by Ann Harries
‘I assure you I am very austere,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Women and children are usually repelled by my presence. I cannot understand why things have changed since I arrived in this hemisphere.’
‘So there is no Mrs Wills?’ she smiled mischievously.
I confirmed that there was indeed no Mrs Wills. She cut herself a slice of hard cheese and then said: ‘To pick up on an earlier – but related – theme –’ I awaited a return to the language of food, but instead she said: ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that if the company at our table considers the breeding of British babies on British territory to be one of the finest things we can do, then they themselves aren’t doing very much – again, in evolutionary terms, of course – to ensure the continued survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. I know for a fact that my husband is the only man of the company at the head of the table to have brought forth Anglo-Saxon offspring – with a little help from me, of course!’
I looked about me in some alarm at these indiscretions, and then replied: ‘I believe the feeling is that children get in the way of Great Men. The sound of childish romps disturbs Great Thoughts.’
She looked sceptical. ‘I am sure there’s a lot more to it than that. However, as our meal is drawing to a close, I have another question to ask you. Would you care for a companion on your journey up the gorge later tonight? I know all about milk-teeth, should you need an expert. But there is a different reason why I should love to accompany you.’
‘Which is?’ I shook my head at the proffered cheese.
‘I wonder if you’ve heard of the Nocturnal Thumbed Ghost Frog, which I’m told lives in the fast-flowing streams of the mountain slopes. Its habits are so silent and secretive that very few specimens have been located. In the whole world.’ She paused. ‘I would be most interested to look for the Ghost Frog before we set sail for England, but my husband shows no interest in accompanying me on a midnight expedition. And I’m not quite bold enough to go by myself.’
‘I’d be delighted to have your company.’ As I uttered these words I was surprised to note that I meant them. Perhaps for the first time in my life I attempted a little joke. ‘I’m not quite bold enough to set out into the wilds of Africa in the middle of the night without the protection of a strong woman!’
She laughed delightedly at my joke, which had issued from my lips without censure from my brain, enmeshed, as it seemed, in a golden cloud of mellow wine fumes.
The men at the table were discussing Challenger’s entourage of monkeys and cockatoos which had evidently accompanied the intrepid game hunter to his sedate hotel in Cape Town. Unknown to me, he had disembarked at the Mother City at the same time as I had, when it became apparent that his stump grew gangrenous and was in immediate need of hospital attention. No one seemed to hold his behaviour against him: a man who has shot seventy-two elephants in one year is entitled to a little fun with his gun.
The men adjourned for coffee and port. I excused myself, pleading exhaustion; then slipped outside to meet Mrs K near the dead hydrangeas.
To find a milk-tooth beneath a pebble in the middle of the night is no easy task and I might have given up very soon (feeling somewhat uneasy in the dark forestation) were it not for Mrs K’s bright chatter and womanly optimism. It was plain that both she and her husband were accustomed to excursions such as these and considered the magical world of childhood to be every bit as important as the largely mundane world of adulthood. I could not remember that my own mother had ever introduced an element of magic into my childhood, yet the brilliance of her outdoor passions was similar in quality to Mrs K’s enthusiasms. Perhaps what both women had in common was a refreshing lack of ambivalence about the way they conducted their lives: they moved swiftly from A to B in a slip-stream of certainty, while their more talented husbands wavered in mires of self-doubt.
I began to long for my bed. To my plea that we might spend the whole night lifting up round pebbles surrounded by violets, and swinging a lantern over the insect life that crouched beneath, she replied that each failure to discover the elusive pearl would wonderfully enhance the final discovery. The fallen pine with which the treacherous pebble was aligned now seemed to have realigned itself with a thousand other such pebbles, and I cursed myself for not making a clear mark on the hiding place with my fountain pen, or leaving my handkerchief nearby. In addition to her relentless optimism, the woman appeared to have nerves of steel. As we were crossing the moonlit lawns and were about to embark upon the forest path, a shadow slid from the trees and advanced towards us. I have to confess that my first instinct was to drop the lantern and run back to the house, but Mrs K broke into peals of laughter: ‘Why, Kenneth, you are a naughty fellow! You’ll be getting a dose of shot in your stern if you go on doing this!’ The apparition glared at us, a loaded branch of green bananas twined around his horns, which he devoured with a jerk, one by one, unselfconsciously, as we watched. A bull-kudu of some eighteen hands, he must have jumped the seven-foot fence which separated the vast gardens from the mountain fields above, wherein grew no banana trees. Mrs K reminded herself to report this invasion to the head gardener, and opened the forest gate for me to enter.
