A Question of Latitude

R >> Richard Harding Davis >> A Question of Latitude


For weeks, with a missionary as a guide, he walked through forests into
which the sun never penetrated, or, on the river, moved between banks
where no white man had placed his foot; where, at night, the elephants
came trooping to the water, and, seeing the lights of the boat, fled
crashing through the jungle; where the great hippos, puffing and
blowing, rose so close to his elbow that he could have tossed his
cigarette and hit them. The vastness of the Congo, toward which he
had so jauntily set forth, now weighed upon his soul. The immeasurable
distances; the slumbering disregard of time; the brooding, interminable
silences; the efforts to conquer the land that were so futile, so
puny, and so cruel, at first appalled and, later, left him unnerved,
rebellious, childishly defiant.

What health was there, he demanded hotly, in holding in a dripping
jungle to morals, to etiquette, to fashions of conduct? Was he, the
white man, intelligent, trained, disciplined in mind and body, to be
judged by naked cannibals, by chattering monkeys, by mammoth primeval
beasts? His code of conduct was his own. He was a law unto himself.

He came down the river on one of the larger steamers of the State, and,
on this voyage, with many fellow-passengers. He was now on his way home,
but in the fact he felt no elation. Each day the fever ran tingling
through his veins, and left him listless, frightened, or choleric. One
night at dinner, in one of these moods of irritation, he took offence
at the act of a lieutenant who, in lack of vegetables, drank from
the vinegar bottle. Everett protested that such table manners were
unbecoming an officer, even an officer of the Congo; and on the
lieutenant resenting his criticism, Everett drew his revolver. The
others at the table took it from him, and locked him in his cabin.
In the morning, when he tried to recall what had occurred, he could
remember only that, for some excellent reason, he had hated some one
with a hatred that could be served only with death. He knew it could not
have been drink, as each day the State allowed him but one half-bottle
of claret. That but for the interference of strangers he might have shot
a man, did not interest him. In the outcome of what he regarded
merely as an incident, he saw cause neither for congratulation or
self-reproach. For his conduct he laid the blame upon the sun, and
doubled his dose of fruit salts.

Everett was again at Matadi, waiting for the Nigeria to take on cargo
before returning to Liverpool. During the few days that must intervene
before she sailed, he lived on board. Although now actually bound north,
the thought afforded him no satisfaction. His spirits were depressed,
his mind gloomy; a feeling of rebellion, of outlawry, filled him with
unrest.

While the ship lay at the wharf, Hardy, her English captain, Cuthbert,
the purser, and Everett ate on deck under the awning, assailed by
electric fans. Each was clad in nothing more intricate than pajamas.

"To-night," announced Hardy, with a sigh, "we got to dress ship. Mr.
Ducret and his wife are coming on board. We carry his trade goods, and I
got to stand him a dinner and champagne. You boys," he commanded, "must
wear 'whites,' and talk French."

"I'll dine on shore," growled Everett.

"Better meet them," advised Cuthbert. The purser was a pink-cheeked,
clear-eyed young man, who spoke the many languages of the coast glibly,
and his own in the soft, detached voice of a well-bred Englishman. He
was in training to enter the consular service. Something in his poise,
in the assured manner in which he handled his white stewards and the
black Kroo boys, seemed to Everett a constant reproach, and he resented
him.

"They're a picturesque couple," explained Cuthbert. "Ducret was
originally a wrestler. Used to challenge all comers from the front of
a booth. He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was
mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small
way, in ivory. Now he's the biggest merchant, physically and every other
way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad. He has a house at Brazzaville built
of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-plant. His wife was a
supper-girl at Maxim's. He brought her down here and married her. Every
rainy season they go back to Paris and run race-horses, and they say the
best table in every all-night restaurant is reserved for him. In Paris
they call her the Ivory Queen. She's killed seventeen elephants with her
own rifle."

In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were pallid,
washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age. For
him women of any other type had ceased to exist. He had come to think of
every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun,
with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through
gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed. He thought of them
as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and
army helmets.

When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she
was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger. She appeared to have stepped
to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue de la Paix.
She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great loveliness,
and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, a la Merode, across a broad, fair
forehead. She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as delicate as
a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a curtain,
hung more lace. When she was pleased, she lifted her head and the
curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes. Around the white, bare throat
was a string of pearls. They had cost the lives of many elephants.

Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was--a
Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne. He knew that on any night at Madrid
or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same
charming type. They might lack that something this girl from Maxim's
possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the
depths of darkness. But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as
she.

But to Everett she was no messenger from another world. She was unique.
To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was
her entire sex personified. She was the one woman for whom he had always
sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the
one thing to be desired. Opposite, across the table, her husband, the
ex-wrestler, chasseur d'Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an
ox. Men felt as well as saw his bigness. Captain Hardy deferred to
him on matters of trade. The purser deferred to him on questions of
administration. He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in
big figures. He was fifty years ahead of his time. He beheld the Congo
open to the world; in the forests where he had hunted elephants he
foresaw great "factories," mining camps, railroads, feeding gold and
copper ore to the trunk line, from the Cape to Cairo. His ideas were the
ideas of an empire-builder. But, while the others listened, fascinated,
hypnotized, Everett saw only the woman, her eyes fixed on her husband,
her fingers turning and twisting her diamond rings. Every now and again
she raised her eyes to Everett almost reproachfully, as though to say,
"Why do you not listen to him? It is much better for you than to look at
me."

When they had gone, all through the sultry night, until the sun drove
him to his cabin, like a caged animal Everett paced and repaced the
deck. The woman possessed his mind and he could not drive her out. He
did not wish to drive her out. What the consequences might be he did not
care. So long as he might see her again, he jeered at the consequences.
Of one thing he was positive. He could not now leave the Congo. He would
follow her to Brazzaville. If he were discreet, Ducret might invite
him to make himself their guest. Once established in her home, she MUST
listen to him. No man ever before had felt for any woman the need he
felt for her. It was too big for him to conquer. It would be too big for
her to resist.

