Kitabı oku: «The Mulberry Empire», sayfa 4
9.
And so, when the infidel had been fed, and watered, and dismissed for the day, Dost Mohammed looked out over his city. Dost Mohammed, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, son of Usaf, son of Yaru, son of Mohammed, son of Omar, son of Khizar, son of Ismail, son of Nek, son of Daru, son of Saifal, son of Barak, son of Abdal, Abdal the Great, father of the Afghans, Heir of Israel, Lord of the Wind, Emperor of the distant horizons; Dost Mohammed looked over the city in his easy splendour, and, in the empty room, let his marvellous mind fill with guile. No noise of feeling crumpled his face, and he thought as long as he could about the English. They, surely, would be useful; the heavy useful English, having money and guns and land, could usefully help the Amir to stay just as he was, just where he was, and continue in his usual ways, without offering interference, preventing trouble without knowing, exactly, what they were doing. Presently the call of the imam to prayer drifted up from the city. Dost Mohammed began, quite slowly, on his devotions. As he rose and fell, his head lifting and dropping over the divine flawed complexity of the prayer-mat, his lips muttering in the empty room, his mind continued to dwell, quite properly, on punishment. It was the Amir’s duty each night to determine the punishments to be visited on wrongdoers the next day, and it was to this which, in prayer, he now turned his mind. From the mosques in the city, a rumbling muttering of prayer filled the city with noise, thousands of the devout rising and falling, a single huge multiple sound, and Dost Mohammed rose and fell in prayer, and thought of violence. The wrongdoers the next day were a various bunch. Low thieves, the adulterous twelve-year-old wife of one of the sons of the Amir, the rebellious chief of a tribe whose lands lay just within the uncertain shifting borders of the kingdom. Hanging and beheading and dragging behind horses for the thieves, as was ordained. The adulterous princess to be thrown down the well of the Bala Hissar itself.
And, for the seditious leader – Dost Mohammed thought hard. He despised rebellion, because it always failed; and failure was what Dost Mohammed despised most, being a blot on the face of God. His head lifted and lowered above the glowing ruby prayer-mat, and for the moment he could not think of any punishment. Then he remembered the decreed fate of Sayad Ata, in his youth; he had been caught in rebellion. His fate had been to be tied down on his breast while an elephant trampled on him. Dost Mohammed, deep in prayer, remembered the devout, righteous and splendid sight of the death of Sayad Ata; how the unworthy descendant of the Prophet himself had groaned and wailed at the approach of the beast! How his followers had groaned in the crowd, not understanding where the path of right had led, as if a thousand elephants were approaching, to tread on them! How his shrieks had been stopped, like a finger placed over the hole in a leaking whistling goatskin, as his bones, all at once, had cracked and popped! How grand and dreadful the sudden gouts of blood from every orifice, bursting out like a spirit-witness to the Faith, spilling into the dust! How right and good, the decreed end of Sayad Ata! Rising and falling in his devotions, his mind filling with the happy contemplation of the exercise of justice and right, the Amir quite forgot that some other means of execution would have to be found for tomorrow’s rebellious tribesman, there being, at the moment, no imperial elephant to be had. What had happened to the imperial elephant Dost Mohammed could not, for the moment, quite recollect; whether the dingy, foul-tempered, foul-smelling and noisy beast had been borrowed by some fool son, given to another recalcitrant tribe as an expensive joke, or had simply wandered off into the hills, Dost Mohammed could not think, so firmly fixed was his mind on the imperial devotions, the imperial punishments. But soon the great Amir, son of Sarfraz, son of Hajji Jamal, all the way back to Abdal and the Heir of Israel himself, would have to think up some new way of putting the better class of criminal to death. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would ask the infidel if he wanted to come and see the executions. Tomorrow, indeed, he would ask the infidel how criminals were put to death in Engelstan. The infidel, after all, was bound to be full of ingenious new ideas.
