by Ann Harries
‘But look at the massive influence even the smallest species can have on its environment – and on the mightiest of human races at that!’ I was emboldened to interrupt. ‘Look at that scab mite Astigmata psoroptidae – an organism so microscopic that it does not even have to breathe to survive – which has ruined your colony’s wool production. It will almost certainly develop a resistance to your disinfectant which you will then have to modify in response. Look at the malaria parasite – an animal organism consisting of precisely one cell, only a step away from the vegetable kingdom. Yet the presence of that protozoan parasite has determined the fate, the history, of whole geographical areas. How very different a continent Africa might be if Equus equus had been able to withstand the bite of the anopheles mosquito – to say nothing of your settlers up north, who, I gather, succumb almost immediately to the fever.’
As I droned on, mistaking, I fear, the dinner guests for undergraduates at a seminar, I noticed our host nod meaningfully at Huxley, who in turn nodded his own bullet head with the utmost seriousness at a line of Negro manservants who seemed to have been waiting in anticipation of this signal, for even as my closing pronouncement on the mosquito left my mouth, they surged over to the dinner table and, with a silent dexterity that was awesome, removed everything from it, including the gigantic lace tablecloth, by now somewhat stained by the various liquids and gravies that had attended the earlier courses. Within seconds the glassware and cutlery had been returned to the bare boards of the table, together with a set of rare and exquisitely fragile loving-cups, their stems twisting into a double spiral. Exclamations of polite appreciation sounded across the table.
‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs K, ‘the pokaals. I see you and I are to share one, Professor.’
At this point a heavenly vision floated towards me. So light, so aerial was the apparition that I could have thought it a cloud dropped from the skies and trailing a cinnamon fragrance, had not a white-gloved hand descended along with it. I have a weakness for sweet milky puddings, and this one was closer to heaven-spun manna than anything I have ever eaten. Helplessly, I succumbed to the seduction of pastry made by angels with an inner froth of egg, cream and sugar. Argument about mosquitoes and sheep-scab raged all around me, but no words could tempt me from the paradise in my mouth.
At last, as I scraped at the last magical traces of this confection, I became aware that Mrs Kipling had leaned over to me. ‘You seem to have enjoyed your melktert, Professor!’ exclaimed she in tones of maternal interest. ‘That is the first course you have not pushed to one side.’
‘Melktert?’ I enquired, licking my lips in an abandoned fashion.
‘A very popular Boer recipe. I believe you have to make the pastry late at night and hang it up in a damp muslin cloth in a draught. It has to be baked before sunrise for the light flakes to be formed. I shall try it as soon as we arrive in England.’
‘Ah,’ said I, unused to discourse of this nature, but fascinated by the details none the less.
‘And speaking of evolution,’ continued Mrs Kipling in the pleasant American drawl which curled up the edges of her words and made them light as Boer pastry, ‘have you noticed how the great chain of being is represented in this evening’s meal? Primeval soup – fish – flesh – manna? Even to the point of imitating the textures of the soul? But look, he is about to speak again. That poor man does not look well. He needs to spend a month at a spa, in my opinion. I believe there are many hot springs further north.’
The Colossus was indeed struggling to his feet with some difficulty. So massive, so weighty, so purple, did the hulk of his flesh now appear that any physical effort seemed likely to bring on heart failure. But in the end he reared himself upright, and, swaying slightly (he had refilled his silver beaker many times with a curious mixture of champagne and stout), he begged the company’s attention.
‘I have an announcement to make, ladies and gentlemen. The distinguished scientist in our midst’ – and here his gaze rested almost respectfully on my startled visage – ‘has been prised out of his Oxford college and brought across the high seas to this faraway city for a purpose. He has brought with him some two hundred songbirds – nightingales, blackbirds, thrushes – from the mother country. In two days’ time these songsters are to be released from their cages into the forests surrounding this house, and there they will fill the air with the glorious sounds of the English countryside which we all know and love.’ His voice trembled briefly. ‘I am now inviting the present company to attend that grand opening of the cages which will be held on my lawns – along with suitable celebrations – on Saturday at midday. Ladies – gentlemen … let us raise our loving-cups – in honour of nightingales!’
