Beneath Gray Skies (4 page)

The Prime Minister replied. “Reggie, I asked you all to be quiet—” He broke off and thought for a moment. “What a foul mind you have, Reggie. How perfectly foul. Is that possible?” he asked the Foreign Secretary, worriedly.

“From what I know of these Nazi blokes, yes, it’s possible. Not really probable, but certainly possible, based on this Hitler’s stated positions.”

“Slavery in Europe. And it’s at least partly something to do with us, isn’t it? After all, we have some sort of responsibility for Germany, since we won the war and everything.”

“There’s one thing we must do,” replied the War Secretary. “We must make sure it doesn’t ever stand a chance of happening. And we mustn’t forget the possibility that Hitler will start to re-arm Germany. As I said just now, he’s spreading the story that Germany lost the war through internal treachery, and Germany must fight again to claim rightful victory.”

“Rubbish!” snorted the Chancellor of the Exchequer. “No-one wants another war.” There were nods all round the table. Every man in the British Cabinet had lost a son, a nephew or some other close relation in the trenches of Flanders, the beaches of Gallipoli, or the hell of Mesopotamia, and had no wish to see a repeat of the Great European War. “I’m sure that applies to the Germans as much as it does to us. God knows the poor blighters suffered enough.”

“They did, but if they felt they had enough potential to make the weapons, and if they were backed by a large force, like the Confederate Army, the Nazis are perfectly capable of arousing enough national sentiment. One of their slogans is ‘Germany, awake’, after all.”

“As if we hadn’t had enough problems putting the beggars to sleep last time,” remarked the Home Secretary.

“With all their talk about the purity of the German race, they’ll probably want to try and sweep all the German-speakers in Europe into a new empire. That would mean most of what was Austria-Hungary, and parts of Poland. And don’t forget all the rubbish about the Jews. Hitler’s said in his speeches that Germany must be free of Jews.”

“This isn’t the Middle Ages. You can’t go around expelling a whole race of people from your country,” objected the Home Secretary.

“Whatever you may think, this is what Hitler’s saying. There’s a crackpot called Julius Streicher from whom Hitler’s got most of his ideas, and let’s face it, the Jews have never been very popular in that part of the world. Hitler may be mad, but unfortunately, a lot of Germans are listening to him.”

“Shouldn’t we be listening to him, too?” came a voice. “It does sound as though he has the right idea about the Communists, anyway. And I don’t know that much about the German Jews, but I think we’d be a damn’ sight better off without ours.”

There was a murmur of agreement from a few voices around the table, matched by an equal or larger number of angry dissenting murmurs.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up, Charles,” came another voice. “We don’t all suffer from your bee in the bonnet about the Jews. The poor bastards have suffered enough from the Russian and Polish pogroms over the past years and the Bolsheviks don’t seem to have sorted things out in Russia as far as that’s concerned. In any case, Arthur Balfour’s as good as promised the Jews that they can all go off and live in Palestine, which I for one think is a bloody stupid idea. It’s not ours to give away, and there are people there already who aren’t going to welcome a whole crowd pushing their way in.”

“And I’m all for sending them over there. We don’t all have your Quaker-like tolerance of the whole of God’s creation, Reggie. I may pray in church every Sunday for all sorts and conditions of men, but it doesn’t mean that I have to like them, even if you take it to mean you have to treat the lower classes as equals.”

“Personally, I think we’re better off with our Jews in England, and not making fools of ourselves in that part of the world.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” interrupted the Prime Minister. “Can we come to the point, please? The question is not what we are going to do about British Jewry, or what sort of role we should be playing in Palestine, but whether we allow Herr Hitler to have a free hand to persecute his Jews in Germany.”

“It’s not just a question of the Jews, Prime Minister. There’s the whole question of whether we want a Hitler government in Germany forming an alliance with the Confederacy. Leaving out any moral question of Jews and Negroes, an awakened militaristic Germany with access to all those raw materials would be a disaster for European security.”

“As if we didn’t have enough of those disasters already with Russia,” added a voice.

“Well, personally,” said the Prime Minister, “I don’t want to sound all priggish about this, but it does seem to me that we have a moral duty to frustrate the Confederacy. The fact that we’ve tolerated slavery for so long in an English-speaking country—”

“Would it be any better if it were French-speaking?” the Minister for Industry enquired innocently.

“Oh for Heaven’s sake, Reggie, of course it wouldn’t. I suppose not, anyway,” he added dubiously. “Where was I? Oh yes. It’s a scandal that we’ve allowed slavery to continue there, and I think we should do our best to prevent them getting ahead. We were all hoping that the country would fall to pieces under the weight of slavery, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. And if what you say about Herr Hitler is true, we have some sort of duty there as well.”

“I agree,” said the Foreign Secretary. “If the bloody Americans can’t get their house in order, then we’re going to have to step in. They’re so bloody moral when it suits them, the Americans. All that high-minded stuff about leagues of nations and so on, and that ghastly idea of Prohibition—I can’t believe that can ever become national law, let alone part of the Constitution—but they seem happy enough to tolerate slavery in their back yard, so to speak. And they don’t treat their own blacks that well anyway, even if they’re not slaves.”

“Thank you,” sighed the Prime Minister. The Foreign Secretary’s anti-American bias was infamous throughout Westminster and Whitehall, not to mention Washington, DC. “But shouldn’t we be talking to Washington about all this?” he asked. “I really don’t want to have to deal with them as enemies at the same time as the Confederacy and Germany, if it’s at all possible.”

