‘I’m all set for home.’
‘So you see that, at last. Factory, home, recreational activity – all much the same wherever you are. What you call patriotism is objectless.’
‘Aye. You don’t need to be always kissing your girl in public.’
Pretorius was thankful for a chance to be generous. It was absurd to stand on his dignity, always unwelcome, because of this French cricket.
‘Very well, Mr Brown, if that’s how you feel, the unproven case against you can be dropped and you may return to the mainland whenever you wish. Let’s see – where was it you came from?’
‘Tunis Garden City.’
‘Very well managed, I believe.’
‘Smooth as bloody grease! But me, I’m staying here.’
‘That is out of the question.’
‘No, Excellency,’ Humphrey interrupted quietly. ‘To a man as broad-minded as your daughter insists that you are, nothing is ever out of the question.’
‘Middlesex, I’m afraid you do not realise that you are consorting with criminals.’
‘You have to mix with politicians too. It doesn’t affect either of us, I hope.’
Pretorius gave his first genuine smile and asked what exactly he had been up to.
‘Just listening to some of these welfare units. By the way, Pezulu Pasha, don’t blow the heads of those two just when they were expecting promotion for grabbing Alfred. They were quite right to arrest me too. Hadn’t the faintest notion who I was. Ought to have been dressed in goatskins or something.’
‘And this canvassing of yours – what is its object?’ Pretorius asked.
‘To suggest to these immigrants that there’s a lot in Your Excellency’s point of view. It doesn’t make a pig’s tail of difference to them whether they are governed by the Federation or a self-conscious little Assembly of their own. Their food comes from factories, their thought and art and music from factories. And if you could colour their eyes blue you’d be making them in factories.’
‘That’s off the point, Middlesex. You are attacking our common civilisation.’
‘I am. It has given my people nothing they really want, and is now going to deprive them of what they do.’
‘Your people?’
‘Yes. With all these politics in the way, I couldn’t see that they loved the place.’
‘Oh, not that again!’ Pretorius sighed.
‘Take Alfred Brown’s daughter, for example! I haven’t met the girl. Hysterical, I should think. But I’m told that when she landed she kissed the ground. Absurdly emotional of course, but from the heart. Shooting at you wasn’t.’
‘In any case I cannot understand this obsession with geography.’
‘I can’t either when you put it like that. Ask your daughter!’
‘She’s all right, of course, in your absence?’
‘Oh, yes. Smith and Green won’t do her any harm.’
Pezulu had reported their presence in the forest as a fact to the High Commissioner, but in reality it was no more than a rumour which he wanted Pretorius to take seriously and consider Humphrey of Middlesex as a potential ally. He was appalled to find the rumour true.
Pretorius himself was silent for a moment. His confidence that the revolt of the immigrants had been crushed for all time was in shreds. If there was any confidence about, it was Humphrey’s which must be immediately shattered. The only possible response to it was power. He allowed full play to his earlier resentment.
‘You will surrender those two instantly.’
Pezulu stood up and made the gesture of advancing on Humphrey with a couple of steps.
‘Together with the Chancellor!’ he demanded.
‘Don’t tell me you want him back!’
The Chief of Police stared into that impenetrable face with its air of courtesy and amusement and resumed his seat.
‘The return of Smith and Green is a sine qua non,’ Pretorius insisted.
‘A what, your Excellency?’
‘An essential.’
‘Latin?’
‘I really do not know.’
‘Sounds like it. We still learned Latin in the tribal college.’
Pretorius, sidetracked by his enlightened interest in all that concerned the history of the natives since the Age of Destruction, controlled his impatience and asked if Humphrey understood it.
‘No, I can’t say I do. It’s supposed to discipline the mind.’
‘What you all need is sound technical instruction to Certificate level.’
‘But one can pick that up any time.’
