“Rotten luck!” He shuddered as he dragged himself wearily to his feet. He could not have gone before, not while there was the mud with “that” on it; not even so long as the shining sands were bare. It would have seemed too hurried, almost indecent. But now that an unbroken, glittering sheet of water lapped the very edge of the shore, the funeral ceremony—with all its pomp of sunrise—was over; and, turning aside, he stumbled wearily through the rough grass to the place where he had left his bicycle.
HATTERAS
By A. W. MASON
The story was told to me by James Walker in the cabin of a seven-ton cutter, one night when we lay anchored in Helford River. It was towards the end of September; during this last week the air had grown chilly with the dusk, and the sea when it lost the sun took on a leaden and a dreary look. There was no other boat on the wooded creek and the swish of the tide against the planks had a very lonesome sound. All these circumstances I think provoked Walker to tell the story, but most of all the lonely swish of the tide against the planks. For it is the story of a man’s loneliness and the strange ways into which loneliness misled his soul. However, let the story speak for itself.
Hatteras and Walker had been schoolfellows, though never classmates. Hatteras indeed was the head of the school and prophecy vaguely sketched out for him a brilliant career in some service of importance. The definite law, however, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children overbore this prophecy. Hatteras, the father, disorganized his son’s future by dropping unexpectedly through one of the trapways of speculation into the Bankruptcy Court beneath, just two months before Hatteras, the son, was to have gone up to Oxford. The lad was therefore compelled to start life in a stony world with a stock-in-trade which consisted of a schoolboy’s command of the classics, a real inborn gift of tongues and the friendship of James Walker.
The last item proved of the most immediate value. For Walker, whose father was the junior partner in a firm of West African merchants, obtained for Hatteras an employment as the bookkeeper at a branch factory in the Bight of Benin.
Thus the friends parted. Hatteras went out to West Africa alone, and met with a strange welcome on the day when he landed. The incident did not come to Walker’s ears until some time afterwards, nor when he heard of it did he at once appreciate the effect which it had upon Hatteras. But chronologically it comes into the story at this point, and so may as well be immediately told.
There was no settlement very near to the factory. It stood by itself on the swamps of the Forcados River with the mangrove forest closing in about it. Accordingly the captain of the steamer just put Hatteras ashore in a boat and left him with his traps on the beach. Half-a-dozen Kru boys had come down from the factory to receive him, but they could speak no English, and Hatteras at this time could speak no Kru. So that although there was no lack of conversation there was not much interchange of thought. At last Hatteras pointed to his traps. The Kru boys picked them up and preceded Hatteras to the factory. They mounted the steps to the verandah on the first floor and laid their loads down. Then they proceeded to further conversation. Hatteras gathered from their excited faces and gestures that they wished to impart information, but he could make neither head nor tail of a word they said, and at last he retired from the din of their chatter through the windows of a room which gave on to the verandah, and sat down to wait for his superior, the agent.
It was early in the morning when Hatteras landed and he waited until midday patiently. In the afternoon it occurred to him that the agent would have shown a kindly consideration if he had left a written message or an intelligible Kru boy to receive him. It is true that the blacks came in at intervals and chattered and gesticulated, but matters were not thereby appreciably improved. He did not like to go poking about the house, so he contemplated the mud banks and the mud river and the mangrove forest, and cursed the agent. The country was very quiet. There are few things quieter than a West African forest in the daytime. It is obtrusively, emphatically quiet. It does not let you forget how singularly quiet it is. And towards sundown the quietude began to jar on Hatteras’ nerves. He was besides very hungry. To while away the time he took a stroll round the verandah.
He walked along the side of the houses towards the back, and as he neared the back he heard a humming sound. The further he went the louder it grew. It was something like the hum of a mill, only not so metallic and not so loud; and it came from the rear of the house.