THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Page 6

  Yet despite his youthful self-confidence, it must be admitted that when a few hours later Tony Kenyon found himself disembarking upon a tiny jetty, where a tall Hausa ‘boy’, the oddly named Plumjam—impressively dignified despite the ludicrous effect of a small European straw ‘boater’, worn in alliance with ordinary native garb—waited to welcome him with before him, his future home, a sturdy little bungalow, standing beside a group of out-buildings and native huts, backed by the impenetrable dark-green wall of the forest and bathed in welcoming sunshine, he felt a sinking sensation at the pit of the stomach, and a childish desire to turn and run. For Tinpot Landing, even in the sunshine, seemed disquietingly small and solitary. A tiny clearing in the very heart of the African bush, a fragment of civilisation in a giant and indifferent wilderness. . . .

  Secretly he hoped that the Lou Helen might be tying up to the jetty for the night, but Vechten’s time was limited, and he was anxious to leave before dusk. Plumjam had carried on his chief’s work to the best of his ability, and there were a few cases standing ready to be conveyed to the Company’s Headquarters in Lagos; but these were soon dumped on board, and with much snorting and protest, the little steamer backed and turned until she was headed down river. With a cheery word and a clap on the back, the little Dutchman bade his young friend good-bye and climbed on board, and puffing, the Lou Helen drew away, heading for Lagos and civilisation once more. . . . As he stood watching it depart, the captain standing on the stern, his round face beaming like a red moon above the rail, Tony Kenyon felt that faint and unpleasant sinking at the base of his stomach grip him once more.

  Now that it came to the crux, there was something rather grim in knowing that when the battered little steamer had turned the far bend of the river he would be entirely alone but for a few natives, for the first time in his life. For three solid months, then for three again, and three more on the top of that, and so on for two long years. . . . It didn’t seem so good somehow, standing here thinking of that, with those phalanxes of great macabre trees standing watching you, with the brown river running silently past only a few feet away, and only that little group of natives, detached and alien as animals, to whom you could turn in time of need.

  However, one did not give in to these things! After the Lou Helen had finally vanished round the bend of the river, the new agent, pulling himself resolutely together, proceeded to take stock of his new quarters—a gesture that did a good deal to cheer him. The bungalow was built upon piles, as were all the other buildings in the little clearing, since the Mawa had the pleasing habit of coming down in spate during the rainy season, and sweeping more conventionally built houses bodily away. As Vechten had said, these piles were faced on the outside, by way of protection against ants, with sheets of tin cut from old biscuit boxes, metal cases and so on, which still shone bravely despite the coating of dirt and age, giving the little buildings the look of being supported, one and all, on groups of square tin feet.

  The bungalow itself was built partly of corrugated iron, partly of wood and adobe—the native building material, river-mud mixed with chopped grass and fibre—and boasted a hideous iron roof that was, however, almost hidden in a flood of starry white ‘nipa’ flowers like a stray snowdrift that had settled there. A veranda ran all round the house, and few steps led up to it from the ground to the main door—this led directly into the living-room, and as he stepped inside Tony Kenyon drew a faint breath of surprise. He had known the bungalow was furnished, but had not dreamt it would seem so altogether ‘lived in’—for an absurd moment he felt almost embarrassed at entering, as if his predecessor, the dead Sanders, must step out from some inner doorway and demand by what right he was there!

  Obviously the faithful Plumjam had merely kept the place reasonably clean and tidy, and left most of his dead chief’s possessions in their respective places, pending his successor’s arrival. It was the same all over the tiny house. Several zinc-lined boxes were still full of Sanders’ clothes, pleasant ancient garments smelling of tobacco and shaving-soap; his guns, boots, fishing-rods were still stacked in their accustomed corners. A pair of well-worn ebony-backed hair-brushes lay side by side on the top of the chest of drawers that served as a toilet-table in the small bedroom, and a pair of blue pyjamas still lay across the striped red, green and yellow native-woven coverlet, on the narrow camp-bed where Sanders had breathed his last, defeated by the grim inexorable Bush . . . with a little shiver of mingled distaste and pity, Tony deposited his own suitcase upon the bed, and turned away to explore the rest of the tiny bungalow.

