The Claws of Mercy

by John Harris

  Clerk Smith, his spectacles, white suit, umbrella and topee discarded, danced a frenzied shuffling dance round the gramophone, clad only in a pair of tattered underpants.

  “What the hell’s all this?” Gotto roared and the drums stopped immediately. Several of the black men scrambled to their feet and moved back and, in the sea of silence that flowed after Gotto’s shout, the gramophone still screeched its gabbling tune, a reedy pipe punctuated by the roars where scratches marred the record.

  For a second or two, Smith continued to dance, then the absence of the drums edged in on his senses and he stopped, panting and sweating, his eyes wild. Recognising Gotto, he approached him, obviously very drunk, his hand extended, a wide, white grin on his black face.

  “Boss Gotto,” he said gaily. “My friend Boss Gotto. All my friends here now. Boss Gotto go sleep my good friend Zaidee.”

  “Shut your mouth, you clown,” Gotto shouted, shoving him away violently.

  Smith’s eyes clouded then he grinned again and advanced once more.

  “Boss Gotto make joke,” he said. “We no laugh. Ha ha! Clerk Smith, you de stupidest damn’ ole fool in de whole worl’. Boss Gotto make joke. You no’ laugh.”

  “I’m not making any joke,” Gotto raved, suddenly scared of Jimmy arriving unexpectedly and finding the party in possession of the bungalow. “Get this mob out of here, you clown. Get out!”

  “But, Boss, we come join you. We come make laugh and dance and sing. Plenty palaver.”

  Gotto could hardly speak for the rage that engulfed him. “Out,” he stormed and, seizing Smith by his skinny black arm, swung him almost off his feet in a great scything movement, that sent him skidding along the concrete floor on the seat of his grubby pants. One foot jarred against the gramophone, ending the song in a violent shriek that added one more scratch to the record, then he crashed into a basket chair, and, with its shattered remains round his neck, ended upside down against the wall.

  At once, as though at a signal, the room emptied. There was a rustle and in silence all the other black men and women disappeared through doors and windows until the room was clear. Even the two unconscious figures were whipped away, the drums, everything. Only two or three empty gin bottles lay on the floor, one still rolling – and a few dirtier bottles which had contained palm wine.

  Smith climbed shakily to his feet.

  “Boss Gotto, you my friend,” he said hesitantly, game to the last, but Gotto gave him another violent shove that sent him flying down the steps on to the muddy moonlit earth outside. Almost before he had landed, his clothes came flying out of the door after him, then bottles, then the record of Carmen Miranda which shattered at his feet, and finally the gramophone. It landed by his side with a crash and the twang of a broken spring, and became silent, the turn-table still spinning idly of its own volition.

  Smith stared at the gramophone for a while then, still only in his torn underpants, he flopped on his knees beside it in the mud with a wail.

  Frantically, he wound it up and waited for the turn-table to spin. When it didn’t, he moved it with his finger and watched it run down again to a stop.

  “Dis ole t’ing go break,” he howled in an outburst of misery, tears coming to his eyes.

  He wound up the machine again and tried once more to spin the turn-table, then still on his knees, he searched round for the broken parts of the record.

  “Ole Carmen Mirandy no sing no mo’,” he mourned noisily. “Dat ole Gotto go break ’um.”

  He turned towards the silent bungalow as his rage burst out of him. “You bloody damn’ ole white bastard,” he shrieked at the closed door. “You go break my Carmen Mirandy! You break my gramophone! You damn’ bloody fool white man, why you no’ open de door? I t’ink you my friend. I tell Sargy Asimani. He come take you for calaboose.”

  For some time, his spectacles awry, he stormed at the unresponsive bungalow, then, still shouting and muttering to himself and with tears of rage and unhappiness streaming down his black face, he scooped up the gramophone, cradling it to his skinny bosom like a mother with an injured child. He picked up the pieces of record and what he could find of his clothes and began to stagger out of the clearing towards Amama.

  On the main road, his friends met him, first one or two, emerging from the shadows where they had hidden to watch the fun, then in groups.

