Contango (Ill Wind), Page 2

  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 counter
balanced 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 cour
se, 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.