The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie [81]
Later.
It is definitely settled that I go to Jo’burg tomorrow. Race urges me to do so. Things are getting unpleasant there, by all I hear, but I might as well go before they get worse. I dare say I shall be shot by a striker, anyway. Mrs Blair was to have accompanied me, but at the last minute she changed her mind and decided to stay on at the Falls. It seems as though she couldn’t bear to take her eyes off Race. She came to me tonight, and said, with some hesitation, that she had a favour to ask. Would I take charge of her souvenirs for her?
‘Not the animals?’ I asked, in lively alarm. I always felt that I should get stuck with those beastly animals sooner or later.
In the end, we effected a compromise. I took charge of two small wooden boxes for her which contained fragile articles. The animals are to be packed by the local store in vast crates and sent to Cape Town by rail, where Pagett will see to their being stored.
The people who are packing them say that they are of a particularly awkward shape (!), and that special cases will have to be made. I pointed out to Mrs Blair that by the time she has got them home those animals will have cost her easily a pound apiece!
Pagett is straining at the leash to rejoin me in Jo’burg. I shall make an excuse of Mrs Blair’s cases to keep him in Cape Town. I have written him that he must receive the cases and see to their safe disposal, as they contain rare curios of immense value.
So all is settled, and I and Miss Pettigrew go off into the blue together. And anyone who has seen Miss Pettigrew will admit that it is perfectly respectable.
Chapter 29
Johannesburg, March 6th.
There is something about the state of things here that is not at all healthy. To use the well-known phrase that I have so often read, we are all living on the edge of a volcano. Bands of strikers, or so-called strikers, patrol the streets and scowl at one in a murderous fashion. They are picking out the bloated capitalists ready for when the massacres begin, I suppose. You can’t ride in a taxi–If you do, strikers pull you out again. And the hotels hint pleasantly that when the food gives out they will fling you out on the mat!
I met Reeves, my labour friend of the Kilmorden, last night. He has cold feet worse than any man I ever saw. He’s like all the rest of these people; they make inflammatory speeches of enormous length, solely for political purposes, and then wish they hadn’t. He’s busy now going about and saying he didn’t really do it. When I met him, he was just off to Cape Town, where he meditates making a three days’ speech in Dutch, vindicating himself, and pointing out that the things he said really meant something entirely different. I am thankful that I do not have to sit in the Legislative Assembly of South Africa. The House of Commons is bad enough, but at least we have only one language, and some slight restriction as to length of speeches. When I went to the Assembly before leaving Cape Town, I listened to a grey-haired gentleman with a drooping moustache who looked exactly like the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. He dropped out his words one by one in a particularly melancholy fashion. Every now and then he galvanized himself to further efforts by ejaculating something that sounded like ‘Platt Skeet’, uttered fortissimo and in marked contrast to the rest of his delivery. When he did this, half his audience yelled ‘whoof, whoof!’ which is possibly Dutch for ‘Hear, hear’, and the other half woke up with a start from the pleasant nap they had been having. I was given to understand that the gentleman had been speaking