[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
while beneath the dark bulk of an elm. He felt her tongue against his teeth.
She pulled back a bit. "We have to get home, Ned. All right?"
"All right," he said, breathing hard. "But show me your legs now. Please?"
She looked up and down the path, then lifted her petticoats to the knee and
dropped them again.
"They're perfection," he said. "You could sit to painters."
"I have sat to painters," she said, "and it don't pay."
A steamer sounded at Cremorne Pier. They ran to it and got aboard with moments
to spare. The effort sent whiskey racing through Mallory's head. He gave the
girl a shilling to pay the four-
pence toll, and found a canvas steamer-chair up near the bow. The little ferry
got up steam, its side-wheels slapping black water. "Let's go in the saloon,"
she said. "There's drink."
"I like to see London."
"I don't think you'll like what you see on this trip."
"I will if you stay with me," he said.
"How you talk, Ned," she said, and laughed. "Funny, I thought you were a
copper at first, you looked so stern and solemn. But coppers don't talk like
that, drunk or sober."
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Difference%20Engine,%20The.txt (91 of 178)
[1/14/03 11:24:14 PM]
Page 124
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Difference%20Engine,%20The.txt
"You don't like compliments?"
"No, they're sweet. But I like champagne, too."
"In a moment," Mallory said. He was drunker than he liked to be. He stood and
walked to the bow railing and gripped it hard, squeezing sensation back into
his fingertips. "Damned dark in the city," he said.
"Why, it is," she said, standing near him. She smelled of salt sweat and
tea-rose and cunt. He wondered if she had much hair there and what its color
was. He was dying to see it. "Why is that, Ned?"
"What?"
"Why is it so dark? Is it the fog?"
"Gas-lights," he said. "Government have a scheme to turn off the gas-lights
because they smoke so."
"How clever of them."
"Now people are running about in the blackened streets, smashing everything in
sight."
"How do you know that?"
He shrugged.
"You're not a copper?"
"No, Hetty."
"I don't like coppers. They're always talking as if they know things you don't
know. And they won't tell you how they know it."
"I could tell you," Mallory said. "I should like to tell you. But you wouldn't
understand."
"Of course I'd understand, Ned," Hetty said in a voice as bright as peeling
paint. "I love to hear clever men talk."
"London is a complex system out of equilibrium. It's like -- it's like a
drunken man, blind drunk, in a room with whiskey bottles. The whiskey is
hidden -- so he's always walking about looking for it. When he finds a bottle,
he takes a long drink, but puts it down and forgets it at once. Then he
wanders and looks again, over and over."
"Then he runs out of liquor and has to buy more," Hetty said.
"No. He never runs out. There's a demon that tops up the bottles constantly.
That's why it is an open dynamical system. He walks round and round in the
room, forever, never knowing what his next step may be. All blind and
unknowing, he traces circles, figure-eights, every figure that a skater might
make, but he never leaves the boundaries. And then one day the lights go out,
and he instantly runs headlong out of the room and into outer darkness. And
anything may happen then, anything at all, for the outer darkness is Chaos. It
is Chaos, Hetty."
"And you like that, eh?"
"What?"
"I don't know what that means that you just said; but I can tell you like it.
You like to think about it." With a gentle, quite natural movement, she put
her hand against the front of his trousers. "Isn't it stiff!" She snatched her
hand back and grinned triumphantly.
Mallory looked hastily about the deck. There were other people out, a dozen or
so. It seemed none of them were watching, but it was hard to tell in the foggy
darkness. "You tease," he said.
"Pull it out, and you'll see how I tease."
"I'd rather wait for the proper time and place."
"Fancy a man saying that," she said, and laughed.
The steady slapping paddle-wheels suddenly changed their tenor. The black
Thames gave up a vile rush of stench and the crisping sound of bubbles.
"Oh, it's horrid," cried Hetty, clapping a hand to her mouth. "Let's go in the
saloon, Ned, please!"
A strange curiosity pinned Mallory in place. "Does it get worse than this?
Down-river?"
"Much worse," Hetty said through her fingers. "I've seen folk swoon away."
"Why do the ferries still run, then?"
Page 125
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"They always run," Hetty said, half-turning away. "They're mail-boats."
"Oh," Mallory said. "Could I buy a stamp here?"
"Inside," said Hetty, "and you can buy me something, too."
Hetty lit an oil-lamp in the cramped little hallway of her upstairs lodging in
Flower-and-Dean
Street. Mallory, powerfully glad to be free of the fog-choked eeriness of
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]