Challenger did not know where the birdsong was coming from. Years of discipline had enabled him to keep his bloodshot eyes on the target even when a chaffinch shrilled just behind his ear and a blackbird called above the dining-room door. But when the nightingale burst into liquid song from the tapestry at the other end of the room he allowed his irises to flicker in recognition of a supreme artist, rather than out of curiosity or surprise. It was in the split second of that saccadic shift that Huxley (who had been pouring a stream of champagne into a loving-cup when Challenger’s command rang out) was able to smash the heavy bottle, already held obediently aloft, over the head of the armed (and armless) guest, thereby rendering him instantly unconscious upon the floor. At once a knot of manservants gathered about this prone form and carried him, one to each limb, into the multiplicity of corridors in the Great Granary.
‘You were saying?’ Not a muscle appeared to have moved in Milner’s face during this interruption, as if he had been inconveniently petrified for a few minutes.
‘This message.’ I slid the envelope along the tablecloth among the wine glasses. Milner swept it on to his knee and opened it without moving his arms.
Challenger’s name bubbled down the table, but the Colossus helped himself to more melktert.
‘Saved by the song of the nightingale!’ exclaimed Mrs K. ‘What a fortunate coincidence that a flock of invisible birds should happen to pass through this dining-room at the very moment Mr Challenger was threatening to pull his trigger!’
‘Oh, there was never any danger,’ smirked Jameson. He opened his fist to display a small pistol with mother-of-pearl inlay. ‘This pretty little lady has saved the day on many an occasion, I can assure you.’
‘I’d rather be saved by birds, thank you,’ replied Mrs K smartly, and her husband lifted his head from a plate of pudding to reveal his massive moustache laden with cream. Without bothering to blot his lips he enquired: ‘Where did those birds come from? And where are they now?’ His gaze fastened on me in friendly fashion through his round glasses, as if I alone must have the answer.
At this the whole table became extremely animated, each face (with the exception of Jameson, who appeared to be lost in thought) turned towards me at a different angle of curiosity mingled with incipient gratitude, evidenced in the display of bared teeth and elevated eyebrows, in some ludicrous way reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper. I lowered my eyes modestly, for once not appalled to be the centre of attention.
‘Well now!’ squealed the Colossus, with his mouth full. ‘It seems we have a hero in our midst! A man of many talents, I’d say! A true Oxford man, in fact!’
‘Three cheers for Professor Wills!’ cried Mrs K, and for the first time in my life I became the object of a resounding roar of appreciation. This experience, to my surprise, released a slender flow of pleasure into the pool of anxieties which made up my usual emotional state, and, with a shy smile, I lifted my head to acknowledge the accolade.
‘I say, Wills, let’s have an encore!’ Jameson’s boyish face was defiant.
With a shrug I made a sparrow cheep so loud upon his shoulder that he jumped, then laughed in his embarrassment. Rallying, he cried: ‘I don’t know why you’ve brought those damned birds in the cages out there with you: you’re a good deal more tuneful yourself, old chap!’
In the midst of all this frivolity Milner had been casting his cold eye over Miss Schreiner’s Appeal, which he held on his lap among the folds of the tablecloth, at the same time appearing to take part in the table’s activity along with everyone else. Once the conversation had become general again, he leaned towards me and murmured: ‘Not my style, Wills, not my style at all. I have already received some hysterical communication from the lady which I have chosen to ignore.’
‘The lady is very determined. Ten minutes is all she asks.’
‘Impossible. I don’t have ten minutes. If only someone would give me ten minutes …’
I drank deep from my silver beaker. ‘Miss Schreiner happened to overhear you tell me about the – female – personage from Brixton earlier today.’
The glance that flickered over me could have been the lash of a whip. He snorted. ‘A complete waste of my time. But I’ll do it for your sake – she’ll not leave you in peace otherwise. I make one condition, however: you must accompany me. I do not want to be compromised. The woman’s a man-eater, I believe.’ He swung his shoulder away from me to engage in conversation with bright-eyed Kipling. At the same time Mrs K leaned towards me. ‘I should be much obliged if you would whistle for my children,’ she smiled. ‘I know they’d be enchanted.’
