The Human Factor

by Graham Greene

  ‘I do wish though that you’d tell me – it can’t matter any longer, can it? – how you got that Bantu girl away. I suppose it was to Swaziland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought we had that frontier closed pretty effectively – except for the real guerrilla experts. I never considered you were an expert, though I realized you did have some Communist contacts, but I assumed you needed them for that book of yours on apartheid which was never published. You took me in all right there. Not to speak of Van Donck. You remember Captain Van Donck?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Vividly.’

  ‘I had to ask the Security Police for his demotion over your affair. He acted very clumsily. I felt sure that, if we had the girl safe in prison, you’d consent to work for us, and he let her slip. You see – don’t laugh – I was convinced it was a real love affair. I’ve known so many Englishmen who have started with the idea of attacking apartheid and ended trapped by us in a Bantu girl’s bed. It’s the romantic idea of breaking what they think is an unjust law that attracts them just as much as a black bottom. I never dreamt the girl – Sarah MaNkosi, I think that was the name? – all the time was an agent of MI6.’

  ‘She didn’t know it herself. She believed in my book too. Have another whisky.’

  ‘Thank you. I will.’ Castle poured out two glasses, gambling on his better head.

  ‘From all accounts she was a clever girl. We looked pretty closely into her background. Been to the African University in the Transvaal where Uncle Tom professors always produce dangerous students. Personally, though, I’ve always found that the cleverer the African the more easily he can be turned – one way or another. If we’d had that girl in prison for a month I’m pretty sure we could have turned her. Well, she might have been useful to both of us now in this Uncle Remus operation. Or would she? One forgets that old devil Time. By now she’d be getting a bit long in the tooth, I suppose. Bantu women age so quickly. They are generally finished – anyway to a white taste – long before the age of thirty. You know, Castle, I’m really glad we are working together and you are not what we in BOSS thought – one of those idealistic types who want to change the nature of human beings. We knew the people you were in touch with – or most of them, and we knew the sort of nonsense they’d be telling you. But you outwitted us, so you certainly outwitted those Bantu and Communists. I suppose they too thought you were writing a book which would serve their turn. Mind you, I’m not anti-African like Captain Van Donck. I consider myself a hundred per cent African myself.’

  It was certainly not the Cornelius Muller of the Pretoria office who spoke now, the pale clerk doing his conformist job would never have spoken with such ease and confidence. Even the shyness and the uncertainty of a few minutes back had gone. The whisky had cured that. He was now a high officer of BOSS, entrusted with a foreign mission, who took his orders from no one under the rank of a general. He could relax. He could be – an unpleasant thought – himself, and it seemed to Castle that he began to resemble more and more closely, in the vulgarity and brutality of his speech, the Captain Van Donck whom he despised.

  ‘I’ve taken pleasant enough week-ends in Lesotho,’ Muller said, ‘rubbing shoulders with my black brothers in the casino at Holiday Inn. I’ll admit once I even had a little – well, encounter – it somehow seemed quite different there – of course it wasn’t against the law. I wasn’t in the Republic.’

  Castle called out! ‘Sarah, bring Sam down to say good night to Mr Muller.’

  ‘You are married?’ Muller asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m all the more flattered to be invited to your home. I brought with me a few little presents from South Africa, and perhaps there’s something your wife would like. But you haven’t answered my question. Now that we are working together – as I wanted to before, you remember – couldn’t you tell me how you got that girl out? It can’t harm any of your old agents now, and it does have a certain bearing on Uncle Remus, and the problems we have to face together. Your country and mine – and the States, of course – have a common frontier now.’

  ‘Perhaps she’ll tell you herself. Let me introduce her and my son, Sam.’ They came down the stairs together as Cornelius Muller turned.

  ‘Mr Muller was asking how I got you into Swaziland, Sarah.’

  He had underestimated Muller. The surprise which he had planned failed completely. ‘I’m so glad to meet you, Mrs Castle,’ Muller said and took her hand.

  ‘We just failed to meet seven years ago,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Yes. Seven wasted years. You have a very beautiful wife, Castle.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sarah said. ‘Sam, shake hands with Mr Muller.’

