She takes his hand, and sees, even in this dimness, that he is either just over, or just about to come down with, fever: his eyes are shadowed and the irises look unhealthily jaundiced.
—I’m studying fish and fetish, she says. And trading some.
—Damn foolery hanging about a place like this.
—Well, ’ere we are.
He turns and indicates the dim gray course of the river in the low light.
—That river took two of my men yesterday. Bloody fever. And one of them drowned. Fell off the gunnel in a sick fever and was waterlogged before we got him back in the boat. He’s down there waiting for a decent burial.
—I saw Deerforth, Mary says.
Conklin merely stares back at her.
—I was with him when he died of the fever.
The other’s face changes only slightly—a kind of sinking in the cheeks, making them look even more emaciated than they are.
—I don’t think he recognized me, Mary says.
—Yes, well. That’s how you die here. Alone. Unless you’re in the company of a snake or a leopard. Or a bloodthirsty savage.
He looks at the ground, and then adjusts one of the pistols in his belt. The two other men who are with him are instructing the Ajoumbas about where to place the boxes of goods. One of them indicates the long canoe at moor on the bank, and the wrapped bundle in it.
—Where are you headed, Miss Kingsley, if you don’t object to my asking.
—The country of the Fang.
—I’ll take that lightly, he says. Even you wouldn’t be so reckless.
—You may take it any way you wish, sir.
She can’t articulate for herself, in the little amount of time between his words and her response, why it angers her so. She registers the surprise in his features, and the slow dawning of her seriousness and offense. He nods, and tips his hat, and looks beyond her at the house from which she has come.
—I meant no disrespect of you, he says. Surely you know that by now.
—I was so sorry about Deerforth. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.
—I had a suspicion, Conklin says, when the poor chap didn’t show up on Corsica Island. We were supposed to meet there.
They are silent for a few seconds. Somewhere off in the bush a leopard makes a long, terrible, coughing guttural roar.
—You really are going to the Fang?
—Yes, Mary says.
—Did you hear about Withers? he asks.
—No. Did he go back to England?
Conklin spits at the ground and then moves his boot across it in the dirt, turning from her to watch his men and the Africans putting the bags of goods down on the side of the path leading into the village. The sun is just reaching the tops of the giant redwoods on the other side of the river. Two of the Africans—one of them, Mary sees, is Gray Shirt—are carrying the wrapped body up from the canoe.
—Did he take his wife back to England? she asks Conklin.
Conklin gives her a rueful look, then shakes his head.
—They think he bludgeoned her, and then took his own life. Well, he took his own life, all right. He put the bloody pistol in his mouth and shot through the top of his own head. They found her beaten senseless with a cane. She survived. She sailed for England under the care of a nurse hired by her family. She wouldn’t say who it was beat her that way. But there were no other likely suspects. He thought he’d done the job on her and then he did it proper on himself. And she woke up.
—Where did this take place? Mary asks.
—They never left Saint Paul de Loanda. He lost his mission rather quickly—drinking rum to calm his nerves. Afraid of losing his bloody wife to the fevers. Or the insects. Or the snakes. Then he was just afraid.
She says nothing. Some others in the village are stirring. Soon there will be a rush of people coming out and down to the bank to dispense with the body, and to begin trading with the newcomers.
—I saw them once more after The Lagos, you know. I was in Saint Paul de Loanda getting up supplies for a little trading up this very river. They were standing in the square at the marketplace, having a terrible row. I walked up to them and when they recognized me they became two gentle, loving, considerate souls, filled with the most killing consideration of each other and wondering whatever happened to the lovely Miss Kingsley.
—I have survived, Mary says.
—You look none the worse for wear.
—There is some sort of liquor in Gray…in the ’ouse. Would you care for something this early in the morning?
He smiles, then tips his hat again.
—All we need are Corliss’s cigars.
—Do you ’ave any word of Corliss? she asks.
—Nothing. Not a word or a whisper. Haven’t seen him since The Lagos.