‘I am already training a small girl to whistle,’ I replied, and to my surprise found myself describing to her in some detail my encounters with Maria-of-the-Mountain, including my plan to replace the tooth under the stone with a silver tickey which Huxley had obligingly given me.
‘Oh, what fun!’ she cried. ‘I must say, Professor, when I met you in the corridor this morning I thought you were a typically austere English academic, but now I see you in a quite different light!’
‘I assure you I am very austere,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Women and children are usually repelled by my presence. I cannot understand why things have changed since I arrived in this hemisphere.’
‘So there is no Mrs Wills?’ she smiled mischievously.
I confirmed that there was indeed no Mrs Wills. She cut herself a slice of hard cheese and then said: ‘To pick up on an earlier – but related – theme –’ I awaited a return to the language of food, but instead she said: ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that if the company at our table considers the breeding of British babies on British territory to be one of the finest things we can do, then they themselves aren’t doing very much – again, in evolutionary terms, of course – to ensure the continued survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. I know for a fact that my husband is the only man of the company at the head of the table to have brought forth Anglo-Saxon offspring – with a little help from me, of course!’
I looked about me in some alarm at these indiscretions, and then replied: ‘I believe the feeling is that children get in the way of Great Men. The sound of childish romps disturbs Great Thoughts.’
She looked sceptical. ‘I am sure there’s a lot more to it than that. However, as our meal is drawing to a close, I have another question to ask you. Would you care for a companion on your journey up the gorge later tonight? I know all about milk-teeth, should you need an expert. But there is a different reason why I should love to accompany you.’
‘Which is?’ I shook my head at the proffered cheese.
‘I wonder if you’ve heard of the Nocturnal Thumbed Ghost Frog, which I’m told lives in the fast-flowing streams of the mountain slopes. Its habits are so silent and secretive that very few specimens have been located. In the whole world.’ She paused. ‘I would be most interested to look for the Ghost Frog before we set sail for England, but my husband shows no interest in accompanying me on a midnight expedition. And I’m not quite bold enough to go by myself.’
‘I’d be delighted to have your company.’ As I uttered these words I was surprised to note that I meant them. Perhaps for the first time in my life I attempted a little joke. ‘I’m not quite bold enough to set out into the wilds of Africa in the middle of the night without the protection of a strong woman!’
She laughed delightedly at my joke, which had issued from my lips without censure from my brain, enmeshed, as it seemed, in a golden cloud of mellow wine fumes.
The men at the table were discussing Challenger’s entourage of monkeys and cockatoos which had evidently accompanied the intrepid game hunter to his sedate hotel in Cape Town. Unknown to me, he had disembarked at the Mother City at the same time as I had, when it became apparent that his stump grew gangrenous and was in immediate need of hospital attention. No one seemed to hold his behaviour against him: a man who has shot seventy-two elephants in one year is entitled to a little fun with his gun.
The men adjourned for coffee and port. I excused myself, pleading exhaustion; then slipped outside to meet Mrs K near the dead hydrangeas.
To find a milk-tooth beneath a pebble in the middle of the night is no easy task and I might have given up very soon (feeling somewhat uneasy in the dark forestation) were it not for Mrs K’s bright chatter and womanly optimism. It was plain that both she and her husband were accustomed to excursions such as these and considered the magical world of childhood to be every bit as important as the largely mundane world of adulthood. I could not remember that my own mother had ever introduced an element of magic into my childhood, yet the brilliance of her outdoor passions was similar in quality to Mrs K’s enthusiasms. Perhaps what both women had in common was a refreshing lack of ambivalence about the way they conducted their lives: they moved swiftly from A to B in a slip-stream of certainty, while their more talented husbands wavered in mires of self-doubt.
I began to long for my bed. To my plea that we might spend the whole night lifting up round pebbles surrounded by violets, and swinging a lantern over the insect life that crouched beneath, she replied that each failure to discover the elusive pearl would wonderfully enhance the final discovery. The fallen pine with which the treacherous pebble was aligned now seemed to have realigned itself with a thousand other such pebbles, and I cursed myself for not making a clear mark on the hiding place with my fountain pen, or leaving my handkerchief nearby. In addition to her relentless optimism, the woman appeared to have nerves of steel. As we were crossing the moonlit lawns and were about to embark upon the forest path, a shadow slid from the trees and advanced towards us. I have to confess that my first instinct was to drop the lantern and run back to the house, but Mrs K broke into peals of laughter: ‘Why, Kenneth, you are a naughty fellow! You’ll be getting a dose of shot in your stern if you go on doing this!’ The apparition glared at us, a loaded branch of green bananas twined around his horns, which he devoured with a jerk, one by one, unselfconsciously, as we watched. A bull-kudu of some eighteen hands, he must have jumped the seven-foot fence which separated the vast gardens from the mountain fields above, wherein grew no banana trees. Mrs K reminded herself to report this invasion to the head gardener, and opened the forest gate for me to enter.
