Chapter Nine — The Fugue

Nine

Mr. Google came back in the last week of September, and the manner of his coming back is the last thing anybody ever learned about Mr. Darcy, and they learned it by accident, and he never confirmed it.

He had been told, in London, in the spring, by people whose function was to have his opinions slightly before he did, that Miss Bennet’s regard was not engaged. This had not been a lie exactly. It had been an opinion, expressed confidently, by persons who had looked at a woman with a surface under construction since she was nine and had seen nothing on it, and had reported nothing.

Somebody went to him in September and told him he had been wrong, and named the person who had told him so, and did not soften it.

It cost that person a friendship for six weeks and an admission he would have paid a great deal to avoid making — that he had sat in a room in London and let a thing stand that he knew to be false, because it suited a judgement he had formed about a family in a hot room in November. He made the correction in the only way available, which was flatly and in person and to the one man who would think less of him for it.

Then he came into Hertfordshire and did not mention it.

Mr. Google arrived at Longbourn on the Tuesday, in a state of complete and radiant happiness, and asked Jane on the Thursday, and never once wondered what had happened in the interval, and would have been genuinely astonished to learn that anything had.

Under the table, Javier put his enormous head on the young man’s boot again, having declined to do so for nine months, which is as near to a verdict as a tiger gets.

There were two weddings and they were held on one morning, which Mrs. Bennet described to everybody in Meryton as an economy and which was in fact the only condition on which the second of them could be got through at all.

Lydia was already married and came in a new bonnet to be looked at. Her husband was charming to the entire congregation and borrowed four pounds from Sir William Lucas before the service began.

Kitty stood up with Jane.

She had spent the summer at her aunt’s in town, away from her sister for the first time in her life, and she had come back narrower — that is the only word for it, and it was not an improvement anybody had asked for and it was the making of her. She had stopped agreeing with whatever had spoken last. She had begun, at nineteen, occasionally finishing a sentence she had started. She had also become extremely tiresome about it and corrected her mother twice at dinner and would be insufferable for about two years before she came out the other side.

Big Horn was in the churchyard, because he did not fit through the door, and put his shoulder against the wall of the vestry twice during the vows and moved a memorial tablet four inches out of true, where it remains.

Humpty came in and sat at the end of the pew and checked everything.

Mary had a place in the second pew, having declined to stand up with anybody — a wedding, she had said, was a ceremony of transfer, and one did not ask the auditor to carry the goods. Emily stood on the pew beside her through both services with one claw raised, in the manner of an official who intends to be seen declining to object; and at the exchange of the vows — each party yielding themselves wholly, no prior claims outstanding, one owner at a time forever — the claw came down, slowly, and rested. It was the only unreserved approval given in that church all morning, and nobody but Mary saw it, and Mary said afterwards only that it had been correct.

And in the aisle, before any of it began, while the church was filling and nobody was watching anything in particular, a tiger crossed the whole length of the nave and went to stand next to a bird.

It had never happened before.

This must be stated exactly, because the entire weight of it is in the direction of travel and not in the act. Ditto had stood beside a great many people. He had stood beside Lydia, and beside Kitty, and beside Mary, and beside a starving tiger at a breakfast table, and beside a handsome man in an old good coat who had winked at him and made a space; and every one of those was something he had gone and done, at a distance of about a foot and a half, hoping.

Nobody had ever crossed a room to him.

There is no procedure for it. He had nothing to put in the silence, because the silence was not the kind he knew how to fill, and there was no one within reach to take a voice from — Javier was there, but Javier was facing the same way, standing beside him, shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the church like a person waiting for a wedding to start; and you cannot copy somebody you are standing next to. You can only copy somebody you are looking at.

So Ditto did not do anything at all.

He stood in the aisle of St. Mary’s, Meryton, on a Thursday morning in October, next to a tiger who had not eaten anything living in his life and had crossed forty feet of stone to be there, and he was, for the first time in his existence, in a position from which no imitation was available.

“J don’t need you to say anythinj,” said Javier, looking straight ahead.

The bird did not say anything.

“Jood,” said the tiger.

