The Trader's Wife: Part Three
I
DE SOPO was not of an ill humor — he did not resent his expulsion from a domesticity so remote from his own experience and so unexpected; he gave small attention to Harford’s schemes for an unnatural and emasculated trade; he congratulated him elaborately on his marriage with a lady so evidently illustrious, so beautiful, so gracious, and he trusted that his presence in the neighborhood, and the presence of his slaves, would not be offensive. He had got his girl from a partner who had died in the interior, with whom he had been making his way from the upper reaches of the Muni River to the Nkomo. A hard country to travel until they struck the navigable river, by which time his partner had died. De Sopo had missed the aid of a partner, but his slaves — who were a half day behind him — were a poorspirited lot and amenable to his Benga overseers. Harford was disarmed more than he had thought to be; they parted on a civil note.
‘I could not have him here,’ he told Lucy that night, ‘as he had hoped to be — both on your account and on my own, because of the reputation I am earning for another sort of trade. But I should like him sometimes to come to see us, unless that would displease you.’
Lucy had not dealt with the matter of De Sopo so definitely; she would have been led in any case by Harford. The girl, Harford told her, was doubtless lonely. She had belonged to another man; De Sopo hardly could be attractive to a beautiful girl like that — though it was strange, he said, how now and again you found a girl who seemed to form such an attachment.
Lucy lay upon her bed, watching Harford move about the room. A silence followed this comment; he saw Lucy perfectly still, her breath suspended, looking at him with a child’s amazement. The girl — what was she to De Sopo?
‘She is his woman’ Harford told her reasonably, but a flood of sympathy filled him when he saw her struggle with this. ‘It is natural,’ he told her; ‘he is a man alone, living in dreary places, and she is a woman, clean, clever — she looks clever — she gives him pleasure — it is customary.’ Harford felt his way along, and Lucy turned to stone.
‘Customary,’ Lucy murmured; and then she breathed her question into the silence where Harford had felt, curiously enough, so safe: —
‘Did you?'
‘Yes,’ said Harford, looking at her without dissimulation; and he had more to say, but she turned to the wall. He waited until his words had sunk back into his heart, and he went away.
Atemba was sitting under the eaves of one of the cabins, and Harford sent him down in the moonlight to invite De Sopo for a drink. The moments dragged until he came. Harford felt a need of masculine conversation; it was almost with relief that he heard the account of the capture of the slaves, who were all war captives, the Fang having raided the villages of the Makae. De Sopo had been gathering food for them on his way down the river; he was expecting old Otolo and his people to bring in several canoe loads of plantain and cassava before the noonday; he had ten hunters out for game, and what rice he had was already under cover — ‘ though the niggers of these parts will not eat rice unless they are starving.’ But with all he could do by way of provision either out of his stock or by purchase from the Fang, he felt a shortage. He had been a long time coming overland, and the Fang by the way had been grudging of their food, seeing that the slaves were Makae. He hoped that Harford had rice and salt to spare, else he would have to go down the river to Taylor, as he had salt for no more than a week, and while he expected news of the Arrow within that time, there was no certainty, as Harford knew. And he wondered whether Harford would be able, when the time of shipment came, to lend him five or six canoes.
Harford sighed with irritation; he assured De Sopo that he must not look to him for any help, as his equipment was no more than adequate for his own needs, and he was concerned that the Fang should not have occasion to associate him with any other trade than his own. De Sopo amiably agreed; the idiosyncrasies of his companion were curious, and might perhaps be explained as the Fang were explaining them. Old Otolo had told De Sopo that Hallifodi had a strong taboo and must not trade in slaves. De Sopo had acquired some taboos himself; he could only be grateful that these were minor and not of a nature to interfere with business. He was glad of Harford’s presence in the neighborhood, for the barracoon was not of the best, having been hastily made, without proper stronghold; he knew that the presence of a white man’s factory would intimidate the slaves, and this, in default of his dead partner, was an end much to be desired. They were in poor shape, he told Harford, having suffered from the journey.
The two men remembered old times — days of youth, captains of ships, old and fantastic headmen; traders and their adventures, their girls, their deaths, the fates of their half-breed children, were remembered until the moon was low and De Sopo must go back to his cabin in the village that was nearest the barracoon. The slaves, he said, should be coming along in the morning. He had a crew of Benga men with them, an armed man to a canoe, and that was not enough.
