The weather did not help much. Often, at this time of the year, it grew oppressive, discouraging all personal enterprise, from lovemaking to petty larceny. But now, as if to demonstrate which side was the side of the angels, it turned a little cooler; and Pharamaul, freed from a ninety-five-degree noon temperature and a brutal humidity, gave itself afresh to the delights of popular demonstration. Throughout the length and breadth of the land, men stirred, and looked about them, and rose early to raise hell.
In Port Victoria, they were much heartened by the success of the strike at the club – and especially by its aftermath. On the morrow of the abortive club dance, and the shameful early closing of the bar, the Committee girded its ample loins and – impelled by the furious resentment of ninety per cent of its members – sacked the entire club staff from the major-domo who allocated the seating in the dining-room, to the diminutive youth who brought the cold drinks for the adolescents who hung up the tea-towels after the dishes had been dried.
The Committee then sent out an appeal – by Press, radio, proclamation, broadsheet, word of mouth, and police grapevine – for one hundred and forty Maulas of either sex, aged between ten and sixty, to undertake remunerative employment at the Pharamaul Club. Within half a day, the results of that appeal, and their full implication, were known in every home in Port Victoria. For not a man, not a boy, not a washgirl or sweeper, came forward to offer their services.
The consequences were immediate, and catastrophic. For the first time in sixty-five years, the Pharamaul Club failed to open its doors at sundown.
There were some who blamed the Committee, some who blamed the Press; some who blamed Dinamaula, or William Ewart O’Brien, editor of the Times of Pharamaul, or even Sir Elliott Vere-Toombs – who was, ex officio, Honorary President of the club. There were others who just could not make up their minds, and blamed democracy, or communism, or South Africa. The only zone of agreement concerned the extent of disaster and affront. If this could happen, anything could happen.
The trouble was, of course, that the Maulas were demonstrably in a far stronger position than were the club members. It was notorious that Maulas could live on nothing a day; the local equivalent of the Asiatic handful of rice was a couple of mealie-cobs and a swig of kaffir-beer. They could always stay alive, somehow; and they all had hordes of relatives, anyway … On the other hand, the members had to have their club; in the entire course of their adult lives, they had never had to do without it, and it was too late to start now.
Various expedients were tried. An appeal to the Governor for police action to break the strike was politely dismissed, on formal grounds – there was no evidence of intimidation, only of passive resistance to employment. An attempt was made to draft in servants from private houses; but after an evening given over exclusively to acid comment on how terribly badly everyone else’s servants were trained, this was abandoned. An emissary was even sent to Dinamaula, at his lodgings in Port Victoria, asking him to use his influence to persuade recruits to come forward; the messenger returned with the unheard-of, dusty answer: ‘The chief-designate is not running an employment agency.’
Then the LADIES themselves tried, toiling in eight-hour shifts and running the club on a canteen basis. This worked for two nights, and was then likewise abandoned. The trouble was social rather than organizational. Everyone wanted to preside behind the bar, and sometimes to sit on it; no one volunteered to cook or to wash up. The cloakrooms degenerated into a sordid maze of stopped-up toilets and dirty towels; the kitchens were stacked waist-high with greasy crockery. One entire collection of signed bar chits, covering forty-eight hours, was inadvertently put into the incinerator. The bar itself lost a fortune.
The Committee met again, for the eighth time in five days. The meeting was brief, the discussion simple and pointed. They needed the club. The Maulas didn’t need it. The Maulas would thus have to be reinstated.
But now a further difficulty arose. The spokesman for the dismissed staff trained in heaven-knew-what school of trade-union dialectics, suddenly confronted the committee with an unprecedented demand for an increase in wages.
‘What?’ It was the Chairman himself, Twotty Wotherspoon, who was the first to explode. ‘Good God, you must be round the bend! What the hell do you mean, an increase?’
The spokesman, a smiling young Maula whom hitherto they had only known as the quickest and best of the dining room stewards, was smiling still. He stood before the five-man committee in the Secretary’s office – the first time in his life that he had penetrated thus far.
‘An increase, sir,’ he answered. ‘Ten shilling increase.’
‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ said Wotherspoon, a strong and florid man with a tendency to high blood pressure. ‘We’re actually offering you your jobs back. All of you. We’re prepared to forget the rotten way you behaved, the other night. Walking off the job like that …’ He drew a heavy breath. ‘Well, never mind. We want you to get back to work, straight away. What about it?’
‘Increase, sir,’ said the young Maula. ‘Cost of living increase. Ten shillings.’
