The Human Factor

by Graham Greene

  On the first occasion he left a large peppermint humbug wrapped in greaseproof paper, and when he revisited the hole it had gone. Then he left a note which declared his love – in capital letters because she had only just begun to read – but when he came back the third time he found the note was still there but disfigured by a vulgar drawing. Some stranger, he thought, must have discovered the hiding-place; he wouldn’t believe that she was responsible until she put her tongue out at him, as she went by on the other side of the High Street, and he realized she was disappointed because she had not found another humbug. It had been his first experience of sexual suffering, and he never returned to the tree until almost fifty years later he was asked by a man in the lounge of the Regent Palace, whom he never saw again, to suggest another safe drop.

  He put Buller on his lead and watched from his hiding-place in the bracken. The man from the car had to use a torch to find the hole. Castle saw his lower half outlined for a moment as the torch descended the trunk: a plump belly, an open fly. A clever precaution – he had even stored up a reasonable amount of urine. When the torch turned and lit the way back towards the Ashridge road, Castle started home. He told himself, ‘This is the last report,’ and his thoughts went back to the child of seven. She had seemed lonely at the picnic, where they had first met, she was shy and she was ugly, and perhaps he was drawn to her for those reasons.

  Why are some of us, he wondered, unable to love success or power or great beauty? Because we feel unworthy of them, because we feel more at home with failure? He didn’t believe that was the reason. Perhaps one wanted the right balance, just as Christ had, that legendary figure whom he would have liked to believe in. ‘Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden.’ Young as the girl was at that August picnic she was heavily laden with her timidity and shame. Perhaps he had merely wanted her to feel that she was loved by someone and so he began to love her himself. It wasn’t pity, any more than it had been pity when he fell in love with Sarah pregnant by another man. He was there to right the balance. That was all.

  ‘You’ve been out a long time,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Well, I needed a walk badly. How’s Sam?’

  ‘Fast asleep, of course. Shall I give you another whisky?’

  ‘Yes. A small one again.’

  ‘A small one? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just to show I can slow up a bit perhaps. Perhaps because I’m feeling happier. Don’t ask me why, Sarah. Happiness goes when you speak of it.’

  The excuse seemed good enough to both of them. Sarah, during their last year in South Africa, had learnt not to probe too far, but in bed that night he lay awake a long time, repeating to himself over and over again the final words of the last report which he had concocted with the aid of War and Peace. He had opened the book at random several times, seeking a sortes Virgilianae, before he chose the sentences on which his code was to be based. ‘You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.’ It was as if, in choosing that passage, he were transmitting a signal of defiance to both the services. The last word of the message, when it was decoded by Boris or another, would read ‘good-bye’.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER I

  1

  THE nights after Davis died were full of dreams for Castle, dreams formed out of broken fragments of a past which pursued him till the daylight hours. Davis played no part in them – perhaps because the thought of him, in their now reduced and saddened sub-section – filled many waking hours. The ghost of Davis hovered over the bag from Zaire and the telegrams which Cynthia encoded were now more mutilated than ever.

  So at night Castle dreamt of a South Africa reconstructed with hatred, though sometimes the bits and pieces were jumbled up with an Africa which he had forgotten how much he loved. In one dream he came on Sarah suddenly in a litter-strewn Johannesburg park sitting on a bench for blacks only: he turned away to find a different bench. Carson separated from him at a lavatory door and chose the door reserved for blacks, leaving him on the outside ashamed of his lack of courage, but then quite another sort of dream came to him on the third night.

  When he woke he said to Sarah, ‘It’s funny. I dreamt of Rougemont. I haven’t thought of him for years.’

  ‘Rougemont?’

  ‘I forgot. You never knew Rougemont.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘A farmer in the Free State. I liked him in a way as much as I liked Carson.’

  ‘Was he a Communist? Surely not if he was a farmer.’

  ‘No. He was one of those who will have to die when your people take control.’

  ‘My people?’

  ‘I meant of course “our people”,’ he said with sad haste as though he had been in danger of breaking a promise.

  Rougemont lived on the edge of a semi-desert not far from an old battlefield of the Boer War. His ancestors, who were Huguenot, had fled from France at the time of the persecution, but he spoke no French, only Afrikaans and English. He had been, before he was born, assimilated to the Dutch way of life – but not to apartheid. He stood aside from it – he wouldn’t vote Nationalist, he despised the United Party, and some undetermined sense of loyalty to his ancestors kept him from voting for the small band of progressives. It was not a heroic attitude, but perhaps in his eyes, as in his grandfather’s, heroism began where politics stopped. He treated his labourers with kindness and understanding, with no condescension. Castle listened to him one day as he debated with his black foreman on the state of the crops – they argued with each other as equals. The family of Rougemont and the tribe of the foreman had arrived in South Africa at much the same time. Rougemont’s grandfather had not been an ostrich millionaire from the Cape, like Cornelius Muller’s: when he was sixty years old grandfather Rougemont had ridden with De Wet’s commando against the English invaders and he had been wounded there on the local kopje, which leaned with the winter clouds over the farm, where the Bushmen hundreds of years earlier had carved the rocks with animal forms.

