Part 5

I stood there on the terrace watching this strange scene, and the curious part of it was that it did not seem in the least degree curious to me while it was being enacted. On the contrary, I had a distinct sense of harmony--of artistic finish--the pleasurable sensation of which one is conscious on the completion of the _leit motif_ of a symphony,--that is how I can best express what my feelings were at the time. During the hour that I remained there it never occurred to me that I should draw any nearer to the shadowy group. As a matter of fact, I believe that there was uppermost in my mind an apprehension that it was necessary for me to keep very still, lest I should interfere with the work. I have had precisely the same feeling when in the studio of a painter while he was at work and I was watching him. But I could not leave the place where I stood, so long as that scene was being enacted in the silence, and the three figures were equally silent. The night knew no sound except that caused by the chiselling of the stone.

An hour must have passed--perhaps more than an hour--and then, still in silence, the sculptor threw his chisel and his mallet to the ground. I heard the little thud which each gave on the turf. Then he sprang to the ground; but his feet made no sound in alighting. I stood on the terrace and watched him and his model move away across the garden as silently as they had come, and disappear among the trees at the entrance to the glen.

*****

The next morning when I had breakfasted I sought my friend Dr Barnett, and told him my experience of the night. He did not smile. But he was strictly scientific. We were smoking together on one of the paths bordered by laurels, and when I had told him all that I had to tell, he put his hand on my arm, saying--

“My dear boy, the phenomena of ghosts are invariably interesting, and, on the whole, not more perplexing than other natural phenomena. Sometimes they are due to one cause, sometimes to another. Most frequently they must be attributed to the projection of an image upon the eye from within, not from without. Now, in your case--but we had better stroll round to the scene of your illusion.”

We went together across the lawn in the direction of the companion cedars, and he continued his discourse.

“All that you have told me interests me greatly, showing as it does how, under certain conditions, the most admirably balanced brain may become what I may call sensitised--susceptible as a photographic plate to an image----”

At this point his speech was arrested. We had passed between the cedars, and the statue was facing us. The doctor was gazing up at it.

“Good heavens!” he said in a whisper; “he has finished it!”

I looked up and saw that the head of the figure was covered with curls.

“He has finished it--he has finished it,” the doctor whispered again.

“Yes,” I said, “he has finished it. I saw him do it.”

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.