“Well why not begin?” I asked.
“That’s the whole point” he said sadly. “I would not be content with anything less than perfect. And you cannot, it seems to me, do it simply by being nice and well conducted and full of notions—though why the hell not? It’s as if my parents had bought me an expensive wheelbarrow when they sent me to Winchester—and here I am too lazy to garden. It’s despicable.” He struck his calf with his cane and uttered an oath. “On the other hand how can one believe in literature? Nor is the contemporary scene very reassuring for the newcomer. Crowns of rhubarb 1st Class, parsley, sage, rue. Tinsel for the new boys. Then the allocation of honorary titles like ‘The Thrush of Finchingfield’. This is more than a little dispiriting.”
“Well I don’t know what to suggest.”
“Of course you don’t: nor do I. And here is time flying by and I’m putting on weight. Soon I shall be only fit to write the history of Adipose Rex—sorry!”
We arrived at last at the intersection of streets where Sacrapant had promised to meet me; Vibart hung on, talking, unwilling to relinquish a listener.
“I have mislaid myself” he announced with a grandiose gesture of his stick in the direction of the Grand Bazaar. “E quindi uscimmo a riverder le stelle—but where do I fit in, please tell me? Shall I carve myself a niche among the waterbabies of socialism—the songsters of the back passage? Or contract criticism, that superior form of blood poisoning? Shall I present as a Protestant Radical—one who will not take yes for an answer? Or is reticence the better part of valour? Shall I focus my 200 rabbit power eyes on the future and stay mum?”
I persuaded him to allay his vexation somewhat by entering a café with me to have a mastika; here he continued with this unwearying self-examination for my benefit. “I have mapped out my whole career more than once. I have even written my own press book. ‘Full of characteristic felicities and written at gale force. Who is this Vibart? We must know.’ (Sheffield Clarion): or ‘Subtle, thought-provoking and full of lovely mince’ (The Times): or ‘Ecstasy to riffle and give away’ (Vogue). I am already at the height of my career. How did I achieve this transcendent position? I became so thin they gave me the Nobelly Prize and a whole page in the Literary Sacrament….”
“It won’t do, Vibart.”
“I know it won’t. Comely of form was he, but with the temperament of a field-mouse. Damn. Damn.”
All this of course masked a very real dilemma; I saw that to accuse himself of vainglory, narcissism, selfishness and so on was something more than just a defence; on the one hand it earned him kudos for honesty and insight—on the other it absolved him from doing anything about it. But then, on the other hand, why should he? I liked him the way he was. Besides one day he might shake the drops off and address himself honestly to life. “Well keep trying” I said. “And I’ll get in touch with you in a day or two about the contracts.” He took his leave with many a sad cautionary head-shaking, and I watched the tall athletic figure slipping away through the warrens of the souk. And here, as if by magic, Mr. Sacrapant appeared at my elbow with his characteristic air of piety. He gazed moistly at me and clasped his hands together. “Have you joined us, Mr. Charlock? Have you signed?” For some reason this incessant harping had begun to get on my nerves. “No I have not” said stoutly with a mulish expression. “I have left them to be carefully examined. It will take a day or two.”
He gave a disappointed sigh, and then shrugged his shoulders. He looked inexpressibly saddened and pained—I suppose by my suspicious hesitations over joining the firm. I saw him suddenly—a grey-haired, winged and ithyphallic little man off some shattered Phrygian marbles, standing there eternally with that look of sadness, but silent now, silent as rain on fleece. Elias Sacrapant Esq. He stood upon the axis drawn by intersecting arcades, silent and friendly. “Let us talk of other things” I said. “What about this political meeting you want monitored?”
Sacrapant came down to earth at once and took on the aspect of a conspirator; he leaned forward, after a glance around him, and said: “I was going to bring that up today. I knew you had been approached. It would be just a minute or two. They meet every evening, about six, all this week. So you could choose your time.” I reflected. “You know,” I said “I have left one of my boxes in my room at the Pera. If you like we could get it and do the job this very evening. What do you say?”
Sacrapant’s eyes kindled. “Good. Excellent. The sooner Mr. Pehlevi knows the truth the better for the firm. I will go down and tell the launch to wait for us, and then taxi up to join you at the hotel. You will walk I presume? Well, we have time, we have time.”
I fell in with his wishes, and woolgathered my way back to the hotel where I tested my machine and the spare microphone. Then I lay on my bed and dozed off incontinently—to dream a confused dream of childless blue-stockings lecturing to Vibart on the novel.
Little bas bleu
Come blow up my horn
And sanction a tumble
Amid the green corn,
My pretty blue stocking
My supercherie
With prune and with prism
Fandangle with me.
I awoke with a start to find myself looking down the barrel of a pistol. I cried out incoherently and Mr. Sacrapant burst into a thin peal of delighted laughter. “It isn’t loaded of course” he said. “But how was I to know that?” He became all contrition. “I am sorry. But I have been told to take some weapon with me. In case.”
“In case what?”
“You never know.”
I began to feel indignant. “Look here, I wasn’t told that there was any danger about this performance.”
