The Heart of the Matter Read online

  ‘Of course,’ Perrot said. ‘We’re stripped for action here. Have another drink?’ Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and the organ of the Orpheum Cinema, Clapham, sailed to them over three thousand miles. From across the river the excited voices of the carriers rose and fell. Somebody knocked on the verandah door. Scobie shifted uncomfortably in his chair: the music of the Würlitzer organ moaned and boomed. It seemed to him outrageously immodest. The verandah door opened and Wilson came in.

  ‘Hello, Wilson,’ Druce said, ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

  ‘Mr Wilson’s up to inspect the U.A.C. store,’ Mrs Perrot explained. ‘I hope the rest-house at the store is all right. It’s not often used.’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s very comfortable,’ Wilson said. ‘Why, Major Scobie, I didn’t expect to see you.’

  ‘I don’t know why you didn’t,’ Perrot said. ‘I told you he’d be here. Sit down and have a drink.’ Scobie remembered what Louise had once said to him about Wilson—phoney, she had called him. He looked across at Wilson and saw the blush at Perrot’s betrayal fading from the boyish face, and the little wrinkles that gathered round the eyes and gave the lie to his youth.

  ‘Have you heard from Mrs Scobie, sir?’

  ‘She arrived safely last week.’

  ‘I’m glad. I’m so glad.’

  ‘Well,’ Perrot said, ‘what are the scandals from the big city?’ The words ‘big city’ came out with a sneer—Perrot couldn’t bear the thought that there was a place where people considered themselves important and where he was not regarded. Like a Huguenot imagining Rome, he built up a picture of frivolity, viciousness and corruption. ‘We bushfolk,’ Perrot went heavily on, ‘live very quietly.’ Scobie felt sorry for Mrs Perrot; she had heard these phrases so often: she must have forgotten long ago the time of courtship when she had believed in them. Now she sat close up against the radio with the music turned low listening or pretending to listen to the old Viennese melodies, while her mouth stiffened in the effort to ignore her husband in his familiar part. ‘Well, Scobie, what are our superiors doing in the city?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Scobie vaguely, watching Mrs Perrot, ‘nothing very much has been happening. People are too busy with the war …’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Perrot said, ‘so many files to turn over in the Secretariat. I’d like to see them growing rice down here. They’d know what work was.’

  ‘I suppose the greatest excitement recently,’ Wilson said, ‘would be the parrot, sir, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Tallit’s parrot?’ Scobie asked.

  ‘Or Yusef’s according to Tallit,’ Wilson said. ‘Isn’t that right, sir, or have I got the story wrong?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know what’s right,’ Scobie said.

  ‘But what is the story? We’re out of touch with the great world of affairs here. We have only the French to think about.’

  ‘Well, about three weeks ago Tallit’s cousin was leaving for Lisbon on one of the Portuguese ships. We searched his baggage and found nothing, but I’d heard rumours that sometimes diamonds had been smuggled in a bird’s crop, so I kept the parrot back, and sure enough there were about a hundred pounds’ worth of industrial diamonds inside. The ship hadn’t sailed, so we fetched Tallit’s cousin back on shore. It seemed a perfect case.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘You can’t beat a Syrian,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Tallit’s cousin’s boy swore that it wasn’t Tallit’s cousin’s parrot—and so of course did Tallit’s cousin. Their story was that the small boy had substituted another bird to frame Tallit.’

  ‘On behalf of Yusef, I suppose,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Of course. The trouble was the small boy disappeared. Of course there are two explanations of that—perhaps Yusef had given him his money and he’d cleared off, or just as possibly Tallit had given him money to throw the blame on Yusef.’

  ‘Down here,’ Perrot said, ‘I’d have had ’em both in jail.’

  ‘Up in town,’ Scobie said, ‘we have to think about the law.’

  Mrs Perrot turned the knob of the radio and a voice shouted with unexpected vigour, ‘Kick him in the pants.’

  ‘I’m for bed,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a hard day.’

