第 7 页

It was baking hot down below, and the place was alive with rats and cockroaches. I rigged a wind-scoop through the port in my room, got into pyjamas, and lay down on the top of the bunk. But I can't say I did much business with sleep; the menagerie held cheerful meetings all round, and the perspiration tickled as it ran off my body in little streams; and these things keep a man awake. My room was to starboard, and when through the porthole I saw day blaze up from behind the low line of African hills, I turned out, rolled a cigarette, and went on deck. I was just in time to see the first funeral.

Four very frightened-looking men and a profane mate were fitting a couple of biscuit sacks over a twisted figure which lay on the grimy, greasy deck planks. They pulled one over the head and another over the heels, and then with a palm and needle made them fast about the figure's middle. Afterwards they lashed a fire bar along the shins, and then, with faces screwed up and turned away, they lifted the body as though it had been red-hot, and toppled it over the rail.

The dead man dived through the swell along side almost without a splash; but, as though his coming had been a signal, a dozen streaks of foam started up from various points, each with a black triangular fin in the middle of it; and I did not feel any the happier from knowing precisely what that convoy meant.

However, the sharks and the body drifted away into the wake astern, and I rolled another cigarette and got a chair and sat on the break of the bridge deck. From there I saw the mate and his four hands fetch one by one five other bodies out of the forecastle, and prepare them for burial. Three they covered with canvas; and then the supply of biscuit sacks seemed to run out, because the last two they put over the side with the fire-bar attachment only.

The fifth man had to be content with four participators in his funeral. The remaining sailor held strangely aloof; his face turning through a prism of curious colours; his body swaying in uncouth jerks. As the fifth corpse toppled over the rail, this fellow threw himself down on the hatch cover, and lay there writhing and screaming in a torment of cramps.

At that moment a man in a white serge cas sock, which reached to his heels, came out of one of the forecastle doors and walked rapidly across to the new victim. He was a long, lean man with a hawk's nose, and bright, large eyes. The skin of his face was like baggy yellow leather, and it was dry with fever. As he knelt beside the writhing sailor, I saw the metal crucifix nearly fall from his thin hands through sheer weakness. He was the Portuguese bishop from down-coast, of course, and when I remembered that he had just been through black-water fever (which is own brother to yellow jack) I judged that, from a human point of view, he was behaving with exquisite foolishness in meddling with first-crop cholera patients. But I respected him a good deal for all that, and went and got opium and acetate of lead and gave the man on the hatch a swingeing dose. It was a useless thing to do, because the chap had got to die, and one incurred one's own risks by going near him; but if that bishop was a fool, I had got to be a fool too, and there was an end of it.

Mark you, I wasn't feeling a bit frightened then. I'd been through cholera-cramp in India, and knew what my chances were, and was ready to face them without whimpering; though of course I'd freely have given every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again. But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole like that.

I had breakfast all to myself that morning, because no one else turned up; and afterwards the captain did me the honour to call me into consultation. My Portuguese is off colour, but I speak enough to get along with.

"You English know so much about these things," he said.

"We keep clean ships," I answered, " and when anything goes wrong on them we do not lose our heads. Also we try to trace our way back to the root of evils. How did this plague start?"

"You must have brought it on board at Ba nana. We had none in the ship before you came."

"We did not bring it. There is no cholera in the Congo now. And, moreover, your passengerboys are none of them sick. You must try back further."

We did that together laboriously; and at last traced the mischief to that fatal case of baccalhao which had been shipped at Bahia, an infected port; and had this essence of pest promptly thrown to the sharks. Next we went into the question of hands.

"I have not enough firemen and trimmers left to man a single watch," said the captain. "The cholera hit the stoke-hold first. The fellows who are working there now have stood three watches on end, and they are hardly making enough steam to give her steerage way."

"If you let your old beast of a tramp stop and drift about here like a potato-chip in a frying-pan, it won't improve matters. Those of us who don't peg out with cholera will start murdering one another. The niggers will begin."

