He was always inclined to over-state his case, as when he told me that in the Km war no women had been killed, only one woman accidentally wounded, while the British Consul’s report spoke of seventy-two women and children dead. Now he remarked that there had never been any yellow fever in Liberia; the manager of the British bank who had died of it in Monrovia (his death was one of the reasons why the British Bank of West Africa withdrew altogether from Liberia) had brought the infection with him from Lagos. All the other deaths could be traced to inoculation. There was less malaria, he went on, in Liberia than in any other part of the West Coast: I had seen myself, he said, that there were no mosquitoes. But providence gave Colonel Davis a raw deal in this case because, when evening came and we were waiting for him to join us over our whisky, the Quartermaster brought news that he was down with a bad attack of fever.
So the Quartermaster entertained us our last evening in Tapee-Ta, sitting moonily opposite with his great seal’s eyes begging, begging all the time for friendship. He had taken an immediate fancy to me, he said, when he saw me come out of the French path by Ganta; he had felt then that we would be friends. He would write to me and I would write to him. It was lonely in Tapee : he was used to the life of the capital; in Monrovia it was so gay, the dancing and the cafιs on the beach. By the time we arrived the Season would be over, but it would still be gay, so much to do and see, dancing by moonlight. His great lustrous romantic eyes never left me. He said, because his mind was full of love and friendship, dancing and the moon, “You’ve come from Buzie country. They have wonderful medicines there. There is a medicine for venereal disease. You tie a rope round your waist. I have never tried it.” He said wistfully, “I guess you white people aren’t troubled with venereal disease.” He brooded a long time on our departure. He wished he was coming too, but he would always be my friend. He would have letters from me. That night when I was making my way out of the compound into the forest he intercepted me. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind his stopping me, but there was a very good closet behind the Colonel’s bungalow with a wooden seat. It was more suitable for me than the bush, he said, but I couldn’t help remembering that he had not yet tried the Buzie medicine and I went inexorably on into the forest. He got up very early next morning to see us go, and the last I remember of Tapee was his warm damp romantic handshake in the grey deserted compound.
THE LAST LAP
A Touch of Fever
I HAD never imagined that Grand Bassa would one day become my ideal of a place to sleep and rest in” Bet now it seemed like heaven. There would be another white man there; the sea in front instead of bush; there might be beer to drink. I hadn’t realised until I began to walk again how down-and-out I was. No amount of Epsom salts had any effect on me; I used to take a handful morning and night in hot tea, but I might have been taking sugar. I felt sick and tired before I had walked a step and now there was no hammock I could use. Six days, they had said at Ganta, would bring us from Tapee to Grand Bassa, but now at Tapee they said that the journey would take a week at the very least, perhaps ten days. I could no longer count time in such long periods : even four days might have been eternity for all my mind was capable of conceiving it. Not until I could say “tomorrow” would I believe that we were really drawing nearer to the Coast. My brain felt as sick as my body. The responsibility of the journey had been mine, the choice of route, the care of the men, and now my mind had almost ceased to function. I simply couldn’t believe that we should ever reach Grand Bassa, that I had ever led a life different from this life.
To reach our next stop, Zigi’s Town, I found difficult enough. It was nearly nine hours’ solid trek from Tapee, going down all the while into a damper closer heat, and the first few miles of path were flooded waist-high. Our guide, whom the Commissioner of Grand Bassa had lent to lead us to the door of the P”Z. store on Bassa beach, proved useless from the start. Dressed in a ragged blue uniform, a rifle over his shoulder which wouldn’t have fired even if he’d had the rounds, with all his belongings in a little tin pail, he dropped behind at the first village we reached. He was called Tommie and he had a brazen boyish charm. He knew the way, but he had no intention of walking at our rate. He started each day well, but after half an hour he would slip aside into the bush and not catch up again until the midday halt. By that time he was usually a little drunk. Because he wore a uniform he could rob any village he passed of palm wine, fruit and vegetables.
I remember nothing of the trek to Zigi’s Town and very little of the succeeding days. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t write more than a few lines in my diary; I hope never to be so tired again. I retain an impression of continuous forest, occasional hills emerging above the bush so that we could catch a glimpse on either side of the great whale backed forests driving to the sea. Outside Zigi’s Town there was a stream trickling down the slope and a few ducks with a curiously English air about them. I remember trying to sit down, but immediately having to deal with the town chief over food for the carriers, trying to sit down again and rising to look for threepenny-bits the cook needed for buying a chicken, trying to sit down and being forced up again to dress a carrier’s sores. I couldn’t stand any more of it; I swallowed two tablespoonfuls of Epsom in a cup of strong tea (we had finished our tinned milk long ago) and left my cousin to deal with anything else that turned up. My temperature was high. I swallowed twenty grains of quinine with a glass of whisky, took off my clothes, wrapped myself in blankets under the mosquito-net and tried to sleep.
A thunderstorm came up. It was the third storm we’d had in a few days; there wasn’t any time to lose if we were to reach the Coast, and I lay in the dark as scared as I have ever been. There were no rats, at any rate, but I caught a jigger under my toe when I crawled out to dry myself. I was sweating as if I had influenza; I couldn’t keep dry for more than fifteen seconds. The hurricane lamp I left burning low on an up-ended chop box and beside it an old whisky bottle full of warm filtered water. I kept remembering Van Gogh at Bolahun burnt out with fever. He said you had to lie up for at least a week : there wasn’t any danger in malaria if you lay up long enough; but I couldn’t bear the thought of staying a week here, another seven days away from Grand Bassa. Malaria or not, I’d got to go on next day and I was afraid.
The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me. My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek for the time being was over. I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.
It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.) If the experience had not been so new to me, it would have seemed less important, I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain. Perhaps the sediment has value, the memory of a conversion may have some force in an emergency; I was able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been complete!) convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.
It was supposed to be a seven-hour trek from Zigi’s Town to Bassa Town, the first stop inside Bassa territory. I was doubtful if I could make it without some help from a hammock, so I took on two extra carriers and my men hacked a pole to take the place of the one I had discarded. I was feeling very weak, but I hadn’t enough carriers to let myself be carried all the way, so I walked the first two hours and then had ten minutes in the hammock and walked again. I didn’t like being carried. A two-man hammock puts a great strain on the carriers and my men were already tired by the long trek. One heard the hammock strings grinding on the pole and saw the shoulder muscles strain under the weight. It was too close to using men as animals for me to be happy.