By Jean Kenyon Mackenzie
IT used to make me homesick, in our little African clearing, to see the albino woman. She would move about among her brown companions like a flame—and her white body, that flickered in the sun and glimmered in the shade, used to knock at the door of nostalgia. Homesick people always long for a visit, and that albino was so white!
Once, to our neighborhood, where in those days white women did not come, there came a white woman. She did not lodge with us; she lodged with the white officer because she was an officer's wife. We used to wonder if she would call upon us. One of us had a pair of field-glasses, and we used to watch her little figure coming and going about the clearing on the government hill. When one day she was seen to come down into our valley by the zigzag trail, we thought we had a Visit. I cannot tell you how anxious we were, in that little bark house, to make a good appearance—or what fresh disposals were made, with our eyes upon that descent, of our properties. I do not wish to make you too sad, but that white woman did not visit us. She went away. She did not know about us, or about exiles—that they are always dreaming of a Visit.
It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort, based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are perceived by the mind's eye—which like a cat's eyes sees them better for the dark—to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude.
Dusk is altogether the most illuminating hour for the exile; he then knows so exactly where he is; he has a perfectly visual sense of his surroundings. He sees where he is, but how came he to be there? The geography of his circumstance is plain, but not the logic. He who has no other companions than himself suspects this companion, in that hour of dusk, to be a fool. It must be a poor fool, he thinks, who has drifted into such a clearing by such a river!
The forest of the Cameroon is as good a place as any to be homesick; but I will not be saying that the members of my profession—and I am a missionary—are chronic sufferers. Missionaries are, in the main, gay, and for excellent reasons—some of them pagan reasons, for they are little brothers of Antæus; some of them Christian reasons, for they are of the company of successful fishermen. A fisherman with a good catch can defy even the dusk; his string of silver fish is a lantern to his feet.
No, if there were an altar and a service to placate nostalgia it would not be that fisherman who would most attend that service. The path to that altar would be worn brown by the feet of the trader. I think the trader is lonelier than the missionaries are; he is better versed in solitude. He goes into the forest with a backward look; he comes out of the forest sometimes with a secret and a stricken countenance. More than missionaries do, he does. More often than they, he builds out of his lonely horror and the license of solitude a perverse habitation for his soul. Sometimes—and this is very sad—he is afraid. He lingers and lingers on the margin of that green sea of forest.
'The heart,' say the Bulu, 'has gone to hide in the dark.' And this is a Bulu way of saying that the heart is not worn upon the sleeve. Well, upon the sleeve of the white-drill suits that beach-traders wear there is, I will agree, no device of hearts. But those lonely inland traders,—those that have traveled ten, twenty, thirty days from their kind,—what is that they sometimes seem to wear upon the sleeve of their singlets? And who cares where he wears his heart if there is never a white man's eye to fall upon it! In those little bark huts on the trading posts, where young white men pale with the passing hours, there comes to be a careless fashion in wear, whether of hearts or of collars. In the warm dusk of those little houses, where there is an earthen floor, where there are tin trade-boxes as bright as jockeys' jackets, where there are trade-cloths printed with violent designs, where there is salt fish and cheap scent and tobacco,—where all these desirable things may be had for ivory and rubber,—there the trader may wear his heart upon his sleeve without shame. None of those brilliant eyes, set in those dark faces, know a white man's heart when they see it. There in his hut is a monotony of brown bodies quick with vehement gestures; there is a tumult of controversy in a tongue he does not know. The sudden glitter of brass ornament is there, and the glitter of brass spears. There are fantastic head-dresses studded with buttons and shells and beads, and scented with the odor of wood-fires. Between those brown bodies and the body of the white man lies the counter. More lies between them than this. There are between them such barriers that the white man is not more lonely when he is alone.
Yet how still it is of an idle day under the thatched leaves of that little house! The sun does its exaggerated violence to the yellow earth of the clearing; the forest hangs its arras over its secret. How far it is, in this place not named on the map, from Manchester! How, when the rain falls, it is other than rainfall on the Clyde! How the pale fruit that hangs high on the ajap tree is not like the apples that ripen in Wishaw!
Do not speak of apples! Nostalgia in her cruel equipment carries a scented phantom apple.