CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

M and G sprinted past big brass ashtrays full of sand and up the marble stairs to the Sylvia's second floor. As if magic had come to aid them, an elevator door opened and there did stand D, smiling his smile, a rather thin thing, but the only smile he owned. " Look, you cheps," he said, "I'll just run down to the lobby and get some ciggies and meet you in the room."

Scarcely breaking stride, G pushed D back into the elevator and followed, M too. G pushed the button for the sixth floor. "But I haven't any cigarets at all, G," cried D. "I think that A stole them. And then three men in suits, the leader of whom wore, like the head of the UBC English Department, an Andy Gump moustache, stole A! They grabbed her the minute we stepped onto the beach!"

G's face contorted to a fierce question.

"I don't know where they took her; I just ran like hell up the beach, across the street, and in here. Without any ciggies. Look, G, I must break it to you that A didn't look all that unhappy to see those Guys. There's something going on there."

"Well," allowed G, "whatever they're doing they were right behind us on the street and they're in the hotel by now. If we don't get up there, they'll beat us to the room."

"How do you know the room?" said M.

"It's room 614," muttered G. "The room always has a six and a one in it."

"Oh yes," said D. "Remember, M, at the Roundtowner, the room that the body was in?

M just gaped. His friends were hip; he was laggard.

On the sixth floor they followed the corridor west toward the water. Room 614 turned out to be in the ell of the north-west corner. Its door, painted a hideous Chinese orange, was open.

G boldly advanced into the hall; 614 was a suite with a separate bedroom and a large kitchen off a hall beyond the main room, furnished for sitting. All seemed deserted. M stepped into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. "There's food in the fridge!" he called. "Someone's staying here." He withdrew consideringly a small, stout pie. "This, by its height, its girth and its scent, is a Melton Mowbray pork pie," he announced. "Wouldn't ya think 'twould be a marvel in the mouth as in the eye? Yet it is not a marvel; it is a chunky, congealed thing that doesn't take to being heated, that refuses to get moist and brown and rich and loving. It's just a damned grey, gelid, obdurate cold duchess of a thing that belies its divine ingredients. Though I am catholic in my tastes, I cannot worship at this shrine," he concluded, putting the pie back into the fridge.

"Well, there's nothing in the bedroom," said D.

"There's nothing in the bathroom," announced G, "except tiny paper-wrapped Palmolive soaps."

The three turned as one toward the large main room. It was no longer empty; two men who looked like monks in movies and comic books sat against one wall on the plain leatherette-seated chairs. Commandingly in the middle of the room, in a striped armchair, sat a third man, also in robish clothing, of lapels and layers. His face was plain, ascetic, with large eyes, pleasant. His hair, even for 1960, was cut extremely short.

The three young men walked to him and simply stared. Whatever the explanation for these ecclesiastical-appearing figures, clearly something special had been laid on.

"My name," announced the man, "is Nicholas Breakspear." His voice was British, but accented in a way that fell strangely on the ears.

"I have come to you this evening," the man continued, "because some mysteries must have an end and an explanation, because young men must get moving in their lives, not remain youths forever, and because when the callow vanity and idle pranks of youth grow near to overwhelming the world, time itself cries for an intervention. Even an intervention that mocks the laws of time."

M thought, is this one of G's literary persons? Another Corno Emblemado, Patrick O'Groin, Anselm Hoohaw?

There was a muffled shout somewhere in the hall outside, and some thumping, lurching sounds along the hall, coming nearer to the room. There came one large thump against the door to the suite, which popped open. Three figures in dark overcoats huddled over a huge canvas sack and thrust it into the room. The figures receded into the hall; Agent McDonald's red face was seen briefly at the edge of the door as he closed it. Six men stared at a struggling, shapeless, dun-coloured thing on the floor. Pale fists split the zipper of the sack from inside, and out stepped A, wearing freshly short, straight hair and a toggled duffel coat.

"Christ, what I've been through," she muttered. Then she saw the man who had introduced himself as Nicholas Breakspear. A turned to G and grabbed the lapel of G's salt and pepper fleck sportcoat.

"G!" she exclaimed, "Do you know who this man is?"

"This is Nicholas Breakspear, A," said D.

"Yeah, I know it's Nicholas Breakspear. But do you people know what that means?" said A.

"No," said D, "I don't."

"Nope," said G.

Breakspear smiled widely and gently from the striped chair.

"Well," he said pleasantly. "You are all here now. I can tell you of myself and of my reason for being here with you."

"I was born in England, at Abbott's Langley, on a farm, as most people were in my time. My family was a large one. I had three brothers, with myself the third boy born. I had five or six sisters, and I cannot know how many really, for two had left the family, married and gone off to live elsewhere by the time I was old enough to have any conception of what my family was. I had two sisters near my own age, one older who died of a fever when I was six or seven years old, and one younger."

