by Tom Stoppard
The ninth earl (numismatic) was examining one of his coins, fingernailing the yellow unmilled edge, squinting for the flaw in the smooth gold, and, having found it, he carefully began to peel away the foil.
‘Breeding,’ he remarked with approval. ‘As Lord Curzon said to the actress, a lady does not move.’ And stripping off the gold tinsel, he popped the resultant chocolate into his mouth.
* * *
Sitting easy in the saddle, L. J. (for Long John) Slaughter moseyed down the slope, hat low over his eyes. The things you noticed were the single gun on his left hip and the tough leather chaps that covered his denims though this wasn’t cactus country. Slaughter was a left-handed gun and he had the look of a man who had come a long way.
The chestnut mare skidded once and L. J. lurched in the saddle, murmured ‘Easy, boy, easy, and his eyes never stopped moving. He slapped his right hand whup-whup against her neck. He figured he must be heading east, which was about right. He came on down, just moseying.
Suddenly his whole body tensed and his eyes narrowed, staring ahead where a lone horseman had appeared out of the fast-fading light, riding towards him. His lips parted in the faintest smile and he let his left hand hang loose. He tightened rein and edged the mare a little to the right to favour his gun-hand. ‘Whoa boy,’ he murmured, watching the other rider come close.
Slaughter said: ‘Where ya headin’, Jasper?’ and to the mare, ‘Whoa, will you, whoa boy.’
Jasper jabbed his finger west. He kept daylight between his body and his right arm.
L. J. nodded carefully, hauling back on the rein. The distance between them closed as the mare walked on.
He said, ‘Whoa, boy, whoa!’
Jasper said: ‘Where ya bin?’ His eyes were hard as gun barrels.
Slaughter hooked a thumb over his shoulder. He said: ‘Jes’ in case you’all thinkin’ of callin’ on a certain little lady, I happen ta know that she don’ wanna thing to do with a hick like you,’ and to the mare, ‘Stop, you dumb bastard.’
Jasper leaned on the loaded saddle bag and his lips parted in the faintest smile.
‘If you’re carryin’ a forty-five,’ he said, ‘there ain’t no sense in shootin’ with your mouth,’ as Slaughter’s mare brought them level.
Slaughter turned towards him, one hand on his loaded saddle bag. ‘I’ll be lookin’ for you,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘I ain’t so hard to find,’ Jasper shouted back at him.
L.J. slackened rein but the mare kept to the same stately walk. He nudged her in the belly with his heels and said, ‘Go now, boy, we’ll cut round an’ head him off – giddy’yup now.’ The mare walked on without resentment.
* * *
From behind a scrub of thorn the lion watched her. He was not sure yet and the wind was wrong. He lay flattened and nothing of him moved except the very end of his tail which flicked in the grass.
The woman came obliquely towards him, staggering, her eyes red-rimmed and desperate, and once she nearly fell. Her face had turned a deep unnatural red and her mouth hung open and dry. She licked her lips and fell again. It was evening but not yet dark.
She was a white woman, neither old nor young, and she had lost one of her shoes. She no longer knew where she was. She wanted to drink and sleep, and her thirst would not let sleep take her. Her mouth and throat, her whole body, felt as if she had never had a drink in her life and all the dry years were compressed now into a terrible need. Every bush was a person watching her or all the people watching her were bushes. She opened her mouth to shout at them but nothing came out but a dry hoarse sob, and she did not know she was falling until the earth smacked her flatly from ankle to cheek.
The lion lay ten yards away, watching for her to move.
* * *
He was a dark man with thick matted curls that hung down till they became a beard, and he sat on the donkey side-saddle with his feet bare and brown below the hem of his linen robe.
The path took him by a small lake. The man got down from his donkey and washed his feet carefully and then knelt to splash away the dust from his face. He was tired and very hungry. He hoped to find a fig-tree among the stunted hawthorns but there was food only for the donkey. He smiled gently at this reminder of the infinite workings that compensated all God’s creatures for their limitations and checked them for their presumptions. He lay down on the grass and fell asleep.
