The devil was paying his respects to the chief and to the strangers, so the interpreter explained in Bande, and was ready to dance for them. There was an uneasy pause while I wondered with the embarrassment of a man in a strange restaurant whether I had enough in my pocket. But a dash of a shilling was sufficient and the devil danced. It was not so accomplished a dance as we saw later by a devil belonging to a woman’s society in Buzie country; the lack of religious enthusiasm in the Bande tribe, if it allows them to lead an easier life, less under the fear of poisoning, diminishes their artistic talent. Vitality was about the only quality one could allow Landow; he lashed a small whip; he twirled like a top; he ran up and down between the huts with long sliding steps, his skirts raising the dust and giving his progress an appearance of immense speed. His interpreter did his best to keep up with him, brushing him when he was within reach. The spirit was definitely carnival; no one above the age of childhood was really scared of Landow; they had all passed through his school, and one suspected that the blacksmith of Mosambolahun, the slack grimy town, had not maintained very carefully his unmasked authority. He was a ‘good fellow’, one felt, and like so many good fellows he went on much too long: he would sit on the ground and mutter, then run up and down a bit and sit down again. He was a bore as he played on and on in the blistering afternoon sun, hoping for another dash, which I simply hadn’t got with me. One woman ran up and flung down two irons and ran away again, and he cracked his whip and raced and turned and spun. The villagers stood in the background smiling discreetly; it was a carnival, but it wasn’t a carnival in the vulgar sense of Nice and the Battle of Flowers; it wasn’t secular and skittish; like the dancing in the Spanish cathedral at Easter, it had its religious value.
I remembered a Jack-in-the-Green I had seen when I was four years old, quite covered except for his face in leaves, wearing a kind of diving-suit of leaves and twirling round and round at a country crossroads, far from any village, with only a little knot of attendants and a few bicyclists to watch him. That as late as the ninth century in England had religious significance, the dance was part of the rites celebrating the death of winter and the return of spring, and here in Liberia again and again one caught hints of what it was we had developed from. It wasn’t so alien to us, this masked dance (in England too there was a time when men dressed as animals and danced), any more than the cross and the pagan emblems on the grave were alien. One had the sensation of having come home, for here one was finding associations with a personal and a racial childhood, one was being scared by the same old witches. They brought a screaming child up to the devil and thrust him under the devil’s muzzle, under the dusty raffia mane; he stiffened and screamed and tried to escape and the devil mouthed him. The older generation were playing the same old joke they had played for centuries, of frightening the child with what had frightened them. I went away but looking back I saw a young girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad erotic appeal of projecting buttocks and moving belly; she at least didn’t know it was the blacksmith of Mosambolahun as she danced like Europa before the bull, and the old black wooden muzzle rested on the earth and the eyes of the blacksmith watched her through the flat painted rims.
Music at Night
That night Gissi, a Buzie man, came up to play the harp. A row of black heads lined the verandah, while he sat with dangling legs picking out of the palm fibres light melancholy monotonous music, beautifully superficial music which just tickled the surface of the mind, didn’t tiresomely claim any deep emotion whether of grief or exaltation, the claim which fixes strained masks on the faces in a concert hall. This was the music of a cigarette-box; it was sad, but it didn’t really care, everything would always be the same. The little recurring notes plucked with four nails died out and began again unvaried against the night, the black faces, the hurricane lamp and the moths that drove by in swarms to shrivel their wings against it. Mark shovelled them from the table in handfuls, and Gissi didn’t watch his harp or his fingers or his friends; he looked away smiling gently at the hopping wingless moths. He was not a handsome man, he was beautiful as a woman can be beautiful, without effeminacy. His round skull and tiny ears, projecting lower lip and long curling eyelashes had nothing in common with the buck negro type, who represents Africa to the European lounging round the bars off Leicester Square, beating the piano in dance orchestras. His chin was very gently moulded, his hair fitted his head like a skull-cap; he was more Grecian than African, early Grecian before the decadence. He wore an elephant-hide bracelet and a silver ring.
The goat-herd came and danced, stamping and flinging out his arms, and one by one the men came out of the dark on to the verandah, into the lamp-light, hurling themselves this way and that, sending the shadows flying from their arms and legs. Their faces were strange but soon they were to become familiar, for these were the labourers whom Vande, my newly-appointed headman, had found for me, to carry fifty-pound weights for four weeks on end, for three shillings a week and their food. It sounded to a stranger next door to slave labour, but these were not slaves stamping up and down with a controlled wildness and an unconscious grace. There was Amah, my second headman, a tall sullen humourless Mandingo with a shaven head in a long blue and white robe; there was Babu, a Buzie man like Gissi with the same delicate cultured features, the features of a tribe sensitive to art and fear, weavers of exquisite cloth, in touch more than any tribe with the supernatural, makers of lightning, poisoners; Fadai, a gentle-mannered boy from Sierra Leone with soft sad eyes, infected with yaws; there was one-eyed shaven shifty Vande Two.
