Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  Casement looks over the inventory for a shipment for upriver. As usual, there are more loads than porters, although Casement has put together a good group of mostly Bakongo.

  “We’re going to have to winnow it down to forty loads,” says Casement.

  Slade goes about the baskets with great energy and little purpose. He does not know where to start. John Michael, the best of the mission boys, who speaks impressive English and has learned to read, looks on with a studied, affected seriousness.

  “First,” says Casement, “I’m not sure about the five baskets of bibles.”

  “But those have been sent by a congregation in Edinburgh that is one of our best donors.”

  “No one in that region speaks English. And even if they did, no one can read.”

  “But—”

  “Next time,” says Casement.

  “What will I tell Reverend McIntyre?”

  Casement looks sympathetically at Slade. He picks a bible out of a basket and tosses it onto a load of tinned biscuits. “You’ll tell him thanks very much and we’ve sent your gift on. All the medicine needs to go, and all the seed and tubers, and the farming tools. There are four loads of assorted machinery and parts and those, of course, are necessary. When all’s said and done, we have four loads to play with.” Casement grabs at some rolled fabric and unfurls an odd garment, shapeless, white, and only identifiable by the presence of a neck-hole and arms. “And what is this for?”

  “It’s to dress the natives.”

  “The men or the women?”

  “Both.”

  “And where did it come from?”

  “A lady’s group sent us two sewing machines and now we have some women making the garments,” says Slade.

  “My sister is making these dresses,” says John Michael. He wants to laugh.

  “Oh,” says Casement, “the tyranny of generosity.” He slips the dress over his head and pulls it on. The dress is so large and shapeless that it easily fits over his clothes.

  “What do you think?” he asks John Michael.

  “I think it is better for a woman,” John Michael says.

  “And you, what do you think?” Casement asks Slade.

  “What are my choices?”

  “Bibles or dresses,” says Casement.

  “It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “The will of God.”

  “Better consult quickly,” says Casement. “We’ve got half an hour before we need to leave, otherwise we won’t get far before the heat sets in.”

  Casement sets out with Patrick, formerly known as Makola, for Stanley Pool. It is not a difficult march, although the paths are now more crowded. One must step aside for caravans heading in the opposite direction, loaded with ivory. And these porters are a deeply miserable lot, malnourished and overloaded, living with the chicotte snapping at their heels. These men are strung along with iron collars and heave clanking chains. They are slaves hunted and captured by Arabs, leased to the Belgians. When Casement’s little column passes them, he can feel the fear rise among his people. He’ll chat to them, to try to keep them calm. In the past, he would have said, “Your load is not so heavy and you are not chained.” Now he says, “Your load is still heavy and I’m sure you’d rather be at home.” He’s not sure what created this change in him. Patrick has planned a route different from the one that Casement used the last time, because Arabs have burned one of the villages to the ground and the land is now occupied by a hostile group of Bolongo. Or that’s what Patrick thinks is happening. Regardless, what had once been a good place to purchase food is no longer, so they must hug the coast more closely, even though the terrain is rockier and more uneven.

  “Do you understand?” Patrick had asked. He finds it hard to believe that Casement really speaks his language beyond barking orders or delivering salutations or bartering.

  “Of course,” Casement had said. “And I don’t need to call you Patrick.”

  “I don’t need to call you Mayala Swami,” Patrick had responded.

  But Casement is still calling Patrick Patrick.

  Patrick is still calling Mayala Swami Mayala Swami.

  Patrick abandoned his trousers at the limits of the mission and is now in his usual wrap, exposed to the elements, but looking less vulnerable as a result. He lopes along, circles back. He helps a porter redistribute the contents of a basket, which have shifted in the course of portage, making the load imbalanced. The porter explains animatedly about how worried he was that the basket would fall when they were passing close by the river. The porter says, “It would have been bad. Very bad.” And Casement peeks into the basket that reveals the rolled-up dresses. How bad would it have been? He imagines crocodiles coming across the robes, their toothy snouts nudging the fabric into lazy circles.

  “Are you well?” asks Patrick.

  “Just a bit light-headed,” says Casement.

  Casement sits on a log and Patrick sits next to him. He can feel Patrick studying the side of his face and hears him calling to one of the others to fetch some water. The water arrives and Casement drinks. He focuses on his shoes, then on Patrick’s feet. He sees a series of scars rising around Patrick’s calf like bracelets, not elegant enough to be ornamental scarring, yet even in their progress. There must be close to ten of these encircling scars.

  “What happened to your leg?” asks Casement. He’s dizzy and Patrick steadies Casement by leaning him against his side.

  “I had too much malafu and fell asleep in the path.” Patrick could be telling a funny story, but his expression is droll as always. “I awoke to my friends shouting and shouting all around me. There was a snake that had started to eat my leg. He was moving as snakes eat like this,” Patrick shows Casement a two-inch increment with his thumb and forefinger, “and like this,” he shows him the same distance a little farther up in the air. “So my friends killed the snake.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I became a Christian. It is not good to drink too much.”

  This is a good story and once Patrick starts preaching will make sense to other villagers. “Did the snake really think it was going to be able to eat you?”

