A Question of Latitude | Page 7

had occurred, he could remember
only that, for some excellent reason, he had hated some one with a
hatred that could be served only with death. He knew it could not have
been drink, as each day the State allowed him but one half-bottle of
claret. That but for the interference of strangers he might have shot a
man, did not interest him. In the outcome of what he regarded merely
as an incident, he saw cause neither for congratulation or self-reproach.
For his conduct he laid the blame upon the sun, and doubled his dose of
fruit salts.
Everett was again at Matadi, waiting for the Nigeria to take on cargo
before returning to Liverpool. During the few days that must intervene
before she sailed, he lived on board. Although now actually bound
north, the thought afforded him no satisfaction. His spirits were
depressed, his mind gloomy; a feeling of rebellion, of outlawry, filled
him with unrest.
While the ship lay at the wharf, Hardy, her English captain, Cuthbert,
the purser, and Everett ate on deck under the awning, assailed by
electric fans. Each was clad in nothing more intricate than pajamas.
"To-night," announced Hardy, with a sigh, "we got to dress ship. Mr.
Ducret and his wife are coming on board. We carry his trade goods, and
I got to stand him a dinner and champagne. You boys," he commanded,
"must wear 'whites,' and talk French."
"I'll dine on shore," growled Everett.
"Better meet them," advised Cuthbert. The purser was a pink- cheeked,
clear-eyed young man, who spoke the many languages of the coast
glibly, and his own in the soft, detached voice of a well- bred
Englishman. He was in training to enter the consular service.
Something in his poise, in the assured manner in which he handled his
white stewards and the black Kroo boys, seemed to Everett a constant
reproach, and he resented him.

"They're a picturesque couple," explained Cuthbert. "Ducret was
originally a wrestler. Used to challenge all comers from the front of a
booth. He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was
mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small
way, in ivory. Now he's the biggest merchant, physically and every
other way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad. He has a house at
Brazzaville built of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-
plant. His wife was a supper-girl at Maxim's. He brought her down here
and married her. Every rainy season they go back to Paris and run
race-horses, and they say the best table in every all-night restaurant is
reserved for him. In Paris they call her the Ivory Queen. She's killed
seventeen elephants with her own rifle."
In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were
pallid, washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past
middle-age. For him women of any other type had ceased to exist. He
had come to think of every white woman as past middle-age, with a
face wrinkled by the sun, with hair bleached white by the sun, with
eyes from which, through gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had
departed. He thought of them as always wearing boots to protect their
ankles from mosquitoes, and army helmets.
When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as
though she was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger. She appeared to
have stepped to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue
de la Paix. She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great
loveliness, and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, a la Merode, across a
broad, fair forehead. She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as
delicate as a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a
curtain, hung more lace. When she was pleased, she lifted her head and
the curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes. Around the white, bare
throat was a string of pearls. They had cost the lives of many elephants.
Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she
was--a Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne. He knew that on any night at
Madrid or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the
same charming type. They might lack that something this girl from

Maxim's possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband
into the depths of darkness. But outwardly, for show purposes, they
were even as she.
But to Everett she was no messenger from another world. She was
unique. To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain,
she was her entire sex personified. She was the one woman for whom
he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be