Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  Ready tars appeared with ropes that they anchored to pillars, gnarled unafraid men smoked like kippers, their bare horny feet holding the deck, or posh dainty floor, like suckers, except where there was broken glass which, with their own digital wisdom, they avoided without the prompting of their owners. The frightened passengers were encouraged to get up and grip the ropes like tug-o'war teams and, in a temporary settling, move out to other ropes and their cabins. The ship's doctor was busy elsewhere, but two orderlies came in with a stretcher for the Bishop of Gibraltar. "Right out, Jack," the orchestra leader said through his Craven A smoke. "Poor bugger's concussed."

  I went to the sick bay the following morning, when the Indian Ocean was as quiet again as a bluefleeced lamb, and the Bishop of Gibraltar was conscious after a long blackout, though exhibiting the classic symptoms of concussionirritability, a tendency to drop off without warning, patches of lost memory. "Who the hell are you?" he asked.

  "Never mind. How are you, how are they going to get you ashore, how's your control of your limbs?"

  "I can't remember the Athanasian Creed." He began to cry.

  "It begins Quicunque vult, doesn't it?"

  "That's Latin, the damned thing's in English, I can't remember it, a damned fool I'm going to look to the Indians."

  "Ah, you've not forgotten that anyway. Tomorrow morning we reach Bombay. The Athanasian Creed will all come back, you'll see, you'll be right as rain in a couple of days."

  "What's rain to do with it? Is it the season of the rains? Have the rains come? Falleth alike on the just and on the unjust. Why did God strike me down?"

  "That wasn't God, that was Mother Nature."

  "God rides on the storm. There's a hymn about that, Isaac somebodyorother. You'd better hear my confession."

  "No, no, you know I can't. Besides, you people don't have concussion. I mean, you don't--"

  His bandaged head fell sideways and he began to snore. Poor devil. His poor church. Deck games and tangos. When we arrived at Bombay in great grey humidity, there was a welcoming party of brown clergymen, girls in saris, choirboys singing a hymn unidentifiable as to either words or tune, and an old white man in glossy alpaca who seemed to be the retiring bishop. There were wreaths of frangipani wilting in the damp heat. The quondam Bishop of Gibraltar tottered but was much better. Indian bearers took his baggage ashore which included, as far as I could tell through the crush, a full-size crucifix perhaps used as a hatstand, and he fussed over everything, waving a walking stick. A Dravidian photographer enlivened the greyness with flashes, and a Eurasian in a topee from The Indian Express (Bombay) asked questions. But the bishop, looking like a haji with his head bandage, spoke words to all in a forward-placed professional baritone. "Struck," he said, "by God's hand but fast recovering, though I cannot remember the Athanasian Creed, I am happy to be with you." Laughter and applause. "Good old bish," one of the Malayan planters said. "We will march forward together in our fight against vicious materialism." Applause and laughter. "All who believe in God, quicunque vult, are one body. First things first. May the creeds sink their differences and unite in the face of the threat of a common enemy." This, in early September 1924, was the first public statement ever made, I believe, in favor of an ecumenical movement. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. He somethings His footsteps in the sea and rides upon the. This should have been a historic moment. The retiring bishop got his successor ashore as quickly as he could. Laughter and applause. A couple of Buddhist monks in daffodil robes came aboard later to ensure a continuing religious presence, but they were sailing to Colombo in steerage. We missed the Bishop of Gibraltar, now of Bombay.

  Of Colombo I remember one thing only. The local madrigal society gave a concert in the Mount Lavinia Hotel, and a local baritone interspersed some solos, among which was that aria of Gay and Handel, "O Ruddier Than the Cherry." Instead of "Or kidlings bright and merry" he sang "Or kiplings." No one seemed to notice. It is possible that there was an inverted d in his copy. He accepted perhaps without question that there was a class of things called kiplings. I have been haunted by this all my life. Colombo and the collective nightmare of rooks in the great raintree over the hotel and a Handel aria with kiplings in it.

