The Complete Simon Iff (50 page)

The surprised party had no fear of talking; the fire was sufficient evidence of their presence. They discussed the cause of the disturbance.

“It sounded to me like the scouts of a war party,” said the Honourable Charles Sexton.

“No,” said the head man. “This noise stopped. Scouts would have gone back to warn the war chief.”

“What do you think, Bill?” said the white man.

The girl always answered to the name of Bill—it was short for Billiken, though she looked more like a regular West African idol.

“I don’t think,” she said, “I smell. There is a white man here.”

Silence fell intense like a pass on a coffin. Then from the top of a tree rang a firm voice which said: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

The party looked up amazed. In the branch of a tree, at the end of the clearing, they could see the face of a small, spry, active, old man wearing very ragged khaki and a smile which was not ragged at all.

“I wish you a very good evening, sir,” the voice continued, and with a light leap the man sprang into the clearing. As he did so, he was joined by a slim youth, exceeding pale. Sexton ran forward to great them.

“Excuse this quiet unwarrantable intrusion, my dear sir,” said the old man, “and still more the alarm which we inadvertantly caused you, but we had no means of knowing who you were. A thousand apologies to the lady,” he added, as Billiken came forward, all smiles, and took him by both hands.

“Permit me to introduce myself—my name is Simon Iff; and this is Lord Juventius Mellor.”

“Glad to know you,” said the hunter, “my name is Charles Sexton; and this is Billiken, better known as Bill. I hope you will take food with us.”

“You are very kind indeed,” returned the other. “To tell the truth, we have been on quarter rations for some time.”

“We have enough dried hippo meat and broiled monkey for a regiment to say nothing of tins.”

They sat around the fire in a certain state, for the Honourable Charles Sexton always did himself pretty well. He gave the ‘Colonel Elliot’s chair’ to his principal guest, while he and the rest seated themselves on such loads as had not been unpacked. Bill devoted herself to Lord Juventius, beginning a passionate flirtation by offering him a pellet of opium, which was the thing he most needed to combat his sickness and exhaustion. With this and a little more than his share of the champagne, he was soon able to sustain the combat.

“This is a most particularly fine cut of monkey,” said Simon Iff. “I wish indeed that I had the secret of your cuisine.”

“The secrets are two,” said the hunter. “The first is Bill, who can make parrot taste like Sole Mornay, and the second is Worcester Sauce. But forgive my curiosity—where have you come from, and where are all your men?”

“We have come from Timbuctoo,” answered the magician, “after crossing the Sahara with the caravan from Biskra, and we have not any men because we thought they would be more trouble than they were worth; besides, it’s more exciting.”

“I should say it was,” returned Sexton, “but how in blazes do you find your way? Have you any idea where you are?”

“Pretty fair,” answered Iff. “I have a sense of direction and a sense of distance which serve me pretty well. Besides, when we went into this delightful swamp twelve days ago, they told us that there was only one trail and that it led to the village of Mwala. They told us that Mwala was a terrible potentate, the offspring of a gorilla and a demon king, that he was cruel, treacherous, bloodthirsty, and a cannibal. As the very charming people, who gave me this information, were described in precisely the same terms by their neighbours to the North East, I expect to find Mwala a modern Old King Cole.”

“We are two days’ journey from Mwala,” said Sexton, “but only about ten miles of it is this ungodly swamp. Beyond that there is pleasant upland park country with plenty of game. But as to Mwala, he was a pretty decent sort when I was here three years ago. Something seems to have spoilt his temper.”

“Have you had any serious trouble?” asked the magician.

“Well, there’s a war on, for one thing. There’s another king called M’Qob—we thought at first you were scouts of a war party of his—and somehow or other they’ve both got guns—strictly against the law, of course—and they’ve been itching to use them. The old man wanted me to lead one of his armies. Did you ever hear of anything so asinine? I told him that sooner or later the French would be down on him, but of course he said he was bound to defend his people from the assassin M’Qob. I am a Gallio in these matters, but they had quite a nice battle last week, with fifty or sixty killed on either side, village raided, cattle driven off, and all that sort of thing.”

“What’s the war about? The usual nothing?”

