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+Project Gutenberg's A Question of Latitude, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Question of Latitude
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2006 [EBook #1817]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A QUESTION OF LATITUDE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Don Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+A QUESTION OF LATITUDE
+
+
+By Richard Harding Davis
+
+
+
+Of the school of earnest young writers at whom the word muckraker had
+been thrown in opprobrium, and by whom it had been caught up as a title
+of honor, Everett was among the younger and less conspicuous. But, if
+in his skirmishes with graft and corruption he had failed to correct the
+evils he attacked, from the contests he himself had always emerged with
+credit. His sincerity and his methods were above suspicion. No one
+had caught him in misstatement, or exaggeration. Even those whom he
+attacked, admitted he fought fair. For these reasons, the editors of
+magazines, with the fear of libel before their eyes, regarded him as a
+"safe" man, the public, feeling that the evils he exposed were due
+to its own indifference, with uncomfortable approval, and those he
+attacked, with impotent anger. Their anger was impotent because, in the
+case of Everett, the weapons used by their class in "striking back"
+were denied them. They could not say that for money he sold sensations,
+because it was known that a proud and wealthy parent supplied him
+with all the money he wanted. Nor in his private life could they find
+anything to offset his attacks upon the misconduct of others. Men had
+been sent to spy upon him, and women to lay traps. But the men reported
+that his evenings were spent at his club, and, from the women, those who
+sent them learned only that Everett "treats a lady just as though she IS
+a lady."
+
+Accordingly, when, with much trumpeting, he departed to investigate
+conditions in the Congo, there were some who rejoiced.
+
+The standard of life to which Everett was accustomed was high. In his
+home in Boston it had been set for him by a father and mother who,
+though critics rather than workers in the world, had taught him to
+despise what was mean and ungenerous, to write the truth and abhor a
+compromise. At Harvard he had interested himself in municipal reform,
+and when later he moved to New York, he transferred his interest to
+the problems of that city. His attack upon Tammany Hall did not utterly
+destroy that organization, but at once brought him to the notice of
+the editors. By them he was invited to tilt his lance at evils in
+other parts of the United States, at "systems," trusts, convict camps,
+municipal misrule. His work had met with a measure of success that
+seemed to justify Lowell's Weekly in sending him further afield, and
+he now was on his way to tell the truth about the Congo. Personally,
+Everett was a healthy, clean-minded enthusiast. He possessed all of the
+advantages of youth, and all of its intolerance. He was supposed to be
+engaged to Florence Carey, but he was not. There was, however, between
+them an "understanding," which understanding, as Everett understood it,
+meant that until she was ready to say, "I am ready," he was to think of
+her, dream of her, write love-letters to her, and keep himself only for
+her. He loved her very dearly, and, having no choice, was content to
+wait. His content was fortunate, as Miss Carey seemed inclined to keep
+him waiting indefinitely.
+
+Except in Europe, Everett had never travelled outside the limits of
+his own country. But the new land toward which he was advancing held no
+terrors. As he understood it, the Congo was at the mercy of a corrupt
+"ring." In every part of the United States he had found a city in the
+clutch of a corrupt ring. The conditions would be the same, the methods
+he would use to get at the truth would be the same, the result for
+reform would be the same.
+
+The English steamer on which he sailed for Southampton was one leased
+by the Independent State of the Congo, and, with a few exceptions, her
+passengers were subjects of King Leopold. On board, the language was
+French, at table the men sat according to the rank they held in the
+administration of the jungle, and each in his buttonhole wore the tiny
+silver star that showed that for three years, to fill the storehouses
+of the King of the Belgians, he had gathered rubber and ivory. In the
+smoking-room Everett soon discovered that passengers not in the service
+of that king, the English and German officers and traders, held aloof
+from the Belgians. Their attitude toward them seemed to be one partly of
+contempt, partly of pity.
+
+"Are your English protectorates on the coast, then, so much better
+administered?" Everett asked.
+
+The English Coaster, who for ten years in Nigeria had escaped fever and
+sudden death, laughed evasively.
+
+"I have never been in the Congo," he said. "Only know what they tell
+one. But you'll see for yourself. That is," he added, "you'll see what
+they want you to see."
+
+They were leaning on the rail, with their eyes turned toward the
+coast of Liberia, a gloomy green line against which the waves cast
+up fountains of foam as high as the cocoanut palms. As a subject of
+discussion, the coaster seemed anxious to avoid the Congo.