  And so at last Singapore came up from the sea in the night, greeted by revellers in fancy dress. I was Julius Caesar, all things to all men, my moustache having been removed distractedly by the ship's barber while I dozed. Disembarkment at noon the following day. My dear, the heat. Life in a slow oven. Someone had chalked, as in welcome, a gross caricature of buggery on the wall of one of the godowns. Singapore duly smelt of boiling dishrags and cat piss. I stayed at the Raffles Hotel which Willie Maugham, under their later notepaper heading, was to laud as breathing all the mystery of the Fabled East. The mystery lay perhaps in the provenance of the meat for the curries. The lounge was as big and bare as a football stadium, ringing with the frustrated thirsty crying "Boy!" The boys or waiters were ancient soured Chinese wandering unheeding forlornly under the ceiling kipas or fans. I picked up one tale from a bank manager. Forbes, his young assistant, had had to get to work each morning by way of the Botanical Gardens, which were full of monkeys. He got into the habit of bringing a loaf of Chinese bread with him and throwing bits of it to them, who pranced and gibbered about him, bolting without gratitude. They grew used to his coming and soon took Forbes's bounty as their due. One night he took home a Malay prostitute from the Park of Happiness, was vigorous with her at dawn and then overslept. He had no time to get a loaf for the monkeys. The monkeys were enraged when they saw Forbes breadless and they tore him to pieces. Literally. The entire monkey population of the Botanical Gardens tore Forbes to pieces. You may know the story I made of this, "A Matter of Gratitude."

  I took the night train to Kuala Lumpur, the muddy estuary, and stayed at the station hotel for three days. I picked up the materials for "The Smoking Sikh,"

  "Little Eleanor," and "Without a Tie" (the tale of a man who tried to get into the Selangor Club without a tie). Then I went to Ipoh, the tin town, chief city of the state of Perak (whose name means silver, or tin), and there a visit to Kuala Kangsar was recommended to me, the royal town at the junction of the rivers Perak and Kangsar. Picturesque, I was told, with a fine mosque and istana where I must make my number, meaning sign the book. Also there was the Malay College, a public school on English lines for the sons of the Malay aristocracy. There was also a peaceful rest house where they served the best damn cup of tea in the entire FMS. From now on for a time my story must seem to be a Tale of Horror and Imagination, but it is all true. In Kuala Kangsar I met, if I may be permitted the novelettish locution, my love.

  CHAPTER 34

  "Full house," I said, showing two kings and three nines, and then my heart behaved strangely. It bounced at my ribs as though dangled and my arms swiftly filled with air. The air was evidently being drawn off from my lungs. I gasped, tried to stand, then went over. I saw the weave of the fallen rattan chair like some mysterious page of the codex of the dead and then I was out. I came to in, so the planter Fothergill was to tell me, three minutes flat and felt well again though weak. I tried to rise but they said stay there. Greene the planter said he was going to telephone Doc Shawcross. The Chinese boy said it because very hot very hot for new tuan. I was, then, on the floor of the Idris Club, saying at least let me have my drink there, so Booth the planter allowed me a sip or two of my Booth's gin pahit or merah, meaning bitter or pink (red really), holding my shoulders like Hardy Nelson's. The kipas spun above my eyes, but the boy, Boo Eng, fanned me with an ancient copy of The Illustrated London News. I'm all right, really. You wait, titan doktor he come. You all right, old chap? Really all right? You have to get used to this climate, the humidity causes the trouble not the heat. So I was allowed to sit. You do look all right now but that seemed to me to be rather nasty.

  Doe Shawcross found me sipping brandy and ginger ale. "Well," he said, "what's this I hear?" He was a young man in white shirt
and shorts and white long stockings, very brown and pared, I could tell, by duty and heat and an athletic or certainly ascetic mode of living, unlike the planters, who were all paunched. The tropical egg, the French called it. "Toomey?" he said. "Kenneth Toomey? But I read you. I've some of your books at home. Well well, we can't allow anything to happen to Kenneth Toomey." He said that with evident sincerity.

  "Heart," I said. "It happens very very occasionally. Five years I think it is since it last happened. I'm perfectly all right now."

  "Watch the drink. Cut down on the smoking." With his doctor's eyes he had noted my stained index finger. "Don't eat too much. First few months in the tropics and you eat like a horse, I know. Then follows anorexia. Hard to say which is worse. Where are you staying? How long are you staying?"

  "Rest house. How long I don't know. I've been writing. This is a good town for writing. Peaceful."

  "A drink, doc?" Fothergill offered.