“Can’t make out. The two kings were as thick as thieves three years ago. They had sworn blood brotherhood, they had put down raiding, stopped human sacrifice, and generally had become the very best kind of nigger, than whom there is no more charming person alive. Now it’s all upset. I hear that human sacrifice has been started again.”

“What’s the ostensible cause of the quarrel?”

“Naylor can tell you more about that than I can: he’s the trader out here. He is at Mwala’s now. I hope you will join my party. We are going straight back. I have got three gorillas, two of them alive, as you see in the cage there, and I have had enough of this poisonous darkness.”

“I shall be very glad,” said Simon.

“Splendid,” cried the hunter. “And now I am sure you want to sleep.”

“My body does,” replied the magician, “and the beast has carried me so well that I begrudge it neither its oats, not even it’s wild ones, nor it’s straw.”

But long after the rest of the party was asleep, the magician, smoking a curved black briar pipe, gazed intently upon the fire. Perhaps he saw faces there. But one may doubt whether he saw any face so strange as that of the days that were to be.

II

Mr. Naylor was an Englishman of the lower middle-class. He was conventional; and he was stupid; and he was cowardly; and the combination of these qualities had made him the regular British hero. One must earn one’s living in the regular way. What better place than Africa? His stupidity and conventionality quite discounted his cowardice, for though he saw men dying all around him, he believed himself to be under the special protection of a deity called Jesus Christ by the Methodists, to whom he belonged, but to be carefully distinguished from a false god of the same name worshipped by Baptists, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Plymouth Brethren, Agapemonites, Lady Huntington’s Connection, or other savage sects. Intelligent men, such as the French or Germans, cannot colonise. The art needs a race too stupid to understand that it is being martyred. Empire is a dream, with nightmare passages. And men must be asleep to dream.

Mr. Naylor was breakfasting in his compound at Mwala’s village. The meal consisted of a little tea and a little banana and a lot of whiskey and quinine. He was too blond and too fat to thrive in West Africa. Dysentery to him was almost a hobby. He had no imagination and counted his days dull, though haemoglobinuria did its little best to add a touch of colour to his life. He cursed the mosquitoes in a way that would have shocked the Methodists of Birmingham. He was passionately devoted to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, as a colonial administrator and empire builder.

Mr. Naylor was particularly annoyed this morning, the second after Iff’s arrival at Sexton’s camp, by the fact that the Rev. Moses Rose had not seen fit, as promised, to join in his not very festal festivity. The missionary was somewhat aggressively 100% American; but some people, on introduction, ventured to speculate how long it was since Rose was Rosenbaum. Mr. Naylor wanted to see him very badly, because business was wretched. His stock consisted of things desirable in peace, and the war had completely upset his calculations. Everybody had denuded himself of his substance in order to buy the instruments of death. He hoped at least to do a little business with the good man, though he knew him of old as a very shrewd hand at a bargain. But more important still, he wanted to sound him on the situation, and to bribe him by offering him a commission to “put the fear of God into the niggers” and get them to dig up enough rubber and other treasures to take the stock off his hands. But there was no Moses Rose to say Grace Before Bananas. He smoked his woodbine tremulously and determined to go around to the mission after breakfast. His meditations were disturbed by the beating of innumerable drums and a very inferno of yelling. The damn fools are going out to fight again, he thought. But no, the drums came nearer and the village itself broke into joyful clamour. Women and children ran forth gleefully.

“It is very good, sir,” said Mr. Naylor’s servant, a tall negro from Sierra Leone. “It is a great victory, now they will buy everything.”