  “Dat old Gotto,” Smith shrieked at them in English. “He go break Carmen Mirandy. De music no play. No parties. Clerk Smith go tell Sargy Asimani.”

  They commiserated with him noisily and offered him a drink. Eventually, he permitted someone to carry the gramophone for him while he retained his clothes and the pieces of broken record, then the whole lot, drums, bottles of palm wine, broken gramophone and all, set off towards Amama Town, bewailing the villainy of Gotto for spoiling their party, Smith’s arms going like a set of station signals all the time, his crumpled white suit flapping in his hands as though in distress.

  As they moved slowly along the road in the faint light of the stars, passing in and out of the shadows that striped the silver, others joined them, most of them not very interested in Smith’s sorrows but all of them enjoying the noise and the shouting.

  Driving towards the jetty with the half-dozen labourers he had rounded up on receiving Earnshaw’s SOS, Jimmy passed them as they entered the outskirts of Amama Town. They were straggling across the highway, still drinking from bottles, pushing each other and quarrelling among themselves, the major issue lost in the presence of a dozen smaller ones. Their black faces were almost invisible but their clothes stood out, disembodied and wavering about like ghosts in the starlight.

  As he edged past them, they shouted at the station wagon and one or two of them even shook their fists, but they all moved back and offered no sign of violence.

  He had hardly halted the vehicle at the jetty when Earnshaw appeared out of the darkness, smeared with black mangrove slime, his face drawn with exhaustion.

  “How many you got, old lad?” he asked.

  “Six,” Jimmy said. “I crammed ’em in. I can easily fetch you some more if you want ’em.”

  “Don’t bother. Any more’ll only get in the way. Come on, old lad, help me get ’em on the job. A couple of the boats is ’oled and there’s some more on the mud down-stream.”

  He pushed a crow-bar into Jimmy’s hand and they set off towards the dim outline of the pile-driver and the ghostly shapes of the piles that stuck out of the mud like gravestones.

  “What’s all that shouting going on up there?” he asked.

  “Party, I think,” Jimmy said. “They’ve all been celebrating. I passed a bunch on the road arguing about something.”

  Earnshaw grunted and indicated the boats jammed against the concrete piles. “This is a fine old lark, ain’t it? Your pal, Gotto.”

  “He’s no pal of mine.”

  “If he’d got on with the job, that jetty would have been finished.”

  “It would have been finished if he’d only let the men get on with the job.”

  “Have it your own way. Anyway, my bleedin’ boats has gone. And my jetty. And if it interests you, your conveyor. Christ, he won’t half catch a cold when I see him. I’ll let him have the length of me tongue, I will proper.”

  “Much more sense to let the DC have it tomorrow,” Jimmy said soberly.

  Clerk Smith’s party duly arrived back in Amama and the drumming and the dancing and the drinking there stopped long enough for his followers to swell to a hundred or more. They swept up the centre of the town towards the police station, with Clerk Smith lost in the middle of them, hugging the gramophone to his breast again while someone else carried his clothes. He was still shouting and weeping alternately.

  “Dat damn’ bloody ole Gotto,” he was wailing. “He go smash de music. Now no dance. No drumming. No parties.”

  Those round him who could not hear properly assumed that Gotto had forbidden dancing and music, and the noise grew louder. Outside the police stati
on, Sergeant Asimani, uneasily comparing his few court messengers with the number of Smith’s supporters, tried unavailingly to break up the milling crowd, but it was still there when Samuel Assissay and the city-suited gentlemen from Freetown arrived out of the shadows and started to harangue the fringes. Indian Joe, sitting in his chair at the entrance to his bar, smiled his mouthful of gold teeth and leaned forward delightedly to see better.

  “De Lord say de white man go pinch all Africa from de black man,” Assissay was yelling. “De Bible, dat good book, say all men equal. Black man rise up, go punish de brutal white man.”

  The spectacled, suited gentlemen from Freetown took up the chant. “Go punish the white man,” they shouted. “Down with the white man who steals the African’s land.”

  The crowd had been good-natured up to this point but, like all African crowds, it was easily stirred to excitement and anger, and the words of Samuel Assissay and his friends fell on ground sewn with discord by Gotto. Before long, they were surging up through the centre of Amama Town again and Swannack and his wife and Stella watched them pass with worried eyes.

