews in the 1930s and 1940s by a German dictator by the name of Adolf Hitler. There is an older word, as well, that was appropriated for this unthinkable act. The word is ‘holocaust.’”

It was quite telling — the fact that Miss Wolf could not give a definitive answer to the question of our future. I was convinced now that she had been placed with deliberate intent into the uninformed darkness. She was, in effect, more like us now than like those from whom she came. Perhaps it was because they could no longer trust her.

My heart had softened towards Miss Ruth Wolf. I would not trade places with her for worlds: fully trusted, fully embraced by no one — not we Dinglians nor the Outland masters for whom she worked. She was adrift.

And she was beautiful.

But she would not be mine.

ater that day, Muntle was dismissed from his office as sheriff of Dingley Dell.

It was Lord Mayor Feenix himself who had informed him of the PetitParliament’s decision. Feenix came to Muntle’s apartments in the Inn-of- Justice, accompanied by the man who was to take his place — or rather the boy , for Muntle had lost his position to none other than his lowest deputy, Billy Boldwig, whose behaviour, in spite of the rather grave and humiliating circumstances, was marked by callous exuberance for his new position and for his new lodgings — it being required that Muntle vacate his apartments immediately and the boy registering nothing of Muntle’s devastated demeanour, except that he moved slowly.

I did not know any of this at the time. My friend Vincent, being a proud man, confessed to me later that he had been reluctant to tell anyone. When one’s professional life comes to a sudden, ignominious end, even the most garrulous of men are apt to keep quietly to themselves.

At dawn the next morning I was awakened by a scream. I thought for a moment that it had been emitted by some wraith within my dream — for I always dreamed heaviest in the hour prior to waking, and at that moment was immersed quite deeply in a goblins’ croquet game. (Please don’t ask me why, for I have never played it.) I sat up in bed and listened. Muffled voices filtered up from Mrs. Lumbey’s dress shop showroom below. I quickly donned my robe, threw open the door to the stairwell that led down to the shop, and hurriedly but cautiously descended the dark stairs (for the sun, though rising, had yet to infiltrate every nook and cranny of the passage).

Mrs. Lumbey stood in the centre of the showroom, wearing her dressing gown, her hands outstretched to coax her frightened apprentice Amy Casby, crouched and quivering in a far corner of the room, to come into her enfolding embrace. The girl quickly consented to Mrs. Lumbey’s offer of temporary harbourage and stood for the moment weeping and clutching, but giving no explanation for what could possibly have incited such a fearful outburst.

A moment later, Hannah Pupker appeared. There was genuine concern written upon her face as well for the woman with whom she had formed a loose friendship of circumstance. Gathering the plaits of her own gown in a distempered hand, she darted her eyes about the room to descry the cause of Amy’s distress (wondering all the while if her provocative presence here were somehow implicated).

“Speak up, dear girl,” said Mrs. Lumbey to her assistant, whilst gently smoothing back the young woman’s sleep-tangled hair. “Dry your tears and tell us what has frightened you so.”