"Yes, I know. I wanted some of them to serve as firemen for good pay. But they will not listen to me. I do not think they under stood. Will you come and translate?"

We took revolvers, holding them ostentatiously in our pockets. We crossed the dizzy sunshine of the lower main deck. The negroes on the fore castle head were chattering together like a fair of monkeys, but they ceased when we came up, and stared at us with faces working with excitement.

"Which be head-man?" I asked.

A big fellow stood forward, hat in hand. " I fit for head-man, sar."

I told him hands were wanted for the stoke hold, and that the gorgeous pay of four shillings English per diem was offered.

"We no fit for stoke, sar," said he. " We gen'lemen wid money, sar. We passenger-boys, sar."

"Very well, daddy," said I. " But stoke you've got to. And if you won't do it civilly, you'll do it the other way. Now, my frien', pick me out twelve good strong boys. If you don't do it, I'll shoot you dead one-time; if they won't work, I'll shoot them. You quite savvy?"

We got the men and they went off to the stoke-hold, frightened and raging. Poor wretches, eight of them toppled over in the next twentyfour hours, and half-a-day later the engines stopped for the last time. I was smoking industriously under the alley-way, and Tordoff came and loafed near me.

"I'm a bally fine chief-engineer, aren't I?" said he.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I'm the best man that's left of all our crowd, that's all. They're every sinner of them dead, black men, white men, and Portuguese. Where are we now?"

"Slap bang under the equator. That mountaintop sticking out of the water is San Thome."

"Then I'm off there," said Tordoff. "This bloomin' steamer's played out. She can't steam, and she wouldn't sail if there was any wind, which there isn't. I shall take one of the boats and skip. You'd better come too."

No."

"What for? Why not?"

"Because there are only two boats and they aren't enough for all hands."

"The boats will hold all the white men, or them that call themselves white. But if you are one of the missionary crowd that hold niggers as good "

"I'm not. I know what niggers are, and there fore I'm not an Exeter Hall fool about them. I'll make free to tell you this boat-game's been thought of before; but that bishop says he won't leave the niggers to peg out alone; and if he's going to be idiot enough to stay, I am going to be another idiot. That's the size of it."

"Well," said Tordoff, " I've got no use for that kind of foolishness myself, and if you're left, you needn't come and haunt me afterwards. You've had the straight, square tip. And you'll do no good by spreading this palaver about. If any one tries to stop us, there'll be a lot of men killed. We aren't the kind of crowd that'll stick at trifles if we're meddled with. So long!"

He slouched off, and I went to the deck of the bridge and looked down on a curious scene. The main deck was a shambles. There were a score of corpses there, pitching about stiffly to the roll of the ship, with no one offering to touch them. There were a score more of sick, shrieking and knotting themselves i n their agony. The survivors were in two sorts of panic the comatose, and the madly violent. A crowd of yelling, dancing negroes, most of them stark naked, had set up a ju-ju on a barrel of the fore-deck winch, and were sacrificing to it a hen which they had stolen from one of the coops. The little wooden god I knew: it was one that I had picked up in the Kasai country, and I was taking it home as a curiosity. It had been lifted from my own state-room by some prowling negro, and was now receiving fresh daubs of red blood amid the clamour of frantic worshippers. It was quite a reasonable thing to expect under the circumstances. But what threw the action of these savages into grotesque relief was the sight of another man crouched in prayer beside the bulwarks. It was the bishop. His tottering hands were pinning the crucifix to his hollow chest; his hips were swaying under him with weakness; his dry, cracked lips moved noise lessly; and the molten sunlight beat upon him as it pleased.

The sight of that man gave me a bad feeling. Before I knew quite how it happened, I was down on the frizzling main-deck, and the ju-ju had been plucked from the winch barrel and flung over the side, together with the tortured hen, and I was fighting for my life amongst a crowd of furies. Tordoff was there too (though I'm sure I don't know how he came), and thanks to him I got back again on to the bridge deck; but the bishop did not come with us. He stayed down there amongst those sullen animal blacks, imploring them, praying with them, soothing them. He was a braver man than I, that Portuguese.

