The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

We sank, and kissed the lake. Several hundred yards away rose the base of Mount Kangosi. I looked with admiration up the slope; great slabs of rock stood out from the verdure; crouching at the bottom of this colossus was a village, part of it forced by the steepness of the incline to stand out on piles into the lake.

‘Leave everything to me, boss,’ J-Casta said, grabbing a hand asdic from the port locker and climbing out on to the float. We followed. It seemed likely that the disturbance was due to a slight subsidence in the side of the lake basin. Such subsidences, Jubal said, were not uncommon, but in this case it might provide a link with Lake Victoria. If they could pin-point the position of the new fault, frogmen would be sent down to investigate.

‘We’re going to have company,’ Jubal remarked to me, waving a hand over the water.

A dozen or so dugouts lay between us and the shore. Each bore two or three shining-skinned fishermen. The two canoes nearest us had swung round and were now being paddled towards our float.

I watched them with more interest than I gave to the asdic sweep. Men like these sturdy fishermen had existed here for countless generations, unchanged: before white men had known of them, before Rome’s legions had destroyed the vineyards of Carthage, before – who knows if not before the heady uprush of civilisation elsewhere? – such men had fished quietly in this great lake. They seem not to have advanced at all, so rapidly does the world move; but perhaps when all other races have fallen away, burnt out and exhausted, these steady villages will come into a kingdom of their own. I would elect to live in that realm.

A man in the leading canoe stood up, raising his hand in greeting. I replied, glancing over his shoulder at the curtain of green behind him. Something caught my eye.

Above some yards of bare rock, a hundred feet up the slope, two magnificent Mvules – African teak trees – grew. A china blue bird dipped suddenly from one of the trees and sped far and fast away over the water, fighting to outpace its reflection. And the tree itself began to cant slowly from the vertical into a horizontal position.

Jubal had binoculars round his neck. My curiosity aroused, I reached to borrow them. Even as I did so, I saw a spring of water start from the base of the Mvules. A rock was dislodged. I saw it hurtle down into bush below, starting in turn a trail of earth and stones which fell down almost on to the thatched roofs of the village. The spring began to spurt more freely now. It gleamed in the sun: it looked beautiful but I was alarmed.

‘Look!’ I pointed.

Both Jubal and the fisherman followed the line of my outstretched arm. J-Casta continued to bend over his metal box.

Even as I pointed, the cliff shuddered. The other Mvule went down. Like an envelope being torn, the rock split horizontally and a tongue of water burst from it. The split widened, the water became a wall, pouring out and down.

The sound of the splitting came clear and hard to our startled ears. Then came the roar of the water, bursting down the hillside. It washed everything before it. I saw trees, bushes and boulders hurried down in it. I saw the original fissure lengthen and lengthen like a cruel smile, cutting through the ground as fast as fire. Other cracks started, running uphill and across: every one of them began to spout water.

The fishermen stood up, shouting as their homes were swept away by the first fury of the flood.

And then the entire lower mountainside began to slip. With a cumulative roar, mud, water and rock rolled down into the lake. Where they had been, a solid torrent cascaded out, one mighty wall of angry water. The escaping flow from Lake Victoria had found its outlet!

Next moment, our calm surface was a furious sea. Jubal slipped and fell on to one knee. I grabbed him, and almost went overboard myself. A series of giant waves plunged outwards from the shore. The first one rocked us, the second one overturned our flimsy craft completely.

I came to the surface coughing and snorting. J-Casta rose at my side. We were just in time to see the float slip completely under: it sank in no time, carrying the pilot with it. I had not even seen his face, poor fellow.

Jubal came up by the fisherman, who had also overturned. But dugouts do not sink. We owe our lives to those hollowed tree trunks. They were righted, and Jubal and his henchman climbed into one, while I climbed into the other. The waves were still fierce, but had attained a sort of regularity which allowed us to cope with them.

The breakthrough was now a quarter of a mile long. Water poured from it with unabated force, a mighty waterfall where land had been before. We skirted it painfully, making a landing as near to it as we dared.

The rest of that day, under its blinding arch of sky, passed in various stages of confusion and fear.

