by H. F. Heard
“From that he modulated into an account of the secret arms traffic—no names, but just a hint of what great causes of freedom were being sustained, and how. And here again, for the second time, and with a somewhat firmer emphasis, the money theme appeared. It was a gallant trade but expensive, but, thank heaven (yes, heaven was thanked in our hearing, and again we delighted in this worst of taste), if you sowed in such a gallant trade and with a right agricultural adviser—he was gutteral in his pleasure at his little simile—you reaped. Of course, you had denied yourself recognition; you did not expect gratitude, even if the side to which you gave the help won. Hence, you had to be content just with what he would call coverage—and coverage, we discovered, was not less than two hundred per cent profit.
“I believe he would have collected our subscriptions to his crusade—for he saw we had more money than we knew what to do with—if we had not been so green that we hadn’t been thinking of the money line of our jingle couplet. We had been wanting to prove we couldn’t be shocked, and here we were, overlooking hot money. When he was gone, someone raised the point, but most of us were really timid rats and afraid of the police, and so decided that he wouldn’t have let us in on anything anyway.”
Mr. M. shook his head. “A nice point, and a good point at which to stop and reflect on a remarkable tale, if I may say so, and I have heard a few in my time. So Jane, who is now in the offing, is ‘nicking the minute with a happy tact.’”
And we had a delightful lunch which whetted my appetite for more of this odd tale that somehow—I could not make out how, but Mr. M. already seemed to suspect—led to us all being here in this place and in the spot where either a suicide or a murder had so lately been the latest incident.
“I think,” resumed Millum, “that our Alsatian big-scale assassin thought we were soft, so that when he rose he said, ‘I expect you find my kind of trade a bit humdrum and really almost aboveboard. I own it is; profit and patriotism are really my only interests. But you’re more of the jeunesse dorée, so you’d really like the oddities of a luxury trade more than my straightforward hard-as-steel stuff.’
“He said it with sufficient mockery so that Sankey, who was, I think, the cleverest and toughest of us, replied, ‘Well, you are really always in danger of being recognized,’ and, as the other got ready to seize the opportunity to enlarge his sneer at our expense, Sankey ended rather neatly, ‘and of being made the hero of the new nation, whatever it is, and of appearing with your bosom covered with its brand-new orders, and no doubt of acting as its chief ambassador!’
“Our guest saw that the laugh might be turned on him, so he shot out, ‘If you are so keen on trying to put your noses right up on what the world still rates as the worst smell, ask your own countryman Crofts, here! I mix with all if there’s profit in it. And, as I see it, it’s just the tough unders getting at the tough overs. That’s life, it’s a struggle. But beside us who do the tiger business, there are hyenas. As you want to see—as in the fairy tale—whether you can shudder, maybe you would like to see what I think to be a human hyena.’
“Perhaps he thought we’d back down. Even if we’d wished to, we couldn’t. We couldn’t have him leave with all the trumps. We had to get back our initiative. Sankey again spoke for us.
“‘We like our zoo to have all the contents of the Ark. With our dear vulgarian, Kipling, we call “nothing common or unclean” until it bores us.’
“‘All right,’ our guest shot out as he turned to the door, ‘if you have the guts, ask Crofts—here’s his address. He’s always wanting to use my lines for his filthy freight, but I’m not hard enough up yet to let him in on my tracks. In my world we have got to let live in order to be able to get the profits which belong to us unrecognized patriots, called by the mincing liberals “merchants of death.” But I still have a nose, and I don’t like Crofts near me.’
“We tittered at our guest’s sudden adoption of high moral tone, and he, now quite angry, threw a card at us and left, remarking, ‘Well, I hope he’ll get you into a mess, as he certainly can.’
“When he was gone we snatched up the billet-doux. It was a simple carte de visite on which was written Mr. William Crofts and a quietly good address in Mayfair. I couldn’t think why the name seemed somehow to be familiar, but we decided, on the strong recommendation we had received, to ask him to be our next guest.
