“A telegram came for me, just as I was leaving for the office one morning. It required me to call on Mr. Utah R. Brewster at the Hotel Palace, that very day, but at a time when I should have been industriously at work for another. The question was, should I catch that morning ’bus I had never missed—or take all the possibilities beyond this door which promised to open on romance? I made up my mind, which went drunk with rebellion. I got into my seventh-day clothes. Utah R. Brewster and freedom! The Blackwall ’bus—do you remember those old hearses, with a straight companion-ladder to the upper deck where the outside passengers sat, knees up, back to back along the middle?—well, it had to go by the office, and I was actually in doubt whether, aware of my unprecedented revolt, it would stop outside the familiar glum office and lawfully refuse to budge till I alighted. It went on, blundering past the place, all strangely unconscious of what it was doing, bearing me with my courage screwed down to bursting-point. The driver even said what a lovely May morning it was.
“The Hotel Palace! I had often seen that ornate building when Saturday afternoon release took me west. Red carpeting on the steps, a glimpse of ferns, women all as strange as exotics going in and out, and between me and it a chasm which cut clear to the very centre of the earth. I carried my attack beyond the portals. It was nothing, after all. A flunkey put me in a chair too full of cushions to be easy, and I watched men and women who, at that time of the day, when all the folk I knew were making desperate and cunning efforts to keep their places here safe—I watched those men and women behaving as though all eternity were theirs, and it was the angels’ business to bear them up. It was as great a mystery to me whose every week-day morning was the inviolate possession of another, as Joshua’s solar miracle. I was called, led along a silent corridor full of shut doors, and after a long walk found myself beyond all the noise of London, far in solitude with a man in a dressing-gown, who stood before a fire, working a cigar with strong, mobile lips. He put up a monocle, and looked at me shyly. Then began to walk up and down the hearth-rug, talking.
“‘Well,’ he said. ‘All right. I guess you’ll do. Say, you look pretty fit. You don’t drink, eh? Don’t get nervous when you see the dead, huh? All right.’ He put his monocle back into his eye, and grinned at me. I told him, in a rush, how much I wanted to see the tropics. He said nothing. He got a large blue map, intricate with white lines, and told me of The Company. The Job.
“I did not fully comprehend it then. I don’t now. He left out too much. There was no beginning and no ending. There was hardly a middle. He merely indicated unrelated points; but at any rate the points were so widely sundered and so different that the bare indication of them conveyed a sense of an enormous undertaking, difficult, important, and necessary. Work for an army. I should be but an insignificant sutler in that army. But at least I should be one in it, one of those putting this important affair through for future generations. The communal idea, this. The very size of it gave me a sense of security. It was too broad-based to collapse. Success was inherent in its impersonal nature. A state affair. Brewster briefly mentioned some showy names, names of great financiers. They were my generals, and I should never see them. But their reputations were partly in my keeping.
“Hallelujah! I had escaped. I never went back to the office. I never replied to its curt inquiry. In a week I sailed from Liverpool. Much I heard, on the mail boat, of The Company, this new enterprise which was going to make a tropical region one of the richest countries in the world; develop it, fling its riches to all. In four weeks more I arrived at a small tropical island, at which I had to wait for The Company’s tug to take me to the mainland and my business.
“There was a club-house ashore, where I stayed for a few days. There I met some men who had been working for The Company, but for incomprehensible reasons were leaving this work to which I had come so eagerly; they were returning home. They were strangely pallid and limp as though the dark of some hot damp underground had turned their blood white. Their talk was drawled out, the weary utterance of the disillusioned who yet showed fate no resentment. They might have been the dead speaking, long untouched by any warm human vanity. I was really glad to get away from them. A tug conveyed me to the mouth of the river, up which I was to proceed to my station. I joined a shallow-draught river steamer.
