When Tulbach Browne of the Daily Thresh arrived in Gamate, he did not immediately make contact with Dinamaula. Being an experienced newspaperman, he saved the best to the last, knowing well that the delay was likely to give him a better story in the end. Before he saw Dinamaula, he wanted to see the place where he lived, and the people he lived with, and the Maulas whom he ruled, and the white men who, in a truer sense, ruled the Maulas and Gamate and Dinamaula himself as well. Armed thus, and with his prejudices sharpened, he hoped to come upon Dinamaula with a dozen barbed inquiries that would tie his series of stories up into one neat, poisonous bundle.
His headquarters was now the Gamate Hotel, and from there he foraged diligently, a small figure in a seersucker suit and a broad-brimmed hat, intent on the murder of fact. What the Maulas themselves thought of him was never recorded, though he did slip into their tribal legend, much later, as a cloudy figure who had brought trouble and bloodshed to Gamate at a fearful moment in its history – a sort of fore-running Wicked Wizard who never returned to witness the working-out of the curse he had laid on the town. Maula children of a later generation were to know him as ‘White Man with Forked Tongue’. In their games, he was the butt, the figure of fun who might, in certain circumstances, spoil everything and emerge as the grisly victor.
But just now he was Tulbach Browne; and as Tulbach Browne he gave Gamate a thorough going-over. He went everywhere – in the hotel, on the aboura, touring the outlying districts, calling at the Residency, hanging round the tribal office, knocking on any door, saluting any man, bribing any child. He had a car at his disposal, a hired car from Port Victoria, with a grinning driver who had never had it so good … In the first week, which included a sudden dart back to Port Victoria in order to file a confidential despatch to his paper, Tulbach Browne’s taxi bill was £125.
No one on the Daily Thresh would have complained that this sum was wasted. The piece he did on ‘Gamate’s Tin Gods’ was alone worth the money … It stemmed from a half-hour talk with Llewellyn, the agricultural officer, and a longer call on Andrew Macmillan up at the Residency. From the latter, Tulbach Browne had returned with the inward smile and the itching fingers that only a typewriter could assuage.
Macmillan had received him, as he did all his visitors, sitting on the stoep that overlooked the Residency garden, and the broad vista of Gamate that lay below it. The four red-jerseyed convicts were still at work on one corner of the lawn, under the occasional eye of the fat warder with the spear, and it was this that gave Tulbach Browne his first question.
‘Do those lads earn any extra money for working here?’ he asked offhandedly, as soon as Macmillan had poured their drinks.
‘No,’ answered Andrew Macmillan shortly. He had had a long day already, and only a Government House directive about ‘making himself available to the Press’ had reconciled him to this interview. Indeed, recalling that directive (which mentioned ‘due caution and reserve’ in its second paragraph) he would scarcely have received Tulbach Browne at all – and certainly not at this hospitable level – had it not been for the tradition of welcome that was an essential part of Gamate, and innumerable places like it. In such towns, sprouting like grateful flowers in a desert, the dusty traveller must always be cared for, the weary stranger refreshed. Andrew Macmillan had entertained hundreds of such visitors at the Residency – officials, tourists, priests, traders. Tulbach Browne was part of a moving frieze of guests, as inevitable as the ants in the garden outside … ‘We don’t pay them anything extra,’ he went on, explanatorily. ‘It’s included in their normal prison routine. They’re all hard-labour convicts.’
‘But you have to pay for their time, of course?’
‘No,’ said Macmillan again.
‘Sounds like forced labour,’ said Tulbach Browne.
‘It’s nothing of the sort,’ said Macmillan tartly. ‘They’ve got to work somewhere. They would much rather be doing garden work, out-of-doors, than sweating away at breaking rocks or digging drains, down at the prison. You just ask them.’
‘Well,’ said Tulbach Browne jovially, ‘it means that you get four gardeners for free, anyway.’
‘It’s not my garden,’ said Macmillan. ‘It belongs to Government.’
There was a short pause. Tulbach Browne stared ahead of him, pursing his lips, already well pleased. There would be no need to take notes, at this rate … The phrase ‘Slave labour would probably improve your garden, too,’ and ‘Nice work if you can get it – for nothing’ swam briefly before his eyes.
He said: ‘I suppose there was a lot of excitement when Dinamaula got back here?’
‘There was the usual party,’ answered Macmillan, rather wearily. ‘Dinamaula was a good excuse for it.’
‘I see you take a rather detached view of the whole thing,’ said Tulbach Browne, eyeing him. ‘Blasé overlord’, he thought, slipping into sub-headings. ‘Godlike eminence…’ Aloud, he continued, ‘But a new chief is something special, after all.’
‘Certainly he’s something special, and I don’t take a detached view at all.’ Macmillan felt himself getting nettled, realized that it was foolish and possibly dangerous, and took a pull at his self-control. ‘It’s part of my job to see that that sort of occasion doesn’t get out of hand.’
