“Baby Balls?” I exclaimed. Banubula nodded and pursued his rigorous exposé with raised finger. “You are perhaps too young to remember how the British sense of humour was saved and revived after the first World War? By the Baby Balls organised by the Bright Young Things.”
“But what the devil is it?”
“Simply a Ball to which you have to go dressed as a baby, sucking a bottle, and preferably in a pram wheeled by a close friend.”
“Well I’m damned.”
“It worked Felix” he cried. “You would never have believed it. All those huge German business-men crammed into prams, dressed as babies, sucking on their bottles of milk, and waving clusters of coloured balloons. Nothing exceeded in pity and terror the sight of them entering so determinedly into the fun of the thing. We had thought of everything, you see. We had musical chairs, prizes for bobapple, buns and booby traps, cap-pistols and those streamers which uncurl when you blow them and go wheee….”
He mopped his face and laughed shyly adding only the vital words: “All Germany laughed and all Germany went back to work and the needle began to mount again on the production board. Do you see the delicacy of the whole operation, I mean?”
To say that our collective breath was taken away would be an understatement. We sat and gaped our humble admiration. The Count himself seemed transfigured by this simple but subtle success. “D’you know,” he went on “we had a special interview with Julian in which he congratulated us and said that he would see to it that we got an O.B.E. each in the Prime Minister’s next list.” The narration of this great coup de théâtre had so moved him that there was a long moment of silence while he applied himself to the delicacies of the establishment, giving himself totally, fervently, to the crumpets, and also to the toasted tea-cake. Caradoc gazed upon him with what one might call tears of admiration welling up behind his eyeballs. After so many years of waiting, of doing menial little jobs unworthy of his manifest genius … and at last to find his real bent in the firm. It was wonderful! Benedicta pressed his hand with sympathy and congratulation. Banubula himself was transported—he was quite beside himself, professionally speaking. I mean that there was not the slightest touch of complacence in his manner when he added “And this is only one occasion of many, many where we have been of vital use to the firm.”
“Tell about the Koro epidemic” said Caradoc who for once seemed generously pleased to let his friend hold the floor.
“Ah that!” said Banubula rolling his fine eyes. “That really did tax us to the hilt. Lambitus was actually ill afterwards and imagined all sorts of things. I wonder if I dare speak of it without indiscretion before….”
He nodded towards Benedicta who acknowledged the delicacy with a smile but spread her white hands in supplication. “Yes, please do. It is fascinating.”
Banubula mopped his brow, poked his handkerchief into his sleeve and sat back. “This will amaze you I think” he said. “It certainly took us by surprise. We had not heard of Koro before, which is known as Shook Yong to the Chinese of the Archipelago. In fact the first we heard of it was when Nash, who had been sent out with a group of psychiatrists to stem this epidemic if possible, sent a signal back saying that nothing could be done. It was an S.O.S. if ever there was one. Lambitus and I were at the Savoy Grill when we got orders to move in and set our brains to work on this problem which was threatening to disrupt whole sectors of our work both in Singapore and throughout the whole network of islands where we had enormously important sources of raw materials at work for the firm. By morning’s early light then, we were in the air, sometimes holding hands a bit as neither of us liked air-travel and the journey was bumpy: we were on our way to Singapore. May I have this last one?” He took up the last crumpet on the dish and used it lightly at a baton to punctuate his discourse, pausing from time to time to take a small bite from it.
