Free The Book of the Heathen by Robert Edric Page A

opened and someone else was shown in by the porter.
    This man stood for a moment, accustoming his eyes to the dimmer light of the room. At first he did not see me. He, too, went to the lion skin. He pulled a chair to the wall, stood on it and examined the animal’s head more closely. I heard him talking to himself, remarking on what a poor job had been made of preparing the skin. I rose then, making as much noise as possible to announce my presence to him. I expected him to climb down from the chair and come to me, but instead he searched for me, saw me against the glow of the fire, and asked me if I had ever seen a less fearsome-looking lion.
    I went to him, the volume still in my hand.
    â€˜Are you a committee member?’ he asked me.
    â€˜I’m here for interview,’ I said.
    â€˜Ukassa Falls, the concessionary Station?’ He leaped down and came towards me with his hand out. ‘Nicholas Edwin Stephen Frere,’ he said. ‘When I was five, my dying father confided to me that I had been an unwanted child, that I was unlikely to inherit anything from him, and that I was called Stephen against my mother’s wishes after the saint who was stoned to death.’
    â€˜It seems a lot to take on at such an age,’ I said.
    â€˜Death-bed confidence. And you?’
    I told him my name as we shook hands. He repeated it, grasping my hand more firmly. He closed his eyes for an instant, opened them, and said, ‘Some Technical Difficulties Concerning the Azimuth Mapping of Near-Polar Latitudes.’
    It was the title of a paper I had published two years earlier; four pages long with a further seven pages of calculations and two sides of references. Sixty copies of the off-print still sat in my bureau; twelve copies of the journal in which it appeared sat in my bookcase. I had submitted three further articles on the strength of this acceptance, and all three had been returned. It was hard for me to believe that anyone else had read the article, then or since.
    â€˜Were you long at the Pole?’ he said.
    â€˜At the Pole?’
    â€˜Mapping.’
    I had been no further north than Edinburgh and told him this.
    â€˜I imagined as much,’ he said, and burst into laughter. He pulled the chair back to where it had stood and pointed me back to the fire.
    â€˜I’m surprised you remembered it,’ I said.
    â€˜I have a curse of a memory. Practically everything I read or see or do, I remember.’
    We sat in seats on either side of the fire. He seemed perfectly at home there, as though he were a regular visitor.
    â€˜Was this what you expected to find?’ he asked me. ‘All this, this room, this building, all this ostentation, all this marble, brass and mahogany?’
    I told him I hadn’t known what to expect.
    â€˜And which position are you here for?’
    â€˜Map-maker.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜Good?’
    â€˜I personally am offering my worthless self up for the post of – ’ he pulled a folded sheet from his jacket – ‘Officer in charge of Acquisitions and Chief Cataloguer. Two posts.’
    â€˜What will they involve?’
    â€˜Who knows? Means and needs, I suppose. Much like your own position.’
    â€˜Are you hopeful?’ I asked him.
    â€˜Hopeful that when my money bond is paid it will be sufficient.’
    I knew that this was how these positions were often acquired. My father had written letters of recommendation; I had brought sealed envelopes to his business partner.
    I wished I had known then that Frere had published fourteen articles and papers, six in the same journal as my own, and that he had written and published two books, the first at his own expense, concerning the classification of microscopic fauna. But I knew nothing of any of this until we were quartered together on the Alpha three months later. Another man might have made more of my solitary article merely as an introduction to his own, but not