While this good woman helped me lift stones, she also kept an eye out for her frog, darting off every now and then to the turbulent waters of the stream, over which she waved her own lantern (obligingly supplied by Huxley) to see if she could find this silent creature gripped to a rock. For an amateur she had an impressive understanding of the mountain flora and fauna. The forest shrilled with the voices of a thousand insects and frogs, many of which she could identify by the correct generic name. Even the dark woodland odours released by our footfalls were recognised by her as drifting from this mushroom or that leaf mould. Yet at no stage did she make me feel she was in competition with me: her observations were made with a gentle humility that I felt would have much improved Miss Schreiner’s delivery and general womanliness.
We had been searching for perhaps an hour when my ever-vigilant ears detected the crunch of feet upon pine needles further up the forest. I could tell at once from the rapid regularity of the sounds that this was not another Kenneth, but a light-footed biped, probably female. The footsteps were too far away for their owner to be able to see our lanterns held low over stream and pebbles, and were soon absorbed among all the other night sounds chorusing in the forest. The sound made me uneasy, but was clearly unrelated to our presence.
I suppose I must have lifted the stone, found the tooth and smelt the smoke at the same moment. I had forgotten just how tiny a milk-tooth is; probably I had picked up the same stone several times only to find the tooth rendered invisible by a beetle or an earthworm. Such was the intensity of my delight – as if I had discovered an extinct species of beetle under a pebble – that the wisp of smoke which passed under my nose seemed merely to be a physical manifestation of my triumph, and I allowed myself to ignore it. ‘Hooray!’ I sang out, and Mrs K came running from her position by the stream where she had just encountered twelve small Ghost Frog tadpoles clinging with all their might to the pebbles in the fast-running water.
‘A priceless pearl!’ she breathed as I held up my trophy. ‘Far more valuable than any one of his precious stones!’ Then her nostrils twitched.
‘Professor Wills, do you smell what I smell?’
Only then did I realise that a multitude of odours had been entering my nostrils all the while: the forest became at once a giant pot-pourri in which a thousand fragrances were blended into an integrated whole. But even as I sniffed with widened nostrils, a half-visible plume of smoke drifted by and jolted my heartbeats momentarily.
‘It’s coming from up there! Quick!’ There was no time for further panic, and I am pleased to say that I remembered to put the little tickey in place before straightening my stiff knees.
We pushed our way up through the closely packed conifers (my treasure safely tucked in my fob-pocket), and further up into the tangle of jacaranda and eucalyptus, releasing wave after wave of powerful odour. Yet even as my nostrils sustained this olfactory assault, my ears sharpened to the faint tinkle of jewellery swinging against itself. And was I being fanciful, or did I for a few seconds inhale the faint aroma of the morning’s over-sweet perfume as well? But before I could confirm this with further active sniffs, we arrived at a scene requiring our immediate attention.
No breeze fanned the little plume of smoke that coiled lazily from the mound of leaves and twigs that had been piled together, but it was clearly a matter of moments before the crackle inside it flared into fire. ‘Hurry!’ shouted Mrs K, even as I fumbled with my fly buttons, all thoughts of modesty abandoned. I felt excited as a naughty child: my hand shook as I directed my nervous waters at the smouldering heap and aimed at a flame. Then, with a thunderous sizzle quite out of proportion to my thin stream, water triumphed over fire, and I found the foreign sound of laughter rising in my throat.
‘You’re not taking this very seriously, Professor!’ Mrs K was giggling herself. Acrid clouds of smoke shot out of the destroyed fire and our eyes watered horribly as we kicked at the remains of the arson attempt and stamped on glowing embers, our lanterns high above our heads, causing the upper reaches of the trees and creepers to bulge with light.
