life was beginning to gall him. And yet was there not something about him more imposing than before? Had he taken some kind of grip on himself? His face was stern and melancholy. He led his staff like a prophet to their quarters. 'Their' quarters, for they were no longer 'his'. With his accession to Headmasterdom he had forfeited his room above the Professors' Quadrangle which he had occupied for three-quarters of his life. Alone among the professors it was for him to turn back after he had escorted his staff a certain distance of the way, and to return alone to the headmaster's bedroom above the Masters' Hall.
It had been a difficult time for him since he first put on the Zodiac gown of high office. Was he winning or losing his fight for authority? He longed for respect, but he loved indolence also. Time would tell whether the nobility of his august head could become the symbol of his leadership. To tread the corridors of Gormenghast the acknowledged master of staff and pupil alike! He must be wise, stern, yet generous. He must be revered. That was it... 'revered'. But did this mean that he would be involved in extra work...? Surely, at his age...?
The excitement in the multiform legs of the dragon had only begun to operate since the professors had left the Masters' Hall behind them, and with the Hall their duties also. For their day in the classrooms of Gormenghast was over, and if there was one thing above others that the professors looked forward to, it was this thrill, this five o'clock thrill of returning to their quarters.
They breathed in the secret air of their demesne. Over their faces a series of private smiles began to play. They were nearing a world they understood - not with their brains, but with the dumb, happy, ancestral understanding of their marrow bones.
The long evening was ahead. Not one ink-faced boy would they see for fifteen hours.
Taking deep breaths into its many lungs the hydra-headed dragon approached the stone flight of steps. In its wake, along the domed ceiling of the long corridor, an impalpable serpent of exhaled pipe-smoke hovered and coiled.
An almost imperceptible widening of the corridor was now apparent. The professors became less cramped in their movements as the dragon began to come to bits. The widening of the corridor had become something quite unique, for a great vista of wooden floor-boards was spread before them until the walls (now about forty feet apart) turned abruptly away on either side to flank the wide wooden terrace which overlooked the flight of stairs. Although this flight was exceptionally broad and the professors as they descended had plenty of space in which to indulge themselves (if the whim should take them) in a general loosening of their deportment, a more vigorous smacking or a fiercer twinkling of their feet - yet at the base of the stairs there was, once again, a bottleneck; for although there was plenty of room on each side of the ancient turnstile for them to stream past and into the great crumbling chamber beyond, yet the custom was that the turnstile should be the only means of access to the chamber.
Above the stone flight the sloping roof was in so advanced a state of disintegration that a great deal of light found its way through the holes in the roof, to lie in golden pools all over the great flight of stairs, with their low treads and wide terrace, like shelves of shallow stone.
As with their difficult egress from the Masters' Hall, the professors were now being held up at the Great Turnstile.
But here it was a more leisurely affair. There was neither the scuffling nor the agitation. They were in their own realms again. Their apartments that surrounded the small quadrangle would be waiting for them. What did it matter if they waited a little longer than they could have wished? The long, bland, archaic, nostalgic, almond-smelling evening lay ahead of them, and then the long, sequestered night before the clanging bell aroused them, and a day of ink- and thumb-marks, cribbing and broken spectacles, flies and figures, coastlines, prepositions, isthmuses and essays, paper darts, test tubes, catapults, chemicals and prisms, dates, battles and tame white mice, and hundred half-formed, ingenious and quizzical faces, with their chapped red ears that never listened, renewed itself.
Deliberately, almost 'augustly,' the gowned and mortar-boarded figures followed one another through the great red turnstile and filed into the chamber beyond.
But for the most part, the professors stood in groups, or were seated on the lower steps of the stone flights, where they waited to take their turn at the 'stile'. They were in no hurry. Here and there a savant could be seen lying stretched at full length along one of the steps or shelves of the stone stairs. Here and there a group would be squatting like aboriginals upon their haunches, their gowns gathered about them. Some were in shadow, and very dark they looked - like bandits in a bad light; some were silhouetted against the hazy, golden swathes of the sun shafts; and some stood transfixed in the last rays as they streamed through the honeycombed roof.
A small muscular gentleman with a spade-shaped beard was balancing himself upside down and was working his way down the wide steps on his hands. His head was, for the most part-hidden because his gown fell over and obliterated it, so that, apart from balancing, he had to feel for the edge of each step with his hidden hands. But occasionally his head would appear out of the folds of his gown and the beard could be seen for a quick moment, its harsh black spade a few inches from the ground.
Of the few who watched him bemusedly there were none who had not seen it all a hundred times before. A long-limbed figure, with his knees drawn up to his blue jaw, which they supported, stared abstractedly at a group which stood out in silhouette against a swarm of golden motes. Had he been a little closer and a little less abstracted he might have heard some very peculiar ejaculations.
But he could see quite clearly that at the centre of this distant group a short, precise figure was handing out to his colleagues what looked like small stiff pieces of paper.
And so it was. The sprightly Perch-Prism was dispensing the invitation cards which he had received that same afternoon by special messenger:
IRMA and ALFRED PRUNESQUALLOR hope to have the pleasure of.......................................... 's company on .......................................... (etc.)
One by one the invited parties were handed their invitations, and there was not a single professor who could withhold either a gasp or grunt of surprise or a twitch of the eyebrow.
Some were so stupefied that they were forced to sit down on the steps for a short while until their pulse rate slackened.
Shred and Shrivell tapped their teeth with the gilded edges of their cards, and were already making guesses at the psychological implications.
Fluke, his wide lipless mouth disgorging endless formations of dense and cumulous smoke, was gradually allowing a giant grin to spread itself across his gaunt face.
