Saturday, February the 5th, 2005

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Jarvis and Cubbit

One of yesterday's three Tales Of The Uncanny featured Jarvis and Cubbit, the bird scientist and his assistant. Dobson filled dozens of notebooks with stories about these characters, whom he conceived as an immortal duo as archetypal as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, or Laurel and Hardy. Alas, the out-of-print pamphleteer had no talent for fiction, and the surviving manuscripts are fragmentary, littered with vague sketches, false starts, and incomprehensible jottings. Jim Pond, newly-appointed Professor of Dobson Studies at the University of Jim Pond & His Immediate Family, has spent countless hours in the archives to prepare a selection of Jarvis and Cubbit stories, and has kindly offered us permission to publish the following, undated, piece.

The bell tower had bells in it, but that was not what caught the attention of Jarvis, the bird scientist.

“Look, you young tyke, there is a bird on the bell tower,” he said to his pneumonia-racked assistant Cubbit, who was doing something foolish with a pair of bicycle clips.

Jarvis pointed at the bird, expecting Cubbit to look, but the spindly youth was distracted by a passing pantechnicon all a-clatter with pots and pans. It was the neighbourhood Windy Man, on his rounds.

Jarvis hated the Windy Man, for his clattering pots and pans made a din that often frightened birds, so that they flew away into the blue majestic skies just as the ornithologist was creeping close with his tweezers and bird beaker. The Windy Man, on the other hand, was passionately in love with Jarvis, and had been ever since he had seen the bird scientist standing on a dais making a bird-related proclamation, years ago, for all the world like an Apollonian god, or so he seemed to the Windy Man. But the Windy Man was shy, and dared not speak of his love, so he pined and felt pangs and was in torment.

Cubbit knew nothing of what is related in that paragraph.

By chance, a snapshot exists of this precise moment. It was taken by a passing camera buff whose fancy had been taken by a pirouetting mechanical nougat-vending machine, all pink and gleaming. There it is to the left in the black-and-white photograph, in front of the bell tower. To the right, in the foreground, we see the back of Cubbit's head, next to a furious-looking Jarvis. Partially obscured behind them is the Windy Man's pantechnicon, on which some of the clattering pots and pans are visible. Sadly, the Windy Man's face is blurred by a smudge or a cloud of gnats or a freakish effulgence of mist and gas. It could be any of those things. In framing his photo, the enthusiast did not include the upper part of the bell tower, so we do not know what kind of bird Jarvis was pointing at, nor whether it was a bird at all, or just a fluttering black napkin borne aloft on a gentle summer breeze, given avian form through the power of Jarvis' unquenchable imagination.

Ever after, he insisted it was a trumpeter swan.