Mr Pye (Vintage Classics) by Mervyn Peake

Author:Mervyn Peake [Peake, Mervyn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781409058380
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

A COUPLE of hundred feet below him the bottle-green water washed the shores of the old Eperquerie harbour. The rain had stopped and a pale sun shone across the sea, and the red and black seaweeds swaying to and fro in the shallows seemed to shine unnaturally.

Mr Pye sat upon the old weather-pitted barrel of a cannon, which at the cliff’s edge pointed its rusty nozzle at the sea. Reputed to have once given Napoleon food for thought, the old thing now lay half-buried in the short, rabbit-nibbled turf.

Across the sea a faint thickening of the horizon implied France, and piled above this tenuous implication there were great domes of cloud.

Mr Pye, upon the cannon, sat very straight indeed, his hands in his lap, his knees drawn up, his feet together, his head turned to the sea, but his eyes out of focus.

Mechanically his hand stole into a waistcoat pocket and withdrew a fruit-drop, but he forgot to put the bright green thing into his mouth. Again he was motionless, his hand raised and the sweet between his finger and thumb.

The world that he knew, the rational world, the world whose natural and physical laws he had always taken for granted, was suddenly exploded. He would have been, of course, among the first to challenge any suggestion that the world was fundamentally rational or that everything in life could be explained – for the Great Pal was not rational, nor was beauty rational – and self-sacrifice and religious inspiration were certainly not rational, but nevertheless he knew that if great tracts and areas of life (which he among the rest of mankind had always relied on to be consistent) were suddenly to behave illogically or defy the laws of nature, then it would be of little use for him to follow his evangelical star, for chaos would yawn at him at every turning and his star might itself fall suddenly down the sky and become (why not?) a catfish, as it fell.

What other explanation could there be than that he had reached so elevated a condition that the body had no option but to try and follow where the soul was leading, and for all he knew he was now not so much a little lower than the angels, but on a par.

But Mr Pye was not so sure that he wanted to be an angel or to find himself upon equal footing with the heavenly host. It was one thing to be an angel in Paradise, but quite another to be an angel in Sark.

If it was the work of the Great Pal then he felt he should have been warned. After all, the responsibility was a heavy one for even the purest soul to carry. There was, of course, something very flattering about it all, but the complications that loomed ahead were legion.

Was he to divulge what had happened and appear to the Sarkese, and indeed to the world, in his plumage, and by means of this sign,

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