Mrs K slipped her arm through mine and together we held the slim spiral of glass and sipped from the ancient cuplets, now brimming with finely-bubbled champagne. The intimacy of this ritual, to say nothing of the reason for it, would normally have caused my blood to acidify; instead I found myself hoping she would lay her hand upon mine. Indeed, I believe our fingers did touch as we drank, by accident, and I did not instantly withdraw my hand.
In the midst of these warm sensations, I felt Milner’s eye turn upon me. ‘What a shame I’ll be locked up in a railway carriage in Bloemfontein with the old Boer President and his Bible at the very moment your birds fly into the forests. I shall allow my thoughts to fly with them for a few seconds.’
The moment had arrived. I cleared my head of all other thoughts, as a lifetime of discipline has enabled me to do, within reason. The hand that had held the pokaal stem now dived into my breast pocket and I began to deliver my well-rehearsed sentence in confidential tones. ‘I wonder if I might deliver to you an urgent message from someone who has the highest opinion of your ability to prevent war.’ I produced Miss Schreiner’s envelope with a discreet flourish.
Good wines had relaxed the vulture gleam in his eyes. He glanced at the missive in my hand and opened his mouth to reply.
At that precise moment the brass gong thundered to the uncarpeted floor, causing the entire company to freeze in their poses of inter-prandial discourse.
‘Hands up, and shut up, the lot of you!’
In the doorway, a fiendish grin contorting his ravaged features, stood a familiar figure, his Holland and Holland double-barrelled eight-bore rifle balanced on his shoulder and aimed at the upper end of the dinner table. His poodle barked prettily at his feet.
‘I assure you it’s loaded.’ He moved the barrel up and down, as if unsure who to select as his victim.
‘Oh, good evening, Challenger,’ exclaimed the Colossus. ‘I was wondering when you would arrive!’
As I sat at that colonial dinner table, strangely indifferent as to whether Challenger blew my brains out or not, my hands nevertheless held high above my head, one of them bearing Miss Schreiner’s Appeal, I thought of Mr James.
After the massacre of the moths, my father had sunk into a deep depression, spending his days slumped in his shuttered bedroom, unable to shoulder his responsibilities to the Church.
Two weeks later, he hanged himself in the conservatory. I had found his body, with its purple, protruding tongue, as I tiptoed about the house on my early morning tour of inspection, which had become a feature of my new-found mobility. The bodies of his treasures still carpeted the flagstones: he had not allowed them to be swept away. Elspeth immediately sent for Mr James and locked me in my bedroom. She had discovered the door of my father’s safe flung open: inside it lay all the missing single wings from the dead moths, piled over the Dodo egg like a mound of dried petals.
Mr James propelled himself post-haste in his wheelchair from his cottage in the village. Elspeth and he arranged the funeral, a subdued and hasty affair, because of the suicide. The Anglican Church allowed us orphans to remain in the house while they looked for a new vicar.
Full summer was upon us. Birdsong still flooded the gardens, and every day several new species of flora burst into life in the flower beds. James and I g
rew inseparable. Every day we would tour the vicarage gardens and surrounding woods, both of us equipped with the compulsory paraphernalia of the serious natural-history collector: net, game bag with multiple pockets, box with cork damped in chloroform for the insects, pincushion with six sizes of pins. Between us we netted every variety of butterfly and moth around the vicarage. No beetle escaped our rapacious fingers, James even placing one in his mouth (like Darwin) when both hands were filled with booty.
His photographic equipment always came with us, solemnly pushed by either James or me in the handcart. By the end of the summer I was able to prepare the wet plates as well as develop and print them in the portable dark-room immediately after taking the photographs. My first formal portrait was taken at the age of nine on the occasion of Mr James’s marriage to Elspeth; it still resides upon her mantelpiece, next to a portrait of my father (which their visitors often mistake for a portrait of myself).
