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 wounds. 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.
"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 tells 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."