Riotous Assembly (20 page)

“So do I,” said the Mayor, who still didn’t feel very comfortable about the rubber
spears.

Dr Herzog hesitated. “Oh dear, I do wish you had told me it was illegal before. I
don’t see what I can do now,” he said anxiously.

“Well, if you won’t stop it, I will,” said the Kommandant. “Good man,” said the Mayor,
seconded by the councillors.

Before he could think about the likely consequences of his intervention, Kommandant
van Heerden found himself being helped off the saluting base and on to the parade ground.
He marched slowly towards the two armies, and as he went the realization of his position
slowly dawned on him. In the middle of the square halfway between the two opposing forces
of lunatics, he began to regret his precipitate decision to intervene. On one side of
him five hundred Zulu schizophrenics pawed the ground and waved their spears ferociously,
while on the other, an equal number of white madmen awaited defeat with a
determination made all the more awful by foreknowledge.

Kommandant van Heerden halted and raised his hand. Silence fell over the two
armies.

“This is Kommandant van Heerden speaking,” he shouted. “I am ordering you to
disperse and return to your wards. This is an illegal gathering and contravenes the
Riotous Assemblies Act.”

He stopped and waited for the armies to retire. There was no sign of their doing
anything of the sort. As his words echoed away, both sides stared insanely at their
adversaries and there were murmurs in the ranks. Miss Hazelstone finished sighting the
field guns and stepped forward. On the Zulu side an enormous warrior followed suit.

“What is the meaning of this nonsense?” Miss Hazelstone shouted.

“You heard me,” said the Kommandant. “This battle constitutes a breach of the peace. I
insist you disperse.”

In the space between the armies Kommandant van Heerden found his new role as keeper of
the peace becoming more difficult.

“You’ve no right to come here and interfere with our pageant,” Miss Hazelstone
insisted. “And it’s not a breach of the peace.”

“We won,” said the Zulu chief. “We won the battle of Isandhlwana and now we win it
again.”

“Over my dead body,” said the Kommandant and regretted the words as soon as he had said
them. The murmurs in the ranks of the two armies indicated all too clearly that the
spirit of belligerency was spreading.

On the saluting base the spectators were growing as restless as the lunatics.

“Are those axes made of rubber too?” the Mayor asked as he watched several Zulus
flourishing choppers in place of their spears.

“I certainly hope so,” said the Superintendent.

“The British appear to be loading those field guns,” said the Mayor.

“Impossible,” said the Superintendent. “They’ve nothing to load them with.”

“They’re putting something up the spout,” said the Mayor. “And those Zulus seem to be
putting something on the ends of their spears. They look like knitting needles to me.
Either that or bicycle spokes.”

The alarm of the Mayor was as nothing to the panic that Kommandant van Heerden was
beginning to feel. Miss Hazelstone and the Zulu chief were engaged in a fierce argument
about who had won the Battle of Isandhlwana.

“My grandfather was there,” said Miss Hazelstone.

“So was mine,” said the Zulu.

“Mine wasn’t,” said the Kommandant, “and in any case I don’t care a stuff who won the
battle, no one is going to win it here. I demand you withdraw your forces.”

“We’re going to win,” said the Zulu. “We’ve been losing all afternoon and we’ve a right
to win.”

“Nonsense,” said Miss Hazelstone. “My grandfather won the victory and that’s all there
is to be said.”

“My grandfather told my father and my father told me that your grandfather ran away,”
the Zulu said.

“How dare you?” Miss Hazelstone shrieked. “How dare you insult a Hazelstone?”

Kommandant van Heerden was horrified too. He knew from experience what was likely
to be the result of any altercation between Miss Hazelstone and a Zulu. As the old lady
wrestled with the sword that hung from her belt and the Zulu took refuge behind his
enormous shield, Kommandant van Heerden made one last effort to restore harmony.

“I order you to leave this parade ground,” he yelled, drawing his revolver from its
holster, but it was already too late. With an upward sweep of her sword Miss Hazelstone
knocked the Kommandant’s arm into the air. The revolver fired harmlessly into the sky
and with a great roar the two armies of the insane surged towards one another.

