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A Question of Latitude, by Richard Harding Davis
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Project Gutenberg's A Question of Latitude, by Richard Harding Davis
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Title: A Question of Latitude
Author: Richard Harding Davis
Release Date: May 12, 2006 [EBook #1817]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A QUESTION OF LATITUDE ***
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</pre>
<p>
<br /> <br />
</p>
<h1>
A QUESTION OF LATITUDE
</h1>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h2>
By Richard Harding Davis
</h2>
<p>
<br /> <br />
</p>
<hr />
<p>
<br /> <br />
</p>
<p>
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.”
</p>
<p>
Accordingly, when, with much trumpeting, he departed to investigate
conditions in the Congo, there were some who rejoiced.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“Are your English protectorates on the coast, then, so much better
administered?” Everett asked.
</p>
<p>
The English Coaster, who for ten years in Nigeria had escaped fever and
sudden death, laughed evasively.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
Everett gazed suspiciously at the unmoved face of the veteran.
</p>
<p>
“WHO ate them?” he asked guardedly. “Sharks?”
</p>
<p>
“The natives that live back of that shore-line in the lagoons.”
</p>
<p>
Everett laughed with the assurance of one for whom a trap had been laid
and who had cleverly avoided it.
</p>
<p>
“Cannibals,” he mocked. “Cannibals went out of date with pirates. But
perhaps,” he added apologetically, “this happened some years ago?”
</p>
<p>
“Happened last month,” said the trader.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“Do you mean that only twenty miles from the coast—” began Everett.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
For some moments the muckraker considered the statement thoughtfully.
</p>
<p>
“You mean,” he inquired, “that the atrocities are not all on the side of
the white men?”
</p>
<p>
“Atrocities?” exclaimed the trader. “I wasn’t talking of atrocities. Are
you looking for them?”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.
</p>
<p>
“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—”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“What’s the use!” he exclaimed.
</p>
<p>
“Try,” laughed Everett. “Maybe I’m not as unintelligent as I talk.”
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“What thing?”
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his
side.
</p>
<p>
“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?”
</p>
<p>
Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.
</p>
<p>
“That’s what I’m here for!” he said.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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?”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito boots,
was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn. “You lose!” he called.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
So he opened Everett’s fingers.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
“I’ll dine on shore,” growled Everett.
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“I am not quite mad,” he said, “but you have got to come with me.”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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!”
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
In apparent agitation, she whispered, “To-morrow! To-morrow I will give
you your answer.”
</p>
<p>
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!”
</p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“To-morrow, then!” whispered Everett, grudgingly. “But I must kiss you
now!”
</p>
<p>
Only an instant did Madame Ducret hesitate. Then she turned her cheek.
“Yes,” she assented. “You must kiss me now.”
</p>
<p>
Everett did not rejoin the others. He led her back into the circle of
light, and locked himself in his cabin.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Everett, his eyes on fire with triumph, his fingers trembling, tore open
the envelope.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /> <br />
</p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
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