Part 17

He was pointed out to me first as a singular fellow who kept doves; a tall, gaunt man, with a deliberate gait, perhaps fifty years of age, in old garments, long boots laced to the knees, and a battered pith helmet. He strolled along with his eyes cast down. If you met him abroad, and stopped him, he answered you with a few mumbles while looking away over your shoulder. His big mouth drew down a grizzled moustache cynically, and one of his front teeth was gold plated. Before he passed on he looked at you with the haughty but doubtful stare of an animal. He seemed too slow and dull to be combustible. I ceased to credit those tales of his berserker rage. He always moved in that deliberate way, as if he were careful, but bored. Or he stood before his doves, and made bubbling noises in his loose, stringy throat. He embarrassed me with a present of many of the trophies he had secured in years of travel in the wilds. One day a negro and O'Brien were in mild dispute on the jetty, and the negro called the white a Yankee. The river was twenty feet below swiftly carrying its logs. O'Brien took the big black, and with vicious ease threw him into the water. The negro missed the floating rubbish, and struck out for the bank. No one could help him. By good luck he managed to get to the waterside; yet O'Brien meanwhile had hurried his long legs over the ties of the skeleton structure, his face transfigured, and was waiting for the negro to emerge, a spade in his hand. But under other circumstances I have not the least doubt he would have fought the Brazilian army single-handed, and so finished, in defence of that same negro.

IV

Night brought one of these men to each of our cabins, and put a party of them drinking in the saloon. After my habit of thinking of people in crowds, as an Anglican Church, or an ethical society, a labour movement, a federation of proprietors, or suffragists, or Jews, or stockbrokers' clerks, crowds moving with massed exactitude by the thousand at least, when prompted, this man O'Brien standing on his two legs by himself, old man Jim, and the rest, each of them defending and running his own particular kingdom, and governing that, ill or well--for I saw them fairly drunk now and then--and never waiting for a word from any master or delegate, made me wonder whether till then I had met a living man, or had heard merely of a population of bundles of newspapers. These men had no leaders. They attended to all that. Each had to find his own way. They were unrelated to anything I knew, and beyond the help of even a candidate for Parliament. I suppose they had never heard of a Defence League. They could have found no use for it, because a challenge to defend themselves would never catch them unwilling or unable. Each man soldiered himself, and perhaps was rather too ready to deal with a show of insolence, or an assumption of power in another. Yet they were not the violent and headstrong fellows of romantic tales. They were simple and kind, submitting with a sick smile to the prickly ridicule of their fellows round the board. They regarded meat, drink, and tobacco as common; they were ready to leap into the dark for a friend.

There was one young bearded Englishman among them who was more than a friendly figure to me. All were friendly; but the Americans bore themselves with the easy assurance of the favoured heirs of Adam; though their successful work in that tropical swamp perhaps justified them. The Englishman had less of that assurance of a unique favour which was so completely bestowed that irresolution never shook the aplomb of its lucky inheritors. He came into my cabin one night, hoping he was not disturbing me, and bringing as a present a sheaf of native arrows tipped with red and blue macaw feathers, as he had promised.

"They come from Bolivia--forest Indians--three hundred miles from here." He explained he had reached our point in the Brazilian forest from the Pacific side. He had crossed the mountains, descended to the level jungle at the base of the Andean wall, and followed the rivers eastward, alone in a canoe till he chanced upon our steamer unloading Welsh fuel into a forest clearing. To a new-comer in a mysterious land, this was a clear invitation to listen, and I looked at the man expectantly. He was lighting his pipe. The country through which he must have passed was unknown, as our maps showed. But he simply indicated that manner of his advent, as though it were the same as any other, and sat looking through the door of my cabin, smoking, absently gazing at the night scene on the afterdeck.

The hombres were working at the hold immediately below us, their labours made obscurely bright by a roaring flame of volatalised oil. The light pulsed on the face of the Englishman, and chequered my cabin in black and luminous gold. Of all the region of forest about us nothing showed but a cloud of leaves, which leaned towards us out of the night, supported on two pale, tremulous columns. The hold of the ship was a black rectangle, and the almost naked negroes and brown men moving about it, or peering into the chasm, were like sinister figures on an inscrutable business about the verge of the pit. They were not men, but the debris of men, moving with awful volition, merely a bright cadaverous mask hovering in a void, or two arms upheld, or a black headless trunk. For the roaring illuminant on deck dismembered the ship and its occupants, bursting into the weight of surrounding night as a fixed explosion, beams rigid and glowing, and shadows in long solid bars radiating from its incandescent heart.

"I'm glad you're here," said my companion. He never gave me his name, and I do not know it now. "I hav'n't heard home talk for a year. Hav'n't heard much of anything. A little Spanish coming along; and here some American."