‘Quite, quite, but –’ Pretorius pulled himself together; ‘Middlesex, after two years of casual dealings with you I am accustomed to approach business through a number of pleasant irrelevancies. And when I have the time I enjoy it. But if you have come here with some unwise proposal or ultimatum, get on with it!’
‘Oh, that! Ultimatum sounds like Latin too. Well, what I did come to say was that I could offer you peace or civil resistance based on London.’
‘There is no London.’
‘That is why it will be so very expensive to suppress us.’
Pretorius realised that his best available weapon was charm against charm. He was aware, he said, that Middlesex and his tribe had been unsettled by all the excitement in Avebury. He did not want to appear patronising for he knew well that there were aspects of their culture of value to the future. But they were only two generations removed from bar … – well, the free life of natural man, and he did ask them to think whether they might not be out of their depth.
‘Hopelessly, Your Excellency, hopelessly! I hate making anybody do what he doesn’t want to. But here are my sine qua nonni, or nonna perhaps. Deportation to be stopped. Young Silvia to be released. Alfred Brown and myself to be Special Commissioners advising you on the permanent settlement of the immigrants.’
‘And dismissal of Pezulu Pasha,’ Alfred added.
Humphrey calmed down Pretorius with a genial gesture, implying that they must both be patient with old Brown, and turned amicably to the Chief of Police.
‘I do hope I shan’t offend you, Pezulu Pasha, if I say that I usually know what you will do and can make a good guess at what you will say.’
‘If you mean that I am on the side of law and order, I am. And proud of it!’
‘Loyal, energetic and quite incorruptible, Alfred. And that’s about all anyone can ask.’
‘Well, if you say so. Provided it ain’t me who has to deal with him. All right, power to dismiss will do.’
‘We will now cut this short,’ Pretorius said. ‘I have no authority to grant any of this nonsense.’
‘The Federation is in such a flutter that it will accept whatever Your Excellency recommends.’
‘I do not recommend impractical folly.’
Pretorius had always wondered how Middlesex preserved his power, for he knew only the smile which accompanied social ease. He had not previously met the smile which accompanied action. The subtle change in his opponent’s face reminded him of a cat with the claws unsheathed whose power to strike was plain and intentions incalculable; playful they could be, or deadly.
‘Then I offer you Smith’s policy which is severely practical,’ Humphrey replied.
‘And that is?’
‘Resistance to the death based on my territory! Black Rod whom I have attached to the Chancellor calls it terrorism. You can always take one of them with you. That’s a fragment of St Winston though your daughter says he was only a symbol of virility. We shall give you death in your houses, death in the darkness, death wherever a man walks alone. We shall destroy your industry and communications and then – vanish!’
In spite of his alarm Pretorius responded bravely:
‘Middlesex, by this time I can – unfortunately – recognise the sound of hatred in a voice. It is not in yours.’
‘But I do not hate you. I like and admire you. And when I string you up from a tree in the course of my duty I shall not be able to trust my v
oice. Green will have to speak for me.’
Pretorius looked at Tito Pezulu for help but the appeal went unanswered. The Chief of Police never interfered in matters of high policy – a strategy which had served him well in the past, and at times had allowed him to come to the rescue.
‘Middlesex, you have not been in the capital for the last month. I think a talk with General Aranda might bring you back to sanity.’ Pressing a button of the desk transmitter he added: ‘Aranda, can you come up a minute?’
‘I will not stay in the same room as that butcher!’ Brown shouted.
‘Butcher? Only his duty, Alfred. But not one of us in this room would have dreamed of marching out alone to meet that fearless woman. Gallantry answered to gallantry. It was called chivalry once. I’ve read of it but never quite knew what the word meant.’
‘You didn’t? Who bellowed the flames until his hair was singed?’
‘That was hospitality to a stranger. But for a soldier like Aranda chivalry is an instinct. Funny how a trade can die, and yet its finest tradition carries on.’
Brown, unaffected by such niceties, repeated that he would not stay in the same room. For the first time Pretorius lost his temper. He had no patience with a man so unforgiving that he did not even try to understand.