Another night came down, and the steamer wallowed in inky blackness. In the morning we were still more helpless. The mates, the few remaining sailors, the stewards and cooks, and the two yellow traders had gone; the captain lay in the alley-way with a knife between his shoulderblades; the bishop and I and Tordoff were the only white men remaining on board. Yes, Tordoff. I went into the pantry smoking a cigarette, and found him there, eating biscuits and raisins.

"You here?" I said. " Why, man, I thought you cleared out with the rest."

"No," he said, " I thought it would be fine to stay behind and be able to scoff the cabin grub just as I pleased. I just stayed for the grub, and it's worth it."

"You're rather a decent sort of liar," I said; "do you mind shaking hands?"

"I don't see the need," he said; " and besides, I'm using my hands to eat these raisins; but you may kick me if you like. There isn't a redder fool than me in both Atlantics. By the way, how's the padre?"

"Very sick. I looked into his room and found him lying in his bunk. He couldn't talk."

"I put him there. 'Found the old fool preach,ing to those beasts on all fours this morning, and looked on till he dropped; then I lugged him under cover."

"Any more dead?"

"Five pegged out during the night. They were lying pleasantly in and amongst the others, and there were seven more sick. I told the head man when I went down with the padre to have them put over the side or I'd kill him. And when I came back I found he'd shoved over the whole dozen. The man-and-a-brother's a tolerable brute when he comes to handling his own kind, Mr. Calvert."

We went out then and set the passenger-boys to washing down decks. We could not give them the hose because there was no donkey working; but they drew water in buckets and holystoned and scraped and scrubbed till they cleaned the infection out of the decks, and sweated it out of themselves. The cholera seemed to have exhausted itself. There were three other cases, it is true, but they were mild, and none died. In their fright the boys would have chucked their friends overboard as soon as they were taken sick, but I promised the head-man to shoot him most punctually if any one went over the side who was not a pukka corpse, and if niggers were addicted to gratitude (which they are not), there are gentlemen now living on the Kroo coast who might remember me favourably. For we did get in. A B. and A. boat picked us up three weary days later, and towed us at the end of an extremely long hawser into the very place to which I wanted to go.

Of course Fernando Po, being Spanish, kept us very much at arm's length; and we did a thirty days' most rigid quarantine, which made (after the last case had recovered) a matter of forty days in all. But we had no more deaths, and the bishop pulled up into fine form. He was not a man that I could ever bring myself to like, and as Tordoff was for the most part sullen and unwishful for talk, the time that we swung to our anchor off Port Clarence was not exhilarating.

Still it was pleasant to think that one was alive, and to realise that one had got respectably out of a very tight corner yes, one of the tightest. The tramp's two boats never turned up again. I suppose they carried cholera away with them, and drifted about in the belt of equatorial calms, full of sun-dried corpses, till some tornado came and swamped them. So that we three were the only Europeans left out of thirty-four, and of the two hundred and thirty negroes who left Banana in the Congo, only seventy-four came to Fernando Po. It was a tolerable thinning out; but when it came to climbing the peak, that made up for all which had gone before. Indeed, it is a wonderful mountain.

I saw Tordoff again just as I was going away from the island, and tried to put it to him deli cately that I was not badly off, and would like to give him a lift if the thing could be managed.

"No, Mr. Calvert," he said, " thanks. I prefer to go to the devil my own gait. I don't suppose you'd ever know who I am; but if anybody describes me and asks, just say you haven't seen me."

And that is the last I have seen or heard of him. It is extraordinary how one drifts away from men. But, on the other hand, I should not be in the least surprised at stumbling across Tordoff again, in purple and fine linen for choice on the next occasion.

V

THE HERMIT

WHEN ladies go alligator-hunting, they should clearly understand that people whom they find, and associate with most freely, in an Alabaman layou should not always be bowed to in Picca dilly. This sounds simple; an axiom, in fact; but because Miss Wilcoxn did such an uncalledfor bowing, things happened which put two most respectable families in a condition of open fury, and I earned dislike as the Origin of Evil.