  Sitting up in bed under his mosquito-net Scobie opened his diary. Night after night for more years than he could remember he had kept a record—the barest possible record—of his days. If anyone argued a date with him he could check up; if he wanted to know which day the rains had begun in any particular year, when the last but one Director of Public Works had been transferred to East Africa, the facts were all there, in one of the volumes stored in the tin box under his bed at home. Otherwise he never opened a volume—particularly that volume where the barest fact of all was contained—C. died. He couldn’t have told himself why he stored up this record—it was certainly not for posterity. Even if posterity were to be interested in the life of an obscure policeman in an unfashionable colony, it would have learned nothing from these cryptic entries. Perhaps the reason was that forty years ago at a preparatory school he had been given a prize—a copy of Allan Quatermain—for keeping a diary throughout one summer holiday, and the habit had simply stayed. Even the form the diary took had altered very little. Had sausages for breakfast. Fine day. Walk in morning. Riding lesson in afternoon. Chicken for lunch. Treacle roll. Almost imperceptibly this record had changed into Louise left. Y. called in the evening. First typhoon 2 A.M. His pen was powerless to convey the importance of any entry: only he himself, if he had cared to read back, could have seen in the last phrase but one the enormous breach pity had blasted through his integrity. Y. not Yusef.

  Scobie wrote: May 5. Arrived Pende to meet survivors of s.s. 43 (he used the code number for security). Druce with me. He hesitated for a moment and then added, Wilson here. He closed the diary, and lying flat on his back under the net he began to pray. This also was a habit. He said the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and then, as sleep began to clog his lids, he added an act of contrition. It was a formality, not because he felt himself free from serious sin but because it had never occurred to him that his life was important enough one way or another. He didn’t drink, he didn’t fornicate, he didn’t even lie, but he never regarded this absence of sin as virtue. When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I missed Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did—that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered. ‘O God, bless—’ but before he could mention names he was asleep.

  II

  They stood on the jetty next morning: the first light lay in cold strips along the eastern sky. The huts in the village were still shuttered with silver. At two that morning there had been a typhoon—a wheeling pillar of black cloud driving up from the coast, and the air was cold yet with the rain. They stood with coat-collars turned up watching the French shore, and the carriers squatted on the ground behind them. Mrs Perrot came down the path from the bungalow wiping the white sleep from her eyes, and from across the water very faintly came the bleating of a goat. ‘Are they late?’ Mrs Perrot asked.

  ‘No, we are early.’ Scobie kept his glasses focused on the opposite shore. He said, ‘They are stirring.’

  ‘Those poor souls,’ Mrs Perrot said, and shivered with the morning chill.

  ‘They are alive,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In my profession we have to consider that important.’

  ‘Does one ever get over a shock like that? Forty days in open boats.’

  ‘If you survive at all,’ the doctor said, ‘you get over it. It’s failure people don’t get over, and this you see is a kind of success.’

  ‘They are fetching them out of the huts,’ Scobie said. ‘I think I can count six stretchers. The boats are being brought in.’<
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  ‘We were told to prepare for nine stretcher cases and four walking ones,’ the doctor said. ‘I suppose there’ve been some more deaths.’

  ‘I may have counted wrong. They are carrying them down now. I think there are seven stretchers. I can’t distinguish the walking cases.’

  The flat cold light, too feeble to clear the morning haze, made the distance across the river longer than it would seem at noon. A native dugout canoe bearing, one supposed, the walking cases came blackly out of the haze: it was suddenly very close to them. On the other shore they were having trouble with the motor of a launch; they could hear the irregular putter, like an animal out of breath.

  First of the walking cases to come on shore was an elderly man with an arm in a sling. He wore a dirty white topee and a native cloth was draped over his shoulders; his free hand tugged and scratched at the white stubble on his face. He said in an unmistakably Scottish accent, ‘Ah’m Loder, chief engineer.’

  ‘Welcome home, Mr Loder,’ Scobie said. ‘Will you step up to the bungalow and the doctor will be with you in a few minutes?’

