When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  It was just before sundown when we reached Kabalo, a place of forbidding aspect. There was no platform; a heap of wood-fuel and the abrupt termination of the line marked the station; there were other bits of line sprawling out to right and left; a few shabby trucks had been shunted on one of these, and apparently abandoned; there were two or three goods sheds of corrugated iron and a dirty little canteen; apart from these, no evidence of habitation. In front of us lay the Upper Congo – at this stage of its course undistinguished among the great rivers of the world for any beauty or interest; a broad flow of water, bounded by swamps; since we were in the rainy season, it was swollen and brown. A barge or two lay in to the bank, and a paddle steamer, rusted all over, which was like a flooded Thames bungalow more than a ship. A bit of the bank opposite the railway line had been buttressed up with concrete; on all sides lay rank swamp. Mercifully, night soon came on and hid this beastly place.

  I hired a boy to sit on my luggage, and went into the canteen. There, through a haze of mosquitoes, I discerned a prominent advertisement of the Kabalo – Matadi air service; two or three railway officials were squatting about on stiff little chairs swilling tepid beer. There was a surly and dishevelled woman slopping round in bedroom slippers, with a tray of dirty glasses. In answer to my inquiry, she pointed out the patron, a torpid lump fanning himself in the only easy chair. I asked him when the next aeroplane left for the coast; everyone stopped talking and stared at me when I put this question. The patron giggled. He did not know when the next would leave; the last went about ten months ago. There were only two ways of leaving Kabalo; either by train back to Albertville or by river. The Prince Leopold was due that evening for Bukama.

  At this stage one of the railway officials interposed helpfully. There were trains from Bukama to a place called Port Francqui. If I wired, and if the wire ever reached its destination, I could arrange for the Elisabethville-Matadi air service to pick me up there. Failing that, I could get from Bukama on to the newly-opened Benguela railway and come out on the coast at Lobita Bay in Portuguese West Africa. In any case, I had better go to Bukama. Kabalo, he remarked, was a dull place to stay in.

  Two hours passed and there was no sign of the Prince Leopold. We ate a frightful (and very expensive) meal in the canteen. The Seventh Day Adventist came in from the railway line, where he had been sitting in the dark in order to avoid the sight and smell of beer-drinking. He was travelling by the Prince Leopold, too. Another two hours and she arrived. We went on board that night and sailed at dawn.

  The journey took four days.

  The Prince Leopold was a large paddle-steamer, twice the size of the Rusinga, with half the staff. The captain and a Greek steward seemed to do all the work; the former young and neurotic, the latter middle-aged and imperturbable, both very grubby. It was a great contrast to all those dapper bachelors on Lake Victoria, with their white collars and changes of uniform. We stopped two or three times a day at desolate little stations. We delivered mail, took up cargo, and occasionally effected some change of passengers. These were all Greek or Belgian; either traders or officials; except for the inevitable round of handshaking each morning there was very little intercourse. The Seventh Day Adventist became slightly ill; he attributed his discomfort to the weakness of the tea. The scenery was utterly dreary, flat papyrus-swamps on either side broken by rare belts of palm. The captain employed his time in inflicting slight wounds on passing antelope with a miniature rifle. Occasionally he would be convinced that he had killed something; the boat would stop and all the native passengers disembark and scramble up the side with loud whoops and yodels. There was difficulty in getting them back. The captain would watch them, through binoculars, plunging and gambolling about in the high grass; at first he would take an interest in the quest, shouting directions to them; then he would grow impatient and summon them back; they would disappear further and further, thoroughly enjoying their romp. He would have the siren sounded for them – blast after blast. Eventually they would come back jolly, chattering, and invariably empty-handed.

  We were due to arrive at Bukama on Sunday (February 8th). The train for Port Francqui did not leave until the following Tuesday night. It was customary for passengers to wait on board, an arrangement that was profitable to the company and comparatively comfortable for them. I was prevented from doing this by a violent and inglorious altercation with the captain, which occurred quite unexpectedly on the last afternoon of the journey.

  I was sitting in my cabin, engrossed in the affairs of Abyssinia, when the captain popped in and, with wild eye and confused speech, demanded to be shown the ticket for my motor-bicycle. I replied that I had no motor-bicycle. ‘What, no motor-bicycle?’ ‘No, no motor-bicycle.’ He shook his head, clicked his tongue and popped out again. I went on writing.

  In half an hour he was back again; this time with a fellow passenger who spoke English.

  ‘The captain wishes me to tell you that he must see the ticket for your motor-bicycle.’

  ‘But I have already told the captain that I have no motor-bicycle.’

  ‘You do not understand. It is necessary to have a ticket for a motor-bicycle.’

  ‘I have no motor-bicycle.’

  They left me again.

  Ten minutes later the captain was back. ‘Will you kindly show me your motor-bicycle.’

  ‘I have no motor-bicycle.’

  ‘It is on my list that you have a motor-bicycle. Will you kindly show it to me.’

  ‘I have no motor-bicycle.’

  ‘But it is on my list.’

  ‘I am sorry. I have no motor-bicycle.’