They didn’t speak a word as they swayed and stamped; each improvised, dancing alone with no reference to the others; it was only the music and the shadows which lent them unity. I was to see these improvised dances again and again during the long trek. The slightest hint of a tune would set them off; if there was no music someone would tap a twig on an empty tin. They were more easy to appreciate than the communal dances. They had obvious dramatic qualities and one could see hidden under the personal idiosyncrasies the germ of the Charleston. But to the native, I suppose, the communal dance was on a higher, more subtle level; only one hadn’t oneself got a clue to their appreciation. I saw such a dance in the village. A band of youths with drums chanted an air, while about seven boys shuffled in a small circle with their hands at their sides, one foot forward, the other brought up beside it, then forward again. Presently three girls joined them and the circle became smaller than ever: a girl’s nipples bulged against the back in front, her buttocks were pressed by the girl behind. Round and round they went to the monotonous beat, a snake eating its own tail.
That night of dancing on the verandah was specially memorable because it was the last at Bolahun. The next day the real journey was going to begin. Amedoo had returned from hospital; even Van Gogh, pale as a ghost under his bleached gold stubble, a curiously intellectual sensitive face for a prospector (he treated the natives with a harsh lack of consideration one would never have guessed existed behind the horn-rimmed glasses), had staggered over for a cup of tea. Long study of the manuscript maps the Dutch prospectors had made of the Western province, consultations with the German linguist, had decided us to take a different and longer route. I wanted to deliver my letter to Chief Nimley, and so I planned to walk down to Sinoe and Nana Kru, first striking along the northern border to Ganta, where an American medical missionary, Dr Harley, might be expected to know something of the route. Nobody in Bolahun had been so far as Ganta, but the German doctor at the hospital had been to Zigita, and there one might expect to get more information. The fathers with a saintly trust in human nature cashed my cheque for £40 in small silver on a trading firm in Monrovia and sold me two hammocks which could be carried by two men apiece. With these light hammocks I hoped to economize in men and time.
The first stop, so at first it was decided, was to be Pandemai, and I sent off two carriers ahead to warn the chief, but as we talked at tea, the distance to Pandemai seemed to increase
while the kindness one might look for from the chief in Kpangblamai became more desirable. The truth was, I couldn’t help being a little scared. I wanted to break the strangeness and wildness gently.
Mark I had decided to add to the company as interpreter, jester and gossip. I hadn’t been able to resist the letter he thrust on me one day over the verandah.
Sir In honour to ask you that I am willingly to go with you down Monrovia please kindly I beg you. Because you love me so dearly I don’t want you must live me here again, and More over I am too little to take a load. I will be assisting the hammock till we reach. Me and the headman. Please sir don’t live me here again. I was fearing to tell you last night please Master, good master and good servant. I am yours ever friend Mark.
It proved always possible, however tired and vexed and sick I felt, to gain a little of the old zest at second-hand through Mark, for Mark had never seen the sea nor a ship nor a brick house. It was the greatest adventure he was ever likely to have and he was still only a schoolboy. One could see in his avid gaze at new people and new customs the dramatizing instinct at work: he was going to have stories to tell when he got back to school.
Now on the verandah, with the dancers, apprehensions gathered. This was the last rest-house we would occupy for a long while. It was to be native huts after this. I remembered what the sisters had said of the rats which swarmed in every native hut. You couldn’t, they said, keep them off your bed; the mosquito net was useless; once a sister had woken to find a rat sitting on her pillow savouring the oil on her hair. But you soon got used to rats, they said. They were right, but I didn’t believe them. I had never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my mother’s terror of birds, couldn’t touch them, couldn’t bear the feel of their hearts beating in my palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn’t like, the idea of eternal life and damnation. But in Africa one couldn’t avoid them any more than one could avoid the supernatural. The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa may be imagined as saying, you can’t avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can’t turn your back, you can’t forget it, so you may as well take a long look.
A dog ran whining across the verandah, between the dancers’ legs, and off down the path to the convent. Some instinct told it to keep moving; it slathered and whined and ran; it had been bitten by a snake. The sisters had called in a medicine man who had poured medicine down its throat and tied sticky charms to its legs, but these the sisters had removed when the man had gone. It was still alive, but it had to keep on running.
It wasn’t so good when the dancers went. Neither of us felt to happy; I couldn’t help remembering C and Van Gogh. My cousin had been bitten all over (if by mosquitoes, then malaria might easily find us less than half-way through the forest). I had a rash over my back and arms like the rash of chicken-pox. I didn’t feel so well: perhaps I had drunk too much whisky. There did seem to be an air of sickness about the prospect; Amedoo’s lung and Van Gogh’s fever contributed to it. After dinner I went out to the last pail-closet I should see before Monrovia; the wooden seat, of course, was swarming with ants, but I realized by this time that it was luxury to have a closet at all. We had discovered we hadn’t enough lamps with us. The boys needed both lamps while they were washing up the dinner things, which meant that we must sit in the waning light of our two electric torches. The mosquito-netting over the windows and door was broken and anything came in, large horse-flies, cockroaches, beetles, cockchafers, and moths. Now and then to save light we sat in darkness. It was a grim evening and our nerves were rather strained. Big spiders dashed up and down the wall, the filter in the corner slowly and regularly dripped, a tom-tom was beating somewhere some message, probably about the President’s coming, and a big black moth the size of a bat flapped against the walls. The only thing to do was to go to bed early and sleep well.
