George Calderon

“ A gaunt old man stood before him with arms upraised to the sky, pouring forth a torrent of incomprehensible words. Not knowing what was expected of him, the Colonel took a mug that lay beside him, dipped it in the tank, and handed it to the old man, whose eyes gushed over with tears of delight at this sign of favour; while the rest made a clucking noise with their tongues and said:
‘Dwala malana!’—which means, ‘Glory to Him-of-Two-Names.’
They invited him with gestures to taste the dishes of fruit which lay about him; and he did so, to their great joy. ”

“ This he had known and felt in the American, in the Soochings, in Mr. Cato, in the housemaid—it was the basis of his respect and obedience; but it was wanting in Pendred Lillico.
It was fortunate that he was disabused of error so early in his career. He could afford to laugh at his foolishness later—he saw what mistakes of behaviour it would have led him into; for when he came to know London better, he found that the mass of people, both in drawing-rooms and slums, indubitably men, altogether lacked the ‘eye’ which he had thought essential. ”

“ Success is a strong wine. It was running vividly in Dwala’s veins. Every least thing he did seemed to him fate-ordered and conclusive. Oh, the pride of it, the joy of it, the ease of it! The acclamations and the consciousness of right!
[213] The new Civilisation was like a poem, the scheme of which has come whole and organic to the poet, and which germinates therefore without constraint into its natural, necessary verses. ”

“ There were fifteen parties in Parliament, and only two lobbies for them to vote in; leaders with opinions were a drug in the market; better the large unifying vagueness of a mind with none. Why he was to be great no one clearly knew; the fiat had gone forth from some hidden chamber of the citadel; or it had descended inscrutably from heaven, or risen on the breath of the sweating multitude: anyhow, there was a general agreement of unknown origin to magnify the name of Dwala. ”

“ The straight blue figure of a smooth slender woman, diffusing a soft air of beauty and disdain; and half at her side, half behind her, the Biologist, sly and satisfied, hair and flesh of an even tawny hue, the neck bent forward, equally ready to pounce on a victim or suffer a yoke, balancing his body to a Lyceum stride, clasping an elbow with a hand behind his back, bountifully pouring forth minted words and looking through rims of gold into the woman’s face, as it were round the corner of a door, like some mediæval statesman playing bo-peep with a baby king. ”

“ A wise Providence has ordained that Man’s eyes should be blind to the vision of real naked Nature-given personality: were it suddenly otherwise, the long-wrought classifications of the ages would disappear at once in a confusion of particular differences; all leadership and direction would be lost; just as Science would shiver to a heap of individual facts if she were robbed of her slow-built generalisations.
Dwala saw that he could never merely put aside his mask and say, Behold me as I am. ”

“ Dwala was a social success, an object of multiple affection. His large grave ways, his modesty, his kindliness, made him personally beloved. He was, of course, always a ‘native’; there was no escaping that. But to be tolerated, if you are tolerated everywhere, is social greatness.
One thing he lacked, they said—the sense of humour. The tiny shock that makes a human joke was too slight for his large senses. But humour, after all, is a rather bourgeois quality. ”

“ The Colonel dropped breathless for one moment on all fours, rose to his full height swinging the monstrous branch over his head and sending forth a long loud yell like a man in a nightmare, then swept crashing away into the forest, his weapon thumping like a sledge-hammer as he went.
The monkeys in the trees about chattered applause or commentary, a cloud of sea-fowl flew up from the shore, and the American stood scratching the back of his head thoughtfully in the midst. ”

“ The interest of the nation is the only interest unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Deafened with the shouts of the people, afraid to venture to his official home through the angry crowds that filled Whitehall, the Premier tendered his resignation, and retired—poor scapegoat—to his gardened grange, to finish his book on Problems of Pure Thought.
XXVIII
Disturnal came and went with an air of genial mystery. The cab that carried him from Lady Wyse’s to Prince Dwala’s carried the fate of the nation on its two wheels. ”

“ What’s the plate like, Prosser?’
‘Very handy, Mr. Hartopp,’ answered the valet, falling into old tracks of thought.
‘It’s beautiful plate,’ said Dwala: ‘all the most expensive kinds. You’d have it on the table every day at meals if you came and lived [161] with me, Mr. Hartopp: of course you wouldn’t see it, because you’re blind, but you’d know it was there. It’s a lovely house altogether, I believe: everything’s as expensive as we could get anywhere; there are five footmen, and heaven only knows how many housemaids. What I’m looking for is somebody who’d really enjoy all these things. ”

“ You regard the ways of the money market as immoral; you preach saintliness in the conduct of business; you think our social and financial system a mistake; you are, in fact, opposed to our civilisation as you find it. Those are your politics. Excellent! Charming! That is what makes your speeches a success. Moreover, you have a perfect right to practise your theories with your own property if you please. This Sermon-on-the-Mount way of doing business would make you a delightful customer in the City, no doubt. But when it comes to Prince Dwala’s affairs, the case is different. ”

“ Not a monster created, like Dwala, at one wave of the wand by Nature in the woods; but hewn from the living rock by a thousand hands of men, slowly chipped and chiselled and polished and refined till it reached perfection. ”

“ What am I, and what is this poor Lord Glendover? Makers and unmakers of men? Pah! We are pitiful pawns in the awful game, dreaming we move of our own accord only because the other pawns do not jostle us. ”