  Again he went away; again he returned; now, beyond question, stark crazy. ‘The motor-bicycle – the motor-bicycle! I must see the motor-bicycle.’

  ‘I have no motor-bicycle.’

  It is idle to pretend that I maintained a dignified calm. I was in a tearing rage, too. After all we were in the heart of the tropics where tempers are notoriously volatile.

  ‘Very well, I will search your luggage. Show it to me.’

  ‘It is in this cabin. Two suitcases under the bunk; one bag on the rack.’

  ‘Show it to me.’

  ‘Look for it yourself.’ As I say, an inglorious, schoolboy brawl.

  ‘I am the captain of this ship. Do you expect me to move luggage.’

  ‘I am a passenger. Do you expect me to?’

  He went to the door and roared for a boy. No one came. With a trembling hand I attempted to write. He roared again. Again. At last a sleepy boy ambled up. ‘Take those suitcases from under the bunk.’

  I pretended to be writing. I could hear the captain puffing just behind me (it was a very small cabin).

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘have you found a motor-bicycle?’

  ‘Sir, that is my affair,’ said the captain.

  He went away. I thought I had heard the last of the incident. In half an hour he was back. ‘Pack your bag. Pack your bag instantly.’

  ‘But I am staying on board until Tuesday.’

  ‘You are leaving at once. I am the captain. I will not allow people of your kind to stay here another hour.’

  In this way I found myself stranded on the wharf at Bukama with two days to wait for my train. A humiliating situation, embittered by the Seventh Day Adventist, who came to offer his sympathy. ‘It doesn’t do to argue,’ he said, ‘unless you understand the language.’

  I thought I had touched bottom at Kabalo, but Bukama has it heavily beaten. An iron bridge spans the river leading from the European quarter to the desolated huts of the native navvies who built it. Two ruined bungalows stand by the waterside and the overgrown Government rest-house, whose use has been superseded by the Prince Leopold; it is still nominally open, and it was here that I should have to stay if I decided to wait for the Port Francqui train. It is unfurnished and infested with spirillum tick. Some distance from the landing-point lies the jumble of huts that serve as ticket and goods office of the Katanga railway. A road leads up the hi
ll, where are two abandoned offices and a Greek bar and general store. At the top of the hill is the administrative post – a flagstaff, the bungalow of the resident official, and a small hospital round which squatted a group of dejected patients enveloped in bandages. A platoon of native soldiers shuffled past. The heat and damp were appalling, far worse than anything I had met in Zanzibar. At sundown, swarms of soundless, malarial mosquitoes appeared. I sat in the Greek bar, with sweat splashing down like rain-water from my face to the floor; the proprietor knew only a few words of French. In these few words he advised me to leave Bukama as soon as I could, before I went down with fever. He himself was ashen and shivering from a recent bout. There was a train some time that evening for Elisabethville. I decided to take it.

  We had a long wait, for no one knew the time when the train was expected. The station was completely dark except for one window at which a vastly bearded old man sold the tickets. Little groups of natives sat about on the ground. Some of them carried lanterns, some had lighted little wood fires and were cooking food. There was a ceaseless drumming in the crowd – as difficult to locate as the song of a grasshopper – and now and again a burst of low singing. At ten o’clock the train came in. The carriage was full of mosquitoes; there was no netting; the windows were jammed; the seats hard and extremely narrow. Two Greeks ate oranges all through the night. In this way I went to Elisabethville.

  There the air service proved definitely and finally to be useless to me. The ‘newly opened’ railway to Lobita Bay was closed again. It had been possible only in the dry season when motor-transport could bridge the unfinished gap at the Belgian end of the line. Paradoxically enough, the quickest way to Europe was hundreds of miles out of the way through the Rhodesias and the Union of South Africa. There I could get a fast mail-boat from Cape Town to Southampton.

  I had some difficulty in explaining, to the satisfaction of the immigration officer whose permission was necessary before I could leave the Congo, why I diverged so much from the itinerary outlined in my certificate of entry. In the end, however, he understood my difficulties and gave me leave to depart. In the meantime I worked, rested, and enjoyed the comfort and tranquillity of Elisabethville.

  Six days in the train. At Bulawayo I bought a novel called A Muster of Vultures, in which the villain burned away his victims’ faces with ‘the juice of a tropical cactus’; at Mafeking I bought peaches; once our windows were bedewed with spray from the Victoria Falls; once everything was powdered deep in dust from the great Karroo Desert; once we took in a crowd of bad men dismissed from the Rhodesian copper-mines; two were known to be without passports and there was a frantic search for them by bare-kneed police officers, up and down the corridors and under the seats; one of them stole nine shillings from the half-caste boy who made up the beds. When we changed on to a new train at Bulawayo there were white stewards in the dining-car; after so many months it seemed odd and slightly indecent to see white men waiting on each other.

  At last we arrived in Cape Town.

