Various Flavors of Coffee (28 page)

“Do you really think the white men have come all the way here just to help us kill it?”

She shrugged noncommittally.

“It bothers me, too,” he said. He spat into the fire.“In any case, I’m glad they don’t want the leopard. I’m rather hoping to take care of that myself.”

“You!”

“Yes.Why not?”

“People in your age-clan should leave the hunting to the younger men.”

“You think I’m too old?”Tahomen said in mock astonishment. “Is that what people say, that I’m too old to kill another leopard?” She sighed. Tahomen had a way of turning whatever you said back on yourself.
Look,
he was saying,
I’m getting older, too. Do you see me moping about it?
And—though she would never have voiced the thought out loud—in the unspoken row they were having with each other, she was forced to shout,
No! But it’s different for

you!You can just take another wife!

On the outside, of course, she just grunted.

Tahomen spat expertly into the fire again. “There’s more than one way to catch a leopard, in any case,” he said thoughtfully.

“Yes. And in my experience, all of them end in the people try-ing them getting killed.”

“Well, we shall see.”

[
for ty
]

ell before daybreak the cook, Kuma, woke the two

white men with strong black coffee. Outside, Jimo waited with a line of stupefied, hungover villagers. Many had daubed themselves with magical patterns for the occasion; some had even painted their faces to represent the whiskers and spots of the ani-mal they were about to hunt. Some were carrying axes, some clubs, some spears.

“Like children,” Hector said with a sigh. “Spears to chop trees!

Imagine! Jimo, get some more axes out of the store.”

When all the men were properly equipped, the chopping party filed into the jungle, Hector leading them uphill until he reached the highest point. He pointed at the trees.“Here! Cut these!”

The villagers looked bemused. “Bwana say chop trees!” Jimo shouted.“One time! One time!”
Now.

The villagers looked at each other. If they stopped to cut these trees down, there would certainly be no hope of finding the leopard today.

“Come on, boy,” Jimo said, roughly pushing one of the younger

men toward a tree. Reluctantly, the man hoisted his axe and began to chop.

“Good! Next boy! Chop!” Jimo shouted, leading the next man to the adjacent tree. Soon he had a line of nonplussed villagers all hard at work chopping trees.

When the trees were almost chopped through, Hector had Jimo move the men on to the next row down. Again they chopped un-til the trunks were almost severed, and again they stopped before the trees actually fell.The villagers worked sullenly now—they had realized there was to be no leopard hunt after all, but there was still the promise of
dish-dash.
They grunted questions to each other as they chopped—what could all this wood be for? The strangers must be building a vast hut, or perhaps a series of huts. But why were they not finishing the trees off, and instead leaving them half severed like this? It must be the white man’s way, but why?

They carried on like this until they moved forward another row. Now one of the trees in the way was a
quiltu,
a sycamore. Automatically the villagers parted, moving to left and right so that it would not be chopped.

“Over there!” Hector called.“They missed one.”

Jimo took one of the men by the shoulder and led him back to the sycamore tree.“Chop!” he commanded.

The man looked first startled, then puzzled, then alarmed.The other villagers halted their own work to explain the problem to the visitors.This, they explained, was a tree sacred to women, from which the women’s
siqquee
or ritual sticks were made.

“Make them stop jabbering,” Hector said to Jimo, who drove the protesting villagers back to their own trees. “Robert! Time to show them that we don’t ask them to do anything we’re not prepared to do ourselves.” He pointed to the base of the tree. “You take that side.”

The villagers watched in appalled silence as the white men’s

axes spat wood. It was hard work, and both men were sweating profusely by the time the job was done—or rather, almost done: once again, a narrow cone was left at the heart of the tree.

It was early
afternoon when Hector finally called a halt. By now some thirty or forty trees had been half chopped.They all trudged back up the hill, where Hector had the men finish off the very first tree they had worked on.With a great crash it fell—but its way was impeded by the tree below, which somehow bore its weight.That tree too was felled, and that too leaned against its neighbor on the downhill side.The combined weight of both trees was now being supported only by the forest canopy that stretched down the hill.