They start up to Gray Shirt’s house and walk up the steps of the veranda. Several people from the village are already in the path, among them Gray Shirt himself. She waves at him and indicates Conklin.
—Very good one time, says Gray Shirt, smiling with his amazing white teeth.
But then he frowns and points back in the direction of the river.
—Dis body bad palaver for town. Dey feel it, ma. I think dese men have to must take it downriver wid dem.
—We’ll bury it downriver, Conklin says. Christ.
—Hab mercy, sa.
—Thank you, Gray Shirt, Mary tells him, and watches as he turns to direct the others to carry the wrapped corpse back down to the riverbank. Conklin stands at her side.
—I’m beginning to get sick of it here, he says.
—You look a bit feverish.
—I’ve been fighting it this whole trip.
Inside the house, in the closeness, she breathes the sweat and faintly rum-stale, tobacco odor of him, and is strangely happy. The news has been bad—Withers dead; she has had to tell him about poor Deerforth. There is a cadaver by the riverbank waiting to be consigned to the water. Yet she feels a stir of exaltation, handing him the calabash she drank from last night. He holds it to his nose, then sips it and closes his eyes tight, swallowing.
—It’s some liquor made from bananas. Very strong. And very bloody good.
Now he takes a long drink of it.
—Ahh. Very, very good indeed.
—Is Kurschstler with you? she says. I forgot to ask.
He just holds the gourd to his mouth and is swallowing a large draft of the liquor, so that it washes in two small rivulets down either side of his mouth. He brings the gourd down, and runs the back of his hand across his lips, eyes closed tight again, for the sting of swallowing. Then he straightens and looks at her as if she’s far off. He blinks again and smiles.
—You know, you are really quite a strikingly beautiful woman.
—’ere, she says. Let me ’ave it.
Evidently he thinks she’s going to drink from it, and when she puts it back in its place he frowns, and steps back a little, looking at the room.
—What’s your host’s name?
—I asked you about Kurschstler, she says.
He waves this away, moving sullenly to the other side of the room and gazing for a moment into the mirror there. Then, in a low, almost capitulating tone:
—Kurschstler’s dead, too.
—Tell me.
—Something bit him. It attacked his face while he was asleep. He woke up to the stinging and screamed. We never saw what it was. He had three stings on his cheek. Small ones. Little points of discolored blood. The Africans called it a name I’d never heard. Their name for it. Or what I could bloody well make of their bloody name for it. You can’t tell with the Negroes. They could’ve meant some sort of magic, or spell. But it started with three small rashes on the stung places, like a little rawness in the skin. But those rashes connected into one rash, across his cheek, and he washed it every day and it kept growing and getting more angry-looking and he kept washing it and then one day he went mad, and he stayed that way for a long time—almost a
bloody month. Mad, screaming, with this dreadful place widening all the time on his face. It turned his skin to a leathery, festering mess. And then one morning he was dead. A man lying dead with his mouth wide open on a scream that had been going on for twenty-three days.
Mary looks out the window of Gray Shirt’s house, at the white men standing with their goods and the dark people of the village, men, women, and children gathering around them. In the distance, the body of the unfortunate man who drowned is lying next to the lapping waters of the bank. There’s an irremediable pang at her heart, looking at them all under the rising sun, these precarious souls crowding around a lot of boxes filled with baubles and material goods, and beyond them the person who is beyond all these sounds and passions and excitements. She turns to Conklin.
—We leave this morning, she says.
—I wonder if you’ve heard me at all, says Conklin.
—Yes.
A moment later, she draws up the courage to ask about James Henley Batty, and Captain Murray, and the others. Mary Slessor, and the MacDonalds, whom she has just been with.
—Batty’s fine, last I heard he was still in England.
—No. He left for Sierra Leone before I left for ’ere.
—Well, I haven’t seen him.
—And the others?
