Once Upon A Time | Page 4

a "Palm Oil Ruffian," sufficient evidence that it had been
forged or stolen. He soon saw that solely as a white man was he
accepted and made welcome. That he was respectable, few believed,
and no one cared. To be taken at his face value, to be refused at the
start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel sensation; and yet not
unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted only as Everett the
Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier than others. It
afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body received when, in
his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he drank beer with a
chef de poste who had been thrice tried for murder.
Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was
strange; so strange as to appear unreal. This did not prevent him from at
once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt
officials, incompetence, mismanagement. He did not need the

missionaries to point out to him that the Independent State of the
Congo was not a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a
vast rubber plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man.
It was not in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his
attitude of mind toward almost every other question.
At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he
excused the country tolerantly as a "topsy-turvy" land. He wished to
move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. He did not
understand that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the
official 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