BLACK AS HE IS PAINTED.
I.
The houses which constitute the town of Picotee—in the Gambia region a commendable liberality of spirit prevails as to the requisite elements of a town—were glistening beneath the intolerable rays of the afternoon sun. To the eyes of all aboard the mail steamer Penguin, which had just run up a blue-peter in the anchorage, the town seemed of dazzling whiteness. It was only the inhabitants of Picotee who knew that the walls of the houses were not white, but of a sickly yellow tinge; consequently, it was only the inhabitants who knew how inappropriate it was to allude to their town as the “whited sepulchre”—a term of reproach which was frequently levelled against it rather on account of the appalling percentage of mortality among its inhabitants than by reason of the spotlessness of the walls, though they did appear spotless when viewed from the sea. In the saloon of the Penguin the thermometer registered 95°, and when the passengers complained to the captain of the steamer respecting the temperature, holding him personally responsible for every degree that it rose above 70°, he pointed across the dazzling blue waters of the anchorage to where the town was painfully glistening, and asked his complainants how they would like to be there.
It was universally believed that when the captain had put this inquiry, the last word had been said regarding the temperature: he, at any rate, seemed to fancy that he had relieved himself from all responsibility in the matter.
At Picotee things were going on pretty much as usual. But what is progress at Picotee would be regarded as stagnation elsewhere.
There was a fine suggestion of repose about the Kroomen who were dozing in unpicturesque attitudes in the shade of the palms on the ridge nearest to the beach; and even Mr Caractacus Brown, who, being one of the merchants of the place,—he sold parrots to the sailors, and would accept a contract for green monkeys from the more ambitious collectors of the fauna of the West Coast,—was not supposed to give way to such weaknesses as were exhibited by the Kroomen—even Mr Caractacus Brown wiped his woolly head and admitted to his neighbour, Mr Coriolanus White, that the day was warm. Having seen Coriolanus selling liquid lard by the spoonful, he could scarcely do otherwise than admit that the temperature was high. Devonshire cream was solid in comparison with the lard sold at Picotee. But, in spite of the heat, a pepper-bird was warbling among the bananas, and its song broke the monotony of the roar of the great rollers that broke upon the beach—a roar that varies but that never ends in the ears of the people of Picotee.
Dr Claude Koomadhi, who occupied a villa built on the lovely green slope above the town, opened the shutters of the room in which he sat, and listened to the song of the pepper-bird. Upon his features, which seemed as if they were carved out of black oak and delicately polished, a sentimental expression appeared. His eyes showed a large proportion of white as he sighed and remarked to his servant, who brought him a glass of iced cocoanut milk, that the song of the pepper-bird reminded him of home.
“Of ‘ome, sah?” said the old woman. “Lor’ bress yah, sah! dere ain’t no peppah-buds at Ashantee.”
Dr Koomadhi’s eyes no longer wore a sentimental expression. They flashed when the old woman had spoken, but she did not notice this circumstance. She only laid down the tumbler on the table, hitched up her crimson shawl, and roared with negress’ laughter.
“You don’t understand, Sally. I said home—England,” remarked the doctor.
“Oh, beg pardung, sah; thought yah ‘looded to Ashantee,” said the old woman as she rolled out of the room, still uttering that senseless laugh.
Dr Koomadhi did not seem to be greatly put out by that reminder of the fact that Ashantee was his birthplace. He threw himself back in his cane chair and took a sip from the tumbler. He then resumed his perusal of the ‘Saturday Review’ brought by the Penguin in the morning.
He did not get through many pages. He shook his head gravely. He could not approve of the tone of the political article. It suggested compromise. It was not Conservative enough for Dr Koomadhi. He began to fear that he must give up the ‘Saturday.’ It was clearly temporising with the enemy. This would not do for Dr Koomadhi.
He took another sip of cocoanut milk, and then began pacing the room. He was clearly restless in his mind; but, perhaps, it would be going too far to suggest that he was perturbed owing to the spirit of compromise displayed in the political article which he had just read. No; though a staunch Conservative, he was still susceptible of a passion beyond the patriotic desire to assist in maintaining the integrity of the Empire. This was the origin of his uneasiness. He had been awake all the previous night thinking over his past life, and trying to think out his future. The conclusion to which he had come was that as he had successfully overthrown all the obstacles which had been in his path, to success in the past, there was no reason why he might not overthrow all that might threaten to bar his progress in the future. But, in spite of having come to this conclusion, he was very uneasy.
He did not become more settled when he had gone to a drawer in his writing-desk and had taken out a cabinet portrait—the portrait of a lady—and had gazed at it for several minutes. He laid it back with something like a sigh, and then brought out of the same receptacle a quantity of manuscript, every page of which consisted of a number of lines, irregular as to their length, but each one beginning with a capital letter. This is the least compromising way of referring to such manuscripts. To say that they were poetry would, perhaps, be to place a fictitious value upon them; but they certainly had one feature in common with the noblest poems ever written in English: every line began with a capital letter.
Dr Koomadhi’s lips—they constituted not the least prominent of his features—moved as he read to himself the lines which he had written during the past three months,—since his return to Picotee with authority to spend some thousands of pounds in carrying out certain experiments, the result of which would, it was generally hoped, transform the region of the Gambia into one of the healthiest of her Majesty’s possessions. Then he sighed again and laid the manuscripts over the photograph, closing and locking the drawer of the desk.
He walked fitfully up and down the room for another hour. Then he opened his shutters, and the first breath of the evening breeze from the sea came upon his face.
“I’ll do it,” he said resolutely. “Why should I not do it? Surely that old ridiculous prejudice is worn out. Surely she, at least, will be superior to such prejudice. Yes, she must—she must. I have succeeded hitherto in everything that I have attempted, and shall I fail in this?”
The roar of the rollers along the beach filled the room, at the open window of which Dr Koomadhi remained standing for several minutes.
II.
Dr Koomadhi belonged to a race who are intolerant of any middle course so far as dress is concerned. They are either very much dressed or very much undressed. But he had lived long enough in England to have chastened whatever yearning he may have had for running into either extreme. Only now and again—usually when in football costume—he had felt a strange longing to forswear the more cumbersome tweeds of daily life. This longing, combined with the circumstance of his being extremely fond of football, might be accepted as evidence that the traditions of the savages from whom he had sprung survived in his nature, just as they do in the youth of Great Britain, only he had not to go so far back as have the most of the youth of Great Britain, to reach the fountain-head.
