I stopped to examine a blossoming aloe hanging over the serpentine path; it was, surely, not the correct season to see such a thing, and the Governor’s wife laughed mildly at me, and explained that here, there are no seasons, but a constant flowering and shedding and leaving in the mild unchanging climate. ‘Do you suppose he was happy, at the last?’ I asked. ‘In this desolate spot?’ ‘Desolate, sir?’ the Governor’s wife said. ‘Isolate, certainly. Yes, I believe he was happy. He was surely a great man, and if he lost the world, then he could console himself with the knowledge that few, since Alexander, have had a world to lose. He, dolphin-like, bestrode the ocean, and lands like plates … Forgive me, sir. I once knew Shakespeare, but … We were quite friends, the Emperor and I, as I liked to call him – you have no idea how agreeable and amusing it is to call a man Emperor. And now you will think the worse of me. We were friends. But we talked of small matters, of the concerns of a small country town, set down somehow in the middle of a great ocean. Marriages and betrothals among our little flock, and the shortages of foodstuffs, even of ladies’ fashions on the island, and how they would look next to the fashions this year of London, or of Paris; these were the concerns of our conversations. We did not fight the Battle of Waterloo over and over, as old soldiers are said to be fond of doing. The Governor, my caro sposo, you know, sometimes tried to tempt him to do so, with silver pepperpots and the saltshakers, but he would smile, and talk of something else entirely. He was greatly interested in the tittle-tattle of our little parish, you know, and of news of the great world, not at all. When ships came, he was invariably afflicted with the blue devils, and retreated to his residence, scowling. He was right so to do; some of those who came, you know, sir, would chivy him out like a curious bear, to see him growl. And once the ship had left, he would come out again, climb Rupert’s Hill in his funny, breathless, stumpy way, and as he came down from the peak, it was as if the sun had risen in his face once more. There is one curious fact I always like to share with our visitors; he was very fond of gold, and most understanding of a lady’s hunger for display after nightfall. I never met his like. Forgive me, sir; that is a foolish thing to say, for of course, the world never saw his like. Naturally, it did not. All that I can add to the world’s estimation is the poor opinion of a poor lady, set as far apart from the world as a lady can be, and tell you that I grew to be fond of him, truly. As a man, you understand, as a man. And, sir, when does your ship sail for India?’
We set sail on a fine evening, replete with water and fresh stores. I had gorged myself on watercress for days, and was happy. The sea, for the moment, was like a glass. You will laugh at me for dealing in worn-out poetry, Bella, but I can do nothing with the truth; the sea truly was like a glass, and I could not see what propulsion drove us onward. Behind us was the little island, and the lights of the town were beginning to twinkle in the evening air. This, then, was what it came down to; the man who strode Europe, and dreamt of striding the world, was reduced to this little scrap of land, this emerald atom, floating in the velvet sea, and was satisfied at last. The island receded from view, fell back by degrees into the saltly tropical marine night, and by degrees I felt myself withdrawing from any interest in the company on board ship. I went below, as darkness fell, and I stopped caring about Tredinnick and Lannon, Elliott and Captain Taylor; even about Miss Brown. Losing everything. Losing – well, what have I lost? There, too, is something I shall spare you, but now I have made a strange decision, and there may no longer be any reason to spare you anything. But still I pass over some things: in these pages, for my own sake, I shall set down only what pleases me in myself, and that, most of all, is my memory of you. For me, now, there is no world, but only you, set down in these pages. There is no Jane, there is no society, and, like Bonaparte on his little island, I can count the world well lost, knowing what I have gained.
I shall not see them again. I am going back to Kabul. I did not tell you. I am telling you now. I am going back to Kabul.