+
+"It was there," he said, pointing, "the Three Castles struck on the
+rocks. She was a total loss. So were her passengers," he added. "They
+ate them."
+
+Everett gazed suspiciously at the unmoved face of the veteran.
+
+"WHO ate them?" he asked guardedly. "Sharks?"
+
+"The natives that live back of that shore-line in the lagoons."
+
+Everett laughed with the assurance of one for whom a trap had been laid
+and who had cleverly avoided it.
+
+"Cannibals," he mocked. "Cannibals went out of date with pirates. But
+perhaps," he added apologetically, "this happened some years ago?"
+
+"Happened last month," said the trader.
+
+"But Liberia is a perfectly good republic," protested Everett. "The
+blacks there may not be as far advanced as in your colonies, but they're
+not cannibals."
+
+"Monrovia is a very small part of Liberia," said the trader dryly. "And
+none of these protectorates, or crown colonies, on this coast pretends
+to control much of the Hinterland. There is Sierra Leone, for instance,
+about the oldest of them. Last year the governor celebrated the
+hundredth anniversary of the year the British abolished slavery. They
+had parades and tea-fights, and all the blacks were in the street in
+straw hats with cricket ribbons, thanking God they were not as other men
+are, not slaves like their grandfathers. Well, just at the height of the
+jubilation, the tribes within twenty miles of the town sent in to say
+that they, also, were holding a palaver, and it was to mark the fact
+that they NEVER had been slaves and never would be, and, if the governor
+doubted it, to send out his fighting men and they'd prove it. It cast
+quite a gloom over the celebration."
+
+"Do you mean that only twenty miles from the coast--" began Everett.
+
+"TEN miles," said the Coaster, "wait till you see Calabar. That's our
+Exhibit A. The cleanest, best administered. Everything there is model:
+hospitals, barracks, golf links. Last year, ten miles from Calabar, Dr.
+Stewart rode his bicycle into a native village. The king tortured him
+six days, cut him up, and sent pieces of him to fifty villages with the
+message: 'You eat each other. WE eat white chop.' That was ten miles
+from our model barracks."
+
+For some moments the muckraker considered the statement thoughtfully.
+
+"You mean," he inquired, "that the atrocities are not all on the side of
+the white men?"
+
+"Atrocities?" exclaimed the trader. "I wasn't talking of atrocities. Are
+you looking for them?"
+
+"I'm not running away from them," laughed Everett. "Lowell's Weekly is
+sending me to the Congo to find out the truth, and to try to help put an
+end to them."
+
+In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.
+
+"Among the natives," he explained, painstakingly picking each word,
+"what you call 'atrocities' are customs of warfare, forms of punishment.
+When they go to war they EXPECT to be tortured; they KNOW, if they're
+killed, they'll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds these
+customs have existed for centuries. He adopts them, because--"
+
+"One moment!" interrupted Everett warmly. "That does not excuse HIM.
+The point is, that with him they have NOT existed. To him they should be
+against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater knowledge,
+a much higher intelligence; he should lift the native, not sink to him."
+
+The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to
+speak. Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.
+
+"What's the use!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Try," laughed Everett. "Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as I talk."
+
+"You must get this right," protested the Coaster. "It doesn't matter
+a damn what a man BRINGS here, what his training WAS, what HE IS. The
+thing is too strong for him."
+
+"What thing?"
+
+"That!" said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding
+mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the
+waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.
+
+"The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before
+Christ," said the Coaster. "And, in twenty-two hundred years, he's got
+just twenty miles inland. The native didn't need forts, or a navy, to
+stop him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun.
+Especially the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him
+pass. The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun
+strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
+Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for
+three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three
+minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are
+going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him
+mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and THAT takes away his
+nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits, over
+silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a
+coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.
+
+"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from
+any other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
+him, and in a rage he half kills the boy. He broods over that, until he
+discovers, or his crazy mind makes him think he has discovered, that
+in revenge the boy is plotting to poison him. So he punishes him again.
+Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to
+punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he
+tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat,
+the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on
+edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral
+strength. He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate.
+He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,'
+until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in
+his mouth and blows the top of his head off."
+
+The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his
+side.
+
+"And you," he mocked, "think you can reform that man, and that hell
+above ground called the Congo, with an article in Lowell's Weekly?"
+
+Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.
+
+"That's what I'm here for!" he said.
+
+By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned that
+in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be accepted
+only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed himself to be.
