THE LOVES OF M'LINO.
When a man loves one woman, whether she be alive or dead, a deep and
fragrant memory or a very pleasant reality, he is apt to earn the
appellation of "woman-hater," a hasty judgment which the loose-minded
pass upon any man whose loves lack promiscuosity, and who does not
diffuse his passions. Sanders was described as a woman-hater by such men
who knew him sufficiently little to analyse his character, but Sanders
was not a woman-hater in any sense of the word, for he bore no illwill
toward woman kind, and certainly was innocent of any secret love.
There was a young man named Ludley who had been assistant to Sanders for
three months, at the end of which time Sanders sent for him--he was
stationed at Isisi City.
"I think you can go home," said Sanders.
The young man opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Why?" he said.
Sanders made no reply, but stared through the open doorway at the
distant village.
"Why?" demanded the young man again.
"I've heard things," said Sanders shortly--he was rather uncomfortable,
but did not show it.
"Things--like what?"
Sanders shifted uneasily in his chair.
"Oh--things," he said vaguely, and added: "You go home and marry that
nice girl you used to rave about when you first came out."
Young Ludley went red under his tan.
"Look here, chief!" he said, half angrily, half apologetically, "you're
surely not going to take any notice--you know it's the sort of thing
that's done in black countries--oh, damn it all, you're not going to act
as censor over my morals, are you?"
Sanders looked at the youth coldly.
"Your morals aren't worth worrying about," he said truthfully. "You
could be the most depraved devil in the world--which I'll admit you
aren't--and I should not trouble to reform you. No. It's the morals of
my cannibals that worry me. Home you go, my son; get married, _crescit
sub pondere virtus_--you'll find the translation in the foreign phrase
department of any respectable dictionary. As to the sort of things that
are done in black countries, they don't do them in our black
countries--monkey tricks of that sort are good enough for the Belgian
Congo, or for Togoland, but they aren't good enough for this little
strip of wilderness."
Ludley went home.
He did not tell anybody the real reason why he had come home, because it
would not have sounded nice. He was a fairly decent boy, as boys of his
type go, and he said nothing worse about Sanders than that he was a
woman-hater.
The scene that followed his departure shows how little the white mind
differs from the black in its process of working. For, after seeing his
assistant safely embarked on a homeward-bound boat, Sanders went up the
river to Isisi, and there saw a woman who was called M'Lino.
The average black woman is ugly of face, but beautiful of figure, but
M'Lino was no ordinary woman, as you shall learn. The Isisi people, who
keep extraordinary records in their heads, the information being handed
from father to son, say that M'Lino came from an Arabi family, and
certainly if a delicately-chiselled nose, a refinement of lip, prove
anything, they prove M'Lino came from no pure Bantu stock.
She came to Sanders when he sent for her, alert, suspicious, very much
on her guard.
Before he could speak, she asked him a question.
"Lord, where is Lijingii?" This was the nearest the native ever got to
the pronunciation of Ludley's name.
"Lijingii has gone across the black water," said Sanders gently, "to his
own people."
"You sent him, lord," she said quickly, and Sanders made no reply.
"Lord," she went on, and Sanders wondered at the bitterness in her tone,
"it is said that you hate women."
"Then a lie is told," said Sanders. "I do not hate women; rather I
greatly honour them, for they go down to the caves of hell when they
bear children; also I regard them highly because they are otherwise
brave and very loyal."
She said nothing. Her head was sunk till her chin rested on her bare,
brown breast, but she looked at him from under her brows, and her eyes
were filled with a strange luminosity. Something like a panic awoke in
Sanders' heart--had the mischief been done? He cursed Ludley, and
breathed a fervent, if malevolent, prayer that his ship would go down
with him. But her words reassured him.
"I made Lijingii love me," she said, "though he was a great lord, and I
was a slave; I also would have gone down to hell, for some day I hoped I
should bear him children, but now that can never be."
"And thank the Lord for it!" said Sanders, under his breath.
