The Devil in the Bush

by Matthew Head

  P.S.—The 4th of July blowout was a great success. Everybody came, even the Governor General. Somebody brought along a Madame de l’Andréneau who has just blown into town. Hod—ziggady! Bad timing, Hoop, you there and her here. T.

  P.S. again. Later. You may see her after all. She’s going back to the Congo-Ruzi because of somebody’s sickness or something. The hod-ziggady still goes. Don’t forget you work here.

  Tommy Slattery had an infallible instinct when it came to what he always called the hod-ziggadies, but my taste didn’t always agree with his, so the only thing I knew for sure about this Madame de l’Andréneau was that Tommy’s instinct told him she was pretty easily available.

  I folded the letter and slipped it into my pocket, and said to Gabrielle:

  “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “I help out,” she said. The morning was still fresh and pleasant and Gabrielle was a perfect part of it. She wasn’t working yet—just sitting, with a breeze coming in the window and blowing her hair a little bit.

  “Gabrielle,” I said, “you’re an awfully pretty girl.”

  “I am very happy if—” she began, but she knocked it off and finished up with just a “Thanks.”

  “What shall I call you?” she asked. “You have such a funny name.”

  “Hoop,” I said.

  “’Oop,” she repeated. “That’s funny too!”

  “The way you say it it is,” I said, “but I like it.”

  “I shall call you ’Oop. Sit down.” She patted the desk top beside her, and I went over and sat down on it.

  “Gabrielle—” I said.

  “Gaby, most people say.”

  “I don’t like it. It makes me think of Gaby Deslys or somebody like that, not you. I like Gabrielle.”

  “Gabrielle, then. What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say that if this were America, I’d ask you to go to a movie or to a dance somewhere.”

  “Oh, I wish we could!” she cried out. “This place—!” She checked herself and went on in her calm way, “Girls must have a wonderful time in America. They’re all beautiful and they have lovely legs and beautiful clothes and they do as they please.”

  She had lovely legs herself. “What can we do here?” I asked her. “Something we don’t have to do with everybody else.”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Then we haven’t a chance for a date?” I didn’t know a French word for “date” so I used the English one.

  “Date? What’s that, date?”

  When I explained to her she said, “No wonder we don’t have a word for it. We don’t even have it. Mama or Papa would have to come along, even if we were engaged.”

  “Well,” I said, “what can we do about it?”

  “Nothing,” she said, “not a thing.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Very too bad,” said Gabrielle. “I would like so much to have just one date.”

  She got up and took a step to the window and stood looking out. Outside the window there was a beautiful blue sky with mounds of pearly clouds; there were mountains; there was a gaudy fever tree hung with its crazy flowers. “Here comes Gérôme,” she said.

  She turned and faced me, with her back to the window, so the light was behind her. I remembered a woman in a mussy bedroom in Bafwali, but it couldn’t have been Gabrielle. She wasn’t smiling any more and she said, “If I could have just one date like an American girl! You know, ’Oop—how would Mademoiselle Finney say it?” She groped for a minute and then said in English, with her wonderful accent, “Miss Finney would say this is a ’ell of a place, ’Oop. ’Oop, it is. It is one ’ell of a place, one ’ell of a place.”

  Sweetness on the desert air, I thought. But I had a question to ask.

  “Before Gérôme gets here,” I said, “is there a Madame de l’Andréneau?”

  “Why yes—Jacqueline.”

  “I mean what is she,” I asked, “mother, wife, widow, or what?”

  “Gérôme’s wife,” said Gabrielle. “What makes you ask about her? She’s in—oh, maybe you met her, in Léopoldville. She’ll be back here any day now, I guess—do you like her a lot?”

  “I don’t even know her,” I said.

  “Then why are you so curious about her?”

  “I’m not so curious about her.”

  “You ask questions about her.”

  “I only want to know what she’s like,” I said.

  Gabrielle opened her mouth, but just then Gérôme came through the door. I said to Gabrielle, “Sorry about the date.”

