CHAPTER IV.
BLACK AND WHITE.
A year and more, spring and summer, autumn and winter, had gone by since Allan Carew and his companions set their faces towards the Dark Continent; and now it was spring again, the early spring of Central Africa; and under the pale cloudless blue of a tropical sky three white men, with their modest following of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi—a company no bigger than that with which Captain Trivier crossed from shore to shore—camped beside the Sea of Ujiji. They had come from the east, and the journey from the coast opposite Zanzibar, taken very easily, with many halting-places on the way, had occupied the best part of a year. Some of those resting-places had been chosen for sport, for exploration, for repose after weary and troublesome stages. Sometimes a long halt had been forced upon the travellers by sickness, by inclement weather, by the rebellion or the perversity of their men—those porters upon whose endurance and good will their comfort and safety alike depended, in a land where it has been truly said that "luggage is life."
That march from Bagamoyo, Stanley's starting-point, through the vicissitudes of the road and the seasons, had not been all pleasure; and there were darker hours on the way, when, toiling on with aching head and blistered feet, half stifled by the rank mists and poisonous odours of a jungle that smelt of death, Allan Carew and his companions may have wished themselves back in the beaten paths of a civilized world, where there is no need to think of bed or dinner, and where all that life requires for sustenance and support seems to come of itself. But if there had been weak yearnings for the comfortable, as opposed to the adventurous, not one of the three travellers had ever given any indication of such backsliding. Each in his turn stricken down—not once, but often—by the deadly mukunguru, or African fever, had rallied and girded his loins for the journey without an hour's needless delay; and then, on recovery, there had followed a fervent joy in life and nature; a rapture in the atmosphere; a keener eye for every changeful light and colour in earth and sky; the blissful sensations of a newly created being, basking in a new world. It was almost worth a man's while to pass through the painful stages of that deadly fever, the ague fit and languor, the yawning and drowsiness which mark the beginning of sickness, the raging thirst and throbbing temples, the aching spine and hideous visions that are its later agonies, in order to feel that ecstasy of restored health in which the convalescent sees ineffable loveliness even in the dull monotony of rolling woods, and thrills with friendship and love for the dusky companions of his journey.
Loneliness and horror, pleasantness and danger, a startling variety of scenes had been traversed between the red coast of Eastern Africa and that vast inland sea where many rivers meet and mingle in the deep bosom of the mountains. Across the monotony of rolling woods that rise and fall in a seemingly endless sequence; by fever-haunted plains and swampy hollows; through the dripping scrub of the Makata wilderness; in all the dull horror of the Masika season, when the long swathes of tiger-grass lie rotting under the brooding mists that curtain the foul-smelling waste, when the Makata river has changed from a narrow stream to a vast lake which covers the plain, and in whose shallow waters trees and canes and lush green parasites subside into tangled masses of putrid vegetation, until to the traveller's weary eye it seems as if this very earth were slowly rotting in universal and final decay.
They had come through many a settlement, friendly or unfriendly, through rivers difficult to cross by ford or ferry, difficult and costly too, since there are dusky sultans who take toll of these white adventurers at every ferry, sometimes rival chiefs who set up a claim to the same ferry, and have to be defied or satisfied—generally the latter; through many aguet à pens, where the "whit-whit" of the long arrows sounded athwart the woods as the travellers hurried by; through scenes of beauty and romantic grandeur; across vast expanses of green sward diversified with noble timber, calmly picturesque as an English park—a hunter's paradise of big game. They had journeyed at a leisurely pace, loitering wherever nature invited to enjoyment, their camp of the simplest, their followers as few as the absolute necessities of the route demanded.
By these same forest paths, fighting his way through the same inexorable jungle, Burton had come on his famous voyage of discovery to the unknown lake; and by the same, or almost the same, paths Stanley had followed in his search for the great God-fearing traveller, brave and calm and patient, who made Africa his own. And here had come Cameron, meeting that dead lord of untrodden lands, journeying on other men's shoulders, no longer the guide and chief, but the silent companion of a sorrowful pilgrimage. Lonely as the track might be, it was peopled with heroic memories.
