Chapter XII

Lace was the factor at Daga, a corpulent man with a red face and a watery eye, and he had for assistant Berry, who looked for all the world like whom but Williams at Amory Hall? Under these were three clerks or handy men--Andrews, Hyde and Graves. The surgeon was Markham, a man of fifty and sour as a green grape. He was kept at Daga years and years, only, I think, because he was fearless. There are no more fearless men in this trade than in any other, and they are needed and are at a premium when found. Baker was the storekeeper, and he had Brown for helper. There were other white men at Daga, filling small offices of kinds. And there were four or five who filled no office, hangers-on, men with some claim on some one, or with no claim; sea-drift, withering and growing sapless of all that man might be. And there was Rathbone Lace, the factor’s brother, a man of about my age.

Daga fort carried fifteen guns, but they were of old times and nowadays never used. But they could be used; shot was piled beside them, and Daga had an ammunition chamber, powder and muskets and cutlasses. Within the four walls a vast sunbaked square of court provided room for half a dozen buildings of kinds and yet left space for a caravan market or what not. And in the thick walls were hollowed passages and chambers enough--places of storage with heavy doors and infrequent, grated loophole windows. On opposite sides of the court stairs of stone led to the top of the wall that was wide enough for a coach and four, if ever there had been such a thing in Africa. From the wall, ocean, sand, wilderness--wilderness, ocean, sand, except when one looked almost immediately beneath, being then on the northern face. Here showed a baked, brown palaver ground and a haphazard and pell-mell assemblage of cane and plaster huts thatched with palm and sheltering the multitude of Daga’s black retainers. Runners, hunters, boatmen, porters and so on forever. Women too.

On the eastern face also an interruption occurred, for here rose a sudden, small hill with what looked like a cart road to the top where, a hundred feet above the world, stood the fairsized, broadly verandahed house of the factor with about it its own huts for servitors. With him dwelled his brother and he gave house room to two of the clerks. The cart track led directly from a postern door in the wall--nothing was more than a pistol shot from anything else. Markham the surgeon had likewise a house on this hillock, a small house under heavy and magnificent trees, where he dwelled solitary, a curious, bitter, hardened man. The remainder of the twenty or so white men at Daga lived in the fort.

This “castle”, this African village, this wilderness, this white and sun-charged sand, this dark blue ocean! There was surf, but a barrier reef taking the most of it left only slight foam and low thunder for the actual shore. In the deep water beyond the surf rode the _Janet_ and two smaller ships, the _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_--Liverpool and Lancaster. It was now November and the climate at its best.

The _Janet_ proposed to swing at anchor before Daga for no more than a couple of weeks. This was an orderly, big station that knew about when to expect the ships that used it, and that gathered and stored beforehand the cargos. Where such establishments lacked, a ship, if conditions were adverse, might hang offshore or in some river mouth while weeks slipped into months before the full tale of slaves was secured. But the proper factory made proper provision--never, in short, was without stock. Here were three ships, but the full crop was nearly gathered.

“Where is the barracoon?” I asked Andrews the clerk, who was showing me around. We were on the wall looking down into the square.

“Oh,” he said and waved a hand, “there’s room enough in this place! We keep them in the old stone rooms--dungeons, you know.”

“Do they stay there day and night?”

“From five in the afternoon to sunrise,” he said listlessly. “They’ve just been kennelled.” The sun hung low, a red ball. He spoke in a weary, singsong voice. “The _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_ finished their lading yesterday. There aren’t but three hundred for you here now. But we’ve boats up the river. The rest will be down in time. This is your first voyage and you’re kin of Captain Bartram?”

“Yes,” I said, and I looked at the sun, and I saw the Negroes in the fields of Virginia looking at the same red and sinking sun, straightening themselves from their toil, turning their faces to the cabins. And I heard with the inner hearing Old Hannibal singing loudly:

“When hab I done with de trouble ob de world?
Ooo-h! trouble ob de world!
My sins so heavy I can’t get along.
Trouble ob de world!”

I stared at the _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_ and a kind of terror came upon me, and yet I did nothing that I should have done.