At the other side of the city, the infidel was sitting or standing, and not saying anything much. Gerard had taken off his full dress uniform, and was sitting in his long thick smalls, holding but not reading a book; his mouth pursed in concentration, he was staring over the top, examining the clean rough floor. Mohan Lal had absented himself, and was in the latrines. Burnes, standing at the window, was giving way to an unfamiliar sensation, the slow scarlet flashes of terror. He had expected relief after his audience with the Amir. He had met emperors before, had met with the great of the Company and the Government. He had been ushered into the presence of the jewelled savage potentates of the East, had sat with tyrants whose teeth were blacked and pointed, as with the blood of their own children, and each time, before, had experienced the same sequence of events. Before, there had been a sort of dread, suppressed by the will like a child’s balloon held to the ground by a spreading fist; then the willed exercise of confidence as the great savage potentate, whether a pantomime cannibal king or a savage director of the Company in his Bloomsbury palace, turned his eyes to the pink-and-white stripling and listened to the cautious opinions, buried in carefully lavish flatteries. And afterwards, that sense of relief, as the fist let the balloon go and the dread flew away, away, leaving only a nervous flurry of chat.
Now Burnes did not want to chat. He felt no relief. He felt no nervousness. He felt only the same terror he had felt before they had set off for the Amir’s palace, and the kindness of the Amir only augmented the terror he had felt at his quizzing presence. All at once, he felt the full imperial splendour of the Amir’s mind, of which he had been permitted to glimpse only the merest fraction; he had recognized that here was no ostentatious potentate, but the weight and show of the imperial, the Napoleonic mind up there could not be greater if it buried itself in rubies. He was not, to be perfectly honest, quite sure what if anything had happened to them, up there in the Bala Hissar; only that tomorrow it was going to happen again. Tomorrow, they would go back, and tomorrow it would be the same. He would walk through the hard-packed mud streets, corralled between horses, walking between hot flanks in his thick shining uniform, and feel himself drenched in sweat and dread.
There was an itch there in him, there, in his hands, and, for the first time since arriving in Kabul, he went to his pack, and took out his notebook, a knife, and the last scrap of a pencil. Slowly, paying no attention to the others in the room, he cut away at the stump, baring the lead, and then squatted on the floor. He took the pencil in his itching hand, and began to write.
‘The Afghans,’ he wrote, ‘are a nation of children; in their quarrels they fight, and become friends without any ceremony. They cannot conceal their feelings from one another, and a person with any discrimination may at all times pierce their designs. No people are more incapable of managing an intrigue. I was particularly struck with their idleness; they seem to sit listlessly for the whole day, staring at each other; how they live it would be difficult to discover, yet they dress well, and are healthy and happy.’
While he wrote, the itch, the uneasy fear, seemed to pass, as he described what he was so certain of, and seemed to bring the Afghans who surrounded them, every one under the point of his pencil. Now, as he wrote, they were a nation of children, and he, describing them, felt for the moment quite safe. But as he stopped and stared at the wall, the feeling returned. ‘I imbibed a very favourable impression,’ he wrote, ‘of their national character.’
10.
Under the lighted window, five squatting men sat, their attention focused on the eldest of them, his beard thick and square and white on his brown face, like a silver spade. Sadiq, older than he could tell, was telling them a story. His stories were not princesses in gardens and wizards and magic rings, but stories of this city, stories of the past. He was telling them what their fathers had told them many times, the story of how the brave, the great Futteh Khan, great brother of the Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, met his end at the hands of the stinking enemy. They knew the story, had heard it a hundred times, from their fathers, their mothers, and, dozens of times, many many dozens of times, sitting just here, squatting against the wall, listening to just such a storyteller as the fierce-eyed Sadiq, rousing them to vengeance, muttering into the listening night. ‘And when the Vizier Futteh Khan returned, the treacherous Prince Kamran, chief of the stinking Suddozyes, he fell on him, and seized him, and his eyes were put out. And when he was blind and powerless he was not left to wander the deserts to beg for pity, powerless as he was, but was sliced, and cut, and yet he suffered all in silence. First the treacherous Prince Kamran demanded that he and his brothers surrender to the Persian Emperor, and the Vizier refused. And so Atta Mahmoud Khan, may his torments in hell be unending, sliced off his ear, and another the other ear, and a third his nose. And all the time they lied and said the Vizier had done them wrong. May we rise up and avenge the Vizier and all his enemies! And then his right hand and then his left, and all these torments and lies the Vizier Futteh Khan bore silently and without a sound, as the blood gushed from his face and the stumps of his arms like the fount of a river in spring, so brave was he; but when his enemies took his beard, and with their knives cut it from his face, he wept from his bleeding eyes and cried out from his tongueless mouth, to think how his pride was treated. Vengeance fall on his enemies! Vengeance in the hearts of the subjects of the Amir!’
