It was dusk when they had gone, and I began to be impatient for the carriers’ chop. It was nearly forty-eight hours since they had eaten a really good meal. I sent a messenger for the chief, who said that the chop was at that moment being cooked. I made the mistake of giving him whisky, thinking it would make him more ready to do what I wanted, but it only made him sleepy and confused and less able than ever to deal with his disobedient townspeople. When it was quite dark and we were sitting in the compound squeezing limes into our whisky, he returned with a pretty nubile girl who was one of his two wives. His father the Paramount Chief, he said, had fifty-five. He drank more whisky and became rather fuddled. I was aware of the carriers hovering miserably out of range of my hurricane lamp; I wanted to impress them that I was doing something about their food, I was feeling guilty sitting there drinking whisky, waiting for my own chop to be served. I told the chief he was lying, that he had done nothing about the men’s chop, and he leapt up, dignified and drunk and a little too plausible like the motor salesman he should have been. He said he would show me that he was not a liar; the chop was cooking now-I had only to follow him, and he set off with long strides towards the town. I called out into the shadows for Vande and pursued him at the run. It was a very lovely night; I had never seen so many stars; the whisky made me want to be at peace with all the world; I was quite ready to take the chief’s word when he halted outside one of the furthest huts and pointed to a circle of women, their faces lit by the slow low flames of the wood fire on which they were boiling a great cauldron of rice. “Is it enough?” I asked Vande, and Vande said, Yes, it was enough. Neither of us could speak the language and ask the women whether the food was really intended for the carriers. A few. sullen notabilities of the place loitered at the edge of the dark, hating us, hating the young drunk chief. We returned and presently I went to bed. After an hour or two someone moved in my hut. It was Amedoo come to tell me that the carriers had received no chop at all and had gone hungry to their beds.
The Tax-gatherer
The dry weather was breaking: in a few weeks the way to Grand Bassa would be impossible. When I woke at half-past five the rain was pouring down, the empty compound was lit by green lightning. The chief’s cows, great cream-coloured beasts with curled horns and velvet eyes, were standing close against the women’s huts for shelter. It looked as if we shouldn’t get away till late. There was no sign of the carriers : it was not until half-past six when the rain had stopped, though the lightning flickered on, that they drifted into the compound, wet and hungry and miserable.
I called Vande, gave him half a crown to buy a goat with whenever he chose, and told them to cook the little rice we had with us and eat it before starting. Then the young chief appeared in the compound; he had an aching head and a dry mouth, and he was embarrassed and ashamed. I pretended not to notice him until he climbed on to my verandah, and then I didn’t offer him a chair. I waited until my carriers were close and then I cursed him. I was very Imperialist, very prefectorial as I told him that a chief must be judged by his discipline, that he ought not to allow his headman to disobey him. He couldn’t tell my satiric self-criticism as the ghost of Arnold of Rugby addressed his head prefect through my lips.
We did not get away from Sakripie till nine-thirty; we had never before been so late in starting, for by ten the heat was always intense. The paths were rougher than any we had encountered since Zigita, and the storm gave us an indication of how impossible the route would be when the rains set in. Already the paths were turning into swamps and the men had sometimes to wade waist-deep in water. We were not taking the quickest route to Tapee, which would have involved two long and scorching days on a path cleared of shade, and the villagers we now passed saw white faces for the first time. They ran screaming beside us, waving sprays of leaves, until we reached the boundary of the village land; there they always stopped at some invisible line across the forest path. Once they tried to seize my cousin’s hammock and rush it triumphantly through a village, but Amedoo drew his sword and held them off.
After five hours we reached Baplai. We were by this time among the Gio tribe, who live on the extreme edge of subsistence in the great bush. The steep pointed roofs were falling in, and the inhabitants were quite naked except for loin-cloths. They were so thin one expected to see the bones through the veneral sores. The presence of a ‘civilised man’, however, ensured their keeping a rest-house, one musty little hut with two rooms the size of large dog kennel, where, I suppose, Liberian Government agents slept if ever they came up into the Gio tribe.