As Miss Hazelstone’s sword swept through the air and the Zulu parried with his shield,
Kommandant van Heerden turned to flee. One glance at the Zulu schizophrenics convinced
him that if safety lay anywhere, it was with the British Army and he dashed towards tie
advancing lines of redcoats. A moment later he regretted his decision. Advancing at
a run, a regiment of paranoid women in kilts still headed by the depressed piper playing
The Road to the Isles, swept over the Kommandant and he had just time to turn and run with
them before he was bowled over and thrown to the ground. He lay still and was trodden on
several times before the regiment was past. Then raising his head, he surveyed the scene
around him.

It was immediately clear that the Zulus had no intention of forgoing their
victory. Nonplussed for a moment by the charge of the paranoid women, they had
recovered their nerve and had counter-attacked to good effect. Using their short rubber
spears now tipped with knitting needles, they were stabbing their way forward very
successfully. On the left flank the Welsh Guards were making a desperate defence but
their wooden rifles were no match for the assegais. As the Black Watch wavered and began
to retreat Kommandant van Heerden scrambled to his feet and ran before them. Around him
the parade ground echoed to the war-cry of the Zulu hordes, the screams of the wounded
women, and the weird noises coming from the bagpipes. To add to the din a tape-recorder
struck up the 1812 Overture through the loudspeakers. In the middle of the battle, Miss
Hazelstone’s pith helmet could be seen bobbing about. Kommandant van Heerden made it to
the British camp and collapsed inside one of the tents.

 To the spectators on the stand the re-enactment of history appeared at first
to be entirely convincing. The valiant charge of the British and their subsequent
retreat had an air of authenticity about them which the previous tableaux had lacked.

“Amazing realism,” said the Mayor, who had just seen a Guardsman run through with a
spear.

“I think the music helps too,” said the Superintendent.

The Mayor had to agree. “People seem to be screaming rather a lot,” he said.

“I’m sure this sort of thing helps the patients,” Dr Herzog continued. “Tends to take
their minds off their problems.”

“I suppose it must,” said the Mayor. “Certainly takes other things off. There’s a
fellow over there who seems to have lost a leg.”

On the square in front of them glimpses of a terrible reality were beginning to
appear through the pageant of history. Increasingly it was becoming difficult to tell
what was illusion from what was fact. History and present tragedy mingled
inextricably. In some places, death was being mimed with a series of violent
contortions whose realism far surpassed the agonies of those whose deaths were in no way
rehearsed. To the strains of Tchaikovsky a number of patients in the Black Watch found
themselves being raped by Zulu warriors while a detachment of frogmen who had never
been anywhere near Isandhlwana threw themselves into the fray with all the vigour their
flippers would allow.

From the shelter of the tent into which he had crawled the Kommandant watched as the
crew of a field gun aimed the weapon into the crowd of struggling combatants and was
horrified to see Miss Hazelstone, minus her pith helmet and stained with blood,
superintending the operation.

“More chlorate and less sugar,” he heard her say to a man who was filling what appeared
to be a pillowcase with powder. The Kommandant waited no longer. He knew too well Miss
Hazelstone’s remarkable skill with large-calibre weapons to risk being in the line of
fire. Disentangling himself from the canvas and refusing the passionate overtures of
a private of the Black Watch who had crawled in beside him, the Kommandant dashed for
shelter towards the saluting base. He had covered some twenty yards when he heard Miss
Hazelstone give the order to fire, and a moment later a sheet of flame enveloped the
British camp. As an enormous explosion threw him to the ground and the blast slid him across
the tarmac the Kommandant shut his eyes and prayed. Above his head portions of field gun
mingled with combatants interrupted in their struggles. Miss Hazelstone had not merely
fired the gun, she had exploded it. As he slid to a halt under the saluting base,
Kommandant van Heerden raised his head and looked around at the subsiding chaos. The
actors in the tableau had assumed a new and altogether convincing stillness and it was
clear that nobody had won the Battle of Isandhlwana.

 The parade ground was littered with black and white bodies while what survivors
there were had lost all interest in history. With all the marks of an entirely sane
instinct for self-preservation, they crawled towards the sick bay.

Only the staff seemed to have taken leave of their senses. On the stand above him the
Kommandant could hear Dr Herzog still trying to reassure the late Mayor that the spears
were made of rubber. To Kommandant van Heerden the assurance seemed quite unnecessary.
Whatever had hit the Mayor had been made of something much more lethal.