“There isn’t theoretically. None at all.”
He slipped the weapon shyly into an inner breast pocket and pulled his coat down. “In a while we can start” he said.
It was my first introduction to the fantastic honeycomb of ancient cisterns upon which the city appears to have been built. Afterwards I returned to explore them in some detail, but on this occasion we found our way to the Yeri Batan Serai—the Underground Palace built by Justinian under the portico of the Basilica itself. Its entry was an obscure hole—like a shaft dug into a tumulus. A leather and wooden door, fastened with wire, marked the entry to the long flight of steps which led downwards at a steep angle to the water’s edge. Here Mr. Sacrapant, true to form, produced a couple of pocket torches. It was awe-inspiring to plunge down all of a sudden into this watery cathedral. The symmetrical rows of columns stretched away on all sides in extraordinary perspectives, picking up the light and shadow simultaneously. The depth, the gloom, the reverberation of our footsteps on the staircase swelled the sense of mystery; moreover from one of the darker corners—across the long lanes of dark water which threw wobbling shadows into the heavy vaulting overhead—I saw a light. Mr. Sacrapant whistled, but very softly; and he was answered after a pause by a replica of the sound, soft and mellifluous. The light approached us now, and I saw that it was on the prow of a small skiff, being rowed by a single old Turk who wore a fez. “Come” breathed Mr. Sacrapant, and held the nose of the boat steady for me to climb in with my gear. Then lithe as a lizard he leaped in after me, and we set off down these long dark galleries of water. The rower propelled his boat noiselessly with a simple twisting motion of the oars, standing upright and never letting the blades rise to the water-surface. It was fearfully damp; the least sound—crepitation of water in the caverns, peppering of sand falling from the roof—became blown up, magnified, hazy. None of us spoke. The rower seemed to know his destination. Mr. Sacrapant sat forward flashing his torch upon the darkness ahead. His lips moved. He was it seemed counting the columns, for presently he muttered a figure under his breath and tapped a signal on the back of the Turk, who turned the boat at a sharp angle, and set off down a side-gallery. We came at last to a shallow flight of stairs—a sort of water-gate—which led upwards into the throat of the cistern, so to speak; it pierced the ceiling with a rotten tra
p of wood. This was our objective, or so it seemed. Here Sacrapant began to behave with a good deal of muffled circumspection, using gestures and mime wherever they might replace spoken words. The staircase was solid enough, but the heavy recorder was a clumsy thing to man haul, particularly in the dancing uncertain light of the little torches. However we managed the operation without mishap; and now I followed the lanyard-like figure upwards into the gloom, along a cob-webbed corridor, and then upwards again. He was hunting along the wall of a particular place. The white light jumped and flicked along the gloomy stone facings—the ground floor of a deserted subterranean Venice I thought to myself as I followed him, by this time feeling more than a touch of apprehension. Blind man’s fingers. I had not visualised this sort of exploit when Pehlevi spoke to me about my recorders. But it was now too late to withdraw and show a white flag. Sacrapant skidded along the corridors in lizard fashion until at last he came to a marked stone in the wall. He produced a pocket knife and, beckoning me to preserve an absolute silence, inserted it in the interstices of the stone to exercise leverage on it. It came away with relative ease and on his invitation I took a look into a sort of flue which I was soon to realise was that of a vast fireplace. The hole, admirably camouflaged, stood about six feet above ground level.
As far as the room was concerned there seemed to be a meeting already going on; chairs scraped, the hum of voices swelled and subsided. It was all barks and glottal stops to me. For my part all I had to do was to let a microphone dangle as low as possible above the hearth and start printing this medley of sound. Pertinacious Mr. Sacrapant seemed now to be in an agony of apprehension; he stood on one leg and then on the other. Why? The operation was a simple one and it was not very long before I saw my blue pilot nodding away at me in the gloom, and heard the soft whirr of the machine “taking”. Down below in the board room or officers’ mess or whatever the place might be, new voices came up. Some sort of speech of welcome was made; measured and sententious sentences without subsidiary clauses, following one another in dactylic progression. I had copied for about ten minutes when Sacrapant signalled me to cut out. It was quite enough, he contorted; and so I began to pull in my line like some benighted fisherman and swash up my equipment. And here all at once there was a hitch. My line must somehow have dislodged a small stone or pebble from the interior of the flue—for something fell into the fireplace with a clatter, bouncing on the iron firedogs. At once I was aware that the inhabitants of the room below had been alerted by this sound. Voices came up the flue now—they were trying to look up the chimney. I hauled in like mad; it was not a moment to hang about. Sacrapant hopped and cajoled me to hurry up. For my part I did not even wait to replace the stone, so infectious was the little man’s anxiety. I hulked the stuff down and jumped into the boat; Sacrapant followed, but as he did so his little pistol slid out of his pocket and into the dark water with a splash. The Charon-like Turk was now urged to carry us away from the place at all speed; but he was typical of his leaden unhurried race, and so we set off at the same funeral pace, moving at right angles to one set of pillars. We had extinguished the light of the boat, and depended for direction on an occasional torch-blink from Sacrapant. So we scored our slow way across the inky water of the cavern. Suddenly, far away to the right, there came a gleam of yellow light—as if from a door which had been thrown open—and one heard the nibble of voices. After a moment’s delay—perhaps for deliberation—we heard the snickering of pistol-shots ricocheting from the vaults and falling in the water. It was not clear whether they were aiming at us or not but the sound was ominous. Mr. Sacrapant with great prudence lay down in the bottom of the boat and complained about feeling sea-sick. The Turk was completely unmoved and plodded on towards our own landing-stage. I tried as far as possible to sit in a position which would have shielded me from our aggressors, though their exact whereabouts as well as the direction of their fire was somewhat in doubt. It seemed to take an age before we grazed the landing-stage and bumped to a halt. By now we were far away from the scene of our imprudence and it seemed possible to use the torches again; we paid off the old man and clambered out into a surprise—for darkness had already fallen upon the city. Nor did it seem possible even at this early hour to find a taxi so we were forced to content ourselves with a horse-drawn cab which jogged us, juddering and swaying, down to the Galata bridge where the launch waited, its captain smoking patiently on the bridge.