But shall I tell you something else, Bella? Something truly strange? My strange decision? I know now that you will never read this journal, that no one shall. I had planned to despatch it to you on my arrival in India, but I have a better plan. Tomorrow, I shall go to the prow of the boat, and look at the white beating sea, and feel the wind on my face, and hear the cries of the hands and the gulls, tangled up in the rigging. I shall take this little book, and throw it as far as I can, casting it to the waves, commending it to the care of the deep. And the salt water shall wipe away the ink, and dissolve the stitching, and the fish will nuzzle the little book into pieces. And the waves shall wash away my sins, and no one will know of them, and nothing will be heard of them but in the great cavernous halls of the ocean, the echoing infinite chambers of eternity.
Write to me, Bella. I think of you every moment of the day.
BURNES
To tell, he longs to see his son, were strong
But let him say so then, and let him go;
But let him swear so, and he shall not stay
We’ll thwack him hence with distaffs.
The Winter’s Tale
NINE
1.
IMAGINE, NOW, A PLAIN. The most dun and dreary, greasy and grey plain in the world. It is relieved by no virtue of freshness, no green, no water. No palace here, no shade, no pantomime Orient (though we are in India), no cool oasis, no sight or promise of rest. There is no field of rice to be seen, no lush verdure clouding the earth, nothing upon which the eye, gritting up with dust, may pause and be soothed. Raise the observing eye up, now, as if on some high crystal stair, some glass silent Babel, hundreds and hundreds of feet into the lowering grey empyrean, and now imagine again, as far as the mind’s eye can see, nothing, but nothing, but the slow curving earth. A flat grey brown eventless plain under a flat grey eventless sky. At the furthest grey horizon, that may be an immense range of broodingly dark mountains, rearing up like thunder as the eye focuses on them. Or the eye may be forming some movement out of mossily green thunderclouds, reaching down like sickening black mountains to the earth. No rain falls here, and the long thunder bears no fruit. Nothing lives, except a single hopeless beggar, squatting in the dry filth. He can only be waiting for death; this landscape gives no alms. A perpetually darkening light, a vast dusty plain a thousand miles from any sea, here in the unloved empty heart of Imperial India. Somewhere in this huge vacuum, the Governor General is advancing on his progress.
There he goes; there, miles away, near the baking horizon. He, of course, cannot be seen; his entourage cannot be seen. What can be seen is dust, and he emerges from a cloud. From here, however, from our falcon’s view, it looks more like a movement of insects or an extraordinary meteorological phenomenon than the movement of men, or gods. All that can be seen is a vast brown cloud, rising from the earth and taking its single direction; an arrowed cloud, taking its single direction. Some great event is occurring down there on the plain, and wrapping itself in a cloud of earth while it takes its patient, tremendous form, like the manifestation of the wrathful Jehovah before Ezekiel.
From here, the huge slow storm of the earth, risen in wind, announces the progress and hides it, ostentatious and secretive at once. Swoop down, now, to this dun linear cloud, and there, at the head of it, as if emerging from the smog, is the Governor General himself. He rides at the head of his procession like a jewel set at the head of a mace. He is set in his palanquin and lolls, nodding, from side to side. Occasionally his head jerks firmly upright. Etiquette and the requirements of the vast entourage have combined, and mean that he must rise before five each day, and in this late-afternoon thickening gloom, he is feeling the weight of his early rising. Before and beside his gilded elephant strut barefoot bearers, flailing their moghul pennants (but to whom, no one asks). Stern-faced, they raise and lower their feet with swift deliberation, as if in imitation of the Governor General’s elephant. Behind Lord Auckland’s elephant are the elephants of his domestic party, his sisters and hi
s courtiers. Emily and Fanny are doing their best to remain poker-stiff, firmly staring in their upright palanquins. But two hours on an elephant is as much as either of them can stand, and – after four times as long as that – they pine, they simply ache for the opportunity to complain, even more than the chance to rest. Emily, in particular, does not seem to be looking at anything, and there is nothing there to be seen. She seems, rather, to be fixing the scene – the landscape – all India – with her newly acquired gimlet glare. The gimlet glare is meant to assure the bearers that she is not tired, but stoic under these cushioned conditions; it does not quite succeed, and she looks like someone concentrating very hard on her physical sufferings.
