by Angus Wilson
“But if he fails here surely his reputation will collapse? Sir James, you know, is one of those ‘nothing to do with failure’ people.”
“Well, that’s your problem. You know this Sir James.”
“I don’t. I’ve never met him.”
“Well, the Swami thinks you’re his éminence grise. Oh, for Jesus’ sake! Lots of people may get killed You’re supposed to be the humanist, not I. Anyway, even if you do persuade the Swami to leave, you’ll have a problem on your hands smuggling him through old Goa. The Catholics will be out for his blood. If you can’t get the old buzzard away, you must unfix Ned. Offer him your bub to suck or something of the kind. He wants you for a mother. Surely you know that. The only trouble will be if he’s not with the Swami’s party.”
Alexandra said, “I think we needn’t talk about Ned. We’re neither of us any good to him. Anyway, when you say such silly vulgar things as what you’ve just said, it’s hard to believe that all the rest of this business isn’t rubbish.”
“You know it’s true!”
“Yes. I think I do. And I must do what I can. But how am I to get there?”
“Like any other person, I suppose. Hire, beg or borrow an automobile.”
“But I don’t drive.”
“You don’t what? Oh God! The British! We have a problem here. As my awful father says. Not that he’s ever solved one. We can’t bring a stranger in on this. I don’t think I have the answer. Yes, I have too. We must get my mother in here.”
To the summoned Thelma, she said, “How long since you drove an automobile?”
“I haven’t driven in thirty-five years. I drove up from Gijón over the frontier when the Barcelona thing broke. And that Nancy Cunard gave me some sort of cassoulet at Perpignan that wasn’t wholesome. When I started on for Montpellier, I commenced to throw up and I landed right into a plane tree and into a hospital. And, honey, when I married that stinking Congressman, he insisted that I had a chauffeur. That’s when I never drove an automobile again.”
It didn’t sound very promising to Alexandra, but Elinor said, “Well, it’s a calculated risk, but you’re going to drive now.”
And she explained all the circumstances. There and then Thelma, in her bra and panties, did a kind of samba.
“So we’re finally going to get that guru,” she said.
Alexandra would have expected the sight to be macabre, but in fact it was truly girlish and touching, perhaps because Thelma really hadn’t understood the purpose of the expedition at all.
So Thelma climbed into a large picture hat and a kind of three-quarter-length summer frock and all her pearls, and took her travellers’ cheque books, and set off to hire a car. Alexandra, with a possible scheme in mind, stuffed some old clothes and shoes into an air-line bag which she slung around her neck, and with the greatest reluctance and bravery, left a tearful Oliver with a tearful Elinor. She went downstairs to wait for Thelma’s return.
As she came down the staircase, she saw, to her amazement, the giant figure of Hamo almost touching the ceiling of the little entrance-hall. He was expostulating with the porter. She had never seen him so wild in his gestures. It was hard to believe that he could be angry. She stood very still on the half-landing. Remembering a remark of the Swami’s, and Elinor’s recent story of rural disturbances, she saw that somewhere in this absurd but frightening jig-saw, the improbable and comic figure of her godfather fitted in. But he’s such a big piece to fit in, she thought. Almost instantly, she added, and such a fine one, as she saw him standing there so tall and English and upright and indignant, at once so good and simple and so ludicrous. She couldn’t imagine how he was going to be fitted in, but she knew at once that he was the piece that she had been unconsciously seeking all these months in order to make sense of everything. And yet he remained totally ridiculous. Perhaps it was just because of that. In any case she must remain silently out of his notice until she’d time at least to think of some way of dealing with this sudden overwhelming revelation.
“I think everyone here must have gone mad,” he was saying angrily. The difficulties I had at the airport and on the ferry! And police and soldiers everywhere! And when I explain that I have come to help the situation, you tell me that nobody is there to make use of me. I have given you six names at the Ministry of Agriculture and three at the Ministry of Tourism and you tell me that not one of them is at his desk. It’s hard to say whether this is incompetence or panic. But whichever it is, it doesn’t promise very well for Goa. Now you have the impertinence . . . No, let me withdraw that, presumably you have your orders. But you tell me that the last incoming telephone call was from some idiot in the police saying that nobody is to be allowed into the streets, because of the dangers of mob action. Then why may I ask is an elderly and totally unprotected American lady permitted to endanger her life in contradiction to your orders?”
