The Book of the Heathen

by Robert Edric

  Cornelius made no secret of these solitary practices, and he could often be heard offering prayers and singing hymns at the top of his voice as though he were sitting at the centre of a large congregation.

  The journey to Kirasi was an easy one. The path was broad and much-used; it lay across open terrain for the most part, and then through a sparse forest for its final few miles. The land surrounding the mission buildings was cultivated, and people paused in their labours to watch us pass. Cornelius pointed out to me the small crucifixes nailed to each of the trees which bordered our path.

  I had tried again along our journey to quiz him on his involvement with the place, his reason for visiting it now, and for asking me to accompany him, but as on the previous evening, he had been reluctant to tell me any more than I might have learned from a dozen others. I had leavened our conversation by saying that at the very least I might ask the missionaries to pray for Frere.

  ‘Do what you please,’ he had said harshly. ‘But I wouldn’t ask it of them.’

  As we approached the main building, a delegation gathered on the road and came towards us. Seeing this, Cornelius stopped, wiped the dirt and sweat from his face and buttoned up his jacket. I copied him. He shielded his eyes to examine the people approaching us.

  ‘We’ll disappoint them,’ he said coldly. ‘They’ll think we’re new converts.’

  It seemed a strange remark to make. He walked several paces ahead of me towards them.

  They were led by a small man in a black jacket and trousers with a white collar. At first I imagined him to be a native, but as he came closer I saw that his face was heavily tanned. Recognizing Cornelius, this man stopped, held up a hand to halt the others behind him and then took off his cap. His short hair, cut close to his scalp, was vividly white in the sun.

  I looked beyond him and saw that immediately behind him stood two nuns, both native women.

  The priest came forward alone to greet Cornelius. It was a cold greeting, a handshake and not an embrace, and neither man prolonged it. They spoke briefly, but kept their voices low and I could hear nothing of what they said. I waited where I stood until Cornelius turned and beckoned me to them.

  ‘Father Klein,’ he said.

  I shook the priest’s hand and felt it thin and fragile in my own. He made no effort to reciprocate my grasp, merely letting his hand rest in mine for an instant before withdrawing it. When he stood with his arms by his side the cuffs of his sleeves fell to his fingertips, giving him the appearance of a child in a man’s jacket. It was difficult to guess his age, but I imagined he and Cornelius to be contemporaries.

  As though in answer to my thoughts, Cornelius said, ‘Father Klein and I are both from Ypres.’

  ‘But neither of us will return there,’ Klein added quickly. ‘Cornelius because he is too long away from the place to ever call it home again, and I because this is where my calling lies.’

  It seemed an unnecessarily cruel remark to make. He motioned for the two women standing in attendance behind him to come forwards. By then a considerable crowd had gathered around us and I sensed that everything the priest now did he did with an awareness of these other watching eyes.

  The two nuns came to stand alongside him, moving in a fluid, practised motion, as though it was something upon which they had been instructed. I bowed slightly to each of the women and Klein laughed.

  ‘You think they are nuns?’ he said.

  Neither woman spoke.

  ‘How could they be nuns? They came to us here from Gran’ Bassam, from that illustrious palace of pleasure.’

  ‘And so are damned for all eternity and will burn in hell,’ Cornelius said. I heard the provocation in his voice and remained silent.

  ‘I am afraid so,’ Klein said.

  I looked more closely at the two women. Their outfits, I saw, were crudely constructed of poor, heavy cloth. The hoods shielded the upper part of their faces, through which only the whites of their eyes showed. They both looked at me, transferring their gaze at the same instant to Cornelius, who said, ‘Perpetua and Felicity,’ and went forward to embrace them. I saw the look of disgust on Klein’s face as he did this.

  Then Klein turned to me and took my arm, leading me away from Cornelius and the women.

  ‘So you are James Charles Russel Frasier,’ he said. ‘There was a woman here once who was a great friend of your mother.’

  The remark caught me off-guard. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Lady Edith Pemberton. She came twelve years ago. Her husband was stationed briefly at Stanleyville. She was with us for four nights. Twelve servants dancing attendance on her, four porters for her wardrobe and another to carry her cosmetics.’

  I had some vague recollection of the woman, whom my mother had met through her charity work. To the best of my memory she had made a name for herself by sketching the poor and the destitute of the East End of London and then selling these sketches to her wealthy acquaintances to support her African work. She herself lived in great style and comfort in several houses. I remembered, too, that she once employed a household of black servants for a season, and then replaced them all as unsatisfactory. There was a small, poorly executed painting of a native child in our Leicestershire drawing room. Perhaps this was one of hers.

  ‘You know her, of course,’ Klein said.

  I told him I did.

  We walked towards the mission. The people around us returned to their work in the fields.

  Cornelius waited until we were well ahead of him before following us in the company of the ‘nuns’. Their voices came to us as we walked, and Klein strained for some idea of what was being discussed.

  ‘Why do they dress as nuns if they are not nuns?’ I asked him.