And then the courtiers – the cousins and aunts, each in a tonjaun, the young men from John-Company, as the natives say, the illustrious connection of Lord Palmerston (so very great a disappointment, this young man, such a very distant connection in any case and dim and argumentifying as your everyday country curate) – and – and – and. There are so many men and women in the court of the Governor General, so many courtiers and attendants, each at the centre of his own little court. Every man has one hundred and twenty bearers, and many of those bearers have bearers of their own, fanning – as Emily is apt to say – the third footman’s body servant’s lapdog for two rupees a month and a red silk kurta. The Governor General never goes for a walk on his own; it is as unimaginable as God turning out without his seraphim. George, as his sister is always recalling, is a surprisingly mild boy, once you get to him. But if he is unchanged from her vision of him as an adored fifteen-year-old elder brother, his circumstances are now quite altered. His nazir, and his elephant jemaudar, and his mahout, and his syces, and his elephant coolies, and the bearers and wallahs and advisers and aides all have the faces of thunder, of archangels barring the path. He can never be alone. His life is one of ceaseless, palatial, sublime discomfort.
Behind the gubernatorial party, that vast train of bearers and under-bearers and bearers’ bearers’ bearers rises up and is swallowed in mud and choking dust. The Governor General’s discomfort is considerable, but at least he does not ride in the dust kicked up by a preceding half-mile of procession. He rises before six and departs, and the last of the followers only moves from its overnight camp two hours later. It is like the unfolding of a gargantuan squeezebox; a process which is just now reversing itself. Lord Auckland gives a peremptory signal. It is not his decision, in fact, since he has been in urgent communication with the nazir’s messenger boy. The boy, running alongside the Governor’s elephant, has been trying to inform him that the nazir, that tremendous personage, now wants to make camp for the night. George seems to agree, and his elephant is hauled to a halt like a ship being tugged to shore. The other elephants shuffle to a standstill, and following the lead of the Governor’s great steed, fall slowly to their knees. Behind them, the long alarming series of cannonadings and collisions, yells and crushing of animal against man come to a stop. The Governor’s party descend, very gracefully, from their mounts on the unfolding portable stairs used for the purpose; against the singing yowl of the camp’s native languages, their English chatter is suddenly spiky with consonants as the song of crickets.
2.
Elphinstone and Macnaghten are already arguing, as ever. The pair of them have formed a bickering twosome for days now, Macnaghten and Elphinstone, Elphinstone and Macnaghten, each throwing his long-hoarded experiences and adventures at the other. The others in the Governor’s party have taken to avoiding, not at all politely, the two dull old men. Now, they seem to be taking up where they left off after breakfast, trawling over their long-ago travels and bringing up their favourite stories, in guise of intense scholarly debate. Macnaghten is a fine handsome ancient – so, in fact, is Elphinstone. Elphinstone is a prinked, polished dandy, whose old age shall be made to shine with huile antique and one of Truefitt’s best nutty-brown wigs. Macnaghten is more rumpled, more the brilliantly impossible young man grown wrinkled and grey and rancid. They do not look alike, and yet they are obviously gruesome varieties of the same pompous type; to watch them argue is to think of a dead magpie in a ditch, and its live glossy brother, hopping around with offensive perkiness.
Neither Elphinstone nor Macnaghten can make up his mind to come to a conclusion on any subject, and their arguments, interrupted by the day’s travels, continue placidly from one week to another. Both find themselves possessed of the sort of ageing handsomeness against which a guiltily shifting expression acquires a high gleam. The Governor’s party habitually moves away from them, once they start talking; on this progress, however, each independently fancies that he has found a more deserving and interested listener than his habitual interlocutor. This more deserving young man is a recent addition to the party. At this moment, he is doing his best, nodding and smiling and making small polite interjections in the exchange, turning from Macnaghten to Elphinstone, and back to Macnaghten. He is disagreeing with neither of them. It might be politeness; it might, on the other hand, be a variety of arrogance, the certainty of a man who knows his company is not worth arguing with or persuading. He knows he is in the right. Elphinstone, as it happens, is appealing to the young man while haranguing Macnaghten. Macnaghten is presently at something of a disadvantage, since he is dismounting from his elephant, and trying to disagree all the while. Emily and Fanny, the Governor’s sisters, are helplessly shaking with laughter at his attempts to descend, tip the boy, correct Elphinstone’s ancient and decrepit memory and smile condescendingly at the young man all at once.
