Читать книгу Contango - James Hilton - Страница 3

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“Curious, the way things do jump out of nothing. This affair seems to have been begun by a hat blowing off.”

To Gathergood, as he said this, sitting on his bungalow verandah at Cuava with the temperature over a hundred in the shade and his whole body perspiring with the slightest movement, there came the sudden realisation of unpopularity. He had been conscious of it, at times, before; but never quite so definitely. He wondered if the planters had been telling tales against him, but he did not trouble himself much with the possibility; it was far too hot—an hour for anything rather than unpleasant speculation. He added, stiffening his glance as he met the eyes of the man across the table-top: “Of course it’s bad enough, in the result, but I’m not so sure that as much underlies it as you think.”

“You mentioned something about a hat blowing off?”

“Yes, Morrison’s hat. He was walking down from the club after tiffin, and just there”—he pointed with a jerk of the head—“where the path curves round the cliff his hat blew into the sea. He called to a native down below on the quayside to get it for him—a young Cuavanese named Naung Lo—but the fellow didn’t hear him, apparently. Morrison then scrambled down the cliff himself and made a scene. That’s as far as we can get before the evidence begins to be conflicting.”

“A planter named Franklyn was with Morrison, I understand?”

“Yes. Of course it’s on Franklyn’s evidence that Naung Lo was arrested. He says Naung Lo pushed Morrison into the sea.”

“Well, is there any doubt of it?”

“Naung Lo says he didn’t push him. He says he didn’t hear what Morrison had shouted, that Morrison then came down and hit him, that there was a bit of a struggle on the edge of the quay, and that Morrison suddenly toppled over. He also says that Morrison was drunk.”

“And I take it you accept this version of what happened in preference to Franklyn’s?”

“No, not altogether. I daresay Naung Lo may have pushed—I don’t see how, if there was a struggle, he could have avoided it.”

“Franklyn says Naung Lo hit first.”

Gathergood was silent a moment. Then he replied, rather slowly: “It’s too hot to take you to the scene of the affair or you’d realise that Franklyn, being thirty yards away at least, may not have been in the best position for seeing exactly what did happen. Naturally he was indignant about the death of his friend.”

“You wish me to infer that his evidence is false?”

“By no means, Humphreys,” answered Gathergood sharply. “I don’t suggest anything of the kind. But Franklyn admits that he stayed on the path up above, while Morrison climbed down to the edge of the quay where the whole thing took place.”

“But he doesn’t admit that Morrison was drunk.”

“No. Drunkenness is perhaps a matter of opinion. I can only say that I should have called him drunk when he left the club—I was there and I saw him. But that, of course, was half an hour earlier. Some men quickly throw off the effects.”

A long silence followed, which Gathergood broke by adding: “I think I should point out also that Naung Lo is slight in build, while Morrison was a six-footer. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, that the smaller man would begin the attack, without weapons— and no weapons were found on or near him afterwards.... And, of course, Morrison’s death was in some sense an accident, anyhow—he certainly wouldn’t have drowned if his head hadn’t struck a stone that stunned him.”

“Franklyn went to the rescue, didn’t he?”

“Yes. And Naung Lo stood by and gave what help he could. A point in his favour, I should be inclined to think.”

“Well, now we’ve had all the points in his favour—unless there are some more—perhaps we can consider those against him. He’s been in prison, they tell me?”

“Yes, several times—for theft. I don’t claim that he’s a highly moral character in any way.”

“And he was once in the employ of Morrison, but got the sack?”

“Yes, Morrison had to sack a good many natives. So have all the planters round here, with rubber down to fourpence a pound. The biggest item of evidence against the youth—I’ll tell you to save you the trouble of finding it out for yourself—is that he’s undoubtedly been heard to utter threats against Morrison. Morrison thrashed him once, and he swore to get even with him. He probably deserved the thrashing—though, on the other hand, Morrison was rather noted for that sort of thing.”

“Well, it establishes a motive, doesn’t it?”

“Certainly.”

The two men, Gathergood the Agent and Humphreys the Vice-Consul from the mainland, faced each other again in a lengthy silence. Then Humphreys said: “Of course, Gathergood, people are rather expecting you to do something about it.”

The Agent replied quietly, scarcely moving a muscle in the almost intolerable noonday heat: “I’m doing what I can, Humphreys. I’m trying to find out if there were other witnesses of the affair.”

“Still, you know, witnesses or not, the awkward fact remains that here you have an Englishman dead and a native somehow or other responsible. These things have a way of leading to trouble if they’re not smartly dealt with. What’s the present position?”

“Naung Lo’s in jail awaiting trial, or perhaps I should rather say, awaiting sentence. Cuavanese law is primitive, but quite brisk on these occasions. As soon as the Sultan decides that he’s guilty, he gets his head chopped off right away.”

Humphreys raised his eyebrows with a certain blandness. “And may I enquire if you have seen fit to offer His Highness any advice in the matter?”

