The Cipher

by Gerard Hoffnung, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Mr Herbert Gill visited Reginald Swales on Thursdays, between seven and eight in the evening, in Swales's cell on the second landing of B Wing. That was the arrangement. An officer let him in, and locked the door behind him, and came back at eight and let him out again, and in between the two of them sat side by side on the bed, because there was only the one stool, and Swales would not hear of a visitor sitting on a bed while he took the stool.

"You are the guest," Swales said, the first time. "I am merely the resident."

Gill was thirty-one and taught Latin at a preparatory school on the edge of the town. He had joined the Society of Friends four years before and had become a prison visitor eighteen months after that, and he had been told at the meeting where these things were explained that he was not to ask a man what he had done. So he did not ask. Swales did not say. For the first eleven Thursdays they talked about music, or rather Swales talked about music and Gill listened, which was a division of labour that suited them both, because Gill was tone deaf.

He had confessed this in the second week. Swales had taken it very well. He had looked at Gill for a while, with the expression of a doctor who has been told something by a patient that he had suspected from the start, and then he had said, "Well. It is not catching," and gone on with what he had been saying about Bach.

Swales was fifty-eight. He was a large, soft, tidy man with a grey moustache that he kept trimmed with a pair of nail scissors he was not supposed to have, and he had the hands of a much smaller person: short-fingered, quick, always slightly moving on his knees, as if the knees were a keyboard and there was something on them that needed finishing. For twenty-two years, until the summer before last, he had been the organist at the Rialto cinema in the High Street. He had played the Compton before the big picture every evening, rising out of the floor on a lift in a white jacket, with the console lit from underneath in four colours that changed while he played. He told Gill about the lift a good deal. It had been his great sorrow that he could not see the colours himself, being on top of them.

"Amber," he said, "rose, a sort of green, and blue. In that order. The blue was for the national anthem." He played a little of the national anthem on his knees. "I have been told it was very fine."

---

In the twelfth week the chaplain made Swales the chapel organist.

The chapel was at the end of A Wing, a long room with a vaulted ceiling painted cream and benches for three hundred, and at the front of it, to the left of the altar, stood the instrument. It was not an organ. It was an American reed organ, a harmonium, built in Vermont in about 1890, with a tall walnut case and a little mirror in the top of it, and two pedals at the bottom, covered in worn carpet, which the player worked with his feet to supply the wind. It had fourteen stops with china faces. Several of them did nothing. One of them said VOX HUMANA, and when you drew it a small fan began to revolve inside the case and the whole instrument trembled, very slightly, like an old lady on a cold platform.

It had been played for some years by a man doing three years for receiving, who had been released at Michaelmas. Since then the chaplain, the Reverend Mr Ogilvy, had led the singing unaccompanied. Mr Ogilvy was a kind man with a strong voice which he used on the wrong notes. He had heard about the Rialto, and he had sent for Swales.

"He asked me," Swales told Gill, that Thursday, "whether I could manage it. He asked whether I could manage a harmonium." He sat for a moment with his small hands quite still. "I said I would do my best."

"That was generous of you."

"It was," said Swales. "There is a cipher on the D."

Gill did not know what a cipher was, and said so.

"A note that sounds when it should not," said Swales. "When nobody is pressing it. There is a little valve under every key, a pallet, a flap of wood with leather on it, and a spring to keep it shut. Under the D above middle C something has got in. Dust. A hair. A bit of fluff from a cassock. And the pallet does not close. So the moment there is any wind in the instrument and a stop drawn, the D sounds. All the time. Whatever else you are playing." He pressed down on his knee with one finger, and held it there. "D," he said. "D. D. D. Like a man in a waiting room who has been told his name will be called."

"Can it be mended?"

"In twenty minutes. You take out four screws at the back, lift the action, find the pallet, blow, and put it all back." He took his finger off his knee. "I need a screwdriver."

---

The request for a screwdriver went, as the Prison Rules required, from Swales to the officer on the landing, and from the officer on the landing to the Principal Officer, and from the Principal Officer to the Chief Officer, Mr Dunmore, who had been in the Navy and did not care for music in buildings.

Mr Dunmore considered the request for a week. Then he wrote across it, in green ink, that a screwdriver was a tool, and that prisoners did not have tools, except in the workshops, under supervision, and that the chapel was not a workshop. He suggested that the matter be referred to the Works Department. The Works Department was a man called Pratt, who came on Tuesdays.

"Pratt," said Swales, on the Thursday, "is a plumber."

"Perhaps he has a screwdriver," said Gill.

