The passionate rain returned. Slumped in the back-seat of the official monster, The Honourable Mr. Tomlin saw the vegetable and mineral parts of the kingdom he was supposed to rule, on his way, behind a forlorn little flag, to the Astana, residence of the Caliph. He saw failed cocoa, half-hearted maize, scooped rock, mud, sleeping bulldozers, abandoned native houses. Under these sheltered pie-dogs, his visible animal kingdom. The Astana was a long way out of town. In their corral the royal elephants raised rods of sugar-cane, like primitive elephant flutes, to the sour-milk sky. The Honourable Mr. Tomlin passed the houses of court officials with pretentious and unpronounceable titles, their washing on the line swilled by the great taps of the air. He passed the surau or private mosque and entered the palace grounds. Here the driver was challenged, as in a charade, by black sentries. Driver and sentries knew each other and, with golden jaws ajar, exchanged banter. The U.N. Adviser was then saluted in American fashion and allowed to pass.
The Astana was a very comfortable-looking Edwardian mansion. Here was nothing of the Alhambran super-cinema or the provincial Turkish baths. With its imported red brick, its gable-ends, its weathercock, it was easily the most exotic building in the State of Dunia. But no venerable butler came to the door. Instead a pert young flunkey in silk, a red sash, a tarboosh with the royal badge in silver, with a mouthful of good teeth, jauntily swung open the heavy oak and greeted the driver cordially. The Honourable Mr. Tomlin tapped on the glass to stem the long discussion of debts and family. Big lips came down like funeral blinds over shining teeth. The U.N. Adviser was bowed from his car and admitted to the Astana. There was a long smoke-room with club chairs and pictures of shipwrecks. A fresh flunkey led him to deep plush, another brought him warm orange-squash, another offered cigarettes and a Queen Anne silver table-lighter. Like any other visitor, he was being looked after. He sat in gloom, waiting, seeing in the long wall of windows wet greenery slobbering, rain rushing from ornamental pipes, the terrible sky of Africa over an English park. At length an official of the palace came, a fat healthy-looking young man in a well-cut lounge suit and a tarboosh, educated at Achimoto and Magdalen, welcoming but not deferential. The U.N. Adviser was led towards the Presence, through corridors loud with royal children in wet-day play (nephews and nieces mainly, but sufficiently intimidating to the new arrival. The Honourable Mr. Tomlin knew them all well, hated them, showed his teeth at them in a horror-film smile). Soon they came to the tabernacle. The U.N. Adviser entered, his breathing shallow, his heart faster than usual. Had he been of the faith of Nando Tasca he would have recognised the feeling of entering the confessional ("twelve months since my last ... missed Easter duty ... drunk ... adultery ... ").
The first thing the U.N. Adviser saw was himself. Like the Magis Zoroaster, my dead child, he met his own image, but twice, pinioned in Mr. Smetana's art. And his all too live child. And his tooth-picking lady. He stood amazed, his mouth open. The Caliph was seated and drew down the eyes of his visitor with a formal Arabic greeting. The Caliph was in white silk shirt, black wide trousers, dagger in belt, cigarette smoking away, dark glasses.
"And may the peace of God be with you," responded the U.N. Adviser. "Where did you get these things?"
"Do be seated. A young foreigner gave an exhibition of his pictures in the Rest House. Tuesday and Wednesday. I was invited to open it. It was generally regretted that you were not able to be present."
"You can't hang those up there," protested the U.N. Adviser. "You just can't."
"You really should have been present," said the Caliph. "A very clever young man. A most interesting exhibition much appreciated by all."
"I had to work," said the U.N. Adviser. "Somebody has to work." He kept his eyes still on the cruel likeness.
"I?" said the Caliph. "I?" There was reproach in the flood of cigarette-smoke. The U.N. Adviser remembered he was in private audience with the ruler of Dunia. It was meet for him to use the special terminology, survival of ancient days, happy days, days before the West had brought in the whisper of democracy. "Dog had to work," emended the U.N. Adviser sullenly. "Dog could not go to the exhibition. If Dog had been there Dog would have bought up those pictures. Dog would like to buy them now off Your Highness."
"No can do," said the Caliph in crisp National Language. "May it please the U.N. Adviser to be seated."
"Your Highness can't do it," said the seated Honourable Mr. Tomlin. "Your Highness is making a laughing-stock of Dog to all Your Highness's visitors. Dog is, after all, representative of the United Nations Organisation."
"I have worked out reform of the currency," said the Caliph. "Or rather, I should say, of the nomenclature of the currency. That is why I summoned you. You are entitled to give me your U.N. Advice about secular matters."
