Once Upon A Time | Page 3

each word,
"what you call 'atrocities' are customs of warfare, forms of punishment.
When they go to war they expect to be tortured; they know, if they're
killed, they'll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds these
customs have existed for centuries. He adopts them, because--"
"One moment!" interrupted Everett warmly. "That does not excuse him.
The point is, that with him they have not existed. To him they should
be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater
knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the native, not
sink to him."
The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to
speak. Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.
"What's the use!" he exclaimed.
"Try," laughed Everett. "Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as I talk."
"You must get this right," protested the Coaster. "It doesn't matter a
damn what a man brings here, what his training was, what he is. The
thing is too strong for him."

"What thing?"
"That!" said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding
mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the
waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.
"The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before
Christ," said the Coaster. "And, in twenty-two hundred years, he's got
just twenty miles inland. The native didn't need forts, or a navy, to stop
him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun. Especially
the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him pass.
The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun strikes
through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them
for three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe.
Three minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days.
Where you are going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him:
it drives him mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and that takes
away his nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits,
over silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes
a coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a
bully.
"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any
other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
him, and in a rage he half kills the boy. He broods over that, until he
discovers, or his crazy mind makes him think he has discovered, that in
revenge the boy is plotting to poison him. So he punishes him again.
Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to
punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he
tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat,
the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge,
rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength.
He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate. He
invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,'
until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his
mouth and blows the top of his head off."

The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his
side.
"And you," he mocked, "think you can reform that man, and that hell
above ground called the Congo, with an article in _Lowell's Weekly_?"
Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.
"That's what I'm here for!" he said.
By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned
that in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be
accepted only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed
himself to be. This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced
on him by the men with whom he came in contact. Associations and
traditions, that in every part of the United States had served as letters of
introduction, and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to
the white men on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning
or value. That he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who
had not heard even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of
_Lowell's Weekly_ meant less to those who did not know that
_Lowell's Weekly_ existed. And when, in confusion, he proffered his
letter of credit, the very fact that it called for a thousand pounds was, in
the eyes of