Bartram and I were spending the night ashore under the factor’s roof. I might indeed spend as many nights as I pleased, being lavishly invited to do so. But Bartram never, they said, gave but the one and that grudgingly. The star his foe might have traveled elsewhere in the infinite room to journey, taking with him that unlucky number, whatever it might be. He might have come for all time out of the belt of darkness. On the whole he thought he had. But something nested still in his mind, for you could not separate him from the _Janet_--not, they said, until, every two years or so, she rested in Bristol dock when he would go into the country for a while. But at Daga or Kingston or any port a day at a time or a night at a time was all he could be got to give. He trusted McNaughton whom he always left in charge, but when pressed to stay he answered that Bartram’s place was with his ship and walked somewhat rapidly to the boat that ever was held waiting for him.

But first night at Daga was a custom that it was politic to maintain, seeing that factors must be kept friendly or captains of ships might meet a thousand petty annoyances, to say nothing of second or third choice in goods. So Bartram, Colley and I had come ashore, leaving McNaughton and Pomeroy with the _Janet_. Bartram was smoking and drinking good wine and conversing with the factor on the latter’s verandah. Colley had been claimed by Markham. Andrews the clerk would show me, the only stranger, the sights of Daga.

The sun was going down. Somewhere a thin, small drum began to beat, flat and fast and insistent and desperately unchanging, like the drumming of a giant insect. “Tom-tom,” said Andrews. “The palaver ground’s yonder. A lot of black traders are in from up river and they’re feasting. There goes their bonfire.”

We came down from the wall and crossing the court went by the long storehouse and the ammunition house and the house where the white men slept, and through the dark, high, echoing passage and out at the castle gate. And here stretched the white sand and the ocean, endless under the red west. The west never stopped it; it came around again to the east. It was dusk, the air heavy and warm for all that sea before it, and the drums beat, beat, beat.--I have heard them so often; I have heard them too often!

Andrews was speaking, “I wish I were in Boston where I was born!”

“Boston in England?”

“New England. That’s the country for me!”

I regarded his long, lank frame and his thin and sickly face. Everything about him languished. “Why do you stay in Africa?”

He answered with a weak and boyish violence. “Because I can’t help myself! I got into trouble with the law--it wasn’t so much my fault, I can tell you, as ’twas that of others!--but I can’t go home. My father’s part owner of the _Indian Maid_ that trades here, so here I was shipped! New England ships come, and I can’t go back in them. Back home. I’m homesick, I tell you. I’ll die presently. If there’s a melancholy hell it’s Africa!”

“It’s the trade you’re not liking?”

He took me up dully. “The trade? No, it’s not the trade I’m objecting to. But at home now the snow’s beginning to fall, so white and pretty, and directly they’ll be thinking of sleighing and Christmas.”

We were walking now over the hard sand to the road that led to the factor’s house. “Does every one here hate Africa?”

“Oh, no!” he answered. “The factor has been at Daga twenty years. He likes it well enough. He’s got his comforts around him--he doesn’t miss his family.” He said the last in a curious tone, and I afterwards found it to mean the two Mandingo women and the children that looked now like them and now like Samuel Lace. “As for Mr. Markham the surgeon, he’s an old hand too. He’d find verjuice wherever he went, so what does the place matter? And to listen to some of the others you’d think it the finest place! Of course you can have a good deal to drink and all the women you please. Only I don’t like whisky, and for the other----” he made a vague gesture of dismissal. “There’s a farm out Concord way that I see forever.”

By this we were even with those native huts and that irregular trodden ground of gathering where smoked and reddened and flared the bonfire and where moved and sat and kept up a great laughter and noise a number of dark people. We saw between stems of cocoanuts and other trees whose names I did not then know.

“Let us stop for a moment and watch.”

He asked wearily, “Do you find it interesting? That’s long ago over for me, if it ever began.” But he stood still and I with him under the heavy cocoanut fronds and the clusters of nuts the size of men’s heads. A voice behind us spoke. “Listen to old Osuma holding forth! He’s boasting now about how the King received him in Dahomey.”

Andrews said, “This is Mr. Scott, Mr. Rathbone, who’s kin to Captain Bartram and came in the _Janet_.”

“Glad to know you, Mr. Scott! I’ll go along with you up to the house. I’ve been on the _Fancy_ and so missed your landing. So ‘Holy Bartram’s’ well and fortunate still?”

“Do you call him that here too?”

“Oh, yes! Behind his back. But no offense, Mr. Scott! He likes it when he hears of it. And coming in, just now, I admired the _Janet_, too, for the fiftieth time. The others in harbor can’t touch her!”

