by Matthew Head
“What’s she like?”
“Oh, she’s small, very good figure. I don’t suppose you would think she’s pretty. She’s not pretty in the American way. She’s about thirty-five. Very French. She’s French, not Belgian, that’s one reason I don’t think you’ll think she’s pretty. She was an understudy or something like that in the Comédie Française when she married Gérôme. That was only seven or eight years ago. I guess—” He stopped.
“Go on, what do you guess?”
“I guess she decided she’d never make the grade. She was twenty-eight by then. So she got married. She was lucky to get Gérôme, a man with plenty of money, at that time, and a good family too, and willing to marry her. She’d had lovers, not casual affairs but a series of protectors or whatever you want to call them, and normally she’d have gone on and made a career of it the way the rest of them do, but Gérôme fell for her. He’s really crazy about her. It looked like security and money for the rest of her life.”
“Does everybody know about this?” I asked him. “Madame Boutegourde seems so conventional, I should think there’d be some conflict there.”
“Of course everybody knows it or I wouldn’t be telling you,” he said. “I suppose Angélique Boutegourde would turn on Jacqueline and tear her to pieces, if Jacqueline were down. But Jacqueline’s not down—she’s up as far as the Boutegourdes are concerned; she’s the boss’s wife. Here we are.”
We turned down the road that led to Henri’s house. I could see the corner of the garden with the eagle’s cage.
“You never did make that eagle scream for me,” I said.
“We’ll do it now, if Albert has a piece of raw meat,” said Henri.
“I’m not changing the subject,” I said. “Go on about Jacqueline.”
“Oh. I said she was up, as far as the Boutegourdes are concerned. But as far as she herself is concerned, she took an awful tumble. Her type doesn’t really care for anything except pretty clothes and attention from men, and when the Congo-Ruzi began to go down-hill, Gérôme pulled her out of Europe for this place. They thought it was going to be for only a few months while he made a checkup, and I suppose Jacqueline pictured herself on safari the way they do it in the movies—nail polish and all. Well, they’re stuck here now, first because they haven’t got enough money to go back, and second because of the war. Jacqueline’s sunk pretty low when Léopoldville looks like heaven to her. That’s where she is now, I suppose you know.”
“She’s coming back any day now,” I said.
“Is she? I’d never be told.” I wasn’t as sure he took it as indifferently as he was acting.
“Another thing I wanted to ask you,” I said, “while you’re feeling communicative. Did Gérôme really do that hanging?”
“Of course,” said Henri in real surprise. “I was there. What makes you ask that?”
“It seems a little out of character, that’s all. He’s a nice guy, but you wouldn’t think he’d have the guts to go around hanging people.”
“Sure,” said Henri, “he’s indecisive and temperamental. I like Gérôme too, and I admire the show of courage he’s making in trying to pull the Congo-Ruzi together, but he’s coddled himself too long.”
“Then how could he hang a man?” I asked. “Nobody else was willing to, but he did. Doesn’t that show some kind of strength?”
“Not necessarily,” said Henri. “Maybe some kind of weakness. It’s a simple thing to spring a gallows trap. Somebody else rigs it up, ties the knot, sticks the guy’s head into it and everything, and all Gérôme had to do was stand there and knock out a wooden pin with a hammer that somebody handed him. If you wanted to prove to yourself and other people that you were really quite a man, that would look like an easy way to do it. No danger, no nothing. If you were selfish enough, and weak enough, and eager enough to prove you were strong, what easier way than to spring the trap under a poor black nigger that somebody else had condemned to die anyhow? It wasn’t something Gérôme had that made him willing to hang the fellow when nobody else wanted to. It was something he lacked.” Henri had been speaking irritably, almost angrily. He paused a minute and then said, “I guess I’m just a sorehead.”
“You’re all right,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with you that a woman and a change of scene wouldn’t cure.”