—I heard MacDonald has recently been in a mess at Akassa. A lot of damned killing and shooting and cutting up of people. I also heard that he’s about to be assigned to go to India. You probably know more about all that than I do. I’d heard you were in Calabar with Lady Mac.
—No, Mary says. I left there. Against her kind wishes.
—Captain Murray has another vessel.
—Yes, I traveled on it.
—Well, if you know, why in bloody hell did you ask about him?
—I thought you might’ve seen ’im since.
—I don’t know anyone named Slessor, he says. Another woman, is she?
Mary nods.
—More craziness, he mutters.
—I’m very sorry about Kurschstler, she says.
—You knew Dolokov, didn’t you?
—Yes. Slightly. I delivered some letters ’e wrote to someone in London. Or I tried to deliver them.
—Well, he’s dead, too. Drink, and the consumption.
—I think I knew that, Mary says.
Conklin looks at her, and then at the calabash gourds on the table next to where she stands. He wipes one hand across his mouth.
—Even knowing Dolokov’s fate, just now, I’d like another touch of that banana liquor.
She offers him the gourd, and watches him swallow.
—Damn country’s going to kill us all, he mutters.
It strikes her that in some ways, now, she is fresher, more vigorous than he is. And she had looked upon him as such a hardened, strong part of the mysteries of the place. She says:
—You’re really thinking of shipping to England?
He shakes his head slowly, as though giving the thought every consideration; but when he speaks, his tone is that of mild puzzlement.
—No, he says. You?
3
THE FOLLOWING MORNING she and Gray Shirt, and the other three of her original party, along with three members of Conklin’s group, depart for the uncharted reaches of the Ogowe. The new members of the group include two Europeanized Fang and a Mpongwe named Obanjo, who also calls himself Captain Johnson, and speaks a slightly idiosyncratic, though perfectly accented English. They are all in two long canoes, Mary in the first one with Pagan, Silence, Singlet, and Gray Shirt. She offered a guarantee to Conklin for the other canoe and the use of three of his party, using a voucher from Hatton & Cookson. Conklin accepted it. This counts as an exorbitant expense, since very few remain in her reticule. She left Conklin with only partially feigned irascibility.
—I wonder what you would’ve charged a man for these things. Or if indeed there would’ve been any charge.
—Maybe if you run out of Hatton and Cookson gold, you’ll have to stop this foolery and do something to save your life, he said.
—Rot, she said in return.
—I still think you are an astonishingly, strikingly beautiful woman.
—I should’ve given you more of the banana liquor, she said. Enough to send you off. I’d feel better now.
—I might’ve had less restraint, lady.
—I’m not amused, she said.
He tipped his hat and smiled a crooked smile, bowing, as a gentleman would seeing a lady into a surrey in London.
—Perhaps I’ll see you on the river, madam.
Now, the two canoes glide along, and the growing tension of the men with her is testimony to how far they are getting from the protection of European flags or authority. For long intervals, no one speaks. The vegetation on either side closes in on them. They pass the burned remains of an abandoned trading post, the charred boards torn from the frame and left in a pile partially in the water, which releases a fetid odor, fused with the smell of wood ash.
A few miles farther along, the current speeds up, and the banks recede, until it looks almost as though they have entered a lake. There are sandbars and islands of trees and mangrove stands and marsh grass, looking like cruel blades jutting from the mire at the edge. They see crocs sunning themselves on the banks, and moving through the heavy green water, like pieces of a sunk barque on a tide, the surface parting with their motion, forming a widening V of ripples, a thin, nearly translucent wake. Above them the sky is blue-white, with thin, hazy wisps of cloud high up. The vision of it is stunning after the long passages in the foliate gloom of the trees.
Gray Shirt calls this part of the river Lake Ncovi. Mary notices that the oars are no longer fouled with mud and sand, but have been washed clean in this deeper water, the drops melting from the end of the oar blades like liquid silver as they are lifted and then put back under, pulling the canoes along. The two canoes are headed north/northeast, now. A little to the left, over the clefts of low mountains in the distance and the near darkness of the trees, the sun begins to sink, causing the whole sky to glimmer with new colors, new shades of the rainbow—such clarity of hue and tint that the whole prospect of the prodigious, accepting distances before them is transformed, as if it has never before been quite visible to human eyes. Mary looks at the others in her party, and notes that they are not even quite aware of this matchless beauty.
