A day or so after we had got to work upon the quap I found myself so
sleepless and miserable that the ship became unendurable. Just before
the rush of sunrise I borrowed Pollack’s gun, walked down the planks,
clambered over the quap heaps and prowled along the beach. I went
perhaps a mile and a half that day and some distance beyond the ruins
of the old station. I became interested in the desolation about me, and
found when I returned that I was able to sleep for nearly an hour. It
was delightful to have been alone for so long,—no captain, no Pollack,
no one. Accordingly I repeated this expedition the next morning and the
next until it became a custom with me. There was little for me to do
once the digging and wheeling was organised, and so these prowlings of
mine grew longer and longer, and presently I began to take food with
me.
I pushed these walks far beyond the area desolated by the quap. On the
edges of that was first a zone of stunted vegetation, then a sort of
swampy jungle that was difficult to penetrate, and then the beginnings
of the forest, a scene of huge tree stems and tangled creeper ropes and
roots mingled with oozy mud. Here I used to loaf in a state between
botanising and reverie—always very anxious to know what was up above in
the sunlight—and here it was I murdered a man.
It was the most unmeaning and purposeless murder imaginable. Even as I
write down its well-remembered particulars there comes again the sense
of its strangeness, its pointlessness, its incompatibility with any of
the neat and definite theories people hold about life and the meaning
of the world. I did this thing and I want to tell of my doing it, but
why I did it and particularly why I should be held responsible for it I
cannot explain.
That morning I had come upon a track in the forest, and it had occurred
to me as a disagreeable idea that this was a human pathway. I didn’t
want to come upon any human beings. The less our expedition saw of the
African population the better for its prospects. Thus far we had been
singularly free from native pestering. So I turned back and was making
my way over mud and roots and dead fronds and petals scattered from the
green world above when abruptly I saw my victim.
I became aware of him perhaps forty feet off standing quite still and
regarding me.
He wasn’t by any means a pretty figure. He was very black and naked
except for a dirty loin-cloth, his legs were ill-shaped and his toes
spread wide and the upper edge of his cloth and a girdle of string cut
his clumsy abdomen into folds. His forehead was low, his nose very flat
and his lower lip swollen and purplish-red. His hair was short and
fuzzy, and about his neck was a string and a little purse of skin. He
carried a musket, and a powder-flask was stuck in his girdle. It was a
curious confrontation. There opposed to him stood I, a little soiled,
perhaps, but still a rather elaborately civilised human being, born,
bred and trained in a vague tradition. In my hand was an unaccustomed
gun. And each of us was essentially a teeming, vivid brain, tensely
excited by the encounter, quite unaware of the other’s mental content
or what to do with him.
He stepped back a pace or so, stumbled and turned to run.
“Stop,” I cried; “stop, you fool!” and started to run after him,
shouting such things in English. But I was no match for him over the
roots and mud.