CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

"Get your tongue out of my ear, your hand from off my groin. For thou and I must make words fly, before they'll let us foin."

Thus M to Miss Take as his friend G lumbered out of the Sports Department of The Bad Seed and, alternatively waving his long arms and clutching to the bridge of the nose his spatulate fingers, cried Havoc and Where's Our Dogs of War, the Bad Guys have A, we must call D, where is my sanity. He grabbed the telephone.

M grabbed the typewriter, an Underwood. He wished it were a Remington, but Perry Southam, Bron Cornstead, and Pat Mawldunk, the general news reporters of the Seed, always hogged the Remingtons, (bunch of Remington stealers, D had remarked) and had hold of them now, writing sober and reporterly accounts of campus doings and issues. "Golliwog Wins Cakewalk" and "Riot on Lower Mall; Chinks Routed by Engineers" said the Seed, employing the language particular to that time at the university. "Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Dog" was a loose confederation of movie, book or theatre reviews interspersed with quotations or pseudoquotations from whatever Jacobean dramatist M currently favoured. This column, largely sophomoric wind, was cherished by D, the editor of The Critic's Page where it appeared. From an editor's point of view, M was reliable. He wrote, rewrote, revised and redecorated endlessly his bellowing, brazen, rococoo, ululant too-clever-by-halfings, but every Thursday afternoon he came in and produced them, unfailing. (Failure he reserved for his performances on final examinations in Second-year Russian. His signal achievement here was an exam paper that weighed in at seven marks out of a possible hundred and fifty. It had taken him three tries at the subject to reach this level, starting at forty-eight marks and moving inexorably downward each year as he attended ever fewer classes and remembered ever fewer of the rules of the language picked up in his first year. The seven Russian émigrés and one Canadian spinster [a male, be it noted] who composed the Slavonics Department toasted M in flavourless Alberta vodka at their annual end-of-year party. "Iss an inspirashunal depth of knowing nudding, a Kasbian zee uff eegnorance, eefen vor a Kanaddian stoo-dent.")

At the telephone, G was gibbering, his off-arm sawing the air in an artless rodomontade that suggested he had not paid much attention to Hamlet's advice to the players, an impression confirmed whenever he took to the stage, even in such a minor role as the elm tree in Maeterlinck's impressionist epic, The Forest of Guliann. G was announcing, apparently to D, something about meeting at the Cecil at eight o'clock.

M grabbed the phone from G, who sat himself in front of the Underwood and stared in wonder at the buff copy paper on which was limned the first part of M's theatre review, entirely and extravagantly scathing except for some ga-ga gurglings about "the comely thighs" of the juvenile lead of The Forest of Guliann.

"Is that M?" shouted D on the phone. "And if it is, why is it M?"

"Just the sort of question I was addressing in my column before you interrupted," replied M. "What's all this about the Cecil Hotel?"

"Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia!" shouted D. "Sylvia who comes with the north wind in her hair! Sylvia who brings on her enveloping wings the scent of northern forests, the scent of pine needles, moss and forest loam! Sylvia the eldritch queen of the herring chokers!"

D had spent a summer haying in Sweden. It was a part of the ill-conceived practicum of the agricultural college which his parents, at a loss for how best to harness his young energies, had sent him. He'd spent as much time that summer pitching woo as pitching hay. Or doing both at the same time. The girls very gradually assembled to watch the skinny aristocratic-looking English boy, who would by-and-by stand leaning on his fork, panting a little. Sad brown eyes.

"Heavy work for a little fellow like me," he said softly in his over-enunciated Swedish. "Where do you girls work? What's it like there? Do they need any more hands?"

At the edge of the farm stood seven birches, as perfect and silver-fawn-green as the Great Artificer promised us they would be in all our dreams of Sweden. By nightfall D had a new job, an easier one running a machine, and quarters upstairs next to the girls' dormitory. Late in the night, his education continued, giggling. Light young legs endlessly moving, twining. The birches trilled and murmured, their limbs phosphorescent by moonlight. By the time his shifty eyes gazed over the rail of the MV Bursk in Goteborg harbour at the start of his journey home in September, three amiable young Svenskas were in the family way with little D's and Deas. One of these girls was indeed named Sylvia. She would have had a daughter with shifty, sad, brown eyes, also named Sylvia perhaps, but these were schoolgirls after all, and their mistakes were corrected, a few weeks after D's leaving, in a state clinic in Skovde which specialized in such errors.

"What is all this stuff about being and dung?" asked G.

"Being undone, you dolt!"

"Sylvia! Have you got that? asked D," adding "And don't get confused about this, because it's certainly a life-and-death matter. Eight o'clock. And at all costs keep G on a short leash. Muzzle the lad! For if he goes shrieking about the place like a trumpeter swan, as he's all too likely to do, the game's up and they're warned. In particular, Diana will be warned!"

"Who is she?" asked M, his eyes rolling with delight.

"What is she?" corrected D. His voice became thinner and harder, more clipped than ever, as confidential as Liam Chutney's. "Diana is a code name."

"Who is who?" shouted G from the Underwood. "Tell D we have to be at the Sylvia at eight p.m." He typed a blizzard of words or near-words, including a sentence which included "his long, agyle fringers delicatelli fringring her frustum." Reading G, one never knew how much to blame on haste and overconfidence, how much to credit to inborn genius and wisdom.

"D? Have you ever heard of a frustum?" said M into the bakelite.

