“Jim,” said Hatteras in his natural voice.
“That’s better,” said Walker. “Let’s go in and talk.”
He went up the steps and lighted the lamp. Hatteras followed him and the
two men faced one another. For a little while neither of them spoke.
Walker was repeating to himself that this man with the black skin, naked
except for a dirty loincloth and a few feathers on his head, was a white
man married to a white wife who was sleeping—nay, more likely crying—not
thirty yards away.
Hatteras began to mumble out his usual explanation of duty and the rest
of it.
“That won’t wash,” interrupted Walker. “What is it? A woman?”
“Good Heaven, no!” cried Hatteras suddenly. It was plain that that
explanation was at all events untrue. “Jim, I’ve a good mind to tell you
all about it.”
“You have got to,” said Walker. He stood between Hatteras and the steps.
“I told you how this country fascinated me in spite of myself,” he
began.
“But I thought,” interrupted Walker, “that you had got over that
since—why, man, you are married,” and he came across to Hatteras and
shook him by the shoulder. “Don’t you understand? You have a wife!”
“I know,” said Hatteras. “But there are things deeper at the heart of me
than the love of woman, and one of these things is the love of horror. I
tell you, it bites as nothing else does in the world. It’s like
absinthe, that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can’t do
without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first
landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now——”
He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. His voice dropped to
a passionate whisper, he locked and unlocked his fingers with feverish
movements, and his eyes shifted and glittered in an unnatural
excitement.
“It’s like going down to hell and coming up again and wanting to go down
again. Oh, you’d want to go down again. You’d find the whole earth pale.
You’d count the days until you went down again. Do you remember Orpheus?
I think he looked back, not to see if Eurydice was coming after him, but
because he knew it was the last glimpse he would get of hell.” At that
he broke off and began to chant in a crazy voice, wagging his head and
swaying his body to the rhythm of the lines—
Quum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem
Ignoscenda quidem scirent si ignoscere manes;
Restitit Eurydicenque suam jam luce sub ipsa
Immemor heu! victusque animi respexit.
“Oh, stop that!” cried Walker, and Hatteras laughed. “For God’s sake,
stop it!”
For the words brought back to him in a flash the vision of a classroom
with its chipped desks ranged against the varnished walls, the droning
sound of the form-master’s voice, and the swish of lilac bushes against
the lower window panes on summer afternoons. Then he said, “Oh, go on,
and let’s have done with it.”
Hatteras took up his tale again, and it seemed to Walker that the man
breathed the very miasma of the swamp and infected the room with it. He
spoke of leopard societies, murder clubs, human sacrifices. He had
witnessed them at the beginning, he had taken his share in them at the
last. He told the whole story without shame, with indeed a glowing
enjoyment. He spared Walker no details. He related them in their
loathsome completeness until Walker felt stunned and sick. “Stop,” he
said again, “stop! That’s enough.”
Hatteras, however, continued. He appeared to have forgotten Walker’s
presence. He told the story to himself, for his own amusement, as a
child will, and here and there he laughed, and the mere sound of his
laughter was inhuman. He only came to a stop when he saw Walker hold out
to him a cocked and loaded revolver.
“Well?” he asked. “Well?”
Walker still offered him the revolver.
“There are cases, I think, which neither God’s law nor man’s law seems
to have provided for. There’s your wife, you see, to be considered. If
you don’t take it I shall shoot you myself now, here, and mark you I
shall shoot you for the sake of a boy I loved at school in the old
country.”
Hatteras took the revolver in silence, laid it on the table, fingered it
for a little.
“My wife must never know,” he said.
“There’s the pistol. Outside’s the swamp. The swamp will tell no tales,
nor shall I. Your wife need never know.”
Hatteras picked up the pistol and stood up.
“Good-bye, Jim,” he said, and half pushed out his hand. Walker shook his
head, and Hatteras went out on the verandah and down the steps.
Walker heard him climb over the fence and then followed as far as the
verandah. In the still night the rustle and swish of the undergrowth
came quite clearly to his ears. The sound ceased, and a few minutes
afterwards the muffled crack of a pistol-shot broke the silence like the
tap of a hammer. The swamp, as Walker prophesied, told no tales. Mrs.