He slept for several hours, and although many people passed by and glanced at him none disturbed him. When he awoke he was cold. He climbed up on to the donkey and guided it along the track between green country. The track became a lane and there were people there. Many wondered at this strange stoical figure who looked neither to right nor left as the donkey carried him along.
It was quite late in the day when he came to a busy road which led into the heart of the city. The streets were crowded and there was much traffic on them, and the donkey sometimes had to push its way through the bystanders. The man made no sign to them and seemed so removed from everything around him that when the donkey halted at the central point of a busy junction, he did not look up until the horns blared from wall to wall and abusive cries rose on the air.
The man nudged the donkey with his heels but the animal did not move. He patted its neck and made encouraging sounds at it, also without result. Wearily the man got down and tried to pull the donkey forward by the halter and then, reconsidering, got behind it and started to push. The noise of the surrounding chaos took on an apoplectic pitch. The donkey stood quite still. The man took a pace back and kicked it side-footed on the rump. The donkey was unmoved. The man glanced wildly round and kicked the donkey in the genitals. He hopped round on one foot to the front of the donkey and punched it between the eyes, and hopped off again with his right fist in his left armpit. The crowd seemed to have turned against him. He started to scream at the donkey, ‘Get on, yer milk-brained whoor!’ and beat and kicked it about the legs, and the donkey turned to look at him with an air of christ-like forbearance. The man started to cry. He climbed back on to the donkey. There seemed nowhere else to go, and when the accident happened he was weeping quietly into the donkey’s neck.
* * *
Jane was sitting at her toilette, as she called it in the French manner, dreaming of might-have-beens. It was the height of the Season in London, and an onlooker might have been forgiven for wondering why it was that this mere slip of a girl with hair like spun gold, with exquisite features that proclaimed a noble breeding, should sit alone with sadness in her heart.
She sighed deeply, with her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her hands. A painter would have delighted in her pensive beauty, in the enigmatic trace of sadness in those wide brown eyes which had captivated so many swains, in the peeping blush of her firm young breasts where the thin silk of her gown fell loose about her… ‘Ah me,’ she sighed, ‘What a silly I am!’ for she was not given to feeling sorry for herself as a rule. But even as she laughed her laughter rang false.
Just at that moment her ears caught the soft fall of distant hoofbeats, and her heart fluttered within her. She raised her head to listen, one soft golden lock brushing her exquisite cheek. The hooves came closer. Her heart began to beat, but she dare not let herself believe it could be him.
‘Impossible,’ she breathed-and yet! The horse clattered to a halt outside the house and she heard the rider’s boots on the step.
She called sharply, ‘Marie! Marie! See who has come!’
‘Oui, Madame,’ answered Marie from outside the door. ‘I go.’
It seemed an eternity before she heard Marie’s voice once more – ‘It is Monsieur Jones, Madame!’
Jane caught her breath. She raised her head proudly.
‘Tell him I am not at home!’
‘Oui, Madame,’ called Marie from the hall.
She sat quite still. Her young face, too young for such cares, wept bitter tears that ran down her ivory-sculptured neck and left their salty traces on her ripening breasts. Her thin sh
oulders shook as she buried her face in her hands.
She heard Marie’s voice – insisting – ‘Madame is not at home, Monsieur!’ and then his voice calling, ‘Jane! Jane!’ And suddenly he was hammering at the door behind which she sat.
But she was still proud.
‘I will not see you again! Go away and leave me now, I beg you. I have suffered too much!’
‘But I want you, Jane, I want you!’
She caught her breath once more. She heard him put his weight against the door.
‘I cannot stay away from you, Jane!’ he cried.
‘Stand back – I swear I will shoot the lock!’
The next moment his pistol roared and with a splintering of wood the door burst open. She looked at him coldly as he stood disconcerted in the doorway.