+This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced on him by the
+men with whom he came in contact. Associations and traditions, that in
+every part of the United States had served as letters of introduction,
+and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to the white men
+on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning or value. That
+he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard
+even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of Lowell's Weekly meant
+less to those who did not know that Lowell's Weekly existed. And when,
+in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact that it
+called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a "Palm Oil Ruffian,"
+sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen. He soon saw that
+solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome. That he was
+respectable, few believed, and no one cared. To be taken at his face
+value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel
+sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted
+only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier
+than others. It afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body
+received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he
+drank beer with a chef de poste who had been thrice tried for murder.
+
+Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was
+strange; so strange as to appear unreal. This did not prevent him from
+at once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt
+officials, incompetence, mismanagement. He did not need the missionaries
+to point out to him that the Independent State of the Congo was not
+a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a vast rubber
+plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man. It was not
+in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his attitude
+of mind toward almost every other question.
+
+At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he
+excused the country tolerantly as a "topsy-turvy" land. He wished to
+move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. He did not understand
+that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the official term
+of three years, or for life, measured time only by the date of their
+release. When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home
+in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought
+letters were a three months' journey from the coast and from each other,
+his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.
+
+His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer
+was ready to start for Leopoldville. Of the two places he was assured
+Matadi was the better, for the reason that if you still were in favor
+with the steward of the ship that brought you south, he might sell you a
+piece of ice.
+
+Matadi was a great rock, blazing with heat. Its narrow, perpendicular
+paths seemed to run with burning lava. Its top, the main square of the
+settlement, was of baked clay, beaten hard by thousands of naked feet.
+Crossing it by day was an adventure. The air that swept it was the
+breath of a blast-furnace.
+
+Everett found a room over the shop of a Portuguese trader. It was caked
+with dirt, and smelled of unnamed diseases and chloride of lime. In it
+was a canvas cot, a roll of evil-looking bedding, a wash-basin filled
+with the stumps of cigarettes. In a corner was a tin chop-box, which
+Everett asked to have removed. It belonged, the landlord told him, to
+the man who, two nights before, had occupied the cot and who had died
+in it. Everett was anxious to learn of what he had died. Apparently
+surprised at the question, the Portuguese shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Who knows?" he exclaimed. The next morning the English trader across
+the street assured Everett there was no occasion for alarm. "He didn't
+die of any disease," he explained. "Somebody got at him from the
+balcony, while he was in his cot, and knifed him."
+
+The English trader was a young man, a cockney, named Upsher. At home he
+had been a steward on the Channel steamers. Everett made him his most
+intimate friend. He had a black wife, who spent most of her day in a
+four-post bed, hung with lace curtains and blue ribbon, in which she
+resembled a baby hippopotamus wallowing in a bank of white sand.
+
+At first the black woman was a shock to Everett, but after Upsher
+dismissed her indifferently as a "good old sort," and spent one evening
+blubbering over a photograph of his wife and "kiddie" at home, Everett
+accepted her. His excuse for this was that men who knew they might die
+on the morrow must not be judged by what they do to-day. The excuse did
+not ring sound, but he dismissed the doubt by deciding that in such heat
+it was not possible to take serious questions seriously. In the fact
+that, to those about him, the thought of death was ever present, he
+found further excuse for much else that puzzled and shocked him. At
+home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside as
+something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At Matadi,
+at every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death must be
+faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself, "If I eat
+this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I drink this
+will I die?"
+
+Upsher told him of a feud then existing between the chief of police and
+an Italian doctor in the State service. Interested in the outcome only
+as a sporting proposition, Upsher declared the odds were unfair, because
+the Belgian was using his black police to act as his body-guard while
+for protection the Italian could depend only upon his sword-cane. Each
+night, with the other white exiles of Matadi, the two adversaries met
+in the Cafe Franco-Belge. There, with puzzled interest, Everett watched
+them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends, excitedly
+playing dominoes. Outside the cafe, Matadi lay smothered and sweltering
+in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the river, in
+a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as Europe.
+Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron tables, the
+oil lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks, upon the
+tanned, sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and the
+Belgian lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed, shrugged,
+gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.
+
+"But why doesn't some one DO something?" demanded Everett. "Arrest them,
+or reason with them. Everybody knows about it. It seems a pity not to DO
+something."