As the light fades, they come into a region of loneness, and of something else. The sky is indigo, without a trace of a cloud or a star or the moon. There is still wide space all around them, yet a kind of pall hangs in the air. Mary has an image of the forests on the shoreline leading into some region of death and decay. She looks at the others, who all seem to have noticed the change in the air; they are looking around them, paddling more slowly. They pass one small island and Gray Shirt says, abruptly:
—I smell them blood.
This, Mary knows, is the African equivalent of a European saying that he has just felt someone pass over his grave. It’s a morbid remark, expressing his fear and unease. Everyone else berates him in several languages, and he stares ahead, tight-lipped, having made his observation. Mary finds herself admiring his steadfast pessimism.
They head for a second, larger island, and as they come near, a big village becomes visible in the sinking grayness, scattered among the trees at the summit. The beach is a crescent-shaped sandy cove, bordered by a small cliff, along which a wide path ascends into the first trees. Something is going on in the village—a tumult comes from there, shouting and singing and the heavy unison of many tom-toms. The two canoes come close to the bank, and beach among the rocks. Each of the men brings out his pistol, checks that it is loaded and that the safety is off. Mary calls forward the two Fang she had lured away from Conklin for the promise of Hatton & Cookson vouchers and money. Though Gray Shirt and Pagan say they have a pair of friends in this village, she wants these pure Fang to see their fellows, even in their rather un-Fanglike appearance and
demeanor. Obanjo/Captain Johnson wishes not to leave the canoes, and refuses to do so, because it is clear, now, that the village is aware of their arrival. Down the path alongside the small cliff, running, armed with guns and spears and clubs, come forty or fifty very fierce-looking men, all of them shouting and whooping and making threatening gestures. Very quickly the whole beach is crowded with them, standing in a half circle around the visitors, who are backed against the edge of the river. The villagers grow very quiet now, wielding knives as well as guns. A fight is imminent, and it will be short work, too. Mary stands forward, partially aware that the strangeness of her dress and appearance might buy some time. She makes signs that she wishes to trade, and she gestures for her two Fang guides to begin speaking. They say nothing. They are as frightened as Obanjo/Captain Johnson, who cowers in the canoe, nowhere in sight, really, understanding, no doubt, that if he is seen, he will be perceived as cowering, and will be treated accordingly.
Gray Shirt and Pagan step quickly forward, arms extended straight out from their bodies to show that they are not armed, and they say the name of the Fang villager they believe resides here.
—Kiva, Gray Shirt says, echoed by his companion. Kiva.
The Fang begin speaking to each other, some trying to be heard over others, so that it is abruptly rather like a town meeting.
Silence steps close to Mary and says:
—It would be bad palaver if Kiva no live for this place.
—I wish you would go back to living up to your name, Mary tells him.
Finally, after what seems a horribly long interval, Pagan recognizes Kiva, and rushes toward him, speaking quickly, offering such heartfelt affection that everyone is embarrassed. In the next instant, Gray Shirt recognizes another man, a friend of his own, and one more scene of overwrought warmth unfolds. There is prickly, careful friendship all around now, and Pagan introduces Kiva to Mary, followed by Gray Shirt doing the same with his friend. Gray Shirt’s friend puts his big dark hands in the air on either side of Mary’s elbows, as though he is about to take hold of her and lift her up. But he doesn’t touch her, and his smile, though baldly curious, reassures her that he means no harm. Finally the village men circle Mary and her party, and herd them along in a wave of naked brown humanity up the path to the village. At sight of Mary, women and children at first seem curious enough to approach, but then shy away; some scatter to the protection of their huts.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 69