"Ugh," said Kettle, "dog stew, is it? Yes, I know the animal, if you say he's the one I kicked. I had watched the brute eating garbage about the village for half an hour, and then when he wanted to chew my leg, I hit him. Ugh, daddy, don't you bring on these delicacies quite so sudden, or I shall forget my table manners. African scavenger dog! And I saw him make his morning meal. Here, Missis, for Heaven's sake take this dish away."
The glistening black woman stepped forward, but the head-man stopped her. There was some mistake here. He had killed the best dog in the village for Captain Kettle's meal, and his guest for some fastidious reason refused to eat. He pointed angrily to the figured bowl. "Dug chop," said he. "Too-much-good. You chop him." This rejection of excellent food was a distinct slur on his ménage, and he was working himself up into passion. "You chop dem dug chop one-time," he repeated.
The situation was growing strained, and might well culminate in fisticuffs. But Captain Kettle, during his recent many months' sojourn as a lone white man in savage Africa, had acquired one thing which had never burdened him much before, and that was tact. He did not openly resent the imperative tone of his host, which any one who had known him previously would have guessed to be his first impulse. But neither at the same time did he permit himself to be forced into eating the noxious meal. He temporized. With that queer polyglot called Coast English, and with shreds from a score of native dialects, he made up a tattered fabric of speech which beguiled the head-man back again into good humor; and presently that one-eyed savage squatted amicably down on his heels, and gave an order to one of his wives in attendance.
The lady brought Kettle's accordion, and the little sailor propped his back against the wattle wall of the hut, and made music, and lifted up his voice in song. The tune carried among the lanes and dwellings of the village, and naked feet pad-padded quickly up over dust and the grass; the audience distributed itself within and without the head-man's hut, and listened enrapt; and the head-man felt the glow of satisfaction that a London hostess feels when she has hired for money the most popular drawing-room entertainer of the day, and her guests condescend to enjoy, and not merely to exhibit themselves as blases.
But Captain Kettle, it must be confessed, felt none of the artist's pride in finding his art appreciated. He had always the South Shields chapel at the back of his mind, with its austere code and creed, and he felt keenly the degradation of lowering himself to the level of the play-actor; even though he was earning his bare existence--and had been doing all through the heart of barbarous Africa--by mumming and carolling to tribes whose trade was murder and cannibalism.
He felt an infinite pity for himself when he reflected that many a time nothing but a breakdown, or a loudly bawled hymn, or a series of twisted faces, had been the only thing which stood between him and the cooking fires. But there was no help for it. He was a fighting man, but he could not do battle with a continent; and so he had either to take the only course which remained, and lower himself (as he considered it) to the level of the music-hall pariah, and mouth and mow to amuse the mob, or else accept the alternative which even the bravest of men might well shrink from in dismay.
His travel through the black heart of this black continent may have been paralleled by that of other obscure heroes who voyaged from grim necessity and not for advertisement, but the history of it, as it was told me in his simple log-book style, far surpasses the wonder of any of those travels which find a place in published volumes. He had started, a completely destitute man, from a spot far up on the Haut Congo, amidst treacherous hostile population. He had not a friend in Africa, black or white. He had no resources save his tongue, his thews, an empty revolver, and his mother wit, and yet he had won a slow way down to the western seaboard through a hundred hostile tribes, where an army would have been eaten up, and a Marco Polo might well have failed.
It would suit my pleasure finely to write of this terrific journey, with its dangers, its finesses, and its infinite escapes; it would gratify me to the quick if I might belaud to the full of my appreciation the endurance, and the grand resourcefulness, of this little sailor cast so desperately out of his more native element; but the account of the travel is reserved for the pen of Captain Kettle himself, and so the more professional scribe may not poach upon his territory.
I had it from his own lips that the perils of the way made him see the poetry of it all, and he said to himself that here was the theme for that great epic, which would be the chef d'oeuvre of his literary life. It is to be written in blank verse, with the hymns and secular songs he sang at each stop given in an appendix, and he confidently hopes that it will stand out as something conspicuous and distinct against the sombre background of prosaic travel books.
His arrival at the coast was an achievement that made him almost faint with joy. Xenophon and his ten thousand Greeks hailed the sea, we are told, with a mighty shout. But to them Thalassa was merely a way-mark, a sign that they were nearing home. To Kettle it was more, far more, although he could not define the relationship. He had dwelt upon the sea the greater part of his days; he had got his meagre living from her; and although at all times she had been infinitely hard and cruel to him, and he had cursed her day in and day out with all a seaman's point and fluency, she had wrapped herself into his being in a way he little guessed, till separation showed him the truth.