  ‘Ah have no need of doctors.’

  ‘Sit down and rest. I’ll be with you soon.’

  ‘Ah want to make ma report to a proper official.’

  ‘Would you take him up to the house, Perrot?’

  ‘I’m the District Commissioner,’ Perrot said. ‘You can make your report to me.’

  ‘What are we waitin’ for then?’ the engineer said. ‘It’s nearly two months since the sinkin’. There’s an awful lot of responsibility on me, for the captain’s dead.’ As they moved up the hill to the bungalow, the persistent Scottish voice, as regular as the pulse of a dynamo, came back to them. ‘Ah’m responsible to the owners.’

  The other three had come on shore, and across the river the tinkering in the launch went on: the sharp crack of a chisel, the clank of metal, and then again the spasmodic putter. Two of the new arrivals were the cannon fodder of all such occasions: elderly men with the appearance of plumbers who might have been brothers if they had not been called Forbes and Newall, uncomplaining men without authority, to whom things simply happened. One had a crushed foot and walked with a crutch; the other had his hand bound up with shabby strips of tropical shirt. They stood on the jetty with as natural a lack of interest as they would have stood at a Liverpool street corner waiting for the local to open. A stalwart grey-headed woman in mosquito-boots followed them out of the canoe.

  ‘Your name, madam?’ Druce asked, consulting a list. ‘Are you Mrs Rolt?’

  ‘I am not Mrs Rolt. I am Miss Malcott.’

  ‘Will you go up to the house? The doctor …’

  ‘The doctor has far more serious cases than me to attend to.’

  Mrs Perrot said, ‘You’d like to lie down.’

  ‘It’s the last thing I want to do,’ Miss Malcott said. ‘I am not in the least tired.’ She shut her mouth between every sentence. ‘I am not hungry. I am not nervous. I want to get on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To Lagos. To the Educational Department.’

  ‘I’m afraid there will be a good many delays.’

  ‘I’ve been delayed two months. I can’t stand delay. Work won’t wait.’ Suddenly she lifted her face towards the sky and howled like a dog.

  The doctor took her gently by the arm and said, ‘We’ll do what we can to get you there right away. Come up to the house and do some telephoning.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Miss Malcott said, ‘there’s nothing that can’t be straightened on a telephone.’

  The doctor said to Scobie, ‘Send those other two chaps up after us. They are all right. If you want to do some questioning, question them.’

  Druce said, ‘I’ll take them along. You stay here, Scobie, in case the launch arrives. French isn’t my language.’

  Scobie sat down on the rail of the jetty and looked across the water. Now that the haze was lifting the other bank came closer; he could make out now with the naked eye the details of the scene: the white warehouse, the mud huts, the brasswork of the launch glittering in the sun: he could see the red fezzes of the native troops. He thought: Just such a scene as this and I might have been waiting for Louise to appear on a stretcher—or perhaps not waiting. Somebody settled himself on the rail beside him but Scobie didn’t turn his head.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts, sir.’

  ‘I was just thinking that Louise is safe, Wilson.’

  ‘I was thinking that too, sir.’

  ‘Why do you always call me sir, Wilson? You are not in the police force. It makes me feel very old.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Major Scobie.’

  ‘What did Louise call you?’

  ‘Wilson. I don’t think she liked my Christian name.’

  ‘I believe they’ve got that launch to start at last, Wilson. Be a good chap and warn the doctor.’

  A French officer in a stained white uniform stood in the bow: a soldier flung a rope and Scobie caught and fixed it. ‘Bon jour,’ he said, and saluted.

  The French officer returned his salute—a drained-out figure with a twitch in the left eyelid. He said in English, ‘Good morning. I have seven stretcher cases for you here.’

  ‘My signal says nine.’

  ‘One died on the way and one last night. One from blackwater and one from—from, my English is bad, do you say fatigue?’

  ‘Exhaustion.’

  ‘That is it.’

