That night, and the night following, there was no more violence in Gamate. Macmillan was not sure why. It might be that the tribe was shocked into sullen compliance by the death of the headman and the small boy, whose funeral was witnessed by a vast silent throng, trooping in endless procession up the hill to the burial ground. It might have been due to Crump’s well-advertised precautions, which brought in an extra squad of police from Port Victoria. Or it might have been the sunset curfew which he imposed, as a matter of urgent necessity.
Whatever the cause, forty-eight hours passed with no ripple breaking the surface of the troubled pool that was Gamate township. Then, on the third night, after a brooding, malevolent respite, rioting broke out again.
It started with a Maula girl-child, who was taken to hospital with acute pleurisy. She reached hospital too late, and died during the afternoon.
Word instantly spread (so Crump told Macmillan later) that the child had been poisoned, so cruelly that the whole corpse was blue, and that all Maula children would be so disposed of, one by one, till the entire tribe disappeared and the white man ruled a deserted village … Windows were broken at the hospital; a car taking some nurses to work from their hostel was overturned and set on fire, and the girls themselves manhandled. A police charge produced a crop of broken skulls, two stabbings, and furious resentment throughout the tribe.
The child’s body was stolen from the hospital and paraded through the huts, with screams and wailings from the women such as Gamate had never heard before. Thousands of people broke the curfew, and the police, powerless to enforce it, were taunted and mocked intolerably.
Andrew Macmillan rang the Governor at midnight, after a tour of the huts in his car, and a brave, fruitless appeal for order. He was calm, following a nerve-stretching half-hour during which anything might have happened; but his intense weariness induced a sense of doom which the sound of the telephone endlessly ringing and ringing, two hundred miles away in Port Victoria, seemed to crystallize. When finally he heard the answering voice at the other end of the wire, it was like a speck of light at the farthermost limit of an enormous gloomy tunnel – a speck of light which somehow had to be reached, if sanity and order were ever to be restored.
He had never before felt so feebly armed, so dependent on higher authority. A few months earlier he would have been appalled at such personal inadequacy: a few years earlier, it could never have happened. Now it was here, and it stemmed from four sources.
There was the silence at his aboura, which had sounded, for Macmillan, an initial private knell of defeat. There was the tribe, which continued mutinous and violent. There was Dinamaula, at once guarded and slippery, impossible to treat with, impossible to pin down. There was the death of the Maula boy, as sad and senseless as a child struck by lightning, a bride dying on her wedding night.
Taken in series, these things might have been negotiable. Taken together, at the low ebb of his fifty-eighth year, they were an avalanche of ill fortune whose repeated blows seemed to have brought him to his knees.
Sir Elliott Vere-Toombs awoke swiftly to crisis. He had been irritable, when first he was called from his bed to answer the telephone; during the past forty-eight hours the Scheduled Territories Office had been plaguing him with cabled excerpts from the London papers, coupled with requests for information to combat a totally adverse Press; and his staff – notably Aidan Purves-Brownrigg – had filled in the gaps with minutes, memoranda, draft cables, and the steady pressure of eager subordinates. But as Andrew Macmillan painted his picture, in a few brisk foreboding words, the Governor progressed quickly to energy and decision.
‘I’m not surprised,’ he said presently, when Macmillan reached the end of his recital. ‘There’s a good deal of unrest here, too, a decided undercurrent …’ He paused. Then he asked: ‘How is your telephone manned, Andrew?’
‘I’m at the police post, sir,’ answered Macmillan. ‘I’ve got a policeman on the switchboard – one of Crump’s sergeants. The line’s clear at this end.’
The Governor nodded to himself. At his end also, the privacy of their exchange was assured; the call was routed by direct line through the Secretariat switchboard, which Aidan, on his own initiative, had now organized on a twenty-four-hour basis.
‘That’s all right then … What do you suggest, Andrew? I can’t let you have any more men, I’m afraid.’
‘I’ve got enough men, sir,’ said Macmillan. ‘But we must somehow relieve the pressure locally. I’d like you to talk personally to Dinamaula. He’s the key point in all this.’
‘Is he active?’
‘Not openly. But behind the scenes I think he’s doing a lot of manoeuvring and organizing. So are the Press boys, though it’s almost impossible to pin them down.’
‘What about the Regents?’
‘Seralo has virtually given up. Katsaula is talking about the divine right of kings to do exactly what they want, all of the time. Puero’s working openly for a free hand for Dinamaula.’
‘You must speak to them all, very strongly,’ said the Governor, fussily.
‘I’ll try again, sir,’ said Andrew. ‘But I don’t think it’s the answer. Dinamaula himself needs to be taken out of this altogether.’
‘How do you mean, “taken out”?’
