The Devil in the Bush

by Matthew Head

  When Henri and I got back to the station, Henri said he had to spend the morning in the laboratory unless there was something he could help me with. Whether this was true or whether he just wanted to get away from me I wasn’t sure, but I said that was fine, I’d just fool around his house and get a little rest. So I dropped him at the laboratory and drove his car on down to the house. I said hello to Dodo, who gave the impression of nodding a greeting in her fragile and ladylike way, but the eagle fixed me with a malevolent yellow eye and hissed slightly through his beak.

  I went into the bedroom and undressed and got into my pajamas and lay down for a cigarette. After that I thought I’d like to read. There were no books in the bedroom so I went into the little living room, although I didn’t remember seeing any there either. I was right—no books. It was out of character with that otherwise homelike room. I wandered out onto the veranda and walked around it until I found Albert hanging some laundry on bushes in a sunny stretch back of the house. When he saw me he grinned and came running up to the veranda. He said to me, “Toas’? Toas’?”

  “No thanks, Albert, no more toast,” I said. “I want a book.” He didn’t understand my French any better than I understood his, so we went into the house together and I pulled out of my suitcase an Oxford Book of English Verse that somebody had thought would be just the thing for me to carry around the Congo. “Livre, livre,” I said.

  He brightened and cackled and said, “Liv’, liv’!” Then his face fell and he spread his hands wide and said something like “Boolay, boolay.”

  I gave up the French and told him, “I don’t get it,” in English.

  He went into one of his pantomimes. His eyes darted around the room until he saw my box of matches on the bedside table with my cigarettes. He grabbed the box and opened it and pulled out a match, and pantomimed lighting it. He walked over to me, giving a wonderful imitation of a man protecting the flame of a match, and then very carefully he bent over and went through the motions of touching the flame to the Oxford Book of English Verse.

  “Liv’ boolay, toot boolay,” he said, and straightened up to see if I’d got it this time.

  “Livres brûlés!” I cried out. “Books burnt—all the books burnt?”

  He gave that delighted cackle again and began showing me how a big fire had been built. He made the motions of throwing book after book into the fire, and finally he dug a hole and buried the ashes.

  I felt goose flesh popping out on me at the thought of books being burnt alive; and out there, where you needed books so much and they were so hard to get, the burning had the scary quality of pointless violence.

  I made the motions of throwing books on the fire myself, and asked Albert, “Monsieur Henri ?”

  “Oui-oui,” he said. “Monsieur Henri,” and he became for a moment Henri, throwing books onto the fire and watching them burn.

  I went in to lie down for another cigarette. The goosefleshy feeling went away and a completely puzzled one took its place. I lay there watching the cigarette smoke curl and drift in the heavy air. Then after a while I went to sleep. I woke up for lunch feeling logy, and it wasn’t much help dousing my head in the washbasin of tepid water. We had a good lunch, fresh tomatoes and canned corned beef. Henri seemed more communicative but now I had my own reasons for feeling standoffish.

  “What would you like to do this afternoon?” he asked. “There are some boiling springs nearby—if you like boiling springs. That’s just about all, within an afternoon’s reach.”

  “I think I’ll just lie around some more,” I said. “I can take an awful lot of sleep. Do you suppose I could find a book somewhere?”

  “The Boutegourdes have a lot of standard stuff—classics and that kind of thing,” he said, without batting an eyelash. “Gérôme might have something livelier. Shall I go ask him for something?”

  “I’d enjoy going myself,” I said. “How will you spend the afternoon?”

  “If you really don’t want to do anything special I’ll put in some more token time at the lab,” he said, and after lunch he told me how to get to Gérôme’s and left.

  All the houses on the place were within a few minutes’ walk of one another but isolated by differences in level and clumps of thinned-out bush. It took me maybe ten minutes to walk to Gérôme’s. The grounds of the station were naturally beautiful in spite of being badly kept up. There were lackadaisical natives around about, listlessly making a show of sickling grass or chopping undergrowth. Gérôme’s house was an awkward cement structure that had been painted a sort of yellow color, now mostly chipped or washed off. But the house was solid and the living room looked comfortable enough in an ungainly way. Gérôme let me into it with a surprised polite smile, running his fingers through his uncombed hair, so that I thought I must have caught him lying down. We made a little polite talk for a while but nothing we said amounted to anything except one thing:

  “I’d like to borrow a book, if you have one you can lend me,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Gérôme. “Take any you want.” He showed me his three or four dozen books lined up between book ends. “But if you couldn’t find anything at Henri’s, I’m afraid you won’t want any of mine. He’s got a much better collection.”