"Pratt will have a great many screwdrivers. It is not the screwdriver. It is what is at the other end of it." Swales looked at his hands. "You do not let a plumber into a harmonium. It is like letting a horse into a tea shop. He will mean well."

Gill asked whether he himself might be allowed to do it, under Swales's direction. He was not a mechanical man, but he could take out four screws. Swales looked at him with real tenderness.

"Mr Gill," he said. "You are a visitor. If you were to be found in the chapel with your head inside the harmonium, it would go up to the Governor, and the Governor would write to the Home Office, and the Home Office would write to your Society, and they would all of them be perfectly right." He patted Gill's knee, twice. "Besides, you would not be able to tell whether you had fixed it."

This was true, and Gill laughed, and after a moment Swales laughed as well, a large, soft laugh which he kept mostly inside himself, as you are obliged to do in a cell.

The request went to the Works Department. Pratt came on the Tuesday and looked at the harmonium and said that he would need to order a part. Nobody knew what part. It was the second week of December. The carol service was on the twenty-second, and the Bishop of the diocese was coming, and the Governor, Colonel Hethersett, had let it be known that he would like the singing to be good.

---

"What will you do?" said Gill.

Swales did not answer at once. He got up off the bed and went to the window, which was small and high and had seven bars across it, and stood looking up at it, although there was nothing to see at that hour except the dark and, if you craned, the top of the boiler-house chimney.

"I have been thinking," he said, "about the Italians."

Gill waited. It was one of the things he had learned to do on Thursdays.

"In the old days," said Swales, "before Christmas, the shepherds used to come down out of the mountains into Rome, and Naples, and play in the streets. On bagpipes. Pifferari, they were called. They would stand in front of the shrines of the Virgin, at the street corners, and play their Christmas tunes, and the bagpipe has a drone, you understand, a pipe that sounds one note underneath everything, all the time, without stopping. Handel heard them. He put them into the Messiah. The Pastoral Symphony. The little bit before the shepherds. It is nearly all over a drone." He turned round. "One note in the bass, and the tune on top of it, like smoke going up from a fire."

"I don't know it," said Gill.

"No," said Swales kindly. "But you would know it if you heard it. It is the nicest four minutes in the whole thing." He sat down again on the bed. "The D," he said, "is going to sound. Mr Dunmore cannot stop it. Mr Pratt cannot stop it. The Governor cannot stop it, nor the Bishop, nor the Home Secretary. It is the one thing in this establishment which is not subject to the Prison Rules." He spread his small hands on his knees. "Very well. If it will not stop, then we shall have to stop asking it to. Everything is going to be in D this Christmas, Mr Gill. Or in G, of which D is the fifth, which comes to the same thing. The rest of the world will have to come to us."

---

Gill went to the carol service because the chaplain asked him, and because it fell in the school holidays, and because he wanted to see.

It was a cold evening, with a fog coming up off the river. He was taken through four doors and across a yard where the gravel had frozen into lumps, and into the chapel, where it was hardly warmer. Three hundred men sat on the benches in grey jackets with their hands in their laps. The officers stood along the walls. In the front row, on chairs that had been brought in, sat the Governor, who was tall and had one arm, and his wife, who had a fur hat, and the Bishop, who was smaller than Gill had expected, and pink, and kept looking at the ceiling. Mr Dunmore stood at the end of the front row, very upright, with his cap under his arm. He was looking at the harmonium the way a man looks at a dog that has been known to bite.

Swales sat at it. He had had his hair cut. Somebody had found him a white shirt that almost fitted.

The chaplain gave out the first carol. Swales put his feet on the pedals and began to pump, and the wind came up, and from the walnut case, before he had touched a single key, there came the D.

It was not a loud note. That was the thing about it. A loud note one could have objected to. It was a mild, reedy, reasonable note, a little nasal, like someone humming who did not know he was humming, and it came out of the harmonium and filled the cream-painted vault and settled there, quite comfortably, and stayed. Three hundred men looked up. Two or three of them laughed. An officer on the left-hand wall said, "Quiet," and they were quiet, and in the quiet the D went on.

The Bishop looked at the harmonium, and then at the Governor. The Governor did not look at anyone. Mr Dunmore's face did not move at all, and Gill, who had taught small boys for nine years, recognised this as the expression of a man who has decided that whatever is about to happen did not happen on his watch.

Then Swales began to play.

The first carol was "While Shepherds Watched," and he played it in D. The D lay under it, as he had said, like a floor. Over it the tune went up and down, plain and square, the way it is printed in the hymn book, and the men stood and began to sing, raggedly at first, and then, finding that the note underneath them did not go away, more firmly, as if they had found something to stand on. Gill sang too. He sang, as he always sang, a little below everyone else and on no note in particular. Nobody turned round.