When a new vicar was eventually appointed and it became necessary for the couple to move, they chose to live in Battersea, South London, where Mr James could push himself to the local Working Men’s Club and teach the workers about natural history across the world. He always carried a shrivelled human head around in his wheelchair having discovered a whole basketful of them under his bed while sojourning in one of the islands of New Guinea. It resembled nothing so much as a withered old pomander, with the cloves mostly fallen out. I begged that we should slice it open with a bread knife to see what lay within, but some sort of superstitious fear he had picked up from the natives prevented him from agreeing to my request, which otherwise would have interested him greatly.
My father had left a substantial sum of money to Elspeth, with the result that she was able to buy a house large enough to hold my sisters and myself as well, our relations in Ireland having declined to adopt so unpromising a set of offspring. I was happy enough in Battersea, attending a preparatory school along the Thames during the week, and listening to Mr James’s adventures during the weekends. Elspeth developed a fanatical interest in cookery, more particularly in recipes from far-flung spots of the Empire. Guided by her husband’s culinary experiences, she was able to produce exotic meals like Nasi Goreng and obscure curries requiring ingredients from Asian chefs in Soho or the East India Docks. The decline of my sisters was rapid: they did not care for Battersea even though they had not availed themselves of the Oxfordshire countryside after my mother’s death. Eventually it was considered kinder to allow them to fade away in a sanatorium in Kent which specialised in distressed gentry. I did not miss them.
Mr James had many bird stories to tell. (Although all natural history was of interest to me, it seemed I had a particular feeling for ornithology, and I filled the house with cages of live birds whose behaviour I carefully recorded from an early age.)
James informed me that in parts of the remote bushveld of Southern Africa birds proclaim their joint territory by singing in the same key. He knew when he was moving out of one territory and into another because all the birds, whether singers or squawkers, sang a semi-tone higher or lower than their neighbours. Thus hornbill, stork and toucan would rumble in the key of, say, B flat, while lilac-breasted rollers, white-fronted bee-eaters and the ubiquitous red-winged starlings chorused out the harmonic series of the home key. A hundred yards further on, the same species of bird, but different individual members, would shrill out the same sounds in B major. And so on. James was an excellent musician, with perfect pitch, and an uncanny ability to play the piano with his back to the keyboard, especially after his fall, when he had more time for activities of this sort.
He added that in the desert-land even further north, a German missionary taught his pet starlings to sing the opening phrases of Mozart’s G minor Symphony (dadadum dadadum dadadabdi). After a local massacre, during which the starling cages were smashed open, the birds escaped, and proceeded to produce wild offspring – each of which sang Mozart in preference to its inborn high-pitched whistle. James swore that if you sat motionless for a whole day, you would hear the whole of the first subject of the first movement of this symphony, reproduced in perfect sequential order; more astounding still was the birds’ ability to improvise a second subject of their own, in the required dominant key, with a typically embellished coda.
James had been taught how to whistle in New Guinea by the owner of the human heads. The bird whistling was amplified by cupping the hands over the mouth and flapping combinations of fingers open and shut. However, a tribe of Indians in the Amazon Basin had showed him how to produce similar effects using only the cavities of his cheeks as resonators.
This was the technique that he had passed on to me.
Great Granary 1899
Challenger did not know where the birdsong was coming from. Years of discipline had enabled him to keep his bloodshot eyes on the target even when a chaffinch shrilled just behind his ear and a blackbird called above the dining-room door. But when the nightingale burst into liquid song from the tapestry at the other end of the room he allowed his irises to flicker in recognition of a supreme artist, rather than out of curiosity or surprise. It was in the split second of that saccadic shift that Huxley (who had been pouring a stream of champagne into a loving-cup when Challenger’s command rang out) was able to smash the heavy bottle, already held obediently aloft, over the head of the armed (and armless) guest, thereby rendering him instantly unconscious upon the floor. At once a knot of manservants gathered about this prone form and carried him, one to each limb, into the multiplicity of corridors in the Great Granary.