+
+Upsher nodded his head. Dimly he recognized a language with which he
+once had been familiar. "I know what you mean," he agreed. "Bind 'em
+over to keep the peace. And a good job, too! But who?" he demanded
+vaguely. "That's what I say! Who?" From the confusion into which
+Everett's appeal to forgotten memories had thrown it, his mind suddenly
+emerged. "But what's the use!" he demanded. "Don't you see," he
+explained triumphantly, "if those two crazy men were fit to listen to
+SENSE, they'd have sense enough not to kill each other!"
+
+Each succeeding evening Everett watched the two potential murderers with
+lessening interest. He even made a bet with Upsher, of a bottle of fruit
+salt, that the chief of police would be the one to die.
+
+A few nights later a man, groaning beneath his balcony, disturbed his
+slumbers. He cursed the man, and turned his pillow to find the cooler
+side. But all through the night the groans, though fainter, broke into
+his dreams. At intervals some traditions of past conduct tugged at
+Everett's sleeve, and bade him rise and play the good Samaritan.
+But, indignantly, he repulsed them. Were there not many others within
+hearing? Were there not the police? Was it HIS place to bind the wounds
+of drunken stokers? The groans were probably a trick, to entice him,
+unarmed, into the night. And so, just before the dawn, when the mists
+rose, and the groans ceased, Everett, still arguing, sank with a
+contented sigh into forgetfulness.
+
+When he woke, there was beneath his window much monkey-like chattering,
+and he looked down into the white face and glazed eyes of the
+Italian doctor, lying in the gutter and staring up at him. Below his
+shoulder-blades a pool of blood shone evilly in the blatant sunlight.
+
+Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito
+boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn. "You lose!" he
+called.
+
+Later in the day, Everett analyzed his conduct of the night previous.
+"At home," he told Upsher, "I would have been telephoning for an
+ambulance, or been out in the street giving the man the 'first-aid'
+drill. But living as we do here, so close to death, we see things more
+clearly. Death loses its importance. It's a bromide," he added. "But
+travel certainly broadens one. Every day I have been in the Congo, I
+have been assimilating new ideas." Upsher nodded vigorously in assent.
+An older man could have told Everett that he was assimilating just as
+much of the Congo as the rabbit assimilates of the boa-constrictor, that
+first smothers it with saliva and then swallows it.
+
+Everett started up the Congo in a small steamer open on all sides to the
+sun and rain, and with a paddle-wheel astern that kicked her forward at
+the rate of four miles an hour. Once every day, the boat tied up to a
+tree and took on wood to feed her furnace, and Everett talked to the
+white man in charge of the wood post, or, if, as it generally happened,
+the white man was on his back with fever, dosed him with quinine. On
+board, except for her captain, and a Finn who acted as engineer, Everett
+was the only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he soon
+disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and the
+Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they were
+not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided the
+blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no harm.
+
+According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war, in
+his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were
+always content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
+cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
+But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not dance.
+They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,
+lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
+man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It was
+always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They asked it of
+Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates, humped on their
+naked haunches, crowding close together, they muttered apparently
+interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes never left him. He
+resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his nerves. He was sure
+they were evolving some scheme to rob him of his tinned sausages, or,
+possibly, to kill him. It was then he began to dislike them. In reality,
+they were discussing the watch strapped to his wrist. They believed it
+was a powerful juju, to ward off evil spirits. They were afraid of it.
+
+One day, to pay the chief wood-boy for a carved paddle, Everett was
+measuring a bras of cloth. As he had been taught, he held the cloth in
+his teeth and stretched it to the ends of his finger-tips. The wood-boy
+thought the white man was giving him short measure. White men always HAD
+given him short measure, and, at a glance, he could not recognize that
+this one was an Everett of Boston.
+
+So he opened Everett's fingers.
+
+All the blood in Everett's body leaped to his head. That he, a white
+man, an Everett, who had come so far to set these people free, should be
+accused by one of them of petty theft!
+
+He caught up a log of fire wood and laid open the scalp of the black
+boy, from the eye to the crown of his head. The boy dropped, and
+Everett, seeing the blood creeping through his kinky wool, turned ill
+with nausea. Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself
+shouting, "The BLACK nigger! The BLACK NIGGER! He touched me! I TELL
+you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and gave him
+fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling and nausea
+ceased.
+
+Then, partly in shame, partly as a bribe, he sought out the injured boy
+and gave him the entire roll of cloth. It had cost Everett ten francs.
