Power Of The Sword Part 43

Marriage is a hard business without complicating it by different religions and customs and ways of life." How wise of me, Blaine nodded. And how would you reply? I would tell you that for the past year I have been taking instruction with Rabbi Jacobs and by the end of next month I will be a Jewess!

Blaine winced. You have never kept anything from me before, Matty!

I told Mummy!

I see!

still trying to make a game of it.

She smiled cheerily, Then you would say, "But, Matty, you are still a baby."

Amd you would reply, "I will be eighteen next birthday." you would look gruff and say, "What are David's prospects?"

And you would tell me, "David starts work with Courtney Mining and Finance at the end of the year with a salary of two thousand a year.

How did you know that? Matty was stunned. David only told me, She broke off as she realized what his source had been and she fidgeted in her seat. Her father's relations.h.i.+p with Centaine Courtney troubled her more than she could ever tell him.

Do you love him, Matty? Yes, Daddy. With all my heart. And you have already obtained your mother's permission that I can be sure of. Over the years both Mathilda Janine and Tara had become adept at playing Isabella and Blaine off against each other.

mathilda Janine nodded guiltily, and Blaine selected a cheroot from the humidor on his desk. While he prepared it, he frowned thoughtfully.

It's not a thing to go into lightly, Matty. I am not going into it lightly. I've known David two years. I always thought you might make a career- I am, Daddy. My career is going to be making David happy and giving him lots and lots of babies. He lit the cheroot and grumbled. Well then, you'd better send your David to see me. I want to warn him what will happen to him if he doesn't look after my little girl. Mathilda Janine shot round the desk, dumped herself into his lap and flung both arms around his neck. You are the most wonderful father any girl ever had! When I give in to you! he qualified the compliment, and she hugged him until her arms and his neck ached.

Shasa and David flew up to Windhoek in the Rapide to fetch Abe Abrahams and his wife down for the wedding. The rest of David's family and most of his friends, including Dr TWentyman-jones, came down by train. Together with the friends and family of Mathilda Janine Malcomess this made up a mult.i.tude that filled the great synagogue in the Gardens suburb to capacity.

David would dearly have liked Shasa to act as his best man. However, it had taken some delicate persuasion to get the strictly orthodox Rabbi Jacobs to perform the ceremony for a bride who had clearly converted to the Faith for the express purpose of marriage rather than out of purely religious commitment. David could not therefore try to smuggle a gentile best man into the schul, and Shasa had to be content with the position of pole-holder at one corner of the huppah canopy. However, Shasa made a hilariously funny speech at the reception which Blaine gave at the house in Newlands Avenue, with David as the b.u.t.t of his wit.

The wedding reception provided Shasa with an opportunity to effect one of his periodic reconciliations with Tara Malcomess. Their relations.h.i.+p over the two years since the Berlin Olympics had been storm and sunny weather alternating so rapidly that even the two protagonists themselves were not always certain as to how matters stood between them at any given time.

They managed to occupy opposing grounds on almost every issue; though politics was their favourite subject of dissension, the plight of the poor and oppressed in a land where there were plenty of both of these cla.s.ses was another perennial winner.

Tara could usually find plenty to say about the insensitivity of the privileged rich white ruling cla.s.ses, and the iniquity of a system which enabled a young man, whose only proven distinctions were a beautiful face and a rich and indulgent mother, to number amongst his playthings fifteen polo ponies, an SS Jaguar in British racing green with the special three and a half litre engine, and a De Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, while thousands of black children had their little bellies bloated with malnutrition and their legs bowed and deformed by rickets.

These subjects did not exhaust their genius at finding contentious issues. Tara had strong views on so-called sportsmen who went out into the veld armed with high-powered rifles to blast the innocent and beautiful animals and birds; nor did she approve of the obvious relish with which some witless young men regarded the slow but inexorable approach of war clouds for the promise of excitement that they seemed to offer. She was scornful of anyone who was satisfied with a second-cla.s.s degree when it was apparent that with just a little application they could have finished an expensive education, denied to tens of thousands of others, with a c.u.m laude degree in engineering.

On the other hand, Shasa thought it sacrilege that a girl who had the face and body of a G.o.ddess should try to disguise these facts in an attempt to be taken for a daughter of the proletariat. Nor did he approve of this same young woman spending most of her waking hours either in study, or in the slums and shanty towns that had sprung up on the Cape Flats, dis.h.i.+ng out to snot-nosed piccaninnies free soup the ingredients of which she had helped obtain by standing on street corners with a beggar's box.

