All the newspapers were blazing, but they were blazing in different colours, with variations of heat, light, and smoke. The arrival of Dinamaula was headline material, but it did not precipitate the hundred per cent universal row which would have greeted it a month or so earlier. For some stomachs, Shebiya had been too strong altogether; for others, too foreboding. Also, Dinamaula himself had proved curiously uncommunicative. He admitted that he was ‘disappointed’. He said that he was ‘sad to leave’. He declared that he ‘still regarded himself as chief’. Then he stopped talking, and went into effective hiding.
Certain of the newspapers, however, held their course unwaveringly.
‘The issue in Pharamaul is democracy versus colonialism,’ said the Daily Thresh, editorially. ‘It is as simple as right and wrong. If we exile Dinamaula, we are guilty, before the entire civilized world, of the betrayal of black mankind.’
‘The issue in Pharamaul is crystal clear,’ said the News Intelligence. ‘We are using the mailed fist of officialdom to crush a simple, trusting people. But it is not too late to reverse this indecent process. Forget the past! Send Dinamaula back to his bereaved nation!’
‘The issue in Pharamaul,’ said the Globe, ‘has never been clearer. Let Dinamaula claim his shapely white bride, and return in triumph for a glamorous, thrill-packed honeymoon under the tropical palms.’
‘The situation in Pharamaul is a mess,’ said the New Nation. ‘Moreover, it is a mess of our own making. A handful of stuffed shirt jacks-in-office is sabotaging, in the sacred name of discipline, a gallant people on the verge of well-earned self-government. The least we can do is to send Dinamaula back with apologies – and plenary powers.’
‘On page 4,’ said Glimpse Magazine, ‘a photograph of some goats at Gamate, taken by Lebourget & O’Toole – presumably to keep their hands in. It was as near to the famed “Shambles of Shebiya” as the British would let them come.’
But other newspapers were having second thoughts, for all sorts of reasons.
‘The issue in Pharamaul demonstrates the need for firm handling at the summit – and the current lack of it,’ said the Onlooker. ‘This government of elderly ditherers is directly responsible for the atrocities at Shebiya. If we are going to rule, let us rule like men, not Etonian mice with drooping grey whiskers.’
‘The issue in Pharamaul,’ said the Earl of Erle (Gold Stick in Abeyance, Leader of the House of Lords) in a letter to The Times, ‘is a classic example of too little and too late. It recalls India, and, to a certain extent, America. Firmness tempered with a due regard for the susceptibilities of a backward people should be our watchword.’
‘We did right to sack Dinamaula,’ said the Right-wing Sunday Mirror. ‘He is hand-in-glove with the gang of perverts and communists who have made his country a hotbed of dirty-minded thuggery. Let him stay sacked!’
‘As anyone with any knowledge of the national character might have forecast,’ said Clang, ‘Britain was second-guessing about Pharamaul. If he had done nothing else, hoofed-out chief Dinamaula had made them take a long, long look at their colonial responsibilities. Until last week, there had been nothing like it since the red-coats were routed at Bunker Hill.’
‘The issue in Pharamaul,’ said the Daily Telegram, ‘is a delicate one.’
Above all, Parliament itself was thinking again. On the afternoon of Dinamaula’s return, there was another long Question Time session on Pharamaul, the sixth in as many weeks; but it was neither as one-sided nor as awkward as the preceding ones. The horror of Shebiya, freshly reported in the newspapers, was in everyone’s mind; and those who came to rant and roar about the blazing injustice involved in Dinamaula’s removal found an unreceptive House and a firm Minister. It was even possible to detect the actual embryo of this unreceptiveness; the moment when the tide began to turn. It was, as so often in the history of disputation, a moment of laughter.
Emrys Price-Canning was on his feet, wagging a scornful finger at Lord Lorde, the Minister for the Scheduled Territories Office, and launching a series of supplementary questions which accused the latter of double-dealing with the electorate, bullying backward peoples, inventing atrocities, betraying Britain’s historic mission of emancipation, and exiling a true martyr. But Price-Canning was not carrying the House, which had heard it all before, and he knew this, and it drove him to explore the realms of metaphor and simile. The flight was unfortunate.
‘Since Pharamaul without its chief,’ he began yet another question, ‘is like a rudderless child–’
There was a titter, and then a loud burst of laughter which flooded the whole chamber. Price-Canning shook his head angrily, waited for the noise to subside, and then threw in: ‘The laughter of fools …’ by way of rebuke. But he did not recover from the setback; his supplementary petered out into silence; and presently the topic itself ground to a halt, with nothing settled and no verdict given.
But the Minister had the last word, and he used it like a layer of slapped-on vanishing cream. The Government, said Lord Lorde, by way of graceful congé, realized that the need was not for the cut-and-thrust of debate, but rather for a dispassionate assessment of the known facts; with this in view, they would shortly table a White Paper on the origins and development of the disorders in Pharamaul, and their wider implications. The House and the nation could then see if the action over Dinamaula were not justified. Meanwhile …
Meanwhile it was enough for the Parliamentary bookies, who presently, in the cosy hideaway of the Members’ Bar, calculated the odds as even money against a full-dress debate, four to one against a Government retreat, and ten to one against Dinamaula’s returning to Pharamaul within three years.