We continued looking at the puzzling, disrupted scene outside for some time without speaking, secure in a chance and lucky sympathy. Then a basket of coal tipped against a hatch coaming and whirled away, scattering the men. We rose to see if any were hurt.

"Curious, this desperate haste, isn't it?" said the Englishman. "At every point of the compass from here there's at least a thousand miles of wilderness. Excepting at this place it wouldn't matter to anybody whether a thing were done to-night, or next week, or not at all. But look at those fellows--you'd think this was a London wharf, and a tide had to be caught. Here they are on piece-work and overtime, where there's nothing but trees, alligators, tigers, and savages. An unknown Somebody in Wall Street or Park Lane has an idea, and this is what it does. The potent impulse! It moves men who don't know the language of New York and London down to this desolation. It begins to ferment the place. The fructifying thought! Have you seen the graveyard here? We've got a fine cemetery, and it grows well. Still, this railway will get done. Yes, people who don't know what it's for, they'll make a little of it, and die, and more who don't know what it's for, and won't use it when it's made, they'll finish it. This line will get its freights of precious rubber moving down to replenish the motor tyres of civilisation, and the chap who had the bright idea, but never saw this place, and couldn't live here a week, or shovel dirt, or lay a track, and wouldn't know raw rubber if he saw it, he'll score again. Progress, progress! The wilderness blossoms as the rose. It's wonderful, isn't it?"

I was just a little annoyed. After all, I was part of the job. I'd made my sacrifices, too. But I admitted what he said. Why not? It was something, that fancy, that every rattle of the winch outside, bringing up another load, moved abruptly under the impulse of another thought from London Town--six thousand miles away; two months' travel. Great London Town! It was true. If London shut off its good will that winch would stop, and the locomotives would come to a stand to rot under the trees, and the lianas would lock their wheels; and in a month the forest would have foundered the track under a green flood. Where the American accent was dominant, the jaguars would moan at night. That long wound in the forest would be annealed and invisible in a year. While it persisted, the idea could conquer and maintain.

"Yes, but it's all chance," said the Englishman.

"That uncertain and impersonal will controls us. Have you ever worked desperately, the fever in your bones, at a link in a job the rest of which was already abandoned, though you didn't know it? Yet perhaps even so there is something gained, the knowledge that all you do is fugitive, that there is nothing but an idea, which may be withdrawn without warning at any moment, under the most complicated and inspiring structure. Having that fore-knowledge you can work with a light heart, secure against betrayal, ready with your own laugh when the mockery comes. A community finds it must have a bridge; Wall Street hears of it, and finances a contractor, who finds an architect to design it. An army builds it. And then this blessed old planet moves in its sleep, and the obstructing river flows another way. Well for us we can rarely see the beginning and the end of the work we are doing. Most of the men on this job have not been here three months. They come and shovel a little dirt, and die. Or they get frightened, and go. But that idea, that remains here, using up men and forests, using up all that comes within its invisible influence, drawing in material and pressing it into its unseen mould, so that out of the invisible sprouts a railway, projecting length by length, transmuted men and timber. A courtier once gave his cloak to Queen Elizabeth to save her feet; but what is that when these men give their bodies to make an easier road for the commerce of their fellows? They say every sleeper on a tropical line represents a man. The conquering human, who lives by dying!

"The unseen idea remains--some stranger's idea--of gain; profit out of a necessity not his, filled by other men unknown to him. You can't escape it. First and last, it uses you. It uses you up. You may twist and double, but 'when me you fly, I am the wings,' as Emerson says. Once, once, I deliberately tried to escape from it, to get out of its range. I thought it was local, that idea, a mean and local urge. I believed I had escaped it too. I was young, though, then. But we all try when we're young. There is but one way of escape--you may use up others; but that isn't an easy way of escape, for some of us.

"No alternative but that, and a man cannot take it. There you are; use, or be used. Once I thought I had escaped. Once upon a time, every morning at eight o'clock, I went to an office in Leadenhall Street. Know that place? My first job. I was one in a crowd of fifty clerks. We sat on high stools, facing each other across double-desks. There were brass rails above each desk, where we rested ledgers and letter baskets. Each of us marked his stool somewhere with a personal symbol. My own, my sole point of vantage there, my support in life, that high stool; and I would have been prepared to maintain it upright--following our office code of honour, I as firm as may be upon it--even if, treacherously blabbing, I had had to deprive all my fellow-clerks of their supports in life. We were not a community, working out a common ideal. An idea used us. And that was a job I got as a favour, mark you. Some one had known my dead father.