  ‘That was my idea. I hoped it might instil them with some, shall we say, loftier notion of life and all that might be achieved were virtue to be applied.’

  I nodded in agreement with this, wondering if some more precise meaning had not been lost in his glib translation.

  As we walked, I saw for the first time that he carried a slender cane, no more than a switch, which fell from his hidden hand to the ground, where it trailed behind him and left a thin line in the dust.

  ‘It was the saddest day of my life when your great lords and masters saw fit to withdraw their support from us,’ he said. ‘So much that might have been achieved here had we not been so brusquely abandoned. We continue to do what we can, of course, but without that vital support I’m afraid a great deal has been lost.’ Then he said, ‘Did van Klees tell you that I am to accompany you back to Ukassa in the hope of securing some assistance from your competitors on the far shore? Our mother mission in Yaliembe was informed that their trading enterprise was expanding and that, in return for any assistance we might proffer, we might in some small way be remunerated for our help.’

  I did not know how to reply; I was not even certain of what I was being told, or why. I felt I had been used by Cornelius.

  ‘Are you returning with us alone?’ I said.

  ‘Myself, and those of my congregation who wish to accompany me.’

  ‘Have you been offered anything definite?’

  ‘Definite?’ He said it as though he did not understand the word, but instead of asking me to explain myself he quickened his pace and walked ahead of me.

  Over the next hour we were given a tour of the mission, its chapel, its dormitory, its school, its small hospital. Everyone there worked in fear of Klein, bowing to him and clasping their hands in prayer when he approached them. Some of them even raised their knotted hands to their lips and kissed them as they answered him.

  There was a great poverty about the place, spiritual as well as material, and this was reflected in everything that went on there. The children in the school were all younger than five or six, and the lessons were of the simplest sort. The man who taught them carried a switch similar to Klein’s, and he conducted them with it in their shouted answers. In a lesson clearly prepared for our visit, they answered
him on the members of the Holy Family and told him what Heaven and Hell were. When one child, a small girl, faltered, he flicked the side of her head with his switch.

  In the hospital most of the simple beds lay empty, and those few that were occupied contained men and women who received no treatment, it seemed, other than to have their faces wiped by those who attended them.

  Following this tour, Cornelius told Klein that he wished to be alone with me, and the priest immediately withdrew.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me we were here to collect him?’ I said.

  He dismissed my remark with a shrug. ‘Our chapel was consecrated by him; he believes he owns it.’

  ‘And do you believe you – you personally – exercise some control over him because—’

  ‘Because I understand him, and he knows me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask you to come with me to receive your blessing in the venture. He knows as much as you or I do regarding Frere, and with or without our permission or assistance, he would have come to tell everyone what he knows. He owes us no favours. He had a comfortable life here until the Company withdrew its money and its so-called good name.’

  And I heard in this cold pleading that the man had some hold over Cornelius, too.

  ‘You’ve known each other a long time,’ I said, probing, holding his gaze.

  ‘And, naturally, you suspect something between us that connects us in some other way.’

  His words convinced me of it.

  We walked together back to the main entrance and followed the shaded walls of the buildings until we were a good distance from anyone working there.

  ‘My daughter is buried here,’ he said.

  ‘I never—’

  ‘What? You never knew, never imagined, never believed? What?’

  Whatever I said would have insulted him.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘She was called Magdalene. It was not my choice. Klein called her that. It was the stick with which he beat me. The child was only seven when she died of haematuric fever. I saw her seven times, came once a year. The year she died was the year our connection with the place was severed.’

  ‘Is her grave close by?’ I looked around us at the cultivated land.

  ‘Somewhere. It was never marked. There is a cemetery here, of sorts, but the child, being what she was, was not allowed – he—’ Cornelius stopped speaking, his mouth dry.

  ‘Was your wife…?’

  ‘She was never that.’ Meaning she had been a native woman.

  ‘Was that why Klein refused the child a Christian burial?’

  He nodded. ‘I knew the child was coming, of course, but the first time I saw her she was almost a year old. That was when I learned her name.’

  ‘Did her mother live with her here?’

  ‘Klein sent her away in disgrace. And kept the girl here for the same reason.’

  ‘Is that why you still come here, despite everything?’

  ‘Despite him, you mean. I come because I still feel a sense of unfulfilled responsibility towards them both. If she had not been banished then I would have brought her closer to the Station and provided for her. I loved her. I know how difficult a notion that is for some men to understand, let alone give credence to, but it was how I felt. And if the girl had lived I would have done everything a father does for his daughter.’

  ‘And Klein denied you the opportunity to do either.’

  ‘All the while proclaiming that he did what was best in the eyes of God.’

  ‘How do you feel about him coming to the Station?’

  ‘I wish he weren’t, of course I do. But having withdrawn our support from him, we no longer possess the authority to deny him.’

  I saw then that this was why Cornelius had maintained the fabric of the chapel and why he kept his vigil there.

