Manly Pursuits

by Ann Harries

  He had doubled in size since his undergraduate days (needless to say, he did not recognise me). He was as crumpled as the photographs and cartoons had led me to expect: an enormous fleshy man with a bloated face and cold blue eyes. His thick hair was unbrushed, even untidy, but his moustache had been carefully shaped and his skin shone with the soap of a recent shave. I remembered the dimpled chin. Could he be wearing the same spotted sailor bow of twenty-five years ago?

  I watched him study my own pink and white features, my neatly clipped grey beard, the paucity of my hair, which had treacherously receded to the back of my head, the rosiness of my too-full lips. Something in his piercing stare made me shrink from him, to wriggle in that gloomy tapestried room, like the blackbird’s victim worm itself. But even in my discomfort, I could feel pity. Although I am not a medical doctor, my interest in the zoological field (and, let me admit it, in my own physical ailments) has made me observant. I know an ill man when I see one. Heart malfunction and hard living were etched in the myriad purple veins on this man’s face. His forehead was beaded with perspiration. Yet he continued to stare.

  His acolytes had gathered round him, handsome young men in the main who, by contrast, exuded the ruddy glow of good health, some slumping in vacant chairs, others peering over his shoulders (he was taller than any of them) to fix me with their energetic blue gazes. I could feel the phlegm (the aftermath of my prolonged bronchial attack) gather in my throat, and cleared it with my sparrow’s cough.

  ‘Well,’ I stammered, marvelling nevertheless that I was able to produce a fully formed sentence under these trying circumstances, ‘it is true that the blackbird has remarkable auditory powers.’

  This evasive answer seemed to satisfy the great man. I believe it was the sound of my voice he wished to hear rather than any ornithological information I could impart. To my relief he moved from behind me and I was able to straighten my position, administering at the same time a deliberate massage to the twisted muscles of my neck.

  He sank into the chair on my right hand and honoured me with a surprisingly limp handshake, using only two fingers (the house is filled with Masonic emblems of one kind or another). At once the white manservant, a grim-faced fellow of military bearing, provided him with a mug filled with odious coffee. Fastening me again with that look of peculiar intensity, he pronounced, still in that queer soprano voice of his: ‘Wills, it is my dream to fill my forests with the sounds of all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’ He ran his fingers through his thatch of greying hair, an affectation designed, I felt sure, to draw attention to its quantity, and continued: ‘Do you know what it is I miss most in this mighty African continent?’

  I raised a polite eyebrow.

  ‘I miss the early morning song of the blackbird, the thrush, the little wren: that dawn chorus which in my opinion far exceeds any human opera or oratorio in musical beauty. Their music is nothing less than the song of civilisation!’ His already moist eyes reddened and glazed; the young men looked downwards. His fleshy chin sunk into his hand, his profile was that of a melancholy Roman emperor.

  I felt that this was not the moment to remind him that the dawn chorus occurs only during spring and early summer, and that the Southern hemisphere was about to enter the silent months of winter. Nevertheless, I was compelled to confess an unfortunate development.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ I murmured, ‘that half the blackbirds died on the voyage out.’

  I could have sworn that a minuscule serpent’s tongue flickered out of each of his watering eyes as I spoke. A secretary gasped.

  ‘And are the other half in mourning?’ he enquired sharply, with no hint of melancholy. ‘There are over one hundred songbirds caged in my grounds, and I am told that every one of them is silent. I hope, Professor Wills, that they are not the subjects of your experiments?’

  I could feel my face flush even more crimson than my interrogator’s. ‘I can assure you …’

  So he knows, he knows. Does everyone in this great household know?

  ‘We release them Saturday. Jot that down, Joubert!’ snapped the Colossus to the nearest secretary. ‘I shall invite a hundred guests. The Kaffirs can play their minstrel music on the lawns and every child shall have ice-cream. Then the Professor here will open the aviary doors and – voosh!’ – hands flapped from wrists in imitation of a bird in flight – ‘my forests will fill with a halleluiah of birdsong!’

