Presently, by means of an agency, he invited the wife of the American minister to dance with him. The other couples fell back. With gravity and grace he led Mrs Schonbaum into the centre, danced with her twice round the room, led her back to her table, bowed and returned to his box.
‘Why, he dances beautifully,’ reported Mrs Schonbaum. ‘I often wonder what they would say back home to see me dancing with a man of colour.’
‘I do pray he comes and dances with Mum,’ said Prudence. ‘Do you think it’s any use me trying to vamp him, or does he only go for wives?’
The evening went on.
‘The maître d’hôtel approached Prince Fyodor in some distress.
‘Highness, they are complaining about the champagne.’
‘Who are?’
‘The French Legation.’
‘Tell them we will make a special price for them.’
‘….Highness, more complaints of the champagne.’
‘Who this time?’
‘The Duke of Ukaka.’
‘Take away the bottle, pour in a tumbler of brandy and bring it back.’
‘… Highness, is it proper to serve the Minister of the Interior with more wine? He is pouring it in his lady’s lap.’
‘It is proper. You ask questions like an idiot.’
The English party began to play consequences on the menu cards. They were of the simplest sort: The amorous Duke of Ukaka met the intoxicated Mine Ballon in the Palace w.c. He said to her ‘Floreat Azania’ …
‘Envoy, if you laugh so much we’ll have to stop playing.’
‘Upon my soul, though, that’s funny.’
‘Mum, do you think that young man with the Connollys is the one who called?’
‘I dare say. We must ask him to something some time. Perhaps he’ll be here for the Christmas luncheon … but he seems to have plenty of friends already.’
‘Mum, don’t be snobbish — particularly now Connolly’s a Duke. Do let’s have him to everything always …
Basil said, ‘I’ve been trying to catch the Emperor’s eye. I don’t believe he remembers me.’
‘The old boy’s on rather a high horse now the war’s over. He’ll come down a peg when the bills start coming in. They’ve brought us a better bottle of fizz this time. Like Fyodor’s impudence trying to palm off that other stuff on us.’
‘I wonder if it would be possible to arrange an audience.’
‘Look here, old boy, have you come here to enjoy yourself or have you not? I’ve been in camp with that Emperor off and on for the last six months and I want to forget him. Give Black Bitch some bubbly and help yourself and for the love of Mike talk smut.’
‘Monsieur Jean, something terrible has come to my knowledge,’ said the French second secretary.
‘Tell me,’ said the first secretary.
‘I can scarcely bring myself to do so. It affects the honour of the Minister’s wife.’
‘Incredible. Tell me at once. It is your duty to France.’
‘For France then … when affected by wine she made an assignation with the Duke of Ukaka. He loves her.’
‘Who would have thought it possible? Where?’
‘In the toilette at the Palace.’
‘But there is no toilette at the Palace.’
‘Sir Samson Courteney has written evidence to that effect. The paper has been folded into a narrow strip. No doubt it was conveyed to him by one of his spies. Perhaps in a roll of bread.’
‘Extraordinary. We will keep this from the Minister. We will watch, ourselves. It is a secret between us. No good can come of it. Alas, poor Monsieur Ballon. He trusted her. We must prevent this thing.’
‘For France.’
‘For France and Monsieur Ballon.’
‘… I have never observed Madame Ballon the worse for drink …‘
Paper caps were resumed: bonnets of liberty, conical dunce’s hats, jockey caps, Napoleonic casques, hats for pierrots and harlequins, postmen, highlanders, old Mothers Hubbard and little Misses Muffet over faces of every complexion, brown as boots, chalk white, dun and the fresh boiled pink of Northern Europe. False noses again: brilliant sheaths of pigmented cardboard attached to noses of every anthropological type, the high arch of the Semite, freckled Nordic snouts, broad black nostrils from swamp villages of the mainland, the pulpy inflamed flesh of the alcoholic, and unlovely syphilitic voids. Ribbons of coloured papers tangled and snapped about the dancers’ feet; coloured balls volleyed from table to table. One, erratically thrown by Madame Fifi, bounced close to the royal box; the Minister of the Interior facetiously applauded her aim. Prince Fyodor glanced anxiously about him. His patrons were beginning to enjoy themselves. If only the Emperor would soon leave; an incident might occur at any moment.
