The story was told to me by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton
cutter, one night when we lay anchored in Helford River. It was towards
the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly
with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a
dreary look. There was no other boat on the wooded creek and the swish
of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All these
circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story, but most of all
the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the story of
a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled his
soul. However, let the story speak for itself.
Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never classmates.
Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched
out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The
definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited
upon the children overbore this prophecy. Hatteras, the father,
disorganized his son’s future by dropping unexpectedly through one of
the trapways of speculation into the Bankruptcy Court beneath, just two
months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad
was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a
stock-in-trade which consisted of a schoolboy’s command of the classics,
a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker.
The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose
father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants,
obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch
factory in the Bight of Benin.
Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone, and met
with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident did not
come to Walker’s ears until some time afterwards, nor when he heard of
it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon Hatteras. But
chronologically it comes into the story at this point, and so may as
well be immediately told.
There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself on
the swamps of the Forcados River with the mangrove forest closing in
about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put Hatteras
ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach. Half-a-dozen
Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him, but they could
speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak no Kru. So that
although there was no lack of conversation there was not much
interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his traps. The Kru
boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the factory. They mounted
the steps to the verandah on the first floor and laid their loads down.
Then they proceeded to further conversation. Hatteras gathered from
their excited faces and gestures that they wished to impart information,
but he could make neither head nor tail of a word they said, and at last
he retired from the din of their chatter through the windows of a room
which gave on to the verandah, and sat down to wait for his superior,
the agent.
It was early in the morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until
midday patiently. In the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent
would have shown a kindly consideration if he had left a written message
or an intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks
came in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were
not thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the
house, so he contemplated the mud banks and the mud river and the
mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There
are few things quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is
obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how
singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the quietude began to jar on
Hatteras’ nerves. He was besides very hungry. To while away the time he
took a stroll round the verandah.
He walked along the side of the houses towards the back, and as he
neared the back he heard a humming sound. The further he went the louder
it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so metallic
and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.
Hatteras turned the corner and what he saw was this—a shuttered window
and a cloud of flies. The flies were not aimlessly swarming outside the
window; they streamed in through the lattice of the shutters in a busy,
practical way; they came in columns from the forest and converged upon
the shutters; and the hum sounded from within the room.
Hatteras looked about for a Kru boy for the sake of company, but at that
moment there was not one to be seen.
He felt the cold strike at his spine. He went back into the room in
which he had been sitting. He sat again but he sat shivering. The agent
had left no word for him.... The Kru boys had been anxious to
explain—something. The humming of the flies about that shuttered window
seemed to Hatteras a more explicit language than the Kru boys’
chatterings. He penetrated into the interior of the house, and reckoned
up the doors. He opened one of them ever so slightly and the buzzing
came through like the hum of a wheel in a factory revolving in the
collar of a strap. He flung the door open and stood upon the threshold.
The atmosphere of the room appalled him; he felt the sweat break cold
upon his forehead and a deadly sickness in all his body. Then he nerved
himself to enter.
At first he saw little because of the gloom. In a while, however, he
made out a bed stretched along the wall and a thing stretched upon the
bed. The thing was more or less shapeless because it was covered with a
black furry sort of rug. Hatteras, however, had little trouble in
defining it. He knew now for certain what it was that the Kru boys had
been so anxious to explain to him. He approached the bed and bent over
it, and as he bent over it the horrible thing occurred which left so
vivid an impression on Hatteras. The black furry rug suddenly lifted
itself from the bed, beat about Hatteras’ face, and dissolved into
flies. The Kru boys found Hatteras in a dead swoon on the floor
half-an-hour later, and next day, of course, he was down with the fever.
The agent had died of it three days before.
Hatteras recovered from the fever, but not from the impression. It left
him with a prevailing sense of horror and, at first, with a sense of
disgust too.
“It’s an obscene country,” he would say. But he stayed in it, for he had
no choice. All the money which he could save went to the support of his
family, and for six years the firm he served moved him from district to
district, from factory to factory.
Now the second item of his stock-in-trade was a gift of tongues, and
about this time it began to bring him profit. Wherever Hatteras was
posted, he managed to pick up a native dialect, and with the dialect
inevitably a knowledge of native customs. Dialects are numerous on the
west coast, and at the end of six years Hatteras could speak as many of
them as some traders could enumerate. Languages ran in his blood; he
acquired a reputation for knowledge and was offered service under the
Niger Protectorate, so that when, two years later, Walker came out to
Africa to open a new branch factory at a settlement on the Bonny River,
he found Hatteras stationed in command there.
Hatteras, in fact, went down to Bonny River town to meet the steamer
which brought his friend.
“I say, Dick, you look bad,” said Walker.
“People are not, as a rule, offensively robust about these parts.”
“I know that; but you’re the weariest bag of bones I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, look at yourself in a glass a year from now for my double,” said
Hatteras, and the pair went up river together.
“Your factory is next to the Residency,” said Hatteras. “There’s a
compound to each running down to the river, and there’s a palisade
between the compounds. I’ve cut a little gate in the palisade as it will
shorten the way from one house to the other.”
