The Heart of the Matter Read Online Free Page B

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.’
    ‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’
    ‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’
    ‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah in Sharp Town?’
    ‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’
    ‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’
    ‘No, sir. Same father.’
    The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that failed she had taken action herself. She would deny that there had ever been a chest of china. The corporal would confirm this. He would turn out not to be the landlady’s brother, but some other unspecified relation—probably disreputable. Bribes—which were known respectably as dashes—would pass to and fro, the storm of indignation and anger that had sounded so genuine would subside, the partitions would go up again, nobody would hear any more about the chest, and several policemen would be a shilling or two the richer. At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty houseowner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself. After that he had tried to kill these cases at birth: he would reason with the complainant and point out that the investigation would do no good and undoubtedly cost her time and money; he would sometimes even refuse to investigate. The result of that inaction had been stones flung