by Brian Aldiss
I too put what had been asked of me out of my mind, with enough success that when on a windless and baking afternoon a native boy shook me awake from a nap, I could not imagine why.
‘Who are you? What are you doing in my bungalow?’
He only stared down at me, as though it were he who could not think why I should be there before him. Questions in his own language got no response either. At length he backed out the door, clearly wanting me to follow; and so I did, with the dread one feels on remembering an unpleasant task one has contrived to neglect. I found him outside, standing beside my Land-Rover, ready to get aboard.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Very well.’ I got into the driver’s seat. ‘Point the way.’
It was a small spread of tobacco and a few dusty cattle an hour’s drive from town, a low bungalow looking beaten in the ochre heat. He gave no greeting as I alighted from the Land-Rover but stood in the shadows of the porch unmoving: as though he had stood so a long time. He went back into the house as I approached, and when I went in, he was standing against the netting of the window, the light behind him. That seemed a conscious choice. He was smiling, I could tell: a strange and eager smile.
‘I’ve waited a long time for you,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind saying.’
‘I came as quickly as I could,’ I said.
‘There was no way for me to know, you see,’ he said, ‘whether you’d come at all.’
‘Your boy was quite insistent,’ I said. ‘And Mr Rossie –’
‘I meant: to Africa.’ His voice was light, soft, and dry. ‘There being so much less reason for it, now. I’ve wondered often. In fact I don’t think a day has passed this year when I haven’t wondered.’ Keeping his back to the sunward windows, he moved to sit on the edge of a creaking wicker sofa. ‘You’ll want a drink,’ he said.
‘No.’ The place was filled with the detritus of an African bachelor farmer’s digs: empty paraffin tins, bottles, tools, hanks of rope and motor parts. He put a hand behind him without looking and put it on the bottle he was no doubt accustomed to find there. ‘I tried to think reasonably about it,’ he said, pouring a drink. ‘As time went on, and things began to sour here, I came to be more and more certain that no lad with any pluck would throw himself away down here. And yet I couldn’t know. Whether there might not be some impulse, I don’t know, travelling to you from – elsewhere…. I even thought of writing to you. Though whether to convince you to come or to dissuade you I’d no idea.’
I sat, too. A cool sweat had gathered on my neck and the backs of my hands.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘when I heard you’d come – well, I was afraid, frankly. I didn’t know what to think.’ He dusted a fly from the rim of his glass, which he had not tasted. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘this was against the rules given me. That I – that I and – that you and I should meet.’
Perhaps he’s mad, I thought, and even as I thought it I felt intensely the experience called déjà vu, an experience I have always hated, hated like the nightmare. I steeled myself to respond coolly and took out my memorandum book and pencil. ‘I’m afraid you’ve rather lost me,’ I said – briskly I hoped. ‘Perhaps we’d better start with your name.’
‘Oh,’ he said, smiling again his mirthless smile, ‘not the hardest question first, please.’
Without having, so far as I knew, the slightest reason for it, I began to feel intensely sorry for this odd dried jerky of a man, whose eyes alone seemed quick and shy. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘nationality, then. You are a British subject.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Proof?’ He answered nothing. ‘Passport?’ No. ‘Army card? Birth certificate? Papers of any kind?’ No. ‘Any connections in Britain? Relatives? Someone who could vouch for you, take you in?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘None who could. None but you. It will have to be you.’
‘Now hold hard,’ I said.
‘I don’t know why I must,’ he said, rising suddenly and turning away to the window. ‘But I must. I must go back. I imagine dying here, being buried here, and my whole soul retreats in horror. I must go back. Even though I fear that, too.’
He turned from the window, and in the sharp side light of the late afternoon his face was clearly the face of someone I knew. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Mother and father. Your mother and father. They’re alive?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Both dead.’
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘very well’; but it did not seem to be very well with him. ‘I’ll tell you my story, then.’
‘I think you’d best do that.’
‘It’s a long one.’
‘No matter.’ I had begun to feel myself transported, like a Sinbad, into somewhere that it were best I listen, and keep my counsel: and yet the first words of this spectre’s tale made that impossible.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Denys Winterest.’
I have come to believe, having had many years in which to think about it; that it must be as he said, that an impulse from somewhere else (he meant: some previous present, some earlier version of these circumstances) must press upon such a life as mine. That I chose the Colonial Service, that I came to Africa – and not just to Africa, but to that country: well, if anything is chance, that was not – as I understand Sir Geoffrey Davenant to have once said.
In that long afternoon, there where I perhaps could not have helped arriving eventually, I sat and perspired, listening – though it was for a long time very nearly impossible to hear what was said to me: an appointment in Khartoum some months from now, and some decades past; a club, outside all frames of reference; the Last equipment. It was quite like listening to the unfollowable logic of a madman, as meaningless as the roar of the insects outside. I only began to hear when this aged man, older than my grandfather, told me of something that he – that I – that he and I – had once done in boyhood, something secret, trivial really and yet so shameful that even now I will not write it down; something that only Denys Winterset could know.