"But Your Highness did not summon Dog. Dog arranged this interview with Your Highness through Your Highness's private secretary. Dog has more urgent matters than currency to talk about." The U.N. Adviser's eyes could not leave the wall.
"Oh?" smoked the Caliph. "The messages must have crossed. We will take it that you are here at my summons. You will give me your advice about the currency. 'Buck', I have discovered, is a vulgar Americanism. Why was I not told before? It seemed formerly a reasonable Anglicisation of the National Language bukh which, as you know, means anything folded. Now, I have had a dream, or, rather, a vision. In this vision an angel appeared and said that our unit of currency should be divided into eight and called a piece of eight. Eight seems a more satisfactory division than ten. It means we can have quarters. Now, as to the names – "
"But, Your Highness," said the U.N. Adviser, "this is frivolous, if Your Highness will permit Dog to say so. Dog comes on a matter of morality, of religion."
"Frivolous?" puffed the Caliph sharply. "An angelic vision frivolous?"
"The Mosque," said the U.N. Adviser. "The marble. The Italian workers. Does Your Highness realise that one of these attempted to rape my wife, then my daughter, then succeeded in seducing the wife of one of the Australian road engineers, then half-killed the husband?" In the urgency of his words The Honourable Mr. Tomlin had forgotten to inflect "Dog" to the possessive form. The Caliph was indulgent and let that pass. He looked up, instead, at the pictures on the wall, the blind dark glasses seeming to assess the seducibility of the U.N. Adviser's wife and daughter. He said:
"Surely this is a criminal matter. I am not the Chief of Police. He has his office, I mine. We will return to the currency."
"Dog is not going to the police," said the U.N. Adviser. "The wife of Dog is making no charge. The wife of Dog has no intention of making an exhibition of herself."
"That," said the Caliph, gazing still through smoke and dark lenses at Mr. Smetana's art, "has been done already for her."
"Dog begs Your Highness's pardon?" The two sat as close as in a cabin of a children's joy-wheel, black knees almost touching grey. The U.N. Adviser had so far had little difficulty in hearing. But now the Caliph had decided to start mumbling. Now, as they neared the crux.
"If it is not a matter for the police," said the Caliph firmly, "it is not a matter for anybody. I would say only this: it is hardly seemly for the wife and daughter of the U.N. Adviser to render themselves so easily accessible to repressed Italian workmen. Unless, of course, the Italian workman broke into the Residency."
"Dog's wife and daughter were at the cinema, Your Highness."
"Without escort?"
"Dog had a headache."
"You see," said the Caliph, "what happens when you relax the ancient rules. When my womenfolk pine for the cinema, the cinema is brought to them. This excessive licence you grant to women-it is that that is bringing Europe to ruin."
"We will forget that," said the U.N. Adviser. "The other matter is a matter which calls at once for action. The husband saw his wife assaulted and was then assaulted himself."
"Look," said the Caliph, "Allah knows that the time for living the good life is short. There is this question of the currency. Let the wronged man seek redress of his wrongs through the channels that you, the United Nations, have appointed. This is no concern of mine."
"Oh, but it is, Your Highness. There is the question of the Mosque. The internal decorations of the Mosque are by no means completed. The day of its consecration and opening approaches. I – “ (in his sense of power and authority he instinctively dropped the "Dog") "I am forced to give the two Italians notice to leave the State. They are undesirable elements. The question of police action is neither here nor there. I think, Dog thinks, that it was Your Highness himself who declared, in full State Council, that there is no room for immorality here."
"It was you," said the Caliph, in sharp blue smoke, "who seemed to imply that there was."
"There was, Dog said, a difference between private and public morality."
"That I cannot see."
"Dog and Your Highness will not argue about that now. Dog, as Your Highness will admit, is responsible for the expatriate community. The two Italian expatriates must go."
"Very well. Let them go. How quickly can replacements be found for them?"
"Replacements cannot be found, Your Highness." The Honourable Mr. Tomlin sat back and looked up at the spinning fan in hidden triumph. The tail of his right eye caught his blubbering image on the wall and, framed in the window near it, the blubbering sky. 'Reality,' he thought.
"Replacements must be found."
"The firm in Tripoli has a virtual monopoly of this kind of work, Your Highness. There are, it would seem, other skilled workers in marble, also Italian. They have just completed some work in Cairo and have now been sent to Zanzibar to decorate the offices of a Turf Commission Agency. But there are no others. Only the Tascas are now available, and there is no possibility of recruiting other skilled workers. Not in the time. A cable was sent to Tripoli and that was the reply. So that is the position, Your Highness."
