“What’s that?” asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.
“That?” replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. “I told you I would bring back Barrington if I found him,” and he trundled a scoured and polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.
HATTERAS.
THE STORY WAS told to us by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton cutter one night when we lay anchored in Helford river. It was towards the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look. There was no other boat in the wooded creek and the swish of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All the circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story but most of all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the story of a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled him. However, let the story speak for itself.
Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never schoolmates. Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, overbore the prophecy. Hatteras, the father, disorganised his son’s future by dropping unexpectedly through one of the trap ways of speculation into the bankruptcy court beneath just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a stock in trade which consisted of a school boy’s command of the classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker. The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone and met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident did not come to Walker’s ears until some time afterwards, nor when he heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point, and so may as well be immediately told.
There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself on the swamps of the Forcados river with the mangrove forest closing in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach. Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him, but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation. Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail of a word they said and at last he retired from the din of their chatter through the windows of a room which gave on the verandah, and sat down to wait for his superior, the agent. It was early in the morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the house, so he contemplated the mud-banks and the mud-river and the mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There are few things in the world quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the quietude began to jar on Hatteras’ nerves. He was besides very hungry. To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
He walked along the side of the house towards the back, and as he neared the back he head a humming sound. The further he went the louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this — a shuttered window and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming outside the window; they streamed in through the lattices of the shutters in a busy practical way; they came in columns from the forest and converged upon the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the room.
Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy just for the sake of company, but, at that moment there was not one to be seen. He felt the cold strike at his spine, he went back to the room in which he had been sitting. He sat again, but he sat shivering. The agent had left no work for him…. The Kru boys had been anxious to explain something. The humming of the flies about that shuttered window seemed to Hatteras to have more explicit language than the Kru boys’ chatterings. He penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned up the doors. He opened one of them ever so slightly, and the buzzing came through like the hum of a wheel in a factory, revolving in the collar of a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold. The atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold upon his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved himself to enter.
At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a moment, however, he made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with a black, furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black, furry rug suddenly lifted itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras’ face, and dissolved into flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the fever. The agent had died of it three days before.
Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It left him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of disgust too. “It’s a damned obscene country,” he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to district, from factory to factory.
Now the second item in the stock in trade was a gift of tongues and about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect and with the dialect inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the west coast, and at the end of six years, Hatteras could speak as many of them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood; because he acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service under the Niger Protectorate, so that when two years later, Walker came out to Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the Bonny river, he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny river town to meet the steamer which brought his friend.
“I say, Dick, you look bad,” said Walker.
“People aren’t, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts.”
“I know that; but your the weariest bag of bones I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,” said Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
“Your factory’s next to the Residency,” said Hatteras. “There’s a compound to each running down to the river, and there’s a palisade between the compounds. I’ve cut a little gate in the palisade as it will shorten the way from one house to the other.”
The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few months — indeed, more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only aware that, when they were both at home, Hatteras would come through it of an evening and smoke on his veran
dah. Then he would sit for hours cursing the country, raving about the lights in Piccadilly-circus, and offering his immortal soul in exchange for a comic-opera tune played upon a barrel-organ. Walker possessed a big atlas, and one of Hatteras’ chief diversions was to trace with his finger a bee-line across the African continent and the Bay of Biscay until he reached London.
More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon came to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory and for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled Walker considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that Hatteras was hiding at the Residency — well, some one whom it was prudent, especially in an official, to conceal. He abandoned the conclusion, however, when he discovered that his friend was in the habit of making solitary expeditions. At times Hatteras would be absent for a couple of days, at times for a week, and, so far as Walker could ascertain, he never so much as took a servant with him to keep him company. He would simply announce at night his intended departure, and in the morning he would be gone. Nor on his return did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of his journeys. On one occasion, however, Walker broached the subject. Hatteras had come back the night before, and he sat crouched up in a deck chair, looking intently into the darkness of the forest.
“I say,” asked Walker, “isn’t it rather dangerous to go slumming about
West Africa alone?”
Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant question.
“Have you ever seen the Horse Guards’ Parade on a dark, rainy night?” he asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from the forest. “The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the arches a Venice palace above it.”
“But look here, Dick!” said Walker, keeping to his subject. “You never leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have come back until you show yourself the morning after.”
“I think,” said Hatteras slowly, “that the finest sight in the world is to be seen from the bridge in St. James’s Park when there’s a State ball on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens the lake and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies.”
“Even your servants don’t know when you come back,” said Walker.
“Oh,” said Hatteras quietly, “so you have been asking questions of my servants?”
“I had a good reason,” replied Walker, “your safety,” and with that the conversation dropped.
Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African mangrove forest at night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that ever a man’s ears harkened to. And the sounds come not so much from the birds, or the soughing of the branches; they seem to come from the swamp life underneath the branches, at the roots of trees. There’s a ceaseless stir as of a myriad of reptiles creeping in the slime. Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest — the croaking of a bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room that hears another dog barking in the street.
“Doesn’t it sound damned wicked?” he said, with a queer smile of enjoyment.
Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them struck obliquely upon Hatteras’ face and slanted off from it in a narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which ran in Hatteras’ voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth. In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus, had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
“Dick,” he said, “this house of mine stands between your house and the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the swamp. Is that why you always prefer it to your own?”
Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a little he said: —
“It’s not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you, it’s the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can’t get the forest and the undergrowth out of my mind. I dream of them at nights. I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,” and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forwards. “Doesn’t it sound wicked?”
“But all this talk about London?” cried Walker.
“Oh, don’t you understand?” interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he changed his tone and gave his reason. “One has to struggle against a fascination of that sort. It’s devil’s work. So for all I am worth I talk about London.”
“Look here, Dick,” said Walker. “You had better get leave and go back to the old country for a spell.”
“A very solid piece of advice,” said Hatteras, and he went home to the
Residency.
II.
The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon his table a couple of new volumes. He glanced at the titles. They were Burton’s account of his pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Mecca.
Five nights afterwards Walker was smoking a pipe on the verandah when he fancied that he heard a rubbing, scuffling sound as if some one very cautiously was climbing over the fence of his compound. The moon was low in the sky and dipping down toward the forest; indeed the rim of it touched the tree-tops so that while a full half of the enclosure was bare to the yellow light that half which bordered on the forest was inky black in shadow; and it was from the furthest corner of this second half that the sound came. Walker bent forward listening. He heard the sound again, and a moment after another sound, which left him in no doubt. For in that dark corner he knew that a number of palisades for repairing the fence were piled and the second sound which he heard was a rattle as some one stumbled against them. Walker went inside and fetched a rifle.
When he came back he saw a negro creeping across the bright open space towards the Residency. Walker hailed to him to stop. Instead the negro ran. He ran towards the wicket gate in the palisades. Walker shouted again; the figure only ran the faster. He had covered half the distance before Walker fired. He clutched his right forearm with his left hand, but he did not stop. Walker fired again, this time at his legs, and the man dropped to the ground. Walker heard his servants stirring as he ran down the steps. He crossed quickly to the negro and the negro spoke to him, but in English, and with the voice of Hatteras.
“For God’s sake keep your servants off!”
Walker ran to the house, met his servants at the foot of the steps, and ordered them back. He had shot at a monkey he said. Then he returned to Hatteras.
“Dicky, are you hurt?” he whispered.
“You hit me each time you fired, but not very badly I think.”
He bandaged Hatteras’ arm and thigh with strips of his shirt and waited by his side until the house was quiet. Then he lifted him and carried him across the enclosure to the steps and up the steps into his bedroom. It was a long and fatiguing process. For one thing Walker dared make no noise and must needs tread lightly with his load; for another, the steps were steep and ricketty, with a narrow balustrade on each side waist high. It seemed to Walker that the day would dawn before he reached the top. Once or twice Hatteras stirred in his arms, and he feared the man would die then and there. For all the time his blood dripped and pattered like heavy raindrops on the wooden steps.
Walker laid Hatteras on his bed and examined his wou
nds. One bullet had passed through the fleshy part of the forearm, the other through the fleshy part of his right thigh. But no bones were broken and no arteries cut. Walker lit a fire, baked some plaintain leaves, and applied them as a poultice. Then he went out with a pail of water and scrubbed down the steps.
Again he dared not make any noise, and it was close on daybreak before he had done. His night’s work, however, was not ended. He had still to cleanse the black stain from Hatteras’ skin, and the sun was up before he stretched a rug upon the ground and went to sleep with his back against the door.
“Walker,” Hatteras called out in a low voice, an hour or so later.
Walker woke up and crossed over to the bed.
“Dicky, I’m frightfully sorry. I couldn’t know it was you.”
“That’s all right, Jim. Don’t you worry about that. What I wanted to say was that nobody had better know. It wouldn’t do, would it, if it got about?”
“Oh, I am not so sure. People would think it rather a creditable proceeding.”
Hatteras shot a puzzled look at his friend. Walker, however, did not notice it, and continued, “I saw Burton’s account of his pilgrimage in your room; I might have known that journeys of the kind were just the sort of thing to appeal to you.”
“Oh, yes, that’s it,” said Hatteras, lifting himself up in bed. He spoke eagerly — perhaps a thought too eagerly. “Yes, that’s it. I have always been keen on understanding the native thoroughly. It’s after all no less than one’s duty if one has to rule them, and since I could speak their lingo—” he broke off and returned to the subject which had prompted him to rouse Walker. “But, all the same, it wouldn’t do if the natives got to know.”
“There’s no difficulty about that,” said Walker. “I’ll give out that you have come back with the fever and that I am nursing you. Fortunately there’s no doctor handy to come making inconvenient examinations.”
Hatteras knew something of surgery, and under his directions Walker poulticed and bandaged him until he recovered. The bandaging, however, was amateurish, and, as a result, the muscles contracted in Hatteras’ thigh and he limped — ever so slightly, still he limped — he limped to his dying day. He did not, however, on that account abandon his explorations, and more than once Walker, when his lights were out and he was smoking a pipe on the verandah, would see a black figure with a trailing walk cross his compound and pass stealthily through the wicket in the fence. Walker took occasion to expostulate with his friend.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 770