  “A ’ell of a place,” she whispered, and then aloud, “Bon jour, Gérôme.”

  Gérôme, Henri, and Papa Boutegourde took me all over the station that morning. What I thought of it can best be summed up by part of a letter I wrote back to Tommy Slattery:

  Dear Tommy,

  I feel in a spot, but there’s nothing to do about it. These people are so nice to me that it’s going to be heartbreaking to turn in the report I’ll have to turn in. Remains of a flourishing station everywhere you look but in no condition worth our while to rebuild. Monsieur Boutegourde does whatever is done around here. He showed me his new seed-beds (for pyrethrum marriages, if that means anything to you) which are very good as far as they go but completely inadequate for the job. There’s an old grove of cinchona trees that could have been the basis of a quinine program if the original plans, begun about fifteen years ago, had been carried through—but like everything else here, it’s gone to pot. They’ve been working hard on pyrethrum since the price went up but they’ve only met average production standards.

  It’s a shame because the place could be so good. Management has been just plain rotten or nonexistent. The laboratory technician and general assistant, Henri Debuc, seems like a nice fellow but for some reason he has laid down on the job after getting off to a good start five years ago.

  Most of this decay is the fault of André de l’Andréneau, that we had the correspondence with. I got here to find him just dead—amoebic dysentery, and I hope you’re having the lettuce washed in permanganate as I told you. Two years ago his brother Gérôme came up here to see if he could save anything from the wreck of the company. Seems they had plantations all around Bafwali too, but lost them, and Gérôme came up here to try to get this area’s concessions into working order as well as to get the experimental side of the station into something like operation. Gérôme is head of the whole shebang; André was director of the station and more or less of the concessions in this district. The plantation owners are dropping out as fast as they can get rid of their contracts. In short, the Congo-Ruzi is on the skids.

  I’ll write this into a formal report later but I thought I’d let you have the word. I got your letter— including the P.S’s. I’ve decided to leave here in the morning so unless she gets here today I’ll miss your Madame Hod-Ziggady. (She’s Gérôme’s wife.) The way you talk she sounds like Dr. Slattery’s Favorite Remedy. She’ll have to be really something to shade out a very sweet number named Gabrielle who is up here wasting her sweetness on the desert air, but this one is strictly a nice kid, although I know your theory about all women over the age of fourteen.

  It took most of the morning to go all around the station. When we got back, Miss Finney was waiting in the office with Gabrielle.

  “Henri,” she said, “where’s my culture on André?”

  “Do you mean to say you want to see that thing again?” asked Henri. “It’s right there in the laboratory.”

  “With a hundred others, it is. I can’t find it in all that mess you’ve got.”

  Henri said, “I’ll show it to you, but you know it’s amoebic.”

  “Sure I know it’s amoebic, but I want to see it all the same,” Miss Finney said. “I like to look at it. You got anything else interesting?”

  “Not much,” said Henri. “That ear fungus smear you brought in is ready, if you think that would be fun too.”

  “
Henri’s wonderful,” Miss Finney said to me. “He can do anything. He makes all these cultures and everything and he’s got some wonderful slides. If only we had a better microscope. Henri, you ever get sections of that tumor I brought in?”

  “If Henri can ‘do anything’,” said Papa Boutegourde abruptly, “it’s too bad he does nothing.”

  Henri only smiled. “If you don’t need me, Gérôme,” he said, “I’ll take Miss Finney into the laboratory.”

  “I excuse myself also,” said Papa Boutegourde. “I am sorry, Monsieur Taliaferro, that we hadn’t better to show you.” I hadn’t said anything, but Papa Boutegourde wasn’t fooling himself, and he was in a bad mood.

  “Gabrielle,” he said, “are you coming now?”

  “I want to finish a little something,” Gabrielle said, although there wasn’t anything in the typewriter. “I’ll come along soon.”

  Papa Boutegourde said good-by and went out, and Gérôme and I went into his office and closed the door. Just before I went in I looked at Gabrielle. She looked at me like the cat that swallowed the canary, and I knew she was waiting there to tell me something.