"I knew the name of my boss, but that was all. I never spoke to him. I used to see him, a middle-aged man with sad eyes and a petulant mouth, clean shaved, and bald headed. He came in a carriage every morning, and went straight to a room kept from us by opaque glass. I used to wonder what he did in there. He rarely came into the office. When he did come into it, his was the only voice which ever spoke there above a whisper; a sharp, startling, and minatory voice. But we rarely saw him there. A bell would ring, a sinister summons on the ceiling over the desk of a principal clerk, and that chap would drop anything he was doing, anything, and go. I've seen my senior clerk, an elderly man in spectacles, jump as if he'd been struck when his bell whirred. It was such an awfully solemn place. Nobody ever thought of calling across that room, but would go round to another desk, and whisper. You felt you were part of a grave and secret plot, scribbling away to bring it to a completion, and that all your fellow-conspirators were possible traitors.

"But the plot was never complete. It went on and on, day after day, in an everlasting, suffocating sanctity, with the opaque shining glass front of the private room overlooking us, a luminous face entirely blank, though you knew the brain behind it saw everything, and was aware of all. It even knew old Beckwith, my senior, had got deeply into debt through his wife's doctor's bills, and had been fool enough to go to the moneylenders. His bell sprang a summons one morning; in Beckwith went; came out again, looking grey, poor old perisher, went straight to the hat rack, passed awkwardly through the swing doors, letting in a burst of traffic noise from the street, while we watched him furtively, and that was the last of Beckwith. I have heard our boss was a rigid moralist. He said a man who drank, gambled, or got into debt, not being able to control his own life, was no good for the business of another man. A system should have no bowels. Out the incompetent had to go. It was Spartan, but it paid twenty per cent., I've heard. Once we had a rebellious interruption of our sacred quiet, but only once. I never knew exactly why it was. We had a huge factory somewhere in the East End--Cubitt Town way--and one afternoon a woman came to the counter, and asked for the cashier. She was so obviously East End, in a shawl, that the counter clerk was shocked at the bare idea of it. She kept demanding the cashier. The clerk politely, but nervously, because of her rising, emotional voice, resisted her. She began to shout. We all stopped to see what would happen. Shouting there! She was still crying out--she wanted justice for a daughter whose body had got into a machine, I think--and the cashier was forced to appear. I was surprised that he was so quiet with her. She was weeping hysterically at our polished mahogany counter, with its immaculate blotters, and flat, crystal ink-pots, where there were men in silk hats, looking at the unusual scene sideways and smiling. She could not be pacified; and suddenly she picked up an ink-pot, and hurled it through that frozen glass face of the private room. A devastating crash. The shocking, raucous horror of blasphemy. The silence following was unendurable. We looked to the private door for outraged power to appear. Nothing happened. A policeman came and removed the woman, the cashier smiling indulgently at the officer, and shaking his head. The system, after a momentary halt, moved on again, broad, serene, and irresistible.

"I never catch the smell of an open Bible now but it conjures a picture of that arid office, angular, polished, and hard, where the ledgers before the disciplined men exude a dusty, leathery smell. But there I stayed for years, smelling it, and making out bills of lading and invoices. It was my lot. There was a junior who assisted me, a chap with flat, shiny hair parted in the middle. He had a habit of whispering about girls, when he was not whispering about the music hall last night, or the football next Saturday. When the cashier, a young man, and a relative of the boss, came walking down the avenue of desks, his sharp eyes narrowed to slits, and his mouth a little open, it was funny to see my junior put on speed, and get an intent and earnest look in his face.

"When I was done for the day, I'd get my book out of my bag, and wonder, going home, whether I'd ever see those places I read about, Java, India, and the Congo, where you went about in a white helmet and a white uniform, and did things in a large, directive way, helping Indians and niggers to make something of their country. Not this niggling, selfish, pretty chandlery written large in stone, mahogany, and glass, disguised in magnitude and gravity. Cocoanut palms and forests with untold tales. But like the boys who found fun with the girls, with music halls and football, but were afraid of the sack. I did nothing. I was even afraid of the girls.

"One day as usual I went with some of the other fellows to lunch, at an A.B.C. shop. We always went there. The girls knew us and would smile at our jokes. Small coffee and a scone and butter. My life! I found a _Telegraph_ some one had left on a chair, and I read it more because I didn't want to listen to that virulent abuse of our mean cashier--he certainly was mean--than because I wanted to read. In it, by chance, I noticed an advertisement for a book-keeper who would go to the tropics. That I noted. Of course, I stood no chance. But I could try.

"That night at home I wrote an application. I wrote it, I think, a dozen times, till the letter was impeccable, a thing of beauty and precision. I felt this was a most momentous affair. Whether it was the excitement of doing something in the veritable direction of romance, or whether it was through reading 'Waterman's Wanderings' I don't know, but I remember a curious dream I had that night. I was alone in a forest which made me afraid and expectant. It was still and secretive. You know the empty stage in an unnatural, rosy light, with a glorified distance in which you expect a devil or a fairy queen to appear. There was a hammock hanging motionless from a branch. Something was in it, but I could not see what. That hammock was as still as the leaves hanging over it. Then the hammock shook, and a girl rose in it and smiled at me. She was tiny, but adult, and her eyes were shining in the dusk of her hair, which fell thickly over her little, coffee-coloured breasts.

