Enough of simpering and grimace,
Enough of vacuity, trimmed with lace.
“Curse this country! Curse it--curse it!” The man spoke aloud, but there
was no one near to hear. He shook his skinny yellow fist out over the
broad river that crept greasily down to the equatorial sea.
All around him the vegetable kingdom had asserted its sovereignty. At
his back loomed a dense forest, impenetrable to the foot of man, defying
his puny hand armed with axe or saw. The trees were not high, few of
them being above twenty feet, but from their branches creepers and
parasites hung in tangled profusion, interlaced, joining tree to tree
for acres, nay for miles.
As far as the eye could reach either bank of the slow river was thus
covered with rank vegetation--mile after mile without variety, without
hope. The glassy surface of the water was broken here and there by
certain black forms floating like logs half hidden beneath the wave.
These were crocodiles. The river was the Ogowe, and the man who cursed
it was Victor Durnovo, employe of the Loango Trading Association, whose
business it was at that season to travel into the interior of Africa to
buy, barter, or steal ivory for his masters.
He was a small-faced man, with a squarely aquiline nose and a black
moustache, which hung like a valance over his mouth. From the growth of
that curtain-like moustache Victor Durnovo's worldly prosperity might
have been said to date. No one seeing his mouth had before that time
been prevailed upon to trust him. Nature has a way of hanging out signs
and then covering them up, so that the casual fail to see. He was a man
of medium height, with abnormally long arms and a somewhat truculent way
of walking, as if his foot was ever ready to kick anything or any person
who might come in his way.
His movements were nervous and restless, although he was tired out and
half-starved. The irritability of Africa was upon him--had hold over
him--gripped him remorselessly. No one knows what it is, but it is
there, and sometimes it is responsible for murder. It makes honourable
European gentlemen commit crimes of which they blush to think in after
days. The Powers may draw up treaties and sign the same, but there
will never be a peaceful division of the great wasted land so near to
Southern Europe. There may be peace in Berlin, or Brussels, or London,
but because the atmosphere of Africa is not the same as that of the
great cities, there will be no peace beneath the Equator. From the West
Coast of Africa to the East men will fight and quarrel and bicker so
long as human nerves are human nerves. The irritability lurks in the
shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal
sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers
haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is
everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to
brutal passion over a futile discussion.
Victor Durnovo had sent his boatmen into the forest to find a few
bananas, a few handsful of firewood, and while they were absent he gave
vent to that wild unreasoning passion which is inhaled into the white
man's lungs with the air of equatorial Africa. For there are moral
microbes in the atmosphere of different countries, and we must not judge
one land by the laws of another. There is the fatalism of India, the
restlessness of New York, the fear of the Arctic, the irritability of
Africa.
“Curse this country!” he shouted, “curse it--curse it! River and
tree--man and beast!”
He rose and slouched down to his boat, which lay moored to a snag
alongside the bank, trodden hard to the consistency of asphalte by a
hundred bare feet. He stepped over the gunwale and made his way aft with
a practised balancing step. The after part of the canoe was decked in
and closed with lock and key. The key hung at his watch-chain--a large
chain with square links and a suggestive doubtfulness of colour. It
might have been gold, but the man who wore it somehow imparted to it a
suggestion of baser metal.
He opened the locker and took from it a small chest. From this he
selected a bottle, and, rummaging in the recesses of the locker, he
found an unwashed tumbler. Into half a glass of water he dropped a
minute quantity from the bottle and drank off the mixture. The passion
had left him now, and quite suddenly he looked yellow and very weak. He
was treating himself scientifically for the irritability to which he had
given way. Then he returned to the bank and laid down at full length.
The skin of his face must have been giving him great pain, for it was
scarlet in places and exuding from sun-blisters. He had long ago given
up wiping the perspiration from his brow, and evidently did not care to
wash his face.
Presently a peacefulness seemed to come over him, for his eyes lost
their glitter and his heavy lids drooped. His arms were crossed behind
his head--before him lay the river.
Suddenly he sat upright, all eagerness and attention. Not a leaf
stirred. It was about five o'clock in the evening, the stillest hour of
the twenty-four. In such a silence the least sound would travel almost
any distance, and there was a sound travelling over the water to him.
It was nothing but a thud repeated with singular regularity; but to his
practised ears it conveyed much. He knew that a boat was approaching,
as yet hidden by some distant curve in the river. The thud was caused by
the contact of six paddles with the gunwale of the canoe as the paddlers
withdrew them from the water.
Victor Durnovo rose again and brought from the boat a second rifle,
which he laid beside the double-barrelled Reilly which was never more
than a yard away from him, waking or sleeping. Then he waited. He knew
that no boat could reach the bank without his full permission, for every
rower would be dead before they got within a hundred yards of his rifle.
He was probably the best rifle-shot but one in that country--and the
other, the very best, happened to be in the approaching canoe.
After the space of ten minutes the boat came in sight--a long black form
on the still waters. It was too far away for him to distinguish anything
beyond the fact that it was a native boat.
“Eight hundred yards,” muttered Durnovo over the sight of his rifle.
He looked upon this river as his own, and he knew the native of
equatorial Africa. Therefore he dropped a bullet into the water, under
the bow of the canoe, at eight hundred yards.
A moment later there was a sound which can only be written “P-ttt”
between his legs, and he had to wipe a shower of dust from his eyes. A
puff of blue smoke rose slowly over the boat and a sharp report broke
the silence a second time.