“No one stops Senhora Tarbett. She carries evil spells. Maybe you do not believe, Sir, but . . .”
“I most certainly do not. Irresponsible nonsense.” Hamo banged on the reception desk so fiercely that the ink-well fell to the floor, broke into pieces and splashed navy-blue ink over his immaculate white linen trousers and the porter’s beige tunic.
At once Alexandra knew. She ran down the stairs, threw her arms round Hamo’s neck, and kissed him on his little moustache. To reach his mouth she had to jump in the air, and, in doing so, she swung the air-line bag so that it hit him sharply on the back of the head. It seemed to Alexandra the best of omens.
“Hamo darling!” she cried. “Do you remember the Meissen figure? And now the ink-well! But it isn’t only you who are divinely clumsy, you see. All the same, you are Myshkin. I only did that because your beautiful clumsiness is infectious. Oh! I’m so happy. I know that it’s going to be all right. Even if there is this bad time to go through.”
He disengaged himself, but he held her hands in his. “Alexandra! You oughtn’t to be here. The whole situation’s out of hand. And it’s all my fault.” Looking at her thin white face and the great eyes staring out of mauve, almost transparent eyelids, he was both excited and horrified to feel an urge, a very strong urge to pull her down onto the old sofa in the hallway and begin at once to explore every inch of her wonderful meagre street urchin’s body under her clothing. He said sternly, “I think if I can speak to these people, I can give them hope for the future that will check their desperation at any rate until things are under control. But you mustn’t move from your room until you’re allowed to. You see,” he said, trying to find simple words, “it’s all been my fault. Magic, that’s the rice I hybridized, has put a lot of people out of work and others can’t grow it on their poor lands and so they’ve been ruined. And when I discovered this, it shocked me so much that I said a lot of foolish impulsive things to the journalists. I’m not very good with the Press, I’m afraid. Then the rumour got about that I’d come as a sort of champion of the poor and underprivileged. Actually I am determined to start a new programme of research to assist these people. It just isn’t good enough to dismiss people as hopeless. But it’ll take time. That’s what I’ve got to explain to them. They must wait. And it may not work in the end. It’ll be hard for them. But it is the only way. Otherwise it’ll all end in violence and worse misery for them. But I need an interpreter. And all these idiots at the ministries have panicked and left their desks. It’s intolerable.”
She pulled him down onto the couch. She held his face in her hands lovingly. At intervals kissing him, she said, “You are Myshkin. Oh, damn! You’ve probably never even read Dostoevsky. We’ve got to find some means of communication. You see all this time I’ve been looking. I mean not only for myself. But for Oliver. That’s my baby. You don’t even know that. Oh dear! There isn’t time for talking now too. Oh, not just for him, you idiot. For me especially. You see all those other things—the Birkins and dandies and gurus—just won’t do. But you’ve never bullied or cringed. And I need someone so much. I’ve been waiting for someone
. It’s you. You’ve acted with divine idiocy, just simply doing all the mad contradictory things that were right. I want,” she ended, and she began to kiss his eyelids, “I want you to marry me.”
It was a sensation he had never known, a lust and a sort of bursting through of worship into desire that made his head swim, his ears ring. If only, he thought, there had been girls like this, like boys when he was younger. But, at the same time, he knew it was all wrong. First, because all women married to queers were deceived. Second, because it was a sort of hero-worship on her part and . . . He tried to remind himself that she had no cock, but then when had he ever cared whether the youths he fucked had cocks or not? He said, “Look, Alexandra darling, for you are a darling and that I can say which I never dared say before. This is all make-believe. I don’t know what this divine idiocy is, but there’s nothing good in what I’ve done. I just went on in my own selfish way, doing work I liked and pretending that the consequences were not my affair. Then when I saw those consequences I immediately indulged in a lot of emotional guilt and breast-beating. Now, it’s true, I am trying to put things right. But that isn’t heroism, it’s just muddle. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that there are such things as heroes. The whole idea does more harm than good.” As he heard himself say it, he wondered if the world would blow up around him—his grandfather hero of Loos, his father twice hero of Arnhem, his housemaster hero of Greek ideals, Leslie hero of sexual realism—he had spat in their faces now, all those who had been the mainstay of his life. Yes, and where had they got him to? Not that it was their fault—they hadn’t asked to be put on pedestals. “No, there are no heroes,” he said decisively.
