The Complete Short Stories (15 page)

‘She was one of my
girls,’ she said, ‘I gave her lessons for three years.’

Mannie rose to leave,
and before Fanny followed him she picked a card from her handbag and held it
out to me between her fingernails.

‘If any of your friends
are interested …’ said Fanny hazily.

I looked at this as she
drove off with the man, and above an address about four miles up the river I
read:

Mme La Fanfarlo (Paris, London)

Dancing Instructress. Ballet. Ballroom.

Transport
provided By Arrangement

Next day I came across
Cramer still trying to locate the trouble with the Mercedes.

‘Are you the man
Baudelaire wrote about?’ I asked him.

He stared past me at the
open waste veldt with a look of tried patience.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘What
made you think of it?’

‘The name Fanfarlo on
Fanny’s card,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you know her in Paris?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Cramer, ‘but
those days are finished. She married Manuela de Monteverde — that’s Mannie.
They settled here about twenty years ago. He keeps a Kaffir store.’

I remembered then that
in the Romantic age it had pleased Cramer to fluctuate between the practice of
verse and that of belles-lettres, together with the living up to such
practices.

I asked him, ‘Have you
given up your literary career?’

‘As
a career,
yes,’ he answered. ‘It was an obsession I was glad to get rid of’

He stroked the blunt
bonnet of the Mercedes and added, ‘The greatest literature is the occasional
kind, a mere afterthought.’

Again he looked across
the veldt where, unseen, a grey-crested lourie was piping ‘go’way, go’way’.

‘Life,’ Cramer
continued, ‘is the important thing.’

‘And do you write
occasional verses?’ I inquired.

‘When occasion demands
it,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ve just written a Nativity Masque. We’re giving a
performance on Christmas Eve in there.’ He pointed to his garage, where a few
natives were already beginning to shift petrol cans and tyres. Being members
neither of the cast nor the audience, they were taking their time. A pile of
folded seats had been dumped alongside.

Late on the morning of
Christmas Eve I returned from the Falls to find a crowd of natives quarrelling
outside the garage, with Cramer swearing loud and heavy in the middle. He held
a sulky man by the shirt-sleeve, while with the other hand he described his
vituperation on the hot air. Some mission natives had been sent over to give a
hand with laying the stage, and these, with their standard-three school
English, washed faces and white drill shorts, had innocently provoked Cramer’s
raw rag-dressed boys. Cramer’s method, which ended with the word ‘police’,
succeeded in sending them back to work, still uttering drum-like gutturals at
each other.

The stage, made of
packing-cases with planks nailed across, was being put at the back of the
building, where a door led to the yard, the privy and the native huts. The
space between this door and the stage was dosed off by a row of black Government
blankets hung on a line; this was to be the dressing-room. I agreed to come
round there that evening to help with the lighting, the make-up, and the
pinning on of angels’ wings. The Fanfarlo’s dancing pupils were to make an
angel chorus with carols and dancing, while she herself, as the Virgin, was to
give a representative ballet performance. Owing to her husband’s very broken
English, he had been given a silent role as a shepherd, supported by three
other shepherds chosen for like reasons. Cramer’s part was the most prominent,
for he had the longest speeches, being the First Seraph. It had been agreed
that, since he had written the masque, he could best deliver most of it; but I
gathered there had been some trouble at rehearsals over the cost of the production,
with Fanny wanting elaborate scenery as being due to her girls.

The performance was set
to begin at eight. I arrived behind the stage at seven-fifteen to find the
angels assembled in ballet dresses with wings of crinkled paper in various
shades. The Fanfarlo wore a long white transparent skirt with a sequin top. I
was helping to fix on the Wise Men’s beards when I saw Cramer. He had on a
toga-like garment made up of several thicknesses of mosquito-net, but not thick
enough to hide his white shorts underneath. He had put on his make-up early,
and this was melting on his face in the rising heat.

‘I always get nerves at
this point,’ he said. ‘I’m going to practise my opening speech.’

I heard him mount the
stage and begin reciting. Above the voices of excited children I could only
hear the rhythm of his voice; and I was intent on helping the Fanfarlo to paint
her girls’ faces. It seemed impossible. As fast as we lifted the sticks of
paint they turned liquid. It was really getting abnormally hot.