“Is that all?” said Henri, and I realized that I had named the two things that were most impossible in his situation. But an image of Gabrielle popped into my head. I had asked him enough. I didn’t ask him why propinquity and all the other factors in favor of it hadn’t thrown him and Gabrielle into the marriage bed long ago.
We turned into the little garden.
“Well,” said Henri, “I’ve always got Dodo. She loves me even if Jacqueline doesn’t.” The little antelope was nuzzling at the stockade, and we both reached over to give her a scratching back of the ears. She snuffled with appreciation and made little punching motions against the stockade with the end of her nose, but when we went up the steps onto the veranda she turned away and started cropping at a little pile of carrots and lettuce leaves in her feedbox.
Albert came out, grinning as usual. He had the table all set on the veranda, and he began jabbering away to Henri in his outlandish tongue. All I could catch was that it was about Father Justinien.
Henri turned to me and said, “You’re moving. Father Justinien cleared out this morning and they’re putting you in the guest house. Albert wants to know if he can pack your bag. What he really wants is a legitimate excuse to look over your things.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “But I don’t want to move out— except that you can have your bed back.” And then it occurred to me too that I wouldn’t have to do any finagling to get away from Henri to Gabrielle that night.
“You’ll be more comfortable over there,” Henri said. “You’ll have a couple of boys to heat your bath and so on. I’ll tell Albert to take your things over there while we’re at dinner tonight, on his way back to the village.”
“Ask him about the raw meat too,” I said.
Albert produced a strip of meat and when we went out and Henri held it up near the wire netting, the eagle raised its crest and gave a series of raucous screams that sounded as if they must be tearing his throat to pieces. Then Henri threw the meat between the wires onto the dust of the bottom of the cage. The eagle pounced on it and held it down with his yellow claws while he ripped into it with his beak. He gulped it down with painful jerking contortions of his neck.
“I gave him a live rabbit once,” Henri said. He stood and watched the eagle tearing at the meat. His eyes stayed fixed on the bird until the last strip disappeared. The eagle waddled about on the bottom of the cage while the spasmic jerkings of its neck subsided. Henri gave a slight shudder and turned to me.
“He was eating at it before he killed it,” he added, and we went in and sat down to a lunch I had lost my appetite for.
Even if there hadn’t been Madame Boutegourde’s wonderful dinner the night before for contrast, Gérôme’s would have been bad anywhere. It was an imitation of a good European meal, but it had only one virtue, it was a perfect demonstration of what happens when you try to transplant European living unchanged into the bush. It kept reminding me of that blind fireplace in the house in Bafwali. We all sat around the table chewing at the stuff and telling Gérôme how wonderful it was to have a real European meal again, just like being in Brussels.
Gabrielle sat across the table from me. Whatever she might be doing to her napkin while her hands were in her lap, she was her usual calm and self-confident self above table. Her note was in my pocket. I was glad when Miss Finney began to yawn after dinner and said she would have to turn in early. She was still staying at Gérôme’s, where she had stayed while André was sick, and Miss Collins was staying at the Boutegourdes’. It made Miss Finney a sort of hostess, and the way everybody jumped up and said they had to go home, Gérôme must have known that everybody was champing at the bit to get away. Bu
t he was graceful about it and showed us to the door with a few languid regrets that we couldn’t stay longer.
The three Boutegourdes and Miss Collins went their way, and Henri walked back to the guest house with me. It was a brick one-room and imitation-bath job, very pleasant. Albert had left all my things neatly opened up on the table. Henri stayed for a cigarette and I was afraid he might stay longer, but finally he stubbed out the end of it and said good night and went off. I gave him fifteen minutes to get settled at home, and started out with my map.
There was plenty of moon for following the paths. They skirted around back of the station buildings and ran past small areas of bush, dense black and murmurous in the bluish light. Gabrielle’s X was a small clear grassy plot on a sort of promontory. It dropped off suddenly into the darkness in front, and was backed up by a solid wall of bush. She wasn’t there, and I stood looking out over the vaporous blank that I could tell was a valley because the broken lines of the grass fires showed up bright but far away and below me, wavering, flaring, and fading in their irregular patterns. “Hello.”