The Foreign Secretary laughed bitterly. “I would forget Washington for now, Prime Minister. The last thing the Americans want is a foreign war, or even trouble on their southern border. They’ve backed away from a confrontation with the South every time—Fort Sumter in 1861, the whole series of slave revolts in the ‘60s which their people triggered off when the hard-line Abolitionists went north to Canada, the South Texas defection to Mexico in ‘75, the big New Orleans-Mississippi slave revolts in the late ‘70s, and the Oklahoma raids in ‘06. The closest they came to conflict was when they helped the Cuban rebels against the Spanish in ‘95, and then encouraged them to take over Southern Florida. Of course, they did get that navy base in Cuba—Guantánamo or whatever it’s called, in return for a rusty gunboat and a few used rifles. You know, come to that,” he continued, “they never even really challenged us in ‘62 when we won Seward’s US-Canadian war and took Washington Territory off their hands and added it to Canada. I think we have to face it, they’ve no stomach for a real fight with the South. Since they seem to be mostly first-generation immigrants—at least, the soldiers in their army and sailors in their navy seem to be mostly newcomers who can’t find any other work—they’ve no way of getting any real national pride or fighting spirit into their army. I think they proved that to our satisfaction in the last show when they refused to provide us with direct military assistance under any circumstances.”

“Thank you, Sir Edmund,” sighed the Prime Minister. He envied and resented the Secretary’s ability to drop names and dates so easily, but he agreed with the analysis in this case.

“I’d also like to point out,” the Foreign Secretary added, “that their army and their navy seem to be chiefly employed in trying to enforce law and order, especially in those states which refuse to admit the existence of alcohol.” The men round the table sighed.

“That sounded to me,” remarked the Prime Minister, with the ghost of a smile, “like something similar to a sigh of relief that we haven’t gone so far in Britain. Lloyd George’s lunacy happily never took final form here, thank goodness. Brandy, anyone?” He pressed a bell, and a servant entered.

A few minutes later, brandy snifter in hand, “Gentlemen, I give you confusion to our enemies.” The table responded. “Now, how do we stop our friend Jeff Davis from using Herr Hitler to further his foul ends?”

“
I don’t blame him, considering how awful we’ve treated you colored folks. If you hated us all, I wouldn’t blame you.”

I
t seemed a long way from the kitchen to the gazebo in the Georgia August heat. Christopher Pole, property of Miss Henrietta Justin since his birth some twenty-seven years previously, carried the tray of drinks to where Miss Justin and her nephew Mr. Lamar Fitchman were sitting under a shade tree, looking out over the watermelon fields towards the Flint River, just visible in the distance.

As he put the tray on the table and handed the glasses to Miss Justin and Mr. Fitchman, he heard her murmured thanks to him, and he smiled to himself. He was lucky with Miss Justin, a lot luckier than he would have been with that Mr. Fitchman, he reckoned.

He bowed and walked away from the table, but before he was out of earshot, he heard Fitchman say, “You’re wasting that boy. Big buck like him should be workin’ in the watermelon patches. You’re not getting your money’s worth out of him, givin’ him sissy’s work like that.”

“Lamar, Christopher’s the finest butler I’m ever going to be able to afford. It would be a waste to let him do field work. Someone with his gifts of sympathy and his intelligence.”

“He’s not a ‘someone’, Aunt Henry. He’s a Nigra, and he’s just waitin’ for a chance to cut our throats one night. All of them are.” He drained his whiskey angrily. “Here, boy! Another one.” He held the empty glass out, and as Christopher moved to take it, deliberately let it fall on the stone beside his chair. “You clumsy Nigra! Aunt Henry, will you allow me to beat the useless animal for you?” Christopher, on his knees picking up the shattered fragments, stole a glance at the young man’s excited face, and was frightened by the look of almost sexual excitement that he saw.

“Certainly not, Lamar. I saw exactly what happened, and I’m ashamed of you. Christopher, please don’t use your hands to pick up that broken glass. Go back and get a brush and pan.”

Fitchman sneered. “Boy! Get me another whiskey while you’re there.”

“Mr. Fitchman has had a sufficiency, Christopher. You may bring him an iced tea if he is still thirsty.”

Christopher looked from one calm face to the other angry countenance. “Very good, Miss Justin.”

He walked back to the kitchen, hearing fragments of the conversation, in which he caught the phrases “inheritance”, “when I die” and “set them all free” from Miss Justin, and “you wouldn’t dare” from Mr. Fitchman. He poured a glass of iced tea into a glass, and collected a brush and pan, which he stuck under his arm. When he reached the chairs under the shade tree, Miss Justin was sitting there alone.

“Put the glass on the table, please, Christopher, and sweep up Mr. Fitchman’s mess.”

As he bent to sweep the glass shards into the pan, she continued talking to him. “I am sorry, Christopher, about Mr. Fitchman. You probably realize that that wasn’t his first drink of the day, poor man. You needn’t worry about him any more today. He took himself home by way of the back gate.”

Poor man? thought Christopher to himself. But he carried on sweeping.

As if reading his thoughts, Miss Justin went on, “I say ‘poor man’, because I mean it. All of us here in this Confederacy. I don’t need to spell out to you why I call you ‘poor man’. Of course I could set you free, but where would you go in this town? What would you do?” She didn’t seem to be expecting an answer, so Christopher didn’t give one, but he thought about the freed slaves who hung around the pool halls and saloons, waiting for the chance of work that was so dirty or dangerous that the slave owners wouldn’t set their own slaves to doing it. “And yes, I could free you and keep you here, but you know something, Christopher? I couldn’t afford to pay you what you’re worth. When I die, this house will be sold and a lot of the money will go your way. And Betsy’s and Horace’s, and you can all of you make your way to a better town than this little Cordele, where you can set up your own businesses. But until then, believe me, you’re better off the way things are.” She paused, and this time it seemed to call for an answer.

“Yes, Miss Justin,” he replied. It seemed to be enough. She was off again.