He would have given her some words of cheer, but she turned abruptly
from him and walked away. Sanders watched the graceful figure as it
receded down the straggling street, and went back to his steamer.
He was ten miles down the river before he remembered that the reproof he
had framed for the girl had been undelivered.
"That is very extraordinary," said Sanders, with some annoyance, "I must
be losing my memory."
Three months later young Penson came out from England to take the place
of the returned Ludley. He was a fresh-faced youth, bubbling over with
enthusiasm, and, what is more important, he had served a two-years'
apprenticeship at Sierra Leone.
"You are to go up to Isisi," said Sanders, "and I want to tell you that
you've got to be jolly careful."
"What's the racket?" demanded the youth eagerly. "Are the beggars
rising?"
"So far as I know," said Sanders, putting his feet up on the rail of the
verandah, "they are not--it is not bloodshed, but love that you've got
to guard against."
And he told the story of M'Lino, even though it was no creditable story
to British administration.
"You can trust me," said young Penson, when he had finished.
"I trust you all right," said Sanders, "but I don't trust the woman--let
me hear from you from time to time; if you don't write about her I shall
get suspicious, and I'll come along in a very unpleasant mood."
"You can trust me," said young Penson again; for he was at the age when
a man is very sure of himself.
Remarkable as it may read, from the moment he left to take up his new
post until he returned to headquarters, in disgrace, a few months later,
he wrote no word of the straight, slim girl, with her wonderful eyes.
Other communications came to hand, official reports, terse and to the
point, but no mention of M'Lino, and Sanders began to worry.
The stories came filtering through, extraordinary stories of people who
had been punished unjustly, of savage floggings administered by order of
the sub-commissioner, and Sanders took boat and travelled up the river
_hec dum_.
He landed short of the town, and walked along the river bank. It was not
an easy walk, because the country hereabouts is a riot of vegetation.
Then he came upon an African idyll--a young man, who sat playing on a
squeaky violin, for the pleasure of M'Lino, lying face downwards on the
grass, her chin in her hands.
"In the name of a thousand devils!" said Sanders wrathfully; and the boy
got up from the fallen tree on which he sat, and looked at him calmly,
and with no apparent embarrassment. Sanders looked down at the girl and
pointed.
"Go back to the village, my woman," he said softly, for he was in a
rage.
"Now, you magnificent specimen of a white man," he said, when the girl
had gone--slowly and reluctantly--"what is this story I hear about your
flogging O'Sako?"
The youth took his pipe from his pocket and lit it coolly.
"He beat M'Lino," he said, in the tone of one who offered full
justification.
"From which fact I gather that he is the unfortunate husband of that
attractive nigger lady you were charming just now when I arrived?"
"Don't be beastly," said the other, scowling. "I know she's a native and
all that sort of thing, but my people at home will get used to her
colour----"
"Go on board my boat," said Sanders quietly. "Regard yourself as my
prisoner."
Sanders brought him down to headquarters without troubling to
investigate the flogging of O'Sako, and no word passed concerning M'Lino
till they were back again at headquarters.
"Of course I shall send you home," said Sanders.
"I supposed you would," said the other listlessly. He had lost all his
self-assurance on the journey down river, and was a very depressed young
man indeed.
"I must have been mad," he admitted, the day before the mail boat called
_en route_ for England; "from the very first I loved her--good heavens,
what an ass I am!"
"You are," agreed Sanders, and saw him off to the ship with a cheerful
heart.
"I will have no more sub-commissioners at Isisi," he wrote acidly to the
Administration. "I find my work sufficiently entertaining without the
additional amusement of having to act as chaperon to British officials."
He made a special journey to Isisi to straighten matters out, and M'Lino
came unbidden to see him.
"Lord, is he gone, too?" she asked.
"When I want you, M'Lino," said Sanders, "I will send for you."
"I loved him," she said, with more feeling than Sanders thought was
possible for a native to show.