"I should like to have been the first to come this way," Geoffrey had said with a vexed air, as he twirled the tattered leaves of Burton's book, which, with Stanley's and Cameron's travels, and Goethe's "Faust," composed the whole of his library.
"You would always like to be first," Allan answered, laughing. "Is it not enough for you that you are the mightiest hunter of us three—the father of meat, as our boys call you—and that finer giraffes and harte beestes have fallen before your gun than even Patrington can boast, experienced sportsman though he is?"
Patrington assented with a lazy comfortable laugh, stretched his legs on the reed mat under the rough verandah, and refilled his pipe.
He was content to take the second place in the record of sport, and to let this restless fiery spirit satisfy its feverish impulses in the toils and perils of the jungle or the plain.
Here was a young man with an insatiable love of sport, an activity of brain and body which nothing tired, and it was just as well to let him work for the party, while the older traveller, and nominal chief of the expedition, basked in the February sun, and read "Pickwick."
A little brown-leather bound Bible, which he had used a good many years before at Harrow, and a dozen or so of Tauchnitz volumes, all by the same author, and all tattered and torn in years of travel and continual reperusal, constituted Mr. Patrington's stock of literature. Allan was the only member of the party who had burdened himself with a varied library of a dozen or so of those classics which a man cannot read too much or too often; for, indeed, could any man, not actually a student, exercise so much restraint over himself as to restrict his reading for three or four years to a dozen or so of the world's greatest books, that man would possess himself of a better literary capital than the finest library in London or Paris can provide for the casual reader, hurrying from author to author, from history to metaphysics, from Homer to Horace, from Herodotus to Froude, the wasting years of careless reading upon those snares for the idle mind—books about books. Half the intelligent readers in England know more about Walter Pater's opinion of Shelley or Buxton Forman's estimate of Keats than they know of the poems that made Shelley and Keats famous.
Dickens reigned alone in Cecil Patrington's literary Valhalla. He always talked of the author of "Pickwick" as "he" or "him." Like Mr. Du Maurier's fine gentleman who thought there was only one man in London who could make a hat, Mr. Patrington would only recognize one humourist and one writer of fiction.
"How he would have enjoyed this kind of life!" he said. "What fun he would have got out of those crocodiles! What a word picture he would have made of our storms, and the Masika rains, and those rolling woods, that illimitable forest t'other side of Ukonongo! and how he would have understood all the ins and outs in the minds of our Zanzibaris, and of the various nigger-chiefs whose society we have enjoyed, and whose demands we have had to satisfy, upon the road!"
"Have they minds?" asked Geoffrey, with open scorn. "I doubt the existence of anything you can call mind in the African cranium. Hunger and greed are the motive power that moves the native mechanism; but mind, no. They have ferocious instincts, such as beasts have, and the craving for food. Feed them, and they will love you to-day; but they will rob and murder you to-morrow, if they see the chance of gaining by the transaction."
"Oh, come, I won't have our boys maligned. I have lived among them for years, remember, while you are only a new-comer. Granted that they are greedy. They are only greedy as children are. They are like children——"
"Exactly. They are like children. They could not be like anything worse."
"What!" cried Patrington, with a look of horror, "have you no faith in the goodness and purity of a child?"
"In its goodness, not a whit! Purity, yes; the purity of ignorance, which we call innocence, and pretend to admire as an exquisite and touching attribute of the undeveloped human being. These blackies are just as good and just as bad as the average child; greedy, grasping, selfish; selfish, grasping, greedy; ready to kiss the feet of the man who comes back to the village with an antelope on his shoulder; ready to send a poisoned arrow after him if on parting company he refuses to be swindled out of cloth or beads. They are bad, Patrington—if I were not a disciple of Locke, I would say they are innately bad. But what does that matter? We are all bad."
"What a pleasant way you have of looking at life and your fellow-men!" said Patrington.