Above, by the light of a candle which stank of tallow, and burned the walls black and smoked out the room, Burnes, oblivious, wrote on, setting down the Afghans, making sure of what they were and what he knew. For now, this would do. In the end, however, he came to examine his feelings, his sensations; and came to contemplate the particular hollow beating, between dread and excitement, which settled in the stomach at especial moments. Especial moments; standing there, in the hall of the Bala Hissar, waiting to be shown into the presence of the Amir. It was a feeling like that of standing there before a woman who waited only for him to seize her. A feeling like sitting, even, at his desk, taking up a sheaf of paper and beginning to write, to set down what he had seen. Each time the same feeling, each time, a feeling not to be argued with, or explained away. So strong it was, and it remained, that he concluded, in the end, when his life had become what it would become, that it was not, after all, what it so resembled, the awareness of the physical manifestation of sex, nor of the possibility of sex, but merely that of possibility. For him, the excitement which hollowed out his stomach and made his heart beat would always be produced not by what might happen, but what would not, despite all appearances, occur, and it was for the empty promises of chance that his heart beat, and his eyes grew big, and his stomach hollowed, and he stood, and stared at what was there to be stared at. Just that. And, each day, before he began to write, the proverb of the poet came to mind, the proverb carved deep on the tomb of the Emperor Babur, and he spoke it to himself, in his sincere deep rumbling Persian. Drink wine in the city of Kabul, and send round the cup without stopping; for Kabul is a mountain, a sea, a town, a desert.
THREE
1.
LONDON, IN MAY.
At any other place in the world, late May would customarily be termed spring, and call forth the songs of birds, and the gambolling of infant mammals, and their attendant poets to sing their praises in the approved manner. Here, in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, there are no birds, or only ones so very brown and grey and drooping it is as if their native colours are all washed out with the incessant rinsing which falls from the London skies, birds which make no noise but an occasional croak to clear their throats of dirt. There are no lambs for the poets to celebrate, but only the usual London dogs, lying, their limbs curled up, at every street corner, too dejected to do anything but raise their heads in mild supplication at every passing boy’s kick, too far gone in hopelessness to make any noise but a quiet moan, like the wind in a loose pane. You may be sure that the month makes no difference to them, or only in that the earth they find themselves licking ceaselessly off their pelts is dry like dust, or wet like mud. There are poets, it is true, here in London, in the fourth decade of the last century but one, and they write, it is true, about spring and lambs and birds. But to do so, I suppose, they are obliged to shut their eyes against the city they live in, and make something up.
London knows no seasons; knows nothing of spring or summer or winter. It knows nothing but two seasons: Dust, and Mud. Now, at this moment, in May, we seem to be getting towards the end of Mud. Mud settled in more than six months ago, and has shown no sign of taking its leave just yet. The streets have settled into their pristine ooze, and if there be any bedrock beneath the vast sucking mass which London is proud to call a street, no one pretends any longer to know. Anything dropped in the street is instantly swallowed by London and its mud, and is never seen again; a prayer-book, a ring, a hammer, a cloak; all fall to the ground and are forever lost, deep in the mud and slime and filth of the London street. Once a poor musician let his bassoon fall, not far from Seven Dials; the mud deprived him of his livelihood, and the family, tragically bassoonless, now must beg for their merest sufficiencies, there, outside Mrs Lirriper’s drapery shop. Once, as mothers tell their naughtier sons, a small boy let go of his mother’s hand while crossing the great swamp of Piccadilly, and, untethered, sank to the bottom of the mud, never to be seen again. Soon, it is to be hoped, the weather will improve, and Mud be succeeded by Dust, though it seems unlikely that any poet will want to sing the praises of that modern season. When that happens, everything changes; the sounds of the city alter from the obscene sucking and splash and brown drain-gurgle of one half the year, to the dry crackle and quiet thudding of the other half. Those who cannot leave the city will start to complain, not of the wet and chill ceaselessly rising around their ankles, but the dry choking heat which gets into the throat, and strangles the Londoner all day and all night.