  ‘Fancy climbing up that under fire with a pack on your back,’ Rougemont had remarked to Castle. He admired the British troops for their courage and endurance far from home rather as though they were legendary marauders in a history book, like the Vikings who had once descended on the Saxon coast. He had no resentment against those of the Vikings who remained, only perhaps a certain pity for a people without roots in this old tired beautiful land where his family had settled three hundred years ago. He had said to Castle one day over a glass of whisky, ‘You say you are writing a study of apartheid, but you’ll never understand our complexities. I hate apartheid as much as you do, but you are much more a stranger to me than any of my labourers. We belong here – you are as much an outsider as the tourists who come and go.’ Castle felt sure that, when the time for decision came, he would take the gun on his living-room wall in defence of this difficult area of cultivation on the edge of a desert. He would not die fighting for apartheid or for the white race, but for so many morgen which he called his own, subject to drought and floods and earthquakes and cattle disease, and snakes which he regarded as a minor pest like mosquitoes.

  ‘Was Rougemont one of your agents?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘No, but oddly enough it was through him that I met Carson.’ He might have added, ‘And through Carson I have joined Rougemont’s enemies.’ Rougemont had hired Carson to defend one of his labourers accused by the local police of a crime of violence of which he was innocent.

  Sarah said, ‘I sometimes wish I was still your agent. You tell me so much less than you did then.’

  ‘I never told you much – perhaps you thought I did, but I told you as little as I could, for your own safety, and then it was often lies. Like the book I intended to write on apartheid.’

  ‘I thought things would be different,’ Sarah said, ‘in England. I thought there would be no more secrets.’ She drew in her breath and was again immediately asleep, but Castle lay awake a long time. He had at such moments an enormous tempta
tion to trust her, to tell her everything, much as a man who has had a passing affair with a woman, an affair which is finished, wants suddenly to trust his wife with the whole sad history – to explain once and for all the unexplained silences, the small deceptions, the worries they haven’t been able to share, and in the same way as that other man he came to the conclusion, ‘Why worry her when it’s all over?’ for he really believed, if only for a while, that it was over.

  2

  It seemed very strange to Castle to be sitting in the same room he had occupied for so many years alone with Davis and to see, facing him across the table, the man called Cornelius Muller – a Muller curiously transformed, a Muller who said to him, ‘I was so sorry to hear the news when I got back from Bonn . . . I hadn’t met your colleague, of course . . . but to you it must have been a great shock . . .’ a Muller who began to resemble an ordinary human being, not an officer of BOSS but a man whom he might have met by chance in the train on the way to Euston. He was struck by the note of sympathy in the tone of Muller’s voice – it sounded oddly sincere. In England, he thought, we have become increasingly cynical about all deaths which do not concern us closely, and even in those cases it is polite to fit on quickly a mask of indifference in the presence of a stranger; death and business don’t go together. But in the Dutch Reformed Church to which Muller belonged, a death, Castle remembered, was still the most important event in family life. Castle had attended a funeral once in the Transvaal, and it was not the sorrow which he recalled but the dignity, even the protocol, of the occasion. Death remained socially important to Muller, even though he was an officer of BOSS.

  ‘Well,’ Castle said, ‘it was certainly unexpected.’ He added, ‘I’ve asked my secretary to bring me in the Zaire and Mozambique files. For Malawi we have to depend on MI5, and I can’t show you their material without permission.’

  ‘I’ll be seeing them when I’ve finished with you,’ Muller said. He added, ‘I enjoyed so much the evening I spent at your house. Meeting your wife . . .’ He hesitated a little before he continued, ‘and your son.’

  Castle hoped that these opening remarks were only a polite preparation before Muller took up again his inquiries about the route Sarah had taken into Swaziland. An enemy had to remain a caricature if he was to be kept at a safe distance: an enemy should never come alive. The generals were right – no Christmas cheer ought to be exchanged between the trenches.

  He said, ‘Of course Sarah and I were very happy to see you.’ He rang his bell. ‘I’m sorry. They’re taking the hell of a long time over those files. Davis’s death has a bit upset our routine.’

  A girl he didn’t know answered the bell. ‘I telephoned five minutes ago for the files,’ he said. ‘Where’s Cynthia?’

  ‘She isn’t in.’

  ‘Why isn’t she in?’

  The girl looked at him with stone-cold eyes. ‘She’s taken the day off.’

  ‘Is she sick?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Penelope.’

  ‘Well, will you tell me, Penelope, what exactly you mean by not exactly?’

  ‘She’s upset. It’s natural, isn’t it? Today’s the funeral. Arthur’s funeral.’

  ‘Today? I’m sorry. I forgot.’ He added, ‘All the same, Penelope, I would like you to get us the files.’

  When she had left the room he said to Muller, ‘I’m sorry for all this confusion. It must give you a strange impression of the way we do things. I really had forgotten – they’re burying Davis today – they’re having a funeral service at eleven. It’s been delayed because of the post mortem. The girl remembered. I forgot.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Muller said, ‘I would have changed our date if I’d known.’

