The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2)

by Michael Moorcock

  In her carved oak and mahogany, her wrought-iron elevators, her open fireplaces and leather upholstery, the Mauretania represented the best of English good taste. It was easy to imagine oneself part of that country’s noble past. This atmosphere of security persisted even on deck in a high sea when she rolled magnificently, her bow lifting sixty feet before plunging down, burying itself in the waves, thrusting back mountains of water on either side. Crashing and creaking she roared with exultation at her own enormous strength.

  As a man of science I was welcomed in the wheelhouse. Captain Hargreaves talked proudly of the ship’s wartime service, her long record as fastest Atlantic liner. He spoke of the sad murder of her sister ship Lusitania, struck by treacherous torpedoes off the Irish coast, a signal for the whole American nation to rise in arms and rush to fight the Kaiser. I was impressed by her huge steam turbines. She had only two main condensers but these could develop a million pounds of steam an hour. Her twenty-five boilers were stoked round the clock by hard-bodied, sweating men who never seemed to tire. ‘Liverpool Irish,’ said Hargreaves. ‘The only stokers to match them are Hungarians. Of course we have nothing but British crews since a British ship is legally a floating piece of our nation. That’s why Cunard never sought foreign capital, even in bad times. Cunard and England are synonymous.’ He was a proud old sea dog, not an easy man to impress. I was flattered by his interest in my ideas for larger and faster ships. Later I learned he sailed home on his last commission, so attached to his ship he died the moment she docked at Southampton.

  Two particular friends (I think these originally christened me ‘Peterson’) were, like me, young ex-army men. Captain James Rembrandt (‘as in Van Dyke’) and Major Lucius Mortimer, both fashionably dressed, personable and good looking: American gentlemen to their fingertips. We originally met in the first class smoking room. They taught me gin rummy and poker. I won quite easily and they said I was evidently a natural player, suggesting I give them a chance to win their money back the next evening. I agreed, though as it happened I had to cancel our appointment when I met Mrs Geldorf, who was travelling alone and needed a dancing partner for the ‘novelty ball’. Mrs Geldorf was dark, curly haired, a lady of about forty. She swore I was the handsomest boy she had ever met. She introduced me to Tom Cadwallader (‘I pack meat in Mississippi, but I used to pack a six-shooter in Arizona’). He told me of his early life fighting the Apaches and was curious to hear all my Cossack experiences. He invited me to join the company of George Stonehouse, an Atlanta lawyer with business interests all over the world. Mrs Geldorf told me Stonehouse was one of the richest and most influential millionaires in the South. A neat, small, soft-voiced man with terrier eyes and a way of chewing a cigar like an old slipper, he was excellent and humorous company. We shared many views in common. In my presence he told Tom Cadwallader they could do with more like me in the South. Cadwallader himself was short and fat with the ruddy complexion of the habitual drinker, but his little blue eyes possessed a steady candour at odds with the rest of his appearance. He and Stonehouse talked of their troubles since the War. Everything had been shaken up and things were even more problematical than before. The main difficulty seemed to be with Eastern agitators sent down to disturb the working people. Much of what they said was fairly meaningless to me. ‘Carpetbaggers trying to get in by the back door since we stopped them coming in the front.’ My visit to the South would illuminate me.

  A Bostonian, Mrs Geldorf laughed at them. The Civil War was over ‘but silly old fogeys go on fighting nonetheless’; she seemed to enjoy these arguments. They called her a ‘gol-darned Yankee’, yet were evidently fond of her. Their rivalry, similar to that between Ukrainian and Great Russian, was meant in fun. It was well bred and never offensive and this was the tone everywhere aboard our ship, whether I spoke to Lord and Lady Cooper, of the famous beer concern, or Sir Humphrey Thin-Garbett, the well known QC. We formed what Mrs Geldorf called ‘Our Clan’ which also included Sir James Maggs, MP for Kerry, and his charming wife and daughter, Mr and Mrs Wilkinson of South Audley Street, London, who were couturiers. Sir Laurence Lane, the Shakespearian actor and Gloria his beautiful actress bride, William Browne, the industrialist film producer; Mr and Mrs Dewhurst, land owners from Croydon; Mrs Gladstone, widow of the famous Chancellor, Mr and Mrs Steenson, garden manicurists from Chicago, and Mr Fred T. Halpert who had made his fortune, he said, with a new type of screw. He and I had many interesting conversations, but my ideas were beyond him, as he frequently and admiringly admitted. To Mr Browne I gave the address of Mrs Cornelius, telling him she was one of the finest actresses on the London stage. He promised that as soon as he returned to London he would write and offer her an audition. He thanked me for my kindness in recommending her.

