The Empire Trilogy (118 page)

Walter, returning to his senses, now realized that Abdul, his Malay major-domo, had approached silently and was eyeing him with concern.

‘What news, Master?'

‘Good news, Abdul,' replied Walter conventionally. The fellow clearly wanted to tell him something. He bent an ear.

‘A
what
, Abdul? A yogi?' Walter stared in amazement at the elderly Malay who had been in his service for some years and for whom he felt a considerable affection and respect.

The major-domo explained. The yogi had come to entertain the guests. It was the idea of the young
Tuan
Blackett.

‘Well, tell the bloody man to go away again. It's supposed to be a dinner-party, not a circus.'

‘Yes,
Tuan
.' The old man smiled faintly for there was a bond of sympathy between him and Walter when it came to the behaviour of the younger generation and it was clear that he, no less than Walter, had found the idea of a yogi at a dinner-party outrageous.

‘But no, wait, Abdul. On second thoughts we must let Monty make his own decision about the yogi. He'll never learn if we always have to tell him what's what. I shall let him take charge of the dinner-party this evening. There probably won't be more than a dozen guests or so and they can be served in the breakfast-room. Tell him, will you, that I won't appear until after they've eaten. I've work to do.' And as the old servant was leaving Walter added: ‘The boy must learn by his own mistakes, Abdul. There's no other way, I'm afraid, no other way.'

Alone in his study Walter was once more preoccupied with his family, this time with his son. Monty had energy and he worked hard. He had done a good job in reorganizing the administration of their estates when business was expanding again after the Depression. He was doing a good job now of pushing through the replanting, very often against opposition from estate managers who could not see the logic of it when rubber was booming. He even had some business sense which, with experience, might be developed. But the boy was erratic, there was no other word for it. Every now and then he would produce some wild idea that made you wonder whether he had understood anything at all. A yogi to entertain at supper on a day like this! True, he had not known that Mr Webb would collapse, but all the same! And they had barely recovered from the Chinese band he had insisted on having at the garden-party.

Moreover, Monty was no longer, strictly speaking, a boy. He was thirty. If he were ever going to learn by his mistakes it was high time that he started. Walter could not help comparing him, unfavourably, with a photograph he had once seen of the five young Firestones, each one as neatly brushed, as smartly turned out in his identical dark suit as his four brothers. And each one, no doubt, with a perfect command of that day's
Wall Street Journal.
You would not catch the young Firestones inviting fakirs to dinner-parties.

Monty had certain good qualities but he was seriously lacking in judgement. Perhaps this would not have mattered if it had been merely a question of the occasional bizarre idea for amusing guests, but alas, it was not. In 1936 Monty had been sent to take charge of the London office for a few months to learn the European side of the business and, while he was there, he had got Blackett and Webb involved in something that anyone with common sense would have avoided. Towards the end of that year Monty had lent the authority of the firm to a great wave of speculation which was being generated by the rubber dealers and brokers in Mincing Lane. Mincing Lane's market analysts, peering into the swirling mists of the future, had perceived not only an approaching shortage of rubber but, stretching beyond that shortage, higher prices as far as the eye could see (that is what they said they had perceived, anyway). The brokers' market reports were in little doubt, they declared, but that the Restriction Committee had decided on maintaining higher prices indefinitely; after all, it could make little difference to the manufacturers who would simply pass the increases on to their customers. And even if the Committee had
not
decided on a higher price it was well known, in Mincing Lane if not in Malaya, that not enough rubber could be produced to meet higher percentage rates of release. Besides, there was a shortage of labour. Besides, it was well known that once the native smallholders, who produced almost half of Malaya's rubber, made a little money, as they would with present high prices, they had the amiable habit of downing tools instead of pressing home their advantage, preferring to doze the day away in hammocks. So, one way or another, a shortage of rubber was inevitable. There was a quick fortune to be made.

