“Why—yes. Business is pleasure, my friend,” laughed the baron. “Big business! The biggest pleasure in the world! You know that, don’t you?” And he went on, with sharp, sudden emphasis, “Special business! Business dealing with—oh—shall we say a plum-colored, heathenish African king’s ransom in gold dust and rubber and ivory? A goodish section of this sweating, miasmic continent begging for the wares and the protection of the Chartered Company?”
“Or of Donachie & Daud!” suggested the other.
Baron de Roubaix smiled.
“Dead men tell no tales,” he said, “and dead men cannot trade.”
“You—” the Arab was excited—“you have heard—”
“Who hasn’t by this time? Why—there isn’t a kraal in the whole of Africa that hasn’t heard the news. My very office boys, back home in Brussels, whisper about it, and speculate. Oh—but you are ingenuous, my little Daud!”
The baron talked in a flat, drawling voice—a voice, thought the Arab, different from the hectic, chopped, hacked, imploring accents with which he had spoken to him a few months earlier when he had faced the Belgian in the Brussels headquarters of the Continental Chartered Company, behind the ground-glass door with the gold-stenciled legend:
M. LE BARON ADRIEN JACQUES MARIE DE ROUBAIX
Governor-General and Chairman of the Board of Directors
PRIVATE
Somehow, that day in the baron’s office had marked the apex of Mahmoud Ali Daud’s career. Twenty years back, at the time when the Chartered Company had tremendously expanded with the help of French and Belgian capital and had begun to throw its gold-baited nets all the way from Morocco to the Cape, north to Timbuktu and southeast to the giant swirl of the Murchison Falls, the Arab, then a trade-station inspector for the company, had been dismissed to make room for some younger son whose father had invested twenty thousand pounds in the company stock.
Almost immediately a toss of the dice of Fate had thrown together—in some stinking Congo settlement—him and his future partner: the latter, James Donachie, whose dour Scots blood had been but imperfectly tempered by the fact that he had been born and bred in Chicago, and himself, Mahmoud Ali Daud, the grave, dark, sloe-eyed Arab from Damascus.
Strange bedfellows!
For the one was a Scot of the Scots, rigidly Presbyterian, hardheaded and hard-souled, but suffused with an incongruous, sentimental Celtic mysticism that often caused him to look below the practical surface of practical things and conditions and to stay the weight of his hand even at a loss to himself. Narrow where his own and broad where other people’s morals were concerned, demanding each penny in the pound less for avarice than because of the principle involved, and, furthermore, a man whose Glasgow ancestors had contributed innumerable divines to the Kirk since the days of John Knox; while the other, a purebred son of the al-Ansari tribe, a noble race, kin to the Prophet Mohammed, who for over twelve hundred years had been the hereditary keepers of the keys of the sacred Kaba Mosque, was Arab in everything: greedy, and yet generous; well-mannered, and yet overbearing; sincere, and yet sneering; sympathetic to his friends, and incredibly cruel to his enemies; austere, and yet passionate; simple, and yet complex.
And—partners!
“Donachie & Daud”—shortened generally into Double-Dee—their firm, from small beginnings, was now known from the Cape to the Congo, and up through the brooding hinterland, the length of the great, sluggish river, even as far as the black felt tents of the Touaregs. It had made history in African commerce. It was respected in Paris and London and New York, feared in Brussels and Amsterdam, envied in Hamburg and Berlin.
Donachie & Daud traded in ivory and ostrich feathers and rubber, in gold and beads, in calico and gum-copral and quinine and orchilla roots, in Canadian canoes and tiny, tight American motor launches, in cotton and oil and tobacco, and—if the truth be told—in grinning, heathenish juju idols manufactured in Birmingham by a firm of devout Baptists, cases of cheap Liverpool gin, and the sort of rifles guaranteed to explode at the first discharge which the Congolese Arabs call the “mothers of bellowing.”
Two decades of hard, hard uphill pull and work—work in this black, fetid land of Africa which gives riotously of its treasure, and which maims and squeezes and kills even while it gives! Two decades, apart occasional business trips to England, France, Morocco, or the Cape, spent on the west coast and up the miasmic hinterland where, to quote Sir Charles Lane-Fox, governor of the colony, the cemeteries were the only thriving white settlements!