The evening attire which he now resumed was wholly white,—from his pith helmet down to his canvas shoes, he was in white, with the exception of his tie, which was black. He looked at himself in a glass when at the point of leaving his house, and he felt satisfied with his appearance; only he should have dearly liked to exchange his black tie for one of scarlet. He could not understand how it was that he had never passed a draper’s window in London without staring with envious eyes at the crimson scarves displayed for sale. No one could know what heroic sacrifices he made in rejecting all such allurements. No one could know what he suffered while crushing down that uncivilised longing for a brilliant colour.
Just before leaving the house he went to his desk and brought out of one of the drawers a small ivory box. He unlocked it and stood for some time with his face down to the thing that the box contained—a curiously-speckled stone, somewhat resembling a human ear. While keeping his head down to this thing his lips were moving. He was clearly murmuring some phrases in a strange language into that curiously shaped stone.
Relocking the ivory box, he returned it to the drawer, which he also locked. Then he left his house, and took a path leading to a well-built villa standing in front of a banana-jungle, with a tall flag-pole before its hall door—a flag-pole from which the union-jack fluttered, indicating to all casual visitors that this was the official residence of her Majesty’s Commissioner to the Gambia, Commander Hope, R.N.
“Hallo, Koomadhi!” came a voice from the open window to the right of the door. “Pardon me for five minutes. I’m engaged at my correspondence to go to England by the Penguin this evening. But don’t mind me. Go through to the drawing-room and my daughter will give you a cup of tea.”
“All right, sir,” said Dr Koomadhi. “Don’t hurry on my account. I was merely calling to mention that I had forwarded my report early in the day; but I’ll wait inside.”
“All right,” came the voice from the window. “I’m at the last folios.”
Dr Koomadhi was in the act of entering the porch when his pith helmet was snatched off by some unseen hand, and a curious shriek sounded on the balcony above the porch.
“The ruffian!” said Koomadhi, with a laugh. “The ruffian! He’s at his tricks again.”
He took a few steps back and looked up to the balcony. There sat an immense tame baboon, wearing the helmet and screeching with merriment.
“I’ll have to give you another lesson, my gentleman,” said the doctor, shaking his finger at the creature. “Hand me down that helmet at once.”
The baboon made a grimace and then raised his right hand to the salute—his favourite trick.
Suddenly the doctor produced a sound with his lips, and in an instant the monkey had dropped the helmet and had fled in alarm from the balcony to the roof of the house, whence he gazed in every direction, while the doctor went into the house with his helmet in his hand. He had merely given the simian word of alarm, which the creature, understanding its mother tongue, had promptly acted upon.
“‘You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, but the scent’—you know the rest, sir,” remarked Mr Letts, the Commissioner’s Secretary, who had observed from his window the whole transaction.
“What was that, Letts?” asked the Commissioner.
“Koomadhi spoke to the baboon in its own tongue, sir, and it took the hint of a man and a brother and cleared off.”
“Yes, but where does the shattering of the vase come in?” asked the Commissioner.
“I mean to suggest that a nigger remains a nigger, and remains on speaking terms with a baboon, even though he has a college degree and wears tweeds,” said Mr Letts.
“Oh,” said the Commissioner.
He had heard the same opinion expressed by various members of his staff ever since he had anything to do with the administration of affairs on the West Coast. He had long ago ceased to take even the smallest amount of interest in the question of the exact depth of a negro’s veneer of civilisation.
III.
But while Mr Letts was quoting Thomas Moore’s line—in a corrupt form—to the Commissioner, Dr Koomadhi was accepting, with a certain amount of dignity, the greeting which was extended to him by Miss Hope, the Commissioner’s daughter, in the drawing-room. She had been trying over some songs which had just arrived from England. Two of them were of a high colour of sentimentalism, another belonged to that form of poetic composition known as a coon song. It had a banjo obbligato; but the pianoforte accompaniment of itself gave more than a suggestion of the twanging of strings and the banging of a tambourine. Had Dr Koomadhi arrived a few minutes sooner it would have been his privilege to hear Gertrude Hope chant the chorus—
“Don’t you belieb un, Massa John,
Jes’ winkie mid y o’ eye,
Kick up yo’ heels to de gasalier—
Say, how am dat for high?”
But Gertrude had, after singing the melody, pushed the copy under a pile of music, and had risen from the piano to receive her visitor, at the same time ringing for tea.
He apologised for interrupting her at the piano.
“If I had only known that you were singing, I should certainly have—well, not exactly, stayed away; no, I should have come sooner, and remained a worshipper in the outer court.”
“Oh, I wasn’t singing—not regularly singing,” said she, with a laugh. “Trying over stupid songs about lovers’ partings is not singing, Dr Koomadhi.”
“Lovers’ partings?” said he. “They seem particularly well adapted to lyrical treatment.”
“The songs at any rate are heart-breaking,” said she.
“They represent the most acute stage of the lovers’ feelings, then?” said he.
“I daresay. I suppose there are degrees of feelings even of lovers.”
“I’m sure of it, Miss Hope.”
He was seated in a wicker chair; she had thrown herself into another—a seat that gave her the appearance of lying in a hammock. He scanned her from her white forehead down to the dainty feet that crossed one another on the sloping support of cane-work. She would have been looked on as a very pretty girl in a London drawing-room; and even a girl who would be regarded as commonplace there would pass as a marvel of loveliness on the West Coast of Africa.
“Yes,” continued Dr Koomadhi, “I’m sure there are degrees of feeling even among lovers.”
“You are a doctor, and so doubtless have had many opportunities of diagnosing the disease in all its stages,” said she.
“Yes, I am a doctor,” said he. “I am also a man. I have felt. I feel.”
She gave another laugh.
“A complete conjugation of the verb,” said she. “Past and present tenses. How about the future?”
There was only a little pause before he said—
“The future is in your hands, Miss Hope. I have come here to-day to tell you that I have never loved any one in all my life but you, and to ask you if you will marry me.”
There was now a long pause—so long that he became hopeful of her answer. Then he saw the blank look that was upon her face change—he saw the flush that came over her white face when she had had time to realise the import of his words.
She started up, and at the same instant the baboon came in front of the window and raised his right hand to the salute.