"Look here," said D. "You must understand that our friend G, because he is losing the deevine A to dark forces we all wish and fear to comprehend, is at this time experiencing a state known to medical science as perdition of the marbles, permanent - PMP for short. It follows that he will blunder at the Underwood even more than he usually does. In any case, I can't stay on the line, because I'm speaking long distance."

"Where are you?"

"Where, indeed. I am a distance considerably south of you and G, in a spot rather more infamous and more mythic than virtual. Here I am watched at all times by authorities whose purposes are fell, and whose standards of civility fall somewhat short of what we're used to in the British Commonwealth of Nations. I am surrounded by Americans, by Chesterfield cigarettes, Walgreen drugstores, and chicken-fried steak. I am amongst people the depth of whose love of liberty is exceeded only by the shallowness of their perceptions of good and bad, which childish terms are the entirety of their metaphysics. I crawl parched through Mencken's Sahara of the Bozart. But then, considering what a pee-green boat of a world we're all - Yanks, Canucks, and woggish what-have-yous-living in, where are we all? And where is Sylvia?"

M had bought cheap cotton dacron slacks from Fred Asher on the promise that they were "American-styled." They had been dyed in sort of woadish blue, and that woad was now coming off on his hands, which, unusually large and dangling far down, nearly to his knees, looked like those of the monster with the bolt stuck horizontally through his head. Stained dimly blue and confused by the sinisterly hissed farrago coming from the telephone, M was also feeling and thinking like Frankenstein's monster. D rasping in one ear and G clacking at the other made him want to dash their heads together, as John Wayne did in the movies. And it wasn't the first time. Where was that apprentice reporter? Perhaps she'd gone off to fetch him a stirrup cup, something to uplift and sustain him through the long evening of early summer, sunshot and cloud-raddled, gathering itself outside the narrow basement windows of The Bad Seed.

The pause having now become nearly Pinteresque, M muttered into the phone, "We're due at the Sylvia at eight p.m. A stands in danger there, or nearabouts."

Suddenly reverting to his normal voice, plummy and purry, all edge of urgency gone, D responded, "My dear chep, who is Sylvia?"

"She's a hotel."

"No, M," said D in his Plummery voice. "Thou brutish slave and sullen wretch, thou shalt some day learn that little Leonard Cohen, mocked as both actor and poet manqué, and generally seen to be about as handsome as a vampire bat, and no less pale, tiny, and caped, is, in no less august estimation than his very own, an hotel. Sylvia is simply the name of the woman on my lap. Say hello to M, my dear."

"Hello, M." It was the kind of voice that could strip words from the page, or lift varnish from the woodwork, rouse a dead man's member, waken Jordan's Chaucer class from slumber at 8:30 in the morning, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Buchanan 118, settle the cooing dove in its roost, knock the top off a Sherman tank, raise the Marine Building, Vancouver's tallest, out of its foundations, spin Sir Philip Sidney in his grave, rouse the Greeks against Islam, the Israelites against Egypt, settle the furious brannigans of Eire, hail Bonnie Charlie back from Skye, erect a mighty plinth to which the gods might descend, arrest the Jordan River in its rolling, lull the earthworms of Luna with blue and silver lullabies, rouse jaded Jesus from Plato's sleep, raise a mighty army against the Usurper, meet him on the beach, fight him in the fields and ditches, carry off his head in triumph, and bring the boys back home.

"All is dross that is not Sylvia," resumed D's voice now. "I will be Paris, and for love of her instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked. And I will combat with weak Menelaus and wear her colours on my plumed crest. Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, and then return to Sylvia for a kiss. She's fairer than the evening's air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

"Well," gasped M, "you'd better bring her along to the Sylvia with you, then."

"-30-!" shouted G., ripping the sheet from the Underwood. He handed M this and several more sheets.

M stared at the melee of dark letters, into which G had randomly flung every special character, from ampersand to @, on the keyboard, as well as others usually found only in the land of ascii. "G!" he cried "this is gibberish! You'll ruin my reputation!"

G smiled fatly. "Unlax. This is postmodernism. It'll be the making of you."

Cloud, showers, and thunderous anticipation of more and harder rain followed G and M downtown on the Number Eight bus and along Beach Avenue toward the Sylvia Hotel.

As they left the bus on Beach, an Oldsmobile 98, modishly black with white sidewall tires and chrome Buck Rogers miniports followed them, and Agent John Ames McDonald slipped the Hydramatic Drive lever into low. Beside him sat Top Agent Roy Daniells, eyes hard and teeth clenched on his brier. In the back seat, Agent Clyde Gilmour peered from under his slate-blue fedora at the raffish West-End street life and the two tall young men gesticulating their way toward the hotel. It was Gilmour who cranked down the street-side window and called.

"Hey! You men!"

G turned first. "Jesus, M, those guys...." He shot for the heavy oak and glass door that led to the beverage room of the Sylvia, M right at his heels.

Just off the D.O.T. marker buoy at the entrance to Burrard Inlet, the thirty-two-foot Topham Island slowed to eight knots and coasted into English Bay, sliding over light chop toward the beach. The Sylvia Hotel, wavering, bobbing in the windscreen, rose just above the beach.

"How's she doing back there?" The twang was that mysterious amalgam of Northern England and East London that calls itself Strine. The speaker sounded nervous, but grasped and arced the steering wheel with assurance.

"She's talking that stuff again, that language." The second voice was Canadian.

"Yih?"

"Yieh."