At Salt Ponds there is a little company of white people, and, so says report, the very worst surf on the Coast, with perhaps the exception of Half Assinie. The D.C. was away, so the Provincial Commissioner had telegraphed to the medical officer asking him to get me quarters. I arrived about three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, when the place was apparently wrapped in slumber; the doctor's bungalow was pointed out to me, built on stilts on a cement foundation, and on that foundation I established myself and my loads, and made my way upstairs. A ragged and blasphemous parrot, with a very nice flow of language, was in charge, and he did not encourage me to stop, nor did he even hint at favours to come, so I went down again and waited. Apparently I might wait; towards evening I made my way—I was homeless—towards another bungalow, where a white man received me with astonishment, gave me the nicest cup of tea I have ever drunk, and sent for the medical officer, who had lunched off groundnut soup and had gone into the country to sleep it off. We all know groundnut soup is heavy.
The medical officer remains in my mind as a man with a grievance; he was kind after his fashion, but he did hate the country. If I had listened to him, I should have believed it was unfit for human habitation, and I couldn't help wondering why he had honoured it with his presence. In his opinion it was exceedingly unbecoming in a woman to be making her way along the Coast alone. To drive in these facts he found me house-room with the only white woman in the place, the charmingly hospitable wife of the German trader who had been on the Coast for a couple of years, who was perfectly well, healthy, and happy, who always did her own cooking, and who gave me some of the most delicious meals I have ever tasted. Thus I was introduced to the German element in West Africa, and began to realise for the first time that efficiency in little things which is going to carry the Germans so far. This fair-haired, plump young woman, with the smiling young face, was one of a type, and I could not help feeling sorry there were not more English women like her. I do not think I have ever met an English woman, with the exception of the nursing Sisters, who has spent a year on the Coast. The accepted theory is they cannot stand it, and in the majority of cases they certainly can't. They get sick. With my own countrywomen it is different; the Australian stays, so does the German, so does the French woman. At first I could not understand it at all, but at last the explanation slowly dawned upon me.
“Haus-fraus,” said many a woman, and man, too, scornfully, when I praised those capable German women who make a home wherever you find them, and it is this haus-frau element in them that saves them. A German woman's pride and glory is her house, therefore, wherever she is she has to her hand an object of intense interest that fills her mind and keeps her well. An Australian does not take so keen an interest in her house, perhaps, but she has had no soft and easy upbringing; from the time she was a little girl she has got her own hot water, helped with the cooking, washing, and all the multifarious duties of a houshold where a servant is a rarity, therefore, when she comes to a land where servants are plentiful, if they are rough and untaught, she comes to a land of comfort and luxury. Besides, it is the custom of the country that a woman should stand beside her husband; she has not married for a livelihood, men are plentiful enough and she has chosen her mate, wherefore it is her pleasure and her joy to help him in every way. She is as she ought to be, his comrade and his friend, a true helpmate. God forbid that I should say there are not English women like that, because I know there are, but the conditions in England are also very different. The girl who has been brought up in an English household, even if it be a poor one, is not only brought up in luxury, but is the victim of many conventions. Any ruffled rose leaf makes her unhappy. The servants that to the Australian are a luxury to be revelled in are very bad indeed to her. Whenever I saw one of these complaining English women, I used to think of the Princess of my youth. We all remember her. She was wandering about lost, as royalty naturally has a habit of doing, and she came to a little house and asked the inmates to give her shelter because she was a princess. They took her in, but being just a trifle doubtful of her story—when I was a little girl I always felt that was rather a slur upon those dwellers in the little house—they put on the bed a pea and then they put over it fourteen hair mattresses and fourteen feather beds—it doesn't seem to have strained the household to provide so much bedding—and then they invited the princess to go to bed, which she did. In my own mind I drew the not unnatural conclusion that princesses were accustomed to sleeping in high beds. Next morning they asked her how she slept. She, most rudely, I always thought, said she had not been able to sleep at all, because there was such a hard lump in the bed. And so they knew that her story was true, and she was a real princess. Now, the English women in West Africa always seem to me real princesses of this order. Certain difficulties there always are for the white race in a tropical climate, there always will be, but there is really no need to find out the peas under twenty-eight mattresses. In a manless country like England, many a woman marries not because the man who asks her is the man she would have chosen had she free right of choice, but because to live she must marry somebody, and he is the first who has come along. He may be the last. Her African house interests her not, her husband does not absorb her, she has no one to whom to show off her newly wedded state, no calls to pay, no afternoon teas, no matinées, in fact she has no interest, she is bored to death; she is very much afraid of “chill,” so she shuts out the fresh, cool night air, and, as a natural result, she goes home at the end of seven months a wreck, and once more the poor African climate gets the credit.
No, if a woman goes to West Africa there is a great deal to be said for the German haus-frau. At least they always seem to make a home, and I have seen many English women there who cannot.
At Salt Ponds one of my carriers came to me saying he was sick and wanting medicine, and I regret to say, instead of sending him at once to the doctor, I casually offered him half a dozen cascara tabloids, all of which to my dismay he swallowed at one gulp. The next morning he was worse, which did not surprise me, but I called in the medical officer and found he was suffering from pneumonia—cascara it appears is not the correct remedy—and I was forced to leave him behind. The mammies I had engaged at Cape Coast also declined to go any farther, so I had to look around me for more carriers, and carriers are by no means easy to come by. Finally the Boating Company came to the rescue with four Kroo boys, and then my troubles began.
I set out and hoped for the best, but Kroo boys are bad carriers at all times. These were worse than usual. One of my hammock-boys hurt his foot, or said he had, and had for the time to be replaced by a Kroo boy, and we staggered along in such a fashion that once more I felt like a slave-driver of the most brutal order. Again and again we stopped for him to rest, and my hammock-boys remarked by way of comforting me:
“Kroo boy no can tote hammock.”
“Why can Kroo boy no tote hammock?”
“We no know, Ma. We no be Kroo boy.”
We scrambled along somehow, out of one village into another, and at every opportunity half the carriers ran away and had to be rounded up by the other half. In eight hours we had only done fifteen miles. I felt very cheap, very hungry, very thirsty, and most utterly thankful when we arrived late in the afternoon at a dirty native town called Tantum. The carriers straggled in one by one, and last of all came my chop box, so that, for this occasion only, luncheon, afternoon tea, and dinner were all rolled into one about six o'clock in the evening.