Various Flavors of Coffee (46 page)
Few of us in the procession were men, but we were a particular target. To begin with I did not understand why I kept hearing a peculiar clucking sound, until I also heard the shouts of “Henpecked! Henpecked!” and “Wash the dishes!”
I felt Emily push her arm through mine as we walked.“Just ig-nore it.”
“On the contrary,” I said,“I was thinking what a pleasure it is to be mistaken for your husband.”
As we reached Westminster the crowd began spitting. Great glistening webs of phlegm flew through the air around us. One landed on Emily’s jacket, where it hung on her lapel like a slimy, opalescent brooch.
“They will have to do better than that,” she said grimly, pulling out a handkerchief.
As we entered Westminster Square the crowd pushed in behind us. In front of us, blocking the way to the House, was a line of mounted policemen. It seemed that we were not to be allowed to present our petition after all, but we could not go back, either.
All around us the chanting intensified as the bystanders took advantage of our immobility to taunt us further. And then, quite without warning, there was a commotion on our right.A group of men rushed into the marchers, grabbing the women and wrestling them to the ground.
“Why don’t the police do something?” “They are moving at last. Look.”
It was true—the police had drawn their truncheons. But with a sickening sensation I saw that they were not pulling the attackers off: it was the suffragettes who were their targets. Female screams filled the air. We could not escape—the press of the panicking crowd all around us was too thick, and although we were pushed and pulled this way and that like seaweed on a rock, we always got swept back to the same place. The blue uniforms and their truncheons were twenty feet away—ten—within touching distance. I could see the sweat on the red face of the policeman nearest to me as he knocked a woman to the ground. She kicked out at him, and he clubbed her across the shins.
“Get behind me,” I told Emily. “It will make no difference.” “Do it anyway.”
I turned and clasped her to me, turning my back on that blue wave as it prepared to break over us.
• • •
I waited
in a cell for hours, bloodied, bruised, and thoughtful.
Allegiance is a strange thing. It can be intellectual—but it can also be visceral, a decision forced on you by events. I had no rea-son to care about the women’s cause. But I had stood alongside them as they were attacked, and I saw now, quite suddenly, the natural justice of what they were trying to do. If their demands were really as trivial as the newspapers claimed, why go to such lengths to deny them? If females were really such gentle, precious creatures, to be ushered through doors and protected from traffi on pavements, why club them to the ground at the fi st signs of dissent? Were they really the meeker sex—or was it simply a fi men had created, so that we could keep them that way?
As I pondered these unanswerable questions the door opened.
A policeman looked in and said,“Come with me.”
Still handcuffed, I was led down the corridor into a gloomy room lined with white tiles, like a bathroom. Emily’s husband was sitting at a steel table. Next to him sat a dour-looking fellow in a black suit.
“Wallis,” Brewer said, looking me contemptuously up and down.“I suppose I should have known.”
“Known what?”
He leaned back, hooking his thumb into the watch pocket of his waistcoat. “When they told me that my wife and I had both been arrested, I was naturally concerned. To be in two places at once is difficult enough, but to have been making a civil disturbance outside the House while simultaneously denouncing it in-side is surely quite remarkable.”
“That particular mistake was not of my making, I assure you.” “No. It was mine. I should have realized that someone—or
something—had infected my wife with this filth.”
The idea was so ridiculous that I laughed out loud. He eyed me sourly.“What’s so funny?”
“Where is she?”
“She is to be released on medical grounds.” “Why? Is she hurt?”
“None of your damn business,” growled the man in the black suit.
Brewer said calmly, “She suffers from hysteria.Were you aware of that, before you dragged her into a riot?”
“Hysteria? Says who?”
“I do,” the man in black said.
“Dr. Mayhews is her principal physician. It turns out that she has not been attending her appointments with the specialist for some time.” Brewer eyed me with distaste. “In any case, she will now get the treatment she requires.”
“If you have harmed her—”
“I am sending her to a private sanatorium in the country,” he interrupted.“The fresh air and calm will do her good.And
you
will never make contact with her again. Do I make myself clear?”
“I intend to write a full account of today’s procession—including the illegal activities of the police—and submit it to a newspaper.”
“Please do so.You will find that no editor in this country will publish it.Take him back to his cell,” he told the policeman.
With deliberate insolence I said, “I doubt very much that you will want my association with your wife to become common knowledge, Brewer.” I gave the word
association
a particular intona-tion. I knew what he would take it to mean.
His face froze.
“If you have her locked up, I will publicize our relationship in every club and coffee shop in London.”
He recovered himself. “The suffragists cannot afford that kind of scandal.”
“Perhaps. But I am not the suffragists. And I will stop at nothing—nothing—to have Emily released.”
“And if I do release her?” he said slowly.“What do I get then?” “My discretion.”
He snorted disbelievingly.
I shrugged.“It is the only guarantee you will get.”
There was a long silence.“Throw this man out,” he said at last. “Doctor, we will make alternative arrangements for my wife’s treatment in London.”
“I told him that I would keep quiet about the affair we are having if he let you go.”
“I saw him just now,” she said, appalled,“and he never so much as mentioned it.”
“Perhaps he was too embarrassed.”
“No,” she said.“We underestimate men like Arthur. How good they are at keeping their true feelings hidden. It is why they will never give us power unless they are forced to.” She looked at me. “So you struck a deal over me.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You had no right to do it. Even if it had been true, you would have had no right.”
“I’m sorry. I could think of no other way.”
“And now I will have to face Arthur every day, and he will never say anything, but he will think he knows . . .” She sighed. “Well, I have lost the moral high ground, but it is my own fault. Perhaps it will do me good to be a little humbled.”
“Of course,” I said,“there is one possible compensation . . .” “Oh? What’s that?”