The third tree was a giant, tall and top-heavy. As it came crashing down, the trunk splintered: men leapt away as its vast bulk kicked into the air. Its branches slammed into the next tree down. With a sudden crack, that tree gave under its weight—and then the next did the same, and the next, the hillside turning into a great surging tidal wave of tumbling trunks and churning branches.The avalanche swept everything before it, even trees that had not been touched by the axes, toppling like dominoes all the way down the slope. It was as if some all-powerful giant had puffed his cheeks and flattened the jungle under his breath. The sound rippled like thunder away from the cutters, and then toward them again, back and forth, a roar that echoed from every side of the val-ley. Birds flung themselves upward: dust exploded through the falling branches: everything seemed to bounce and settle in slow motion.

“Now
tha’,
” said Hector, gazing with satisfaction at the exposed hillside,“is the best damn sight in the whole damn world.”

• • •

In the village
Kiku heard the noise and froze. All around her there was screaming as women, suspecting an earthquake, ran to find their children. Kiku realized immediately that it was not an earthquake, but what it was she could not say. It was something completely outside her experience: the forest seemed to be collapsing in on itself, the way skin tore when you caught it on a rock. In the huge, raw gap, amongst the flotsam of broken trunks and upturned branches, she could see men, tiny at this distance, moving along to the next part of the hillside.

That night
the villagers sat round the fire and discussed what had happened. It was plain to everyone what the white men were about now.There was to be no leopard hunting: it was the forest it-self that the newcomers had come to slay. Yet what did it mean when a whole forest, which was composed of spirits as well as trees, was destroyed like this? When a person died their spirit climbed into a tree: when a tree was felled, its spirits joined the spirits of the other trees around it.What would happen now to all the hundreds, thousands of spirits the white men had set loose this afternoon? Nobody knew, because no one had been in a situation like this before.

Some of the older men believed that the young men should withdraw their labor. For the younger men, though, the damage to the forest was not so important as the fact that the white men were promising to reward them for their help.These young men could sense that everything was about to change, and saw that it might be to their advantage. Instead of being at the mercy of the jungle, as in the past, now the villagers would be able to control it, just like the white men. Some of the younger men, in particular, had found the method by which the white men had cleared the hillside both brilliant and thrilling.They relived over and over the sound of the

breaking tree trunks—you had to have been there, they assured the other villagers: it was like the mightiest storm that any of them had ever heard, and all made by man! That they could work for people with such powers, and become rich at the same time, was an unimaginable piece of good fortune.

[
for ty-one
]

am seeing some people today,” Pinker says diffi ently. “I

wonder if you would care to join me.” Emily looks up.“Oh? What people, Father?”

“They work for an American concern—that of Mr. J. Walter Thompson.” Pinker grimaces. “Quite why Americans have to put both dates and initials in the wrong order I shall never know. Anyway, they are the people who have been advising Arbuckle’s on their advertising. Now they have an office over here.They have written to me to say they have some new ideas on how to sell to the female market. I thought perhaps you would be better placed than I to judge whether they are right.”

“I would be fascinated.”

“Good.” Pinker consults his watch.“They will be here at eleven o’clock.”

Rather
to her disappointment, only one of the advertising men is an American. His name is Randolph Cairns, and he is almost exactly the opposite of what she had been expecting—instead of a

personable, go-getting huckster, Mr. Cairns is quiet and polite and fussy, like a schoolteacher or an engineer.

“How are you marketing your brand at present, Mr. Pinker?” he inquires genially.

“With methods you yourselves, I believe, pioneered in America,” Pinker answers promptly. “Every packet of Castle Coffee has a voucher on the wrapper, which can be redeemed for a ha’penny off the next purchase.”

“That’s all well and dandy, sir. But I think you misunderstood my question. I did not ask how you were selling your product—I asked how you were marketing your
brand.
”

Her father looks confused.