The second carol was "Once in Royal David's City." Swales took it in G. Gill knew nothing about the key of G. But he could hear, even he, that the D had changed its job, as a man changes his job and remains the same man. It was no longer the floor. It was something nearer a bell, a little above the middle of things, ringing every time the tune came back down to rest and leaning, very gently, against the notes that were not its own. At the third verse Swales drew the VOX HUMANA, and the little fan began to turn inside the case, and the whole instrument trembled, and the D trembled with it. Somewhere at the back a man said, quite loudly, "Blimey," and was not told to be quiet, because the officer nearest him had his mouth open.

The Bishop read the lesson about the shepherds. The Governor read the lesson about the wise men, holding the Bible flat on his one hand and turning the pages with his thumb. The D sounded all the way through both of them, underneath, as the sea sounds underneath conversation in a house near the sea, until nobody heard it any longer, in the way that nobody, after a day or two, hears the sea.

Then, before the last carol, there was a gap in the order of service, and Swales filled it.

Gill did not know what it was at first. It was slow, and it rocked, the way a cradle rocks or a boat, in threes; and under it lay the D, which had been lying under everything all evening, and which, Gill now understood, had been waiting for this. The tune went over it in two voices, twined like a rope. It was very simple and very quiet. The men on the benches had been shifting their feet against the cold; they stopped. The Bishop stopped looking at the ceiling. In the front row the Governor's wife put her gloved hand on the Governor's empty sleeve, and left it there.

It lasted, Gill thought afterwards, about four minutes. When it was over Swales took his feet off the pedals, and the wind sighed out of the instrument, and for the first time that evening the D stopped. The silence it left was so large and so sudden that several people looked round, as if something had been taken out of the room.

Then the chaplain gave out "O Come, All Ye Faithful," in D, and Swales pumped, and the note came back, and everyone stood up.

---

Afterwards, in the corridor, while the men were being taken back to the wings landing by landing, Gill found himself next to the Bishop, who was being helped into his coat.

"Remarkable," said the Bishop. He had a high, pleasant, slightly surprised voice. "I have never heard a harmonium do that."

"It has a cipher, my lord," said Gill. "On the D."

"Has it." The Bishop thought about this. "Then I hope nobody mends it."

Mr Dunmore, who was standing a little way off with his cap under his arm, did not appear to hear. But on the Tuesday after Christmas, Swales told Gill, Mr Pratt had come into the chapel with a bag of tools and an envelope from the Works Department containing a pallet spring, which he had ordered from a firm in Leeds, and had found a note pinned to the harmonium in green ink. The note said: NOT BEFORE EPIPHANY. Mr Pratt had read it, and put the envelope in his pocket, and gone off to look at a drain.

---

They had the chapel to themselves on the Thursday after that, for half an hour, by special permission of the chaplain, with an officer reading the Daily Sketch on a bench at the back.

Swales sat down at the harmonium and pumped. The D came out, as mild and reasonable as ever.

"Now then," he said. "Sing that."

"I can't," said Gill.

"You can't sing a tune. That is a different matter. Nobody is asking you for a tune. I am asking you for one note. It is the same note it has been since Michaelmas. It is not going to move. It is not going to go anywhere. It is the least demanding note in Christendom." He went on pumping. "Open your mouth and say 'ah,' as if for the doctor, and then go up or down until it stops rubbing."

Gill opened his mouth and said "ah." It was too low. He could not hear that it was too low, but he could see Swales hear it, the moustache moving very slightly at one corner, like a sleeper disturbed by a fly.

"Up," said Swales.

Gill went up.

"Too far. Back. Less. Less than that. Stay there." Swales stopped pumping. The bellows sighed out; the harmonium fell silent; and Gill, who had kept his mouth open because nobody had told him to close it, found that the note was still in the room. He was holding it. He was the only thing holding it. It came out of his own chest and went up into the cream-painted vault, a little thin, a little shaky, exactly where the D had been.

He shut his mouth. The officer at the back turned a page.

"That," said Swales, "was a D."

He pushed in the VOX HUMANA, and the little fan inside the case ran down and stopped, and he pushed in the other stops one by one, as a man puts out the lights of a house he is leaving. Then he got up, with one hand on the walnut, and held out the other, and Gill, not knowing what else to do, shook it.

"You'll know it again," said Swales.

Gill walked home that evening by the river, in the fog, with his collar up. Halfway along the embankment, where there was nobody about, he stopped under a lamp, and opened his mouth, and found it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Gerardō Hoffnungō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Gerard Hoffnung, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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