But if it is true that London knows no seasons, that, perhaps, is because it knows only one Season. It is here, in May, that we find ourselves; here, standing with the linkboys and the cutpurses and the crossing-sweepers, each unpromising youth with the tools of his unpromising trade, standing and gawping at the slow procession unfurling before them, at this hour of early dusk in late spring. It is the height of the Season, and also, nearly, the end of it – a paradox more often stated than relished. The linkboys and cutpurses and crossing-sweepers stand just where Piccadilly turns into Park Lane, and watch the procession before them, silently or raucously calling out, according to their temperament. Up Piccadilly comes a succession of carriages, each a closed black box on wheels, shiny and locked, drawn, mostly, by two black horses, for all the world as if the cashboxes of Threadneedle Street had, with one voice, cried, ‘Enough of the City!’ and, equipped each with a pair of plate-faced footmen and a set of wheels, set off to see if what they had always heard of the West End and its Court could possibly be the case. Up Piccadilly come the melancholy cashboxes, and, at the corner, you can see, as they turn, the whinnying wheels and hooves pulling free of the mud, that each, too, contains a treasure.
The linkboys cry out, with ridicule or amazement, at what they see. At this corner, the inhabitants of each carriage lean forward, and look out. Because here, you see, at this corner, lives the Duke, the old victor of Waterloo, and everyone is curious about the Duke’s habits, and will, on passing from Piccadilly into the Park, lean forward in the hope of a brief glimpse of the great man. It is a hope which is often gratified; the Duke is a man who likes to show himself, and strolls, daily, in the Park to accept the homage of strangers. But tonight, there is nothing to be seen. If the inhabitants of the carriages sink back with a minor disappointment, their evenings indefinably clouded now in some way, we have not been disappointed; because now, with the linkboys and the cutpurses, we have caught a marvellous glimpse of a lady or two. Out of the funereal darkness of the inside of a carriage, for all the world like the glitter of a black cashbox being flung open, a glistening white face appears, bathed and almost certainly scented, a white face which allows you to dream of the white flesh, the dream of white lace and silk almost certainly hidden underneath the dark cloak, and, most marvellous of all – something which forces even the wiser cynics of the observing mob into an awed silence – the unmistakable deep glitter of diamonds, brought from the far East for no reason but to decorate these cool, lovely, clean faces. Everywhere else in the city – everywhere else in the great world, as far as the linkboys know – is mud and filth, and these white faces with their bright white light of diamonds shine like unaccustomed, unimaginable virtue.
They flash in the gaze of the street observers for one second, these costly faces, and then move on in their stately way. Where are they all going, all in the same direction? Why, they are going out, naturally, because this is the Season, and in the Season it does not do, if you are of a certain level in society, to stay at home. It is required of you to put on your least comfortable clothes, ones fitted neither for a London cold nor a London heat, and go and sit for a few hours with people you know nothing of and care nothing for, drawing what satisfaction you may from the fact that when you leave to go home, outside there may be poor people who may be prepared to gawp, who, you hope, are eaten up with envy of you; because if no one in London envies you in your party-going plight, it is hard to see why you should continue the exercise.
2.
The carriage now rounding the corner extracts itself with such unpredictable lurchings from the mud beneath the wheels that the cockaded footman on top almost drops his reins. Inside, a startled face lunges towards the window, to the rich appreciation of the street onlookers; they like a nice-looking girl. The nice-looking girl smooths her dress, braces herself as if with cold, and draws back into her seat. By her is an old man, his skin so taut and leathery, his eyes so yellow and unobserving, and the whole effect so quickly angular as he sits there in the clothes for his immaculate evening that you almost expect a forked tongue to dart out, to catch a fly or two. His blood is cold, his movements quick and stiff. He is not in the first flush of fashion, nor of youth; his clothes, though immaculate, have a distinct first-gentleman-of-Europe air, as if remembering on his behalf what he has now forgotten, his high season, so long ago. The fashion of thirty years before, too, accounts for his air; not inattentive, exactly, but strongly attentive to something not in the carriage, something Bella cannot see and does not wish to share. The ruby witch, she once heard him call it; the opium he has been taking, daily, for decades. In recent years, noticing, perhaps, that the young did not care for it and often disapproved of it, he has stopped mentioning it with his customary glee, even to what remains of his family. Bella would not mention it, but has grown used to the idea that when her father hands her into the carriage on their evening round, his touch will not be firm, his gaze fixed on a spot somewhere beyond her. The jerk of the carriage into or out of the mud jolted him into seeing; now his eyes are glazing over again, into their customary blank bliss. His daughter looks at him; she knows the expression very well, and blushes for him.
