The Human Factor

Astle helped himself to another whisky. Sarah had been upstairs a long time with Sam, and he was alone, waiting for the bell to ring, waiting.

Castle finished his whisky and poured himself another small one. He had to be careful.

Sarah called down to him, "What are you doing, darling?"

"Just waiting for Mr. Muller," he replied, "and drinking another whisky."

"Not too many, darling."

They had decided that he should welcome Muller first alone. Muller would no doubt arrive from London in an embassy car. A black Mercedes like the big officials all used in South Africa? "Get over the first embarrassments," C had said, "and leave serious business, of course, for the office. At home you are more likely to pick up a useful indication ... I mean of what we have and they haven't. But for God's sake, Castle, keep your cool." And now he struggled to keep his cool with the help of a third whisky while he listened and listened for the sound of a car, any car, but there was little traffic at this hour in King's Road--all the commuters had long since arrived safely home.

His mind wandered to that other occasion when he had waited for at least three-quarters of an hour, in the office of Cornelius Muller. He had been given a copy of The Rand Daily Mail to read--an odd choice since the paper was the enemy of most things that Boss, the organisation which employed Muller, supported. He had already read that day's issue with his breakfast, but now he reread every page with no other purpose than just to pass the time. Whenever he looked up at the clock he met the eyes of one of the two junior officials who sat stiffly behind their desks and perhaps took it in turn to watch him. Did they expect him to pull out a razor blade and slit open a vein? But torture, he told himself, was always left to the Security Police--or so he believed. And in his case, after all, there could be no fear of torture from any service--he was protected by diplomatic privilege; he was one of the untorturables. No diplomatic privilege, however, could be extended to include Sarah; he had learned during the last year in South Africa the age-old lesson that fear and love are indivisible.

If fear and love are indivisible, so too are fear and hate. Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates. When he had been allowed at last to drop The Rand Daily Mail and they interrupted his fourth reading of the same leading article, with its useless routine protest against the evil of petty apartheid, he was deeply aware of his cowardice. Three years of life in South Africa and six months of love for Sarah had turned him, he knew well, into a coward.

Two men waited for him in the inner office: Mr. Muller sat behind a large desk of the finest South African wood which bore nothing but a blank blotting pad and a highly polished pen-stand and one file suggestively open. He was a man a little younger than Castle, approaching fifty, perhaps, and he had the kind of face which in ordinary circumstances Castle would have found it easy to forget: an indoors face, as smooth and pale as a bank clerk's or a junior civil servant's, a face unmarked by the torments of any belief, human or religious, a face which was ready to receive orders and obey them promptly without question, a conformist face. Certainly not the face of a bully--though that described the features of the second man in uniform who sat with his legs slung with insolence over the arm of an easy chair as though he wanted to show he was any man's equal; his face had not avoided the sun: it had a kind of infernal flush as though it had been exposed too long to a heat which would have been much too fierce for ordinary men. Muller's glasses had gold rims; it was a gold-rimmed country.

"Take a seat," Muller told Castle with just sufficient politeness to pass as courtesy, but the only seat left him to take was a hard narrow chair as little made for comfort as a chair in a church--if he should be required to kneel, there was no hassock available on the hard floor to support his knees. He sat in silence and the two men, the pale one and the heated one, looked back at him and said nothing. Castle wondered how long the silence would continue. Cornelius Muller had a sheet detached from the file in front of him, and after a while he began to tap it with the end of his gold ball-point pen, always in the same place, as though he were hammering in a pin. The small tap tap tap recorded the length of silence like the tick of a watch. The other man scratched his skin above his sock, and so it went on, tap tap and scratch scratch.

At last Muller consented to speak. "I'm glad you found it possible to call, Mr. Castle."

"Yes, it wasn't very convenient, but, well, here I am."

"We wanted to avoid making an unnecessary scandal by writing to your ambassador."

It was Castle's turn now to remain silent, while he tried to make out what they meant by the word scandal.

"Captain Van Donck--this is Captain Van Donck--has brought the matter to us here. He felt it would be more suitably dealt with by us than by the Security Police--because of your position at the British Embassy. You've been under observation, Mr. Castle, for a long time, but an arrest in your case, I feel, would serve no practical purpose--your embassy would claim diplomatic privilege. Of course we could always dispute it before a magistrate and then they would certainly have to send you home. That would probably be the end of your career, wouldn't it?"

Castle said nothing.

"You've been very imprudent, even stupid," Cornelius Muller said, "but then I don't myself consider that stupidity ought to be punished as a crime. Captain Van Donck and the Security Police, though, take a different view, a legalistic view--and they may be right. He would prefer to go through the form of arrest and charge you in court. He feels that diplomatic privileges are often unduly stretched as far as the junior employees of an embassy are concerned. He would like to fight the case as a matter of principle."

The hard chair was becoming painful, and Castle wanted to shift his thigh, but he thought the movement might be taken as a sign of weakness. He was trying very hard to make out what it was they really knew. How many of his agents, he wondered, were incriminated? His own relative safety made him feel shame. In a genuine war an officer can always the with his men and so keep his self-respect.

"Start talking, Castle," Captain Van Donck demanded. He swung his legs off the arm of his chair and prepared to rise--or so it seemed--it was probably bluff. He opened and closed one fist and stared at his signet ring. Then he began to polish the gold ring with a finger as though it were a gun which had to be kept well oiled. In this country you couldn't escape gold. It was in the dust of the cities, artists used it as paint, it would be quite natural for the police to use it for beating in a man's face.