The wicket gate was frequently used during the next few months—indeed
more frequently than Walker imagined. He was only aware that, when they
were both at home, Hatteras would come through it of an evening and
smoke on his verandah. There he would sit for hours cursing the country,
raving about the lights of Piccadilly Circus, and offering his immortal
soul in exchange for a comic opera tune played upon a barrel-organ.
Walker possessed a big atlas, and one of Hatteras’ chief diversions was
to trace with his finger a bee-line across the African continent and the
Bay of Biscay until he reached London.
More rarely Walker would stroll over to the Residency, but he soon came
to notice that Hatteras had a distinct preference for the factory and
for the factory verandah. The reason for the preference puzzled Walker
considerably. He drew a quite erroneous conclusion that Hatteras was
hiding at the Residency—well, someone whom it was prudent, especially in
an official, to conceal. He abandoned the conclusion, however, when he
discovered that his friend was in the habit of making solitary
expeditions. At times Hatteras would be absent for a couple of days, at
times for a week, and, so far as Walker could ascertain, he never so
much as took a servant with him to keep him company. He would simply
announce at night his intended departure, and in the morning he would be
gone. Nor on his return did he ever offer to Walker any explanation of
his journeys. On one occasion, however, Walker broached the subject.
Hatteras had come back the night before, and he sat crouched up in a
deck chair, looking intently into the darkness of the forest.
“I say,” asked Walker, “isn’t it rather dangerous to go slumming about
West Africa alone?”
Hatteras did not reply for a moment. He seemed not to have heard the
suggestion, and when he did speak it was to ask a quite irrelevant
question.
“Have you ever seen the Horse Guards’ Parade on a dark rainy night?” he
asked; but he never moved his head, he never took his eyes from the
forest. “The wet level of ground looks just like a lagoon and the arches
a Venice palace above it.”
“But look here, Dick!” said Walker, keeping to his subject, “you never
leave word when you are coming back. One never knows that you have come
back until you show yourself the morning after.”
“I think,” said Hatteras slowly, “that the finest sight in the world is
to be seen from the bridge in St. James’ Park when there’s a State Ball
on at Buckingham Palace and the light from the windows reddens the lake
and the carriages glance about the Mall like fireflies.”
“Even your servants don’t know when you come back,” said Walker.
“Oh,” said Hatteras quietly, “so you have been asking questions of my
servants?”
“I had a good reason,” replied Walker. “Your safety”; and with that the
conversation dropped.
Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African
mangrove forest night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that ever
a man’s ears hearkened to. And the sounds come not so much from the
birds or the soughing of branches; they seem to come from the swamp-life
underneath the branches, at the roots of the trees. There’s a ceaseless
stir as of a myriad reptiles creeping in the slime. Listen long enough
and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush of innumerable
crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again a more
distinctive sound emerges from the rest—the croaking of a bull-frog, the
whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras would start up in
his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room that hears another dog
barking in the street.
“Doesn’t it sound damned wicked?” he said with a queer smile of
enjoyment.
Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them
struck obliquely upon Hatteras’ face and slanted off from it in a
narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves
of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which rang in Hatteras’
voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he
gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth. In
some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he
appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus had
Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon his
face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his friend. He
wondered whether all these months his judgment had been wrong. And out
of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
“Dick,” he said, “this house of mine stands between your house and the
forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the swamp.
Is that why you prefer it to your own?”
Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost
suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a little
said:
“It’s not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you;
it’s the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these
miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can’t get the
forests and the undergrowth and the swamp out of my mind. I dream of
them at night. I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of
mud. Listen,” and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forward.
“Doesn’t it sound wicked?”
“But all this talk about London?” cried Walker.
“Oh, don’t you understand?” interrupted Hatteras roughly. Then he
changed his tone and gave his reason quietly. “One has to struggle
against a fascination of that sort. It’s devil’s work. So for all I am
worth I talk about London.”
“Look here, Dick,” said Walker. “You had better get leave and go back to
the old country for a spell.”
“A very solid piece of advice,” said Hatteras, and he went home to the
Residency.
The next morning he had again disappeared. But Walker discovered upon
his table a couple of new volumes, and glanced at the titles. They were
Burton’s account of his pilgrimage to El Medinah 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 someone 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 treetops so that while a full half of the enclosure was lit
by 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 leaned forward listening. He heard the sound
again, and a moment after a second 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 someone 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 palisade. 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 rickety, 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 plantain 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 loud 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 a rather 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 natives 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 those 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.
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 was
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 that 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 glare 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.
“Jim,” said Hatteras, starting up, “I’ve got a year’s leave; I’m 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 years with these 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 his lectures 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 a while 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. Therefore
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—never. 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
man must run who serves the Empire. “Never a lotus closes, you know,” he
quoted, and went back to the factory with the consciousness that he had
been telling lies.
It was a sense of duty that prompted Hatteras, of that Walker assured
himself 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 have passed 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 indraw 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.”