"You are an easy lover," said Sanders.
She nodded.
"That is the way with some women," she said. "When I love, I love with
terrible strength; when I hate, I hate for ever and ever--I hate you,
master!"
She said it very simply.
"If you were a man," said the exasperated Commissioner, "I would tie you
up and whip you."
"F--f--b!" said the girl contemptuously, and left him staring.
To appreciate the position, you have to realise that Sanders was lord of
all this district; that he had the power of life and death, and no man
dared question or disobey his word. Had M'Lino been a man, as he said,
she would have suffered for her treason--there is no better word for her
offence--but she was a woman, and a seriously gifted woman, and,
moreover, sure of whatever powers she had.
He did not see her again during the three days he was in the city, nor
(this is the extraordinary circumstance) did he discuss her with the
chief. He learned that she had become the favourite wife of O'Sako; that
she had many lovers and scorned her husband, but he sought no news of
her. Once he saw her walking towards him, and went out of his way to
avoid her. It was horribly weak and he knew it, but he had no power to
resist the impulse that came over him to give her a wide berth.
Following this visit, Sanders was coming down stream at a leisurely
pace, he himself at the steering wheel, and his eyes searching the
treacherous river for sand banks. His mind was filled with the problem
of M'Lino, when suddenly in the bush that fringes the Isisi river,
something went "woof," and the air was filled with flying potlegs. One
struck his cabin, and splintered a panel to shreds, many fell upon the
water, one missed Sergeant Abiboo's head and sent his _tarbosh_ flying.
Sanders rang his engines astern, being curious to discover what induced
the would-be assassin to fire a blunderbuss in his direction, and
Abiboo, bare-headed, went pattering forward and slipped the canvas cover
from the gleaming little Maxim.
Then four Houssa soldiers jumped into the water and waded ashore,
holding their rifles above their heads with the one hand and their
ammunition in the other, and Sanders stood by the rail of the boat,
balancing a sporting Lee-Enfield in the crook of his arm.
Whoever fired the shot had chosen the place of killing very well. The
bush was very thick, the approach to land lay through coarse grass that
sprang from the swamp, vegetation ran rank, and a tangle of creeper
formed a screen that would have been impenetrable to a white man.
But the Houssas had a way--they found the man with his smoking gun,
waiting calmly.
He was of the Isisi people--a nation of philosophers--and he surrendered
his weapon without embarrassment.
"I think," he said to Sergeant Abiboo, as they hurried down the bank to
the river-side, "this means death."
"Death and the torments of hell to follow," said Abiboo, who was
embittered by the loss of his _tarbosh_, which had cost him five francs
in the French territory.
Sanders put up his rifle when he saw the prisoner. He held an informal
court in the shattered deck cabin.
"Did you shoot at me?" he asked.
"I did, master," said the man.
"Why?"
"Because," the prisoner replied, "you are a devil and exercise
witchcraft."
Sanders was puzzled a little.
"In what particular section of the devil department have I been busy?"
he asked in the vernacular.
The prisoner was gazing at him steadily.
"Master," he replied, "it is not my business to understand these things.
It is said to me, 'kill'--and I kill."
Sanders wasted no more time in vain questions. The man was put in irons,
the nose of the steamer turned again down stream, and the Commissioner
resumed his vigil.
Midway between B'Fani and Lakaloli he came to a tying-up place. Here
there were dead trees for the chopping, and he put his men to replenish
his stock of fuel.
He was annoyed, not because a man had attempted to take his life, nor
even because his neat little cabin forward was a litter of splinters and
broken glass where the potleg had struck, but because he nosed trouble
where he thought all was peace and harmony.
He had control of some sixteen distinct and separate nations, each
isolated and separated from the other by custom and language. They were
distinct, not as the French are from the Italian, but as the Slav is
from the Turk.
In the good old times before the English came there were many wars,
tribe against tribe, people against people. There were battles, murders,
raidings, and wholesale crucifixions, but the British changed all that.
