The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories (9 page)

A few feet away, just by a wire fence, was a little platform covered by an old brown piece of canvas. He saw that Hosmer and Emma were out of sight; he stepped over to it and lifted one comer with his stick. He saw white flesh, narrow sinews and the tight bundles of muscle. His first thought was that it was a human corpse, and that fear of discovering a dead man lessened the shock of seeing the hairy rug, the paws, and—lifting the stiff canvas higher—the two dead dogs, lying side by side on the wooden platform. They had been killed, and Munday thought flayed (the word came to him before he actually saw the slashes), and they lay there on the shelf, speckled by decay, beside their own folded pelts.

Munday dropped the canvas and hurried to the side of the cottage, where Hosmer and Emma were still standing and talking.

“I was just telling your missus,” said Hosmer, squinting. “That end cottage—she’s rented.”

Walking home Emma said, “Those were his boys. I asked him. I wish there were something we could do.”

“Bring them to the attention of Oxfam,” he said. “Alfred.”

“There’s nothing,” he said. “He doesn’t even want us around.”

“They look so beaten.”

“Not beaten,” he said. “Detribalized.”

“It’s so ironic,” Emma said, “living in such squalor with that magnificent view.”

Munday said, “Let’s keep to the road this time, shall we?”

And he knew as they talked about the early twilight, the dusk falling on the hills around them, that he would say nothing about the dead dogs. That baffling scene he understood only as an enactment of violence, but something no usual motive could properly explain or make less beastly was another secret he would have to keep from her and beat alone. It was like a hidden infidelity, a habit of faithlessness he was starting to learn, suppressing what frightened him so that Emma would not be alarmed.

They expected an unheated church hall, so Munday wore a zippered cardigan under his thick tweed suit, and Emma her wool dress and jacket; she carried her mac carefully folded on the arm because of the paw prints. But it was very warm in the hall, Munday felt the heat as soon as he stepped inside, and he commented on it to the vicar.

“They like it this way,” said Crawshaw. He smiled at the seated people as he spoke, and led Munday to the stage. “Pensioners, you see—they really feel the cold. It’s why we have these monthly talks. The central heating in here is so expensive. We put some of the proceeds toward the fuel bill. It’s oil-fired. One day we’ll have a new hall.”

Munday said, “If anyone asks me whether it’s hot in Africa I’ll say, ‘No hotter than this room!’ ” There was also a dusty sweetness in the air, like flower scent but cloying, the odor of talcum, cologne, and bay rum, perfumes Of the aged that rubbed against Munday’s eyes.

Every seat was taken. Some people turned and stared as Munday and the vicar walked up the center aisle, but he saw most of them from the back, the suspended lamps lighting their white hair and giving it the thin wispiness of little nest-:like caps of illuminated cobwebs. The bald spots shone. It might have been a gathering for a church service they were so still, almost prayerful; and that look of piety was somehow intensified by the size of their heads, which were very small and set on disproportionately large shoulders.

When Munday reached the front of the hall and mounted the stage he saw the reason for this—they were all dressed for outdoors, each person wore a heavy winter coat. From the front, bundled up in this way, they looked defiant to Munday, annoyed in their cumbersome winter clothes. But there was a general unbuttoning and opening of the coats when they saw Munday and the vicar.

A man on stage was fumbling with a screen, trying to set it up. Crawshaw introduced him to Munday as Chester Lennit.

“Sorry I don’t have a free hand,” said Lennit, flashing Munday a faintly sheepish smile. “Be through in a minute, though,” he said, but as he spoke the tripod collapsed, and the telescoping upright shot down with a great clatter. Heads bobbed in the audience. Lennit pulled it again into position and said, “Bally thing won’t hold.”

The people in the audience watched with bright eyes.

“Mr. Lennit is in charge of our visual aids,” said Crawshaw.

“Not trained for it, or anything like that,” said Lennit. “I used to be with British Rail, on the accounts side, in London. For years.”

“Perhaps I can give you a hand,” said Munday.

“No, I’ve done this lots of times before,” said Lennit. He wouldn’t let himself be helped. He said, “Very fiddly, these things. You just have to know the right combination.” He looped the screen once again onto the upright and nudged the tripod into place with his foot. It crashed again. “Oh, God,” he muttered, and his grip on the apparatus became strangulatory.