‘I see the Duke is still in town,’ she says.
‘The Duke would never leave town before – before—’ her father says, as his look moves back inside the carriage. ‘I remember, once, many years ago, before you were born or not long after. In the Park we were, and I greeted the Duke. Old acquaintances we were, and he stopped and pinched y’brother’s cheek. “Fine child, that, Colonel,” he said. And Harry took one look at him, with his great beak and his great ramrod shoulders and started to howl. Never saw the Duke again, not to speak to.’
‘Poor Harry,’ Bella Garraway murmurs. Her father has been galvanized by his own anecdote, which Bella has heard many times before; everyone in London has one story about the Duke of Wellington, and – Bella sometimes thinks – each is told and retold until every story has been heard by every man, woman and child in London, and then they die, stories melting into silence, and oblivion. Her father’s story always moves her, strangely, even though it hardly amounts to a story, so ruefully does it reflect on poor Harry and his hopes. She has no response for his story, but it hardly matters, because now Colonel Garraway is sinking back into his sharp-elbowed opiate haze.
The line of wheeled cashboxes moves on, stately as an oriental caravan through the trackless wastes of Piccadilly and Park Lane, all with one end, it seems, in view. At this time of the year, at this time of the afternoon, it is always thus; the upper few thousand, scrubbed and whited like so many peripatetic sepulchres, squeeze themselves into their least comfortable clothes, and set off for the evening’s entertainment. To dinner, to a rout, to a dance, to the opera; the upper few thousand, encased in whatever it has been decreed they should wear, limber stiffly through their doors, and into their carriages, to set off to see whatever people they have been seeing every week, all through the Season. Stiffened by their unyielding but undeniably fashionable raiment, you would recognize a member of the upper few thousand even unclad, fresh from the bath, or at the loose-robed gates of heaven; their gait is jointed and unnatural as a puppet’s is, and an old dowager walks as smartly as an upright old soldier. You would recognize them naked, but they are held up by their clothes and, stripped of their acquired carapace, they would surely fall, bonelessly, to the ground. As they manoeuvre their much corseted old bodies in or out of the carriage, it is difficult not to fancy that they creak in the exercise. But fashion dictates the stiff brocades and tight corseting, and fashion, here and now, is obeyed as promptly as an admiral.
Of course, everyone who now is making their slow path up Park Lane knows everything that is to be known of their fellow pilgrims. They are a very few, few thousand, and only rarely do they admit a new postulant at the crepuscular shrines of the fashionable London evening. Rarely, and usually by virtue merely of being born, is a new member of Society admitted. Money may admit you as a curiosity; or genius, particularly if displayed by a foreigner about whose origins it is possible to be rather vague, such as that excitingly-coiffeured Signor Paganini who was everywhere with his recitals two years ago. Adventure, too, or heroism committed by a suitably handsome young man in the East may serve very well to supply the fashionable two-legged curiosity of the Season. A young man with a good tale to tell, possessed of the fortune which accrues so readily in India and the deserts which lie beyond the Bosphorus, may be admitted to have a splendid Season, listened to by every ear from Park to Park, and carry into the country at the end the memory of adoring listening faces, turned up to his, white fans clasped by plump white hands, fluttering off like Cabbage Whites as the marvellously retold anecdote reaches its terrifying climax and the brave young man saves the little Rani from the jaws of the man-eating tiger. He may, also, carry the certainty of hundreds of new friends, many brave Seasons to come, if the hero of the day is foolish; if he is wise, however, he will pack his bags and go back to the scene of his great triumphs after one Season. Next year, as everyone knows, the great world will supply some new excitement, and the great tiger-beating hero will be cut in the Park by all his old friends, now so fascinated by a seven-foot American funambulist, a Russian poetess or eight-year-old watercolourist that his old stories start to seem very old hat indeed. He will be well advised to retire where he can, and draw what solace he can from his thousands, the vast and grateful emerald the Maharajah awarded him, the rapidly-acquired fat sensible wife.
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