  I felt faint. There had been no mention of this in the telegrams. I cannot abide celebration of any kind, and this one would assuredly be celebrating failure.

  ‘What time will that be, sir?’ The secretary’s pen was poised.

  ‘Make it midday, Joubert,’ replied his master. ‘And have fifty bottles of Veuve Clicquot up from the cellar, will you?’ He pulled his fob-watch from his waistcoat pocket and frowned. ‘And tell our High Commissioner I’m ready for him now.’

  Draining his coffee mug in one ill-concealed gulp he began to rise from his chair. The acolytes rushed to stand by, without actually assisting him, and as he floundered upwards he turned to me and smiled briefly. It was a smile to penetrate my bones and warm my blood: in a moment of brilliance I felt my flesh grow young.

  ‘Welcome to my home, Professor,’ said he. ‘You are an honoured guest.’ His eyes were suddenly azure. Their brightness seemed to illuminate the gloom, even after he had swept out of the dining-room to the clanging of two Javanese gongs which stood on the bureau nearest the door, responding with their fierce metal vibrations to draughts caused by passers-by.

  The gongs kept up their ominous rumble for some time after the Colossus’ exit. I dabbed my lips cautiously with my unstarched table napkin and felt for the handle of my tea cup. The massive grandfather clock, with its cut-out galleon tossing on mechanical waves, reminded me it was time to visit the birds. The manservant was collecting used crockery in thoughtful silence. I decided to risk a conversation to deflect the panic I could feel rising from the pit of my stomach.

  ‘Were you a soldier once, Huxley?’ (The extreme erectness of the spine can also denote a long spell in prison, I have been told – though I can’t say Oscar’s posture improved much after his incarceration.)

  The man smiled modestly. ‘You can tell, sir?’

  ‘My brother’s in the army, you see. One brother in the Army, one in the Church, and then there’s me – in the University.’ The man looked impatient, so I returned to the topic of his former career. ‘And what made you leave? I suspect you made a fine soldier.’ (I do not intend to sound patronising, but know no other way to talk.)

  Huxley, whose accent sounded South London, overlaid a little with the rasping Boer intonations, pulled himself up even straighter. ‘The master picked me out, sir,’ he said with pride. ‘He’s a man who makes his mind up quick. Saw me one night at the Wynberg barracks when he came drinking with his friend. Took a fancy to me there and then. Next thing I know I’m his butler – of sorts.’

  ‘He’s treated you well.’ (I was careful to state rather than to question.)

  ‘Couldn’t find a finer employer, sir. He respects the fact that I was once a sergeant major.’ He hovered a moment, then brought himself to utter: ‘Sir, could I ask you something?’

  ‘Depends what it is, Huxley.’ (This is the way I reply to my scout’s respectful questions.)

  ‘Sir, I’ve been thinking. It’s May, right?’

  ‘Yes, Huxley.’

  ‘May’s spring back home, but it ain’t spring here, sir. In fact, it’s getting on for winter in these parts. It’s like that, in the Southern hemisphere,’ the innocent explained.

  ‘I know that, Huxley,’ I said patiently.

  ‘So then, how’s them birds going to lay their eggs, sir, what with them being all muddled up, like?’

  How indeed? ‘Well, we might have to wait till your spring arrives, Huxley,’ I replied, less patiently. ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  I could feel another question brewing, and pursed my lips in
preparation.

  ‘It’s a pity about them nightingales, isn’t it, sir?’

  I flinched. ‘How do you mean. Huxley?’ I enquired in my gravest voice, laced with the slightest hint of warning, which I expect was entirely lost on this simple man.

  ‘They ain’t lookers, are they, sir? I mean, I was expecting a beautiful bird, not a little brown thing, you wouldn’t look at it twice!’ (I will not attempt to reproduce the glottal stops that drilled holes through Huxley’s speech.) ‘And to think she sings more lovely than any other bird in the world!’

  ‘“She”, Huxley? Have you been reading those silly tales by Mr Wilde?’ (I will never forgive Oscar for the ornithological misinformation he has disseminated in his children’s stories.)