He went down to the clearing, his shadow, with its broad hat, black behind him. Harford marked how thin the Spaniard was — as he had already marked his pallor. De Sopo walked like a man without a care in the world. As for himself—he looked about his clearing where his goods were stored and his crew of Fang were sleeping, to the cabin where his wife lay and where a light still shone at the window, and he felt a kind of envy of homeless, reckless, disreputable vagabonds.
With the dawn there came a wailing on the river; Harford wakened to the sound and wondered that De Sopo would put up with it — he should be able, Harford thought, to control the wailing of his slaves. The wailing grew as the canoes multiplied at the landing — the high desolate wailing that is the voice of the sorrows of Africa. That rhythmic crying presently filled the river valley. The devil must have a million of them, Harford thought. And he heard a sobbing at the door of the factory — thinking it a strange thing, until he knew it to be Lucy. She fell against him sobbing; she could not get her breath to ask him what it was she heard, and her terror released in him a fresh sense of the authentic anguish of the wailing. He took her to his bed and warmed her, soothing her; he gave her brandy that she took with a child’s obedience, sobbing as she put her lip against the cup. He lay beside her, telling her that she must be reassured, that it was the slaves come down the river into the barracoon. And when he was done, the sound of wailing filled the room; his wife wept against him. Neither of them ever spoke again of the union of black girls and white men.
II
With the morning there was silence in the river valley. The clearing between the walls of the barracoon was alive with human activities; above the thatch which roofed the lean-to that ran along the inner walls smoke rose; fires burned here and there in the compound, and pots were on the fires. Harford could see, with his eye to his spyglass, all that remembered routine of the encampment waiting shipment; he noted that the slaves were ill-fed, and he thought, in view of the disrepair of the stockade, that this was a good thing. The lot was mixed in age and sex, though women were in the majority, as is customary among captives of tribal wars. The men were chained in pairs, but the women were not shackled.
When he put his glass down Lucy picked it up. She was not expert in its use, and into the frame of its single round there swung the green wall of the forest across the river, where, among the branches of a tree in flower, a golden snake imperceptibly drew its length. She lowered the glass; there was a canoe, brown on the brown flood of the river. Bracing the barrel of the glass against a stanchion of the verandah, she got the range of the barracoon and she caught her breath. On that day, and on the days that followed, for hour after hour she inspected the barracoon.
Harford’s attention was presently caught; he watched her, wondering at her concentration. He saw the glass, shifted delicately, rake the sunny open and the shadows under the thatch of the long roof. He saw that Lucy was pale and that she leaned against the stanchion, but she would not be dissuaded. ‘ I see them living,5 she told her husband when he asked her what was there. And was again absorbed.
The slaves were ten days in the barracoon before Harford forbade Lucy the use of the spyglass. He had been away overnight, little as he liked to leave his wife alone at the factory; but he trusted Atemba, and he took advantage of the presence of De Sopo, knowing that the Spaniard was within hail. He returned light-hearted, with three ivories bought from under the bamboo bed of a difficult old headman. His carriers sang as they came out of the forest path into the factory clearing; Harford thought that Lucy would be hearing them, and glad of his return. But Lucy, in the blaze of the afternoon sun, was on the verandah, looking through the glass. Harford was on the steps before she took account of him. The degree of her preoccupation repelled him; her dress was disordered and her hair unkempt; their greetings were brief. She returned to her post at the stanchion, and pointed her glass again with a practised hand.
Atemba brought him his food, and Lucy did not join him. Harford observed her from where he sat at table behind the bamboo screen that shaded the north end of the little verandah — it came into his mind that she might be ill. He bade her go to the shade of her room, and this she did, but with reluctance. Later in the afternoon she came to him where he was alone in the musty gloom of the storehouse; she was then hysterical — telling him that she could not bear her life and must get away. He turned from the shelves where he was going over his bales of calico. ‘This,’ he thought, ‘ is nostalgia’ — and he thought himself to be overtaken by the difficulties he had foreseen from the first day of his marriage. She said again that she must get away, and she wrung her hands. He considered her seriously; he told her that when he had finished with an ivory deal now pending with Efa Ngoto they would take a holiday down the river — though he sighed when he said this, and did not see his way clear. ‘It will be a long time, perhaps,’ he told her, and said that she must not count on it.
