Richard Harding Davis

“ And, on the Congo, to grudge to another man the sight of a pretty woman was as cruel as to withhold the few grains of quinine that might save his reason. But before the day passed, Madame Ducret was aware that the American could not be lightly dismissed as an admirer. The fact neither flattered nor offended. For her it was no novel or disturbing experience. Other men, whipped on by loneliness, by fever, by primitive savage instincts, had told her what she meant to them. ”

“ Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn. “You lose!” he called.
Later in the day, Everett analyzed his conduct of the night previous. “At home,” he told Upsher, “I would have been telephoning for an ambulance, or been out in the street giving the man the ‘first-aid’ drill. But living as we do here, so close to death, we see things more clearly. Death loses its importance. It’s a bromide,” he added. “But travel certainly broadens one. Every day I have been in the Congo, I have been assimilating new ideas.” ”

“ Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat, the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral strength. ”

“ She’s killed seventeen elephants with her own rifle.”
In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were pallid, washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age. For him women of any other type had ceased to exist. He had come to think of every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun, with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed. He thought of them as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and army helmets. ”

“ Down here we are cave people; if you fight me, I will club you and drag you to my cave. If others fight for you, I will KILL them. I love you,” he panted, “with all my soul, my mind, my body, I love you! I will not let you go!”
Madame Ducret did not say she was insulted, because she did not feel insulted. She did not call to her husband for help, because she did not need his help, and because she knew that the ex-wrestler could break Everett across his knee. She did not even withdraw her hands, although Everett drove the diamonds deep into her fingers. ”

“ He did not need the missionaries to point out to him that the Independent State of the Congo was not a colony administered for the benefit of many, but a vast rubber plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man. It was not in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his attitude of mind toward almost every other question.
At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he excused the country tolerantly as a “topsy-turvy” land. He wished to move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. ”

“ By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned that in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be accepted only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed himself to be. ”

“ To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was her entire sex personified. She was the one woman for whom he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the one thing to be desired. Opposite, across the table, her husband, the ex-wrestler, chasseur d’Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an ox. Men felt as well as saw his bigness. Captain Hardy deferred to him on matters of trade. The purser deferred to him on questions of administration. ”

“ He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate. He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable ‘atrocities,’ until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in his mouth and blows the top of his head off.”
The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his side.
“And you,” he mocked, “think you can reform that man, and that hell above ground called the Congo, with an article in Lowell’s Weekly?”
Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully. ”

“ Are you looking for them?”
“I’m not running away from them,” laughed Everett. “Lowell’s Weekly is sending me to the Congo to find out the truth, and to try to help put an end to them.”
In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.
“Among the natives,” he explained, painstakingly picking each word, “what you call ‘atrocities’ are customs of warfare, forms of punishment. When they go to war they EXPECT to be tortured; they KNOW, if they’re killed, they’ll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds these customs have existed for centuries. ”

“ He did not understand that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the official term of three years, or for life, measured time only by the date of their release. When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought letters were a three months’ journey from the coast and from each other, his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.
His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer was ready to start for Leopoldville. ”

“ He could not now leave the Congo. He would follow her to Brazzaville. If he were discreet, Ducret might invite him to make himself their guest. Once established in her home, she MUST listen to him. No man ever before had felt for any woman the need he felt for her. It was too big for him to conquer. It would be too big for her to resist.
In the morning a note from Ducret invited Everett and Cuthbert to join him in an all-day excursion to the water-fall beyond Matadi. Everett answered the note in person. ”

“ The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart ”

“ On board, the language was French, at table the men sat according to the rank they held in the administration of the jungle, and each in his buttonhole wore the tiny silver star that showed that for three years, to fill the storehouses of the King of the Belgians, he had gathered rubber and ivory. In the smoking-room Everett soon discovered that passengers not in the service of that king, the English and German officers and traders, held aloof from the Belgians. ”

“ That he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of Lowell’s Weekly meant less to those who did not know that Lowell’s Weekly existed. And when, in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact that it called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a “Palm Oil Ruffian,” sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen. He soon saw that solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome. ”

“ They could not say that for money he sold sensations, because it was known that a proud and wealthy parent supplied him with all the money he wanted. Nor in his private life could they find anything to offset his attacks upon the misconduct of others. Men had been sent to spy upon him, and women to lay traps. ”