It was two and a half hours before we were taken off the strip of shore. We were not idle in that time, although every few minutes Jubal paused to curse the fact that he was stranded and powerless. Miraculous as it seems, there were some survivors from the obliterated village, women mostly; we helped to get them ashore and built fires for them.

Meanwhile, Dam Authority planes began to circle the area. We managed to attract the attention of one, which landed by our party. Jubal changed at once; now that he had a machine and men who, unlike the villagers, were in his command, he worked with a silent purpose allowing of no question.

Over the vision, he ordered the rest of the floats to attend to the villagers’ needs. We sped back to Mokulgu.

On the way, Jubal spoke to Owenstown. They took his news almost without comment. They reported that Victoria was still sinking, although the rate had now steadied. A twenty-four-hour a day airlift was about to go into operation, dropping solid blocks of marble on to the lake bed. There, a fault about three miles square had been located; four frogmen had been lost, drowned.

‘It’s like tossing pennies into the ocean,’ Jubal said.

I was thinking of the frogmen, sucked irresistibly down the fault. They would be swept through underground waterways, battered and pulped, to be spat out eventually into our lake.

Vision from Mokulgu, coming on just before we landed there, reported a breach in the lake banks, some twenty miles north of the town. At a word from Jubal, we switched plans and veered north at once to see just how extensive the damage was.

The break was at a tiny cluster of huts dignified by the name of Ulatuama. Several men, the crew of a Dam Authority patrol boat, were working furiously at a widening gap. The damage had been caused by the very waves which had swamped us, and I learnt that a small, disused lock had stood here, relic of an earlier irrigation scheme; so the weakness had been of man’s making. Beyond the lock had been a dried-up channel some twenty yards wide; this was now a swollen, plunging river.

‘Is this serious?’ I asked Jubal. ‘Isn’t it a good way of getting rid of surplus water?’

He gave me a withering look. ‘Where are we if we lose control?’ he demanded. ‘If this thing here runs away with us, the combined waters of Victoria and Tanganyika will flood down into the Congo.’

Even as he spoke, the bank to the south of the escaping waters crumbled; several yards were swept away, their place instantly taken by the current.

We flew back to Mokulgu. Jubal visioned the mayor and got permission to broadcast to the city. I did not hear him speak; reaction had set in, and I had to go and sit quietly at home with Sloe fussing daintily round me. Although you ‘know’ from a child that Earth is a planet, it is only when you drift towards it from space, seeing it hang round and finite ahead, that you can realise the fact. And so, although I had always ‘known’ man was puny, it was the sight of that vast collapsing slab of mountain which had driven the fact into my marrow.

To guess the sort of sentiments Jubal broadcast to the city was easy. He would talk of ‘rallying round in this our time of crisis’. He would speak of the need for ‘all hands uniting against our ancient enemy, Nature’. He would come over big on the tanks; he would be big, his fists clenched, his eyes ablaze. He was in touch with the people. And they would do what he said, for Jubal carried conviction. Perhaps I envied my half-brother.

Labour and supplies began to pour north to mend the damaged bank. Jubal, meanwhile, thought up a typically flamboyant scheme. Tilly, one of the lake steamers, was pressed into service and loaded full of rock and clay by steam shovel. With Jubal standing on the bridge, it was manœuvred into the centre of the danger area and scuttled. Half in and half out of the rushing water, it now formed a base from which a new dam could be built to stem the flood. Watched by a cheering crowd, Jubal and crew skimmed to safety in a motor boat.

‘We shall conquer if we have to dam the water with our bodies,’ he cried. A thousand cheering throats told him how much they liked this idea.

The pitch of crisis which had then been engendered was maintained all through the next two days. For most of that time it rained, and men fought to erect their barrier on clinging mud. Jubal’s popularity – and consequently his influence – underwent a rapid diminution. The reason for this was two-fold. He quarrelled with J-Casta, whose suggestion to throw open the new dam to relieve pressure elsewhere was refused, and he ran into stiff opposition from Mokulgu Town Council.

This august body, composed of the avariciously successful and the successfully avaricious, was annoyed about Tilly. Tilly belonged to the local government, and Jubal had, in effect, stolen it. The men from the factories who had downed tools to fight the water were summoned back to work: the Dam Authority must tend its own affairs.