“You are mad—mad!” she said, in a whisper that had something fierce about it. Then she lay back in her chair with a laugh. “I marry you—you. I should as soon marry——”
She had pointed to the baboon before she had checked herself.
“You would as soon marry the baboon as me?” said he in a low and laboured voice.
“I did not say that, although—Dr Koomadhi, what you have told me has given me a shock—such a shock as I have never had before. I am not myself—if I said anything hurtful to you I know that you will attribute it to the shock—I ask your pardon—sincerely—humbly. I never thought it possible that you—you—oh, you must have been mad! You——”
“Give me a cup of tea, my dearest, if you don’t want to see me perish before your eyes.” The words came from outside a window behind Dr Koomadhi, and in another second a man had entered from the verandah, and had given a low whistle on perceiving that Miss Hope had a visitor.
“Come along,” said Miss Hope, when she had drawn a deep breath—“Come along and be introduced to Dr Koomadhi. You have often heard of Dr Koomadhi, I’m sure, Dick. Dr Koomadhi, this is Major Minton.”
“How do you do?” said the stranger, giving his hand to the doctor. “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you, and how clever you are.”
“You flatter me,” said Dr Koomadhi, shaking hands with the new-comer. “I must now rush away, Miss Hope,” he added. “I only called to tell your father that I had forwarded some reports by the Penguin.”
“Jolly old tub, the Penguin—glad I’ve seen the last of her,” said Major Minton.
“Major Minton arrived by the Penguin this morning,” said Gertrude. “Must you really go away, Dr Koomadhi?”
“Not even the prospect of a cup of your tea would make me swerve from the path of duty, Miss Hope,” said the doctor, with a smile so chastened as to be deprived of all its Ethiopian character.
He shook hands gracefully with her and Major Minton, and passed out by the verandah, the baboon standing to one side and solemnly saluting. The Major was the only one who laughed, and his laugh was a roar.
IV.
Dr Koomadhi found waiting for him at his house his old friend Mr Ross, the surgeon of the Penguin. He had been unable to leave the steamer earlier in the day, and he had only an hour to spend ashore. No, he did not think that anything was the matter with a bottle of champagne, provided that it was large enough and dry enough, and that it had been plunged into ice, not ice plunged into it.
These essentials being guaranteed by Dr Koomadhi, Mr Ross’s hour passed—as he thought—pleasantly enough. The two men sat together on cane chairs on the balcony facing the sea. It is at such a time, and under such conditions, that existence on the Gambia becomes not merely endurable, but absolutely delightful. Mr Ross made a remark to this effect, and expressed the opinion that his friend was in luck.
“In luck? Oh yes. I’m the luckiest fellow in the world,” responded Koomadhi grimly. “I’ve everything that heart can wish for.”
“Yes, you’re well paid, you don’t mind the climate, and you’re honoured and respected by the whole community,” said Ross.
“Of course—honoured and respected—that’s the strong point of the situation,” said Koomadhi.
“The only drawback seems to me to be the rather narrow limits of the society. Still, the Commissioner is a decent enough sort of old boy, and Letts has a good deal to recommend him. By the way, you’ll not be so badly off in this matter during the next six months as you have been. We brought out a chap named Minton—a chap that any one could get on with. He’s just chucked the service and is going to marry Miss Hope.”
“I have just met him at the Residency,” said Koomadhi, filling up with a steady hand the glass of his guest. “And so he’s going to marry Miss Hope, is he?”
“Yes; he confided a lot in me—mostly on the bridge toward the hour of midnight. The young woman has been engaged to him for a year past. They met just before the Commissioner got his berth, but the daughter being a good daughter, and with a larger sense of duty than is possessed by most girls, swore—in her own way, of course—that nothing should tempt her to desert her father for at least a year. Much to Minton’s disgust, as you can understand, she came out here, telling him that if he still was anxious to marry her, he might follow her at the end of a year. Well, as he retained his fancy, he came out with us, and I believe you’ll be in a position to add an official wedding to your other experiences, Koomadhi.”
“That’s something to look forward to,” said Koomadhi. “But how will that incident improve society in this neighbourhood? I suppose Minton and his wife will get off to England as soon as possible?”
“Not they. Although they are to get married at once, they are to remain here for six or seven months—until, in fact, the Commissioner gets his leave, and then they all mean to go home together. Minton has a trifle of six thousand a-year and a free house in Yorkshire, so Miss Hope is in luck—so, for that matter, is Minton; she’s a fine young woman, I believe. I only met her once.”
“I’m not so certain about her constitution,” said Koomadhi. “Her lungs are, I believe, all right, but her circulation is defective, and she suffers from headaches just when she should be at her best.”
“Oh, hang it all! a girl’s a girl for a’ that!” cried Ross. “Your circulation’s defective, Koomadhi, if you’re capable only of judging a girl by the stethoscope. You’re too much absorbed in your profession, that’s what’s the matter with you.”
“I daresay you are right,” Koomadhi admitted after a pause of a few seconds.
In the course of the next half-hour, several other topics in addition to the matrimonial prospects of Major Minton and the constitutional shortcomings of Miss Hope were discussed on the verandah, until, at length, the sound of the steam-whistle of the Penguin was borne shore-wards by the breeze.
“That’s a message to me,” said Ross, starting up. “Come down to the shore and see the last of me for three months at any rate.”
Dr Koomadhi put on his helmet, and saw his friend safely through the surf on his way to where the steamer was swinging at her anchor. The sun had set before he returned to his house to dinner; and before he had risen from the table a message came to him that one of the officers of the Houssas was anxious to see him, being threatened with an attack of fever. The great stars were burning overhead before he returned from the barrack of the Houssas, and was able to throw off his coat and lie back in his chair in his own sitting-room.
He had a good deal to think about before going to his bedroom, and he seemed to find the darkness congenial with his thoughts. In fact, the negro acknowledged a sort of brotherhood in the night, and he remained for some hours in that fraternal darkness. It was just midnight when he went, with only a small amount of groping, to his desk, and took out of its drawer the ivory box containing the earshaped stone, into whose orifice he had spoken some words before leaving for the Commissioner’s house in the afternoon. He unlocked the box and removed the stone. He left his villa, taking the stone with him, and strolled once more to the house which he had visited a few hours before.
