In spite of their servant Laminah’s warning that, if they looked at the Devil, ‘Massa go blind. Missis go blind’, the Greenes had to go out into the night to relieve themselves at the edge of the forest, and afterwards, in the rest house, they lifted their screens to look out, but saw nothing; yet they had, that night, ‘almost believed in strange supernatural things’. In his diary, Greene quotes Saki: ‘When once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.’
Next day a storm burst and there was a vertical wall of water all day, the guard outside the Devil’s house waving the storm away with a black elephant-hair fan – there was no sound from the carriers, no dancing or singing – thirty of them were crushed into a small hut. At night rats like large cats rampaged in Greene’s hut so that he could not sleep.
Greene concluded that there was certainly something bad about Zigita. ‘I never felt quite well again until I reached the Coast. It was not that I believed in the devil’s power so much as in the power of my own mind. The suggestion of malice and evil here was so great that I could imagine it influencing my mind until I half believed, and a half-belief can be strong enough to affect the health.’38 From that last evening at Zigita Greene’s health began to suffer, and for the rest of the trip and for some time after he returned to England, he was, according to Barbara, unwell.39
Incredibly, given the country they had covered and their diverse experiences, only five weeks had passed since they left London.
They left Zigita in a mist so heavy that they could not see twenty yards ahead, but then, when the sun had sucked up the mist, they had all the ferocity of the African sun on a shadeless road. It sickened Greene even through his sun helmet.
They were heading for a Lutheran mission at Zorzor, and a messenger sent ahead met them with the promise of accommodation. The mission proved to be dirty and desolate, with a lady missionary living alone who inspired Barbara’s single harsh description in her book: ‘A large white lump, like bread before it is put in the oven to be baked.’ She felt that if she pressed her she would sink in and the dent would remain. ‘Someone had put two black currants into the dough for eyes, and her mouth was an old strip of orange peel.’40
She was a Mrs Curran, though Greene calls her Croup in his book, and she had been left to cope when her husband was drowned and the other missionary had gone off his head. She had been alone there, without seeing another white face, for six months and she was quite strange. She kept a cobra in her garden, fed it a chicken a day, and said to the Greenes, ‘I’d have sent you an invite to dinner but I’m going home in six months.’ She was desperately lonely.
As usual at a stop, Greene was faced with the problem of which way to go next. He felt that if he could reach Ganta and Dr Harley (a famous authority, incidentally, on Bush Devils), he would be given accurate advice on the rest of the journey. Mrs Curran advised them to cut across the corner of French Guinea to Ganta, making a first stay at Bamakama. Only gradually did Greene realise that this very fat woman had always travelled in a hammock with eighteen carriers and could not remember the names of any villages she had passed through. Her guide said that Bamakama was two days ahead and the shortest way was by Jbaiay, and in order to please his carriers, Greene decided to take the shortest way.
There were no rats that last night in Zorzor, but there were cockroaches – like large blood blisters against the wall. What Greene was chiefly to remember about Liberia was cockroaches eating their clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails and ants building their conical buildings or fastening on the flesh.
Then the carriers, deciding that he was planning to take them too far on the next day, led them astray to another village, whose name they never knew. In a note in her diary, Barbara writes: ‘he is convinced that the carriers are leading us out of our way, so that we shall not be able to reach Bamakama tonight. I am angry. Graham is angry. And … the carriers are all furious too.’41 The village was in French Guinea and that was all they knew. The carriers kept apart from them and talked in high angry voices. Just before sundown, when Graham was sponging himself down in a tin bath, his personal servant Amedoo came into the hut. Greene compares him to Jeeves advising Bertie Wooster – it was a strain living up to Amedoo’s standards of loyalty, honesty and complete reliability. He put the situation in a nutshell: ‘The labourers say they want more money. Massa say no.’ Greene had a strike on his hands.
