The Devil in the Bush

by Matthew Head

  I said, “Your partner certainly takes over in a big way when she takes over.”

  Miss Collins turned on me like a field mouse protecting its litter and said, “Don’t you dare say a word against Mary Finney! She’s a wonderful woman!” She pranced off in the direction of the kitchen to make my sandwich.

  I hadn’t intended to say a word against Mary Finney, but as I lay in bed that night I thought over all she had said about Henri, and although I couldn’t deny that there was no place I could punch a hole in what she had worked out, I knew that Henri was a good man, and I wished that I knew the absolute straight of the thing, not just a synthesis of it as Miss Finney worked it up. I couldn’t help knowing that however right she might prove to be in her facts, the very facts could lie about a man so that they distorted our image of him.

  I went over to the Boutegourdes’ according to orders the next morning. Miss Collins and Papa Boutegourde were all packed up and ready to go. Miss Finney came in half an hour later, looking grim, her mouth set in a hard line I had never seen on her face before. She drank a cup of coffee while the rest of us ate a decent breakfast to fortify ourselves, then she ordered Miss Collins and Papa Boutegourde into the station wagon, and said that when Jacqueline and Henri showed up, the four of us would follow in my truck and Henri’s car. She said that if we didn’t pass them on the road they should reserve rooms for everybody at the Grand Hotel de Bruxelles in Costermansville where Gaby and Madame Boutegourde were already supposed to be. One more thing, she said—if they saw a car coming up the road from Costermansville it would probably be the officials coming up to the station. They should try to wave this car down and tell the officials to look out for us, Miss Finney and me, on the road. She would tell them all about things, and come back to the station with them if necessary. This sounded phony to me, as did a lot of what she said with that new tight look of hers. But Miss Collins and Papa Boutegourde got into the station wagon without questions, and drove off.

  Miss Finney said to me, “We’ll give them an hour’s start. I don’t want to overtake them.”

  “Anyway we’re waiting for Henri and Jacqueline,” I reminded her.

  “You know perfectly well we aren’t,” she said, but she spoke without her old snap. “We’re leaving them behind.” It was a grim ride to Costermansville. Miss Finney slept, or pretended to sleep, most of the way. Now and then we made desultory talk, avoiding any mention of anything we were thinking about.

  We did meet the officials on their way up from Costermansville, four of them, their car parked at the roadside where Miss Collins and Papa Boutegourde had told them to stop and watch for us.

  “No, you stay here, Hoop,” Miss Finney told me, as I started to climb out of the truck after her. She made me drive ahead about forty feet and wait for her, but I could look back as I was parked there and I watched her talking to the men. Whatever she was telling them, she was getting a fine set of reactions. Her back was to me but I could see the faces of the men, amazed, incredulous, and full of concern. She talked to them twenty minutes or so, then I saw them lift their helmets to her with obvious respect, and she came back and climbed into the truck beside me and we went on. She remained quiet and unapproachable all the rest of the way to Costermansville except once when she reached into her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and dropped it in my lap. I recognized it by the smear of blood that I had wiped off my hand that night. It had dried to its dull brown color. “Through with it?” I asked.

  “I’m through with it,” she said without expression. “I’m through with the whole thing.” We rode on for a long time before she added, “I thought I might need that smear of blood if Henri destroyed his clothes, but I’m not going to after all.” She wouldn’t say anything more and when I threw the handkerchief out the window she made no comment. We got to the hotel in time for a late supper. When the others asked where Jacqueline and Henri were, Miss Finney told them they had gone back with the officials. After supper we went right up to our rooms.

  Miss Finney stopped at her doorway and said, “Come in a minute, Hoopie.”

  I followed her in and she closed the door. She paced up and down uneasily for a moment or two and then went suddenly over to her suitcase and took out a fat white envelope. “You might as well have it now,” she said abruptly.

  Harshly, I would have thought, if I hadn’t known she was covering up another emotion. “Let me give you the background. I wrote Henri that letter yesterday afternoon that I told you I was going to. I took it over to his house. Albert was still there. He said Henri was asleep, but wanted to be waked in an hour. I gave the letter to Albert and told him to give it to Henri when he woke him.”

  She paused, the white envelope in her hand, and I reached for it.

  She drew it away. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You know what I wrote in my letter. What we talked about yesterday afternoon. I also told him that if I found an answer to my letter in Gérôme’s desk in the laboratory at seven o’clock this morning, we would all leave the station without him and Jacqueline. But that if I came there at seven o’clock and found him there himself instead of a letter, I would know there was something to talk over. Well, his letter was there. Here it is. I read it this morning before I saw you. You read it now.”