Jubal merely sneered at this dangerous pique and visioned Leopoldsville. In the briefest possible time, he had the army helping him.

It was at dawn on the morning of the third day that he visioned me to go down and see him. I said adieu to Sloe and took a float over to Ulatuama.

Jubal stood alone by the water’s edge. The sun was still swathed in mist, and he looked cold and pinched. Behind him, dimly outlined figures moved to and fro, like allegorical figures on a frieze. He surveyed me curiously before speaking.

‘The work’s nearly done, Rog,’ he said. He looked as if he needed sleep, but he added energetically, pointing across the lake: ‘Then we tackle the main job of plugging that waterfall.’

I looked across the silent lake. The far shore was invisible, but out of the layers of mist rose Mount Kangosi. Even at this distance, in the early morning hush, came the faint roar of the new waterfall. And there was another sound, intermittent but persistent: beyond the mountain, they were bombing fault lines. That way they hoped to cause a collapse which would plug Victoria’s escape routes. So far, they had had no success, but the bombing went on, making a battlefield of what had once been glorious country.

‘Sorry I haven’t seen anything of you and Sloe,’ Jubal said. I disliked his tone.

‘You’ve been busy. Sloe called you on the vision.’

‘Oh that. Come on into my hut, Rog.’

We walked over to a temporary structure; the grass was overloaded with dew. In Jubal’s hut, J-Casta was dressing, smoking a cheroot as he dexterously pulled on a shirt. He gave me a surly greeting, whose antagonism I sensed was directed through me at Jubal.

As soon as the latter closed the door, he said: ‘Rog, promise me something.’

‘Tell me what.’

‘If anything happens to me, I want you to marry Sloe. She’s your sort.’

Concealing my irritation, I said: ‘That’s hardly a reasonable request.’

‘You and she get on well together, don’t you?’

‘Certainly. But you see my outlook on life is … well, for one thing I like to stay detached. An observer, you know, observing. I just want to sample the landscapes and the food and the women of the solar system. I don’t want to marry, just move on at the right time. Sloe’s very nice but – ’

My ghastly inability to express the pressure of inner feeling was upon me. In women I like flamboyance, wit and a high spirit, but I tire quickly of it and then have to seek its manifestation elsewhere. Besides, Sloe frankly had had her sensibilities blunted from living with Jubal. He now chose to misunderstand my hesitations.

‘Are you standing there trying to tell me that you’ve already tired of whatever you’ve been doing behind my back?’ he demanded. ‘You – you – ’ He called me a dirty name; I forgot to make allowances for the strain he had been undergoing, and lost my temper.

‘Oh, calm down,’ I snapped. ‘You’re overtired and overwrought, and probably over-sexed too. I’ve not touched your little woman – I like to drink from pure streams. So you can put the entire notion out of your head.’

He rushed at me with his shoulders hunched and fists swinging. It was an embarrassing moment. I am against violence, and believe in the power of words, but I did the only possible thing: spring to one side and catch him a heavy blow over the heart.

Poor Jubal! No doubt, in his frustration against the forces of nature, he was using me only as a safety valve. But with shame, I will now confess what savage pleasure that blow gave me; I was filled with lust to strike him again. I can perceive dimly how atrocities such as the Massacre came about. As Jubal turned on me, I flung myself at him, breaking down, his defences, piling blows into his chest. It was, I suppose, a form of self-expression.

J-Casta stopped it, breaking in between us and thrusting his ugly face into mine, his hand like a clamp round my wrist.

‘Pack it up,’ he said. ‘I’d gladly do the job myself, but this is not the time.’

As he spoke, the hut trembled. We were hard pressed to keep our feet, staggering together like drunken men.

‘Now what – ’ Jubal said, and flung open the door. I caught a rectangular view of trees and mist, men running, and the emergency dam sailing away on a smooth black slide of escaping water. The banks were collapsing!

Glimpsing the scene, Jubal instantly attempted to slam the door shut again. He was too late. The wave struck us, battering the cabin off its flimsy foundations. Jubal cried sharply as he was tossed against a wall. Next moment we were floundering in a hell of flying furniture and water.

