So this bare grimy pool in the deep forest had more goodness in it than we had expected : even the fat chief in his dirty robe and battered bowler, who had greeted us so surlily when we entered, mistaking us, as Mr. Nelson had done, for Government agents, proved himself to possess a kindly heart. Amah and Vande were quite drunk with palm wine long before dark, and when we ourselves were sitting at dinner the waving of half a dozen torches announced the chief’s approach with the carriers’ chop. He stood there swaying in front of us between two tipsy torch-bearers, while Vande whispered in my ear, “Chief good man. Chief very good man,” and his men brought up between the pointed huts, under the light of the flaming splinters, bowl after bowl of food. The carriers had never seen such a feast. Its stink reeked in the hot flyey night, the stink of fourteen bowls of chop and three bowls of meat scraps.
Later I was a little drunk myself, not this time for fear of rats but from mere good fellowship. I remember wandering round the village listening to the laughter and the music among the little glowing fires and thinking that, after all, the whole journey was’ worth while : it did reawaken a kind of hope in human nature. If one could get back to this bareness, simplicity, instinctive friendliness, feeling rather than thought, and start again …
I was more spellbound, I suppose, than Vande, who clutched my sleeve in the shadow of a hut and begged me to take the half-crown I had given him that morning into safe keeping: he was afraid to carry such wealth about him among this low bush tribe. He took a green leaf out of his pocket and unwrapped it : inside the leaf was a matchbox : inside the matchbox another leaf, and inside that the silver coin. Then he went back to his palm wine and later I encountered him again wandering in blissful drunkenness, hand in hand with the headman of the village, who had reserved for him a special bowl.
“All Hail, Liberia, Hail!”
I woke at five. In my dream someone had been reciting Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christs Nativity. The version belonged entirely to sleep, but it seemed to me more moving than any poetry I had ever heard before. Two lines, “Angels bright Bathed in white light”, brought tears to my eyes, and for a long while after I woke I believed them to be beautiful and even to have been written by Milton. The darkness was thinning behind the pointed huts. The smell of goats blew in on the damp misty wind. It was Victor Prosser, I suppose, who was responsible, who had brought the idea of God and heavenly hierarchies, of crystal spheres and light insufferable, into the empty pagan land.
I said goodbye to the chief and Mr. Nelson. When I gave the chief a present of money he was taken aback, he wasn’t used to payment and automatically held it out to the tax-gatherer, and automatically Mr. Nelson’s hand moved towards it. Then he remembered he was observed and turned the movement into a jest, a hollow jest unshared by “the drained malarious eyes.
Victor Prosser had gone ahead with my cousin. There were a lot of things he wanted to learn before he reached Toweh-Ta. Was it true that Queen Elizabeth was a Protestant, and Mary Queen of Scots a Catholic like himself? Where did the Thames rise? Was London on the Tiber as well as the Thames? Were Sweden and Switzerland the same country? He asked what London was like, and my cousin chose to tell him of the underground trains, but it wasn’t an easy idea to convey to someone who had never seen an ordinary train. “Very remarkable,” he said coldly and disbelievingly at the end of it and changed the subject by humming God Save the King. The boy with the gun walked behind and last followed the tiny piccaninny in the transparent vest. Victor Prosser walked very slowly, and with some pain, because he wore backless slippers for the sake of his prestige as head teacher of Toweh-Ta.
He asked my cousin to join him in singing God Save the King, which the Catholic missionaries on the Coast had taught him; I can’t imagine why, for they were all of them Irish. He said he knew some Protestant hymns and insisted they should sing Onward, Christian Soldiers together as they picked their way through the Liberian jungle. When I joined them he and his two schoolboys were singing the Liberian national anthem :
All hail, Liberia, hail I
All hail, Liberia, hail!
This glorious land of liberty shall long be ours,
Tho’ new her name, green be her fame,
And mighty be her powers.
In joy and gladness with our hearts united,
We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted.
Long live Liberia, happy land,
A home of glorious liberty by God’s command,
All hail, Liberia, hail!
All hail, Liberia, hail!
In union strong success is sure, we cannot fail
With God above our rights to prove.
We will o’er all prevail.
With heart and hand our country’s cause
defending, We’ll meet the foe with valour unpretending. Long live Liberia, happy land, A home of glorious liberty by God’s command.
The patriotic sentiments sounded better as I heard them later bawled by a school of two hundred children in Monrovia; here it was “the land benighted”, the tall trees standing like cliffs of dull green stone on either side, which really prevailed. After a while Victor Prosser ceased to sing and dropped farther and farther behind in his flopping slippers. I could hear him humming Venite, Adoremus, as we passed the coffin-shaped holes dug by some Dutch prospector, who had been that way alone a year before.
Toweh-Ta was quite a large town; a Paramount Chief had his compound there, and the forest was cleared away from its outskirts. A broad bare road sloped up to it and a big square hut behind a fence at the beginning of the road was Victor Prosser’s school. His manner had altered; here he was someone of importance. It was about half-past nine by our time, which agreed roughly with the handsome silver watch Victor Prosser had won on the Coast. School, he said, would have started; his assistant would be controlling the boys till his coming, and he asked us in to see the class at work. But when he opened the door there was no class : only a little room of empty benches, a cane balanced on two nails, a desk which just succeeded in standing on four loose crooked legs.
And when Victor Prosser angrily demanded why the school bell had not been rung, the young assistant pointed to a rusty kitchen alarm clock on the desk By his time it was only eight-forty-five. Victor Prosser was embarrassed : we all compared watches : then he rang the bell, put the clock to nine and led us up the hill to the Paramount Chiefs cookhouse.
This impressive building was too large for me to photograph: I couldn’t get far enough from it. A circular building with open sides, it had a huge cone chimney of smoothly plaited reeds. Where it fitted down over us like a fool’s cap it must have been about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and it narrowed very gradually until through the top, more than the height of Salisbury Cathedral nave, a handkerchief of sky was visible. Here the town chief came and dashed me a chicken and a hamper of rice-embarrassingly, for the hamper was a man’s load and my cousin’s hammock-men had had to be reduced to three.