The System of the World (25 page)

“But what good is it, if not coined?”

“Gold has other uses,” Daniel said. “Of which I shall tell you more some day. But not today. For we are approached by Peer, and must bring the oddness of our discourse down to a value of one or two on the scale I mentioned earlier.”

“Peer? Who or what is Peer?”

“For a man who, moments ago, was lecturing me ’pon the workings of Grub Street, you’ve not been attending to your newspapers at all, have you?”

“I know it exists, how it works, and that it’s important, but—”

“I read the papers every day. Let me tell you quickly then: there is a newspaper called
Ye Lens
which was started by Whigs, when their Juncto held power; several clever men write for it; Peer is not one of them.”

“You mean, he doesn’t write for the
Ye Lens
?”

“No, I mean he is not very clever.”

“How’d he get the job, then?”

“By being in the House of Lords, and always taking the Whig side.”

“Ah, so he
is
a peer!”

“A Peer of the Realm, with writerly ambitions. And as he writes for the
Lens
, and a lens is something you peer through, he has given himself the pen-name of Peer.”

“This is the longest prolog to an introduction I’ve ever heard,” Dappa remarked. “When is he actually going to show up?”

“I believe he—they—are waiting for you to notice them,” Daniel said, pointing with his eyeballs. “Brace yourself.”

Dappa narrowed his eyes, flared his nostrils, and then torqued himself round in his chair until he had—heeding Daniel’s sage advice—braced one elbow on the table.

Facing him from roughly twelve feet away were the Marquis of Ravenscar, planted stolidly on the booze-slickened Kit-Cat floor-boards, and an even better-dressed chap, who was dangling by both arms from one of the Clubb’s low-hanging beams, his impeccably shod feet swinging back and forth just a few inches above the floor.

When this man saw that Dappa was looking his direction, he let go and dropped to the floor with a loud, chesty “Hoo!” His knees bent deeply, creating alarming strains in the crotch of his breeches, and allowing his knuckles to dangle near the floor. After making certain he’d caught Dappa’s eye, he moved in a waddling gait to the Marquis of Ravenscar, who was standing still as a star, his face pinched up in a pickled smile.

Peer now pursed his lips, thrust them out as far as they would go, and, glancing back frequently to make sure he still had Dappa’s attention, began to make little “Hoo! Hoo!” noises while circling cautiously around Roger. After completing a full orbit of Roger, he shuffled in closer, leaned in so that he was almost nuzzling Roger’s shoulder, and began to make snuffling noises whilst cocking his head this way and that. Noting something apparently caught in the tresses of Roger’s splendid wig, he raised one hand off the floor, reached into the luxuriant mass of curls, pinched something tiny, pulled it out, examined it, gave it a good thorough sniffing, then popped it into his mouth and began to make exaggerated chewing noises.
Then, in case Dappa had glanced away during this, he sidled around Roger and repeated the performance some half-dozen times, until even Roger became sick of it, raised one hand in the mildest of threats, and muttered, “Oh, will you stop it!”

Peer’s response was extreme: he jumped back out of cuffing-range, came to rest on his knuckles and the balls of his feet, made excited screeching noises (or as near as a member of the House of Lords could come to it), then sprang into the air while flinging his arms above his head. He grabbed the beam again, knocking loose a shower of dust that sifted down, stained his white wig gray, and caused him to sneeze—which was most unfortunate, as he’d been taking snuff. A bolo of reddish-brown mucus hurtled out of his nose and made itself fast to his chin.

The Kit-Cat Clubb had become quiet as a monastery. Perhaps three dozen men were in the place. By and large, they were of a mind to find nearly
anything
funny. Rarely did a minute tick away without all conversation in the Clubb being drowned out by a storm-burst of booming laughter from one table or another. But there was something in Peer’s performance so queer that it had shut them all up. Daniel, who had phant’sied that the crowding and the hubbub gave him and Dappa some sort of privacy, now felt even more exposed, and acutely spied upon, than ever.

The Marquis of Ravenscar swaggered toward Dappa. Behind him, Peer dropped from the rafters and got busy with a Belgian gros-point lace handkerchief. After Roger had moved along for a few paces, Peer followed him, cringing along in Roger’s wake.

