The Great Pursuit

'You'll have to. Remember that contract you signed? The one saying you had paid fifty thousand pounds advance for Pause?'

'You tore that up,' said Geoffrey, 'I saw you do it.'

Frensic nodded. 'But Hutchmeyer didn't,' he said. 'He had photocopies made and if this thing comes to court you're going to have a hard time explaining why you signed two contracts with the same author for the same book. It isn't going to look good, Geoffrey, not good at all.'

Geoffrey could see that. He sat down.

'What do you want?' he asked.

'A bed for the night,' said Frensic, 'and tomorrow morning I shall go to the American Embassy for a visa.'

'I can't see why you've got to spend the night here,' said Geoffrey.

'You would if you saw her,' said Frensic man-to-man. Geoffrey poured him another brandy.

'I'll have to explain to Sven,' he said, 'he's obsessively jealous. By the way, who did write Pause?' But Frensic shook his head. 'I can't tell you. There are some things it's best for you not to know. Just let's say the late Peter Piper.'

'The late?' said Geoffrey with a shudder. 'It's a curious expression to apply to the living.'

'It's a curious expression to apply to the dead,' said Frensic, 'It seems to suggest that they may yet turn up. Better late than never.'

'I wish I could share your optimism,' said Geoffrey.

Next morning, after a restless night in a strange bed, Frensic went to the American Embassy and got his visa. He visited his bank and he bought a return ticket to Florida. That night he left Heathrow. He spent the crossing in a drunken stupor and boarded the flight from Miami to Atlanta next day feeling hot, ill and filled with foreboding. To delay matters he spent the next night in a hotel and studied a map of Alabama. It was a detailed map but he couldn't find Bibliopolis. He tried the desk clerk but the man had never heard of it.

'You'd best go to Selma and ask there,' he told Frensic. Frensic caught the Greyhound to Selma and enquired at the Post Office.

The sticks. A wide place in the road over Mississippi way,' he was told. 'Swamp country on the Ptomaine River. Take Route 80 about a hundred miles and go north. Are you from New England?'

'Old England,' said Frensic, 'why do you ask?'

'Just that they don't take too kindly to Northern strangers in those parts. Damn Yankees they call them. They're still living in the past.'

'So is the man I want to see,' said Frensic and went out to rent a car. The man at the office increased his apprehension.

'You're going out along Blood Alley you want to take care,' he said.

'Blood Alley?' said Frensic anxiously.

That's what they call Route 80 through to Meridian. That road's seen a whole heap of deaths.'

'Isn't there a more direct route to Bibliopolis?'

'You can go through the backwoods but you could get lost. Blood Alley's your best route.'

Frensic hesitated. 'I don't suppose I could hire a driver?' he asked.

'Too late now,' said the man, 'Saturday afternoon this time everyone's gone home and tomorrow being Sunday...'

Frensic left the office and drove to a motel. He wasn't going to drive to Bibliopolis along Blood Alley at nightfall. He would go in the morning.

Next day he was up early and on the road. The sun shone down out of a cloudless sky and the day was bright and beautiful. Frensic wasn't. The desperate resolution with which he had left London had faded and with each mile westward it diminished still further. Woods closed in on the road and by the time he reached the sign with the faded inscription BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES he almost turned back. But a pinch of snuff and the thought of what would happen if Piper continued his campaign of literary revival gave him the courage he needed. Frensic turned right and followed the dirt road into the woods, trying not to look at the black water and the trees strangled with vines. And, like Piper those many months before, he was relieved when he came to the meadows and the cattle grazing in the long grass. But still the abandoned shacks depressed him and the occasional glimpse of the river, a brown slurry in the distance fringed by veiled trees, did nothing for his morale. The Ptomaine looked aptly named. Finally the road veered down to the left and across the water Frensic looked at Bibliopolis. A wide place in the road, the girl in Selma had called it, but she had quite evidently never seen it. Besides, the road stopped at the river. The little town huddled round the square and looked old and unchanged from some time in the nineteenth century. And the ferry which presently moved towards him with an old man pulling on the rope was from some bygone age. Frensic thought he knew how why Bibliopolis was said to be in the sticks. By the Styx would have done as well. Frensic drove the car carefully on to the ferry and got out.

'I'm looking for a man called Piper,' he told the ferryman.

The man nodded. 'Guessed you might be,' he said. 'They come from all over to hear him preach. And if it isn't him it's the Reverend Baby up at the Church.'

'Preach?' said Frensic, 'Mr Piper preaches?'

'Sure does. Preaching and teaching the good word.'

Frensic raised his eyebrows. Piper as preacher was a new one to him. 'Where will I find him?' he asked.

'Down Pellagra.'

'Down with pellagra?' said Frensic hopefully.

'At Pellagra,' said the old man, 'the house.' He nodded in the direction of a large house fronted by tall white columns. 'There's Pellagra. Used to be the Stopeses place but they all died off.'

'Hardly surprising,' said Frensic, his intellectual compass spinning between vitamin deficiency, advocates of birth control, the Monkey Trial and Yoknapatawpha County. He gave the man a dollar and drove down the drive to an open gate. On one side a sign in large italic said THE PIPER SCHOOL OF PENMANSHIP while on the other an inscribed finger pointed to the CHURCH OF THE GREAT PURSUIT. Frensic stopped the car and stared at the enormous finger. The Church of The Great Pursuit? The Church of...There could be no doubting that he had come to the right place. But what sort of religious mania was Piper suffering from now? He drove on and parked beside several other cars in front of the large white building with a wrought-iron balcony extending forward to the columns from the first-floor rooms. Frensic got out and walked up the steps to the front door. It was open. Frensic peered into the hall. A door to the left had painted on it THE SCRIPTORIUM while from a room on the right there came the drone of an insistent voice. Frensic crossed the marble floor and listened. There was no mistaking that voice. It was Piper's, but the old hesitant quality had gone and in its place there was a new strident intensity. If the voice was familiar, so were the words.

'And we must not (the "must" here presupposing explicitly a sustained seriousness of purpose and an undeviating moral duty) allow ourselves to be deluded by the seeming naïvety so frequently ascribed by other less perceptive critics to the presentation of Little Nell. Sentiment not sentimentality as we must understand it is cognizant...'

Frensic shyed away from the door. He knew now what the Church of The Great Pursuit had for its gospel. Piper was reading aloud from Dr Louth's essay 'How We Must Approach The Old Curiosity Shop'. Even his religion was derived. Frensic found a chair and sat down filled with a mounting anger. 'The unoriginal little sod,' he muttered, and cursed Dr Louth into the bargain. The apotheosis of that dreadful woman, the cause of all his troubles, was taking place here in the heart of the Bible belt. Frensic's anger turned to fury. The Bible belt! Bibliopolis and the Bible. And instead of that magnificent prose, Piper was disseminating her graceless style, her angular inverted syntax, her arid puritanism and her denunciations against pleasure and the joy of reading. And all this from a man who couldn't write to save his soul! For a moment Frensic felt that he was at the heart of a great conspiracy against life. But that was paranoia. There had been no conscious purpose in the circumstances that had led to Piper's missionary zeal. Only the accident of literary mutation which had turned Frensic himself from a would-be novelist into a successful agent and, by the way of The Moral Novel, had mutilated what little talent for writing Piper might once have possessed. And now like some carrier of literary death he was passing the infection on. By the time the droning voice stopped and the little congregation filed out, their faces taut with moral intensity, and made their way to the cars, Frensic was in a murderous mood.