‘Where are we?’ Fanny says, rubbing her rump discreetly with the point of her parasol, like a placid cow scratching herself against a gate.
‘Goofrein, madam,’ the nazir says, rushing up with his own little entourage. ‘One moment—’ hits a boy, ‘—yes, madam, indeed, Goofrein.’ And then he dashes off again, to supervise the erection of the tents.
Emily looks around her at the sandy waste. ‘I shall never, never understand,’ Emily says to the group in general, smiling brightly, ‘why such a place has a name at all. There is nothing here – nothing at all.’
‘Not nothing, sister,’ Fanny says, stretching. ‘Look – there.’
‘No, not nothing,’ Emily says, squinting and observing a small assemblage of buildings. ‘A tank and a little mosque, as usual, and a holy man, naked and painted. The same, every day. I wonder why we travel, to see the same mosque and the same tank in the company of ten thousand of our devoted followers.’
‘Fifteen thousand, at the last count,’ Fanny says. ‘Five thousand for me, and five for you, and five for George.’
Lord Auckland hears his name, and turns momentarily from his deep conversation with one of the company wallahs; sees, as Fanny smiles, that it is nothing of significance, turns back to the day’s dull business. Emily is dry with thirst and itchingly hot. She sees that Fanny’s dress is stained in the upper arm, and curses the fashion for tight sleeves – so very undesirable a mode if travelling in India, and probably one long abandoned in London in any case. She is reminded, too, that her wardrobe has now been deprived of another gown; she foolishly wore a new silk gown to call on the little ranees the day before, and it was quite ruined by their hospitable custom – carried out with distinct relish – of pouring attar over the departing guest. And now not even Myra will wear it. The next time, she will wear muslin to visit the little ranees, and hang the incivility. Both Emily and Fanny are plump-cheeked, snub-nosed, bright-eyed; they look like a pair of intelligent, curious porpoises.
Elphinstone and Macnaghten are working up to a terrific display of learning and memory. ‘Great enthusiasts, great enthusiasts in the black arts of divination,’ Elphinstone is saying. He is recalling his days in Kabul, thirty or more years back, for the benefit of the new young man. ‘I recall that they attempt to divine the future by examining the blade bone of a sheep, by examining the marks in the blade bone of a sheep. Most popular, very much like our own practice of examining coffee grounds,
or so I imagine. Did you, sir, ever hear of the continuation of such pagan practices?’
‘Coffee grounds, sir?’ Burnes says – for of course it is he whose novel presence has excited the conversational display of these venerables. He is only half-listening.
‘No, sir, the examination of the blade bones of sheep,’ Elphinstone says. ‘I wonder if you ever saw such a thing, in your travels in the country of Kabul. My recollection, now, is of the customs which pertained over a quarter of a century ago.’
‘I do not recall,’ Burnes says briefly.
Macnaghten triumphantly runs his hands through his haystack hair, delighted at this. ‘Of course, Elphinstone, it was a very long time ago you were in Kabul. Are you sure it was there that you saw such a thing? Or was it at Astley’s circus in London? Very easy to confuse these things, sir, very easy indeed, as one gets on in years, as we are. A colourful court; a cleverly put-together spectacle. Very much the same thing to that interesting thing, the ageing memory.’
Elphinstone rises above this in his polished patrician carriage. ‘I wonder, sir, if you recall, then, what method the Kabul court uses to foretell the future. All civilized and, indeed, uncivilized societies have great interest in divination, as you know, sir, and whether for use or amusement, you must have seen some way in which they seek to peer into the future. If not the sheep bone, then I wonder what, what, what …’
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