Mason & Dixon Read online

  “Excuse me? I’m not actually sure that I— ”

  “Ah! Now ’tis you, even you, Mason! What use are Trines and Sex-tiles, if Human Discourse be denied me? Fly on, fly on, Midge of Mischief,— thou hast triumph’d!”

  Mason understands that he may if he wishes see himself thro’ Duty at St. Helena by baiting Maskelyne thus, any time he has a Velleity to. He also understands how quickly the amusement value of this will fade. “Usually,” he feels nonetheless impell’d to suggest, “a Messenger going the other way is returning, after having deliver’d his Message someplace else.”

  Maskelyne frowns and begins to consider this. The next day, after smoking a while in silence, “Perhaps that’s it. Explains a good deal, doesn’t it? A Message that never came to me. How shall I proceed?— waste what scrap of Life-Span remains to me, attempting to find out what it was?”

  “According to this Chart,” advises Mason, “you’ll find out sooner or later. Refrain from struggle, allow your Life to convey it to you when it will, and as in all else, Bob’s your Uncle. Or in this case, Brother-in-Law.”

  14

  Mason, up on the Ridge, finds himself wondering about Dixon,— whether he has arriv’d safely at the Cape,— what, if he be there, he may be doing at a particular moment,— given the time of day or night, and Weather unknown. “Our daily lives to distant Stars attuned,” he writes in a Letter to Dixon he then decides not to send,—

  (“Just a moment,” Pitt says.

  “You saw this Document?” inquires Pliny.

  “Good Lads!” cries Uncle Ives, blessing each with a Pistole. “No, no, don’t thank me, the only condition is that you spend it wisely. Prudently invested, it could provide you a tidy Fund by the time you’re establish’d enough as Attorneys to need a friendly Judge now and then. Be better of course if you were partners. Confuse people.”

  “Our idea, actually,” says Pitt, “is for one of us to run away and pretend to lead a Wastrel’s Life, whilst the other applies himself diligently to the Law,— ”

  “— making it even less possible to tell you apart,” declares their Aunt Euphie.)

  Mason can calculate roughly when Dixon may be at the Snout, watching Jupiter and its Harem of moons, and when up in the Malay quarter, inspecting some Harem of his own. He imagines Dixon learning to cook a Kari with orange leaves, re-inventing the Frikkadel, putting that G-dawful Ketjap in ev’rything.

  Believing he has walked away from the Cape and successfully not looked back, to see what Plutonian wife, in what thin garment, may after all have follow’d,— tho’ none of them is anyone’s Eurydice, he knows well enough who that is,— or would be, were he Orpheus enough to carry a Tune in a Bucket,— Mason continues to wonder, how Dixon has brought himself to turn, and then, to appearance imperturbable as a Clam, go back in,— back to Jet, Greet, Els, Austra, Johanna, the unsunn’d Skins, the Ovine Aromas, the Traffick to and from the Medicine-Cabinet at all hours, the Whispering in the Corners, the never-ending Intrigues,— whilst coiled behind all gazes the great Worm of Slavery. No hour of the Chapter-Ring is exempt from the echoes of Heated Voices off unadorn’d Walls. The Girls, having raided their Father’s Snuff Supply, dashing about, colliding and dreamy, and talking to no effect. . . .

  By the time Dixon arrives, a number of stories have long been circulating . . . the Town pretends to be shock’d. Church services, far from the Ordeals Johanna has expected, turn lively at last, with smirks and stares and eye-avoidance, in full knowledge that ev’ryone knows ev’ryone else’s secrets,— she feels she’s being admitted at last to the adult life of the Cape . . . tho’ nothing, understand, for all the racing up and down stairs and hanging out windows, has really “happen’d,” as these matters are reckon’d,— so that she feels like an imposter, too, which is not without its own thrill of shame, before the Faces of the Congregation, where within the Brass-bound mercilessness of Sunday, these multiple acts of sisterhood will continue, till after a while the focus shifts to some new Bathsheba.