“Now Shook Yong” he said in a faraway fairy-tale voice “and its ravages are hardly known to us occidentals, and when one first hears of it one thinks it rather far-fetched. But it is real, and it creates mass panics. What is it? Well, it is a belief that those who contract this disease experience a sudden feeling of retraction of the male organ into the abdomen; this is accompanied by a hysterical fear that should the retraction be allowed to proceed, and if swift medical aid is not available, the whole penis will simply disappear into the belly with fatal results for the owner.” He paused for the inevitable smiles. “I know” he went on gravely. “So it struck me at first. But it spreads like wildfire, whole communities get taken with Shook Yong just as our medieval ancestors, I suppose, contracted dancing or twitching manias. It is real, all too real. Now when a community is so afflicted they experience utter terror and in their anxiety to hold on to their own property they grab and pull it to prevent it vanishing: worse still, they often use instrumental aids such as rubber bands, string, clamps, clothes-pegs and chopsticks, and frequently inflict severe bruising or worse damage on the organ. Now what had caused all this trouble, which spread from Singapore like wildfire and gained the remotest corners of the landmass in next to no time, was a rumour set about (perhaps by the Indians) that Koro was caused by eating the flesh of swine which had recently been vaccinated in an attempt to combat swine fever. At once there was an almost complete standstill in the pork sales in markets, restaurants and so on—but those who thought that they might have been exposed to the disease by accident took fright. So Koro or Shook Yong became an epidemic to be reckoned with.* Everything was done to educate public opinion by press conferences and radio and journalism—but it was all in vain. The Ministry of Health reported that both the public and private hospitals were swamped by mobs of yelling patients holding on to their organs and calling loudly for medical aid. The scenes were indescribable. Oriental mass panic has to be seen to be believed. Poor Nash, who had arrived with some severe-looking but orthodox Freudians, was completely out of his depth, and indeed, when we found him, quite pale with terror at all the commotion. He was holding on to his own organ, not, as he explained, because he felt he had Shook Yong but simply because he feared to lose it in the general mêlée. I don’t mind confessing that for a while the whole problem seemed to me a bit out of our usual range. They hadn’t explained in London the meaning of these deplorable crowd scenes taking place all over the city. Freud was no help, however much the disease might have suggested an ordinary anxiety neurosis. You cannot ask a yelling Chinese to lie down on a couch and give you free associations for the word ‘penis’ when he is holding fast to his own, convinced that it is simply melting away. Worst of all, the telephones were humming from the plantations telling us that the epidemic had already penetrated into the countryside where the people are even more susceptible to mass suggestion than in the towns. We attended conference after conference, Lord Lambitus and I, listening to these grave accounts of a world turned upside down; and both of us completely perplexed as to what to do to lend nature a hand. As I gathered that the scourge had already been signalled among the Buginese and Maassars in Coelebes and West Borneo at other periods, it seemed to me that the whole thing would sweep over the subcontinent and perhaps die a natural death in Australia where they have another attitude to the male organ. But it was very disturbing all the same. It put us on our mettle. Yet there we were in an unfamiliar world, with the most arbitrary sanitation and precious little ice for drinks, beating our heads, almost our breasts, so worried were we.
“And at every conference the case-histories poured in, collected by devoted and whey-faced doctors. Just to give you a typical one to illustrate what was happening. A fifteen-year-old boy was rushed into the emergency ward of the clinic by his shouting and gesticulating parents calling for aid. The boy, they said, had contracted Shook Yong. The youth was pale and scared and was pulling hard on his penis to prevent it being swallowed up. He had heard about Shook Yong in school and that morning had eaten a little pow, which contains some pork, for his breakfast. When he went to the lavatory he saw that his member had shrunk
very greatly and concluded that he had contracted the scourge. Yelling, he ran to his parents, who ran yelling with him to the doctor. Here at least he might receive sedatives and reassurance provided he and his parents had reached the stage of evolution when things begin to make sense; mostly however they hadn’t. Well, as I say, Lambitus and I were at our wits’ end to devise some equitable way of ending this intellectual debauch. The Freudians keeled over one by one and even Nash, who had led the rescue group, was sent to hospital for a while and put under heavy sedation. He had, I believe, become prone to the contagious atmosphere which Koro creates, and had almost begun to believe … well, I don’t know. Anyway, everyone seemed privately highly delighted in rather a cruel way. But still we could make no advance on the problem. The season was breaking up, the monsoons were heralded. And now Lambitus, who is a man of iron nerve, quite unimaginative, as you have to be in the higher diplomacy, began to show signs of strain. He spent an awful long time in the shower-room every morning examining himself for signs of Koro. I began to suspect him of suspecting…. Well, anyway the situation was desperate. I sat night after night swatting giant moths with a bedroom slipper and brooding on the problem.