We dined late that night, but on the same balcony overlooking the darkened garden, and this time my host was in high spirits at the success of our operation of the evening; Sacrapant was invited to dinner throughout which he sat in a daze of self-congratulation. “We were shot at” he repeated wonderingly more than once. “Mr. Charlock and I were shot at.” I said nothing about him lying in the sheets, or about my heroic attempt to shield myself behind the rower. We were heroes. Bravo, Felix! I was only sorry that the mysterious Benedicta was not there to share in all this grandeur; but she had crossed over to the Asiatic side, and was to meet us next morning for a day’s falconry. “You know, don’t you, that she has been very ill?” said Jocas Pehlevi in what seemed on the face of it an inconsequential aside. It had nothing to do with the preceding conversation. I could not quite decide whether his tone implied a warning or the registration of a simple piece of information. But the phrase cracked open a new area of comprehension. Pausing for thought, I understood now the secret source of that striking and distracted gaze—the source of what I called her beauty. It was not simply the happy disposition of features, it was the sadness and withdrawnness of her illness—the fragmentation of neurasthenia—which gave her the air of someone distractedly listening to an interior monologue, a private musical score. The total solipsism of … but I won’t say it: why offend the doctors? But if she had not had this she might have seemed as commonplace as half a hundred good-looking blonde girls; with it she achieved a kind of legendary quality—a sick muse embedded in a statue of flesh and bone. This realisation so kindled my sympathy that I hardly heard Jocas saying: “Now can we hear your records please?” I came to myself with a start. “Yes, of course.”
I had been somewhat doubtful about the quality of my recording, but here again luck held. It was pronounced clear. Jocas listened with intense concentration, smoking a cigar, head down; but after the fourth repetition he said with a sigh of relief: “It was not Mahmud was it?” Sacrapant shook his head joyfully. “Then we will not have to act for the time being” said Jocas. “Good. Good.”
The conversation shifted crabwise to other and more impersonal matters which did not concern me, and I turned my attention adrift, not surprised that it wandered off in the direction of Benedicta, recalling all the minutae of her behaviour and appearance as if to find in each fragment a specimen of the sick beauty which had once become her master. I excused myself early that night, as we were due to set off before dawn, and made my way back to my waterside bungalow. I took off all my clothes and went over my body point by point, holding up the light in the mirror the better to study it. I did not know why I was doing this—nor did I ask myself any questions. But afterwards I sat down in despair on the bed and said aloud: “Is this what it is like?” What was I talking about? I don’t know. I found my beauty unconvincing I suppose! Moreover to add to this feeling of horrible dispersion and inadequacy there came its twin—the conviction that I had made a choice that was as bad as it was irrevocable! But, O dear, how clearly I saw that face! Nevertheless the realisation must have cleared the air, so to speak, for that night I slept the dreamless sleep of early childhood. Iolanthe must have been dreaming about me.
As for Benedicta herself I must confess that I had seen her before, in a manner of speaking. The gesture with which Iolanthe sank down upon the carpet and drew forth the greasy little pack of playing-cards always heralded a prolonged scrutiny of the auspices, an evaluation of her future and mine; she kept them separate even then, out of who knows what sad tact? And, youthful and self-sufficient boor that I was, I har
dly noticed the crestfallen tones in which she might say: “Our story is coming to an end for many years. Soon I shall go from you, and the other will come, the widow. She will be sadder than I, much sadder. I see many doors around her, and all of them closed.” I yawn, of course, in the manner of one who has known (as Caradoc would say) “des femmes de toutes les caté-gorilles”. We scientific chaps cannot countenance divination by aces and spades. “My story is one of riches, riches, but much dissatisfaction, much unhappiness. Then look, we meet again in another country—but it will be too late to start again. Meanwhile the widow will hold you. She is fair. You will recognise her by her right foot—something is wrong with it.”
“A cripple? Does she limp?”