Babel, page 14
Still, he couldn’t help but press. ‘I heard there was another student, a few years before me. Also from the coast.’
‘Oh – yes, I suppose there was.’ Professor Chakravarti’s fingers drummed anxiously against the desk. ‘A nice boy, though not quite as diligent as you are. Griffin Harley.’
‘Was? What happened to him?’
‘Well – it’s a sad story, really. He passed away. Just before his fourth year.’ Professor Chakravarti scratched his temple. ‘He fell ill on an overseas research trip and didn’t make it home. It happens all the time.’
‘It does?’
‘Yes, there’s always a certain . . . risk, entailed in the profession. There’s so much travel, you know. You expect attrition.’
‘But I still don’t understand,’ said Robin. ‘Surely there’s any number of Chinese students who would love to study in England.’
Professor Chakravarti’s fingers quickened against the wood. ‘Well, yes. But first there’s the matter of national loyalties. It’s no good recruiting scholars who might run home to the Qing government at any moment, you know. Second, Richard is of the opinion that . . . well. One requires a certain upbringing.’
‘Like mine?’
‘Like yours. Otherwise, Richard thinks . . .’ Professor Chakravarti was using this construction quite a lot, Robin noticed, ‘that the Chinese tend towards certain natural inclinations. Which is to say, he doesn’t think Chinese students would acclimatize well here.’
Lowly, uncivilized stock. ‘I see.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you,’ Professor Chakravarti said quickly. ‘You’re raised properly, and all that. Wonderfully diligent, I don’t expect that will be a problem.’
‘Yes.’ Robin swallowed. His throat felt very tight. ‘I’ve been very lucky.’
On the second Saturday after his arrival to Oxford, Robin made his way north for dinner with his guardian.
Professor Lovell’s Oxford residence was only a shade more humble than his Hampstead estate. It was a bit smaller, and enjoyed a mere front and back garden instead of an expansive green, but it was still more than someone on a professor’s salary should have been able to afford. Trees bearing plump red cherries lined the hedges by the front door, though cherries could hardly still be in season at the turn of autumn. Robin suspected that if he bent down to check the grass by their roots, he would find silver bars in the soil.
‘Dear boy!’ He’d scarce rung the bell when Mrs Piper was upon him, brushing leaves from his jacket and turning him in circles to examine his reedy frame. ‘My heavens, you’re so thin already—’
‘The food’s horrible,’ he said. A great big smile spread over his face; he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed her. ‘Just like you said. Dinner yesterday was salt herrings—’
She gasped. ‘No.’
‘—cold beef—’
‘No!’
‘—and stale bread.’
‘Inhumane. Don’t you worry, I’ve cooked enough to make up for it.’ She patted his cheeks. ‘How’s college life besides? How do you like wearing those floppy black gowns? Have you made any friends?’
Robin was about to answer when Professor Lovell came down the stairs.
‘Hello, Robin,’ he said. ‘Come in. Mrs Piper, his coat—’ Robin shrugged it off and handed it to Mrs Piper, who examined the ink-stained cuffs with disapproval. ‘How goes the term?’
‘Challenging, just as you warned.’ Robin felt older as he spoke, his voice somehow deeper. He’d left home only a week ago, but he felt like he’d aged years, and could present himself now as a young man and not a boy. ‘But challenging in a way that’s enjoyable. I’m learning quite a lot.’
‘Professor Chakravarti says you’ve made some good contributions to the Grammatica.’
‘Not as much as I’d like,’ said Robin. ‘There are particles in Classical Chinese that I’ve just no idea what to do with. Half the time our translations feel like guesswork.’
‘I’ve felt that way for decades.’ Professor Lovell gestured towards the dining room. ‘Shall we?’
They might as well have been back in Hampstead. The long table was arranged precisely the same way Robin was used to, with him and Professor Lovell sitting at opposite ends and a painting to Robin’s right, which this time depicted the Thames rather than Oxford’s Broad Street. Mrs Piper poured their wine and, with a wink at Robin, disappeared back into the kitchen.
Professor Lovell raised his glass to him, then drank. ‘You’re taking theory with Jerome and Latin with Margaret, correct?’
‘Right. It’s fairly good going.’ Robin took a sip of wine. ‘Though Professor Craft lectures like she wouldn’t notice if she were speaking to an empty room, and Professor Playfair seems to have missed a calling for the stage.’
Professor Lovell chuckled. Robin smiled, despite himself; he had never been able to make his guardian laugh before.
‘Did he give you his Psammetichus speech?’
‘He did,’ said Robin. ‘Did all that really happen?’
‘Who knows, except that Herodotus tells us so,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘There’s another good Herodotus story, again about Psammetichus. Psammetichus wanted to determine which language was the foundation of all earthly languages, so he gave two newborn infants to a shepherd with the instructions that they should not be allowed to hear human speech. For a while all they did was babble, as infants do. Then one day one of the infants stretched out his little hands to the shepherd and exclaimed bekos, which is the Phrygian word for bread. And so Psammetichus decided the Phrygians must have been the first race on earth, and Phrygian the first language. Pretty story, isn’t it?’