While this good woman helped me lift stones, she also kept an eye out for her frog, darting off every now and then to the turbulent waters of the stream, over which she waved her own lantern (obligingly supplied by Huxley) to see if she could find this silent creature gripped to a rock. For an amateur she had an impressive understanding of the mountain flora and fauna. The forest shrilled with the voices of a thousand insects and frogs, many of which she could identify by the correct generic name. Even the dark woodland odours released by our footfalls were recognised by her as drifting from this mushroom or that leaf mould. Yet at no stage did she make me feel she was in competition with me: her observations were made with a gentle humility that I felt would have much improved Miss Schreiner’s delivery and general womanliness.
We had been searching for perhaps an hour when my ever-vigilant ears detected the crunch of feet upon pine needles further up the forest. I could tell at once from the rapid regularity of the sounds that this was not another Kenneth, but a light-footed biped, probably female. The footsteps were too far away for their owner to be able to see our lanterns held low over stream and pebbles, and were soon absorbed among all the other night sounds chorusing in the forest. The sound made me uneasy, but was clearly unrelated to our presence.
I suppose I must have lifted the stone, found the tooth and smelt the smoke at the same moment. I had forgotten just how tiny a milk-tooth is; probably I had picked up the same stone several times only to find the tooth rendered invisible by a beetle or an earthworm. Such was the intensity of my delight – as if I had discovered an extinct species of beetle under a pebble – that the wisp of smoke which passed under my nose seemed merely to be a physical manifestation of my triumph, and I allowed myself to ignore it. ‘Hooray!’ I sang out, and Mrs K came running from her position by the stream where she had just encountered twelve small Ghost Frog tadpoles clinging with all their might to the pebbles in the fast-running water.
‘A priceless pearl!’ she breathed as I held up my trophy. ‘Far more valuable than any one of his precious stones!’ Then her nostrils twitched.
‘Professor Wills, do you smell what I smell?’
Only then did I realise that a multitude of odours had been entering my nostrils all the while: the forest became at once a giant pot-pourri in which a thousand fragrances were blended into an integrated whole. But even as I sniffed with widened nostrils, a half-visible plume of smoke drifted by and jolted my heartbeats momentarily.
‘It’s coming from up there! Quick!’ There was no time for further panic, and I am pleased to say that I remembered to put the little tickey in place before straightening my stiff knees.
We pushed our way up through the closely packed conifers (my treasure safely tucked in my fob-pocket), and further up into the tangle of jacaranda and eucalyptus, releasing wave after wave of power
ful odour. Yet even as my nostrils sustained this olfactory assault, my ears sharpened to the faint tinkle of jewellery swinging against itself. And was I being fanciful, or did I for a few seconds inhale the faint aroma of the morning’s over-sweet perfume as well? But before I could confirm this with further active sniffs, we arrived at a scene requiring our immediate attention.
No breeze fanned the little plume of smoke that coiled lazily from the mound of leaves and twigs that had been piled together, but it was clearly a matter of moments before the crackle inside it flared into fire. ‘Hurry!’ shouted Mrs K, even as I fumbled with my fly buttons, all thoughts of modesty abandoned. I felt excited as a naughty child: my hand shook as I directed my nervous waters at the smouldering heap and aimed at a flame. Then, with a thunderous sizzle quite out of proportion to my thin stream, water triumphed over fire, and I found the foreign sound of laughter rising in my throat.