Hatteras gave the one explanation of her husband’s disappearance that
she knew, and returned broken-hearted to England. There was some loud
talk about the self-sacrificing energy which makes the English a
dominant race, and there you might think is the end of the story.
But some years later Walker went trudging up the Ogowe River in Congo
Français. He travelled as far as Woermann’s factory in Njob Island, and,
having transacted his business there, pushed up stream in the hope of
opening the upper reaches for trade purposes. He travelled for a hundred
and fifty miles in a little sternwheel steamer. At that point he
stretched an awning over a whale-boat, embarked himself, his banjo and
eight blacks from the steamer, and rowed for another fifty miles. There
he ran the boat’s nose into a clay cliff close to a Fan village, and
went ashore to negotiate with the chief.
There was a slip of forest between the village and the river banks, and
while Walker was still dodging the palm creepers which tapestried it he
heard a noise of lamentation. The noise came from the village, and was
general enough to assure him that a chief was dead. It rose in a chorus
of discordant howls, low in note and very long drawn out—wordless,
something like the howls of an animal in pain, and yet human by reason
of their infinite melancholy.
Walker pushed forward, came out upon a hillock fronting the palisade
which closed the entrance to the single street of huts, and passed down
into the village. It seemed as though he had been expected. For from
every hut the Fans rushed out towards him, the men dressed in their
filthiest rags, the women with their faces chalked and their heads
shaved. They stopped, however, on seeing a white man, and Walker knew
enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the coming of
the witch-doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural death, and
since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the Fan country,
it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the witch-doctor had
been sent for to discover the criminal. The village was consequently in
a lively state of apprehension, for the end of those who bewitch chiefs
to death is not easy. The Fans, however, politely invited Walker to
inspect the corpse. It lay in a dark hut, packed with the corpse’s
relations, who were shouting to it at the top of their voices on the
off-chance that its spirit might think better of its conduct and return
to the body. They explained to Walker that they had tried all the usual
varieties of persuasion. They had put red pepper into the chief’s eyes
while he was dying; they had propped open his mouth with a stick; they
had burned fibres of the oil-nut under his nose. In fact they had made
his death as uncomfortable as possible, but none the less he had died.
The witch-doctor arrived on the heels of the explanation, and Walker,
since he was powerless to interfere, thought it wise to retire for a
time. He went back to the hillock on the edge of the trees. Thence he
looked across and over the palisade, and had the whole length of the
street within his view.
The witch-doctor entered in from the opposite end to the beating of many
drums. The first thing Walker noticed was that he wore a square-skirted
eighteenth century coat and a tattered pair of brocaded knee breeches on
his bare legs; the second was that he limped—ever so slightly. Still he
limped, and with the right leg. Walker felt a strong desire to see the
man’s face, and his heart thumped within him as he came nearer and
nearer down the street. But his hair was so matted about his cheeks that
Walker could not distinguish a feature. “If I was only near enough to
see his eyes,” he thought. But he was not near enough, nor would it have
been prudent for him to have gone nearer.
The witch-doctor commenced the proceedings by ringing a handbell in
front of every hut. But that method of detection failed to work. The
bell rang successfully at every door. Walker watched the man’s progress,
watched his trailing limb, and began to discover familiarities in his
manner: “Pure fancy,” he argued with himself. “If he had not limped I
should have noticed nothing.”
Then the doctor took a wicker basket, covered with a rough wooden lid.
The Fans gathered in front of him; he repeated their names one after the
other, and at each name he lifted the lid. But that plan appeared to be
no improvement, for the lid never stuck. It came off readily at each
name. Walker, meanwhile, calculated the distance a man would have to
cover who walked across country from Bonny River to the Ogowe, and he
reflected with some relief that the chances were several thousand to one
that any man who made the attempt, be he black or white, would be eaten
on the way.