There was peace in the land.
Sanders selected with care a long, thin cigar from his case, nibbled at
the end and lit it.
The prisoner sat on the steel deck of the _Zaire_ near the men's
quarters. He was chained by the leg-iron to a staple, and did not seem
depressed to any extent. When Sanders made his appearance, a camp stool
in his hand, the Commissioner seated himself, and began his inquisition.
"How do they call you, my man?"
"Bofabi of Isisi."
"Who told you to kill me?"
"Lord, I forget."
"A man or a woman?"
"Lord, it may have been either."
More than that Sanders could not learn, and the subsequent examination
at Isisi taught Sanders nothing, for, when confronted with M'Lino, the
man said that he did not know her.
Sanders went back to his base in a puzzled frame of mind, and Bofabi of
Isisi was sent to the convict establishment at the river's mouth. There
matters stood for three months, and all that Sanders learnt of the girl
was that she had a new lover whose name was Tebeki, and who was chief of
the Akasava.
There were three months of peace and calm, and then Tebeki, coveting his
neighbour's wife, took three hundred spears down into the Isisi country,
burnt the village that sheltered her, crucified her husband, and carried
her back with him.
In honour of this achievement Tebeki gave a feast and a beer dance.
There were great and shameless orgies that lasted five days, and the
strip of forest that fringes the river between the Isisi and the lower
river became a little inferno.
At the end of the five days Tebeki sat down to consider his position. He
was in the act of inventing justification for his crime, when Sanders
came on the scene. More ominous were the ten Houssas and the Maxim which
accompanied the brown-faced little man.
Sanders walked to Tebeki's hut and called him out, and Tebeki,
blear-eyed and shaky, stepped forth into the hot sunshine, blinking.
"Tebeki," said Sanders, "what of O'Sako and his village?"
"Master," said Tebeki, slowly, "he put shame upon me----"
"Spare me your lies," said Sanders coldly, and signed to the Houssas.
Then he looked round for a suitable tree. There was one behind the
hut--a great copal-gum.
"In half an hour I shall hang you," said Sanders, looking at his watch.
Tebeki said nothing; only his bare feet fidgeted in the dust.
There came out of the hut a tall girl, who stood eyeing the group with
curiosity; then she came forward, and laid her hand on Tebeki's bare
shoulder.
"What will you do with my man?" she asked. "I am M'Lino, the wife of
O'Sako."
Sanders was not horrified, he showed his teeth in a mirthless grin and
looked at her.
"You will find another man, M'Lino," he said, "as readily as you found
this one." Then he turned away to give directions for the hanging. But
the woman followed him, and boldly laid her hand on his arm.
"Master," she said, "if any was wronged by O'Sako's death, was it not I,
his wife? Yet I say let Tebeki go free, for I love him."
"You may go to the devil," said Sanders politely; "I am getting tired of
you and your lovers."
He hanged Tebeki, expeditiously and with science, and the man died
immediately, because Sanders was very thorough in this sort of business.
Then he and the Houssa corps marched away, and the death song of the
woman sounded fainter and fainter as the forest enveloped him. He
camped that night on the Hill of Trees, overlooking the sweeping bend of
the river, and in the morning his orderly came to tell him that the wife
of O'Sako desired to see him.
Sanders cursed the wife of O'Sako, but saw her.
She opened her mission without preliminary.
"Because of the death I brought to O'Sako, my husband, and Tebeki, my
lover, the people have cast me forth," she said. "Every hand is against
me, and if I stay in this country I shall die."
"Well?" said Sanders.
"So I will go with you, until you reach the Sangar River, which leads to
the Congo. I have brothers there."
"All this may be true," said Sanders dispassionately; "on the other
hand, I know that your heart is filled with hate because I have taken
two men from you, and hanged a third. Nevertheless, you shall come with
us as far as the Sangar River, but you shall not touch the 'chop' of my
men, nor shall you speak with them."
