The Book of the Heathen (21 page)

After that we did little but wait for the coming men, our days filled with empty whistles and false alarms. ‘Empty whistles' was the term we gave to signals from those boats which did not come to us, but whose masters sounded their whistles or horns or rang their bells at every indication of habitation along the shore, we looking at them, they at us, seldom even waving or calling out to each other during these passing encounters – constant reminders, despite our mirror image across the river, of the vast and mostly impenetrable emptiness amid which we otherwise sat.

During that week – an omen almost of what was afterwards to befall us – there occurred a partial eclipse of the sun. Cornelius warned us that it was coming, saying that it would unsettle our employees, that some among them would refuse to work while this crescent of black – this, to their minds, paring of the unimaginable – lasted. This break in the day's operations was of no consequence to us.

Reports arrived of men approaching us from all directions.

We fastened our collars and pulled straight our jackets, so to speak, and waited. And when these false alarms passed we returned to our unobserved lives almost with a sense of having been cheated.

We learned in the middle of the week that Dhanis's expedition to Fashoda had ended with the mutiny of his three thousand Batetela porters. Some accounts said that Dhanis himself, along with all his Belgian officers, had been killed, and that these three thousand disaffected men were armed and rampaging across the north of the state, causing the factories and the stations there to cease operating, and in some cases to be abandoned when they came under attack.

Later the same day, we heard that Dhanis alone had survived and that he had fled and was now back in Stanleyville. It was said the Batetela were approaching the place with the intention of plundering it. With Stanleyville gone our own major line of trade and communication no longer existed. If the news caused us concern, then we could only imagine what terrors it struck into the hearts of Dhanis's countrymen across the river, many of whom had families living in Stanleyville.

The following day I was with Fletcher when he killed and butchered a small black pig he had bought. He killed the animal by stunning it and then slitting its throat to bleed it. Afterwards he cut open its belly to disgorge its innards, but then, as he paused to sharpen his knife, the creature came miraculously back to life, struggled to its feet and ran squealing around the compound with its innards trailing behind it in a single glossy piece. I helped him chase the animal, both of us helpless with laughter. We called for the assistance of some of our nearby workers, but they refused to intervene, and instead watched wide-eyed as the small pig continued running and squealing. Eventually, the animal succumbed and Fletcher carried it twitching back to the table where he was finally able to butcher it.

At Abbot's insistence we raised a crisp new flag up our pole.

Klein and his congregation marked the ceremony with a service and more singing, and Bone insisted on his men firing a salute.

Thus did we compose and prepare ourselves, and more forcibly than ever before did the wilderness surrounding our swept-out buildings and laundered flag strike me as something more permanent and invincible than anything else I could imagine, something as potent and as indestructible as evil or truth itself, and something waiting only for our departure to reassert itself and to prove once and for all the insignificance of our brief and unremarkable existence within it.

PART THREE

19

‘My name,' he said, ‘is Granville Beaufoy Montague Nash.'

A finger gently prodded four times into each of our chests. A name before which a weaker man might have taken a step backwards.

His own men were lined up behind him, all Zanzibaris, porters and guides. We had anticipated that he might be accompanied by other Company men, or by men acting under the Company's authority collected at the coast or Stanleyville. These men stood upright, their arms flat by their sides, as though about to be inspected. Those senior among them wore red fezzes and cotton drill suits. Nash himself wore a brilliantly white topee, varnished boots and an alpaca dress jacket with a stiff masher collar. Afterwards, Cornelius said the man reminded him of a tailor's dummy. It was clear to us all that this one pristine outfit had been saved for this occasion, and that, fitting so closely and cleanly to the man inside it, it was there to serve a purpose, to signal intent.

‘Beaufoy?' Fletcher said.

And as though on cue, the man said, ‘Henry Beaufoy is my uncle. My father's brother. I was named after him long before I was called here.' He relaxed momentarily, tugged by this distant memory, and then he remembered himself and straightened.

Henry Beaufoy had been, or perhaps still was, the Secretary of the African Association. His portrait had looked down on Frere and myself in that overheated library. The man was a Quaker and well known for being governed in all his actions and decisions by the strictures of his religion.

Cornelius was the first to approach the man in greeting.

‘And these are my men,' Nash said, his first time in command, stepping aside to present them.

I recognized those of the porters who had been here before. They were not reliable men. They had come with Nash because, in addition to their pay, there was some novelty involved, and some distant possibility of further pay.

Cornelius, guessing what was expected of him, walked along the line and looked each of the men in the eye. Most avoided him, but Henry Beaufoy Montague Nash did not see this.

We had known of the party's arrival since the previous evening, when word of it had come to us from a fisherman who encountered them a mile downriver. Abbot had gone to them, found them exhausted and in disarray, and had then been sent back to us by Nash, who insisted that he would not present himself in that condition. Abbot had asked him where the other members of the delegation were, and Nash, perhaps imagining he was referring to the porters yet to catch up with him, had told Abbot they were coming. It was why, at this appointed hour, we had expected to see other Englishmen standing alongside him.

I alone, I believe, felt some reassurance at seeing him standing there by himself, the thinnest of threads between everything that had happened and everything that was yet to come.

As he waited with his porters lined up behind him, others came into the compound to join them. These late arrivals wore only loincloths or tattered trousers and carried small loads, which they dropped unceremoniously in a mound beside Nash. He told them to be more careful, but they ignored him, and only when Cornelius shouted at them in the language they better understood did they lay down their packages in neat piles.

‘Thank you,' Nash said to Cornelius. It was the first of his concessions.

Cornelius then invited the man to accompany him to his quarters, where he might wash and change his clothes.