‘There now,’ he said, eyes cast down. ‘There now, you must believe me. You will listen. The world has not been as you thought it to be, any more than it was as I thought it to be, when I was as you are now. I shall tell you why: and we will hope that mine is the last story that need be told.’
And so it was that I heard how he had gone up the road to Groote Schuur, that evening in 1893 (a young man then of course, only twenty-three), with the Webley revolver in his breast pocket as heavy as his heart, nearly sick with wonder and apprehension. The tropical suit he had been made to wear was monstrously hot, complete with full waistcoat and hard collar; the topee they insisted he use was as weighty as a crown. As he came in sight of the house, he could hear the awesome cries from the lion house, where the cats were evidently being given their dinner.
The big house appeared raw and unfinished to him, the trees yet ungrown and the great masses of scentless flowers – hydrangea, bougainvillaea, canna – that had smothered the place when last he had seen it, some decades later, just beginning to spread.
‘Rhodes himself met me at the door – actually he happened to be going out for his afternoon ride – and welcomed me,’ he said. ‘I think the most striking thing about Cecil Rhodes, and it hasn’t been noticed much, was his utter lack of airs. He was the least self-conscious man I have ever known; he did many things for effect, but he was himself entirely single: as whole as an egg, as the old French used to say.
‘ “The house is yours,” he said to me. “Use it as you like. We don’t dress for dinner, as a rule; too many of the guests would be taken short, you see. Now some of the fellows are playing croquet in the Great Hall. Pay them no mind.”
‘I remember little of that evening. I wandered the house; the great skins of animals, the heavy beams of teak, the brass chandeliers. I looked into the library, full of the specially transcribed and bound classics that Rhodes had ordered by the yard from Hatchard’s: all the authorities that Gibbon had consulted in writing the Decline and Fall. All
of them: that had been Rhodes’s order.
‘Dinner was a long and casual affair, entirely male – Rhodes had not even any female servants in the house. There was much toasting and hilarity about the successful march into Matabeleland, and the foundation of a fort, which news had only come that week; but Rhodes seemed quiet at the table’s head, even melancholy: many of his closest comrades were gone with the expeditionary column, and he seemed to miss them. I do remember that at one point the conversation turned to America. Rhodes contended – no one disputed him – that if we (he meant the Empire, of course) had not lost America, the peace of the world could have been secured forever. “Forever,” he said. “Perpetual Peace.” And his pale opaque eyes were moist.
‘How I comported myself at table – how I joined the talk, how I kept up conversations on topics quite unfamiliar to me – none of that do I recall. It helped that I was supposed to have been only recently arrived in Africa: though one of Rhodes’s band of merry men looked suspiciously at my sun-browned hands when I said so.
‘As soon as I could after dinner, I escaped from the fearsome horseplay that began to develop among those left awake. I pleaded a touch of sun and was shown to my room. I took off the hateful collar and tie (not without difficulty) and lay on the bed otherwise fully clothed, alert and horribly alone. Perhaps you can imagine my thoughts.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘No. Well. No matter. I must have slept at last; it seemed to be after midnight when I opened my eyes and saw Rhodes standing in the doorway, a candlestick in his hand.
‘“Asleep?” he asked softly.
‘“No,” I answered. “Awake.”
‘“Can’t sleep either,” he said. “Never do, much.” He ventured another step into the room. “You ought to come out, see the sky,” he said. “Quite spectacular. As long as you’re up.”
‘I rose and followed him. He was without his coat and collar; I noticed he wore carpet slippers. One button of his wide braces was undone; I had the urge to button it for him. Pale starlight fell in blocks across the black and white tiles of the hall, and the huge heads of beasts were mobile in the candlelight as we passed. I murmured something about the grandness of his house.
‘“I told my architect,” Rhodes answered. “I said I wanted the big and simple – the barbaric, if you like.” The candle flame danced before him. “Simple. The truth is always simple.”
‘The chessboard tiles of the hall continued out through the wide doors onto the veranda – the stoep as the old Dutch called it. At the frontier of the stoep great pillars divided the night into panels filled with clustered stars, thick and near as vine blossoms. From far off came a long cry as of pain: a lion, awake.
‘Rhodes leaned on the parapet, looking into the mystery of the sloping lawns beyond the stoep. “That’s good news, about the chaps up in Matabeleland,” he said a little wistfully.
‘“Yes.”
‘“Pray God they’ll all be safe.”
‘“Yes.”
‘ “Zambesia,” he said after a moment. “What d’you think of that?”
‘“I beg your pardon?”
‘“As a name. For this country we’ll be building. Beyond the Zambesi, you see.”
‘“It’sa fine name.”
‘He fell silent for a time. A pale, powdery light filled the sky: false dawn. “They shall say, in London,” he said, “‘Rhodes has taken for the Empire a country larger than Europe, at not a sixpence of cost to us, and we shall have that, and Rhodes shall have six feet by four feet.’ ”
‘He said this without bitterness, and turned from the parapet to face me. The Webley was pointed towards him. I had rested my (trembling) right hand on my left forearm, held up before me.
‘“Why, what on earth,” he said.
‘“Look,” I said.
‘Drawing his look slowly away from me, he turned again. Out in the lawn, seeming in that illusory light to be but a long leap away, a male lion stood unmoving.