Lights were in the windows of the Residency, and certain musical sounds were coming from the room where he had been. With the twanging of the banjo there came the sound of a light bass voice of no particular timbre, chanting the words of the latest plantation melody—
“Don’t you belieb un, Massa John,
Jes’ winkie mid yo’ eye,
Kick up yo’ heels to de gasalier—
Say, how am dat for high?”
Dr Koomadhi listened while three stanzas of the doggerel were being sung by Major Minton; then he raised the ear-shaped stone that was in the hollow of his hand, and whispered some words into it as he had done in the afternoon. In a second the song stopped, although the singer was in the middle of a stanza.
“Confound it all!” cried Major Minton—Koomadhi heard his voice distinctly. “One of my strings is broken. I suppose it was the sudden change of atmosphere that made it give way. It’s a good bit drier here than aboard the Penguin.”
“The concert is over for to-night,” came the voice of the Commissioner. “It’s about time for all of us to be in our beds.”
“That’s my notion too,” said Letts. “Those who object can have their money returned at the doors.”
“It was strange—that breaking of the string without warning,” Dr Koomadhi heard Gertrude say.
He smiled.
It was only at midnight in the open air, and when he was alone, that he allowed himself the luxury of an unbridled smile. He knew the weaknesses of his race.
He put the stone into the pocket of his coat and returned to his house.
V.
The marriage of Major Minton to Miss Hope took place in another week. Of course the ceremony was performed by the Lord Bishop of Bonny, who was also Metropolitan of the Gambia and Senegal. The gunboat that was at the anchorage displayed every available rag of bunting, and the lieutenant who commanded her said he would gladly have fired a salute in honour of the event, only for the fact that the Admiralty made him accountable for every ounce of powder that he burned, and, in addition, for the wear and tear on every gun. The guns didn’t bear much tampering with, and there was nothing so bad for them as firing them: it wore them out, the Admiralty stated, and the practice must be put a stop to.
But if there was no official burning of powder to mark the happy event, there was a great deal of it that was unofficial and wholly irregular. Dr Koomadhi spent several hours of the afternoon amputating fingers of Krooboys that had been mutilated through an imperfect acquaintance, on the part of the native populace, with the properties of gunpowder when ignited. An eye or two were reported to be missing, and in the cool of the evening the Doctor had brought to him, by a conscientious townsman, a human ear for which no owner could be found.
The happy pair went to the Canary Islands for their honeymoon, and returned radiant at the end of six weeks; and the Commissioner’s ménage, which had suffered materially through the absence of the Commissioner’s daughter, was restored in all its former perfection. Every night varied strains of melody floated to the ears of such persons as were in the neighbourhood of the Residency; and it was a fact that Major Minton’s banjo never twanged without attracting an audience of from ten to five hundred of the negro population of Picotee. The pathway was every night paved with negroes, who listened, shoulder to shoulder, and kneecap to kneecap—they sat upon their haunches—to the fascinating songs. They felt that if the Commissioner had only introduced a tom-tom obbligato to the tom-tom melodies, the artistic charm of the performance would be complete.
The native evangelist, who occasionally contrived to fill a schoolhouse with young Christians by the aid of a harmonium,—a wheezy asthmatic instrument, which, in spite of a long lifetime spent on the West Coast, had never become fully acclimatised,—felt that his success was seriously jeopardised by the Major’s secular melodies. When the flock were privileged to hear such fascinating music unconditionally, he knew that it was unreasonable to expect them to be regular in their attendance at the schoolhouse, where the harmonium wheezed only after certain religious services had been forced on them.
He wondered if the Bishop might be approached on the subject of introducing the banjo into the schoolhouse services. He believed that with such auxiliaries as the banjo, and perhaps—but this was optional—the bones, a large evangelistic work might be done in the outlying districts of Picotee.
Dr Koomadhi had always been a frequent visitor at the Residence, but for some time after the marriage of the Commissioner’s daughter he was not quite so often to be found in the drawing-room of an evening. Gradually, however, he increased the number of his weekly visits. He was the only person in the neighbourhood who could (occasionally) beat Major Minton at billiards, and this fact helped, in a large measure, to overcome the prejudice which Major Minton frankly admitted (to his wife) he entertained against the native races of West Africa. Major Minton was becoming a first-class billiard-player, as any active person who understands the game is likely to become after a few months’ residence at a West Coast settlement.
“Dr Koomadhi is a gentleman and a Christian,” Mrs Minton remarked one day when Mr Letts, the Secretary, had challenged discussion upon his favourite topic—namely, the thinness of the veneer of civilisation upon the most civilised savage.
“He’s a negro-gentleman, I admit,” said Letts.
“A man who plays so straight a game of billiards can’t be far wrong,” remarked Major Minton.
“I have reasons—the best of reasons—for knowing that Dr Koomadhi is a forgiving Christian gentleman,” said Gertrude. “Yes, he shall always be my friend.”
She had not forgiven herself for that terrible half-spoken sentence, “I would as soon marry——”
She had not forgiven herself for having glanced at the baboon as she checked the words that sprang from her almost involuntarily.
But Dr Koomadhi was showing day by day that he had forgiven them.
And thus it was she felt that he was worthy to be regarded by all men as a gentleman and a Christian.
VI.
A few days later Dr Koomadhi was visited by Major Minton. The Major was anxious to have some shooting at big game, and he was greatly disappointed at being unable to find in the neighbourhood of Picotee any one who could put him on the right track to gratify his longing for slaughter. The ivory-hunters did not find an outlet for their business at Picotee, and the majority of the inhabitants were as unenterprising, Major Minton said, as the chaw-bacons of an English village; nay, more so, for the chawbacons were beginning to know the joy of a metropolitan music hall, and that meant enterprise. He wondered if Koomadhi would allow him to accompany him on his next excursion inland.
Koomadhi said that no proposal could give him greater pleasure. He would be going up again in a week or two, and he could promise Major Minton some first-class sport. He could show him some queer things.
Talking of queer things, had Major Minton ever seen a piece of the famous African sound-stone?
It was supposed that the famous statue of Memnon had been carved out of that stone.
Major Minton had considered all that had been written on the subject of the talking statue utter rot, and he believed so still. Could any sane man credit a story like that, he was anxious to know?
“I suppose not,” said Koomadhi.
“But anyhow, I have now and again come upon pieces of the sound-stone. I’ll show you a couple of bits.”
He produced the roughly cut stone ear, and then an equally rough stone chipped into the form of a mouth—a negro’s mouth.