Swept along on a giant sluice, the cabin turned over and over like a dice. That I was preserved was a merest accident. Through a maze of foam, I saw a heavy bunk crashing towards me, and managed to flounder aside in time. It missed me by a finger’s width and broke straight through the boarding wall. I was swept helplessly after it.

When I surfaced, the cabin was out of sight and I was being borne along at a great rate; and the ugly scene in the cabin was something fruitless that happened a million years ago. Nearly wrenching my arm off in the process, I seized a tree which was still standing, and clung on. Once I had recovered my breath, I was able to climb out of the water entirely, wedge myself between two branches and regain my breath.

The scene was one of awesome desolation. I had what in less calamitous circumstances might have been called ‘a good view’ of it all.

A lake spread all round me, its surface moving smartly and with apparent purpose. Its forward line, already far away, was marked by a high yellow cascade. In its wake stretched a miscellany of objects, of which only the trees stood out clearly. Most of the trees were eucalyptus: this area had probably been reclaimed marsh.

To the north, the old shore-line of the lake still stood. The ground was higher there and solid rock jutted stolidly into the flood.

To the south, the shore-line was being joyously chewed away. Mokulgu had about half an hour left before it was swamped and obliterated. I wondered how the Mokulgu Town Council were coping with the situation.

Overhead, the sun now shining clear, bars of pink, wispy cloud flecked the blue sky. The pink and the blue were of the exact vulgar tints found in two-colour prints of the early twentieth century AD – that is, a hundred years before the Massacre. I was almost happy to see this lack of taste in the sky matching the lack of stability elsewhere. I was almost happy: but I was weeping.

‘They visioned me that one of the floats had picked you up – and not Jubal. Is there any hope for him, Rog, or is that a foolish question?’

‘I can’t give you a sensible answer. He was a strong swimmer. They may find him yet.’

I spoke to Sloe over the heads of a crowd of people. Mokulgu, surely enough, had been washed away. The survivors, homeless and bereaved, crowded on to high ground. Sloe had generously thrown open most of her house as a sort of rest-camp-cum-soup-kitchen. She superintended everything with a cool authority which suitably concealed her personal feelings. For that I was grateful: Sloe’s feelings must be no affair of mine.

She smiled at me before turning to address someone behind her. Already the light was taking on the intensity of early evening. Above the babble of voices round me came the deep song of speeding water. It would continue for months yet: Africa was ruptured at her very heart, beyond man’s mending.

Instead of flowing northward, fertilizing its old valley, Victoria crashed into our lake, adding its burden to the weight of water rolling west. While twenty-one million people perished of drought in Egypt, as many perished of flood and typhoid in the Congo.

I seemed to know what was coming as I stood in the crowded room, knowing Jubal dead, knowing the nation of Africa to be bleeding to death. We were dying of our own wounds.

The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.

Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history.

Tradesman’s Exit

When it comes to human nature, there’s nobody to beat Henshaw. He has the humanest nature I have ever met: how he kept it intact working 33 years for old Sowerby, I don’t know. He once told me that his secret was that he suffered fools gladly; however that may be, we always get on splendidly together.

‘Nick your chin every morning to let him see you’ve shaved, say “Morning, sir” when he comes in, and you’ll be OK’, Henshaw told me, the day I started work at Sowerby’s. The ‘he’ he referred to was Sowerby; the way Henshaw pronounced it, it was a fitting epithet.

Apart from an almost faceless woman who came from ten till one each day, to add up figures in the ledgers, Henshaw and I were Sowerby’s only staff. Sowerby’s is a poky bookshop and stationers the Chancery Lane end of High Holborn. Its aspect is prim but seedy; it is surrounded by piles of masonry too loud to be called building and too lewd to be called architecture. (That’s what I once heard an intellectual say; we used to get them in from the insurance offices nearby.)

I stared at Henshaw; thin and dry, 54, with a poor head of hair that made him look like a shabby eagle. He wore dim, stately suits. He was a tradesman and a gentleman, but a tradesman first, and being a gent did not stop him being a good sort.

Henshaw stared at me; thin but shiny, 24, with thick, rimless glasses and a detestably round face. My ice-blue suit was my only suit, and my digs were in Tabernacle Place. I was miraculously ignorant then.

