The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  After an hour he felt hungry and remembered that he had had nothing to eat since mid-day. The clink of cutlery and cheerful conversation came to him faintly from the breakfast-room. It was clear that not everyone was allowing Mr Webb’s approaching end to weigh on his spirits. Reluctant to join this cheerful gathering he made his way towards the dining-room, thinking that perhaps there might still be some food set out there.

  Entering the dining-room he received a shock, for the servants, evidently uncertain as to the evening’s arrangements, had left the room exactly as it was. The long table was still set with eighty places in silver cutlery. Bowls of flowers and silver candlesticks alternated from one end to the other while at each place there stood a little family of wine glasses in which toasts would have been drunk to Mr Webb on his birthday, to himself, to the firm’s future prosperity. But what had given Walter such a shock were the four life-size heads fashioned of cake and icing-sugar, crude but recognizable, which had been set up on side tables, one in each corner of the room. Two of the heads he recognized immediately: one was of himself, benign, dew-lapped, cheeks unnaturally rouged with cochineal, the scalp tonsured with white icing-sugar. The other, more lifelike, represented old Mr Webb’s gaunt and dignified features. It seemed to Walter that a cold, almost cynical smile hovered about his former partner’s lips, and for a moment he found himself believing that real thoughts might be passing through the fruit-cake brain behind those piercing pale-blue eyes of sugar, that he was thinking: ‘So! You thought you had got rid of me at last!’

  Recovering from his surprise Walter advanced smiling to read a sugar inscription which announced that these cakes had been presented on the occasion of Mr Webb’s birthday and the inauguration of the firm’s jubilee celebrations by Blackett and Webb’s Chinese employees who had collected subscriptions for the purpose, perhaps, Walter surmised, with the tactful encouragement of the publicity department but nevertheless … This was unexpected and gratifying, given the troubled labour situation in the Colony. And to think that only a few weeks earlier all work in the rubber godowns had come to a halt and Singapore had trembled on the verge of a General Strike! ‘Now who are these other chaps?’

  One was clearly intended to be Churchill, but a Churchill with slanting eyes and an Oriental look, manifestly the work of a Chinese pastry-cook. It took him a moment longer to recognize the fourth head, thin-featured, high-cheekboned, facing Churchill diagonally across the room but eventually he realized that it must be Chiang Kai-shek. How patriotic the overseas Chinese remained and, considering everything, how well organized!

  In the past three years while the Sino-Japanese war had continued to boom and crash like a distant thunderstorm here and there over the mainland there had been a great multiplication of so-called ‘Anti-Enemy Backing-up Societies’, not all of them, alas, controlled by the Kuomintang. Sinister letters by courier from Shanghai to the Malayan Communist Party had been intercepted (according to the Combined Intelligence Summary), declaring that ‘a victorious war for China will be the overture for an emancipation movement in the colonies.’ A memorandum from the Special Branch of the Straits Settlements Police warned against the influence these patriotic societies might acquire with the Malayan Chinese, thanks to their anti-Japanese stand. In appearance, harmlessly engaged in collecting funds to support the Chinese army, many of these ‘National Salvation’ and ‘anti-enemy’ organizations were in fact under the control of the Communists.

  Finding no other food in the dining-room and unwilling to interrupt his train of thought by summoning one of the ‘boys’, Walter broke off one of Mr Webb’s ears and munched it, pacing up and down. How many of his own employees who had perhaps subscribed to these effigies in cake of hated imperialists were at the same time secret members of, say, the Overseas Chinese Anti-Enemy National Salvation Society or of the even more outlandishly named Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps (the latter, to be sure, thought not to be Communist-led and, despite its bloodcurdling title, specializing in nothing more violent than the occasional tarring of a shop in the city for selling scrap-iron to the Japanese), not to mention more conventional gangs like the Heaven and Earth Society? Walter found it disturbing to know so little of where the real allegiance of his employees might lie. ‘Not with us, anyway! Or only when it suits them.’ The strikes which throughout this summer of 1940 had caused the foundations of the Colony to shake were, moreover, only a local manifestation of an ominous awakening of labour throughout the Far East. Shanghai at this very moment was in the embrace of a transport strike which, as it grew, scattered pollen far and wide. First, the British-owned Shanghai Tramways Company, then the China General Omnibus Company had stopped work. Pollen had been carried on the wind from the International Settlement into the French Concession to fertilize workers of the Compagnie Française de Tramways et d’Eclairage Electrique de Shanghai.