  ‘It’s not your fault. The fact is – I have an official diary and a private diary. Here I have you marked, you see, for 10 Thursday. The private diary I keep at home, and I must have written the funeral down in that one. I’m always forgetting to compare the two.’

  ‘All the same . . . forgetting the funeral . . . isn’t that a bit odd?’

  ‘Yes, Freud would say I wanted to forget.’

  ‘Just fix another date for me and I’ll be off. Tomorrow or the next day?’

  ‘No, no. Which is more important anyway? Uncle Remus or listening to prayers being said over poor Davis? Where was Carson buried by the way?’

  ‘At his home. A small town near Kimberley. I suppose you’ll be surprised when I tell you that I was there?’

  ‘No, I imagine you had to watch and observe who the mourners were.’

  ‘Someone – you’re right – someone had to watch. But I chose to go.’

  ‘Not Captain Van Donck?’

  ‘No. He would have been easily recognized.’

  ‘I can’t think what they are doing with those files.’

  ‘This man Davis – perhaps he didn’t mean very much to you?’ Muller asked.

  ‘Well, not as much as Carson. Whom your people killed. But my son was fond of him.’

  ‘Carson died of pneumonia.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. So you told me. I had forgotten that too.’

  When the files at last came Castle went through them, seeking to answer Muller’s questions, but with only half of his mind. ‘We have no reliable information about that yet,’ he found himself saying for the third time. Of course it was a deliberate lie – he was protecting a source from Muller – for they were approaching dangerous ground, working together up to that point of non-cooperation which was still undetermined by either of them.

  He asked Muller, ‘Is Uncle Remus really practicable? I can’t believe the Americans will ever get involved again – I mean with troops in a strange continent. They are just as ignorant of Africa as they were of Asia – except, of course, through novelists like Hemingway. He would go off on a month’s safari arranged by a travel agency and write about white hunters and shooting lions – the poor half-starved brutes reserved for tourists.’

  ‘The ideal that Uncle Remus has in mind,’ Muller said, ‘is to make the use of troops almost unnecessary. At any rate in great numbers. A few technicians, of course, but they’re already with us. America maintains a guided missile tracking station and a space tracking station in the Republic, and they have over-flying rights to support those stations – you certainly know all that. No one has protested, no one has marched. There have been no student riots in Berkeley, no questions in Congress. Our internal security so far has proved excellent. You see, our race laws have in a way been justified; they prove an excellent cover. We don’t have to charge anyone with espionage – that would only draw attention. Your friend Carson was dangerous – but he’d have been more dangerous still if we had had to try him for espionage. A lot is going on now at the tracking stations – that’s why we want a close co-operation with your people. You can pinpoint any danger and we can deal with it quietly. In some ways you’re much better placed than we are to penetrate the liberal elements, or even the black nationalists. Take an example. I’m grateful for what you’ve given me on Mark Ngambo – of course we knew it already. But now we can be satisfied that we’ve missed nothing important. There’s no danger from that particular angle – for the time anyway. The next five years, you see, are of vital importance – I mean for our survival.’

  ‘But I wonder, Muller – can you survive? You’ve got a long open frontier – too long for minefields.’

  ‘Of the old-fashioned kind, yes,’ Muller said. ‘It’s as well for us that the hydrogen bomb made the atom bomb just a tactical weapon. Tactical is a reassuring word. No one will start a nuclear war because a tactical weapon has been used in almost desert country very far away.’

  ‘How about the radiation?’

  ‘We are lucky in our prevailing winds and our deserts. Besides, the tactical bomb is reasonably clean. Cleaner than the bomb at Hiroshima and we know how limited the effect of that was. In the areas which may for a few years be radioactive there are few white Afr
icans. We plan to canalize any invasions there are.’

  ‘I begin to see the picture,’ Castle said. He remembered Sam, as he remembered him when he looked at the newspaper photograph of the drought – the spread-eagled body and the vulture, but the vulture would be dead too of radiation.

  ‘That’s what I came here to show you – the general picture – we needn’t go into all the details – so that you can properly evaluate any information you obtain. The tracking stations are at this moment the sensitive point.’

  ‘Like the race laws they can cover a multitude of sins?’

  ‘Exactly. You and I needn’t go on playing with each other. I know you’ve been instructed to keep certain things from me, and I quite understand. I’ve received just the same orders as you have. The only important thing is – we should both look at identically the same picture; we shall be fighting on the same side, so we’ve got to see the same picture.’

  ‘In fact we’re in the same box?’ Castle said, making his private joke against them all, against BOSS, against his own service, even against Boris.

  ‘Box? Yes, I suppose you could put it that way.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Didn’t you say the funeral was at eleven? It’s ten to eleven now. You’d better be off.’

  ‘The funeral can go on without me. If there’s an after-life Davis will understand, and if there isn’t . . .’

  ‘I’m quite sure there is an after-life,’ Cornelius Muller said.

  ‘You are? Doesn’t the idea frighten you a bit?’

  ‘Why should it? I’ve always tried to do my duty.’