  “I did not ask it.” Patrick places his long hand along the side of Casement’s face, feeling for fever.

  “Is that why your name is Patrick?” As Patrick is unusual for the Baptists.

  “My name?”

  “Because of the snake. Saint Patrick cast out all the snakes from Ireland.”

  Patrick looks indulgently at this nonsense. “Are you better now?”

  Casement nods. He must have just been dehydrated.

  Once at Stanley Pool, Casement arranges for the baskets to be put on board the Peace, and moved to the mission upriver. He collapses, exhausted. His tent is an island in a river of ivory—traders moving back and forth—Flemish curses, English barking, a shuffle and shuffle of barefoot workers, a clank of chains, and the screech of the steam whistle announcing that a new shipment from farther up the Congo has arrived. He lies on his side with his arms in front and his legs stretched forward, as if he is a dog. This is the most comfortable position. As a child, he had found that lying like this helped him drop off. He remembers his mother singing him to sleep and decides the memory to be false—a fantasy of maternal attention. He has had such fantasies since his mother’s death when he was nine. This mother baptized him Catholic, sneaked him off to some roadside church and willing padre. What would this mother think of his masquerading as a Baptist?

  Then Patrick is gently rousing him.

  “Is it late?”

  “No. There is a man who is taking our people to carry his ivory.”

  Casement gets up, finding consciousness. He is quickly in a vicious argument in emphatic French with a lean, bearded Belgian whose faraway stare makes him seem mad. This man has a ch
icotte casually coiled in his hand. Casement buys some time. He tells Patrick in Bakongo that they have to leave immediately, for him to collect the men. They escape while the Belgian is arranging his ivory into loads, having—in his mind—already appropriated the mission’s porters.

  At the mission, Casement grows restless. There is not much for him to do. Right now he has been tasked with building a structure that will function as both school and church. Although he knows that permanent buildings in this climate should be of stone, such a building is beyond his knowledge and the available materials. So it will be of palm and thatch, and Patrick is happy to show him how.

  “How much in the way of palm and thatch do you think this will take? And how many men to do the work?” Casement and Patrick stand side by side looking at the chosen plot of land as Patrick makes the calculations in his head.

  And then he sees him, as he’s just stepped out from the wall of jungle—he sees Ward. There’s a tall, slim native beside him, and also Glave’s boy. Casement cannot move and he wants time to also stop. He wants to look at Ward standing there, his haggard frame, his relief at seeing Casement. He might feel happy but instead is overwhelmed with an almost crippling ache that knocks the breath from him, that feels—although it is so tied to this present instant—like an awful nostalgia.

  Casement watches Ward from across the table, his gaze open, as the long absence excuses this. Ward is thin and he’s pacing himself with his food, taking polite portions of the chicken, which he eats slowly. His eating still seems actions of intermittent devouring rather than a civilized enjoyment of food. If it were up to him, Ward would just set the bowl of chicken at his place and shovel the sauce into his mouth, tear the meat from the bones, wash it down with this one civilized glass of Madeira: stuff Slade won’t touch, but that he has offered to the guest.

  “Casement, how have you been?” asks Ward.

  “Well enough,” says Casement. “And you?” This is said with humor.

  Rumors must have started spreading. Ward considers. “I just missed you, you know, in Equatoria. I stayed up all night chatting with Glave. He said you’d gone elephant hunting. I was jealous.”

  “What were you doing in Equatoria?” asks Casement.

  “On my way to Boma. Glave’s headed to America. That’s why I have Mabruki.” Ward turns to Slade. “He’s learning English.”

  “He seems like a nice boy,” says Slade, understanding that Mabruki is now his boy.

  “But what have you been up to? You’ve been sighted all the way from Stanley Falls to Leo, but in such a short amount of time, I thought there had to be a mistake.”

  “No mistake,” says Ward. “It’s a long story. I haven’t been in Yambuya since March.”

  “Well, it’ll be a long evening then,” says Slade. “And I’ll break my rule and get you another glass of wine.”

  Where to begin? Seeing Casement across the table makes it seem as if Yambuya never happened, or as if it happened to someone else. Jameson had been sent to Tippo Tib’s winter residence at Kassongo to plead for more porters. Barttelot had gone off to Stanley Falls to look for news of Stanley. It was just Ward, Troup, and Bonny in the camp and there was nothing to do but supervise burials, send out work details, and retreat to one’s tent where Ward’s girl waited with her passionless eyes for him to make some demand of her. And then Barttelot returned madder than ever, with a new instruction that Ward return to the coast in order to send a cable to Mackinnon in London. Barttelot was of the opinion that Stanley was dead, swallowed by the middle of Africa, and he was damned if he was going to spend the rest of his life waiting for him.

  Ward looked over Barttelot’s orders. Ward would proceed to Bangala with a cohort of Zanzibari and Sudanese and proceed in canoes from Bangala. No white man had made it down the Congo in anything smaller than a steamboat that was armed with a frightening steam whistle and, should that not suffice, a Martini rifle. There was a gauntlet of hostile tribes all along the banks from Bangala to Stanley Pool. Traveling at night would increase the odds of their survival to about fifty percent.

