A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
—
P. B. Shelley
The duel between The Planner and The Private was entering its sixth year.
It was a quiet, bitter struggle, characterized and made remarkable by the fact that it had lasted more than the same number of weeks. By all the unwritten rules that govern such things, The Planner should have been victorious at an early stage—because all the resources, all the advantages were on his side.
The Planner’s name was Lap Wing Chon and, although he was answerable in the long run to Chairman Lin, his reputation in his own province was such that he had the authority of an Emperor. A brilliant civil engineer—the profession had earned him his popular name—he had graduated to politics, earned a reputation as a theoretician and had at one stage of his long life seemed destined to join the chief executive of the People’s Republic. His progress in that direction had been checked by the related failings of personal egotism and provincialism, but these very faults strengthened his position with the people of the estuary in which he had been born. The system of flood control installations he had designed and insisted on building, despite certain prior claims the national plan had made on the area’s productivity, had saved an estimated half-million lives within five years of its completion. He was tough, stubborn, clever, chauvinistic—and loved by the people. Within the boundaries of his own province, Lap Wing Chon had what amounted to absolute power. He could, for instance, have had The Private executed at any moment during the six long years of their duel, but that was not his way, and not what he had set out to do.
The Private was not a private at all, and it was, in the nature of their struggle that only he and Lap Wing Chon knew, or understood, why he was so called. His name was Lawrence Bell Evans. He had been born in Portsmouth, England, but had grown up in Massachusetts, and had been a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force when his aircraft was struck by lightning during a flight from Manila to Seoul. It was forced down in The Planner’s domain and Evans, the navigator, had been the only crew member to survive the crash. Two decades earlier he would have been transported to Peking for diplomatic auction to his own country, but there had been considerable development and change within the Party. The airman had no political value, and so his fate rested solely with Lap Wing Chon.
They—The Planner and The Private—had met briefly one afternoon when the former was on a routine visit to the 12th Century fortress which was supposed to be an historical monument, but which served as a convenient place in which to keep a variety of political freaks and misfits.
And the intermittent six-year duel had begun…
At first The Planner’s degree of involvement had not been great. The affair had been little more than a stray notion, a whim. He had despised Evans immediately and instinctively for his gangling underdeveloped body, the baby pinkness of his face, and—most of all—for the softness he saw in the airman’s nervous grey eyes. That softness, the obvious lack of political or social will, had been an affront to The Planner’s whole existence, and something had prompted him to mould the clay which had been placed in his hands.
He had begun by presenting Evans with the classical proposition. It was self-evident that the American had been engaged in activities hostile to the Republic. Furthermore, the U.S. Air Force had written him off as dead with the rest of the crew of the lost aircraft, therefore there was no political machinery working on Evan’s behalf. He was alone and could be buried without trace. The Republic was entitled to have Evans executed without further delay, but the humanitarian ideals which inspired the leaders of the revolution prompted them to be merciful. If Evans would confess to his’ crime, and to acknowledge the greater crimes of his masters, he would be returned to his own country immediately,
As was to be expected, Evans had refused.
Lap Wing Chon had smiled patiently, indulgently. And increased the pressure.
It was during the sixth month that he began to realize he had misjudged his man. Evans was politically naive, he was physically weak, he had a great fear of pain and death—yet he had an inner core of certitude, a philosophical armature, which was unbreakable.
“I want to sign the confession, I want to go home,” he used to say, “but we both know it’s untrue—therefore I can’t sign.”
And on one occasion: “If you yourself believed what it says in this paper I might be able to sign it, and trick you, because then it wouldn’t be very important. But you know the truth, and I know the truth, so what you’re asking me to do is sit down with you and cancel out…willingly cancel out my entire previous life. This can’t be done.”
At this stage Lap Wing Chon still thought of his prisoner as “Evans” or “the American“—then Evans was found in his cell one morning suffering from lobar pneumonia. During the subsequent fevers Lap watched over him anxiously, fearing the intervention of death, and during one bedside vigil heard the young man whisper in delirium.
“Last night,” the words were barely audible in the long hospital room. “Last night, among his fellow roughs, he jested, quaffed and swore…”
The Planner, meticulous in everything he did, wrote the words down in his notebook and later, when he was satisfied Evans would recover, had a search made for their source. It was with some curiosity that he picked up the photoprint brought by his secretary and read a poem called “The Private and the Buffs“, with greater wonderment that he set the sheet aside. The verse—he could not class it as poetry—told a story which had some obvious parallels with Evans’ situation. A lone Englishman in the hands of the Chinese…commanded to perform the Kotow…refuses to yield, accepts death before dishonour. The idea that any adult human might be influenced by, and even cherish, the Imperialist principles embodied in the piece both amused and startled The Planner. It also affected his approach to Evans, because he now understood the politically primeval level on which his life and that of his prisoner interacted. This was a clash, not ideology, but of the archetypal Idea.
He allowed several months to pass, then visited Evans in his cell. Evans was not surprised to see Lap Wing Chon because it was during a period in which he was being allowed fairly frequent contact with other human beings. The Planner allowed the conversation to wander aimlessly for a while before he touched on the subject of the poem.
“I think you once told me,” he began, “that you are fond of poetry.”
“Did I? I don’t remember.”
“I may be able to arrange for you to have some anthologies.”
“Really?” Evans sounded uninterested.
“Who are your favourite poets?”
“The good ones.”
The Planner nodded and examined the wood-grained skin of his hands. “The good ones? What do you think of the distinguished English doggerel-writer, Sir Francis H. Doyle?”
Evans frowned slightly. “As you say, he wrote distinguished English doggerel.”
The Planner laughed compliantly. “The Private of the Buffs! The ultimate in jingoism, don’t you think?”
“It out-Kipples Kipling. By the way, the word jingoism has been obsolescent for rather a long time.”
“ ‘Let dusky Indians whine and kneel, An English lad must die.’ Isn’t it incredible?”