Well, promotion of this sort, designed to make your mouth water, is what one must expect of a commodity broker. After all, such a fellow has to make a living somehow and Walter was the last person to hold that against him. But a steady market is not much good to a broker: he wants prices to rise or fall (he does not mind which provided they do one or the other). And if the market declines to fluctuate of its own accord it must be encouraged to do so. A cold night in Brazil and frost has wiped out the coffee plantations. A high wind in Jamaica and it's goodbye to bananas. Fair enough. Walter did not expect the commodity broker to emerge clad in different stripes simply because he was dealing in rubber. But for Monty to give Blackett and Webb's support to such devious special pleading struck Walter as so foolish as almost to amount to the work of an imbecile. Perhaps he had made some money for himself from a judicious trading of rubber shares, yes, perhaps even a large amount, though, if so, he had evidently lost it again gambling. But that was not what he was there for. Fluctuating markets do not help producers because an artificial boom brings with it inevitably its dark shadow, a collapse. And a collapse in prices brings for more difficulties for the producer that the boom earlier brought advantages. But what really angered Walter was something different, something even less tangible. It was the damage which had been done to Blackett and Webb's good name.

Walter got to his feet and stretched wearily. A murmur of voices from another part of the house told him that Monty's guests had arrived. He hoped that the boy would behave in a suitably subdued manner, given the circumstances. Presently, he himself would have to put in a brief appearance. ‘Poor old Webb!' he thought as he settled down at his desk and began to read through the bundle of cables which had been steadily collecting on it all afternoon in his absence. But as he sat there, deep below the surface of his working mind, a disturbing thought shifted imperceptibly once or twice. To whom would Mr Webb leave his share of the business?

After an hour he felt hungry and remembered that he had had nothing to eat since mid-day. The clink of cutlery and cheerful conversation came to him faintly from the breakfast-room. It was clear that not everyone was allowing Mr Webb's approaching end to weigh on his spirits. Reluctant to join this cheerful gathering he made his way towards the dining-room, thinking that perhaps there might still be some food set out there.

Entering the dining-room he received a shock, for the servants, evidently uncertain as to the evening's arrangements, had left the room exactly as it was. The long table was still set with eighty places in silver cutlery. Bowls of flowers and silver candlesticks alternated from one end to the other while at each place there stood a little family of wine glasses in which toasts would have been drunk to Mr Webb on his birthday, to himself, to the firm's future prosperity. But what had given Walter such a shock were the four life-size heads fashioned of cake and icing-sugar, crude but recognizable, which had been set up on side tables, one in each corner of the room. Two of the heads he recognized immediately: one was of himself, benign, dew-lapped, cheeks unnaturally rouged with cochineal, the scalp tonsured with white icing-sugar. The other, more lifelike, represented old Mr Webb's gaunt and dignified features. It seemed to Walter that a cold, almost cynical smile hovered about his former partner's lips, and for a moment he found himself believing that real thoughts might be passing through the fruit-cake brain behind those piercing pale-blue eyes of sugar, that he was thinking: ‘So! You thought you had got rid of me at last!'

Recovering from his surprise Walter advanced smiling to read a sugar inscription which announced that these cakes had been presented on the occasion of Mr Webb's birthday and the inauguration of the firm's jubilee celebrations by Blackett and Webb's Chinese employees who had collected subscriptions for the purpose, perhaps, Walter surmised, with the tactful encouragement of the publicity department but nevertheless … This was unexpected and gratifying, given the troubled labour situation in the Colony. And to think that only a few weeks earlier all work in the rubber godowns had come to a halt and Singapore had trembled on the verge of a General Strike! ‘Now who are these other chaps?'

One was clearly intended to be Churchill, but a Churchill with slanting eyes and an Oriental look, manifestly the work of a Chinese pastry-cook. It took him a moment longer to recognize the fourth head, thin-featured, high-cheekboned, facing Churchill diagonally across the room but eventually he realized that it must be Chiang Kai-shek. How patriotic the overseas Chinese remained and, considering everything, how well organized!