  Ward spent that last night in Bangala on the deck of the Stanley, chatting with Werner, the engineer, who was the only Englishman left in these parts. So many had died in the last couple of years. Ward had them listed in his diary. First, Captain Bore committed suicide at Verona. Second, Benny shot himself; third, a Belgian officer died on his way up; fourth, Webster, who went home very ill; fifth, Deane who underwent awful perils; sixth, Dubois, who was drowned; seventh, Van der Welde, who died the other day at Leopoldville, en route to the Falls; eighth, his companion, Stillmann, who got sick and had to clear off home to save his life; and ninth, Amelot who died on his way to Zanzibar. This sounds like a nursery rhyme, something that little girls rattle off while they’re jumping rope or playing patty-cake.

  “But you’re still here,” says Casement. “You survived.”

  “Barely,” says Ward. “I hit all the missions on the way down to Boma and finally got on a steamer to Banana. From there, I made it to Loanda.” At which point, Ward was not in good shape. His foot was inflamed, and his leg was covered in ulcers that had started as mosquito bites, but that Ward had gouged at and made into something much worse. He engaged Msa, who was about sixteen years old and very capable, who nursed him through.

  A cable finally came from London and Ward started back upriver. Five weeks later, he was in Leopoldville. There were letters waiting for him—moldy missives in his mother’s girlish hand with news from the year before. Then he found passage on a small paddle steamer and was heading as hastily as the conveyance allowed when he met up with the Stanley, chugging along in the opposite direction.

  As was practice, the two boats had pulled up together in order to exchange news and letters. Ward was shocked to learn that Troup was on board, being invalided home. He was very weak, although he brightened when he saw Ward. Troup had not saluted, nor spoken of Egypt, as had once been his habit. Barttelot, according to Troup, had gotten into an argument with Tippo Tib that almost resulted in a small-scale war—one that would have wiped out all the officers at Yambuya. And now there was an awkward truce between Tib and Barttelot, but nothing was ever going to be accomplished by the two men. Jameson had been sent to Kassongo to work out minor things, to create some semblance of normalcy.

  Troup was quite yellow and Ward wondered if he would ever make it home.

  And of course Troup had a new set of orders from Barttelot.

  Ward was to proceed to Bangala and thereafter wait.

  And wait. And wait.

  There would be no glory for Ward, no triumphant rescue for him, no picture in the paper, nothing. Stanley was skirting a major catastrophe. All sources seemed to indicate that not only did Emin Pasha not want to be rescued but that the whole thing had been an opportunistic ploy to subdue the Pasha’s enemies—a cry for help to enable him to stay in Africa, not sweep him back to the bosom of mother Europe. Stanley was looking for scapegoats and Ward was once again watching boxes and stacks and things and garbage, the detritus of the Dark Continent, performing the tasks that gentlemen paid their way out of. There was no news from Yambuya, nothing, and then finally, a letter from Jameson.

  Barttelot was dead. Jameson wrote, somewhat cryptically, that Barttelot had been shot, but there was no explanation. Jameson was now in charge.

  Several weeks passed. Ward realized that he was sleeping much more than he needed to and was indeed laying himself out for a nap when a small boy rushed in to his cabin and, speaking in rapid-fire Swahili, announced that a white man had just come down from the Falls in a canoe.

  It was Jameson.

  Jameson was lying in the floor of the canoe, insensible, surrounded by his men—six Zanzibaris, who had been paddling day and night. They carried Jameson to Van Kerkhoven’s house, since it was the best accommodation in Bangala and Van Kerkhoven—the local chief officer—was used to it being
appropriated for such purposes. Some medicine was tracked down and administered, but Jameson was unresponsive. He was delirious, deep in the grip of hematuric fever. The next evening, Jameson was gone, having died in Ward’s arms.

  “He did recognize me,” Ward says. “He kept saying he was getting better.”

  “So Jameson and Barttelot are both dead,” says Slade, a candle splashing somber shadow on his face.

  “Yes. And I learned of how Barttelot died in Jameson’s diary. One of the natives, Sanga, shot him after Barttelot beat his wife for drumming at dawn. She’d woken Barttelot up. Sanga was worried that Barttelot was going to kill his wife. There was some sort of a trial for this man in Kassongo, but I’m sure he too is dead by now. I had to return to the coast to send cables to the families of Jameson and Barttelot.” Which had been another journey of a thousand miles. “Miserable work.”

  “What are you up to now?” asks Casement.

  “I’m going to Bangala, organizing the last of Yambuya—which should have arrived there by now. I think there are some crates that belonged to Jameson, and Barttelot—and upwards of ten boxes of Stanley’s stuff that Barttelot shipped downriver, although I doubt that’s what Stanley wanted. I sent a letter to him weeks ago and haven’t heard a thing. I guess I’ll bring it to the coast, although there’s photographic equipment in there that Stanley probably needs.”

  “And then what will you do?” asks Casement.

  “I’ve been engaged by Mackinnon to sell off whatever is left of our sorry expedition.”

  “To whom?” asks Slade.

  “Probably the Belgians. If there’s anything in there that you can use, I’ll put it aside, if you like.”