  ‘And the next thing you know they’re all at it!’ One of the cables which Walter had glanced at a few minutes earlier brought news of a meeting organized by the Shanghai General Labour Union on the 27th at which some ninety-odd unions had been represented. The rubber workers’ union, the restaurant workers’ union, the weaving and spinning workers’ union, the bean sauce workers’ union, the silk filature workers’ union, the ordure coolies’ union, the wharf coolies’ union … and so on and so on. Shanghai, despite its almost incredibly precarious political situation, was important to Blackett and Webb. But Walter was more worried by the general implications of the strikes, for where Shanghai led, the rest of the Far East had a habit of following. Admittedly, workers in Shanghai were in real desperation. All the same Walter did not doubt but that the pollen could be carried across the South China Sea to Malaya and Singapore.

  Walter halted in his pacing: again he was aware of a cold, cynical, even bitter expression on the icing-sugar features of his former partner, as if that fruit-cake brain were now thinking: ‘This would never have happened in my day!’ Well, that was true enough. Malaya’s gigantic labour force had been docile in the old man’s day when there were always ships to be seen anchoring in the roads crammed every available inch with wretched, fermenting, indentured coolies. In those days there was always cheap labour to be had. It had been the Depression which in the end, here as elsewhere, had brought about a change. Faced with great numbers of unemployed among the Chinese the Government had spent some millions of dollars in repatriating them to China: this display of munificence had been generated by the shrewd calculation that the cost of relief would be even greater if they remained in Malaya. But it had not done the employers any good.

  In 1933 the Aliens Ordinance had dealt another blow to the business community for it gave the Governor the power to limit the number of aliens landed in the Colony. Although the intention had been more to check the arrival of Communist subversives from the mainland than to limit the size of the labour reservoir, this had proved, nevertheless, to be its effect. The cost of recruiting in China plus an increase in shipping fares had made it less expensive to recruit free workers locally than to ship those cargoes of indentured coolies. The Indian Government in the meantime, in the belief that Malayan businessmen were exploiting its subjects, had taken steps to limit the flow of Indian workers into the country.

  The result? Strikes had begun to break out in Malaya and the Straits Settlements with increasing frequency. The supply of cheap labour had become finite. Many of the estate workers and squatters on pineapple plantations, hitherto isolated from their fellow-workers, had managed to acquire cheap Japanese bicycles: now meetings of widely dispersed workers could be held and collective resistance to low wages had become possible.

  ‘And we didn’t even have the wit to sell them the bloody bicycles!’ reflected Walter with a wry smile at Mr Webb’s effigy.

  There had been another development, too. Chinese women, deprived of employment by the collapse of the silk industry in China and not subject to the limitation of the Aliens Ordinance, had begun to arrive by the shipload, w
hereas before the Depression, apart from women imported by brothel-keepers to stock their establishments, there had been few or none. The result was a sudden sinking of roots. Women had begun to take the cooking and buying of food out of the hands of the Chinese labour-contractors. The workers, who had once been easily abused nomads drifting from one estate or tin-mine to another, had started to settle down and demand the rights of citizens. Old Mr Webb’s almond-paste lips might well curl in contempt at the way his younger partner had allowed the initiative to pass to his employees but could he himself have done anything to prevent it?

