They admire the white man’s hat as much as himself, and regard a suit of blue denim as a nobler work than an honest man.
The white man’s feelings are not seriously affected by the fact that they evidently consider his hat quite as wonderful as himself, and a suit of blue denim a nobler work than an honest man. Of course the first novelty will soon wear off, but a white man, as long as he lives away from the coast and the older settlements, will always be an object of wonder and excitement, and will be expected to maintain his position by wonderful and exciting performances. There is danger that the missionary will never get used to it, but will lose his whole stock of patience and perhaps his reason in the effort; and there is danger also that he will become so well used to this inordinate attention that he will miss it dreadfully when he comes home, and is relegated to his proper obscurity in American society.
Africa is not a great solitude in which one of an ascetic temper might enjoy silence and meditation. There is no quiet except during the night and no solitude but the solitude of a strange city where one passes through a multitude unrecognized and unknown. For these Africans will probably never know us. Nor had we three white men any privacy in our relations with each other, either in our tent or in the house that displaced it; and for my own part, this was the most trying of all our privations. Under the circumstances I think we three men deserved great credit for not hating each other. But after supper, when it was dark I used to go out to a little walk about ten yards long in front of the house and removed a short distance from it, the only smooth walk on the entire hill, and there I enjoyed a few minutes of delightful respite from noise and publicity, while my thoughts of home and friends were unrestrained. The life in the homeland seemed already painfully distant, and almost vague and unreal. Like Silas Marner, when he removed from his old home to Raveloe where he was surrounded by people who knew nothing of his history, so to me sometimes the past seemed like a dream because related to nothing in my present life, and the present, too, a dream, because linked with no memories of the past.
Even at night the noise does not cease, but only removes to a distance where it no longer disturbs. The people stay in their towns at night, but they usually make more noise than in the day. From a village at the foot of the hill rises the weird and incessant wail of their mourning for the dead, an appalling dirge that chills the blood; from another village near by, a savage noise of war drums and shouting by which they are warning an expected enemy that they are on the watch; from another, the uncouth music of their dissolute dance; from another the cries of men who profess to be transformed into gorillas or leopards:—on all sides the noise ascending throughout the night like the smoke of their torment.
How eagerly we welcomed the mail! It arrived once a month, and was six weeks old. Even Dr. Good, indefatigable worker, and the opposite of emotional, was unable to pursue the usual routine of work when we were expecting the carriers with mail. They usually came in the evening, and all that day we were under a noticeable strain of expectancy. We were also exceedingly talkative and communicative for a day or two after its arrival. Years afterwards I once visited one of our missionaries, Miss Christensen, when for some months she had been staying alone at Benito, one of our old coast stations. I remarked that the arrival of her mail must be a great relief to the extreme loneliness of her situation. She replied that, on the contrary, the mail day was the loneliest of all, for want of some appreciative friend to whom she could tell the news contained in her letters and talk about it. There were educated natives around her whose friendship was almost sufficient for other days, but not for mail day. Her home interests were unintelligible to them.
My first letters from Efulen were written on an immense log that lay near the tent. I stood and leaned over upon it as I wrote. When I finished my first letter I found that I had been leaning against a stream of pitch all the while, with the sleeve of a woollen sweater lying in it. But the difficulties of letter-writing were not merely physical. Each correspondent in the homeland naturally expected me to tell him all about the natives and our life in Africa. To describe adequately any one phase of our life would require a length of letter that would have made my correspondence unmanageable, and to refer to our strange surroundings without adequate description would have left my letters unintelligible. I thought to meet the difficulty by dividing my friends into groups, asking friends of a feather to flock together, and writing occasionally a long and elaborate letter to each flock. I have never succeeded in killing two birds with one stone, but I killed a number of valued correspondents with each of those letters. No one replied to them but the person to whom the envelope was directed.
After one month in Africa, while we were still in the tent, I had my first and worst experience of the dreaded African fever, although in this instance it was probably malarial-typhoid. It lasted several weeks. When we had been at Efulen nearly a month Dr. Good was suddenly called to the coast by the severe illness of his wife, who was at Batanga expecting soon to leave for home. Dr. Good was not a physician, but with years of experience and an aptitude for medicine he had acquired such skill in the treatment of African fever that he was almost equal to a physician. As for myself, I summed up my experience in the statement that once in my life I had had a severe headache. I do not remember whether Mr. Kerr’s experience had been as extensive as mine. We both had a vague consciousness when Dr. Good left for the coast that our situation was precarious and fraught with some danger:—in a country called the Whiteman’s Grave, under conditions that even in America would have taxed the constitution of the strongest. In the light of later knowledge we could have greatly improved upon our pioneer methods, and they seemed to us quite amateurish though supported by the best intentions. In coping with untried conditions and unknown factors of danger one must always expect to go through a period of preliminary inexperience and make preliminary blunders before attaining the mastery. But in Africa the preliminary inexperience often costs the life of one and the blunders disable another, while the triumph is reserved for those who come after. The imperfection of our first policy was inevitable; the present method, which provides every procurable comfort for men so situated, is not only more humane but immensely more economical. It is only in the last few years that missions have become a science—at least in Africa, and that those who go to dangerous and unknown places may profit by the formulated experience of those who have gone to such places before. Of course it was never intended that two new arrivals, Mr. Kerr and myself, should be left alone at a new station. But the unexpected emergency which called Dr. Good to the coast is typical of the miscarriage of the surest plans that men can make in Africa.
Only a few days after Dr. Good left Efulen I was stricken with the fever. The approach of it is very peculiar, especially the first time. I mistook it for a spell of homesickness; for one becomes extremely depressed. I thought I had been brave, but all at once the very pith of my resolution was gone. I felt that I had overrated my courage. The life which I had chosen seemed a doom from which there was now no honourable escape. My feelings recoiled in an agony of revolt that was mentally prostrating. It was the fever and I did not know. It was night and I was walking near the house, but I was too tired to continue walking, and I lay down on the ground in the dim starshine and wept for home,—it was many years ago and I was very young. I was not surprised that I had a severe headache, for I thought it was the result of my mental agitation. The next day I was worse, and the following night I was delirious the whole night, but morning brought relief. I did not think it could be fever for the symptoms were not what I had expected. We were pitiably helpless.
At last, a happy thought striking Mr. Kerr, he exclaimed: “I have a thermometer: that will tell us.”
“It would tell us,” said I, “if we knew what normal temperature is; but for my part I don’t know, though I think it is 212°”—perhaps I was still delirious.