Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (14 page)

Drunk with excitement, screaming in high-pitched voices, the small hairless men, who rode as if welded to their horses, careered to and fro among the disordered ranks, reloading and shooting indiscriminately in all directions. The rout was completed by a sortie from the besieged town. The whole Chinese army broke and streamed eastwards into the desert.

During the pursuit they lost about a quarter of their strength, and another two or three hundred were taken prisoner. Among the latter was the Governor Yee.

Three days later when the water-supply had been restored and the inhabitants had partially recovered from their savage purgation, a great feast was held. Because of the numbers attending it took place in the grounds of the Governor’s palace. All the Mongols became terribly drunk, to the scandal of the teetotal Mohammedan natives. At the end the captive Yee was brought out and strangled. My uncle thought that Fulk had nothing to do with this.

These celebrations gave rise to the only other comment in Fulk’s letters on the whole chain of events.

‘We had a party for some chaps who had done us a good turn. At the end it got rather rough, and you would not have liked it, Mother.’

Soon the Oirats rode away northward into their own land. Before they went they begged, in addition to their covenanted reward, a large cart and three mules. These were gladly granted. They took bands of leather and bound them very tautly from side to side of the cart. Then they studded them with nails according to an ancient craftsmanship. The mules were put between the shafts (for it was against the Mongols’ principles to harness a horse), and two men with wooden mallets mounted between the lattice of thongs. They struck them and there came out a deep humming music like the approach of a million hornets.

It was their tradition to mark great victories by the construction of a giant dulcimer on wheels. The battle at Doljuk was the first occasion for doing so in over three hundred years.

This departure from the normal pattern of events seems to have shaken the Chinese. At any rate, though the city and its confederates ultimately abandoned their resistance, they were not subjected to any penalties. The old regime returned slyly and on sufferance.

‘Did you ever find out,’ I asked my uncle, ‘why Fulk Ellison broke so drastically with his family?’

‘The story I heard in India was that old Joseph who used him as a sort of roving ambassador sent him to Mexico to negotiate a contract and gave him several thousand pounds for bribery. It so happened that he got the contract almost without paying and went off to Australia leaving the balance in his own bank account. When he returned to England he found that his father who’d grown insanely suspicious in his old age had sworn out a warrant against him for fraudulent conversion. The case was dropped of course, but it made Fulk so furious that he determined never to set foot in England again. He took on a series of jobs as mining-consultant all over the world. One of them landed him in Doljuk and there he suddenly put down fresh roots and stayed.’

‘It seems a terrible waste,’ I said. ‘If he achieved so much in Sinkiang, think what he might have done if he’d remained among civilized surroundings!’

By this time I was somewhat excessively under the spell of Varvara’s father and too ready to view him as a kind of Robin Hood. My uncle applied a mild dampener.

‘I don’t think that it would have made all that difference in the end. People find their own level.’ He cleared his throat selfconsciously as he did whenever he brought out a quotation from his considerable stock of classical knowledge: ‘ “
Sunt quos comitatur vastitas sua
—Some there are that carry their own wilderness with them.” ’

9

Turpin was looking out of his subterranean window from which the legs of a housemaid were visible halfway up the area steps.

‘What are we?’ he said. ‘Whence do we come? Whither do we go? Dunno!’

His reflections on life had a pleasantly mixed flavour of
lacrimae rerum
and
je m
’
en fous.
They soothed me at a moment when I needed soothing. For I had just made a silly mistake.

The point had arrived when, having read all Fulk’s letters three times, I was bound to render some account of my investigation. Accordingly I had gone to see Mrs. Ellison in her room; not much relishing the prospect of having to point out to her the only piece of evidence which I had discovered. It was the passage where Fulk distinguished between Varvara and any other children whom he might have begotten. It seemed to me that calling attention to it would rip away the veil behind which we had hitherto hidden the true aim of my search. But I had reckoned without the invincible capacity of people of Mrs. Ellison’s generation to remain blind when they did not wish to see.

‘Very interesting,’ she said, examining the lines through her lorgnette. ‘Very interesting. I think men are more sentimental than women over children. Perhaps that’s because they are nearer to them. My son, for instance . . . how he did love to tease by pretending all sorts of wild things about himself!’