“His appearance was not unpromising. His clothes were good and quiet—Saville Row without a doubt. But the face and hands that emerged from the quiet cloth were delightfully unassuring. He was heavy and no doubt brutal, but the eyes, which were large, were very vigilant—dead and at the same time extremely wary. The mouth, too, though coarse, had round it a pleasant disconcerting tension of humor. Yes, he was undoubtedly a very callous man who, under the appearance of being a simple brute, was peculiarly cunning. He was just our dish, and he seemed quite ready to amuse us.
“He began with the usual coarse stories, told with ease and a certain finish; then introduced a slightly more varied flavor as we applauded. Finally, remarking that we were evidently adult, he began to talk of real underlife. As he began to illustrate, I remembered—and at once doubted whether his name was Crofts, and was simultaneously pleased with the quiet effrontery of the man. He had dropped the baronetcy, for that might be too obvious, but he had picked the name—or maybe the name had picked him—from the still grimmer partner of Shaw’s otherwise grimmest character, Mrs. Warren. He began to talk with a lovely mixture of sentiment, business, and lechery of his ‘hotels.’ And before we knew it, he was offering to let us stay at one.
“‘We have to pick our clientele,’ he said, airily waving his cigar like a bookie. ‘Personal service, personal introduction; everything in the best taste—the apartments, the cuisine, down to the girls’ dresses and conversation; perfect gentlemen on one side, and perfect ladies provided on the other. It’s a large, exhaustive piece of work. There’s nothing that can make for the comfort of the one and the rightful profit of the other that is not thought of by our firm.’
“We were half delighted at the disgusting hypocrisy of the man mixed with the cunning and brutality, and half feeling that we had had nearly enough. But then, none of us dared to show his lily liver to the mockery of the rest.
“Finally, as he saw we were hanging back, he remarked with a banter that nearly turned our flank, ‘Well, perhaps you’re too modern to care for the standard honest commodity I trade in. I ought to have guessed—being myself really only the type of man that would be happiest as an English squire, if taxes let me—that your taste would be rather too sickly for my palate,’ and he took a big swig of whisky, raw. ‘So, as you have your own idea of candy, and it certainly isn’t mine and I don’t cater in it, perhaps you’d be more interested in the capital and cash side. You could make quite a lot on quite a little.’
“He looked around to see if avarice would work where he feared lust had failed, I think someone made an appointment with him. But I did not feel, I am sure, the slightest moral prejudice, only that this cad was too near home, and that if he once got one in his hands one might find one was being squeezed by a most capable blackmailer. I’m sure that was my only reason for not going on in the direction in which now I see my tendency and events were forcing me.
“For we did go on trying to find other trial shockers, as we called them. And the next was our last. The next did, at length, bring this modern silly madness of hell-fire clubism to a head. Our secretary, who showed industry worthy of a better pursuit, went on hunting for oddities. He drew a few blanks, it is true, but one day he came in elated.
“‘Look at our list,’ he said boastfully. ‘Up to date our catalogue of crooks runs its roll of industries—Limey, with gin for gringos; the Alsatian, with bombs for Bengalese; Crofts, with repression-ridding for undergraduates; and our little Armenian with his ’eroin for Arabs, and in the end for all Europe. And now I can crown the list.’
“To our ‘Who?’ he said ‘Wait.’
> “Well, he certainly was right. His find crowned and closed the list.”
Millum paused, and then added, “And has led, among other things, to us three being here. I can see that evening. We used to have that hideous hole in which we met lit with those awful incandescent gas mantles, over which were draped those shades just like a woman’s hat in the nineties. The room was always, therefore, hot, and a slight whistling sound as of an asthmatic pug came from the lights. Our secretary was to bring our guest, and five minutes after we were all ready, the door opened.
“He ushered in a towering figure that filled the doorway with a torso dressed in fawn-gray worsted of the finest weave but rather too fine cut. At the too-many-buttoned sleeve ends, an ivory silk shirt showed its cuffs, held by sapphire and platinum links. The tie was silk of Naples yellow; the shoes of patent leather. And, perhaps you will have guessed, the hands and head coal black. He was a giant West African Negro. He bowed to us, and in that rich drawl, without waiting to be introduced, remarked, ‘Pleased to meet you, gentlemen. My name is Johnstone, Odysseus Kaled Johnstone of Zimbawbee Ranch, Mid-Congo, and the Palestrina Apartments, Pall Mall.” He then swept us a bow, and moved his vast frame over to us at the table. Our secretary, being able now to get into the room, began making our presentations to this black presence.