‘You mean, they’re allowed to celebrate, as long as the party doesn’t get too rough?’
‘Yes,’ said Macmillan, and added: ‘Like London on Boat-race night.’
Tulbach Browne steered away from the reasonable comparison. ‘It must be very satisfying,’ he commented, ‘to be able to organize people’s lives so completely.’ He saw Macmillan opening his mouth to protest, and he chipped in quickly: ‘Ah well, it’s over and done with, anyway … Have you seen Dinamaula yourself?’
‘Yes,’ answered Macmillan. ‘I had him up here.’
‘Had him up?’ repeated Tulbach Browne carefully.
‘Yes. I wanted to talk to him.’
‘Anything special?’
‘About his interview with you.’
‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t like it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I thought he went too far.’
‘Did you tell him so?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean, you read the riot act?’
‘Yes.’
Tulbach Browne sighed. This was so much better than he had hoped that he was inclined to leave it at that. But he wanted one more phrase, if possible, to complete this particular section.
‘How did Dinamaula take it?’ he asked.
Macmillan laughed. ‘You’d better ask him,’ he said. ‘I’m not a mind-reader.’
‘Doesn’t it matter to you, then?’
‘No,’ said Macmillan, and then corrected himself. ‘It matters, of course, but it’s not really important. There are certain rules in a territory like this. They have to be obeyed, whether a man is a chief or a herd-boy.’
‘That’s what you told Dinamaula? Toe the line, or else?’
‘There’s no “or else”,’ said Macmillan hardly. ‘It’s just “Toe the line”, as far as I’m concerned.’
Now there was another pause, a much longer one, while the insects renewed their attack on the flyscreen doors, and the sun cast shadows longer by the breadth of a finger, and the four convicts, squatting economically on their thin shanks, advanced a pace or two towards the edge of the lawn. Macmillan, passing his hand over his face, became conscious of three things – that he was tired as he had never been tired before, that he had spoken far too emphatically about something that had really had a softer outline altogether, and above all that he was not doing well with a man whom he must regard as an adversary.
He was mortifyingly aware that Tulbach Browne, and others like him from the slick world of newspapers, could make rings round him, when it came to the subtle realm of question-and-answer: he himself might be Andrew Macmillan, a Resident Commissioner with thirty-five years’ service and limitless experience in his own field, but that still left him in the parish-pump class, when set against the giant background of a world-travelling special correspondent. A part of him was ashamed of this inadequacy, a part of him resented fiercely the immense care, the lifelong cherishing that had gone into his humdrum job, while a man like Tulbach Browne could always earn ten times his salary by tapping out a few sentences for tomorrow’s newspaper.
It was unfair. Something was totally wrong. He wanted to be too tired to care, but even that was not true. In forty years, he had never been too tired to wish to quit himself well.
Tulbach Browne was aware of nothing but pleasure. He had come in search of a peg on which to hang his ‘Tin Gods of Gamate’ article, an article he had planned to write ever since he had heard of Macmillan’s name and reputation, down at Port Victoria. Instead of a single peg, he already had a whole row of them, ranging from the ‘forced labour’ idea that would go down particularly well with impoverished amateur gardeners in England, to Macmillan’s curt, brash remark about his ultimatum to Dinamaula. The expression ‘Toe the line’ would alone prompt a dozen infuriated protest meetings on Chelsea’s coffee-coloured fringe. A man like Emrys Price-Canning, for example, could wring torrents of righteous invective from every tainted syllable. With luck, indeed, he would be doing just that, twenty-four hours from now …
A phrase from his own personal armoury, ‘Hit them while you can,’ occurred to Tulbach Browne, and he put down his glass, and said, ‘Going back to that interview … What exactly was it that you didn’t like?’
‘Quite a lot of things.’ Macmillan’s voice was now subdued, measurably more careful. ‘But most of all, as I said, Dinamaula’s remarks about progress … It’s really not his job to issue statements about what he’s going to do in this territory, before he’s even taken over as chief. Anyway, his ideas may be altogether wrong. We’re not complete fools up here, you know.’
‘No,’ said Tulbach Browne.
‘I’ve worked for thirty-five years in Pharamaul. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what ought to be done here, and the sort of progress we ought to make. Dinamaula isn’t even twenty-three yet, and he’s been away for the last seven years. On the face of it, it’s not likely that he can do the job that I can.’ He considered this last sentence for a moment, realized that it sounded condescending, and tried to improve on it, somewhat lamely. ‘You’ve got to learn to walk before you can run.’
‘And you think that Dinamaula doesn’t know how to walk yet?’
‘He’s young,’ answered Macmillan, almost apologetically. ‘He’s got a lot of ground to make up.’