  There was not much more. A bathroom of sorts containing a tin tub and improvised ‘shower’—a perforated sheet of tin suspended from the ceiling, through which, presumably, the useful Plumjam poured water upon his employer standing in the tub below. A kitchen, likewise of sorts, another tiny room opening off the main room, used for the storage of oddments—boxes, odd sticks, guns, butterfly nets, old papers and so on—and the main or living-room itself, that served as office, dining-and-drawing-room, lounge and study all combined. This was a sizeable room, with two long windows opening on to the veranda, and contained, beside a large desk loaded with dusty papers, a central table, two or three lounge chairs made of wood or wicker, with cretonne-covered cushions obviously sent from England, shelves stacked with dog-eared books and magazines, a pipe-rack equally stacked with pipes, and a gramophone in a square wooden case that the prevailing damp had, alas, long rendered useless except as a spare side-table.

  The walls were covered with pictures cut from magazines, with multifarious snapshots, and various maps, sketches, and hand-drawn diagrams of the locality margined with mysterious pencilled notes, and two large framed photographs were placed carefully in the most prominent places. One of a sweet-faced elderly woman, and the other of a girl who signed herself briefly ‘Eve’.

  It was obvious that the girl was the outstanding feminine influence in the dead agent’s life, for by far the largest proportion of the many snapshots that patterned the bare wooden walls were of her—evidently sent out from England, for the backgrounds were never tropical, as in all the rest. There were also two or three snaps of Sanders himself, presumably taken by Plumjam. A tall rangy fellow, ugly, yet pleasant to look on. . . .

  Interested, Tony wandered about examining and appraising while Plumjam unpacked his goods and laid his supper out upon the table in the living-room under the friendly light of the single yellow-shaded oil lamp. Sardines, tomato soup, corned beef and tinned apricots. Sitting alone after his meal, smoking and staring about him, the young man decided that photographs were friendly things to welcome a fellow condemned to solitude for two long years, and that photographs of this unknown girl most friendly of all. She was not exactly pretty, but the wide-apart steady eyes and firmly cut mouth were attractive—it was a face that grew on you somehow. You felt you would never grow tired of looking at it as you might of some much prettier faces. . . .

  It was easy to learn the relationship between ‘Eve’ and the lean, smiling Sanders of the snapshots. One of the first things that Tony found when going, as in duty bound, through his predecessor’s papers, was a huge bundle of letters signed ‘Eve’, but they were all without address except sometimes briefly ‘home’, or more rarely ‘Paris’ or ‘London’. Evidently the two were engaged to be married. They were old friends—even related in someway, he gathered; probably cousins; she was waiting from him to make enough money to marry her, but that was all that emerged definitely from the scribbled pile. Even her surname remained a mystery. . . .

  ‘Confound it,’ thought Tony as he regretfully slipped the last letter back into its envelope. ‘I can’t do anything—but surely she will have got the official announcement of his death by now, and will write me telling me where to send his things?’

  Meanwhile, he deposited the letters in a freshly emptied drawer of the desk, along with various other personal papers, although of these there were singularly few, since the correspondence was mainly merely business
stuff. There were a few letters from men-friends, from ‘Eve’s’ mother likewise, also a daily journal mainly concerned with records of the amount of stuff per month or week brought in by the natives for despatch to the Company . . . it was easy to gather from these scattered records that Sanders must have been a good twelve or fifteen years older than his fiancée. A man kindly, humorous, eminently likeable, he sort of man that other men instinctively take to . . . There were times, as time went on, that Tony Kenyon, sensing with inward qualms the first stealthy onset of the depression that attacks those who face the desert places of the world alone and undefended save by their own valiance, found himself wishing, wistfully and hungrily, that Sanders—genial, friendly, companionable soul as the homelike atmosphere of the little bungalow told he must have been—could return and bulwark him against the overwhelming loneliness that at times threatened to undermine his courage!

