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"`You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,'
she said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are.
They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything
like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they
were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.
Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever
since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
"After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write often,
and so on--and I left. In the street--I don't know why--a queer feeling
came to me that I was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear out
for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less thought
than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment--I won't say
of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair.
The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second
or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the center of a continent,
I were about to set off for the center of the earth.
"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed
port they have out there, for, as far as I could see,
the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers.
I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship
is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you--
smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage,
and always mute with an air of whispering, `Come and find out.'
This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making,
with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle,
so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf,
ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along
a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.
Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up, clustered inside
the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps.
Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background.
We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on,
landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a
God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost
in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the custom-house
clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf;
but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.
They were just flung out there, and on we went.
Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved;
but we passed various places--trading places--with names
like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names that seemed to belong
to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth.
The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men
with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea,
the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away
from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful
and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and
then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother.
It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning.
Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary
contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows.
You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening.
They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration;
they had faces like grotesque masks--these chaps; but they
had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement,
that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast.
They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort
to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world
of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.
Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember,
we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.
There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush.
It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts.
Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long
eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy,
slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her
thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water,
there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Pop, would go one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame would
dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny
projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened.
Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in
the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight;
and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me
earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--
hidden out of sight somewhere.
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