‘Bloody sauce!’ said Splinter Woodcock.
‘Get to hell out of here!’ said the Chairman.
The young and smiling Maula withdrew.
The very long silence that followed was finally broken.
‘You know, we’re wasting our time,’ said McCarthy, the youngest committee member present. ‘We’ve been wasting our time for a week. They’ve got us by the short and curly ones. Can’t you see that?’
‘But it’s bloody blackmail!’ said Binkie Buchanan.
‘Of course, if you want to side with those bolshy bastards …’
‘Call it what you like. It’s time we faced facts. We need them on the job, and they know it. They’re putting on a squeeze. We either give in, or close up the club.’
‘Bastards!’
‘What do you suggest, then?’
‘He says he wants a ten-bob raise. Offer him five. Five shillings a month, all-round increase.’
‘We can’t afford it.’
‘You know bloody well that we can. And even if we can’t, we’ll have to.’
It was on such ignoble terms, only concluded after a further full half-day of negotiation, that the Pharamaul Club got under way again.
As a strike, it had perceptible elements of humour; but in another part of the town – the dock area – there was a strike of another sort, with very different implications.
It started with a tavern brawl, involving some sailors off a small South African coastal freighter, and a Maula waiter who had been serving them. Either he was not quick enough for their liking, or he answered back, or he brought the wrong change, or he spilt some beer on a sleeve or a trouser-leg – versions differed widely, and lost nothing in the telling. But whatever it was, it sparked a murderous riot.
The unsatisfactory Maula servant was first sworn at, and then roughly assaulted; some of his friends joined in, with ugly intent: the South African sailors were forced to retreat, one with a torn scalp, another with a knife-wound in the shoulder. Ill-contented with this, they marched swaggering down the main dock street, shouting and shoving people off the pavement, followed by a crowd which presently hemmed them into a corner and seemed ripe to give them a bloody manhandling, if nothing worse.
The pushing and jostling, the catcalls, the wild black faces, the steady drone of anger and threat, proved too much for their nerves. One of them drew a gun, and shot a Maula through the head. Then they made good their retreat and, backed by the threat of the gun, fought their way back to their ship.
It sailed inconspicuously with the tide that night. It was the last ship to do so, for a very long time.
The dead Maula was a stevedore, a man famous for his strength and endurance, a shift boss who had many friends. At dawn the following day, after a mass meeting at the dockside, every single Maula employed in the dock area – stevedores, cranemen, winchmen, firemen, checkers, oilers, messengers, berthing parties, pilots’ boatmen – walked off the job and vanished without trace into the town.
It all seemed to happen naturally and inevitably, the direct result of murder and mob anger; but it was also so well organized that it seemed to fit, even more naturally, into the current mutinous pattern of Pharamaul. It was something for the police, something for the town council, above all something for the Governor.
While the authorities investigated, and dug up what witnesses they could, the docks and the harbour seemed to fall dead, at a single stroke. Ships could not sail, ships could not enter, cargoes could not be moved; many of the new arrivals had to anchor in the long ground-swell offshore, unable to establish contact, or to find a vacant berth for themselves, or even discover what was happening. It was as if that particular corner of the island were tainted by plague; no one could enter, no one had the strength to leave.
After an emergency meeting with his advisers, at several levels, the Governor, as a first step, tried to find out who was behind it all, the particular and patently efficient organizer who must be approached in order to find a solution. He failed utterly in this search; so did the police. Dinamaula disclaimed all knowledge; his cousin Zuva, who was staying with him, returned a blank, impertinent negative to all inquiries, while his ‘bodyguard’ smirked and rolled their eyes. At the end, Zuva said, as if contributing something of value: ‘Perhaps they do not choose to work for murderers.’
And one of the bodyguard, a short scarred man with a look of inward violence, said: ‘Perhaps they want their chief.’
The harbour continued dead and forlorn, while the city merchants fumed, perishable cargo rotted on the quayside, and ships’ captains sent messages, scrawled on signal pads, asking what the hell was going on. No one could tell them, because no one knew.
The Governor, back at his desk in the Secretariat after abortive conference with the police, decided that for his part also there was nothing to be done. It must surely be better to wait, and see if the thing would blow over, rather than to make himself, and the police, and the town councillors, ridiculous, by searching for a man, or men, who did not seem to be there at all … In any case, there was no further violence in the town, simply a denial of activity. And what he had to deal with was only a shadow of what now began to happen, two hundred miles to the northwards, in Gamate.