“We didn’t have to put him at ease. He was easily king of his company. He spoke of Africa, and said he was sure we were interested in its art.
“‘I am no artist, alas,’ he said, ‘but I trust I do my little part to be a patron; and, as far as a very busy man may be, an amateur.’
“As the meal came to a close he demonstrated for us, with just the butts of two table knives, what he took rhythm to be. We all held that modern syncopation, if it was African, had demoded all classic music. Indeed, here stole in one of our inconsistencies. We had to say that the “Honeysuckle and the Bee” gave us more amusement than any song by Brahms, but this authentic savage liveliness from the Congo, we somehow made out, came under our category of delicious ill-tastes. We sat entranced, while quicker and quicker he beat out ever more complex tappings. Suddenly he said, throwing down the knives:
“‘That’s merely the echo of the real thing. In Africa we still know what all the rest of the world has forgotten, that music is wonderful as far and only so far as it is the auditory aspect—or, if you will, outlet—of the whole rhythm of life. It is part of the dance and the dance part of the drama. But much as I admire our music, I sometimes think, gentlemen, I am (and might have shown I was, had I not been kept so busy as an executive) more of a plastic artist. If you will give me leave, I will ask my chauffeur to bring up for your inspection a couple of masks which I am taking on to present to one of my friends for one of your large museums.’
“Our secretary asked if he might go, and after a couple of minutes he returned with a chauffeur in lemon-colored livery with silver facings bearing a large box. It was the contrast of man and master on the one hand, and what came out of that box (a huge, white glazed cardboard thing in which are sent the floral tributes meant for a prima donna) that gave us just the thrill we’d hoped for. This evening, we now felt, was surely our best, our climax. The introduction could not have been more symbolically apt. For out of the virgin-looking pasteboard and wrappings of tissue paper came two of the most frightful examples I have ever seen of that strangest of arts—Negro dramatic carving. All the apparent exuberance of Bantu physique and rhythm has no echo or reflection in this terrifying work. The inspiration seems a nightmare obsession with blood, fear, and cruelty. True, they were carved superbly—what they wished to convey they did as powerfully as Phidias could make cold marble take on the spirit of Olympian calm. And the addition of real hair and beards, gray and clotted, did not make them comic but more terrifying. One had in its jaws a none-too-well-cured child’s skull; the other’s teeth were fringed with adults’ fingerbones.
“‘These are authentic. So much that you have in your collections here is, as Americans would say, custom built. You will have already recognized, in regard to these, that they have been used. They are true sacrificial objects. That,’ he paused, letting his hesitation give effect to the word he chose, ‘that “dressing” on the beards and hair is—well, what must be employed if our magic is to operate.’
“He lifted the one whose teeth held the child’s skull and put it in front of his own face. From its foul mouth came a sound which suited its looks. It seemed to breathe loathing out upon us. The appeal of these objects assaulted all the senses. For the crowning touch, le succès fou, was given to this show when, the warmth of the room affecting the objects, they began to yield a smell that made their showman’s hints and recollections come almost tangibly to life.
“Then, turning to me as he laid aside this cloud of beastliness and his big, black, beaming face appeared again, he added in the blandest manner, ‘Of course, Sir, they go too far. The artist and every enthusiast always tends to shock the practical moralist, and such, Sir, I cannot help being. Superb art, as this, has its place. But it must allow that it has no right—if I may paraphrase and convert the Latin epi-grammatist—to shorten life that it may prolong itself! I am absolutely loyal to our wonderful culture. But I have, as a man of the mode—and what is that but to say a person of the current civilized mores?—to recognize that Art cannot be wholly free to be Art for Art’s sake only; nor can we—however anthropologically interesting it may be—preserve the Tradition at any price.’
“We were quite at a loss as to how to take this modulation of key. But we were all too afraid of the others to suggest or show by a sign that we might be getting out of our depth in this black man’s clever word-play. What in hell’s name could he be driving at?