‘You’re not taking this very seriously, Professor!’ Mrs K was giggling herself. Acrid clouds of smoke shot out of the destroyed fire and our eyes watered horribly as we kicked at the remains of the arson attempt and stamped on glowing embers, our lanterns high above our heads, causing the upper reaches of the trees and creepers to bulge with light.
‘I suppose it must have been some Boer,’ sighed my companion as we began our somewhat precipitous descent through the smoke-scented forest. ‘Someone full of resentment – perhaps still holding a grudge after the Raid!’ She was plunging downward rather more quickly than I would have liked, her lantern swerving violently among the night foliage.
‘Hmmm,’ replied I. ‘Rather a half-hearted attempt, don’t you think? Why set the forest alight? Why not the house?’
‘After the last blaze, I believe there is some kind of informal patrol round the house every night. But of course the strange thing is that our host doesn’t really care if all his possessions go up in flames – I suppose you know what he said when they told him his beloved house had burnt down: “Is that all? I thought you were going to say Jameson had died” Extraordinary response.’ She turned round suddenly to face me, just as I was negotiating a rather complicated tangle of roots. ‘Can I confess a dreadful secret to you, Professor Wills?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Please do.’ My head had brushed her bosom as I lifted it, and the sensation had revived a rush of nursery memories.
‘I don’t think I like Dr Jameson very much.’ A frond of plumbago became entangled in her hair, and she swept it away impatiently. ‘My husband worships him, of course. I think he’d like to have the Doctor as the hero of his next novel – if he could somehow transport him to India. But to me … I must say … he’s just a … filibuster!’ She held up her lantern to my face to measure the degree of my shock. On finding a gleam of sympathy in my normally impassive visage, she continued more briskly: ‘If only you knew the damage he’s done with his dratted Raid! In the first place he’s caused the greatest man in South Africa to have to resign his premiership. And in the second place he’s pushed this country much closer to a war that Britain is by no means ready for. Can you imagine the national humiliation if Britain were to be conquered by a barbarous tribe of unshaven Boers? It would be the beginning of the end of the Empire, for a start.’ Mrs K seemed to have forgotten that we were standing on a damp mountain slope at half past two in the morning.
‘According to the newspapers I read, our host was not altogether guiltless in this affair,’ I volunteered, edging down closer to her in the hope of moving her on, for I was more than ready for my bed by this time. But Mrs K wanted to continue her lecture.
‘Certainly he appreciated the fact that that monstrous old Boer was oppressing British men, women and children – not giving the vote, and that kind of thing – and he sincerely wished to come to their aid – but that Doctor Jameson! He saw himself as some kind of knight in shining armour rescuing damsels in distress, and meanwhile the damsels had no need to be rescued. I swear he just wanted to ride in front of a troop of soldiers and wave his sword, pretending to be Sir Lancelot in pursuit of the Holy Grail!’
‘I believe he ended up waving a Hottentot maid’s apron.’
‘He was lucky to escape with his life,’ replied she. ‘And only because that cunning old Boer didn’t want him turned into a martyr. And to see him strutting about now …’ To my relief she turned and made her way down the remainder of the path. I was now quite overwhelmed with tiredness and longed for my bed.
The gables of the Great Granary shone silver in the moonlight, their elongated shadows staining the terraced lawns. We slipped like conspirators between the columns and across the chequerboard tiles of the back verandah, silent at last. Mrs K produced a large key with which to open the back door.
‘I’ll report the fire, if you like,’ she whispered, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Not much point in doing it now. Good night, Professor. I’ve very much enjoyed hunting the tooth with you.’
An almost intolerable exhaustion had overcome me by the time I began to mount the stairs, and I found myself pausing every four or five steps to relieve the ache in my thighs caused by my unwonted midnight exercise. I longed for nothing more than to find myself in bed, and with heartfelt relief flung myself upon the embossed handle of my bedroom door. Just as I was about to enter, the door of the room belonging to the flirtatious mother slid open. Flushing with embarrassment at the idea of meeting female company of any kind in a corridor at nearly 3 a.m. I was about to slip silently into my room when a sharp whisper met my ears.