+To the wood-boy it meant a year's wages. The boy hugged it in his arms,
+as he might a baby, and crooned over it. From under the blood-stained
+bandage, humbly, without resentment, he lifted his tired eyes to those
+of the white man. Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same
+question.
+
+During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many
+missions, stations, one-man wood posts. He talked to Jesuit fathers,
+to inspecteurs, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant
+tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages.
+According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of
+avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade
+that were abnormal, unthinkable. The note never was of hope, never of
+cheer, never inspiring. There was always the grievance, the spirit of
+unrest, of rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate.
+Of his own land and life he heard nothing, not even when his face was
+again turned toward the east. Nor did he think of it. As now he saw
+them, the rules and principles and standards of his former existence
+were petty and credulous. But he assured himself he had not abandoned
+those standards. He had only temporarily laid them aside, as he had left
+behind him in London his frock-coat and silk hat. Not because he would
+not use them again, but because in the Congo they were ridiculous.
+
+For weeks, with a missionary as a guide, he walked through forests into
+which the sun never penetrated, or, on the river, moved between banks
+where no white man had placed his foot; where, at night, the elephants
+came trooping to the water, and, seeing the lights of the boat, fled
+crashing through the jungle; where the great hippos, puffing and
+blowing, rose so close to his elbow that he could have tossed his
+cigarette and hit them. The vastness of the Congo, toward which he
+had so jauntily set forth, now weighed upon his soul. The immeasurable
+distances; the slumbering disregard of time; the brooding, interminable
+silences; the efforts to conquer the land that were so futile, so
+puny, and so cruel, at first appalled and, later, left him unnerved,
+rebellious, childishly defiant.
+
+What health was there, he demanded hotly, in holding in a dripping
+jungle to morals, to etiquette, to fashions of conduct? Was he, the
+white man, intelligent, trained, disciplined in mind and body, to be
+judged by naked cannibals, by chattering monkeys, by mammoth primeval
+beasts? His code of conduct was his own. He was a law unto himself.
+
+He came down the river on one of the larger steamers of the State, and,
+on this voyage, with many fellow-passengers. He was now on his way home,
+but in the fact he felt no elation. Each day the fever ran tingling
+through his veins, and left him listless, frightened, or choleric. One
+night at dinner, in one of these moods of irritation, he took offence
+at the act of a lieutenant who, in lack of vegetables, drank from
+the vinegar bottle. Everett protested that such table manners were
+unbecoming an officer, even an officer of the Congo; and on the
+lieutenant resenting his criticism, Everett drew his revolver. The
+others at the table took it from him, and locked him in his cabin.
+In the morning, when he tried to recall what had occurred, he could
+remember only that, for some excellent reason, he had hated some one
+with a hatred that could be served only with death. He knew it could not
+have been drink, as each day the State allowed him but one half-bottle
+of claret. That but for the interference of strangers he might have shot
+a man, did not interest him. In the outcome of what he regarded
+merely as an incident, he saw cause neither for congratulation or
+self-reproach. For his conduct he laid the blame upon the sun, and
+doubled his dose of fruit salts.
+
+Everett was again at Matadi, waiting for the Nigeria to take on cargo
+before returning to Liverpool. During the few days that must intervene
+before she sailed, he lived on board. Although now actually bound north,
+the thought afforded him no satisfaction. His spirits were depressed,
+his mind gloomy; a feeling of rebellion, of outlawry, filled him with
+unrest.
+
+While the ship lay at the wharf, Hardy, her English captain, Cuthbert,
+the purser, and Everett ate on deck under the awning, assailed by
+electric fans. Each was clad in nothing more intricate than pajamas.
+
+"To-night," announced Hardy, with a sigh, "we got to dress ship. Mr.
+Ducret and his wife are coming on board. We carry his trade goods, and I
+got to stand him a dinner and champagne. You boys," he commanded, "must
+wear 'whites,' and talk French."
+
+"I'll dine on shore," growled Everett.
+
+"Better meet them," advised Cuthbert. The purser was a pink-cheeked,
+clear-eyed young man, who spoke the many languages of the coast glibly,
+and his own in the soft, detached voice of a well-bred Englishman. He
+was in training to enter the consular service. Something in his poise,
+in the assured manner in which he handled his white stewards and the
+black Kroo boys, seemed to Everett a constant reproach, and he resented
+him.