The witch-doctor turned back the big square cuffs of his sleeves as a
conjurer will do, and again repeated the names. This time, however, at
each name he rubbed the palms of his hands together. Walker was seized
with a sudden longing to rush down into the village and examine the
man’s right forearm for a bullet mark. The longing grew on him. The
witch-doctor went steadily through the list. Walker rose to his feet and
took a step or two down the hillock, when, of a sudden, at one
particular name, the doctor’s hands flew apart and waved wildly about
him. A single cry from a single voice went up out of the group of Fans.
The group fell back and left one man standing alone. He made no defence,
no resistance. Two men came forward and bound his hands and his feet and
his body with tie-tie. Then they carried him within a hut.
“That’s sheer murder,” thought Walker. He could not rescue the victim,
he knew. But he could get a nearer view of the witch-doctor. Already the
man was packing up his paraphernalia. Walker stepped back among the
trees, and running with all his speed, made the circuit of the village.
He reached the further end of the street just as the witch-doctor walked
out into the open.
Walker ran forward a yard or so until he, too, stood plain to see on the
level ground. The witch-doctor did see him and stopped. He stopped only
for a moment and gazed earnestly in Walker’s direction. Then he went on
again towards his own hut in the forest.
Walker made no attempt to follow him. “He has seen me,” he thought. “If
he knows me he will come down to the river bank to-night.” Consequently,
he made the black rowers camp a couple of hundred yards down stream. He
himself remained alone in his canoe.
The night fell noiseless and black, and the enclosing forest made it yet
blacker. A few stars burned in the strip of sky above his head. Those
stars and the glimmering of the clay bank to which the boat was moored
were the only light which Walker had. It was as dark as that night when
Walker waited for Hatteras at the wicket gate.
He placed his gun and a pouch of cartridges on one side, an unlighted
lantern on the other, and then he took up his banjo, and again he
waited. He waited for a couple of hours, until a light crackle as of
twigs snapping came to him out of the forest. Walker struck a chord on
his banjo, and played a hymn tune. He played, “Abide with me,” thinking
that some picture of a home, of a Sunday evening in England’s summer
time, perhaps of a group of girls singing about a piano, might flash
into the darkened mind of the man upon the bank, and draw him as with
cords. The music went tinkling up and down the river, but no one spoke,
no one moved upon the bank. So Walker changed the tune, and played a
melody of the barrel organs and Piccadilly Circus. He had not played
more than a dozen bars, before he heard a sob from the bank, and then
the sound of something sliding down the clay. The next instant, a figure
shone black against the clay. The boat lurched under the weight of a
foot upon the gunwale, and a man plumped down in front of Walker.
“Well, what is it?” asked Walker, as he laid down his banjo and felt for
a match in his pocket.
It seemed as though the words roused the man to a perception that he had
made a mistake. He said as much hurriedly in trade-English, and sprang
up as though he would leap from the boat. Walker caught hold of his
ankle.
“No, you don’t,” said he; “you must have meant to visit me. This isn’t
Henley,” and he jerked the man back into the bottom of the boat.
The man explained that he had paid a visit out of the purest
friendliness.
“You’re the witch-doctor, I suppose,” said Walker.
The other replied that he was, and proceeded to state that he was
willing to give information about much that made white men curious. He
would explain why it was of singular advantage to possess a white man’s
eyeball, and how very advisable it was to kill anyone you caught making
Itung. The danger of passing near a cotton tree which had red earth at
the roots provided a subject which no prudent man should disregard; and
Tando, with his driver ants, was worth conciliating. The witch-doctor
was prepared to explain to Walker how to conciliate Tando. Walker
replied that it was very kind of the witch-doctor, but Tando did not
really worry him. He was, in fact, very much more worried by an
inability to understand how a native so high up the Ogowe River had
learned to speak trade-English.
The witch-doctor waved the question aside, and remarked that Walker must
have enemies. “Pussin bad too much,” he called them. “Pussin woh-woh.
Berrah well! Ah send grand krau-krau and dem pussin die one time.”
