by Ann Harries
At least there was no comment on the issue of female emancipation, a topic which, I feel, receives far too much attention in even the most respectable of British broadsheets. In my opinion, only graduates of Oxford and perhaps Cambridge should be allowed to vote in England; it is quite absurd to expect a man of little education to understand the complexities of running a country. I have no doubt my host would thoroughly agree with me, but of course in these days of liberal reform and Marxian stirrings one dare not voice such opinions publicly.
It was ten minutes to nine. I consulted Orpheus on the whereabouts of the Colossus’ bedroom. I have to confess that, momentous as the prospect of this meeting should have been, my thoughts lay more with the meeting I hoped would follow it. The image of the little girl Maria danced around the bedroom: she pushed her face up close to mine and planted kiss after kiss upon my lips. But I pushed her out every time she appeared: after all, I do not like children. How had she managed to trespass into the sanctum of my entirely adult thoughts? Orpheus pointed to the other upstairs wing of the house which I had not had cause to enter, his face as impassive as my own.
In fact, the route from my side of the house to the wing containing my master’s bedroom was not as direct as one might imagine, and I found myself moving cautiously along whitewashed corridors that seemed to take me away from my destination rather than towards it. Old Dutch still-lifes of fruit and vegetables piled on kitchen tables hung at intervals on the walls. A number of dark, heavy looking doors, identical to my own, all firmly shut, lined the corridors on either side. Just as I supposed that I had wandered into the secretaries’ quarters, one of the doors slowly opened and out of it tiptoed the woman I had seen on the back stoep the day before. Sensing I was about to speak to her, she placed her forefinger over her lip to silence me, and closed the door gently behind her with her free hand. Then she bustled me down the corridor past several more doors and whispered: ‘They’re all still asleep and I want them to stay that way! We’ve had a bad night.’
Her voice had the quiet inflections of the New World in it, and made me feel suddenly comfortable: I found myself blushing as I confessed I had lost my way. ‘Oh, you’ve had one of his summonses!’ she laughed, and with matronly confidence led me out of the maze and into a passage which opened on to a panelled landing. ‘There you are,’ said she, pointing at a massive yellowwood door. ‘Good luck!’ And touched me lightly on the shoulder before she pattered off down the stairs. She did not enquire after my identity.
Having cleared my throat for well over a minute, I took the proverbial deep breath, and lifted my hand to knock on the yellow door, framed in chocolate-coloured stinkwood, a combination very popular in this colony. But I paused as I heard my host’s soprano voice raised in argument; a one-sided argument as the unseen listener kept entirely silent during the rattle of words that rose in both pitch and volume together with the speaker’s passion. He appeared to be repeating the phrases I had first heard from his lips the day before: railway gauges, Cape to Cairo, twice the speed. And as I listened – was I being fanciful? – I heard the regular beat of metal wheel against track, interrupted now and then by a kind of braying howl, as if he were himself some great engine of steam and energy upon which we mortals depended for our own momentum; without which inertia would take over.
Then, silence. I awaited a response. None came. I fisted my hand to knock – just as another torrent of shrill argument burst through the stillness. How long did I hover thus, waiting for the right moment to present itself? It became clear to me that only a rap on the door would release his dumb prisoner. I knocked. The monologue ceased at once.
‘That you, Wills?’
‘It is.’
‘Open the door, man, and let yourself in!’ cried the Colossus.
His bedroom was a great net of latticed glass and wood, flung out to capture as much of the mountain view as possible. There is no doubt that his architect fully understands how the window frame can intensify and simultaneously tame a powerful landscape, and by designing a multiplicity of lattice frames, he has indeed augmented the power of the mountain. The eye naturally travels upward, from the wide stone stairway that cuts through the geometry of the Dutch garden, through the terraced lawns and crescent of hydrangeas, to the pine-forested foothills wherein graze zebra, llamas, fallow deer and kangaroo in apparent harmony, and finally up the purple rock-faces of the central mountain, untouched, as yet, by my master’s hand.
For a few moments I stood as if trapped in the window-net, unable to drag my gaze to the seated figure at his desk beneath the great bay window. No one else was in the room. But then my host continued to speak, this time in those final cadences which signify the end of a conversation. ‘G’bye!’ he snapped into the mouthpiece of the telephone, which he replaced with a great deal of noise; then turned his attention to me.
‘I think no other man can have a view to match this one.’ His voice was reverent. Far from looking exhausted after the acrimony in the House the day before, he appeared ten years younger. The puffiness round his eyes had subsided, the eyes themselves were clearer and sparkling with good humour. Clearly this man thrived on stress and confrontation.
Looking at the view through the window I resorted to rhyme:
‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet,
That are not done by jostling in the street.’
‘I like that, Wills, I like that very much!’ His voice soared upwards again in his excitement as he scrabbled among a heap of telegrams on his desk. ‘Let me take that down at once, if I can find a blank piece of paper. Perhaps I can find some woman to work it in cross-stitch and I ‘ll hang it next to my window. Shakespeare, I presume?’
‘Actually, William Blake.’
