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 verandah. 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.