‘You were saying?’ Not a muscle appeared to have moved in Milner’s face during this interruption, as if he had been inconveniently petrified for a few minutes.
‘This message.’ I slid the envelope along the tablecloth among the wine glasses. Milner swept it on to his knee and opened it without moving his arms.
Challenger’s name bubbled down the table, but the Colossus helped himself to more melktert.
‘Saved by the song of the nightingale!’ exclaimed Mrs K. ‘What a fortunate coincidence that a flock of invisible birds should happen to pass through this dining-room at the very moment Mr Challenger was threatening to pull his trigger!’
‘Oh, there was never any danger,’ smirked Jameson. He opened his fist to display a small pistol with mother-of-pearl inlay. ‘This pretty little lady has saved the day on many an occasion, I can assure you.’
‘I’d rather be saved by birds, thank you,’ replied Mrs K smartly, and her husband lifted his head from a plate of pudding to reveal his massive moustache laden with cream. Without bothering to blot his lips he enquired: ‘Where did those birds come from? And where are they now?’ His gaze fastened on me in friendly fashion through his round glasses, as if I alone must have the answer.
At this the whole table became extremely animated, each face (with the exception of Jameson, who appeared to be lost in thought) turned towards me at a different angle of curiosity mingled with incipient gratitude, evidenced in the display of bared teeth and elevated eyebrows, in some ludicrous way reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper. I lowered my eyes modestly, for once not appalled to be the centre of attention.
‘Well now!’ squealed the Colossus, with his mouth full. ‘It seems we have a hero in our midst! A man of many talents, I’d say! A true Oxford man, in fact!’
‘Three cheers for Professor Wills!’ cried Mrs K, and for the first time in my life I became the object of a resounding roar of appreciation. This experience, to my surprise, released a slender flow of pleasure into the pool of anxieties which made up my usual emotional state, and, with a shy smile, I lifted my head to acknowledge the accolade.
‘I say, Wills, let’s have an encore!’ Jameson’s boyish face was defiant.
With a shrug I made a sparrow cheep so loud upon his shoulder that he jumped, then laughed in his embarrassment. Rallying, he cried: ‘I don’t know why you’ve brought those damned birds in the cages out there with you: you’re a good deal mo
re tuneful yourself, old chap!’
In the midst of all this frivolity Milner had been casting his cold eye over Miss Schreiner’s Appeal, which he held on his lap among the folds of the tablecloth, at the same time appearing to take part in the table’s activity along with everyone else. Once the conversation had become general again, he leaned towards me and murmured: ‘Not my style, Wills, not my style at all. I have already received some hysterical communication from the lady which I have chosen to ignore.’
‘The lady is very determined. Ten minutes is all she asks.’
‘Impossible. I don’t have ten minutes. If only someone would give me ten minutes …’
I drank deep from my silver beaker. ‘Miss Schreiner happened to overhear you tell me about the – female – personage from Brixton earlier today.’
The glance that flickered over me could have been the lash of a whip. He snorted. ‘A complete waste of my time. But I’ll do it for your sake – she’ll not leave you in peace otherwise. I make one condition, however: you must accompany me. I do not want to be compromised. The woman’s a man-eater, I believe.’ He swung his shoulder away from me to engage in conversation with bright-eyed Kipling. At the same time Mrs K leaned towards me. ‘I should be much obliged if you would whistle for my children,’ she smiled. ‘I know they’d be enchanted.’
‘I am already training a small girl to whistle,’ I replied, and to my surprise found myself describing to her in some detail my encounters with Maria-of-the-Mountain, including my plan to replace the tooth under the stone with a silver tickey which Huxley had obligingly given me.
‘Oh, what fun!’ she cried. ‘I must say, Professor, when I met you in the corridor this morning I thought you were a typically austere English academic, but now I see you in a quite different light!’