  The man was thrown into confusion, so I said more gently: ‘It is the male of the species who sings, Huxley, not the female. He sings to establish his territory. Or to advertise that he wants a female partner to provide him with offspring.’

  ‘You’re having me on, sir!’ exclaimed Huxley, rapidly gathering the remains of my breakfast. ‘I always thought they sang because they enjoyed singing, like, sir.’

  ‘I expect they do, Huxley,’ I said, taking pity on him. ‘And you may be interested to know that the subject of my research in Oxford has been exactly what you have just queried, Huxley – whether birds ever sing just for the fun of it or not!’

  But the brisk manner in which Huxley gathered together the marmalades (each made from different species of orange that our master had imported from California, according to the ladies) suggested to me not only that his interest in birds was exhausted but that he had also dismissed me as a person of dubious education.

  In any case, someone was running into the dining-room. A secretary. A handsome young chap whose golden moustache perfectly outlined the edge of red lip above ivory teeth. He waved an opened telegram at me, and collided with Huxley. The priceless china cup in my hands flew into the air (my startle-reaction has always been extreme), and just before it would have shattered into pieces upon the uncarpeted floorboards the athletic secretary extended his body sideways and caught it with a deft hand. Huxley fell to his knees, gathering fallen cutlery and swearing with some violence.

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry, Mr Huxley!’ cried the secretary. ‘That’s the second time this week!’ He turned to me and grinned. ‘A message for you, sir.’ His pale blue irises, the colour of the plumbago which riots in all the hedges here, beamed goodwill.

  I frowned at the proffered telegram and made no attempt to accept it. The understanding with my physician had been that there were to be no communications of any kind with Oxford: I was not, in any way, to be reminded of the disastrous sequence of events that had preceded my departure.

  As if reading my thoughts, the young secretary smiled reassuringly.

  ‘He uses them as scrap paper. The message is on the back, sir!’

  My hand shook as I accepted the telegram. I raised my reading glasses to study the well-nigh illegible scribble: ‘Sorry I won’t be dining at home tonight must speak to you, please come to my room 9 a.m. tomorrow.’ No signature was necessary.

  By the time I had read these words, lifted my head, and replaced my glasses, the messenger had vanished, though I could hear his footsteps pounding, diminuendo, down the corridor. A pair of female footsteps pattered after him, probably the young girl’s. Huxley, too, had disappeared. I turned over the telegram to read its original message.

  ARRIVING MORNING TRAIN – STOP – JAMESON – STOP

  The date was today’s.

  I could not prevent a reluctant frisson of excitement from running up my spine. This could only be the Dr Jameson whose image, cast in Staffordshire clay, rode doggedly across a thousand British mantelpieces; the Jameson who, at his trial, argued that he had illegally entered the Boer Republic with his five hundred troopers, not to raid, but to aid helpless British women and children while their husbands rose up against the wicked Boers. Unfortunately, the uprising didn’t materialise and Dr Jim was obliged to hoist, not the Union Jack, but a Hottentot servant’s white apron on a wagon whip … The cunning old Boer president, rather than create a martyr through public execution, shipped the failed raider (previously known and loved as the swashbuckling family doctor of Kimberley) back to his mother country, to appear before a special jury at a trial at bar.

  My interest in these imperial intrigues, though distant, had been triggered by the fact that this trial followed hard on the heels of Oscar’s; in addition, Sir Edward Carson, the counsel who had precipitated my friend’s downfall and humiliation, now presented Leander Starr Jameson to the public as the chivalrous knight who had redeemed the manhood of Britain by daring all. While Oscar, for love of boys, was sent to work the treadmill in Reading Gaol for two years, Jameson, for leading a military expedition against a friendly state, spent a few months in Holloway, without hard labour. His bungled Raid was celebrated in every London music-hall. The very Poet Laureate had composed the words to the song that now began to beat, uninvited, in my head:

  ‘There are girls in the gold-reef city,

  There are mothers and children too!

  And they cry, ‘Hurry up! for pity!’

  So what can a brave man do?

  If even we win, they’ll blame us:

  If we fail, they will howl and hiss.