  "A suku. Plenty of water." A suku was a quarter of whisky as a stengah was a half. Doc Shawcross had a plain honest face with a high narrow forehead, his hair closecropped sunbleached wheat color. The eyes were a speckled hazel. No sexual heat came out of him. A cool man, cool as his trade. About twenty-nine. "I'll have to give you a bit of a going-over, won't I? A bit rough, our rest house. I thought you might be staying with the DO." Meaning the District Officer, an unliterary man with, I was told, a secret sex life that precluded hospitality. Near the end of his tour, they said, and he wouldn't be coming back. "Or the Sultan, for that matter. Pearce could have fixed that." Pearce was a very old Australian who had married one of the Perak princesses and, a widower now, lived in a sort of gazebo in the grounds of the istana. "Anyway, why not move in with me? The doctor's house on Bukit Chandan," meaning Sandalwood Hill, "designed for a married doctor with a full quiver," ah, "but this doctor's by way of being a bachelor."

  "That's awfully kind."

  "That's a good idea, doc," Booth said. "He can take a trishaw down to the club. Arrange a two-buck weekly contract with one of those bastards. Same time every day." They liked me, I think, or they wanted me to put them in a book, even libelously, no matter, being put into a book was the important thing.

  "Come now if you like. My boy can fetch your barang from the rest house. Tea should just be about ready."

  "That's awfully kind."

  "A good idea, doc," Fothergill said, a scrawny bonykneed man with a paunch like a disease though it was only Anchor beer in the evening, Tiger beer in the morning.

  "That's really most awfully kind. But I have some packing to do. And must pay the bill."

  "Don't you bother about all that," Greene the planter said, a man with appropriately Iatexlike chins. "That can all be fixed up without any trouble. Those lazy sods at the rest house can do a bit of work for a change, and they won't pinch anything, more than their job's worth. So you go off with the doc and get a bit of a rest and perhaps we'll have a hand or two of something this evening." All these planters were in Kuala Kangsar for the day and most of the night, drove back to their estates near dawn, Rambutan and Pisang and Gutta Percha, all off the main Ipoh road.

  "This is really most terribly kind."

  So I was taken up Bukit Chandan by Doc Shawcross in his little Ford car. He had a bungalow newly painted green and white by the Public Works Department in a fenced garden cool with bougainvillaea, banyan, flame-of-the-forest and wild orchid. He had a great raintree, a papaya tree and two pomelos, as well as three flaring-red pepper bushes, and the gardener or orang kebun was at work with a hoe or chungkol while a copperhammer bird attended to its distant plumbing. Doc Shawcross parked the Ford in the porch, and we went onto the verandah toward the tinkle of teacups. No, one teacup and saucer, the standard blue of the British community. Yusof the kuki, a very muscular Malay with gentle manners, ran off with pleasure to get more crockery and make more sandwiches (corned beef pounded with paprika, paprika being a wonderful reviver in the late afternoon), and Doc Shawcross and I sat creaking on the rattan chairs. Purple clouds were being pulled with haste, like a blanket over pudic nudity, over the duckegg sky, and the view of golf course, mosque, istana and distant jungle was fine but glum. "At this time every day, prompt at teatime," he told me, "we get this douche." And gentle rain came down as gentle Yusof reappeared with sandwiches and Tiptree's cherry jam. "Terima kaseh, Yusof." Meaning thank you, meaning literally received with love. Then the rain eased and stopped and jungle smells sidled in to growl at the scent of grass refreshed, and the clouds were gone and the sky clear again.

  "This," I said, "is all one needs. I hope," I added, "you'll call me Kenneth or Ken."

  "Philip, me. When a new planet swims into his. I read a fair amount of poetry. The romantics, you know. I need a bit of beauty in this job. Ugliness, ah--perhaps you'll come round to the hospital tomorrow morning. Run a few quick tests on you. Blood pressure, that sort of thing. Show you what I mean by ugliness, if you can take it. But you can, you're a writer, I've read your things, said that already, haven't I?" He poured me more tea. "You could write here, couldn't you? Very quiet." Very quiet indeed, for the birds of Malaya have no song. There are Christmas Day chirpings from tiny yellowbeaked sparrows, and the other calls are mere noises devised for the benefit of the Chinese, for the copperhammer bird reminds of the virtues of hard work, and the fever bird gives them something to gamble with, for one can never predict whether its descending chromatics will add up to three notes or to four. Thousands of dollars, I'd been told, laid on that. "Yusof," Philip said, "minta jalan sama Mat kebun ka-rest house dan bawa barang tuan ini ka-sini." Meaning that Yusof and Mat the gardener were to go and fetch my stuff from the rest house. "You feel like a little lie-down? I have to go back to the hospital. I'll show you your room anyway."