  ‘Did you ever discover what happened to your – to the girl’s mother?’

  He shook his head. ‘I made every effort, but she was banished. She disappeared. I don’t know what there was for her to do, where she might go. The coast, perhaps.’

  ‘What was her name?’ I said.

  ‘I called her Evangeline. I imagine it was the least of everything she had to lose.’

  We continued walking until we reached the first of the trees. Cornelius peered into them, as though it was here that his lost daughter was buried. It seemed to me that I had learned more about the man during our past hour together than in all the time I had known him, and I wished I had understood all this sooner. There had been tears in his eyes at the thought of his lost daughter.

  ‘Will Klein return here?’ I asked him.

  ‘Only when he realizes that this alone is where his power resides, that no-one apart from these few indoctrinated wretches will do his bidding.’

  ‘You have some affection for his “nuns”.’

  ‘They nursed my daughter and then washed and buried her corpse.’

  He left me then to wander among the trees. He was making no real attempt to search for the overgrown grave, wanting merely to convince himself of its presence. We were watched from the fields, and I stood guard between him and these others, though no-one attempted to approach us.

  Later, I saw Perpetua and Felicity come searching for us. They waved and called to us like excited girls.

  * * *

  It was a great joke among my sisters, when searching for their presents for me upon my appointment, that I would be kept awake at night by the constant and infernal beating of drums in the surrounding forests. Just as I would risk grappling with crocodiles or hippopotami each time I went near the water, lions, snakes and elephants in the jungle. Just as I would doubtless be tempted by the charms (I can still hear their laughter, ever louder with each repetition of the word) of the native women. I indulged them in these fantasies. I knew in my own mind what to expect upon my arrival, and I knew what others might imagine to be awaiting me. They made me their hero, their intrepid explorer, their only brother, and their anxieties and concerns for me were contained and concealed in these appeals to my behaviour and safety.

  Their biggest joke was the drums, perhaps because these were the easiest to imagine and believe in, and perhaps because of all their wild imaginings, they represented the least threat to me. I played up to this joke to such an extent that, on the eve of my departure, and following the presentation of everything else I was given, following the speeches of my mother and father and some uncles brought to the house especially for the occasion, I was presented with no fewer than twenty small cases of earplugs of various types and manufacture. I was told to experiment with these and then to write and let my sisters know which brand and type were the most effective at keeping out the drums and allowing me to sleep. A week beforehand, I had woken in the darkness to the sound of all three girls – women, I should say – beating gently and in rhythm upon saucepans with wooden spoons outside my bedroom door.

  By that stage, and at my insistence, Frere had visited our home several times, and I saw even then that there was the beginning of an attachment, a fondness, between himself and Caroline, my middle sister – but one already tempered by what lay ahead of him and the time he would be apart from her.

  His latest passion then was photography, and each time he visited us he brought with him one or other of the cameras he owned, posing every member of my family and the household staff for their portraits, singly and in groups, indoors and outdoors with the house and grounds as his backdrop. Needless to say, my sisters were the ones most impressed by him and by all this – though they already possessed countless portraits of themselves – and his photographs of them outnumbered all others.

  I confronted him one evening when the two of us were alone in London, in the rooms he had rented in Greenwich while making his own preparations to depart, and asked him of his feelings towards Caroline. He told me that had she and he met under different circumstances, then he would have insisted on seeing more of her and perhaps of preparing in some way for their future together. I s
aw immediately what a disservice I had done the pair of them.

  He came to the house at my every invitation, and invariably he brought small presents for all three of my sisters, and for my parents too – nothing of any great value financially, because he did not possess such things, but personal gifts which no other man could produce. For my father he brought a whalebone inkwell which he himself had carved, and for Caroline he once brought an amber necklace which he had strung himself from small pieces he had collected on the Suffolk coast. My father owned a dozen inkwells, mostly of silver, and Caroline had a room strewn with jewellery, but I knew that each of them treasured these gifts above all others.

  In the way that we all mould ourselves in the shapes of others, I saw then in Frere those attributes – of openness and generosity, of flair and kindness – that I knew I should myself enjoy possessing, and which might be appreciated in me by others, just as my sisters admired them in him.

  He and I were frequently compared, inevitably to my detriment. He was worldly, whereas I, for all my military service, had lived a cloistered life; he was open to all new experiences, whereas I insisted on being forewarned of everything; he was a man moving back and forth on contradictory currents, whereas I was a man set rigidly in full sail in one and only one direction. I knew that these remarks were not intended to hurt me, and that my persecution was never anything but playful – Frere himself always arguing in my defence – but at the time I heard in them more truths than I wished to acknowledge. At the slightest indication that I had been stung by their comments, my sisters flocked to me like birds and covered my face with enthusiastic kisses.

  A week before our departure, Frere and Caroline spent a day together, left alone by the others, who knew instinctively that something of this playfulness was at an end and that he and I were already beginning to detach ourselves from the comforts and the certainties of the lives we then lived.