  “That’s a big crowd, Mother,” Swannack said quietly. “Biggest I’ve seen yet, I guess.”

  “Sure is, Father,” Mrs Swannack shouted. “I don’t like the look of it. It looks ugly.”

  “Is anything going to happen?” Stella asked.

  “I don’t know, child. I hope not.”

  “I wish Jimmy were around,” Stella said half to herself. “He’d know what to do.”

  “I figure there’s a lot of our flock there, Father,” Mrs Swannack observed, eager for battle, her eyes bright as she peered into the darkness. “We should go and talk to them.”

  “They look as though they want more than talking,” Stella said uneasily.

  By this time the crowd filled the whole of the open space in the centre of Amama Town, a mass of moving figures and wavering torches that etched reddish highlights on black faces. Occasionally, someone was trampled on or knocked on to a fire and suffered minor bums. A woman was crushed against the wall of a house, and a mud hut was pushed over. When Clerk Smith, fortified and encouraged by the enormous number of what he took to be sympathisers, set off back towards the mine bungalow, the crowd accompanied him, sweeping round him and in front of him and behind him where Samuel Assissay’s friends were whipping in the laggards. There were dozens of dogs on the move with the mob, and more dozens of small boys, running and leaping in and out of the huts, shouting, yelling, taking the opportunity to create mischief. One of them set fire with a torch to the grass roof of a hut out of sheer devilment and the owner, a Mende, having rescued his family, set off, protesting noisily, to search out the nearest Temne on whom he could wreak his vengeance.

  Assissay was marching next to Clerk Smith now, urging on the mob.

  “De children of the Lord God,” he was yelling, “go fight de good fight. Onward, de soldiers of de Lord.”

  Someone, not knowing what the uproar was about, started to sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, as he had been taught by Swannack, and it was taken up like a revolutionary hymn by a section of the crowd, which immediately became involved with a group of pagans and a secondary brawl started.

  Smith was in his element. “I go punch dat ole Gotto in de nose,” he was shouting to those around him who were really no longer concerned with his troubles in the general excitement.

  “I go tell him, Boss Gotto, you no do dat to Personal Officer Smith. I tell Sargy Asimani. He come pinch you for calaboose. I come punch you on de nose. I no’ agree for you no mo’.”

  He squared up, his thin arms in the stance of a pugilist, and shadow-boxed with himself for the next hundred yards until one of his flying elbows hit his neighbour in the eye and started another scuffle. His clothes had long since been stolen and all that he now possessed were his topee, his spectacles, and his muddy cotton pants. Even the gramophone had disappeared knocked out of the hands of its bearer, trodden on and kicked into a water-filled gulley out of the way of bare toes. Carmen Mirandy had been ground to dust in the confusion.

  “I punch him,” Smith was shrieking. “Like dis. One – two – t’ree.”

  “Down with the white oppressors,” roared Assissay.

  “Down with the white men,” shouted the agitators from the fringes and back of the crowd well away from the front where they might get hurt.

  “Down with the whites,” roared the crowd delightedly, neither honestly meaning it nor sincerely understanding why they shouted it, but enjoying the noise, the mass movement. It was all far better than the dancing.

  Two

  Gotto heard the crowd approaching the mine bungalow while it was still more than a mile away. As he went to the door to see what was happening, he was knocked aside by the frantic figure of Amadu, their former house-boy.

  As he shot past, Gotto grabbed him by the collar of his shirt which promptly split down the back, and the two of them staggered apart. Amadu turned and stared at him, his eyes rolling so that only the whites showed.

  “Where Boss Jimmy?” he panted.

  “God knows,” Gotto snapped. “What’s going on? What’s got you?”

  “Dat ole Clerk Smith. Big crowd. Dey come for fight. Shout ‘Down with white man.’ Where Boss Jimmy?”

  “What do you want him for?”

  “I tell him go hide.”

  Even in a moment of panicking fear, Gotto was bitterly aware that Amadu was not including him in his warning.

  “What do they want?” he shouted, leaping across the room and grabbing the house-boy’s wrist.