Lucy turned her back and leaned her forehead on the door jamb; he felt her struggle to control her voice. ‘It is the slaves,’ she said. ‘I can’t—I can’t —Mr. Harford, the children —’ But she could not bring herself to tell him more.
He drew her out of the storeroom; with his habit of caution he paused to lock the door. Going to the verandah, he trained the glass on the barracoon. He must see for himself what it was that so possessed his wife — though it was a fever in the making, he told himself. He swept his eye about that clearing, full of late afternoon sunlight and of slaves. The accommodations were certainly not of the best — De Sopo had been doing a makeshift sort of business, and there was obviously a shortage of food. He especially observed the women and children, as Lucy had done; he tried to see them with her eyes, and he agreed that it was a sorry sight. When he lowered the glass he put it away in a chest of his own belongings, telling her that she must oblige him by not using it again so long as the slaves were there—‘and that will not be long,’ he told her; De Sopo was hoping to send them down the river any day and any hour. He begged her to contain herself. His own business was urgent for the time, and he could not go away.
‘ Let me go with Atemba,’ she urged. ‘ I could go down the river with Atemba — we should be safe.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and find yourself in a fleet of slave canoes — or sleeping in Taylor’s house when the cargo is landing! You must content yourself,’ he told her, ‘for you are a trader’s wife. It will not be long.’
But it was long. Two long days from then, when Lucy sat before a dressing table she had made of packing boxes and muslin, De Sopo came to confer with Harford, and his Mpongwe girl — breaking bounds — came with him. Lucy saw her shadow in the mirror, dark against the orange daylight at the door. She turned and looked at her; the girl moved into the room as though Lucy’s glance were a summons; she came near, looking gravely about at the white woman’s possessions.
‘How you health, Mamee?’ she said in her soft insinuating voice. And the aura of her femininity, fostered as it was and cultured in its kind, startled Lucy, so long used to men and to the hardy alien Fang women.
‘What for you come here, Mamee?’ asked the girl. ‘This never be proper town for beach woman.’
‘What for you come here?’ asked Lucy.
‘My white man come; he speak for you man. He ask you man: “What for you no fit for give proper food for them slaves? They live for die they no catch food. Plenty pickaninny die; night come we throw him for bush!” My massa ask you man: “What for you no give proper chop? You like all my slaves die, we throw him for river?” ’
Lucy sat staring at the girl, not knowing all that she had said. And the soft voice went on: ‘Hallifodi say he never be fit for feed all them slaves. My massa say, “You please feed all them sick slaves, all them pickaninny — those women holler all night you never feed them!” Hallifodi say, “No, goddam, I never feed them slaves — I got big taboo, I never feed slaves!”'
Lucy’s hand fell from her head, letting her hair fall, and the Mpongwe, grown bolder, touched it softly as she had often wished to do. She sang a little chant of admiration in her own tongue. Lucy did not draw away; she was grown used to the pleasure of black women in her hair and skin. She answered Esala perfunctorily when the girl asked, ‘What tribe be your slave Atemba? Where you get that boy?’ She was sunk in dark thoughts. She did not know when Esala went away.
At table that night she asked Harford if De Sopo came to see him, and when he answered ‘Yes’ and no more, she asked him, ‘Why?’
‘He cannot let me alone about food for his slaves—he says they will starve if Taylor does n’t send for them soon. He has cleaned out the Fang — they had little to spare. And he cannot agree that I am not here to sell him food.’
‘Cannot you?’ questioned Lucy heavily.
‘I cannot. I have vowed that I am not a slaver, nor a partner of slavers. Either I do a legitimate trade in Africa or I get out!’ Harford flung himself sidewise to the table — he had hoped to put away this palaver long enough to eat his palm-oil chop and baked plantain. He felt himself to be harried to death. De Sopo would go down the river that night, he told her, to see what could be done, though fearing to leave the barracoon in charge of the crew of Benga. A gang of slaves should be under the surveillance of not less than three white men.
‘He says he cannot trust the Benga not to sleep at night. He had the hardihood to ask me if I would not serve him in his absence. He is n’t such a bad fellow, either; I’d do him a service if I could, and I pity him.'
Harford presently went down to the landing to see De Sopo off; he asked Lucy if she could spare half a dozen of her soda biscuits for De Sopo, and a pot of the preserve she had made of an edible forest fruit. She made a little pack of these; she saw her husband go away with his hurricane lamp, and she went to his chest, from which she took his spyglass.