For some reason, Henshaw liked me. Now I’ve cultivated my intelligence a bit with correspondence schools he might not like me so much.

The business of his getting the sack did not crop up until I had been 18 months at Sowerby’s. Henshaw was a permanent fixture sort of chap; only an old swine like Sowerby could have thought of sacking him at all.

Not that Sowerby was a nuisance. Each day, he came in, passed around the stands and tables to the back of the shop, climbed up three steps and entered a tiny cubicle lined with dirt and leather. There he stayed till closing. At a misty window set in his wall we occasionally saw his beer-coloured eyes watching us.

‘I don’t believe he is anyone at all,’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘I think he’s empty.’

‘You shouldn’t say that,’ Henshaw advised, turning his head away from the misty peephole to add, ‘because the little ferret probably lip-reads.’

‘I don’t believe he exists,’ I said, likewise turning away and pretending to polish a cobweb.

‘He’s just terribly shy. When we’ve gone and the shop’s closed and the blind’s down, he whips off all his clothes and dances in the window.’

People sometimes entered Sowerby’s and bought pencils, or books on primitive peoples. In the lunch hour, while I gutsed a bun in the background, we were sometimes quite crowded. The customers would scrape their bodies round our trays, picking up volumes here and there. Occasionally I would have to serve. I’d put on a really crack Foyles accent and say, ‘Out of stock’, or ‘Out of print’, or ‘Banned as obscene’, just as Henshaw had taught me.

To him I owe my wealth of book lore.

It was during these rush hours that the disappearances started. Something about jurisprudence went missing on Monday, and on Wednesday it was a marked copy of Atrocities in China. On Friday it was a first edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Westward Ho!, if my memory serves me right.

‘How do you know they’ve been pinched?’ I asked Henshaw.

‘That Westward Ho!’s been there longer than me: it was always too pricey,’ Henshaw said. ‘As for the others, you didn’t sell them, nor did I. Ergo, old chum, some fly boy’s whipped ’em.’

It was the very next morning, Saturday, and I was in our packing room (8 by 6) smarming back my hair in the mirror; Henshaw came in and said, ‘Hey, Nobby, guess what. I’ve got the push.’

‘You’re kidding!’ I exclaimed, wiping the brilliantine off my comb. But when I looked up I could perceive like a flash he was serious. For one thing, he was out of puff; that’s how it takes you, poor devil, when you are 54.

Apparently, Sowerby had popped out of his cubicle on Friday night as Henshaw was getting his raincoat on. He said that Henshaw was in charge of the shop: it was his responsibility to see those three books were replaced. If they weren’t back by Monday night, Henshaw must leave the following Saturday.

‘Silly little B, what’ll he do without you?’ I asked. ‘If you leave, Mr. Henshaw, I come too.’

He was touched at this, and found us some chewing gum in one of his pockets.

‘That may not be necessary,’ he said. ‘I reckon I know the thief. If I spotted him and phoned the police, could you tackle him, Nob?’

Bravely refraining from asking the thief’s size, I said I would. Henshaw told me to look out for a cadaverous chap with bow tie and plastic mack.

On Monday morning I had to deliver a fat account book at Lincoln’s Inn, a heavy affair with blank pages, which cost about five times as much as any book with printed pages. As I re-entered Sowerby’s, my place of rightful employment, at eleven-thirty hours – sorry, I’m talking like the statement I had to make later! As I nipped in, there was this cadaverous fellow with a bow tie and plastic mack, picking over the erotica.

Henshaw was up a ladder, innocent as you please, dusting a run of Hellenic Journal; who Helen was I couldn’t care less, but she had never been given such a going over. He slipped me down a note which read ‘Thief (q.v.) – with Accomplice – are here. Police phoned for – two plain clothes also in shop now – watching suspect (cf.) – awaiting false move. Don’t let on’.

Looking innocuous, I barged round the shop slapping books into place. Several so-called customers were about, but I soon decided which the two coppers were. Once was spotty with huge black glasses, loitering by Travel; the other was cheery and clean-looking, and standing quite near Cadaverous, looking about. He winked at me, a gesture I returned.