Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“AFTER ALL these weeks Bernard is still friendly and protective. His estate is like a private domain, and the Leander people and others have to keep their distance. No one hisses me here. I haven’t heard from Rouvray in London. I don’t know what the new politics are like there now. I am ready to wait. It is something I have learned, but I have less to do here than I have ever had, and it is hard to be idle in the middle of this very busy estate routine. Bernard is on his feet from morning till night.

“Bernard’s wife sometimes has dinner with us. There is something wrong with her bones — Bernard doesn’t say what, and perhaps no one knows. She doesn’t move easily, and it is a strain for her to sit with a stranger and make conversation. She has a pretty young-woman’s face on an old, heavy body. Bernard is devoted to her. They have no children. He loves serving her and looking after her. He loves everything about her — her name, her estate, her fragility, her old-fashioned French. When I first met Bernard in Paris he was a firebrand. That was why I thought him good for my purpose. I never thought of him as a tender person. The tenderness I have seen in him here has probably been brought out by this lady.

“I have not seen any member of the lady’s family in the house. Nor have I seen anyone like the Baron de Montalembert. The story here is that Bernard’s head was turned by these people of title and he didn’t press at the time of the marriage for all that he might have got. They say that among the Gourvilles he is a kind of subordinate, hardly more than the manager of his wife’s estate. There is more to his position than that, but there is nonetheless something in the story.

“The people who tell me these things are people to whom Bernard introduced me. Bernard would think of such people as his friends. I don’t think they can see the effect they are having on me when they tell me these stories. I cannot conceal from myself — and I wish the idea hadn’t occurred to me — that through my association with Bernard I have fallen among the second rank of people in this place. That’s not my judgement alone. That’s the way they judge themselves. They instinctively put themselves in the second rank. So far as they are concerned, Hislop and Cochrane and even Briarly are people of authority, way above, out of reach. They tell bloodcurdling stories about Briarly and Cochrane and absurd stories about Hislop’s gluttony, and they think they are being very frank and critical. But, really, they never question the authority of these people.

“The people they try to damage are people like themselves. As soon as they get you alone — and you have just met them — they tell stories against their friends. So I am nervous of their welcome now. They are so very warm when they meet you; and then you see the other side so soon. I feel that when they offer friendship it is a way not only of claiming me, but also of pulling me down, and when they appear to be sympathizing with my misfortunes they are speaking as good and proper people who have never got above themselves.

“I feel they will soon start telling stories about me. Sometimes when I am with them I find it hard to remember that when I first came here, and was staying at Government House, I looked upon Hislop as a minor local official.

“I have been out of touch, on a tour in the countryside, but have now come back and still find no news from London. It was a month-long tour of English-owned estates with Colonel Downie and Miss McLurie and some others. It was good to get out for a little. It was Downie’s idea — he has hopes of serving in my army when the time comes, and his interest makes me feel that things may not be as hopeless in London as I sometimes think. The English are very recent immigrants here, and some of the newer places we went to were very rough. In one place on a Sunday afternoon the whole atelier were mustered in clean brown-linen clothes in front of the house and they sang English hymns. I couldn’t of course show any interest and this caused a certain amount of bad feeling.

“When I was on the Leander coming south from the United States I made a point of not showing myself too often to the men, for the sake of discipline. On this small island you see the same people all the time. It is like being on a ship, and I began to feel half-way through the tour that I had shown myself too often here and was getting a little too well known. I felt that my reputation was dwindling, and that people were already criticizing me, as they criticized their friends.

“At the end of the tour, at a dinner at Miss McLurie’s, Colonel Downie presented me with the journal he had made of the tour. I was touched by the gesture — I had grown so melancholy towards the end of the tour, yet never able to show anything — but as soon as I opened the roughly bound book I saw that the journal was the work of an uneducated man. I saw that I had been taken in by Downie’s manner and accent, having very few British people of quality here to set him against.

“I looked up. Miss McLurie (who was in her famous transparency, showing her bosom perfectly) was waiting to catch my eye. She said, ‘You know, of course, that he’s not a colonel.’ I didn’t know — I had been cherishing him because of the shine he gave to my own hopes. And I had always thought that he and Miss McLurie were special friends. And he was right there still, one of the guests, at the other end of the table.

“I asked him later. He said Miss McLurie was right: he wasn’t a colonel. He had called himself that after he had come to the island; he had military ambitions and was looking for an opening somewhere. I said he had misled me, and this could have been damaging. I had suffered enough from the Leander people, who had thought that service with me was only a matter of rations and plunder. My venture was likely to have its desperate passages. After my recent reverses I needed men not only with military experience but also with a record of proven luck: he should have known that.

“He hung his head and said he was sorry. But he didn’t think he had done worse than other people I knew, and no one criticized them. It was well known, for instance, that Archibald Gloster, the local attorney-general — another person I keep meeting all the time in various houses — wasn’t a lawyer. He had simply bought a lawyer’s licence from the Council secretary in the time of the first British governor, Picton.

“Bernard later told me it was true about Gloster. It was no secret that the attorney-general wasn’t a lawyer at all. And there was a further story about that, Bernard said. It came out during the enquiry into the slave rebellion that had nearly happened.

“Gloster had a personal servant called Scipio. People here often give their Negroes the better-known classical names — Hercules, Hector, Cupid, Caesar, Pompey, Agrippa, Cato, Scipio. At night — this was in the months during the preparing of the rebellion — Gloster’s Scipio would leave his quarters at the back of Gloster’s yard in the town, and go the five or six miles to the seaside village of Carenage. The Negro known as King Edward had his court at Carenage, and Scipio’s loyalty at night was to the convoi or regiment of King Edward. Edward’s courtiers had wooden swords painted white and green.

“When Scipio first joined the regiment, King Edward offered him a sword and a title: ‘My Lord St. John.’ Everybody who joined a regiment got a title which he had to use at night. Scipio said no, he didn’t want to be My Lord St. John. It didn’t mean anything. He wanted to be attorney-general, like his master. Edward said that wasn’t a proper title for a courtier in his regiment. In the end they decided that Scipio was to be clerk and secretary — the job Bernard now has in real life — and at night, at Carenage, while King Edward’s dauphins and dauphines and princes and princesses drank white rum and sang and danced and ate things that had been cooked for the party in the various estate kitchens during the day, Scipio sat in the light of a flambeau and turned over the pages of one of Gloster’s lawbooks and then for ten or fifteen minutes at a time made a pretence of writing. As secretary, though, he had a serious enough job: he became one of the organizers of the rebellion. He was one of those who got a hundred lashes and lost their ears.