“Indeed I had reached the point when I had decided that we should return and confess our mission a failure when—how does it happen: Nash would know?—an old memory of my youth came to my rescue. You may know that when I was first engaged to the Countess we went round the world together; she said she wished to see me anew in each continent before deciding whether she would marry me or not—so there was nothing for it. It was a pre-honeymoon in a way, and by no means an unfruitful trip. She was an expert botanist, and I was already then working on my comparative folklore of fertility symbols in east and west. We came to Malaya, among other places, and indeed stayed a month on a plantation. From the recesses of these old memories I suddenly resuscitated Tune or Tunk—the small fertility God which is responsible for so much of the overpopulation in these parts and whose little effigy in clay one sees on cottage lintels. It came to me with the force of a forgotten dream that we might perhaps invoke the little deity’s aid once more to counter the nationwide (so it seemed at the time) retraction of the Malayan penis.”
“Do you remember” said Caradoc suddenly “Sipple’s account of his attack of Koro?—it must have been that. In the Nube, a hundred years ago?”
Of course I did.
“It must have been” said Banubula seriously. “It would have been terrible if such an affliction had spread into England. It could topple a Government—I saw it do so. And we couldn’t invoke little Tunc there because nobody believes in him or it. Anyway to resume my account of this strange episode: I woke Lambitus and breathlessly outlined my plan. He was ready to grab at any straw and eagerly backed me up. I obtained some ex-votos, some silk drawings unwittingly issued by the British Council, and set myself to think. In half an hour I had roughed out a more modern effigy which, if fabricated in mauve plastic (the national colour, by the way), might have charm and appeal for the afflicted.
“We rang up Julian and flew him home a sample. Of course we had visualised a vast free distribution of this charm, probably sowed broadcast from the air, but as usual Julian’s keen mind took hold of the problem and solved it. It would have no value to people unless they had to pay for it, he said, and I quite saw his point. We were to give away only a few thousand through the hospitals but put the rest—some four million at first printing—on the open market in order to forestall some similar kind of effort by the Catholics. Moreover he offered us one per cent which was really very handsome of him, and which has made us both extremely rich men. So was Koro finally brought under control by the kindly intervention of Tunc. I must say I am sentimental about the little God and always carry one on my watch-chain for good luck—though God knows at my age….”
Musing thus the Count produced a new gold watch-chain of great lustre and showed us a copy of the charm. “A pretty emblem, no?” he said modestly.
“But why in European characters?”
“Foreign magic has great cachet there. This was the foreign issue given away by the hospital administration. There was also a local version for sales distribution. We were a little worried about religious sensibilities, but everyone was delighted.
He sighed at the memory of these great adventures and glanced at the pristine gold watch which depended from the chain. “I have a conference” he said. “I must run along. I’ll meet you at the plane at six, Caradoc. Without fail, mind, and don’t lose that ticket.” And so saying he waved us an airy goodbye, only pausing to add over his shoulder, “We’ll meet in London I hope.”
Caradoc squeezed the pot dry and took up the final teacup. “Isn’t it marvellous to see what happens when people really find themselves?” It was, and we said so, somewhat sententiously I fear. Banubula had emerged from his cocoon like the giant Emperor moth he had always been and was now in full wing-spread. “You know,” said Caradoc polishing up the butter on his plate with a morsel of tea-cake “that is all that anybody needs. Nothing more, yet nothing less.”