Atemba lighted her way to her cabin, as was his habit at night. The soft dark of the tropics was vibrant with the ineluctable unbroken singing of insects in the grass at the edge of the forest wall. The rains were near again and the insects and the frogs spread an immense fabric beneath the stars. There was no moon; the drumming in the villages was desultory. Suddenly the slaves wailed — faintly, and stronger, and fully, the voice of wailing filled the river valley. Lucy trembled; she sank upon the lower step of her cabin.
‘Oh, why, Atemba,’ she shuddered, ‘do they wail?’ And he told her they wailed because their father was going away. De Sopo was going down the river, so they wailed.
But how was he their father, she asked. Had he not bought them, and would he not sell them? How was he their father? ‘He is certainly that,’ Atemba told her, ‘their father. Without him they would starve, and they fear to see him go. They say, “O our Father, O! We die of hunger, O! Pity your children, O! Do not leave us, lest we starve!” And perhaps they will starve,’ Atemba added dispassionately.
The wailing flowed like a river through the dark. Atemba listened to his mistress’s anguished command that he go to the slaves and beg them not to wail. He thought this a silly invention, but he did not cross his white woman. He would go, he said, if they did not stop — but it would not be a long wailing, for it was no more than a farewell.
It ceased. Atemba went away, and an hour later Harford found Lucy seated on the step of her cabin, the light from her hurricane lamp shining sweetly on her white dress and up into her face. Her mournful dark eyes met his that answered them sternly. ‘This woman,’ he thought, ‘is out of place.’
III
At noon the next day, Harford, who was surrounded by a rustic group and was weighing ivory, did not see Lucy return his glass to his chest. At their midday meal she questioned him closely as to De Sopo’s plans and whether he would be home the next day or the day after that. Not for three days, he told her, and added that the cargo canoes would be longer in coming than that. It was De Sopo’s plan to make a place for the slaves on the beach, although that was against his interest and judgment; but the loss if they were to remain in the barracoon, with food so scarce, would be heavy. He must risk the move to the beach.
Harford hoped — and he wished, in his present preoccupation, to believe — that Lucy did not know the death rate among the slaves. He was glad to forget what he could not see his way to help, and he was elated at the spread of his trade. A company from Ayos had traveled three days by canoe to sell him their ivories; they came, trailing their leopard skins and speaking a modified dialect, from a remote people whose trade he had labored to develop. When night came, and the last man and dog on leash had gone down the hill and off up the river, Harford sank into his chair with a tot of rum, and he could have wished to be alone in his clearing. He wished he need not see his wife at table lest she trouble him with questions. But she was as silent as himself. Had he looked at her he would not have known her for the laughing girl who had hung on his arm when they had first climbed the hill to the factory not a year ago. He would have been struck, had he looked at her, by her thinness, her look of strain, her pallor, her rough and broken hair. But, after the custom of companions who live together without lapse, neither of these two was attentive to the aspect of the other, and Lucy sank away into the shadow of her obsession unobserved.
When Atemba lit the lamp in her cabin that night, Lucy spoke with him. She asked him if he had been born a slave. Atemba was a headman’s son, he told her. ‘It is a strange thing,’ he thought, ‘how long the white people are in framing the first of questions.’ She asked him if the big gate to the barracoon was locked with a key. Atemba said it was, barred and locked with a key, and that there were other precautions about the outer wall — there was an outer wall and an inner door. A passage, very short, led from the gate to the inner door. All the building, Atemba told her, was rough. The barracoon in which he himself had been imprisoned once was strong; none could have looked into that barracoon. And with that memory a terrible excitement began to flow into his heart, threatening his control. He felt a current of intention, obscure as yet, lift him from his accepted groove. He gave his attention, suddenly creative, subtly perceptive, to Lucy — trying to penetrate her secret thought, conscious of an intense dynamic at work beneath her fixed composure.
She asked him who had the key to the gate — if De Sopo had it; and he said he did not know. He was silent. And then he said there was one who knew who had the key, and if his Mamee commanded him to ask that one he would do so. When Lucy pressed him for the name of that one, he said it was Esala, De Sopo’s woman. She would know who had the key. If his Mamee commanded him to do so, he would return, when night was in the middle, with that knowledge.