I looked at her in astonishment, but she gave no indication of disbelieving what she said. On the whole I was delighted that the awkward corner had been rounded so easily. This gave me a false confidence; for the moment I was under the impression that I could ‘manage’ Mrs. Ellison. In this mood I said something which suggested fairly unequivocally that, whatever the facts about Varvara’s birth, there was a moral obligation to treat her as a full member of the family.

I forget exactly what reply I received but it was one which choked me off completely. I was made to feel impertinent and vulgar. That I soon got over, but I could not so easily rid myself of the fear that I might have done Varvara some irrevocable harm. It persisted, despite the fact that for me the interview closed on a note of signal forgiveness.

When I tried to give back the originals of the letters and the copy which I had had made, Mrs. Ellison waved the latter aside.

‘If you find them as interesting as you say, David, you might like to keep them. When I am dead you can do with them what you like.’

I think the sincerity of my thanks did a good deal to rehabilitate me in her eyes.

It was August Bank Holiday and stiflingly hot when Cedric brought Deirdre round for the second time. Whilst he was having one of his usual interviews with his mother she came out into the garden. Hardly wasting an instant on greetings, she launched into a long dirty story of whose point she obviously had only a dim conception. She had barely finished when her father joined us.

For once he seemed to be in a good temper.

‘Tea,’ he said. ‘Yes, a little tea, I think, today. With cucumber sandwiches.’

He strolled back across the lawn to summon Turpin. Simply making conversation, I said to Deirdre:

‘Your father doesn’t usually take tea, does he?’

A truly fiendish gleam lit up her eyes.

‘Because of his weight. We have to be very careful of that, otherwise he might stop being such a fine figure of a man. D’you know something . . . he wears corsets. Sometimes when he’s very hurt and grieved because I’ve let him down, I can hear them creaking.’

Damn it, I thought, blood may be thicker than water but nothing will persuade me that that girl is in her father’s camp!

Turpin brought out a couple of heavy silver trays. He was in a mutinous mood, for he had not expected to be dragged out of his cool pantry. As he passed my chair he muttered:

‘Work I expect to: swink I will not.’

On a second circuit he paused behind Cedric for so long that he seemed to have fallen into a kind of catalepsy, with his eyes fixed on the upper storeys of the house.

‘What’s wrong, man?’ said Cedric irritably. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘Pardon me, sir,’ said Turpin in a hollow tone, ‘but I ’ave just perceived a fowl effecting an entry by the museum window.’

It was one of Turpin’s ways of showing his disapproval of Cedric to address him in terms of stilted and soapy euphuism; often, for greater irony, coupling them with an oriental servility. One day, with an extra drink or two inside him, I expected him to begin with the words: ‘Deign to trample on this dishonourable carcase.’

The knowledge, albeit vague, that he was being guyed, showed in the sharpness of Cedric’s answer.

‘For God’s sake, talk sense. You mean a bird’s gone in. What sort?’

‘Pigeon, sir.’

‘Damn it. They’re great big brutes. If it starts flapping about it may smash a lot of valuable stuff.’

‘ ’Ighly probable, sir,’ said Turpin who realized how much any heritable property meant to Cedric. ‘An ’ideous pest, the pigeon.’

‘Well, don’t stand there moralizing like a village idiot. Come and help me turn the damned thing out.’ He swung round on the other two of us and snarled: ‘Would it be too much to ask you young people to repay some fraction of the hospitality you are receiving by lending your help?’

As we crossed the hall we met Varvara, who allowed herself to be pressed into service. I did not really believe in that bird and I thought that when we reached the museum, Turpin would claim an optical illusion. But there, sure enough, strutting on top of one of the tall glass-cases was a pigeon. At first it seemed quite composed in its new surroundings, but Cedric soon altered that. He organized us into line like beaters at a shoot and gave us each a course to pursue between the cases and the
bric-à-brac.
The idea was that we should drive the intruder before us until it was forced out of the window. As a plan it neglected only one factor—that the room had a ceiling at least twelve feet high. The pigeon retreated in short hops and flutters almost to the windowsill; then it flew up on to the curtain-rail and back over our heads.

‘The door!’ howled Cedric. ‘Shut that door, you fools!’