  Cornelius, for his part, is not having quite so easy a time of it. Suddenly, wherever he goes, Dixon finds this unstable Butter-box up the wrong end of some Elephant Gun swiveling ever in Dixon’s direction, as if the Dutchman has decided to accept him as a fair substitute for Mason. Through the streets, in the great South-East wind, the wig-snatching, flame-fanning, judgment-warping Wind, they chase, Cornelius presently setting the Fork’d Support in the blowing dirt, with some smoldering naval slow-match he carries in his teeth igniting a giant full Dutch-ounce blast whose Ball ricochets off the roof-tiles, sending small Slides of red fragments into the street a good ten feet wide and short, windage calculations out here being matters more of Sentiment than of Science. He pauses to reload, his hair-tie loos’d and then blown away downwind whilst Dixon lopes on, unwilling to believe that the Dutchman can still feel unrequited enough to want to go through this exercise again,— until the next great crack, echoing from the hillside, as the hornetting sphere this time explodes a watermelon at a nearby market stand, and the greengrocers head for cover. As the Dutchman, unhurried, stolid, probably insane, is reloading for yet another onslaught, this time Musketoon-style with a great pink Fist-ful of bullets, Dixon, having had enough, turns and makes a run at him. There seems to be time. As he gets near, he sees white all ’round Vroom’s irises, and though it may not matter in a short while, knows that the Dutchman has never faced a charging animal in his life,— until now, it seems, for he stands paralyzed, powder horn slipping from his grasp, screaming, “No! I am supposed to do this!”

  Dixon takes the weapon gently away. “My life, for that ass Mason’s? Excuse me, the Mails, I’ve not been getting my Gazette,— was there some amendment to the Code of Honor that no one told me of?”

  “This is not about Honor, it is about Blood!”

  “Aye, and were you a Malay Lad I shouldn’t be that surprised . . . ? but as you’re a Dutch Lad, well, well, this ‘running amok’ business,— not that much in your people’s line, is it, there’s a good fellow . . . ,” coaxing him along before the wind, “same as we don’t see that many Malays, do we really, standing about in wooden shoes, eh? fingers stopping up holes in the Dike sort of thing, no we don’t, now just around this corner, good,— a little Soupkie ought to be just the Ar-ticle . . . ?— ”

  “Soupkie,” the Dutchman in a stricken monotone, nodding.

  “Through this door, Mynheer,— there he is,— Abdul, you son of a sea-camel. We need a crock of your Special reserve gin, with the unusual herbs in it,— have the Nautch Girls come in yet? Eeh, well,— we’ll just be over here, in the Corner . . . ?”

  “Ice. Ice.”

  “Quite so, Cornelius,— I may call you that mayn’t I,— Ice Abdul by all means and perhaps two pipes as well?” He waves Cornelius into the Tavern. “My Local,— The World’s End.”

  They retreat to a dark corner and for the next several hours, in a fragrant Nebulosity that provides comfort when Dixon cannot, go a-sorting in some detail thro’ the Vrooms’ domestic Sadness. Dixon is astonished at its depth, though it all becomes difficult to follow after a while. The fire roars, above it the Haunch of some Animal unfamiliar to Englishmen is slowly turn’d, and basted. A Phillippino guitar player strums a careless Suite of Nautical Melodies, at the end of each of which he grins, “Not done yet! More to come, Sí?” Tallow candles gutter and go out, as others are relit elsewhere in the Room. The wind hoots up and down the alley-ways, Table Bay slowly but measurably is blown seaward, the Town being borne away from the Shore-line at the same rate, and as the evening falls, in from all this peculiar Weather, hair and costumes blown and tangl’d, wearing Cast-offs from the days of the Sumptuary Laws, which the Slaves who got them either sold again promptly, or could not bring themselves to wear, in Ticklingburgs and Paduasoy, Swanskin and Shalloon, Brabant Lace and Ostrich-Feather Hats, here enter a Parade of curiously turned-out young creatures, most o
f whom appear to know Dixon,— each to go sit at a table-ful of Sailors, take a pipe or a drink, and eventually leave with a nautical Prize in tow. The Phillippino strums passionate minor-key Declarations of Longing. The Smoke in the room, though chiefly from tobacco, includes as well that of Opium, Hemp, and Cloves, so that anyone who walks in must become intoxicated, merely by standing and breathing.

  Dixon came ashore intending to clear Mason’s Name of all Suspicion before Cornelius, if not before the Town, but somehow no opening for this has occurred. “Here’s what we’ll do,” proposes Cornelius now, gravely giddy, “— we will go to the Company Lodge, where the women are of all races, sizes, and specialties. We’ll use my membership to get in, and you, that is the Royal Society, will then pay for everything.”

  “I am happy to see you thus return’d to what the Dutch must reckon Sanity,” replies Dixon, for whom the Scene before them has begun to break up into small swarming Bits of Color, “and of course I’d be nothing but delighted . . . ?”

