“I see. You generally come out a week or so later, I suppose?”
“It is the one boon I wring out of the Colonial Office; but I am speaking confidentially, Mrs. Lewin. You happen to know these things because you are here and in touch with them. At home they know little, because Mr. Gregory has quite a prejudice against the Press.”
“They might hinder him, but I doubt anything really stopping his drastic measures, as you call them.” A memory of the Administrator’s face rose before her like a revelation—the overhanging brows and forehead, the savage, lidless eyes, the secretive mouth, that lurked under the ragged moustache. Above all, the voice that spoke under his breath seemed to her ominous. Here was a strong man, not afraid to do lawless things and call them law by his own authority. Her blood tingled a little with the thought. “How they must hate him!” she said. “How weaker men must long to tie his hands and make him pay for proving them his inferiors, in action at least!”
“If we could tax success it would no doubt be a popular measure with the majority—who have not succeeded.”
There was a flash of appreciation in Mrs. Lewin’s eyes, but all she said was, “The lighter green is the cane, I suppose?” in an irrelevant tone.
“Yes, but this is a small crop compared to a big sugar estate—Denver’s, or the Tsara Valley crops, for instance. There is no considerable hemp-growing in Key’land, and we wish there was none at all. There it is at present, however.”
He pointed with his whip, and her eyes followed and distinguished the two plantations. The hemp was thinly sown, as it always is for intoxicating purposes, whereas when honestly cultivated for fibre the plants are crowded together. It was not yet in flower, for the sowing was in October or November—the spring of the Key’land year, the Tsara of Madagascar. The young plants stood stiffly, and were branched even to the roots; from the distance where Mrs. Lewin and Halton had paused it was just possible to distinguish how far apart the plants grew, unlike the unbroken sweep of the sugar-cane. The crop was always sown on higher ground too, generally on the gentle slope of the further hills, for hemp does not love a low level. The dark green of its wide leaves contrasted boldly with the lighter cane, and made a pleasant patchwork of the valley.
“They don’t pull the male flowers until January, and the female a month later,” remarked Halton, looking across the wicked sexual hemp that flowered twelve feet high in Hashish Valley, for it liked the rich soil. “You know, of course, that it has two genders.”
“And then?”
“Then it is converted, ostensibly, into ropes, and food for small birds, and other innocent and useful things, in that hemp mill down there. Now, Mrs. Lewin, you are looking at the sugar factory.”