It is the simplest explanation of the facts contained in Blue Book, and. 4614: the woman just delivered of twins shot in her bed and her children burnt; children cut down with cutlasses; the heads and limbs of victims carried on poles; for otherwise Colonel Davis has to be pictured as a monster, and a monster one simply couldn’t believe him to be, as he flashed his gold teeth over the whisky, a bit doggish, a bit charmingly and consciously shy and small boy in the manner of the black singer Hutch.
He came across again the next evening for whisky and nearly finished all we had. It was a bitterly cold night, and a heavy storm came up : there could be no doubt that the rains were on us. After an hour or two the Colonel grew sentimental, leaning bad in his chair with a wistful misunderstood air; and it became difficult to believe that he had even so much as witnessed the atrocities. “I was on a liner once,” the Colonel said, “and I remember the Captain calling me up to the bridge after dinner. He made a remark I have never forgotten. He pointed to a boat that was going by and said it reminded him of three books that were in the library down below: Ships that Pass in the Night-can you guess the others?”
We couldn’t.
“Well, the Captain pointed down at the deck where the other passengers were and said to me, There, Davis : The People We Meet9; and then he turned to me and said, littleBut more important still, Davis, The Friends We Love?”
I filled the dictator’s glass. “It was a beautiful thought,” he said, looking away.
I worked the. conversation back to Liberia and politics. Colonel Davis was North American by birth, but he was a Liberian patriot. “As the poet wrote,” Colonel Davis said, ” Is there a man with soul so dead, Who never has said, I love my own, my own country?’ ” I asked him about Mr. Barclay and his chances, and whether Mr. Faulkner would be opposing him as well as Mr. King. No, he said, Mr. Faulkner had retired from politics. He had seen Mr. Faulkner in the Post Office just before leaving Monrovia and Faulkner had told him that he was neither supporting nor opposing either candidate. “So I said to him, ‘Mr. Faulkner, there is a parable in the Bible. A disciple came to Christ and said, ‘One in the next village is casting out devils in Beelzebub’s namelittle and Christ said, ‘Who is not with me is against me.’ ” My ignorance of Monrovia contributed to the drama of the political scene: I couldn’t tell that the Post Office was a loft in a wooden shed to which one climbed by a ladder.
Victorian Sunday
I woke next morning with a bad cold after spending the night under two blankets with a sweater over my pyjamas. A letter was waiting for me at breakfast from die Quartermaster :
Dear Friend Mr, Green: Good morning. I’m about to ask a favour of you this morning which I hope you will be able to grant” If you have any Brandy kindly send me a little or anything else if Brandy is out. Some would be very appreciated by me. I’m feeling very, very cold this a.m. you know hope you both well. With best wishes for health. Your friend Wordsworth. QM. N. B.-I’ll bring my sisters to pay a visit to you and cousin this p.m. as they like you for their friends,
I sent him a glass of whisky and asked for a coconut and some palm nuts which the cook needed for lard. Presently back came a coconut and a bottle of palm oil and a note :
Dear Friend: Too many thanks for such a kind treat this a.m. it was highly appreciated. I shall always regard you as my friend… .
The place was very still : it was Sunday and a heavy Victorian peace settled over Tapee. Even native dances were forbidden. The prisoners were driven out to wash tied together by ropes, and a gramophone from the bungalow where two D.C.s were staying played hymn-tunes across the hot empty compound : Hark, the herald angels sing and Nearer, my God, to Thee. But after a while these gave place to dance music and American hot songs. I went for a walk; I was feeling ill and homesick; the Coast seemed as far away as ever. I felt crazy to be here in the middle of Liberia when everything I knew intimately was European. It was like a bad dream. I couldn’t remember why I had come. I wanted to be away at once, but I simply hadn’t the strength, and Dr. Harley’s warning against walking any distance in the West African climate weighed on my mind. I had to have these days of rest, and so did the boys. Mark was dead tired, and even the nerves of Amedoo and Laminah were strained. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that it was only six days to Grand Bassa and if Colonel Davis were to be believed we should not have to wait longer than a week at that miserable little port before a boat passed.
While I was having a bath in preparation for a long siesta the Quartermaster arrived. He wanted to buy a bottle of whisky for his brother and his brother had sent five shillings. I said I had none left, or at any rate only just enough to see me to the Coast Then at two-thirty by my watch, when I had just fallen asleep, he came again with a note from the D.C. inviting me to dinner at two o’clock. I had eaten a large lunch already, but I went, taking with me half a bottle of whisky very diluted.
I was reminded of one of those curious thick crude groups by Samuel Butler. One had slipped back sixty years in time to a Victorian Sunday dinner. The only thing lacking was the wife; she helped to serve the dinner. There at the end of the table sat Papa, yellow-faced Wordsworth in his heavy side-whiskers dressed in a thick dark Sunday suit with a gold watch-chain across his stomach and a gold seal dangling from it. On the walls were faded Victorian photographs of family groups, whiskers and bustles and parasols, in Oxford frames. All except myself and Colonel Davis, who sat at the other end of the table and carved the goose, were in Sunday clothes: an old negro who had withered inside his clothes like a dried nut in its shell and who was one of the Judges of Assize, the native Commissioner from Grand Bassa and another Commissioner who was very shy and scared of Colonel Davis and whom I suspected of having played the hymns. The Commissioner of Grand Bassa, I suppose, was responsible for the hot music.
Conversation was halting: the weather, devils and secret societies, the small talk of Liberia. Colonel Davis was a firm believer in the power of the lightning societies. He had visited towns where the members had performed in his honour. They would tell him that lightning would be made at a certain hour, and at that hour out of a cloudless sky along all the hills for miles around it would begin to play. Mr. Justice Page capped the story with a few legal decisions of his own on the subject of lightning. makers, but Colonel Davis was determined to raise the conversation to a high social level : to food. He had toured Europe with Mr. King and he remembered very well the Caviare.
Colonel Davis explained to the dark blank faces, “Caviare is the black eggs of little fisheslittle’ He turned to me, “Of course, in England now, you no longer get the Russian cigarette.” I said I really didn’t know: I thought I’d seen them in tobacconists’. “Not real oneslittle’ Colonel Davis said, “they are very rare indeed. A season or two ago in Monrovia they formed a course in themselves at dinner parties.” “Where did the course come?” I asked. “After the fish and before the saladlittle’ Colonel Davis said, while the Commissioner from Grand Bassa learn forward and drank in every syllable describing the gilded life of the capital. “The lights were loweredlittlelittle he paused impressively, “and one cigarette would be served to each guestlittle’ The judge nodded; he came? from Monrovia as well.
I remember saying to Colonel Davis how surprised! T was not to have seen a single mosquito. He, toi he said, had not seen one since the last rains; he mid suffering a little from prickly heat, but Liberia was really the healthiest place in Africa.