by John Crowley
At Khartoum, Denys bid the honeymooners farewell: they were taking the Empire Airways flying boat from here to Gibraltar, and the Atlantic dirigible home. Denys, by now feeling quite proprietary about his Empire’s transportation services, assured them that both flights would also certainly be right on time, and would be as comfortable as the sleepers they were leaving, would serve the same excellent meals with the same white napery embossed with the same royal insignia. Denys himself was driven to the Grand Hotel. His Sudan Railways sleeper to Cairo left the next morning.
After a bath in a tiled tub large enough almost to swim in, Denys changed into dinner clothes (which had been carefully laid out for him on the huge bed—for whom had these cavernous rooms been built, a race of Kitcheners?). He reserved a table for one in the grill room and went down to the bar. One thing he must do in London, he thought, shooting his cuffs, was to visit his tailor. Bechuanaland had sweated off his college baby fat, and the tropics seemed to have turned his satin lapels faintly green.
The bar was comfortably filled, before the dinner hour, with men of several sorts and a few women, and with the low various murmur of their talk. Some of the men wore white dinner jackets—businessmen and tourists, Denys supposed; and a few even wore shorts with black shoes and stockings, a style Denys found inherently funny, as though a tailor had made a frightful error and cut evening clothes to the pattern of bush clothes. He ordered a whiskey.
Rarely in African kraals or in his bungalow or his whitewashed office did Denys think about his Empire: or if he did, it was in some local, even irritated way, of Imperial trivialities or Imperial red tape, the rain-rusted engines and stacks of tropic-mildewed paperwork that, collectively, Denys and his young associates called the White Man’s Burden. It seemed to require a certain remove from the immediacy of Empire before he could perceive it. Only here (beneath the fans’ ticking, amid the voices naming places—Kandahar, Durban, Singapore, Penang—did the larger Empire that Denys had never seen but had lived in in thought and feeling since childhood open in his mind. How odd, how far more odd really than admirable or deplorable, that the small place which was his childhood, circumscribed and cozy—gray Westminster, chilly Trafalgar Square of the black umbrellas, London of the coal-smoked wallpaper and endless chimney pots—should have opened itself out so ceaselessly and for so long into huge hot places, subcontinents where rain never fell or never stopped, lush with vegetable growth or burdened with seas of sand or stone. Send forth the best ye breed: or at least large numbers of those ye breed. If one thought how odd it was—and if one thought then of what should have been natural empires, enormous spreads of restless real property like America or Russia turning in on themselves, making themselves into what seemed (to Denys, who had never seen them) to be very small places—then it did seem to be destiny of a kind. Not a destiny to be proud of, particularly, nor ashamed of either, but one whose compelling inner logic could only be marveled at.
Quite suddenly, and with poignant vividness, Denys saw himself, or rather felt himself once more to be, before his nursery fire, looking into the small glow of it, with animal crackers and cocoa for tea, listening to Nana telling tales of her brother the sergeant, and the Afghan frontier, and the now-dead king he had served—listening, and feeling the Empire ranged in widening circles around him: first Harley Street, outside the window, and then Buckingham Palace, where the king lived; and the country then into which the trains went, and then the cold sea, and the possessions, and the Commonwealth, stretching ever farther outward, worldwide: but always with his small glowing fire and his comfort and wonder at the heart of it.
So, there he is: a young man with the self-possessed air of an older, in evening clothes aged prematurely in places where evening clothes had not been made to go; thinking, if it could be called thinking, of a nursery fire; and about to be spoken to by the man next down the bar. If his feelings could be summed up and spoken, they were that, however odd, there is nothing more real, more pinioned by acts great and small, more clinker-built of time and space and filled brimful of this and that, than is the real world in which his five senses and his memories had their being; and that this was deeply satisfying.
“I beg your pardon,” said the man next down the bar.
“Good evening,” Denys said.
“My name is Davenant,” the man said. He held out a square, blunt-fingered hand, and Denys drew himself up and shook it. “You are, I believe, Denys Winterset?”
