“Anything
I
tell you?”
“Yes—if you feel like it. I wish you would.”
“About what?”
“About Livia… that is, of course, unless you’d rather not discuss
her.”
George then said what he had made up his mind to say if this situation
should arise. He said: “I don’t mind discussing her, but I’d better tell you
something in advance. I was once married to her.”
“GOOD GOD! You don’t say?”
Till then George had felt slightly uncomfortable, but now, relaxed by his
own candour, he could almost enjoy the other’s unbounded astonishment. He
grinned across the table. “I dunno why I felt I had to tell you, but now I
have done, I hope you’ll go ahead and give me any more news you have about
her.”
“So you’re just as interested as I am?”
“Probably. That’s rather natural, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t kept in touch with her at all?”
“No—not since…” He left the sentence unfinished.
“And that was—when?”
“September First, Nineteen-Twenty-One.”
“Well remembered, eh?”
George nodded.
Millbay gave him a slow, shrewd glance, then continued: “Jeffrey happens
to be a friend of mine… Would you like me to talk about his marriage?”
“Aye—if YOU feel like it.”
“And you won’t mind if I’m frank?”
“We’d both be wasting our time if you weren’t, wouldn’t we?”
“Glad you think so. And in exchange will you give me your own frank
opinion… afterwards?”
George smiled. “Nay, I’ll not promise that. Let’s hear your story
first.”
I first met Jeffrey Winslow, Millbay said, in connection
with the Kemalpan
affair. I don’t suppose you heard much about that. It didn’t get publicized.
Things like it are always apt to happen, and to happen with the same
declension of eventfulness—that is to say, they begin excitingly
—bloodshed in the jungle, perhaps—and end a year or so later with
quiet voices pronouncing judgment across some departmental desk-top in
Whitehall. Mine was one of the quiet voices; I had all the papers relating to
the affair before me, and I’d given several days to the most careful study of
them. After all, you don’t squash a man’s career without good reason,
especially if he belongs to a family like the Winslows. I was as tactful as I
could be. I rather liked the look of the fellow from the outset; he was
neither truculent nor obsequious, and heaven knows he could have been either.
He just sat at the other side of the desk—a little nervous, as was
natural; he answered questions briefly and clearly, and there was a pleasant
ring in his voice that I would have taken for sincerity had not the
circumstances of the moment put doubts in my mind.
Of course the Kemalpan affair needs some explanation—that is, if you
don’t already know about it. (George said he didn’t.) Oh, well, I can put it
in a few sentences. Kemalpan is a technically independent Sultanate that the
British Government has a treaty with; Jeffrey Winslow was adviser to the
Sultan on matters connected with imperial relations—somewhat of a
nebulous job, but semi-diplomatic, with tentacles reaching into commercial
and military spheres. Decidedly no plum—but not badly paid, and easy
enough, as a rule, if you didn’t mind burying yourself in a place like
Kemalpan. That, I should add, is the name of the capital city as well as of
the state; the capital is inland, in the midst of jungle and rubber
plantations; Winslow preferred to live with his wife at a settlement on the
coast fifty miles away—healthier there, or so he reckoned. There’s a
telegraph line between the coast and the capital, and a sort of rough trail
that you can drive over in a Ford—but no good roads, no railway, and in
those days no air line. These details are important in view of what happened.
Also I should add that a small colony of British and Dutch rubber planters
lived on their estates near the inland capital, and were on good terms with
the Sultan, whose subjects they employed. The Sultan didn’t mind low wages
for the tappers so long as he got a cut of the plantation profits
—which he did, more or less, in the form of thoroughly legalized
taxation. Quite a nice set-up as long as it lasted, and it lasted throughout
the twenties, when rubber rose to four shillings a pound; but later the fall
to sixpence led to labour troubles, and by the mid-thirties these had reached
danger-point. All this is necessary to give the background to what happened
in October ‘thirty-four, when an insurrection in the capital threatened to
depose the Sultan in favour of some native ‘leader’ whom the planters called
a Communist—it’s a conditioned reflex, you know. But it was true that
the plantations couldn’t pay higher wages without going bankrupt, and equally
true that the mob was in a mood to overthrow things if the millennium didn’t
appear overnight. The Sultan, who was a sly old debauchee with no real
interest in life but graft and women, rapidly slipped into panic; meanwhile
the planters with their wives and families moved in from outlying districts
to seek protection in the royal palace—protection being a few hundred
of the Sultan’s private army, poor in quality and doubtful in allegiance.