  The room was at the back of the house with an uninterrupted view of the jungle. Simple PWD furniture, a bed with a rolled-up mosquito net, a ceiling fan, a bathroom leading off. "This is really most terribly." There was a plain deal desk and before it, ready, a Windsor chair. I foresaw Yusof padding in with ladyfingers or something in a jamjar.

  "I'll get Mas, she's the amah, to bring sheets. Nice name, don't you think, Mas, it means gold. I've been asked out to dinner tonight, I'll chuck if you like, we could spend a quiet evening at home." Home. I felt the promise of the prick of tears at the word, sentimental, noble, nostalgic, yearning, what the hell does it matter? "Or perhaps you'd like to come. He'd take it as an honor, two white men instead of one. A Tamil. Mahalingam is the name. That means great ah generative organ--"

  "Goes further, doesn't it, religious, holy symbol of life and so on. Well, yes, why not, thanks, I'm here to learn. Dinner with a Tamil. I thought the Tamils did the rough work out here."

  "Not all. I have one in the lab, a good lad, Madras degree. Mahalingam's new, in charge of the waterworks, sent from Penang, at the last club meeting we argued about inviting him to join, but it is a white man's club, except for the Malays of course, and the nature of a club is exclusivity. I mean, we're not allowed to join the Chinese Club or the Indian. Seems reasonable, really. Now I really must go and do my evening round."

  "Perhaps if I just sat on the verandah for a bit."

  "You do that. Awfully glad to have you, you know that."

  "Oh no, it's I who am awfully delighted, really."

  So I sat on the verandah and did nothing except gaze onto the golf course, which was full of natural hazards, and the bulbous mosque and the honeycolored istana as the sun made its cautious approach toward plunging plummetlike for the rush of stars and the stride of night, delightful, very much at peace.

  I heard the squeak of the wheels of two or three trishaws bringing my barang and the soft voices of Mat the gardener and Yusof the cook. Then Yusof came and said, "Saya buka barang, tuan?" And he made the gesture of opening bags. Terimah kaseh, received with love and two dollar bills which Yusof tucked into the waist of his sarong.

  I showered and dressed in grey flannel trousers, white silk shirt a
nd a gold and blue striped tie. The living room was long with a dining alcove, primrose cushions on the sturdy bamboo armchairs, ceiling fans spinning gently at their bottom notch, a bookcase with photographs on it. The women in his life: a plain sister and a handsome mother. His father evidently a doctor too, a smiling snap of him with black bag entering a car. The arms of the University of Manchester on a tobacco jar: Virgil's serpent arduus ad solem. A student group, Philip smiling uneasily in the back row, with a scowling professor impatient in the front middle. The books very ordinary, and I make no exception of the one or two of mine that were there, RLS, The Jungle Book, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, the Keats and Shelley in one volume a fourth-form prize, medical texts including Manson-Barr's Tropical Medicine. A decent ordinary colonial medical officer, hardworked but comfortable, not overpaid, one of the white leeches to be later vilified by the forces of disaffection, living in a standard pattern colonial bungalow which he called home.

  Yusof switched on the lights and drew the curtains of cream and leafgreen and said, "Tuan mahu minum?" Yes, a drink would be welcome. He brought me a whisky and soda, cold but without ice. Received with love. "tuan datang," he said, hearing the Ford before I did. And then there was a weak brandy and ginger ale for Philip as we sat in the delightful languor of a tropical early evening.

  I said, "A lonely life would you consider it?"

  "Plenty of patients, not much time to feel lonely really, the local planters are decent enough chaps, the odd drink, the odd curry tiffin, the wives are mostly a great pain, was it Kipling who said the fall of the Empire would be due to the memsahibs?"

  "It sounds as though it might be somebody from the outside, an American perhaps. How long have you been here and why?"

  "Coming to the end of my first tour. Due for leave after Christmas. Why? Oh, I don't know really. The call of the East. Adventure." He said it with an ironic intonation. "I read a book by Conrad. Youth. It's there somewhere."