‘I’d like to send him down to you, sir. And I’d like him kept in Port Victoria, until things quieten down a bit.’
There was a long silence on the wire. Across two hundred miles of parched, arid scrub, now cooling after a day of fierce heat, both men were listening and thinking. The Governor was listening to the peaceful silence of Government House, and a radio playing far away in the kitchen quarters; he was thinking of what the reaction would be, another five thousand miles away in London, if Dinamaula were ‘taken out’ in the way that Macmillan had suggested.
Certainly, as Governor, he had the necessary emergency powers, and the necessary discretion as well; but the fierce light now beating upon Pharamaul called for an unassailable moral warrant as well.
Macmillan was also listening, to the confused, nearby sounds of a town in revolt. He was in the small bare office of Crump’s police post. By his side was the sergeant on the switchboard, across the room were two other native policemen, their faces intent, their clubs swinging from leather thongs circling their wrists. Outside was shouting, and the drumming of feet on bare naked earth, and a battery of floodlights on the police jeep steadily sweeping from side to side across the aboura, and the occasional crash of broken glass from the schoolhouse.
Outside, somewhere, was Forsdick the District Commissioner, with one squad of policemen, and Crump with another, and a first-aid detachment from the hospital. Outside were other volunteers – Oosthuizen the farmer, and Fellows from the Gamate Hotel, and the postmaster, and one of the hospital doctors – all doing their best to bring calm and quiet to the violent night. Outside also were three Pressmen who demanded a statement, and Father Hawthorne who wanted permission to hold a solemn requiem mass (interdenominational) for the Maula boy and the stabbed headman; and Father Schwemmer – a deeply troubled Father Schwemmer – who simply wanted to help.
Macmillan was thinking of immediate security, safety measures, the delicate balance of an angry mob who must be outfaced by a few cool men. To the Governor must be left another kind of balance: the intricate balance of policy, the weighing of the expedient against the desirable … Even as Macmillan thought, and listened, there was a long concerted howl from across the aboura, and the policemen half turned, also listening, and gripped their thonged clubs in supple readiness.
The Governor spoke, far away from this crude scene, but blessedly aware of its menace.
‘All right, Andrew,’ he said briskly. ‘Send Dinamaula down to me. I’ll keep him here until things have a chance to cool off. We’ll make out an Order-in-Council, if necessary.’
‘When shall I send him?’
‘Now,’ said the Governor.
‘I can’t spare Crump,’ said Macmillan, relieved, but already beset by yet another problem. ‘Or Forsdick either.’
‘Llewellyn will do,’ said the Governor, while Macmillan wondered at his decisive, knowledgeable control, and was deeply grateful for it. ‘He’s got a car, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s got his own truck.’
It was almost as if the Governor knew of Macmillan’s defeat and fear, and was planning and working overtime in order to cover them up.
‘Write out a formal letter of instruction,’ came the Governor’s voice. ‘Signed by you, on my behalf. Dinamaula is to come down to Port Victoria, forthwith–’ the unlikely word crackled over the wire, ‘–forthwith, for personal consultation with me. He is to come by himself, with no attendants of any kind. He is to be conducted by Mr Llewellyn, agricultural adviser, who is nominated as my personal representative.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Andrew Macmillan again.
‘See the Regents again tomorrow,’ said the far-away voice. ‘Tell them there’s to be no more nonsense. Tell them that unless things quieten down again, there’ll be another Order-in-Council, imposing martial law on Gamate. Then they’ll find themselves out of a job altogether.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t give anything at all to the Press.’
‘No, sir.’
‘Let me know tomorrow how you get on with the Regents.’ The Governor’s voice was fading. ‘How soon will Dinamaula be in Port Victoria?’
‘If he starts by one o’clock,’ said Macmillan, ‘he should be there by breakfast time.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said the Governor. ‘Allow him twenty minutes to pack … Good night, Andrew.’
‘Good night, sir.’
The line was already dead as Macmillan replaced the receiver. He leant back against the wall of the office, thinking of his next move, while outside the raging turmoil in the aboura continued unabated. The Maula sergeant at the switchboard pulled out the two plug cords, killing the connexion, and leant back also, easing one of the headphones away from his ear. He was an alert young man, keen on his work, already schooled in contrasting cultures. As he sat back he was smiling, patently pleased at the way things were going.
‘Hot dog!’ he said.
Llewellyn, the agricultural officer, was not the prototype of a brave man. But he was a small Welshman with a job to do, and that was enough to take the place of valour. Leaving the engine of his truck still running, he walked up the short path to the hut of Dinamaula, a single piece of paper in his hand. The hut stood well back from the aboura, but even here the tumult could be heard in angry waves of sound.