“I am,” Denys said, searching the smiling face before him and wondering from where he was known to him. It was a big, square, high-fronted head, a little like Bernard Shaw’s, with ice-blue eyes of that twinkle; it was crowned far back with a neat hank of white hair, and was crossed above the broad jaw with upright white mustaches.
“You don’t mind the intrusion?” the man said. “I wonder if you know whether the grub here is as good as once it was. It’s been some time since I last ate a meal in Khartoum.”
“The last time I did so was a year ago this week,” Denys said. “It was quite good.”
“Excellent,” said Davenant, looking at Denys as though something about the young man amused him. “In that case, if you have no other engagement, may I ask your company?”
“I have no other engagement,” Denys said; in fact he had rather been looking forward to dining alone, but deference to his superiors (of whom this man Davenant was surely in some sense one) was strong in him. “Tell me, though, how you come to know my name.”
“Oh, well, there it is,” Davenant said. “One has dealings with the Colonial Office. One sees a face, a name is attached to it, one files it but doesn’t forget—that sort of thing. Part of one’s job.”
A civil servant, an inspector of some kind. Denys felt the sinking one feels on running into one’s tutor in a wine bar: the evening not well begun. “They may well be crowded for dinner,” he said.
“I have reserved a quiet table,” said the smiling man, lifting his glass to Denys.
The grub was, in fact, superior. Sir Geoffrey Davenant was an able teller of tales, and he had many to tell. He was, apparently, no such dull thing as an inspector for the Colonial Office, though just what office he did fill Denys couldn’t determine. He seemed to have been “attached to” or “had dealings with” or “gone about for” half the establishments of the Empire. He embodied, it seemed to Denys, the entire strange adventure about which Denys had been thinking when Sir Geoffrey had first spoken to him.
“So,” Sir Geoffrey said, filling their glasses from a bottle of South African claret—no harm in being patriotic, he’d said, for one bottle—“so, after some months of stumbling about Central Asia and making myself useful one way or another, I was to make my way back to Sadiya. I crossed the Tibetan frontier disguised as a monk—”
“A monk?”
“Yes. Having lost all my gear in Manchuria, I could do the poverty part quite well. I had a roll of rupees, the films, and a compass hidden inside my prayer wheel. Mine didn’t whiz round them with the same sanctity as the other fellows’, but no matter. After adventures too ordinary to describe—avalanches and so on—I managed to reach the monastery at Rangbok, on the old road up to Everest. Rather near collapse. I was recovering a bit and thinking how to proceed when there was a runner with a telegram. From my superior at Ch’eng-tu. WARN DAVENANT MASSACRE SADIYA, it said. The Old Man then was famously closemouthed. But this was particularly unhelpful, as it did not say who had massacred whom—or why.” He lifted the silver cover of a dish, and found it empty.
“This must have been a good long time ago,” Denys said.
“Oh, yes,” Davenant said, raising his ice-blue eyes to Denys. “A good long time ago. That was an excellent curry. Nearly as good as at Veeraswamy’s, in London—which is, strangely, the best in the world. Shall we have coffee?”
Over this, and brandy and cigars, Sir Geoffrey’s stories modulated into reflections. Pleasant as his company was, Denys couldn’t overcome a sensation that everything Sir Geoff
rey said to him was rehearsed, laid on for his entertainment, or perhaps his enlightenment, and yet with no clue in it as to why he had thus been singled out.
“It amuses me,” Sir Geoffrey said, “how constant it is in human nature to think that things might have gone on differently from the way they did. In a man’s own life, first of all: how he might have taken this or that very different route, except for this or that accident, this or that slight push—if he’d only known then, and so on. And then in history as well, we ruminate endlessly, if, what if, if only…The world seems always somehow malleable to our minds, or to our imaginations anyway.”
“Strange you should say so,” Denys said. “I was thinking, just before you spoke to me, about how very solid the world seems to me, how very real. And—if you don’t mind my thrusting it into your thoughts—you never did tell me how it is you come to know my name; or why it is you thought good to invite me to that excellent dinner.”