  But there’s many a man lives famous

  For daring a wrong like this!’

  Needless to say, money, or, more precisely, gold was behind the whole story. Had Jameson’s madcap dash succeeded, the wealthiest goldfields in the world would have become the property of Great Britain. This not irrelevant fact wasn’t even mentioned at the Committee of Inquiry held at Westminster a year or so later when the Colossus was called over to be publicly interrogated about his role in the Raid. There was of course no question but that the Raid had been his master-plan to grab ultimate wealth and a further chunk of Africa for the Crown – he’d resigned his Premiership of the Cape the day after it happened – but all that emerged from that farcical Lying in State at Westminster (as the wits would have it) was a dense fog of ambiguities, nods, winks, misunderstandings, evasions, half-truths and partial replies, out of which miasma shambled the bloated figure of my host, a not unheroic villain in the unlikely role of sacrificial lamb.

  It was generally known that a number of telegrams had gone missing – telegrams, it was whispered, implicating our Secretary of State for the Colonies – up to the neck! Could it be possible that Joe Chamberlain, the self-made man from Birmingham with a home-grown orchid in his buttonhole and a monocle in his steely eye, had really backed the very Raid he had so roundly condemned, both at the time of the crisis and throughout the Inquiry? Far be it from me to seek logical behaviour in political animals. One needs proof before one can accuse: the variables must be eliminated. But it is true that Uncle Joe’s orchids continued to bloom in his buttonhole and the Colossus, in spite of his disgrace, was able to keep intact his Chartered Company, and to continue to build his Cape to Cairo railway.

  In the world of Art and the Emotions, a different set of criteria operate. Three months after the Westminster Inquiry, Oscar was released from Reading Gaol. He slipped over to France twenty-four hours later to escape the full fury of the nation’s outrage.

  ‘The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.’ (Oscar)

  Oxford 1870

  An unexpectedly long queue, a millipede queue, wound through all four corridors of the museum’s upstairs galleries, past the collections of crustaceans, each with a name as long as itself penned across a label in minute copperplate; past the boxes of small fossils that Gosse claimed had been created by God simultaneously with the earth; past the six-legged insects and eight-legged spiders of a thousand different species, each pinned in order of size inside gigantic display cabinets. Alice doubted the value of giving names to insects if they wouldn’t answer to them, but the newly-built University Museum was to be read as a book of Natur
e, and labels were thus everywhere, even upon the gallery columns, each made of a different British ornamental rock, and supporting cast-iron girders between whose ribs blossomed metal branches of leaf and flower. The remarkable synthesis between iron, stone and glass, to say nothing of the range of Natural History exhibits, made of the museum a miniature Gothic Crystal Palace in which it was impossible not to be educated, even while dawdling in a queue.

  Mr James and I had arrived early, having caught the 6.05 that morning from Clapham, and changed at Reading. The lecture was due to begin at midday but Mr James wanted me to get a taste of the colleges, as it was generally considered I would continue my zoological studies at Oxford. In fact, this introduction to the City of Spires was unnecessary, for even as I stepped off the train on to the Oxford railway platform and lifted my eyes to the cold sky-line apparently pierced by inverted icicles, I knew I had found my home. A few snowflakes materialised out of the grey air, as if in welcome.

  This overwhelming sensation of arrival, of return to a place I had not yet visited, was interrupted by the practical necessity of removing Mr James from the compartment we had shared. As arranged, the wheelchair was rushed to the door of our carriage, and, with a great deal of heaving and general advice from passengers, we succeeded in transferring my guardian into his chariot (as he called it), the train’s engine panting out clouds of impatient steam as we too panted under James’s great weight. I was thankful we had dissuaded him from bringing his photographic equipment, which inconveniently included a range of pungent chemicals, a handcart and a portable dark-room.

  Mr James knew the colleges well, having once supplied them with exotica from foreign lands. He directed me to Christ Church Meadows, Magdalen Deerpark and Trinity Gardens with an assurance that disregarded the considerable effort involved in pushing him to these far-flung spots at top speed, if we were to arrive at the museum in good time.