  ‘This is my son, Mr Muller,’ Castle said. He knew Muller would be a good judge of colour shades, and Sam was very black.

  ‘How do you do, Sam? Do you go to school yet?’

  ‘He goes to school in a week or two. Run along up to bed now, Sam.’

  ‘Can you play hide-and-seek?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I used to know the game, but I’m always ready to learn new rules.’

  ‘Are you a spy like Mr Davis?’

  ‘I said go to bed, Sam.’

  ‘Have you a poison pen?’

  ‘Sam! Upstairs!’

  ‘And now for Mr Muller’s question, Sarah,’ Castle said. ‘Where and how did you cross into Swaziland?’

  ‘I don’t think I ought to tell him, do you?’

  Cornelius Muller said, ‘Oh, let’s forget Swaziland. It’s all past history and it happened in another country.’

  Castle watched him adapting, as naturally as a chameleon, to the colour of the soil. He must have adapted in just that way during his weekend in Lesotho. Perhaps he would have found Muller more likeable if he had been less adaptable. All through dinner Muller made his courteous conversation. Yes, thought Castle, I really would have preferred Captain Van Donck. Van Donck would have walked out of the house at the first sight of Sarah. A prejudice had something in common with an ideal. Cornelius Muller was without prejudice and he was without an ideal.

  ‘How do you find the climate here, Mrs Castle, after South Africa?’

  ‘Do you mean the weather?’

  ‘Yes, the weather.’

  ‘It’s less extreme,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Don’t you sometimes miss Africa? I came by way of Madrid and Athens, so I’ve been away some weeks already, and do you know what I miss most? The mine dumps around Johannesburg. Their colour when the sun’s half set. What do you miss?’

  Castle had not suspected Muller of any aesthetic feeling. Was it one of the larger interests which came with promotion or was it adapted for the occasion and the country like his courtesy?

  ‘My memories are different,’ Sarah said. ‘My Africa was different to yours.’

  ‘Oh come, we are both of us Africans. By the way, I’ve brought a few presents for my friends here. Not knowing that you were one of us, I brought you a shawl. You know how in Lesotho they have those very fine weavers – the Royal Weavers. Would you accept a shawl – from your old enemy?’

  ‘Of course. It’s kind of you.’

  ‘Do you think Lady Hargreaves would accept an ostrich bag?’

  ‘I don’t know her. You must ask my husband.’

  It would hardly be up to her crocodile standard, Castle thought, but he said, ‘I’m sure . . . coming from you . . .’

  ‘I take a sort of family interest in ostriches, you see,’ Muller explained. ‘My grandfather was what they call now one of the ostrich millionaires – put out of business by the 1914 war. He had a big house in the Cape Province. It was very splendid once, but it’s only a ruin now. Ostrich feathers never really came back in Europe, and my father went bankrupt. My brothers still keep a few ostriches though.’

  Castle remembered visiting one of those big houses, which had been preserved as a sort of museum, camped in by the manager of all that was left of the ostrich farm. The manager was a little apologetic about the richness an
d the bad taste. The bathroom was the high spot of the tour – visitors were always taken to the bathroom last of all – a bath like a great white double bed with gold-plated taps, and on the wall a bad copy of an Italian primitive: on the haloes real goldleaf was beginning to peel off.

  At the end of dinner Sarah left them, and Muller accepted a glass of port. The bottle had remained untouched since last Christmas – a present from Davis. ‘Seriously though,’ Muller said, ‘I wish you would give me a few details about your wife’s route to Swaziland. No need to mention names. I know you had some Communist friends – I realize now it was all part of your job. They thought you were a sentimental fellow traveller – just as we did. For example, Carson must have thought you one – poor Carson.’

  ‘Why poor Carson?’

  ‘He went too far. He had contacts with the guerrillas. He was a good fellow in his way and a very good advocate. He gave the Security Police a lot of trouble with the pass-laws.’

  ‘Doesn’t he still?’

  ‘Oh no. He died a year ago in prison.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard.’