Crawshaw turned to the audience: “While Mr. Lennit’s putting the screen into shape, I’d like to make a few announcements. First, Mrs. Crawshaw asked me to thank all of you who kindly brought fresh flowers for the memorial service last Sunday. Those of you who spent Saturday afternoon polishing the brasses deserve a special vote of thanks. The Christmas supper is scheduled for the twenty-second, and may I just say a word about our charity drive for the less fortunate in Four Ashes? It’s not too early to start thinking about setting tins and warm clothes aside—”

Emma, in the front row, was listening to the vicar. Munday tried to catch her eye—he wanted her to wink at him; she turned and smiled slightly and went back to the vicar. She looked calm, but after the walk that evening she had stopped in the courtyard of the house and said, “I don’t want to go in.” Munday had entered first. He called to her; there was nothing. Behind her now, making her seem almost girlish in her Indian silk scarf, the rows of elderly listeners hunched in their dark coats received the vicar’s news without reacting. Then Munday realized that they were not looking at the vicar, but rather at Mr. Lennit who at the back of the stage was stretching the screen into position for the fourth time.

Munday, scowling in the heat, was struck by their certain age, which he took to be around seventy, and by the uniformity of their appearance. They looked so similar, they shared so many features: their faces were small, bony, skull-like, some of the women’s faces looked dusted with flour, and yet none gave the impression of being sickly. Their postures were the same; they sat on the folding chairs, their hands clutched in their laps, bent slightly forward, as if straining to hear, or perhaps to get a better view of Mr. Lennit. Many of the men wore lapel pins, some two or three, and the women small corsages, sprigs of winter flowers on their coats. It was a vision for Munday of old age crowded in a hall, like a council convened by the geriatrics in a village convinced of their own doom. There were such villages on remote African hillsides, from which all the young people had fled in a time of famine or drought, leaving the aged ones to resist, huddled in broken huts. Munday had seen them crouched in shadows, facing fields parching in a killing sun.

“—I think,” said the vicar, glancing behind him, “that Mr. Lennit has succeeded in putting up his awfully complicated cinema screen. Before we begin I must ask you to avoid stepping on the cord to the slide projector. We don’t want a repetition of the Hardy talk!”

A mirthful hum vibrated in the audience, and chairs clanked as people shifted in their seats.

The vicar said to Munday, “Someone plunged us into darkness that night. Gave some of the good ladies here quite a shock.”

Munday nodded and said, “Rather.”

“This evening,” said the vicar, raising his voice, “we are privileged to have with us a man who has spent a good part of his life in some very sticky places. Africa has always had a strange fascination for the English. We explored its jungles, we fought there— many Englishmen still lie buried there—we cplonized and brought light to that dark continent. A few of you here tonight have yourselves been to Africa and can claim some credit for these accomplishments. Today, Her Majesty no longer rules over Africa, and the territories that flew the Union Jack now have their own flags of various colors. From what we read in the papers they seem terribly confusing—”

The introduction went on for several more minutes and continued to embarrass Munday, and when the vicar said, “I give you—Doctor Munday,” he stepped forward to the dry clapping and realized how inappropriate the opening remarks he had prepared were, how scholarly and ill-suited to the mood of this provincial place. So he began by saying, “The vicar called it sticky. It’s only that in the literal sense, never very dangerous. In fact I should say it’s a good deal safer than London!”

They laughed at this, and he went on, encouraged by their amusement, trying to find a way into the talk he had prepared. “They say Africa gets into one’s blood. It’s probably truer to say it gets under one’s skin!” This time he paused for the laughter, but it was slighter than before, and scattered, and he quickly resumed, “Unless you’re a chap like me who rather enjoys poking his nose in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. It’s a queer kind of community, an African village, but in many ways no different from your own village. The social organization is quite similar, there are meeting places like this church hall, and shops, and village elders to whom, like the vicar here, people look for counsel. So when you think of an African village, don’t think of a great mass of gibbering black people with bones in their noses, shaking spears and beating on tom-toms”—here there was some laughter, but Munday pressed on without acknowledging it— “think of yourselves.”

