I had written to Browne. He had not replied; and now, reading the newspapers, I felt I had not paid sufficient attention to his silences. He had not been at the public meeting which condemned me. It presently came out that he had not been asked; there were vague suggestions that we were too close. Then I saw that my return to Isabella was not only unnecessary, it was even more irresponsible than my departure had been.
I had already seen Browne, as black folk-leader, incapable of breaking out of that sterile fate, in competition with the faceless men we had made. Whether I had returned or not, that competition would have continued, and at that level. In our movement power was to be redefined, and its true possessors revealed. I was out of the running, for all the newspaper space I occupied. But by returning, by putting myself at the passive centre of events, by being the dandy, the picturesque Asiatic, I gave direction of a sort to the struggle. My presence made the struggle more plausible, made it more than one of personalities. It dictated the terms in which that struggle, irrelevant to myself, was to be fought out; it suggested the way in which faceless men, by creating disorder, might demonstrate their power. And the foreign press, always conventionally sympathetic to proclamations of distress, was approving! What could I do? I had my police guard. I stayed in the Roman house.
For the calamity that came — there is no other word for open racial conflict in a small territory — I must bear much of the responsibility. It was a responsibility that began with that moment of return to the slave island, that moment of morning stillness; it continued to the moment of my final departure. Do not think, the acceptance of guilt being easier than action and in some ways more satisfying, that I seek simply to heap guilt on myself. The faceless men, who out of disorder of this sort rise to the top and are briefly glorious, are never guilty. They play with incurable distress from within. They are made by distress and are part of it. The same will be true of their successors.
Do not yet think that I speak calmly from the position of the secure, the physically safe, the man who has found refuge thousands of miles away in this suburban hotel, where every evening I dine below the portraits of the man and woman whom we here regard as our protecting lord and lady. My inactivity and folly amounted to cruelty. But I was a helpless spectator of this cruelty. Helpless; yet I cannot say that at the time I felt guilt. I lived; I passed the days. Everything in the Roman house continued to work. The water in the swimming-pool continuously changed, continuously passed through the filter. If the machine had failed for thirty-six hours that blue pool, restlessly webbed with light throughout its depth, would have become as still and milky green and opaque with minute vegetation as a pool in the jungle. So the water-jets splashed; and every morning, beside them, I sat in the shade at my breakfast table — avocadoes, fried plantains, cinnamon-scented chocolate, white tablecloth, ironed white napkin, a small bowl of fresh flowers — and read the newspapers.
When the organized violence began, when men distraught with anger and fear and outrage, who considered themselves betrayed by me yet saw that in their predicament they had no one else to turn to, when these men, braving the city streets, came to me at the Roman house with tales of Asiatic distress, of women and children assaulted, of hackings, of families burnt alive in wooden houses, I closed my eyes and thought about the horsemen riding to the end of the world. The details of physical suffering entered into me. In a book about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps I had once seen a photograph: an Australian, blindfolded, on his knees, far from home, about to be beheaded. Heroic this central figure had seemed to me, in my quick fear: heroic and very private, and by this privacy ridiculing the ridicule of his tormentors. Now I asked my informers to give me no more details. I offered them the comfort I offered myself. I said, ‘Think about this as something in a book, in a newspaper. Do not give me names. Do not tell me how people died. Say instead, “Race riots occurred”. Say, “There was loss of life”.’
One poor man had brought a stone stained and sticky with blood and fine hair, the hair perhaps of a child. What could I do with his evidence, his witness? I tried to get him to enter my mind, to ride with me to the end of the empty world. His grief made him, as it had made others, receptive. It was night. I took him to the garden of the Roman house and asked him to drop the stone. He was glad to obey. The link between us then was more than the link of speech. The comfort I offered him was the comfort I offered myself, to destroy the images of vulnerable flesh. Was this cruel or fraudulent? The gift of comfort which at that moment I discovered in myself, this ability to transmit my own vision of the world, this was something I could have worked miracles with, I know, even at that late stage. But this would have required an assurance of imminent order, and to a belief in that I could lead no one. The call to action and self-fulfilment was the necessary complement to the vision I offered; without this the gift was useless, destructive. So the gift, at the moment of its discovery, was abandoned. I became a leader too late.
And it would not surprise me to hear that that very man, whose face in the dark garden I couldn’t even see, turned on me a week later when he heard that I had accepted, from our new leaders, the offer of a free and safe passage, to London again, by air, with sixty-six pounds of luggage and fifty thousand dollars. A fraction of my fortune. My irresponsibility extended even to myself: I had not taken the proper precautions. They were simple, frightened men. I am sure they had no wish to harm me. But in their situation they could no longer trust themselves; they offered me only what they hoped they might themselves be offered when their time came.
Perhaps, then, I was a betrayer. But not in the way that was said. This was not something that could be explained to a reporter, if there remained any who wished to interview me. And my acquiescence, again in a role that was given me, need not be wondered at.
9
I THOUGHT when I began this book that it would be the labour of three or four weeks. Memories of my fluency, on The Socialist, in cabinet, were still fresh; the five-thousand-word paper on the reorganization of the police, not a negligible document, had been the concentrated work of an evening. After eighteen months of the anaesthetizing order of life in this hotel, despair and emptiness had burnt themselves out. And it was with a delicious sense of anxiety and of being employed again that I got the hotel to give me a writing-table, set it beside the window, and composed myself to work.
It was just after breakfast. The pleasant middle-aged Irish chambermaid had got my room ready early and was going to bring me coffee at eleven. My mouth felt clean; my arms were strained and tingling with excitement. At the appointed time the coffee came. My excitement had turned to a type of irritable fatigue; I had written nothing. The wallpaper, in grey, black and red, had a pattern of antique motorcars; the curtain, which hung beside the table, was of a heavy red rep, brownish where it had been handled, discoloured along the folds exposed to the sun; the window, in a modern metal frame, was low, offering a view of the hotel’s putting green, bounded at the far end by a wall of brick, pale-red, washed-out; beyond this, more red brick, warehouses, garages, houses, just a segment of the city. I was overwhelmed as much by the formlessness of my experiences, and their irrelevance to the setting in which I proposed to recount them, as by the setting itself, my physical situation, in this city, this room, with this view, that lustreless light. And it was not until late afternoon, excitement gone, the light faded, the curtains about to be drawn, my stomach, head and eyes united in a dead sensation of sickness, that the memory at last came which, forcing itself to the surface all day, had kept the first page of the Century notebook blank except for the date: the memory of my first snow and the memory, incredulously examined, of the city of the magical light.