Two decades of grueling, heart-breaking competition against the great Chartered Company that had a king for main shareholder, a prime minister for chief counsel, a bishop for secretary, a Hebrew banker with a historical name for treasurer, and whose agents and factors and explorers were the picked and reckless spirits of all the seven seas, keen, clever, unscrupulous down-East Yankees, north-country Englishmen, Brazilian Jews, Portuguese half-breeds, Arabs, Welshmen, Sicilians, Armenians, and Glasgow Scots.
But Double-Dee had succeeded against tremendous odds.
Today, all the way up the river, their factories and wharves, their stations and warehouses, proclaimed their insolent wealth. They ran their own line of paddle-steamers as far as the Falls; they had their own dry-docks and repair-shops; twice a year they chartered fast, expensive turbine boats to carry precious cargo to Liverpool and Antwerp and even direct to New York. They had their fingers in every African financial or commercial pie.
Years earlier they could have retired from business; Donachie to a brick-and-stone realization of the Chicago Lake Shore Drive palace about which his imagination wove nostalgic dreams on those choking days when, outside, the sun-rays dropped down like crackling spears while, inside, behind closed rattan shutters and the velvet punkah going at top speed, the heat was like a woolen blanket; and Mahmoud Ali Daud to his pleasant Damascus villa gleaming like a jewel in its setting of rose-bushes and the flaunting garden with the ten varieties of date-trees of which he talked so much.
They spoke of it—retirement from business, home—with longing in their voices. They quarreled about it, cursed each other about it, year after year.
But they remained, year after year. For this was Africa. The cloying, subtle poison of it had entered their souls. It was like a drug. They could not do without it.
There was always something new waiting for them, behind the ranges, the rivers, the whirling, swirling falls, the jungles, and the forests; something new to be discovered, explored, tamed, exploited, colonized—
“Africa,” the Arab would say and thereby greatly shock his Scotch partner, “a passionate mistress she, but clever—Allah! Allahu!—as clever as Shaitan, the cursed, the stoned, the father of lies and fleas! Always withholding the full sweetness of her kiss, the full thrill of her embrace—always luring on, on!”
One day there would be a clicking, grunting whisper in the kraals of a virgin ground of ivory caches above the last bush station of the Grand L’Popo Basin; another day there would be florid, metaphorical talk brought by an Arab runner, drunk with hemp, of an incredible store of gold-dust, the plunder of the swinging, heathen centuries, in some jungly village near the Bight; or, perhaps, the night drums would throb forth the tale of a new find of rubber beyond Kimbedi.
Then the Chartered Company would be after it, and so of course—“wolf running side by side with gray wolf,” was Mahmoud Ali Daud’s comment—would be Double-Dee. Victory swinging her ironic pendulum—throwing the flash and thrall of the red gold into the lap of the one or the other; today causing the frock-coated, silk-hatted gentry in Brussels to smile and rub their palms, and tomorrow causing the Arab to give sonorous thanks to Allah and the Prophet while his Presbyterian partner would look on with a strange, but typical mixture of financial satisfaction and spiritual disapproval.
Then finally some months earlier, had come the apex of Donachie & Daud’s career—a double apex and, by the same token, a double triumph, conceived—logically, properly, since this was
Africa—in the lap of hazard and mad chance and leering, hiccupping coincidence.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN FROM THE FAR PLACES.
For, one sultry night, out of the jungle, naked but for a crimson-fringed Galla blanket, his face and body burnt the color of age-darkened mahogany, bearded to below his chest with a thick, ruddy-gold, matted beard, a grisly collection of voodoo charms about his ankles, had come a white man—rather the fantastic semblance of a white man.
He had walked stealthily, with the suspicious tread of the jungle-bred, slinking like a dingo-dog past the few, scattered residences of the European settlers, avoiding the pretentious double row of electric lights that swept up to the governor’s corrugated-iron mansion, passing at a run the red brick church of the Jesuit Fathers, hugging close the coiling, trooping shadows of a clump of carob trees as, suddenly, a square, yellow glare cleft the darkness, and subaltern Johnny Mortimer of the Haussa Gunners swaggered out of the officers’ mess-room, and finally coming to rest in the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, owned by Leopoldo de Lisboa de Sousa, a west coast Portuguese, whose presence in the colony was a continuous thorn in the side of all the respectable whites and most of the respectable blacks in the little port settlement.
