V.

He was given a lovely mare named Firelily: how he adored that animal! You couldn't keep her from prancing and posturing; she was a typical woman. How her deep sorrel flanks and hindquarters would flash in the sun! He was careful to have his Bastard servant keep her always curried and clean. He believed the first time the General ever addressed him directly was to compliment him on Firelily.

He rode her all over the territory. From the coastal desert to the Kalahari, from Warmbad to the Portuguese frontier, Firelily and he, and his good comrades Schwach and Fleische, they dashed madcap over sand, rock, bush; forded streams that could go from a trickle to a mile-wide flood in half an hour. Always, no matter which region it was through those ever-dwindling herds of blacks. What were they chasing? What youthful dream?

For it was hard to avoid a feeling of impracticality about their adventure. Idealism, fatedness. As if first the missionaries, then the merchants and miners, and lately the settlers and bourgeoisie had all had their chance at something and had failed, and now it was the army's turn. To go in and chase about that silly wedge of German earth two tropics away for no other reason, apparently, than to give the warrior class equal time with God, Mammon, Freya. Certainly not for the usual soldatesque reasons - young as they were, they could see that. Next to nothing to plunder; and as for glory, what was there to hanging, clubbing, bayoneting something that did not resist? It had been a terribly unequal show from the start: Hereros were simply not the adversaries a young warrior expects. He felt cheated out of the army life the posters had shown. Only a pitiful minority of the niggers were even armed, and then only a fraction of those had rifles that worked, or ammunition. The army had Maxim and Krupp guns, and little howitzers. Often they never even saw the natives before they killed them; merely stood off on a kopje and bombarded the village, then went in afterward to finish any they'd missed.

His gums ached, he felt tired and possibly slept more than normal, whatever normal was. But this had modulated at some paint into yellow skin, high thirst, flat purple spots on his legs; and his own breath sickened him. Godolphin, in one of his lucid moments, diagnosed this as scurvy, the cause being simply bad (in fact hardly any) diet: he'd lost twenty pounds since the beginning of the siege.

"You want fresh vegetables," the sea dog informed him, fretting. "There must be something in the larder."

"No. For God's sake," Mondaugen raved, "don't leave the room. Hyenas and jackals are padding up and down those little corridors."

"Try to lie quietly," Godolphin told him. "I can handle myself. I won't be a moment."

Mondaugen lunged off the bed, but flaccid muscles betrayed him. Nimble Godolphin vanished, the door swung to. For the first time since hearing about the Treaty of Versailles in detail, Mondaugen found himself crying.

They'll drain his juices, he thought; caress his bones with their paw-pads, gag on his fine white hair.

Mondaugen's own father had died not so many years ago, somehow involved in the Kiel revolt. That the son should think of him at this point indicated perhaps that Godolphin hadn't been the only one in that room to be "visited." As the partying rushed in phantasmagoria at and around their supposedly insulated turret, into blur, there had grown increasingly more visible one unwavering projection on the wall of night: Evan Godolphin, whom Mondaugen had never seen, save by the dubious fluorescence of nostalgia he didn't want, nostalgia forced on him by something he was coming to look on as a coalition.

Presently, heavy footsteps approached through the outer regions of his Versuchsstelle. Too heavy, he decided, to be Godolphin's returning: so craftily Mondaugen wiped his gums once more on the bedsheets and allowed himself to fall off the bed and roll back under an arras of satin comforter, into that cool, dusty world of old burlesque jokes and so many unhappy-go-accident-prone lovers in this real life. He made a little peephole in the coverlet and looked out: his view was directly into a high mirror that commanded, say, a third of the circular room. The knob turned, the door opened and Weissmann, draped in an ankle-length white dress with ruffled neck, bodice and sleeves, circa 1904, tiptoed into the room, crossing between the mirror's frontiers and vanishing again near the sferic equipment. All at once a dawn chorus burst from the loudspeaker, chaotic at first but resolving eventually into a deep-space madrigal for three or four voices. To which the intruder Weissmann, out of sight, added still another, in falsetto, to a minor-keyed Charleston:

“Now that the twilight's just beginning,

World, stop

Spinning;

Cuckoo's in his clock with laryngitis,

So he can't tell us what night tonight is.

No one among the other dancers has

Any

Answers, just

You, I, the night

And a little black sjambok . . .”