chater: (Startled) Eh?
brice: (Pleased) Ah!
Septimus: Oh, damn your soul, Chater! Ovid would have stayed a lawyer and Virgil a farmer if they had known the bathos to which love would descend in your sportive satyrs and noodle nymphs! I am at your service with a half-ounce ball in your brain. May it satisfy you - behind the boat-house at daybreak - shall we say five o'clock? My compliments to Mrs Chater -have no fear for her, she will not want for protection while Captain Brice has a guinea in his pocket, he told her so himself.
brice: You lie, sir!
Septimus: No, sir. Mrs Chater, perhaps.
brice: You lie, or you will answer to me!
Septimus: (Wearily) Oh, very well -1 can fit you in at five
minutes after five. And then it's off to the Malta packet out of Falmouth. You two will be dead, my penurious schoolfriend will remain to tutor Lady Thomasina, and I trust everybody including Lady Croom will be satisfied! (SEPTIMUS slams the door behind him.)
brice: He is all bluster and bladder. Rest assured, Chater, I will let the air out of him.
(brice leaves by the other door, chater's assurance lasts only a moment. When he spots the flaw .. .
chater: Oh! But...
(He hurries out after brice.)
42
SCENE FOUR
HANNAH and valentine. She is reading aloud. He is listening. Lightning, the tortoise, is on the table and is not readily distinguishable fromPlautus. In front ofValentine is Septimus's portfolio, recognizably so but naturally somewhat faded. It is open. Principally associated with the portfolio (although it may contain sheets of blank paper also) are three items: a slim maths primer; a sheet of drawing paper on which there is a scrawled diagram and some mathematical notations, arrow marks, etc.; and Thomasina9 s mathematics lesson book, i.e. the one she writes in, which valentine is leafing through as he listens to HANNAH reading from the primer. HANNAH: 'I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone. This margin being too mean for my purpose, the reader must look elsewhere for the New Geometry of Irregular Forms discovered by Thomasina Coverly.' (Pause. She hands valentine the text book, valentine looks at what she has been reading.
From the next room, a piano is heard, beginning to play quietly, unintrusively, improvisationally.) Does it mean anything? valentine: I don't know. I don't know what it means, except
mathematically. hannah: I meant mathematically. valentine: (Now with the lesson book again) It's an iterated
algorithm. hannah: What's that?
valentine: Well, it's. . .Jesus. . . it's an algorithm that's been . . . iterated. How'm I supposed to... ? (He makes an effort.) The left-hand pages are graphs of what the numbers are doing on the right-hand pages. But all on different scales. Each graph is a small section of the previous one, blown up. Like you'd blow up a detail of a photograph, and then a detail of the detail, and so on, forever. Or in her case, till she ran out of pages.
43
HANNAH: Is it difficult?
valentine: The maths isn't difficult. It's what you did at school.
You have some x-and-.y equation. Any value for x gives you a
value fory. So you put a dot where it's right for both x andy.
Then you take the next value for x which gives you another
value fory> and when you've done that a few times you join
up the dots and that's your graph of whatever the equation
is. hannah: And is that what she's doing? valentine: No. Not exactly. Not at all. What she's doing is,
every time she works out a value for y, she's using that as her
next value for x. And so on. Like a feedback. She's feeding
the solution back into the equation, and then solving it again.
Iteration, you see. hannah: And that's surprising, is it? valentine: Well, it is a bit. It's the technique I'm using on my
grouse numbers, and it hasn't been around for much longer
than, well, call it twenty years.
(Pause.) hannah: Why would she be doing it? valentine: I have no idea.
(Pause.)
I thought you were doing the hermit. hannah: I am. I still am. But Bernard, damn him ...
Thomasina's tutor turns out to have interesting connections.
Bernard is going through the library like a bloodhound. The
portfolio was in a cupboard. valentine: There's a lot of stuff around. Gus loves going
through it. No old masters or anything .. . hannah: The maths primer she was using belonged to him - the
tutor; he wrote his name in it. valentine: (Reading) 'Septimus Hodge.' hannah: Why were these things saved, do you think? valentine: Why should there be a reason? hannah: And the diagram, what's it of? valentine: How would I know? hannah: Why are you cross? valentine: I'm not cross. (Pause.) When your Thomasina was
44
doing maths it had been the same maths for a couple of thousand years. Classical. And for a century after Thomasina. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the mathematics of the natural world.
HANNAH: This feedback thing?
valentine: For example.
hannah: Well, could Thomasina have -
valentine: (Snaps) No, of course she bloody couldn't!
hannah: All right, you're not cross. What did you mean you were doing the same thing she was doing? (Pause.) What are you doing?
valentine: Actually I'm doing it from the other end. She
started with an equation and turned it into a graph. I've got a graph - real data - and I'm trying to find the equation which would give you the graph if you used it the way she's used hers. Iterated it.
hannah: What for?
valentine: It's how you look at population changes in biology. Goldfish in a pond, say. This year there are x goldfish. Next year there'll bey goldfish. Some get born, some get eaten by herons, whatever. Nature manipulates the x and turns it into y.Theny goldfish is your starting population for the following year. Just like Thomasina. Your value fory becomes your next value for x. The question is: what is being done to x? What is the manipulation? Whatever it is, it can be written down as mathematics. It's called an algorithm.
hannah: It can't be the same every year.
valentine: The details change, you can't keep tabs on
everything, it's not nature in a box. But it isn't necessary to know the details. When they are all put together, it turns out the population is obeying a mathematical rule.
hannah: The goldfish are?
valentine: Yes. No. The numbers. It's not about the behaviour offish. It's about the behaviour of numbers. This thing works for any phenomenon which eats its own numbers -
45
measles epidemics, rainfall averages, cotton prices, it's a natural phenomenon in itself. Spooky.
HANNAH: Does it work for grouse?
valentine: I don't know yet. I mean, it does undoubtedly, but it's hard to show. There's more noise with grouse.
hannah: Noise?