It was an open secret that De Sousa had committed every crime on the rather comprehensive African calendar, from slave-dealing to gunrunning, from illicit diamond-buying to other less mentionable felonies closely connected with the Quartier St. Jacques of Marseilles. But he was as slippery as an eel. He had never been caught; and the standing reward of a thousand pounds, offered by Sir Charles Lane-Fox, the governor of the colony, from his large, private fortune for any information sufficient to jail De Sousa for a term of not less than five years, still remained unclaimed, though many were the traps laid for the hotel-keeper’s wary feet.
The night was heavy and thick; the sour smell of fever was in the air, keeping all the world within the snug shelter of wall and roof; and nobody had seen the blanketed, bearded figure creep out of the jungle. Nobody had seen him enter the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, nor there heard him buy food and drink and opium and silence from De Sousa with a couple of large, uncut diamonds drawn from a leopard-skin pouch, except one M’Kindi.
He was a wizen, tattooed, flat-faced Balolo from beyond the Yellala Falls, an outcast from his tribe, who, for decidedly unsavory reasons, for reasons the tale of which has not yet been written, for reasons furthermore, which James Donachie, so as to save his peculiar Scotch conscience, refused to know, was bound hand and foot to the latter’s partner and used by him as a spy, a listener, a gatherer of subterranean information.
Three minutes after the jungle man had entered the hotel, M’Kindi bowed low, with outstretched hands, before Mahmoud Ali Daud in his great living-room which was as typically Arab as if he had never left his native town of Damascus. For there was a polished expanse of mosaic marble under foot, cut everywhere by small, silken, yielding Persian rugs; in the corners stood tall candlesticks of gilded wood with huge candles of saffron-colored, spikenard-perfumed wax; the high dado of tiles on the walls was softly luminous with nacreous-blue and peacock-green and dull, burnt orange; the dwarf windows, high up, were darkened by reed blinds; and there was no furniture except a mastabha, a long, low, carpeted platform heaped with pillows and shadowed by a brattice screen of ancient Moorish stucco work, an immense, turquoise-studded water-pipe, and a carved, inlaid palm wood table with the more intimate of the Arab’s belongings: a basketed bottle of holy Zemzem water, coffee-cups in engraved brass holders, perfumery-bottles, a stray book or two, a traveling Koran in crimson, pliant Bokhara leather, and a magnificent, black-and-gold turban cloth which coiled about the table like a snake.
Daud raised his eyelids that were slightly reddened with hasheesh, as M’Kindi slid through the room on silent, unclean feet, then squatted on his flat heels, lifting one withered, plum-colored paw and giving ceremonious greetings:
“My life is in the hollow of thine hand, O Inkos! Thy heart is indeed my aim and my contentment!”—a salutation which usually tended to precede a maudlin demand for money, tobacco, or drugs.
Thus small blame to the Arab that, instead of returning greetings, he snarled blood-curling threats of the many and extremely painful things that would happen to the Balolo if he did not immediately remove his “abominable and most odorous shadow” from the room and indicated, significantly, the sjambok of pickled hippo-hide which lay convenient to his hand; but he sat up straight and a gleam came into his eyes when the other neither fawned nor asked for money, but poured forth a stream of clicking, grunting Bantu words, winding up with:
“Even now, O Inkos, he is with the Portuguese, eating opium as a goat licks salt—and a great fear is in his bones—and the diamonds—”
“Is it the truth, great and uncouth cockroach?” asked Daud.
“It is! By my mother’s honor!”
“Bah—thy mother’s honor—which was, belike, thy father’s dishonor! Thy mother’s—aughrr—” Daud spat—“may pigs defile her grave!” His lean, brown, steely hand gripped the Balolo’s bony shoulder and squeezed unmercifully. “Is it the truth—tell me, O whelp of thy mother’s breeding—and not a dog’s trick to—”
“It is the truth—the truth!” came the negro’s agonized protest, and something in the man’s accents, in the flash and roll of his popping white eyeballs, convinced the Arab who released his grip and pointed to the door with his thumb, on which shone a great star sapphire in a hammered lead setting.