There was still light in the sky, and also the back flare from the bonfire. I could make him out; rather tall, with a short beard and red cheeks, with a wide, straw hat and white clothes. His voice had oil in it, but also iron. Oiled iron. Between Bartram and Colley, I knew well enough the white inhabitants of Daga. So now I said, “Mr. Rathbone Lace?”

“The same,” he answered. “Have you had enough of this? But if you will wait longer, I am at your service.”

“They are traders who have brought in slaves?”

“A hundred yesterday. Small traders--Osuma and Banno and their men--and they’ll feast and dance here till late. I see it’s your first voyage. From Kingston?”

“No. I am a Scot, but I have come from Virginia.”

“Ah, Virginia! I have been in Baltimore and New York. That’s the one thing we miss in Daga, not seeing the world.”

We went up the hill. It was low, rising from a wooded plain that stretched far inland. But there were mountains and great ones in Africa. I had noted them from the sea. We went up the hill in the hot dusk, the ocean faintly booming against the reef and the drums sounding behind us. I asked my question that was growing wearisome, even to myself. “Do you like your trade?” And Rathbone Lace’s was the first full assent.

The others had misliked and inveighed and cursed though they stayed, or had found reasons for refusing to consider if they liked it or did not like it, or had seemed unthinking, or indifferent, or apathetic, or too dull to have tastes. But Rathbone Lace said, “Why, it gets hold of you! Yes, I like it.” I was to come to know not a few who felt as he did, but he was the first. To like it for itself and in itself. To like black power as black power!

We went up the low hill. Lights were shining out of the factor’s house. Andrews now left us, murmuring something about some errand and taking a side path with a small, lighted house at its end. We went on a few steps. Something came hurriedly from the bush and would have flitted across the way and been gone, but “Lalla!” he shouted and made after and seized and brought her back upon the white road that yet gleamed under a sky yet lighted. She twisted this way and that in his hands, then stood, a slight, dark-skinned girl, dressed in a scanty white robe with chains of beads about her neck. He spoke to her gibingly in a tongue I did not understand, and she answered thrillingly, with passion and complaining. He grew angry and shook her as he might have shaken a child or a dog; only needed a free hand perhaps to have struck her. She broke into a passion of speech, confused, hurried, and charged with some kind of woe, then putting forth a sudden, unexpected strength, dragged herself free, turned, and with a cry was gone into the thick darkness and matted growth. He thundered after her some threat, but there only came another cry and then silence.

He cursed, then laughed. “The devil! I’ll pay her out!”

“What is the matter with her?”

“She’s Fullah; that is, she’s part Arab. Old Banno brought in yesterday five or six Fullah men whom he got from the King of Dahomey who had them as a gift from some Senegal chief. She’s heard of it, and has taken a notion that among them is a member of her family.”

Her cry still echoed in my ears. “Couldn’t you release him to her?”

He stared, then burst into laughter. “Well, I confess _that_ hadn’t occurred to me! I’m more like to sell her to go along with them--the vixen!”

“Then she belongs to you?”

“Yes,” he said, as indifferently as you please. It seemed to suffice to him to explain all things, for he immediately with profound unconcern began to talk of the trade goods that the _Janet_ had brought. By now I knew as well as he that the _Janet’s_ port before Norfolk in September had been Bristol where she had refitted, and where the Company had loaded her heavily with wares for Africa. Only a small space of that slave deck was cavernous and empty, boxes and bales being stored through all the rest. To-morrow would begin the unlading and Daga be furnished for a year. And I knew that Rathbone Lace was supercargo or receiver here. He was speaking of trade rum, trade muskets, kegs of powder, tobacco in cask, hatchets and axes and small tools, beads and looking-glasses and figured handkerchiefs, kettles and pans and cottage crockery. I knew as he knew that the muskets were none of the best, nor the axes and hatchets and knives; nor the tobacco which we had taken on at Norfolk, nor the rum, nor the powder, nor the cloth, nor the more trifling articles nor anything else. They were manufactured in England for Africa, and if the muskets burst and the powder was dampened and the axes would take no edge and the cloth would tear like paper, and if the tobacco was leavings, and if rum and sugar and salt were adulterated, what were the odds? Africa was not critical, or if critical gained nothing thereby.