I made a dash and cut the bird off from the rest of the house.

‘Haven’t any of you any common sense?’ he inquired. ‘The things here are valuable, but downstairs they’re priceless.’

He himself had been the last person into the room. I began to have some idea what it must be like to work in his office.

We formed up again and repeated the manœuvre. The result was exactly the same, except that the pigeon was now becoming agitated; on its return flight it barged into a coaching-lantern which hung from the roof and left a streak of white slime on a Red Indian headdress.

‘Doesn’t anybody care if my mother’s house is turned into a shambles?’ asked Cedric, grimacing with rage.

I should never have supposed that he was one to bear up well in adversity. But this absurd loss of self-control in face of a petty crisis was something which I had not expected.

It diminished him in my eyes—an effect which was not unwelcome. I glanced significantly at Varvara to see whether she was taking in the absurdity of her bogey-man. But she appeared to be in an unusually lethargic mood. Since we met her, she had hardly spoken.

After another futile drive General Cedric decided to arm the troops. As I have mentioned, some of the museum’s larger and lighter exhibits were supported on lattice racks attached to the walls. I equipped myself with the genuine prong of a swordfish; Turpin had a Dyak paddle; at the time I did not notice what the others picked up. Hooking and slashing at the air we advanced once more. Yet it was probably chance that this time the pigeon sailed out of the window, leaving a final trade-mark on the curtains.

‘Well, well,’ said Cedric, now mollified, ‘our friend went just in time.’

‘Else ’e might ’ave spoke ’arshly to the pore bastard,’ said Turpin in an undertone.

Cedric continued: ‘I definitely prefer humane methods. But if he’d lingered longer I should have had to dispatch Mr. Pigeon.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I remarked, resenting his switch from panic to complacency. ‘One blast of a shotgun in here would do more harm than twenty birds.’

‘Ah, but I should have used more subtle means. You see this?’

For the first time I looked at his weapon. It consisted of a thin tube made apparently from some whitish-grey wood and bound at intervals along its barrel with rings of desiccated fibre. One orifice sloped down to a mouthpiece like that of a fife, with a cut-away underpart for the lip; the other was slightly flared out in the style of a trumpet.

‘Blow-pipe,’ said Cedric. ‘As used by the aborigines of South America.’

‘You mean you’d simply have blown that pigeon out of the room?’ said Deirdre (playing up, perhaps).

‘I don’t know what young people learn nowadays,’ said Cedric, ‘for all the money spent on their education. No, my dear, the blow-pipe is designed to shoot small parts dipped in poison. Look! I took the precaution of detaching these.’

He held up a narrow gourd on a string which I imagine had originally been hung round the stem of the pipe. From it he took out two or three slender shafts of wood, about six inches long, and we all gathered round to inspect them more closely. The butts were swollen with blobs of pith designed to ensure an airlock against the mouthpiece; at the other end a sharp thorn had been cemented on and its point was glazed with a film of gummy substance.

Pointing gingerly at the tip, Cedric said:

‘Now I wonder how many of you have heard of curare . . .’

He elaborated on its deadly properties. It should have been interesting, for his facts were more or less correct, but the patronage of his manner made the lecture a torment. Moreover, I realized from his exceptional burst of
bonhomie
that the triumph over the pigeon counted in his eyes as a major victory.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, playing the young pedant, ‘but surely the stuff would be pretty useless after years of keeping?’

‘It is an exception in that way,’ said Cedric, adding with a horrible roguishness, ‘Wherein, my dear David, may we hope that it resembles your own qualities!’

I said stubbornly, ‘Anyhow, I doubt whether a light dart would go through a pigeon’s feathers. They’ll even turn shot at a distance.’

‘My dear boy,’ replied Cedric with a gratifying testiness, ‘you evidently know nothing about the power of these blow-guns. Now just stand aside everyone and I’ll show you.’

He slipped a dart down the barrel of the tube, then indicated as his target the fold of a thick baize cloth which hung over one of the cabinets. But before he could lift the weapon to his mouth he was interrupted. Turpin, who was looking out of the window, said in a voice of sepulchral idiocy, ‘Excuse me, sir, but the brute creation is again misbe’aving.’