“They are rum things, to be sure,” said Minton. “I don’t think that I ever saw stones just the same. Is the material marble?”
“I haven’t the least idea,” said Koomadhi. “But just put that stone to your ear for a few moments.”
Minton had the mouth-stone in his hand. Koomadhi retained the ear-stone and put it to his lips the moment that the Major raised his hand.
“No,” said the Major. “I hear nothing. That sound-stone myth isn’t good enough for me. I’m not exactly a lunatic yet, and that’s why I’m going to climb up to your roof to enjoy the sea-breeze. Take your marvellous sound-stone, and I’ll show you what it is to be a gymnast.”
He opened the shutters, got out upon the verandah, and began climbing one of the supports of the verandah roof. He was a pretty fair athlete, but when the thermometer registers 97° is not, perhaps, the most favourable time for violent exercise. Still, he reached the roof with his hands and threw one leg up; in another moment he was sitting on the highest part of the roof, and was inviting Koomadhi to join him, declaring that only a fool would remain indoors on such a day.
Koomadhi smiled and shook his head.
“You must have some refreshment after your exertions,” said he. “What would you like—a brandy-and-soda, with a lump of ice clinking the sides of the tumbler?”
“That sounds inviting,” said Major Minton, scratching his chest with a forefinger—it had apparently been chafed in his ascent of the roof. “Yes; but if you chance to have a banana and a few nuts—by Jingo I should like a nut or two. Has no dietist written a paper on the dietetic value of the common or garden nut, Koomadhi?”
“Come down and I’ll give you as many nuts as you can eat,” said Koomadhi.
“Yes, I’ll come down this way,” said the Major. He swung himself by one arm from the side of the roof to the bough of a tree. There he hung suspended by the other arm, and swinging slowly backward and forward. Even then he scraped the breast of his shirt, uttering a number of sounds that might have meant laughter. Then he caught a lower branch with his loose arm and dropped to the ground. Again he scraped at his chest and laughed.
“How about those nuts?” he said. “I think I’ve earned them. How the mischief is it that I neglected my gymnastics all these months? What a fool I was! Walking along in the open day by day, when I might have been enjoying the free life of the jungle!”
“Come inside and try a bit of cocoanut,” said Koomadhi.
“I’m your man,” said the Major.
“My man—man?” laughed the Doctor. “Oh yes, you’ve earned the cocoanut.”
The soft flesh of a green cocoanut lay on the table of the sitting-room, and Major Minton caught it up and swallowed it without ceremony. The Doctor watched him with a curious expression on his face.
“That’s the most refreshing tiffin I’ve had for a long time,” said the Major. “Now, I’ll have to get back to the Residency. Will you drop in for a game of billiards?”
“Perhaps I may,” said the Doctor. “Take that sound-stone again, and try if you really cannot hear anything when you put it to your ear.”
“My dear fellow, I’m not the sort of a chap to become the victim of a delusion,” said the Major, picking up the stone and holding it to his ear. “Not a sound do I hear. Hang it all, man, I’d get more sound out of a common shell. Au revoir.”
He had his eyes fixed upon the ink-bottle that stood on the desk beside a blotter and a sheet of writing-paper. Dr Koomadhi noticed the expression in his eyes, and turned to open the door. The very instant that his back was turned, Major Minton ran to the ink-bottle, upset it upon the blotter, and then rushed off by the open window, laughing heartily.
And yet there was no human being who so detested the playing of practical jokes as Major Minton.
Dr Koomadhi put away the stones, and called his servant to wipe up the ink, which was dripping down to the floor.
“Lorramussy!” cried the old woman. “How eber did yo’ make dat muss?”
“I didn’t know that it was on the blotter until too late,” said he. And yet Dr Koomadhi was a most truthful man—for a doctor.
VII.
Hullo!” said Letts, “what have you been doing to yourself?”
Major Minton had thrown himself into the Secretary’s cosiest chair on his return from visiting Dr Koomadhi, and was wiping his forehead.
“I’ve been doing more to myself than I should have done,” replied Minton. “For heaven’s sake, ring for a brandy-and-soda!”
“A brandy-and-soda? That’s an extreme measure,” said Letts. “But you look as if you needed one.” He went to his own cupboard and produced the brandy, and then rang the bell for the soda-water, which was of course kept in the refrigerator. Then he looked curiously at the man in the chair. “By the Lord Harry! you’ve been in a fight,” he cried, when his examination had concluded. “You’re an ass to come between any belligerents in this neighbourhood: you forget that Picotee Street is not Regent Street. You got your collar torn off your coat for your pains; and, O Lord, your trousers!”
“I did not notice how much out of line I had fallen until now,” said Minton, with a laugh. “By George, Letts, that tear in my knee does suggest a free-and-easy tussle.”
“But how on earth did it come about?” asked Letts. “Surely you should know better than to go for a nigger as you would for a Christian! Why the mischief didn’t you kick him on the shins, and then put your knee into his face?”
“Give me the tumbler.”
The Secretary handed him the tumbler, containing a stiff “peg,” and he drained it without giving any evidence of dissatisfaction.
“Now, how did it come about?” inquired Letts. “I hope you haven’t dragged us into the business. If you have, there’ll be a question asked about it in the House of Commons by one of those busybodies who have no other way of proving to their constituents that they’re in attendance. ‘Mr Jones asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies if he had any information to give to the House regarding an alleged outrage by a white man, closely associated with the family of her Majesty’s Commissioner at Picotee, upon a native or natives of that colony.’ That’s how it will read. Then there’ll be puppy leaders in those papers that deal with ‘justices’ justice’: the boy who gets a month’s imprisonment for stealing a turnip—you know that sort of thing.”
“Keep your hair on,” said Minton; “there’ll be no show in the House about this. There has been no row. I went round to Koomadhi’s, and when we were talking together I suddenly fancied that the day was just one for a gymnastic display. I don’t know whether it was that polite manner of Koomadhi’s or something else set me off, but I felt an irresistible impulse to bounce. Without waiting to take off my coat I went out on the verandah and hauled myself up to the roof: I don’t know how I did it. I might have managed it ten years ago, when I was in condition; but, considering how far off colour I am just now, by George! I don’t know how I managed it. Anyhow, I did manage it.”
“At some trifling cost,” said Letts. “And what did you do on the roof when you got there?”