But Seth sat alone among the palms and garlands, apparently deep in thought; his fingers fidgeted with the stem of his wine glass; sometimes, without raising his head, he half furtively surveyed the room. The equerries behind his chair despaired of permission to dance. If only His Majesty would go home, they could slip back before the fun was all over …
‘Old boy, your pal the Great Panjandrum is something of a damper on this happy throng. Why can’t the silly mutt go off home and leave us to have a jolly up?’
‘Can’t conceive why young Seth doesn’t move. Can’t be enjoying himself.’
But the Emperor sat tight. This was the celebration of his Victory. This was the society of Debra Dowa. There was the British Minister happy as a parent at a children’s party. There was the Minister of the Interior, behaving hideously. There was the Commander-in-Chief of the Azanian army. And with him was Basil Seal. Seth recognized him in his first grave survey of the restaurant and suddenly, on this triumphal night in his own capital, he was overcome by shyness. It was nearly three years since they last met and Seth recalled the light drizzle of rain in the Oxford quadrangle, a scout carrying a tray of dirty plates, a group of undergraduates in tweeds lounging about among bicycles in the porch. He had .been an undergraduate of no account in his College, amiably classed among Bengali babus, Siamese, and grammar school scholars as one of the remote and praiseworthy people who had come a long way to the University. Basil had enjoyed a reputation of peculiar brilliance among his contemporaries. On the rare occasions when evangelically minded undergraduates asked Seth to tea or coffee, his name occurred in the conversation with awed disapproval. He played poker for high stakes. His luncheon parties lasted until dusk, his dinner parties dispersed in riot. Lovely young women visited him from London in high-powered cars. He went away for week-ends without leave and climbed into College over the tiles at night. He had travelled all over Europe, spoke six languages, called dons by their Christian names and discussed their books with them.
Seth had met him at breakfast with the Master of the College. Basil had talked to him about Azanian topography, the Nestorian Church, Sakuyu dialects, the idiosyncrasies of the chief diplomats in Debra Dowa. Two days hater he invited him to luncheon. There had been two peers present and the President of the Union, the editor of a new undergraduate paper and a young don. Seth had sat silent and entranced throughout the afternoon. Later, after long consultation with his scout, he had returned the invitation. Basil accepted and at the last moment made his excuses for not coming. There the acquaintance had ended. Three years had intervened, during which Seth had become Emperor, but Basil still stood for him as the personification of all that glittering, intangible Western culture to which he aspired. And there he was, unaccountably, at the Connollys’ table. What must he be thinking? If only the Minister for the Interior were more sober …
The maitre d’hôtel again approached Prince Fyodor.
‘Highness, there is someone at the door who I do not think should be admitted.’
‘I will see him.’
But as he turned to the door, the newcomer appeared. He was a towering Negro in full gala dress: on his head a lion’s-mane busby; on his shoulders a shapeless fur mantle; a red satin skirt
; brass bangles and a necklace of lion’s teeth; a long, ornamental sword hung at his side; two bandoliers of brass cartridges circled his great girth; he had small bloodshot eyes and a tousle of black wool over his cheeks and chin. Behind him stood six unsteady slaves carrying antiquated rifles.
It was one of the backwoods peers, the Earl of Ngumo, feudal overlord of some five hundred square miles of impenetrable highland territory. He had occupied himself ‘throughout the civil war in an attempt to mobilize his tribesmen. The battle of Ukaka occurring before the levy was complete, saved him the embarrassment of declaring him-self for either combatant. He had therefore left his men in the hills and marched down with a few hundred personal attendants to pay his respects to the victorious side. His celebrations had lasted for some days already and had left some mark upon even his rugged constitution.
Prince Fyodor hurried forward. ‘The tables are all engaged. I regret very much that there is no room. We are full up.’
The Earl blinked dully and said, ‘I will have a table, some gin and some women and some raw camel’s meat for my men outside.’
‘But there is no table free.’