‘I’ll take your word for it. The words are strangely appropriate: I happen to get my Greatest Thoughts on the mountain. Most people go to church for their religious experiences, but my church is Out There, where I’m alone with the Alone, where I can dream my dreams …’ As he spoke he scribbled on the back of a telegram, while I allowed my eyes to wander round the room.
More of an office than a bedroom, further flags, firearms and photographs adorned his whitewashed walls. Next to a large photograph of himself in the company of grinning young men, inscribed The Conqueror of Matabeleland, a pair of large crossed flags was ostentatiously displayed, both of which, a label beneath them told me, Jameson had carried during the first Matabele War, and one of which was riddled with shot. Further along this wall an old-fashioned blunderbuss, evidently taken from the heart of an oak tree on the estate, hung above some links of an ancient Arab slave chain: all arranged for my host to view from his bed.
In the midst of these trophies hung two pictures within a single frame. The etching on the left was familiar to me, having appeared in many newspapers at the time of the great Diamond Rush, and having also been revived at the time of the infamous Commission of Inquiry in London, to illustrate how the Colossus had made his millions. Labelled Colesburg Kopje, in the same brown copperplate that marked all the other pictures and souvenirs, it depicted an opencast mine operating on many levels, in the various chasms of which several thousand men clustered thick as ants, while above them baskets of ore swung along fantastical webs of aerial tramwires, and mules pulled carts along the very edge of the crumbling abyss. The artist had contrived to give almost every ant a pickaxe or shovel: those who were not digging deep into their disintegrating claims were scuttling up vertiginous ladders or staggering towards the mule carts with bucketloads of earth in which their fortune might lie.
The photograph beside this etching, also marked Colesburg Kopje, by contrast appeared to be nothing more than a flat-topped hill in an empty landscape. The juxtaposition of these two pictures was certainly very striking.
An old photograph of himself in the centre of three rows of his Chartered Company men hung above his bed, together with a recent picture of himself propped up horizontally on a mattress somewhere in the veld, the om
nipresent secretaries grinning around him; and a portrait of the Matabele king who had sold his country’s mineral rights to the Colossus for a thousand breech-loading rifles and an armed steamboat on the Zambezi. The bed itself was simple and narrow, with no hint of the luxury one might have expected from the richest man in Southern Africa. Next to the bed, a table fashioned from an elephant’s foot was adorned with a photograph of an elderly woman, presumably his mother; a well-used copy of the Marcus Aurelius meditations; a biography of Napoleon; and the collected Sherlock Holmes stories. A variety of pills and potions, such as one would expect a man of an invalid disposition to rely upon, were clustered next to the books.
He was rising from his desk, his great girth blotting out much of the vista behind him. ‘I must apologise for my absence over the past few days.’ Though his eyes suggested a bland regret, his mouth expressed scorn. It was a masterful mouth, with a full lower lip which twitched with every passing thought, beneath the curve of his neat moustache. ‘I have to travel all round the Colony at the drop of a hat – keep the members of my constituency happy and all that. But I’ve called you here for a very specific reason, Wills.’ He strode over to the frame of the Colesburg Kopje pictures, and with a flick of his hands caused it to swing open. A small safe was embedded in the wall. ‘I’d like you to see my collection of little treasures.’ He was rotating a complex safety lock backward and forward: it emitted a series of musical clicks, and the heavy metal door suddenly swung open. I tried to prevent myself from peering inside it in the expectation of glittering precious stones and priceless jewellery. In fact, the safe seemed to be disappointingly empty, though my peripheral vision (upon which I increasingly rely for much of my visual information) noted a shadowy hoard of stone relics, small carvings and several piles of papers, carelessly stacked.
‘You can see I’m not a man for ornament,’ he said, withdrawing from the safe something so small as to be entirely enclosed in his huge hand. ‘But I have in my time been given valuable gifts – some might call them sweeteners – which I have not wanted to sell or store in a Swiss bank. This is one of them. I have reason to regret having accepted this gift, but it is a cunning one, and I cannot bring myself to return it, as I should.’
He opened his hand. In its palm lay something about which I had heard much but had never seen. Peter Carl Fabergé’s jewelled Easter eggs, designed for the Tsar to present to his Tsarina on the most important day of the Russian calendar, had achieved mythical status in Britain, where only the wealthiest in the land were able to commission the goldsmith to create objets d’art on a miniature scale of such exquisite detail. The egg in the hand of the Colossus was encrusted with gold, diamonds and Lilliputian pearls, one of which, when pressed, caused the crust to crack open and reveal its inner treasure. Coiled inside the shell like a long earthworm was a diminutive model of the Orient Express, complete with two steam engines.
‘How well she understood my passion.’ His voice whined upwards. ‘Probably a copy of the original, but priceless, nevertheless. I believe she has staked her entire fortune in giving it to me. They tell me she hasn’t a penny.’
‘She?’
‘A Russian princess who has set her heart on marrying me … not the first, I can assure you. I was fool enough to be taken in by her title and flattery. She was intelligent enough, and vivacious … but marriage!’ He snorted and snapped the egg to. ‘I hope she’s got the message. Used to spend a lot of time here and at my dining-table, but I thank God she’s returned to Switzerland.’