“Well, I swung myself down again. But I seemed to have a notion in the meantime that that nice, well-groomed nigger would try to climb up beside me, and I know that I had an impulse to catch him by the tail—the tail of his coat, of course—and swing him through the shutters.”
“But he didn’t make such an ass of himself as to go through some gymnastics, and the thermometer standing a degree or two under a hundred. Well, you’ve got off well this time, Minton; but don’t do it again, that’s all.”
“I tell you it was an impulse—a curious——”
“Oh, impulses like that don’t come to chaps who have their wits about them.”
“I suppose it was a bit of bounding, after all. But, somehow—well, you wouldn’t just call me a bounder, would you, Letts?”
“Why shouldn’t I call you a bounder, I’d like to know? A bounder is one who bounds, isn’t he?”
“Well, I suppose—but I give you my word, I felt at that moment that it was the most natural thing I could have done—climbing up to the roof of the verandah, and then——”
“And then?”
“Swinging down again, I suppose.”
He was afraid to tell Letts of that practical joke which he had played off on Koomadhi, when he found that the Doctor did not lend himself to that subtle piece of jocularity which Minton said he had conceived when sitting on the roof of the verandah. Letts had been pretty hard on him for having gone so far as to climb up to the roof; but what would he have said if he had been told about that ink-bottle incident?
Minton thought it would, on the whole, be doing himself more ample justice if he were to withhold from Letts all information regarding that ink-bottle business. He said nothing about it, and when Letts mumbled something when in the act of lighting a cigar—something about fellows, who behave like idiots, going home and giving the whole West Coast a bad name, whereas, properly treated, the climate was one of the most salubrious, he remarked confidentially—
“I say, old chap, you needn’t mind jawing to the missus or the Governor about this business; it’s not worth talking about, you know; but they’re both given to exaggerate the importance of such things—Gertrude especially. I’m a bit afraid of her still, I admit: we’ve only been married about three months, you’ll remember.”
“Great Duke! here’s a chap who fancies that as time goes on he’ll get less afraid of his wife,” cried Letts. “Well, well, some chaps do get hallucinations early in life.”
“Don’t say a word about it, Letts. Where’s the good of making a poor girl uneasy?”
“Where, indeed? But why ‘poor girl’?”
“Because she’s liable to be made uneasy at trifles. You’re not—only riled. But I don’t blame you: you’ve been on this infernal coast for three years.”
“There’s nothing the matter with the coast: it’s only the idiots——”
“Quite so: I seem somehow to feel that I’ve heard all that sort of thing before. I’m one of the idiots.”
“Far be it from me to contradict so able a diagnosis of——”
He caught the cushion which Minton hurled at him, and laughed. Then he became curiously thoughtful.
“By the way,” he said, “wasn’t it a bit rum that Koomadhi didn’t try to prevent your swinging out to that roof? He’s a medico, and so should know how such unnatural exertion is apt to play the mischief with a chap in such a temperature as this. Didn’t he abuse you in his polite way?”
“Not he,” said Minton; “on the contrary, I believe I had an idea that I heard him suggest... no, no; that’s a mistake, of course.”
“What’s a mistake?”
“That idea of mine—I don’t know how I came to have it.”
“You were under the impression, somehow, that he suggested your climbing to the roof? That was a rummy notion, wasn’t it?”
“A bit too rummy for general use. Oh no: he only said—now, what the mischief did he say? Oh, no matter.”
“If he said ‘no matter’ when he saw that you were bent on gymnastics in the middle of a day with the temperature hovering about a hundred, he should be ashamed of himself.”
“He didn’t say ‘no matter.’ I’ve just said it. Let me say it again. You should be a cross-examiner at the Bailey and Middlesex Session, Letts. Now, mind, not a word to the missus. Don’t let her cross-examine you: evade her as I’m evading you. I’ll see you after dinner: maybe we’ll have a billiard together—I’m too tired now.”
He went off, leaving Letts trying to find out the place where he had left off in a novel of George Eliot’s. George Eliot is still read on the West Coast of Africa.
But when Minton had left the room Letts did not trouble himself further with the novel. He tossed it away and lay back in his Madeira chair with a frown, suggesting perplexity, on his face.
Some five minutes had passed, and yet the frown, so far from departing, had but increased in intensity.
“I should like very much to know what his game is,” he muttered. “It wouldn’t at all be a bad idea to induce sunstroke by over-exertion on a day like this. But why can’t he remember if the nigger tried on that game with him? P’chut! what’s the good of bothering about it when the game didn’t come off, whatever it was?”
But in spite of his attempted dismissal of the whole matter from his mind, he utterly failed to give to the confession of the youth in ‘Middlemarch’ (it was to the effect that his father had been a pawnbroker, and it was very properly made to the young woman to the accompaniment of the peals of a terrific thunderstorm) the attention which so striking an incident demanded.
VIII.
If it’s a command, sir, I’ll obey; if not, well——”
“Oh, nonsense, Letts!” said the Commissioner. “There’s no command to a dinner with my daughter, her husband, and another man.”
“Ah, that other man,” said Letts.
“Now, I hope I’ll hear nothing more about your absurd objection to that other man,” said the Commissioner. “I tell you that it’s not only ridiculous, that old-fashioned prejudice of yours, it’s prejudicial to the Service—it is, upon my soul, Letts. You know as well as I do that the great thing is to get in touch with the natives, to show them that, as common subjects of the Sovereign, enjoying equal rights wherever that flag waves, we are, we are—well, we must show them that we’ve no prejudices. You’ll admit that we must do that, Letts.”
(As Letts had not written out this particular speech for him, the Commissioner was a trifle shaky, and found it to his advantage to abandon the oratorical in favour of the colloquial style.)
“I don’t feel called on to show that I’m not prejudiced against the whole race, sir—the whole race as a race, and Dr Koomadhi as an individual,” said Letts. “Therefore I hope that you and Mrs Minton will excuse me from your dinner.”
“Upon my soul, I’m surprised at you, Letts,” said Commander Hope. “I didn’t expect to find in these days of enlightenment such old-fashioned prejudices as regards race. Great heavens! sir, is the accident of a man’s being a negro to be looked on as debarring him from—from—well, from all that you would make out—the friendship of the superior race, the——”
“Ah, there you are, sir; the superior race. In matters of equality there’s no superior.”