The Kommandant waited until Dr Herzog had been taken away before crawling from his
hiding-place. He stood up and looked around. History had not merely been portrayed, he
thought, it had been made. Not only the past but the present and future of South Africa was
to be seen in the devastation that greeted his eyes. Picking his way over the bodies, the
Kommandant made his way towards a large crater which had been blown in the middle of the
parade ground. Beside it, there lay the remains of a plumed pith helmet and the Star Miss
Hazelstone had been wearing.

“A last memento,” he murmured, and picked them up. Then still dazed and shaken he turned
and made his way back to the car.

On the morning of his execution Jonathan Hazelstone was denied the usual privilege of
choosing a hearty breakfast on the grounds that before all major operations patients had
to do with light refreshment. Instead of the bacon and eggs he had ordered, he was
allowed a cup of coffee and a visit from an Anglican chaplain. Jonathan found it
difficult to decide which was the more unpleasant. On the whole he thought he preferred
the coffee.

His ties with the Church had been severed at the time of his trial and the Bishop had
reached the conclusion that the refusal of the Church authorities to testify on his
behalf had been due to the jealousy he knew to exist among his colleagues at the rapidity
of his promotion to a bishopric. He had no idea that parts of his confession,
particularly those chosen by Konstabel Els, had been shown to the Archbishop.

“I knew the fellow was progressive,” the Archbishop muttered as he read the
extraordinary document, “but really this time he has gone too far,” and he recalled
Jonathan’s admission that he had used every possible method to attract people into the
Church. “High Church in ritual, Low Church in approach, that’s my way,” Jonathan had said and
the Archbishop could see that he had meant it. To combine sodomy with genuflection was to
be High Church and Low with a vengeance and it was hardly surprising his congregations
had grown so quickly.

“I think the least said the soonest mended,” the Archbishop had decided, and in short
the Church had disowned him.

 The Chaplain who came to visit him in his last hours was not a South African. It had
been impossible to persuade any self-respecting parson to minister to the needs of a
man who had brought disgrace on his cloth and even the Bishop of Piemburg had declined the
invitation.

“There are moments when a man needs to be alone,” he explained to Governor Schnapps over
the telephone, “and this is surely one of them,” and had gone back to compose a sermon on
the Brotherhood of Man.

In the end it was the Chaplain of a Cambridge college who was visiting Piemburg
during the long vacation who was inveigled into Piemburg Prison to attend to the
prisoner’s spiritual needs.

“I understand there is a particularly fine display of prickly pears in the prison
garden,” the Vicar of Piemburg explained to the Chaplain who was far more interested in
the physical needs of rock plants than in the spiritual ones of his fellow men and the
Chaplain had jumped at the opportunity afforded by the hanging to see a riot of
prickly pears.

Standing in the cell, the Chaplain found it difficult to know what to say.

“You weren’t by any chance in the Navy?” he asked finally.

Jonathan shook his head.

“I just wondered,” the Chaplain continued. “There was a middy on HMS Clodius in ’43 I
think it was, or it might have been ’44. His name was Hazelnut.”

“Mine’s Hazelstone,” said the Bishop.

“So it is. How forgetful of me. One meets so many people in my profession.”

“I suppose so,” said the Bishop.

The Chaplain paused, and looked at the manacles and chains. “Do you wear those all the
time?” he asked. “They must be frightfully uncomfortable.”

“Only when I’m going to be hanged,” said the Bishop.

The Chaplain thought he detected a note of bitterness in the remark, and
recollected the reason for his visit.

“Is there anything you would like to tell me?” he asked.

The Bishop could think of a great many things he would like to tell him, but there didn’t
seem much point.

“No,” he said, “I have made my confession.”

The Chaplain sighed with relief. These occasions are so embarrassing, he thought.

“I’ve never actually attended an execution before,” he mumbled at last.

“Nor have I,” said the Bishop.

“Nasty things,” continued the Chaplain, “nasty but necessary. Still they do say
hanging is quick and painless. I daresay you’ll be quite relieved when it is all over.”

The Bishop, whose hope of eternal life had vanished along with his faith, doubted if
relieved was quite the right word. He tried to change the subject.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

“To the prison?”

“To South Africa, though it’s much the same thing.”

The Chaplain ignored the remark. He was a staunch supporter of the South African point
of view at high table in his college, and had no time for liberals.

“I try to get away to summer climes at least once a year,” he said. “Undergraduates are
so irreligious these days and my real interest lies in gardening. South Africa is full
of lovely gardens.”

