CHAPTER V

EVENTS AT MALLA-NULLA

Mr. Smith had been away from his creature comforts for a spell of twenty hours, and most of that time had been spent on the thwart of a dancing surf boat in the embraces of a dank sea fog. He had been divorced from food, stimulant and tobacco smoke for all that time--the surf boat had been twice upset in getting off, and drowned all the matches--and as a consequence his temper was vile, and his language was sulphurous. He was barely thankful when he came back to the beach again and found Malla-Nulla factory neither burned nor looted; he was openly ungrateful when he found that the last of the stock of limes had gone mouldy, and realized for the moment a Coast cocktail was beyond the limitations of art. As a consequence Mr. Smith romped up and down the untidy mess-room in a state bordering on frenzy, and in his own especial polyglot reviled the unknown K. O'Neill as the _fons et origo mali_.

In addition to the legitimate boat boys, the whole of the other factory boys had been crammed into the surf boat, and as a consequence they also were chilled, cramped, and bad-tempered. His own body servant was openly insolent when commanded to produce dry tobacco and a pipe. And when on the top of all this Mr. Smith opened Carter's bedroom door, stumbled over the sleepy White-Man's-Trouble, and was promptly floored by that nervous savage and threatened with a well-filed matchet, the remaining rags of his temper at last gave way. He sat there on the floor, a very unkempt figure, and for five minutes without stopping (or repeating himself) said exactly what he thought.

During four of these minutes his Assistant had been awake, and listening to him through the thin filter of the mosquito bar.

"Perhaps I should explain, sir," said Carter, stiffly, when the flow of words at last ended, "that I came back here because I thought you were in a hole and I might be of use. I have not been indulging in whiskey as you suggest, but I believe I have been through a stiffish bout of fever."

"Get up, man, and look at yourself in the glass."

Carter did that, inspected a moment, and then whistled. "Good Lord," he said, "I don't wonder you think I had been on the razzle. What on earth's this white stuff painted round my eyesockets? I look like a clown in a circus."

"Oh, Carter," said White-Man's-Trouble, "dem ju-ju. Last night you lib for fever plenty-too-much bad. I fit for cure you. Now you well. If you touch dem ju-ju, you lib for fever again, one-time."

Carter's meddling hand dropped to his side as though the white stuff round his eye had stung him. He turned half-apologetically to Mr. Smith. "Do you think that's likely, sir? You know West African ways better than I do."

"Beyond me. But you never can tell, and there's always the probability of Africa springing something new upon one. If I were you I should let your personal appearance slide and risk wearing that decoration for the day, if your boy says so. Ju-ju's a dangerous thing to meddle with anyway, and he calls it that. Besides your fever's gone, you say?"

"Absolutely. And I don't even feel a wreck."

"You're sure you were pretty bad last night?"

"I fancy I was close upon pegging out. I never had such a stiff bout before."

"Well, Mr. Carter," said the old man screwing in an eyeglass and staring at him, "if I were you I should dash Trouble five bob for saving your life, and follow out the rest of his instructions. Ju-ju often gets there when drugs won't touch the spot at all, and, mark you, you're getting that admission from the man who knows more about drugs suitable for Coast ailments than anybody in West Africa. The only trouble about putting this into general practice, is, where are you going to find the proper ju-ju to meet the case? But you seem to have got hold of the right boy for this sort of thing in Trouble. Turning to business for a moment, I hope you're satisfied with your exertions on behalf of Craven and O'Neill with his Majesty of Okky?"

"Well, I don't know what he's done yet, sir. Mr. Slade said he had wiped out Malla-Nulla factory and killed you and all the boys, but that seems, well, exaggerated."

"Slade always takes the gloomy view. The King talked; and I'll admit things looked ugly for a bit. You see you'd walked off with the Firm's artillery."

"Good heavens, do you mean that my tin-pot ten-and-sixpenny revolver was the only gun about the place?"

"Certainly I do. You see--er--Mr. Carter, one occasionally--er--dines rather heavily here, and once after dining too well I saw a man shoot another whose loss he regretted afterwards. So as I wished to spare myself those regrets, I saw to it that there was nothing more deadly about the place than trade guns, and you wouldn't catch me loosing off one of those, however drunk I might be. I regret to say the King didn't continue to carry his liquor like a gentleman after you'd left; he grew quarrelsome; and finally I had to pull him up with some sharpness. Then came the ultimatum. He said I should find the roads stopped already--the old scoundrel had been playing me like a trout, it seems, till everything had been got ready, and he told me that as a fine for your lèse-majesté he should help himself to the contents of the factory as they stood."

"But you headed him off there, sir, at any rate."

Swizzle-Stick Smith chuckled. "Well, I haven't been on this Coast for twenty-five years without knowing a thing or two. I told the King I was rather glad to hear him say that because it showed that a prophecy made a year ago was now going to be fulfilled. He asked what it was. I spouted to him

'Maecenas Atavis edite regibus O et præsidium et dulce decus meum, Sunt, quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum Conlegisse juvat, ...

as the first thing that came into my head, and fine pompous lines they are, as you'd remember if you'd ever been to a public school, which you haven't."

