The sentry returned and led me across the compound to another bungalow, a less smart one this time, with a few rickety chairs on the verandah. The District Commissioner appeared in the doorway, a slatternly mulatto woman peered over his shoulder. He was a middle-aged man with a yellow face and Victorian side-whiskers; he hadn’t shaved for a long time; his teeth were bad, and he wore a shabby khaki uniform and the dirtiest old peeling white sun helmet I had ever seen. He was like a stern and sadistic papa in a Victorian children’s story; his name was Wordsworth, but he was more like Mr. Fairchild than the poet. I think his appearance maligned him and that really he was shy and afraid of humiliation; I this quite possibly, like Mr. Fairchild, he had a heart of gold under that repressive exterior. Now he stood above me like a little yellow tyrant, and I really believed at first that he would refuse me a house, but instead he called his young brother, the Quartermaster.
Mr. Wordsworth, junior, was quite different. He had a round seal-grey face with soft lips (there seemed to be less white blood in his veins) and he had a passion for friendship. He it was who had raised his hat to me at the crossing of path and road at Ganta. He led me to the next bungalow : a palatial building of four rooms and a cookhouse. In one of the rooms we found the Paramount Chief, squatting on the native bed, eating his lunch with the clan chief; he was very like the ex-King of Spain and wore a soft hat and a native robe. We had arrived at Tapee during a conference of the local chiefs. They had made complaints against the District Commissioners, especially against Mr. Wordsworth, and Colonel Davis had arrived as the President’s special agent to hear the complaints. There were several D.C.s now staying in the compound. We had arrived in the lunch interval.
I sat down in a wooden chair and waited for the others to arrive. The Paramount Chief hastily came out of the bedroom and said the chair was his. I could sit in it, but it was his. The palaver-house m the compound began to fill up with chiefs who streamed in at the gates in soft hats under umbrellas, their chairs carried by boys. I began to ask the Paramount Chief to sell me rice for my men. Thin, vital, Bourbon-nosed, he seemed to pay no attention whatever. He strode away to say something to the clan chiefs, then strode back and said I could have rice at four shillings a hamper. I said that was too-much, but he was gone again. His mind was full of state affairs, he hardly had time to bring the price down to three shillings, and before I could propose half a crown, he was off to the palaver-house. Then a bugle blew and Colonel Davis, accompanied by the D.C.s, walked across the compound to the council.
Even at a distance there was something attractive about the dictator of Grand Bassa. He had personality. He carried himself with a straight military swagger, he was very well dressed in a tropical suit with a silk handkerchief stuck in the breast pocket. He had a small pointed beard and one couldn’t at that distance see the gold teeth which rather weakened his mouth. He was like a young black Captain Kettle and reminded me of Conrad’s Mr. J. K. Blunt who used to declare with proud simplicity in the Marseilles cafιs, “I live by my sword.” He had noted our arrival and presently the seedy Commissioner appeared to say that the President’s special agent wished to see our papers.
It was the first time in Liberia that our passports had been examined. The absconding financier whom I have imagined settling in the unpoliced hinterland of Liberia, taking his holidays at will in French Guinea, a good enough substitute for Le Touquet without any tiresome bother about papers, would do well to avoid Tapee-Ta. For there is a prison in the compound at Tapee-Ta, and though the dictator of Grand Bassa was satisfied with our passports, which certainly did not include permission to pass through Central Liberia, the financier might have fared worse. That prison, next door to our own bungalow, combined behind its thatch and whitewashed walls and tiny portholes the sense of darkness and airlessness, and the kind of mindless brutality which sometimes vents itself in this country in the torture of a cat (the head warder was a moron and a cripple). Each porthole, the size of a man’s head, represented a cell The prisoners within, men and women, were tied by ropes to a stick which was laid crosswise against the porthole outside. There were two or three men who were driven out to work each morning, two skinny old women who carried in the food and water, their ropes coiled round their waists, an old man who was allowed to lie outside on a mat tied to one of the posts which supported the thatch. In a dark cavernous entrance, where the whitewash stopped, a few warders used to lounge all through the day shouting and squabbling and sometimes diving, club in hand, into one of the tiny cells. The old prisoner was a half-wit; I saw one of the warders beating him with his club to make him move to the tin basin in which he had to wash, but he didn’t seem to feel the blows, Life to him was narrowed into a few very simple, very pale sensations, of warmth on his mat in the sun and cold in his cell, for Tapee-Ta at night was very cold, One of the old women had been in prison a month waiting trial. She was accused of having made lights rung in her village, and there was a pathetic impotence in her daily purgatory under the staggering weight of water from the stream half a mile away. If she could make lightning, why did she not burn the prison down or strike the dilatory Commissioner dead? Very likely she had made lightning (I could not disbelieve these stories; they were too well attested), but perhaps the natural force had died in her during her imprisonment, or perhaps she simply hadn’t the right medicines with her in that place. I asked the Quartermaster when she would be tried; he didn’t know.
The council in the palaver-house went on till after five: the place was packed. It must have been appallingly hot. One suspected that the whole inquiry was designed to quiet the chiefs rather than try the Commissioners, for the judge was a cousin of the principal accused. But at any rate he showed patience and endurance.
Later that evening came the ceremony of lowering the Liberian flag, carried out with solemnity; two buglers played a few bars of the national anthem—
In joy and gladness with our hearts united, We’ll shout the freedom of a land benighted and everyone on the verandahs stood at attention. When it was over I sent a note across to Colonel Davis asking for an interview and received a reply that he was worn out by nine hours of council, but would spare me a few minutes.
The ‘few minutes’ developed into several hours, for the Colonel was garrulous, and after more than an hour’s conversation on his verandah, we adjourned to mine for whisky. He had once been a private in the American army and his career, if frankly written, would prove one of the most entertaining adventure stories in the world. As a private or a medical orderly in a black regiment-I forget which-he had served in Pershing’s disastrous Mexican expedition when hundreds of men died in the desert for lack of water; later he had seen service in the Philippines; and finally, for what reason I do not know, he had left America and come to Monrovia. He was very soon appointed medical officer of health, though I do not think he had any kind of medical degree, and from this vantage point he had worked his way into politics. Under Mr. King’s presidency he had been appointed Colonel Commandant of the Frontier Force and had managed to shift his allegiance to Mr, Barclay when Mr. King was forced to resign after the League of Nations inquiry. No story was undramatic to Colonel Davis, and the whole shabby tale of Mr. King’s participation in the shipping of forced labour to Fernando Po and his rather cowardly acceptance of the League’s condemnation, which threatened Liberian sovereignty, followed by his resignation when the Legislature proposed to impeach him, became an exciting melodrama in which Colonel Davis had played an heroic part.