She had stepped out of the bush behind me, bush that looked so thick that you’d have thought nothing but a snake could have pushed through it.
She came up beside me and we stood for a minute looking at the fires. “The natives set them,” she said. “They set them to drive the game into range, and just let them burn out by themselves. They can’t go too far, they always reach the bush, and you can’t burn that.”
“How’d you get through that tangle?” I asked.
“There’s a path. I didn’t think you could follow it so I made you go around on your map. I know all these paths, I could do them blindfolded. This one’s awfully pretty in daylight. Let’s sit down here.”
“It’s a nice spot,” I said. “I never had a date in one like it before.” We sat near the edge of the promontory.
“It’s the very end of the station on this side,” said Gabrielle. “You follow the path on down and you’d come to the M’buku village.” She peered into the space for a moment and then pointed to a spot of light not as far away as the grass fires. “See,” she said, “that’s their gate fire, it burns all night. It’s nice up here in the morning. They all file up the path on the side of the hill, coming up toward you. And in the evening they come back this way. They’re not supposed to pass this point unless they’re working at the station, and we aren’t supposed to go into their area either. When you do, you say to anybody you meet, Mokala bo n’dolo, bo-sendi. That means I enter your land in friendship. If it’s a woman you’ve met, she’ll get down on her knees in the path before you and smile and clap her hands together to show you’re welcome.”
“That’s very pretty,” I said. “It doesn’t tie in with all that business we were talking about last night.”
“The rebellion,” she said. “That won’t ever happen again. Anyhow they have more gracious little customs among themselves than you’d ever expect. ’Oop, I feel awful.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you really have to go tomorrow?”
“I’d better. I have to catch that plane and I need some leeway.”
“You could take a later one. We’re just beginning to get acquainted.” Even in that light I could tell what a beautiful smile she gave me. “It’s our first date,” she said. “You know, I might never have another date in my life.”
“You come to America,” I said. “You’d have plenty.”
Her voice changed. “America!” she said. “I hate this place, ’Oop! You can’t imagine! It’s—I—” she stopped, but you could feel whatever it was she wanted to say still trying to find words for itself. She stirred restlessly and leaned back on one elbow, half lying down, then sat up again and said, “Give me a cigarette.”
She had always refused cigarettes before. I lit this one for her and she sat looking straight ahead and took several puffs, blowing the smoke out quickly, not savoring it, and not relaxing at all.
“Talk to me!” she blurted out at last. “This place—” She stopped and ground the cigarette out on the earth.
“Have you been a lot in New York?” she asked, as if it were a matter of life and death.
“Sure,” I said, “lots of times. What’s the matter, Gabrielle, you act as if you’re about to jump out of your skin.”
“That’s the way I feel,” she said. “I wish I could!” She turned toward me and said, “What’s going to happen to me?”
I couldn’t answer that one. “I’ve wondered,” I said. “What does happen to girls like you?”
“There aren’t any other girls like me,” she said. “Do you know what’s going to happen to me? Nothing! Nothing! I can stay here and rot. Papa hasn’t any money, not any at all. He had it all in this old Company. Do you Americans really marry girls without any dowry? Who could I marry anyway?”
“You don’t have to get married,” I dodged. “You could go to Léopoldville and get a job.”
“Of course I have to get married,” she said. “And a nice Belgian girl can’t go anywhere and work. She can’t go without her mother. Maybe I could marry a Portuguese in Léopoldville. A Portuguese! No thanks.”
“When I first saw you at the funeral I thought you were the most self-possessed girl I’d ever seen,” I said. “Now you act as if you’re about to fly to pieces.”
“I’m always this way inside,” she said. “Mama taught me how to stand still, that’s all. You can stand still when you have a nice figure like mine and nobody can tell what’s going on inside. I do have a nice figure, haven’t I?”