+
+"They're a picturesque couple," explained Cuthbert. "Ducret was
+originally a wrestler. Used to challenge all comers from the front of
+a booth. He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was
+mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small
+way, in ivory. Now he's the biggest merchant, physically and every other
+way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad. He has a house at Brazzaville built
+of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-plant. His wife was a
+supper-girl at Maxim's. He brought her down here and married her. Every
+rainy season they go back to Paris and run race-horses, and they say the
+best table in every all-night restaurant is reserved for him. In Paris
+they call her the Ivory Queen. She's killed seventeen elephants with her
+own rifle."
+
+In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were pallid,
+washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age. For
+him women of any other type had ceased to exist. He had come to think of
+every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun,
+with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through
+gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed. He thought of them
+as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and
+army helmets.
+
+When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she
+was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger. She appeared to have stepped
+to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue de la Paix.
+She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great loveliness,
+and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, a la Merode, across a broad, fair
+forehead. She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as delicate as
+a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a curtain,
+hung more lace. When she was pleased, she lifted her head and the
+curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes. Around the white, bare throat
+was a string of pearls. They had cost the lives of many elephants.
+
+Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was--a
+Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne. He knew that on any night at Madrid
+or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same
+charming type. They might lack that something this girl from Maxim's
+possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the
+depths of darkness. But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as
+she.
+
+But to Everett she was no messenger from another world. She was unique.
+To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was
+her entire sex personified. She was the one woman for whom he had always
+sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the
+one thing to be desired. Opposite, across the table, her husband, the
+ex-wrestler, chasseur d'Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an
+ox. Men felt as well as saw his bigness. Captain Hardy deferred to
+him on matters of trade. The purser deferred to him on questions of
+administration. He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in
+big figures. He was fifty years ahead of his time. He beheld the Congo
+open to the world; in the forests where he had hunted elephants he
+foresaw great "factories," mining camps, railroads, feeding gold and
+copper ore to the trunk line, from the Cape to Cairo. His ideas were the
+ideas of an empire-builder. But, while the others listened, fascinated,
+hypnotized, Everett saw only the woman, her eyes fixed on her husband,
+her fingers turning and twisting her diamond rings. Every now and again
+she raised her eyes to Everett almost reproachfully, as though to say,
+"Why do you not listen to him? It is much better for you than to look at
+me."
+
+When they had gone, all through the sultry night, until the sun drove
+him to his cabin, like a caged animal Everett paced and repaced the
+deck. The woman possessed his mind and he could not drive her out. He
+did not wish to drive her out. What the consequences might be he did not
+care. So long as he might see her again, he jeered at the consequences.
+Of one thing he was positive. He could not now leave the Congo. He would
+follow her to Brazzaville. If he were discreet, Ducret might invite
+him to make himself their guest. Once established in her home, she MUST
+listen to him. No man ever before had felt for any woman the need he
+felt for her. It was too big for him to conquer. It would be too big for
+her to resist.
+
+In the morning a note from Ducret invited Everett and Cuthbert to join
+him in an all-day excursion to the water-fall beyond Matadi. Everett
+answered the note in person. The thought of seeing the woman calmed
+and steadied him like a dose of morphine. So much more violent than the
+fever in his veins was the fever in his brain that, when again he was
+with her, he laughed happily, and was grandly at peace. So different was
+he from the man they had met the night before, that the Frenchman and
+his wife glanced at each other in surprise and approval. They found
+him witty, eager, a most charming companion; and when he announced his
+intention of visiting Brazzaville, they insisted he should make their
+home his own.
+
+His admiration, as outwardly it appeared to be, for Madame Ducret, was
+evident to the others, but her husband accepted it. It was her due. And,
+on the Congo, to grudge to another man the sight of a pretty woman was
+as cruel as to withhold the few grains of quinine that might save his
+reason. But before the day passed, Madame Ducret was aware that the
+American could not be lightly dismissed as an admirer. The fact
+neither flattered nor offended. For her it was no novel or disturbing
+experience. Other men, whipped on by loneliness, by fever, by primitive
+savage instincts, had told her what she meant to them. She did not
+hold them responsible. Some, worth curing, she had nursed through the
+illness. Others, who refused to be cured, she had turned over, with a
+shrug, to her husband. This one was more difficult. Of men of Everett's
+traditions and education she had known but few; but she recognized the
+type. This young man was no failure in life, no derelict, no outcast
+flying the law, or a scandal, to hide in the jungle. He was what, in her
+Maxim days, she had laughed at as an aristocrat. He knew her Paris as
+she did not know it: its history, its art. Even her language he spoke
+more correctly than her husband or herself. She knew that at his home
+there must be many women infinitely more attractive, more suited to him,
+than herself: women of birth, of position; young girls and great ladies
+of the other world. And she knew, also, that, in his present state, at
+a nod from her he would cast these behind him and carry her into the
+wilderness. More quickly than she anticipated, Everett proved she did
+not overrate the forces that compelled him.