While Lucy pondered upon this, he looked in her mirror, taking counsel with the dark and secret image that spoke to him there, eye to eye. Behind him in the dim reflection stood the white woman listening to a strong inner voice. She would tell him to go. And if she did not tell him, still he would go — for he felt an irresistible quickening toward a course that was clearing, like a path when dawn reveals it. When Lucy told him that he must do as he had said, his going was a passion of acquiescence. The swift withdrawal of his energy from her cabin and from the clearing left Lucy like a castaway, with the tide on the ebb — she felt a vast fatigue and the hurry of her heart beating.
Harford’s window shed an orange light and then was dark; there was now no light in the forest. Upon the dark the Southern Cross was erected and leaned again to its decline; occasionally a bird called or a band of monkeys clamored briefly; a late moon rose behind the cabins, and their black shadows bit into the flooding light.
At something like two o’clock Atemba stood in the shadow of Lucy’s west window; he had the key and gave it to her. Esala, he said, had given him the key to hold until the dark before the dawn. ‘What shall I tell the white woman,’ he thought, ‘if she asks me why Esala gave me the key? ’ But Lucy did not ask that or any other question — she seemed to dream.
Atemba came to the door and opened it; beyond the shadow where he stood there was a wash of moonlight in the clearing. ‘Mamee,’ he asked her with an utmost urgence, ‘when you let the slaves go — am I then free?’
He saw Lucy startle as if she woke. She asked him if he saw the Benga guards and if they were sleeping. He had found them sleeping — and that was because their master was away and because the slaves, they knew, were weak from sickness and from hunger. Atemba had wakened the guards as he passed, telling them there was a leopard abroad in the clearing on moonlight nights. Only strangers and white men, he told them, were ignorant of this — all others seeking a shelter to sleep in. The Benga men, he said, had given him thanks and had said that they must lie outside to watch the slaves. There was a house, he had told them, near the gate; they had better lie there. If the leopard caught them, who would watch the slaves? Would their master not then blame them that they had not listened to the warning of Hallifodi’s man? After which reasoning, Atemba told Lucy, they had risen from their bed of leaves upon the ground and had gone away into the house. The house, Atemba told her, looked away from the barracoon. It was a strange thing, he told her, but they went into that house. ‘Ah, Mamee,’ he said in a voice of profoundest passion, ‘when you let the slaves go —’
She did not answer him — she moved past him down the steps into the moonlight. She took no account of him. But later, when they were in the shadow of the trail to the river, he pressed his fate again: ‘Ah, Mamee, am I, too, free? When it is taboo for you to have a slave, and it is taboo for Hallifodi to have a slave, am I free?’ He was behind her in the trail; he heard her say yes. He took the key from her hand; her hand was hot, and, with his faculty of perception at its highest level, he was aware, among a multitude of impressions, that she had a fever. He wished that her dress were dark; it glimmered, and her skirt was noisy among the grasses. He wished that she were sure to do as he might find occasion to tell her; he wished that he were in control, as a man should be — and his will leaped before him in the path. When she came to the end of the shadowed trail and to the verge of the clearing about the barracoon, he bade her wait, and they stood still.
In the mild clear light of the moon the stockade of the barracoon rose to the height of about twelve feet; they were standing a hundred feet from its southeast corner. Midway of the eastern wall there was, curiously, a great tree; it was incorporated in the stockade, and it made, of a morning, shade upon the glare on the floor of the barracoon. It is to be supposed that De Sopo had left it there because it presented difficulties in felling, and its crest of branches, high upon the pillar of its bole, was not hospitable to escape. The river ran fifty yards from the west wall; the space between was cleared and was now in shadow. The gate was in the south wall; it was barred, and the lock was a padlock. The guards were not in sight; the fire by which they had slept was sunk to embers, and their leafy beds were dark on the ground. There was no sound of life, only the river’s running.
Suddenly from behind the wall of the barracoon there rose a woman’s faint and plaintive wailing — like a thread of smoke from a small fire on a windless air. Atemba knew it for a cry of remembrance. Without warning Lucy floated out into the moonlight; she was at the gate before he was; her hand was at her lip while he unlocked the gate. They stepped swiftly into the passage; Atemba drew the gate to; the key was in his hand. The passage was eight feet long — the depth of the lean-to that ran about the inner wall; the door at the end of this short passage was barred but not locked. The delicate cry rose again. Lucy threw up the iron bar, and they were in the yard of the barracoon.
