Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“Captain, have you a cigar left?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, give it to me quick.”

Jolting from ditch to quagmire, water to mud, and back to water, they finally arrived at the steamer landing.

On further inquiry about the fee, the coachman said only, “We won’t need a judge to settle it, your Excellency. Next time, you really should go to the opera.” And he seemed more than happy with ten gulden.

The steamer Desdemona had started her career with a rudder at each end and a small hut on deck, her huge paddlewheels driven by horses on a capstan inside the hull. When a British firm, Andrews and Richard, bought the ship, a coal stove took over for the horses, and the hut was replaced by an elegant mirrored saloon with red plush couchettes. A diving bell sat funereally upon the stern. The new captain, a weather-beaten English seafarer, knew no more about the sandbanks of the Mze than the bed of the Yellow Sea, and so at flood-time the ship was often found marooned in the middle of a field. The engineer was Scotch and would happily explain mechanical details of the operation, while the jolly Italian cook always kept a pot of bouillabaisse on the boiler.

It took three quarters of an hour to load the carriages, the stevedores cackling and the peasants crossing themselves. Then the ship’s whistle sounded, a small cannon boomed, and the Desdemona shuddered away from the slimy embankment, the paddlewheels churning up water lilies and duckweed as it bore new shortcuts into the rank abundance of the river’s huge loops. Countless waterfowl rose from the dead estuaries — cormorants and kingfishers, herons and egrets, warblers and martins — and from the dark walls of alder and poplar, hungry, chirping nestlings in a thousand nests craned their naked necks.

The river course seemed to have changed substantially in only a month. The passage was most dreary, winding among queer little villages well back from the treacherous banks and monstrous hills covered with hideous, half-pruned vineyards, while the river emitted a peculiar hissing like soda water. They saw neither sail nor oar, and it was difficult to even make out the direction of the current. But the cook enlivened things by making pancakes stuffed with pickled walnuts, and occasionally while rounding a bend, the Professor was taken aback by adorable women in lilac and lavender walking fully dressed into the river up to their armpits.

Inside the mirrored saloon of the Desdemona , the Professor recalled his first sight of Felix Aufidius Pzalmanazar. Confirming his worst suspicions out here in the country, his host had come out holding a riding crop and wearing a tweed Chesterfield smoking jacket, twill jodhpurs, and a floppy fedora protruding a long pheasant feather. How well he knew the type. Here stood the very symbol of the moral pathology of the West, genteel, courteous, and above all handsome, a “Christian gentleman” and sportive hunter-magistrate — all a glittering illusion covering over the sickness of society, distracting the masses from reality. Had not Spengler himself identified the gentry as the most reactionary of classes? The Professor knew this privileged caste and its hypocritical code all too well. Oh, it all sounded sportsmanlike—“No hitting below the belt!” and “May the best man win!”—but every generous and graceful gesture obscured a base struggle for power. He imagined his host drinking himself into insensibility each night over a game of cards, then walking a seven-minute mile in the morning to sweat out the toxins, followed by a bit of tennis or high jumping (nothing that would make you appear a clown, of course), before heading out for an agricultural congress or a junket to fix an election.

But then from behind Felix had appeared, sheathed in shot silk, the most beautiful creature of any species the Professor had ever seen, walking at a slightly impossible angle, like a ballerina falling out of a fouetté. Here she was, the perfect trophy companion for our sportive hunter-magistrate! (Why is it always the man of orthodox views who gets to bed the girls by the cartful?) As Ainoha proffered a tray of spritzers and bogberry jam, the traditional Cannonian welcome, the look of her had sent a crackling over his heart which he had experienced only among Italian ruins at dusk.

“The Mze is a very bad neighbor,” the captain of the Desdemona grumbled to the Professor down in the saloon. There were landslides every minute. Boulders tumbled along fans of scree, and portions of forest collapsed before his eyes. They bumped along sunken bars of quartz, reconnoitered newly regurgitated islands, and dodged fallen logs, varying their course through new obstructions the river had created for itself. Bighorn sheep jumped from ledge to ledge on the creeper-plumed cliffs, and there now seemed miles of nothing save the antlers of dead boughs, crowned with mistletoe and hunched bald eagles. When they did reach a village, enormous white awnings had been cranked open, but only dogs were about, vicious as dingos, trotting down the shuttered lanes. The Professor nevertheless felt full of energy, for you only fully exist when you are in a lost province.

Then Ferryland, latifundia of the Astingi, opened up, a chocolate-colored expanse striped by barley and hay, scattered with poppies, horses swishing their tails, sheep up to their bellies in daisies, and everywhere the bangs of hunting guns. A few girls in the fields waved their sickles at the Professor, and by the time they reached the ruined piers at Dragon’s Teeth and the patiently waiting Moccus pulling a hooded lilac gig, all his ideas were again being hushed.

As the windless pillar of smoke above Semper Vero came into view, the Professor noticed some Astingi children in a clearing, charging about good-naturedly on their golden ponies, and playfully brandishing short, curved swords. They wore intricately braided jerkins (a doublet which it was said could deflect any arrow not entirely on the mark) and the Professor could make out some Astingi girls setting up melons atop fence posts, while one by one the boys thundered down the line at full cantor, leaning out of their stirrups and lopping the melons cleanly in half. The girls replenished the practice course with whole fruit as they feasted on the shards, spitting the seeds out in great arcs, as lesser men might lag pennies, and the boys waved gleefully to the stranger as they abruptly reined up their mounts. It was a silent and dignified affair, marred by not so much as a war whoop or girlish squeal. Even the hoof beats were barely audible in the soft Cannonian earth.

At length, however, one rider struck out toward the gig, waving his saber menacingly, and the Professor broke into a nauseating sweat, realizing that in all this vastness there was not a single place to hide. But some fifty meters away the boy sheathed his weapon, leaned out from the horse, and with his head dangling near its hooves, plucked a sapling straight out of the ground. Then, swinging upward in triumph, he grinned, revealing a golden triangle in his front teeth. At this moment the Professor felt he had wasted his entire life.

The Astingi were neither an ethnic group nor a nation, neither a religion nor a movement. The only barbarian tribe to keep its name and language intact, even their race was difficult to tell, as they were usually covered with a grime of coal smoke, and their reddish-blond hair turned black in old age. They had no monuments, no ruins, no book, and they spoke a language unknown to their neighbors — indeed, to whom they were intelligible, besides animals, is not quite clear. A popular academic surmise held they were the remnants of a species of Homo erectus that had elsewhere died out without evolving into us. But they were not the proto-us. They were superior to us.