The Towers of Trebizond (2 page)

My aunt, therefore, had inherited a firm and missionary Anglicanism, with strong prejudices against Roman Catholicism, continental Protestantism, Scotch Presbyterianism, British Dissent, and all American religious bodies except Protestant Episcopalianism; she had also inherited a tendency to hunt fish.

She was now a widow. Comparatively early in her married life she and her husband, a zealous missionary, had, while travelling in the more inhospitable parts of central Africa, been surprised by ferocious savages, equipped with the most horrible weapons. My uncle by marriage had been told by the British Resident Officer at Nwabo that he had better not fall alive, or let aunt Dot so fall, into the hands of this unamiable tribe, who were inclined to cook their captives alive in boiling water, as we do lobsters, to improve their flavour, so my uncle and aunt took poison tablets with them. Feeling for these tablets, my uncle discovered that he had lost them, on account of a hole in his pocket So he said to aunt Dot, as the frightful savages appeared, "I think I had better shoot you first, then myself." Aunt Dot was definitely against this plan; but there was little time for argument, so my uncle, after commending both their souls and pronouncing an absolution, aimed his gun at her and fired. Fortunately he was not a good shot, and the bullet whizzed through aunt Dot's topee. Lest he should have another shot, aunt Dot, full of presence of mind, fell to the ground as if dead; my uncle then turned his gun on himself, and this time met with more success; he fell, shot through the head. The savages, being by now arrived close to them, were about to carry off the bodies to the pot, but aunt Dot sprang to her feet and told them in their own language, having prudently learned the appropriate phrases beforehand, that she was a goddess, whose flesh was poisonous to those who consumed it, but that she would confer many favours on them if spared. So they conducted her to the hut of their chief, and, as he was away on a hunting expedition, put her in the haarem to await his return. She was small and plump, which was the shape he preferred; though, as they regretfully said, she would also have done very nicely for the pot.

She found the other haarem women rather boring: they seemed, she said, to know little about anything but sweets and love. She shewed them the Book of Common Prayer, translated into central African, and said compline every evening aloud in the same tongue, for she had an office book in it, but they did not think much of either. The wives used to go down to the river half a mile away to wash their clothes and their children; aunt Dot went too, and took her fishing rod, and caught several of a small and distasteful fish called kepsi. Once they met a lioness, who stood in the path and stared at them and waved her tail.

"The wives all ran away," said aunt Dot. "Nice little women, but they ran away. I stayed and stared back, and presently the creature slid off. Then
I
ran away."

"How did you escape from the haarem?" I would ask her, when she told me this story in my childhood.

"One of the wives, who didn't want me to wait till the chief came back, bribed one of the tribe to take me away into the jungle and kill me. But he was afraid to do this, as I was a goddess, so he showed me a path out of the forest that led to a Baptist missionary settlement. I had never cared much for Baptists, but they were really most kind. You must never forget, Laurie, that dissenters are often excellent Christian people. You must never be narrow minded."

I promised that I never would.

"Though of course," my aunt added, "you must always remember that
we
are
right.
"

I promised that I always would.

I now stayed mostly with aunt Dot when I was not in my London flat. Her children are either deceased, or following some profession abroad. I too follow professions, but at some distance behind, and seldom catch up with them. My favourite one is painting water-colour sketches to illustrate travel books, which is a good way to get abroad, a thing I like doing better than anything else, for I agree with those who have said that travel is the chief end of life.

My aunt looked very pleasant. She was at this time in her early sixties, small and plump, with a round, fair, smooth face and shrewd merry blue eyes. She enjoyed life, and got about, sharing my views on the chief end of life, and was a cheerful and romantic adventuress.

When I returned from stabling the camel, my aunt asked me, as she often did, to ring up a house agent about a derelict house she had seen in St. John's Wood. He said the rent would be eight hundred, and the lino, the Hoover, and the bowl of goldfish, which all went with the house, would cost two thousand more. Aunt Dot said, "Rubbish. Offer him a thousand for the lino and the Hoover and say I won't take the fish."

The agent said the fish must be taken, but that the owner might be prepared to discuss one thousand eight hundred for the lot. He added that this was moderate, as household fittings went, and that one of his clients last week had paid a thousand for some kitchen lino and the lounge under-felt only.

"Tell him I'll think about it," said aunt Dot, rather impressed. "He must keep it open a few days."

The agent said someone else was after it, who would probably be prepared to pay the full two thousand.

I did not suppose it would come to anything. Aunt Dot, who was looking for a home for what she called "all those poor young unmarried fathers, ruined by maintenance," always liked to keep several houses on a string, toying with them, but she seldom took them, she would go abroad with the camel just before the agreement was to be signed.