He especially did not like the medical students and newly qualified young doctors, bolsheviks one and all, with whom she spent so much time in her capacity as an unpaid and untrained nurse in the volunteer clinics, tending unwashed and highly infectious brown and black patients suffering from tuberculosis, syphilis, infant dysentery, scabies, the secondary effects of chronic alcoholism and all the other unlovely consequences of poverty and ignorance.

St Francis of a.s.sisi was lucky he didn't have you to compete with - you'd have made him look like Attila the Hun. He found her friends boring in their serious singlemindedness, and ostentatious in their left-wing beards and shoddy dress.

They just lack any style or cla.s.s, Tara. I mean, how can you bear to walk in the street with one of them?

Their style is the style of the future, and their cla.s.s is the cla.s.s of all humanity., Now you are even talking like one of them, for cat's sake! However, these differences were mild and without real substance when compared to their truly monumental disagreement on the subjects of Tara Malcomess chast.i.ty and virginity.

For G.o.d's sake, Tara, Queen Victoria has been dead for thirty-seven years. This is the twentieth century. Thank you for the history lesson, Shasa Courtney, but if you try to get your hand into my bloomers again I am going to break your arm in three separate and distinct places., What you have got in there isn't so b.l.o.o.d.y special. There are plenty of other young ladies, I "'Ladies" is a euphemism, but let that pa.s.s. I suggest that in the future you confine your attentions to them and leave me alone. That is the only sensible suggestion you have made all evening, Shasa told her in an icy fury of frustration and started the Jaguar sports car with a thunder of exhausts and superchargers that echoed through the pine forests and startled all the other couples parked in the darkness about the pseudo-Greek temple that was the memorial to Cecil John Rhodes.

They drove down the winding mountain road at a savage pace, and Shasa skidded the big sports car to a halt in the gravel in front of the double mahogany doors of the Malcomess home.

Don't bother to hold the door for me, Tara said coldly, and slammed it so hard that he flinched.

That had been two months before, and there hadn't been a day since then that Shasa hadn't thought of her. When he was sweating in the heat of the great pit of the H'ani Mine or poring over a contract with Abe Abrahams in the Windhoek office or watching the muddy brown waters of the Orange river being transformed into sheets of silver by the spinning overhead sprinklers of the irrigation equipment, Tara's image would pop uninvited into his mind.

He tried to erase it by flying the Tiger Moth so low that the landing wheels raised puffs of dust from the surface of the Kalahari, or by absorbing himself in precise and intricate acrobatic evolutions, the spin and barrel roll and stall turn, but as soon as he landed Tara's memory was waiting for him.

He hunted the red-maned Kalahari lions in the desert wilderness beyond the mystic hills of the H'ani, or immersed himself in the multifarious affairs of the Courtney compantudying under his mother, watching her methods and ies, s absorbing her thinking, until she trusted him sufficiently to put him in control of some of the smaller subsidiaries.

He played the game of polo with almost angry dedication, pus.h.i.+ng himself and the horses under him to the outer limits, and brought the same single-minded determination to the pursuit and seduction of a daunting procession of women young and not so young, plain and pretty, married and single, more and less experienced, but when he saw Tara malcomess again he had the strange hollow feeling that he had only been half alive during those months of separation.

For her sister's wedding, Tara had put aside the pretentiously drab uniform of the left-wing intellectual, and as a bridesmaid she was dressed in grey silk with a blue sheen to it which, beautiful as it was, could not quite match the steely grey of her eyes. She had changed her hairstyle, cutting it short; the thick smoky curls formed a neat cap around her head, leaving the back of her long neck bare, and this seemed to emphasize her height and the length and perfection of her limbs.

They looked at each other for a moment across the length of the crowded marquee, and it seemed to Shasa that lightning had flashed across the tent; for an instant he knew that she had missed him as much and thought about him as often. Then she nodded politely and turned her full attention back to the man beside her.

Shasa had met him once before. His name was Hubert Langley and he was one of Tara's bleeding-heart brigade. He wore a shabby tweed jacket with leather elbow patches when most of the other male guests were in morning dress. He was an inch shorter than Tara, with steel-rimmed spectacles and prematurely thinning blond hair. His beard was the colour and texture of the plumage of a day-old chicken, and he lectured in sociology at the university.