“ From the fire of that dismay the Biologist emerged a withered and broken man; Mr. Cato never flinched, his sheer goodness protected him; Lady Wyse broke into tears. She, too, was unscathed. No human canon of ethics has been invented by which she could be called good; she was a breaker of laws, an enemy of her kind. But in the place of ‘goodness’ she had a greatness which set her above the need of it.
When the paroxysm of laughter was ended, Dwala staggered and sank into a chair, and they [226] saw him hanging from it with the blood streaming out of his mouth. ”

“ Men had not died without a struggle; there had been riots and fighting and theft; empty bellies had gone of their own accord through broken windows to fill themselves with guinea loaves, and thence to the crowded gaols to pick oakum into ropes to hang their leaders with; women died patiently, like overloaded horses that fall on the climbing hill, with a last look of the white bewildered eye entreating pardon of their masters for having failed to drag the burden to the top. Children died believing in their mothers; women died believing in some God or Fate ”

“ Each of you goes through a foolish, innocent routine, with a clear conscience and the applause of the poor multitude; and the result is misery, misery, misery. Not random misery, here and there, such as you harmless creatures might chance on by the way, but a fearful consistent scheme of deeply-calculated, universal misery—a thing of hellish contrivance, worthy of the fiery genius of the sulphur pit. ”

“ His career had given him a longing for other people’s property; things lost their interest for him once they became his own. He craved for the excitements of the past. Scissors, and ashtrays, and other glittering things got a way of disappearing wherever he went about the house. One night Dwala was aroused by the screaming of a police whistle from one of Hartopp’s windows over him, and going up he found the Fence sitting on Prosser’s chest in the window-seat, and blowing for all he was worth. ”

“ The Bishop of Windsor will have to come and see you, just as a matter of form. He’s our President. He’s a dear old thing; you’ll like him. You’ll only have to give him some lunch, and pat him on the back and send him home again. I’ve settled it all with Lady Wyse.’
The Bishop came to lunch—really a ‘dear old thing’; a crumpled and furrowed saint, with the wise brow of a Scotch terrier, fitted for better things than to be managed by a scheming Jesuit like Disturnal. Dwala respected him as a man; Huxtable as a Bishop; Hartopp as neither. ”

“ There is a magic in our masquerading: it is with deep feelings of solemnity that man shuffles off one disguise and gets into another; the fraudulent company-promoter, growing rich, enters upon his fortune almost with the same ennobling awe as a young girl going to her Confirmation.
Hartopp made an effort: he stopped Dwala as they went downstairs.
‘Let’s understand one another clearly, Prince [168] What’s-your-name. If I come, I come as a free man: Joey too. We come as gentry, or we don’t come at all. The servants are to treat us with respect as such. ”

“ He walked up to Dwala, hissing like a serpent in his face.
‘You have come to Man as an apostle, bringing us a new message of Civilisation.’
Dwala nodded, rather proudly.
‘Do you know what Man has given to you in return? What Man always gives to such animals? What any scientist could have told [224] you you were bound to get in coming?... Consumption.... Phthisis pulmonalis.... Death!... Going back while you’re young and strong to your wild life in the forest! Pish! You won’t live the month out. I knew it that night. You’re a dying beast.’
Alas! why had Lady Wyse never told him? ”

“ A man of his talents oughtn’t to be contented to loaf about doing nothing. He might be anything with his intellect—a great writer, or a scientist, or a diplomat, or a financier.’
‘Or a tinker or a tailor, or a soldier or a sailor,’ said the Biologist.
‘Do you think that I’m joking, you idiot?’ said Lady Wyse, emitting a cold shaft of light that went to his backbone. ”

“ They felt his largeness. He was talked of everywhere as the capable man of the Cabinet. A Minister, he was remarkable even among ordinary Members as the man who never spoke. He was the ‘strong and silent man in a babbling age.’
In the hour of despair the people clamoured, with as much reason as they usually have for such clamouring: ‘Prince Dwala alone can save us! Down with Glendover! Down with Whitstable! Down with Huggins! Dwala for ever!’ The papers talked of a new era and a new man, who was to ‘cleanse the Augean stable’ and set Old England on its legs again. ”

“ It was too funny; the surprise of the inevitable [225] overcame him; it was a Joke which suddenly leaped up embracing the whole life of a created being, and the destiny of a nation—of humanity itself.
Dwala laughed. For the last time he laughed. A laugh to which his others were childish crowings; a laugh which flung horror on to the walls and into the darkened air, and spread a sudden dismay of things worse than death throughout the land. Men stopped in their work and in their talk and their lips grew pale without a cause ”

“ In the middle of the room sat Huxtable, serious and concentrated, managing the gramophone: one [186] hand hovered over it, deft, square, and muscular, lightly adjusting some moth’s wing of a lever in the instrument. Beyond him, in the background, was a stout, serious, important looking man, with his face blacked—a nigger minstrel in red and black striped trousers, with a tiny doll’s hat pinned on the front of his head—who rose respectfully at Dwala’s entrance, a glass of champagne in one hand and a banjo in the other. ”

“ Dreading above all things the multiple solitude which hastens every way at once; craving before all things that sureness of direction in space which makes the intensity both of hope and of prayer; fixing their eyes on a personality as the distracted peasant fixes his eyes on an image or an eikon, the crowd betake themselves, of a sudden unanimous impulse, all in one way, shouting the name of a saviour or a scapegoat, clearing confusion by the embodiment of vengeance and deliverance in limited thinkable dimensions. ”