The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [622]
Walter, even in his weakened state, had been stubborn enough to keep on trying. He had paid another visit to the Governor, suggesting that he might intercede with the War Council to provide a labour company under military discipline (which might encourage them to turn up for work) in order to start reloading the great backlog of rubber before it was too late. But Sir Shenton Thomas had barely listened to him. Although he was normally sympathetic to the Colony’s mercantile community, he had shown visible signs of impatience with Walter’s difficulties. That stuffed shirt! He had hardly even taken the trouble to make an excuse, muttering something about it being all he could do to prevent the military from commandeering what labour was already available to the rubber industry … Relations with Malaya Command and Singapore Fortress, already bad at the outbreak of war, had got worse … Walter would kindly realize that the community had other needs, above all civil defence, besides his own … Well! Walter had come close to asking him whose taxes he thought paid his bloody salary! Affronted, he had taken his leave. The bales of rubber, in their thousands of tons, had continued to sleep undisturbed in their godowns.
And yet this was the moment, Walter knew in his heart, to adopt some resolute plan, perhaps to conscript a labour force of one’s own by closing down other aspects of the business, certain of which would soon close down anyway of their own accord, by transferring estate labour (such of it as had not yet been overrun by the advancing Japanese) to the docks, by offering double wages if necessary, anything provided that rubber was shifted. It was no good for Walter, isolated and overworked as he was, to tell himself that he must not let that rubber get out of proportion … What was it compared to the rubber which had passed through his hands in his time? Nothing! … It seemed to him like a tumour, disfiguring his career in Singapore. And like a tumour it continued to grow because, although diminished in quantity by the Japanese advance and by the increasingly chaotic state of the roads in Johore, new consignments of rubber continued to arrive from across the Causeway.
The fact was that all the options Walter considered were hedged around with administrative difficulties through which he could see no way. In desperation he even considered, though only for a moment, the possibility of forming a co-operative labour force with other firms in a similar, if less acute, predicament … perhaps even with Langfield and Bowser. But that solution, which was probably the only one capable of realization in practice, was denied to Walter by the competitive habits of a lifetime. He could hardly enter into such an agreement without revealing the sheer size of his stocks to his rivals, who would know immediately by the amount of rubber he had waiting that he had made a grotesque miscalculation. To go cap in hand to old Solomon Langfield in Blackett and Webb’s jubilee year to propose such a scheme was more than he could bring himself to do. But at this point fate, in the shape of a Japanese bomb, took a hand.
51
Even taking into account the new-found amity between the two families, you would hardly have expected to see what you now did see at the Blacketts’ house, the extraordinary spectacle of lions lying down with lambs and scarcely even licking their lips. Walter found himself sitting at his own dining-table surrounded, it seemed, by nothing but Langfields. Even more unexpected was the fact that a similar scene had taken place yesterday and would take place again tomorrow … though with the women-folk subtracted, for this was the eve of their departure for Australia. What then was the explanation? For this was not, needless to say, the company that Walter would have chosen for his evening meal, including as it did, old Solomon Langfield with a slightly