We seemed to be passing away from the birdless region which lay inland from the Arctic coast. But still there was no great abundance of feathered creatures. On the swamps one could usually see a pair of curlew, but seldom more; from behind the forest trees one sometimes heard the cuckoo’s hoot, though from one side of the country to the other we never saw the bird itself in the actual flesh and feather; and once, a little ringed dotterel came out into an open space before us and went through its pitiful pantomime of being wounded, just as one may see it on the shingle of a Shetland tarn. It was the breeding season for all of them of course, and even if we had possessed a gun, and from sheer stress of hunger been willing to slay nursing parents, we should have got little for our pains; certainly not enough to live on.
It was during a halt on this march, I remember, that Hayter suddenly exploded into a fit of (apparently) causeless merriment. I asked him what was the matter. He chuckled and said, “If only it would not cost so much,” and stopped and laughed again.
I did not understand, and asked him to explain further.
He pointed to Johann, who was going through one of his quaint, domestic exercises, and said, “I wish we could get that beauty to London, and dump him down in (say) Willis’s rooms, and bribe a waiter to put a smart luncheon in front of him, and then watch from a distance to see the result.”
It was a luscious theme, and we enlarged on it with infinite enjoyment.
We pictured the result of taking Johann back to our native Islands and launching him upon Society. It would be a thing quite easily done, and as it happened I knew a parallel case where it was carried out, and many who read this will probably recollect (perhaps with some discomfiture) the hero of it. The matter happened quite recently.
Now, who remembers it? There arrived at Liverpool by a B. and A. steamer not four years ago a jet-black negro from the West Coast of Africa. He had a little money and more self-confidence than any white man on earth ever possessed. He wanted to have a good time in England, and he had it. He had come up from the Coast on the B. and A. boat in the ordinary second-hand clothes of civilisation, because, of course, plenty of people on board knew him for what he was. But once ashore in a London hotel (which is a very long way from a Liverpool quay or the West Coast of Africa), he took off his shoes and socks and started sandals and bare legs, he doffed his trousers and coat and shipped long embroidered robes of green and white, clapped a Haûsa hat on his head in place of the brown billy-cock, and announced that he was Prince H’umaduya, of some unpronounceable place behind the British Gold Coast.
Did any one doubt his statement? Not a soul who cared to speak. Childish, snobbish London took him at his own valuation, and competed for the honour of fêting him. He went everywhere, did everything, was fawned upon by everybody. White women waited on him—because he was a prince. The Lord Mayor gave him a dinner—because he was a prince. And he accepted it all with the self-assurance he had learned professionally, and asked for more.
But before his vogue was done, he wisely took himself off, and departed for Liverpool en route for home and business. I saw him six months later, in the principal town on the Gold Coast, engaged in his professional avocation. He was selling a consignment of black, second-hand, wearing apparel, with noise and industry. Of course he had gone back to the ordinary boots and trousers and shirt of pseudo-civilisation, and was in fact very like any other third-rate auctioneer with a pitch in a back street. His name, as it appeared on his license and on his signboard down there on the Coast, was John Henry Brown, and he was reputed to be making money hand over fist, and saving it. He had tasted the sweets of being an imported prince in London once, and (as a year or two has passed since then) he is about due to turn up again and once more offer himself to the lionising public.