Naylor knew that the victory in any war is only one degree less unfortunate than the vanquished. This holds even in Africa, where the object of war is avowedly loot. However, victory was better than nothing. He walked feebly to the door of the compound to see the return of the warriors. But as the head of the procession passed, his negro Sam, informed him (for of course he would not condescend to understand a word of the language of the people with whom he was trading) that it was not victory, but peace. The two kings had met on the previous day, and talked to each other instead of fighting. The interview, it appeared, had been engineered by a Roman Catholic Missionary in M’Qob’s village. Mr. Naylor had never liked this man; both because he was a wicked Papist, which is worse than any other idolatry because the sinner has sinned against the light, and because he would never play Mr. Naylor’s little games for him by mising up religion and business. But this time it seemed he had done him a particularly good turn. Mr. Naylor returned to his hut. The sun was already very hot. He did not want to see Mr. rose any more, just then. He had to calculate on how much he would raise prices on him

Meanwhile the other inhabitants of the village abandoned themselves to unrestrained joy. Mr. Naylor would put in an hour or two on his accounts and sleep the mid-day sleep. In the afternoon he would see Mr. rose, and in the morning perhaps the people would be sober enough to do business. His intentions were interrupted by the Hon. Charles Sexton, who came into the compound like a leopard crying, “Get your rifle, man, and bid your caravan stand to arms, there’s going to be a fuss.”

Mr. Naylor’s terror thrust forward the accelerator of his remarks. In less than a minute the head man of his caravan had placed a strong guard at every wall of the compound. But nothing happened. The streets of the village were deserted. Everyone had gone to the great space around the palace, to celebrate peace. About one half hour later the rest of Sexton’s caravan filed in. Mr. Naylor was in the last extremity of fear; for Sexton had explained matters to him, in an off-hand way, like a man describing a costume ball. It is probable that his stupidity grasped none of the details of the explanation; for when he visualized it with the arrival of the caravan, his teeth chattered like a monkey’s. On a litter, in the midst of the procession, lay Mr. Rose; and it was shockingly evident that he had lost a foot. His hands, too, were discolored and disfigured, terribly swollen, and his face was almost shapeless with mosquito bites. Fear of torture and loss of blood had rendered him a hideous lump, from which all semblence of humanity had nearly fled. Simon Iff’s eyes swept round the defenders of the compound.

“How far is the nearest white force?” he asked of Sexton.

“Probably not within a week,” replied the hunter.

“Then, assuming your messenger loses no time, no one can get here for a fortnight.”

“Just about,” said Sexton, “though my man might do it in five days—perhaps four.”

“In that case,” returned the magician, greatly pleased, “we have ample time for deliberation, which seems to me our chief need.”

“What we need is food,” said Sexton shortly, “there wasn’t too much of it before the fuss started.”

“I want to talk this business thoroughly over with Mwala. His ingenuity seems to me to run away with him.”

“You will have your chance,” said Sexton grimly, “he will be here with about one thousand men in five minutes after he hears of this.”

“And M’Qob’s men, too,” bleated the missionary. “Pilate and Herod have made friends.”

“Their guns are as good as ours,” continued Sexton, “where-ever they got them. Luckily they shoot more for the noise than for result.” This was a cheerful lie intended to encourage Mr. Naylor.

“Mr. Sexton,” said Simon Iff sharply, “it is no use deceiving others, it teaches us to deceive ourselves. If your psychology and your facts are right, we can be stormed in an hour or starved in a week. What we need is thought. I don’t see why you’re so sure that this is a race riot. If it were, why didn’t they get Mr. Naylor? Let me see. Are you able to answer a few questions, Mr. Rose?” The missionary nodded, with an effort.

“What time was it when they took you?”

“Just before evening service.”

“And where were you then, Mr. Naylor?”

“I was dining here at home,” said the trader. “I had no idea of any disturbance.”

Simon Iff puffed at his pipe. He was watching the face of Billiken out of the corners of his eyes. He turned to her sharply.

“Bill, my dear,” he said, “you know something. What is it?”

“I don’t know anything,” she replied stolidly. “I smell something.”

“Well, what do you smell?”

“I smell magick.”

“That’s only me, my dear,” smiled Iff. “I am myself something more than an amateur of the art.”

“Great!” she cried, and flung her brown arms round his neck, a gesture which she followed with a hearty kiss.

“Pray, do not say such things even in jest,” murmured the missionary, “you mean a conjurer, of course. But out here in Africa magic is a dreadful superstition associated with the most revolting crime. My present state, my martyrdom, if I may say it, is evidently due to the personal action of the Prince of Evil. We are in touch with the powers of darkness—it is for my faith that I suffer.”