Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  Mary is steering the boat, which Captain Murray has let her do of late, after some instruction. “Sounds like magic,” she says.

  “Magic?”

  Mary nods, keeping her eyes on the horizon. “Goes in a glass bead, comes back a diamond.”

  “Well observed, Miss Kingsley,” says Captain Murray. “You should see what Africa does to men.”

  Through the soles of her boots, Mary can feel the efforts of the engine, a shiver running up the length of her legs into her hands where she grips the wheel.

  What has Africa done to her? Lured her with emptiness, promised nothing. What will she call forth from this dark continent? What will it call forth from her? She is armed with jars for collecting fish, bottles of whiskey and packages of tobacco for trading with the natives. She is light-headed with awareness of her lunacy. Mary, self-styled trader, has decided to penetrate the interior on foot. This comes to her in an inspired moment, while doing her accounting. There’s enough to send a boat up the river, but nothing for the return. So leasing a boat is out, unless she wants to start rallying investors, and one look in the mirror is enough to discourage that.

  She keeps her cards close to her chest. She has a hard time defending herself against accusations of foolishness and ignorance. Her only defense is that no information exists—nothing: no European has been into the interior, or if he has, is yet to reemerge—therefore there is nothing negative. This does not sound like a defense, rather an admission. The whole ordeal of defending herself to strangers is demeaning, yet her endless articulating of her rather vague mission, “to explore the interior,” has given her a collateral resolve. And why shouldn’t she be foolish? She’s spent her time thus far being useful to others. Why not expire in the jungle? It would at least be a comic ending to one whose life has been in dire need of levity.

  Monsieur Gotard, whose mission is two days in from Libreville, does not see the levity of a single woman blundering into the jungle. And the stock of liquor and tobacco, although quite good at explaining one’s purpose with the natives, only adds to his dismay, as if, as he desperately tries to save the savage soul, Mary is out there, skirts dragging, bottles clinking, an odd emissary of corruption.

  He fiddles with his waistcoat, a missing button recalled by a tassel of thread. “I do not think you will be able to afford your entourage, even if it is composed solely of natives,” says Monsieur Gotard.

  “Really?” says Mary. “How many do I need?”

  “Well, for your trading stock, I would say four porters. And a guide, who must speak something of use—some French, for you have none—”

  Mary takes the insult.

  “—and Fang, if you wish to trade with the Fang, many of whom have never seen a white person, less a woman.” He throws his hands up in despair.

  “But if they’ve never seen any white people, how can I be more remarkable by virtue of my being a woman? I’ll just be a very strange-looking trader.”

  “It is still impossible.”

  “Why? Surely I can afford five natives for a couple of weeks.”

  “Seven.”

  “Seven?”

  “The hammock bearers. How do you propose to travel from one place to another? There are no rickshaws there, no carriages, no trains.”

  “I propose to go on my own two feet,” says Mary, stifling laughter. She’s been in a hammock, rocked to and fro like a baby. It was something she could have lived without experiencing. “And I’ll trade for ivory and rubber, and if I run out of money, I’ll come back.”

  “On your own two feet?” says Monsieur Gotard, each word inflected.

  What does this man know, he who has never been into the interior? How can he possibly help, sitting there on the edge of the continent, with his hurricane lamps and quinine, with his well-meaning wife teaching the native women the best way to iron and starch when these people don’t even wear clothes? And the native men, all taught the basics of mechanics, when there is very little machinery to be found and that, when it succumbs, as it often does to rust, mildew, rot, whatever, a general wasting away (much like the European population), can’t be repaired anyway. And all of this sanctioned by Jesus Christ of the Middle East, by way of France.

  But finally Monsieur Gotard does give her the porters and the guide, whose linguistic skills are comprised of a smattering of French, no English, and a lot of woolly, clapping native tongue that Mary soon begins to learn.

