That night there were no signs of the missing men, but next morning the brother, the man who ought to have carried the bath, turned up. His face was sodden with crying. A negro is intensely emotional, but this man had some cause for his grief. He had missed his brother, abandoned the bath, and gone right back to Half Assinie to look for him. The way was by the seashore, there is no way to wander from it; on one side is the roaring surf that no man alone may dare, and on the other, just beyond the line of cocoa-nut palms, a mangrove-fringed lagoon, and beyond that a bush, containing perhaps a few native farms to be reached by narrow tracks, but a bush that no stranger would lightly dare. But no trace of his brother could this man find. What had become of the sick carrier? That was the question we asked ourselves, and to that no answer could we find except the sinister verdict pronounced by his fellows, “Make die and chopped.” And that I believed for many months, till just before I left the Coast the Forestry officer and I met again and he told me the end of the story. He had made every inquiry, telegraphed up and down the Coast, and given the man up for lost, and then after four or five weeks a miserable skeleton came crawling into Axim. The lost carrier. He had felt faint by the wayside, crawled into the shade of a bush and become insensible, and there had been found by some man, a native of the country and a total stranger to him. And this Good Samaritan instead of falling upon him and making him die as he fully expected, took him to his own house, fed and succoured him, and when he was well enough set him on his way. So he and I and all his fellows had wronged these men of the shore. Greater kindness he could not have found in a Christian land, and in all probability he might easily have found much less.
But Beyin too furnished another lesson for me, not quite so pleasant. All my carriers had come from here, and on our way back they struck. In plain words they wanted to see the colour of my money. Said the Forestry officer, “Don't pay them, else they'll all run away and you will have no one to carry your things into Axim.” That was a contingency not to be thought of, so the ultimatum went forth—no pay until they had completed their contract. That night I regret to state there was a row in the house, a matrimonial quarrel carried on in the approved matrimonial style all the world over, with the mother-in-law for chorus and general backer-up. There was a tremendous racket and the principal people concerned seemed to be one of my women-carriers and the Omahin's registrar in whose house we were lodged. Then because Fanti is one of the Twi languages, and an Ashanti can understand it quite well, Kwesi interpreted for me. This woman, it appeared, was one of the registrar's wives, and he disapproved of her going on the road as a common carrier. It was not consistent with his dignity as an official of the court, he said at the top of his voice; he had given her a good home and she had no need to demean herself. She shrilly declared he had done no such thing, and if he had, had shamefully neglected her for that last hussy he had married, and her mother backed her and several other female friends joined in, and whether they settled the dispute or not to their own satisfaction I do not know, but the gentleman cuffed the lady and the lady had the extreme satisfaction of scattering several handfuls of his wool to the winds.
Next morning none of my carriers turned up; there lay the loads under a tree in front of the house with the orderly looking at them with his sardonic grin, but never a carrier. It was cool with the coolness of early morning. We had our breakfast in the great room, we discussed the disturbance of the night before, the things were all washed up, still no carriers; at last, just as it was getting hot and our tempers were giving out, came a message. The carriers would not go unless they were paid.
“And it's a foregone conclusion they won't go if they are paid,” sighed the Forestry officer as he set off to interview the Omahin and tell him our decision. If the carriers did not come in at once, it ran, we would leave all the loads, making him, the Omahin, responsible for their safety, and we would push on with the Mendi and Kroo-boy carriers in the Forestry officer's employ. Those left behind not having carried out their contract of course would then get no pay at all, and this would happen unless they returned to work within a quarter of an hour. The effect was marvellous. The Omahin, of course, did not grasp how exceedingly uncomfortable it would have been for us to leave our gear behind us, and as we had sixteen Kroo boys and Mendi boys the feat was quite feasible, and promptly those Beyin people returned to work and were as eager to get their loads as they had before been to leave them. So I learned another lesson in the management of carriers, and we made our way without further incident back to Axim.
CHAPTER VIII—ALONE IN WEST AFRICA
Cinderella—A troubled Commissioner—Few people along the Coast—No hotels—Nursing Sister to the rescue—Sekondi—A little log-rolling—A harassed hedge—Carriers—Difficulties of the way—A funeral palaver—No dinner and no ligjit—First night alone—Unruly carriers—No breakfast—Crossing the Prah—A drink from a marmalade pot—“We no be fit, Ma”—The evolution of Grant—Along the Coast in the dark—Elmina at last—A sympathetic medical officer—“I have kicked your policeman.”
West Africa is Cinderella among the colonies. No one goes there for pleasure, and of those who gain their livelihood from the country three-fourths regard themselves as martyrs and heroes, counting the days till the steamer shall take them home again for that long leave that makes a position there so desirable. The other quarter perhaps, some I know for certain, find much good in the country, many possibilities, but as yet their voice is not heard by the general public above that chorus that drowns its protest. That any man should come to the Gold Coast for pleasure would be surprising; that a woman should come when she had no husband there, and that she should want to go overland all along the sea-board, passed belief. “Why? why?” asked everyone. “A tourist on the Coast,” a surprised ship's captain called me, and I disclaimed it promptly. My publisher had commissioned a book and I was there to write it. And then they could not make up their minds whether I or my publisher were the greater fool, for but very few among that little company saw anything to write about in the country.
In Axim the troubled Commissioner set his foot down. I had been to Half Assinie and he felt that ought to satisfy the most exacting woman; but since I was anxious to do more he stretched a point and took me as far as Prince's, an abandoned Branden-burgher fort that is tumbling into ruins, with a native farm in the courtyard, but no farther could I go. Carriers he could not get me, and for the first time I saw a smile on his face, a real relieved smile, when he saw me into the boat that took me to the steamer bound for Sekondi.