Werther added gorgeous lavs of intricately patterned red and blue ceramic, their bowls filled with living flowers: with whispering toadflax, dragonsnaps, goldilocks and shanghai lilies, with blooming scarlet margravines (his adopted daughter’s name-flower, as he knew to his pride), with soda-purple poppies and tea-green roses, with iodine and cerise and crimson hanging johnny, with golden cynthia and sky-blue truelips, calomine and creeping larrikin, until the room was saturated with their intoxicating scents.
Placing a few bunches of hitler’s balls in the corners near the ceiling, a toy fish-tank (capable of firing real fish), which he remembered owning as a boy, under the window, a trunk (it could be opened by pressing the navel) filled with clothes near the bed, a full set of bricks and two bats against the wall close to the doorway, he was able, at last, to view the room with some satisfaction.
Obviously, he told himself, she would make certain changes according to her own tastes. That was why he had shown such restraint. He imagined her naive delight when she wakened in the morning. And he must be sure to produce days and nights of regular duration, because at her age routine was the main thing a child needed. There was nothing like the certainty of a consistently glorious sunrise! This reminded him to make an alteration to a power ring on his left hand, to spread upon the black cushion of the sky crescent moons and stars and starlets in profusion. Bending carefully, he picked up the vibrant youth of her body and lowered her to the bed, drawing the silver sheets up to her vestal chin. Chastely he touched lips to her forehead and crept from the room, fashioning a leafy door behind him, hesitating for a moment, unable to define the mood in which he found himself. A rare smile illumined features set so long in lines of gloom. Returning to his own quarters, he murmured:
“I believe it is Contentment!”
A month swooned by. Werther lavished every moment of his time upon his new charge. He thought of nothing but her youthful satisfactions. He encouraged her in joy, in idealism, in a love of Nature. Gone were his blizzards, his rocky spires, his bleak wastes and his moody forests, to be replaced with gentle landscapes of green hills and merry, tinkling rivers, sunny glades in copses of poplars, rhododendrons, redwoods, laburnum, banyans and good old amiable oaks. When they went on a picnic, large-eyed cows and playful gorillas would come and nibble scraps of food from Catherine Gratitude’s palm. And when it was day, the sun always shone and the sky was always blue, and if there were clouds, they were high, hesitant puffs of whiteness and soon gone.
He found her books so that she might read. There was Turgiditi and Uto, Pett Ridge and Zakka, Pyat Sink – all the ancients. Sometimes he asked her to read to him, for the luxury of dispensing with his usual translators. She had been fascinated by a picture of a typewriter she had seen in a record, so he fashioned an air car in the likeness of one, and they travelled the world in it, looking at scenes created by Werther’s peers.
“Oh, Werther,” she said one day, “you are so good to me. Now that I realize the misery which might have been mine (as well as the life I was missing underground), I love you more and more.”
“And I love you more and more,” he replied, his head a-swim. And for a moment he felt a pang of guilt at having forgotten Mistress Christia so easily. He had not seen her since Catherine had come to him, and he guessed that she was sulking somewhere. He prayed that she would not decide to take vengeance on him.
They went to see Jherek Carnelian’s famous “London, 1896”, and Werther manfully hid his displeasure at her admiration for his rival’s buildings of white marble, gold and sparkling quartz. He showed her his own abandoned tomb, which he privately considered in better taste, but it was plain that it did not give her the same satisfaction.
They saw the Duke of Queens’ latest, “Ladies and Swans”, but not for long, for Werther considered it unsuitable. Later they paid a visit to Lord Jagged of Canaria’s somewhat abstract “War and Peace in Two Dimensions”, and Werther thought it too stark to please the girl, judging the experiment “successful”. But Catherine laughed with glee as she touched the living figures, and found that somehow it was true. Lord Jagged had given them length and breadth but not a scrap of width – when they turned aside, they disappeared.
* * *
It was on one of these expeditions, to Bishop Castle’s “A Million Angry Wrens” (an attempt in the recently revised art of Aesthetic Loudness), that they encountered Lord Mongrove, a particular confidant of Werther’s until they had quarrelled over the method of suicide adopted by the natives of Uranus during the period of the Great Sodium Breather. By now, if Werther had not found a new obsession, they would have patched up their differences, and Werther felt a pang of guilt for having forgotten the one person on this planet with whom he had, after all, shared something in common.
In his familiar dark green robes, with his leonine head hunched between his massive shoulders, the giant, apparently disdaining an air carriage, was riding home upon the back of a monstrous snail.
The first thing they saw, from above, was its shining trail over the azure rocks of some abandoned, half-created scene of Argonheart Po’s (who believed that nothing was worth making unless it tasted delicious and could be eaten and digested). It was Catherine who saw the snail itself first and exclaimed at the size of the man who occupied the swaying howdah on its back.
“He must be ten feet tall, Werther!”
And Werther, knowing whom she meant, made their typewriter descend, crying:
“Mongrove! My old friend!”
Mongrove, however, was sulking. He had chosen not to forget whatever insult it had been which Werther had levelled at him when they had last met. “What? Is it Werther? Bringing freshly sharpened dirks for the flesh between my shoulder blades? It is that Cold Betrayer himself, whom I befriended when a bare boy, pretending carelessness, feigning insouciance, as if he cannot remember, with relish, the exact degree of bitterness of the poisoned wine he fed me when we parted. Faster, steed! Bear me away from Treachery! Let me fly from further Insult! No more shall I suffer at the hands of Calumny!” And, with his long, jewelled stick he beat upon the shell of his molluscoid mount. The beast’s horns waved agitatedly for a moment, but it did not really seem capable of any greater speed. In good-humoured puzzlement, it turned its slimy head towards its master.
“Forgive me, Mongrove! I take back all I said,” announced Werther, unable to recall a single sour syllable of the exchange. “Tell me why you are abroad. It is rare for you to leave your doomy dome.”
“I am making my way to the Ball,” said Lord Mongrove, “which is shortly to be held by My Lady Charlotina. Doubtless I have been invited to act as a butt for their malice and their gossip, but I go in good faith.”
“A Ball? I know nothing of it.”
Mongrove’s countenance brightened a trifle. “You have not been invited? Ah!”
“I wonder … But, no – My Lady Charlotina shows unsuspected sensitivity. She knows that I now have responsibilities – to my little Ward here. To Catherine – to my Kate.”
“The child?”
“Yes, to my child. I am privileged to be her protector. Fate favours me as her new father. This is she. Is she not lovely? Is she not innocent?”
Lord Mongrove raised his great head and looked at the slender girl beside Werther. He shook his huge head as if in pity for her.
“Be careful, my dear,” he said. “To be befriended by de Goethe is to be embraced by a viper!”
She did not understand Mongrove; questioningly she looked up at Werther. “What does he mean?”
Werther was shocked. He clapped his hands to her pretty ears.
“Listen no more! I regret the overture. The movement, Lord Mongrove, shall remain unresolved. Farewell, spurner of good-intent. I had never guessed before the level of your cynicism. Such an accusation! Goodbye, for ever, most malevolent of mortals, despiser of altruism, hater of love! You shall know me no longer!”