  But at first everything was too new, and too interesting in its novelty, for him to plumb the full depths of his solitude, though the actual work was easy enough—too easy to keep an imaginative mind thoroughly occupied. It consisted of receiving and logging up the stuff brought in by the natives—kola nuts, copra, calabar beans and a small amount of palm-oil for the most part, though the maw of the Company was large, and monkey-skins, bird-plumage for the European markets, aromatic or medicinal roots, rare woods and an occasional small quantity of ivory, against the law as this was, passed through their agent’s hands in the course of his duty. Tony’s job was to deal with these. To give receipts to the native ‘collectors’; pay their wages, consisting mainly of lengths of bright-coloured stuffs, tobacco, salt or beads; to store the good delivered in ant-proof cases in which to await the arrival of the Lou Helen; to keep an accurate log of the daily proceedings . . . and after that, he was his own master.

  A very little exploring satisfied him that Vechten had been right anent the hopelessness of obtaining any shooting—the forest was too thick and swampy for expeditions of this kind to be anything but a weariness to the flesh as well as substantially dangerous to health and limb. The river was not productive of much in the way of fishing, developing into almost continuous rapids a little higher up—the utter monotony of the forest made mere wandering a bore, and he soon gave that amusement up as a bad job. The official ‘log’ developed into a voluminous diary, and he took to trying to learn the difficult Hausa dialect from Plumjam, as also to perfect his playing on the little ‘uke’ he had brought with him into the wilderness. . . . In the silence of the long dull evenings its tuneful squeak defied the grim brooding darkness of the forest like a Tom Thumb challenging Goliath, tiny but valiant!

  He taught himself to play patience with an old pack of cards found in Sanders’ desk, and wrote innumerable letters to anybody he could think of; busied himself in fact valiantly and persistently, yet despite himself the daily and hourly silence—since the guttural talk of the outdoor natives meant no more than the chattering of the monkeys in the Bush, and Plumjam rarely spoke unless addressed—began to fret his nerves, and there were times when he resolutely refused to look ahead. Two years! And the first three months had been so long! There is no denying that when, for the first time since his arrival at Tinpot landing, Tony Kenyon heard the hoot of the Lou Helen in the far distance, his heart was thumping with excitement, and an hour before the steamer was due, he was waiting upon the quay clad in a fresh white suit, eager to fall upon the skipper’s fat neck. Vechten clapped him paternally upon the back and invited him to dinner on board, an invitation that Tony, weary of Plumjam’s rather limited culinary accomplishments, eagerly accepted . . . it was during dinner that Vechten, fishing out a bunch of letters from his pocket, tossed them over the table to his guest.

  ‘Id iss gurious,’ he remarked in his guttural English. ‘Zome ledders for poor Sanders are amongst your mail. In a woman’s hand. I know id, the girl he meant to marry, I dink. Id must be months now dat she hear noding from him, and yet she go on wriding. . . . Ach, women, dey are mizzderious liddle gusses!’

  ‘Mizzderious’ was scarcely the word, thought Tony puzzled beyond measure as he turned the letters over and over. He stuffed them finally into his pocket without comment, and turned eagerly to the kindly Dutchman, drinking in his talk, his laughter, his stories, with a pathetic hungry pleasure that spoke aloud of his hunger for the company of his fellows, until between excitement, interest, and the plentiful good schnapps with which the old man plied him it was an uproariously tipsy and cheerful young man who ultimately tumbled into his bed at four o’clock the following morning!

  But awakening brought with it the usual Nemesis of a severe headache, and a few hours later, when the Lou Helen had chugged her way downstream and out of sight, the young agent in charge of Tinpot Landing despatched the mystified Plumjam, plus two of his henchmen, to the stores, and on their bringing forth the few cases of spirits kept there in case of accidents, dumped them dramatically in the river! Theatrical as the geste was in the long run it was probably a wise one—yet Tony Kenyon was to regret it poignantly as time went on, when the long days and nights grew drearier, and he found himself longing for some form of drug to banish the abysmal depression that now attacked him more and more frequently.

  The new batch of letters from ‘Eve’ provided no more information as to her whereabouts than the previous ones he had found among Sanders’ papers, but they read curiously as if she still thought her love living and waiting for her—but Tony read no farther than the first one or two, feeling an odd embarrassment at reading love-letters so palpably not intended for his eye. Not that they could be called ‘love-letters’ in the literal sense of the word; rather they seemed letters cheery, affectionate, friendly, like those of a young sister to an elder brother—with a little sigh of exasperation Tony stored them away with the others, and turned once more to his work.

