QB VII by Leon Uris Read Free Book Online Page B

use their own taboos to gain his end. But the frustration wore on.
    “Dr. Adam buy four water buffalo from Chinese. Why you no go to town of Sarebas and bring back?”
    “Buffalo sacred omen, like moth and blue bird.”
    “But you not bring them to eat but only to work with in field.”
    “Curse to make sacred omen labor.”
    After another hour of it, Adam was exhausted. He begged to be excused from the feast and the cockfight and tersely bid them farewell. Pirak, the Manang Bali, was now filled with kindness, having won all his arguments. Dr. Adam would not return till after monsoon. As he climbed into his boat and curtly ordered the boatmen to cast off, the Ulus on shore waved a halfhearted farewell. When the boat turned the bend, Bintang looked to Mudich and asked, “Why does Dr. Adam come here if he hate us so much?”

9
    T HE CLOSENESS OF THE British compound at Fort Bobang imposed friendships on persons who would have spent a lifetime avoiding each other. Angela was particularly adaptable to the narrow social circle. Adam was not.
    He had a particular dislike for L. Clifton-Meek, the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Second Division. Clifton-Meek’s office adjoined his clinic and their homes were only separated by that of the commissioner, Jack Lambert.
    The Empire was a haven that saved the mediocre from obscurity. Lionel Clifton-Meek was a prime example of the shoe clerk, the railroad ticket seller, the humbled assistant tailor who had wiggled his way into a niche in His Majesty’s far-flung interests. It was a small hole to crawl into indeed, but once staked out it was his and his alone. Clifton-Meek carefully guarded against either taking on responsibility, or making decisions, or outside intrusions. He clothed himself in a blanket of paper work to expand a belief in his own importance. In this safe place he could wait it out and end up with a nice pension for loyal service to the crown.
    If L. Clifton-Meek personified a low echelon of civil servants, his drab, turkey-necked wife, Mercy, even more vividly portrayed what was hated by the black and yellow people they ruled.
    In England, the Clifton-Meeks would have lived a gray life in a brick row house in a gray town or in London in a walk-up cold water flat, where her only qualification to augment her husband’s insufficient income would be to hire herself out as a maid.
    But the Empire did much for the lowly of England. In Sarawak they had stature. In the Second Division there was no other agricultural commissioner. Clifton-Meek had much to say about the rice fields, and the rubber plantations, and spent much of his time frustrating the Sarawak-Orient Company by the endless chain of command. A bone in the throat of progress.
    Mercy Meek had at her beck and call two Malayan house-boys, who slept on the veranda and chased after her with an umbrella to shade her milky freckled skin from the sun. And she had a pure Chinese cook. The artificial snobbery of then-low ancestry caused them to hyphenate their name as a further gesture of self-importance. And to top it all, Mercy attempted to bring the God of the Episcopalians to these heathens. On Sunday, the compound vibrated with her playing of the organ and pounding the fear of Jesus into them to a response of listlessly mumbled prayers.
    Commissioner Lambert was another sort. Like Adam’s superior, MacAlister, Lambert was an old hand in these parts, a good administrator who calmly listened to the complaints of the native chiefs, did little about them, and saw that everyone was well supplied with British flags and portraits of the King for their long houses. Basically, Lambert and Kelno left each other alone.
    But that time had to come when L. Clifton-Meek had been buggered about once too often by that certain foreign medical officer and filed an indignant report.
    Before Lambert let the report go into channels, he thought a meeting ought to take place between parties. It commenced in the commissioner’s