A Bend in the River: Part Four

If I had come to it fresh from my upriver town it would have seemed immense, rich, a capital. But after Europe, and with London still close to me, it seemed flimsy in spite of its size, an echo of Europe, and like make-believe, at the end of all that forest.

All along the road were big boards about ten feet high, uniformly painted, each with a separate saying or maxim of the President.

There was to me an element of pathos in those maxims, portraits and statues, in this wish of a man of the bush to make himself big, and setting about it in such a crude way.

The hilly land had been scraped clean, cut up, eroded, exposed.

The posts that supported the President's maxim boards were often set in bare clay. And the boards themselves, spattered with mud from the road and dust-blown at the bottom, not as fresh as they had seemed to me the previous morning, were like part of the desolation.

When we went out to the wet field to board it I saw the man with the fireman's helmet—and a companion, also helmeted—standing unsteadily beside the gangway.

He said he was radicalizing and taking away everything from everybody. All foreigners.

The President had sprung another of his surprises, and this surprise concerned us. I—and others like me—had been nationalized.

Our businesses had ceased to be ours, by decree, and were being given out by the President to new owners. These new owners were called “state trustees.” Citizen Théotime had been made the state trustee of my business; and Metty said that for the last week the man had actually been spending his days in the shop.

Adequate compensation will be paid.

The banks were flush with money.

In a bank in Europe I had about eight thousand dollars, proceeds from my gold dealings in the old days; that money had just stayed and rotted, losing value.

It was a slow, tout -like, humiliating business.

Someone had unloaded his stock—pink and lime and red and mauve and blue.

He was drunken, aggrieved and threatening, and as deliberately irrational as an official who had decided to be malin.

He wanted me, almost, to act out my subordinate role as a favour to him.

He added it to his idea of his role; and he would use that authority later to extort some new concession.

He added it to his idea of his role; and he would use that authority later to extort some new concession.

I had resolved to be calm about my dispossession, to keep my mind on the goal I had given myself.

Metty’s face twisted with exasperation, and he did a silent stamp with one foot.

There was something artificial and even quaint about it: this new jail in this new settlement, all so rough and temporary-looking, in a clearing in the bush.

His appointment had been announced some time before, but so far he had not appeared in the town; and it was possible that the appointment had been rescinded.

The steamer office was famous for its erratic hours. I sat on the wooden bench outside the door until the man came and opened up.

It looked a little demoralized these days, as though awaiting radicalization.

I went around to the shaded side, which overlooked the quay.