"A telegram came for me, just as I was leaving for the office one morning. It required me to call on Mr. Utah R. Brewster at the Hotel Palace, that very day, but at a time when I should have been industriously at work for another. The question was, should I catch that morning 'bus I had never missed--or take all the possibilities beyond this door which promised to open on romance? I made up my mind, which went drunk with rebellion. I got into my seventh-day clothes. Utah R. Brewster and freedom! The Blackwall 'bus--do you remember those old hearses, with a straight companion-ladder to the upper deck where the outside passengers sat, knees up, back to back along the middle?--well, it had to go by the office, and I was actually in doubt whether, aware of my unprecedented revolt, it would stop outside the familiar glum office and lawfully refuse to budge till I alighted. It went on, blundering past the place, all strangely unconscious of what it was doing, bearing me with my courage screwed down to bursting-point. The driver even said what a lovely May morning it was.

"The Hotel Palace! I had often seen that ornate building when Saturday afternoon release took me west. Red carpeting on the steps, a glimpse of ferns, women all as strange as exotics going in and out, and between me and it a chasm which cut clear to the very centre of the earth. I carried my attack beyond the portals. It was nothing, after all. A flunkey put me in a chair too full of cushions to be easy, and I watched men and women who, at that time of the day, when all the folk I knew were making desperate and cunning efforts to keep their places here safe--I watched those men and women behaving as though all eternity were theirs, and it was the angels' business to bear them up. It was as great a mystery to me whose every week-day morning was the inviolate possession of another, as Joshua's solar miracle. I was called, led along a silent corridor full of shut doors, and after a long walk found myself beyond all the noise of London, far in solitude with a man in a dressing-gown, who stood before a fire, working a cigar with strong, mobile lips. He put up a monocle, and looked at me shyly. Then began to walk up and down the hearth-rug, talking.

"'Well,' he said. 'All right. I guess you'll do. Say, you look pretty fit. You don't drink, eh? Don't get nervous when you see the dead, huh? All right.' He put his monocle back into his eye, and grinned at me. I told him, in a rush, how much I wanted to see the tropics. He said nothing. He got a large blue map, intricate with white lines, and told me of The Company. The Job.

"I did not fully comprehend it then. I don't now. He left out too much. There was no beginning and no ending. There was hardly a middle. He merely indicated unrelated points; but at any rate the points were so widely sundered and so different that the bare indication of them conveyed a sense of an enormous undertaking, difficult, important, and necessary. Work for an army. I should be but an insignificant sutler in that army. But at least I should be one in it, one of those putting this important affair through for future generations. The communal idea, this. The very size of it gave me a sense of security. It was too broad-based to collapse. Success was inherent in its impersonal nature. A state affair. Brewster briefly mentioned some showy names, names of great financiers. They were my generals, and I should never see them. But their reputations were partly in my keeping.

"Hallelujah! I had escaped. I never went back to the office. I never replied to its curt inquiry. In a week I sailed from Liverpool. Much I heard, on the mail boat, of The Company, this new enterprise which was going to make a tropical region one of the richest countries in the world; develop it, fling its riches to all. In four weeks more I arrived at a small tropical island, at which I had to wait for The Company's tug to take me to the mainland and my business.

"There was a club-house ashore, where I stayed for a few days. There I met some men who had been working for The Company, but for incomprehensible reasons were leaving this work to which I had come so eagerly; they were returning home. They were strangely pallid and limp as though the dark of some hot damp underground had turned their blood white. Their talk was drawled out, the weary utterance of the disillusioned who yet showed fate no resentment. They might have been the dead speaking, long untouched by any warm human vanity. I was really glad to get away from them. A tug conveyed me to the mouth of the river, up which I was to proceed to my station. I joined a shallow-draught river steamer.

"The river, that gateway to my dream come true, was a narrow place, a cleft in universal trees, every tree the same. Mangroves, I suppose. Soon the forest changed, often rising on each bank to meet overhead. Those were uncertain places of leaves and dead timber, and as quiet and still as churchyard yews at midnight. The thumps of our paddle-wheels did not sound pleasant. Deeper and deeper we went, making turns so often that I wondered how we could ever be got out again. Sometimes in an open space we saw a flock of birds. I saw no other sign of life. There were no men. All my fellow-passengers--there were ten of us--were newcomers; some from the States, some from Germany, and a Frenchman. I was the only Englishman. Each of us knew what was expected of himself; none of us knew what that was which all would be doing. There were clerks with us, miners, civil engineers, timber men, and a metallurgist. We speculated much, were perhaps a trifle anxious, but reposed generally on the great idea.