Scobie climbed the great steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation - a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.
He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’
‘Anything to report?’
‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’
‘Anything on the charge sheet?’
‘Two black men fight in the market, sah,’
‘Mammy trouble?’
‘Yes, sah,’
‘Anything else?’
‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah, I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’
‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’
‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’
‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’
‘Very good, sah.’
Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the walclass="underline" he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.
‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three - one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.
‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’
‘I know.’
‘I suppose everyone knows.’
‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’
‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’
Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’
‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just’
‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that’
‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’
‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said,
‘Your wife won’t like it’
‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here - somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’
‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’
‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.
‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’
‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’
‘They haven’t got that far yet That’s the next stage. No, you steep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’
‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’
‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’
‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’ ‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’
Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t live here, do you?’
‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’
‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary - no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.
The girl said, ‘My landlady - she broke up my home last night She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’
‘You got plenty lodgers?’
‘Only three, sir.’
He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece - a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’