Tara had once confided in Shasa. Huey is actually a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, isn't that remarkable? Her voice was awed. He is totally committed and he has an absolutely brilliant mind. One might call him a s.h.i.+ning jewel in a greasy and grubby setting, Shasa remarked, thereby precipitating another of their periodic estrangements.

Now he watched as Huey laid one of his freckled paws on Tara's unblemished forearm, and when he touched Tara's cheek with his wispy moustaches and whispered one of the gems from that absolutely brilliant mind into her pink sh.e.l.llike ear, Shasa realized that slow strangulation was too good for him.

He sauntered across the tent to intervene and Tara greeted him coolly, perfectly hiding the fact that her pulse was thumping loudly in her ears. She hadn't realized how intensely she had missed him until she watched him making his speech, urbane and self-a.s.sured, amusing and so infuriatingly good-looking.

However, we are not climbing on the same old merry-goround again, she warned herself, and put up all her defences as he took the chair on the other side of her and smiled at her and teased her lightly while looking at her with open admiration, which was so hard to resist. They had shared so much together, friends and places and fun and fights, and he knew exactly how to tickle her sense of humour. She realized that once she started to laugh it was all over, and she held out against it, but he worked on her defences with skill and perfect timing, adroitly breaking them down as swiftly as she set them up, until at last she surrendered with a tinkle of laughter which she could no longer contain, and he followed up swiftly, cutting her out from Huey's side.

From the balcony Mathilda Janine singled out her elder sister and tossed her bouquet directly at her. Tara made no effort to catch it but Shasa s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air and handed it to Tara with a bow, while the other wedding guests applauded and looked knowing.

As soon as David and Matty had departed, dragging a bunch of old shoes and tin cans behind David's old bullnosed Morris, Shasa worked Tara out of the marquee and spirited her away in the Jaguar. He didn't make the mistake of taking her back up the mountain to the Rhodes memorial, the scene of their last historic battle. Instead he drove out to Hout Bay and parked on the top of the precipitous cliffs.

While the sun set in a silent bomb-burst of orange and red into the sombre green Atlantic, they fell upon each other in a frenzy of reconciliation.

Tara's body was divided into two zones by an invisible but distinct line around her waist. On occasions of extreme goodwill such as this, the area above the line was, after a suitable show of resistance, made available to him. However, the area south of the line was inviolate, a restriction that left them both strung up with nervous tension when in the dawn they finally and reluctantly parted with one last lingering kiss at Tara's front door.

This latest reconciliation lasted four months which was a new record for them, and after preparing an emotional balance-sheet on which the many advantages of bachelorhood were overbalanced by one single weighty consideration, I cannot live without her, Shasa formally proposed marriage to Tara Malcomess and was devastated by her reply.

Don't be silly, Shasa, apart from a sort of vulgar animal attraction, you and I have absolutely nothing in common. That is the most utter bilge, Tara, he protested. We come from the same backgrounds, we speak the same language, laugh at the same jokes, 'But Shasa you don't care. You know that I plan to enter Parliament. 'That is a career decision, not a thing of the heart, that isn't caring for the poor and the needy and the helpless.

I care for the poor You care for Shasa Courtney, that's who you really care for. Her voice rasped like a stiletto drawn from its sheath.

For you the poor is anybody who can afford to ran only five polo ponies. Your papa had fifteen nags in training at the last count, he pointed out tartly.

You leave my father out of this,, she flashed at him.

Daddy has done more for the black and brown people of this country He held up both hands to stop her. Come on, Tara! You know I am Blaine Malcomess's most ardent admirer. I was not trying to insult him, I was simply trying to get you to marry me. It's no good, Shasa.

It's one of my unshakable convictions that the vast wealth of this land must be redistributed, removed from the hands of the Courtneys and the Oppenheimers and given That's Hubert Langley speaking, not Tara Malcomess.

Your little Commie pal should think of generating new wealth rather than dividing up the old. When you take everything we have, the Courtneys and the Oppenheimers, and share it out equally, there would be enough for a square meal for everybody, twenty-four hours later we would all be starving again, the Courtneys and the Oppenheimers included., There you are! I She was triumphant. You are quite happy to see everybody starve but yourself. He gasped at the injustice, and rallied to launch a fullscale counterattack, but just in time he saw the steely grey battle light in her eyes and checked himself.

If you and I were married,he made his voice humble, you could influence me, persuade me to your way of thinking She had been poised for one of their marvelously exhilarating shouting matches, and now she looked slightly crestfallen.

You crafty little capitalist she said. That's not fighting fair.

