Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

  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 Zambezi, you see.’

  “‘It’s a fine name.’

  “He fell silent 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 toward 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, ocher 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 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 Otherhood could not rescue me, for I had canceled 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.”

  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 withstand 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.”

  He took out a large pocket-handkerchief and mopped his face and his eyes; no doubt it was hot, but it seemed to me that he wept. Tears, idle tears.

  “I met Dr. Jameson during the Matabele campaign,” he continued. “Leander Starr Jameson. I think I have never met a man—and I have met many wicked and twisted ones—whom I have loathed so completely and so instantly. I had hardly heard of him, of course; he was already dead and unknown in this year as it had occurred in my former past, the only version of these events I knew. Jameson was a great lover of the Maxim; he took several along on the raid he made into the Transvaal in 1895, the raid that would eventually lead to war with the Boers, destroy Rhodes’s credit, and begin the end of Empire: so I have come to see it. The fool.

  “I took no part in that war, thank God. I went north to help put the railroad through: Cape to Cairo.” He smiled, seemed almost about to laugh, but did not; only mopped his face again. It was as though I were interrogating him, and he were telling me all this under the threat of the rubber truncheon or the rack. I wanted him to stop, frankly; only I dared say nothing.

  “I made up for a lack of engineering expertise by my very uncertain knowledge of where and how, one day, the road would run. The telegraph had already reached Uganda; next stop was Wadi Halfa. The rails would not go through so easily. I became a sort of scout, leading the advance parties, dealing with the chieftains. The Maxim went with me, of course. I learned the weapon well.”

  Here there came another silence, another inward struggle to continue. I was left to picture what he did not say: That which I did I should not have done; that which I should have done I did not do.

  “Rhodes gave five thousand pounds to the Liberal party to persuade them not to abandon Egypt: for there his railroad must be hooked to the sea. But then of course came the end of the whole scheme in German Tanganyika: no Cape-to-Cairo road. Germany was growing great in the world; the Germans wanted to have an Empire of their own. It finished Rhodes.

  “By that time I was a railroad expert. The nonexistent Uganda Railroad was happy to acquire my services: I had a reputation, among the blacks, you see…I think there was a death for every mile of that road as it went through the jungle to the coast: rinder-pest, fever, Nanda raids. We would now and then hang a captured Nanda warrior from the telegraph poles, to discourage the others. By the time the rails reached Mombasa, I was an old man; and Cecil Rhodes was dead.”

  He died of his old heart condition, the condition that had brought him out to Africa in the first place. He couldn’t breathe in the awful heat of that summer of 1902, the worst anyone could remember; he wandered from room to room at Groote Schuur, trying to catch his breath. He lay in the darkened drawing room and could not breathe. They took him down to his cottage by the sea, and put ice between the ceiling and the iron roof to cool it; all afternoon the punkahs spooned the air. Then, suddenly, he decided to go to England. April was there: April showers. A cold spring: it seemed that could heal him. So a cabin was fitted out for him aboard a P&O liner, with electric fans and refrigerating pipes and oxygen tanks.

  He died on the day he was to sail. He was buried at that place on the Matopos, the place he had chosen himself; buried facing north.

  “He wanted the heroes of the Matabele campaign to be buried there with him. I could be one, if I chose; only I think my name would not be found among the register of those who fought. I think my name does not appear at all in history: not in the books of the Uganda Railroad, not in the register of the Mount Nelson Hotel for 1893. I have never had the courage to look.”

  I could not understand this, though it sent a cold shudder between my shoulder blades. The Original Situation, he explained, could not be returned to; but it could be restored, as those events that the Otherhood brought about were one by one come upon in time, and then not brought about. And as the Original Situation was second by second restored, the whole of his adventure in the past was continually worn away into nonbeing, and a new future replaced his old past ahead of him.

  “You must imagine how it has been for me,” he said, his voice now a whisper from exertion and grief. “To everyone else it seemed only that time went on—history—the march of events. But to me it has been otherwise. It has been the reverse of the nightmare from which you wake in a sweat of relief to find that the awful disaster has not occurred, the fatal step was not taken: for I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real, until nothing in past or presen
t is as I knew it to be; until I am like the servant in Job: I only am escaped to tell thee.”

  March 8, 1984

  I awoke again this morning from the dream of the forest in the sea: a dream without people or events in it, or anything whatever except the gigantic dendrites, vast masses of pale leaves, and the tideless waters, light and sunshot toward the surface, darkening to impenetrability down below. It seemed there were schools of fish, or flocks of birds, in the leaves, something that faintly disturbed them, now and then; otherwise, stillness.

  No matter that orthogonal logic refutes it, I cannot help believing that my present succeeds in time the other presents and futures that have gone into making it. I believe that as I grow older I come to incorporate the experiences I have had as an older man in pasts (and futures) now obsolete: as though in absolute time I continually catch up with myself in the imaginary times that fluoresce from it, gathering dreamlike memories of the lives I have lived therein. Somewhere God (I have come to believe in God; there was simply no existing otherwise) is keeping these universes in a row, and sees to it that they happen in succession, the most recently generated one last—and so felt to be last, no matter where along it I stand.

  I remember, being now well past the age that he was then, the Uganda Railroad, the Nanda arrows, all the death.

  I remember the shabby library and the coal fire, the encyclopedia in another orthography; the servant at the double doors.

  I think that in the end, should I live long enough, I shall remember nothing but the forest in the sea. That is the terminus: complete strangeness that is at the same time utterly changeless; what cannot be becoming all that has ever been.

  I took him out myself, in the end, abandoning my commission to do so, for there was no way that he could have crossed the border by himself, without papers, a nonexistent man. And it was just at that moment, as we motored up through the Sudan past Wadi Halfa, that the Anglo-French expeditionary force took Port Said. The Suez incident, that last hopeless spasm of Empire, was taking its inevitable course. Inevitable: I have not used the word before.