“Kraw-kraw?” interposed the missionary. “I know all about kraw-kraw. The highest authorities on tropical diseases have declared that it is not a physical, but a mental, malady that attacks the Old Coaster. The victim imagines that he is an old crow, and he goes around flapping his wings and crying, ‘Kraw-kraw.’”
One morning at the breakfast-table, when the conversation turned for a moment to the cheerful subject of cocktails, a youngster exclaimed: “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I protest against this cheerfulness. For a whole minute the conversation has been utterly irrelevant. Men are mortal and the dead are accumulating. Let us therefore return to the obsequies.”
A solemn-eyed Old Coaster leaned towards his neighbour and in a loud, sepulchral whisper remarked: “I give him a month.”
“I give him two weeks,” replied the other.
Many of those who came aboard, especially those from the more lonely places, looked like haunted men. Extreme isolation invites madness. There were moments when the heart of the traveller faltered or stood still, almost crushed by the pathos and tragedy of it all.
At the annual mission-meeting I was appointed not to Gaboon, but to Angom, seventy miles up the Gaboon River. Angom had a peculiarly evil reputation even in Africa, and the appointment was made only after a prolonged discussion in which some contended that the place ought to be abandoned and the climate of that particular station pronounced impossible. The facts arrayed in support of this opinion presented such a gloomy outlook that when, in conclusion, a missionary physician and his wife and myself were assigned to Angom, the appointment sounded in our ears somewhat like an order for our execution.
Three weeks after we reached Angom I stood one morning on the bank of the river, exceedingly lonely as I gazed after the boat that bore away the physician and his wife, both of them sick and returning to the United States. I remained alone at Angom only a few months, but I was expecting to remain for the entire year, sixty miles from the nearest white man, and unable as yet to speak the language of the jungle folk around me. And besides the barrier of an unknown language between them and me, there was at first such a mental and moral aloofness from the natives that their presence, and especially the sound of their constant laughter, only drove me to the centre of a vaster solitude.
Often in those first days I fought against loneliness and fever together, each aggravating the other. When loneliness would make its most terrible onslaught it assumed a disguise—and invariably the same disguise. More than half the battle was fought when I had penetrated the disguise and learned to recognize the foe even from afar. It invariably approached in the form of discouragement—the intolerable feeling that all I was doing was useless; that I was the fool of a pathetic delusion whose only redeeming feature was a good intention. The doubt suddenly emptied life of all that was worth while and left an aching void; and nothing in the whole world can ache like a void. In our nobler aims and enthusiasms doubt is the worst foe of courage—the thought that one may be making a fool of himself; the highest courage is to resist the doubt, and the highest wisdom is to know when to resist it. I think Hawthorne said something like that.
Let me anticipate the years so far as to say that, although I was always more or less alone in Africa, and drank the cop of solitude to the dregs, I completely outlived these attacks. And, strange enough, the very question which had been my dreaded foe became my strongest ally and defense, namely, the question, Is it worth while? For I fought that question out to a sure affirmative. In later years the dominant feeling, that which constituted the irresistible attraction of missionary life, and made its privations as nothing, was the constant feeling that life in Africa was infinitely worth while, and that nowhere else in the world could my life count for so much to so many.
The first letters from missionaries at the coast advised that I should not think of staying alone at Angom, but should move to the coast and join them at Baraka, our Gaboon station. This did not seem to me advisable, since it would separate me from the interior tribe, the wild Fang, among whom I was expecting to work and whose language I was learning. The coast tribe, the Mpongwe, were already provided for and did not need me. But as time passed letters came from all over the mission making so strong a protest that it seemed inadvisable to “insist upon being a martyr”—as my fellow missionaries expressed it, with naïve candour. One friend added that if I died, or rather when I died, I would have no one to blame for it but myself. That settled it. The idea of dying with no one to blame for it, after the lonely life at Angom, was entirely too unsensational; so I moved to Baraka, where some one could be blamed when I died.