I don't want to fight with you, my dear girl. In fact, what I want to do with you is diametrically the opposite of fighting. Despite herself, she giggled. That's another thing I have against you, you carry your mind around in your underpants. You still haven't answered my question: will you marry me? to hand in by nine o'clock tomorrow I have an essay morning, and I am on duty at the clinic from six o'clock this evening. Please take me home now, Shasa. 'Yes or no? he demanded.

Perhaps, she said, but only after I detect a vast improvement in your social conscience, and certainly not before I have obtained my master's degree. That's another two years. Eighteen months, she corrected him. And even then it's not a promise, it's only a big fat "perhaps"., I don't know if I can wait that long. Then bye-bye, Shasa Courtney. They never extended their record beyond four months, for three days later Shasa received a phone call. He was at a meeting with his mother and the new winemaker that Centaine had recently brought out to Weltevreden from France.

They were discussing the designs for the labels on the latest vintage of Cabernet Sauvignon when Centaine's secretary came through to her office.

There is a phone call for you, Master Shasa. I can't come now. Take a message and I'll call back. Shasa did not even look up from the display of labels on Centaine's desk.

It's Miss Tara, and she says it's urgent. Shasa glanced sheepishly at Centaine. it was one of her strict maxims that business came first, and did not mix with any of his social or sporting activities, but this time she gave him a nod.

I won't be a minute. He hurried out and was back within seconds.

What on earth is it? Centaine stood up quickly when she saw his face.

Tara, he said. It's Tara., Is she all right? She's in jail. In December of the year 1838 on a tributary of the Buffalo river, the Zulu King Dingaan had sent his impis of warriors armed with rawhide s.h.i.+eld and a.s.segai against the circle of wagons of the Voortrekkers, the ancestors of the Afrikaner people.

The wheels of the wagons were bound together with trekchains and the s.p.a.ces between them blocked with thorn branches. The Voortrekkers stood to the barricade with their long muzzle loaders, all of them veterans of a dozen such battles, brave men and the finest marksmen in the world.

They shot down the Zulu hordes, choking the river from bank to bank with dead men and turning its waters crimson, so that for ever after it was known as Blood river.

On that day the might of the Zulu empire was shattered, and the Voortrekker leaders, standing bare-headed on the battlefield, made a covenant with G.o.d to celebrate the anniversary of the victory with religious service and thanksgiving for all time.

This day had become the most holy date in the Calvinistic Afrikaner calendar after the day of Christ's birth. It celebrated all their aspirations as a people, it commemorated their sufferings and honoured their heroes and their forefathers.

Thus the hundredth anniversary of the battle had peculiar significance for the Afrikaners and during the protracted celebrations the leader of the Nationalist Party declared, We must make South Africa safe for the white man. It is shameful that white men are forced to live and work beside lesser breeds; coloured blood is bad blood and we must be protected from it. We need a second great victory if white civilization is to be saved. Over the months that followed, Dr Malan and his Nationalist Party introduced a series of racially orientated bills to the House. These ranged from making mixed marriages from a crime, to the physical segregation of the whites from men of colour, whether Asiatic or African, and disenfranchising all coloured persons who already had the vote while ensuring that those who did not have it, remained without it. Up until the middle of 1939 Hertzog and s.m.u.ts had managed to head off or defeat these proposals.

The South African census distinguished between the various racial groups, the Cape-coloured and other mixed breeds'. These were not, as one might believe, the progeny of white settlers and the indigenous tribes, but were rather the remnants of the Khoisan tribes, the Hottentots and Bushmen and Damaras, together with descendants of Asiatic brought out to the Cape of Good Hope slaves who had been in the s.h.i.+ps of the Dutch East India Company.

Taken together they were an attractive people, useful and productive members of a complex society. They tended to be small-boned and light-skinned with almond eyes in faintly oriental features. They were cheerful, clever and quickwitted, fond of pageant and carnival and music, dextrous and willing workers, good Christians or devout Muslims.

They had been civilized in Western European fas.h.i.+on for centuries and had lived in close and amiable a.s.sociation with the whites since the days of slavery.

The Cape was their stronghold and they were better off than most other coloured groups. They had the vote, albeit on a separate roll from the whites, and many of them, as skilled craftsmen and small traders, had achieved a standard of living and affluence surpa.s.sing that of many of their white neighbours. However, the majority of them were domestic servants or urban labourers surviving just above or below subsistence level. These people now became the subject of Dr Daniel Malan's attempts to enforce segregation in the Cape as well as every other corner of the land.