“Dr. Waterhouse. Mr. Dappa,” said Roger with tremendous aplomb. “It is good to see you both again.”

“And you likewise,
et cetera,
” answered Daniel shortly, as Dappa had been temporarily robbed of the power of speech.

Conversations resumed, tentatively, around the Clubb.

“I pray you will not take it amiss if I refrain from picking lice out of your hair, as my lord Wragby has been so considerate as to do for me.”

“It’s not even my hair, Roger.”

“May I introduce to you, Dappa, and re-introduce to you, Daniel, my lord Walter Raleigh Waterhouse Weem, Viscount Wragby and Rector of Scanque, Member of Parliament, and Fellow of the Royal Society.”

“Hullo, Uncle Daniel!” said Peer, suddenly straightening up. “Very clever of someone to dress him up in a suit of clothing! Was that your conceit?”

Dappa was staring sidelong at Daniel. “I forgot to mention that
Peer is my half-great-nephew once removed, or something like that,” Daniel explained to him, behind his hand.

“Who are you talking to, uncle?” Peer inquired, looking past Dappa’s head into a void. Then, with a shrug, he continued, “Do you phant’sy my demonstration worked? I did ever so much
research
, to get it right.”

“I’ve no idea, Wally,” Daniel returned, and then looked over at Dappa, who was still frozen in the sidelong-glare attitude. “Dappa, did you understand, from what you just observed, that my lord Wragby, here, is a member of my lord Ravenscar’s ape-tribe, and that he plays a submissive role, fully acknowledging my lord Ravenscar’s dominance?”

“Who are you talking to?” said Peer for the second time.

“To whom are you talking!”
Dappa corrected him.

A few moments’ silence from Peer, greatly savoured by Roger and Daniel. Peer raised one hand, pointed his index finger at Dappa as if holding him at bay with a pistol, and turned to Daniel with his mouth a-jar.

“What you didn’t know, my nephew,” Daniel said, “is that Dappa was, at a very young age, taken aboard ship by pirates as a sort of pet. And these pirates, being a polyglot group, amused themselves by training Dappa to speak twenty-five different languages fluently.”

“Twenty-five different languages!” Peer exclaimed.

“Yes. Including better English than you, as you just saw.”

“But…but he doesn’t actually
understand
any of them,” Peer said.

“No more than a parrot does, when it squawks out a demand for a cracker,” Daniel affirmed, then let out a squawk of his own as Dappa kicked him in the shin under the table.

“What a remarkable feat! You should exhibit him!”

“What do you think I’m doing right now?”

“How was the weather yesterday?”
Peer inquired of Dappa, in French.

“In the morning it was miserable and rainy,”
Dappa returned.
“After noon I thought it would clear but, alas, it was still overcast until nightfall. Only as I was getting ready for bed did I begin to see stars shining through gaps between clouds. Could I trouble you for a cracker?”

“I say, the French pirate who taught him that trick must have been an educated man!” Peer exclaimed. Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time. “One would suppose there would be no point in holding a conversation with a man who does not understand what he is saying. And yet he described yesterday’s
weather better than I could! In fact, I think I’ll use his wording in tomorrow’s edition!” Again, now, the thoughtful look. “If he could relate other experiences—such as his
tête-à-tête
with the Duchess—as faithfully as he recalls the weather, it would make my interview with him ever so much easier. I had come prepared to do it all in grunts and sign language!” And Peer gave a note-book in his hip-pocket an ominous pat.

“I suppose that whenever one speaks in the abstract—which is to say, most of the time—what one is really doing is interacting with some sort of image that is held in the mind,” Dappa said. “For example, yesterday’s weather is not here in the Kit-Cat Clubb with us. I cannot feel yesterday’s rain on my skin, nor can I see yester-eve’s stars with my eyes. When I describe these things to you (in French or any other language) I am really engaging in some sort of internal colloquy with a stored image inside of my brain. It is an image I may call up on demand, as a Duke might demand that a certain painting of his be brought down out of the garret. Once it is before my mind’s eye, I may see it as if it were there, and describe it.”