  Castle went to the sideboard and poured himself yet another double whisky. With plenty of soda the J. & B. looked no stronger than a single.

  ‘Don’t you like this port?’ Muller asked. ‘We used to get admirable port from Lourenço Marques. Alas, those days are over.’

  ‘What did he die of?’

  ‘Pneumonia,’ Muller said. He added, ‘Well, it saved him from a long trial.’

  ‘I liked Carson,’ Castle said.

  ‘Yes. It’s a great pity he always identified Africans with colour. It’s the kind of mistake second-generation men make. They refuse to admit a white man can be as good an African as a black. My family for instance arrived in 1700. We were early comers.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My God, with you I’m a late stayer. My driver must have been waiting an hour. You’ll have to excuse me. I ought to be saying good night.’

  Castle said, ‘Perhaps we should talk a little before you go about Uncle Remus.’

  ‘That can wait for the office,’ Muller said.

  At the door he turned. He said, ‘I’m really sorry about Carson. If I’d known that you hadn’t heard I wouldn’t have spoken so abruptly.’

  Buller licked the bottom of his trousers with undiscriminating affection. ‘Good dog,’ Muller said. ‘Good dog. There’s nothing like a dog’s fidelity.’

  2

  At one o’clock in the morning Sarah broke a long silence. ‘You are still awake. Don’t pretend. Was it as bad as all that seeing Muller? He was quite polite.’

  ‘Oh yes. In England he puts on English manners. He adapts very quickly.’

  ‘Shall I get you a Mogadon?’

  ‘No. I’ll sleep soon. Only – there’s something I have to tell you. Carson’s dead. In prison.’

  ‘Did they kill him?’

  ‘Muller said he died from pneumonia.’

  She put her head under the crook of his arm and turned her face into the pillow. He guessed she was crying. He said, ‘I couldn’t help remembering tonight the last note I ever had from him. It was waiting at the Embassy when I came back from seeing Muller and Van Donck. “Don’t worry about Sarah. Take the first possible plane to L.M. and wait for her at the Polana. She’s in safe hands.”’

  ‘Yes. I remember that note too. I was with him when he wrote it.’

  ‘I was never able to thank him – except by seven years of silence and . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what I was going to say.’ He repeated what he had told Muller, ‘I liked Carson.’

  ‘Yes. I trusted him. Much more than I trusted his friends. During that week while you waited for me in Lourenço Marques we had time for a lot of argument. I used to tell him he wasn’t a real Communist.’

  ‘Why? He was a member of the Party. One of the oldest members left in the Transvaal.’

  ‘Of course. I know that. But there are members and members, aren’t there? I told him about Sam even before I told you.’

  ‘He had a way of drawing people to him.’

  ‘Most of the Communists I knew – they pushed, they didn’t draw.’

  ‘All the same, Sarah, he was a genuine Communist. He survived Stalin like Roman Catholics survived the Borgias. He made me think better of the Party.’

  ‘But he never drew you that far, did he?’

  ‘Oh, there were always some things which stuck in my throat. He used to say I strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel. You know I was never a religious man – I left God behind in the school chapel, but there were priests I sometimes met in Africa who made me believe again – for a moment – over a drink. If all priests had been like they were and I had seen them often enough, perhaps I would have swallowed the Resurrection, the Virgin birth, Lazarus, the whole works. I remember one I met twice – I wanted to use him as an agent as I used you, but he wasn’t usable. His name was Connolly – or was it O’Connell? He worked in the slums of Soweto. He said to me exactly what Carson said – you strain at a gnat and you swallow . . . For a while I half believed in his God, like I half believed in Carson’s. Perhaps I was born to be a half believer. When people talk about Prague and Budapest and how you can’t find a human face in Communism I stay silent. Because I’ve seen – once – the human face. I say to myself that if it hadn’t been for Carson Sam would have been born in a prison and you would probably have died in one. One kind of Communism – or Communist – saved you and Sam. I don’t have any trust in Marx or Lenin any more than I have in Saint Paul, but haven’t I the right to be grateful?’