  Meanwhile, missing Esmé and frustrated by the absence of feminine company, I discovered consolation in Mrs Helen Roe. This thin, red-headed lady, recently divorced from the tennis player, was on her way back to New York. She would stay with her parents before visiting California for, she said, a long rest. There was a possibility she would go to Florida instead. Since her interest in me was more than platonic, we passed several energetic nights together, though her tendency to sob loudly while at the same time calling upon me to ‘push harder you foreign bastard’ could be disconcerting. However, she gave me her New York address and this, together with other invitations I had received, meant I would not be completely friendless upon arrival in America.

  Mauretania is a land lacking only forests and rivers, but some day her namesake shall have even these. There are shops and services to suit every need; cinemas, theatres, sports, lectures and exhibitions. There are bars, of course, and Americans patronise them with urgent gusto since the sale of alcohol at home became illegal. The days are ordered by a succession of meals; one exists in a timeless and opulent dream, with every need catered to by well mannered stewards anxious to discover one’s smallest desires. Press reporters sail back and forth on her, hardly ever landing, save to deliver an article, for she is a world with a thousand brilliant stories. Discretion frequently vanishes out of sight of land. The affairs of Mauretania’s citizens are of absorbing interest to the less privileged, for whom a voyage aboard a great liner shall always be an unrealised ambition. These buoyant worlds, able to distinguish the orbit of their choice, the epitome of glamour and breeding, are the ideal symbol of success. A society which refuses such symbols has neither standards nor progress. They offer the promise of a future we could all share. The finest combination of modern technology, they encourage almost every human creative talent to its greatest expression. No wonder the worth of a nation is measured by the number of great liners sailing under its colours. That is why the governments of the world bestow such considerable honour upon their leading shipowners. Prestige is not lightly won. Prestige is both the measure of a country’s power and the uses to which she puts it. The past and the future merge. The best of both worlds can, after all, be ours. The little, whispering, wicked voices of Carthage shall not touch us here. We are our own free nation. We ascend to the upper air, leaving the land to the brutalised, the ignorant and the depraved. Let them slaughter one another into non-existence. Down there the weary arms of helmeted half men rise and fall, hacking at the flesh of their fellows; a black smoke rolls into the valleys and the churches are burning. There are no trees which are not withered, no water that is not poisoned. Starving children crawl through mud which stinks of blood and urine while their dying mothers spread unwholesome legs for gangrenous soldiers, sobbing for life already lost. We, however; have escaped the Apocalypse, by virtue of our honour and our foresight. Russia shudders in suicidal agonies; Germany shrieks in chains; England stinks of untreated wounds, while France at last looks in the mirror and sees her cosmetics cracking, peeling to reveal the hideous canker beneath. But we have found the sky and populated it with civilised steel, with silver wings and golden domes. We can only weep for those below who are trapped in a terrible folly. We weep for them. To do more
would be dangerous. If the mob scents weakness (and generosity is perceived as weakness) it strikes.