The crisis developed within a matter of hours, while the Winslows were at
their home on the coast; Winslow wired the news to London, which was part of
his job, and was told to await instructions. A day later those instructions
were sent. He was told to assure the Sultan that the British Government would
back him to the full in suppressing the revolt, and that therefore the
capital must be held at all costs until such assistance was
forthcoming…
Now this was the point. Those instructions were SENT, and we had evidence
later that they reached the coast settlement where Winslow lived; but he
swore he never got them. Thus he didn’t give the Sultan any assurance of
British help and the Sultan promptly gave in to the rebels. There followed a
nasty little affray at the palace in which three white men and two white
women were butchered. Well, that was the Kemalpan affair… nothing very
remarkable, but thoroughly reprehensible from every official standpoint, and
a year later we were still holding enquiries about it in Whitehall, still
collecting more evidence that the instructions to Winslow had actually been
transmitted and must have been received by him, though he still swore that
they hadn’t.
A further point cropped up: the telegraph line from the coast to the
inland capital had been cut, so that if Winslow HAD received his orders he
could only have properly obeyed them by making the fifty-mile trip in person
over the rough trail; and this, with most of the intervening country in the
hands of the rebels, might not have been so safe. In fact, it might have been
decidedly unsafe—which was why he couldn’t have relied on anyone else
to do the job. So you see where all this is leading… and where it had
already led on that foggy Friday in November ‘thirty-five when I first talked
to the fellow in my office. Was his denial of having received instructions
just the only thing he could think of as an excuse for having been scared? If
that were the true interpretation, it added up to something rather
serious.
You know, it’s a queer thing when you have to talk to a gentleman in the
social sense who has somehow broken the code of a gentleman in the ethical
sense. You can never quite come to grips with the situation. You fence and
evade and know that he knows all the time what you’re really thinking. I
never, for instance, came anywhere near hinting to Winslow that he might be
both a liar and a coward, yet he must have known that that was the inevitable
implication behind all the questioning. And presently it all boiled down to
that simple question: Had he or had he not received those instructions? He
stuck to it that he hadn’t, and he sounded convincing, but long experience
has left me with the opinion that lies are, if anything, easier to tell
convincingly than the truth. Besides, evidence that the instructions HAD
reached him was almost watertight, so I had to accept it. But of course I did
not say so. I said, quietly and politely: “Well, Winslow, we seem to have
reached a deadlock. Maybe there’ll be some further evidence… if so, perhaps
you’ll be good enough to come here again.”
He answered then, with a certain austere dignity which I liked (whether he
were a liar and a coward or not): “Of course I will, but it’s nine months now
since I was advised to come home on leave, and since then I’ve been kept
waiting for the enquiry to finish. It’s rather a strain, in some ways.
Besides, I should very much like to go back to my job.”
It was then my duty to tell him that there was little chance of his ever
resuming that kind of job under Government service. He took it very well. He
said he was sorry—which I knew did not mean any kind of confession, but
merely that the outcome was a blow to him. I said I was sorry too— and
by that I did not mean that as a liar and a coward he deserved any special
leniency, but merely that it grieved me, as a member of the so-called ruling
class, to see another member acquitting himself out of style. You see what
snobs we all are… Anyhow, I shook hands with him and wished him well and
didn’t expect to see him again.