And then he said, “You understand in Four Ashes what it’s like to be a bit off the map, and tonight I’m going to talk to you about another remote people—” He sensed a slackening in the audience’s attention right away, an adjustment to heaviness in them he tried to shift with his voice; fighting for their .eyes made his tone preachy and somewhat strident. Emma had advised him to pick one person and speak to him. He did this: the man was in the third row, and was distinguished by a fine tweed coat, lighter than all the others. Munday continued speaking; the man put his chin in his hand reflectively; his head tilted to the side and the hand seemed to tip the head onto his shoulder. Asleep, he seemed especially aged. Munday searched the hall for another face.

“It’s a law of nature,” he was saying, “that once a group of people has been cut off from the world they begin to change. Their direction alters—though they have no sense of having turned. They have nothing, no one, to measure themselves by, except a distant feeble memory of the way things were once done. You must bear in mind that certain activities put us in touch with other people—trade, selling our skills and goods, travel, reading, even warfare helps us to come to an understanding of the world outside the village. But where there is little saleable skill, a subsistence economy, a reluctance to travel, and where people are entirely self-sufficient, they withdraw to a shadowy interior world. This inspires certain fears —irrational fear, you might say, is a penalty of that isolation. Who can verify it or tell you it doesn’t matter? Who can witness this decline? The remote people begin to act in a manner that looks very strange indeed to an outsider. Their sense of time, for example, is slowed down. The sameness of the days makes them easy to forget and so history goes unwitnessed. It’s a kind of sleep. There is ‘little innovation because really there is no need for it. What is not understood—and this can be as simple and casual as a tree falling across the road in a storm—is called magic. And this happens in more places than the witch-ridden society of semi-pygmies at the latter end of the world.

“But the most remarkable thing is that a village isolated in this way becomes wholly unaware of its isolation. The village is the world, the people are real, and everything else is mysteriously threatening. So the stranger comes, as I did ten years ago to that remote village, and he is viewed from an alarming perspective. He might be seen as dangerous, or else —it happens—as a kind of savior. He is not a man like them. The Bwamba, who had never seen a white woman before, thought my wife was a man. Ten years ago the Bwamba believed white men were cannibals, who fed on Africans. It’s odd: the only mystery for the stranger is that little clearing in the jungle, which thinks of itself as the only real thing.”

He thought the paradox might drag them into motion, but they were unresponsive, sitting at doubtful attention, some in the sleeping postures of broken statuary. Many were still awake—he knew that from their coughing.

“What if it happened,” he went on, “that the stranger was himself from a remote village? Suppose the English villager meets the African villager— the isolation they have in common is the very thing that isolates them from each other. There is not a syllable of speech they can share. Common humanity, you might reply; of course, yes, but if each has been marked by his solitude, aren’t we then dealing with two separate consciousnesses which have evolved in circumstances so different that nothing at all can be spoken and no judgment can be possible? The English villager might report that what he has seen is strange. What will the African report? The same, of course. Mr. Kurtz said his Africans were brutes; what did those Africans make of Kurtz? What did Schweitzer’s patients make of that shambling old man playing his pipe-organ in the jungles of Gabon? Imagine, if you can, the opinions of Livingstone’s porters, Burton’s guides, Mungo Park’s paddlers! Anthropology is man speculating on man, but when the man who is the subject turns around and becomes the speculator, you see how relative the terms ‘barbaric’ and ‘simple’ and ‘primitive* are.

“And reality, what is reality?” he asked of the dozing people in the hall. “It is a guess, a wish, a clutch of fears, an opinion offered without any hope of proof. One might say that only pain can possibly substantiate it You see the oddest things, you know, dead things or specters, that can cause you such panic that to dismiss them makes any argument for reality a series of arrogant notions inspired by the sharpest fear.”

Emma’s eyes were fixed on him. He spoke to her: “We accept what reality is bearable and try to ignore the rest, because we know it would kill us to see it all. I see Fve wandered a little from my subject,” he said. And he had; the impassive, unresponding audience had caused it. He was talking to himself and to Emma. He said, “In closing, let me say that for a long time I’ve thought of doing a rather unfashionable book, in which we see anthropologists through the eyes of their subjects. Think about it for a moment. Malinowski as described by the Trobriand islanders, Levi-Strauss’s fastidious Frenchness noted by the Nambikwara Indians in the Mato-Grosso. The headhunter’s view of the anthropologist, you might say. It would be interesting to see how we invent one another.”