‘You are fond of railway trains?’ I enquired, in an attempt to discourage further intimate revelations.
‘Not as much as I love railway lines, Wills, and one line in particular: that which will extend from Cape to Cairo!’ he exclaimed, burrowing into his safe for another exhibit. ‘That is my dream, Wills. My heart is riveted into those lines of steel that now run right through the colonies named after me, and all the way to Ujiji!’
I feared a lecture on the economic opportunities to be opened up by the advent of rail, and a debate as to the advantages of a broader gauge, but he had judged his audience correctly and changed the subject with customary abruptness.
‘Now I come to a treasure closer to your ornithological heart.’
It was clear that the great man had structured a piece of sequential theatre for reasons that I could not begin to fathom. With some reluctance I allowed myself to look at the next miniature he held in his hand. And tried not to gasp.
The pistol which he pointed at my heart was decorated with enamel and precious stones. At its mouth hovered a humming-bird which quivered its wings and sang, not with its own unmusical voice, but with the pure warble of the goldfinch. Even though my poor heart was beating at twice its normal rate I at once recognised the exquisite flageolet as the work of the Swiss music-box manufacturer, M. Jaquet-Droz. ‘Worth a pretty penny, eh Wills? I won’t tell you who gave me this pretty thing – or why he gave it to me!’
Well pleased with the fright he had given me, my host replaced his two miniatures, and, between sniggers, withdrew a third and final item. Suddenly solemn, he motioned me across the room so that we could stand in the magnificent bow window and inspect the contents of the simple box he held in his hand.
‘I have another apology to make to you, Wills,’ he said simply. ‘The original arrangement was for you to come in spring. I very much appreciate the fact that you were able to come at short notice several months earlier.’
‘I must say that I am curious as to why the plan was changed.’
‘I suppose you know the Hans Andersen story about the emperor and the nightingale?’
Warning bells jangled in my head, but I said calmly enough: ‘I confess I know only the Wilde story. About the nightingale and the rose. Based on a Persian fable, I believe.’
At the mention of my friend’s name, the Colossus gave a violent start. For a few moments he seemed lost for words, though the tremor in his underlip indicated that his thoughts were racing. Finally he whispered: ‘You are referring to – Oscar Wilde?’
‘He was – he is – my close friend.’ Was.
My host glowered at me with his red-rimmed eyes. ‘You believe in absolute loyalty to your friends, even in the depth of their disgrace?’
‘I do. Though absolute loyalty requires a courage of which I am not always capable.’
His gaze softened. ‘I’m glad to hear it, Wills.’ He seemed to have forgotten about the box in his hands. ‘One must not abandon one’s friends in the time of their greatest need. This is the cornerstone of my personal philosophy.’
Were those bright, pale eyes filling with liquid? ‘Absolutely!’ I agreed with a fervour that was calculated to calm him, to dry his tears. I do not care for open emotion.
‘It might sound extraordinary to you, Wills, but I identify with Wilde in a number of ways. I was at Oxford with him, you know.’ Certainly I could think of no two men I knew who were so much the opposite of each other. Quite apart from matters of lifestyle, ambition and politics, it was apparent to me that my host thought and expressed himself exclusively in the literal mode, altogether lacking the musical ironies of Oscar’s discourse – and yet, I could recognise that, mysteriously, my host, for all his stumbling staccato prose, was able to mesmerise those around him by the power of his dreams in the same way that Oscar had once bewitched his audiences through the dazzle of his words.
‘One minute your friend is at the peak of his career, the toast of London, the darling of society. The next – well, even I have difficulty in saying his name. I followed the case, of course, but the thing that struck me most of all was – here today and gone tomorrow. Little did I know that by the end of that very year I too would be thrown into deepest disgrace. Doubtless you know the details.’ He winced at his memories. ‘And both your friend and I were toppled because we valued our friendships more than even our countries or our own personal fame. I could have put the blame squarely on Jameson’s shoulders. I could have avoided hum
iliation.’ He sank into a brief, bitter reverie. Then: ‘I believe Wilde is out of prison now. Will he have the strength to rise to his former heights, I wonder. He is an artist, and most artists I know are weak, self-indulgent. I doubt he has the discipline to pick himself out of the mire.’
The Colossus had sunk into a dreamlike state. He spoke without meeting my eye. ‘Sometimes I wonder, Wills, and you may laugh at me for this, whether our society is being dragged down by the end of the century. It’s as if we have to arrive at a solution before the twentieth century overtakes us: public figures have to be sacrificed like offerings to the gods. I worry about this war that Milner’s going to drag us into. I feel he wants to cleanse the air with bloodshed to start the new century with a tabula rasa, even if it means sacrificing the whole Boer race!’
He gave a shuddering sigh. ‘But there is one thing I wish most profoundly, and that is that I shall live into the twentieth century, if only for a year or two.’ The man turned to face his mountain. ‘That is why I sent for you.’ He lit a foul-smelling cigarillo.
‘You flatter me …’ I stammered, scarcely believing this last remark. But he was telling me a story, or, more accurately, telling the mountain a story, pulling deeply at his cigarillo all the while.