Contango (Ill Wind) (3 page)

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.