CHAPTER X

ENVOYS IN COUNCIL

"Hallo, Meredith, I heard rumors that there was a white man up in this part of the bush, but I never guessed it was you. I did think of sending on a runner to see, but somehow I didn't."

"No, you wouldn't," said the older man. "I never knew you make up your mind to anything unless it was decided for you. Now, look here, Slade, we're in lonely country here, and if I shoot you, you'll never be missed; and, by gad, shoot you I will unless you mend your memory."

"Poof! what does it matter? We're the only white men within two hundred miles, and the boys are out of earshot."

"A black boy can hear a lot farther than you think, and for that matter I've known trees in West Africa to have ears that understand English--at least that has been the only explanation one could find of the way things have leaked out. But we'll leave all that alone. I've given you to understand by what name I wish to be addressed."

"Well, you needn't be so short about it. I've always called you Smith down in the Coast factories. Of course I can't forget that I once knew you when you were----"

"Will you hold your slobbering tongue? If you can't, say so, and I'll stop it once and for always. I've told you my wish; to you or anyone else I'm Smith, or Swizzle-Stick Smith, which you like. I've no connection with anything that went before, and 'pon my soul, as you're the only man now alive that knows it, I believe I'd be a lot safer if you were out of the way."

Slade turned his back petulantly. "Oh, do stop this wrangle. I'll call you Swizzle-Stick Smith to the end of the chapter, and forget that you were ever anything other than a drunken old palm-oil ruffian, if it pleases you. Come to my hut and chop. I shot some parrots this morning. They'll taste a bit like high rook, but they are better than tinned stuff anyway. They came over finely; real raketers. It was quite like the old days at home. This gun, by the way, is about my last link with ancestral splendor. Look there, a Holland. They wanted me to have ejectors, I remember, but I wouldn't."

Mr. Smith screwed his eyeglass into his other eye and straightened the new black silk ribbon by which it hung. "No," he said grimly, "that was very wise of you, especially as ejectors weren't invented when that gun was built. I wonder what sort of a tale you told Image before he trusted you with it?"

"What are you driving at? What's Cappie Image to do with it?"

"That's my gun. I had it--well, as you've started the forbidden subject already--I had it before the fall. Image saw it at Malla-Nulla one day when I was full up and walked off with it, and I never managed to get it back from him. He always said the beach was too bad to risk letting a surf boat bring it ashore. Well, you may keep the thing for the present, and I'll take a bowlful of your parrot stew by way of rent. This the house? You've managed to find yourself pretty comfortable quarters, I see."

The house was a series of rooms packed round an internal courtyard. The outer walls were of wattle, luted with mud thrown onto them in vigorous handfuls, and left to bake hard in the sun. The roof was a pile of untidy thatch, the floor of hardened mud, and in the middle of the courtyard was an ineffective shade-tree scorched by the smoke of the cooking fires. Beyond this house sprawled the other houses of a small West African village, with the usual squalor heaped between them.

To most Europeans there would have been much to notice--the cooking vessels, the calabashes, the food, the ju-ju charms that one met at unexpected corners, the scavenging dogs, and the all-pervading smells. But Swizzle-Stick Smith's curiosity was worn by twenty years attrition, and these savage circumstances had grown native to him. He did not even comment on the fact that Slade was living entirely in local fashion, the thing was so obvious a course for his friend to follow that he took it for granted. He himself was a man of like tastes. Down at Malla-Nulla the menu had mostly smacked of Africa; but once he had left the Coast, Mr. Smith had travelled as an Okky headman travels, living mainly on kanki and couscousoo, and for beverage partaking of sour palm wine, muddy bush-water, and an allowance of trade gin sternly cut down to one square-faced bottle per diem.

His only comment on the place was that Slade's mosquito bar was made of a material that they had long ago decided was faulty, and that a certain mark of cheesecloth gave better passage to the air, and was more impervious to insects. To which Slade made reply that he knew it, but couldn't be bothered to change, after which the cookboy brought in a calabash of odorous, highly-peppered stew, colored bright orange with palm oil and condiments, and set it on the floor of one of the rooms. Mr. Smith pocketed his pipe, dropped his eyeglass to the end of its black ribbon, and wiped his hands on his shabby pyjamas, after which simple preparations the pair of them sat down on the earth beside the calabash and proceeded to eat skilfully from their fingers.

Around them were the cases and bales of Slade's outfit, each done up into a "load" ready for a carrier's head. In the other room of the house and in the courtyard were the carriers, some of them eating, some of them cleaning their teeth with the rubbing stick, which all Coast natives use incessantly in moments of leisure, some of them chatting. Most of them sat bareheaded in the staring sunlight; a few nestled in the purple shadows. One was picking a jigger out of his toe with a splinter of bamboo. In a spare corner another played tom-tom on the bottom of an empty kerosene-tin bucket, and three stalwarts stood up before him monotonously dancing.

