Once Upon A Time | Page 5

a grandfather. At
Matadi, at every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death
must be faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself,
"If I eat this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I
drink this will I die?"
Upsher told him of a feud then existing between the chief of police and
an Italian doctor in the State service. Interested in the outcome only as
a sporting proposition, Upsher declared the odds were unfair, because
the Belgian was using his black police to act as his body-guard while
for protection the Italian could depend only upon his sword-cane. Each
night, with the other white exiles of Matadi, the two adversaries met in
the Café Franco-Belge. There, with puzzled interest, Everett watched
them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends, excitedly
playing dominoes. Outside the café Matadi lay smothered and
sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the river,

in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as Europe.
Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron tables, the oil
lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks, upon the tanned,
sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and the Belgian
lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed, shrugged,
gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.
"But why doesn't some one do something?" demanded Everett. "Arrest
them, or reason with them. Everybody knows about it. It seems a pity
not to do something."
Upsher nodded his head. Dimly he recognized a language with which
he once had been familiar. "I know what you mean," 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