Walker could not recollect for the moment any “pussin” whom he wished to
die one time, whether from grand krau-krau or any other disease. “Wait a
bit,” he continued, “there is one man—Dick Hatteras!” and he struck the
match suddenly. The witch-doctor started forward as though to put it
out.
Walker, however, had the door of the lantern open. He set the match to
the wick of the candle, and closed the door fast. The witch-doctor drew
back. Walker lifted the lantern and threw the light on his face. The
witch-doctor buried his face in his hands, and supported his elbows on
his knees. Immediately Walker darted forward a hand, seized the loose
sleeve of the witch-doctor’s coat, and slipped it back along his arm to
the elbow. It was the sleeve of the right arm, and there on the fleshy
part of the forearm was the scar of a bullet.
“Yes,” said Walker. “By God, it is Dick Hatteras!”
“Well?” cried Hatteras, taking his hands from his face. “What the devil
made you tum-tum ‘Tommy Atkins’ on the banjo? Damn you!”
“Dick, I saw you this afternoon.”
“I know, I know. Why on earth didn’t you kill me that night in your
compound?”
“I mean to make up for that mistake to-night!”
Walker took his rifle on to his knee. Hatteras saw the movement, leaned
forward quickly, snatched up the rifle, snatched up the cartridges,
thrust a couple of cartridges into the breech, and handed the loaded
rifle back to his old friend.
“That’s right,” he said. “I remember. ‘There are some cases neither
God’s law nor man’s law has quite made provision for.’” And then he
stopped, with his finger on his lip. “Listen!” he said.
From the depths of the forest there came faintly, very sweetly the sound
of church-bells ringing—a peal of bells ringing at midnight in the heart
of West Africa. Walker was startled. The sound seemed fairy work, so
faint, so sweet was it.
“It’s no fancy, Jim,” said Hatteras, “I hear them every night, and at
matins and vespers. There was a Jesuit monastery here two hundred years
ago. The bells remain, and some of the clothes.” He touched his coat as
he spoke. “The Fans still ring the bells from habit. Just think of it!
Every morning, every evening, every midnight, I hear those bells. They
talk to me of little churches perched on hillsides in the old country,
of hawthorn lanes, and women—English women. English girls—thousands of
miles away, going along them to church. God help me! Jim, have you got
an English pipe?”
“Yes; an English briarwood and some bird’s-eye.”
Walker handed Hatteras his briarwood and his pouch of tobacco. Hatteras
filled the pipe, lit it at the lantern, and sucked at it avidly for a
moment. Then he gave a sigh and drew in the smoke more slowly and yet
more slowly.
“My wife?” he asked at last, in a low voice.
“She is in England. She thinks you dead.”
Hatteras nodded.
“There’s a jar of Scotch whisky in the locker behind you,” said Walker.
Hatteras turned round, lifted out the jar and a couple of tin cups. He
poured whisky into each and handed one to Walker.
“No, thanks,” said Walker. “I don’t think I will.”
Hatteras looked at his companion for an instant. Then he emptied
deliberately both cups over the side of the boat. Next he took the pipe
from his lips. The tobacco was not half consumed. He poised the pipe for
a little in his hand. Then he blew into the bowl and watched the dull
red glow kindle into sparks of flame as he blew. Very slowly he tapped
the bowl against the thwart of the boat until the burning tobacco fell
with a hiss into the water. He laid the pipe gently down and stood up.
“So long, old man,” he said, and sprang out on the clay. Walker turned
the lantern until the light made a disc upon the bank.
“Good-bye, Jim,” said Hatteras, and he climbed up the bank until he
stood in the light of the lantern. Twice Walker raised the rifle to his
shoulder, twice he lowered it. Then he remembered that Hatteras and he
had been at school together.
“Good-bye, Dicky,” he cried, and fired. Hatteras tumbled down to the
boat-side. The blacks down river were roused by the shot. Walker shouted
to them to stay where they were, and as soon as their camp was quiet he
stepped ashore. He filled up the whisky jar with water, tied it to
Hatteras’ feet, shook his hand, and pushed the body into the river. The
next morning he started back to Fernan Vaz.