"Talk about what?" Castle asked.

"You are like most Englishmen who come to the Republic," Muller said, "you feel a certain automatic sympathy for black Africans. We can understand your feeling. All the more because we are Africans ourselves. We have lived here for three hundred years. The Bantu are newcomers like yourselves. But I don't need to give you a history lesson. As I said, we understand your point of view, even though it's a very ignorant one, but when it leads a man to grow emotional, then it becomes dangerous, and when you reach the point of breaking the law. ..."

"Which law?"

"I think you know very well which law."

"It's true I'm planning a study on apartheid, the Embassy have no objection, but it's a serious sociological one--quite objective--and it's still in my head. You hardly have the right to censor it yet. Anyway it won't be published, I imagine, in this country."

"If you want to fuck a black whore," Captain Van Donck interrupted with impatience, "why don't you go to a whorehouse in Lesotho or Swaziland? They are still part of your so-called Commonwealth."

Then it was that for the first time Castle realised Sarah, not he, was the one who was in danger.

"I'm too old to be interested in whores," he said.

"Where were you on the nights of February 4th and 7th? The afternoon of February 21st?"

"You obviously know--or think that you know," Castle said. "I keep my engagement book in my office."

He hadn't seen Sarah for forty-eight hours. Was she already in the hands of men like Captain Van Donck? His fear and his hate grew simultaneously. He forgot that in theory he was a diplomat, however junior. "What the hell are you talking about? And you?" he added to (continued on page 178)Human Factor(continued from page 90) Cornelius Muller. "You too, what do you want me for?"

Captain Van Donck was a brutal and simple man who believed in something, however repugnant--he was one of those one could forgive. What Castle could never bring himself to forgive was this smooth educated officer of Boss. It was men of this kind--men with the education to know what they were about--that made a hell in heaven's despite. He thought of what his Communist friend Carson had so often said to him--"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt."

Muller said, "You must know very well that you've broken the Immorality Act with that Bantu girl-friend of yours." He spoke in a tone of reasonable reproach, like a bank clerk who points out to an unimportant customer an unacceptable overdraft. "You must be aware that if it wasn't for diplomatic privilege you'd be in prison now."

"Where have you hidden her?" Captain Van Donck demanded and Castle at the question felt immense relief.

"Hidden her?"

Captain Van Donck was on his feet, rubbing at his gold ring. He even spat on it.

"That's all right, Captain," Muller said. "I will look after Mr. Castle. I won't take up any more of your time. Thank you for all the help you've given our department. I want to talk to Mr. Castle alone."

When the door closed Castle found himself facing, as Carson would have said, the real enemy. Muller went on, "You mustn't mind Captain Van Donck. Men like that can see no further than their noses. There are other ways of settling this affair more reasonably than a prosecution which will ruin you and not help us."

"I can hear a car." A woman's voice called to him out of the present.

It was Sarah speaking to him from the top of the stairs. He went to the window. A black Mercedes was edging its way up the indistinguishable commuters' houses in King's Road. The driver was obviously looking for a number, but as usual several of the street lamps had fused.

"It's Mr. Muller all right," Castle called back. When he put down his whisky, he found his hand shaking from holding the glass too rigidly.

At the sound of the bell Buller bagan to bark, but, after Castle opened the door, Buller fawned on the stranger with a total lack of discrimination and left a trail of affectionate spittle on Cornelius Muller's trousers. "Nice dog, nice dog," Muller said with causion.

The years had made a noticeable change in Muller--his hair was almost white now and his face was far less smooth. He no longer looked like a civil servant who knew only the proper answers. Since they last met, something had happened to him: he looked more human--perhaps it was that he had taken on with promotion greater responsibilities and with them uncertainties and unanswered questions.

"Good evening, Mr. Castle. I'm sorry I'm so late. The traffic was bad in Watford--I think the place was called Watford."

You might almost have taken him now for a shy man, or perhaps it was only that he was at a loss without his familiar office and his desk of beautiful wood and the presence of two junior colleagues in an outer room. The black Mercedes slid away--the chauffeur had gone to find his dinner. Muller was on his own in a strange town, in a foreign land, where the post boxes bore the initials of a sovereign E II, and there was no statue of Kruger in any market place.

Castle poured out two glasses of whisky. "It's a long time since we met last," Muller said.

"Seven years?"

"It's good of you to ask me to have dinner at your own home."

"C thought it was the best idea. To break the ice. It seems we have to work closely together. On Uncle Remus."

Muller's eyes shifted to the telephone, to the lamp on the table, to a vase of flowers.

"It's all right. Don't worry. If we are bugged here it's only by my own people," Castle said, "and anyway I'm pretty sure we are not." He raised his glass. "To our last meeting. Do you remember you suggested then I might agree to work for you? Well, here I am. We are working together. Historical irony or predestination? Your Dutch church believes in that."

"Of course in those days I hadn't an idea of your real position," Muller said. "If I'd known I wouldn't have threatened you about that wretched Bantu girl. I realise now she was only one of your agents. We might even have worked her together. But, you see, I took you for one of those high-minded anti-apartheid sentimentalists. I was taken completely by surprise when your chief told me you were the man I was to see about Uncle Remus. I hope you don't bear me any grudge. After all you and I are professionals, and we are on the same side now."

"Yes, I suppose we are."

"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 realised 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 goodnight 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 roles."

"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 week-end 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 and 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 realise 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 goodnight."

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."

•

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?"