Mark I had decided to add to the company as interpreter, jester and gossip. I hadn’t been able to resist the letter he thrust on me one day over the verandah.
Sir In honour to ask you that I am willingly to go with you down Monrovia please kindly I beg you. Because you love me so dearly I don’t want you must live me here again, and More over I am too little to take a load. I will be assisting the hammock till we reach. Me and the headman. Please sir don’t live me here again. I was fearing to tell you last night please Master, good master and good servant. I am yours ever friend Mark.
It proved always possible, however tired and vexed and sick I felt, to gain a little of the old zest at second-hand through Mark, for Mark had never seen the sea nor a ship nor a brick house. It was the greatest adventure he was ever likely to have and he was still only a schoolboy. One could see in his avid gaze at new people and new customs the dramatising instinct at work : he was going to have stories to tell when he got back to school.
Now on the verandah, with the dancers, apprehensions gathered. This was the last rest-house we would occupy for a long while. It was to be native huts after this. I remembered what the sisters had said of the rats which swarmed in every native hut. You couldn’t, they said, keep them off your bed; the mosquito net was useless; once a sister had woken to find a rat sitting, on her pillow savouring the oil on her hair. But you soon got used to rats, they said. They were right, but I didn’t believe them. I had never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my mother’s terror of birds, couldn’t touch them, couldn’t bear the feel of their hearts beating in my palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn’t like, the idea of eternal life and damnation. But in Africa one couldn’t avoid them any more than one could avoid the supernatural. The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa may be imagined as saying, you can’t avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can’t turn your back, you can’t forget it, so you may as well take a long look.
A dog ran whining across the verandah, between the dancers’ legs, and off down the path to the convent. Some instinct told it to keep moving; it slathered and whined and ran; it had been bitten by a snake. The sisters had called in a medicine man who had poured medicine down its throat and tied sticky charms to its legs, but these the sisters had removed when the man had gone. It was still alive, but it had to keep on running.
It wasn’t so good when the dancers went. Neither of us felt too happy; I couldn’t help remembering C. and Van Gogh. My cousin had been bitten all over (if by mosquitoes, then malaria might easily find us less than halfway through the forest). I had a rash over my back and arms like the rash of chicken-pox. I didn’t feel so well : perhaps I had drunk too much whisky. There did seem to be an air of sickness about the prospect; Amedoo’s lung and Van Gogh’s fever contributed to it. After dinner I went out to the last pail-closet I should see before Monrovia; the wooden seat, of course, was swarming with ants, but I realised by this time that it was luxury to have a closet at all. We had discovered we hadn’t enough lamps with us. The boys needed both lamps while they were washing up the dinner things, which meant that we must sit in the waning light of our two electric torches. The mosquito-netting over the windows and door was broken and anything came in, large horseflies, cockroaches, beetles, cockchafers, and moths. Now and then to save light we sat in darkness. It was a grim evening and our nerves were rather strained. Big spiders dashed up and down the wall, the filter in the corner slowly and regularly dripped, a tomtom was beating somewhere some message, probably about the President’s coming, and a big black moth the size of a bat flapped against the walls. The only thing to do was to go to bed early and sleep well.
But that was impossible; a great storm of rain beat upon the roof and afterwards it was too cold to sleep properly, just as in the day it had been too hot to walk. I dreamed uneasily I was present at the assassination of the President. It took place in Bolahun close to one of the green leafy arches they had raised in case he passed that way, between the borders of the path where the pineapple plants were sprinkled with white powder which meant “There is joy in our hearts at your coming.” He was shot in a carriage by one of the drummers I saw at Tailahun and I tried in vain to send the story to a newspaper. At four I woke and got out of bed, without putting on my shoes, and found my vest, it was so cold. I knew some days later that I had caught a jigger by my carelessness, the small insect which burrows into the toe under the skin and lays its eggs and goes on multiplying until it is cut out. I slept again and had more restless dreams : that there was a case of yellow fever in Bolahun and I was put in quarantine and my diary was burnt; I woke weeping with fury. I began more than ever to wish I hadn’t got to go at dawn. The process of psychoanalysis may be salutary, but it is not at first happy. This place was luxury, it was civilised in a way that I was used to and could understand. It was foolish to be dissatisfied, to want to penetrate any further. People had made their home here. I thought of the five sisters who had come from Malvern; I thought of the young German doctor with his duelling scars and his portrait of Hitler. He was the best kind of Nazi; he had been given the strength and the enthusiasm and the hope, and he hadn’t been in Germany to see the dirty work done. His wife, dark and thin and lovely in a fierce tired way, had borne her first child at the mission three weeks before. Bolahun in the early morning of the last day seemed a lovely place, where oranges were twelve a penny and mangoes three for a farthing and bananas so cheap that one hadn’t time to eat them before the ants and flies got into them. These were what I remembered most clearly through the monotony of the forest: the lovely swooping flight of the small bright rice-birds, the fragile yellow cotton flowers growing with no stalk directly out of the canes, something like a wild rose, transparent primrose petals with a small red centre and a black stamen; butterflies, palms, goats and rocks and great straight silver cotton trees, and through the canes the graceful walking women with baskets on their heads. This was what I carried with me into new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving on from one place to another, that I hadn’t expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.
New Country
Coming into Riga three years before, I had deceived myself into thinking I was on the verge of a relationship with something new and lovely and happy as the train came out from the Lithuanian flats, where the peasants were ploughing in bathing-slips, pushing the wooden plough through the stiff dry earth, into the shining evening light beside the Latvian river. I had left Berlin in the hard wooden carriage at midnight; I hadn’t slept and I’d eaten nothing all day. There was a Polish Jew in the carriage who had been turned out of Germany; he couldn’t speak any English and I could speak no German, but a little stout Esthonian girl who had been a servant in London could speak both. She was an Esthonian patriot, she hadn’t a good word for Riga, she regarded the grey spires beyond the river with firm peasant contempt.