‘I beg your pardon, Ma’am, I thought—’
He started to back out, but Jane could contain herself no longer. She jumped up with a cry wrung out of her heart, tears of joy streaming down her face, and started to run towards his strong brown arms, forgetting that her knickers were round her ankles. She fell heavily on the bathmat, and the tight roll of paper she had been holding on her lap spun away, unwinding itself across the floor.
* * *
So you carry this bomb about with you expressly for the purpose of throwing it at someone?
Well, yes. I suppose there’s no getting away from that. Or leaving it – I mean it’s got this time-fuse. I could leave it, but I don’t think I will when it comes to it, I mainly think of throwing it.
At whom?
I don’t know. I’ve got a list.
Now why exactly—
I don’t know. Exactly.
It’s all right, we’ll just take it slowly. Would you have a messianic complex about sin, for example?
No, it’s not that, not really, except it is something to do with no one being good any more, but that’s part of the other thing, of things all getting out of control, too big. I mean I’m not a crank fixated on an individual – it’s not vengeance, it’s salvation.
From what?
It’s all got huge, disproportionate to the human scale, it’s all gone rotten because life – I feel it about to burst at the seams because the sheer volume and numbers of the things we’re filling it up with, and people, it’s all multiplying madly and no one is controlling it because it’s all got too big.
But how do you apply—
It needs an explosion to shock people into calling a halt and catch up, stop and recognise, realise – everyone takes it all for granted. When an oil well catches fire, or a gas well, in the desert, there’s this column of fire blasting out of the sand high into the sky, day and night, week in and week out, a fantastic godlike pillar of fire, and the only way you can put it out is to have an explosion, make one, a great big bang that snuffs it out, and then the people can take over again.
Would you describe yourself as a psychotic?
No. I am just wide-open to things, certain things…
Some kind of hysteric?
I’m hysterical with secret knowledge, I—
But throwing a bomb—
I want nothing to do with it all-it’s self-defence, and if I can’t disengage myself by an act of will then perhaps an act of violence—
That’s where I got these braces….
Mmm?
‘Little shop back there, sold nothing but braces,’ said the ninth earl. ‘Of course that was years ago, that was the age of the specialist. Nowadays I suppose people buy their braces at the grocer’s along with their beastly gramophone records.’
II
Struggling with the inexpressible, Moon yet again abandoned his interview and saw that they were climbing St James’s Street at a reckless gallop. He could hear O’Hara screaming from his box. There were cars parked down both sides of the street, and many more nosed each other out of sight towards a mechanical infinity beyond human dominion, all essentially alike as though the product of some monstrous spawn. Moon tried to seal off his mind against his integrality with a vast complex of moving parts all dependant on each other and maintained on the brink of disintegration only by their momentum. He was breathing in spasms. He closed his eyes, and all the motorcars began to breed, spread, press the people to the walls, pinning them by their knees, and there was no end to it and no alternative either, because you couldn’t stop making them just like that because then there’d be hundreds of thousands of people out of work, with children and all, and no money to spend, so the shopkeepers would get caught up in it, grocers and shoeshops and garages and all the people dependent on them, with children and all, and if they couldn’t go on then the factories and the oil refineries would have to stop so there’d be millions of people out of work, with children and all, so—
He felt the shell of human existence ballooning to a thinness that must give way at some point, and his whole nervous system was tensed for the apocalyptic moment. If it did not come soon he would have to anticipate it, in microcosm, for his private release. The bomb bulked in his pocket, heavy with reassurance, and the coach swung into Piccadilly, turning, unwisely, right.
The oncoming traffic was a wall of blaring indignation spread pavement to pavement, but the terrified horses plunged on against O’Hara’s weight on the reins, and the wall parted for them, streaming and screaming past the windows.
Ahead of them a woman staggered out of the colonnade of the Ritz and swerved through the gate into Green Park, almost falling.
‘Laura!’ shouted the ninth earl. ‘Pull yourself together and go home!’ adding, ‘I can’t stop now,’ and pulled his head back into the coach.
