Mortgages.
Emigration.
Please see to this. Also organise system of reser-voirs for city’s water supply and draft syllabus for competitive examination for public services. Suggest compulsory Esperanto. Seth.
“E’s been reading books again, Mr. Seal, that’s what it is. You won’t get no peace from im not till you fix im with a woman. Why can’t e drink or something?”
In fact the Ministry’s triumph in the matter of birth control was having highly embarrassing consequences. If before, Basil and Mr. Youkoumian had cause to lament their master’s tenacity and single-ness of purpose, they were now harassed from the opposite extreme of temperament. It was as though Seth’s imagination like a volcanic lake had in the moment of success become suddenly swollen by the irruption of unsuspected, subterranean streams until it darkened and seethed and overflowed its margins in a thousand turbulent cascades. The earnest and rather puzzled young man became suddenly capricious and volatile; ideas bubbled up within him, bearing to the surface a confused sediment of phrase and theory, scraps of learning half understood and fantastically translated.
“It’s going to be awkward for us if the Emperor goes off his rocker.”
“Oh, my, Mr. Seal, you do say the most damned dangerous things.”
That afternoon Basil called at the Palace to discuss the new proposals, only to find that since his luncheon the Emperor’s interests had veered suddenly towards archaeology.
“Yes, yes, the abolitions. I sent you a list this morning, I think. It is a mere matter of routine. I leave the details to the Ministry. Only you must be quick please… it is not that which I want to discuss with you now. It is our Museum.”
“Museum?”
“Yes, of course we must have a Museum. I have made a few notes to guide you. The only serious difficulty is accommodation. You see it must be in-augurated before the arrival of the Cruelty to Animals Commission at the beginning of next month. There is hardly time to build a house for it. The best thing will be to confiscate one of the town palaces. Ngumo’s or Boaz’s would do after some slight adjustments. But that is a matter for the Ministry to decide. On the ground floor will be the natural history section. You will collect examples of all the flora and fauna of the Empire, lions, butterflies, birds’ eggs, specimens of woods, everything. That should easily fill the ground floor. I have been reading,” he added earnestly, “about ventilation. That is very important. The air in the cases must be continually renewed—a cubic metre an hour is about the right draught—otherwise the specimens suffer. You will make a careful note of that. Then on the first floor will be the anthropological and historical section—examples of native craft, Portuguese and Arab work, a small library. Then in the Central Hall, the relics of the Royal House. I have some of the medals of Amurath upstairs under one of the beds in a box—photographs of myself, some of my uniforms, the cap and gown I wore at Oxford, the model of the Eiffel Tower which I brought back from Paris. I will lend some pages of manuscript in my own hand to be exhibited. It will be most interesting.’
For some days Mr. Youkoumian busied himself with the collection of specimens. Word went round that there was a market for objects of interest at the Ministry of Modernisation and the work of the office was completely paralysed by the hawkers of all races who assembled in and around it, peddling brass pots and necklaces of carved nut, snakes in baskets and monkeys in cages, cloth of beaten bark and Japanese cotton, sacramental vessels pouched by Nestorian deacons, iron-wood clubs, homely household deities, tanned human scalps, cauls and navel strings and wonder-working fragments of meteorite, amulets to ward off the evil eye from camels, M. Ballon’s masonic apron purloined by the legation butler, and a vast monolithic phallus borne by three oxen from a shrine in the interior. Mr. Youkoumian bar-gained briskly and bought almost everything he was offered, reselling them later to the Ministry of Fine Arts of which Basil had created him the director. But when, at a subsequent interview, Basil men-I97 tioned their progress to the Emperor he merely nodded a listless approval and even while he un-screwed the cap of his fountain pen to sign the order evicting the Earl of Ngumo from his town house, began to speak of the wonders of astronomy.
“Do you realise the magnitude of the fixed stars? They are immense. I have read a book which says that the mind boggles at their distances. I did not know that word, boggles. I am immediately founding an Institute for Astronomical Research. I must have Professors. Cable for them to Europe. Get me tip-top professors, the best procurable “
But next day he was absorbed in ectogenesis. “I have read here,” he said, tapping a volume of speculative biology, “that there is to be no more birth. The ovum is fertilised in the laboratory and then the foetus is matured in bottles. It is a splendid idea. Get me some of those bottles… and no boggling.”
Even while discussing the topic that immediately interested him, he would often break off in the middle of a sentence, with an irrelevant question. “How much are autogyros?” or “Tell me exactly, please, what is Surrealism” or “Are you convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence?” and then, without pausing for the reply would resume his adumbrations of the New Age.
The days passed rapturously for Mr. Youkoumian who had found in the stocking of the Museum work for which early training and all his natural instincts richly equipped him; he negotiated endlessly between the Earl of Ngumo and Viscount Boaz, armed with orders for the dispossession of the lowest bidder; he bought and resold, haggled, flattered and depreciated, and ate and slept in a clutter of dubious antiques. But on Basil the strain of modernity began to leave its traces. Brief rides with Prudence through the tinder-dry countryside, assignations furtively kept and interrupted at a moment’s notice by some peremptory, crazy summons to the Palace, alone broke the unquiet routine of his day.
“I believe that odious Emperor is slowly poisoning you. It’s a thing he does do,” said Prudence. “And I never saw any one look so ill.”
“You know it sounds absurd but I miss Connolly. It’s rather a business living all the time between Seth and Youkoumian.”
“Of course you wouldn’t remember that there’s me too, would you,” said Prudence. “Not just to cheer me up you wouldn’t?”
“You’re a grand girl, Prudence. What Seth calls tip-top. But I’m so tired I could die.”
And a short distance away the legation syce moodily flicked with his whip at a train of ants while the ponies shifted restlessly among the stones and shelving earth of a dry watercourse.
Two mornings later the Ministry of Modernisation received its sharpest blow. Work was going on as usual. Mr. Youkoumian was interviewing a coast Arab who claimed to possess some “very old, very genuine” Portuguese manuscripts; Basil, pipe in his mouth, was considering how best to deal with the Emperor’s latest memorandum, Kindly insist straw hats and gloves compulsory peerage, when he received an unexpected and disturbing call from Mr. Jagger, the contractor in charge of the demolition of the Anglican Cathedral; a stocky, good-hearted little Britisher who after a