‘Then you can leave it, damn you!’
Alfred Brown stamped straight to the small door which led to the private lobby and flung it open.
‘Not that way!’ Pezulu barked too late.
Seeing his daughter and the Inspector of Police, Brown turned with blazing eyes and clenched fist.
‘Now that’s the end of it, ye pair of crooks!’
Humphrey stood back and looked through the open door.
‘If only you had told me what was delaying you both, my dear Pezulu,’ he said. ‘It’s so embarrassing. The very least you can do now is to invite the girl in. It’s no good pretending she doesn’t exist.’
For the moment, Pretorius and Pezulu were dominated by his casual acceptance of the incident as a mere social blunder. Neither protested when he called to the Inspector and prisoner to come in. Silvia’s face lit up when she saw her father, but she controlled her reaction as Britannia should and stood defiantly in the doorway.
‘Come in!’ Humphrey repeated smiling. ‘There’s no catch about it.’
Britannia was still suspicious, but defiance looked painfully like sulks.
‘Be your natural self, girl! I can’t run this show if you aren’t.’
At last she ran to her father and clung to him in tears. Pretorius, feeling more and more keenly the desecration of his seat of government, exclaimed that this was intolerable. And then the slippery Middlesex, impossible to pin down, deliberately chose to misunderstand him.
‘Yes, I haven’t a daughter myself,’ Humphrey said. ‘But I do understand how you must feel. Take her back to the other room, Alfred, and don’t bother if the Inspector writes down every word you say. It won’t make any sense, you know.’
When they had gone the High Commissioner tried to keep in mind that only ten minutes ago he had decided that his best weapon was charm against charm.
‘I hope, Middlesex, that at home, too, your influence …
‘You have talked to my mother?’
‘I have once had the honour of listening to her.’
General Aranda entered by the private lobby. His excellent military manners prevented him from commenting on the curious sight of a pretty child crying in the arms of an apparently prosperous citizen of Avebury, of the type to make a reliable sergeant, while an Inspector of Police looked abstractedly out of the window. Pretorius, seeing that no questions were to be asked (did Aranda think she had been beaten up or recruited unwillingly for the High Commissioner’s bed?) made no reference to the encounter.
‘Oh, Aranda,’ he said, ‘I believe you have not met Humphrey of Middlesex.’
They greeted each other most cordially, Aranda remarking that he had heard a lot about Humphrey from Pezulu Pasha.
‘He should have brought you to see me.’
‘Ha ha, yes! I’d have liked to study that little problem on the ground.’
Pretorius asked what problem.
‘The Corrector I told you about,’ Pezulu answered. ‘I put it up to military intelligence.’
Humphrey’s enigmatic smile was really one of private enjoyment; if the authorities chose to consider it ruthless, so much the better.
‘I wish you’d come over to the mainland with me and talk to the backroom boys,’ Aranda said.
‘Let’s give them a taste of the wilderness, General! It would make such a change for them.’
Pretorius broke in impatiently:
‘Aranda, I must warn you that the native British put a high value on these little polite exchanges. They mean nothing. I wanted you here because Middlesex has just threatened to hang me.’
‘Good Lord! Where?’
‘On a tree.’
‘He is under arrest?’
‘No, no, no! He hasn’t published it,’ Pezulu protested hastily.
‘Published what?’ Humphrey asked.
‘Your threat to hang the High Commissioner. If you published it you’d be run in under Paragraph 16A.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. We never publish anything till we’ve done it.’
‘I wish I had you on my staff, sir,’ said Aranda.
‘Gentlemen, these irrelevancies …’ Pretorius began.
‘I am so sorry, Excellency. Now, you wanted the General to explain something to me.’
‘Middlesex has presented me with a childish ultimatum, Aranda. If I do not recommend his terms for acceptance by the Federation – which I have no intention of doing – he means to support a band of assassins in his territory to creep out of the trees by night and kill and destroy …’
‘And he’s got the leaders of the immigrants there already,’ Pezulu added.