She nodded and left him, and Sanders issued orders for her treatment.
In the middle of the night Abiboo, who, in addition to being Sanders'
servant, was a sergeant of the Houssas, came to Sanders' tent, and the
Commissioner jumped out of bed and mechanically reached for his Express.
"Leopards?" he asked briefly.
"Master," said Sergeant Abiboo, "it is the woman M'Lino--she is a
witch."
"Sergeant," said the exasperated Sanders, "if you wake me up in the
middle of the night with that sort of talk, I will break your infernal
head."
"Be that as it may, master," said the sergeant stolidly, "she is a
witch, for she has talked with my men and done many wonderful
things--such as causing them to behold their children and far-away
scenes."
"Have I an escort of babies?" asked Sanders despairingly. "I wish," he
went on, with quiet savageness, "I had chosen Kroomen or Bushmen"--the
sergeant winced--"or the mad people of the Isisi River, before I took a
half-company of the King's Houssas."
The sergeant gulped down the insult, saying nothing.
"Bring the woman to me," said Sanders. He scrambled into his clothing,
and lit his tent lantern.
After a while he heard the pattering of bare feet, and the girl came
into his tent, and regarded him quietly.
"M'Lino," said Sanders, "I told you that you were not to speak with my
men."
"Lord," she said, "they spoke with me first."
"Is this true?"
The sergeant at the tent door nodded. "Tembeli, the son of Sekambano,
spoke with her, thus disobeying orders, and the other men followed," he
said.
"Bushmen by gad!" fumed Sanders. "You will take Tembeli, the son of
Sekambano, tie him to a tree, and give him twenty lashes."
The sergeant saluted, produced a tawdry little notebook, all brass
binding and gold edges, and made a laborious note.
"As for you," said Sanders to the woman, "you drop your damned
bush-mesmerism, or I'll treat you in the same way--_alaki_?"
"Yes, lord," she said meekly, and departed.
Two Houssas tied Tembeli to a tree, and the sergeant gave him twenty-one
with a pliable hippo-hide--the extra one being the sergeant's
perquisite.
In the morning the sergeant reported that Tembeli had died in the night,
and Sanders worried horribly.
"It isn't the flogging," he said; "he has had the _chicotte_ before."
"It is the woman," said the sergeant wisely. "She is a witch; I foresaw
this when she joined the column."
They buried Tembeli, the son of Sekambano, and Sanders wrote three
reports of the circumstances of the death, each of which he tore up.
Then he marched on.
That night the column halted near a village, and Sanders sent the woman,
under escort, to the chief, with orders to see her safely to the Sangar
River. In half an hour she returned, with the escort, and Sergeant
Abiboo explained the circumstances.
"The chief will not take her in, being afraid."
"Afraid?" Sanders spluttered in his wrath; "Afraid? What is he afraid
of?"
"Her devilry," said the sergeant; "the _lo-koli_ has told him the story
of Tebeki, and he will not have her."
Sanders swore volubly for five minutes; then he went off to interview
the chief of the village.
The interview was short and to the point. Sanders knew this native very
well, and made no mistakes.
"Chief," he said at the end of the palaver, "two things I may do; one is
to punish you for your disobedience, and the other is to go on my way."
"Master," said the other earnestly, "if you give my village to the fire,
yet I would not take the woman M'Lino."
"So much I realise," said Sanders; "therefore I will go on my way."
He marched at dawn on the following day, the woman a little ahead of the
column, and under his eye. Halting for a "chop" and rest at mid-day, a
man of the Houssas came to him and said there was a dead man hanging
from a tree in the wood. Sanders went immediately with the man to the
place of the hanging, for he was responsible for the peace of the
district.
"Where?" he asked, and the man pointed to a straight gum-tree that stood
by itself in a clearing.
"Where?" asked Sanders again, for there was no evidence of tragedy. The
man still pointed at the tree, and Sanders frowned.