Gathergood answered, still without movement: “The Sultan asked me if I thought the youth should be put to death and I said not yet, at any rate, because it seemed to me there were doubts.”

“Well, I suppose you know your own business best—or should do. But in these days, with all these political crimes everywhere— India, Burma—”

“Yes, quite, but I don’t think this has anything to do with it.”

“You’re by nature an optimist, perhaps?”

Gathergood half-smiled. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist, either. I just think one ought to preserve one’s sense of proportion, that’s all....”

Humphreys stayed on for a few days and then took the coastal boat back to the mainland.

Gathergood was forty-nine, and had spent a quarter of a century in various parts of the East. He had never married, nor had rumour ever associated him with a woman, white or coloured. He was aware that women did not particularly care for him, and he had never found their indifference hard to endure. With men, individual men, he had sometimes wished he could become more intimate, but even the wish for this had rarely been enough to make for keen disappointment. He knew, as indeed it was impossible not to know, that his intrusion into Cuavanese society had scarcely been a social success. He was neither gallant enough for the planters’ wives nor sufficiently alcoholic to be considered a good fellow by the planters themselves; whilst among the natives a reputation for fair dealing was outweighed by an unwillingness to give a dollar tip when half a dollar was ample. Moreover, all these negations were much emphasised by his having come to Cuava in 1927, after Bullenger, whose reputation for hard drinking and hard wenching had fitted easily into the spacious prosperity of the rubber boom, so that those golden years were still remembered in some such phrase as: “Ah, that was in poor old Bullenger’s time.” A tribute, wistfully inaccurate, since the man had been neither poor nor old, but had died wealthy and prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver; and a censure, by implication, on the stiff, more difficult fellow whose succeeding regime had coincided with Cuava’s decline from affluence to penury.

In appearance Gathergood was tall, spare, and nearly as brown- complexioned as some of the Malays; he had fine teeth and a strong chin, but was not otherwise good-looking; his chill blue eyes repelled more often than they attracted. In speech he was decisive, but rather slow; indeed, his eyes more often commanded than his voice.

After the departure of Humphreys he went on with his job, which was not normally very onerous, and was decidedly not among the plums of the service; apart from acting as go-between for British merchants doing trade with Cuava, giving occasional advice to the Sultan, and attending to such matters as quarantine and the immigration of British Chinese from Hong-Kong, there was not a great deal to do. His bungalow, which included an office, stood on a spit of land just above the water-front, and was chiefly built of reed and thatch after the local fashion. A few of the planters had been able to afford Europeanised bungalows out of the profits of the boom years, but on the whole Cuava was still primitive in these matters—owing chiefly, no doubt, to the fact that it remained a native state, under a Sultan who enjoyed a more than technical independence of the authorities at Singapore and Batavia, though faintly compelling eyes were often cast upon him from those quarters.

Cuava, capital of the island and state of the same name, was the only white settlement, and its white population, due to the slump in rubber, was rather rapidly decreasing. Perhaps forty or fifty survivors of a once prosperous community lived on the two hills that lay behind and above the native kampong; a few of them had their wives, but most were considerate enough to make do with the resources of the locality. There was a Welsh doctor who shared his activities between Cuava and another island a day’s journey distant; and there had once been an American missionary who had been converted from missionary work by the superior opportunities of buying up rubber estates. Occasionally a European sea-captain came ashore and spent a few days drinking and yarning at the club. This latter institution, inevitable where two or three Englishmen are gathered together, was the centre of Cuavanese society, the fount of its corporate wisdom, the source of its rumours, and the sounding- board of its various opinions. It stood on the hill nearest the estuary, adjacent also to the plantations, and surrounded by billowy land which enthusiastic new-comers always dreamed of turning into a golf-course until they had their first experience of the sweltering Cuavanese summer.

Down in the native kampong on the water-front there was reckoned to be a mixed population of some ten thousand Malays, Chinese, and Sikhs. Many of them had been attracted from overseas when work and pay on the plantations were both plentiful; now, with these conditions at an end, an existence not far above the starvation line was somehow contrived. They lived in ramshackle huts on the edge of the river-mud, and except when they caught cholera or smuggled gin authority was glad enough to leave them alone.

Authority, indeed, resided five miles inland, well removed from the commercial and maritime atmosphere. There, enclosed by primeval jungle, was situated the Sultan’s palace, with its private apartments, its imperial harem, and its government offices, council chamber, prison, and military arsenal; a mysterious and legendary place to the white planter who rarely or never visited it.

