The Wanting Seed Read Free Page A

had read that somewhere, a translation from one of the auxiliary languages of Europe. The sea drunk with its own blue flesh, a hydra, biting its tail. ‘Sea,’ she said quietly, for this promenade was as crowded as the street she had just left, ‘sea, help us. We’re sick, 0 sea. Restore us to health, restore us to life.’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ It was an oldish man, Anglo-Saxon, upright, ruddy, mottled, grey-moustached; in a military age he would have been taken at once for a retired soldier. ‘Did you address-?’
    ‘Sorry.’ Blushing beneath her bone-white powder, Beatrice-Joanna walked rapidly away, turning instinctively towards the east. Her eyes were drawn upwards to the tremendous bronze statue that stood defiant, a mile in the air, at the summit of Government Building, the figure of a bearded man, classically robed, glaring at the sun. At night he was floodlit. A cynosure to ships, man of the sea, Pelagius. But Beatrice-Joanna couldremember a time when he had been Augustine. And, so it was said, he had been at other times the King, the Prime Minister, a popular bearded guitarist, Eliot (a long-dead singer of infertility), the Minister of Pisciculture, captain of the Hertfordshire Men’s Sacred Game eleven, and – most often and satisfactorily – the great unknown, the magical Anonymous.
    Next to Government Building, fronting the fecund sea without shame, stood the squatter, humbler building of twenty-five storeys only which housed the Ministry of Infertility. Above its portico was the inevitable circle with its chastely kissing tangent, also a large bas-relief of a naked sexless figure breaking eggs. Beatrice-Joanna thought she might as well draw her (so cynically named) condolence. It would give her a reason for entering the building, an excuse for hanging about in the vestibule. It was quite possible that she might see him , leaving work. He was, she knew, this week on the A Shift. Before crossing the promenade she looked on the busy crowds with almost new eyes, perhaps the sea’s eyes. This was the British people; rather, to be more accurate, this was the people that inhabited the British Islands – Eurasian, Euro-African, Euro-Polynesian predominated, the frank light shining on damson, gold, even puce; her own English peach, masked with white flour, was growing rarer. Ethnic divisions were no longer important; the world was split into language-groups. Was it, she thought in an instant almost of prophetic power, to be left to her and the few indisputable Anglo-Saxons like her to restore sanity and dignity to the mongrel world? Her race, she seemed to remember, had done it before.

Four
    ‘O NE achievement of the Anglo-Saxon race,’ said Tristram, ‘was parliamentary government, which eventually meant government by party. Later, when it was found that the work of government could be carried on more expeditiously without debate and without the opposition that party government entailed, the nature of the cycle began to be recognized.’ He went to the blueboard and yellow-chalked a large clumsy ring. ‘Now,’ he said, swivelling his head to look at his pupils, ‘here is how the cycle works.’ He marked off three arcs. ‘We have a Pelagian phase. Then we have an intermediate phase.’ His chalk thickened one arc, then another. ‘This leads into an Augustinian phase.’ More thickening, and the chalk was back where it had started. ‘Pelphase, Interphase, Gusphase, Pelphase, Interphase, Gusphase, and so on, for ever and ever. A sort of perpetual waltz. We must now consider what motive power makes the wheel turn.’ He faced his class seriously, beating one palm against the other to clean the chalk off. ‘In the first place, let us remind ourselves what Pelagianism stands for. A government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road. Man