And so at last the time came to take leave of him, which we did with reluctance, yet with delight to know that he was still to be numbered among the living. I spoke to him a little bit about his papers and his aphorisms and recordings—and indeed all the trouble Vibart and I had been to, to try and assemble a coherent picture of this venerable corpse. He laughed very heartily and wiped his eye in his sleeve. “One should never do that for the so-called dead” he said. “But it’s largely my fault. One should not leave such an incoherent mess behind. I didn’t know then that everything must be tidied up before one dies or it just encumbers one’s peace of mind when one is dead, like I have really been, in a manner of speaking. It was too bad and I am really sorry. We’ll order things better next time, for my real death. There won’t be a crumb out of place, you’ll see. The whole thing will be smooth as an egg, mark me. Not a blow or a harsh word left over—and even tape recordings burn or scrub don’t they?” He walked us with his old truculent splayed walk to the car-park and waved us goodbye in the misty evening. I looked back as we turned the corner and gave him a thumbs-up to which he responded. Lighting-up time by now with mist everywhere and foggy damp, and the wobble of blazing tram-cars along the impassive avenues. “I feel sort of light-headed,” I said “from surprise I’ve no doubt.”
Benedicta put her hand briefly on my knee and pressed before turning back to the swerves and swings of the lakeside road. “Perhaps you’ve contracted Koro” she said.
“Perhaps I have.”
“You must ask for an amulet from the firm.”
“I think I will. You can never be certain in this world; even the innocents like Sipple can get struck down it seems.”
The dark was closing in fast and soon I was drowsing in the snug bucket-seat, waking from time to time to glance at the row of lighted dials on the fascia. “Why so fast?” I said suddenly. “Light me a cigarette,” said Benedicta “and I’ll tell you. Tonight we shall hear from Julian. As it may be a phone-call I suddenly had a guilty conscience and thought we should get back.” I lit the cigarette and placed it between her lips. “And how did you know?” I said. “I had a postcard ages ago giving me this date, but it slipped my mind and I only remembered it all of a sudden while Caradoc was talking. If it’s too fast for you tell me and I’ll slow down.”
No, it wasn’t too fast: but it wasn’t a phone message either. It was a telex to the hospital from Berne, saying: “If Felix feels up to it and if you are free please meet me with a small picnic on the Constaffel, hut five, at around midday on the fifteenth. My holiday is so short that I would like to combine the meeting with a bit of a run on the snow. Will you?”
“The polite request disguises the command” I said. “Shall I decline? And what the devil is the Constaffel?”
“It’s where the practice slopes begin up on the mountainside; the Paulhaus always keeps a camper’s hut available there for the use of conval
escents.”
“Look Benedicta,” I said severely “I am not webtoed, and I am not going to scull about in the mountains on skis in my present state of health.”
“It’s not that at all” she said. “We can go up with the téléférique and the hut is about five hundred yards along the cliff-face with a perfectly good path to it. It won’t be snowed up in this sort of weather. We could walk, if you’ll go, that is. If not let me send him a cable.”
I was tempted to give way to an all too characteristic petulance but I reflected and refrained. “Let us do it, then” I said. “Yes, we’ll do it. But I warn you that if he appears disguised as the Abominable Snowman I’ll hit him with an ice pick and polish him off for good and all.”
“I count on you.”
They were easily said, these pleasantries, but in the morning lying beside her warm dent, her “form”, while she herself was making up her face in the little bathroom next door I found myself wondering what the day would bring, and what new information I would glean from this encounter. I went in to watch her play with this elegant new face, now grown almost childish and somehow serene. She had only half a mouth on which made me feel hungry. “Benedicta, you don’t feel apprehensive about this, do you?”
She looked at me suddenly, keenly. “No. Do you?” she said. “Because there’s no need to go. As for me I told you I had come to terms with Julian. I’m not scared of anything any longer.” I sat down on the bidet to wash and reflect. “I used the wrong word. What I dread really is the eternal wrangle with people who don’t understand what one is trying to do. I fear he’ll just ask for me to come back, everything forgotten, but never to try and run away again. It’s what they do to runaway schoolboys at the best schools. Whereas I am not giving any guarantees to anyone. I intend to always leave an open door.” Benedicta finished her mouth and eyes without saying anything. Then she went out and I heard her giving Baynes instructions about thermos flasks and sandwiches. So I shrugged my shoulders and had a shower.