Gathergood had acted for four years as a species of liaison officer in this complicated and peculiarly balanced society, and that he had not achieved the personal popularity of his predecessor did not by any means signify his failure at the job. On the contrary, he had comfortably surmounted all the various minor difficulties that had arisen from time to time; his relations with the Sultan were good, and his periodic reports to Singapore models of humdrum neatness. His job was not the kind that all men would have envied, but he himself had no particular complaint to make of it. The Sultan’s government was strong and fairly free from corruption; his own health was excellent; he was used to loneliness; and, perhaps most fortunately of all, he had no investments in the local estates and his salary did not depend on the price of rubber. Yet, during the days that followed the departure of Humphreys, he was aware of a changed note, a feeling of tension in the air, not lessened, he guessed, by talks which Humphreys had had with the leading planters during his visit. As he dictated business letters to his one Eurasian clerk he did not fail to observe the look of feverish enquiry in the violet-brown eyes that stared above the typewriter-roller. Recent events had provided sensation for bungalow and kampong alike; already the dead Englishman was beginning to acquire among the planters the legendary habiliments of martyrdom. And among the natives, too, there were hints, rather than evidences, of trouble; wage reductions on the estates had prepared a soil well suited to the flowering of unrest. All this Gathergood sensed with an involuntary stirring of distaste; he lacked sympathy with the jingo impulsiveness of the planters nearly as much as with the Bolshevist nonsense that was beginning to permeate the mob.

With relief, when he had discharged his daily routine of duties, he turned as a rule to his botanical specimens, of which during his years in Cuava he had made a large and varied collection. It was probably, he sometimes thought, the most complete of its kind in the world, since the island seemed to have been just as unaccountably neglected by naturalists as by explorers. That range of mountains, for instance, barely visible on a very clear day from the rubber estates—curious, he thought, that none of the planters ever desired to climb or investigate them. Gathergood had done so several times, struggling through difficult miles of mangrove swamp and jungle. “Was it worth while?” he was once asked on his return. “Did you strike any gold reefs, buried treasure, tin deposits?” He had answered, with a simplicity so odd that it was misread as a pose: “Hardly that, but I did find two quite remarkable things on the summit—a small lake that always had ice on it in the early mornings, and little blue forget-me-nots, growing just as they do in England.” Which was a type of remark that proceeded rather eccentrically from the mouth of a British Agent in a club-room of rubber-growers.

One morning, while his enquiries into details of the Morrison case were still pending, one of the younger planters, not long out from home, called on him and remarked with candid indiscretion that the planters were not at all satisfied with the way matters were developing. “And neither was that fellow Humphreys,” continued the youth, even more indiscreetly.

“And neither am I,” added Gathergood.

The youth went on: “Not of course that Morrison was a saint, by any means, but, still, the poor beggar’s dead, and we’ll have the whole pack on top of us if we let ’em get away with a thing like that. It’s the example to the rest that’s so damned dangerous.”

“I hope not, if we all keep our heads.”

“That won’t help things much, with the tappers already talking revolution. Perhaps you heard of the strike of coolies this morning?”

“Some small trouble over a shipment. It’s settled now. There’s trouble all over the world, for that matter. We mustn’t get excited.”

“You keep on saying that, sir, while all the time things are heading for a crisis.”

Gathergood smiled, more charmed than displeased by the frankness of the outburst. He guessed a little of the resentment smouldering behind the youth’s words, that dream of being lordly and prosperous that had wilted during a few months’ experience of dragooning natives on a nearly bankrupt plantation. Gathergood felt sorry for him. He touched his arm—a rare thing for him to do to anyone—and answered: “Don’t worry. When I next see the Sultan I’ll indicate to him, if I can, the desirability of keeping his kampong hotheads under control. He doesn’t want trouble, remember, any more than we do.”

“He’ll get it, though, if he’s not mighty careful, sir. It’s pretty obvious he’s shielding Morrison’s murderer. It can’t go on. Everyone knows these native states are ana—ana”—he stumbled over the half-known word and added, more confidently—“out-of-date.”

There was a certain pathos, to the Agent, in the triteness of all that. It was rather like saying “I do think flowers are lovely” at a horticultural show. On the club verandah it was the everlasting small change of minor grousing; while in Singapore civil servants had grown grey in turning it into Blue Book prose. Gathergood did not conceive it his duty either to have or to express an opinion on the subject. Cuava was Cuava; he was content to accommodate himself to the system as it existed. He took little interest in politics, and had no passionate conviction that direct control from Singapore would be an improvement. He said, comfortingly: “All the same, I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”

But the youth’s remarks had made him feel that he might, perhaps, expedite his visit to the Sultan. He went that evening.