Hertzog and s.m.u.ts were fully aware that many of their own followers sympathized with the Nationalists, and that to oppose them rigidly might easily bring down the delicate coalition of their United Party. Reluctantly they put together a counter-proposal, for residential segregation, which would disrupt the delicate social balance as little as possible and which, while making law a situation which already existed, would appease their own party and cut the ground from under the Nationalist opposition's feet.

We aim to peg the present position, General Jan s.m.u.ts explained, and a week after this explanation a large orderly crowd of coloured people, joined by many liberal whites, gathered in the Greemnarket Square in the centre of Cape Town peaceably to protest against the proposed legislation.

Other organizations, the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress, the Trotsky National Liberation League and the African Peoples Organization, scented blood in the air and their members swelled the ranks of the gathering, while in the front row centre, right under the hastily erected speakers stand, auburn hair s.h.i.+ning and grey-blue eyes flas.h.i.+ng with righteous ardour, stood Tara Malcomess. At her side, but slightly below her level, was Hubert Langley, backed by a group of Huey's sociology students from the University. They stared up at the speaker, enthralled and enchanted.

This fellow is very good, Hubert whispered. I wonder why we have never heard of him before. He is from the Transvaal, one of his students had overheard and leaned across to explain. One of the top men in the African National Congress on the Wit.w.a.tersrand. Hubert nodded. Do you know his name? Gama, Moses Gama. Moses, the name suits him, the one to lead his people out of captivity., Tara thought that she had seldom seen a finer-looking man, black or white. He was tall and lean, with the fare of a young pharaoh, intelligent, n.o.ble and fierce.

We live in time of sorrow and great danger, Moses Gama's voice had a range and timbre that made Tara s.h.i.+ver involuntarily. A time that was foreseen in the Book of Proverbs., He paused and then spread his hands in an eloquent gesture as he quoted. There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords and there jaw teeth as knives to devour the poor from the earth, and the needy from among men. d again.

That's magnificent! Tara s.h.i.+vered again. MY friends, we are the poor and the needy. When each of us stands alone we are weak, alone we are the prey for those with teeth like swords. But together we can be strong.

if we stand together, we can resist them. Tara joined in the applause, clapping until the palms of her hands were numb, and the speaker stood calmly waiting for silence. Then he went on, The world is like a great pot of oil slowly heating. When it boils over there will be turmoil and steam and it will feed the fire beneath it. The flames will fly up to the sky and afterwards nothing will be the same again. The world we know will be altered for ever, and only one thing is certain, as certain as the rise of tomorrows sun. The future belongs to the people, and Africa belongs to the Africans. Tara found she was weeping hysterically as she clapped and screamed her adulation.

After Moses Gama, the other speakers were dull and halting and she was angry with their inept.i.tude, but when she looked for him in the crowd Moses Gama had disappeared.

A man like him dare not stay too long in one place, Hubert explained. They have to move like the will o' the wisp to keep ahead of the police. A general never fights in the front line. They are too valuable to the revolution to be used as cannon-fodder. Lenin only returned to Russia after the fighting was over. But we will hear of Moses Gama again mark my words. Around them the crowd was being marshalled to form up into a procession behind a band, a fifteen-piece marching band, any gathering was an excuse for the Cape-coloured people to make music, and in ranks four and five abreast the demonstration began to snake out of the square. The band played 'Alabama', setting a festive mood, and the crowd was laughing and singing; it seemed a parade rather than a demonstration.

We will be peaceful and orderly, the organizers reinforced their previous orders, pa.s.sing them down the column. No trouble, we want no trouble with the police. We are going to march to the Parliament building and hand a pet.i.tion to the prime minister. There were two or three thousand in the procession, more than they had hoped for. Tara marched in the fifth rank just behind Dr Goollarn Gool and his daughter Cissie and the other coloured leaders.

With the band leading them, they turned into Adderley Street, the main city thoroughfare. As they marched up towards the Parliament building, the ranks of the procession were swelled by the idlers and the curious, so that as their leaders attempted to turn into Parliament Lane, they were followed by a column of five thousand, a quarter of a mile long, almost half of whom were there for the fun and the excitement, rather than from any political motives.

At the entrance to Parliament Lane a small detachment of police was waiting for them. The road had been barricaded, and there were more police armed with batons and sjamboks, those long black whips of hippohide, being held in reserve further up the road in front of the fence of castiron palings which protected the Parliament building.