IV
The moon was above the eastern wall; the shadow of the great tree was upon the trodden ground of the western half of the enclosure. Under the thatch of the lean-to the slaves slept in the shadow. Lucy — who had brooded so many days upon the comings and goings of the many dark bodies, now cooking, now eating, now lamenting — was alone with the moonlight in the clearing. She was arrested in a still enchantment. Atemba saw that she did not see a woman gray with dust who lay upon the earth, and swifter than her perception he sprang to where the woman lay. Catching her about the middle, he brought her to her feet, one hand over her mouth. Her eyes stared at Lucy while he dragged her to the passageway. Atemba summoned Lucy with a movement of his head; they were in the passage before she had caught her breath, and Atemba was speaking in the woman’s ear. He instructed her; Lucy saw her eyes focus on his words. He released her — she was a young woman ravaged with hunger; she was gone back into the compound like the flowing of water.
Atemba drew Lucy through the outer gate; he closed it, and they slid by the south wall in the moonlight to the shadow under the west wall. In that shadow Lucy fell to trembling, her teeth chattered, and she leaned against the wall. Presently she vomited. Atemba, seeing that she could not stand, supported her. She moaned, and he was appalled, but his decision was as swift as breath. He carried her to the water’s edge; the jetty was in moonlight, and he was too much a forest creature to move that way; he laid Lucy among the leaves at the foot of the forest wall, first stirring them with his foot; he covered her white dress with his own dark cloth. He let himself down into the water that ran deep by this bank, and returned with a small canoe — it was the ferryman’s canoe and its anchorage well known. Lucy was past speech. He laid her in the seepage in the bottom of the canoe; drawing her dress along her sides, he laid his cloth over her and pushed off into the stream. He could see a flowing of dark bodies along the bright south wall of the barracoon; they disappeared into the shadow of the west wall. He dipped his paddle, making upstream.
A river silence fell on the canoe; Lucy’s sigh was light. Coming to a little beach landing, the canoe wavered. Atemba gave a bird call; there was no answer. Under the deep shade of a wooded bank he whistled again and waited, but not long; Lucy moaned and stirred; he cleared the bank and paddled upstream. He dipped his paddle three or four times before he heard an answer to his call — a bird whistled among the branches that swung from the near margin. Atemba held the canoe and scanned the forest wall. He drew in to a log and found a backwater in the thicket; the river glittered in midstream, but here was a moon dusk. Esala crept out on the log, and Atemba held out to her the key. She took it, thrusting it into a basket under her arm; drawing the canoe alongside, she boarded, startling when she felt Lucy’s body under the cloth. The paddle sank into the waiter, the canoe shot out into the stream, and there was silence on the river.
In the moonlight Atemba saw that Esala had whitened her face with clay, after the manner of the Fang who mourn, and that she was as naked as a Fang woman, that she had painted dark designs on her body, which was smooth and without the inevitable Fang tattoo. He understood that she was joining her fate with his, and he felt a rush of pride and passion. It was true of Atemba that he was a chief’s son and of no mean tribe. How far his home was, or where it might be, he could not know; he could look up at the stars and take counsel of them; soon, too, he must counsel with Esala. It did not appear to him what he must do with the white woman; his swift planning had not foreseen the present difficulty — he had thought that Lucy would steal away to her cabin when they had left the barracoon. But there was no hope of that now; he knew the course of her fevers, and that she would be helpless for not less than a day. Nothing in his heart swerved from his intention of escape; he was as single as an arrow that has been released from the bow; all his wisdom was fused to an instinct, and he knew that he must go upriver swiftly all the night — and without, words.
Neither he nor Esala could pass in prolonged intercourse as Fang. A canoe from upriver hailed them, surveyed them in the moonlight, and, seeing the ashen face of Esala, the paddler asked them who had died. ‘A child,’ said Atemba. Esala wailed faintly, and the canoe went its way. But Lucy, when Esala wailed, stirred again, moaned, and would have sat up. Atemba steered into a backwater; the canoe stole up this dark shallow until he knew by the evil smell that he was at the end of the inlet, and in a pool where the women of a village were used to soak their manioc. He shipped his paddle and crept along the length of the canoe to Esala in the bow. He began to speak to her softly in their only common tongue, which was Fang. Under the intense dark Lucy sighed and slept.
