by Evelyn Waugh
“God, we’ve been a long time in that house,” said Alastair as at length they regained the Bentley. “Awful old humbug. Comes of getting tight.”
“Hell, I could do with another,” said Rip. “Know anywhere?”
“I do,” said Alastair and, turning a corner sharply, ran, broadside on, into a mail van that was thundering down Shaftesbury Avenue at forty-five miles an hour.
When Rip stood up, dazed but, as far as he could judge, without specific injury, he was scarcely at all surprised to observe that both cars had disappeared.
There was so much else to surprise him; a light breeze, a clear, star-filled sky, a wide horizon unobscured by buildings. The moon, in her last quarter, hung low above a grove of trees, illumined a slope of hummocky turf and a herd of sheep, peacefully cropping the sedge near Piccadilly Circus and, beyond, was reflected in a still pool, pierced here and there with reed.
Instinctively, for his head and eyes were still aflame from the wine he had drunk and there was a dry, stale taste in his mouth, Rip approached the water. His evening shoes sank deeper with each step and he paused, uncertain. The entrance of the Underground Station was there, transformed into a Piranesi ruin; a black aperture tufted about with fern and some crumbling steps leading down to black water. Eros had gone, but the pedestal rose above the reeds, moss grown and dilapidated.
“Golly,” said Mr. Van Winkle slowly, “the twenty-fifth century.”
Then he crossed the threshold of the underground station and, kneeling on the slippery fifth step, immersed his head in the water.
Absolute stillness lay all around him except for rhythmic, barely audible nibbling of the pastured sheep. Clouds drifted across the moon and Rip stood awed by the darkness; they passed and Rip stepped out into the light, left the grotto and climbed to a grass mound at the corner of the Haymarket.
To the south, between the trees, he could pick out the silver line of the river. Warily, for the ground was full of pits and crevices, he crossed what had once been Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. Great flats of mud, submerged at high water, stretched to his feet over the Strand, and at the margin of mud and sedge was a cluster of huts, built on poles; inaccessible because their careful householders had drawn up the ladders at sunset. Two campfires, almost extinct, glowed red upon platforms of beaten earth. A ragged guard slept with his head on his knees. Two or three dogs prowled below the huts, nosing for refuse, but the breeze was blowing from the riverbank and, though Rip had made some noise in his approach, they gave no alarm. Limitless calm lay on all sides among the monstrous shapes of grassgrown masonry and concrete. Rip crouched in a damp hollow and waited for day.
It was still night, darker from the setting of the moon, when the cocks began to crow—twenty or thirty of them, Rip judged—from the roosts under the village. The sentry came to life and raked over the embers sending up a spatter of wood sparks.
Presently a thin line of light appeared downstream, broadening into delicate summer dawn. Birds sang all round him. Tousled households appeared on the little platforms before the huts; women scratching their heads, shaking out blankets, naked children. They let down ladders of hide and stick; two or three women padded down to the river with earthenware pots to draw water; they hitched up their clothes to the waist and waded thigh deep.
From where Rip lay he could see the full extent of the village. The huts extended for half a mile or so, in a single line along the bank. There were about fifty of them; all of the same size and character, built of wattle and mud with skin-lined roofs; they seemed sturdy and in good repair. A dozen or more canoes were beached along the mud flats; some of them dug-out trees, others of a kind of basketwork covered in skins. The people were fair-skinned and fair-haired, but shaggy, and they moved with the loping gait of savages. They spoke slowly in the sing-song tones of an unlettered race who depend on oral tradition for the preservation of their lore.
Their words seemed familiar yet unintelligible. For more than an hour Rip watched the village come to life and begin the routine of its day, saw the cooking-pots slung over the fires, the men going down and muttering sagely over their boats as longshoremen do; saw the children scrambling down the supports of the houses to the refuse below—and for perhaps the first time in his life felt uncertain of what he should do. Then with as much resolution as he could muster, he walked towards the village.
The effect was instantaneous. There was a general scramble of women for their children, a general stampede for the ladders. The men at the boats stopped fiddling with tackle and came lumbering up the banks. Rip smiled and walked on. The men got together and showed no inclination to budge. Rip raised his clasped hands and shook them amicably in the air as he had seen boxers do when entering the ring. The shaggy white men made no sign of recognition.
“Good morning,” said Rip. “Is this London?”