“Oh, of course I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t some difference between the two races. Don’t they say it was the effects of the curse, Letts—the curse of Ham? If a race was subject to the disabilities of an early curse duly recorded, you can’t quite expect them to recover themselves all in a moment: it wouldn’t be reasonable—it wouldn’t be Scriptural either. But I think that common charity should make us—well, should make us do our best to mitigate their unfortunate position. That appeal of yours to Scripture, Letts, was used as an argument in favour of slavery. It’s unworthy of you.”
“I agree with you, sir; and I do so the more readily as I don’t recollect ever having made use of such an authority as Scripture to bear out my contention that the polish of a nigger is no deeper than the polish on a mahogany table,—a thin and transparent film of lacquer. You see I’ve had the advantage of living in Ashantee for six months, and when there I got pretty well grounded on the negro as a man and a brother. A man—well, perhaps; a brother, yes, own brother to the devil himself.”
“Nonsense, Letts! Can’t you keep Scripture out of the argument?”
“I tell you, sir, I saw things in the Ashantee country that made me feel certain that the archfiend made that region his headquarters many years ago, and that he has devoted himself ever since to the training of the inhabitants. They are his chosen people. If you had seen the unspeakable things that I saw during my six months in Ashantee, you would hold to my belief that the people have been taught by Satan himself, and that they have gone one better than their instructor. No, sir, I’ll not dine with Koomadhi.”
Commander Hope shook his head.
“You’re very pig-headed, Letts,” he remarked; “but we won’t quarrel. I’ll see if I can make Gertrude understand how it is you refuse her invitation.”
“I hope to heaven that she’ll never get a glimpse of the real negro, sir—the negro with his lacquer scratched off.”
The Commissioner laughed.
“I’ll not tell her that, Letts,” he said.
Letts did not laugh.
It was really Gertrude who had suggested inviting Dr Koomadhi to dinner at the Residency. He had frequently partaken of the refreshment of tea in her drawing-room, but she knew that tea counts for nothing in the social scale even at Picotee: it conferred no more distinction upon one than a presentation at the White House does upon a citizen of the United States, or a citizen’s wife or sister. He had never been asked to dine at the Commissioner’s table, and that she knew to be a distinction, and one which he would be certain to value.
But when she suggested to her father that there would be a certain gracefulness in the act of inviting Dr Koomadhi to dinner, she found her suggestion treated with that form of contumely known as the snub. Her father had looked at her sternly and walked away, saying—
“Impossible! What! a nig———Oh, my dear, you don’t understand these things. Impossible—impossible!”
Gertrude Minton, being a woman, may not have understood some things, but she thoroughly understood how her father (and all other men) should be treated upon occasions. She took her snubbing meekly, as every clever woman takes a snubbing, when administered by a father, or a husband, or a brother; and of course, later on, she carried her point—as any clever woman will; for a properly sustained scheme of meekness, if persisted in, will accomplish anything, by making the man who snubs thoroughly ashamed of himself, and the man who is thoroughly ashamed of himself will be glad to come to terms, no matter how disadvantageous to himself, in order to avert a continuance of that reproachful meekness.
It was the Commissioner himself who, a few days later, went to his daughter and told her that if she had her heart set upon inviting Dr Koomadhi to dinner he would not interfere. It had at first seemed to him a monstrous proposal, he admitted; but on thinking over it calmly, and with the recollection of the circumstances (1) that the present day was one of innovations; (2) that the negroes were treated on terms of the most perfect equality by the people of the United States of America,—he had come to the conclusion that it was necessary even for a British naval officer to march with the times; consequently he was prepared to do anything that his daughter suggested. He added, however, that up to the date at which he was speaking he had got on very well without once asking a nig——that is, a negro gentleman, to dine at his table.
“I knew you would consent, papa,” said Gertrude, throwing off her mask of meekness in a moment, much to the satisfaction of her father. “I knew you would consent: it would be quite unlike you not to consent. You are so broad-minded—so generous—so reasonable in your views on all native questions. I feel that I—that we—owe some amends—that is, we should do our best to give him to understand that we do not regard a mere accident of colour as disqualifying him from—from——”
“Quite so,” said her father. “We’ll ask Letts: he won’t come, though.”
“Why should he not come?” she asked.
“Letts is full of prejudice, my dear. He has more than once made disparaging remarks regarding Koomadhi. You see, he lived for some months in the Ashantee country, and saw the human sacrifices and other barbarities.”
“If you speak to him with due authority, he will be compelled to come,” said Gertrude warmly. “You are the head here, are you not?”
He looked at her and assented, though he knew perfectly well that it was not he who was the head of the Residency. Would he ask a nigger to dine at his table if he was at the head of it? he asked himself.
“Well, then, just tell Letts that you expect him to dine here on Wednesday next, and he is bound to come. He is only secretary here.”
“My dear Gertrude, you know as well as I do what it is to be secretary here,” said the Commissioner. “Letts can do what he pleases. I shall certainly not coerce him in any way: I know it would be no use trying.”
“But you must try,” cried Gertrude. She had, undoubtedly, quite got rid of her meekness. “You must try; and you must succeed too.”
Well, the Commissioner had tried, and the result of his attempt has just been recorded.
He told his daughter of the firm attitude that Letts had assumed—it was just the attitude which he himself would like to assume if he had the courage; but of course he did not suggest so much to Gertrude.
“The foolish fellow! I shall have to go to him myself,” said she.
And she went to him.
IX.
She had at one time fancied that Letts was fond of her, and she had thought that her liking for him was no mere fancy. A young woman with good looks and a pleasant manner and a young man with a career before him are very apt to have fancies in respect to each other on the West Coast of Africa, where good looks and pleasant manners are not to be met with daily. Of course when Gertrude had gone home for some months, and had met Major Minton, she became aware of the fact that her liking for Letts was the merest fancy; and perhaps when she returned with the story of her having promised (under certain conditions) to marry Major Minton, Letts had also come to the conclusion that his feeling towards Miss Hope was also a fancy. This is, however, not quite so certain. At any rate, Letts and she had always been very good friends.
For half-an-hour she talked to him quite pleasantly at first, then quite earnestly—didactically and sarcastically—on the subject of his foolish prejudice. She called it foolish when she was pleasant, and she called it contemptible when she ceased to be pleasant, on a matter which she, for her part, thought had been long ago passed out of the region of controversy. Surely a man of Mr Letts’ intelligence and observation could not be serious in objecting to dine with Dr Koomadhi simply because he chanced to be a negro.