The Caliph poked blind fingers into his cigarette tin. It was empty. He rang a bell, made a silent victory sign at his lips to the entering flunkey. The flunkey brought a tin, feverishly rotating the lid with its attached metal-cutter. In the silence, to which the perpetual fan-whirr was assimilated, the two seated men, Head of the Faithful, Head of the Infidel, heard air rush into the air-tight vault of the stacked white tubes, heard the thin clatter of the circumcised tin top as the flunkey detached it clumsily. The full tin was placed on the Caliph's smoking table; two full ash-trays were removed; two empty ones set down. The Caliph smoked. The smokeless interval had been like a cessation of breathing. The Caliph breathed smoke. "I see," he said. "You can go," he said to the flunkey, who, with open mouth, wondered at the pictures on the wall, wondered where he had seen that face before. "Him," he suddenly, happily said. He smiled at the Caliph. "You can go," said the Caliph, not unkindly.
"So perhaps the opening of the Mosque will have to be postponed," said The Honourable Mr. Tomlin. "Unless, of course, it is opened in its unfinished state."
"It's quite true," the Caliph mumbled. "The white men are clever. One oughtn't to underrate them."
"Dog begs Your Highness's pardon?"
"Now," said the Caliph, with new vigour, "I think we shall have to overlook the viciousness of these Italians for a time. I think they will have to be allowed to stay till their work is completed. Don't you think so?"
"But Your Highness cannot possibly condone vice, even where a great and holy occasion is at stake. The holiness would, surely, be impaired? Wouldn't it?" asked the U.N.Adviser.
"Oh, fool," said the Caliph impatiently. "I beg your pardon," he said. But The Honourable Mr. Tomlin had not clearly caught the word. "Oh, don't you see that virtue can use sin? You people don't know enough theology, that's your trouble. Coming here with your police stations and your water-closets and your expurgated copies of Macbeth." (The Caliph had once taken Senior Cambridge.) "You know nothing of the real things."
"What was that word, Your Highness?"
"Reality, reality. God can use sin. God clearly wants to use sin now. Can't you see it?"
"Religion is not the province of Dog, Your Highness. Your Highness told Dog that the other day."
"How much notice have you given these Italians?" asked the Caliph. "Twenty-four hours?"
"A week, Your Highness. The father says that the son gave his passport away. He didn't realise its value. A new one's being rushed through."
"Well," said the Caliph. He took comfortably a fresh cigarette. "You realise, of course, that nobody may leave the State without requesting the Caliph's permission ?"
"But nobody may stay in the State without sponsorship. That's laid down in the Immigration Enactment. And Your Highness and the entire State Council have expressed a desire for greater stringency in the application of the Enactment."
"Well?"
"These two Italians have no sponsor," said the U.N. Adviser. "The sponsorship of the appropriate department has been withdrawn."
"Oh." Blue smoke rose to the ceiling-fan. The arms of the fan danced with the veil of smoke and then tore it into shreds. "They have a sponsor," said the Caliph. "There is no difficulty. I shall sponsor them myself."
Both men sat back, a new image dancing between them, under the fan: two ragged infidels, drunk or immoral, certainly irresponsible, tucked under the mothering wings of an Islamic potentate. The U.N.Adviser almost saw it projected on to the wall, limned by the sharp pencil of a Czech from Asmara.
"By God," said The Honourable Mr. Tomlin, "to think that that man accepted my hospitality."
"I beg your pardon?" The U.N.Adviser had spoken English. "Perhaps you didn't quite hear," said the Caliph. "I sometimes forget your infirmity. I shall sponsor them myself."
"Yes, Your Highness. That seems to be the best thing to do." He saw a new image, jerkily replacing the last one as in a lantern lecture – a gunboat steaming up the river.
"And then Forbes can charge young Tasca and young Tasca can go to jail. So the Mosque still won't be finished."
"Oh, if a charge is preferred, the trial can always be postponed. There would be difficulty in getting an Italian interpreter, for instance. I don't see anything to worry about. Now shall we return to this question of the currency?"
"Those pictures there," said the U.N.Adviser very sharply. "Those insulting and libellous pictures. In the name of the United Nations, I protest. I, I, I," he repeated. "Not Dog. I. I protest." He stood up, the better to protest.
"You see," said the Caliph, "why you can't possibly come back for another term. You see, don't you ? You've probably been out in the tropics too long. It affects one's nervous control, after a time. One must be born to this climate." He waved his cigarette in a proprietary way at the endless energy of the rain outside, at the fan above whose cool draught was an emblem of the heat. "But, when you have gone, I shall have something to remember you by." He conducted a bar of common time at the art of Mr. Smetana. "And Mrs. Tomlin. And Miss Tomlin. The Potoks used to hang shrunken heads at their waists. We are more civilised than that. And he tried to rape them, did he? Remarkable."
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