‘I’m assuming no one accepts that argument,’ said Robin.
‘Heavens, no.’
‘But could that really work?’ asked Robin. ‘Could we actually learn anything from what infants utter?’
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘The issue is it’s impossible to isolate infants from an environment with language if you want them to develop as infants should. Might be interesting to buy a child and see – but, well, no.’ Professor Lovell tilted his head. ‘It’s fun to entertain the possibility of an original language, though.’
‘Professor Playfair mentioned something similar,’ said Robin. ‘About a perfect, innate, and unadulterated language. The Adamic language.’
He felt more confident talking to the professor now that he’d spent some time at Babel. They were on more of an equal footing; they could communicate as colleagues. Dinner felt less like an interrogation and more like a casual conversation between two scholars in the same fascinating field.
‘The Adamic language.’ Professor Lovell made a face. ‘I don’t know why he fills your minds with that stuff. It’s a pretty metaphor, certainly, but every few years we get an undergraduate who’s determined to discover the Adamic language in Proto-Indo-European, or otherwise wholly invent it on his own, and it always takes either a stern talking-to or a few weeks of failure for him to come back to his senses.’
‘You don’t think that an original language exists?’ Robin asked.
‘Of course I don’t. The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’ He shook his head. ‘There are those who think that the Adamic language might be English – might become English – purely because the English language has enough military might and power behind it to credibly crowd out competitors, but then we must also remember that it was barely a century ago that Voltaire declared that French was the universal language. That was, of course, before Waterloo. Webb and Leibniz once speculated that Chinese might, in fact, have once been universally intelligible due to its ideogrammatic nature, but Percy debunks this by arguing Chinese is a derivative of Egyptian hieroglyphs. My point being, these things are contingent. Dominant languages might keep a little staying power even after their armies decline – Portuguese, for instance, has far outstayed its welcome – but they always fade from relevance eventually. But I do think there is a pure realm of meaning – a language in between, where all concepts are perfectly expressed, which we have not been able to approximate. There is a sense, a feeling of when we have got it right.’
‘Like Voltaire,’ Robin said, emboldened by his wine and rather excited that he could remember the relevant quote. ‘Like what he writes in his preface to his translation of Shakespeare. I have tried to soar with the author where he soars.’
‘Quite right,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘But how does Frere put it? The language of translation ought, we think, as far as possible, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more. But what do we know of thought and feeling except as expressed through language?’
‘Is that what powers the silver bars?’ Robin asked. This conversation was starting to get away from him; he sensed a depth to Professor Lovell’s theorizing into which he wasn’t prepared to follow, and he needed to bring things back to the material before he got lost. ‘Do they work by capturing that pure meaning – whatever gets lost when we invoke it through crude approximations?’
Professor Lovell nodded. ‘It is as close to a theoretical explanation as we can get. But I also think that as languages evolve, as their speakers become more worldly and sophisticated, as they gorge on other concepts and swell and morph to encompass more over time – we approach something close to that language. There’s less room for misunderstanding. And we’ve only begun to work out what that means for silver-working.’
‘I suppose that means the Romanticists might eventually run out of things to say,’ said Robin.
He was only joking, but Professor Lovell nodded vigorously at this. ‘You’re quite right. French, Italian, and Spanish dominate the faculty, but their new contributions to the silver-working ledgers dwindle by the year. There’s simply too much communication across the continent. Too many loanwords. Connotations change and converge as French and Spanish grow closer to English, and vice versa. Decades from now, the silver bars we use from Romance languages might no longer have any effect. No, if we want to innovate, then we must look to the East. We need languages that aren’t spoken in Europe.’
‘That’s why you specialize in Chinese,’ said Robin.
‘Precisely.’ Professor Lovell nodded. ‘China, I’m quite sure, is the future.’
‘And that’s why you and Professor Chakravarti have been trying to diversify the cohorts?’
‘Who’s been gossiping to you about departmental politics?’ Professor Lovell chuckled. ‘Yes, there are hurt feelings this year because we only took one Classicist, and a woman at that. But that’s how it has to be. The cohort above you are going to have a tough time finding jobs.’
‘If we’re talking about the spread of language, I wanted to ask . . .’ Robin cleared his throat. ‘Where do all those bars go? I mean, who buys them?’
Professor Lovell gave him a curious look. ‘To those who can afford them, of course.’
‘But Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wide use,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, in Calcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indians are contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’
‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a great deal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’re often less able to pay the export fees.’
‘But we have silver bars in charities and hospitals and orphanages here,’ said Robin. ‘We have bars that can help people who need them most. None of that exists anywhere else in the world.’
