Another postman, never to be forgotten by those exiles whom he served, never came at all. This was a boy, too young, you would think, for his great office. The letters in his little pack were from husbands to wives, and they must travel a hundred miles of forest-trail in time of war. Not twenty miles they traveled when the postman, surrounded by black soldiers, was called to deliver. He did not deliver. He could not give the white man's letters to another hand. He said, No, he could not. And for this they killed him. That young body tarried forever upon the trail, witnessing in that interminable delay—as Ebengé had witnessed in his swift coming—to the sacred element in the mail.
Here is the king's touch for the king's evil—the hand of the postman dropping a letter. For this the victims of nostalgia do long service. For this they scribble, in their lonely and various dwellings, their letters. There is a night, in those alien settlements all about the world, that is unlike other nights. It is the night before the mail is closed. The lamp is full of oil that night, and the cup of coffee is at the elbow. On and on, while the stars march, the white man's hand runs upon the page. In villages where there are no street lamps, the white man's window is a lamp all night of the night before the mail. From steamers that are tied to trees among the rushes, in rivers that you do not know, the officer on watch may look all night through such a window at such a man writing, writing a long, long letter—the beating heart of man, articulate in all that heartless darkness.
How quick a seed, you would say, the seed in such a letter! How such a letter must bear, some sixty-, some an hundred-fold! Yet myself I saw this: I saw the harbor-master of Kabinda, a settlement of white men on the west coast of Africa, come aboard the monthly steamer to get the mail. He was an old Portuguese, coffee-colored in his gray linen suit. A long time he had been harbor-master, and many times he had taken the brown bag of mail ashore. This day, when he lifted his bag, he 'hefted' it: the lightness of it in his hand made him smile. Some irony that was the fruit of his long experience of exiles and their letters made that old indifferent man curl the lip. I think that in Kabinda that night there went white men hungry to bed.
I would not like to live in Kabinda, where the postman is so old and so wise. These white postmen know too much; they can count more than ten. And other things they know: they know a thing too sad to tell. Better Ebengé, who ran so swiftly with his load, or little Esam, who thought that for a load of letters some would even dare to die.
The Life of Adventure
By Edgar J. Goodspeed
'ADVENTURES,' said the gifted Mr. Disraeli, 'are to the adventurous.' Stevenson somewhere recommends the conception of life as a series of adventures, each morning witnessing as it were a new embarkation upon some treasure-quest or feat of arms. And I have often observed that my adventurous friends have a knack of reporting with all the flavor of genuine adventures, experiences which upon sober reflection seem rather to fade into the light of common day. It would appear, therefore, that it is they who put the adventurous into life, rather than that life is responsible.
In this fact lies much encouragement for one whose life seems set in a routine of commonplace; who lives upon a decent city street, where even burglars seldom penetrate, and nothing more exciting than automobile collisions ordinarily happens. These last are, however, of a gratifying frequency, if it is excitement that one craves. Indeed, we have latterly come to a weary sense of annoyance when the familiar crunch informs us that two motorists have simultaneously claimed the right of way. The pious duty of sweeping up all that was mortal of these unfortunates sometimes becomes really distressing, and one feels like a modern Tobit, keeping watch o'er man's mortality.