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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Question of Latitude, by Davis
+#21 in our series by Richard Harding Davis
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+A Question of Latitude
+
+by Richard Harding Davis
+
+July, 1999  [Etext #1817]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Question of Latitude, by Davis
+******This file should be named qlttd10.txt or qlttd10.zip******
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+
+A QUESTION OF LATITUDE
+
+
+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 The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Question of Latitude, by Davis
+
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