  ‘Why do you worry so much about it? No one would say you were wrong to be grateful. I’m grateful too. Gratitude’s all right if . . .’

  ‘If . . .?’

  ‘I think I was going to say if it doesn’t take you too far.’

  It was hours before he slept. He lay awake and thought of Carson and Cornelius Muller, of Uncle Remus and Prague. He didn’t want to sleep until he was sure from her breathing that Sarah was asleep first. Then he allowed himself to strike, like his childhood hero Allan Quatermain, off on that long slow underground stream which bore him on towards the interior of the dark continent where he hoped that he might find a permanent home, in a city where he could be accepted as a citizen, as a citizen without any pledge of faith, not the City of God or Marx, but the city called Peace of Mind.

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  ONCE a month on his day off Castle was in the habit of taking Sarah and Sam for an excursion into the sandy conifered countryside of East Sussex in order to see his mother. No one ever questioned the necessity of the visit, but Castle doubted whether even his mother enjoyed it, though he had to admit she did all she could to please them – according to her own idea of what their pleasures were. Invariably the same supply of vanilla ice-cream was waiting for Sam in the deep freeze – he preferred chocolate – and though she only lived half a mile from the station, she ordered a taxi to meet them. Castle, who had never wanted a car since he returned to England, had the impression that she regarded him as an unsuccessful and impecunious son, and Sarah once told him how she felt – like a black guest at an anti-apartheid garden party too fussed over to be at ease.

  A further cause of nervous strain was Buller. Castle had given up arguing that they should leave Buller at home. Sarah was certain that without their protection he would be murdered by masked men, though Castle pointed out that he had been bought to defend them and not to be defended himself. In the long run it proved easier to give way, though his mother profoundly disliked dogs and had a Burmese cat which it was Buller’s fixed ambition to destroy. Before they arrived the cat had to be locked in Mrs Castle’s bedroom, and her sad fate, deprived of human company, would be hinted at from time to time by his mother during the course of the long day. On one occasion Buller was found spread-eagled outside the bedroom door waiting his chance, breathing heavily like a Shakespearian murderer. Afterwards Mrs Castle wrote a l
ong letter of reproach to Sarah on the subject. Apparently the cat’s nerves had suffered for more than a week. She had refused to eat her diet of Friskies and existed only on milk – a kind of hunger strike.

  Gloom was apt to descend on all of them as soon as the taxi entered the deep shade of the laurel drive which led to the high-gabled Edwardian house that his father had bought for his retirement because it was near a golf course. (Soon after he had a stroke and was unable to walk even as far as the club house.)

  Mrs Castle was invariably standing there on the porch waiting for them, a tall straight figure in an out-dated skirt which showed to advantage her fine ankles, wearing a high collar like Queen Alexandra’s which disguised the wrinkles of old age. To hide his despondency Castle would become unnaturally elated and he greeted his mother with an exaggerated hug which she barely returned. She believed that any emotions openly expressed must be false emotions. She had deserved to marry an ambassador or a colonial governor rather than a country doctor.

  ‘You are looking wonderful, Mother,’ Castle said.

  ‘I’m feeling well for my age.’ She was eighty-five. She offered a clean white cheek which smelled of lavender water for Sarah to kiss. ‘I hope Sam is feeling quite well again.’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s never been better.’

  ‘Out of quarantine?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Reassured, Mrs Castle granted him the privilege of a brief kiss.

  ‘You’ll be starting prep school soon, I suppose, won’t you?’

  Sam nodded.

  ‘You’ll enjoy having other boys to play with. Where’s Buller?’

  ‘He’s gone upstairs looking for Tinker Bell,’ Sam said with satisfaction.

  After lunch Sarah took Sam into the garden along with Buller so as to leave Castle alone with his mother for a little while. That was the monthly routine. Sarah meant well, but Castle had the impression that his mother was glad when the private interview was over. Invariably there was a long silence between them while Mrs Castle poured out two more unwanted coffees; then she would propose a subject for discussion which Castle knew had been prepared a long time before just to cover this awkward interval.