Mr. Nelson appeared from his own hut next door. He wore a pair of torn white trousers, backless slippers on his grey naked feet and a torn pyjama jacket which had lost most of its buttons. On his head was a kind of rough-rider’s hat, and his eyeballs were yellow and malarious. All vitality, except a little malice and covetousness, had been drained out of the half-cast, who lived here, year in, year out, squeezing taxes out of the bare village, with no pay but the percentage he chose to steal. He was officially reckoned civilised because he could speak English and write his name.
When I came in with my carriers he thought I was a Government agent and asked me what my ‘privileges’ were: how many free labourers I was allowed, how many hampers of rice unpaid for from this starved village. I said I had no privileges but wished to buy food for my men.
“Buy?” Mr. Nelson said, “Buy? That’s not so easy.” He said with a faint flicker of hatred, “These people would rather be forced to give than sell.” Later I photographed him with his wife, an old Gio woman naked to the waist, and he came and sat beside me and talked languidly of politics. I spoke of the coming election. He said that Mr. King had no chance of re-election, but all his opinion meant was that he owed his position, if you could call his dreary exile by that name, to Mr. Barclay’s party. If King succeeded Barclay, even the Nelsons would be ruined. I asked him about Mr. Faulkner, who contested the election in 1928 against King and who had started the League of Nations inquiry into slavery. Mr. Faulkner had won the uneasy respect of everyone in Liberia; he had refused minor offices in every Government; he had spent all his own money, earned as an electrical engineer and the owner of Monrovia’s only refrigerating plant, in fighting president after president in the cause of reform. “But no,” Mr. Nelson said, turning his yellow malicious eyes over the pointed leaking huts, “we don’t like Faulkner.” After a while he found enough vitality to explain, “You see, he has an idea.”
“What idea?” I said.
“Nobody knows,” Mr. Nelson said, “but we don’t like it.”
A young man came out of the forest in the evening light followed by a boy with a gun. He was a native, with a round sad gentle face, dressed in plus-fours with bright little tassels below the knee and the same rough-rider hat as Mr. Nelson wore. He introduced himself: he was Victor Prosser, a Bassa man, schoolmaster of Toweh-Ta. He had been on a visit to the Catholic priest at Sanoquelleh, two days’ march away, to make his confession and fetch back to school his youngest pupil. He was a devout young man who had been educated by the Catholic fathers on the Coast, and was now established as the head of a little mission school. When he heard that I was a Catholic too, he was overjoyed. He sat there beside Mr. Nelson, repeating over and over again in a soft hesitating English I had to bend my head to catch, “That’s very good. That’s good. Very good. That is good.” Mr. Nelson eyed him sourly and cynically and left us.
Victor Prosser said that he would call his youngest pupil to read me the Catechism, and gave an order to the boy with the gun. He didn’t ask whether I would like, to hear the child; he assumed that any Catholic would be pleased to hear the Catechism recited at any time. The piccaninny appeared : a tiny creature of about three years old, dressed in nothing but a transparent shirt. The dark settled over Baplai as he began rapidly to read, his pronunciation so odd that I could only recognise occasional words-venial : purgatory: Communion of Saints. Victor Prosser interrupted him, “What is purgatory?” and the small Gio repeated rapidly the definition established by I know not what council of the medieval church, “Purgatory is that state …” He wasn’t really reading, I could tell that : he had learnt the whole thing off by heart, but if I were inclined to criticise the value of that, there before me was Victor Prosser who had in his time too been a piccaninny with nothing but a retentive memory for words which meant nothing to him at all, and now sat there visibly entranced over ‘purgatory’ and ‘the communion of saints’. The child, too, had an ancient English reader with little steel engravings of ladies in bustles and gentlemen with trousers buckled below their boots. Victor Prosser refused the drink I offered him and, rising to go, said that he would lead us himself next morning on our road as far as Toweh-Ta.