Cedric lowered the pipe and, with the rest of us, directed his gaze down into the garden. A large ginger cat had climbed on to the tea-table and was making free with the food.

‘Damn it,’ said Cedric, ‘those cups are best Staffordshire. Get off, get off with you!’

But the cat remained impervious to shouts and imprecations. It looked as if nothing less than our return to the garden would dislodge it; until Turpin discovered among the exhibits a rattle used in Polynesian religious ceremonies. Its din seemed to scalp the cat’s nerves, for it fled as though pursued by a mastiff.

‘Would you have shot the cat with the blow-gun, Daddy?’ said Deirdre innocently.

‘A gentleman doesn’t shoot cats,’ replied Cedric severely.

‘Besides,’ said Deirdre, ‘it would be difficult to hit it at that range.’

Since her father showed no sign of resuming his demonstration, she had picked up the blow-gun and was testing its balance. Although its length was greater than that of her body she had no difficulty in handling it because of the lightness of the wood. She raised the mouthpiece idly to her lips—and then she must have given a tentative puff.

Afterwards I made experiments. I can only say that without them I should never have believed how small an effort would send the charge streaking over twenty yards. There must have been some secret in the construction which concentrated the force of the lightest breath.

The dart shot out in the direction of the door, just as Varvara, who had drifted away from the group, decided to leave the room. For a moment it seemed to have struck her squarely, high up in the nape of the neck. Then I saw that it was touch-and-go whether it had penetrated the mass of hair which she now wore curled back at the base of her skull.

The thing which made me hope for the best was the slowness of her reaction, which was not that of a person who had been hurt, even mildly. Groping, she raised a hand to the back of her head.

‘Leave that thing alone,’ I shouted.

I ran up to her and made her bend her head. Very carefully I plucked out the dart. Then I parted the hair so that I could see the scalp between the strong tawny hairs. I could not discover any sign of a wound, but it was difficult to be certain owing to the darkening of the skin round the roots.

‘Looks as if it’s all right,’ I said cautiously.

To do him justice, Cedric appeared to be more shaken than anybody else. I wondered why. Then it struck me that some of the most disconcerting moments in life are when chance reveals to us our subconscious wishes.

He turned on Deirdre and started to berate her savagely for her carelessness. Somehow—perhaps from sentimental ideas of chivalry—I expected Varvara once more to intervene in her cousin’s favour. I little understood how her mind was working.

She was still so silent and subdued that I thought she might be suffering from shock at her narrow escape. But suddenly she came to life. Taking advantage of a pause in Cedric’s tirade, she strode up to him, her face hard with anger.

‘You would have done better to take the blood on your own hands,’ she said. ‘It costs no more in the eye of God, and the performance would have been more certain.’

Cedric gave her a look which was either a fine bit of acting or reflected a genuine bewilderment.

‘There,’ he said, ‘there. No wonder you’re upset. We must get Nurse Fillis to have a look at your head and make sure there’s really no damage.’

Varvara said: ‘You tried once with your daughter, and now you want a second chance through your whore!’

Cedric still affected not to understand, but Deirdre burst into a wail like a siren.

Throughout dinner, to which I made little social contribution, I was balancing up the possibilities. I knew that I was shortly going to be involved in an argument with Varvara in which accusations of idiocy, disloyalty, and complicity in murder would be flying about like hail. It would be well to have my reasons ready. The more I considered the facts, the more firmly I was convinced of the rightness of my first assumption. The episode of the blow-gun had been a pure accident.

Mrs. Ellison, to whom nobody had mentioned the incident, sat up later than usual that evening. No sooner had she gone to bed than Varvara made for her own room, indicating clearly that she expected me to follow.

I had scarcely taken up my usual seat on the bed when the indignation which was seething inside her burst forth.

‘You have deceived me,’ she said.

‘Me!’ I said.

‘You told me many times that England is not like Doljuk. “Here”, you said, “they do not plot to kill. You only think these things because you are a savage.” ’

I sighed. It was exactly as I had feared. Varvara had the sort of fierce, medieval suspiciousness which made it impossible for our ancestors to believe that people just unaccountably died: no, there had to have been a witch at work.

‘I have not changed my mind,’ I said. ‘What happened this afternoon wasn’t planned. It was just the carelessness of a schoolgirl.’