This, indeed, was what we were about to do now. We were off in three weeks on another mission-investigation expedition, this time to Turkey and the Black Sea, to find out how successful an Anglican mission in the neighbourhood of Trebizond seemed likely to be, and how it would be regarded by the local population. My aunt belonged to an Anglo-Catholic missionary society, which sent investigators abroad to make these reports on this or that hitherto little tilled corner of the world, all of which they saw as a potential field for Anglican endeavour, for they regarded the Anglican Church as the one every one should belong to, whatever the nature of their previous beliefs.

It was remarkable how large a special currency allowance the Treasury, urged by various ecclesiastical interests and by several High Court bishops, allowed to these A.C.M.S. spies, and, as aunt Dot also had very good black market connections everywhere, she did pretty well. She meant also to write a book about the position of women in the Black Sea regions, which she would call
Women of the Euxine today
, for the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind. She often took me with her on such expeditions, as illustrator, courier and general aide, and, she was kind enough to say, as company. The A.C.M.S. would arrange that she should also take a clergyman, because of having to show potential converts what Anglican services were like. This time she was taking the Rev. the Hon. Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg, an ancient bigot who had run a London church several feet higher than St. Mary's Bourne Street and some inches above even St. Magnus the Martyr, and, being now just retired, devoted his life to conducting very High retreats and hunting for relics of saints, which he collected for the private oratory in his Dorset manor house. He had already assembled in his reliquaries many fragments of saintly bone, skin, hair, garments, etc., and hoped to find many more in the tombs, hermitages and monasteries of Armenia and Cilicia. He was also anxious to explore the ancient lava dwellings of Cappadocia, and Mount Ararat, where planks from the ark still, it seems, lie scattered. He hoped also to push on south into Syria and Jordan and the mountains about the Dead Sea, desiring to celebrate Mass in the Greek monastery of Sabas, and search for such scrolls as might still be lying about in caves. He meant to take some of his relics with him and work miracles, which would greatly impress Moslems and others. He believed everything, from the Garden of Eden to the Day of Judgment, and had never let the chill and dull breath of modern rationalist criticism shake his firm fundamentalism. Aunt Dot, too, though far from a fundamentalist, was all for giving converts the whole works; she thought it made it easier for Moslems (who are themselves of a fundamentalist turn of mind), though harder, of course, for Christians. I felt that Father Chantry-Pigg did not really much like either aunt Dot or me, but he was glad of the chance to travel abroad and win souls from the Prophet to the Church and test the power of his relics, so he accepted the invitation without reluctance, the more so because there had last year come to his London parish a band of very enterprising Arab Moslem missionaries from the Dead Sea, who had worked with great zeal and some success among his congregation, and he felt inclined for a return match.

Aunt Dot had a notion that we might even get into Russia, so she had started some time ago working away at Russian visas, but without success, as this was some time before the Great Thaw. All she would be allowed to do about Russia would be to join a sponsored party in celebration of some Russian literary man, or of the various Russians who invented radio, motor cars, and the telephone, or a party of scientists and people who enjoyed such things as hospitals, lavatories, maternity homes, model farms, underground stations, universities, schools and dams, or at least, whether they enjoyed them or not, would have to see them.

"Certainly not," said aunt Dot. "I would want to see the Caucasus, Circassian slaves, Tartars, wild mares, koumiss, churches, clergymen, and women."

Hearing her say this on the telephone to the Russian Consulate, I started dreaming of Caucasian mountains, over which Tartars galloped upside down on long-tailed ponies, shouting horribly, wild mares with their koumiss foaming into green pitchers, sledges and droshkys speeding over the steppes fraught with fur-capped men and Circassian slaves and pursued by wolves, who, every mile or so, were thrown a Circassian slave to delay them, but, never having enough, took up the chase again, till at last they had devoured all the Circassian slaves, the horses, and the fur-capped men. I dreamed too of the Crimea, of crumbling palaces decaying among orchards by the sea, of onion domes, of chanting priests with buns
 
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Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult. It was obviously one's duty to try to convert such Russians as had succumbed to Soviet atheism, and particularly Tartars in the Caucasus. She also had large future designs on Arabs and Israelites. But first it was to be the eastern end of the Black Sea, and we were to sail in a ship that took camels and plan our campaign from Istanbul.

"Constantinople," said Father Chantry-Pigg, who did not accept the Turkish conquest.

"Byzantium," said I, not accepting the Roman one.

Aunt Dot, who had accepted facts, said, "How many of our friends are in Turkey just now?"