But that was impossible; a great storm of rain beat upon the roof and afterwards it was too cold to sleep properly, just as in the day it had been too hot to walk. I dreamed uneasily I was present at the assassination of the President. It took place in Bolahun close to one of the green leafy arches they had raised in case he passed that way, between the borders of the path where the pineapple plants were sprinkled with white powder which meant ‘There is joy in our hearts at your coming.’ He was shot in a carriage by one of the drummers I saw at Tailahun and I tried in vain to send the story to a newspaper. At four I woke and got out of bed, without putting on my shoes, and found my vest, it was so cold. I knew some days later that I had caught a jigger by my carelessness, the small insect which burrows into the toe under the skin and lays its eggs and goes on multiplying until it is cut out. I slept again and had more restless dreams: that there was a case of yellow fever in Bolahun and I was put in quarantine and my diary was burnt; I woke weeping with fury. I began more than ever to wish I hadn’t got to go at dawn. The process of psychoanalysis may be salutary, but it is not at first happy. This place was luxury, it was civilized in a way that I was used to and could understand. It was foolish to be dissatisfied, to want to penetrate any further. People had made their home here. I thought of the five sisters who had come from Malvern; I thought of the young German doctor with his duelling scars and his portrait of Hitler. He was the best kind of Nazi; he had been given the strength and the enthusiasm and the hope, and he hadn’t been in Germany to see the dirty work done. His wife, dark and thin and lovely in a fierce tired way, had borne her first child at the mission three weeks before. Bolahun in the early morning of the last day seemed a lovely place, where oranges were twelve a penny and mangoes three for a farthing and bananas so cheap that one hadn’t time to eat them before the ants and flies got into them. These were what I remembered most clearly through the monotony of the forest: the lovely swooping flight of the small bright rice-birds, the fragile yellow cotton flowers growing with no stalk directly out of the canes, something like a wild rose, transparent primrose petals with a small red centre and a black stamen; butterflies, palms, goats and rocks and great straight silver cotton trees, and through the canes the graceful walking women with baskets on their heads. This was what I carried with me into new country, an instinctive simplicity, a thoughtless idealism. It was the first time, moving on from one place to another, that I hadn’t expected something better of the new country than I had found in the old, that I was prepared for disappointment. It was the first time, too, that I was not disappointed.
New Country
Coming into Riga three years before, I had deceived myself into thinking I was on the verge of a relationship with something new and lovely and happy as the train came out from the Lithuanian flats, where the peasants were ploughing in bathing-slips, pushing the wooden plough through the stiff dry earth, into the shining evening light beside the Latvian river. I had left Berlin in the hard wooden carriage at midnight; I hadn’t slept and I’d eaten nothing all day. There was a Polish Jew in the carriage who had been turned out of Germany; he couldn’t speak any English and I could speak no German, but a little stout Estonian girl who had been a servant in London could speak both. She was an Estonian patriot, she hadn’t a good word for Riga, she regarded the grey spires beyond the river with firm peasant contempt.
And there was something decaying, ‘Parisian’, rather shocking in an old-fashioned way about the place. One could see why someone so fresh and unspoiled was disgusted. The old bearded droshky drivers and their bony haggard horses at the station were like the illustrations to a very early translation of Anna Karenina; they were like crude and foxed wood engravings. They must have dated back to the days when Riga was a pleasure resort for Grand Dukes, a kind of aristocratic Brighton to which
one slipped away from a duchess’s bed with someone from the theatre, someone to be described in terms of flowers and pink ribbons, chocolates and champagne in the slipper, of black silk stockings and corsets. All the lights in Riga were dimmed by ten: the public gardens were quite dark and full of whispers, giggles from hidden seats, excited rustles in the bushes. One had the sensation of a whole town on the tiles. It was fascinating, it appealed immensely to the historical imagination, but it certainly wasn’t something new, lovely and happy.
Even the street women were period. They were not, poor creatures, young enough to be brazen under what little light there was, though they had a depraved air of false youth as if they knew their only hope was to appeal to the very old. Their manners too, one felt, dated back to the Grand Dukes. Their allure was concentrated in an ankle, a garter, which they would bend down to adjust with a dreadfully passé gesture of allurement. Their street manners were infinitely more elegant than the street manners of London, but they weren’t in the picture any longer. There were no more Grand Dukes on the spree to be attracted by their immature girlish legs, their corseted waists, their slipping garters, their black silk stockings; unless perhaps one of the old droshky drivers was a Grand Duke. It was not improbable. At Tallinn a Baron carried luggage at the airport. And there could be no more suitable ending of an evening than for a street-walker to go home with the droshky driver; the garter with the long grey Franz Josef whiskers.
You couldn’t really pity them. They belonged so completely to a different world. A war and a revolution came between, left you on one side, with the little stout Estonian peasant girl who spoke English and German and didn’t trouble to flirt, and left them with the ikons in the second-hand shops, the Orthodox priest selling pictures on the pavement, a wilderness of empty champagne bottles . . .