“The product,” Mr. Cairns explains, “is what you
sell.
The brand is what people
buy.
”

Pinker nods, but Emily can tell he is still as baffled by this as she is.

“To put it another way”—Cairns fixes them both with a lofty stare—“your brand is the expectation people have of your goods. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the actual product plays very little part in it.” He sits back in his chair.“So.The question is, how do we create an expectation of superiority?”

He seems content to let the question hang in the air. Emily wonders if he is waiting for her or her father to come up with the answer.

“Sir?” It is one of Cairns’s own retinue who leans forward—a young man who, Emily can now see, is both personable and eager.

Cairns nods.“Philips?” “By psychology, sir?”

“Exactly.” Cairns turns back to Pinker. “Psychology! The time will come, sir, when businessmen realize that customers are simply bundles of mental states, and that the mind is a mechanism which we can affect with the same exactitude with which we control a machine in a factory. We are scientists, Mr. Pinker—scientists of

sales. We do not employ guesswork or hot air—we stick to what

works.
”

Emily can see that her father is mightily impressed.“And what does that mean—specifically—for Castle?” she interjects skepti-cally.“How would it change what we do?”

“No more coupons,” Cairns says decisively.“We need to create a favorable impression—a mood. We are trying to woo the consumer, not to bribe her.” He nods to Philips, who pulls some newspapers out of a case.

Cairns laces his fingers on the table. “First, you have to get yourselves out of the old-fangled notion that what you sell is cof-fee,” he announces.“What you sell—what the housewife buys—is love.”

“Love?” Pinker and his daughter look equally astonished. “Love,” Cairns says firmly. “To serve your husband a great cup

of coffee—what better way is there, for a wife, of showing her love?”

Once more his question hangs in the air. But this time Philips does not bob up to answer: it is, Emily realizes, meant to be rhetor-ical.

“The smell of coffee is the smell of happiness,” Cairns continues dreamily.“Why, when my wife makes me coffee, it is a pleasure for her, because she knows it gives me pleasure. And”—he holds up a finger—“she has the reassurance of knowing she cannot show her devotion any better way than to serve me Castle.”

“How does she know it?” Emily asks. She cannot decide whether this extraordinary spiel is brilliant or nonsensical or some higgledy-piggledy mixture of the two.

“Because we will tell her, of course.” Cairns turns to Philips, who opens the first newspaper with a flourish.

The page he is holding up has been pasted in: it is, she realizes, a mock-up of the advertisement they are proposing. A man sits in his shirt-sleeves drinking coffee. There is a wide grin on his face.

Behind him, holding a coffee-pot, is a smiling wife. Some trick of perspective makes it seem as if she only comes up to his midriff. The headline reads:
Every husband’s right—every woman’s duty.
In smaller type, at the base of the page, it says:
Don’t disappoint him! Make the right choice—choose Castle!

“It is . . . different, certainly,” Pinker says. He looks helplessly at his daughter.“Emily? What do you say?”

“It seems somewhat negative.”

Cairns nods gravely. “That is intentional. In sales the negative principle, it has been proven, is more powerful than the positive.”

“Well, if it has been proven . . .” Pinker says, relieved.

Cairns gestures at Philips, who holds up a second advertisement.
“If you love him—show it. Choose Castle, and he’ll know it!”
he reads aloud.
“A meal is always a feast with a lovely woman at the foot of the table, a pot of hot Castle Coffee in her hand.”

“Hmm,” Pinker says. He looks baffled.

Philips holds up a third advertisement.A wife stands next to her husband, who is seated. From behind his cup of coffee, he beams at the reader.
“His pleasure—her satisfaction! Now he knows it’s Castle, he’s CERTAIN she gives him the best!”

“But there is absolutely nothing here,” Emily says despairingly, “about quality. About the raw ingredients—the proportion of mocca, whether we use Bourbon coffee or Typica—”

“The housewife does not care about that sort of thing,” Cairns says dismissively.“She cares about pleasing her husband.”