"Very well," I said at last, "I will go and tell Major Schomburgk that you refuse to perform your duties."
Whereupon the poor man, driven into a corner, blurted out the message, running his words altogether in his confusion and excitement. "The impudent little wench says," he rapped out, "that shefearstolookuponyoubecauseyouaresougly."
I had to laugh. I simply could not help it. But my mirth had a slight—a very slight—tinge of bitterness in it. To be told to my face that I was ugly! And by this naked little ebony imp.
Well, men, I reflected, had not found me uncomely. And even from my own sex—supremest test of all—I had listened to words of appreciation, and even of admiration upon occasion. So I playfully pinched the cheek of my little critic, and sent her away happy in the possession of a gaudy-coloured silk handkerchief.
This incident broke the ice, so to speak, and soon I was on the best of terms with practically the entire juvenile population of Paratau. They discovered that I was not really an ogre, as they had imagined at first. But I could not prevail upon them to admit that I possessed any claim upon their admiration, whatever I might have upon their gratitude. "Am I really and truly ugly?" I one day asked a little boy, a dear little chum of mine. "Really and truly you are, dear Puss," he replied, with childish frankness. "But," he added in extenuation, and as a balm perhaps for my wounded feelings, "you cannot help that. The good God made you so, did he not? We cannot all be black and beautiful."
Projecting my mind into theirs, and trying to think as they thought, I have come to the conclusion that they regarded me much as a white child regards a black golliwog—a something to be frightened of at first, and yet cherished because of its strangeness and uncouthness. Only in their case the golliwog was alive, and so all the more fearsome until experience had shown them its harmlessness.
After spending about ten days in Paratau, I began to feel my health breaking down. Our camp was pitched close to the old Government station, and the site was by no means an ideal one. My hut, like the others, was close, very stuffy, and almost unventilated. It had no windows, and it was built of the usual wattle and daub, which is all right when fairly fresh, but when old, as this was, it is apt to give off a sickly, mouldy odour. Then, too, there were the smells from the native village—anything but pleasant. While to crown all, the entire place was surrounded by dense fields—you might almost call them plantations—of guinea corn, fifteen to twenty feet high, which effectually shut out any breath of air. Not, however, that this mattered so very much; for the harmattan season had now set in, and the hot, palpitating air was filled with an impalpable yellow dust, like fog, so thick that one could look straight into the sun at mid-day without hurting one's eyes.
One result was that I suffered from almost incessant headaches. Yet I did not like to complain, for we were now in the middle of a new drama, and I knew that Schomburgk had set his heart on completing it at as early a date as possible. But sometimes, after rehearsing from seven till eleven in the broiling heat, in cowboy dress, and with crowds of perspiring niggers for supers, I felt that I must drop in my tracks from sheer physical exhaustion.
The climax came one day when I had to enact the heroine in a scene where Nebel, who was supposed to be a fugitive from justice, was galloping away across the mountains, and I after him, followed by twenty or thirty Tschaudjo horsemen. Nebel kept turning round in his saddle and firing at me. The horsemen behind were emitting a series of the most blood-curdling yells. And between them they frightened my horse, so that it bolted, and headed straight for the brink of a fairly high cliff, with a lot of rocks and broken ground at the bottom.
Greatly alarmed, I threw away my revolver, and using both hands, and all my strength, I tried my hardest to pull up my frightened steed. He was a grand horse, the best in Sokode, and he and I were great friends. Ordinarily, I could do anything with him, but now he was simply mad with terror, and I was entirely powerless to even check appreciably his wild race towards what appeared to be certain death for both of us.