Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “It’s too dangerous a game for a man to play for any length of time.

  It is doubly dangerous now that you limp. You ought to give it up.”

  Hatteras made a strange reply.

  “I’ll try to,” he said.

  Walker pondered over the words for some time. He set them side by side in his thoughts with that confession which Hatteras had made to him one evening. He asked himself whether, after all, Hatteras’ explanation of his conduct was sincere, whether it was really a desire to know the native thoroughly which prompted these mysterious expeditions; and then he remembered that he himself had first suggested the explanation to Hatteras. Walker began to feel uneasy — more than uneasy, actually afraid on his friend’s account. Hatteras had acknowledged that the country fascinated him, and fascinated him through its hideous side. Was this masquerading as a black man a further proof of the fascination? Was it, as it were, a step downwards towards a closer association? Walker sought to laugh the notion from his mind, but it returned and returned, and here and there an incident occurred to give it strength and colour.

  For instance, on one occasion after Hatteras had been three weeks absent, Walker sauntered over to the Residency towards four o’clock in the afternoon. Hatteras was trying cases in the court-house, which formed the ground floor of the Residency. Walker stepped into the room. It was packed with a naked throng of blacks, and the heat was overpowering. At the end of the hall sat Hatteras. His worn face shone out amongst the black heads about him white and waxy like a gardenia in a bouquet of black flowers. Walker invented his simile and realised its appositeness at one and the same moment. Bouquet was not an inappropriate word since there is a penetrating aroma about the native of the Niger delta when he begins to perspire.

  Walker, however, thinking that the Court would rise, determined to wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual details — human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, and then had candles brought into the Court-house. He seemed indeed not so much to be investigating the negro’s guilt as to be adding to his own knowledge of Fetish ceremonials. And Walker could not but perceive that he took more than a merely scientific pleasure in the increase of his knowledge. His face appeared to smooth out, his eyes became quick, interested, almost excited; and Walker again had the queer impression that Hatteras was in spirit participating in the loathsome ceremonies, and participating with an intense enjoyment. In the end the negro was convicted and the Court rose. But he might have been convicted a good three hours before. Walker went home shaking his head. He seemed to be watching a man deliberately divesting himself of his humanity. It seemed as though the white man were ambitious to decline into the black. Hatteras was growing into an uncanny creature. His friend began to foresee a time when he should hold him in loathing and horror. And the next morning helped to confirm him in that forecast.

  For Walker had to make an early start down river for Bonny town, and as he stood on the landing-stage Hatteras came down to him from the Residency.

  “You heard that negro tried yesterday?” he asked with an assumption of carelessness.

  “Yes, and condemned. What of him?”

  “He escaped last night. It’s a bad business, isn’t it?”

  Walker nodded in reply and his boat pushed off. But it stuck in his mind for the greater part of that day that the prison adjoined the Court-house and so formed part of the ground floor of the Residency. Had Hatteras connived at his escape? Had the judge secretly set free the prisoner whom he had publicly condemned? The question troubled Walker considerably during his month of absence, and stood in the way of his business. He learned for the first time how much he loved his friend and how eagerly he watched for the friend’s advancement. Each day added to his load of anxiety. He dreamed continually of a black-painted man slipping among the tree-boles nearer and nearer towards the red glow of a fire in some open space secure amongst the swamps, where hideous mysteries had their celebration. He cut short his business and hurried back from Bonny. He crossed at once to the Residency and found his friend in a great turmoil of affairs. Walker came back from Bonny a month later and hurried across to his friend.

  “Jim,” said Hatteras, starting up, “I’ve got a year’s leave; I am going home.”

  “Dicky!” cried Walker, and he nearly wrung Hatteras’ hand from his arm. “That’s grand news.”

  “Yes, old man, I thought you would be glad; I sail in a fortnight.”

  And he did.

  For the first month Walker was glad. A year’s leave would make a new man of Dick Hatteras, he thought, or, at all events, restore the old man, sane and sound, as he had been before he came to the West African coast. During the second month Walker began to feel lonely. In the third he bought a banjo and learnt it during the fourth and fifth. During the sixth he began to say to himself, “What a time poor Dick must have had all those six years with those cursed forests about him. I don’t wonder — I don’t wonder.” He turned disconsolately to his banjo and played for the rest of the year; all through the wet season while the rain came down in a steady roar and only the curlews cried — until Hatteras returned. He returned at the top of his spirits and health. Of course he was hall-marked West African, but no man gets rid of that stamp. Moreover there was more than health in his expression. There was a new look of pride in his eyes and when he spoke of a bachelor it was in terms of sympathetic pity.

  “Jim,” said he, after five minutes of restraint, “I am engaged to be married.”

  Jim danced round him in delight. “What an ass I have been,” he thought, “why didn’t I think of that cure myself?” and he asked, “When is it to be?”

  “In eight months. You’ll come home and see me through.”

  Walker agreed and for eight months listened to praises of the lady. There were no more solitary expeditions. In fact, Hatteras seemed absorbed in the diurnal discovery of new perfections in his future wife.

  “Yes, she seems a nice girl,” Walker commented. He found her upon his arrival in England more human than Hatteras’ conversation had led him to expect, and she proved to him that she was a nice girl. For she listened for hours to him lecturing her on the proper way to treat Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny river, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.

  For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its chickens and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West Africa. Thus for awhile he almost lost sight of Hatteras and consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning, however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was sorry, but her husband was away.

  Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs. Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his schooldays. Thereupon Mrs. Hatteras gave way.

