‘Of course,’ I said.
I approached the subject of the Kru war by way of the Colonel’s other military exploits. I felt that after the British Consul’s report he might feel shy of the subject, but I always over-estimated the Colonel’s shyness. When I expressed my admiration for the way in which he had disarmed the tribes, the Colonel took up the subject with enthusiasm. As far as I could make out the operation had turned on a cup of Ovaltine rather than on rifles or machine-guns, for he was a sweet-tempered man: butter wouldn’t have melted between the gold teeth. One tribe had sent out armed men to ambush him, but he had learnt their plans from his spies, had taken a different path and entered the town while it was quite empty except for women and old men. From the report on the Kru war I should have expected Colonel Davis to have set fire to the town while his men raped the women: but no: he called for the oldest man, made him sit down, gave him a glass of Ovaltine (with the barest glance at the opposite verandah, where my whisky and glasses were laid out, the Colonel remarked, ‘I always have a glass of Ovaltine at the end of a day’s trek’), made friends with him, and had him send messages out to the warriors to return in peace. ‘Of course,’ the Colonel said, ‘I made him understand that he and the other old men would have to remain as my guests until the arms were handed over . . .’
The character of the Colonel eluded me. Lord Cecil in the House of Lords had called him a ‘buccaneer’, but that was perhaps pardonable exaggeration. He was obviously a man of great ability; his disarming of the tribes testified to it, and that he had courage as well as brag the whole Kru story showed. I had not only his own word for it: the fact emerged even from the unfriendly report of the British Consul. He had come down into Chief Nimley’s district as the President’s special agent, under a guard of soldiers, to collect long overdue taxes. He knew well the man he had to deal with and he knew the risk he was running when he agreed to meet him at a palaver in the village. It had been agreed that neither should bring armed men, but when Davis arrived at the palaver-house with his clerk he found Nimley and his leading men sitting there fully armed. Even then, Davis thought, all would have gone well had not the Commander of the Frontier Force, Major Grant, who had taken a stroll round the village, rushed into the hut, interrupted the palaver, and cried out that Nimley had armed men concealed in the banana plantations. Davis commanded him to stay where he was, but Grant, crying out that he was responsible to the President for Davis’s safety, ran from the hut to summon his soldiers.
Davis’s later opinion was that Grant was in the pay of the Krus, for his action had the immediate effect of endangering Davis’s life. Nimley left the hut and his warriors swarmed round the Colonel. Naturally he made the most of the situation to me, as he leant there over the Tapee verandah with one eye on the drinks. (‘I said to my clerk, “Take the papers. They won’t harm you. Walk slowly up to the camp and stop the soldiers from coming here.” I stood with my back to the wall and they flourished their spears in my face. My clerk said, “Colonel, I will not leave you. I will die here with you.” I said to him, “There is no point in dying. Obey orders.” ’) But the facts were undisputed. He had been a prisoner and he had escaped. He said that when his clerk had gone, he left the wall and walked very slowly to the door. They made gestures of stabbing, but no one would stab first. Then an old man appeared with a great staff and beat them back and cleared a way for Davis through the village. ‘Afterwards Nimley killed the old man.’
His cook appeared on the verandah behind us and said that dinner was served, but the Colonel wouldn’t let me go: he had an audience for a story which had probably become rather stale on the Coast.
‘That night I was sitting on my verandah, as it might be tonight; it was ten o’clock, and there, just where the sentry is, I saw a big warrior dressed in war paint with little bells tied under his knees. He came up and said, “Who’s the big man around here?” I said, “I guess I’m the biggest man here. What do you want?” He said, “Chief Nimley send me to tell you he’s coming up here at five o’clock in the morning to collect his tax money.” So I said, “You tell Chief Nimley that I’ll be waiting for him.”
‘And at eleven o’clock I looked up and there was another warrior, a small man, all in war paint. He came up to the verandah and said, “Are you the big man here?” “Waal,” I said, “I guess you won’t find anyone bigger around this place. What do you want?” He said, “Chief Nimley send me to tell you that at five o’clock he come to see if he’s a man or you are a man.” So I said, “You go back to Chief Nimley and tell him if he comes up here at five o’clock, I’ll show him which is the man.”
‘And at midnight I looked up and there was a little piccaninny in Boy Scout uniform, but all dressed in war paint. He came up to the verandah and he said, “Where’s the big man?” So I said, “Are you a Boy Scout?” and he said, “Yes.” I said, “Who’s your National Director of Boy Scouts?” He said, “Colonel Elwood Davis.” I said, “Where’s Colonel Davis now?” and he said, “In Monrovia.” “No,” I said, “I’m Colonel Davis. Now what do you mean by appearing before your National Director of Boy Scouts in war paint?” So he got kind of shy and said, “Chief Nimley told me to come up here.” I said, “You go back to Chief Nimley and say I wouldn’t let a Boy Scout deliver a message like that.’ ”
That seemed to be the end of the story. I said, ‘And did Chief Nimley come?’
‘Oh no,’ Colonel Davis said, ‘he just made lightning. But there were a lot of Buzie men in the camp, members of the Lightning Society, and they laid out their medicines and the lightning hit the trees on the beach and didn’t do any harm.’
He brought up the subject of the British Consul’s report himself. He said what had gone most to his heart in a very unfair document was the story that six children had been burnt alive. There was no one who loved children more than he did. He had piccaninnies of his own, and I had only to ask his wife, his second wife, whether every night he didn’t read them stories before they went to bed. His enemies in Monrovia, who were jealous of his position, had pretended to believe in these atrocities, and even his mother, back in America, had read about them; but she knew him better, she’d dandled him on her knee, and she didn’t believe. Colonel Davis said, ‘If you want to know the truth of that story –’
Apparently one evening he had heard children crying and had sent soldiers from the camp who found two babies in the swamps. They had been hidden there when Nimley’s tribe took to the bush. The next day he sent more soldiers to search the neighbourhood, and they brought in four more children. He was a mother to those children. He had made the soldiers wash them, had given up his own porridge and the last of his own vaseline; then next day he had sent men to capture a few women to look after them. These were the very children he had been accused of having burnt alive.
His cook again appeared and said that chop was getting cold. Davis snapped at him, but he had no control over his servants. He was very smart, very astute, but I think it was this which was wrong with him. He came over to my verandah and drank whisky and told us all about his first marriage to a teetotaller and how he had cured her by guile of her prejudice, and his servant kept on popping up at intervals to remind him of chop, while Davis stubbornly sat on, just to show who was master.
It is the simplest explanation of the facts contained in Blue Book, Cmd. 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 back in his chair with a wistful mis
understood 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 Meet”, and then he turned to me and said, “But 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 name,’ 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 the 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. Q.M.
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 DCs 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 Leminah 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 DC inviting me to dinner at two o’clock. We 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 fishes.’ 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 ones,’ 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 salad,’ Colonel Davis said, while the Commissioner from Grand Bassa leant forward and drank in every syllable describing the gilded life of the capital, ‘The lights were lowered,’ he paused impressively, ‘and one cigarette would be served to each guest.’ The judge nodded; he came from Monrovia as well.
I remember saying to Colonel Davis how surprised I was not to have seen a single mosquito. He, too, he said, had not seen one since the last rains; he was suffering a little from prickly heat, but Liberia was really the healthiest place in Africa.
He was always inclined to over-state his case, as when he told me that in the Kru 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 the colonel 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 cafés 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 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.
Chapter 4
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. But 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 realized 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.