第5章

He caught up a log of fire wood and laid open the scalp of the black boy, from the eye to the crown of his head.The boy dropped, and Everett, seeing the blood creeping through his kinky wool, turned ill with nausea.Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself shouting, "The BLACK nigger! The BLACK NIGGER! He touched me! I TELL you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and gave him fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling and nausea ceased.

Then, partly in shame, partly as a bribe, he sought out the injured boy and gave him the entire roll of cloth.It had cost Everett ten francs.To the wood-boy it meant a year's wages.The boy hugged it in his arms, as he might a baby, and crooned over it.From under the blood-stained bandage, humbly, without resentment, he lifted his tired eyes to those of the white man.Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same question.

During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many missions, stations, one-man wood posts.He talked to Jesuit fathers, to inspecteurs, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant tusks, in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages.According to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of avarice, of hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade that were abnormal, unthinkable.

The note never was of hope, never of cheer, never inspiring.There was always the grievance, the spirit of unrest, of rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate.Of his own land and life he heard nothing, not even when his face was again turned toward the east.Nor did he think of it.As now he saw them, the rules and principles and standards of his former existence were petty and credulous.But he assured himself he had not abandoned those standards.He had only temporarily laid them aside, as he had left behind him in London his frock-coat and silk hat.Not because he would not use them again, but because in the Congo they were ridiculous.

For weeks, with a missionary as a guide, he walked through forests into which the sun never penetrated, or, on the river, moved between banks where no white man had placed his foot; where, at night, the elephants came trooping to the water, and, seeing the lights of the boat, fled crashing through the jungle; where the great hippos, puffing and blowing, rose so close to his elbow that he could have tossed his cigarette and hit them.The vastness of the Congo, toward which he had so jauntily set forth, now weighed upon his soul.The immeasurable distances; the slumbering disregard of time; the brooding, interminable silences; the efforts to conquer the land that were so futile, so puny, and so cruel, at first appalled and, later, left him unnerved, rebellious, childishly defiant.

What health was there, he demanded hotly, in holding in a dripping jungle to morals, to etiquette, to fashions of conduct? Was he, the white man, intelligent, trained, disciplined in mind and body, to be judged by naked cannibals, by chattering monkeys, by mammoth primeval beasts? His code of conduct was his own.He was a law unto himself.

He came down the river on one of the larger steamers of the State, and, on this voyage, with many fellow-passengers.He was now on his way home, but in the fact he felt no elation.Each day the fever ran tingling through his veins, and left him listless, frightened, or choleric.One night at dinner, in one of these moods of irritation, he took offence at the act of a lieutenant who, in lack of vegetables, drank from the vinegar bottle.Everett protested that such table manners were unbecoming an officer, even an officer of the Congo; and on the lieutenant resenting his criticism, Everett drew his revolver.The others at the table took it from him, and locked him in his cabin.In the morning, when he tried to recall what had occurred, he could remember only that, for some excellent reason, he had hated some one with a hatred that could be served only with death.He knew it could not have been drink, as each day the State allowed him but one half-bottle of claret.That but for the interference of strangers he might have shot a man, did not interest him.In the outcome of what he regarded merely as an incident, he saw cause neither for congratulation or self-reproach.For his conduct he laid the blame upon the sun, and doubled his dose of fruit salts.

Everett was again at Matadi, waiting for the Nigeria to take on cargo before returning to Liverpool.During the few days that must intervene before she sailed, he lived on board.Although now actually bound north, the thought afforded him no satisfaction.

His spirits were depressed, his mind gloomy; a feeling of rebellion, of outlawry, filled him with unrest.

While the ship lay at the wharf, Hardy, her English captain, Cuthbert, the purser, and Everett ate on deck under the awning, assailed by electric fans.Each was clad in nothing more intricate than pajamas.

"To-night," announced Hardy, with a sigh, "we got to dress ship.

Mr.Ducret and his wife are coming on board.We carry his trade goods, and I got to stand him a dinner and champagne.You boys,"he commanded, "must wear 'whites,' and talk French.""I'll dine on shore," growled Everett.

"Better meet them," advised Cuthbert.The purser was a pink-cheeked, clear-eyed young man, who spoke the many languages of the coast glibly, and his own in the soft, detached voice of a well-bred Englishman.He was in training to enter the consular service.

Something in his poise, in the assured manner in which he handled his white stewards and the black Kroo boys, seemed to Everett a constant reproach, and he resented him.