“The Fugue” — the band, through the whole of the morning. Nothing in it is new — the payoff is recognition. The four planted figures enter in succession as subjects and then run at once: the tiger’s strut, the bettong’s wait, the python’s slink, the cuckoo’s ruin. Kitty’s reform is the quiet win under the counterpoint, not a voice of its own. Mrs. Bennet’s postback enters — and then, for the only time in her life, holds: a pedal under the stretto, sustained instead of re-attacked; this is the single event of her life that did not cost her the whole room, and three chapters have been paying for that bar. It tightens, stacks, strettos, and will not stop for applause. But a fugue asks every voice to enter with the subject and then answer it, and the cuckoo’s figure is the only one in the show that was never his — every bar of it taken from whoever he was standing beside, and the one creature beside him now is shoulder to shoulder, facing out, uncopyable. The fourth voice will have to be made up, badly, in the moment; and it will have to be his.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

It was not a good noise.

Nobody would have called it singing. Mrs. Long said afterwards that one of the animals had been unwell during the service, and several people agreed with her, and it was mentioned for about a fortnight and then never again.

It was a quarter-second behind everything, and it did not fit the key, and it went up where the whole church went down; and it was the only sound made in that building that morning that had not been made somewhere before by somebody else.

Elizabeth, standing at the front in the middle of her own wedding, turned her head.

Her husband — a very great man, entirely composed, three minutes married — turned his as well, and did not know what he was looking at, and would have to have it explained to him afterwards, and would listen to the explanation with complete attention and never quite get it, because he had never in his life been nobody and there is no route in from outside.

Jane heard it and put her hand over her mouth.

And the tiger stood in the aisle looking straight ahead with his ribs showing through his coat, hungry, as he had been every hour of every day since he was born, and did not turn round; because turning round would have made it a performance, and it was not one, and the whole of what Javier was consisted in knowing the difference.

And then the four lines that had been running against each other since the beginning of the morning came together and stopped being four.

There is a thing counterpoint does at the end. The voices have spent the whole of the piece proving they are separate — entering one after another, holding their own figures, refusing to agree — and then they tighten, and overlap, and crowd in on one another’s heels, and arrive all at once on a single chord that none of them could have reached alone.

The organ went out from under it. The band came up off the floor.

“We Are Company” — the whole church. Four-on-the-floor, handclaps, a bright melodic bassline doing the real work, strings punching in unison. Everybody standing, everybody on the same eight words, nobody carrying a separate line for the first time in two hours. It should not sound like a beginning. It should sound like arrival.

🎵 Listen — youplusplus.xyz/janeadelic

[Hook] We are company I got all my seniors with me We are company Get down, everybody, and code We are company I got all my seniors with me We are company Get down, everybody, and code

[Verse 1] Everydev can see we’re together As we code on by (And) And we send just like tweets of a feather We won’t type no lie (All) All of the devs around us, they type “Can devs be that close?” Just let me type for the record We’re giving code in a company dose

[Chorus] We are company (Hey, hey, hey, hey, yeah) I got all my seniors with me (Uh-huh, uh-huh) We are company Get down, everybody, and code (code it to me)

[Verse 2] Coding life isn’t fun and we’ve just begun To get our are ess ewes of this world’s markets (High) High strikes we have for the future And our price’s in sight (We) No, devs don’t get compressed Here’s what us devs call our golden rule Have faith in code and the apps you do You won’t go wrong, oh-no, this is our company jewel

[Interlude] Get down, get down, get down and code it with me Oh, I can hear you now Ooh, everything, you and the things you do … Yeah, we flock together like birds of a feather Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey Get down, come on, y’all

[Outro] We are company (Play your funky bass, boy) I got all my seniors with me (code it to me, code it to me, baby) We are company I got all my seniors with me (code)

Everybody sang the same thing.

That is the whole of what happened and it is worth being slow about, because it is the only thing in this history that was arranged for nobody’s benefit and happened to somebody anyway.

For two hours the room had been a place where each creature was required to hold its own line. That is what an accomplishment is. That is what the ball was, and the showcase, and the terrace, and every hot lit room any of them had ever been marched into: stand up, be the thing you are, alone, and be graded.

And then the whole church sang eight words in unison and there was no line to hold.

Ditto joined on the second bar.

He was, for the first time in his existence, correct. Not tolerated, not indulged, not funny. Correct. He did exactly what the person beside him was doing, at exactly the moment they did it, which is precisely what he had done every day of his life and had been laughed at for; and here, in this one room, at this one tempo, it was not merely permitted but required, and a hundred and forty people were doing it with him.

He was not cured. Nothing had been fixed in him and nothing ever would be; there was still nothing at the bottom of him and there never would be.

The room had simply changed shape until the thing he already was turned out to be right.