"I look life and my fellow-man full in the face, and I ask myself if there is any man living whose nature—noble, perhaps, according to the world's esteem—does not include a latent capacity for evil. Every man and every woman, the best as well as the worst, is a potential criminal. Do you thinkthatMacbeth who came over the heath at sundown after the battle, flushed with victory, was a scoundrel? Not he. There was not a captain in the Scottish army more loyal to his king. He was only an ambitious man. Temptation and opportunity did all the rest. Temptation, were it only strong enough, and opportunity, would make a murderer of you or me."
"'Lead us not into temptation.' Oh, wondrous wise and simple prayer, which riseth every night and morning out of the mouths of babes and sucklings over all the Christian world, and in a few brief phrases includes every aspiration needful for humanity!" said Cecil Patrington, who was in matters theological just where he had been when his boyish head was bowed under the Episcopal hand on the day of his confirmation.
Far away from new books and new opinions, knowing not the names of Spencer or Clifford, Schopenhauer or Hartmann, this rough traveller's religion was the unquestioning faith of Paul Dombey, of Hester Summerson and Agnes Whitfield and Little Nell, of all the gentlest creatures in the dream-world of Charles Dickens.
There was leisure and to spare for argument and discussion here in this quiet settlement on the shore of the great lake. The travellers had established themselves in a desertedtembe, which had been allotted to them by the Arab chieftain of the land, and which was pleasantly situated on a ridge of rising ground about a mile from the busy village of Ujiji. They had done all that laborious ingenuity could do to purify the rough clay structure, ridding it as far as possible of the plague of insects that crawled in the darkness below or buzzed in the thatch above, of the rats which the dusk of evening brought out in gay and familiar riot, and the snakes that followed in their train, and the huge black spiders, whose webs choked every corner. They had knocked out openings under the deep eaves of the thatched roof—openings which allowed of cross-currents of air, and were regarded by their Zanzibaris and Unyanyembis with absolute horror. Only once in their pilgrimage had the travellers found a hut with windows.
"What does a man want in histembebut warmth and shelter? And how can these white men be so foolish as to make openings that let in the cold?" argued the native mind; nor was the native mind less exercised by the trouble these three white men took to keep theirtembeand its surroundings, the verandah, the ground about it, severely clean, or by their war of extermination against that insect life whose ravages the African suffers with a stoical indifference.
The travellers had established themselves in this convenient spot—close to the port and market of Ujiji—to wait for the Masika, the season of rain that raineth every day—rain that closes round the camp like a dense wall of water—such rain as a man must go to the tropics to see, and which, once having seen, he is not likely to forget. They could hardly be better off anywhere, when the rains of April should come upon them, than they would be here. The natives were friendly; friendly too, friendly and kind and helpful, was the mighty Arab chief Roumariza, the white Arab, sovereign lord of these regions, sole master here, where the sceptre of the Sultan of Zanzibar reaches not: a man whose word is law, and in whose hand is plenty.
Roumariza looked upon Cecil Patrington's party with the eye of favour, and upon Patrington as an old friend—nay, almost a subject of his own, so familiar was Patrington's bronzed face in those regions, whither he had come close upon the footsteps of Cameron, and when that lake land of tropical Africa was still a new world, untrodden by the white man's foot, the northern shores of the lake still unexplored, the vast country of Rua unknown even to the Arabs.
At Ujiji provisions were plentiful and cheap. At Ujiji there were boat-builders; and canoes and rowers were at hand for the exploration of the vast fresh-water sea. Indeed, there was only too much civilization and human life to please that son of the wilderness, Cecil Patrington.