  The mob cannot reach the ship. Here we are purified. There is no security in those flying cylinders, packed end to end with people unable to walk or feed themselves, waiting passively for malodorous trays. No wonder they complain, grow angry, panic. This is the flying the mob deserves: anything better would be unappreciated. It offers nothing for people of refinement. That is why I never travel now. What is left on the Atlantic? A single great Cunarder on which they do not even, I hear, dress for dinner? One Polish tub; two pathetic Soviet hulks built in Germany, full of rats and leaky lifeboats, grotesquely aping the glories of their overthrown masters? A Dutch tramp? A couple of South American banana boats? A single container carrier? Meanwhile the skies, which could have been glorious with my aerial cities, are littered with smelly steel tubes, worse than tourist buses. Those golden cities fade and fall like autumn leaves. Squalid winter covers the world with impure white; the blood and the filth, soaked upwards, encrust the surface like a cancer. When this snow melts everything revealed is misshapen and the colour of mud. The grey planes land to disgorge dazed and shambling cattle. Loaded up again with identical cargo, they move it as speedily as possible to another patch of mud. Some of these creatures are ‘on business’, some ‘on holiday’. How can they tell? By painted signs? Red tsu der vant! Is that all that is left? Our prophets are reviled. Our children are slaves. Our cities are conquered and we are driven from them. O Carthage, thou hast triumphed by treachery alone! By thy stealth and thy cunning hast thou overwhelmed us. With poison and with calumnies. And we are without place or name. Our faces are hidden and our raiment torn. Thou hast taken our daughters in fornication and placed our gold upon thine altars. O Carthage, thou has spat upon our holy things, cast down our temples and scattered the ashes of our books upon the wind. We wept for thee, Carthage, and thou turnest our tears into weapons against us. We did not know the Greek when He spoke to us. We heeded Him not. We are banished to timeless night.

  We can no longer find the Greek. In the awful midden of modern Russia swine stare stupefied at huge portraits of their masters; perhaps the Greek walks there, bringing compassion to those still calling for Him. Carthage has stolen our future. Our wings have shrivelled to stumps on our shoulders. They have torn out our eyes so we raise bloody sockets to the skies, seeking only for the sounds of our lost cities. Little by little we are forgetting our future. In shul arein! Soon we shall remember nothing. Carthage shall be secure in all her citadels. They will not let me fly. I refuse to accept their yiddishkeit. They put a piece of metal in my stomach. They tried to hold me but the doctors could find nothing wrong. I looked in Springfield for the Greek but He had gone to Los Angeles and I no longer have the means to follow Him. I will not travel in their filthy cylinders. Why become wadding in a bullet aimed at your own heart? I have known true wonder, walking on the glowing balconies of an aerial city, a mile above the clouds, while an invisible orchestra plays music. There are people dancing. I hear their laughing conversation. They are elegant and courteous, these new Mauretanians, lovers of beauty and intelligence. They do not need to find the Greek. He has come to them already. There is a surge like a great, steady wave, and the city shivers, her white towers shimmering under the haze of her huge protective dome. She mounts the air, floats upon cloud masses which are rolling surf against the peaks of the Himalayas. Then, with a monstrous thrust, she turns towards the wild blaze of the sun, heading for the West, riding as a ship might ride upon the water, her hull rolling and vibrating and her steam whistle, pitched two octaves below Middle A, sounding like a lament for her lost dreams, her vanishing future. They took my children, meine einiklack.

  The Mauretania’s four red-and-black funnels send plumes of smoke up into the blue pallor. The sea is calm, from horizon to horizon, and here we are secure until Liberty is sighted and Babylon’s terraces rise yellow, cream and orange in the setting sun. Until then I shall walk along her polished decks, nodding to acquaintances, lifting my hat, taking the air while a little light spray refreshes my face and Helen Roe seizes my arm and cries, pointing, ‘Can you see the dolphins?’ We are somewhere near the West Indies. Helen is certain she saw a gull yesterday. ‘Or at least some sort of bird.’ The decks stretch ahead of us like so many cloisters around which we stroll, talking softly, a chosen community. We give ourselves in gentle and unconscious celebration to the spirit of practical science which is represented by the vessel herself; thousands of cubic feet of man-made metal and machinery, kept alive and on the move by the sophisticated ingenuity of our engines. These alone, a hundred years ago, could not be imagined.

  History does not change, because people will always prefer the false comfort of repetition. In crisis they look for the familiar, they fall back on convention, no matter how unsuited it is to their situation. Neophobia is the great destructive disease of the human race; it is spread through hysterical gesture, anxious phrases, nervous tone: a smell.