The men looked at each other in surprise, and one very old white beard giggled slightly. After a painful delay the leader nodded and said, “Lunnon.” Then they cautiously encircled him until, growing bolder, they came right up to him and began to finger his outlandish garments, tapping his crumpled shirt with their horny nails and plucking at his studs and buttons. The women meanwhile were shrieking with excitement in the house-tops. When Rip looked up to them and smiled, they dodged into the doorways, peeping out at him from the smoky interiors. He felt remarkably foolish and very dizzy. The men were discussing him; they squatted on their hams and began to debate, without animation or conviction. Occasional phrases came to him, “white,” “black boss,” “trade,” but for the most part the jargon was without meaning. Rip sat down too. The voices rose and fell liturgically. Rip closed his eyes and made a desperate effort to wake himself from this preposterous nightmare. “I am in London, in nineteen-thirty-three, staying at the Ritz Hotel. I drank too much last night at Margot’s. Have to go carefully in future. Nothing really wrong. I am in the Ritz in nineteen-thirty-three.” He said it over and over again, shutting his senses to all outward impression, forcing his will towards sanity. At last, fully convinced, he raised his head and opened his eyes… early morning on the river, a cluster of wattle huts, a circle of impassive barbarous faces…
II
It is not to be supposed that one who has lightly skipped five hundred years would take great notice of the passage of days and nights. Often in Rip’s desultory reading, he had struck such phrases as, “From then time ceased to have any reality for her”; at last he knew what they meant. There was a time when he lived under guard among the Londoners; they fed him on fish and coarse bread and heady, viscous beer; often, in the late afternoon when the work for the day was over, the village women would collect round him in a little circle, watching all his movements with an intent scrutiny; sometimes impatiently (once a squat young matron came up to him and suddenly tweaked his hair) but more often shyly—ready to giggle or take flight at any unusual movement.
This captivity may have lasted many days. He was conscious of restraint and strangeness; nothing else.
Then there was another impression; the coming of the boss. A day of excitement in the village; the arrival of a large mechanically propelled boat, with an awning and a flag; a crew of smart Negroes, all wearing uniforms of leather and fur although it was high summer; a commander among the Negroes issuing orders in a quiet supercilious voice. The Londoners brought out sacks from their huts and spread on the beach the things they had recovered from the ruins by digging—pieces of machinery and ornament, china and glass and carved stonework, jewellery and purposeless bits of things they hoped might have value. The blacks landed bales of thick cloth, cooking utensils, fish-hooks, knife-blades and axe-heads; discussion and barter followed, after which the finds from the diggings were bundled up into the launch. Rip was led forward and presented, turned round and inspected; then he too was put in the launch.
A phantasmagoric journey downstream; Rip seated on the cargo; the commander puffing imperturbably at a cigar. Now and then they stopped at other villa
ges, smaller than London, but built on the same plan. Here curious Englishmen crowded the banks and paddled in to stare at him until peremptorily told to keep their distance. The nightmare journey continued.
Arrival at the coast; a large military station; uniforms of leather and fur; black faces; flags; saluting. A pier with a large steamer alongside; barracks and a government house. A Negro anthropologist with vast spectacles. Impressions became more vivid and more brief; momentary illumination like flickering lightning. Someone earnestly trying to talk to Rip. Saying English words very slowly; reading to him from a book, familiar words with an extraordinary accent; a black man trying to read Shakespeare to Rip. Someone measured his skull with calipers. Growing blackness and despair; restraint and strangeness; moments of illumination rarer and more fantastic.
At night when Rip woke up and lay alone with his thoughts quite clear and desperate, he said: “This is not a dream. It is simply that I have gone mad.” Then more blackness and wildness.
The officers and officials came and went. There was a talk of sending him “home.” “Home,” thought Rip and beyond the next official town, vague and more distant, he saw the orderly succession of characterless, steam-heated apartments, the cabin trunks and promenade decks, the casinos and bars and supper restaurants, that were his home.
And then later—how much later he could not tell—something that was new and yet ageless. The word “Mission” painted on a board; a black man dressed as a Dominican friar… and a growing clearness. Rip knew that out of strangeness, there had come into being something familiar; a shape in chaos. Something was being done. Something was being done that Rip knew; something that twenty-five centuries had not altered; of his own childhood which survived the age of the world. In a log-built church at the coast town he was squatting among a native congregation; some of them in cast-off uniforms; the women had shapeless, convent-sewn frocks; all round him dishevelled white men were staring ahead with vague, uncomprehending eyes, to the end of the room where two candles burned. The priest turned towards them his bland, black face.
“Ite, missa est.”
III
It was some days after the accident before Rip was well enough to talk. Then he asked for the priest who had been by his head when he recovered consciousness.
“What I can’t understand, Father, is how you came to be there.”
“I was called in to see Sir Alastair. He wasn’t badly hurt, but he had been knocked unconscious. You both had a lucky escape. It was odd Sir Alastair asking for me. He isn’t a Catholic, but he seems to have had some sort of dream while he was unconscious that made him want to see a priest. Then they told me you were here too, so I came along.”
Rip thought for a little. He felt very dizzy when he tried to think.
“Alastair had a dream too, did he?”
“Apparently something about the Middle Ages. It made him ask for me.”
“Father,” said Rip, “I want to make a confession… I have experimented in black art…”
BY SPECIAL REQUEST
An alternative ending to A Handful of Dust
I
The liner came into harbour at Southampton, late in the afternoon.
They had left the sun three days behind them; after the Azores there had been a high sea running; in the Channel a white mist. Tony had been awake all night, disturbed by the fog signals and the uncertainty of homecoming.
They berthed alongside the quay. Tony leant on the rail looking for his chauffeur. He had cabled to Hetton that he was to be met and would drive straight home. He wanted to see the new bathrooms. Half the summer workmen had been at Hetton. There would be several changes to greet him.