‘Open that door,’ yelled the Fanfarlo. The
back door was opened and a crowd of curious natives pressed round the entrance.
I left the Fanfarlo ordering them off, for I was determined to get to the front
of the building for some air. I mounted the stage and began to cross it when I
was aware of a powerful radiation of heat coming from my right. Looking round,
I saw Cramer apparently shouting at someone, in the attitude of his dealings
with the natives that morning. But he could not advance because of this current
of heat. And because of the heat I could not at first make out who Cramer was
rowing with; this was the sort of heat that goes for the eyes. But as I got
farther towards the front of the stage I saw what was standing there.

This was a living body.
The most noticeable thing was its constancy; it seemed not to conform to the
law of perspective, but remained the same size when I approached as when I
withdrew. And altogether unlike other forms of life, it had a completed look.
No part was undergoing a process; the outline lacked the signs of confusion and
ferment which commonly indicate living things, and this was also the principle
of its beauty. The eyes took up nearly the whole of the head, extending far
over the cheekbones. From the back of the head came two muscular wings which
from time to time folded themselves over the eyes, making a draught of
scorching air. There was hardly any neck. Another pair of wings, tough and
supple, spread from below the shoulders, and a third pair extended from the
calves of the legs, appearing to sustain the body. The feet looked too fragile
to bear up such a concentrated degree of being.

European residents of
Africa are often irresistibly prompted to speak kitchen kaffir to anything
strange.

‘Hamba!’
shouted
Cramer, meaning ‘Go away’.

‘Now get off the stage
and stop your noise,’ said the living body peaceably.

‘Who in hell are you?’
said Cramer, gasping through the heat.

‘The same as in Heaven,’
came the reply, ‘a Seraph, that’s to say.’

‘Tell that to someone
else,’ Cramer panted. ‘Do I look like a fool?’

‘I will. No, nor a
Seraph either,’ said the Seraph.

The place was filling
with heat from the Seraph. Cramer’s paint was running into his eyes and he
wiped them on his net robe. Walking backward to a less hot place he cried, ‘Once
and for all —’

‘That’s correct,’ said
the Seraph.

‘— this is my show,’
continued Cramer.

‘Since when?’ the Seraph
said.

‘Right from the start,’
Cramer breathed at him.

‘Well, it’s been mine
from the Beginning,’ said the Seraph, ‘and the Beginning began first.’

Climbing down from the
hot stage, Cramer caught his seraphic robe on a nail and tore it. ‘Listen here,’
he said, ‘I can’t conceive of an abnormality like you being a true Seraph.’

‘True,’ said the Seraph.

By this time I had been
driven by the heat to the front entrance. Cramer joined me there. A number of
natives had assembled. The audience had begun to arrive in cars and the rest of
the cast had come round the building from the back. It was impossible to see
far inside the building owing to the Seraph’s heat, and impossible to re-enter.

Cramer was still
haranguing the Seraph from the door, and there was much speculation among the
new arrivals as to which of the three familiar categories the present trouble
came under, namely, the natives, Whitehall, or leopards.

‘This is my property,’
cried Cramer, ‘and these people have paid for their seats. They’ve come to see
a masque.

‘In that case,’ said the
Seraph, ‘I’ll cool down and they can come and see a masque.

‘My
masque, said
Cramer.

‘Ah, no,
mine,’
said
the Seraph. ‘Yours won’t do.’

‘Will you go, or shall I
call the police?’ said Cramer with finality.

‘I have no alternative,’
said the Seraph more finally still.

Word had gone round that
a mad leopard was in the garage. People got back into their cars and parked at
a safe distance; the tobacco planter went to fetch a gun. A number of young
troopers had the idea of blinding the mad leopard with petrol and ganged up
some natives to fill petrol cans from the pump and pass them chainwise to the
garage.

‘This’ll fix him,’ said
a trooper.

‘That’s right, let him
have it,’ said Cramer from his place by the door.

‘I shouldn’t do that,’
said the Seraph. ‘You’ll cause a fire.’

The first lot of petrol
to be flung into the heat flared up. The seats caught alight first, then the
air itself began to burn within the metal walls till the whole interior was
flame feeding on flame. Another car-load of troopers arrived just then and
promptly got a gang of natives to fill petrol cans with water. Slowly they
drenched the fire. The Fanfarlo mustered her angels a little way up the road.
She was trying to reassure their parents and see what was happening at the same
time, furious at losing her opportunity to dance. She aimed a hard poke at the
back of one of the angels whose parents were in England.