Moon saw the woman fall down a few yards into the park. From behind a bush a long yellow animal like a mountain lion padded towards her and put down its great cat-head to sniff at her hair. Several people were watching the scene. The lion suddenly turned and ran off across the park.
‘Rollo!’ shouted the ninth earl joyfully. He clapped Moon on the knee. ‘Did you see? – she’s found Rollo.’
Up ahead a policeman stepped into the road with his arms out. When the horses were ten feet away he tried to jump to one side and was jerked out of sight.
‘I think we bumped into someone, my lord,’ Moon said. He felt exhilarated.
‘I’m always bumping into people,’ said Lord Malquist. ‘Most of them claim they know me. So tiresome. Dear boy,’ he added, ‘please would you remind me to telephone Sir Mortimer in case there is any nastiness.’
‘What was that woman doing, my lord?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the ninth earl wearily. ‘She gets carried away by the conviviality of her interests. Take my advice, dear fellow, never marry a woman with more than two-introspection and copulation.’
‘Was that your wife?’
’I certainly don’t know anyone else who could be thrown out of the Ritz before eight o’clock without feeling somewhat passé.’
O’Hara, transferring all his weight to one rein, pulled the coach right into Half Moon Street sending a motor-cyclist through the door of a travel agency, and left into Curzon Street, right again into Park Lane, once more against the traffic while he wept and implored the galloping greys, ‘Enough! Enough already!’
‘I’m beginning to wonder,’ said the ninth earl, ‘if O’Hara is the right man for the job. He seems to have no rapport with animals.’
He shouted something at the coachman but whatever it was disappeared without trace into a general crescendo as two taxis locked horns and catherine-wheeled into a bus. From the ensuing fragmentation of glass and steel there bolted, with a completeness and an air of instant creation that suggested to Moon divine responsibility, a donkey with a white-robed rider sitting on its back.
‘Such utter disregard for the common harmonies of life,’ complained the ninth earl. ‘I look around me and I recoil from such disorder. We live amidst absurdity, so close to it that it escapes our notice. But if the sky were turned into a great mirror and we caught ourselves in it un
awares, we should not be able to look each other in the face.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.’
The coach, with the donkey following, turned right into South Street and seemed about to distribute itself around the dead end of Farm Lane when it found the opening into a mews. And there, the horses whinnying with relief, the ride ended. The greys pulled up beside a third horse tied to the railings. The donkey, now riderless, stopped also. Moon got up from the floor of the coach and opened the door. All his exhilaration had drained away leaving a swamp of emotional weight that expressed itself in nausea. He heard Marie shouting, ‘Madame, it is the Monsieur!’ But he was beyond surprise. He climbed down from the coach and nearly fell.
‘Who is that delicious fertile creature?’ enquired the ninth earl.
Moon made no reply. He went unsteadily up the steps, put his hands on Marie’s shoulders and briefly hugged her. When she managed to get free, he walked past her into the house. Lord Malquist followed, pausing to lift Marie’s fingers to his lips.
In the drawing-room Jane was lying on the chesterfield, all but naked despite her silk dressing-gown. A cowboy was kneeling beside her, rubbing cream into her left buttock.
‘Darling!’ she greeted him. ‘What a lovely way to come home! Today’s becoming so romantic!’ and to the cowboy, ‘That’s lovely, darling, that will do nicely,’ and stood up as Lord Malquist entered the room.
‘May I present my wife Jane,’ said Moon. ‘Lord Malquist.’
‘Charmed,’ said Jane. ‘I do apologise that you should find me in this awfully undone state.’
‘My dear Mrs Moon, if I may say so, we should both be congratulated.’
Jane giggled.
‘And this,’ she said, waving a hand at the cowboy who had got up and was staring resentfully at them, ‘is Mr Jones.’
‘Ah!’ said the ninth earl jauntily, ‘The Duke of Wellington, I believe!’
‘I don’t care what you’re selling, just piss off,’ the cowboy replied.
‘Now Jasper,’ Jane reproved him, ‘don’t be jealous. Lord Malquist always dresses like that, don’t you, your Grace?’