Gathergood had no car; the lack of roads in Cuava made one an unnecessary expense. There was, it is true, a track of sorts leading steeply up to the Sultan’s palace, but the Agent preferred the more tranquil if slower method of having his native boys paddle him upstream to a point from which the palace lay but half an hour’s walk uphill. He had travelled thus on many occasions, and had perfected a pleasurable technique in sparing his boys as much expenditure of energy as possible. He first let the canoe drift across the estuary with the incoming tide; then he steered his way amongst the slow channels of the mangrove swamps, thus escaping the force of the current in midstream. It was possible, except at the height of the dry season, to traverse almost the entire distance in this manner; the journey took time, but there was rarely any particular reason for hurry. Nor did Gathergood find the scenery tedious as others might have done; the swamps were certainly desolate, but he could find plenty of interest in them, the more so as their tangles of rotting foliage had often yielded important additions to his naturalist’s collection. He liked the play of light, especially towards sunset, on the pale, sword-like nippa leaves; and the swish of the wind through them amused him sometimes by its likeness to human whispering.

That night he arrived at the Sultan’s private landing-place amid the warm scents of twilight. He climbed the wooden stairs, crossed the jetties of split palm-trunks, and took the ascending path to the palace. When at last he reached it, the widespread litter of buildings, with lights here and there, was shrouded in mystery, but it did not affect him; he knew it well enough, and after a few words to a turbanned sentry was admitted through familiar entrances into familiar rooms. Most of them were of the same type, though larger than the ordinary Cuavanese but; and only the throne-room, into which he was finally ushered, presented any original features. It was a lofty wooden apartment, lit with oil-lamps and hung with mats and strips of red cotton sheeting; it also exhibited, apparently as an objet d’art, a three-year-old business calendar advertising a San Francisco insurance company.

Gathergood, thin and ghost-like in his white ducks, waited for several moments without impatience. He was a man who did not object to waiting, and to whom the mere saving of seconds seemed of little value without some definite use for the time saved. It was this attitude of mind which, though he had never thought out the question, gave him ease in dealing with Orientals and made him often appear stiff and dilatory before the quick-dealing Westerner.

At length a door opened and Gathergood made a profound bow. An old, an almost incredibly old man was tottering forward. His body, which had once been very tall, now stooped to a mere five feet above the ground; his head, wrinkled and shaven, was partly covered by a turban of green silk; while the rest of his attire revealed itself, to all outward conjecture, as the badly-fitting uniform of a liner-steward.

Yet, with every inelegance and incongruity, there was a quality in the old man that made Gathergood’s bow a fitting gesture. Pathetic dignity reposed in the slowly raised head and in the grim, toothless smile; the nose and lips, strong and sensual at one time, had been thinned by age to a sharpness which, with the small, gleaming eyes, reminded Gathergood of newspaper pictures of Philip Snowden.

Meanwhile the Sultan of Cuava held out his hand with a brave imitation of the western salutation. Gathergood offered his own hand, and the old man held it limply for a moment. “Your Highness is well?” queried Gathergood, and a cracked, scarcely audible voice replied: “Very well, Tuan.”

But it was rather obvious that he was not. He was wheezy, asthmatic, and unsteady on his legs; only with assistance from Gathergood and two personal attendants did he finally seat himself on the royal throne, which was a shabby wooden affair, decorated with strips of coloured cloth. He was, indeed, immensely old—some said over a hundred, though that was probably an exaggeration. It was well established, however, that he had feasted on human flesh during his earlier manhood, and that he had begotten several children since becoming a great-grandfather; nor was it impossible, as legend asserted, that he had once slaughtered with his own hands two hundred prisoners captured in battle. One could imagine sometimes that the memory of such exploits gleamed in his brilliant eyes; and, in fact, most white visitors (such as government officials from Singapore) were so apt to imagine things of this sort that they scarcely ever managed to treat him as a human being. Gathergood, however, was not a man of imagination, nor, in his relations with the Sultan, was he troubled by reflections sinister or abstruse. It did not occur to him that His Highness’s nondescript clothing and enormously developed stomach made him comic, or, at least, any more comic than his own notorious chastity must seem to the Sultan. The two of them, one so old and the other no longer young, respected each other. Sometimes they talked about plants, birds, and insects; the Sultan was interested in Gathergood’s expeditions to the interior and had always used his influence to further them. His eyes forgot their years during such interviews, and the Agent, shouting the lilting Cuavanese dialect into the old man’s ear, chatted with no more difficulty than with some deaf old crony in an English bar-parlour.

That evening their talk was protracted longer than usual. Bright-turbaned attendants brought the Agent a long ceremonial cigarette, and lit beside him two large, beeswax candles. The first question, raised by the Sultan himself, concerned a letter he had recently received from an American university, offering to confer on him the degree of Doctor of Literature in return for a registration fee of a hundred dollars. The Sultan, sincerely proud of the distinctions that civilised countries had already granted him, asked Gathergood’s advice; and the latter returned a simple negative. It was thus that they had dealt with many problems during the past four years.

Then they touched upon the future of Naung Lo, still in the Sultan’s prison in connection with the Morrison affair. The Sultan had been deeply perturbed by the tragedy, and was willing, indeed eager, to behead somebody. Gathergood described his continuing investigations, adding: “It still doesn’t seem to me that the case has been proved.”

The Sultan inclined his head. “Very well, Tuan. He shall wait.”

