The Governor's Lady Read Free

got better. The road began to climb. It spiralled up and up through the red hills, getting cooler with every hairpin bend. Even here, however, there were difficulties. Every week or so, large portions of the sandstone, baked dry and flaky like pastry, detached themselves and went slithering down into the valley. Sometimes they carried the road with them, sometimes they merely lay across it, smothering the surface. Either way, it called for giant-size gardening to get things going again.
    On the map, this portion of the road was still shown as a continuous thick black line, Thirty miles ahead, the thick black line gave way to a succession of little dots.
    There things really began to grow desperate. The road-builders had given up trying. Or succumbed to sunstroke. The road simply went mad. It followed river-beds that flooded without warning. It tried to climb water-falls. It nosed its way into mountain culs-de-sac. It led to the edge of precipices. It went straight as an arrow across wide plains and then turned at right-angles because no one had remembered the lake on the other side. It plunged into forests. It ended. Only the larger kinds of American cars ever attempted the journey.
    But Sir Gardnor insisted. It was part of his faith. He believed in that road. Even though at some point in its course from Amimbo, the nationality of the landscape invisibly changed—this thorn-bush British, that one Portuguese—it was undeniably, so the Governor said, God’s intended passageway towards the open sea. The Arab slave-traders had used it for centuries.
    The railway, on the other hand, was entirely artificial. It came thrusting through from the wrong direction. It was political, rather than natural. Only British Colonialism at its most obstinate would ever have thought of building it at all; or have succeeded.
    Financially, it was a write-off. It paid no dividends, owned no assets except practically valueless land, utterly obsolete rolling-stock. But it was still part of the Imperial network. It joined an inland British Colony —a mere foreign island in the middle of hostile Africa—with the remoteocean. And every ant-indented sleeper along its six-hundred-and-fifty wandering miles was British, too.
    Even that, however, in Sir Gardnor’s eyes did not excuse its elementary wrongness, its irrelevance. A glance out of the train window was enough to show. Different ecology. Different tribes. Different customs. Different loyalties. Different sins. Nothing to do with his own beloved Amimbo.
    That was why, with no argument at all, Sir Gardnor required all new members of his staff to make the proper approach; the one that took so much longer.
    There was no denying, the young man kept reminding himself, that it was a privilege to serve under such a figurehead. Sir Gardnor Hackforth was already famous; something of a living legend in the Service.
    At forty-five he was head and shoulders above anyone else, and there seemed no Proconsular heights to which he might not eventually climb. He was there at his own wish in Amimbo at this moment: that much was common knowledge. But when he was ready—it was understood that, by now, there had been a hint here, a word dropped in the right quarter there—he could take his choice. A really fat Governorship. A Governor-Generalship perhaps. Even Delhi possibly. Or Westminster. The Lords, of course; and his own Department.
    In the meantime, Sir Gardnor was finishing his book. It was the book that had got young Harold Stebbs the job. He was scarcely the type to which an Interview Board could be expected to warm irresistibly. Altogether too self-effacing; too diffident. No presence; and too many of his sort coming forward nowadays, the Chief Establishment Officer considered.
    Asked the key-question of how he thought he would behave in a civil emergency if he should find himself the sole representative of British authority, he had replied, briefly but damagingly, that he had never