  ‘If you will let my labourers come on board they will get the stretchers off.’ Scobie said to the carriers, ‘Very softly. Go very softly.’ It was an unnecessary command: no white hospital attendants could lift and carry more gently. ‘Won’t you stretch your legs on shore?’ Scobie asked, ‘or come up to the house and have some coffee? ‘

  ‘No. No coffee, thank you. I will just see that all is right here.’ He was courteous and unapproachable, but all the time his left eyelid flickered a message of doubt and distress.

  ‘I have some English papers if you would like to see them.’

  ‘No, no, thank you. I read English with difficulty.’

  ‘You speak it very well.’

  ‘That is a different thing.’

  ‘Have a cigarette?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I do not like American tobacco.’

  The first stretcher came on shore—the sheets were drawn up to the man’s chin and it was impossible to tell from the stiff vacant face what his age might be. The doctor came down the hill to meet the stretcher and led the carriers away to the Government rest-house where the beds had been prepared.

  ‘I used to come over to your side,’ Scobie said, ‘to shoot with your police chief. A nice fellow called Durand—a Norman.’

  ‘He is not here any longer,’ the officer said.

  ‘Gone home?’

  ‘He’s in prison at Dakar,’ the French officer replied, standing like a figure-head in the bows, but the eye twitching and twitching. The stretchers slowly passed Scobie and turned up the hill: a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten with a feverish face and a twig-like arm thrown out from his blanket: an old lady with grey hair falling every way who twisted and turned and whispered: a man with a bottle nose—a knob of scarlet and blue on a yellow face. One by one they turned up the hill—the carriers’ feet moving with the certainty of mules. ‘And Père Brûle?’ Scobie asked. ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘He died last year of blackwater.’

  ‘He was out here twenty years without leave, wasn’t he? He’ll be hard to replace.’

  ‘He has not been replaced,’ the officer said. He turned and gave a short savage order to one of his men. Scobie looked at the next stretcher load and looked away again. A small girl—she couldn’t have been more than six—lay on it. She was deeply and unhealthily asleep; her fair hair was tangled and wet with sweat; her open mouth was dry and cracked, and she shuddered regularly and spasmodically. ‘It’s terrible,’ Scobie said.

  ‘What is terrible?’

  ‘A chil
d like that.’

  ‘Yes. Both parents were lost. But it is all right. She will die.’

  Scobie watched the bearers go slowly up the hill, their bare feet very gently flapping the ground. He thought: It would need all Father Brûle’s ingenuity to explain that. Not that the child would die—that needed no explanation. Even the pagans realized that the love of God might mean an early death, though the reason they ascribed was different, but that the child should have been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in the open boat—that was the mystery, to reconcile that with the love of God.

  And yet he could believe in no God who was not human enough to love what he had created. ‘How on earth did she survive till now?’ he wondered aloud.

  The officer said gloomily, ‘Of course they looked after her on the boat. They gave up their own share of the water often. It was foolish, of course, but one cannot always be logical. And it gave them something to think about.’ It was like the hint of an explanation—too faint to be grasped. He said, ‘Here is another who makes one angry.’

  The face was ugly with exhaustion: the skin looked as though it were about to crack over the cheek-bones: only the absence of lines showed that it was a young face. The French officer said, ‘She was just married—before she sailed. Her husband was lost. Her passport says she is nineteen. She may live. You see, she still has some strength.’ Her arms as thin as a child’s lay outside the blanket, and her fingers clasped a book firmly. Scobie could see the wedding-ring loose on her dried-up finger.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Timbres,’ the French officer said. He added bitterly, ‘When this damned war started, she must have been still at school.’

  Scobie always remembered how she was carried into his life on a stretcher grasping a stamp-album with her eyes fast shut.

  III

  In the evening they gathered together again for drinks, but they were subdued. Even Perrot was no longer trying to impress them. Druce said, ‘Well, tomorrow I’m off. You coming, Scobie?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Mrs Perrot said, ‘You got all you wanted?’