Then Gathergood outlined, as well as he could, the difficulties that might arise out of unrest in the kampong. He suggested that the Sultan should increase the native police force, put an extra tax on the sale of gin, and issue an official edict denouncing the doctrines of Russian and Chinese communism. The Sultan, who had been very pro-British during the War, and whose habit of mind was inclined to be fixed, could not entirely escape the conviction that he ought at once to arrest and behead the crew of a German sailing-ship loading cutch in the estuary; but at the end of Gathergood’s explanation he signified an earnest and cordial agreement with all the main points.

After that, as the old man was obviously fatigued, Gathergood made to depart. But there was one other matter which the Sultan broached with almost a child’s shyness. “Tuan,” he croaked, holding Gathergood’s hand again, “I have some pictures for you.” He took out of his jacket pocket a small Kodak, from which, with a smile, the Agent removed the used film. It was the Sultan’s principal hobby, and though many of his snapshots tended to be either obscure or obscene was always ready to oblige by developing them in his little improvised dark-room at the bungalow. “I will bring them to you next week,” he answered, and the Sultan responded, with conventional courtesy: “Good night, Tuan Bezar. Your visit has made me very glad.”

Events, however, prevented Gathergood from keeping his promise. That very night, while he was asleep under his mosquito-net, a score or more planters, fully armed, marched on the Sultan’s palace, forced an entrance, kidnapped Naung Lo from his prison-cell, and hanged him from a tree in the jungle less than a mile away.

Gathergood did not hear of this till the morning, when his house-boy brought him the sensational news. He was, for him, immensely disconcerted. He was even, when he had begun to consider it, appalled. In all that the Morrison case had so far meant to him, there had been simply the question of the accused man’s probable guilt or innocence. Of the tangled interplay of motive, racial and political, that might lie beyond that straightforward issue, he had been remotely aware, but he had shrunk from it; he lacked intricacy of vision, and his instinct was always to ignore the intangible. Now, at a stroke, the merely judicial question had been transformed into a matter of vaster significance which he took some time to comprehend. He sat for over an hour before his office-desk, thinking things out with an entire absence of personal passion that concealed, nevertheless, a growing inward uneasiness. The day was warming up; clammy and so far sunless, it sent hardly a ripple of sea moving over the sandbars of the estuary, and the tops of the rubber-planted foothills soared into a creamy haze. Towards midday he sent a boy with written messages to all the planters, asking them to meet him in the club-house during the afternoon. That done, he deliberately wrote business letters as usual and gave the daily orders to his Chinese cook; after which, having taken a drink and a sandwich, he walked up the hill to the club-house.

The planters awaited him there in a mood of sultry, half-shamed truculence. It was possible that already, in the light of day, their exploit seemed less wholly estimable. But this reaction was itself counterbalanced by an intensifying of their feeling towards the Agent; sprawling over the chairs and tables, they faced him as if whatever might be unstable in an unstable world, their hatred of him was sure. They clung to it, for defence, for companionship, for very love of one another; and seeing them, Gathergood suddenly felt himself a scapegoat for all the trouble that had visited Cuava since his predecessor left it—for untapped trees and rebellious labourers and bankrupt companies, for dread movements on distant stock exchanges, for doom that could sweep as swiftly as pestilence. He, the Jonah, had come to Cuava as a human symbol of unluck, so that upon him, it seemed, the rage of men against events must now be concentrated.

He was not a good talker in public, but he had prepared what to say, and it was, as he said it, very simple. The night’s escapade, he began, without preamble, was as dangerously mistaken as it was utterly unjustifiable. At this there was much dissent, and he waited quietly for silence. It was typical of him that the arguments he developed had an almost legal precision; Cuava, he reminded them, was the Sultan’s territory, and the attack on his palace could only be regarded as equivalent to an act of war. Neither the home government nor that at Singapore could or would defend them in such a matter. Here a shout of “We can defend ourselves” stung him to a retort which, being impromptu, was more humanly pungent: “Perhaps, then, you’ll tell me how a few dozen whites can hold out against twenty thousand natives if the latter make a concerted attack?”

He talked for some time, dealing with interruptions and questions as they arose; he was calm throughout, and perhaps this calmness, as much as anything, became eventually impressive. He stirred misgiving in their minds, then doubt, then a touch of panic, and, last of all, a chastened mood in which one of them could ask, almost humbly: “Well, Gathergood, granted that there may be something in what you say, what would you recommend us to do about it?”

The Agent had his reply ready. “Choose one of yourselves as a representative, and let him come with me to the palace immediately— we’ll smooth things down as best we can.”