In the past three years while the Sino-Japanese war had continued to boom and crash like a distant thunderstorm here and there over the mainland there had been a great multiplication of so-called ‘Anti-Enemy Backing-up Societies', not all of them, alas, controlled by the Kuomintang. Sinister letters by courier from Shanghai to the Malayan Communist Party had been intercepted (according to the Combined Intelligence Summary), declaring that ‘a victorious war for China will be the overture for an emancipation movement in the colonies.' A memorandum from the Special Branch of the Straits Settlements Police warned against the influence these patriotic societies might acquire with the Malayan Chinese, thanks to their anti-Japanese stand. In appearance, harmlessly engaged in collecting funds to support the Chinese army, many of these ‘National Salvation' and ‘anti-enemy' organizations were in fact under the control of the Communists.

Finding no other food in the dining-room and unwilling to interrupt his train of thought by summoning one of the ‘boys', Walter broke off one of Mr Webb's ears and munched it, pacing up and down. How many of his own employees who had perhaps subscribed to these effigies in cake of hated imperialists were at the same time secret members of, say, the Overseas Chinese Anti-Enemy National Salvation Society or of the even more outlandishly named Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps (the latter, to be sure, thought not to be Communist-led and, despite its bloodcurdling title, specializing in nothing more violent than the occasional tarring of a shop in the city for selling scrap-iron to the Japanese), not to mention more conventional gangs like the Heaven and Earth Society? Walter found it disturbing to know so little of where the real allegiance of his employees might lie. ‘Not with us, anyway! Or only when it suits them.' The strikes which throughout this summer of 1940 had caused the foundations of the Colony to shake were, moreover, only a local manifestation of an ominous awakening of labour throughout the Far East. Shanghai at this very moment was in the embrace of a transport strike which, as it grew, scattered pollen far and wide. First, the British-owned Shanghai Tramways Company, then the China General Omnibus Company had stopped work. Pollen had been carried on the wind from the International Settlement into the French Concession to fertilize workers of the Compagnie Française de Tramways et d'Eclairage Electrique de Shanghai.

‘And the next thing you know they're all at it!' One of the cables which Walter had glanced at a few minutes earlier brought news of a meeting organized by the Shanghai General Labour Union on the 27th at which some ninety-odd unions had been represented. The rubber workers' union, the restaurant workers' union, the weaving and spinning workers' union, the bean sauce workers' union, the silk filature workers' union, the ordure coolies' union, the wharf coolies' union … and so on and so on. Shanghai, despite its almost incredibly precarious political situation, was important to Blackett and Webb. But Walter was more worried by the general implications of the strikes, for where Shanghai led, the rest of the Far East had a habit of following. Admittedly, workers in Shanghai were in real desperation. All the same Walter did not doubt but that the pollen could be carried across the South China Sea to Malaya and Singapore.

Walter halted in his pacing: again he was aware of a cold, cynical, even bitter expression on the icing-sugar features of his former partner, as if that fruit-cake brain were now thinking: ‘This would never have happened in my day!' Well, that was true enough. Malaya's gigantic labour force had been docile in the old man's day when there were always ships to be seen anchoring in the roads crammed every available inch with wretched, fermenting, indentured coolies. In those days there was always cheap labour to be had. It had been the Depression which in the end, here as elsewhere, had brought about a change. Faced with great numbers of unemployed among the Chinese the Government had spent some millions of dollars in repatriating them to China: this display of munificence had been generated by the shrewd calculation that the cost of relief would be even greater if they remained in Malaya. But it had not done the employers any good.

In 1933 the Aliens Ordinance had dealt another blow to the business community for it gave the Governor the power to limit the number of aliens landed in the Colony. Although the intention had been more to check the arrival of Communist subversives from the mainland than to limit the size of the labour reservoir, this had proved, nevertheless, to be its effect. The cost of recruiting in China plus an increase in shipping fares had made it less expensive to recruit
free
workers locally than to ship those cargoes of
indentured
coolies. The Indian Government in the meantime, in the belief that Malayan businessmen were exploiting its subjects, had taken steps to limit the flow of Indian workers into the country.