“The river, that gateway to my dream come true, was a narrow place, a cleft in universal trees, every tree the same. Mangroves, I suppose. Soon the forest changed, often rising on each bank to meet overhead. Those were uncertain places of leaves and dead timber, and as quiet and still as churchyard yews at midnight. The thumps of our paddle-wheels did not sound pleasant. Deeper and deeper we went, making turns so often that I wondered how we could ever be got out again. Sometimes in an open space we saw a flock of birds. I saw no other sign of life. There were no men. All my fellow-passengers—there were ten of us—were newcomers; some from the States, some from Germany, and a Frenchman. I was the only Englishman. Each of us knew what was expected of himself; none of us knew what that was which all would be doing. There were clerks with us, miners, civil engineers, timber men, and a metallurgist. We speculated much, were perhaps a trifle anxious, but reposed generally on the great idea.
“In two hundred miles we reached a clearing. Why it should have been at that particular place did not show. But there it was, the tangible link in an invisible, encompassing scheme. It was my place. I landed with my box. There was a white man on the river bank, sitting on a sea-chest, his head in his hands. He looked up. ‘You the victim?’ he said. ‘Well, there you are’—sweeping a lazy arm round the small enclosed ground—‘that’s your job. There’s your store. There’s your house. That’s where the niggers live.’
“‘Pedro!’ he called. A copper-coloured native, in shorts and a wide grass hat, loafed over to us. ‘This is your servant,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit mad, but he’s not a fool. He’s all right. Keep your eye on the niggers though. They are fools, and they’re not mad. You’ll find the inventory and the accounts in the desk in your hut. The quinine’s there too. Take these keys. Oh, the mosquito curtain’s got holes in it. See you mend it. I couldn’t. Had the shakes too bad. Cheer up!’
“He went aboard. The steamer saluted me with its whistle, turned a corner, and the sound of its paddles diminished, died. I seemed to concentrate, as though I had never known myself till that instant when the sound of the steamer failed, when the last connection with busy outer life was gone. I could smell something like stephanotis. In that dead silence my hearing was so acute that I caught a faint rustling, which I thought might be the sound of things growing. I turned and went to my hut, sad Pedro following with my box. The cheap American clock in the hut made a terrific noise, filling the afternoon with its rapid and ridiculous beat, trying to recall to me that time still was moving quickly, when it was quite evident that time had now come for me to an absolute stand in a broad-glowing noon. I sat surveying things from a chair. Then leisurely took my envelope and read my instructions—how I was to receive and take charge of shovels, lanterns, machinery parts, railway metals, soap, cooking utensils, axes, pumps, and so on, which consignments I must divide and parcel according to directions to come, marking each consignment for its own destination. The names of a hundred destinations I should hear about in my future work were given. They were names meaning nothing to me. Then followed some brief rules for a novice in the governing of men. Through all the rules ran an incongruous note for such a place as that, a reminiscence of Leadenhall Street and its miserable whine. Yet it hardly disturbed me. I sat and thought over this expansion of my life. A melancholy bird called in two notes at intervals. The leaves which formed the thatch of my hut hung a long coarse black fringe at the door. My walls were of leaves, and the floor a raft of small logs, still with the bark on, just clear of the ground. The sunlight came through one dark wall, studding it with sparks. No. That dubious and familiar note in the instructions was nothing. I was clear beyond all that now—all those occasions for carking anxiety which deprave the worker, and make him hate the task to which whipping necessity drives him. The domineering manner of my instructions, the fretfulness of the old correspondence I found carelessly scattered about, addressed to my predecessor, was the illusion. The forest behind the hut, the black river, the quiet, the insects, the foreign smell, the puzzling men, my men to command, who kept passing without in the violent light, they were not from books any more, they made evidence direct to my own senses now. I was authority and providence, moulding and protecting as I thought right. This place should be kept reasonable, four square, my plot of earth to be clean and unashamed, frankly open to the eye of the sky. I would see what I could do; and I would start now. I laughed at authority—all I could see of it—reflected in a fragment of mirror kept to a door tree by nail heads; the funny hat and the shirt which did not matter, bad as it was, for I was authority there by every reason of that white shirt; and the beard which was coming. Latitude, my boy, latitude! I strolled out to survey my little world.