At this, as Gathergood had expected, there was a further uproar of dissent and defiance; he stood watching and hearing it emotionlessly, his eyes remote and implacable. All he said when the shouting subsided was: “Well, gentlemen, it’s for you to decide. You asked my advice and I gave it. I know the Sultan is reasonable; if he can be convinced that no personal insult was intended, and that you were merely carried away by your feeling about Morrison, a good deal of the harm may yet be undone. Think it over.” Suddenly, at that, he turned and left them, walked out of the club, and back through the oven-heat to his bungalow.

Till evening he rested; then a deputation of planters came to see him. He received them on his verandah, offering drinks, which they declined. They announced without courtesy, their decision to take his advice, and Franklyn, who had been Morrison’s particular friend, was the representative they had chosen. He was a tall, sallow-faced man of about fifty; he lived with his wife in the largest bungalow on the hill, and had never troubled to disguise his dislike of Gathergood. The latter now glanced at him and replied: “Very well. If you’re ready, Franklyn, we’d better go up now, without delay.”

Franklyn laughed with forced cynicism. “All right, if it’s got to be done. You guarantee a safe return, I suppose, Gathergood? No doubt you’re in a position to—the old boy’s rather a pal of yours by all accounts? So long as I don’t get pushed overboard, like Morrison, or stuck by a kris.... If I do, you’ll be responsible. Personally, it seems to me a damsilly thing to go bootlicking to a nigger.”

Gathergood did not reply. He was calling his house-boy and giving orders about the journey.

They went, not by canoe, but in Franklyn’s Ford, driven by the planter himself up the winding, rutted track amongst the hills. Little was spoken; the fact that Franklyn’s apology would be completely insincere did not, of course, matter much, but it made for Gathergood an extra discord between them. As the journey progressed the Agent became conscious of the hairline precariousness of the entire situation, and of the alarming extent to which he had personally become involved in it. He tried to think if at any point he had taken an incautious step, or had come to an unwise decision; but everything he had decided seemed preferable to the likely results of doing otherwise. He even in a certain sense looked forward to meeting the Sultan; it might be comforting to talk things over quietly with that serene old patriarch. A reasonable man, Gathergood stressed to himself; whatever else, a REASONABLE man....

But once again the march of events had tragically forestalled. What happened is best described in Gathergood’s own phrases, as he had to compose them for a later audience. When he and Franklyn arrived at the Sultan’s palace they were admitted, not to the Sultan, but to a congress of sons and grandsons, by whose orders they were promptly arrested and flung into prison, without any chance of explaining their mission. The aged Sultan, it appeared, had died of an apoplectic fit caused by the excitement of the previous night’s attack on his domain.

The two prisoners were without weapons; they tried the walls in vain for any means of escape, and at length lay down on the mud floor in sheer weariness. Towards midnight by Gathergood’s watch Franklyn was led out by armed guards, with whom the Agent expostulated and struggled in vain. The planter’s subsequent fate was never definitely established—the exact manner of his death, that is to say. Gathergood, however, was released later on during the night—apparently on account of his friendship with the late Sultan. To his enquiries, entreaties, and protests about Franklyn, he could obtain nothing but evasive replies.

Driving back to his bungalow as fast as the Ford would take him, Gathergood might well have wished that no such distinguishing clemency had been shown him. That he did not, that he steered unhesitatingly down the craggy hillsides, was clue to the curious singleness of mind that permitted him only one purpose at a time. He felt the seriousness of the situation rising round him like a gale, but he had no conception of the force of the wind or of the general direction in which it was blowing. Turned now, by logical process, into a man of action, he drove through the dark jungle tunnels with one thought new and foremost in his mind—the deliverance of Franklyn. He did not then know or suspect that the planter was dead, but the fact of his being held a prisoner was serious enough. And he began, thinking clearly during that summer dawn, to make plans for contriving or enforcing a release. He perceived that the entire English colony in Cuava must now be mobilised for defence, that help would have to be summoned from the mainland, and that in these matters there was not a moment to be lost.

When he reached the water-front not far from his bungalow he found that hostilities had already broken out between the whites and the natives. His first instinct, even amidst so many greater urgencies, was for the suppression of disorder nearby, and when he could no longer drive the car, he jumped out amongst the mob of drink-inflamed coolies and knocked down one man whom he saw looting a store. He was himself hit and badly battered, and might have suffered more severely had not the crowd been scattered by a volley of rifle-shots from the surrounding hills, where the planters had already improvised a firing-line. Several natives were killed and wounded, and Gathergood was unlucky enough to get a bullet through his leg.

So began one of those apparently spontaneous outbreaks which from time to time acquaint the British taxpayer with the extent and variety of his responsibilities. The trouble at Cuava, resulting in the death of one Englishman (Franklyn) and fifteen Chinese and Cuavanese, made a sufficiently startling headline for the London breakfast-table, whither it was served along with the tactful information as to where and what Cuava was. A question was later asked in the House of Commons, in reply to which the Under Secretary for the Colonies announced that a cruiser and two gunboats had already arrived at Cuava from Singapore, that order in the affected districts had been completely restored, and that a full and exhaustive enquiry would be held as soon as possible.