“My dear boy,” Davenant said, holding up his cigar as though to defend his innocence.
“I can’t think it was chance.”
“My dear boy,” Davenant said in a different tone, “if anything is, that was not. I will explain all. You were on that train of thought. If you will have patience while it trundles by.”
Denys said nothing further. He sipped his coffee, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead.
“History,” said Sir Geoffrey. “Yes. Of course the possible worlds we make don’t compare to the real one we inhabit—not nearly so well furnished, or tricked out with details. And yet still somehow better. More satisfying. Perhaps the novelist is only a special case of a universal desire to reshape, to ‘take this sorry scheme of things entire,’ smash it into bits, and ‘remold it nearer to the heart’s desire’—as old Khayyám says. The egoist is continually doing it with his own life. To dream of doing it with history is no more useful a game, I suppose, but as a game, it shows more sport. There are rules. You can be more objective, if that’s an appropriate word.” He seemed to grow pensive for a moment. He looked at the end of his cigar. It had gone out, but he didn’t relight it.
“Take this Empire,” he went on, drawing himself up somewhat to say it. “One doesn’t want to be mawkish, but one has served it. Extended it a bit, made it more secure; done one’s bit. You and I. Nothing more natural, then, if we have worked for its extension in the future, to imagine its extension in the past. We can put our finger on the occasional bungle, the missed chance, the wrong man in the wrong place, and so on, and we think: if I had only been there, seen to it that the news went through, got the guns there in time, forced the issue at a certain moment—well. But as long as one is dreaming, why stop? A favorite instance of mine is the American civil war. We came very close, you know, to entering that war on the Confederacy’s side.”
“Did we.”
“I think we did. Suppose we had. Suppose we had at first dabbled—sent arms—ignored Northern protests—then got deeper in; suppose the North declared war on us. It seems to me a near certainty that if we had entered the war fully, the South would have won. And I think a British presence would have mitigated the slaughter. There was a point, you know, late in that war, when a new draft call in the North was met with terrible riots. In New York several Negroes were hanged, just to show how little their cause was felt.”
Denys had partly lost the thread of this story, unable to imagine himself in it. He thought of the Americans he had met on the train. “Is that so,” he said.
“Once having divided the States into two nations, and having helped the South to win, we would have been in place, you see. The fate of the West had not yet been decided. With the North much diminished in power—well, I imagined that by now we—the Empire—would have recouped much of what we lost in 1780.”
Denys contemplated this. “Rather stirring,” he said mildly. “Rather cold-blooded, too. Wouldn’t it have meant condoning slavery? To say nothing of the lives lost. British, I mean.”
“Condoning slavery—for a time. I’ve no doubt the South could have been bullied out of it. Without, perhaps, the awful results that accompanied the Northerners doing it. The eternal resentment. The backlash. The near genocide of the last hundred years. And, in my vision, there would have been a net savings in red men.” He smiled. “Whatever might be said against it, the British Empire does not wipe out populations wholesale, as the Americans did in their West. I often wonder if that sin isn’t what makes the Americans so gloomy now, so introverted.”
Denys nodded. He believed implicitly that his Empire did not wipe out populations wholesale. “Of course,” he said, “there’s no telling what exactly would have been the result. If we’d interfered as you say.”
“No,” Sir Geoffrey said. “No doubt whatever result it did have would have to be reshaped as well. And the results of that reshaping reshaped, too, the whole thing subtly guided all along its way toward the result desired—after all, if we can imagine how we might want to alter the past we do inherit, so we can imagine that any past might well be liable to the same imagining; that stupidities, blunders, shortsightedness, would occur in any past we might initiate. Oh, yes, it would all have to be reshaped, with each reshaping….”
“The possibilities are endless,” Denys said, laughing. “I’m afraid the game’s beyond me. I say let the North win—since in any case we can’t do the smallest thing about it.”