“Go back to the hotel,” he said, “and watch. I shall follow presently.”
“But—Inkos!” wheedled the Balolo.
“Well?”
“Thou knowest—I am a poor man—my children are starving—”
“Ya Malhut! Have I ever forgotten to pay—in friendship or in hatred—in reward or revenge—in good deed or bad? Go, thou M’Kindi! Go in peace. Thine shall be a shining reward if, belike, thy tale be true.”
And the Balolo was out of the house and away into the sweating, purple night, while Mahmoud Ali Daud slipped a Webley automatic into his waist-shawl, fastened the thong of the sjambok about his wrist, twisted the turban around his shaven head with a few rapid turns, and wrapped himself in the earth-brown folds of his voluminous, woolen burnoose. He seemed to hesitate a moment, then entered the next room, his partner’s, which the latter had made as homelike as possible with the help of Grand Rapids furniture, a large square—to the Arab’s never-ending, sardonic amusement, since frequently he had offered him the pick of his own collection of choice Persian and Turkoman rugs—of blue-and-gray, machine-made Axminster carpet, a map of the United States, a framed picture of Theodore Roosevelt, with months-old numbers of American magazines lying about and a few tattered volumes of Robert Burns’s and Lady Nairn’s poems to give a Scots tang to the atmosphere.
He looked up as the other entered, and smiled.
They were as far apart as the poles, these two men, in race and education, in ambitions and aspirations, in ideals and morals, in religion and ethics. But they were the best of friends, the most loyal of partners, even though, at times, the language they used to each other seemed to give the lie to the statement.
James Donachie surveyed his friend from head to foot and winked a chilly blue eye.
“Where are you off to this time o’ night,” he asked, “arrayed like Solomon, the King of the Jews, in all his glory?”
The Arab smiled. His friend’s Presbyterian fear of beauty and luxury, in the abstract or the concrete, had never ceased to amuse him, and he used every opportunity to lead him on.
“I am off to see somebody who—” he coughed gently—“ah—somebody who has come back from the far places. And my heart is tight at the thought.”
“That’s just what I imagined,” came Donachie’s ironic grumble. “King Solomon indeed! What does it say in the Song of Songs? ‘Thou art black but comely!’ Mahmoud, my lad, your morals are wretched and heathen—and some day you’ll
get five inches of steel between your ribs—and then I’ll have to look round for a new partner, and I’ll be careful to pick someone who isn’t as fond of the ladies as—”
“Aywah!” cut in the Arab with a hooting bellow of laughter. “It is your imagination, O great Scotch buffalo, which is at fault, and not my morals—which are the whitest this side of Mecca! It is a man who has come back from the far places, and not a woman! It is a man at whose thought my heart is tight. And his name is—” he paused, then, sure of the sensation he was going to cause, gave to his words the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice—“his name is Darwaysh Ukkhab!”
“Darwaysh Uk—” Donachie jumped up. “You don’t mean to say that—it isn’t possible—it isn’t credible—oh—”
“Everything is possible to Fate the which is Allah’s immutable will!” came the Arab’s slightly hypocritical rejoinder; then, a practical man of the world once more: “M’Kindi told me. He saw him enter the back parlor of the Grand Hotel, heard him hold whispered converse with that Portuguese father of piglings, saw him take great diamonds from his pouch—diamonds—you know the old tale, little brother!”
“Yes, yes. But M’Kindi may have lied.”
“He had no reason to.”
“But—why should he have told you, instead of turning the information to his personal benefit?”
“Because it meant nothing to him. He does not even know the Darwaysh’s name.”
“Then—how—”
“How do I know?” smiled Mahmoud Ali Daud. “M’Kindi described him. There is no mistaking Darwaysh Ukkhab. M’Kindi saw him—saw the diamonds—and brought me his report. After all, that dog of a Balolo is on Double-Dee’s pay-roll—”
“Aye! But under the rubric marked ‘Mahmoud Ali Daud—private account.’”
The Arab laughed good-naturedly.
“Careful man!” he said. “But, anyway, the Darwaysh is here, for a reason yet to be discovered, yet to be twisted to the benefit of our purses, partner mine, and to be made to smell most evilly in the nostrils of the Chartered Company. You know that the Darwaysh—”
The Achmed Abdullah Megapack Page 25