‘Do not be put out. That is a simple matter. I have some soldiers with me who will quickly find room.’
The band had stopped playing and a hush fell on the crowded restaurant; scared faces under the paper hats and false noses.
‘Under the table, B lack Bitch,’ said Connolly. ‘There’s going to be a rough house.’
Mr Youkoumian’s plump back disappeared through the service door.
‘Now what’s happening?’ said the British Minister. ‘Someone’s up to something, I’ll be bound.’
But at that moment the Earl’s bovine gaze, moving up the rows of scared faces to its natural focus among the palms and bunting, reached the Emperor. His hand fell to the jewelled hilt of his sword — and twenty hands in various parts of the room felt for pistols and bottle necks — a yard of tarnished damascene flashed into the light and with a roar of homage lie sank to his knees in the centre of the polished floor.
Seth rose and folded his hands in the traditional gesture of welcome.
‘Peace be upon your house, Earl.’
The vassal rose and Prince Fyodor’s perplexities were solved by the departure of the royal party.
‘I will have that table, ‘ said the Earl, pointing to the vacated box.
And soon, quite unconscious of the alarm he had caused, with a bottle of M. Youkoumian’s gin before him, and a vast black cheroot between his teeth, the magnate was pacifically winking at the ladies as they danced past him.
Outside the royal chauffeur was asleep and only with difficulty could be awakened. The sky was ablaze with stars; dust hung in the cool air, fragrant as crushed herbs; from the Ngumo camp, out of sight below the eucalyptus trees, came the thin smoke of burning dung and the pulse and throb of the hand drummers. Seth drove back alone to the black hitter of pal ace buildings.
‘Insupportable barbarians,’ he thought. ‘I am sure that. the English lords do not behave in that way before their King. Even my loyalest officers are ruffians and buffoons. If I had one man by me whom I could trust … a man of progress and culture …’
Six weeks passed. The victorious army slowly demobilized and dispersed over the hills in a hundred ragged companies; livestock and women in front, warriors behind laden with alarm clocks and nondescript hardware looted in the bazaars; soldiers of progress and the new age homeward bound to the villages.
The bustle subsided and the streets of Matodi resumed their accustomed calm: copra, cloves, mangoes and khat; azan and angelus; old women with obdurate donkeys; trays of pastry black with flies; shrill voices in the mission school reciting the catechism; lepers and pedlars, and Arab gentlemen with shabby gamps decently parading the water-front at the close of day. In the derelict van outside the railway station, a patient black family repaired the ravages of invasion with a careful architecture of mud, twigs, rag and flattened petrol tins.
Two mail ships outward bound from Marseilles, three on the home journey from Madagascar and Indo-China paused for their normal six hours in the little bay. Four times the train puffed up from Matodi and Debra Dowa; palm belt, lava fields, bush and upland; thin cattle scattered over the sparse fields; shallow furrows in the brittle earth; white-gowned Azanian ploughboys scratching up furrows with wooden ploughs; conical grass roofs in stockades of euphorbia and cactus; columns of smoke from the tukal fires, pencil-drawn against the clear sky.
Vernacular hymns in the tin-roofed missions, ancient liturgy in the murky Nestorian sanctuaries; tonsure and turban, hand drums and innumerable jingling bells of debased silver. And beyond the hills on the low Wanda coast where no liners called and the jungle stretched unbroken to the sea, other more ancient rites and another knowledge furtively encompassed; green, sunless paths; forbidden ways unguarded save for a wisp of grass plaited between two stumps, ways of death and initiation, the forbidden places of juju and the masked dancers; the drums of the Wanda throbbing in sunless, forbidden places.
Fanfare and sennet; tattoo of kettle drums; tricolour bunting strung from window to window across the Boulevard Amurath, from Levantine café to Hindu drugstore; Seth in his Citroen drove to lay the foundation stone of the Imperial Institutes of Hygiene; brass band of the Imperial army raised the dust of the main street. Floreat Azania.
