Black Mischief (15 page)

Seth
rose and folded his hands in the traditional gesture of welcome.

‘Peace be
upon your house, Earl.’

The
vassal rose and Prince Fyodor’s perplexities were solved by the departure of
the royal party.

‘I will
have that table, ‘ said the Earl, pointing to the vacated box.

And
soon, quite unconscious of the alarm he had caused, with a bottle of M.
Youkoumian’s gin before him, and a vast black cheroot between his teeth, the
magnate was pacifically winking at the ladies as they danced past him.

Outside
the royal chauffeur was asleep and only with difficulty could be awakened. The
sky was ablaze with stars; dust hung in the cool air, fragrant as crushed
herbs; from the Ngumo camp, out of sight below the eucalyptus trees, came the
thin smoke of burning dung and the pulse and throb of the hand drummers. Seth
drove back alone to the black hitter of pal ace buildings.

‘Insupportable
barbarians,’ he thought. ‘I am sure that. the English lords do not behave in
that way before their King. Even my loyalest officers are ruffians and
buffoons. If I had
one
man by me whom I could trust … a man of progress
and culture …’

Six
weeks passed. The victorious army slowly demobilized and dispersed over the
hills in a hundred ragged companies; livestock and women in front, warriors
behind laden with alarm clocks and nondescript hardware looted in the bazaars;
soldiers of progress and the new age homeward bound to the villages.

The
bustle subsided and the streets of Matodi resumed their accustomed calm: copra,
cloves, mangoes and khat; azan and angelus; old women with obdurate donkeys;
trays of pastry black with flies; shrill voices in the mission school reciting
the catechism; lepers and pedlars, and Arab gentlemen with shabby gamps
decently parading the water-front at the close of day. In the derelict van
outside the railway station, a patient black family repaired the ravages of
invasion with a careful architecture of mud, twigs, rag and flattened petrol
tins.

Two
mail ships outward bound from Marseilles, three on the home journey from
Madagascar and Indo-China paused for their normal six hours in the little bay.
Four times the train puffed up from Matodi and Debra Dowa; palm belt, lava
fields, bush and upland; thin cattle scattered over the sparse fields; shallow
furrows in the brittle earth; white-gowned Azanian ploughboys scratching up
furrows with wooden ploughs; conical grass roofs in stockades of euphorbia and
cactus; columns of smoke from the tukal fires, pencil-drawn against the clear
sky.

Vernacular
hymns in the tin-roofed missions, ancient liturgy in the murky Nestorian
sanctuaries; tonsure and turban, hand drums and innumerable jingling bells of
debased silver. And beyond the hills on the low Wanda coast where no liners
called and the jungle stretched unbroken to the sea, other more ancient rites
and another knowledge furtively encompassed; green, sunless paths; forbidden
ways unguarded save for a wisp of grass plaited between two stumps, ways of
death and initiation, the forbidden places of juju and the masked dancers; the
drums of the Wanda throbbing in sunless, forbidden places.

Fanfare
and sennet; tattoo of kettle drums; tricolour bunting strung from window to
window across the Boulevard Amurath, from Levantine café to Hindu drugstore;
Seth in his Citroen drove to lay the foundation stone of the Imperial
Institutes of Hygiene; brass band of the Imperial army raised the dust of the
main street. Floreat Azania.

Chapter Five

On
the south side of the Palace Compound, between the kitchen and the
stockade, lay a large irregular space where the oxen were slaughtered for the
public banquets. A minor gallows stood there which was used for such trivial,
domestic executions as now and then became necessary within the royal
household. The place was deserted now except for the small cluster of puzzled
blacks who were usually congregated round the headquarters of the One Year
Plan and a single dog who gnawed her hindquarters in the patch of shadow cast
by two corpses, which rotated slowly face to face, half circle East, half
circle West, ten foot high in the limpid morning sunlight.

The
Ministry of Modernization occupied what had formerly been the old Empress’
oratory; a circular building of concrete and corrugated iron, its outer wall
enriched with posters from all parts of Europe and the United States advertising
machinery, fashion and foreign travel. The display was rarely without
attendance and today the customary loafers were reinforced by five or six
gentlemen in the blue cotton cloaks which the official class of Debra Dowa
assumed in times of bereavement. These were mourners for the two criminals — peculators
and perjurers both — who had come to give a dutiful tug at their relatives’
heels in case life might not yet be extinct, and had stayed to gape, entranced
by the manifestations of Progress and the New Age.

On the
door was a board painted in Arabic, Sakuyu and French with the inscription:

MINISTRY
OF MODERNIZATION

HIGH
COMMISSIONER & COMPTROLLER GENERAL:

MR
BASIL SEAL

FINANCIAL
SECRETARY: MR KRIKOR YOUKOUMIAN

A vague
smell of incense .and candle-grease still possessed the interior; in all other
ways it had been completely trans-formed. Two partitions divided it into
unequal portions. The largest was’ Basil’s office, which contained nothing
except some chairs, a table littered with maps and memoranda, and a telephone.
Next door Mr Youkoumian had induced a more homely note: his work was
economically confined to two or three penny exercise-books filled with figures
and indecipherable jottings, but his personality extended itself and pervaded
the room, finding concrete expression in the seedy red plush sofa that he had
scavenged from one of the state apartments, the scraps of clothing hitched
negligently about the furniture, the Parisian photographs pinned to the walls,
the vestiges of food on enamelled tin plates, the scent spray, cigarette ends,
spittoon and the little spirit-stove over which perpetually simmered a brass pan
of coffee. It was his idiosyncrasy to prefer working in stockinged feet, so
that when he was at his post a pair of patent leather, elastic-sided boots
proclaimed his presence from the window-ledge.