“A man,” I thought, “to pay for a dull ax. A woman for a glass necklace for another woman.”

I could think as my fellows were not thinking, but I did as they were doing.

We were now before the factor’s house, low and rambling, untidy and yet comfortable. He himself called to us from the verandah. “That you, Rathbone? Is Mr. Scott with you? Supper is ready.”

We went in. Bartram was here and Colley and the captains of the _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_, Berry the assistant and Markham. A table was spread--there were English dishes and African dishes, rice and fowl and pepper, cassava, yam. Two black women waited--there were candles--it was warm. A vast bowl of punch was brought and set before the factor. Tasted, one found it as strong as Hercules.

The captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ was a man I should not wish to sail under. He drank hard and he would drink with each one, round and round. The captain of the _Janet_ would not be tempted. “No, no, Captain Garth! You know my custom. But I wish your health all the same. Prosperous voyage, sir!” The captain of the _Fancy_ was sailing before dawn. He said, “No, I must keep sober, Lace,” and took but three cups of the punch. He was a talker, swinging from one subject to another, especially engaging Rathbone Lace, but bringing in Colley. The elder Lace, the host, promoted all as best he could and urged the punch. Bartram was speaking in his slow, reasonable voice to Berry the assistant. Garth drank with me again. The talk became general and grew thick with ports and prices, African and West Indian names, Company policies and niggardliness or the reverse, Bristol, Liverpool, captains, ships, fair weather and foul, storm, wrack, sickness, mutiny, loss and gain! In at the open windows came rhythmically the sighing, hot breath of Africa; the candle flames bent aside, there seemed wraiths in the room, then nothing but the punch bowl, big as a tarn, and the good, strong, West Indian rum.

Supper was over, I saw that, and the captain of the _Fancy_ bidding Daga good-by, and it occurred to me that it was no loss to see him go. He departed, Berry seeing him from the house. Then the others drank again. Markham the surgeon appeared at my corner of the table, seated there, watching me. “You’re drunk,” he said, “but you carry it as though you were not.”

“That’s the way to be happy,” I said, and indeed was so. I was “happy.” And I sat quietly and did not seem to be drunken. When we got up from the table I did not lose balance or walk crookedly. I sat in a window and watched the room and its occupants, and it all seemed very large and filled with shifting colors and music. Time passed and sometimes I talked and sometimes did not. Time too had expanded and deepened till there seemed much of it and all worth while. And what we were talking of I really did not know, but at last I understood that the night was getting old and that we must go to bed. I thought that Colley was drunk, he and Markham drunk together, and going together out into the night, to Markham’s house. As for myself, I proposed to return to the _Janet_ just so soon as I should see William Bartram my kinsman safely installed in the room next the factor’s, he in one bed and the captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ in the other. I felt a joy of old romance when I thought of the _Janet_ and the cool sea around and the star-powdered night looming above and between her bare masts. If they did not expect me to go and had not provided me a boat, I could swim.

Bartram and Garth and the factor had disappeared. Rathbone Lace had me by the elbow and was laughing. “Come on! I’ve quarters for you in the smaller house.”

The smaller house was set behind and to the left of the greater one. There were trees and a roof and stars, a verandah, a door, a room. I thought that Lace had questioned me as to what book I had been reading lately, and I began to speak of Herodotus and his journey into Egypt that was in this same Africa that had been known so long and both favorably and unfavorably. I talked quite steadily and lucidly, as in a dream. He laughed again and said, “A Scot is a strange animal! Are you drunk or are you not? I swear I’m not certain which!”

But I was drunk and capable of wrecking a ship, my own or another.

The small house had the same guttering, blowing candles. By their vague light coming forth from the interior, I perceived two forms upon the verandah. As we stepped upon it, they moved with a kind of fluttering and a low, nervous, catching laughter. The one vanished around the angle of the verandah, the other remained. Lace put out an arm. “Are you there, Fanny?”

“Yaas, sah.”

He drew her forward. “She’s Fullah--like Lalla. She’s a good girl and has a little, a very, very little English.”

He pushed her toward me, just sufficiently, so that her brown, warm arm came under my hand. “My room’s round the corner,” he said. “See you in the morning--but sleep as late as you choose! Only no one can really sleep after dawn in this place.” With which he bade me good night and was gone, leaving Fanny’s arm under my hand.