“One of the nicest. Look here, Gaby. Calm down and let’s talk about this.”
“I wanted to talk about America—New York and places,” she said. “Would my figure still be nice in New York?”
“It would be nice anywhere. Tell me what you’ve done with yourself here.”
“Do you want the whole story?”
“As much as you feel like telling,” I said. “Want another cigarette?”
“No thanks.” She paused and worried her forehead with the palm of her hand for a minute. Then, “It wasn’t so bad while Jeannette was alive,” she said, speaking more slowly now and looking off across the valley again, not at me. “I used to spend a lot of time with her. We used to—”
“Who was this Jeannette?” I asked.
“Why, Henri’s wife. Didn’t you know that?”
“I didn’t even know he was married,” I said.
“Well, he was. They came here five years ago. I was only fourteen then. I’d been to Belgium when I was four and when I was nine, when the Company gave Papa his vacations. It was wonderful to have Jeannette come here. She was awfully lonely; she was the only woman on the place besides Mama. Gérôme and his horrid Jacqueline hadn’t come yet. I used to go down to Jeannette’s all the time. I thought she was beautiful, and I had a crush on Henri too.”
“You and Henri—” I began.
She gave a short burst of something like laughter.
“Henri!” she said. But she left it unexplained.
“Jeannette taught me a lot,” she went on. “Of course, Mama taught me too. She taught me all my school, except that last year I went to school in Léopoldville. It took all the money Papa had and more that he’s still paying back. Jeannette was always getting books and pictures from Belgium. She’s the one who taught me about poetry. I know a lot of poetry. Mignonne, allons voir si la rose —” She stopped.
“I like that one. Go ahead,” I said.
She recited the whole sonnet, and beautifully. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, it amounts to. To the virgins, to make much of time.
“That’s lovely,” I said. “Jeannette must have been a nice person.” I understood why I had felt the presence of something more than Henri in that house.
“Oh, she was! She was writing a book here, too, for something to do. I used to tell her some of the stories the natives tell their children. I used to hear a lot of them when Mama had nativ
e boys taking care of me, and I never forgot them. Jeannette thought they’d make a book. Stories about where the world came from, and where the dead went, and about magic. Always about magic and always full of fear. The natives are afraid of everything.”
“What ever happened to the book?” I asked.
“I suppose Henri has it somewhere,” she said. “I’d love to have it but I hate to ask him for it. Jeannette’s books mean an awful lot to him.”
“Would it surprise you to learn there isn’t a book in Henri’s house?” I asked. “Not even one?”
“That’s silly,” said Gabrielle. “Jeannette had stacks of them.”
“Just try and find them,” I said. “When were you in Henri’s house last?”
“Months ago. We don’t go to one another’s houses unless we’re asked. It’s the closest we can come to having any privacy.”
“Well, he hasn’t got any books now.”
“Then he’s put them away somewhere for just himself to see,” she insisted. “You ought to ask him to show you this one Jeannette was working on, though. She was doing illustrations for it too. I don’t suppose they were much good but they seemed awfully good to me then. When I began to grow up I depended on Jeannette more than ever, and she was still nice to me. I tagged her around everywhere. At first we used to go out in the bush and have long walks, or we would go to the village and the natives would tell us stories and I’d interpret them for Jeannette. She was thin and delicate looking even when she came here and then she began to get thinner and thinner. Finally Miss Finney told her she had tuberculosis and she had to leave here, but she wouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because she wouldn’t leave Henri,” said Gabrielle. “She said she was going to die anyway and she wouldn’t do it away from him. Henri couldn’t go because then he wouldn’t have any job, and he didn’t have any money. My God!” she cried out, “we’re all prisoners here because we haven’t got any money! Jeannette finally just had to stay in bed all the time. I couldn’t see her often because she was supposed to rest. She didn’t have the right things to eat, and—she died, that’s all. She’s buried back of that awful little shack she had to live in.”