“I’m sorry—I can’t. I had to come this far so that he wouldn’t know. But now I’ve got to go back. Of course what he told you was just a joke—but I must be there today to see that nobody bothers him.”
Spink scanned his companion’s face with friendly flippant eyes. “Well, I give up—. What’s the use, when he don’t want you?—Say,” he broke off, “what’s the truth of that story about the old man’s having insulted a marabout in a mosque night before last? It was all over the bazaar—”
Willard felt himself turn pale. “Not a marabout. It was—where did you hear it?” he stammered.
“All over—the way you hear stories in these places.”
“Well—it’s not true.” Willard lifted his bundle from the motor and tucked it under his arm. “I’m sorry, Harry—I’ve got to go back,” he repeated.
“What? The Call, eh?” The sneer died on Spink’s lips, and he held out his hand. “Well, I’m sorry too. So long.” He turned the crank, scrambled into his seat, and cried back over his shoulder: “What’s the use, when he don’t want you?”
Willard was already labouring home across the plain.
After struggling along for half an hour in the sand he crawled under the shade of an abandoned well and sat down to ponder. Two courses were open to him, and he had not yet been able to decide between them. His first impulse was to go straight to the Mission, and present himself to Mr. Blandhorn. He felt sure, from what Spink had told him, that the old missionary had sent him away purposely, and the fact seemed to confirm his apprehensions. If Mr. Blandhorn wanted him away, it was not through any fear of his imprudence, but to be free from his restraining influence. But what act did the old man contemplate, in which he feared to involve his disciple? And if he were really resolved on some rash measure, might not Willard’s unauthorized return merely serve to exasperate this resolve, and hasten whatever action he had planned?
The other step the young man had in mind was to go secretly to the French Administration, and there drop a hint of what he feared. It was the course his sober judgment commended. The echo of Spink’s “What’s the use?” was in his ears: it was the expression of his own secret doubt. What was the use? If dying could bring any of these darkened souls to the light ... well, that would have been different. But what least sign was there that it would do anything but rouse their sleeping blood-lust?
Willard was oppressed by the thought that had always lurked beneath his other doubts. They talked, he and Mr. Blandhorn, of the poor ignorant heathen—but were not they themselves equally ignorant in everything that concerned the heathen? What did they know of these people, of their antecedents, the origin of their beliefs and superstitions, the meaning of their habits and passions and precautions? Mr. Blandhorn seemed never to have been troubled by this question, but it had weighed on Willard ever since he had come across a quiet French ethnologist who was studying the tribes of the Middle Atlas. Two or three talks with this traveller—or listenings to him—had shown Willard the extent of his own ignorance. He would have liked to borrow books, to read, to study; but he knew little French and no German, and he felt confusedly that there was in him no soil sufficiently prepared for facts so overwhelmingly new to root in it.... And the heat lay on him, and the little semblance of his missionary duties deluded him ... and he drifted....