  Into the liquid jungle she goes. The tree trunks rise smooth like bones and atop them rests the vegetation; beneath her feet is nothing but dirt and the sky is a distant, abstract thing—to look up is to see green—a thing one’s memory situates in the past, like snow, and traffic, and miles of pavement giving way to more and smoke and industry and the whole clatter of Victorian, Regency, Tudor, medieval, Norman, Roman, Gaelic, English history that somehow has come to a point with her and her two leather boot tips edging into the West African forest. Absurd describes it quite well. Ripe with event does too. So does utterly stupid. So does magnificently brave. So does pleasantly pointless.

  “Here village!” says her guide.

  “Right,” says Mary. She sees a narrow muddied track, a brightening at the edge of the trees. “So what do you think?”

  “Talk,” says her guide.

  “Talk, with the chief?” Mary says. “I wonder what he has to trade? Or if he’d prefer liquor to tobacco? Do you know if he’s friendly?”

  “Talk,” says her guide.

  And Mary laughs because she talks all the time and to little purpose. “Thanks for the encouragement,” she says.

  The chief is happy that Mary has a few words of dialect, although she’s not sure which one, but the words find their mark with him and soon she is sitting on a tree stump, her stash of tobacco at her feet. She does three hand-pumping gestures to indicate a good amount and waits for the chief to wave over his kinsmen, who will show her the equivalent in rubber. After the transactions have been completed to everyone’s satisfaction, her hosts provide a meal: native “chop” of snails, some cassava, a palm oil stew that is so curious she wonders how and why the natives manage to produce the same taste over and over. And over. And over. For she has brought little of her own food, and of that she has only one tin of sardines, a precious four biscuits carried in a linen napkin like relics, and a bottle of Madeira, which she thinks keeps her blood hot and healthy. The village women stand and sit close by, and then even closer, and then are riffling through her hair, amazed at the spectacle of hairpins.

  “I wish you wouldn’t take those,” Mary says.

  A woman puts the hairpin in her mouth, bites it, bends it a little. She pokes it into her hair, making her friends laugh.

  “But of course you will,” says Mary. “And that’s fine in the end. I’m a mess, always was. At least now there’s no one to see me.”

  This last bit strikes Mary as ironic because, in truth, she’s never been around so many people in all her life. Day in and day out she marches through the jungle with her companions. She falls in mud up to her knees and they laugh and she laughs too. And now she’s the center of attention. “Do you ever cook with salt?” she asks.

  And the chief responds with something that is translated into something that has the word mange or something like it thrown in, and Mary is at least pleased with the fact that they are both talking about food. Then someone says something, and someone says something else, and everyone bursts out laughing. Mary does too, and her usual dark joke, “Is this when they eat me?” flickers across her mind.

  But they don’t eat her. The chief gives Mary his hut to sleep in, which, when a heaving downpour begins about the village, is almost a hundred percent waterproof. The thunderous rain is a relief: it washes away the insects, discourages the villagers who were eagerly peering through the gaps in the hut walls, generously widening them with sticks to accommodate all the others who wished to see Mary: this gin-wielding, skirt-wearing apparition. She begins unlacing her boots, thinking the r
elentless pounding of the rain is its own kind of silence. But what is that smell? Not like anything she’s ever experienced, and, apprehensively, she begins to follow it about and to its origins with hesitant little sniffs. There’s something hanging from the rafters, a flat basket suspended in a triangulation of twisted fibers. It’s too high for her to see into: there’s no furniture to speak of, just the cot, and she knows it won’t support her weight. She reaches for her hat and her walking stick. “This should do it,” Mary says. With a resolute jab, she upsets the basket, knocking its contents into her hat.