Mr. Smith finished his meal and took out his pipe. "Does it run to a peg?" he asked.

"It does. Don't spoil my fine vintage port with tobacco. You can smoke afterwards. Here, boy, we fit for gin."

"Gin lib," said the Accra in attendance, and handed a square-faced bottle and a bowl.

"Good. Now, when you see dem Smith fit for smoke, you bring fire, one-time. Savvy?"

"I fit."

Swizzle-Stick Smith moved back until his shoulders rested against a bale, and hitched up the knees of his shrunk pyjamas and stretched his arms pleasurably. "You travel in comfort, Slade."

"The secret is, I don't move along too fast. I've been in this village a fortnight. I don't know when I shall make up my mind to pull out and go on."

"Not till you've eaten it bare or are forced off some other way, I suppose. You're a curious envoy for a confiding employer in Liverpool to send out into the bush."

Slade grinned. "Old Godfrey wouldn't have done it. But this new K. O'Neill hasn't seen my cutaway chin. K.'s a hustler, but he's young, remarkably young."

"Have you done anything in the way of getting him a rubber property?"

"Well, curiously enough I have. At least, I've bought him up a few square miles of country that rubber vines would grow on well enough if it was cleared, and planted, and tended, and no one put ju-ju on them."

"Is it get-at-able?"

"It's on some river or other. The ditch isn't marked on the map, but I daresay a steamer could get up if it was worth while. The title's as good as one could expect."

"That means it won't be jumped so long as you pay fifty pounds a year to the next claimant."

"I should say five-and-twenty will fix him," said Slade lazily. "You see he's headman of the next village and he thinks he's got some unproductive bush to sell himself. I've rammed into his skull the great truth that his deal can't go through if he starts trying to jump his neighbor's land and unsteadies the market. I think those considerations will outweigh even his nigger's love for litigation--" He went on to give listlessly enough a few more details of the transaction.

Mr. Smith was well-versed in the ways of West African diplomacy, and could appreciate to a nicety all the haggling and the patience and the tedious arguments that had gone to build up these complicated bargains. He screwed in his eyeglass and looked at Slade attentively. "I wonder," he said, "why you always make yourself out to be such an infernal waster? You know you must have been doing some thundering good work. I couldn't have put that deal through, and I know my West Africa as well as you do or better. There's not one man in five thousand could have managed it. What's your trick?"

"Oh, I found myself in comfortable quarters, and I couldn't make up my mind to move on and try more likely country elsewhere. So I stayed and talked rubber-palaver with the headman. One had to do something for amusement. Besides they'd a tree of alligator pears in the village that were exactly ripe, and it would have been a crime to leave them to benighted Africans. By the way, very rude of me not to ask before, but what have you done since you left the Coast?"

"Got into a very ugly hole," said Swizzle-Stick Smith shortly, "and wriggled out of it by the skin of my teeth."

"Rubber-palaver?"

"No."

"Oh, sorry for inquiring. I thought that was what you came up for?"

"So it was, and I started off from the Coast with a full intention of carrying out O'Neill and Craven's business. But I got led off on an old trail."

"Ah," said Slade thoughtfully. "I believe I could guess."

"Guessing's dangerous. But I may as well own up to you frankly that I've been seeing the King of Okky."

"Well, you've a nerve. I shouldn't have cared for that job myself."

"It wasn't pleasant. Okky City jars one's sense of decency rather badly just now. Old Kallee's been going it extra strong on human sacrifices, you know. His private crucifixion tree is a thing you don't like to think about."

"Filthy old beast he is."

"But he's the strongest man hereabouts."

"I see. And you got onto your old game of the pre-Smith days and tried to get him to put the Okky country and his royal self under the formal protectorate of the British Empire? I thought you dropped all that tommyrot when you got kicked--I mean when you turned trader and became known to fame as Mr. Smith. Sink the past, of course, sink the past, but you started it."

"I couldn't help going. I got news of a French expedition in Okky City. Of course I've been damnably treated by the British Foreign Office in days gone by, but the old fires will relight sometimes. Frenchmen in Okky City, I'll trouble you, Slade, and of course with the usual accompaniment. _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_. So I couldn't resist trying my own hand with the Kallee, even though I hadn't anything at all up to his weight as an introductory dash."

"Half a dozen cases of Heidsieck is the nearest way to his royal ear, though I hear that lately he's developed a taste for the better years of Krug."

"That's quite true. It was a fancy touch of Burgoyne, our Monk River man. I call that hardly legitimate business, you know. German champagne and angostura are good enough for me, and they ought to be good enough for a black savage like Kallee. Dash it, what right's he to a palate?"

"Would he see you?"

"Well, of course I've known him since before he killed his predecessor and got the King's stool, and so he's a bit freer with me than he is with most people."

