The Cold Away: A Winter's Tale

An extract

Once upon a time a learned man sat in his study, surrounded on all sides by leathery books and yellowed papers, while the fire cackled and sniggered in the grate, and his shadow shifted on the wall. Outside the study window hung icicles like silver needles, and every so often one of them would crack impatiently to itself, wondering when it would be allowed to leap free of the clinging gutter and make a merry descent from this seat of learning to fall on the head of someone passing below.

The learned man was tall and thin, with a stooped back and a nose like a stork's beak. His eyes were like small black pebbles, and his legs were so long that his knees creaked continually, because they were right in the middle and thus, as it seemed to them, neither here nor there. At the moment only one knee was creaking, because the learned man had thrown it over the other and was swinging his foot back and forth beneath the desk. Back and forth swung the foot, and this way and that, and the knee creaked with annoyance at every change in direction, while the learned man took no notice whatever.

On the polished desk-top rested papers and books of every age and size, every page covered with writing or with print. Much of the writing was the learned man's own: a black scrawl like a burned picket-fence, made to keep his private thoughts from those who had no business with them. Some of the papers marked places in the books; others lay about on their own, or else in untidy piles weighted down with fossil crustaceans.

Among them, in the very centre of the desk-top, between the learned man's sharp elbows and beneath the black gaze of his eyes, lay some papers with nothing written on them at all, except for a few words at the top of the uppermost page. The learned man's eyes glared down at these papers, and blinked as if their whiteness blinded him. His long, knobbly fingers grasped the pen, dipped it in the ink-well and brought the metal nib within an inch of the page; then stopped. The pen hung, pregnant with ink; the paper waited, itching to be scratched just after the last word written; the ink, losing patience, began silently to collect itself into a droplet, which in the fullness of time would fall and spread itself into a magnificent blot. Of course that would not help matters in the slightest, but it would at least be something.

But the learned man's hand moved away, forcing the ink to drop back into the ink-well, while his shadow jumped on the wall and his eyes glared down at the too-white page, and the other, still whiter pages lurking underneath.

He uncrossed his legs and then, with a protest of knees, crossed them again. He had written, in the careful flowing hand meant for readers to see:

Whenever a good child dies, an angel comes down from heaven, takes the child in its arms and, spreading its large white wings

He had written that two days ago, and nothing since. Such a thing had never happened to the learned man before; nor to his pen, nor to his ink, nor to any white paper that showed itself in his study. All his life the learned man had been noted for his ability to bring forth words onto paper, so that no pen which came into his hand need fear that it would never touch a page, and almost no sentence which he wrote need worry that there would be no more to follow. But now he had begun this sentence, which to all appearances was a thoroughly deserving one, and after two days he was unable even to complete it. The situation was most embarrassing, for the learned man had been poor once, and had worked hard for his education, and the thought of being poor again did not excite his interest in the slightest.

He pushed back his seat and stood up, but not all the way because he did not wish to strike his head on the slope of the ceiling. His study was right beneath the roof, and the ceiling lowered itself precipitately in several places; and in the springtime the birds would land themselves noisily just outside the window and stare in with their blank reptile eyes. The learned man strode up and down the study, away from the desk and past the window and its icicles, as far as the opposite wall, where paper cut-outs of devils and pelicans were pinned for the landlady's disapproval. As the learned man approached the wall, a draught stirred the air, ruffling the paper pelicans and rattling the glittering scarlet devils. The learned man was cheered by this; but then he reached the wall and had to turn around, which meant he could again see his desk with the white paper gleaming and reproaching. He looked through the window at the icicles, but they had nothing to tell him; he stared into the fire, but the flames only sniggered as before. Once more he turned away from the desk, and the devils and pelicans fidgeted conspiratorially. This time the learned man scowled at them; he had created them all himself with nail-scissors and felt that they might show him more respect, although their creation had not been much trouble.

At last he threw up his hands, which collided with the sloping ceiling with a sound like knocking on a great door – a door far too haughty to let in the mere sound of someone rapping on the wood. If one wishes to be heard through such a door one must use the metal knocker, or a stout stick; but the learned man's stick was downstairs, and his ceiling had no knocker because there was nothing on the other side of it but snow and sky, neither of which was prepared to accept his visiting-card.

"Enough!" the learned man exclaimed, rubbing his fingers and glaring at the ceiling which had interrupted his gesture. "Enough! Out upon stories, and children, and angels, and paper and pens, and all the rest of it," and he rubbed his fingers some more, although the agony was very slight.

"Two days," the learned man continued; "two miserable days of imprisonment and toil, and what have I to show for it? An aching back, an aching head, bent nibs, bruised fingers and precisely twenty-three words written. Did ever anyone labour so hard in return for so little at the end? It will not do; indeed it will not," and he thought of all he had written before, with such remembered ease and fluency that it seemed the words had danced out of his pen and arranged themselves, as if rehearsed a dozen times, into their elegant tableaux. Of course they had danced more slowly on some days than others, but only because of interruptions or disturbances, or because the profundity of certain passages had required a more considered and leisurely development. But even the learned man had not thought his present work so profound as to require half an hour for each single word to emerge.

"Why, at this rate," he thought, "the whole story could take weeks to complete, and if I should start a book it would be years, decades even, before I could finish a chapter. I'd have to leave it to my heirs for completion, and who knows what kind of mess they would make?"

Most annoying of all was that he knew the story was ready to be written. It was complete in his head from sensitive beginning to moving conclusion, with angel and children and flowers all in their proper places and ready to fly and converse and remember everything they needed to remember, all in a most touching and improving fashion. It was neither a long story nor a complicated one, and the learned man strode across the study, sat down again at his desk, grasped his pen and dipped the nib in the ink-well. The paper glowed white, for surely this time it would be scratched to its full content; the ink sat wobbling and counting in the nib, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, go; but the go never came, the paper was untouched, the pen returned to its holder, and the learned man's long fingers clenched into a fist, while the fire sniggered and his shadow palpitated with mirth.

"Hell fire! Hell fire and damnation!" exclaimed the learned man, and he started up from his chair once more, unfolding his legs so quickly that his knees had no time to protest. The learned man strode back across the study, past the window towards the wall covered in pelicans and leering devils; but when he reached the wall this time he did not turn back towards his desk, with its obnoxious, angelic white paper. Instead, the learned man went to the door, which was next to the wall so that the devils could leer at the landlady whenever she walked in without knocking. The learned man opened the door and stalked out, and closed the door behind him quite firmly, leaving pen and pelicans, fire and flowers, angels and devils all in the room together. The light in the hallway was brighter, and he was far too agitated to notice that he had also left behind his shadow.

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