  I picked out a book of chit-chat about Paris celebrities called Gens du théâtre que j’ai connu by a kind of French gossip columnist, and when I got back to Henri’s I undressed again and lay down and read for a while. I couldn’t keep my mind on it and I went to sleep again, until Albert woke me up to take a bath and get dressed for dinner at the Boutegourdes’.

  The Boutegourdes’ house was what you would expect—like Gérôme’s but smaller and uglier. When Henri and I got there the cell-like living room was already crowded with the three Boutegourdes, the mousy woman, and the freckled carroty-haired woman, and too much big heavy furniture that was just as bad as what the Boutegourdes would have had back in Belgium. There was an overpowering display of spears and arrows on one wall, but Madame Boutegourde made Papa keep his devil masks and fetishes hidden away. The mousy woman was a New Englander—Miss Emily Collins, missionary, from Milford, Connecticut, a long time ago. The red-headed one was Miss Mary Finney, M.D., medical missionary, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1892. They had a regular itinerary that they covered in a broken-down station wagon. They had been here ever since André had been taken sick, so that Miss Finney could take care of him, but ordinarily they would show up at the Congo-Ruzi for two or three days every couple of months on their regular rounds. Miss Finney would doctor and Miss Collins would take care of the spiritual needs of the natives by teaching them to sing hymns like Will There Be Any Stars in my Crown, in my Crown, translated into Lingala and accompanied by six drums. Henri was a dawdler, and by the time we got to the Boutegourdes’ everybody had highballs except little Miss Collins and Gabrielle, who had glasses of pineapple wine. We came to the door and Miss Finney was waving her glass around and saying to Papa Boutegourde, “My God, César, I don’t see how you can say it. You saw him as well as I did, lying there with his throat cut from ear to ear and half the flesh stripped off his back.” As we came in the door she glanced over and said, “Oh, h’lo Henri, h’lo Mr. Taliaferro,” and then went on scolding Papa Boutegourde. “If it wasn’t for my medical oath,” she said, “I wouldn’t touch another of your goddam M’bukus with a ten-foot hypodermic. You’re crazy.” Madame Boutegourde greeted us and showed us a couple of chairs in a hostessy manner. Gabrielle smiled and nodded and Papa Boutegourde fetched a couple of highballs for us and there was the rigmarole of becoming part of the group. When we got settled I said, “Don’t let us interrupt you, Miss Finney. What’s a goddam M’buku?”

  “Have I been swearing again?” asked Miss Finney.

  “You know you have, Mary Finney,” said Miss Collins.

  “Every time I swear, Emily busts into tears,” said Miss Finney.

  “I do not,” said Emily.

  “You do too,” said Miss Finney, and Miss Collins
gave it up. Henri stepped into the breach. “Albert’s a M’buku,” he said. “They’re the leading tribe around here. Miss Finney hasn’t much to say for them.”

  “They’re the meanest blacks in the Congo, I’ll say that much for them,” Miss Finney told him.

  “But Albert doesn’t strike me as being mean,” I said. “I like him.” I felt sorry for Miss Collins, who was fiddling nervously with the hem of her skirt and looking pretty well squashed. She had a pallid, grainy face with light brown eyes and scanty hair crimped in some kind of patent waver. I said to her, “Miss Collins, do you approve of the way Albert wears his saints’ medals and his jujus on the same string?”