"I love the unknown better than the known," he said. "We shall never see the lake again as Burton saw it—before ever the sound of engine and paddle-wheel had been heard on that broad blue expanse, when the monkeys chattered and screamed and slung themselves from tree to tree in a tumult of wonder at sight of the white wayfarer. Nobody can ever enjoy the sense of rapture and surprise that took Cameron's breath away as he looked down from the hills and saw the wide-reaching, pale blue water flashing in the sun. He took the lake itself for a cloud at the first glance, and a little islet for the lake, and asked his men, with bitterest chagrin, 'Is this all?' And then the niggers pointed, and these vast waters spread themselves out of the cloud, and he saw this mighty sea shining out of its dark frame of mountain and plain forest. Jupiter, what a moment!Icould never enjoy that surprise. I had read Cameron's book, and he had discounted the situation for me; he had swindled me out of my emotions. I knew the breadth and length of the lake to within a mile—no chance of mistake forme. Yes, I said. Here is the Tanganyika, and it is a very fine sheet of blue water; and pray where is the Swiss porter to take my luggage? or where shall I find the omnibus for the best hotel? Mark me, lads, before we have been long underground, there will be hotels and omnibuses and Swiss porters, and the Cooks and Gazes of the future will deal in through tickets to the African lakes, and this great heart of Africa will be the Englishman's favourite holiday ground. Let but the tramway Stanley talks about be laid from Bagamoyo to the interior, and 'Arry will be lord of Central Africa, as he is of the rest of the earth."
Idle talk in idle hours beside the camp-fire. Though the days were as sunny and summer-like as February on the Riviera, the nights were cold; and after sundown masters and men liked to sit by their fires and watch the pine-wood crackle and the flames leap through the smoke like living things, vanish and reappear, fade into darkness or flicker into light with swifter and more sudden movement than even the thoughts of the men who watched them.
The porters and servants had their own huts and their own fires. They had made a rough stockade round the cluster of bee-hive huts—a snug settlement, which Allan compared to a mediæval fortress, one of the Scottish castles, whose inhabitants live and move in the pages of the Wizard of the North. Allan was a devoted worshipper of Scott, whom he held second only to Shakespeare; and as Cecil Patrington claimed exactly this position for Charles Dickens, the question afforded an inexhaustible subject for argument, sometimes mild and philosophical, sometimes vehement and angry, to which Geoffrey listened yawningly, or into which he plunged with superior vehemence and arbitrary assertion if it were his humour to be interested.
In a land where there was no daily record of what mankind were doing, no newspaper at morning and evening recounting the last pages of the world's history, telling the story of yesterday's crimes and catastrophes, sickness and death, wrong and right, evil and good, adventures, successes, failures, inventions, gains and losses—every movement near or far in the great mill-wheel of human life—deprived of newspapers, of civilized society, and of all the business of money-getting and money-spending, it was only in such discussions that these exiles could find subjects for conversation. The contents of the letters and papers that had reached them three months before at Tabora, brought on from Zanzibar by an Arab caravan bound for the hunting-grounds of Rua, had been long exhausted; and now there was only the populace of the great romancers to talk about in the long chilly evenings, when they were in no mood for piquet or poker, and too lazy-brained for the arduous pleasures of chess. Then it was pleasant to lie in front of the fire and dispute the merits of one's favourite novelist, or some abstract question in the regions of philosophy. Sometimes the three men's talk would wander from Dickens to Plato, from Scott to Aristotle, from Macaulay to Thucydides. Allan was the most bookish of the three, and his knowledge of German enabled him to carry the lightest of travelling-libraries, in the shape of that handy series of little paper-covered books which includes the best German authors, together with translations of all the classics, ancient and modern, Greek, Latin, Norse, English, French, Italian, at twopence-halfpenny per volume—tiny booklets, of which he could carry half a dozen in the pockets of his flannel jacket, and which comprised the literature of the world in the smallest possible compass.
For more than a year, these three men had been dependent upon one another's society for all intellectual solace, for all mental comfort; for more than a year they had looked upon no white faces but their own, so tanned and darkened by sun and weather that they had come to talk of themselves laughingly as white Arabs, or semi-negroids, and to opine that they would never look like Englishmen again. Indeed, Cecil Patrington, whose fifteen years of manhood had been chiefly spent under tropic stars, had no desire ever again to wear the sickly aspect of the home-keeping Englishman, whom he spoke of disparagingly as a turnip-face. Bronzed and battered, and hardened by the hard life of the desert, he laughed to scorn the amenities of modern civilization and the iron bondage of the claw-hammer coat.
