Bakula, on his recovery, found himself in a new world. When asked if he would like to stay on the station and be taught, he, immediately and gladly, accepted the invitation, and was handed over to the white man in whose district[[64]] his town happened to be.
Bakula had always thought that “books talked” to the white men. In common with other natives he had said, when he saw a white man looking at a book and laughing: “The book is saying something funny to him.” He was therefore disappointed to find that the white teacher gave him no “medicine” to cause him to understand “book language,” and performed no magic over him to open his ears to the “whispers of book talk”; but that it was a matter of learning properly those curiously twisted and contorted marks called a, b, d, e; and he also found that so many of them changed their appearance when written, and again altered “their legs and arms” when they grew into big letters that he was puzzled, and sometimes feared that he would never know them.
How elusive those letters were! Just as he had mastered them on the printed sheet they changed themselves on the blackboard; and when he wanted to write the “full-grown ones,” and drew them as he remembered them on the sheet, he was told they were wrong, and had to train his hand to all kinds of curves and scrolls. It was like learning four alphabets; but by perseverance and attention he conquered them, so that, no matter what their disguises might be, he recognized them, and would say: “Oh yes, Mr. S; you can curve your back like this, S, or lean half yourself on a stick thus,
, but I know you.”
Meanwhile he had learned to put two letters together and make syllables, and from that accomplishment he was led on to connect the syllables and form words; and from that point the school work became more interesting. Now that the building was showing above the ground he could see the reason for all the foundation work. By the time he had been in the school about two years he was nearing the top classes, and, laughing at the mistakes of newer boys, encouraged them, by his own example, to conquer their difficulties.
Bakula also found there was another language to learn--that of pictures. He had seen pictures at a distance in the houses of the traders, and they had simply been a blurred whole, like the pages of a book written in unknown characters. In the house of the white man, where he spent many a pleasant evening, he saw some copies of the Graphic.
At first he was unable to take in a picture as a whole. He held the illustrations upside down, or sideways, and more often the wrong way than the right one. In time, order seemed to emerge out of the chaos of marks and lines, then he would pick out a feature and say: “That is a nose, or a mouth, or an eye,” as the case might be, and thus he traced out a man or a woman and said: “Why, it is a person!” He did the same with a house, picking out the details, as a door or window, etc., and the same with scenery.
Later he could take in all the details at once. He had to learn to understand pictures by the same method that he learned to read--first the a, b, d, then the t a t a = tata (or father), and lastly the whole word or sentence at a glance. Sometimes he had to appeal to the white man to explain a difficult detail, as a railway, a ship, or a horse; but gradually the pictures opened up a mine of information, and introduced him to new worlds of wonder.
A white man laughingly joked him one day about the pain and inconvenience Congo women suffered in wearing heavy brass collars round their necks, and on their legs anklets of great weight in order to be in the fashion; but Bakula quickly turned over the pictures, and finding a fashion plate that depicted a woman with a very tiny waist, he seriously asked: “Which is the more ridiculous--to wear a brass collar round the neck, or to have a waist like a wasp’s?”