In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.
“Among the natives,” he explained, painstakingly picking each word, “what you call ‘atrocities’ are customs of warfare, forms of punishment. When they go to war they EXPECT to be tortured; they KNOW, if they’re killed, they’ll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds these customs have existed for centuries. He adopts them, because—”
“One moment!” interrupted Everett warmly. “That does not excuse HIM. The point is, that with him they have NOT existed. To him they should be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the native, not sink to him.”
The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to speak. Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.
“What’s the use!” he exclaimed.
“Try,” laughed Everett. “Maybe I’m not as unintelligent as I talk.”
“You must get this right,” protested the Coaster. “It doesn’t matter a damn what a man BRINGS here, what his training WAS, what HE IS. The thing is too strong for him.”
“What thing?”
“That!” said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.
“The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before Christ,” said the Coaster. “And, in twenty-two hundred years, he’s got just twenty miles inland. The native didn’t need forts, or a navy, to stop him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun. Especially the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him pass. The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and THAT takes away his nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits, over silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.