"Male humanity is divided into two classes—the men who dress for dinner, and the men who don't. I have always belonged to the latter half. We are the freemen; our shoulders have never bent under the yoke. I ran away from every school I was ever sent to. I played Hell and Tommy at my private tutor's Berkshire parsonage—set fire to his study when he locked me in, with an order to construe five tough pages of 'Thicksides,' for insubordination. I set fire to his waste-paper basket, lads, and his missus's muslin curtains. I knew I could put the fire out with his garden-hose, when I had given him a good scare; and after that little bit of arson, he was uncommonly glad to get rid of me. The old Herod had insisted on my dressing for dinner every night—putting on a claw-hammer coat and a white tie to eat barley-broth and boiled mutton. I wasn't going to stop in such abougeas that. Then came the university. I was always able to scramble through an exam., so I matriculated with flying colours—passed my Little Go with a flourish of trumpets; and my people hoped I had turned over a new leaf. So I had, boys—a new leaf in a new book. I had begun to read the story of African travel—Livingstone, Burton, Baker, du Chaillu, Stanley. And from that hour I knew what manner of life I was meant for. I got my kind old dad to give me a biggish cheque—compounded with him, before my second term at Trinity was over, for the fifteen hundred my university career would have cost him—and sailed for the Cape; and from that day to this, except when I read a paper one night in Savile Row, I have never worn the garment of the white slave. I have never thrust these hairy arms of mine into the silk-lined sleeves of a swallow-tail coat."
For the eldest traveller those days before the coming of the Masika left nothing to be desired. The long coasting voyages on the great fresh-water sea, the canoes following the romantic shores or threading the southern archipelago where the river Lofu pours its broad stream into the lake, were enough for exercise, excitement, variety.
For Cecil Patrington—for the man who carried no burden of bitter memories, whose heart ached not with the yearning for home faces, the joys of Central Africa were all-sufficing. He had been happy in scenes far less lovely; happy in arid deserts such as the Roman poet pictured to himself in the luxurious repose of his suburban villa—deserts to be made endurable by the presence of Lalage. Cecil Patrington would not have exchanged his Winchester rifle for the loveliest Lalage; he wanted to kill, not to be killed. No sweetly smiling, no prettily prattling society would have made up to him for the lack of big game and the means of slaughter. Perhaps he, too, had dreamed his dream, even as Mr. Jaggers had. There is no man so unlikely of aspect that he may not once have been a lover. Is not the faithfullest, fondest lover in all modern fiction the hunchback Quasimodo? But if this rough sportsman had ever succumbed to the common fever, had ever sighed and suffered, his malady was a thing of the remote past. In his most confidential talk there had never been the faintest indication of a romantic attachment.
"Why did I never marry?" he echoed, when the question was asked jestingly, beside the camp-fire, in the early stages of their journey. "I had neither time nor inclination, nor money to waste upon such an expensive toy as a wife; a wife who would eat her head off in England while I was knocking about over here, a wife who would cost me more than a caravan."
This was all that Mr. Patrington ever said about the matrimonial question; but marriage is a subject upon which some men never reveal their real thoughts.
He took life as merrily as if it had been a march in a comic opera; and in the presence of his cheerfulness the two young men kept their troubles to themselves.
Had Allan forgotten Suzette under those tropic stars? No, he had not achieved forgetfulness; but he had learnt to live without love, without the light of a fair woman's face; and in a modified way to be happy. The changes and chances, difficulties, accidents, and adventures of the journey between the coast and Tabora had kept his mind fully occupied. Fever, and recovery from fever; failure or success with his gun; difficult negotiations with village sultans; and even an occasional skirmish in which the poisoned arrows flew fast, and the stern necessity of firing on their assailants had stared them in the face; all these things had left little leisure for love-sick dreams, for fond regrets.