“All right,” she replied, “If you say so. But I want you. Very, very badly. And so does Oliver. He needs a father. And there’ll be others for us. And as to your having boys, as if that was important!”
He knew then that it was all no good, that she hadn’t really understood; that he and she too, in their own ways, were among the hopeless.
She put her arms round him and pulled him to her. But he disengaged himself and held her at arm’s length.
“No,” he said, “No. It just won’t do. It’s another muddle. I’ve hurt enough people. Above all I’m not going to hurt you.”
Yet he hardly knew how to restrain himself from feeling into every corner of her. At last she broke through his withholding, and pulled him into her arms. This time he kissed her eagerly, although he was crying with despair.
“God Almighty! You certainly know how to pick your times!” Thelma’s rasp shattered their union. Hamo stood up, almost bumping his head. He was crimson in the cheeks. Alexandra scowled at the interruption; but she too stood up, ready for her orders.
“This is Hamo Langmuir. He’s come here to prevent a riot. Not the Swami one. But another one about rice.” As she heard herself speak, she expected Thelma to laugh at her, but it was quite otherwise.
“So what’s stopping him?” she asked. “Except that there isn’t any riot. Not that I could see. Just a hell of a lot of police and soldiers and nobody on the streets. They’re expecting a march on the city or something. Peasants on the move. They have real cock-eyed revolutions round here. No proletariat, only peasants. Hon, is this the middle ages? And then it seems there’s been a violation of that famous temple of theirs, the fancy one at Mangesh or whatever, and old Vishnu’s followers are out to get somebody’s blood. Let’s hope it’s that guru’s.”
“I don’t know anything about that. It’s the peasants I have come to speak to,” Hamo said. He found Thelma’s outré garb and eccentric manner most disconcerting.
“Well, go right ahead. In revolutions, there’s only one rule—get your slogans across clearly and your action will follow. I learned that in Barcelona.”
“But I need an interpreter and a motor car. And they won’t even let me leave this hotel.”
“What? Arturo here stopped you? Oh, Arturo! you naughty, naughty boy! Look, you kids just don’t understand revolution. I do. I wasn’t in Catalonia at the big bad time for nothing. There’s just four things you need in revolutions—exhortation, because people believe, bullying, because people are bad, flattery, because people are human, and a hell of a lot of money, because people are poor. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not the dialectic of the thing. You’ll find that in Trotsky. This is just the know-how. It’s got me the oldest Peugeot in this town. But it’ll get us far enough to tear the guts out of that guru. Let me talk to Arturo. He and I are good friends. Besides he thinks I’m a witch.”
While Thelma took the frightened and yet flattered porter behind the reception desk, Hamo and Alexandra stood, holding hands. They couldn’t find any words. Alexandra was using her wishing power that he shouldn’t escape her; Hamo was desperately trying to find reasons why he was dogmatic and pig-headed in believing that marriage for him would be a wrong action.
“What do you want to tell these peasants?” Thelma asked, and, interrupting Hamo’s lengthy, complicated, stammering answer, she said, “So, ‘you’re the Magic man and they must go home now, but you’ll help them later’, right? Well, I .hope they like the message. It sounds crypto-fascist to me. Have you got that, Arturo? He’s the Magic man. They must go home now. He will help them later. Right. Arturo will take you in the hotel bus. There’ll be police and soldiers, but he’s a good boy, he’ll avoid them where he can. And where he can’t I’ve given him a hell of a lot of money and that means the police and the soldiers will avoid you.”