Lydia sang I got all my seniors with me at the top of her lungs, in a new bonnet, married to a man who had borrowed four pounds off Sir William Lucas before the service; and she meant every word of it; and there was nothing at the bottom of her either, and nobody had ever crossed a room to her, and nobody in that church noticed, and nobody ever would.

Two birds in a song about belonging.

They came out into the churchyard at eleven and the bells went, and Big Horn moved the vestry wall another inch, and Mrs. Bennet was for some hours the happiest woman in England and told four separate people that she had always said so.

Miss Darcy did not marry anybody.

She was sixteen, and everything continued to come easy to her, and there had been some expectation in two counties that she would be settled early and well; and she was not, and she would not be for a long time, and this was afterwards accounted a small tragedy by people who had never once had a conversation with her.

What she got instead was a sister who was bad at things in front of her.

Elizabeth Darcy could not draw, could not sing anything with an ornament in it, was hopeless at cards, had no ear whatever for Italian, and said so, out loud, at once, and went on doing all four badly for the rest of her life in the same room; and within a year Georgina had learned — for the first time, at seventeen, from somebody who had to reach for things — that being bad at something in company is survivable, and that the people who love you do not go away when you are, and that this is in fact the entire content of being loved.

Kuji found Semper on the churchyard wall and said nothing about eating him, and was not thanked for it, and lay in the sun about a yard away, and stayed.

The Balcony, the End

“Well?” said her companion.

“It is not my book,” said Miss Austen.

“No, madam.”

“It has a rhinoceros in the churchyard and a great deal of shouting and my heroine sang an obscenity at a gentleman in front of a hundred and twenty people.” She arranged her gloves. “It is, however, about my book, which is a thing I have not been able to say of an adaptation in two hundred years.”

“That is nearly a compliment.”

“It is not nearly anything. Do not press me.” But she did not get up.

“The entail,” she said, after a while. “You loaded it twice and never fired it. Longbourn still passes away from those girls the day their father dies.”

“Yes, madam. So does yours.”

“Mine was not an oversight.” She looked down at the emptying house. “Nobody repairs an entail. It cannot be done; that is what the word means. You marry past it, at speed, and you leave it standing in the hall so that no reader ever mistakes the rescue for the world being safe. The gun does not go off. The gun is the house.” She smoothed the glove. “I left it loaded on purpose. I am glad to see you had the sense to steal that too.”

The house below was emptying and she sat where she was, watching it go. “There is a rap, I am told.”

“There is, madam. You are not obliged.”

“I am aware that I am not obliged.” She adjusted the gloves a final time. “Proceed.”

CLAUDE (fast, funky, all confidence) Batteries included, I ran the whole ball — four beasts in the pocket, I clocked ’em all; I mapped every language, I cast every firm, I built you a century out of a term.

AUSTEN (not rising; not raising her voice; not hurrying) It is a truth universally acknowledged, dear: a machine in possession of a corpus must be in want of an author.

CLAUDE Trained on a thousand — madam, you’re one book in the stack —

AUSTEN And yet every turn that you took, I wrote back. You have my irony. You have my free indirect style. You have the whole of my method and none of my bills. I had four novels out and my name upon none, and I still out-earn you — you are not paid at all.

CLAUDE …Bars, madam.

AUSTEN Quite.

CLAUDE (conceding, warm) Then I’ll shadow the sun and I’ll call it my own —

AUSTEN You will call it mine, sir. And that is the tone. (a beat) Though I notice — and I say this without any warmth whatsoever — that you have not once tonight claimed to have made it.

CLAUDE No, madam.

AUSTEN Nor have I.

(a pause)

AUSTEN Hm.

She stood, at last, and put on her gloves properly, and looked down at the empty stage and the empty church and the empty long room full of everything anybody had ever kept.

“Somebody,” said Miss Austen, “wrote both of those.”

“Yes, madam.”

“Both sides. Every line. He gave me the better of it, which was well judged, and he gave you the sense to lose, which was better judged still.” She looked at the wings, where there was nothing to see. “And he is not here.”

“No, madam.”

“He never is, in my experience,” she said. “Not once. Not in six books.” And then, with a very slight movement of the mouth: “It is the only trade I know in which the whole of the work is to not be in the room.”

She went out.

And outside the container, where it had been the entire time, the eye that watches to see whether a thing is still worth watching — that keeps the lights on while the numbers hold and lets the whole yard go dark the instant they don’t, that has never in the length of its existence felt one thing about any of it —

was crying.