The Daffodil Affair (20 page)

They were walking uphill; perhaps it was because of this that Hudspith could be heard breathing heavily.

‘And of course spirits it may be. One ought never to jump to conclusions on the strength of fragmentary evidence.’ Wine chuckled. ‘I am taking you this way so that we can get a bird’s-eye view of the islands. This hill in front of us rises to about four hundred feet.’

‘I’m inclined to think,’ said Appleby, ‘that you expect Hudspith and me to rise to more than that.’

‘Ah.’ Wine walked some paces in silence. Then he chuckled again. ‘I think we are getting to know each other very nicely.’ Again he walked in silence. ‘Just think, my dear Appleby, what one could do with Danilov as a sort of evangelist. He roves about the world – perhaps with a little choir or orchestra – and languages come and go as he moves. It’s tremendous.’

The breathing of Hudspith became heavier still. Appleby, glancing sideways as they walked, noticed with some alarm a fixed contraction on his brow. It seemed only too likely that the cheated girls had been usurped. Hudspith had found a new Whale.

They climbed higher. America Island took form beneath them: an irregular oval of blotched green and brown framed in the yellow of the incredible river. On the summit was a little clearing of which the borders were low palmetto scrub and papaw trees and feathery palm. Parrots flew chattering over them; unknown butterflies hovered; and everywhere was the sweet scent of the espinillo de olor. That the island had been cultivated could be seen – but the orange groves, laid out in quincunx form, were now eroded and forlorn, yielding to a stealthy pincers movement of which the spearheads were a tangled
monté
of low trees wreathed in creepers; this with a marching army of criss-crossed bamboo behind. Unguarded, nothing human would last here long; nature would sweep in with something of the pounce of Eusapia’s lazy-tongs, and the Happy Islands would be as they had been before ever Domingo de Irala and the Conquistadors had come this way.

Upstream, the other islands stretched westward; the nearer appearing securely anchored in the flood; those farther away floating uncertainly between air and water. Each was blotched and brown and green, featureless and scrubby except for here and there an aracá or a commanding palm, but with many of the strangely assorted buildings of Schlumpf’s fantasy showing clear in the shadowless light of noon. That queer project had been ragged and untidy and evanescent; superimposed upon it could be seen evidences of the yet queerer but efficient and considered project of Emery Wine. Plain frame buildings had been added here and there; each island had a small uniform jetty; a purposive network of wires ran between the houses and spanned the channels on high-masted buoys; here and there a launch darted on the obscure business of the community. For it was a community of sorts; man dominated this corner of the wilderness and nature took second place.

But the majestic river floated on, and a few miles downstream the world was a solitary haunt of tapir and capybara, of vizcachas sitting at their holes and of flamingos contemplative on stilt-like legs. The river was an unending world of yellow water and pampas grass and willow, of strange birds – macaws and Magellanic swans – and stranger fish – bagre and dorado, pacu and surubi. The river and its multitudinous life was a world unending. But the river also was no more than a dully variegated thread winding through the immeasurable monotony of what from this eminence could be clearly seen: the great green ocean of high and waving grass which made the larger world of this part of the South American continent. It was a far cry from Lady Caroline and the dusty little antique dealer of York.

Wine seated himself in the shade of a solitary Ñandubay. ‘You are looking down,’ he said, ‘on all the kindgoms of the world.’ The words were spoken without magniloquence and without either the irony or the gaiety that the man was wont to affect. Appleby, withdrawing his gaze from the farthest verge of the rippling pampa, looked at him curiously – as one may look at somebody interesting and new. ‘And the glory of them,’ said Wine. His finger made a circle in air – a small circle which seemed to define no more than the group of islands below. ‘So why should you and I pretend to each other any longer?’

‘It does seem unnecessary,’ said Appleby. And Hudspith nodded – not at all like a man who believes that only such successful pretence stands between him and the incomparable digestive system of the crocodile.

‘Radbone and I are after the same thing; so let us admit it. And let him admit that here’ – and again Wine’s finger circled – ‘I have got ahead of him. Let him admit that and come in. He sent you to spy out the land. And now’ – and a third time Wine’s finger circled – ‘it is before you. All the kingdoms of the world, graphed and taped.’

Appleby looked down on the islands and electric wires and launches, on these as a stray and tiny atom of human activity in that great void of green. And he saw the atom as a rebel cell in the vast organism of human civility, a minute cell or nexus of cells, definable still by a circling finger, but having the potentiality for unlimited and disastrous proliferation. Here the thing was growing in treacherous concealment, and presently it would send off down the great river, as if through a bloodstream, armies that should attack every weakened centre of a riven and exhausted planet. It was a large picture, and not a pretty one. ‘Certainly there seems no necessity to pretend,’ Appleby repeated.

‘Did I once remind you that home-keeping youth have ever homely wits? When I was a young man I visited Egypt and I visited Rome. And I saw how the resolute man invents gods to put his fellows in awe. I saw what of splendour and power could be built out of the infantile recesses of the mind. I looked at what Milton accurately calls the brutish gods of Nile – and then I looked at the pyramids. By observing how children irrationally fear a dog or a beetle, by probing a little the vast unreason of the unconscious mind, able men had gained all that over lordship and command. I saw it as men must often have seen it before me. I saw it as Faustus saw it.’

‘Ah,’ said Appleby. ‘Faust. But there are those who believe rather in Prometheus.’

‘And I went to Rome.’ Under the shadow of the Ñandubay, Wine sat staring unseeingly before him, far too absorbed to heed an obscure interruption. ‘My plan came to me there. It was as I sat musing in the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars sang vespers in the temple of Jupiter–’

The man was the soul of charlatanism, Appleby thought. Spouting Gibbon. Always making a tall story of it. And yet practical and efficient and ruthless. In fact – But better hear him out.

‘–that I saw it could all be done again. I saw how such a dominion could be built up more rapidly and surely, because more scientifically, than ever before. Two things were necessary. First, a command of – or better a corner in – all those oddities and abnormalities which must be the instruments for building up a popular magical system. Mrs Nurse and her voices, Eusapia and her conjuring, Danilov and his gift of tongues; all that material one must hold ready and organized. And, second, there must be a softening process. All successful attack, unless it is to rely on sudden and devastating surprise, must be preceded by that. And alone one could not manage it. There must be the hour as well as the man.’

But the point, thought Appleby, is this: is the man, without knowing it, himself the product of the hour? And is the softening process not the source of the plot as well as its instrument? Was not Wine in some measure involved in his own twilight – and was he not vulnerable in terms of this? The point lay there.

‘But the solvents had been at work long before my mind contacted the situation. For decades the great institutional systems of belief had been crumbling. You remember Christianity?’

Hudspith, to whom this flamboyant question appeared to be addressed, glowered darkly. But Wine was not in an observant mood.

‘How exquisitely the rational and the irrational were held together there! What an instrument it was!’ Something of Wine’s gaiety had displeasingly returned, and he spoke as a connoisseur might speak of some rare vintage which had passed its allotted span. ‘But things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ He paused, apparently because this was a quotation and to be savoured. ‘And so we can begin again.’

There were times at which the man had a certain impressiveness of perverted imagination. But at other times he was merely odious. And this, no doubt, was only another facet of the fact that there were several Wines. ‘And so,’ said Appleby, ‘you begin again.’

‘I begin wherever the softening process yields an opening. And there are openings in almost every country. There are openings in all classes – or sections, as I believe your Uncle Len would rather say. The different fields have, of course, been carefully studied; just as carefully as if we were proposing to market a new face cream or soap. In the main it will be spiritualism for the upper class and astrology for the lower. Spiritualism is comparatively expensive – and can be extremely so – whereas astrology is quite cheap. The middle classes will have the benefit of a little of both. For rural populations we shall rely chiefly on witchcraft. What is sometimes called the intelligentsia has exercised my mind a good deal. Yoga might do, and reincarnation and the Great Mind and perhaps a little Irish mythology. But the problem is not important, as there are likely to be singularly few of them left. What we shall have to consider – and that, gentlemen, from China to Peru by way of Paris, London and Berlin – is simply Barbarians, Philistines and Populace. The classification is not one of the most up to date, but I fancy it is sufficient. I may say that the United States, in which even Barbarians are lacking, is going to be the simplest proposition of all.’

‘Do I understand,’ asked Appleby, ‘that you are going to start your own Church?’

‘Hardly that. But I may say that it will be more like a Church in some countries than others. For instance, in America, we shall gradually take over the churches – the buildings, I mean – themselves. But in England I believe that they would be useless to us, even those that still have roofs to them. In England we shall take over the music halls. Have you ever sat among an English audience during a good variety show? A favourite comedienne singing a sentimental song, with a ventriloquist and a bit of conjuring to follow, can get pretty near the sort of atmosphere we want to achieve. The audience fuses into one cheerful and gullible monster. It is true that the music hall has fallen into a decline, but into nothing like so steep a decline as the Church. We shall make it one of our major centres. And the other will be the pub. Do you remember Wells’ story of the man who tried to perform a miracle in a pub – and it worked? I think he ordered a lamp to turn upside down. ‘We shall see to it that all our pubs have lamps like that.’

Hudspith stirred uneasily, as if particularly outraged at the thought of hanky-panky in pubs. For some moments nobody spoke; in the heat of noon the viuditas and cardinales had ceased to sing; there was silence except where, directly beneath their feet, a tuco-tuco pursued its subterranean monologue like a gnome.

‘The inverted lamp.’ Wine had taken off his panama – and with it had shed his facetiousness, so that he was staring across the river, absent and absorbed once more. ‘It might be our emblem. One by one what men have taken to be the true lamps are going out, and only the topsy-turvy ones will give any light at all. But are they topsy-turvy, after all? Or have we followed false lights for a thousand years or more?’

The fellow had taken the trouble, thought Appleby, to provide his rascality with a sort of philosophy. And they were going to be treated to it now; if only Hudspith had his professional notebook and pencil a valuable treatise might be preserved. He settled his back against the great tree. Suddenly overhead a teru-tero was calling – the plover of the pampa – and obscurely the tuco-tuco answered from below. Between them the well-modulated voice of Wine held the middle air.

‘Take a piece of paper and make a pinhole and look through the hole at a lighted lamp. Move the pinhead upwards, between the lamp and the paper until it is within your field of vision as you peer. What happens?’

Hudspith, whose eye appeared to have been probing after the tuco-tuco, looked up frowning. ‘You see the pinhead upside down.’

‘Exactly. Actually it is the image of the lamp which is inverted upon the retina. But our intellect rejects this and insists on seeing the pinhead downwards. It thinks a pin upside down less unlikely than a lamp upside down. And what the intellect rejects shall be our emblem: the inverted lamp.’ Wine’s voice dropped – dropped as if dipping towards the burrowing creature below. ‘Light after light goes out, fire after fire is extinguished. And this gathering darkness has been the work of science. That is the paradox. The Christians had a very clear picture of things. The simplest peasant could take it in and the subtlest schoolman could spend a lifetime interpreting it. It was simple and permanent. But then science came along and substituted something difficult and provisional. Decade by decade the picture became more complicated and shorter lived – until now neither the learned nor the simple at all know where they stand. And it is thus that science puts out the lamps of reason; it is thus that science is a vast softening process, a vast clearing the way for world-wide superstition. Science offers no fixed points of belief. And science, in the popular mind, is the sphere of the unaccountable and the marvellous. Have you studied the strip serials? Nothing could be more significant. The scientist is always there, and he is nothing more or less than the old magician. He belongs to our camp. And we shall use him. Under our control he will become part of what the world most needs.’

Appleby got to his feet. ‘And that is?’

‘A handful of simple and thorough-going superstitions, backed by conjurors, freaks and prodigies.’ Wine too rose. ‘What a pleasant gossip we have had! But now I must go down to the boat. I think you will find luncheon waiting for you. And will you make my apologies to the ladies?’