A Question of Latitude | Page 4

term of three years, or for life, measured time only by the date
of their release. When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach
his home in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he
brought letters were a three months' journey from the coast and from

each other, his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.
His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer
was ready to start for Leopoldville. Of the two places he was assured
Matadi was the better, for the reason that if you still were in favor with
the steward of the ship that brought you south, he might sell you a
piece of ice.
Matadi was a great rock, blazing with heat. Its narrow, perpendicular
paths seemed to run with burning lava. Its top, the main square of the
settlement, was of baked clay, beaten hard by thousands of naked feet.
Crossing it by day was an adventure. The air that swept it was the
breath of a blast-furnace.
Everett found a room over the shop of a Portuguese trader. It was caked
with dirt, and smelled of unnamed diseases and chloride of lime. In it
was a canvas cot, a roll of evil-looking bedding, a wash-basin filled
with the stumps of cigarettes. In a corner was a tin chop-box, which
Everett asked to have removed. It belonged, the landlord told him, to
the man who, two nights before, had occupied the cot and who had died
in it. Everett was anxious to learn of what he had died. Apparently
surprised at the question, the Portuguese shrugged his shoulders.
"Who knows?" he exclaimed. The next morning the English trader
across the street assured Everett there was no occasion for alarm. "He
didn't die of any disease," he explained. "Somebody got at him from the
balcony, while he was in his cot, and knifed him."
The English trader was a young man, a cockney, named Upsher. At
home he had been a steward on the Channel steamers. Everett made
him his most intimate friend. He had a black wife, who spent most of
her day in a four-post bed, hung with lace curtains and blue ribbon, in
which she resembled a baby hippopotamus wallowing in a bank of
white sand.
At first the black woman was a shock to Everett, but after Upsher
dismissed her indifferently as a "good old sort," and spent one evening
blubbering over a photograph of his wife and "kiddie" at home, Everett

accepted her. His excuse for this was that men who knew they might
die on the morrow must not be judged by what they do to-day. The
excuse did not ring sound, but he dismissed the doubt by deciding that
in such heat it was not possible to take serious questions seriously. In
the fact that, to those about him, the thought of death was ever present,
he found further excuse for much else that puzzled and shocked him. At
home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside
as something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At
Matadi, at every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death
must be faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself,
"If I eat this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I
drink this will I die?"
Upsher told him of a feud then existing between the chief of police and
an Italian doctor in the State service. Interested in the outcome only as
a sporting proposition, Upsher declared the odds were unfair, because
the Belgian was using his black police to act as his body-guard while
for protection the Italian could depend only upon his sword-cane. Each
night, with the other white exiles of Matadi, the two adversaries met in
the Cafe Franco-Belge. There, with puzzled interest, Everett watched
them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends, excitedly
playing dominoes. Outside the cafe, Matadi lay smothered and
sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the river,
in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as Europe.
Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron tables, the oil
lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks, upon the tanned,
sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and the Belgian
lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed, shrugged,
gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.
"But why doesn't some one DO something?" demanded Everett. "Arrest
them, or reason with them. Everybody knows about it. It seems a pity
not to DO something."
Upsher nodded his head. Dimly he recognized a language with which
he once had been familiar. "I know what you mean,"