Chapter Five
On the south side of the Palace Compound, between the kitchen and the stockade, lay a large irregular space where the oxen were slaughtered for the public banquets. A minor gallows stood there which was used for such trivial, domestic executions as now and then became necessary within the royal household. The place was deserted now except for the small cluster of puzzled blacks who were usually congregated round the headquarters of the One Year Plan and a single dog who gnawed her hindquarters in the patch of shadow cast by two corpses, which rotated slowly face to face, half circle East, half circle West, ten foot high in the limpid morning sunlight.
The Ministry of Modernization occupied what had formerly been the old Empress’ oratory; a circular building of concrete and corrugated iron, its outer wall enriched with posters from all parts of Europe and the United States advertising machinery, fashion and foreign travel. The display was rarely without attendance and today the customary loafers were reinforced by five or six gentlemen in the blue cotton cloaks which the official class of Debra Dowa assumed in times of bereavement. These were mourners for the two criminals — peculators and perjurers both — who had come to give a dutiful tug at their relatives’ heels in case life might not yet be extinct, and had stayed to gape, entranced by the manifestations of Progress and the New Age.
On the door was a board painted in Arabic, Sakuyu and French with the inscription:
MINISTRY OF MODERNIZATION
HIGH COMMISSIONER & COMPTROLLER GENERAL:
MR BASIL SEAL
FINANCIAL SECRETARY: MR KRIKOR YOUKOUMIAN
A vague smell of incense .and candle-grease still possessed the interior; in all other ways it had been completely trans-formed. Two partitions divided it into unequal portions. The largest was’ Basil’s office, which contained nothing except some chairs, a table littered with maps and memoranda, and a telephone. Next door Mr Youkoumian had induced a more homely note: his work was economically confined to two or three penny exercise-books filled with figures and indecipherable jottings, but his personality extended itself and pervaded the room, finding concrete expression in the seedy red plush sofa that he had scavenged from one of the state apartments, the scraps of clothing hitched negligently about the furniture, the Parisian photographs pinned to the walls, the vestiges of food on enamelled tin plates, the scent spray, cigarette ends, spittoon and the little spirit-stove over which perpetually simmered a brass pan of coffee. It was his idiosyncrasy to prefer working in stockinged feet, so that when he was at his post a pair of patent leather, elastic-sided boots proclaimed his presence from the window-ledge.
In the vestibule sat a row of native runners with whose services the modernizing party were as yet unable to dispense.
At nine in the morning both Basil and Mr Youkoumian were at their desks. Instituted a month previously by royal proclamation, the Ministry of Modernization was already a going concern. Just how far it was going, indeed, was appreciated by very few outside its circular placarded walls. Its function as defined in Seth’s decree was ‘to promote the adoption of modern organization and habits of life throughout the Azanian Empire’ which, liberally interpreted, comprised the right of interference in most of the public and private affairs of the nation. As Basil glanced through the correspondence that awaited him and the rough agenda for the day, he felt ready to admit that anyone but himself and Mr Youkoumian would have bitten off more than he could chew. Reports from eight provincial viceroys on a questionnaire concerning the economic resources and population of their territory — documents full of ponderous expressions of politeness and the minimum of trustworthy information; detailed recommendations from the railway authorities at Matodi; applications for concessions from European prospectors; inquiries from tourist bureaux about the possibilities of big-game hunting, surf bathing and mountaineering; applications for public appointments; protests from missions and legations; estimates for building; details of court etiquette and precedence — everything seemed to find its way to Basil’s table. The other ministers of the crown had not yet begun to feel uneasy about their own positions. They regarded Basil’s arrival as a direct intervention of heaven on their behalf. Here was an Englishman who was willing to leave them their titles and emoluments and take all the work off their hands. Each was issued with the rubber stamp REFER TO BUREAU OF MODERNIZATION, and in a very few days the Minister of the Interior, the Lord Chamberlain, the Justiciar, the City Governor, and even Seth himself, acquired the habit of relegating all decisions to Basil with one firm stab of indelible ink. Two officials alone, the Nestorian patriarch and the Commander-in-Chief of the army, failed to avail themselves of the convenient new institution, but continued to muddle through the routine of their departments in the same capricious, dilatory but independent manner as before the establishment of the new régime.