He had the stamina of a bull; he could stop drinking when he chose. The islands were past, next port of call was on the Coast, he had work to do. Nobody knew how far afield his work was taking him and of its importance; he was fat and boisterous, one couldn’t tell from his manner the anxiety of his journey. He was taking a big risk; he had to get orders; and yellow fever was not going to stop him. There was an epidemic at one of the points on his route; he didn’t know of it when he came on board; everyone laughed at him about the fever, and one could tell that he was a little scared; but one could tell too that it was not going to make any difference. He was like an old fighter who is forced back into the ring because he needs the purse; he may be out of condition, may be afraid of getting hurt, but he cannot afford to lose, even if the effort kills him. Younger talked about his wife; he had never before been to a place where he couldn’t ring her up at nine o’clock of an evening; he’d always done it when he was in Brussels, in Berlin, in Warsaw.
Graveyard
The day after Las Palmas, passengers in West Coast boats wake to a completely new air. It lasts for a day and a day only. My sheets were damp with a kind of dew; there was a warm wet wind and a haze over the sea. The air smelt as salt and fishy as the air on Brighton front. The sodden damp to a traveller back from the Coast with malarial infection in his blood is said to be very dangerous, and among sailors this part of the Atlantic is known as the Elder Dempster Graveyard. But the tradition is older than the Line. Burton wrote of it in his Anatomy: “Such a complaint I read of those islands of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male audire; one calls them the unhealthiest clime of the world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them, and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air. The hardiest men are offended with the heat, and stiffest clowns cannot resist it.”
It made Younger think of yellow fever at Kano. In the smoking-room that night, the first night of his new sobriety, he said that he thought death was a great adventure. But life, Phil said, was a great adventure too. Science was making great strides these days; you never knew; though of course Wells and Jules Verne had foreseen it all; what wonderful prophets they were. He said, “I thought Hannen Swaffer was a prophet too once, but he let me down.”
“Isn’t Hannen Swaffer a woman?” Younger said.
“No, he’s a man.”
“Are you sure?” Younger said. But Phil was sure. He’d seen him. He had even spoken to him one night when he came up to address their literary club. It was a change from bridge, that club; they got really famous writers to talk to them. Chesterton had been and Cecil Roberts. Then he went out to look at the moon, leaning over the side, waiting in vain for my cousin or the other woman on board to join him. If one did, he put his arm round her and talked about Wallasey or his wife or League results. He was only formally romantic; he had a great respect for women. He was really far more at home with Younger, looked after Younger when he was drunk, protected him, undressed him if necessary; when Younger became sober he was rather lost, looked at the moon more often, padding round the deck earnestly romantic, irritable because no one would play at tropic nights with him, disappearing at last into the little wireless room to talk about football to ‘Sparks’. One night his vitality which had no outlet overcame him and he began to throw glasses overboard.
Dakar
It must have been two days later that I woke to the grating of iron against stone, and there was the Coast. The word was already over-familiar. People said, “Eldridge. Of course, he’s an old Coaster,” and Eldridge, the middle-aged shipping agent, at the beginning of every meal would say, “Chop, as we call it on the Coast,” or handing a plate of onions, “Violets, we say on the Coast.” One’s pink gin was called a Coaster. There was no other Coast but the West Coast and this was it.
On the quay the Senegalese strolled up and down, long white and blue robes sweeping up the dust blown from the ridge of monkey-nuts twenty-five feet high. The men walked hand-in-hand, laughing sleepily together under the blinding vertical glare. Sometimes they put their arms round each other’s necks; they seemed to like to touch each other, as if it made them feel good to know the other man was there. It wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand. Two of them went about all day without loosing hold; they were there when the boat slid in beside the monkey-nuts; they were there in the evening when the loading was finished and the labourers washed their hands and faces in the hot water flowing from the ship’s side; they hadn’t done a stroke of work themselves, only walked up and down touching hands and laughing at their own jokes; but it wasn’t love; it wasn’t anything we could understand. They gave to the blinding day, to the first sight of Africa, a sense of warm and sleepy beauty, of enjoyment divorced from activity and the weariness of willine.
Lΰ, tout n’est qu’ordre et beautι, Luxe, calme et voluptι.
One found it hard to believe at Dakar that Baudelaire had never been to Africa, that the nearest he had come to it was the body of Jeanne Duval, the mulatto ‘tart’ from Le Thιβtre du Pantheon, for Dakar was the Baudelaire of L’Invitation au Voyage, when it was not the Renι Clair of Le Million.
It was Renι Clair in its happy lyrical absurdity; the two stately Mohammedans asleep on the gravel path in the public gardens beside a black iron kettle; the tiny Syrian children going to school in white topees; the men’s sewing parties on the pavements; the old pock-marked driver who stopped his horses and disappeared into the bushes to tell his beads; the men laden with sacks moving rhythmically up and down a ladder of sacks, building higher the monkey-nut hill, like the tin toy figures sold in Holborn at Christmas-time; in the lovely features of the women in the market, young and old, lovely less from sexual attractiveness than from a sharp differentiated pictorial quality. In the restaurant, a little drunk on iced Sauterne, one didn’t trouble about the Dakar one had heard about, the Dakar of endemic plague and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the most unhealthy town on the Coast. Mr. Gorer in his Africa Dances tells how in Dakar the young Negroes simply die, not of tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever, but apparently of inanition, of hopelessness. He stayed too long, I suppose, and saw too much; that sudden sense of happiness which came to one in Dakar doesn’t last, which came to one in Le Million, a happiness that tingles behind the eyes, beautiful and insecure, a wish fulfilment.
Do not expect again a phoenix hour, The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining, Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease… .
Undoubtedly the other Dakar (the Dakar of the four hundred and sixteen dead, of the despair and injustice) was there, but something else was momentarily shining through, something which was always stubbornly existing. So in an early Renι Clair film one could believe that this was the life one was born to live, breaking through life as one had been made to live it, breaking through anxiety and irritation and financial depression and a lust which had gone on too long, these voices in the air, this chase of a lottery ticket among the flying opera-hats, this tuneful miniature love behind cardboard scenery nothing was really serious, nothing lasted, you didn’t have to think about tomorrow’s food or tomorrow’s girl; you stuck up your leg in derision sewing pants on the pavement, you fell asleep among the flowers with your black kettle, you touched hands and felt good and didn’t care a damn.