But Mr Letts assured her that he was quite serious in the matter. He didn’t pretend, he said, to be superior in point of intelligence or power of observation to men who made no objection to meet on terms of perfect equality the whole Ethiopian race; but he had had certain experiences, he said, and so long as he retained a recollection of these experiences he would decline to sit at the same table with Dr Koomadhi or any of his race. Then it was that Mrs Minton ceased to be altogether pleasant as to the phrases which she employed in order to induce Mr Letts to change his mind.
“You are not the only one with experiences,” she said. “I have had experience not merely of negroes generally, but of Dr Koomadhi in particular, and, as I told you some time ago, I have reason to believe him to be a generous, Christian gentleman. That is why I wish to do all that is in my power to make him understand that I regard his possession of the characteristics of a gentleman and a Christian as more than placing him on a level with us. I feel that I am inferior to Dr Koomadhi in those qualities which our religion teaches us to regard as noblest.”
“And I hope with all my soul that you will never have a different experience of him,” said Letts.
“I know that I shall have no different experience of him,” said she, with confidence in her pose and in her tone.
He made no reply to this. And then she went on to ask him some interesting questions regarding the general design of the Maker of the Universe, and His intention in respect of the negro; and though Letts answered all to the best of his ability, he was not persuaded to accept Mrs Minton’s invitation to dinner.
She was naturally very angry, and even went so far as to assure Mr Letts that his refusal to accept the invitation which she offered him might be prejudicial to his being offered any future invitations to dine at her table—an assurance which he received without emotion.
She told her father of her failure, and though he shook his head with due seriousness, yet he refrained from saying “I told you so.” But when her husband heard that Letts would not be persuaded, he treated the incident with a really remarkable degree of levity, declaring that if he himself were independent, he would see Koomadhi and all the nigger race sent to a region of congenial blackness before he would sit down to dinner with the best of them. He thought Letts, however, something of an ass for not swallowing his prejudices in a neighbourhood where there were so few decent billiard-players. For himself, he said he would have no objection to dine with bandits and cut-throats if they consented to join in a good pool afterwards.
When Dr Koomadhi received his invitation to dine at the Residency—it was in the handwriting of Mrs Minton—he smiled. His smiles worked at low pressure in the daytime; he felt that he could not be too careful in this respect; he might, if taken suddenly, be led on to smile naturally in the presence of a man with a kodak, and where would he be then?
He smiled. He went to the drawer where he kept the curious stones, and looked at them for some time, but without touching them. Then he went to the drawer in which he kept the verses that he had written expressive of the effect of Miss Hope’s eyes upon his soul. By a poetic licence he assumed that he had a soul, and he liked to write about it: it gave him an opportunity of making it the last word in a line following one that ended with the word “control.” He read some of the pages, and honestly believed that they were covered with poetry of the highest character. He felt convinced that there was not another man in the whole Ashantee country who could write as good poetry; and perhaps he was not wrong in his estimate of his own powers, and the powers of his Ashantee brethren.
As he closed the door with a bang his face would have seemed to any one who might have chanced to see it one mass of ivory. This effect, startling though it was, was due merely to an incidental change of expression. He had ceased to smile; his teeth were tightly closed, and his lips had receded from them as a tidal wave recedes from the strand of a coral island, disclosing an unsuspected reef. His lips hid in their billowy depths the remainder of his face, and only that fearful double ridge of locked teeth would have been visible to any one, had any one been present.
The words that Dr Koomadhi managed to utter without unlocking his teeth were undoubtedly suggestive of very strong feeling; but no literary interest attaches to their repetition.
He seated himself at his desk—after an interval—and wrote a letter which was rather over than under the demands made by politeness upon a man who has been asked to dinner in a rather formal way. He said it would give him the greatest pleasure to accept the most kind invitation with which he had been honoured by the Commissioner and Mrs Minton; and then he added a word or two, which an ordinary gentleman would possibly have thought superfluous, regarding the pride which he felt at being the recipient of such a distinction.
It could not be said, however, that there was anything in his mode of conducting himself at the dinner-table that suggested any want of familiarity on his part with the habits of good society. He did not eat with his knife, though he might have done so without imperilling in any degree the safety of his mouth, nor did he make any mistake regarding his ice-pudding or his jelly. He also drank his champagne out of the right glass, and he did not take it for granted that the water in his finger-bowl was for any but external use.
As he lay back in his chair, with his serviette across his knees and a cigarette between his fingers, discussing with the Commissioner, with that mild forbearance which one assumes towards one’s host, the political situation of the hour, when Mrs Minton had left the room, he looked the picture of a model English gentleman—a silhouette picture. He hoped that the Conservatives would not go to the country without a programme. What were the leaders thinking of that they hadn’t familiarised the country with the policy they meant to pursue should they be returned to power? Home Rule for Ireland! Was there ever so ridiculous a demand seriously made to the country? Why, the Irish were, he assured his host, very little better than savages: he should know—he had been in Ireland for close upon a fortnight. He had some amusing Irish stories. He imitated the brogue of the peasantry. He didn’t say it was unmusical; but Home Rule!... the idea was too ridiculous to be entertained by any one who knew the people.
His political views were sound beyond a doubt. They were precisely the views of the Commissioner and his son-in-law, and the green chartreuse was velvety as it should be.
For this evening only Major Minton sang to his wife’s accompaniment a sentimental song which dwelt upon the misery of meeting daily with smiles a certain person, while his, the singer’s, heart was breaking. He sang it with well-simulated feeling. One would never have thought that there was a banjo in the house.
Then Mrs Minton sang a lovely Scotch song about a burn; but it turned out that the burn was water and not fire, and the Commissioner dozed in a corner.
At last Major Minton suggested a game of billiards, and the suggestion was acted on without delay.
After playing a game with Dr Koomadhi, while her husband looked on and criticised the strokes from the standpoint of a lenient if discriminating observer, Mrs Minton said “goodnight”; she was tired, she said, and she knew that her husband and Dr Koomadhi meant to play all night, so she thought she might as well go soon as late.
Of course Dr Koomadhi entreated her not to leave them. They would, he assured her, do anything to retain her; they would even play a four game—abhorred of billiard-players—if she would stay. Her husband did not join in the entreaties of their guest. He played tricky cannons until she had left the room.