Presently from the forest the guinea fowl called the near approach of morning, and in the dark the two dark heads drew apart, the murmur of voices ceased, the canoe slid back to the river. Time was pressing, but they knew what they must do. Before the pallor of dawn Esala had guided Atemba to a trodden beach; it was the landing of the headman Efa Ngoto, who had a village near by in the forest. She knew that place well, having camped there with De Sopo more than once. A shelter with three walls under thatch was in common use at the landing. It stood clear of the forest, which was here of great trees, and open. They must work quickly before day. Coming ashore, they drew up the canoe, and Atemba lifted Lucy, who was now in a stupor. Esala was before him in the shelter; she found the embers of a fire that was always there upon the ground of the hut, and that would be renewed many times in the day by the villagers as they came and went upon the river. With a burning log for a light, she looked about the hut; there was no snake, no filth, no menace. Atemba, standing with Lucy across his shoulder, watched her; he was ready at the signal to lay his mistress down. She sighed, relaxing on the bed and turning her head away upon the wooden pillow. Esala adjusted her dress. Atemba would have thrown his cloth about her, but Esala caught it up; she drew the logs together, and a thread of smoke rose. Swift as shadows the two were gone, and the canoe, dark a moment on the glitter of the river, disappeared.
V
The smoke among the logs became a flame; the mists of morning rose in the moonlight; the river spoke and spoke against the little beach; a monkey looked into the open shelter with surprise, and was intimidated; with the gray light a million parrots woke to their domestic disagreements and were articulate. The clamor of day woke in the forest. And the first fisherman coming down the village trail looked in at the hut. As if he were winged, he stood again in the street of the village. ‘There is a magic by the river!’ he told his friends. ‘ An enchantment is there! ’
But the headman, when he saw the enchantment, knew it for the wife of Hallifodi, having seen that woman many times. He was appalled.
Behind him and pressing upon him and upon one another, the people of his village crowded, struck with wonder. Their voices, discreet at first, grew in volume and in stress, but Lucy did not move until an old woman broke into a high crying wail. Other women wailed, and the white woman, moaning faintly, moved her head, moved her hand, and was still again.
‘She lives! She breathes!’ cried out the agitated people of the village of Efa Ngoto.
Efa himself, though much against his will, — for who knew how the matter stood either with the white woman’s husband or in the more supernatural implications? — got himself ready to go to Hallifodi. He was deliberate in his preparations, wishing that his experience had fitted him for the present adventure and for the part he had to play. He put on the best he had — and that was a military coat and a red fez cap, both bought of Hallifodi himself. He chose swift rowers. He gave instructions that no one of his village was to approach the white woman, none was to go under the thatch, but that his head wife herself, with those women whom she should choose, was to watch from without the hut. Only Evina was not to watch. She was his present favorite wife and was with child; she must beware dark powers. He went away in the sunlight.
It was presently warm in the shadow of the thatch, and with the passage of the day the sun shone there. The women, four and five at a time, pitied the white woman with their eyes. They sang plaintive songs — spontaneous little ballads about the white woman who had come to lie upon the bed of their village. She had come by the river, O! She had no child, O! Alone she had come, O! She said no word, O! Her beautiful hair, O! Her fine white cloth, O! They struck their hands softly for an accompaniment to their songs.
The white woman whimpered and sighed, and the black women more than ever sang their plaintive songs. These songs, they thought, were good for that magic, for with the afternoon Lucy was still. Harford heard them singing at the bend of the river, and his heart turned over.
The Fang women fell away when the white man came to look at his woman. They had not gone near her all day; they could in no way be to blame for her death — if indeed she was dead.
She was dead. The women saw her hand fall from Harford’s. They saw him look into her eyes. They burst into a wail, and the entire village of Efa Ngoto wailed.
Harford sat down on a piece of firewood; he could no longer stand on his feet. Nothing of all this was clear to him. The face of his wife was a secret silence in a great clamor. He had not eaten that day; news of the empty barracoon had shattered his morning, and with noon Efa Ngoto had stood at the door with news of a wife he had hardly missed. No, he had not missed her; he had been all morning with the Benga guards and with the straggling slaves who had returned to beg from him a handful of rice.
How had she come here, and why? Was this really his wife? A laughing girl, a chatterer — now to be lying so pale and sunken in this rude shelter — lost here in a strange forest. Lying here without a word. No answer. How had she come here? Had she been poisoned? Her dress was draggled. Her hair was disordered. He stooped to put her poor hands beside her, and on the dust of the ground he saw a key. Abstractedly with his foot he pushed it aside — the headman should have a care of his keys.
(The End)