He lingered in the bath and then the carriers approached and there was a long argument. Greene knew he was exploiting them, as other white masters had. He also knew that he could not go on without them. If he paid them off then, he could not afford to take on new carriers; if he cut the journey short and made for Monrovia, his money would still not last. Barbara watched the palaver, which lasted a long time, and though she could not hear what was going on she knew that the ‘carriers were growling and muttering at Graham. He looked calm, but some of his gestures were nervous … Suddenly I could see him decide to … bluff. He waved his hand. “All right,” he seemed to say, “go home. Come for your money later and then go away.” And he turned as if everything were now at an end.’42
What he had actually said to the mutineers was: ‘Tell them they can go home. I’ll give them their pay, but they won’t get any dash, I’ll take new carriers here.’ And his bluff worked. Barbara recorded: ‘There was a moment’s pause, and sudden sheepish grins spread over the faces of our men. That was going too far. They did not want to leave us … smiling and laughing they forgot the whole argument and were as friendly as ever.’43 Greene was banking on the fact that if they stayed together for another two weeks they would be in a country as strange to them as it was to him. He knew there was a tribe, about a week ahead, reputed to be still practising cannibalism, and the carriers clearly would not want to be paid off there.
To celebrate the return to the fold the carriers wanted to kill the kid which a chief had given to Greene in Kpangblamai. It was a time to conciliate and Graham agreed, not expecting an immediate slaughter: at once they held the little kid down on the ground by its legs ‘like a crucified child, the knife across the throat and the screams through the flow of blood. The kid took a long time dying.’44 In his diary he records, ‘music and dancing till late’ by the carriers.
Apart from his travel book, his journey through Liberia produced one short story, ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’, published in the London Mercury in January 1936, which mirrors closely Greene’s experience, even to the final confrontation with the carriers:
Then his boy was beside him again. He whispered urgently to Mr Lever through the mosquito-net, ‘Massa, the labourers say they go home.’
‘Go home?’ Mr Lever asked wearily; he had heard it so often before. ‘Why do they want to go home? What is it now?’ but he didn’t really want to hear the latest squabble: that the Bande men were never sent to carry water because the headman was a Bande, that someone had stolen an empty treacle tin and sold it in the village … that someone wasn’t made to carry a proper load, that the next day’s journey was ‘too far.’ He said, ‘Tell ’em they can go home. I’ll pay them off in the morning. But they won’t get any dash. They’d have got a good dash if they’d stayed.’ He was certain it was just another try-on; he wasn’t as green as all that.45
In Mr Lever’s case they did leave him.
On the following day, Barbara got lost. Graham had started at 7 a.m. The ground was rough and Barbara fell behind in country that changed from hills and forest to a plateau covered with elephant grass twice the height of a man, stretching northwards towards the Mountains of Kong. When there were many paths, the carriers would lay a small branch across the path to be followed, but Barbara’s carriers missed the branch, and her party scrambled on through rough tracks with trunks of trees across them until they reached a deserted village, which she thought might have been stricken by some decimating disease. Suddenly the path disappeared and they faced an impenetrable wall o
f jungle.
Though she felt Graham had disappeared completely, she did not panic. She had to go back and, ignoring the complaints of her carriers – it was her turn to deal with an incipient revolt – she smiled, told the headman, ‘I go on’, turned on her heels and went back, and she won her battle – the carriers followed.
By a piece of luck she met an old man who knew Bamakama, the village they had been heading for, who led them, unceasingly, over streams and along wider paths, the carriers suddenly happy, yelling all together in the hope that Greene’s carriers would hear them, and finally they were brought to a broad river, St Paul – and their shouts were answered from the opposite bank by Greene and his men. He had been on the point of departure because darkness was falling. Barbara and her carriers crossed the great river on a flat raft, pulling themselves over by means of creepers. There was great excitement and relief at joining up again.