"I've written out all Horace twenty times over in impositions and know the bulk by heart, but I can't say I ever got a taste for construing it."

"Well, we won't argue out the value of a classical education just now. Anyway the King of Okky was impressed. Of course he twigged the stuff was not English, or Okky, or Kroo, or Arabic, or any of the tongues hereabouts. He asked what it was. I said it was a priest's tongue. He asked what the words meant. I romanced then and told him they prophesied that the factory would be looted by a King who had made himself a King--the old scoundrel was born a slave, you'll remember, and made the throne vacant by killing his predecessor--and that two days afterwards a new and very curious sort of ju-ju would be put on that King, who would thereupon die a new and very painful sort of death."

"Ripping!" said Carter.

"The meeting broke up in confusion just about then, because his soldiers down below began to run amuck among our boys, and the King heard the row and went for me. However, I'd my big lead tobacco box handy, and I wiped him over the head with that, and as the boys below were frightened, and had got our surf boat ready for launching, I saw that they intended to quit, whatever I might say, and I didn't see the force of holding the fort here alone. So I went to sea with them, and spent the evening preaching them a long sermon on the vice of cowardice. I hadn't much faith that the King would be fool enough to swallow my prophecy, but as I say, you can never be sure which way the African brain will twist. And here you see's the factory untouched."

"When Mr. K. gets a report on this, sir, I fancy you'll have a letter you will like."

"Maybe. But I shan't wear myself out expecting it. Look here"--Mr. Smith produced a letter from the breast pocket of his stained pyjamas--"came in just after you'd left. Sent by canoe and special runner from our factory on the Monk River. Agent there says he wants to charge me seven pound ten for forwarding my mail. If that's K. O'Neill's idea of running a business economically, I wish he'd come out to the Coast here and find a way of making profits to correspond."

Carter had a shrewd suspicion that if Mr. K. had ordered an expenditure of seven pounds ten shilling sterling over the forwarding of a letter, it contained an idea which that very astute business man was sure would produce at least seventy pounds in the near future. But he did not irritate his superior by mentioning this aloud. Instead he asked, "Any instructions for me, sir?"

"Well, yes. First of all there is a direct one. K. says, 'As Mr. Carter seems a good hand at collecting native curios, I should be glad if he would get me some ivory war horns. I want a row of them on my drawing-room wall.' So, young man, you had better get hold of some escribellos and your carving tools and set to work."

"I don't propose," said Carter shortly, "to start faking curios for Mr. K. A man like that would spot them at once. But I'll send my model horn, and see to it he has some other good specimens of the real thing."

"As you like. Well, the letter goes on to advise us that the next thing America and France and Great Britain are going to gamble over is rubber. Not collected wild rubber, you understand, but rubber estates where the vines can be planted and cultivated. K.'s evidently going in for Company Promoting, and as a preliminary he instructs me to get options of suitable territory. He's got an idea that an uncleared estate on the Coast here, which could grow rubber if it had the chance, can be bought at the rate of a case of gin per thousand acres; and if you've a fancy for untouched bush, and a doubtful title, I daresay that is so."

"But one can get a clear title, I suppose, if one takes the trouble?"

Mr. Smith's pipe finally refused even to bubble, so he started to clean out its more obvious horrors into Carter's wash basin. He went on between the throes of this nice operation--"Depends who you mean by 'one.' If you're hinting at yourself, I have no doubt you could manage it, because--you're a very painstaking young man, and I'm sure--you see yourself as a partner of K. O'Neill already. Isn't that so?"

"That might do when I'm ready, sir," said Carter laughing, "unless I see something better in the meantime. But as a point of fact I wasn't setting up myself as a man to see through the tangle of African land transfer."

"If you were referring to me, I shouldn't recommend you to bet on the result, unless the odds are big on your side. And mark you I've been dabbling in West African real estate at intervals for five-and-twenty years"--he pointed to the crown of his bald head--"that's what's worn my hair so thin in places. You get your eye on a piece of land here, you get all the local evidence you can rake up as to who is owner, and you pay that man and put up your buildings. If within the next six months more than three other owners don't turn up with absolutely flawless-looking titles, you'll be lucky. It's a case of pay each of them in turn, or clear out."

"But surely there's the alternative of doing neither?"

"Certainly, if you can get the Government to back you up, and that's the rarest thing imaginable. You see any land trouble of that kind, whatever the rights or wrongs of it may be, always means a war when the white man refuses either to pay or quit. The local kings and ju-ju men always snap at the chance. Well, we needn't argue this out any further. I know all the districts in at the back here where rubber can be grown, and I shall go off on a trip up country and see what I can do in the way of negotiations. I leave you in charge here at Malla-Nulla. Your particular object in life will have to be keeping down expenses."