"Go forward and touch his foot," said the Commissioner, and, after a
little hesitation, the soldier walked slowly to the tree and put out his
hand. But he touched nothing but air, as far as Sanders could see.
"You are mad," he said, and whistled for the sergeant.
"What do you see there?" asked Sanders, and the sergeant replied
instantly:
"Beyond the hanging man----"
"There is no hanging man," said Sanders coolly--for he began to
appreciate the need for calm reasoning--"nothing but a tree and some
shadows."
The Houssa looked puzzled, and turned a grave face to his.
"Master, there is a man hanging," he said.
"That is so," said Sanders quietly; "we must investigate this matter."
And he signed for the party to return to the camp.
On the way he asked carelessly if the sergeant had spoken with the woman
M'Lino.
"I saw her, but she did not speak, except with her eyes."
Sanders nodded. "Tell me," he said, "where did you bury Tembeli, the son
of Sekambano?"
"Master, we left him, in accordance with our custom, on the ground at
the foot of a tree."
Sanders nodded again, for this is not the custom of the Houssas.
"We will go back on our tracks to the camping place where the woman came
to us," he said.
They marched until sundown, and whilst two men pitched his tent Sanders
strolled round the little camp. The men were sitting about their
cooking-pots, but the woman M'Lino sat apart, her elbows on her knees,
her face between her hands.
"M'Lino," he said to her, halting suddenly before her, "how many men
have you killed in your life?"
She looked at him long and fixedly, and he returned the stare; then she
dropped her eyes. "Many men," she said.
"So I think," said Sanders.
He was eating his dinner when Abiboo came slowly toward him.
"Master, the man has died," he said.
Sanders looked at him narrowly.
"Which man?"
"The man you chicotted with your own hand," said Abiboo.
Now, the Commissioner had neither chicotted a man, nor had he ordered
punishment, but he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, "I will see him."
On the edge of the camp there was a little group about a prostrate
figure. The Houssas fell apart with black looks as Sanders came near,
and there was some muttering. Though Sanders did not see it, M'Lino
looked strangely at Ahmid, a Houssa, who took up his rifle and went
stealthily into the bush.
The Commissioner bent over the man who lay there, felt his breast, and
detected no beat of heart.
"Get me my medicine chest," he said, but none obeyed him.
"Sergeant," he repeated, "bring my medicine chest!"
Abiboo saluted slowly, and, with every appearance of reluctance, went.
He came back with the case of undressed skin, and Sanders opened it,
took out the ammonia bottle, and applied it to the man's nose. He made
no sign.
"We shall see," was all that Sanders said when the experiment failed. He
took a hypodermic syringe and filled the little tube with a solution of
strychnine. This he jabbed unceremoniously into the patient's back. In a
minute the corpse sat up, jerkily.
"Ha!" said Sanders, cheerfully; "I am evidently a great magician!"
He rose to his feet, dusted his knees, and beckoned the sergeant.
"Take four men and return to the place where you left Tembeli. If the
leopards have not taken him, you will meet him on the road, because by
this time he will have waked up."
He saw the party march off, then turned his attention to M'Lino.
"My woman," he said, "it is evident to me that you are a witch, although
I have met your like before"--it was observed that the face of Sanders
was very white. "I cannot flog you, because you are a woman, but I can
kill you."
She laughed.
Their eyes met in a struggle for mastery, and so they stared at one
another for a space of time which seemed to Sanders a thousand years,
but which was in all probability less than a minute.
"It would be better if you killed yourself," she said.
"I think so," said Sanders dully, and fumbled for his revolver.
It was half drawn, his thumb on the hammer, when a rifle banged in the
bushes and the woman fell forward without a word.
Ahmid, the Houssa, was ever a bad shot.
* * * * *
"I believe," said Sanders, later, "that you took your rifle to kill me,
being under the influence of M'Lino, so I will make no bad report
against you."
"Master," said the Houssa simply, "I know nothing of the matter."
"That I can well believe," said Sanders, and gave the order to march.