But a fresh twinge of pain caused Bellgrove to grab at his jaw. 'Oh, my 'teeth!'' he moaned.
During this harangue Mr Opus Fluke's mind had wandered. Had he been asked he would have been unable to repeat a single word of what had been addressed to him.
But Perch-Prism's voice cut a path through the thick of his reverie.
'My dear Fluke,' it said, 'did you, or didn't you, on one of those rare occasions when you saw fit to put in an appearance in a classroom - on this occasion with the gamma Fifth, I believe - refer to me as a "bladder-headed cock"? It has come to my hearing that you referred to me as exactly that. Do tell me: it sounds so like you.'
Opus Fluke stroked his long, bulging chin with his hand.
'Probably,' he said at last, but I wouldn't know. I never listen.' The extraordinary paroxysm began again - the heaving, rolling, helpless, noiseless body-laughter.
'A convenient memory,' said Perch-Prism, with a trace of irritability in his clipped, incisive voice. 'But what's that?'
He had heard something in the corridor outside. It was like the high, thin, mewing note of a gull. Opus Fluke raised himself on one elbow. The high-pitched noise grew louder. All at once the door was flung open from without and there before them, framed in the doorway, was the Headmaster.
ELEVEN
If ever there was a primogenital figure-head or cipher, that archetype had been resurrected in the shape of Deadyawn. He was pure symbol. By comparison, even Mr Fluke was a busy man. It was thought that he had genius, if only because he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read, was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his greatness rested was itself worked out by another.
Entering the room immediately behind the Head a tiny freckled man was seen to be propelling Deadyawn forward in a high rickety chair, with wheels attached to its legs. This piece of furniture, which had rather the proportions of an infant's high chair, and was similarly fitted with a tray above which Deadyawn's head could partially be seen, gave fair warning to the scholars and staff of its approach, being in sore need of lubrication. Its wheels screamed.
Deadyawn and the freckled man formed a compelling contrast. There was no reason why they should 'both' be human beings. There seemed no common denominator. It was true that they had two legs each, two eyes each, one mouth apiece, and so on, but this did not seem to argue any similarity of 'kind', or if it did only in the way that giraffes and stoats are classified for convenience sake under the commodious head of 'fauna'.
Wrapped up like an untidy parcel in a gun-grey gown emblazoned with the signs of the zodiac in two shades of green, none of which signs could be seen very clearly for reason of the folds and creases, save for Cancer the crab on his left shoulder, was Deadyawn himself, and all but asleep. His feet were tucked beneath him. In his lap was a hot-water bottle.
His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only difference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar.
His hands rested limply on the tray in front of him at the height of his chin.
As he entered the room he opened one eye and gazed absently into the smoke. He did not hurry his vision and was quite content when, after several minutes, he made out the three indistinct shapes below him. Those three shapes - Opus Fluke, Perch-Prism and Bellgrove - were standing in a line, Opus Fluke having fought himself free of his cradle as though struggling against suction. The three gazed up at Deadyawn in his chair.
His face was as soft and round as a dumpling. There seemed to be no structure in it. no indication of a skull beneath the skin.
This unpleasant effect might have argued an equally unpleasant temperament. Luckily this was not so. But it exemplified a parallel bonelessness of outlook. There was no fibre to be found in him, and yet no weakness as such: only a negation of character. For his flaccidity was not a positive thing, unless Jelly-fish are consciously indolent.
This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was almost terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms. Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men crave: equipoise. In his case an equipoise between two poles which did not exist: but nevertheless there he was, balanced on an imaginary fulcrum.
The freckled man had rolled the high chair to the centre of the room. His skin stretched so tightly over his small bony and rather insect-like face that the freckles were twice the size they would normally have been. He was minute, and as he peered perkily from behind the legs of the high chair, his carrot-coloured hair shone with hair-oil. It was brushed flat across the top of his little bony insect-head. On all sides the walls of horse-hide rose into the smoke and smelt perceptibly. A few drawing-pins glimmered against the murky brown leather.
Deadyawn dropped one of his arms over the side of the high chair and wriggled a languid forefinger. 'The Fly' (as the freckled midget was called) pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, but instead of passing it up to the Headmaster, he climbed, with extraordinary agility, up a dozen rungs of the chair and cried into Deadyawn's ear: 'Not yet! not yet! Only three of them here!'
'What's that?' said Deadyawn, in a voice of emptiness. 'Only, three of them here!'
'Which ones,' said Deadyawn, after a long silence.
'Bellgrove, Perch-Prism and Fluke,' said The Fly in his penetrating, fly-like voice. He winked at the three gentlemen through the smoke.
'Won't 'they' do?' murmured Deadyawn, his eyes shut. 'They're on my staff, aren't... they...?'
'Very much so,' said The Fly, 'very much so. But your Edict, sir, is addressed to the whole staff.'
'I've forgotten what it's all about. Remind... me...'
'It's all written down,' said The Fly. 'I have it here, sir. All you have to do is to read it, sir.' And again the small red-headed man honoured the three masters with a particularly intimate wink. There was something lewd in the way the wax-coloured petal of his eyelid dropped suggestively over his bright eye and lifted itself again without a flutter.
'You can give it to Bellgrove. He will read it when the time comes, said Deadyawn, lifting his hanging hand on to the tray before him and languidly stroking the hot-water bottle... 'Find out what's keeping them.'
The Fly pattered down the rungs of the chair and emerged from its shadow.
He crossed the room with quick, impudent steps, his head and rump well back. But before he reached the door it had opened and two Professors entered - one of them, Flannelcat, with his arms full of exercise-books and his mouth full of seedcake, and his companion, Shred, with nothing in his arms, but with his head full of theories about everyone's sub-conscious except his own. He had a friend, by name Shrivell, due to arrive at any moment, who, in contrast, to Shred, was stiff with theories about his own sub-conscious and no one else's.