  The Company Seraglio smells of sandalwood and burning Musk. There is difficulty at the Door, regarding some unpaid Dues. . . . The Barometer in the ebony case upon the Wall cannot be read, the Lettering too intricate, the Numerals possibly in some System other than the Arabic. There is no column of Mercury, no moving Pointer. Yet Pressure may be read by the Adept, remaining invisible until sought for. . . . The Instrument hangs above a velvet Meridien from France, near a painting of a mounted settler at dusk, somewhere out in Hottentot Land with his old smooth-bore athwart the Saddle, the Mountains between here and Home all grays, except for the sunset catching their Peaks a strange thinn’d luminous Red. And there. In the Shadows, all but painted over,—

  Once again Dixon’s unsuspicious Heart is surpriz’d. The first person to enter the Room is Austra, in a black velvet Gown and a leather collar, being leash-led by a tiny, expressionless Malay Sylph. It is evident from the Leer on Cornelius’s Phiz, that the Tableau has been arrang’d for Dixon. There is enough time for her to recognize him, and know that he will not help her, either, before she passes into another Room, not looking back, to continue this slavery within Slavery. . . . At the moment of her Vanishing, he pays her full Notice for the first time,— tho’ who could have avoided some Overspill from Mason’s obsession? even with Mason seldom able to bore Dixon upon the Topick, Dixon most usually being out satisfying his more general Desire for anything, and on lucky Days everything, the World might be presenting to him, moment by moment. Had he not been under Siege rather by imps of Appetite indiscriminate, might he and Mason have become Rivals for her Attention? Thus stands he gawping after her.

  “Let no one say that we cannot have Fun, when we must,” Cornelius declares, thumping Dixon upon the Shoulder. “It is our Garden of Amusement, here.”

  Something a bit too Churchlike for Dixon, however,— a devotion to ritual and timing, the Space under-lit, what light there is as White as Wig-Powder, flowing from pure white candles, burning smoothly in the still air, and from bowls of incense close by, white Smoke in the same unwavering Ascent. Now in high Humor, Cornelius shows him secret Pornoscopes, conceal’d by fanciful room decorations, where Burghers may recline, grunting expressively, and spy upon one another in Activities that may be elephantine, birdlike, over in a flash, long as Church, enclos’d in hopeless desire for, revenge on, escape from some Woman, somewhere along these befabl’d and dolorous Company Lanes, someone said, some Woman. . . .

  The Opium-Girls are kept in a room of their own. That the substance is smoked in a Pipe has put it immediately in favor among the Dutch Gentlemen. Taken with tobacco, producing a vertiginous Swoon, such as might require most of an evening of drinking spirits to obtain, it seems to promise a great savings in time and cash, a thought these thrifty tradesmen find enchanting. Before this Surrender to Sloth, however, Lust is schedul’d, splashing outside the Church-drawn boundaries of marriage, as across racial lines. Slave Women are brought here from ev’rywhere in this Hemisphere, to serve as dreamy, pliant shadows, Baths of Flesh darker than Dutch, the dangerously beautiful Extrusion of everything these white brothers, seeking Communion, cannot afford to contain,— whilst their wives, if adverted to at all, are imagin’d at home, sighing over needlework, or the Bible.

  The Gunfire is at nine, in practice this curfew is stretched for as much as an hour, but by ten the sailors, so cheery, young, and careless with money, have to be out. After they are gone passes a silent period, an enshadowment which, prolonged past a certain point upon the Clock-Face, begins to rouse apprehension among the filles, for they know their Night has begun, and who is coming for them now, and some of what will be done to them. Many who have been to Rooms forbidden the others, report seeing, inside these, a Door to at least one Room further, which may not be opened. The Penetralia of the Lodge are thus, even to those employed there, a region without a map. Anything may be there. Perhaps miracles are still possible,— both evil miracles, such as occur when excesses of Ill Treatment are transform’d to Joy,— quite common in this Era,— and the reverse, when excesses of Well-being at length bring an Anguish no less painful for being metaphysickal,— Good Miracles. Even in a Polity sunny, bustling, and order’d as Cape Town, for reasons that mystify all (some blame the South-East winds, pointing to now-legendary examples of insane behavior in the dry season, whilst others whisper of magickal Practices of the Natives or Malays), howbeit, now and then, Madness will visit by Surprize, taking away to its Realm of Voices and Pain even a mind in the rosiest fullness of Sanity. When they are too dangerous to roam free, the town Madmen are kept as a responsibility of the Company, confin’d in padded rooms in the Slave Lodge. Sometimes for their amusement the Herren will escort a particularly disobedient employee to a Madman’s cell, push her inside, and lock the door. Next to each cell is a Viewing Room where the gentlemen may then observe, through a wall of Glass disguis’d as a great Mirror, the often quite unviewable Rencontre. The Madmen are of every race, condition, and degree of Affliction, from the amiably delusionary to the remorselessly homicidal. Some of them hate women, some desire them, some know hate and desire as but minor aspects of a greater, Oceanick Impulse, in which, report those who survive, it is unquestionably better not to be included. Again, some do not survive. When the Herren cannot return their Remains to their villages, they dispose of them by sea, that the Jackals may not have them.