At that enquiry Gathergood was, of course, a principal witness.

He had been ill of a fever following his wound, and as if that were not enough, a dose of malaria had pushed further the attack on his normally robust health. During the days before the cruiser could take him on board he had been looked after by his Chinese cook— the only person who, in that emergency, had seemed to care what happened to him. Afterwards, at Singapore, he had spent a month in the government hospital—until nearly the time of the enquiry. He then engaged a room at the Adelphi. He found the bustling and expensive life of the place a strange and soon a tiresome contrast from Cuava. He had never cared much for cities or for the gaieties they offered, and Singapore, during the hot season, with its gaunt-chested rickshaw- men sweating along the tarred, sticky roads, made him long for the enquiry to begin and end so that he might get away. He was lonely, too—a condition he had never known in Cuava, but which the crowded public rooms of the hotel induced unfailingly. He knew nobody, though he was uncomfortably aware that he was known to many by sight—the trouble on the island having been featured so prominently in all the local newspapers. He had read them in hospital, of course, and knew by now that Franklyn’s death must be presumed. It had been a tragic blow, not so much on account of the man personally, as of the revelation it gave of a world in which folly led to folly and violence begat violence. If there were anyone whose death he did personally mourn, it was the aged Sultan. All would have ended happily had he been alive, and the Agent thought with sympathy of the old, wrinkled potentate whose life- interests had so pleasantly progressed from cannibalism to photography.

The enquiry, held in one of the government buildings, began on the hottest day of the year; the stifling atmosphere, impregnated with the smells of dust and leather and teak panelling, affected everyone with fatigue or peevishness, and even the chairman seemed once or twice on the point of falling asleep over his opening oration. He was a pale and elderly civil servant, rather obviously timid in the presence of his colleagues, one of whom, a red- faced, bristling, stiff-backed major, had an air of challenging even the temperature to a trial of endurance. The rest of the committee comprised two members of the local legislature and a naval commander, a lithe, careless- looking Irishman with a nearly bald head and impudent eyes. In attendance on the five were a mixed bevy of white and Eurasian shorthand-writers and newspaper-men; while a small gallery at the rear was occupied by such members of the public as had been fortunate enough to secure cards of admission. There had been a keen demand for these among the friends of the committee, and the result was a quite fashionable audience, mainly of women eager for drama. Conspicuous in the front row, a single touch of black amongst the prevalently brighter colours, sat Franklyn’s widow.

The chairman spoke long and tediously, and it was not till the second day, during which a heavy thunderstorm broke, that the gallery occupants could feel their patience rewarded. Late in the afternoon Gathergood was called. He had not been permitted to attend the earlier sessions, but newspaper reports had already given him some idea what to expect. Yet though he had thus prepared himself for the small insolences of cross-examination, it had certainly never struck him that he would be treated less like a witness than a prisoner on trial. Grimly, after his first hour of questioning, he perceived that things were to be even worse than had seemed possible. His words were being misquoted, his actions misdescribed, and his motives misinterpreted. With all his awareness of unpopularity, he had never guessed that even the bitterest dislike could frame such a conspiracy, or that, if framed, it could prevail with reasonable persons. But perhaps the men and women facing him were not reasonable. They represented him, for instance, as having condoned the murder of a white man by a native, and of having interceded with authority on the latter’s behalf. It was implied that he had definitely taken the part of the native Cuavanese in a matter affecting white prestige. His mission of pacification to the Sultan was held up as an act of humiliating unwisdom equivalent to handing a hostage to the enemy. He had, it was to be inferred, deliberately led Franklyn to his death. At this point in the proceedings Mrs. Franklyn broke down and sobbed audibly for several moments, while the chairman stuttered out a few sentences of sympathy. When the cross-examination was continued, Gathergood was uncomfortable as well as grim, and created a definitely bad impression on listeners already predisposed to receive one; his very carefulness in choosing words, which was normal to him, was taken for over- subtlety—as when, for instance, he answered: “No, it wasn’t that I thought Naung Lo innocent; I only thought that he might not be guilty.” This, spoken in slow, deliberate tones, sent a hot draught of exasperation across the room.

He was asked, of course, about that final tragic pilgrimage to the Sultan’s palace with Franklyn, and he described it with an exactness that made no glimmer of appeal for sympathy. The truth was, his anger, always slow to rise, was now engulfing him in the blackest bitterness of soul. He would not, by a word or by a movement of a muscle, plead with these people who were so obviously bent on vilifying him. He sat rigid in the straight-backed seat, his blue eyes fixed in a stare that only occasionally quickened, and only at one spectacle—the clock that ticked away his ordeal. Once or twice, faint with the heat, he found his attention wandering, and generally it was some outdoor scene that flashed momentarily before him, some remembered spot on one of his jungle expeditions, the place where he had found the sciuropterus or that Polypodium carnosum. And then, breaking in upon such ill-timed tranquillities, would come the chairman’s rasping monotone: “Are we to understand, Mr. Gathergood... So, Mr. Gathergood, it amounts to this, that you... Now, Mr. Gathergood, let’s be quite clear about it—you say you ... ” And so on.