But I just couldn’t get the fellow out of my mind. He’d interested me
—not only because the departure from tradition is always more
interesting than the tradition itself, of which one gets a little bored when
one is, as I am, a somewhat cynical conformist. I should be believed, no
doubt, if I said that after talking to Winslow I paced up and down my office
floor wondering if, in his place, I should have behaved any better. Yet
actually I didn’t wonder at all, because I knew. I have fought in wars, and
there have been several occasions on which I risked my life, not because I
was brave, nor because I hated the enemy, but because risking my life was the
thing to do in those particular circumstances, and all my training had been
to make me act both accordingly and automatically. That’s one of the reasons
why Winslow interested me—because his training had been, if anything,
more traditional than mine. Who’s Who and Debrett were sufficient authorities
for that. He’d been to a good public school and to Oxford, had then passed
into the Diplomatic and been an attaché at various European embassies. Quite
brilliant at Oxford, by the way, and with his family connections he must have
been exactly the type for whom one would forecast a distinguished future. All
of which added to the mystery—for why, if one came to think of it,
should such a fellow ever fetch up at Kemalpan? That was decidedly NOT the
thing to have done… and since it was unlikely that anybody would take
Kemalpan from choice, what had forced him into it? Well, there were people I
knew who could throw out a few hints. Our friend Sprigge is the expert there.
Scandals, women, mésalliances, bad cheques —he can usually tell you. In
Winslow’s case it was a divorce— which in those prim days didn’t help
anyone… and I needn’t say more about that to you.
I also discovered that Winslow had written a book of essays on moral
philosophy that had attracted some attention in its field, and might have led
to a useful subsidiary reputation had not his main career gone off at such a
tangent. I was interested enough to get hold of the book. I found it a bit
above my head, but I thought it showed signs of a first-class mind, and
first-class minds are such rare things in our time and land that it becomes a
crime, in my opinion, to frustrate, side-track, or otherwise stultify them.
And his, at least, had been side-tracked at Kemalpan, for—apart from
the career—there had been no succeeding books.
During the following months a trickle of further evidence came in, but
none of it helpful to his case. A Chinese clerk reported that he had
personally delivered the coded cable message from the telegraph station to
Winslow’s bungalow, where he had handed it to a responsible servant; the
servant said Winslow was out at the time, so he had placed it on his desk
along with other messages and letters… The case also began to look blacker
from another angle, for at the time the message was received it was known at
the coast settlement that the lives of white refugees in the Sultan’s palace
were endangered, so that if Winslow had been concerned with his own personal
safety he must also have weighed it against the safety of others. About
twenty, to be precise—including women and children. And to complete the
indictment, it seemed reasonably probable that if he had managed to get the
message through to the Sultan, the latter would have put up a defence instead
of a surrender, and the five lives might have been saved. Altogether there
was very little excuse for Winslow, and when, just about the time this latter
evidence came in, I got a letter from him in Ireland I was in a rather
unsympathetic mood for considering it, especially as the first few sentences
showed me he was asking the impossible. Briefly, he wanted a job. Not, of
course, the same job in Kemalpan, or even that kind of job in that kind of
place; yet, he argued, could not a decade of experience in the Far East, plus
the knowledge of several obscure languages and dialects, be put to some use
somehow and somewhere? What he hinted at was a job in some Government office,
where he could continue in the public service, however humbly.
I wrote back and told him how little chance he had. And a week later Mrs.
Winslow herself came to see me.
It was another interesting meeting. I had heard of this Mrs. Winslow once
before, in connection with her oft-quoted and misquoted remark about Hitler
at the Batavia dinner-party; I hadn’t disliked her for that (because it
seemed to me she had probably been misunderstood), but it had given me an
impression that she was a dangerous partner for a man of affairs. And now,
when I saw her across my desk, I was immediately struck by a certain
controlled intention in her whole look and attitude. She faced me as if she
knew what she wanted and meant to get her own way at all costs. After a mere
good-morning she plunged right in—couldn’t I possibly find her husband
some desk job in Whitehall? Apparently my letter had been the final blow to
his hopes, and she was afraid of a breakdown if he didn’t find some work
where he felt he could be useful. And though she herself preferred to live in
Ireland, she would not say no to London if Jeffrey had to be there. She
talked of living in London as a sort of sacrifice she would make for her
husband if the Government in return would do its part.