With Edged Tools

by Henry Seton Merriman

All around him the vegetable kingdom had asserted its sovereignty. At his back loomed a dense forest, impenetrable to the foot of man, defying his puny hand armed with axe or saw. The trees were not high, few of them being above twenty feet, but from their branches creepers and parasites hung in tangled profusion, interlaced, joining tree to tree for acres, nay for miles.

As far as the eye could reach either bank of the slow river was thus covered with rank vegetation—mile after mile without variety, without hope. The glassy surface of the water was broken here and there by certain black forms floating like logs half hidden beneath the wave. These were crocodiles. The river was the Ogowe, and the man who cursed it was Victor Durnovo, employe of the Loango Trading Association, whose business it was at that season to travel into the interior of Africa to buy, barter, or steal ivory for his masters.

He was a small-faced man, with a squarely aquiline nose and a black moustache, which hung like a valance over his mouth. From the growth of that curtain-like moustache Victor Durnovo's worldly prosperity might have been said to date. No one seeing his mouth had before that time been prevailed upon to trust him. Nature has a way of hanging out signs and then covering them up, so that the casual fail to see. He was a man of medium height, with abnormally long arms and a somewhat truculent way of walking, as if his foot was ever ready to kick anything or any person who might come in his way.

His movements were nervous and restless, although he was tired out and half-starved. The irritability of Africa was upon him—had hold over him—gripped him remorselessly. No one knows what it is, but it is there, and sometimes it is responsible for murder. It makes honourable European gentlemen commit crimes of which they blush to think in after days. The Powers may draw up treaties and sign the same, but there will never be a peaceful division of the great wasted land so near to Southern Europe. There may be peace in Berlin, or Brussels, or London, but because the atmosphere of Africa is not the same as that of the great cities, there will be no peace beneath the Equator. From the West Coast of Africa to the East men will fight and quarrel and bicker so long as human nerves are human nerves. The irritability lurks in the shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to brutal passion over a futile discussion.

Victor Durnovo had sent his boatmen into the forest to find a few bananas, a few handsful of firewood, and while they were absent he gave vent to that wild unreasoning passion which is inhaled into the white man's lungs with the air of equatorial Africa. For there are moral microbes in the atmosphere of different countries, and we must not judge one land by the laws of another. There is the fatalism of India, the restlessness of New York, the fear of the Arctic, the irritability of Africa.

“Curse this country!” he shouted, “curse it—curse it! River and tree—man and beast!”

He rose and slouched down to his boat, which lay moored to a snag alongside the bank, trodden hard to the consistency of asphalte by a hundred bare feet. He stepped over the gunwale and made his way aft with a practised balancing step. The after part of the canoe was decked in and closed with lock and key. The key hung at his watch-chain—a large chain with square links and a suggestive doubtfulness of colour. It might have been gold, but the man who wore it somehow imparted to it a suggestion of baser metal.

He opened the locker and took from it a small chest. From this he selected a bottle, and, rummaging in the recesses of the locker, he found an unwashed tumbler. Into half a glass of water he dropped a minute quantity from the bottle and drank off the mixture. The passion had left him now, and quite suddenly he looked yellow and very weak. He was treating himself scientifically for the irritability to which he had given way. Then he returned to the bank and laid down at full length. The skin of his face must have been giving him great pain, for it was scarlet in places and exuding from sun-blisters. He had long ago given up wiping the perspiration from his brow, and evidently did not care to wash his face.

Presently a peacefulness seemed to come over him, for his eyes lost their glitter and his heavy lids drooped. His arms were crossed behind his head—before him lay the river.

Suddenly he sat upright, all eagerness and attention. Not a leaf stirred. It was about five o'clock in the evening, the stillest hour of the twenty-four. In such a silence the least sound would travel almost any distance, and there was a sound travelling over the water to him. It was nothing but a thud repeated with singular regularity; but to his practised ears it conveyed much. He knew that a boat was approaching, as yet hidden by some distant curve in the river. The thud was caused by the contact of six paddles with the gunwale of the canoe as the paddlers withdrew them from the water.