“That is all well and good for recollecting what you have gathered in through your senses, and stored in the garret, as it were,” Peer said. “So I could ask you to relate your observations of the Duchess of Qwghlm today, and rely on your account. But as you do not understand the conversation you had with her, or indeed the one you are having with me now, I fear your
interpretation
of what went on at Leicester House might be wide of the mark.” He spoke haltingly, unsure of how to converse with someone who didn’t understand what he was saying.

Preying on this, Daniel inquired, “But how could he interpret
anything
if he didn’t understand it?”

This stopped Peer’s gob for a few awkward moments.

“I would refer you to the work of Spinoza,” Dappa said, “whose words are of course perfect gibberish to me, but who wrote in his
Ethics
, ‘The order and connexion of ideas is the same as the order and connexion of things.’ Meaning that if there are two things, call them A and B, that have a particular relationship to each other, for example, my lord Wragby’s wig, and my lord Wragby’s head, and if I have in my mind an idea of my lord Wragby’s wig, call it alpha, and an idea of his head, call it beta, then the relationship between alpha and beta is the same as that between A and B. And owing to this property of minds, it is possible for me to construct in my head an whole universe of ideas, yet each idea will relate to all of the other ideas in precisely the same way that the things represented by those ideas relate to one another;lo, ’tis as if I have created a microcosm ’tween my ears, without understanding
a bit of it. And some of the ideas may be records of sensory impressions, for example, yesterday’s weather. But others may be abstract concepts out of religion, philosophy, mathematics, or what have you—not that I’d know, since to me they are all a meaningless parade of hallucinations. But insofar as they are all ideas, they are all fungible. Whatever their origins may have been, they are now all con-fused into the same currency, and so I may speak of the Pythagorean Theorem or the Treaty of Utrecht as well as I may speak of yesterday’s weather. To me, they are all just crackers—as are you, my lord Wragby.”

“That is quite clear,” Peer said vaguely, for he had gone a bit glassy-eyed round the point where Dappa had begun to use Greek letters. “Tell me, Dappa, were there any German pirates aboard your ship?”

“You mean, native speakers of High-Dutch, or
Hochdeutsch
? Alas, they are a rare breed ’mong pirates, for the Germans fear water, and love order. Most of them were Dutchmen. However, there was a prisoner, kept in fetters down in the bilge, a Bavarian diplomat who taught me his language.”

“Right then!” And Peer flipped opened his note-book, and began to scan pages filled with laboriously botched cartoons. “Well, Dappa, you may not be aware that we Englishmen dwell on something very much like the sandbars you used to see in your rivers, save that ours is much larger, and free of crocodiles—” He held up a sketch.

“We call it an island,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar helpfully.

“There is a great river of cold, salty water,” Peer said, holding his arms far apart, “ever so much broader than the distance between my book and my pencil, separating us from a place called Europe which is full of nasty nasty apes. In your system of mental ideas, you might liken it to a lot of monkey-bands who are forever screeching and throwing rocks at each other.”

“But sometimes we cross the salty river on things like hollow logs, except much larger,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, now getting into the spirit of things, “and throw a few rocks of our own, just to stay in practice!” He winked at Dappa, who gave back a brooding stare.

“There is a frightfully enormous and strong old gorilla, a silver-back, of whom we are terrified, just over the river.”

Dappa sighed, sensing that there was no way out. “I think I’ve seen his image on French coins, he is called Leroy.”

“Yes! He owns more bananas than anyone else, has more apes in his tribe, and has thrown a lot of rocks at us.”

“That must be very painful indeed,” Dappa said, not very sympathetically.

“Yes, quite,” said Peer. “But we have a mighty silver-back of our own, a really stupendous and deadly accurate stone-thrower, who,
some moons ago, chased Leroy right up a tree! Because of this, our little band, here on our sandbar in the salty river, cannot make out whether to worship and revere our big silver-back as a god, or fear and revile him as a devil. Now, we have an enormous clearing in the jungle, actually not far from where we are right now, where we convene to make obeisance to a certain female silver-back, rather frail—and where we beat our chests, and throw fæces at each other.”

“Ugh! Until you told me that, I was about to say, I should like to see this clearing.”