"You think there will be no trade then?"

"Not now the King of Okky has closed the roads," said Smith decisively.

Now Swizzle-Stick Smith had a long list of failings, but letting his assistants eat the bread of idleness was not among them. "Nothing like work--and a moderate amount of drugs--for keeping fever and mischief out of a man," was his motto, and he saw to it that Carter remained steadily on the run. But now the roads were stopped, and it was only the rare merchant who straggled in scared, and often wounded, from that mysterious Africa behind, George Carter discovered that life was a very different thing. Beforetime, he had found work in the feteesh, and round the factory generally, a trial to the flesh; but the idleness that took its place was infinitely more objectionable.

He employed the Krooboy staff in whitewashing, in building, in making a caricature of a garden; he made the native clerks polish up their books into a shape that would have satisfied even a Glasgow Chartered Accountant; and for himself he made Okky arrows, axes, spears, drums and warhorns, in such quantities that even the curiosity shops of Europe would have been glutted if they had all gone home.

In despair he even thawed to a certain intimacy with the Portuguese linguister, but presently cast him off in disgust, and realized why on the West Coast one divides up the population into white men, black men, and Portuguese. Of course White-Man's-Trouble was always at his elbow, but he hardly fulfilled the requirements of a companion.

To be precise, after the roads were stopped, and Mr. Smith had departed elsewhere, the Trader-in-charge of Malla-Nulla factory discovered for himself what many millions of men have found out before, that it is not good for man to live alone, and though he made many ingenious plans for remedying the evil, all of these, save one, invariably broke down on being tested. The one plan that was sound related to Laura Slade.

Every time that Laura's name inserted itself into the argument his mind would presently leap back to Upper Wharfedale, and he would hear afresh that warning of his father's about taking a wife of one's own color. And his father, he reminded himself, had once held an Indian chaplaincy, and knew what he was talking about.

But by degrees, as this proposition was argued out again and again, and the loneliness of West Africa in general, and Malla-Nulla in particular bit deeper and deeper home, so did England and all that dwelt therein drift further and further away. He had found occasion the day after he had been left in sole charge of the factory to send a business note to Slade at Smooth River. In it he enclosed another to Laura, and to this latter he received a reply that he found charming. The affairs of the factories required many messages after that; and presently the pair of them did away with the cloak and pretence of commerce altogether, and White-Man's-Trouble was kept trotting backwards and forwards across the glaring beaches, frankly as Cupid's messenger. Only once did Slade interfere, and that was when the Krooboy, presuming on his peculiar position, stole from the Smooth River factory some article of more than customary value. Slade said nothing publicly, but took the law into his own hands, and after the custom of the Coast banged White-Man's-Trouble lustily with a section of a packing case; and even then Carter would have known nothing about the matter had not there been a nail in the weapon of offence, which left its marks, and about which he made inquiries.

Slade it seemed had also received from K. O'Neill similar instructions to those recorded above, on the matter of rubber estates, and with his usual indecision would determine one day to set off personally into the bush, and the next day to do the necessary bargaining by correspondence. Finally he wrote to Carter a querulous letter saying that as he got no help from anybody in deciding on such an important subject, he was just going to stay on at Smooth River and twiddle his thumbs, and so Carter was not in the least surprised to hear from Laura within the next twenty hours that her father with hammock-train and escort had that day set off for a prolonged expedition into the bush.

"His last instructions," wrote Laura, "were that I was not to be in the least nervous; he was going to avoid the Okky country; and anyway he was an old Coaster, and knew most thoroughly how to take care of himself. And so, nervous I refuse to feel. But, oh! I am so lonely here with no one whiter than Mr. and Mrs. da Silva to talk to. I somehow quite share your instinctive dislike to West Coast Portuguese."

Within ten minutes after reading that letter, Carter was out under a brazen glare of heat, marching along the sand where it was wet and hard, and nearing the straggle of palms which marked the banks of Smooth River, at the rate of four good miles to the hour. When a white man walks at that speed through West Africa mid-day heat, it is only because some question of life or death hangs upon the speed; though in this case Carter told himself that love was the same as life. He pinned his eyes on the Smooth River palms, which the refraction made to dance up and down most coquettishly, and repeated this over and over again, because another voice within him persisted in sneering something about two very lonely people with nothing to do, who were not in love at all, but merely bored with idleness and their own society; and finally he got quite angry over the matter. He stuck out his great dogged chin, and presently cursed aloud. He shook his fist at the splendor of the tropical sun. "I do love the girl," he declared, "and I will marry her in spite of my father, and K., and everyone, if she will have me. Curse it! Why should I hesitate when I love her? This infernal climate is making me as slack and undecided as even poor old Slade."

So with the surf booming ceaselessly in his ears, and the sea-smoke driving over him and making his white drill collar damp and sticky, he marched resolutely on to meet Fate.