For Willie a kind of unreality, or a reality hard to grasp, veiled the moment. It was like what he had felt in the forest and in the jail, the detachment from what was about him. In a manner he couldn’t reconstruct he became separated from Roger, and docilely, as in the jail, not looking too hard at anything, he followed a servant up to a room. The window had a view of many acres. Willie wondered whether he should go down and walk in the grounds or whether he should stay in the room and hide. The thought of going down and asking his way about the grounds was oppressive. He decided to hide. On the protective glass on the dressing table was an old, solidly bound book. It was an old edition of The Origin of Species. The cramped Victorian typography (the letters seemingly rusty with age) was daunting, as was the smell of the crinkled old paper and the old printing ink (calling up gloomy ideas of the printing shops and the printing workers of the time) that might have caused the paper to crinkle.
The man in the striped trousers (perhaps someone from eastern Europe) began doing the famous unpacking. But since the man was from eastern Europe Willie was not as disturbed as Roger had thought he might be.
Sitting at the dressing table, turning the pages of The Origin of Species while the man unpacked, unfolding the illustrations, Willie saw a little wicker vase or container with sharpened cedar-coloured pencils. It was like the one in his room in Roger’s house. Then he saw a small crystal sphere, solid and heavy, ringed from top to bottom with scored parallel lines, and with a little well at the top with long pink-tipped matches. That, too, was like something in his room in Roger’s house. It was from here — where Roger, behaving in an unexpected way, had brought her to awe her with a grandeur that wasn’t his, the way a poor local person might take a visitor to see the grand houses of his town — it was from here (and perhaps from other places as well, perhaps even from places she had seen or known as a girl) that Perdita had taken some of her ideas of room decoration, focusing on what was small and incidental and attainable. Willie felt an immense surge of sympathy for her, and (surrendering to things within him) he felt oppressed at the same time by the intimation that came to him just then of the darkness in which everybody walked.
After some time he went to the bathroom. It had been constructed within the older room and the partitions were thin. The wallpaper was of a bold design, widely spaced green vines suggesting a great openness. But on one wall there was no wallpaper, no feeling of openness, only pages from an old illustrated magazine called The Graphic, closely printed grey columns in the Victorian way, broken up by line drawings of events and places all over the world. The pages were from the 1860s and 1870s. The artist or reporter (possibly one and the same person) would have sent his copy or sketches by ship; in the office of the magazine a professional artist would have straightened out the drawings, probably adding things according to his fancy; and week by week these drawings, the products of advanced journalistic enterprise, illustrating events in the empire and elsewhere for an interested public, were reproduced according to the best methods of the day.
For Willie it was a revelation. The past in these pasted pages seemed to be just there, something he could reach out and touch. He read about India after the Mutiny, about the opening up of Africa, about warlord China, about the United States after the civil war, about the troubles of Jamaica and Ireland; he read about the discovery of the source of the Nile; he read about Queen Victoria as though she were still alive. He read until the light faded. It was hard to read the small print by dull electric light.
There was a knock at the door. It was Roger. He had been discussing business with the banker and he looked drawn.
He saw the book on the dressing table and said, “What book do you have?” He took it up and said, “It’s a first edition, you know. He likes leaving them about casually for his guests. They are gathered up very carefully afterwards. This time I have a Jane Austen.”
Willie said, “I’ve been reading The Graphic. It’s in the bathroom.”
Roger said, “It’s in my bathroom, too. I will tell you about that. I have an interest, as they say. There was a time when I used to go to the Charing Cross Road to look at the bookshops. It’s not something you can do today, not in the same way. One day I saw a set of The Graphic on the pavement outside one of the shops. They were quite cheap, a couple of pounds a volume. I couldn’t believe my luck. The Graphic was a famous thing, one of the precursors of the Illustrated London News. They were in beautifully bound volumes. It was the way things were done at that time. I don’t know whether the magazine did the binding, or the libraries, or the people who subscribed. I could only take home two of the Graphic volumes, and I had to take a taxi. They were very bulky things, as I told you, and very heavy. It was about this time that I was getting involved with our banker. I was beginning to understand the immense power of the true egomaniac on people around him. In fact, I was yielding to that power without knowing it. To the intelligent person, like myself, the egomaniac is in some ways pathetic, a man who doesn’t see like the rest of us that the paths of glory lead but to the grave. And that is how the intelligent man is caught. He begins by patronising and ends by being a minion. Anyway. Just after I had seen the Graphic set I came here. The great man was still courting me, and in fact I had already been caught. I’m not punning. He showed me some of his pictures. He told me how he had picked them up. And, not to be outdone, I told him how I had recently picked up the two bound volumes of The Graphic. I was boasting. He of course didn’t know about The Graphic, and I was telling him how much I knew. Having boasted to him about The Graphic, I thought, when I went back to London, that I should go and get a few more of the volumes. I found nothing. Our friend had sent his big car and carried away the lot. This was his wife’s idea, pasting the pages on the lavatories. When the place is done up again, or sold, and becomes a hotel or whatever, all those pages will go to the builder’s rubbish dump.”
“You think it will become a hotel?”
“Something like that. Ordinary people can’t live in places like this. You would need a lot of servants. These places were built in the days of many servants. Fifteen gardeners, umpteen chambermaids. Those people don’t exist nowadays. People in service, as they used to say. At one time they were a big part of the population.”
Willie asked, “What happened to them?”
“It’s a wonderful question. I suppose one answer would be that they died out. But that’s not the question you asked. I know what you are asking. If we asked it more often we might begin to understand the kind of country we’re living in. I realise now I haven’t heard anyone ask the question.”
Willie said, “In many parts of India it’s the big issue nowadays. What they call the churning of the castes. I think it’s more important than the religious question. Certain middle groups rising, certain top groups being sucked under. The guerrilla war I went to fight in was a reflection of this movement. A reflection, no more. India will soon be presenting an untouchable face to the world. It won’t be nice. People won’t like it.”