The procession came to a ragged halt at the police barrier and Dr Gool signalled the band to silence, then went forward to parley with the white police inspector commanding the detail while the photographers and reporters from local newspapers crowded around them to record the negotiations.

I wish to present a pet.i.tion to the prime minister on behalf of the coloured people of the Cape Province, Dr Gool began.

Dr Gool, you are conducting an unlawful a.s.sembly and I must ask you to get your people to disperse, the police inspector countered. None of his men had been issued with firearms and the atmosphere was almost friendly. One of the trumpet-players blew a loud raspberry and the inspector smiled at the insult and wagged his finger like a schoolmaster at the culprit; the crowd laughed. This was the kind of paternal treatment which everybody understood.

Dr Gool and the inspector haggled and argued in a goodnatured fas.h.i.+on, undeterred by pleasantries from the wags in the crowd, until finally a parliamentary messenger was sent for. Dr Gool handed him the pet.i.tion and then returned to address the procession.

By this time many of the idlers had lost interest and drifted away; only the original nucleus of the procession remained.

MY friends, our pet.i.tion has been conveyed to the prime minister, Dr Gool told them. We have achieved our object and we can now rely on General Hertzog, as a good man and a friend of the people, to do the just thing. I have promised the police that we will all go home quietly now, and that there will be no trouble. We have been insulted, Hubert Langley called out loudly.

They will not even deign to speak to us. Make them listen to us, another voice called and there was loud agreement and equally loud dissent. The procession began to lose its orderly form and to heave and sway.

Please! My friends -'Dr Gool's voice was almost drowned in the uproar, and the police inspector called an order and the reserves moved down the street and formed up behind the barricade, batons at the ready, facing the head of the procession.

For some minutes the mood was ugly and confused, and then the coloured leaders prevailed and the procession began to break up and disperse, except for a hard core of three or four hundred. All of these were young, many of them students, both black and white, and Tara was one of the few females amongst them.

The police moved forward and firmly herded them away from the barricade, but spontaneously they re-formed into a smaller but more cohesive band and began marching back towards District Six, the almost exclusively coloured area of the city which ab.u.t.ted onto the central commercial area, but whose diffuse and indistinct boundaries would be one of the subjects of the proposed legislation physically to segregate the racial groups.

The younger, more aggressive marchers linked arms and began to chant and sing, and the police detachments shadowed them, firmly frustrating their efforts to turn back into the central area of the city, shepherding them towards their own areas.

Africa for the Africans, they chanted as they marched.

We are all the same colour under the skin. Bread and freedom., Then Hubert Langley's students became more lyrical and picked up the ancient refrain of the oppressed that he had taught them: When Adam delved and Eve span Who was then the gentleman?

The band began to play the more modern protest: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord., And after that they launched into: Nkosi sikelela Africa G.o.d Save Africa. As they entered the narrow lanes and higgledy-piggledy alleys of District Six, the street gangs emerged to watch with interest, and then to join the fun. In the crowded streets were those with personal scores to settle, and there were also the blatantly criminal and opportunistic gang members.

A half brick came sailing in a high arc out of the packed ranks and crashed through the plate-gla.s.s window front of one of the white general dealers, a man notorious for overcharging and restricting credit. The crowd was galvanized, a woman screamed, men began to howl like wolves in a pack.

Somebody reached through the jagged hole in the shop window and grabbed an armful of men's suits. Further down the street another window went with a shattering of gla.s.s shards, and the police grouped more tightly and moved forward.

Tara was trying desperately to help restore order, pleading with the laughing looters as they stampeded into the shops, but she was shoved aside and almost knocked down and trampled underfoot.

Go home, whitey, one of the gang members shouted in her face. 'We don't want you here. Then he ducked into the doorway of the shop and picked up a new Singer sewingmachine in his arms.

Stop it! Tara met him as he came back through the door of the shop. ]Put it back. You are spoiling everything. Don't you see that's what they want you to do? She beat her clenched fists on the man's chest, and he recoiled before her fury. However, the lane was jammed with humanity, looters, gang members, ordinary citizens and political protesters confused and angry and afraid. From the end of the lane the police charged in a phalanx; batons rising and falling, siamboks swinging, they began to sweep the mob down the street.

Tara ran out of the looted store just at the moment when a large constable in dark blue uniform was laying on his baton with a will, his target a skinny little Malay tailor who had scampered out of his shop to try to retrieve a bolt of looted cloth.