  “Well,” she answered me, “I always say you have to meet the natives half way. Especially these M’bukus.” She was sitting on the edge of a low chair with her knees pressed together and her feet apart and pigeon-toed. She kept pulling her skirt down tight around her knees. “Anyway,” she added, “Albert doesn’t wear his jujus for religious reasons. He wears them for medical reasons.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Emily,” said Miss Finney. “Why don’t you just give up and admit you can’t do anything with Albert?” She turned to me. “Emily’s the soul-snatcher in this outfit,” she said, “and I’m the doctor. We represent the body and the spirit between us. God knows why we haven’t killed each other during the last twenty-five years, but we haven’t.”

  “I don’t give up and admit anything of the kind,” said Miss Collins. “Albert’s been a very faithful boy.”

  Miss Finney grunted.

  “He’s been a very syphilitic boy,” she said. “You needn’t worry, though, Henri—I gave him that examination this morning and you just keep on giving him the injections.” Henri nodded; all that evening he just sat and watched the rest of us, relaxed in his chair and looking as if he enjoyed it, but saying hardly anything at all.

  Miss Collins coughed daintily and nervously, took the tiniest sip of her drink, set it down on the table by her side, and pulled at her hem.

  “Emily,” said Miss Finney, “if you pull that damn skirt one more time you’re going to have it right down off your neck. After the things we’ve done the last twenty-five years I should think you could take a little reference to syphilis without fidgeting. You’ve got a chronic case of New England girlhood, that’s what you’ve got.” She added as an afterthought: “I’d rather have syphilis.”

  Miss Collins coughed again and glanced meaningfully at Gabrielle.

  “Oh, that,” said Miss Finney. All this had been in English. She said in French, “Gaby, did you understand what we were saying?”

  Gabrielle said in English, “Not very much of it.” She had a very strong and very delightful accent. She was wearing what I thought must be the same dress she had worn at the funeral, but she had added a pretty bunch of bright cloth flowers at one shoulder and a bright soft belt. And tonight the dress didn’t fit too tight across the front. Her breasts stood out beneath the cloth and you could see them beginning to swell where the neckline was cut. I looked at them as little as I could, but it was hard to keep from it.

  “You may like Albert,” said Miss Finney, “but you better be careful how you let an arm or leg hang out from under the mosquito net. He’s only one generation removed from cannibalism. His tribe used to hunt pygmies the way they hunted antelopes, and for the same reason, too.”

  “No,” said Papa Boutegourde. “Not for the same reason. For sport, not for food. No human being ever ate another because he tasted good.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” interrupted Miss Finney.

  Somehow all the words she used sounded abrupt and rude, but she spoke with such an air of honest good humor that the effect was warm and friendly. “They eat each other because the eater will absorb the desirable qualities of the eaten. They used to make sterile M’buku women eat parts of pygmy women because pygmy women are fertile as rabbits. Well, you can have my share.”

  “Really, Mary,” breathed Miss Collins, but I looked at Gabrielle and she was smiling at them.

  Miss Finney said, “César, you ever eat stewed pygmy? You’ve eaten everything else.”

  “Not quite everything,” said Papa Boutegourde modestly. His eyes lit up behind his spectacles and Madame Boutegourde looked apprehensive. “Grasshoppers, yes—and caterpillars and monkey and snake,” he said, “but not everything. Not that piece of elephant’s trunk. I tried, I tried very hard,” he said, and Madame Boutegourde began to look as if her worst fears were about to be realized, “but it was too much for me. It was cut into round pieces like Bologna sausage and fried. It would have been all right, but for those two little holes in each piece. No, they were too much, those two—”

  “César!” wailed Madame Boutegourde. “Not before my dinner!”

  Miss Collins choked on her wine and set it down quickly while she groped for her handkerchief. She got hold of herself and said, “Never mind me,” and sat there fanning herself.

  “No, for goodness sake never mind, Emily,” said Miss Finney. “You haven’t heard anything yet. Mr. Taliaferro, you ever hear of the M’buku rebellion?”

  “Only the name,” I said. “Wasn’t it around Bafwali?”

  Papa Boutegourde looked puzzled. “What gave you that idea?” he said. “No, it was on one of our own plantations, only forty miles from here—our own little rebellion.”

  “I wouldn’t be proud of it, César,” said Madame Boutegourde.