Slade nodded. "And you drank together till you were both blind speechless?"

"I wasn't, anyway," said the older man shortly. "I kept my head and stuck to my tale. The Frenchman wasn't in it. He went to sleep before we whacked the first ten bottles, and he was laid up with a fine dose of fever next day; but there was no shifting Kallee. He doesn't care an escribello for all the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. He's got ten small cannon up there, that, according to him, can quite account for Great Britain if it comes to worry him, and in the meanwhile the French are very kind friends. They've given him a gramophone, and a general's uniform, and an ice-making machine, and when they bring him the canoe load of Winchester repeaters he's asked for, he'll sign a treaty of allegiance to France."

"Arms of precision! The Frenchman had better take care. If any of our Government fellows catch him at that game, they'll shoot him first and inquire into him afterwards."

"Well, what he's going to do in the matter, I don't exactly know. You see, the beggar had Kallee's ear, and to tell you the plain truth he had me deported. Kallee said that if he laid hands on me again, he would have my skin off, and stuff it with straw, and stick it in the road that leads to Malla-Nulla as a warning to the next Englishman that came along that it would be more healthy to keep inside his own marches."

Slade laughed. "I bet you footed it away."

"What the devil else could I do? And here am I, no forwarder with O'Neill and Craven's job than I was the day I tramped out of Malla-Nulla. I did say 'Rubber' to the King, and he did hear out my tale. He said it was good palaver, and set on a couple of hundred slaves there and then with matchets to clear bush and plant rubber vines to grow revenue for himself. But he sells no land to Englishmen, and I guess if another of the breed comes up yet awhile, Kallee'll plant him. By the way, Slade, have you been in touch with the bush telegraph?"

"Oh, I heard that the usual vague rows and horribles were going on in Okky City, but I didn't pay much attention to that. I did hear, too, that Cappie Image and the _M'poso_ helped a red-headed man, who I suppose was that young Carter of yours, in some sort of a row at presumably Malla-Nulla. I took the trouble to go into the dates; the news must have travelled here in thirty hours, and we're a good two hundred miles from the Coast. It is a bit marvellous. I wonder how the deuce the niggers do it. Some sort of ju-ju, I suppose, but I never met a white man yet who understood the trick."

"Did you hear anything about a white woman stirring things up?"

"Certainly, I did, and concluded it was Laura. I left her in charge at Smooth River, you know, and she's grown into a jolly capable girl, let me tell you, old man, when she cares to spread herself. What are you twiddling about your eyeglass for? Why don't you say out what you mean? Oh, I see. White. By gad, I'd never thought of that. Even a bush telegraph, which is always liable to mistake in detail, would never blunder into calling my little girl white. By gad, Smith, what a damnable thing that 'sins of the fathers' law is. If I were a man that ever looked so much as half a day ahead, I believe I should go mad at the thought of what will become of Laura in the future. You're a tough old ruffian with no cares and you could never understand what that kiddie is to me."

"No use crying over a marriage that's over. Everybody that knows her will do his best for Laura, and if any man tried hanky-panky tricks with her he'd probably die one of the local deaths of Africa in very quick time. But about this white woman. I heard about her, too. There was a big tom-toming far away in the bush one night, ten minutes after the sun went out, and my boys listened hard and then set up a fine chatter. It was long enough before I could make anything out of them, but at last I heard something about 'a white mammy' that set me thinking. I got the idea at first that someone, probably the Okky-men, had been knocking a she-missionary on the head, and that made me cock up my ears. You know when a trader or a man in one of the services gets scuppered out here, the pious people at home say it's his own brutal fault and the poor African is quite right in what he does. But when it's a missionary, the Exeter Hall crew insist on war."

Slade put up the usual Coaster's wish for the future of Exeter Hall.

"Quite so," said Swizzle-Stick Smith. He got up and limped across to the doorway and stood there for a minute puffing pale blue smoke into the dazzle of sunshine. Then he came back again and once more sat on the earthen floor with his back against a bale. "The boys out there, both yours and mine, are still harping on the same subject."

"I didn't make out that the white woman was killed."

"Nor did I, when I went into the matter further. I was only explaining what gave me the first interest in the subject, because if there had been a she-missionary killed, all the bush would know that meant war, and they would slaughter every white man they came across out of sheer light-heartedness. No, if that had happened, you would not have seen me here. I should have lit out for the Coast, one-time. But I presently found that the white woman had not been killed, but that she was a someone who seemed to puzzle my boys exceedingly. There seemed to be heap-too-much ju-ju about her. She did things no one else could tackle."

"Sort of champion lady weight-lifter? Boy, fill Mr. Smith's pipe and bring him fire."

"You know that Kroo word, Oomsha, that means Sultana or woman-above-a-headman, or something like that?"