Breakspear now turned his mild but direct gaze for a moment on G, then on M. "You two do not have sisters," he said. "It is a misfortune for you."

G looked for a moment as if he would set the record straight, then looked as if he would keep the correct information in reserve, just in case it might become an asset of some sort, for a change.

"As I grew up," the seated figure continued, "I found myself more and more, though happy in the life of growing, reaping, and tending fowl, drawn to the life of our church, and, to make the story short, I took orders for a holy mission at the monastery at Verulamium.

"From the sixteenth year and ever afterward, my life was one of service. Whether in the monastery or in the churches and courts of Europe, mine was, I may hazard, a more simple and more rigorous life than you could dream of. It was very exact, yet with very few rules written down, though a very great many understood, and understood as quite absolute and beyond appeal or cavil."

"Sounds like Robertson Davies,'" said G, who had some knowledge of the literature of the Dominion of Canada.

"It was somewhat as Robertson Davies pictures it," said Nicholas Breakspear, "but I warn you not to depend on such an author for an understanding of my period of history. Too melodramatic, for one thing. But above all you must realize that an author who is false to his own time and place, as Robertson Davies is, will be false to all the world, to any part of history that he seeks to convey to us."

Breakspear continued. "Encouraged in my spritual life and in my worship by the fostering influence of Verulamium, I pursued an ecclesiastical life, and such was my fortune and blessing that I achieved honours that allowed me much travel, and for some years a life away from England, in Europe, in Scandinavia, in France and Italy. Your books of history will tell you of some events in which I had a part. Not all of them, indeed, events I could wish to remember. I had Arnold hanged, burnt, and thrown in the river. I wished to see Frederick thrown sideways through Hell. But I did as my faith counselled me to do, and as my church required."

"What has this got to do with us, sir?" said M in the subdued, almost polite tone that he had learned in the private school his parents had seen as the only alternative to reform school.

"You three almost by chance were selected," said Breakspear, "for the sort of missionary work that is always going on in the world, in all ages. This work is a commerce between realms, whereby ours seeks to influence yours, which scarcely wits that it has called out to ours for help."

"You're not seizing us to go to Utah and collect pamphlets and wear suits, are you?" asked G, who had fled desert places, and wanted no more to do with them.

"Really, I have no more to do than to give you the words of a Dutch uncle. We wished to signal quietly to you. We hoped not to have to use such masquerade and ceremony as we have employed this evening. We sent you a sign; it was the flash in the mountains that has puzzled you these last few weeks."

"How did you do that?" said G.

"We simply exploded an electrical transformer: in Lynn Vale, I believe the place is named."

"But the flash - it was way bigger than that would be," said M.

"Oh, yes," said Breakspear. "We enlarged it, of course. And the hieroglyphics that you and indeed the rest of your city saw on the wall of the brewery were simple enough also. They were done in the same manner as signs, whether on walls or in the air, have always been done."

"The sign was Assyrian, ancient Assyrian," said M.

Breakspear nodded. "Yes, we provided, on the yellow brick wall of your imposing modern palace, a passage from the ancient story of Gilgamesh. A passage in which the young and heedless prince is told of the limits of mortal power, warned that he must heed those limits and that he must fear and acknowledge death. 'On the bed of fate he lies; he will not rise again'."

Breakspear now looked with some sadness at the three students. "When the reader is ready, the sign is made. Though you three were ready to see the signs, you have been slow to consider them seriously, or to put aside the fretful fevers of youth, to conduct yourselves toward sobriety and duty." Breakspear paused, looking at D. "We thought we had better go further and speak to you directly."

"But damn it, sir!" exploded D. "There's been all this other cloak and dagger stuff, all these cheps in dark suits running after us, kidnappings, thuggery, muggery, buggery. . . we've been treated pretty roughly!"

"Oh, yes," answered Breakspear. "We threw into the masquerade a few touches suggested by the mythologies of your time, a few playful. . . love-taps, let's call them. These men in dark clothing have always been for hire, you know, for a few florins, in any city in the world, anywhere in history."

D thought of the distinguished professor, the distinguished pecker, moonlighting as a gunsel, a footpad. And what that suggested of the propriety of Sixteenth-century verse forms practised in the latter half of the Twentieth century. He smiled.

"Where am I in this?" demanded A. She had fired up a Matinee cigarette, and jetted smoke from the corner of her mouth as, ignoring D's long questing fingers, she plunged the pack into her coat pocket.