It had been an uneventful excursion. Not for Tony were the ardours of serious travel, desert or jungle, mountain or pampas; he had no inclination to kill big game or survey unmapped tributaries. He had left England because, in the circumstances, it seemed the correct procedure, a convention hallowed in fiction and history by generations of disillusioned husbands. He had put himself in the hands of a travel agency and for lazy months had pottered from island to island in the West Indies, lunching at Government Houses, drinking swizzles on club verandahs, achieving an easy popularity at Captains’ tables; he had played deck quoits and Ping-Pong, had danced on deck and driven with new acquaintances, on well-laid roads amid tropical vegetation. Now he was home again. He had thought less and less of Brenda during the passing weeks.
Presently he identified his chauffeur among the sparse population of the quay. The man came on board and took charge of the luggage. The car was waiting on the other side of the customs sheds.
The chauffeur said, “Shall I have the big trunk sent on by train?”
“There’s plenty of room for it behind the car, isn’t there?”
“Well, hardly, sir. Her ladyship has a lot of luggage with her.”
“Her ladyship?”
“Yes, sir. Her ladyship is waiting in the car. She telegraphed that I was to pick her up at the hotel.”
“I see. And she has a lot of luggage?”
“Yes, sir, an uncommon lot.”
“Well… perhaps you had better send the trunks by train.”
“Very good, sir.”
So Tony went out to the car alone, while his chauffeur was seeing to the trunks.
Brenda was in the back, shrunk into the corner. She had taken off her hat—a very small knitted hat, clipped with a brooch he had given her some years ago—and was holding it in her lap. There was deep twilight inside the car. She looked up without moving her head.
“Darling,” she said, “your boat was very late.”
“Yes, we had fog in the channel.”
“I got here last night. The people in the office said you’d be in early this morning.”
“Yes, we are late.”
“You can never tell with ships, can you?” said Brenda.
There was a pause. Then she said, “Aren’t you going to come in?”
“There’s a fuss about the luggage.”
“Blake will see to that.”
“He’s sending it by train.”
“Yes, I thought he would have to. I’m sorry I brought so much… You see, I brought everything. I’ve turned against that flat… It never quite lost the smell. I thought it was just newness, but it got worse. You know—radiator smell. So what with one thing and another I thought, how about giving it up.”
Then the chauffeur came back. He had settled everything about the luggage.
“Well, we’d better start right away.”
“Very good, sir.”
Tony got in beside Brenda, and the chauffeur shut the door on them. They ran through the streets of Southampton and out into the country. The lamps were already alight behind the windows they passed.
“How did you know I was coming this afternoon?”
“I thought you were coming this morning. Jock told me.”
“I didn’t expect to see you.”
“Jock said you’d be surprised.”
“How is Jock?”
“Something awful happened to him, but I can’t remember what. I think it was to do with politics—or it may have been a girl. I can’t remember.”
They sat far apart, each in a corner. Tony was very tired after his sleepless night. His eyes were heavy and the lights hurt them when the car passed through a bright little town.
“Have you been having a lovely time?”
“Yes. Have you?”
“No, rather lousy really. But I don’t expect you want to hear about that.”
“What are your plans?”
“Vague. What are yours?”
“Vague.”
And then in the close atmosphere and gentle motion of the car, Tony fell asleep. He slept for two and a half hours, with his face half hidden in the collar of his overcoat. Once, as they stopped at a level crossing, he half woke up and asked, deep down in the tweed, “Are we there?”
“No, darling. Miles more.”
&nb
sp; And then he fell asleep again and woke to find them hooting at the lodge gates. He woke, too, to find that the question which neither he nor Brenda had asked, was answered. This should have been a crisis; his destinies had been at his control; there had been things to say, a decision to make, affecting every hour of his future life. And he had fallen asleep.
Ambrose was on the drawbridge to greet them. “Good evening, my lady. Good evening, sir. I hope you have had an agreeable voyage, sir.”
“Most agreeable, thank you, Ambrose. Everything quite all right here?”
“Everything quite all right, sir. There are one or two small things, but perhaps I had better mention them in the morning.”
“Yes, in the morning.”
“Your correspondence is all in the library, sir.”
“Thank you. I’ll see to all that tomorrow.”
They went into the great hall and upstairs. A large log fire was burning in Guinevere.
“The men only left last week, sir. I think you will find their work quite satisfactory.”
While his suitcase was being unpacked, Tony and Brenda examined the new bathrooms. Tony turned on the taps.
“I haven’t had the furnace lighted, sir. But it was lit the other day and the result was quite satisfactory.”
“Let’s not change,” said Brenda.
“No. We’ll have dinner right away, Ambrose.”
During dinner, Tony talked about his trip; of the people he had met, and the charm of the scenery, the improvidence of the Negro population, the fine flavour of the tropical fruits, the varying hospitality of the different Governors.
“I wonder if we could grow Avocado pears, here, under glass,” he said.
Brenda did not say very much. Once he asked her, “Have you been away at all?” and she replied “Me? No. London all the time.”
“How is everybody?”
“I didn’t see many people. Polly’s in America.”
