Dr Koomadhi belonged to a race who are intolerant of any middle course
so far as dress is concerned. They are either very much dressed or
very much undressed. But he had lived long enough in England to have
chastened whatever yearning he may have had for running into either
extreme. Only now and again--usually when in football costume--he had
felt a strange longing to forswear the more cumbersome tweeds of
daily life. This longing, combined with the circumstance of his being
extremely fond of football, might be accepted as evidence that the
traditions of the savages from whom he had sprung survived in his
nature, just as they do in the youth of Great Britain, only he had not
to go so far back as have the most of the youth of Great Britain, to
reach the fountain-head.
The evening attire which he now resumed was wholly white,--from his pith
helmet down to his canvas shoes, he was in white, with the exception of
his tie, which was black. He looked at himself in a glass when at the
point of leaving his house, and he felt satisfied with his appearance;
only he should have dearly liked to exchange his black tie for one of
scarlet. He could not understand how it was that he had never passed
a draper’s window in London without staring with envious eyes at the
crimson scarves displayed for sale. No one could know what heroic
sacrifices he made in rejecting all such allurements. No one could know
what he suffered while crushing down that uncivilised longing for a
brilliant colour.
Just before leaving the house he went to his desk and brought out of one
of the drawers a small ivory box. He unlocked it and stood for some
time with his face down to the thing that the box contained--a
curiously-speckled stone, somewhat resembling a human ear. While
keeping his head down to this thing his lips were moving. He was clearly
murmuring some phrases in a strange language into that curiously shaped
stone.
Relocking the ivory box, he returned it to the drawer, which he also
locked. Then he left his house, and took a path leading to a well-built
villa standing in front of a banana-jungle, with a tall flag-pole
before its hall door--a flag-pole from which the union-jack fluttered,
indicating to all casual visitors that this was the official residence
of her Majesty’s Commissioner to the Gambia, Commander Hope, R.N.
“Hallo, Koomadhi!” came a voice from the open window to the right of the
door. “Pardon me for five minutes. I’m engaged at my correspondence
to go to England by the _Penguin_ this evening. But don’t mind me. Go
through to the drawing-room and my daughter will give you a cup of tea.”
“All right, sir,” said Dr Koomadhi. “Don’t hurry on my account. I was
merely calling to mention that I had forwarded my report early in the
day; but I’ll wait inside.”
“All right,” came the voice from the window. “I’m at the last folios.”
Dr Koomadhi was in the act of entering the porch when his pith helmet
was snatched off by some unseen hand, and a curious shriek sounded on
the balcony above the porch.
“The ruffian!” said Koomadhi, with a laugh. “The ruffian! He’s at his
tricks again.”
He took a few steps back and looked up to the balcony. There sat an
immense tame baboon, wearing the helmet and screeching with merriment.
“I’ll have to give you another lesson, my gentleman,” said the doctor,
shaking his finger at the creature. “Hand me down that helmet at once.”
The baboon made a grimace and then raised his right hand to the
salute--his favourite trick.
Suddenly the doctor produced a sound with his lips, and in an instant
the monkey had dropped the helmet and had fled in alarm from the balcony
to the roof of the house, whence he gazed in every direction, while the
doctor went into the house with his helmet in his hand. He had merely
given the simian word of alarm, which the creature, understanding its
mother tongue, had promptly acted upon.
“‘You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, but the
scent’--you know the rest, sir,” remarked Mr Letts, the Commissioner’s
Secretary, who had observed from his window the whole transaction.
“What was that, Letts?” asked the Commissioner.
“Koomadhi spoke to the baboon in its own tongue, sir, and it took the
hint of a man and a brother and cleared off.”
“Yes, but where does the shattering of the vase come in?” asked the
Commissioner.
“I mean to suggest that a nigger remains a nigger, and remains on
speaking terms with a baboon, even though he has a college degree and
wears tweeds,” said Mr Letts.
“Oh,” said the Commissioner.
He had heard the same opinion expressed by various members of his staff
ever since he had anything to do with the administration of affairs on
the West Coast. He had long ago ceased to take even the smallest amount
of interest in the question of the exact depth of a negro’s veneer of
civilisation.