He was the most even-tempered man as regards his dealings with the natives that I have ever come across. Nothing that they did or said seemed to disturb him in the least.
Curiously enough, although he was a Government official, he was travelling unprovided with an interpreter; and he himself, of course, understood no word of any of the native dialects.
When he wanted anything he simply asked his boy for it, addressing him at considerable length and with much circumlocution in German. Now this boy, whose name by the way was Joa, had been specially engaged by the worthy doctor because he had represented himself to be a fluent German scholar.
As a matter of fact, beyond a few phrases that he had learned to repeat parrot-like, he knew nothing whatever of the language, and the result of their joint efforts to make themselves understood was laughable in the extreme, and was not rendered the less amusing owing to the fact that the doctor would not allow our interpreter to intervene to straighten out the verbal tangle. He wanted, he said, to train his boy to understand German sufficiently well to minister to his wants.
As a result we nearly laughed ourselves into fits over scenes like the following, repeated at intervals, and with variations, all through the day.
"Joa," the doctor would say, "my friends would like a whisky and soda, and I myself could do with a drop. A small modicum of alcohol, Joa, after the day's march, certainly does no harm to a white man, and may conceivably do him good. Therefore, Joa, you may bring us a syphon of soda, please, together with a bottle of whisky"; and the doctor would imitate in dumb show the process of drawing a cork out of a bottle.
"Yah!" Joa would say, his face all one broad grin; and off he would go to his master's tent, to return presently with—a telescope.
"Now, Joa," the doctor would remark genially, "a telescope is a very good thing in its way, but one cannot drink telescopes, Joa. What we now want, Joa, is a whisky and soda, especially the soda." And he would start to imitate the pressing down of the lever of a soda-water syphon.
A new light would then break on Joa's face. "Ah! Yah!" he would cry, and trot off again, to reappear a minute or so later carrying with due care and circumspection his master's double-barrelled rifle, loaded, and at full-cock.
And so the pantomime would proceed, master and man both in the best of tempers, until at last, perhaps at the fourth or fifth attempt, perchance at the tenth or twelfth, the native would hit upon the right article, either by accident, or by the slower process of elimination.