“The next remark puzzled us even more: ‘So I became one of the faithful. One must move with the times.’
“It flashed through my mind that it might really prove too much for our stomachs, too violent and rapid a vertigo if, after all, this great black man should at the end prove to be a Baptist evangelist, and under all his appearance of outré culture have come here to sell us Fundamentalist tracts! That would have been a joke at our expense which I doubt if any of us would have been sufficiently subtle to be able to turn to effect. For an instant I sensed our horrid fear that, in this oddest of disguises, the Trojan horse device had been employed to penetrate our Troy, and that this was the cunning master counterattack from the ‘saved’ native against the ‘damned’ white—a revenge so exquisite and so wholly at our expense that we could not foot the bill: we should have lost face for good and to ourselves.
“But the next remark cleared us of that ghastly possibility, though still leaving us sufficiently uneasy.
“‘So, gentlemen, I joined the Faith, the One Faith of the One—I refer to Islam—Allah Akbar, Bismillah. Yes, all Africa is bowing, like swaths of ripe wheat when the wind goes over it, bowing to the Word that speaks from the Kaaba, the wind that blows from Arabia the blessed. All Africa, pan-Africa, shall rise under the green flag and the crescent.’
“A pan-Islam lecture would be a bore. But we felt with relief that we had escaped the worse fate of being asked if we ourselves were saved. That would have been, in the old, stale term, too ‘shy-making.’ So we settled down while our guest flowed on, as though he were the Congo itself:
“‘I do my part, I trust, loyally. At my initiation by circumcision (no casual water baptism, let me assure you, gentlemen, when performed by ritual correctitude with authentic flint instead of unorthodox steel—oh, yes, we converts pay the price for being True Believers) I took, as I’ve mentioned to you when I introduced myself, as my mid-second name that of him who, because he swept north with the Faith and mowed down the first white areas (I refer to the glorious conquest of Iran), was named by the Prophet himself “Kaled the Sword of Allah,” And so, as I serve the Faith, I may rightly hope for houris and paradise. I say it advisedly: I am no languid convert, content to have secured only my own salvation. I spread the Word.’
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“Then, for the first time, he looked us over with a sudden shrewd sweep of those great ivory eyes in that mask of ebony.
“‘Islam works with Africa as Africa understands. So it worked with my own soul. We have the so-called white man on us all the time, under the name of humanity, trying to break up African unity, so we must work quietly. We have what may be called a front. That is to say, my own business has two sides, one economic and the other religious. To give the taxation authorities the evidence they need and which I must submit for my standard of life,’ and he looked complacently at his clothes, ‘I have my business—large coco plantations. For some reason, that rather cloying drink wrung from black labor always appeals to the Quaker and nonconformist conscience. And behind the waving coco palm I have cover for those bigger aims which are so largely religious.’
“Then suddenly, as though he had gagged sufficiently—I think because he had made up his mind that he might do business with us—his tone changed and he became rapid, matter-of-fact, and startlingly explicit. He smiled a vast ogreish smile and hummed ‘Does any little child ever really want to go to school?’
“‘That, gentlemen, is it in a nutshell. We take them to school. Education is said to be liked by the white, but only if it leads the black to serve him. Well, we have learned the lesson. Mind you, Africa is one. We have no color bar. Arabia gave us our religion and we owe Arabia some return.’
“For a moment we thought we were lost again, but he put us back on the rails with a bump with, ‘My little enterprise—the first to be properly organized on a joint-stock basis with all modern office technique—is what you might call a Meet-Your-Fellow-Religionist club, or a domestic-servant agency. The Arabs up north are fine, God-fearing men, and, as I’ve said, the time has come for my own people to let their faith become art. So,’ and he went on without a change of tone, ‘for a comparatively small commission I carry out the transfers and provide the Arab homes of the north with the domestic help they need, while that domestic help gains the incomparable benefit of being brought up in God-fearing homes. Thus,’ and he spoke with a complacency that awoke our rather grudging capacity for admiration, ‘I am making the best of both worlds: giving my coreligionist clients in the north the economic service they require, and giving my fellow countrymen of central Africa the religious opportunities, of which they will stand in dire need when the few short years of this life are over.’