Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [107]
‘I’m sorry, Monty. I don’t mean to sound prudish. It’s just that I think we have a rotten way of doing things when it comes to anything but making money,’ replied Matthew absently for, of course, Monty could not be blamed for the plight of Chinese refugees on the sea-front in Singapore. But where then did the fault lie? While Matthew mused on this problem the little yellow taxi turned about and headed north again. It rather looked, said Monty gloomily, as if they would have to settle for a massage somewhere.
25
Among the painted masks which had peered in through the cab’s open windows Matthew had noticed one or two younger faces: he remembered one in particular, of a Chinese girl aged perhaps no more than fifteen or sixteen, rather ugly than pretty, but with a pleasant, homely, elfin ugliness like that of a bulldog, if you can imagine a delicately featured bulldog. Supposing that this girl, as seemed likely, was one of the new recruits that Monty had been talking about, he wondered at what precise moment during the past ten years it had become inevitable that she should be uprooted from her village somewhere in South China, or from a slum in Shanghai, and flung down on the streets of Singapore, obliged to sell herself if she could find a buyer? Surely, suggested Matthew to the passive figure of Monty beside him, one must connect this child’s desperate face with the long series of failures he himself had witnessed at the League of Nations in Geneva, with the ever-recurring inability of the Great Powers to commit themselves to a world organized on international lines, with the ever-present cynicism of the Foreign Office, and the Quai d’Orsay, and the Wilhelmstrasse where no opportunity was ever missed for showing the diplomats’ professional distaste for open diplomacy or for sneering at the idea of a world parliament. What chilled the blood was the thought that this girl’s plight and a million other tiny tragedies had been brought about by suave, neatly barbered, Savile Row-suited, genial, polite, cultured and probably even humane men in normal circumstances who would shrink with horror from themselves if they could be made to see their responsibility for what was happening!
Monty’s only reply to this suggestion was a grunt or, possibly, a groan. What the point was, in this sort of speculation, he could not for the life of him see. He yawned and smacked his lips. What an evening! First one thing, then another. Well, the only consolation was that this business about which Matthew was getting so steamed up did sometimes produce mouth-watering opportunities. Perhaps he would manage to lay hands on some newly arrived little Chinese piece before the evening was out. It was sometimes on the cards these days, though one had to be lucky.
Encouraged by Monty’s grunt of interest in what he had been saying, Matthew went on to explain that his own arrival in Geneva had coincided almost to the day with that fateful explosion beside the South Manchurian Railway in 1931. He had seen it all at first hand, from the first angry denunciations by China’s representative, Dr Sze, of massacres by Japanese troops and the reply of Yoshizawa (the same chap who had just recently been in Java demanding oil and minerals from the Dutch) that the troops were merely defending Japan’s enormous interests … to what had happened much later: to the devious, hypocritical, perfectly disgraceful support given to the untenable Japanese position by Sir John Simon and the Foreign Office, not to mention the British Press. Only the Manchester Guardian had condemned the Japanese and their British supporters.
Monty, peering out at the shadowy streets