‘I suppose it must have been some Boer,’ sighed my companion as we began our somewhat precipitous descent through the smoke-scented forest. ‘Someone full of resentment – perhaps still holding a grudge after the Raid!’ She was plunging downward rather more quickly than I would have liked, her lantern swerving violently among the night foliage.
‘Hmmm,’ replied I. ‘Rather a half-hearted attempt, don’t you think? Why set the forest alight? Why not the house?’
‘After the last blaze, I believe there is some kind of informal patrol round the house every night. But of course the strange thing is that our host doesn’t really care if all his possessions go up in flames – I suppose you know what he said when they told him his beloved house had burnt down: “Is that all? I thought you were going to say Jameson had died” Extraordinary response.’ She turned round suddenly to face me, just as I was negotiating a rather complicated tangle of roots. ‘Can I confess a dreadful secret to you, Professor Wills?’
I cleared my throat. ‘Please do.’ My head had brushed her bosom as I lifted it, and the sensation had revived a rush of nursery memories.
‘I don’t think I like Dr Jameson very much.’ A frond of plumbago became entangled in her hair, and she swept it away impatiently. ‘My husband worships him, of course. I think he’d like to have the Doctor as the hero of his next novel – if he could somehow transport him to India. But to me … I must say … he’s just a … filibuster!’ She held up her lantern to my face to measure the degree of my shock. On finding a gleam of sympathy in my normally impassive visage, she continued more briskly: ‘If only you knew the damage he’s done with his dratted Raid! In the first place he’s caused the greatest man in South Africa to have to resign his premiership. And in the second place he’s pushed this country much closer to a war that Britain is by no means ready for. Can you imagine the national humiliation if Britain were to be conquered by a barbarous tribe of unshaven Boers? It would be the beginning of the end of the Empire, for a start.’ Mrs K seemed to have forgotten that we were standing on a damp mountain slope at half past two in the morning.
‘According to the newspapers I read, our host was not altogether guiltless in this affair,’ I volunteered, edging down closer to her in the hope of moving her on, for I was more than ready for my bed by this time. But Mrs K wanted to continue her lecture.
‘Certainly he appreciated the fact that that monstrous old Boer was oppressing British men, women and children – not giving the vote, and that kind of thing – and he sincerely wished to come to their aid – but that Doctor Jameson! He saw himself as some kind of knight in shining armour rescuing damsels in distress, and meanwhile the damsels had no need to be rescued. I swear he just wanted to ride in front of a troop of soldiers and wave his sword, pretending to be Sir Lancelot in pursuit of the Holy Grail!’
‘I believe he ended up waving a Hottentot maid’s apron.’
‘He was lucky to escape with his life,’ replied she. ‘And only because that cunning old Boer didn’t want him turned into a martyr. And to see him strutting about now …’ To my relief she turned and made her way down the remainder of the path. I was now quite overwhelmed with tiredness and longed for my bed.
The gables of the Great Granary shone silver in the moonlight, their elongated shadows staining the terraced lawns. We slipped like conspirators between the columns and across the chequerboard tiles of the back verandah, silent at last. Mrs K produced a large key with which to open the back door.
‘I’ll report the fire, if you like,’ she whispered, as if reading my thoughts. ‘Not much point in doing it now. Good night, Professor. I’ve very much enjoyed hunting the tooth with you.’
An almost intolerable exhaustion had overcome me by the time I began to mount the stairs, and I found myself pausing every four or five steps to relieve the ache in my thighs caused by my unwonted midnight exercise. I longed for nothing more than to find myself in bed, and with heartfelt relief flung myself upon the embossed handle of my bedroom door. Just as I was about to enter, the door of the room belonging to the flirtatious mother slid open. Flushing with embarrassment at the idea of meeting female company of any kind in a corridor at nearly 3 a.m. I was about to slip silently into my room when a sharp whisper met my ears.
‘Wills!’
Frank Harris crept down the corridor, grasping his shoes in his right hand, smoothing his hair with his left. He smiled brilliantly at me in the dim electric light.
‘I say, old chap, I’ve a bottle of excellent brandy in my room. Come and join me for a night-cap, won’t you? Then you can tell me what on earth you are doing here!’