“No,” Davenant said, grown sad again, or reflective; he seemed to feel what Denys said deeply. “No, we can’t. It’s just—just too long ago.” With great gravity he relit his cigar. Denys at the oddness of this response, seeing Sir Geoffrey’s eyes veiled, thought: Perhaps he’s mad. He said, joining the game, “Suppose, though. Suppose Cecil Rhodes hadn’t died young, as he did….”
Davenant’s eyes caught cold fire again, and his cigar paused in midair. “Hm?” he said with interest.
“I only meant,” Denys said, “that your remark about the British not wiping out peoples wholesale was perhaps not tested. If Rhodes had lived to build his empire—hadn’t he already named it Rhodesia?—imagine he would have dealt fairly harshly with the natives.”
“Very harshly,” said Sir Geoffrey.
“Well,” Denys said, “I suppose I mean that it’s not always evil effects that we inherit from these past accidents.”
“Not at all,” said Sir Geoffrey. Denys looked away from his regard, which had grown, without losing a certain cool humor, intense. “Do you know, by the way, that remark of George Santayana—the American philosopher—about the British Empire, about young men like yourself? ‘Never,’ he said, ‘never since the Athenians has the world been ruled by such sweet, just, boyish masters.’”
Denys, absurdly, felt himself flush with embarrassment.
“I don’t ramble,” Sir Geoffrey said. “My trains of thought carry odd goods, but all headed the same way. I want to tell you something, about that historical circumstance, the one you’ve touched on, whose effects we inherit. Evil or good I will leave you to decide.
“Cecil Rhodes died prematurely, as you say. But not before he had amassed a very great fortune, and laid firm claims to the ground where that fortune would grow far greater. And also not before he had made a will disposing of that fortune.”
“I’ve heard stories,” Denys said.
“The stories you have heard are true. Cecil Rhodes, at his death, left his entire fortune, and its increase, to found and continue a secret society which should, by whatever means possible, preserve and extend the British Empire. His entire fortune.”
“I have never believed it,” Denys said, momentarily feeling untethered, like a balloon: afloat.
“For good reason,” Davenant said. “If such a society as I describe were brought into being, its very first task would be to disguise, cast doubt upon, and quite bury its origins. Don’t you think that’s so? In any case it’s true what I say: the society was founded; is secret; continues to exist; is responsible, in some large degree at least, for the Empire we
now know, in this year of grace 1956, IV Elizabeth II, the Empire on which the sun does not set.”
The veranda where the two men sat was nearly deserted now; the night was loud with tropical noises that Denys had come to think of as silence, but the human noise of the town had nearly ceased.
“You can’t know that,” Denys said. “If you knew it, if you were privy to it then you wouldn’t say it. Not to me.” He almost added: Therefore you’re not in possession of any secret, only a madman’s certainty.
“I am privy to it,” Davenant said. “I am myself a member. The reason I reveal the secret to you—and you see, here we are, come to you and my odd knowledge of you, at last, as I promised—the reason I reveal it to you is because I wish to ask you to join it. To accept from me an offer of membership.”
Denys said nothing. A dark waiter in white crept close, and was waved away by Sir Geoffrey.
“You are quite properly silent,” Sir Geoffrey said. “Either I am mad, you think, in which case there is nothing to say; or what I am telling you is true, which likewise leaves you nothing to say. Quite proper. In your place I would be silent also. In your place I was. In any case I have no intention of pressing you for an answer now. I happen to know, by a roundabout sort of means that if explained to you would certainly convince you I was mad, that you will seriously consider what I’ve said to you. Later. On your long ride to Cairo: there will be time to think. In London. I ask nothing from you now. Only…”
He reached into his waistcoat pocket. Denys watched, fascinated: would he draw out some sign of power, a royal charter, some awesome seal? No: it was a small metal plate, with a strip of brown ribbon affixed to it, like a bit of recording tape. He turned it in his hands thoughtfully. “The difficulty, you see, is that in order to alter history and bring it closer to the heart’s desire, it would be necessary to stand outside it altogether. Like Archimedes, who said that if he had a lever long enough, and a place to stand, he could move the world.”
