Contango (Ill Wind) (2 page)

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.