‘I want you to tell him in your precise military way, just as you would tell me,’ Pretorius continued, ‘how many hours it would take to annihilate the lot of them.’
‘Normal civil revolt? Days, not hours, sir. Isolate the area. Destroy all food factories from the air. Wait for surrender. And that’s all.’
‘They have no food factories,’ Pretorius snapped.
‘In any case their supply problem …’
‘To hell with their supply problem! Exterminate them!’
‘Only a matter of logistics, sir. Train the men, cordon off half the island and stop the boltholes! Then drive your roads through the forests. I could defoliate them if it wasn’t against international law.’
‘Burn the trees to the ground!’
‘Can’t, sir. Never enough summer. But all quite feasible provided the Federation will pay for it. Extermination would not take more than four or five years assuming always that they have no defence against the searching type of Corrector.’
‘Only our simple little devices,’ Humphrey admitted modestly.
‘The backroom boys think they’ve got it now.’
‘Yes, the principle is so obvious. If electronics can affect the human brain, then it stands to reason the human brain can affect electronics.’
‘Aranda, we can discuss telepathy whenever you like,’ Pretorius interrupted impatiently. ‘But all the heavy industry of the native British is the hammer and the forge.’
‘And that comes near magic, too, if you ask me,’ said Pezulu.
‘My dear Tito!’
‘It’s all very well, sir, but I like facts, and down among the trees there never are any. They don’t reason or eat or behave as we do and I don’t know how much to believe. Nor would my police. They’d panic or they’d fraternise. The trouble with Middlesex is that he carries the darkness about with him and pretends it’s light. I’m ready to exterminate him here and now, and if I can’t trust my voice you can do the apologising. But what alternative does he offer?’
‘You suggest I surrender? To a barbarian beyond the pale of civi
lisation?’
Humphrey at once broke in with every appearance of being shocked:
‘Excellency, I never dreamed of such a thing. Are we British immigrants? Surrenders, insults, protests, Laws of Nelson – must we talk like that just because I call on you informally with a very tentative proposal?’
The High Commissioner gasped with despair. The other two opened their mouths, searched for anything more than a clearing of the throat and were unable to find it. The sudden silence must have been noticed in the anteroom where Julian Cola had apparently been holding off interruption by a visitor who now considered that there was a gap in the discussion which she could reasonably fill. One half of the double door was largely obstructed by a back view of the Dowager of Middlesex, who was still addressing Cola.
‘Nonsense, young man! You look after the boss’s daughter for another minute or two. Got to prepare him, haven’t I? You can’t take these things as calmly as we do. He’d have a fit if she came barging in here before I had time to warn him.’
The Dowager closed the door firmly, turned and swept her most impressive curtsy to Pretorius.
‘How are you, Excellency? I’ve brought your daughter back. It’s all very well, Humphrey, for you to tell me not to let her out of my sight, but I never could do anything with George when you aren’t there. Sticks the girl across a pony!’
‘Across what?’ Pretorius demanded.
‘A pony. And then she goes and cuts an arser and breaks her arm! George set it without trouble. He’s as good as any of your doctors so long as it’s before dinner. But I knew how you would feel. If she were my daughter and she’d fallen down a community slide or whatever you’ve got to fall down – damned little if you ask me with all the care you take of yourselves – I’d want her back home at once.’
‘You left my daughter at the mercy of a wild animal?’
‘Fourteen-year-old gelding, and a green road. But you know what they are like. Surface liable to fall in. May be only a rabbit hole to start with and after a bit of rain you find yourself looking down a fifty-foot drop with a whole lot of bones and rotten metal at the bottom.’
‘Your people’s disregard for human life is atrocious!’ Pretorius exclaimed, and would have developed his revulsion to the would-be insurgent’s mother if Julian Cola had not held the door open for Thea.
Arrows of Desire Page 10