  Our ship glides towards red and gold cupolas and spires: Moscow and the Kremlin. Formal salutations are offered to the Tsar, the constitutional ruler of this noble democracy. In turn his welcome is extended to us. The Great Powers are in peaceful balance. They have taken charge of the world again. The ship rocks like an old house in the wind. ‘They’ll put yer in an ’ome, Ivan, if yer go on like that.’ Mrs Cornelius means well. Hers is a more ordinary human vision, perhaps, than mine. America should have accepted responsibility. It was no one else’s fault. We have seen some good times, she says. Remember L.A., do yer? She roars as she recalls an anecdote. Her memory is better on the little details. I can still see the huge white seaplane rising over Long Beach and banking towards Catalina Island. Water pours shining from her floats. She is obscured for a moment behind a clump of tall etiolated palms. Then she appears again, her engines yelling as she makes the tight turn and finally disappears. The sound fades; the surf remains. I am not sure I was meant for such brilliant and perpetual sunshine. I never accepted their injections. Perhaps I should have stayed on the horse. White faceless heads turn towards the Cross. Christ is remembered in fire and moonlight. In Tennessee Christ is revenged in blood and steel.

  Mrs Cornelius says in the long run everything usually turns out for the best. It is a tribute to her tolerance and optimism. Personally, I can no longer keep my spirits up. Too many have suffered. Too many have failed. The little girls sing their songs in the Church. Christ is Risen! We have trampled death with death and to those in the tombs we bring life! I see no evidence. All but a handful of us are left. The rest, we should face it, are all Judenknechte these days. On a Thursday afternoon I close my shop. I walk up towards the tranquil convents in the northern parts of Portobello Road. Here the scrap-metal merchants advertise what they will pay for lead, copper, zinc on greasy blackboards propped outside doorways hung with old coats and clean rags. There is an air of peace on Thursday afternoons, a stillness; a pause in the conflict. The sound of car engines becomes muted and distant, like bees in a summer garden. In July and August you see butterflies in the street, dancing over the walls of the monasteries. The children run up and down the kerbs and steps; they cry secret names from unwashed mouths, grimace with unwanted faces. The nuns smile without meaning. The litter of the morning waves and flaps. Nervous dogs with tucked-in tails sniff carefully from stack to stack and any prize is seized swiftly, then they run, forever guilty, anticipating attack. They snarl and huddle in the alleys and sidestreets. Buildings lean and sway under the burden of degenerate poverty; old women pick rotten fruit from the gutters, moving ponderously and bending painfully. Swaggering boys purse their lips at you, their hands in back pockets, and call like carrion to one another across the gaps in the city. Little painted girls ogle you from lascivious, contemptuous eyes. A bank of cloud rises above walls and roofs, blinding white with the sun behind it; a choir of angels and the Virgin Mary. To inhabit a city with a pulsing golden dome I should have to go back nearly fifty ye
ars. Then all this seemed capable of remedy. Mrs Cornelius’s sons call me a sleazy old fascist, but they say this to everyone. I am a visionary, no more, no less. They could not understand how desperate things seemed. They have come to accept this horror as the norm. We hoped for better. In 1959 I wrote that our chances were almost all gone. What was left of the Empire? What of the Law? Does this make me a luftmentsh?

  In 1964 I wrote to Harold Wilson begging him in the name of sanity to consider the real problems of this country. He must have laughed as he crumpled up my letter and put his two hands firmly on the wheel, turning our ship towards the mirage. They said we had easy money. They said we were enjoying a new age of Liberty and Hope. I saw only Licence and Damnation. They said I was a complaining old Jew. They will say anything to diminish my warnings. Today some of them surely must understand how, on every level, they deceived themselves. Little creatures scuttle amongst the ruins, tittering and grinning, creeping from fissures, retreating under broken slabs. This is the inheritance of Carthage. Is the Socialist glad of his euphoria now? Did it achieve what we hoped? Khob’n in bod! These champions of the working class added a new dimension to property speculation; and sold the country lock, stock and barrel to the red-lipped brokers of Carthage.