  Miss Finney said, “It’s a fine bloody story. Let me tell Mr. Taliaferro. I never minded what happened to Duclerc, nasty little thing. You see, Mr. Taliaferro—oh, for goodness sake, what’s your first name?”

  “Hooper.”

  “Well, this nasty little Duclerc was subadministrator and after the natives had worked out their road-tax—they all pay a road-tax in labor—he kept them working on his own plantation, and no pay.”

  “And a gun and whip to back him up, remember that,” said Papa Boutegourde.

  “All right, a gun and whip to back him up. I guess there was a lot to be said for the natives,” admitted Miss Finney. “But he made his mistake when he hired a couple of Kitusis to stand guard.”

  Papa Boutegourde interrupted. “The Kitusis had always warred on the M’bukus,” he said, sounding like a classroom lecturer all of a sudden, “but even in the old days, the M’bukus hadn’t eaten Kitusi flesh because they regarded the Kitusis as their inferiors. However, when Duclerc hired—”

  “I started this,” Miss Finney broke in. “I know you know everything about native history and customs, César, but I’m trying to get to the bloody part. Hoopie’s a tourist.”

  Papa Boutegourde shrugged and settled down to his drink.

  “Well,” said Miss Finney with a certain relish, “it was the most excitement this place ever saw. Three M’bukus got the Kitusis, then they went on and got Duclerc. Damn fool, if he hadn’t hired the Kitusis he’d have got away with it. White men are still sort of demigods out here, but not when they play with Kitusis. They dragged Duclerc out of his house into the bush and cut his throat and took three strips of flesh off the back of his shoulders. I suppose,” she said, “they cut his throat first. I know they ate the flesh.”

  Madame Boutegourde moaned faintly. “My dinner,” she murmured.

  “That’s all,” said Miss Finney. “It’s a nice story for tourists and happens to be true into the bargain. They got one of the M’bukus alive and hanged him right there on the plantation.”

  I wondered why André de l’Andréneau had told me about the hanging but claimed it was in Bafwali. But I only asked, “Who hanged him?”

  Papa Boutegourde said, “They asked me to, but I couldn’t bring myself to it. Monsieur de l’Andréneau volunteered.”

  Madame Boutegourde said miserably, “Does anybody here still feel able to eat my dinner? I have palm-oil chop.”

  You could eat palm-oil chop at the foot of the gallows and enjoy it. It’s the tough Congo chicken stewed into melting tenderness in palm oi
l, red peppers, and its own juice, then garnished with crystallized lemon peel, candied chestnuts, ripe olives, cinnamon sticks, pickled peaches, and anything else you can think of.

  I took Gabrielle into the dining room, and Madame Boutegourde had put us together on one side of the table, with Henri between Miss Finney and Miss Collins on the other.

  “It’s a very pretty dress,” I said to Gabrielle as we sat down.

  “I am very happy if you like it,” she said. “It’s the same one I had on this morning. I only added the flowers and the belt.” Everyone was making sit-down conversation with somebody else. For a moment Gabrielle and I were talking to one another with nobody else in on it. She said: “And I let it out some, too.” She looked at me with a little smile and added, “—as I think you have noticed.”

  She took me so by surprise that I stammered like a fool. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who would be giving you a lead, but at the same time it hadn’t sounded like a rebuke. She turned her eyes away from me in a manner that was a dismissal, and picked up her napkin. As she unfolded it in her lap she smiled at Henri across the table.

  “It’s so nice to have you here again, Henri,” she said. “How is Dodo?”

  She kept that same calm manner all through dinner, but I noticed something else. Under the shield of the table she would clench her napkin or twist it in her fingers. Then she would stop, but before long she would be at it again, her hands twisting and clenching until the napkin was moist and crumpled all over.

  The next morning Henri took me to the building that served as administration center and laboratory for the station.

  Gérôme de l’Andréneau was late and Henri went back to the laboratory to get it in order. Gabrielle was at a desk back of a typewriter, and handed me a letter that she said the poste had brought on its trip back from Costermansville. It was a long letter of instructions from Tommy Slattery, who was head of our mission in Léopoldville. I saw it was mostly routine stuff, but at the end there was a page scribbled in Tommy’s own hand, so I stopped to read it: