“Worse than Shimoneseki,” he said to the Navigating Officer.
“Much worse, sir.” The Navigating Officer could feel the sweat cooling on his brow.
The channel widened into a land-locked bay. The city of Dhon Phon Huang lay at the northern end.
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dropped her anchor and her ship’s company looked out upon a sight which had not changed since the time of Marco Polo.
The Captain studied the shoreline with more than usual attention. There were few landfalls the Captain had not made, few coastlines he had not seen from seaward, and few seaports he had not visited. But Dhon Phon Huang was a new one. The Captain was probably the first man-of-war captain to have penetrated so far up the channel for several hundred years.
The city was uncompromisingly oriental. There were no signs of Western influence, no oil company and soft drink hoardings, no modern buildings, no cars. The city was untouched by hand, a vintage piece. Its skyline was of temples and trees and towers. The silver barges with high prows by the quay might have carried Sinbad himself to catch the magic fish which became beautiful maidens at the cast of his net. The golden temple dome behind the trees might have been the Roc’s egg and those wharves might be the wharves of old Cathay where silk and sandalwood were unloaded by merchants who travelled as far as Samarkand. The Captain thought that
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’s sailors would cause a sensation ashore.
Before the Captain had made any official calls, before even the mail had come aboard, The Bodger received an invitation. Hand-written on excellent writing paper, it smelled faintly of lavender and made The Bodger beetle his eyebrows in disbelief.
Dear Robert,
You won’t remember me so there is no need for you to rack your brains. But I know you because I was at your christening. I was bridesmaid at your grandmother’s wedding and Julia’s grandmother was my greatest friend when we were girls.
I shall expect you to take tea with me this afternoon at my house. My First Elephant will be waiting at Huang Steps at a quarter to four. Come in uniform. I cannot abide your dreadful naval dog-robbers.
Yours sincerely, Emily Several-Strickland.
“Several-
Strickland
! First
Elephant
!
Dog
-robbers! “
The Bodger’s first thought was of a hoax. He suspected the Commander. But when he read the note a second time he was convinced it was genuine; it was too fantastic not to be. Also, the name Several-Strickland had at last stirred a dim memory; The Bodger could remember as a schoolboy going to tea with a mad red-haired family who lived in a huge house twenty miles away. The boys of the family had dared The Bodger to ride a pony bareback and the eldest girl had blacked The Bodger’s eye.
There were no motor cars in Dhon Phon Huang. The townspeople walked, more important citizens had donkeys, and the most important had elephants which reflected their owners’ taste and finances as accurately as motor cars. The British Consul’s elephant, for example, was a splendid animal. It was silver grey in colour and from its silver-tipped tusks to its blue-tasselled tail it had Rolls-Royce written all over it. Emily Several-Strickland’s First Elephant, too, was a majestic beast. It was kneeling on the jetty, its eyes fixed on The Bodger with a look of malevolent appraisal. The Bodger’s transport caused some facetious and ribald comment from the other officers in the boat.
“Please pass, running in,” said the Padre.
“Bet she won’t do more than twenty in third,” said Eric the D.L.O., who had once participated in the Monte Carlo Rally and still dined out on the story.
“Make sure you face the right way, Bodger,” shouted Ginger. “This is one of the reversible ones with old-fashioned reciprocating legs.”
As The Bodger approached, the mahout, who was dressed in clean white linen shirt and trousers, let down a small set of steps. The Bodger mounted into the howdah, which was also stamped with its owner’s personality. The cushions were covered in embroidered silk and the windows were lace-curtained. Sachets of lavender hung in the corners and in a rack was a month-old copy of
The Tatler
. A metal horn, like a goad, lay in a rest and The Bodger picked it up curiously, so uncovering a notice which read: “Don’t
fiddle
”.
The Bodger enjoyed the ride. The elephant’s back put him high above the hurly-burly of the streets. The Bodger looked down on a scene which might have come out of a travel film. There were old women holding chickens, stalls full of pink, fly-covered slices of meat, swarthy faces which burst into huge smiles at the sight of The Bodger, in uniform, swaying on top of the elephant. The Bodger looked across the roofs to the hills at the end of the city. The houses ended abruptly and the elephant rolled along a garden path. The garden had been laid out by an expert. Tropical flowers, flame red and brilliant yellow, grew in banks and slopes and clusters of colour. Here and there, The Bodger recognized familiar faces.
“Goddamn,” he said, “hollyhocks!”
The First Elephant stopped, and knelt, in front of a low white house with a veranda. The Bodger had no time to examine it. An imperious voice called from inside.
“Come in, Robert. One more minute and the tea will be spoiled.”
The Bodger hurriedly handed his cap to a butler who stood at the door and entered a long room which showed its owner’s years of service as a missionary. The furniture was a hotchpotch of bamboo, mahogany and tubular steel. On one wall hung, in succession, a worked sampler commemorating Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, an aquatint of Salisbury Cathedral, an oil portrait of a Malayan pirate, and a rose crayon drawing of a sleeping mongoose. At the far end of the room, bolt upright in a hard straight-backed chair, sat Miss Emily Several-Strickland.
She was plainly one of those fabulous, and formidable, English females who did not allow the peculiar habits of foreigners to alter their own way of life in the least particle. They grew snapdragons in the jungle, took afternoon tea with scones and thin sandwiches in the middle of revolutions, and conducted Sunday school classes, with verve and enthusiasm, on mountain tops. They considered divorce worse than murder, read
The Times
faithfully and minutely, pampered their dogs and dispatched their menfolk dispassionately, almost implacably, to endure incredible privations in every remote corner of the globe. Emily Several-Strickland had her family’s red hair. Her nose was angular and thin. Her skin was like powdered parchment and her eyes were searching, as though she was wondering whether The Bodger had washed his neck before coming to tea. Her greeting was typical.
“Come and sit down, Robert. Let me see your hands.”
The Bodger bashfully held out his hands; he was glad that the Commander could not see him.
“A very fine pair of hands. You’re obviously a very capable man. You’re better-looking than your grandfather. He didn’t drink. You obviously do. I like a man who drinks. If my father had not been a teetotaller he would have lived another forty years. Old Huang would never have dreamed of eating a fellow-alcoholic.”
Miss Several-Strickland poured two cups of tea while The Bodger wrestled with his voice.
“Really, ma’am?”
“The present Huang’s grandfather ate my father, you know.”
The Bodger’s cup rattled involuntarily in the saucer.
“Oh yes,” said Miss Several-Strickland. “With mango sauce. My father was considered quite a delicacy. But I get on very well with young Huang. Probably because we have that bond in common. Huang gave me Manweb, my butler.”
“That’s a very odd name, ma’am,” said The Bodger, desperately seizing on the one intelligible part of this lunatic conversation.
“I saw it on a van at home once and I couldn’t imagine what it meant so I called my butler after it. Manweb is a judo expert. He could break your arm between his thumb and forefinger if he liked. I find him very useful to throw people out of my garden at this time of the year.”
“Do you get much hooliganism during the festival?”
“Oh no. Just a little quite innocent fornication.”
The Bodger’s last mouthful of tea remained suspended in his' throat; his face contorted in a painful rictus of incredulity and shock.
“It does spoil the flower-beds so. You’ll like Huang. I’ve asked him to give your ship’s company the more presentable virgins when you visit his palace on Saturday.”
With difficulty, The Bodger disposed of the mouthful of tea which seemed to have lodged half-way down his throat for almost as long as The Bodger could remember.
“That’s very kind of you, ma’am,” he said breathlessly.
“I’ve always felt it quite wrong that English girls should be expected to be virgins when they marry. It puts them at a disadvantage from the very start. The girls here serve an apprenticeship in the temple first. For most of them it’s their only way of saving up for their dowry. I’m sure Julia would agree with me.”
The Bodger blushed a deep consuming red.
“Good heavens, I’m embarrassing you, boy.”
“Oh, not at all, ma’am.” The Bodger struggled to change the subject; there was no knowing what detail this woman would go into next. “The tea is rather hot. I suppose it’s the local growth?”
“Nonsense, it’s Joe Lyons’ Don’t let that old humbug of a Consul persuade you that the tea they grow here is better. I get it by the bushel from England and Manweb treads it out with his feet.”
“We’re giving a cocktail party on board tonight. I wonder if you would care to come as my guest, ma’am?”
“I should be delighted, Robert! What time?”
“Half-past six. There will be boats from Huang Steps.”
“It’s years since I went to a party on board a ship! Oh,
certainly
I shall come! How very kind of you to invite me.” Miss Several-Strickland pursed her lips and closed her eyes reminiscently and The Bodger had the lunatic thought that perhaps the last wardroom cocktail party Miss Several-Strickland attended had been given by Captain Cook.
The old lady opened her eyes. “Do you still drink gin in the Navy?”
“The old brigade do. Most of the younger generation drink Horse’s Necks.”
“Horse’s Necksl “
“It’s brandy and ginger ale, ma’am.”
“Strange service, the Navy. I’m told they pay you more now. That’s a bad thing. Officers in the services should be able to support themselves. They should have a substantial stake in the country. The people of England haven’t forgotten Cromwell’s Model Army.”
Miss Several-Strickland looked pointedly at a small ormolu clock by her chair. The Bodger rose to his feet. Miss Several-Strickland accompanied him back to the elephant.
“Be careful of the local liquor, Robert,” she called, as The Bodger swayed down the path on the First Elephant’s back. “Huang’s got a head like rock, like his father, but he forgets that not everybody else has.”
The Bodger began to warm towards Huang; he sounded like a first rate fellow.
When The Bodger returned to
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the first boatload of libertymen were being laid out in rows along the upper-deck. The two junior doctors, Hamish Maclean and Alastair Campbell, with stethoscopes and stomach pump, were examining the corpse-like figures.
“Jings,” Hamish said to The Bodger, “they’ve all been drinking Mickey Finns. There was only one could speak and he said he had one pint of the liquor ashore and remembered no more.”
The Bodger looked along the line of unconscious faces. He noticed that the line included representatives from most of the messes in the ship. Royal Marines, stokers, electricians and cooks lay next to each other in happy alcoholic abandon. “Here’s the Chief Steward. He probably hasn’t come off shore drunk since he was a boy. Look at him. Like a baby. Mike Hobbes was the Officer of the Watch and he says he’s never seen a quieter boatload in his life.”
“Oh well,” said The Bodger. “We’ll get our own back tonight.”
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’s cocktail party was attended by Huang himself and by the polite society of the city. It was the most oddly-assorted company ever to gather on
Carousel
’s quarter-deck and the party was the biggest social occasion in Dhon Phon Huang since the consumption of the forty missionaries, nearly a hundred years before.
“They still talk about that,” said Miss Several-Strickland, who was wearing a hat which made the gangway staff feel that their day had not passed unrewarded. “ ‘Missionary’ means ‘very tasty’ here, although its been corrupted to ‘Yummaree’. To a Dhonese, ‘Yummaree’ means anything splendid, or enjoyable, or worth waiting for. Let me point out some of the local celebrities for you, Robert. That woman in the dreadful hat and the bangles over her breasts is the mistress of the deportment school for the temple girls. And that funny little man with the sad face is Huang’s Prime Minister. He wanted to be a farmer, poor man, but his family have always been Prime Minister so he had to be. There’s Huang himself at the end.
Such
a handsome boy. . . .”
Huang was talking to the Captain and the British Consul through the Interpreter. His dark eyes looked out over the guests and to the shore as though he could see the endless plains over which his forbears had galloped with the sun on their backs and the cloak of Genghis Khan in front. He wore a long red silk robe and held a Horse’s Neck in one hand. With the other he fondled the hair of a naked Dhonese girl. He said very little but concentrated upon the drinks. A steward stood with a tray which Huang steadily, as the party progressed, emptied. The Captain and the British Consul stopped their conversation to watch him, in awe. Huang finished the tray and his feet were still as firmly planted upon the quarter-deck and his eyes as levelly fixed on an empty horizon.
Meanwhile, Ginger Piggant entertained the mistress of the temple deportment school and the Commander consoled the Prime Minister. Executioners with bared swords stood at intervals round the quarter-deck. “Slow drinker--
zut!
” said the Navigating Officer to the Dhonese Pilot.
New Year was the most important festival in the Dhonese calendar and the Dhonese set themselves to enjoy it with a single-mindedness which would have made a feasting Roman emperor pensive. The rules of Saturnalia held sway, no man could be punished and no woman was unapproachable. Maidens who had resisted all year gave way in a single night. The temple girls did a brisk trade. Fireworks seared the sky every night and the streets were bright with flaring torches. Processions of dragons, masked men and dancers threaded the narrow streets of the city, kites with long streaming tails flew above Huang’s palace and young men and girls danced to the throbbing of gongs, drums and cymbals.
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’s sailors watched the festivities with goggling eyes, finished their drinks and, led by Number One Boy’s nephews, joined in.