A hanger-on – perhaps a guard – moved to intercept him as he approached. He said: ‘Get out of my way, damn you!’ and then, calling more loudly: ‘Chief!’
‘Who is it?’ came Dinamaula’s voice from within.
‘Mr Llewellyn,’ answered Llewellyn.
‘Come in, please,’ said Dinamaula.
The hut was well lighted, with candles, and two flaring kerosene lamps. Inside were five people: Dinamaula, lying seemingly exhausted on his couch, Puero, lolling in a corner, and three Pressmen – Axel Hallmarck, Tulbach Browne, and Pikkie Joubert. Bottles of beer and whisky stood haphazard on a rush mat at their feet.
Llewellyn looked slowly round the hut. ‘I would like to speak to you alone, Chief,’ he said, after a pause.
‘I am with my friends,’ said Dinamaula coldly.
‘I have a message from the Resident Commissioner.’
‘I am with my friends,’ said Dinamaula again.
‘Very well …’ Llewellyn proffered the piece of paper. ‘This is an order from the Governor,’ he said formally.
Dinamaula reached out his hand and took the piece of paper. Llewellyn was suddenly made aware of the vulgarity of the moment, as first Puero, then Tulbach Browne, then Hallmarck and Joubert, leant across to read what was on it.
After a long pause, Tulbach Browne said: ‘This is completely unconstitutional.’
Llewellyn was looking at Dinamaula, and only at Dinamaula. He saw a deep shadow cross the other man’s face, as if some sudden thought, too heavy for words, had reached his tired brain. Then Dinamaula raised his eyes.
‘This comes as a surprise,’ said Dinamaula. ‘I am not prepared for travel.’
‘I will give you time to pack,’ said Llewellyn. It sounded a ridiculous phrase, absurdly westernized, totally inappropriate to the thatched reed hut and the flaring light of candles and oil lamps. After a moment he said, in the Maula tongue: ‘Please make ready for the journey.’
‘Do not go,’ said Puero contemptuously. He was, as usual, somewhat affected by liquor. ‘This man–’ he gestured crudely, ‘–can wait till morning.’
‘We must start tonight,’ said Llewellyn evenly.
‘Who says so?’ asked Tulbach Browne.
‘Keep out of this,’ said Llewellyn.
‘Who says so?’ repeated Tulbach Browne.
‘It is an order from the Governor,’ said Llewellyn.
A new voice now made itself heard. It was Axel Hallmarck, crisply inquisitive.
‘But what’s it mean, for God’s sake?’ he asked. ‘Is he being deported?’
‘He is going to Port Victoria for consultation with the Governor.’
‘Do not go,’ said Puero again.
‘When will he come back?’ asked Tulbach Browne.
Llewellyn said nothing.
Dinamaula rose to his feet. His face was tired, his slight body drooping. Instinctively Llewellyn knew that the other man had been thinking swiftly, and that his thinking had led him to a preordained conclusion.
Dinamaula asked: ‘You have a car?’
‘All is ready,’ answered Llewellyn. ‘But what about your packing?’
Dinamaula shook his head. ‘I will pack nothing,’ he said coldly.
‘When will he come back?’ asked Tulbach Browne again.
Llewellyn gave no answer.
‘I never thought I’d see this, anywhere in the world today,’ said Axel Hallmarck.
Pikkie Joubert, sweating and owlish with drink, spoke for the first time.
‘Man!’ he proclaimed. ‘You can’t do this sort of thing, not even to a native!’
Tulbach Browne said, looking at the piece of paper, which he had been careful to retain: ‘Even if the chief goes, there’s an implied undertaking that he’ll come back to Gamate again, as soon as he’s seen the Governor. Isn’t that so?’
Llewellyn said nothing.
‘Do not go, my Chief,’ said Puero, for the third time. ‘It is a trick.’
‘I am ready,’ said Dinamaula to Llewellyn. Then he paused, as if remembering something. ‘But I make a formal protest,’ he said, in a strange, almost theatrical voice, ‘against being ordered to leave my home in this irregular way.’ Then he brushed past Llewellyn, and with bent head walked through the door of the hut, and towards the waiting truck.
Llewellyn followed closely, aware of the thin knife-edge of his authority, and of the threatening scrutiny of the guard; alert for any new move. But none came, and within a few moments the two of them, settled in the truck, had set off down the bumpy road leading out of the town. The headlights dipped and wavered, the dust scattered as they passed; while behind them the din of shouting and violence rose and fell in ugly, senseless crescendo.
Behind them also, within a few moments, a second car fell into line, keeping pace and distance as they reached the open road to the south.
But if Dinamaula heard the noise, or noticed the second car, or was aware of any special significance in this farewell to Gamate, he gave no sign. Head sunk on chest, eyes closed, he seemed already to be sleeping.