  She went over to the bed and lay down, turning her face away from me. I went over to a chair in the other corner of the room and took the letter out of the envelope. I still have it; Miss Finney let me keep it after they had photostated it for the records. It translates into this:

  Dear Miss Finney:

  You can imagine that I have difficulty in beginning this letter. I think it will be easier to continue with it. I want you to know the things you are curious about—not to satisfy your curiosity but in a way to justify myself. You have not asked for an explanation of what happened concerning Gérôme’s death, but I can see that you are avid for it. Of course you are right in virtually all of your deductions concerning the death of André. But I believe you have run away with yourself in exaggerating the callousness of my nature, and the extremity of the means I was willing to adopt when I found myself entangled in a desperate situation. Perhaps upon getting further away from the whole thing you would have begun to be less harsh in your assumptions. I am not trying to call myself good. I am not trying to appear altogether the victim of evil circumstance, or at all the tool of a vicious woman; I hope that anyone can see that I am man enough not to have been led wherever Jacqueline chose. But according to your present thinking it would appear to anyone that I had been. For that reason I am writing this to show you the truth, so that when this terrible business becomes known within the next few days, you will not spread any further your exaggerated idea of my villainy. I have not a great many friends in the Congo, and God knows what has happened to those I had in Belgium, but I would not want anybody to think any worse of me than I deserve, which is bad enough. I am even particularly concerned for the opinion of one person I know not well at all—the American, who must have received from all of us the most sordid and fantastic picture of life in our bush, that life which is usually sheer unromantic boredom, the marking of time until we can get back to civilization, but which at our station broke into such a nightmare of melodrama. The American is interested in native art; I have already given him my best piece, the ivory fetish, but if there is anything else in my house that he wants, will you see that he gets it? I cannot think of anybody else who would like to have anything of mine, unless Gabrielle would like the pictures on the living room wall that my brother painted, since Jeannette was fond of these. Everything of Jeannette’s own I have destroyed, for the reason that you supposed. I wish that I had saved for Gaby the book of native legends she was helping Jeannette with. I know she would have liked having it, but I was destroying everything in a clean sweep. This is the last time I shall mention Jeannette in this letter, just as it is the last time I shall mention her in my life.

  Your letter is mercilessly detailed and explicit. André discovered
the relationship between Jacqueline and myself some months ago, no matter how, although you would enjoy hearing it. He was of course neither shocked nor resentful, having been what he was. I think that at first his strongest reaction was one of low-comedy amusement at his brother’s cuckoldom. He had never liked Gérôme’s living at his ease in Europe while André was sent to the Congo to rot away. I have always taken it for granted that André’s family sent him out here as a young man because he was a wastrel at home. When the Company began to fail, André was pleased at his elder brother’s misfortune in having to leave his good life in Europe for the hardships and monotony of the colony, but he was irritated when Gérôme began making serious efforts to reorganize the station, and to force André himself into some kind of effort and responsibility. Naturally André was delighted at the final humiliation of his brother—the discovery of Jacqueline’s adultery—for I think André had also envied Gérôme the possession of a wife who so obviously excelled in the only quality which André demanded in a woman.

  You are right that I was sick of Jacqueline, of her constant carping against Gérôme and the misfortune which had allied her to him, when actually she could have expected much worse from her life. I was sick of her jealousy, her frantic self-pity, and her hysterical demands as my mistress, which she regarded as a permanent alliance. I had never expected the thing to develop into more than the usual run of a hundred other affairs which begin the same way and end through sheer loss of momentum after the excitement of the preliminaries and the novelty of the first few weeks have passed. I think that if events had not taken the turn they did after André found us out, I would have chucked the whole thing and taken whatever consequences Jacqueline wanted to force.

  André never asked me for money, but when he began to realize the weapon which had fallen to him, he began to amuse himself in a dozen ways. He began by coming to my house and carrying away whisky whenever he wanted it. He grew fond of making sluttish remarks for which I would ordinarily have hit him. He adopted the attitude that he and I shared a filthy secret, and when he could find Jacqueline alone his conversation was a stream of obscenities.

  He came to my house one evening and asked for whisky and sat there drinking it. He revealed a depth of nastiness that I had never suspected, and hinted that I was expected to respond with technical descriptions of my intimacies with Jacqueline. I told him that he was not worth hitting like a man, and slapped his face. I told him that he could tell Gérôme what he chose and be damned. As far as its effect on myself was concerned, I had never cared whether André told Gérôme or not, since at the worst I would only have had to go through with an unpleasant scene and find a new job, which I was eager to do in any case. I would in fact have been cut loose from everything that bound me in this impossible situation, but I had some responsibility toward Jacqueline and I had nothing against Gérôme. I would have spared him this humiliation if André had not forced me beyond my limit.

  Instead of going to Gérôme, André went to Jacqueline. She was frantic. Gérôme would divorce her without a penny; she had no dowry or property of her own, and she knew I had none to help her. André’s asking price for his silence was what you have guessed it was, and Jacqueline agreed to meet him in Bafwali where Gérôme was sending him to pack up what was left in the house there. When she asked me for the dysentery culture I gave it to her, and if that is murder I am guilty of it. André did not seem human to me. Extermination is what I would call it.

  When Jacqueline got back to the station last night she had seen you and knew that André had died, but she wanted to know exactly how things stood. Instead of going to Gérôme’s she came to my house. That was when Gabrielle heard the car; it is difficult to judge the distance of sounds here at night, and she could not have heard the car anyway after it turned into the thick bush along my lane. Gabrielle must have been in her room, or on the bush path to the promontory, not to have heard Jacqueline leave in the car later.