Yet the Agent was never near breaking down under the strain. He was upheld by his bitterness; relentlessly he gave reasons why he had done this or had omitted to do that, and even the major’s querulous: “But surely, man, you must have realised ... ” only drew from him a quiet: “I didn’t realise it, anyway.” Once the naval commander interjected, apparently to the assembly in general: “Of course we must all remember how easy it is to be wise after the event”; and Gathergood gave him a swift glance in which just more was visible than mere assent. But on the whole he preserved an outward emotionlessness that antagonised his hearers as much as it disappointed them. The commander tried sometimes to counter this by skilfully leading questions; he remarked, for instance, at one juncture: “I should think, Gathergood, you must be feeling yourself rather an unlucky fellow. Things seem to have gone persistently wrong in all your calculations—a sort of chapter of accidents, eh?”

Gathergood began to respond: “Yes, and as a matter of fact...” and then checked himself sharply; whereat the major, pouncing to the occasion, barked out: “Continue with what you were going to say, Mr. Gathergood.”

“Nothing of any consequence—a mere reflection of my own that can hardly matter.”

“Never mind, let’s have it,” snapped the major, enjoying himself; and the chairman nodded emphatically.

“I was only thinking that the whole thing began with an accident— quite a trifling one—Morrison’s hat blowing into the sea—”

Again the wave of exasperation passed across the faces. But the end was near. On the afternoon of the fifth day Gathergood was suddenly informed that he need not stay further or attend again. He bowed to the chairman and walked, briskly limping, from the room. He felt that the manner of his dismissal was that of a conviction and sentence all in one. Even the Eurasian attendant with whom he had left his hat treated him with barely concealed superciliousness.

That evening, while he was taking coffee in a corner of the hotel lounge, he was surprised to be accosted by the naval officer who had been a member of the committee. His name was Holroyd, and after a few perfunctory remarks he planked himself down at the same table. Gathergood, though not especially anxious for company, offered a drink, and they chatted together for some time, but without mentioning the enquiry; then Holroyd suggested that the Agent should stroll over with him to his hotel, the De la Paix, for another drink. Gathergood agreed and they finally sat up in Holroyd’s private room till nearly midnight. The commander, in this more intimate atmosphere, was breezily candid. “I daresay you’ve guessed by this time, Gathergood, that you’re going to get all the blame—which I don’t suppose you deserve—nobody does deserve what he gets in this world, whether of blame or anything else.”

Gathergood said very little in reply; he had explained himself exhaustively and in public for four days, and had no desire to go all over the ground again. He merely sipped his whisky and let Holroyd go on talking.

“The question is,” continued the commander, “what are you going to do now that the show’s over?”

That was the question, undoubtedly; and from the moment of his dismissal from the enquiry-room Gathergood had seen it confronting him. He answered, a trifle curtly: “Well, I don’t want to stay here.”

“I should jolly well think not.... How’re you feeling now, by the way? Pretty rotten, I expect, after your leg-smash and all the strain of the talky-talky.”

“My leg’s healed well and I feel all right.”

“How about putting in for a spell of sick leave, anyhow?”

“I don’t consider myself really ill.”

Holroyd grunted. “Well, Gathergood, if you won’t take the hint, it’s no use beating about the bush. I’m here, speaking quite frankly, to make a definite suggestion to you—put in for leave and get away back home. Not necessarily to England—in fact, on the whole, I’d say not England, for the time being. Take a long foreign holiday somewhere—nice little places in France or Italy... anyway, clear off pretty quick out of this rotten hole. There’s going to be a hell of a rumpus when the report comes out, and if you take my tip, you won’t wait for it.”

“I’m due to retire next year, you know.”

“Then it fits in rather well, doesn’t it?”

“I’d rather have served out my full time. Not in Cuava, of course, but—”

Holroyd shook his head. “I’m damned sorry, Gathergood, but you can wash out all idea of that. Absolutely no point in mincing matters, is there? But if I were you, I wouldn’t fret about it. ’Be damned to you’—that’s the feeling to have when fate gives you a knock in the eye.”

“I see,” replied the Agent quietly. For the first time then he showed signs of emotion, though only for a few seconds. His mind received the full impact of the future, recoiled a little, and then steadied itself. “Yes,” he added, in control again, “I think that’s just about my own attitude too.”

That midnight, as soon as he was back in his own bedroom, he wrote out a formal application for leave, received an affirmative reply by return of post, booked his passage on a French liner bound for Marseilles, and sent his former Chinese cook two hundred dollars and instructions for the packing and transhipment of his belongings from Cuava to a furniture depository in London.