  But the rot of protracted loneliness was already setting in. Work, once reduced to a routine, became mechanical; the novelty and interest of life at Tinpot Landing wore thin and thinner still, and the young man waxed, as young men will, nervy and irritable under the strain of silence and solitude. So by degrees it came to pass that the two photographs, ‘Eve’ and her lover, Sanders, whose lean kindly countenance still smiled gravely from the wall of the living-room, became almost real to Tony Kenyon, and he found himself talking to them, each in turn, or both together, with a solemn eagerness that was at once pathetic and a little alarming.

  Sanders, he felt, was like a sort of elder brother. One could talk to Sanders, straight, sensibly, about the funny feelings one had when one was alone, and Sanders would neither laugh nor fail to understand. . . . Indeed, there were times, as the weeks passed on, and Plumjam, like a slim brown ghost, went finally out of the room after dinner, and drew the mosquito-curtains close behind him, when Sanders himself seemed to enter softly from the veranda, sit down in the empty chair facing young Kenyon’s own, and taking out his pipe, fill and light it and sit, listening, nodding, his steady eyes quiet on the young man’s light restless ones, a companion unseen, but none the less real and valued.

  The personality of ‘Eve’ was at no time, oddly enough, as tangible as that of Sanders. She represented Woman, an ideal, a lovely phantom too vague and far-off to hope to touch except in dreams. But by degrees the man’s presence, quiet, kindly, sympathetic, seemed to loom more and more solid and actual about the little bungalow as the days dragged by, and Tony Kenyon’s nerves wore more and more frayed as solitude, depression, and the damp unhealthy atmosphere of Tinpot Landing wore him slowly but steadily down.

  Six months, and the Lou Helen came again, bringing yet another batch of letters from Eve to her dead lover; the kindly skipper, frowning at the young man’s white face and strained air, tried hard to persuade him to throw in his hand, and return to civilisation with him, but Tony shook his head, and with set teeth watched the Lou Helen sail away once more. Not only for the sake of his future good name with the Company would he stick it to the end, but for the sak
e of his own self-respect, that refused point blank to admit defeat at the hands of grim relentless Nature, who, by the weapons of dire loneliness, ‘nerves’, boredom and fever, was trying to grind him down into the ranks of the failures. . . .

  When the squat little steamer had sailed away, leaving him to silence and his own company once more, he went wearily back to the bungalow, and sitting down, turned over the last batch of letters from ‘Eve’ with a faint apathetic interest. Poor girl?. Poor girl! Dimly he admired the steadfastness that could go on writing so faithfully without receiving any answer, month after month after poor Sanders lay dead under the mangroves in the clearing behind the bungalow! Dimly he set himself to emulate the strange girl’s staunchness and loyalty by sticking doggedly and regularly to the daily routine that by the end of six months had become a nightmare to him. A nightmare only lightened by his now-nightly talks with the invisible Sanders, talks over which the anxious Plumjam shook his woolly head doubtfully, and the other natives whispered, scared, affrighted. Hour after hour the new Boss sat talking, gesticulating, nodding towards an empty chair, and surely he was going mad, the devils of the forest had their claws into his soul!

  But every nervous system, even the strongest, has its limit, and at last that limit was reached. The young agent in charge of Tinpot Landing went down with a fierce attack of that malaria against which he had thought himself immune, shortly before the Lou Helen was due to pay her third visit to Tinpot Landing. When she anchored at last, the quarterly consignment of goods for despatch to the Company’s Headquarters stood awaiting her on the primitive quay attended by the grave-faced Plumjam alone, for Tony Kenyon lay prostrate on his bed in a high fever?.

  Fat, kindly Hans Vechten, much concerned, lingered as long as he dared at the sick man’s bedside, scratching his head and praying for a temporary glimpse of lucidity in his young friend’s ravings, but he was obliged to give it up at last as a bad job, and departed grumbling into the blue once more—but leaving behind him a certain mysterious parcel of goods that the gods, who are sometimes merciful, had chosen to send Tony Kenyon by way of a surprise!