  Gérôme de l’Andréneau lowered himself elegantly into the chair behind his desk, and began fooling with a pencil, turning it end over end slowly, watching it. He pursed his lips slightly as he watched the pencil, and his toothbrush mustache bristled out. Then he sighed and laid the pencil down with a sharp click, and said to me:

  “Well, Mr. Taliaferro, that is our little station. I am afraid I am not happy over what you probably think of it.”

  “There’s no point in stalling,” I said to him. “Our programs are emergency ones and you’re not in a position to get under way, even with the help we could give you.”

  “No,” said Gérôme, “I am afraid we are not.”

  He picked up the pencil again and concentrated on it, following it with his eyes as he turned it in slow somersaults. There wasn’t any reason for me to, but I felt like a dog. “Of course,” I said, “if I find we have anything to spare that would help you, there’s a bare chance we might work in the Congo-Ruzi on one of our programs—perhaps the pyrethrum. But everything’s awfully tight—”

  He laid the pencil down again and looked at me waver-ingly and said, “No, no, Mr. Taliaferro, if we are lost, we are lost. The Congo-Ruzi has been shrinking for years now. I came out here to save what was left, but I had had too little experience with it in Belgium. I lived off it only. Of course my brother André—but the less said about that the better. It wasn’t until our father died that I began to take the thing seriously.”

  “But this business of the emergency program doesn’t mean the life or death of the Congo-Ruzi Company,” I said.

  “Not exactly,” said Gérôme. “We can go on as a very small company but I’ll have to spend the rest of my life out here keeping it running. I can never afford to hire a manager and go back to Belgium to live on the income as I used to do. I had only hoped against hope that we might get in on the new programs. Well,” he said, forcing a cheery smile, “that is not your trouble and we will stop talking about it. In the meanwhile we enjoy your visit here.”

  I told him why I thought I had better leave the next morning.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Madame de l’Andréneau will be here tomorrow or the next day. If I let an American go before she gets here she’ll never forgive me. America is such a magic word. Poor Jacqueline, she was sure everything was going to be again the way it was in the old days when we were making money.”

  “I’m sorry about it.”

  “It isn’t your fault. Will you and Henri have dinner with me tonight? The rest will be there too.”

  I accepted for both of us and got up to go. He stood up too and pulled out his watch to look at it. The fob was made of a Congo one-franc piece.

  “Hello,” I said, “what’s that on your fob?”

  “A souvenir,” he said, and handed the watch to me. “Perhaps a rather grim souvenir. As a matter of fact, it was my fee for hanging a man. One franc.”

  I guess I looked surprised enough.

  “Only a native,” he said, “but still, I can say I have hanged a man. They paid me this one franc to make it legal.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “the M’buku rebellion. They were talking about it last night at the Boutegourdes’.” I tried to remember. They had said that Monsieur de l’Andréneau had done the hanging, they hadn’t said André or Gérôme.

  “Then you know all about it,” he said. “I came up here because the subadministrator was on one of our plantations. All the officials balked at the job, and—well, I did it for them.”

  I handed the watch back to him and he looked at it with obvious pleasure for a moment, and then dropped it back into his pocket.

  “You could have taken some of the rope and had it reworked into a fob-strap,” I hinted.

  “That’s true,” he said, pleased at the idea. “I still have the rope. Jacqueline wouldn’t let me keep it in the house. It’s in Bafwali—I gave it to André to store with the other things in our house there. I have a good collection of knives, but Jacqueline won’t let me keep them in the house either. Do you like this one?”

  He pulled open the drawer and took out my circumcision knife. It was even better than I had remembered it.

  I went through the routine of examining and admiring it. I handed it back to him and said, “Well—”

  “Good-by for now, then,” said Gérôme. “Until tonight.” I was so busy trying to figure it all out that I passed right by Gabrielle at her desk in the outer office.

  “’Oop!” she called.

  I went over to the desk.

  “What’s new?” I asked.

  “Did you ask me for a date?”

