Late in June a letter came to her from Dicky Cobden, who was at Coquihatville on the Equator, where as he said, “the sun’s rays fall as straight as a tile from a roof.”
... Oh, yes, you and Miss Claes knew a lot more than I did that night at Tara Subramini’s. I shot off a lot of words afterwards. Never again. But I’m going to stay with it, Pidge.... I’ve just had ten days here in the jungles, back on one of the tributaries of the Kong. If I stayed long here, I would see it all as these exiled white men do; that God is a rubber man with ivory legs; that the natives are vermin, not only to be walked over, but to be stamped into the ground. They whimper so. It’s too hot here to be whimpered at.... I think so much about you. Of course, this isn’t news to you, but I say it, because it is so different from what I thought it would be. Something snapped when I got to the Kong.... All fat and decoration are sweated off down here. I reach out to you just the same. Only in New York I thought that we were both wrapt in the same sort of film, a tinted filmy sort of glamour that stretched out as we went different ways. That film was stretched too hard. When I reached the River it snapped. I think I’ll never get over feeling this awful isolation of being a separate creature from everybody, worst of all from you....
... Next morning in the office John Higgins called her in to his desk. “Dicky has sent in some stuff. We begin to publish in August.”
He took off his spectacles and wiped them on the flap of his necktie. His eyes looked watery, as if the light had run out in tears.
“I’ve always heard that the Cobdens were honest,” he went on, “three generations of honest men. They’ve built something, Miss Musser. Not a business, that’s well enough, but they’ve built a man. Listen——”
He opened the pages at random and began to read. It was like the stuff in her letter.
“It’s so for pages and pages,” he continued. “Every word standing out, if you get the hang of it. No tint, no art; just words, pain-born, separate like boulders in a field. He has no hopes, yet he writes what he sees.... Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa.... He watches the string of natives coming in with their tusks; he watches the crocodiles coming up to the blinding surface water; he watches the big monkeys that live in twos, and the little monkeys that live in troops. I don’t know what the world’ll get out of this, but I know what I get out of it——”
She saw that John Higgins was merely thinking out loud. A few moments later he finished:
“This stuff amounts to the most subtle and incredible rearraignment of imperialistic cruelty, but Dicky doesn’t mean it that way. He keeps repeating with devilish calm that it isn’t so bad as it was. It’s no particular nation, but all whites. He writes from the standpoint of a white man who remembers Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, Warren Hastings in India, Cecil Rhodes in Africa and our own dear religious settlers bringing Yankee wits and rum and disease to the red Indians. He turns over the pages of all patriotic histories with a long stick as you would poke the leaves from the face of a corpse you had made yourself. His face tries to turn away; his stomach retches, but he knows each man and each nation must bury his own dead.”
“‘Something seems to have happened to our Dicky, besides Africa,’” Pidge repeated, when she was alone.