I saw that Nash had expected considerably more of his arrival, to be greeted more ceremoniously. Like Abbot, he was a clerk who had wandered further from his desk than he had ever believed possible, and we all saw that.

‘Are there others yet to come?' I asked him, meaning more porters – the forty he had with him had brought the loads of half that number.

‘No,' he said. ‘I am completely alone.' He looked at the men behind him, his gaze stiffening them further.

I went with him to Cornelius's rooms. Throughout our encounter he held a leather case, and when I offered to carry it for him, he thanked me and declined.

Cornelius asked him about the route he had taken and Nash explained at great length how he had chosen his guides at each of his stopping points, and how trustworthy they had proved. It was clear that he had been misled, that his journey had been unnecessarily prolonged and made more costly by these uninformed decisions. Neither Cornelius nor I disabused him of his achievement.

He spoke at great length regarding his stay on the coast, what he had seen there, what changes were under way, and how often his expectations of the places he had visited had been exceeded. He looked around him as he spoke – we were then passing the most dilapidated of our timber warehouses – making his silent, disappointing comparisons.

He complained of an ache in both his knees, and of cuts – one on his shoulder, another on his forearm – which continued to suppurate. Cornelius reassured him that they would be treated.

‘They are of little consequence,' Nash said. ‘What man comes here without the expectation of suffering?' He laughed at the remark. He seemed bound by and devoted to his own expectation.

I saw myself in him. I had been ready to dislike him, to be offended by him and his purpose there, but I saw that he had arrived just as I had arrived, the only difference being that I had come clothed in uncertainty, and here was a man whose conviction in his work was as certain and as solid and as much a part of him as the legs which carried him and the spine which held him upright.

‘Of course,' Cornelius said.

Around us, men were at work unloading a small half-decked steamer, and he asked me about its cargo. I told him what I knew of it, that it had brought only palm nuts – vividly crimson in a mound ahead of us – and a consignment of greenheart and gum. The load was of little value.

‘No rubber?' he said.

Cornelius, I saw, continued to make his own silent assessment of the man.

Arriving at Cornelius's quarters, Nash took off his jacket and undershirts and showed us his wounds. In addition to the two of which he had spoken, there were a further dozen, all displaying various degrees of infection. His chest and neck were covered by insect bites. A lesion ran the length of his ribcage, darkening in the places where the bones came closest to the skin. He studied himself in Cornelius's mirror and seemed genuinely shocked at what he saw there.

He continued to discuss his journey with us, false familiarity in his voice; he mentioned places neither Cornelius nor I had ever visited.

Cornelius washed his wounds and applied iodine and oil of thyme to them. Nash did his best not to show the pain this caused him. Cornelius explained to him what had bitten him, and in turn Nash listed the medicines he had brought with him, few of which would serve him well. One of his porters had died during the journey, an old man who could scarcely manage a quarter-load. He had eaten his meal one evening and then died in the night. Two other men had absconded, one with his load.

I stopped listening to him. We had all been wrong-footed.

‘And Nicholas Frere?' I said finally, stopping Nash at the height of another small speech outlining what he considered to be his duties among us.

He looked at me for a moment, angry at my interruption.

‘Where Nicholas Frere is concerned,' he said, his tone changed, formal, unassailable, as solid as his conviction, ‘I shall determine the facts of the matter – facts of which you are all no doubt already aware; I shall make my assessment based upon those facts; and founded upon that assessment I shall make my recommendations for further action.'

‘Meaning you'll send him to stand proper trial,' Cornelius said flatly.

‘That may be my recommendation, yes. How can I decide when I am not yet appraised of the facts?' His retreat into written orders continued, disappointed that his own part in the proceedings had been so bluntly and swiftly exposed.

‘You will be offered every assistance,' Cornelius said.

‘I understand that.'

‘Beyond our legal or contractual obligations, I meant.'

‘Of course.'

‘We want this whole thing resolved as much as you do.'

‘As the Company's representative in the matter, I shall ask nothing of any of you that you cannot already have considered a hundred times over prior to my arrival. I do understand the nature and the depth of your feeling towards me. Nicholas Frere was your companion and friend. I understand what that means in a place like this.'

By which he meant that we were to keep our distance from him, that we were more likely to hinder than to assist him should we insist on our involvement in the matter. We were men uselessly beating our heads together.

I left them soon afterwards and walked through the tall grass to the edge of the garrison yard. Bone and his men were there, but no-one else. It had been my intention to visit Frere in advance of Nash, to tell him of the man come to question him, but instead I turned away, and little caring where I went, I walked to our useless quarry and sat for an hour at its rim watching the tiny brown figures beneath me.

*   *   *

A month after my arrival I had been taken by Cornelius and Fletcher to witness a trial on the far shore. A Manyema stood accused of theft and murder and was being tried by the Belgians. Cornelius had some small role in the proceedings and would be called to testify to the man's character. Fletcher and myself were invited to attend in the more debatable capacity of ‘official observers'.

We crossed the river on the evening prior to the trial. It was my first time out of the Station, and it surprised me to see how much busier and more obviously prosperous this place was compared to our own.

We were put up at the residence of a man called Henrici, Chief Quartermaster – Cornelius's counterpart – and it was not until late in the evening that I discovered that he was also to be the acting judge in the following day's proceedings.

Alone with Cornelius, I asked him by what authority the man played the role, but he dismissed my remark by asking me how else I imagined these things were done. There was no doubt that the accused man was guilty, having confessed to both his crimes.

Henrici had speculated on the punishment he might deliver, but here too there was little doubt. Cornelius told me to say nothing during the trial. The accused man had also been suspected of stealing from us during the time he was in our employ, but nothing had been done to expose or punish him. I saw then how inextricably all these events and their participants were connected.