  One of the first strikes, though isolated, had been the most serious of all. In the winter of 1935 Communist miners had taken possession of a coal mine at Batu Arang and set up a soviet to administer it. A soviet in the middle of British Malaya, if you please! Walter had been staggered to hear of it. Of course, it had not lasted long. Even if the Batu Arang mine had not been crucial for electricity and the railway it could not have been allowed to remain as an example to the rest of Malaya’s labour force. The police had wasted no time in storming and recapturing it. But the miners’ rash action (how naïve they must have been to think that they would get away with it!) had been like a sudden gust of wind which fills the air with thistledown and strips the dandelion of its whiskers. In due course, given time for germination, strikes had begun to spring up all around. Next year it had been the turn of the pineapple factories. The year after that they had spread for the first time to the rubber estates. And what could the old man have done to prevent it? Not a thing.

  ‘Times have changed. That’s what the old chap never wanted to see. He thought everything should continue the way it always had. But times have changed, for all that.’

  Again that shadow stirred in the depths of his mind: to whom would Mr Webb leave his holdings in the business? ‘A businessman must move with the times,’ said Walter aloud. And breaking off Mr Webb’s other ear, in the interests of symmetry as much as of appetite, Walter departed in search of Monty and his guests, crunching it between his strong yellow teeth as he went.

  9

  Walter could hear no sound as he made his way along the passage to the breakfast-room and his hopes began to rise. The room, indeed, proved to be deserted, although aromatic cigar smoke still hung in the air. Could it be that the guests had taken their leave already, as a mark of respect to old Mr Webb? If that was the case, then so much the better; Walter was weary after the day’s difficulties. But one of the ‘boys’ clearing the table undeceived him. The party had moved outside to watch the yogi demonstrate his talents. Walter followed them, cracking his knuckles. ‘Let the young fool learn by his mistakes then!’

  Stepping grimly out of the luxuriously refrigerated air of the house into the sweltering night Walter found that a little herd of guests, men in white dinner-jackets, women in long evening dresses, had collected on that same portico from which, earlier in the day, he had surveyed the progress of the garden-party. On each side flights of stone steps, glimmering white in the darkness, dropped in zigzags to the lawn on which, directly beneath the balustrade, a platform on wooden trestles had been set up for the yogi’s performance. Two powerful floodlights smoking with insects had been directed down on the yogi from above. From behind the lights the guests watched him uneasily. Walter passed among them, shaking hands and responding with a few grave words to their expressions of regret over the collapse of Mr Webb. It was true, of course, he muttered, that the old gentleman had had a good innings. Still, one could not help feeling that it was the end of an era. Walter’s words, replete with the quiet dignity which the situation demanded, were unfortunately accompanied by a strange descant from below, some monotonous rigmarole in a language no one could understand, spattered from time to time with incomprehensible English. Really, it was perfectly unsuitable and ludicrous.

  Monty suddenly came springing up the steps from the lawn where he had evidently been making some final arrangements. He was rubbing his hands together violently and chuckling in anticipation. Walter’s heart sank at the sight of him: the boy had such a wild look.

  ‘There you are, Father. I was just going to get you. I was afraid you might miss this fellow. He’s really a scream. He does the most amazing things.’

  Walter drew his son to one side and said quietly: ‘I want you to get this over as quickly as possible. I very much doubt whether it was ever a good idea, but to carry on with it this evening in view of what has happened to Mr Webb, really, you must have lost your senses.’

  ‘Oh, look here, Father …’ protested Monty.

  But Walter went on, ignoring him: ‘I should have thought that the merest common sense would have told you … And what d’you think the Langfields will say when they hear about it? They’ll waste no time in putting it around that the Blacketts have been dancing on Mr Webb’s grave while the body is still warm!’

  Walter, becoming excited, had spoken louder than he had intended and the bristles on his spine had puffed up beneath his shirt … One or two of the guests had begun to show signs of concern at this sudden whispered altercation between father and son. Walter realized that even Monty was looking at him oddly. ‘Anyway, get rid of the fellow as soon as you can,’ he said sharply.

