Once Upon A Time | Page 6

only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he
soon disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and
the Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they
were not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided
the blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no
harm.
According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war,
in his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were
always content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not
dance. They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,

lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It
was always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They
asked it of Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates,
humped on their naked haunches, crowding close together, they
muttered apparently interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes
never left him. He resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his
nerves. He was sure they were evolving some scheme to rob him of his
tinned sausages, or, possibly, to kill him. It was then he began to dislike
them. In reality, they were discussing the watch strapped to his wrist.
They believed it was a powerful juju, to ward off evil spirits. They were
afraid of it.
One day, to pay the chief wood-boy for a carved paddle, 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