"I heard a tale of an Oomsha once somewhere up Sokoto way. She's been head wife of an Emir, and when he died she killed all the heirs and ran the town herself. I thought it meant more witch or conjurer. It's a ju-ju word."

"Well, I won't quarrel with you over etymology, and we seem to agree enough on the definition for practical purposes. Now, my boys said that this white woman was an Oomsha. Did you hear that?"

"Not I. I tell you I thought it was Laura they were gassing about, and I didn't trouble myself to inquire more deeply."

"Dash it," said the old man fiercely, "do rouse up and interest yourself in something. What the deuce has a white sultana got to do messing around the Coast factories, especially O'Neill and Craven's? And let me tell that's what's happening."

"Is the mythical lady setting everybody by the ears and preparing for a holy something?"

"That's the maddening part of it. They all seem to like her. She's stirring up everybody, she's upsetting your factory and mine, she's dragged the man with the red head in adoration to her feet and then spurned him from her, and she's even captured the warm and profane Cappie Image as one of her servitors."

"Poof! blarney old Image! Now, that proves you've got onto a fairy tale."

Mr. Smith thumped an emphatic fist on the hard stamped floor beside him. "I tell you I have not. The bush telegraph never lies. You may misunderstand it, but if you take time and trouble, and dig deep enough, you'll always come to the truth of things. As sure as we are sweating in this bush village here, there's a white woman on the Coast turning all the business there upside down."

"I've got it," said Slade. "K. O'Neill's tired of having all his bright ideas comfortably shelved by you and me, and so his new happy thought is to send his fascinating typewriter out to hand instructions over in person, and wait till they're put through. Your Carter and my Laura would be just the sort of enthusiastic young people to fall in with a scheme like that. But I must say the conquest of Image beats me. It would take a heap more than a hen typewriter to tame Cappie Image-me-lad."

"Yes, I thought of all that, but there's one blessed thing that upsets it completely. The Oomsha is making headquarters at the Dutch factory at Mokki, and building a fort there. Now, play on that."

"Weather too hot," said Slade. "Whe-ew! I wish the breeze would come."

"Dash it, man, think! A white woman building a fort up at Mokki."

"Sounds buccaneerish, or I'll tell you what, German." Slade sat up with a sudden spurt of unaccustomed energy and ran the perspiration off his face with a forefinger. "By gad! I didn't think of that, but picture the joys of having a beastly German in at the back of us, with a Government subsidy, and a price-cutting apparatus all complete."

"Yes," said Swizzle-Stick Smith grimly, "and also picture to yourself the eminently British Captain Image yielding to the soft blandishments of a German Frau. He'd as soon think of making himself amiable to a gorilla. No, that theory's wrong. The thing stumps me, and I'm sure if it's too big for me, it's outside your size."

"Quite so," said Slade, who had dropped back into his normal slackness after the spurt of energy. Then he screwed up his eyes tightly as the hot air was split with a succession of piercing yells and screeches.

"Good Lord, what's that?" the old man called out.

"Some poor brute of a farmer, who's been working on his cassava ground, being pulled down by a leopard. There, don't get up; you can't do anything. Don't you hear he's quiet now, which means 'palaver set' as far as the farmer is concerned. That will make the rest of his agricultural neighbors careful for the next twenty-four hours, and go to their work in pairs, and take their spears. At the end of twenty-four hours their massive memories will fail them and they'll stroll out alone just as the spirit moves them, and someone else will be chopped. Those squeals used to make one feel rather sick at first, and one was apt to get excited and rush out with a gun. But it never did any good. Spotted Dick always prefers to dine in privacy and drags his mutton back into the bush. I can imagine," Slade added with a faint laugh, "that an energetic man who was a bit of a sportsman would find this place pretty exasperating. Thanks to these careless animals of villagers ground-baiting the creatures to the extent they have done, there's the best stocked leopard-cover in Africa round here, but you simply can't get them up to the gun. I've tried sitting up for them over a kill, I've tried stalking, and always got nothing. I risked a drive one day and the leopard chopped a couple of beaters. It would be exasperating to an energetic man, but thank goodness I'm not that, and so I've simply taken things as they came."

"H'm," said Smith thoughtfully. "When we walked in here I noticed I limped on one side and you limped on the other. We sort of jabbed at one another, in and out. Now, limping is a new accomplishment for you. Have you been interviewing a leopard personally?'"'

Slade's sallow face flushed a little. "Well, you see, a son of the headman here took it into his silly head to get in a leopard's way one day, and I knew the old chap was awfully fond of the lad. So I just retrieved him, and we both got a bit clawed in the process. But it was purely a matter of business for K. O'Neill. The old goat of a headman wouldn't listen to any suggestion for buying rubber lands before. Dash it all, Smith, I am slack, I know, but I do try and put in a bit of work for the firm in return for my pay sometimes."