“But I can’t accept money like this . . .”
“Oh, don’t let that worry you. It belongs to a skunk called Senator Tarbett. And he’s often said to me—in private, mind—that every Asian life lost keeps revolution further away from the great United States. So this is quite his sort of bonanza. Come on, Alexandra, we don’t have too much time.”
Alexandra gave Hamo a long kiss before she left, and it was of this that he thought, as he automatically boarded the hotel bus next to Arturo, automatically saw the empty stately eighteenth-century streets pass him by, automatically knew that Arturo had stopped to hand out money to some soldiers. It was only when they drew near to the town gardens, to the crescent-shaped flower-beds and the bad heroic statues and the wedding-cake band-stand—the public formality which aped, in tropical guise, Coimbra or Oporto—that loud cries could be heard, shouts, chanting. There’ll be two dangerous moments, Hamo thought, when they hear I’m the Magic man, they’ll try to mob me as some sort of God; and then, when they’re told I can’t help them immediately, they’ll turn ugly. Then is when calmness and trust must work, or never.
“You know what to say?”
“Sir,” Arturo said, “My family is Goan. But I was born in Calcutta. I am only recently from Bengal. I do not understand their language very well.”
“Oh.” This was a facer. “Well. Well, first make absolutely clear to them that I’m the Magic man. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir.” Arturo was steering the bus rather wildly. Clearly the man was afraid.
But there was no going back now, for the first ranks of the crowd poured into the square. All men, but of every age and kind, mostly in Indian dress, though many in the regulation shop-keeping, drab, European suiting. They appeared to be carrying an idol—perhaps a rice god. Many among them were nearly naked, smeared and strewn with ashes. An overpowering wave of incense and sour butter came from them. A few had cudgels, but not many, Hamo noted, carried sickles or machetes or other farm implements, as he had feared. Perhaps they were too poor to possess even a few such tools.
They came in a mass—many hundreds at least—down the bottle-neck of one of the straight, tree-lined avenidas, and debouched like a great wave into the square, scattering all over the gardens. Yet a large number was drawn towards the hotel bus as the only moving thing in sight, although they did not appear to be more than a little curious, a bit obstreperous rather than hostile when they saw its two occupants.
“I think, Sir,” Arturo began, but Hamo
said commandingly: “Now, now, pull yourself together. Tell them who I am. Shout it loudly.”
As though hypnotized with fright, Arturo did exactly that, and, as Hamo had feared, the crowd immediately began to rush towards them. Well, he had no wish to be carried shoulder-high as a god, but still, if he could thus persuade them.
“Sir,” Arturo cried, “they are very angry.”
He tried to turn the bus round to return to the hotel, but already many of the shouting crowd were behind them. In turning he knocked down an old, long white-haired man. In a second the crowd were upon the bus, rocking it from side to side and shouting, and banging their fists on the body; then a stone hit and shattered the windscreen, though only a few pieces were dislodged.
“Tell them I’m here to help. For God’s sake, man, tell them.”
But Arturo was sobbing. And in a minute Hamo was thrown heavily on his side, as the whole bus was turned over.
He was such a long man that it took the crowd many agonizing minutes to pull him through the jagged windscreen. His face, his hands, his ankles were all bleeding from the cruel glass spikes. The pain of the blows, the agony of the stretching of his limbs as they pulled at him from every angle, emptied his mind of thoughts. Twice he was dropped onto the tarmac and was kicked and trampled on. Yet, even so, he felt the pain of another innocent man dead due to his muddle. When he came to, he was being carried and bounced from group to group of the shouting, screaming people towards the river. Once there was some hold-up and he called out for help, but if there were authority, then it had been rolled over, crushed down, made nothing. At last with a great heave they threw him far out into the water. He came to the surface and was hit on the temple by a rock that whizzed at him through the air. The river sucked him down, pulled him under. He had only time to think, it would never have done, women’s bodies suck you in, I need the hard resistance of a youth. And he was gone.