  Mary will write about this incident in Travels in West Africa, how she peered into her hat and saw a series of little bags, each tied with string. The smell was formidable. She jerked her head back, nearly upsetting what the hat contained. Bravely, she untied each little bag and found—with more wonder than dismay—human fingers, toes, and an ear. She will stand before crowds of a hundred people, more than that, learned men, and tell them how she put each object back in each bag and returned it to its proper place. She will fill letters with stories: one time she entered a village where human livers and lungs were on spikes at its perimeter, believed to be “witches” existing within now deceased witch doctors: fishing in a canoe, she pulled in an enormous catfish, and as she and her companions struggled to remove it—it was nearly as big as her!—she found herself pitched out of the canoe and sinking quickly, her long skirts and woolens and other things pulling her down: she tells of how a witch doctor came knocking in the middle of the night and how she followed him to a distant village and of the woman that she cured with European medicine, her juju, at which she is now a skilled practitioner, an able nurse. She holds court in the tiny Addison Road flat, now bursting with artifacts and relics, Mvungu!—a three-foot statue that greets visitors at the door, frightening with his fearful visage, his repulsive smell that Mary was told is the result of his having been daubed in human blood.

  To be truthful, Mary finds London frightening. Through the icy rain spattering against her window, she can make out the specter-like hansom cabs, the beleaguered horses, a grimy coal worker shoveling away, hacking up bacterial phlegm with his ruined lungs. The cold depresses her, and Charley, in his moth-eaten sweater and carpet slippers, padding around all day, pronouncing various important things: snobberies, opinions, needs, and the like—Charley who will not leave her alone!—who sees no need to get a job or bother himself with bills and when he feels like it, regardless of expense, will go to visit friends in other places, spilling coins around with no thought to where they come from. But Mary puts up with this because she wants him gone. She’s writing a book, The Bights of Benin, to finance her next trip to Africa, which she plans to make as soon as Charley does whatever it is that attracts him, whenever he decides to, whenever the pull of the unknown and purpose and embarrassment overpower the ennui that keeps him close by, that occasionally manifests itself in a bad cold, but usually achieves form in Charley’s endless peering over Mary’s shoulder.

  What could be so important as to take all her time? Charley is relieved when relatives fall ill and Mary has to go nurse them. That’s what she should be doing, after all. He cannot bear Mary being in Africa even when he’s overseas. He cannot bear her being out of the house. Sometimes Mary wonders if he returns home from his trips abroad to recall her, to remind her that her first duty is to care for him and that all her books and lectures and argumentative friends magically disappear in a puff of smoke if he but desires a cup of tea.

  Arthur, the teaboy from downstairs, has agreed to help Mary carry the jars, which have been cluttering her apartment ever since her return. It’s Arthur’s day off, but he’s taken some care with his appearance. The fierce cowlick that usually springs up right at the back of his head has been tamed with something like lard, and he’s smiling at her and at the adventure of taking off to the British Museum. Arthur sees Mary smoking at her back window when he takes out the garbage. He knows he’s not supposed to look, but how could he not notice the spectacle of Miss Kingsley puffing into the chill Victorian air—Miss Kingsley who went off to Africa alone. Miss Kingsley who ate a man!

  “Coach is out front, Miss Kingsley,” he says.

  “Thanks for fetching it,” Mary replies. “Now the real work begins.”

  There are four crates and even though, as expressly instructed, Arthur has gotten a coach rather than a hansom, it’s still going to be a bit of a squeeze, even with Arthur sitting up top with the driver. And then she’s carrying the crates down the narrow stairs, tilted in her heeled boots, fairly toppling down upon the crate and the boy, who is cheerfully going backward and taking the majority of the weight. Jars of fish in chemicals are not light.

  “Miss Kingsley,” says Arthur, “can’t Mr. Kingsley help you with this?”

  “What? Charley?” says Mary, her cockney accent achieving a comfortable flair with the teaboy. “You’re better off with me. Besides, he’s in Oxford or Dover or some place.”

  As Arthur unpacks the last of the crates, which he has to do if Mary is to fit in the coach, she takes a minute to smooth her hair in the window’s reflection. And to fix her hat, an odd little hair in the window’s reflection. And to fix her hat, an odd little thing with antennae springing from it—her friend Violet Roy thought it fetching—but Mary now thinks it makes her look like an insect. She has to laugh. But it’s too late to do anything about it. Albert Günther, the preeminent fish expert, has agreed to look at her collection. His book Study of Fishes has been her bible, and Uncle Charles has set up this meeting at the insistence of cousin Rose.

