A Question of Latitude | Page 6

Everett was
measuring a bras of cloth. As he had been taught, he held the cloth in
his teeth and stretched it to the ends of his finger-tips. The wood-boy
thought the white man was giving him short measure. White men
always HAD given him short measure, and, at a glance, he could not
recognize that this one was an Everett of Boston.
So he opened Everett's fingers.
All the blood in Everett's body leaped to his head. That he, a white man,
an Everett, who had come so far to set these people free, should be
accused by one of them of petty theft!
He caught up a log of fire wood and laid open the scalp of the black
boy, from the eye to the crown of his head. The boy dropped, and
Everett, seeing the blood creeping through his kinky wool, turned ill
with nausea. Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself
shouting, "The BLACK nigger! The BLACK NIGGER! He touched me!
I TELL you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and
gave him fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling
and nausea ceased.
Then, partly in shame, partly as a bribe, he sought out the injured boy
and gave him the entire roll of cloth. It had cost Everett ten francs. To
the wood-boy it meant a year's wages. The boy hugged it in his arms, as
he might a baby, and crooned over it. From under the blood-stained
bandage, humbly, without resentment, he lifted his tired eyes to those
of the white man. Still, dumbly, they begged the answer to the same
question.
During the five months Everett spent up the river he stopped at many
missions, stations, one-man wood posts. He talked to Jesuit fathers, to
inspecteurs, to collectors for the State of rubber, taxes, elephant tusks,
in time, even in Bangalese, to chiefs of the native villages. According
to the point of view, he was told tales of oppression, of avarice, of
hideous crimes, of cruelties committed in the name of trade that were
abnormal, unthinkable. The note never was of hope, never of cheer,
never inspiring. There was always the grievance, the spirit of unrest, of

rebellion that ranged from dislike to a primitive, hot hate. Of his own
land and life he heard nothing, not even when his face was again turned
toward the east. Nor did he think of it. As now he saw them, the rules
and principles and standards of his former existence were petty and
credulous. But he assured himself he had not abandoned those
standards. He had only temporarily laid them aside, as he had left
behind him in London his frock-coat and silk hat. Not because he
would not use them again, but because in the Congo they were
ridiculous.
For weeks, with a missionary as a guide, he walked through forests into
which the sun never penetrated, or, on the river, moved between banks
where no white man had placed his foot; where, at night, the elephants
came trooping to the water, and, seeing the lights of the boat, fled
crashing through the jungle; where the great hippos, puffing and
blowing, rose so close to his elbow that he could have tossed his
cigarette and hit them. The vastness of the Congo, toward which he had
so jauntily set forth, now weighed upon his soul. The immeasurable
distances; the slumbering disregard of time; the brooding, interminable
silences; the efforts to conquer the land that were so futile, so puny, and
so cruel, at first appalled and, later, left him unnerved, rebellious,
childishly defiant.
What health was there, he demanded hotly, in holding in a dripping
jungle to morals, to etiquette, to fashions of conduct? Was he, the white
man, intelligent, trained, disciplined in mind and body, to be judged by
naked cannibals, by chattering monkeys, by mammoth primeval beasts?
His code of conduct was his own. He was a law unto himself.
He came down the river on one of the larger steamers of the State, and,
on this voyage, with many fellow-passengers. He was now on his way
home, but in the fact he felt no elation. Each day the fever ran tingling
through his veins, and left him listless, frightened, or choleric. One
night at dinner, in one of these moods of irritation, he took offence at
the act of a lieutenant who, in lack of vegetables, drank from the
vinegar bottle. Everett protested that such table manners were
unbecoming an officer, even an officer of the Congo; and on the

lieutenant resenting his criticism, Everett drew his revolver. The others
at the table took it from him, and locked him in his cabin. In the
morning, when he tried to recall what