“Then perhaps you’ll appreciate this poem,” said the Bishop and began to recite “The
Forerunners”.

 “Lovely enchanting language, sugar cane,

Hony of roses, whither wilt thou flie?”

 He was still reciting when Governor Schnapps and Hangman Els arrived. As the
chains were removed and he was strapped into the harness that held his arms, the Bishop
continued:

 “True beautie dwells on high: ours is a flame

But borrow’d thence to light us thither.

Beautie and beauteous words should go together.”

 “Bugger these buckles,” said Els, who was having difficulty with the straps.

The solemn procession passed out of Bottom into the bright sunshine of the prison
courtyard. Stumbling between Els and the old warder, Jonathan looked round him for the last
time. Incongruous against the dead black paint of the Death House stood a white ambulance.
To everyone’s amazement, the condemned man laughed.

“Bleak paleness chalkes the doore,” he shouted.

 “The harbingers are come. See, see their mark

White is their colour and behold my head.”

 The two ambulance men stared in horror at the shouting figure whose corpse they
had been sent to collect for the transplant operation.

 “But must they have my heart? Must they dispark

Those sparkling feelings which thereine were bred?”

 The little group hurried on up the steps to the scaffold. The old warder helped Els
to get the Bishop on to the trap and then rushed down the ladder and across the courtyard to
his office. It wasn’t that he was squeamish but he had no intention of being anywhere near
the gallows when Els pulled the lever, and besides he had a good excuse for his absence. He
had to phone the hospital the moment the ambulance left the prison.

Standing on the trap the Bishop continued his recitation. Governor Schnapps asked the
Chaplain what a harbinger was. The Chaplain said he thought it was probably a member of the
hydrangea family though he seemed to remember having served under a Captain Harbinger
during the war. Els was trying to get the cloth bag over the Bishop’s head. He was having
some difficulty because the Bishop was so tall and the bag had evidently been made for a
much smaller head. Els couldn’t get the Bishop to bend his legs because the straps
prevented any movement. In the end Governor Schnapps had to give Els a lift up before he
could drag the hood down into position. He had to repeat the performance when it came to
putting the noose round the condemned man’s neck, and then Els pulled the rope so tight the
Bishop was forced to stop his recitation.

“Must dulnesse turn me to a clo-” He ground to a halt.

“For goodness sake, Els, loosen the bloody thing,” Governor Schnapps shouted as the
poem throttled to a stop. “You’re supposed to hang him down there, not strangle him up
here.”

“They seem to grow best in sandy soil,” said the Chaplain.

“Is that loose enough for you?” Els asked after he had pulled the rope and loosened the
noose so that it hung limply on the Bishop’s shoulders. He was sick of people telling him
how to do his job. If the Governor was so bloody knowledgeable about hangings, why didn’t
he do the job himself.

“What do?” Governor Schnapps said to the Chaplain.

“Hydrangeas.”

“Clod,” said the Bishop resuming his recital.

Els stepped over to the lever.

“Yet have they left me,” the Bishop’s muffled voice came through the cloth bag. Els pulled
the lever and the hooded figure disappeared through the trap into the well below, and his
voice, already indistinct, was silenced by the dreadful thud that followed. As the
trapdoor slammed and the scaffold rocked alarmingly under the impact, the Chaplain,
recalled to the purpose of his visit by the intimations of mortality he had just
witnessed, offered a prayer for the dead man.

“Let us pray for the soul of the departed wherever it may be,” he said, and lowered his
head. Governor Schnapps and Els closed their eyes and listened with bowed heads as he
prayed. For several minutes the Chaplain mumbled on before ending, “And may Thy Servant
depart in Peace, Amen.”

“Amen,” said Governor Schnapps and Els together. The men on the scaffold raised their
heads and Els stepped forward to peer down into the well. The rope had stopped swinging and
hung rather limply, Els thought, considering the weight of its burden. As his eyes became
accustomed to the darkness below Els began to realize that something was missing. The
noose on the rope hung loose and empty. The Chaplain’s prayer had been answered. Wherever
God’s servant might be, he had certainly departed and evidently in one piece too. The
well of the scaffold was absolutely empty.