In the
vestibule sat a row of native runners with whose services the modernizing
party were as yet unable to dispense.

At nine
in the morning both Basil and Mr Youkoumian were at their desks. Instituted a
month previously by royal proclamation, the Ministry of Modernization was
already a going concern. Just how far it was going, indeed, was appreciated by
very few outside its circular placarded walls. Its function as defined in
Seth’s decree was
‘to promote the adoption of modern organization and
habits of life throughout the Azanian Empire’
which, liberally interpreted,
comprised the right of interference in most of the public and private affairs
of the nation. As Basil glanced through the correspondence that awaited him
and the rough agenda for the day, he felt ready to admit that anyone but himself
and Mr Youkoumian would have bitten off more than he could chew. Reports from
eight provincial viceroys on a questionnaire concerning the economic resources
and population of their territory — documents full of ponderous expressions of
politeness and the minimum of trustworthy information; detailed recommendations
from the railway authorities at Matodi; applications for concessions from
European prospectors; inquiries from tourist bureaux about the possibilities
of big-game hunting, surf bathing and mountaineering; applications for public
appointments; protests from missions and legations; estimates for building;
details of court etiquette and precedence — everything seemed to find its way
to Basil’s table. The other ministers of the crown had not yet begun to feel
uneasy about their own positions. They regarded Basil’s arrival as a direct
intervention of heaven on their behalf. Here was an Englishman who was willing
to leave them their titles and emoluments and take all the work off their
hands. Each was issued with the rubber stamp REFER TO BUREAU OF MODERNIZATION,
and in a very few days the Minister of the Interior, the Lord Chamberlain, the
Justiciar, the City Governor, and even Seth himself, acquired the habit of
relegating all decisions to Basil with one firm stab of indelible ink. Two
officials alone, the Nestorian patriarch and the Commander-in-Chief of the
army, failed to avail themselves of the convenient new institution, but
continued to muddle through the routine of their departments in the same
capricious, dilatory but independent manner as before the establishment of the
new régime.

Basil
had been up very late the night before working with the Emperor on a codification
of the criminal law, but the volume of business before him left him undismayed.

‘Youkoumian,’

“Ullo.
Mr Seal?’

The
financial secretary padded in from the next room.

‘Connolly
won’t have boots.’

‘Won’t
‘ave boots? But, Mr Seal, he got to ‘ave boots. I bought them from Cape Town.
They come next ship. I bought them, you understand, as a personal enterprise,
out of my own pocket. What in ‘ell can I do with a thousand pair of boots if
Connolly won’t take them?’

‘You
ought to have waited.’

‘Waited?
And then when the order is Out and everyone knows Guards to ‘ave boots, what’ll
‘appen then? Some pig wanting to make money will go to the Emperor and say I
get you boots damned cheaper than Youkoumian. Where am I then? They might as
well go barefoot all same as they do now like the dirty niggers they are. No,
Mr Seal, that is not business. I fix it so that one morning the Army Order says
Guards must have boots. Everyone say, but where are boots? No one got enough
boots in this stinking hole. Someone say, I get you boots in three weeks,
month, five weeks, so long. I come up and say,
I
got boots, How many
pairs you want? Thousand? O.K. I fix it. That is business. What does the
General say?’

Basil
handed him the letter. It was emphatic and almost ungenerously terse, coming as
it did in answer to a carefully drafted recommendation beginning,
‘The
Minister of Modernization presents his compliments to the Commander-in-Chief
of the Imperial Army and in pursuance of the powers granted him by royal decree
begs to advise
…’

It
consisted of a single scrap of lined paper torn from a note-book across which
Connolly had scrawled in pencil:
The Minister of Damn All can go to blazes.
My men couldn’t move a yard in boots. Try and sell Seth top hats next time. Ukaka
C. in C.

‘Well, ‘
said Mr Youkoumian doubtfully, ‘I
could
get top ‘ats.’

‘That
is one of Connolly’s jokes, I’m afraid.’

‘Jokes,
is it? And ‘ere am I with a thousand pair black boots on my ‘ands. Ha. Ha. Like
‘ell it’s a joke. There isn’t a thousand people in the whole country that wears
boots. Besides these aren’t the kind of boots people buys for themselves. Government
stuff. Damn rotten. See what I mean?’

‘Don’t
you worry,’ Basil said. ‘We’ll find a use for them. We might have them served
out to the clergy.’ He took back the General’s note, glanced through it
frowning and clipped it into the file of correspondence; when he raised his
head his eyes were clouded in an expression characteristic to him, insolent,
sulky and curiously childish. ‘But as a matter of fact, ‘ he added, ‘I
shouldn’t mind a show-down with Connolly. It’s nearly time for one.’

‘They
are saying that the General is in love with Madame Ballon.’

‘I
don’t believe it.’

‘I am
convinced, ‘ said Mr Youkoumian. ‘It was told me on very ‘igh authority by the
barber who visits the French Legation. Everyone in the town is speaking of it.
Even Madame Youkoumian has heard. I tell you ‘ow it is,’ he added complacently.’

‘Madame
Ballon drinks. That is ‘ow Connolly first ‘ad ‘er.’

Quarter of an hour hater
both Basil and Mr Youkoumian were engaged in what seemed more important
business.

A
morning’s routine at the Ministry of Modernization.