Envoy Extraordinary

Envoy Extraordinary

William Golding

1. THE TENTH WONDER

The curtains between the loggia and the rest of the villa were no defence against the eunuch's voice. His discourse on passion was understandably but divinely impersonal. It twisted and soared, it punched the third part of a tone suggestive of a whole man's agony, it broke into a controlled wobble, dived, panted neatly in syncopation for breath. The young man who stood against one of the pillars of the loggia continued to roll his head from side to side. There were furrows in his forehead as deep as youth could make them and his eyelids were not screwed up but lowered as if they were a weary and unendurable weight. Beyond and below him the garden was overwhelmed with sunset. A glow, impersonal as the eunuch lay over him, but even so it was possible to see that he was exquisite to look at, tall, red-haired a gentle. His lips fluttered and a sigh came through them.

The old man who sat so restfully by the other pillar of the loggia looked up from his work.

"Mamillius."

Mamillius shrugged inside his toga but did not open his eyes. The old man watched him for a while. The expression on his face was difficult to read, for the sunlight was reflected from the stone pavement and lit him upside down so that the e nose was blunted and an artificial benevolence lay the mouth. There might have been a worried smile under it. He raised his voice a little.

"Let him sing again."

Three notes of a harp, tonic, sub-dominant dominant, foundations of the universe. The voice rose and the sun continued to sink, with remote unimpassioned certainty. Mamillius winced, the man gestured with his left hand and the voice ceased as if he had turned it off.

"Come! Tell me what is the matter."

Mamillius opened his eyes. He turned his head sideways and looked down at the gardens, level after declining level of lawn that yew, cypress and juniper shadowed and formalized, looked listlessly at the last level of all, the glittering sea.

"You would not understand."

The old. man crossed his sandalled feet on the footstool and leaned back. He put the tips of his fingers together and an amethyst ring sparkled on one of them. The sunset dyed his toga more gorgeously than the Syrians could manage and the broad, purple fringe looked black.

"Understanding is my business. After all, I am your grandfather, even though you are not from the main trunk of the imperial tree. Tell me what is the matter."

"Time."

The old man nodded gravely.

"Time slips through our fingers like water. We gape in astonishment to see how little is left."

Mamillius had shut his eyes, the furrows were back and he had begun to roll his head against the pillar again.

"Time stands still. There is eternity between a sleep and a sleep I cannot endure the length of living."

The old man considered for a moment. He put one hand into a basket at his right, took out a paper, glanced at it and threw it into a basket on his left. Much work by many expert hands had gone to giving him the air of clean distinction he cut even before that garden and in that light. He was perfected by art, from the gleaming scalp under the scanty white hair to the tips of the tended toes.

"Millions of people must think that the Emperor's grandsoneven one on the left-hand side - is utterly happy."

'I have run through the sources of happiness."

The Emperor made a sudden noise that might have been the beginnings of a shout of laughter if it

had not ended in a fit of coughing and a nose-blow in the Roman manner. He turned to his papers again.

"An hour ago you were going to help me with these petitions."

"That was before I had begun to read them. Does the whole world think of nothing but cadging favours?"

A nightingale flitted across the garden, came to rest in the dark side of a cypress and tried over a few notes.

"Write some more of your exquisite verses. I particularly liked the ones to be inscribed on an eggshell. They appealed to the gastronome in me."

"I found someone had done it before. I shall not write again."

Then for a while they were silent, prepared to listen to the nightingale: but as if she were conscious of the toodistinguished audience she gave up and flew away.

Mamillius shook out his toga.

"Mourning Itys all these years. What passionate unintelligence!"

"Try the other arts."

"Declamation? Gastronomy?"

"You are too shy for the one and too young for the other."

"I thought you applauded my interest in cooking."

"You talk, Mamillius, but you do not understand. Gastronomy is not the pleasure of youth but the evocation of it."

"The Father of his Country is pleased to be obscure. And I am still bored."

"If you were not so wonderfully transparent should prescribe senna."

"I am distressingly regular."

"A woman?"

"I hope I am more civilized than that."