“And a fine time I had of it the next few months,” grunted MacAllister. “The kid almost pestered me to death trying to discover new short cuts to hell. He started drinking like a fish immediately upon his arrival—cocktails, highballs, rickeys—he had a book of recipes for about two hundred different drinks, and went through it methodically, mixing his own and swilling ’em down in a way which no good Presbyterian—and I am one, even in this hole —could tolerate.
“ ‘Mr. MacAllister,’ he would say. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ and if I accepted, he would say ‘MacAllister, let’s have another,’ and after that it was ‘Mac, another won’t hurt us.’
“If we’d continued that way the station would have been a total loss, so I had finally to refuse to drink with him. He didn’t appreciate my point of view at all.
“He raided the medicine cabinet and experimented with the little opium I had there, the result being that he was violently ill for some time. The whole thing was laughable, if he hadn’t been so damned serious about it, or if he had been content to quit the foolishness after a while. It’s bad enough, captain, to see a man disintegrate little by little under the influence of the heat and stink, but cripes, it’s positively indecent to see one conscientiously trying to kill himself.
“He kept everlastingly at me to find him a girl, but right there I balked. It was so cold-blooded and morbid. ‘But I tell you, old thing,’ he’d beam at me, ‘really a nigger girl is part of the white man’s burthen, if one believes the plays and novels published nowadays. It’s quite de rigueur, donchaknow,’ he would drawl.
“Just as luck would have it, the girl did turn up, a few weeks later. She was black as ebony, and graceful as the devil’s wife, if he has one. The tale she told was that she was a cousin of one of the house boys, and that her family had died of sleeping sickness, or something, so that she had to come to live with her last relative. Well, you can guess what happened after that. Markley simply appropriated her. Not, I sincerely believe, because he particularly wanted her, but because she fitted into some gloomy picture of his final demise which he had built up. ‘Mac, my boy,’ he grinned at me after he had moved her into the bungalow, over my almost tearful protests. ‘She is rather chic, you know. Wouldn’t she make a sensation in London with that figure and that hide.’ I went out and cursed the day both of us were born, and I’m not usually a blasphemous man, Todd.”
“It must have been about a month after he got the girl that I saw Markley for the second time,” the captain took up the tale. “I had some stuff for the station and tied up at the wharf. Things looked about as usual. A few natives with loaded canoes, a few Kroo boys busy tidying the compound. In fact I began to think that Markley had got over his fit until I reached the bungalow veranda. He was sitting there, with his bare feet sticking over the rail. It startled me somewhat. Apparently, he had accomplished in two months what even the most soft-willed white man seldom reaches in years. I’ll admit I admired his determination.
“He was dressed in a singlet, while about his waist was a bath towel, which automatically defined his state of disintegration. He was in the bath-towel stage, the next step being for him to ‘go native’ and spend the rest of his days rotting in some nigger village, ashamed to let white men see him.
“ ‘Greetings, cap’n,’ he called. ‘Come up and refresh yourself. Ruth,’ he shouted to some one inside, ‘bring a glass for a gentleman, a clean one. Pardon me,’ he added, turning back to me, ‘I was referring to the glass, not the gentleman, though I suppose it would be equally appropriate.’ During the pause which followed I tried to imagine who this ‘Ruth’ might be. A white woman could have come up the river, but it was very doubtful that it would have happened without my knowing of it. Then Ruth came out of the bungalow. MacAllister, I’ll agree with you. She was remarkable—lithe and clean-cut, with some forgotten Arab strain, I suspect. And she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothes.”
From his chair, MacAllister snorted in disgust.