And there was something decayed, Tarisian’, rather shocking in an old-fashioned way about the place. One could see why someone so fresh and unspoiled was disgusted. The old bearded droshky drivers and their bony haggard horses at the station were like the illustrations to a very early translation of Anna Karenina; they were like crude and foxed wood engravings. They must have dated back to the days when Riga was a pleasure resort for Grand Dukes, a kind of aristocratic Brighton to which one slipped away from a duchess’s bed with someone from the theatre, someone to be described in terms of flowers and pink ribbons, chocolates and champagne in the slipper, of black silk stockings and corsets. All the lights in Riga were dimmed by ten : the public gardens were quite dark and full of whispers, giggles from hidden seats, excited rustles in the bushes. One had the sensation of a whole town on the tiles. It was fascinating, it appealed immensely to the historical imagination, but it certainly wasn’t something new, lovely and happy.
Even the street women were period. They were not, poor creatures, young enough to be brazen under what little light there was, though they had a depraved air of false youth as if they knew their only hope was to appeal to the very old. Their manners too, one felt, dated back to the Grand Dukes. Their allure was concentrated in an ankle, a garter, which they would bend down to adjust with a dreadfully passι gesture of allurement. Their street manners were infinitely more elegant than the street manners of London, but they weren’t in the picture any longer. There were no more Grand Dukes on the spree to be attracted by their immature girlish legs, their corseted waists, their slipping garters, their black silk stockings; unless perhaps one of the old droshky drivers was a Grand Duke. It was not improbable. At Tallinn a Baron carried luggage at the air-port. And there could be no more suitable ending of an evening than for a street-walker to go home with the droshky driver; the garter with the long grey Franz Josef whiskers.
You couldn’t really pity them. They belonged so completely to a different world. A war and a revolution came between, left you on one side with the little stout Esthonian peasant girl who spoke English and German and didn’t trouble to flirt, and them with the ikons in the second-hand shops, the Orthodox priest selling pictures on the pavement, a wilderness of empty champagne bottles… .
It was a late winter evening when I drove through into the Nottingham suburb from the station, round streets quite as dark as Riga’s, down and down below the castle rock and the municipal art gallery with the rain breaking on the windows. I had a job, it excited and scared me, I was twenty-one, and you couldn’t talk of darkest Africa with any conviction when you had known Nottingham welclass="underline" the dog sick on the mat, the tinned salmon for tea and the hot potato chips for supper carried into the sub editor’s room ready-salted in strips of newspaper (if you had won the football sweep you paid for the lot). The fog came down in the morning and stayed till night. It wasn’t a disagreeable fog; it lay heavy and black between the sun and the earth; there was no light but the air was clear. The municipal ‘tart’ paced up and down by the largest cinema, old and haggard and unused. Her trade was spoilt; there were too many girls about who hadn’t a proper sense of values, who would give you a good time in return for a fish tea. The trams creaked round the goose market, and day after day the one bookshop displayed a card in the window printed with Mr, Sassoon’s poem :
Have you forgotten yet? … Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget.
Somebody must have put it in the window for Armistice Day, and there is stayed, like the Poppy Day posters in Freetown, through the winter months, black sooty dripping months.
In Nottingham I was instructed in Catholicism, travelling here and there by tram into new country with the fat priest who had once been an actor. (It was one of his greatest sacrifices to be unable to see a play.) The tram clattered by the Post Office: “Now we come to the Immaculate Conception”; past the cinema: “Our Lady”; the theatre: a sad slanting look towards The Private Secretary (it was Christmas time). The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior statues. I was baptised one foggy afternoon about four o’clock. I couldn’t think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children’s service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea, the dog which had been sick again on the mat. Before that I had made a general confession to another priest: it was like a life photographed as it came to mind, without any order, full of gaps, giving at best a general impression. I couldn’t help feeling all the way to the newspaper office, past the Post Office, the Moroccan cafι, the ancient whore, that I had got somewhere new by way of memories I hadn’t known I possessed. I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from so far back as innocence.
HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT
“Boss of the Whole Show”
MARK called me at five in the morning, scrabbling against the mosquito-wire. I was sending him ahead with the Mandingo Amah to warn the chief at Kpangblamai of our arrival, of my need of a hut and food for about thirty men, and to ask him to send a messenger to the chief at Pandemai to warn him that I should not be coming after all. I packed my Revelation suitcase and Amah took it, striding off down the path into the village. He wouldn’t be home for weeks, but all his belongings were tied up in a rag the size of a workman’s handkerchief.
It was seven-thirty before I followed. The long column of carriers slipped down from the mission hill into the mist. Vande, the headman, left the column for a few minutes and disappeared between the huts to say goodbye to his wife. He had a cloth cap, a loose shirt and shorts; he carried no load, taking with him for a few days his young brother to carry his bundle; he was very like an English foreman, cheerful, unexacting, a pipe-smoker. When he wasn’t smoking he was shaking a rattle made of two tiny gourds filled with seeds. He kept to the tail of the column staying behind with any man who needed a rest.
For the first mile along the wide beaten way towards Kolahun a piccaninny followed at a jog-trot. He was about two feet high; he carried an empty sausage tin and an empty Ideal milk tin, one in each hand. Men turned and told him to go back, but he wouldn’t obey; he had to run to keep up, but he kept up. He wanted to go with his father. The men laughed and shouted up the line and presently his father turned back and ordered him home. The line passed them and went on : they stood there, the tiny child sullen and unhappy and obstinate, the father telling him to go back as one says “Home” to a dog. At last he left him there, stubbornly planted.
The broad red clay road had been improved for the President’s coming, the trees had been cut down on either side and the trunks tipped into the great palmy ravines. The heavy mist lay low between the hills; one couldn’t see how close one was to the great forest. A deer sprang across the road, a little brown deer which might have belonged to an English park, not the royal antelope which lucky travellers may still see in the Republic, no larger than a rabbit, except for its slim legs, ten inches high with horns of less than an inch. The road was all right so long as the mist held, but all the shade had been cut away, and I hurried to leave it behind before the sun had reached the middle sky. It was half-past nine when the road came to an end in Kolahun, the headquarters of Mr. Reeves.
It occurred to me that though I had been told that the President had gone, and Mr. Reeves presumably with him, it would be wise at least to inquire for the Commissioner. The town seemed empty, the green triumphal arches for the President were dusty and wrinkled with heat; one two-storied concrete house stood apart from the huts in a compound where the star and stripes dangled from a post. This was the house built, according to the natives of Bolahun, with forced labour. That extra storey gave it a formidable air; it stood there above the town as if it watched and knew all that happened; it would be unwise to pass it by with such a long caravan of men; it couldn’t help noticing.