  “I said I would if I could. Can I? I do, now. How about a date?”

  “Of course,” she said. You never saw such a pretty smile.

  “When can you make it?” I asked.

  “Why, tonight, of course!” she said.

  “But I’ve got to have dinner with Gérôme. How—”

  “Me too,” said Gabrielle. “Afterwards. After we are through with dinner.”

  “Golly,” I said. “You pick up American ways fast. That’s a late date.”

  “Late date,” she repeated experimentally. “Here, take this.” It was an envelope.

  “Don’t open it now,” she said. “And don’t let Henri see it. He’s still in the laboratory with Miss Finney. I don’t want Henri to know anything about it. Or anybody. Now go away.” Outside I paused to rip open the envelope. She had penciled a little map of the station, with an X, at one spot, and little arrows showing how to get there.

  I stuck my head back in the door.

  “How do I get rid of Henri?” I asked.

  “You’ll just have to do something about him,” she said. “I can’t take care of everything.”

  I decided not to wait for Henri to get through in the laboratory with Miss Finney, so I started out on the way back to his house alone. I walked along mulling it over in my head and I began to see what had happened in Bafwali. That is, if Gérôme really was the hangman.

  When the bicyclist had first come up to me he had babbled along in French that was hard for me to understand, and then had stuck out his hand for me to shake. I suppose he had introduced himself and I had missed his name. And when I told him mine, he got only the pronunciation “Tolliver” instead of whatever he had been making out of “Taliaferro” in my letters. Then he had thrown this cock-and-bull story at me about the hanging and so on, even using the same phrases that Gérôme used when he told it. When he had already glamorized himself by taking credit for the whole adventure, he discovered who I was and that I was going to show up at the Congo-Ruzi station where I would meet Gérôme even if he, André, managed to wiggle out of seeing me. The hanging story was bound to come up, and he hadn’t any idea how to wiggle out of it. He would look pretty silly. He was willing to sacrifice the possibility of government help for the
Congo-Ruzi in order to save himself some trivial embarrassment, so he had tried to keep me from coming for my inspection.

  I heard a whistle and somebody running behind me. It was Henri. I waited and he caught up with me, panting a little bit.

  “Finish with Miss Finney?” I asked.

  “She’s crazy,” Henri said. We began walking along together. “She wanted to see that culture on André again. Then she kept going over all my old slides, that she knows by heart already, and asking all kinds of questions about them.”

  “She’s a nice person,” I said. “I like her. She makes an odd combination with Miss Collins, though.”

  “Don’t underestimate Emily Collins,” Henri said. “She may look like a mouse but she’s got the determination of a mad water buffalo.”

  “Miss Finney wouldn’t have stuck with her all this time if she weren’t some kind of real person,” I said. “Oh—Gérôme wants us for dinner.”

  He stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “Me?” he said.

  “Sure. He just now told me to tell you.”

  “Well I’ll be damned.” Henri laughed. “You’re a great asset to my social life. I haven’t had my foot inside Gérôme’s door for nearly two years.”

  “I’m not asking any questions,” I said. “The way you shut up on me yesterday morning, I’m not taking any more chances.”

  “I talked too much that first night,” he said, “but anybody would tell you about this. I don’t get along with Gérôme’s wife. It’s the damnedest thing. On a tiny station like this one, people have to watch their dinner lists as if it were diplomatic Lisbon. If Jacqueline’s going somewhere they have to see that I don’t get there, and vice versa and so on. It doesn’t make for easy living, but on the other hand it gives us something to do.”

  “What’s the matter between you two?” I asked.

  He spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance. “I’d answer that too, if I could,” he said. “It’s just that Jacqueline won’t have me around. I like her well enough. We got along fine when she first came here—saw a lot of each other, and I went to their house a lot. I swear I didn’t give her any reason to, but all of a sudden she froze up and—I don’t know what it was. She’s never offered any explanation, at least not any that has ever reached me. But she’s certainly unrelenting, whatever it is. Hardly speaks to me when I do see her by accident.”