‘Wills!’
Frank Harris crept down the corridor, grasping his shoes in his right hand, smoothing his hair with his left. He smiled brilliantly at me in the dim electric light.
‘I say, old chap, I’ve a bottle of excellent brandy in my room. Come and join me for a night-cap, won’t you? Then you can tell me what on earth you are doing here!’
Oxford 1891
It was upon Frank Harris’s lips that I first heard the word c—t. The occasion had been a visit to my college rooms by Oscar, who had come to see Walter Pater at Brasenose, accompanied by Harris. Their visit to Oxford caused a considerable stir, for Oscar’s short novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, had just been published, to howls of opprobrium from that rather large section of society who did not agree that the act of lounging upon a sofa could be an art form.
I suspect he and Harris had an hour to kill, in between invitations to the great houses. Over a bottle of my finest wine (Perrier Jouët 1875-served by a disapproving Saunders) Oscar encouraged his friend to talk about John Ruskin, whom Harris had known well in the eighties, and whose face he claimed was sadder than Lear’s. Oscar was aware that my feelings about Ruskin were mixed, for I had been partly responsible for the Slade Professor’s abrupt resignation when the university authorities had elected to support our new vivisection laboratories, rather than extend his overcrowded lecture theatre next door. He had departed on the grounds that Oxford preferred the screams of agonising, dumb animals to his lectures in praise of beauty and goodness – a response which I considered to be highly emotional, but which nevertheless caused my heart to contract, briefly, with regret. That his mind was unhinged is amply proved by the sad fact that the greatest art critic of the century now writes nothing but his name, over and over, in his house beside Lake Coniston.
I do not care to dwell on the topics raised by Harris in connection with Ruskin’s private habits: suffice it to say that phrases such as ‘glorious silken triangle’ and ‘Venus mound’ flew thick and fast through my chaste bachelor quarters and I was left in no doubt that Ruskin and Harris had very differing attitudes towards these features of a woman’s anatomy.
‘But the Turners, Frank,’ urged Oscar. (Why is it that only paintings and sculptures have achieved metonymic equality with their creators? One does not speak of the Mozarts or the Shakespeares: words and music have less reality than pictures.)
Frank Harris had a tale to tell about the Turners.
‘Of course, it is as an art critic and d
efender of Turner that Ruskin is chiefly known, in spite of his efforts to reform the ills of British society,’ he began, clearly relishing the opportunity to tell a good story. ‘When Turner died and left his paintings to the nation, the nation was not interested. Ruskin found these great works of art in boxes in the cellars of the National Gallery, unappreciated and uncared for. He wrote to Lord Palmerston and asked to be allowed to put Turner’s works in order. He then spent a year and a half mounting and classifying the pictures. To him, the good, the pure and the beautiful were one, perfectly manifested in Turner’s sublime pictures, with their exquisite and subtle interplay of light and water and colour. Ruskin adored colour, associating the beauty of colour in paintings with the holiness of life.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ interrupted Oscar. In spite of the insouciance of his pose and the flabbiness of his face, his eyes gleamed with youthful intelligence. ‘I have always held that a good colour-sense is more important than a sense of right and wrong. But pray continue, now that we have at last reached the point to the story.’
‘Turner was his hero, his god. Because Turner created beauty without blemish his life too must be blemishless.’ Harris raised his eyebrows knowingly and drew upon his cheroot. ‘One fateful day in ’57 Ruskin came upon a portfolio filled with painting after painting not only of the pudenda of women, but of women twisted into erotic positions in the ecstasy of love. He was filled with revulsion. It seemed to him utterly incomprehensible that the man who had produced Rain, Steam and Speed could also paint a woman’s c—t. But worse was to come. He learnt that his hero, far from leading the pure and virtuous life that Ruskin himself lived, would go down to Wapping on Friday afternoons and live there till Monday morning with the sailors’ women, painting them in every posture of abandonment.’ Harris paused, his eyes asparkle, as if envisaging these postures with some relish, and tempted by a diversion into his own scandalous adventures.