"Oh, you are most usefully influential on all of these young men," said Breakspear. "But not enough to take them on a clear course through the confusion of roaring, tailor-worship, penis envy, and braggadocio that now mars their progress."

"But you're saying this is their story?" persisted A. "I'm just an influence? I don't play a leading role?"

Breakspear smiled again his soft smile. "Perhaps you have a power of creation beyond any such power that these have."

"I will not be consigned to motherhood," said A, with intensity.

Breakspear's reply was a quizzical look, cheerful and ambiguous.

The room was a moment silent, except for a buzz of consternation in the heads of the young people and a short "genk" from the radiator. On the broad brick window ledge could be seen one large and three small raccoons. This family had ascended by means of the giant ivy which flourished on the Sylvia's north side. On the thick stems and branches of this wondrous vine Feather McFiddle-dee-dee and Peaches Dobell also had ascended, and now peered from the foliage into the room. Nicholas Breakspear continued.

"I want to tell you of how I came to find my way in life. As a boy, younger than you in years, I had trees to climb. I had, G, an orchard, an English orchard of pear trees and cherry trees and apple trees, with sweet apples that tasted like cherries at the core. In a field near the Breakspear home was a sycamore tree, sixty feet high. I often climbed that tree, for the sheer sport and joy of pulling myself up its grainy, friendly bark, and the poles and struts, regular almost as a ladder, of its branches. And I felt wonderfully vantaged when I looked out and down at Abbott's Langley from a place near the top of the sycamore. I felt in command, in some way, of the scene I looked upon. That group of cottages, with a smithy and a bakeshop and a tithe barn just beyond them seemed almost a world to me, a kingdom. And I knew that far beyond them, down the road that curved up the hill toward the London road, was a greater world, of cities that I had seen drawn on maps, and those cities always were seen from a vantage of height that the map-maker took for his eye and his pen. The maps showed the cities, London, Paris, Tours, Lyons, Bologna, Rome, always as if each city had been drawn from a huge tree at its outskirts. Of course the mapmakers had in truth looked at their towns from the tops of towers or walls, or castellos. While looking at my own small village world from the height of my sycamore tree, I conceived, over weeks or months, and without putting it very directly to myself or to anyone else at all, that I might one day be an author of causes. I knew that I must one day reach some place in affairs - for me, of course, affairs meant the church and its enterprises, both ecclesiastical and civil - where I could manage and shape, in the great world beyond my home village, the peace, order and good purpose that I now saw beneath me in my village. Those views from my tree were the signs that were put in my life to guide me. You three likewise need to find your callings, find how you will make harmonies in your world. You would not have paused on that bridge had our flash not arrested you. You would not have sent that poem, G, to the Tamarack Review if we had not given you the first important word of it on that envelope. The one word in your own language that was mixed in with the Assyrian characters.

"So you do work in poetry!" cried D. "You do use the power of rime!"

"We use," said Breakspear, "whatever tropes will speak to those whom we seek. We work, you know, in many places, among many sorts of people. Some of those people suppose us to be spirits; some think us demons; some give us Greek or Hebrew names. We make these journeys not infrequently, yet it is a privilege to receive our visits. I hope that you will consider with care and (may I say) piety this visit and the counsel I have urged on you.

"For my part I must take my leave, hoping that my explanations of the mysteries in your lives recently have helped you."

He stood, and extended a hand to D, who stood nearest him. "I hope," he said, "that you will each give me your hand, and will not be bothered that my hand is a cold one. My best wishes are nonetheless warmly meant."

The young men in turn shook Breakspear's hand; as did A. Nicholas Breakspear spoke again. "What you must do, above everything, is bring the birds back to your new world here."

"?" said G, with his eyebrows, thinking of an osprey sailing over Skaha Lake.

"Eh?" said D, thinking of the zoo in Regents' Park.

"Birds?" said M, not thinking at all.

"That's what you haven't got, don't you see? You haven't got the birds, not the birds such as we used to have in Britain before the cities, nor the birds that you once had in this country before you started burning coal and gas, and making these big towns and cities. You've got nothing here - Breakspear gestured at the window with English Bay and Stanley Park out beyond it - nothing but some crows, and some dirty-looking seagulls. A remnant of the birds you had here once! You must get back those birds. Much of what has been lost between my time and yours can never come back to this earth and this place in it, but some things can come back. My church has always stood for the rejuvenation of our natural world. You can help in this."

Breakspear looked hard at each of the four young people. Then he slightly turned and walked out through the Chinese-red door, followed by the two other men in robes. If this made any sound it was no more than the phantom sound of cloth moving over carpet.

The four people in the room looked, each, about two feet in front of their noses.

"Birds?" said D.

"Birds," said G, smiling.

"Birds," said M, smiling a little.

"Birds," said A.