As the Bishop dropped into eternity he thought how appropriate his last words had
been and was glad he hadn’t reached the next line which went, “Thou art still my God,” because
he no longer believed. He braced himself for the awful shock to his neck, but the pain came
from another extremity altogether. “Corns,” he thought, as he hit the ground with a
tremendous crash and rolled sideways, through the door and out into the sunlit courtyard.
His cloth bag was ripped and his legs felt decidedly painful, but it was evident that
whatever else had been broken, his neck had not. He lay still, waiting for Els to fetch him
for a second attempt and wasn’t surprised when he felt hands lifting his feet and
shoulders.

A moment later he was lying on a stretcher and had been lifted into the ambulance.
As the doors were slammed the ambulance moved off hurriedly, stopped for a moment while
the prison gates were opened, and hurtled out into the street, its siren whirring.

 Behind it the Death House had begun to fulfil the predictions of the old warder.
Under the impact of the stampede that followed on the scaffold when the distraught
hangman peering into the well slipped and grabbed Governor Schnapps’ legs to prevent
himself falling, the walls of the gallows slowly toppled inwards and with a roar of
falling masonry, Governors, Hangmen and Chaplains, disappeared from view in a dense
cloud of black dust. The old warder sat in his office and thanked his lucky stars. “I said it
wasn’t safe,” he murmured and picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

 As the ambulance sped through the streets of Piemburg, Jonathan Hazelstone felt
the attendant undoing the straps that held his arms and legs. A hand slid inside his shirt
and felt his chest.

“It’s all right. It’s still beating,” he heard the attendant tell the driver. Jonathan
held his breath until the hand went away. Then he relaxed slowly. Around him the sounds of
the city filtered through the canvas bag and as he lay there Jonathan Hazelstone realized
for the first time that what lay in store for him might make death by hanging seem
infinitely preferable.

“I’ll be hanged if anyone is going to cut my heart out now,” he thought to himself as the
ambulance swung through the gates of Piemburg Hospital, and stopped outside the
mortuary.

 Inside the hospital the news of the execution had been accompanied by the old
warder’s insistence that several more ambulances be sent to the prison to deal with the
victims of the disastrous collapse of the Death House. The air of tension that was
already present in the hospital developed into a state of wholesale panic. The
Kommandant, already prepared for the operation, was given a general anaesthetic and
wheeled unconscious into the operating theatre. While the surgeons prepared for the
transplant, ambulance drivers rushed to their vehicles and preparations were made to
receive the expected influx of victims from the prison. Nurses already distraught at
having to deal with scores of lunatics injured in the massacre at Fort Rapier tried to
ready themselves for this fresh disaster. When the ambulance carrying Jonathan
Hazelstone arrived at the mortuary it was caught up in the general confusion.

“Get back to the prison,” yelled an orderly from a window when the two attendants
carried the donor into the mortuary and deposited him on a trolley. “There’s been a
major catastrophe there.” The two men dashed back to their ambulance and drove off. Alone
in the mortuary for a moment the Bishop leapt off his trolley and snatched the cloth bag
from his head and looked around him. Under the sheets that covered still forms on their slabs
he found what he was looking for, and by the time two orderlies arrived to fetch the donor
for the transplant, the body lying snugly under its white sheet and with its head covered
by a grey cloth bag contained a heart that was far too cold and still to be of much
assistance to Kommandant van Heerden.

 As the operation got under way, what remained of the late Bishop of Barotseland
was strolling with the faint suggestion of a limp up the hill towards Jacaranda House, and
as it strolled it was singing:

 “Yet if you go, I passe not; take your way:

For Thou art still my God, is all that ye

Perhaps with more embellishment can say.

Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee.

Let a bleak paleness chalke the door.

So all within be livelier than before.”

 Jonathan Hazelstone had begun to think that there might, after all, be reasons for
recovering his faith.

 The state of panic that reigned at Piemburg Hospital when the ambulance
containing the Bishop arrived was as nothing to the chaos and hysteria which began in
the operating theatre when the body of the donor arrived on the trolley. An incision
had already been made in Kommandant van Heerden’s chest when it was discovered that
whoever had been responsible for the execution had made an altogether too thorough
job of it. The corpse on the trolley had multiple injuries of the most appalling sort. The
only thing that didn’t appear to be broken on it was the neck. Not only was it fractured
in a score of places but it had been dead for at least forty-eight hours. And when it was
further revealed to be the corpse of a woman of eighty-nine, the surgeons knew that what
they had considered stupid from the start, not to say criminal, had degenerated now to
the point of sheer lunacy.