  Monty stiffened. The chanting had stopped. ‘OK, Father. Yeah, OK!’ he muttered and slid away swiftly towards the balustrade beneath which the yogi was now beginning to demonstrate his powers. Walter continued to pass among the guests, conversing gravely with them as if something unsuitable were not happening, or about to happen, just out of sight beneath the portico. And while he conversed he mused grimly again on the damage done to the firm by Monty’s erratic hand in its affairs, for was it not fair to say that the labour trouble on the estates in 1937 had stemmed, indirectly at least, from that great speculative rubber boom which Monty and the London office, in concert with certain unscrupulous brokers of Mincing Lane, had whipped up in the autumn of 1936 with their predictions of a rubber scarcity lasting as far as the eye could see?

  Well, the truth of the matter was simple: the swift rise in the price of rubber, and of the employers’ profits, had not, unfortunately, gone unnoticed by the Chinese work-force. There had been complaints about low wages in Selangor and Negri Sembilan. On the Bangi estate in Ulu Langat the manager had tried to get rid of his Chinese workers and replace them with Javanese. In no time the workers on half a dozen estates had downed tools. Moreover, other districts soon began to join because the workers from the Connemara estate, who had drawn up a list of demands for the Protector of Chinese, were fanning out on bicycles, those same cheap Jap bicycles which Blackett and Webb had not, until too late, thought of importing instead of the more costly products of Birmingham and Coventry, spreading the news far and wide. Presently twenty thousand or more Chinese had stopped work.

  And it had all been perfectly unnecessary. The peaceful atmosphere of Malaya had been riven for no purpose. Ugly scenes had developed. Chinese detectives sent to look for Communists among the strikers, that idée fixe of the Chinese Protectorate, had been roughed up. Heads had been broken. In due course over a hundred workers had found themselves behind bars and, to their original demand for a ten cents a day increase in wages, the strikers were now adding two more: the release of the arrested men and compensation for injuries, bound in the end to involve a loss of face for the Government.

  And why had it been unneccessary? Beceause that ‘almost permanent’ rubber boom which Monty and the market analysts had seen trembling in their telescopes at the end of 1936 had proved to be a mirage, as anyone in Malaya or the Netherlands East Indies could have told you it would. The price of rubber, ridiculously inflated by brokers’ claims, had collapsed, aided by a recession in America. Sales of cars had declined and by the spring of 1938 the price of rubber had plummeted to about five pence a pound. Hardly had the strikers had their pay increased from sixty to seventy-five cents a day as a result of bitter struggles up and down the country, when workers were being laid off and wages redu
ced once more. But Monty, the young fool, impervious to the effects on Malaya’s estate workers (on Malaya’s social fabric even, for once this sort of thing started …!) of these wild fluctuations in price generated by the London market, had been unable to see further than the chance of a quick profit. Instead of squashing the brokers’ claims he had egged them on. And that, thought Walter more grimly than ever, was another example of the changing times. ‘Young men these days have no sense of responsibility to the country!’

  The yogi, Walter discovered, gazing down at him with distaste, was a tall, cadaverous individual, evidently a Punjabi. He was clad only in a white dhoti and gold turban. In the middle of the turban a large white gem, perhaps a diamond but more likely a piece of cut glass, flared in the floodlights. Thin as he was his naked chest was nevertheless disturbingly equipped with a pair of well-formed female breasts. Some distance to the right of the improvised stage the Blacketts’ kebun could be seen tending a blazing bonfire.

  Meanwhile, the yogi’s assistant, a sallow, gold-toothed Eurasian in tattered black evening dress was following in Walter’s wake among the guests, proffering for their inspection a box of tin-tacks and a cheap china tea-cup. The guests fingered them uncertainly. When they had satisfied themselves that no deception was being practised on them the Eurasian threw the box of tacks down to the yogi who caught it, opened it and began, rather gloomily, popping them into his mouth one by one and swallowing them. The guests continued to watch him uneasily. The only sound was the impatient cracking of Walter’s knuckles.