A Question of Latitude | Page 5

he agreed. "Bind
'em over to keep the peace. And a good job, too! But who?" he

demanded vaguely. "That's what I say! Who?" From the confusion into
which Everett's appeal to forgotten memories had thrown it, his mind
suddenly emerged. "But what's the use!" he demanded. "Don't you see,"
he explained triumphantly, "if those two crazy men were fit to listen to
SENSE, they'd have sense enough not to kill each other!"
Each succeeding evening Everett watched the two potential murderers
with lessening interest. He even made a bet with Upsher, of a bottle of
fruit salt, that the chief of police would be the one to die.
A few nights later a man, groaning beneath his balcony, disturbed his
slumbers. He cursed the man, and turned his pillow to find the cooler
side. But all through the night the groans, though fainter, broke into his
dreams. At intervals some traditions of past conduct tugged at Everett's
sleeve, and bade him rise and play the good Samaritan. But, indignantly,
he repulsed them. Were there not many others within hearing? Were
there not the police? Was it HIS place to bind the wounds of drunken
stokers? The groans were probably a trick, to entice him, unarmed, into
the night. And so, just before the dawn, when the mists rose, and the
groans ceased, Everett, still arguing, sank with a contented sigh into
forgetfulness.
When he woke, there was beneath his window much monkey-like
chattering, and he looked down into the white face and glazed eyes of
the Italian doctor, lying in the gutter and staring up at him. Below his
shoulder-blades a pool of blood shone evilly in the blatant sunlight.
Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito
boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn. "You lose!" he
called.
Later in the day, Everett analyzed his conduct of the night previous. "At
home," he told Upsher, "I would have been telephoning for an
ambulance, or been out in the street giving the man the 'first-aid' drill.
But living as we do here, so close to death, we see things more clearly.
Death loses its importance. It's a bromide," he added. "But travel
certainly broadens one. Every day I have been in the Congo, I have
been assimilating new ideas." Upsher nodded vigorously in assent. An

older man could have told Everett that he was assimilating just as much
of the Congo as the rabbit assimilates of the boa-constrictor, that first
smothers it with saliva and then swallows it.
Everett started up the Congo in a small steamer open on all sides to the
sun and rain, and with a paddle-wheel astern that kicked her forward at
the rate of four miles an hour. Once every day, the boat tied up to a tree
and took on wood to feed her furnace, and Everett talked to the white
man in charge of the wood post, or, if, as it generally happened, the
white man was on his back with fever, dosed him with quinine. On
board, except for her captain, and a Finn who acted as engineer, Everett
was the only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he
soon disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and
the Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they
were not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided
the blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no
harm.
According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war,
in his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were
always content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not
dance. They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,
lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It
was always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They
asked it of Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates,
humped on their naked haunches, crowding close together, they
muttered apparently interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes
never left him. He resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his
nerves. He was sure they were evolving some scheme to rob him of his
tinned sausages, or, possibly, to kill him. It was then he began to dislike
them. In reality, they were discussing the watch strapped to his wrist.
They believed it was a powerful juju, to ward off evil spirits. They were
afraid of it.

One day, to pay the chief wood-boy for a carved paddle,