  What so far there have been only rumors of, is a room nine by seven feet and five inches, being with Dutch parsimony reduc’d to a quarter-size replica of the cell at Fort William, Calcutta, in which 146 Europeans were oblig’d to spend the night of 20–21 June 1756. There persists along the Company nerve-lines a terrible simple nearness to the Night of the “Black Hole,” some Zero-Point of history, reckoning whence, all the Marvels to follow,— Quebec, Dr. Halley’s Comet, the Battle of Quiberon Bay, aye and the Transit of Venus, too,— would elapse as fugitive as Opium dreams, and mattering less. . . . To find the Black Hole in a menu of Erotic Scenarios surprizes no one at this particular end of the World,— Residents, visitors, even a few Seamen of elevated sensibility have return’d, whenever possible, to be urg’d along by graceful Lodge-Nymphs in indigo Dhotis and Turbans, dainty scimitars a-flash, commanding their naked “Captives” to squeeze together more and more tightly into the scale-model cell with as many Slaves,— impersonating Europeans,— as will make up the complement, calculated at thirty-six, best able to afford visitors an authentick Sense of the Black Hole of Calcutta Experience.

  “If one did not wish to suffer Horror directly,” comments the Revd in his Day-Book, “one might either transcend it spiritually, or eroticize it carnally,— the sex Entrepreneurs reasoning that the combination of Equatorial heat, sweat, and the flesh of strangers in enforc’d intimacy might be Pleasurable,— that therefore might some dramatiz’d approach to death under such circumstances be pleasurable as well, with all squirming together in a serpent’s Nest of Limbs and Apertures and penises, immobiliz’d in a
bondage of similarly bound bodies, lubricated with a gleaming mixture of their own shar’d sweat, piss, and feces, nothing to breathe but one another’s exhausted breaths, moving toward some single slow warm Explosion. . . .”

  (Tho’ he does not of course read any of this aloud,— choosing rather to skim ahead to the Moral.)

  “Behind our public reaction to the Event, the outrage and Piety, what else may abide,— what untouchable Residue? Small numbers of people go on telling much larger numbers what to do with their precious Lives,— among these Multitudes, all but a few go on allowing them to do so. The British in India encourage the teeming populations they rule to teem as much as they like, whilst taking their land for themselves, and then restricting the parts of it the People will be permitted to teem upon.

  “Yet hear the Cry, O Lord, when even a small Metaphor of this continental Coercion is practis’d in Reverse, as ’twas in the old B.H. of C.

  “ ‘Metaphor!’ you cry,— ‘Sir, an hundred twenty lives were lost!’

  “I reply, ‘British lives. What think you the overnight Harvest of Death is, in Calcutta alone, in Indian lives?— not only upon that one Night, but ev’ry Night, in Streets that few could even tell you how to get to,— Street upon desperate Street, till the smoke of the Pyres takes it all into the Invisible, yet, invisible, doth it go on. All of which greatly suiteth the Company, and to whatever Share it has negotiated, His Majesty’s Government as well.’ ”

  Cornelius has vanish’d into the Room of the Beasts, “A peculiarly Afrikaner Taste,” he pauses to advise Dixon, “— you might not enjoy it!” A slender dark Arm, full of Bangles, emerges from the Door-way, and a practis’d Hand removes his Hat. “Let’s go, Simba.”

  Dixon has some idea of roaming the Lodge, finding a secret Tunnel to the Castle, searching for Austra,— tho’ what he will do then is less clear to him. He gets no further than a small on-Premises Taproom, where, paus’d for what they are pleas’d down in these Parts to term “Ale,” he encounters whom but Police Agent Bonk, wearing a Dressing-Gown of red Velvet galloon’d with Gold, sweating copiously and trying to get Drunk on Cape Madeira.