‘“The pistol won’t stop him,” I said, “but it will deflect him. If you will go calmly through the door behind me, I’ll follow.”
‘Rhodes backed away from the rail, and without haste or panic turned and walked past me into the house. The lion, ochre in the blue night, regarded him with a lion’s expression, at once aloof and concerned, and returned his look to me. I thought I smelled him. Then I saw movement in the young trees beyond. I thought for a moment that my lion must be an illusion, or a dream, for he took no notice of these sounds – the crush of a twig, a soft voice – but at length he did turn his eyes from me to them. I could see the dim figure of a gamekeeper in a wide-awake hat, carrying a rifle, and Negroes with nets and poles: they were closing in carefully on the escapee. I stood for a moment longer, still poised to shoot, and then beat my own retreat into the house.
‘Lights were being lit down the halls, voices calling: a lion does not appear on the lawn every night. Rhodes stood looking, not out of the window, but at me. With deep embarrassment I clumsily pocketed the Webley (I knew what it had been given to me for, after all, even if he did not), and only then did I meet Rhodes’s eyes.
‘I shall never forget their expression, those pale eyes: a kind of exalted wonder, almost a species of adoration.
‘“That’s twice now in one day,” he said, “that you have kept me from harm. You must have been sent, that’s all. I really believe you have been sent.”
‘I stood before him staring, with a horror dawning in my heart such as, God willing, I shall never feel again. I knew, you see, what it meant that I had let slip the moment: that now I could not go back the way I had come. The world had opened for an instant, and I and my companions had gone down through it to this time and place; and now it had closed over me again, a seamless whole. I had no one and nothing; no Last equipment awaited me at the Mount Nelson Hotel: the Other-hood could not rescue me, for I had cancelled it. I was entirely alone.
‘Rhodes, of course, knew nothing of this. He crossed the hall to where I stood, with slow steps, almost reverently. He embraced me, a sudden great bear hug. And do you know what he did then?’
‘What did he do?’
‘He took me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length, and he insisted that I stay there with him. In effect, he offered me a job. For life, if I wanted it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I took it.’ He had finished his drink, and poured more. ‘I took it. You see, I simply had no place else to go.’
Afternoon was late in the bungalow where we sat together, day hurried away with this tale. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I shall have that drink now, if it’s no trouble.’
He rose and found a glass; he wiped the husk of a bug from it and filled it from his bottle. ‘It has always astonished me,’ he said, ‘how the mind, you know, can construct with lightning speed a reasonable, if quite mistaken, story to account for an essentially unreasonable event: I have had more than one occasion to observe this process.
‘I was sure, instantly sure, that a lion which had escaped from Rhodes’s lion house had appeared on the lawn at Groote Schuur just at the moment when I tried, but could not bring myself, to murder Cecil Rhodes. I can still see that cat in the pale light of predawn. And yet I cannot know if that is what happened, or if it is only what my mind has substituted for what did happen, which cannot be thought about.
‘I am satisfied in my own mind – having had a lifetime to ponder it – that it cannot be possible for one to meet oneself on a trip into the past or future: that is a lie, invented by the Otherhood to forestall its own extinction, which was, however, inevitable.
‘But I dream, sometimes, that I am lying on the bed at Groote Schuur, and a man enters – it is not Rhodes, but a man in a black coat and a bowler hat, into whose face I look as into a rotted mirror, who tells me impossible things.
‘And I know that in fact there was no lion house at Groote Schuur. Rhodes wanted one, and it was planned, but it was never built.�
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In the summer of that year Rhodes – alive, alive-oh – went on expedition up into Pondoland, seeking concessions from an intransigent chief named Sicgau. Denys Winterset – this one, telling me the tale – went with him.
‘Rhodes took Sicgau out into a field of mealies where he had had us set up a Maxim gun. Rhodes and the chief stood in the sun for a moment, and then Rhodes gave a signal; we fired the Maxim for a few seconds and mowed down much of the field. The chief stood unmoving for a long moment after the silence returned. Rhodes said to him softly: “You see, this is what will happen to you and all your warriors if you give us any further trouble.”
‘As a stratagem, that seemed to me both sporting and thrifty. It worked, too. But we were later to use the Maxims against men and not mealies. Rhodes knew that the Matabele had finally to be suppressed, or the work of building a white state north of the Zambezi would be hopeless. A way was found to intervene in a quarrel the Matabele were having with the Mashona, and in not too long we were at war with the Matabele. They were terribly, terribly brave; they were, after all, the first eleven in those parts, and they believed with reason that no one could with stand their leaf-bladed spears. I remember how they would come against the Maxims, and be mown down like the mealies, and fall back, and muster for another attack. Your heart sank; you prayed they would go away, but they would not. They came on again, to be cut down again. These puzzled, bewildered faces: I cannot forget them.
‘And Christ, such drivel was written in the papers then, about the heroic stand of a few beleaguered South African police against so many battle-crazed natives! The only one who saw the truth was the author of that silly poem – Belloc, was it? You know – “Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.” It was as simple as that. The truth, Rhodes said, is always simple.’