It was some hours before
the fire was put out. While the corrugated metal walls still glowed, twisted
and furled, it was impossible to see what had happened to the Seraph, and after
they had ceased to glow it was too dark and hot to see far into the wreck.

‘Are you insured?’ one
of Cramer’s friends asked him.

‘Oh yes,’ Cramer
replied, ‘my policy covers everything except Acts of God — that means lightning
or flood.’

‘He’s fully covered,’
said Cramer’s friend to another friend.

Many people had gone
home and the rest were going. The troopers drove off singing ‘Good King
Wenceslas’, and the mission boys ran down the road singing ‘Good Christian Men,
Rejoice’.

It was about midnight,
and still very hot. The tobacco planters suggested a drive to the Falls, where
it was cool. Cramer and the Fanfarlo joined us, and we bumped along the rough
path from Cramer’s to the main highway. There the road is tarred only in two
strips to take car-wheels. The thunder of the Falls reached us about two miles
before we reached them.

‘After all my work on
the masque and everything!’ Cramer was saying.

‘Oh, shut up,’ said the
Fanfarlo.

Just then, by the glare
of our headlights I saw the Seraph again, going at about seventy miles an hour
and skimming the tarmac strips with two of his six wings in swift motion, two
folded over his face, and two covering his feet.’

‘That’s him!’ said
Cramer. ‘We’ll get him yet.’

We left the car near the hotel and followed
a track through the dense vegetation of the Rain Forest, where the spray from
the Falls descends perpetually. It was like a convalescence after fever, that
frail rain after the heat. The Seraph was far ahead of us and through the trees
I could see where his heat was making steam of the spray.

We came to the cliff’s
edge, where opposite us and from the same level the full weight of the river
came blasting into the gorge between. There was no sign of the Seraph. Was he
far below in the heaving pit, or where?

Then I noticed that
along the whole mile of the waterfall’s crest the spray was rising higher than
usual. This I took to be steam from the Seraph’s heat. I was right, for
presently, by the mute flashes of summer lightning, we watched him ride the
Zambezi away from us, among the rocks that look like crocodiles and the crocodiles
that look like rocks.

The Pawnbroker’s
Wife

At Sea Point, on the coast of the Cape of
Good Hope, in 1942, there was everywhere the sight of rejoicing, there was the
sound of hilarity, and the sea washed up each day one or two bodies of servicemen
in all kinds of uniform. The waters round the Cape were heavily mined. The
people flocked to bring in the survivors. The girls of the seashore and harbour
waited two by two for the troops on shore-leave from ships which had managed to
enter the bay safely.

I was waiting for a ship
to take me to England, and lived on the sea-front in the house of Mrs Jan
Cloote, a pawnbroker’s wife. From her window where, in the cool evenings, she
sat knitting khaki socks till her eyes ached, Mrs Jan Cloote took note of these
happenings, and whenever I came in or went out she would open her door a
little, and, standing in the narrow aperture, would tell me the latest.

She was a small woman of
about forty-three, a native of Somerset. Her husband, Jan Cloote, had long ago
disappeared into the Transvaal, where he was living, it was understood, with a
native woman. With his wife, he had left three daughters, the house on the
sea-front, and, at the back of the house which opened on to a little mean
street, a pawnshop.

Mrs Jan Cloote had more
or less built up everything that her husband had left half-finished. The house
was in better repair than it ever had been, and she let off most of the rooms.
The pawnshop had so far flourished that Mrs Jan Cloote was able to take a shop
next door where she sold a second-hand miscellany, unredeemed from the
pawnshop. The three daughters had likewise flourished. From all accounts, they
had gone barefoot to school at the time of their father’s residence at home,
because all his profit had gone on his two opulent passions, yellow advocaat
and black girls. As I saw the daughters now, I could hardly credit their
unfortunate past life. The youngest, Isa, was a schoolgirl with long yellow
plaits, and she was quite a voluptuary in her manner. The other two, in their
late teens, were more like the mother, small, shy, quiet, lady-like,
secretarial and discreet. Greta and Maida, they were called.