Smoothly, without perceptible intent, Tulbach Browne turned the conversation. ‘I was talking to Llewellyn, your agricultural man, a bit earlier. He was saying that he had a lot of trouble, persuading the Maulas to thin out their herds – to go for quality rather than quantity.’
Macmillan, glad to be on what seemed safer ground, nodded. ‘They have this idea,’ he said, ‘that the more head of cattle a man has, and the more goats and sheep running about the place, the richer he is. What they don’t take into account is what these enormous mixed herds do to the grazing. They ruin it, in fact, and the cattle suffer in the process. We have to show them that a hundred prime head of cattle, on a rich pasture, is a much bigger asset than five hundred half-starved animals, trying to live off grazing land that has been cropped nearly bare.’
‘How do you show them?’ asked Tulbach Browne equably.
‘We limit the number of head of cattle a man can own. At least, we try to. It’s a tricky business. It’s tied up with tribal custom, and prestige, and the dowry system, and half a dozen things like that.’
‘But it’s their capital, after all, isn’t it? It’s their savings, the only thing they can own. Can you force them to accept that limitation?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
Tulbach Browne grinned – a grin his friends would have recognized. ‘So it’s “toe the line”, even where farming is concerned?’
Macmillan suddenly awoke – too late – to the tenor of the conversation.
‘It’s for their own good,’ he said.
‘Very likely,’ said Tulbach Browne. ‘But put yourself in their position. Or rather, transfer the whole thing to England. Would you tell an English farmer that he could only own a hundred cows? Would you tell an English investor that he could only save a thousand pounds?’
‘This isn’t England,’ said Macmillan.
‘No,’ said Tulbach Browne. ‘By God, it isn’t!’
For the second time, Macmillan had the abject sense of having been fundamentally outwitted. In his inner mind, he knew once more that the thing was unfair: that one set of rules – in England – did not fit another set of people – here in Pharamaul. An English farmer was not a Maula herdsman: hundreds of years divided them, years of learning, years of development, years of science, selective breeding, communal discipline. He knew all these things, and yet when he tried to explain them, he sounded either pompous or brutal … But he tried once more, aware of making a special effort, aware of an unaccustomed pleading in his voice.
‘This isn’t England,’ he repeated. ‘Ideas that are automatically accepted there, have to be made a matter of enforcement in Pharamaul. Give an Englishman an entirely free hand, and he won’t make a fool of himself; he knows enough not to abuse his freedom. Do the same thing here, and God knows what would happen … It’s true of a lot of things besides farming. They’re just not ready to run their own lives.’
‘Perhaps not from your point of view,’ said Tulbach Browne hardly. He was pressing home an advantage which had somehow been offered him on a plate, and he was not disposed to hesitate in his attack. ‘But it’s just possible,’ he went on ironically, ‘that a man like Dinamaula might be qualified to lead his people towards self-government. He might be the man destined to take the next step.’
Macmillan shook his head. ‘They’re not ready for it …’ He looked at Tulbach Browne, hating and fearing him. ‘I hope that no one tries to tell them that they are.’
‘Meaning me?’
Suddenly Macmillan became conscious of his position, his age, and his authority, and he regretted none of them. All he felt was a grim resentment. ‘Yes, meaning you,’ he snapped. ‘You don’t know what you’re stirring up, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve jumped into this thing like a whore at a christening. If you write about the Maulas as though they could take charge of their own affairs tomorrow, if you talk to them on those lines, if you try to persuade them that they can do without us–’ he tapped his chest, ‘–it’ll be the worst day’s work you’ve ever done.’
‘I’m a reporter,’ said Tulbach Browne austerely.
‘I wish that were true,’ said Macmillan bitterly. ‘But I think you’re something more. I think you’re a promoter … You want to promote a story here, regardless of what it costs. I tell you–’ he had stopped being surprised at himself, and was riding high and reckless, conscious only of the triumphant clarity of his thoughts, ‘–you’re playing with something you know nothing about. Let it alone. It works. Leave it that way.’
‘Sounds like “Anything for a quiet life”,’ said Tulbach Browne. ‘Is that your motto?’
‘There are plenty of worse things,’ answered Macmillan. ‘There could come a day when a quiet life will seem the most precious thing that Gamate ever had.’
‘Precious for whom?’
‘Everyone. Black. White. You. Me. Them.’ Macmillan smiled, unable to hold his mood. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’re getting in too deep, and obviously we don’t agree. How about another drink?’
‘Not for me,’ said Tulbach Browne, rising. ‘I’ve got to work.’ He sounded like a prim man fallen among sinners, a dietitian at a barbecue. ‘Thanks for giving me the interview.’
‘I work, too,’ said Macmillan, leaning back again. Now he didn’t give a damn, and he knew it was dangerous, and he didn’t give a damn for that either. ‘But not all the time.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Tulbach Browne spitefully, moving towards the door.
‘Yes,’ said Macmillan, to his retreating back. ‘Lucky me … Goodbye.’