II.
Dr Koomadhi belonged to a race who are intolerant of any middle course so far as dress is concerned. They are either very much dressed or very much undressed. But he had lived long enough in England to have chastened whatever yearning he may have had for running into either extreme. Only now and again—usually when in football costume—he had felt a strange longing to forswear the more cumbersome tweeds of daily life. This longing, combined with the circumstance of his being extremely fond of football, might be accepted as evidence that the traditions of the savages from whom he had sprung survived in his nature, just as they do in the youth of Great Britain, only he had not to go so far back as have the most of the youth of Great Britain, to reach the fountain-head.
The evening attire which he now resumed was wholly white,—from his pith helmet down to his canvas shoes, he was in white, with the exception of his tie, which was black. He looked at himself in a glass when at the point of leaving his house, and he felt satisfied with his appearance; only he should have dearly liked to exchange his black tie for one of scarlet. He could not understand how it was that he had never passed a draper’s window in London without staring with envious eyes at the crimson scarves displayed for sale. No one could know what heroic sacrifices he made in rejecting all such allurements. No one could know what he suffered while crushing down that uncivilised longing for a brilliant colour.
Just before leaving the house he went to his desk and brought out of one of the drawers a small ivory box. He unlocked it and stood for some time with his face down to the thing that the box contained—a curiously-speckled stone, somewhat resembling a human ear. While keeping his head down to this thing his lips were moving. He was clearly murmuring some phrases in a strange language into that curiously shaped stone.
Relocking the ivory box, he returned it to the drawer, which he also locked. Then he left his house, and took a path leading to a well-built villa standing in front of a banana-jungle, with a tall flag-pole before its hall door—a flag-pole from which the union-jack fluttered, indicating to all casual visitors that this was the official residence of her Majesty’s Commissioner to the Gambia, Commander Hope, R.N.
“Hallo, Koomadhi!” came a voice from the open window to the right of the door. “Pardon me for five minutes. I’m engaged at my correspondence to go to England by the Penguin this evening. But don’t mind me. Go through to the drawing-room and my daughter will give you a cup of tea.”
“All right, sir,” said Dr Koomadhi. “Don’t hurry on my account. I was merely calling to mention that I had forwarded my report early in the day; but I’ll wait inside.”
“All right,” came the voice from the window. “I’m at the last folios.”
Dr Koomadhi was in the act of entering the porch when his pith helmet was snatched off by some unseen hand, and a curious shriek sounded on the balcony above the porch.
“The ruffian!” said Koomadhi, with a laugh. “The ruffian! He’s at his tricks again.”
He took a few steps back and looked up to the balcony. There sat an immense tame baboon, wearing the helmet and screeching with merriment.
“I’ll have to give you another lesson, my gentleman,” said the doctor, shaking his finger at the creature. “Hand me down that helmet at once.”
The baboon made a grimace and then raised his right hand to the salute—his favourite trick.
Suddenly the doctor produced a sound with his lips, and in an instant the monkey had dropped the helmet and had fled in alarm from the balcony to the roof of the house, whence he gazed in every direction, while the doctor went into the house with his helmet in his hand. He had merely given the simian word of alarm, which the creature, understanding its mother tongue, had promptly acted upon.
“‘You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, but the scent’—you know the rest, sir,” remarked Mr Letts, the Commissioner’s Secretary, who had observed from his window the whole transaction.
“What was that, Letts?” asked the Commissioner.
“Koomadhi spoke to the baboon in its own tongue, sir, and it took the hint of a man and a brother and cleared off.”
“Yes, but where does the shattering of the vase come in?” asked the Commissioner.
“I mean to suggest that a nigger remains a nigger, and remains on speaking terms with a baboon, even though he has a college degree and wears tweeds,” said Mr Letts.
“Oh,” said the Commissioner.
He had heard the same opinion expressed by various members of his staff ever since he had anything to do with the administration of affairs on the West Coast. He had long ago ceased to take even the smallest amount of interest in the question of the exact depth of a negro’s veneer of civilisation.