The trek did not end there. After some food, they marched through elephant grass for four hours to a decayed rest house, full of bugs, in Bamakama, where they drank tea and an army of flies settled on their faces and their pet monkey sat in a corner and moaned like a child. Greene concluded, ‘There is only one thing to do here. Get drunk!’ and while he was doing so more trouble broke out among the men over water-carrying, as he describes in ‘A Chance for Mr Lever’. Barbara recorded his response. ‘In his new mood Graham went out. He listened majestically for a few minutes. Then he gave his verdict firmly … “Palaver finished.” Then (swaying, oh so slightly) he walked away. It was a superb performance. We were all astonished. The men had no more to say.’46
But physically and mentally, Greene was reaching the end of his tether. His continuous problem is reflected in his short story: ‘the way you travelled in the Republic was to write down a list of names and trust that someone in the villages you passed would understand and know the route. But they always said “Too far.” Good fellowship wilted before the phrase.’47
The chief of Bamakama, a man of action, strapped on his sword and set off as their guide at a smart pace, and in three hours they reached Galaye, a town with old mud walls, which pleased the carriers probably because the girls here were a great deal more forward with strangers than Greene had seen in any previous village. He remembered watching one girl in particular, who, as darkness fell and the drums and harps and rattles were taken out, joined the carriers in their dances. In his book Greene writes of ‘a stamping and thrusting out of the elbows and buttocks, a caricature of sexuality’;48 in his diary ‘the buttocks thrust out instead of the belly. Does this represent the appeal of the different sexual position?’
Greene was struck by their dancing which went on for hours, ‘a close hot circle before our hut’. He felt that it was the moon that worked on their spirits: ‘The carriers were aware of the moon with an intimacy from which we were excluded.’49 But there was a tremendous ugliness also:
the most grotesque of the dancers was a moron dwarf. They dropped him into the ring with a couple of piccaninnies of three years old who were as tall as he, and he swayed a great inflated head, like a blister a pin would burst, to the beat of the rattle, and then howled and wept to be released.50
That night, at the end of ten days of continuous trekking, they were faced with another invasion by rats. As soon as they had put out the lamps, the rats rushed down the walls.
The indications are that the journey was becoming a nightmare. Ganta seemed to recede rather than come closer, and there was the continual getting up in darkness, the hurried breakfast, the long trek through a forest which seemed to him to be dead: ‘a green wilderness … an endless back garden of tangled weeds; they didn’t seem to be growing round us so much as dying.’
His thoughts were turning homewards. He wrote in his diary: ‘Longing to be there [at Ganta] and start south for home. The trek’s already wearisome … Thought of walking in England, lunch at pubs, the Cotswolds. The same dense untidy scenery grows dull.’ And the day before he recorded that he missed Vivien very badly – ‘and … Lucy [his daughter]’. Listening that night to the music, the beat of a rattle, he wanted flowers and dew and scent: ‘It was hard to believe they existed in the same world and that there were emotions of tenderness and regret that couldn’t be expressed with a harp, a drum and a rattle, buttocks and black teats.’51
They went on, this time following the Galaye chief through the forest, scorched by the sun and cutting a clearing with swords to make a shade. At an unnamed village the chief welcomed them with gourds of wine for the carriers and Greene shook hands with him before realising that he was a leper, his hand covered with white sores.
At another village a procession arrived of a chief in a closed hammock who was preceded by an old man with a sporting gun over his shoulder and a boy blowing a bugle. The chief, wearing an old white topee, a Fair Isle jumper, breeches and braces, a belt and gaiters and little white gloves, invited them to visit him at Djecki, which they did the following day after a two-hour journey. They found the chief sitting on the floor with his wives and daughters, the latter being some of the prettiest women Greene had seen in Africa.
The chief provided a bottle of French white wine and Greene a bottle of whisky, and they drank out of a common mug. Barbara began to feel the atmosphere was only of sex and drunkenness and Greene, in his diary, refers to the chief’s favourite and beautiful daughter, to the ogling, the wine, the smoke, the increasing friendliness with someone one can’t speak to: ‘Her thigh under the tight cloth about her waist was like the soft furry rump of a kitten; she had lovely breasts: she was quite clean, much cleaner than we were. The chief wanted us to stay the night, and I began to wonder how far his hospitality might go.’52
They drank for a further two hours in the heat of day but did not stay overnight, Greene being worried because the village schoolmaster wanted them to see the French Commissioner, when they had no permit to be on French colonial soil. Moreover they discovered that the monsoons were starting early and they could be stranded if they did not press on, and Barbara wanted to get away from the attentions of the chief, whose daughter had told her at intervals: ‘My fadder says you very fine woman.’ ‘The chief’, she wrote, ‘seemed ready to buy me from Graham, but we did not stay to hear what I was really worth.’