In the morning a note from Ducret invited Everett and Cuthbert to join
him in an all-day excursion to the water-fall beyond Matadi. Everett
answered the note in person. The thought of seeing the woman calmed
and steadied him like a dose of morphine. So much more violent than the
fever in his veins was the fever in his brain that, when again he was
with her, he laughed happily, and was grandly at peace. So different was
he from the man they had met the night before, that the Frenchman and
his wife glanced at each other in surprise and approval. They found
him witty, eager, a most charming companion; and when he announced his
intention of visiting Brazzaville, they insisted he should make their
home his own.

His admiration, as outwardly it appeared to be, for Madame Ducret, was
evident to the others, but her husband accepted it. It was her due. And,
on the Congo, to grudge to another man the sight of a pretty woman was
as cruel as to withhold the few grains of quinine that might save his
reason. But before the day passed, Madame Ducret was aware that the
American could not be lightly dismissed as an admirer. The fact
neither flattered nor offended. For her it was no novel or disturbing
experience. Other men, whipped on by loneliness, by fever, by primitive
savage instincts, had told her what she meant to them. She did not
hold them responsible. Some, worth curing, she had nursed through the
illness. Others, who refused to be cured, she had turned over, with a
shrug, to her husband. This one was more difficult. Of men of Everett's
traditions and education she had known but few; but she recognized the
type. This young man was no failure in life, no derelict, no outcast
flying the law, or a scandal, to hide in the jungle. He was what, in her
Maxim days, she had laughed at as an aristocrat. He knew her Paris as
she did not know it: its history, its art. Even her language he spoke
more correctly than her husband or herself. She knew that at his home
there must be many women infinitely more attractive, more suited to him,
than herself: women of birth, of position; young girls and great ladies
of the other world. And she knew, also, that, in his present state, at
a nod from her he would cast these behind him and carry her into the
wilderness. More quickly than she anticipated, Everett proved she did
not overrate the forces that compelled him.

The excursion to the rapids was followed by a second dinner on board
the Nigeria. But now, as on the previous night, Everett fell into sullen
silence. He ate nothing, drank continually, and with his eyes devoured
the woman. When coffee had been served, he left the others at table,
and with Madame Ducret slowly paced the deck. As they passed out of the
reach of the lights, he drew her to the rail, and stood in front of her.

"I am not quite mad," he said, "but you have got to come with me."

To Everett all he added to this sounded sane and final. He told her that
this was one of those miracles when the one woman and the one man who
were predestined to meet had met. He told her he had wished to marry
a girl at home, but that he now saw that the desire was the fancy of
a school-boy. He told her he was rich, and offered her the choice of
returning to the Paris she loved, or of going deeper into the jungle.
There he would set up for her a principality, a state within the State.
He would defend her against all comers. He would make her the Queen of
the Congo.

"I have waited for you thousands of years!" he told her. His voice was
hoarse, shaken, and thick. "I love you as men loved women in the Stone
Age--fiercely, entirely. I will not be denied. Down here we are cave
people; if you fight me, I will club you and drag you to my cave. If
others fight for you, I will KILL them. I love you," he panted, "with
all my soul, my mind, my body, I love you! I will not let you go!"

Madame Ducret did not say she was insulted, because she did not feel
insulted. She did not call to her husband for help, because she did not
need his help, and because she knew that the ex-wrestler could break
Everett across his knee. She did not even withdraw her hands, although
Everett drove the diamonds deep into her fingers.

"You frighten me!" she pleaded. She was not in the least frightened. She
only was sorry that this one must be discarded among the incurables.

In apparent agitation, she whispered, "To-morrow! To-morrow I will give
you your answer."

Everett did not trust her, did not release her. He regarded her
jealously, with quick suspicion. To warn her that he knew she could not
escape from Matadi, or from him, he said, "The train to Leopoldville
does not leave for two days!"

"I know!" whispered Madame Ducret soothingly. "I will give you your
answer to-morrow at ten." She emphasized the hour, because she knew
at sunrise a special train would carry her husband and herself to
Leopoldville, and that there one of her husband's steamers would bear
them across the Pool to French Congo.

"To-morrow, then!" whispered Everett, grudgingly. "But I must kiss you
now!"

Only an instant did Madame Ducret hesitate. Then she turned her cheek.
"Yes," she assented. "You must kiss me now."

Everett did not rejoin the others. He led her back into the circle of
light, and locked himself in his cabin.

At ten the next morning, when Ducret and his wife were well advanced
toward Stanley Pool, Cuthbert handed Everett a note. Having been told
what it contained, he did not move away, but, with his back turned,
leaned upon the rail.

Everett, his eyes on fire with triumph, his fingers trembling, tore open
the envelope.

Madame Ducret wrote that her husband and herself felt that Mr. Everett
was suffering more severely from the climate than he knew. With regret
they cancelled their invitation to visit them, and urged him, for his
health's sake, to continue as he had planned, to northern latitudes.
They hoped to meet in Paris. They extended assurances of their
distinguished consideration.

Slowly, savagely, as though wreaking his suffering on some human thing,
Everett tore the note into minute fragments. Moving unsteadily to the
ship's side, he flung them into the river, and then hung limply upon the
rail.

Above him, from a sky of brass, the sun stabbed at his eyeballs. Below
him, the rush of the Congo, churning in muddy whirlpools, echoed against
the hills of naked rock that met the naked sky.

To Everett, the roar of the great river, and the echoes from the land he
had set out to reform, carried the sound of gigantic, hideous laughter.