  “Dick goes away alone,” she said. “He stains his skin and goes away at night. He tells me that he must, that it’s the only way by which he can know the natives, and that so it’s a sort of duty. He says the black tell
s nothing of himself to the white man — ever. You must go amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back.”

  “But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has always come back,” replied Walker.

  “Yes, but one day he will not.” Walker comforted her as well as he could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the Empire. “Never a lotus closes, you know,” he said, and went back to the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.

  It was no sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that he was certain, and he waited — he waited from darkness to daybreak in his compound for three successive nights. On the fourth he heard the scuffling sound at the corner of the fence. The night was black as the inside of a coffin. Half a regiment of men might steal past him and he not have seen them. Accordingly he walked cautiously to the palisade which separated the enclosure of the Residency from his own, felt along it until he reached the little gate and stationed himself in front of it. In a few moments he thought that he heard a man breathing, but whether to the right or the left he could not tell; and then a groping hand lightly touched his face and drew away again. Walker said nothing, but held his breath and did not move. The hand was stretched out again. This time it touched his breast and moved across it until it felt a button of Walker’s coat. Then it was snatched away and Walker heard a gasping in-draw of the breath and afterwards a sound as of a man turning in a flurry. Walker sprang forward and caught a naked shoulder with one hand, a naked arm with the other.

  “Wait a bit, Dick Hatteras,” he said.

  There was a low cry, and then a husky voice addressed him respectfully as “Daddy” in trade-English.

  “That won’t do, Dick,” said Walker.

  The voice babbled more trade-English.

  “If you’re not Dick Hatteras,” continued Walker, tightening his grasp, “You’ve no manner of right here. I’ll give you till I count ten and then I shall shoot.”

  Walker counted up to nine aloud and then —

  “Jim,” said Hatteras in his natural voice.

  “That’s better,” said Walker. “Let’s go in and talk.”

  III.

  He went up the step and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and the two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them spoke. Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black skin, naked except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his head was a white man married to a white wife who was sleeping — Nay, more likely crying — not thirty yards away.

  Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the rest of it.

  “That won’t wash,” interrupted Walker. “What is it? A woman?”

  “Good Heaven, no!” cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that explanation was at all events untrue. “Jim, I’ve a good mind to tell you all about it.”

  “You have got to,” said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the steps.

  “I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself,” he began.

  “But I thought,” interrupted Walker, “that you had got over that since. Why, man, you are married,” and he came across to Hatteras and shook him by the shoulder. “Don’t you understand? You have a wife!”

  “I know,” said Hatteras. “But there are things deeper at the heart of me than the love of woman, and one of those things is the love of horror. I tell you it bites as nothing else does in this world. It’s like absinthe that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can’t do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now—” He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped to a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with feverish movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural excitement.

  “It’s like going down to Hell and coming up again and wanting to go down again. Oh, you’d want to go down again. You’d find the whole earth pale. You’d count the days until you went down again. Do you remember Orpheus? I think he looked back not to see if Eurydice was coming after him but because he knew it was the last glimpse he would get of Hell.” At that he broke off and began to chant in a crazy voice, wagging his head and swaying his body to the rhythm of the lines: —

  “Quum subita in cantum dementia cepit amantem

  Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;

  Restilit Eurydicengue suam jam luce sub ipsa

  Immemor heu victusque animi respexit.”

  “Oh, stop that!” cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. “For God’s sake, stop it!”

  For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a class-room with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls, the droning sound of the form-master’s voice, and the swish of lilac bushes against the lower window panes on summer afternoons. “Go on,” he said. “Oh, go on, and let’s have done with it.”

  Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it. He spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a growing enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. “Stop,” he said, again, “Stop! That’s enough.”

  Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker’s presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a child will, and here and there he laughed and the mere sound of his laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold out to him a cocked and loaded revolver.

  “Well?” he asked. “Well?”

  Walker still offered him the revolver.

  “There are cases, I think, which neither God’s law nor man’s law seems to have provided for. There’s your wife you see to be considered. If you don’t take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old country.”

  Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered it for a little.

  “My wife must never know,” he said.

  “There’s the pistol. Outside’s the swamp. The swamp will tell no tales, nor shall I. Your wife need never know.”

  Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.

  “Good-bye, Jim,” he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook his head, and Hatteras went out on to the verandah and down the steps.

  Walker heard him climb over the fence; and then followed as far as the verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol shot broke the silence like the tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales. Mrs. Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband’s disappearance that she knew and returned brokenhearted to England. There was some loud talk about the self-sacrificing energy, which makes the English a dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.

  But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowé river in Congo Français. He travelled as far as Woermann’s factory in Njole Island and, having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the hope of opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for a hundred and fifty miles in a little stern-wheel steamer. At that point he stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his banjo and eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty miles. There he ran the boat’s nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan village and went ashore to negotiate with the chief.

  There was a slip of forest between the village and the river bank, and while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it he heard a noise of lamentation. The noi
se came from the village and was general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a chorus of discordant howls, low in note and long-drawn out — wordless, something like the howls of an animal in pain and yet human by reason of their infinite melancholy.

  Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock, fronting the palisade which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed down into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For from every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in their filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their heads shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the coming of the witch doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural death, and, since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the witch doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, since the end of those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however, politely invited Walker to inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut, packed with the corpse’s relations, who were shouting to it at the top of their voices on the on-chance that its spirit might think better of its conduct and return to the body. They explained to Walker that they had tried all the usual varieties of persuasion. They had put red pepper into the chief’s eyes while he was dying. They had propped open his mouth with a stick; they had burned fibres of the oil nut under his nose. In fact, they had made his death as uncomfortable as possible, but none the less he had died.