  I had about forty pounds left in my pocket. A boat was sailing that afternoon. For £20 I bought a third-class berth in a large and clean cabin. The stewards treated us with superiority, but good nature; the food was like that of an exceptionally good private school – large luncheons, substantial meat teas, biscuit suppers. There was a very fat Welsh clergyman travelling in the third class with us. His congregation came to see him off. They sang hymns on the quayside, which he conducted with extravagant waving of his arms until we were out of earshot. Chiefly they sang one whose refrain was ‘I’m sailing home’, but they had been a little deluded by the felicity of these words, for the general theme of the composition was less appropriate. It referred, in fact, not to the journey from Cape Town to England, but to death and the return of the soul to its Creator. However, no one seemed depressed by this prediction, and the clergyman’s wife sang it with great feeling long after her husband had stopped beating the time.

  It was a pleasant voyage. In the evenings we played ‘pontoon’. In the mornings we boxed or played ‘pontoon’. There were frequent sing-songs, led by a troop of disgruntled dirt-track racers whose season in South Africa had been a failure.

  A sports committee was organized, and proved the occasion for much bad blood; the Welsh clergyman in particular came in for criticism, on the ground that a man with a child of his own had no business to organize the children’s fancy-dress party. ‘He’ll give his own little boy the best prize,’ they said. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ He replied by saying that he would have them know that, when he came out, a special presentation had been made to him by his fellow passengers in thanks for his public-spirited management of the deck-games. They said, ‘That’s as may be.’ He said he would sooner give up the whole thing than have his honour questioned. It was all most enjoyable.

  Eventually, on March 10th, we berthed at Southampton.

  On the night of my return I dined in London. After dinner we were in some doubt where to go. The names I suggested had long ceased to be popular. Eventually we decided, and drove to a recently opened supper-restaurant which, they said, was rather amusing at the moment.

  It was underground. We stepped down into the blare of noise as into a hot swimming-pool, and immersed ourselves; the atmosphere caught our breath like the emanation in a brewery over the tanks where fermentation begins. Cigarette-smoke stung the eyes.

  A waiter beckoned us to a small table, tight-packed among other tables, so that our chairs rubbed backs with their neighbours. Waiters elbowed their way in and out, muttering abuse in each others’ ears. Some familiar faces leered through the haze: familiar voices shrilled above the din.

  We chose some wine.

  ‘You’ll have to take something to eat with it.’

  We ordered seven-and-sixpenny sandwiches.

  Nothing came.

  A Negro in fine evening-clothes was at the piano, singing. Afterwards, when he went away, people fluttered their hands at him and tried to catch his eye. He bestowed a few patronizing nods. Someone yelled, ‘He’s losing his figure.’

  A waiter came and said, ‘Any more orders for drinks before closing time?’ We said we had had nothing yet. He made a face and pinched another waiter viciously in the arm, pointing at our table and whispering in Italian. That waiter pinched another. Eventually the last-pinched waiter brought a bottle and slopped out some wine into glasses. It frothed up and spilt on the tablecloth.

  Someone shrilled in my ear: ‘Why, Evelyn, where have you been? I haven’t seen you about anywhere for days.’

  The wine tasted like salt and soda water. Mercifully a waiter whisked it away before we had time to drink it. ‘Time, if you please.’

  I was back in the centre of the Empire, and in the spot where, at the moment, ‘everyone’ was going. Next day the gossip-writers would chronicle who were assembled in that rowdy cellar, hotter than Zanzibar, noisier than the market at Harar, more reckless of the decencies of hospitality than the taverns of Kabalo or Tabora. And a month later the wives of English officials would read about it, and stare out across the bush or jungle or desert or forest or golf links, and envy their sisters at home, and wish they had the money to marry rich men.

  I paid the bill in yellow African gold. It seemed just tribute from the weaker races to their mentors.

  Chapter Four

  A Journey to Brazil in 1932

  (From Ninety-two Days)

  One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life. For myself and many better than me, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is there that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.

  Just as a carpenter, I suppose, seeing a piece of rough timber feels an inclination to plane it and square it and put it into shape, so a writer is not reall
y content to leave any experience in the amorphous, haphazard condition in which life presents it; and putting an experience into shape means, for a writer, putting it into communicable form.

  So for the next month or two I shall be reliving my journey in Guiana and Brazil. Not that it has ever been out of my memory. It has been there, ill digested, throughout a crowded and fretful summer, obtruding itself in a fragmentary way at incongruous moments. Now, in this seaside nursery, it will be all laid out, like the maps and photographs and drawings on the writing table, while falling leaves in the autumnal sunshine remind me that it will soon be time to start out again somewhere else.

  December, 1932

  Warm sun, calm water, a slight following wind; after a week of heavy seas it was at last possible to write. Passengers, hitherto invisible, appeared from below. The ship was small, old and slow, a cargo boat carrying a few passengers and not caring much about them. It was not until the sea became smooth that one saw how slow she was.

  The company was, presumably, typical of the route; three or four planters returning to the islands, men of old-fashioned appearance, thin brown faces and bulky watchchains; two parsons, one white, one black, both affable; two English soaks doing the ‘round trip’ for the good of their health, both surly when sober; some nondescript women of various colours rejoining husbands or visiting brothers; a genteel young Negress with purple lips; a somewhat cranky young man from the Philippines who had an attachment for islands. Very few were going as far as Georgetown.