+
+The excursion to the rapids was followed by a second dinner on board
+the Nigeria. But now, as on the previous night, Everett fell into sullen
+silence. He ate nothing, drank continually, and with his eyes devoured
+the woman. When coffee had been served, he left the others at table,
+and with Madame Ducret slowly paced the deck. As they passed out of the
+reach of the lights, he drew her to the rail, and stood in front of her.
+
+"I am not quite mad," he said, "but you have got to come with me."
+
+To Everett all he added to this sounded sane and final. He told her that
+this was one of those miracles when the one woman and the one man who
+were predestined to meet had met. He told her he had wished to marry
+a girl at home, but that he now saw that the desire was the fancy of
+a school-boy. He told her he was rich, and offered her the choice of
+returning to the Paris she loved, or of going deeper into the jungle.
+There he would set up for her a principality, a state within the State.
+He would defend her against all comers. He would make her the Queen of
+the Congo.
+
+"I have waited for you thousands of years!" he told her. His voice was
+hoarse, shaken, and thick. "I love you as men loved women in the Stone
+Age--fiercely, entirely. I will not be denied. Down here we are cave
+people; if you fight me, I will club you and drag you to my cave. If
+others fight for you, I will KILL them. I love you," he panted, "with
+all my soul, my mind, my body, I love you! I will not let you go!"
+
+Madame Ducret did not say she was insulted, because she did not feel
+insulted. She did not call to her husband for help, because she did not
+need his help, and because she knew that the ex-wrestler could break
+Everett across his knee. She did not even withdraw her hands, although
+Everett drove the diamonds deep into her fingers.
+
+"You frighten me!" she pleaded. She was not in the least frightened. She
+only was sorry that this one must be discarded among the incurables.
+
+In apparent agitation, she whispered, "To-morrow! To-morrow I will give
+you your answer."
+
+Everett did not trust her, did not release her. He regarded her
+jealously, with quick suspicion. To warn her that he knew she could not
+escape from Matadi, or from him, he said, "The train to Leopoldville
+does not leave for two days!"
+
+"I know!" whispered Madame Ducret soothingly. "I will give you your
+answer to-morrow at ten." She emphasized the hour, because she knew
+at sunrise a special train would carry her husband and herself to
+Leopoldville, and that there one of her husband's steamers would bear
+them across the Pool to French Congo.
+
+"To-morrow, then!" whispered Everett, grudgingly. "But I must kiss you
+now!"
+
+Only an instant did Madame Ducret hesitate. Then she turned her cheek.
+"Yes," she assented. "You must kiss me now."
+
+Everett did not rejoin the others. He led her back into the circle of
+light, and locked himself in his cabin.
+
+At ten the next morning, when Ducret and his wife were well advanced
+toward Stanley Pool, Cuthbert handed Everett a note. Having been told
+what it contained, he did not move away, but, with his back turned,
+leaned upon the rail.
+
+Everett, his eyes on fire with triumph, his fingers trembling, tore open
+the envelope.
+
+Madame Ducret wrote that her husband and herself felt that Mr. Everett
+was suffering more severely from the climate than he knew. With regret
+they cancelled their invitation to visit them, and urged him, for his
+health's sake, to continue as he had planned, to northern latitudes.
+They hoped to meet in Paris. They extended assurances of their
+distinguished consideration.
+
+Slowly, savagely, as though wreaking his suffering on some human thing,
+Everett tore the note into minute fragments. Moving unsteadily to the
+ship's side, he flung them into the river, and then hung limply upon the
+rail.
+
+Above him, from a sky of brass, the sun stabbed at his eyeballs. Below
+him, the rush of the Congo, churning in muddy whirlpools, echoed against
+the hills of naked rock that met the naked sky.
+
+To Everett, the roar of the great river, and the echoes from the land he
+had set out to reform, carried the sound of gigantic, hideous laughter.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Question of Latitude, by Richard Harding Davis
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