Eventually, leaving the route followed by earlier travellers, they crossed the forty-foot-wide St John’s river in a dug-out canoe, and entered Liberia again. The carriers were happy, in spite of the fact that they were in the territory of the Manos who still practised ritual cannibalism, though they ate only strangers, not men from their own tribe. Mark exclaimed, ‘Back in our own land!’ and the carriers sang and ran at twice their usual speed.53
*
Their meeting with Dr Harley, the Methodist medical missionary in Ganta, was to be an upsetting experience.
Although the Harleys welcomed them, they both felt that the atmosphere was not right – the Harleys were not happy. Barbara remembered that Mrs Harley, with a face like chalk, wearing a white dress, invited them for supper and then relapsed into silence. Greene recorded, ‘Harley a dead-tired man and his wife washed out … Two yellow-faced self-possessed young boys.’ On the second evening, as Greene wrote in his diary, they ‘Went up to Harley’s for chop. Not feeling too well. Another grim evening.’
There were several reasons for the prevailing sense of unhappiness. To begin with, they had arrived on what would have been the birthday of the Harleys’ third child, who had died from swallowing quinine tablets from a bottle.fn2 Moreover, Harley was a man ‘with a body and nerves worn threadbare by ten years’ unselfish work, cutting away the pus from the huge swollen genitals, injecting for yaws, anointing for craw-craw, injecting two hundred natives a week for venereal disease.’ He also seemed to have a persecution complex, expecting death at any moment. Barbara wrote: ‘After supper Dr Harley talked to us, putting aside his private sorrows and playing, gallantly, the part of host. Every now and then his head would sink down between his hands in an effor
t to remember what he was talking about. And sometimes he would get up quickly and open the door to see if anyone were listening. They were after him, he said. His boys thought that he knew too much. One day they would kill him. He expected it all the time …’54
Dr Harley expected death because of his knowledge of the native secret societies who sought out special victims, the ritual need being on such occasions to take from the victim the heart, palms of the hands and the skin of the forehead. The Greenes were shown Harley’s secret collection of ‘grotesquely horrible devils’ masks’, the very holding of which could warrant a man’s death.
The Greenes arrived tired at Ganta and Graham was on the verge of a fever. What troubled both of them was Dr Harley’s insistence that white men should not walk too far in that area. He told them that they had just sent ‘a man home dead who had walked up from Monrovia without a hammock: another white had died a few days before of dysentery … Death seemed rather close.’55 He warned Graham that he was walking too fast, too far, without sufficient resting times – sheer madness in that climate.
Though the possessor of dangerous secrets, Dr Harley did not in the event die mysteriously, but lived on until 1966. He was called by many ‘Methodism’s Albert Schweitzer’, and was compared with the famous Dr Livingstone. Establishing himself at Ganta in 1925, he did not leave Liberia until 1960, but there was clearly some evidence to support Greene’s observation that Harley had ‘body and nerves worn threadbare’, for his record card, housed in the Methodist headquarters in New York, shows that in March 1933 he was suffering from exhaustion and was forced to take emergency leave. No doubt this was due in part to the death of his child the previous year.
It was in Ganta that Barbara began to worry about Greene’s health. He developed a twitching of the nerve over the right eye: ‘When he felt particularly unwell it would twitch incessantly, and I watched it with horror. It fascinated me, and I would find my eyes fixed upon it till I was almost unable to look anywhere else … I was definitely frightened.’ What Barbara was frightened about was that in a day or two they would be away from Dr Harley and she would be alone with ‘the twitching nerve’ and she understood nothing about nursing. She was aware that illness in the bush often meant death. She watched him put spoonfuls of Epsom Salts in his tea, his face grey, and was aware also that only his tremendous willpower was giving him ‘his burning vitality’.56
The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939) Page 69