Then Victor Durnovo leapt to his feet and waved his hat in the air. From
the canoe there was an answering greeting, and the man on the bank went
to the water's edge, still carrying the rifle from which he was never
parted.
Durnovo was the first to speak when the boat came within hail.
“Very sorry,” he shouted. “Thought you were a native boat. Must
establish a funk--get in the first shot, you know.”
“All right,” replied one of the Europeans in the approaching craft, with
a courteous wave of the hand, “no harm done.”
There were two white men and six blacks in the long and clumsy boat. One
of the Europeans lay in the bows while the other was stretched at his
ease in the stern, reclining on the canvas of a neatly folded tent. The
last-named was evidently the leader of the little expedition, while the
manner and attitude of the man in the bows suggested the servitude of a
disciplined soldier slightly relaxed by abnormal circumstances.
“Who fired that shot?” inquired Durnovo, when there was no longer any
necessity to shout.
“Joseph,” replied the man in the stern of the boat, indicating his
companion. “Was it a near thing?”
“About as near as I care about--it threw up the dust between my legs.”
The man called Joseph grinned. Nature had given him liberally of the
wherewithal for indulgence in that relaxation, and Durnovo smiled rather
constrainedly. Joseph was grabbing at the long reedy grass, bringing
the canoe to a standstill, and it was some moments before his extensive
mouth submitted to control.
“I presume you are Mr. Durnovo,” said the man in the stern of the
boat, rising leisurely from his recumbent position and speaking with a
courteous savoir-faire which seemed slightly out of place in the wilds
of Central Africa. He was a tall man with a small aristocratic head and
a refined face, which somehow suggested an aristocrat of old France.
“Yes,” answered Durnovo.
The tall man stepped ashore and held out his hand.
“I am glad we have met you,” he said; “I have a letter of introduction
to you from Maurice Gordon, of Loango.”
Victor Durnovo's dark face changed slightly; his eyes--bilious,
fever-shot, unhealthy--took a new light.
“Ah!” he answered, “are you a friend of Maurice Gordon's?”
There was another question in this, an unasked one; and Victor Durnovo
was watching for the answer. But the face he watched was like a
delicately carved piece of brown marble, with a courteous, impenetrable
smile.
“I met him again the other day at Loango. He is an old Etonian like
myself.”
This conveyed nothing to Durnovo, who belonged to a different world,
whose education was, like other things about him, an unknown quantity.
“My name,” continued the tall man, “is Meredith--John
Meredith--sometimes called Jack.”
They were walking up the bank towards the dusky and uninviting tent.
“And the other fellow?” inquired Durnovo, with a backward jerk of the
head.
“Oh--he is my servant.”
Durnovo raised his eyebrows in somewhat contemptuous amusement, and
proceeded to open the letter which Meredith had handed him.
“Not many fellows,” he said, “on this coast can afford to keep a
European servant.”
Jack Meredith bowed, and ignored the irony.
“But,” he said courteously, “I suppose you find these coloured chaps
just as good when they have once got into your ways?”
“Oh yes,” muttered Durnovo. He was reading the letter. “Maurice Gordon,”
he continued, “says you are travelling for pleasure--just looking about
you. What do you think of it?”
He indicated the dismal prospect with a harsh laugh.
“A bit suggestive of Hell,” he went on, “eh? How does it strike you?”
“Finer timber, I should think,” suggested Jack Meredith, and Durnovo
laughed more pleasantly.
“The truth is,” he explained, “that it strikes one as a bit absurd that
any man should travel up here for pleasure. If you take my advice you
will come down-stream again with me to-morrow.”
He evidently distrusted him; and the sidelong, furtive glance suggested
vaguely that Victor Durnovo had something farther up this river which he
wished to keep concealed.
“I understand,” answered Meredith, with a half-suppressed yawn, “that
the country gets finer farther up--more mountainous--less suggestive
of--Hell.”
The proprietors of very dark eyes would do well to remember that it is
dangerous to glance furtively to one side or the other. The attention of
dark eyes is more easily felt than the glances of grey or blue orbs.
Jack Meredith's suspicions were aroused by the suspicious manner of his
interlocutor.
“There is no white man knows this river as I do, and I do not recommend
it. Look at me--on the verge of jaundice--look at this wound on my arm;
it began with a scratch and has never healed. All that comes from a
month up this cursed river. Take my advice, try somewhere else.”
“I certainly shall,” replied Meredith. “We will discuss it after dinner.
My chap is a first-rate cook. Have you got anything to add to the menu?”
“Not a thing. I've been living on plantains and dried elephant-meat for
the last fortnight.”
“Doesn't sound nourishing. Well, we are pretty well provided, so perhaps
you will give me the pleasure of your company to dinner? Come as you
are: no ceremony. I think I will wash though. It is as well to keep up
these old customs.”
With a pleasant smile he went towards the tent which had just been
erected. Joseph was very busy, and his admonishing voice was heard at
times.
“Here, Johnny, hammer in that peg. Now, old cups and saucers, stop that
grinning and fetch me some water. None of your frogs and creepy crawly
thing this time, my blonde beauty, but clean water, comprenny?”
With these and similar lightsome turns of speech was Joseph in the habit
of keeping his men up to the mark. The method was eminently successful.
His coloured compeers crowded round him “all of a grin,” as he himself
described it, and eager to do his slightest behest. From the throne to
the back-kitchen the secret of success is the art of managing men--and
women.