  Mary squeezes herself onto the seat between some neatly balanced jars. Arthur hands her a particularly large one in which a snake floats, with diminished menace, in brine.

  “Are you all right in there?” asks Arthur.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says. “Let’s go!”

  The trip is bumpy and long, thankfully without event, but standing in front of the British Museum, its columns and marble evoking millennia of civilization that starts in Greece yet ends in England, Mary has a desire to flee back to her jungle. Günther. What is she thinking? She’d do anything right now to be back where she’s comfortable, marching through the mud with her naked cannibals.

  “Miss Kingsley,” says Arthur, “this is Mr. Günther’s secretary.”

  She sees a thin young man, no taller than she, peering at her through some wire spectacles. “Miss Kingsley, I am Mister Ogilvie. Pleased,” he says, although he looks anything but, “to meet you.”

  “Right,” says Mary. She gets out of the cab and, her arms embraced around the snake, begins to follow the secretary up the front steps and into the building.

  “Yes, yes of course I do,” says Mary.

  “It’s just that you’re carrying a snake.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she says, now flustered. “I caught this snake myself,” she says, “with a forked stick.” Is she bragging now? She feels the blood rise into her face. “It’s a poisonous snake and the natives said it was quite rare.”

  “I see,” says the secretary. He opens the door to an office—tidy and silent—and points her in the direction of an uncomfortable-looking chair. “Please wait here, Miss Kingsley. I’ll find some people to help your boy bring in the rest of your . . . collection.”

  “I appreciate that,” says Mary.

  She sits in the stiff chair with the snake in her lap hearing muffled voices from down the hallway, a laugh that is quickly silenced. The ceiling is high, and in the upper windows Mary sees the pigeons crowding outside, hears their soothing burble and croo. She taps her boots on the floor in an anxious little drumbeat. The dust circles through the light. Mary wonders if this is what most people feel in church: small, frightened, awed.

  “He’s left you out here, has he?” comes a voice.

  “Mr. Günther!” says Mary, struggling out of her seat, which is hard, for the seat has no arms and her jar weighs over twenty pounds.

  “Let me help you wit
h your snake.”

  Günther looks at the snake. “Miss Kingsley, what is this?”

  “I have no idea,” says Mary.

  “Neither do I.” Günther has a twinkle in his eye. Not knowing might mean she’s found something new. Not knowing, to Günther, is a good thing.

  Later, Arthur and the others bring in the rest of the jars, unpack crates, and set each specimen upon the long table.

  “You go with guides?” asks Günther, arranging a jar into a different grouping.

  “I do when I need to, but I’m good at handling a canoe.” Why does she sound like a child? “As good as any African at this point. Of course, it took me a while to get the hang of it. I got fished out half-drowned, natives had a good laugh, that sort of thing.” Why does she keep prattling on? “My favorite thing is to paddle around in the middle of the night when the moon is full.” Nerves, is it? Or maybe she’s just happy.

  “Alone?” asks Günther.

  “Well, no one else wants to go, not at that time. Besides, everyone’s asleep.”

  “It must be very quiet.”

  “No, not with the frogs,” says Mary. “The frogs are almost deafening, but it is peaceful.”

  Günther smiles at her. “You need better equipment.” He holds up an old gin bottle with a curious-looking tadpole in it as evidence of this. “I will provide it for you the next time you go.”

  Mary finds herself suddenly speechless and, horrified, thinks she might start to cry.

  “That’s very kind of you,” says Mary, “to do that for me.”

  “Not for you,” says Günther. “For science.”

  The jumper goes into the trunk and then she takes it out and then she puts it in again. It’s the kind sailors wear to keep out the damp and cold, a tight-knit wool thing that you pull over your head. Mary hasn’t had a garment quite like it since she was small—encouraged to wear the jumpers that Charley had worn out in the elbows, since he couldn’t wear such things at school and there was no one to care, should she.