"A lot," I said. "They are all writing their Turkey books. David and Charles are somewhere by the Black Sea, following Xenophon and Jason about. I had a card from Charles from Trebizond. He sounded cross, and he and David have probably parted by now. David wanted to get into Russia. Freya and Derek are somewhere camping in Anatolia. Margaret Beckford was in the Meander valley when last heard of, digging away for Hittites. I don't know where Patrick is, probably somewhere near Smyrna. And I think Steven is in Istanbul, lecturing to the University."

Aunt Dot said she must get down to her Turkey book quickly, or she would be forestalled by all these tiresome people. Writers all seemed to get the same idea at the same time. One year they would all be rushing for Spain, next year to some island off Italy, then it would be the Greek islands, then Dalmatia, then Cyprus and the Levant, and now people were all for Turkey.

"How they get the money for it I can't think. Turkey costs about a pound an hour. I suppose they have Contacts.

People are so dishonest in these days. What do you think they are all writing about?"

"The usual things, I suppose. Antiquities and scenery and churches and towns and people, and what Xenophon and the Ten Thousand did near Trebizond, and what the Byzantines did, and coarse fishing in the Bosphorus, and excavations everywhere, and merry village scenes."

"I dare say," said aunt Dot, "the B.B.C. has a recording van there. Reporters for the B.B.C. have such an extraordinary effect on the people they meet—wherever they go the natives sing. It seems so strange, they never do it when I am travelling. The B.B.C. oughtn't to let them, it spoils the programme. Just when you are hoping for a description of some nice place, everybody suddenly bursts out singing. Even Displaced Persons do it. And singing sounds much the same everywhere, so I switch off."

We made out a loose itinerary. Father Chantry-Pigg was for going first to Jordan-Jerusalem and staying with the Bishop, to see the Palestine refugees, then crossing the great Divide to visit the Children of Israel. But aunt Dot said no, we must leave Israel to the last, since, owing to the prejudices of Jordanites, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians, it was so difficult to get out of except into the sea. Father Chantry-Pigg said he would like also to go into Egypt and visit the Pyramids but aunt Dot said we couldn't go everywhere in one trip, and anyhow seeing the Pyramids seemed to drive people (other than archaeologists) mad, like Atlantis and the Lost Tribes, they got pyramiditis, and began to rave in numbers. So we decided to go first to the Black Sea. In Istanbul we should, said aunt Dot, be able to discover who were our most dangerous religious rivals. It seemed that in Turkey there were few, though the American Missions claimed a Turkish Christian community of some two thousand five hundred souls. Father Chantry-Pigg said, with hostile contempt, that the Seventh Day Adventists were the busiest missionaries in Turkey and the Levant, and met, he feared, with only too much success. But none of the principal Anglican missionary societies worked much, it seemed, in Turkey; nor, he believed, was the Italian Mission very active. When Father Chantry-Pigg said "Italian Mission", a look of particular malevolence slightly distorted his finely arranged features: the same look, only worse, that was apt to disturb and distort the fleshier and more good-humoured Irish countenance of Father Murphy, the priest of St. Brigid's, when the St. Gregory's clergy and choir filed in chanting, incense-swinging, saint-bearing processions out of their church door and round the square which both churches served. Father Chantry-Pigg took the view that it was emissaries from St. Brigid's who had made a habit of defacing his church notices, and sometimes entered his church in order to make disagreeable remarks and scatter spiteful leaflets, though some of this was-done from a very Low church in a neighbouring street, and some of the leaflets had "Catholic Commandos" printed on them, and others "Protestant Storm Troopers" and Father Chantry-Pigg did not know which of these two bands of warriors he disliked most. When he put a notice on his church door containing the words Eucharist, or Mass, or even Priest (particularly if the priest was going to hear confessions), these words would be struck out by ardent representatives of one or another of these guerrilla armies, or perhaps by both and the Catholic Commandos would write over it "You have no Mass", (or Eucharist, or priests, as the case might be), and, referring to confession, "Why? He has no power to absolve", and the Storm Troopers would correct Mass to the Lord's Supper, and alter the bit about confession to "The Minister will be in church to give counsel", and cross out Benediction, so that, after both sets of workers had been busy with the notices, there was not much of them left and they had to be re-Written. As Father Chantry-Pigg said, the Commandos belonged to the Catholic underworld and the Storm Troopers to the Protestants, and underworlds everywhere are pretty much like one another in manners, even when they hold differing views. Anyhow these underworlds, he said, were two minds (if minds they could be called) with but a single thought (if thought it could be called) about the section of the Anglican Church to which he belonged, and that thought was one of powerful hostility. Both underworlds were, of course strongly disapproved of by the higher minded and better mannered of their respective religious parties.