Part 2

Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it had always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of pa-tients; periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place - Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one - the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for prin-ciple after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheer-ful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right.

Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had garnered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a great stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice - it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.

Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by ac-cumulation - a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten rea-son on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been bor-rowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be re-minded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.

He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’

‘Anything to report?’

‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’

‘Anything on the charge sheet?’

‘Two black men fight in the market, sah,’

‘Mammy trouble?’

‘Yes, sah,’

‘Anything else?’

‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah, I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’

‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’

‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’

‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’

‘Very good, sah.’

Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.

‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three - one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.

‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’

‘I know.’

‘I suppose everyone knows.’

‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’

‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’

Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’

‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do noth-ing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just’

‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that’

‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’

‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said,

‘Your wife won’t like it’

‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here - some-where far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premoni-tory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’

‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’

‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.

‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’

‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’

‘They haven’t got that far yet That’s the next stage. No, you steep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel in-sulted.’

‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’

‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up some-thing different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’

‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’

‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’

Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You don’t live here, do you?’

‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’

‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary - no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secre-tary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.

The girl said, ‘My landlady - she broke up my home last night She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’

‘You got plenty lodgers?’

‘Only three, sir.’

He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin par-titions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece - a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an em-ployer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dan-gerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’

‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’

‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’

‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah In Sharp Town?’

‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’

‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’

‘No, sir. Same father.’

The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that failed she had taken action herself. She would deny that there had ever been a chest of china. The corporal would confirm this. He would turn out not to be the landlady’s brother, but some other unspecified relation - probably disreputable. Bribes - which were known respectably as dashes - would pass to and fro, the storm of indignation and anger that had soun-ded so genuine would subside, the partitions would go up again, nobody would hear any more about the chest, and se-veral policemen would be a shilling or two the richer. At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty house-owner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself. After that he had tried to kill these cases at birth: he would reason with the complainant and point out that the investigation would do no good and undoubtedly cost her time and money; he would sometimes even refuse to investigate. The result of that inaction had been stones flung at his car window, slashed tyres, the nickname of the Bad Man that had stuck to him through all one long sad tour - it worried him unreasonably in the heat and damp; he couldn’t take it lightly. Already he had begun to desire these people’s trust and affection. That year he had blackwater fever and was nearly invalided from the ser-vice altogether.

The girl waited patiently for his decision. They had an in-finite capacity for patience when patience was required - just as their impatience knew no bounds of propriety when they had anything to gain by it. They would sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get served in a store before their neighbour. He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty - the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of the young buttocks, she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows - a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise. He said, ‘Give this chit to the sergeant at the desk.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘Try to tell him the truth.’

He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.