“Even your servants don’t know when you come back,” said Walker.
“Oh,” said Hatteras quietly, “so you have been asking questions of my servants?”
“I had a good reason,” replied Walker. “Your safety”; and with that the conversation dropped.
Walker watched Hatteras. Hatteras watched the forest. A West African mangrove forest night is full of the eeriest, queerest sounds that ever a man’s ears hearkened to. And the sounds come not so much from the birds or the soughing of branches; they seem to come from the swamp-life underneath the branches, at the roots of the trees. There’s a ceaseless stir as of a myriad reptiles creeping in the slime. Listen long enough and you will fancy that you hear the whirr and rush of innumerable crabs, the flapping of innumerable fish. Now and again a more distinctive sound emerges from the rest—the croaking of a bull-frog, the whining cough of a crocodile. At such sounds Hatteras would start up in his chair and cock his head like a dog in a room that hears another dog barking in the street.
“Doesn’t it sound damned wicked?” he said with a queer smile of enjoyment.
Walker did not answer. The light from a lamp in the room behind them struck obliquely upon Hatteras’ face and slanted off from it in a narrowing column until it vanished in a yellow thread among the leaves of the trees. It showed that the same enjoyment which rang in Hatteras’ voice was alive upon his face. His eyes, his ears, were alert, and he gently opened and shut his mouth with a little clicking of the teeth. In some horrible way he seemed to have something in common with, he appeared almost to participate in, the activity of the swamp. Thus had Walker often seen him sit, but never with the light so clear upon his face, and the sight gave to him a quite new impression of his friend. He wondered whether all these months his judgment had been wrong. And out of that wonder a new thought sprang into his mind.
“Dick,” he said, “this house of mine stands between your house and the forest. It stands on the borders of the trees, on the edge of the swamp. Is that why you prefer it to your own?”
Hatteras turned his head quickly towards his companion, almost suspiciously. Then he looked back into the darkness, and after a little said:
“It’s not only the things you care about, old man, which tug at you; it’s the things you hate as well. I hate this country. I hate these miles and miles of mangroves, and yet I am fascinated. I can’t get the forests and the undergrowth and the swamp out of my mind. I dream of them at night. I dream that I am sinking into that black oily batter of mud. Listen,” and he suddenly broke off with his head stretched forward. “Doesn’t it sound wicked?”
“But all this talk about London?” cried Walker.