  “Boss, it dat ole ju-ju. Black men come. Big numbers. Plenty plenty men.”

  Gotto twisted the black wrist until Amadu yelped with pain.

  “Are they coming for me?”

  “Yassah, Boss. Boss, where Boss Jimmy?”

  “To hell with Boss Jimmy.” Gotto flung Amadu away. “I’m getting out. Which way are they?”

  “De Amama Road. Boss, where – ?”

  “How far away?”

  “All de way. Dey just leave Amama Town. I come plenty quick. I run.”

  “All the way, eh?”

  Gotto thought quickly. Not far along the road was Earnshaw’s house and, beyond that, Romney’s. He knew he could reach them before the crowd from Amama did, and he knew the respect with which both were held. He pushed Amadu aside and ran for the car. Starting the engine and letting in the clutch, he shot off with spinning wheels and rocked out of the clearing into the road.

  The vehicle slewed half round in a skid as he stopped at Earnshaw’s sprawling bungalow with its overgrown garden and empty bottles and the petrol tins of geraniums on the veranda. In the distance, as he leapt from the car, he could hear the shouts of the crowd, could even see the pinpricks of red light where the flames of the torches danced against the dark back-cloth of the trees. Then, in a couple of bounds, he was inside the bungalow.

  The lights were still burning, and chairs were overturned, and there was a half-empty gin bottle on the table where Earnshaw had left it when he had been called hurriedly to the jetty.

  “Earnshaw,” Gotto shouted, his voice cracked with strain. The echo came back to him hollowly from the back of the house. “Earnshaw! Where the hell are you?”

  Obsessed by the darkness, the silence of the bungalow and the noise of the approaching crowd, he was caught by a shudder of fear.

  “My God,” he muttered. “They must have got him.”

  As he turned towards the door again, his eyes fell on Earnshaw’s rifle lying, as usual, on the old-fashioned horsehair couch he used. Gotto’s long legs took him across to it in a couple of strides and he snatched it up. The breech was empty and he looked round wildly, wondering where he might find some ammunition. He began to plunge about the bungalow, panting, the sweat streaming down his face as he opened drawers and cupboards in frantic haste, tumbling tins and dishes to the floor.

  Finally, in a drawer of the old-fashioned treadle sewing machine warp
ed to sticking point by the damp, he found a solitary bullet, typical of Earnshaw, thrown there at some time when he was emptying his pockets.

  Gotto thrust it into the breech and slammed the bolt home. Then he ran for the car and drove madly towards Romney’s.

  The doctor was standing on the veranda, smoking and listening to the noise of the crowd. As he saw the car come to a stop, he turned abruptly and went inside, followed by Gotto.

  “The mob’s coming,” Gotto panted, flourishing the rifle. “We’ve got to hold ’em off.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, my dear lad,” Romney said mildly in an effort to calm him. “This isn’t cowboys and Indians we’re playing.”

  Romney’s calmness made Gotto feel stupid and in his embarrassment he shouted louder.

  “They’re coming, I tell you. They’re up the road. They’ve already got Earnshaw.”

  “Not they. He’s the last person they’d ever get, even supposing they wanted him, which I doubt. There’s been a lot of drinking, I suppose, and they’re excited about something, but they’ll do no harm if you don’t do anything stupid.”

  His eyes fell on the rifle in Gotto’s hand. “What are you going to do with that?”

  Gotto looked down at the weapon, suddenly foolish in front of the unperturbed old man. “Hold ’em off, I suppose,” he mumbled.

  “Is it loaded?” Gotto nodded. “Then don’t be stupid. And for God’s sake don’t let that crowd down the road see you with it. It’s just the thing to cause trouble.”

  “I’m not letting go of this,” Gotto said viciously. “Not likely.”

  “Don’t be a damn’ fool. Give it to me.”

  “No. They’re not going to catch me.”

  Romney half turned and seemed to be studying the reply, when he suddenly swung his arm. His podgy fist caught Gotto on the end of his bony nose as he dodged back, and made tears come into his eyes. By the time he had recovered his wits, Romney had snatched the rifle from his hand and thrown it on the table.