“If your husband thinks we are sleeping together, then we might as well be guilty as charged.”
“ ‘Might as well’? What a romantic you are, Robert. I have never been propositioned so charmingly.”
“But you see my point? What is there to stop us?”
“Apart from the little matter of you having given your word, and me having to face Arthur every morning over the breakfast table. Oh, and your slight propensity to go and fall in love with other women. I’m sorry, Robert. Even put so irresistibly, I find I am able to refuse that offer.”
—Uker’s Coffee Buyers’ Guide
*
s the price climbed ever higher, so the quantities of
coffee pouring out of Brazil and the other South American countries turned from a deluge to a flood. Now there was a new shadow on the horizon—over-production. Who would drink all this coffee? True, the standardization of packaging had kept the price of the finished article in grocery stores down; but there was, surely, a limit to how much demand could be expanded.The price wobbled briefly—and still the supply rose, fueled by planting decisions made four or five years earlier. Pinker watched the markets
like a hawk, waiting to pounce.
The Brazilian government announced that it would deal with any over-supply by destroying the surplus itself, before it reached the market. The stock markets approved. The inexorable rise of
coffee, and the various South American bonds and currencies associated with it, continued unabated.
“I need you
to go to Brazil for me, Robert,” Pinker said.
I looked at him somewhat doubtfully. He laughed. “Don’t worry. I am not expecting you to run a plantation this time.There are some matters I must investigate, and it has to be someone I can trust—someone who can see beyond the end of his nose.”
He wanted me to scrutinize the destruction of the coffee, he explained, and make sure that it was really all it seemed.
“Oh, the theory is sound enough. Reduce the supply, and you control the demand. But it is quite one thing for a government to issue such a decree.Those who are required to carry it out will al-ways have a conflict of interest. For any farmer, burning his coffee would be like burning money. And my experience of farmers, Robert, is that they are rarely more altruistic than they need to be.”
I could hardly refuse to go—I was his employee, after all.There was a boat from Liverpool that would reach São Paulo in sixteen days, so I booked my passage.
It was a very different experience from my journey to Africa. For one thing there were no missionaries on board, no sermons about the need to keep up appearances or lighten the darkness. My fellow passengers had only one reason for their journey: coffee. In one way or another all of us were connected to the trade; the only trade, it seemed, that South America knew.
I did not tell them that I had another, secondary reason for my journey. Before I left London, Pinker had entrusted me with a message, to be delivered personally.
“Not to a secretary, not to a foreman, not even to a member of his family. Give it to him directly, and if possible stay with him as he reads it. I want you to tell me how he reacts.”
He placed a letter in my hand.The envelope was sealed: it was the name on it which made me start.
Sir William Howell.
“To no one else, Robert,” he said, watching me.“Place it in Sir William’s hand, and tell no one else of its existence.”
São Paulo
was like nowhere else I had ever been—a city of furious energy, new buildings rising on every side, palaces of stone and marble being built by barefoot men with rags for clothes and sticks for scaffolding. I thought:
This is what Africa might someday become,
but I could not quite believe it; I could not imagine those fierce African skies tolerating such ambition, such relentless, passionate activity.
Pinker had given me letters of introduction to the Secretary for Agriculture, who was only too happy to arrange for me to see the destruction of the coffee at first hand. I was taken to the docks at Santos, where a fleet of barges was being laden with sacks.
“These will all be dumped at sea,” my guide said, with a wave of his hand. “And the same amount next week, and the same the week after that. As you can see, there are armed guards, to ensure no one helps themselves.”
“May I inspect the sacks?” I asked. “If you wish.”
I walked past the guards to the stack of sacks and untied one. I sniffed it.The beans were unroasted and unmilled, but there could be no doubt: this was rough Brazilian arabica, the same coffee that was exported by the ton to San Francisco and Amsterdam. I took a handful and rubbed it in my fingers to be certain, then went to another bag to check that the contents were the same.
“Well? Are you satisfied?” the guide asked, a peeved edge to his voice.
“I am.”
“Good. Then you can tell your employer that when the Brazilian government says it will do a thing, it does it.”
Pinker had left
it to me how best to approach Sir William. In the end I decided that I would simply write to him, telling him that I had something for him. I gave my hotel address, but made it clear that by the time the letter reached him I would already be on my way.
There was a railway all the way from the coast into the hills— the same railway that brought the coffee down for export.The locomotive was an American one of the latest design, with a pointed cow-catcher on its front. For three days we chugged across endless valleys and up innumerable hillsides. But what was extraordinary was that in all that time the view out of my carriage window never changed. Every hill in that country—every valley, every vista—was the same. Stretching into the distance as far as the eye could see, like the grooves in a gramophone record, one saw nothing but shiny, dark-green lines of coffee.The bushes had been pruned so that they stood no higher than a man could pick, and one occasionally glimpsed peons tending to the plants, but for the most part the huge fields were as eerily empty as a desert—a desert of coffee.The original lush jungle had been pushed back into a few ravines and other inhospitable corners not worth cultivating, while the soil, as we gradually went higher, turned a deep brick-red, so dry and fine that in the least puff of wind it lifted, and seemed to drift over the fields like colored smoke. The lines of coffee were so straight, and stretched so far into the distance, that passing by them in the train caused one to experience strange optical illusions: sometimes they seemed almost to flicker and jump, as if the bushes themselves were in motion, striding with military precision into the interior.
When we stopped to take on coal and water, I chatted with the engine driver.
“This is nothing.” He gestured at the combed, regimented landscape, one eye closed against the cigarette in his mouth. “Where you’re going—up to Dupont—now that’s a
fazenda.
Five million trees. Imagine! Me, I have twenty trees, and I consider my-self a wealthy man. Imagine to have five million!”