He was playing a dangerous game, he knew. But he had to seek clarity. He could not construct Professor Lovell and all his colleagues as the enemy in his mind, could not wholly buy into Griffin’s damning assessment of Babel, without some confirmation.
‘Well, we can’t expend energy researching any frivolous application,’ Professor Lovell scoffed.
Robin tried a different line of argument. ‘It’s just that – well, it only seems fair there ought to be some kind of exchange.’ He was regretting now that he’d drunk so much. He felt loose, vulnerable. Too passionate for what should have been an intellectual discussion. ‘We take their languages, their ways of seeing and describing the world. We ought to give them something in return.’
‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good, like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’
There was some logic in this, but the conclusion still made Robin uncomfortable. Surely things were not so simple; surely this still masked some unfair coercion or exploitation. But he could not formulate an objection, could not figure out where the fault in the argument lay.
‘The Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘He has plenty of scholars. He even has linguists who understand English. So why doesn’t he fill his court with silver bars? Why is it that the Chinese, rich as their language is, have no grammars of their own?’
‘It could be they don’t have the resources to get started,’ said Robin.
‘Then why should we just hand them to them?’
‘But that’s not the point – the point is that they need it, so why doesn’t Babel send scholars abroad on exchange programmes? Why don’t we teach them how it’s done?’
‘Could be that all nations hoard their most precious resources.’
‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’ said Robin. ‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all the Grammaticas under lock and key in the tower? Why don’t we ever host foreign scholars, or send scholars to help open translation centres elsewhere in the world?’
‘Because as the Royal Institute of Translation, we serve the interests of the Crown.’
‘That seems fundamentally unjust.’
‘Is that what you believe?’ A cold edge crept into Professor Lovell’s voice. ‘Robin Swift, do you think what we do here is fundamentally unjust?’
‘I only want to know,’ said Robin, ‘why silver could not save my mother.’
There was a brief silence.
‘Well, I’m sorry about your mother.’ Professor Lovell picked up his knife and began cutting into his steak. He seemed flustered, discomfited. ‘But the Asiatic Cholera was a product of Canton’s poor public hygiene, not the unequal distribution of bars. And anyhow, there’s no silver match-pair that can bring back the dead—’
‘What excuse is that?’ Robin set down his glass. He was properly drunk now, and that made him combative. ‘You had the bars – they’re easy to make, you told me so yourself – so why—’
‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just a woman.’
The doorbell rang. Robin flinched; his fork clattered against his plate and fell to the floor. He scooped it up, deeply embarrassed. Mrs Piper’s voice carried down the hall. ‘Oh, what a surprise! They’re having dinner now, I’ll bring you in—’ and then a blond, handsome, and elegantly dressed gentleman strode into the dining room, bearing a stack of books in his hand.
‘Sterling!’ Professor Lovell set down his knife and stood to greet the stranger. ‘I thought you were coming in late.’
‘Finished up in London earlier than expected—’ Sterling’s eyes caught Robin’s, and the whole of him went rigid. ‘Oh, hello.’
‘Hello,’ Robin said, flustered and shy. This was the famous Sterling Jones, he realized. William Jones’s nephew, the star of the faculty. ‘It’s – nice to meet you.’
Sterling said nothing, only perused him for a long moment. His mouth twisted oddly, though Robin could not read the attendant expression. ‘My goodness.’
Professor Lovell cleared his throat. ‘Sterling.’
Sterling’s eyes lingered on Robin’s face for another moment, and then he looked away.
‘Welcome, anyhow.’ He said this like an afterthought; he had already turned his back on Robin, and the words sounded forced and awkward. He set the books on the table. ‘You were right, Dick, it’s precisely the Ricci dictionaries that are the key. We’ve been missing what happens when we go through Portuguese. That, I can help with. Now I think if we daisy-chain the characters I’ve marked here, and here—’
Professor Lovell was flipping through the pages. ‘This is waterlogged. I hope you didn’t pay him in full—’
‘I paid nothing, Dick, do you think me a fool?’
‘Well, after Macau—’
They fell into a heated discussion. Robin was entirely forgotten.
He looked on, feeling tipsy and out of place. His cheeks burned. He had not finished his food, but it seemed very awkward to keep eating now. He had no appetite besides. His earlier confidence vanished. He felt again like a stupid little boy, laughed away and dismissed by those crow-like visitors in Professor Lovell’s sitting room.
And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks. It was a very strange mix of emotions. He hadn’t the faintest idea how to sort through them.
But we haven’t finished, he wanted to tell his father. We were discussing my mother.
He felt his chest constrict, as if his heart were a caged beast straining to burst out. That was curious. This dismissal was nothing he hadn’t experienced before. Professor Lovell had never acknowledged Robin’s feelings, or offered care or comfort, only abruptly changed the subject, only thrown up a cold, indifferent wall, only minimized Robin’s hurts so that it seemed frivolous to bring them up at all. Robin had grown used to it by now.