  It was true, as I told you, that I had gone to sleep early that night, but I had undressed and gone to bed. Jacqueline came to my room and woke me. She sat on my bed and I told her that everything had gone off all right. I saw no reason to tell her of your unusual interest in my dysentery cultures. She was limp with relief and said she was going to pour herself a drink. I told her she was taking a chance, that Gérôme might have been hoping she would arrive that night and could be listening for the car, but she was insistent. She brought back a drink for me too, and we were drinking them when Gérôme burst in on us.

  My first feeling, and probably Jacqueline’s, was that in addition to knowing now that Jacqueline had deceived him, Gérôme also knew she had poisoned André. That impression stayed with me through all the rush of events and confusion of that night, and in some illogical way it was terror of the peril in which this discovery would have placed us which helped sustain me through some of the things I had to force myself to do. It was not until later that I realized that André had no reason to suspect that he had contracted dysentery in anything but the usual way, so he could not have accused us to Gérôme.

  Gérôme was white and trembling with shock and humiliation. I should have known that as fecal a nature as André’s would have found one of its last pleasures in using the form of a death-bed confession to wound his brother with the pointless revelation of his wife’s infidelity. Gérôme had not believed it at first, and then had tried to convince himself that André had spoken in some kind of delirium. He had made a point of referring to Jacqueline as casually as usual around the station, and he had asked me to dinner to see whether he could read anything from my attitude toward him as my host. He had spent days torn between his effort to rationalize back into their innocence a hundred circumstances which now appeared suspicious, and the mounting conviction that André had known what he was saying and had told the truth. And now he saw for himself.

  Jacqueline lost her head completely and tried to answer that she had come to my house to discover whether Gérôme was all right before she went to him. Nothing could have been more ridiculous after two years of pretending that she wouldn’t speak to me, and Gérôme gave it the wild laugh it deserved. He asked her if she couldn’t see the whisky in her hand and her lover lying naked in his bed.

  His trembling gave way to an access of fury and he grabbed Jacqueline by the wrists and dragged her from the room. By the time I had got up and pulled on a pair of pants I found them out on the veranda, close to the edge of the steps. He had her by the shoulders and was shaking her so that she snapped and twisted like a rag in the wind. I thought he was killing her, and I struck him hard enough so that he let her go and turned on me. Jacqueline slumped to the floor and when Gérôme lunged for me I hit him as hard as I could. I saw him fall backwards down the steps, then his whole body twisted over in a gyration that bent his neck under it, and he lay face down on the grass.

  Jacqueline was sobbing for breath but I ran to Gérôme. I turned him over and felt for his pulse and his heartbeat. Jacqueline dragged herself gasping and choking down the steps and began beating Gérôme on the chest with both fists. I told her to stop, that he was dead.

  So that was how it happened. We pulled ourselves together and got through the rest of that night on the reserves of strength that shock and terror unloose. I don’t know how much chance I thought we had of successful deception, but there was nowhere else to try to throw suspicion except on the natives, and there was very little time to think things through. Jacqueline told me that she would make up her own story and plant her own evidence of Gérôme being attacked by natives; the less I knew about it the less likely I was to give it away inadvertently, she said. My whole story was to have been that I had slept through that night, simply that. I do not know yet exactly what Jacqueline told you about herself and Gérôme.

  I got the body to the promontory and did to it what Gabrielle saw me doing, not with the circumcision knife, which was dull, but with my pocket jackknife, which I carried back with me and which served me on Do
do later. After that I threw it in the bush. The circumcision knife was Jacqueline’s idea, and you are right, it was too much. If I had been anything but half crazed I would have known how inconsistent the knife was with what we wanted you to think the natives had done.

  You know most of the rest. When I got back to my place I was too sick with horror and exhaustion to do more than sit down on the steps and cry with relief that it was all over. Dodo came out of her hut and stood at her stockade watching me. When I saw the lights of your truck down at the end of the lane I knew only one thing, that I had to explain the blood on my hands and my clothes. There was only one way to do it. Killing Dodo was as hard as anything I had to do that night. You stayed at the end of the lane for several minutes; it gave me time to get my rifle and fire it into the air twice. You were right about the eagle; he couldn’t have waked me as I said, because he didn’t scream until after you heard the shots.

  I thought I was going to be able to hold out until you and Taliaferro had left me, but I got sick when you said I might have had worse than antelope blood on my hands. I have, so I am not sorry for what I have to do next.

  Henri Debuc

  When I felt able to speak, I said to Miss Finney, “Do you know anything more?”

  She said, without turning her head toward me, “No, nothing more.” Her voice gave out on her and it was a long time before she was able to say: “There’s a lot of morphine in the laboratory. I hope they thought of doing it that way.”

  I have the things from Henri’s house—the fetish he gave me, and the canoe paddles and the pottery and his other things. I have lent them, except for the fetish, to the University museum, where they are taking on that air of never having been alive that native work gets in a white man’s museum. I hope someday to revive them when I have something more than a single room to live in. The circumcision knife went to the museum in Léopoldville after it was released from the files of evidence.