Appreciations

I

IT is an October day, and that is to say, in our West African forest — it is a day of spring. In the clearings, at three of the afternoon, there fell a golden rain from a sky of veiled blue, and all the fairy threads of that rain were drenched in sunlight. By this sign we know the rainy season draws to a close. The roof of the forest has not leaked under this little golden rain; the trail is dry, until we come to a swamp. There upon the trees is a new foliage like flowers — leaves that pale from a deep wine to a rosy ivory, from an ivory green to a green ivory. And all these colored leaves are still. The trees in the swamp are still, and the water in the swamp is still as death; there is movement neither of leaf on the tree nor of its bright image in the water; and there is everywhere in that stillness a vibration, delicate and indefinable.

There is a little boy in that swamp, quite invisible in a camouflage of reflected light and color. He sees me; he leaves his quest of frogs, or snails, or whatever minor prey has drawn him, and he sells his afternoon to the white woman. He besets me behind and before. Coming to the village, where his fellows are, he hails them, and they follow on. White people rarely pass this way; admiration still waits upon us, and I am pursued by lyric cries: —

‘Why such beauty! My mother! This beauty! I see her hair! I see her laughter! She laughs — how beautiful! I get the fragrance of her beauty!’

A long monotony of approbation has drugged my vanity; it sleeps until I hear my little boy exclaim: —

‘I have seen many beautiful women, but you are certainly the woman who excels for beauty!’

He speaks with an absolute conviction that affects me. I think I envy him to have seen so many beautiful women, and to have come, so young and so experienced, upon the very pearl of these.

Other little children attend this beauty-show, and one, though I have seen many beautiful children, does excel. Her little narrow body seems to fly. Running before me in the trail, there is a flutter of little arms and of little grass bustle, and that little creature is hung an instant on the air. She is caught up in an ecstasy of delight and curiosity. Like myself, she is infected by the ardor of our small connoisseur in women. I must be, she thinks, as beautiful as he says I am. And seeing this I am lost in thoughts of discriminations and appreciations.

I think about beauty.

Alone like this on the trail, you savor deliciously your solitude, and your own thoughts, so seldom given place in your heart. You speak then to your carriers about your curiosities, putting away some little honey of observation for your pleasure.

‘Of whom,’ I ask my carriers, ‘would you say that such a one has beauty?’

‘Of yourself! Why not?’

And I say that, having of necessity agreed that I am beautiful, what would they be saying, if not lying, of this matter?

Then they tell me: ‘Ah Matchenda, we cannot truly see that you have beauty. But we always say of you that you have style; and this is a true word — we all say it.’

Bijang abwi — great style! But style of what sort? Because bijang covers the things of ornament — a necklace is bijang; and the things of manner—a studied gesture is bijang. A mannered person is bijang, and a man on a bicycle is bijang. And while a man on a wheel is undoubtedly consumed with pride, there is another word for this flaming emotion. The pride, I suppose, is the inner exaltation, and the bijang is the air of distinction which is the fruit of that spirit. I know bijang when I see it. It is a conscious emphasis in ornament, or carriage, or deportment.

I hear that my bijang is most to be observed when I speak the word of God. ‘When you stand to tell us the word of God, then we say: “Bijang abwi!” ’

Well, so they do — many a time I have heard them, under the thatch of the palaver house in strange villages, and under the great thatch of our church in the clearing.

I am left to make what I can of this; and I conclude that my bijang has to do with carriage and deportment. For while my clothes are, of course, — as are the clothes of the missionary the world over, — much to be admired, the style in question cannot be of that sort — else why does it so dazzle when I rise to tell the word of God?

My preoccupation with the mysteries of bijang gives an unfortunate impression. Ze Temba is sorry for me. He speaks to me very gently, saying that not everyone may have beauty. And I agree. I think of the young Edima — there is a beautiful one! All worldweary folk sigh when they see the young Edima; her presence in the herd of commoner bodies smites them with the classic pang. The faces of middle-aged women yearn upon her. Her face is too laughing, her leaf-apron too fresh and green in this old world, her belt of beads too bright about her body, which is too straight and slim. I ask my carriers of Edima, who is known to them, if she is beautiful. I am assured that she is, she is certainly beautiful, and she has style. You see how unequal a dealing there has been. In my heart I agree that Edima does indeed wear her necklace with a difference.

There is Befege, who claims to be beautiful. ‘I am so beautiful,’ says Befege ever so sadly, ‘that I am besieged!’ And I know, when I return from my journey, Befege, stepping with that regal gait of hers that is Beauty on the march, will come to complain to me of her new offers of marriage. Yes, Beauty’s gait is certainly to be observed in Befege, who is otherwise a bore.

‘What would you say of Befege?’ I ask; and that well-known young woman is considered. Ze Ngambe decrees at last that Befege is a ‘leopard woman’; and all the caravan agree that she is a leopard woman. Not a person of beauty, nor a person of style, but a ze minga. And this is to say, a person of grace.

I think of the things of grace. I remember how many a time I have watched our blacksmith in the clearing at Metet, making spear-heads or dogbells. And how, on a day when he was making a dog-bell, Ngelli the cook was there. Together we watched him. The bell was like a seed pod that is open, but not yet so open as to drop the loose round seed. There is the pod, as big as a big plum, still violet from the flame, and there is the rolling seed, as bright as an ember, shining through the slit. I long to tell our blacksmith how beautiful this is; but Ngelli has warned me that, when the embers are red and the metal is red, it is then tabu for a blacksmith to open his mouth. So I am silent. And I know why our blacksmith has greeted Ngelli and me with two little blows on his anvil: Ngelli has told me that this is the correct greeting when the blacksmith is bound by tabu to hold his tongue.

I do not need Ngelli to tell me our blacksmith is clever: himself, like any other of his craft, will tell me that. There is not a man of the forest tribes who will compete with a blacksmith for that distinction; it is agreed that they are as clever as they claim to be, and there is an understood element of divinity in their skill. Ngelli, the cook, is not in their class at all — they have skill, and Ngelli has wisdom. Ngelli’s wisdom is far-famed; it is an attribute entirely at the service of his fellow clansmen, who assemble constantly at the rear of our cabin, where they call upon Ngelli to come out and be a judge and a divider over them. The wisdom of Ngelli is one of our domestic crosses; his gifts carry him too far from the pot and the fire: here he is, who should be making bread, under the blacksmith’s thatch, dispensing wisdom. And of the dog-bell Ngelli murmurs that it is a leopard thing.

Sparks spring out of this leopard thing, that will be so dull in an hour. African dogs are in themselves so unworthy of such inspired efforts; but the bell is for the hunt, and the hunt is the pursuit of freemen. On the day of the hunt nothing is sordid — not even the dogs. The long shafts of the spears, with their heads of brass and of bright iron; the long narrow nets that are coiled about the bodies of the hunters; the men who gather to the meet, dragging their dogs on leashes of three — nothing of all this but has its glamour. When upon our journeys we pass them of an early morning, forgathering at some cross-road with laughter and with shouting, we workaday folk of the caravan sigh and say: ‘Besom!’ This is a word of envy; it is to say, ' The fortunate ones!’

II

Yes, some are wise and some are skilled and some are fortunate and some are fools. It is a rare caravan, indeed, in which there is no fool. Mbataka is the fool in my caravan on this journey beside the Nlong River. Ze Temba has said so for me, and the comment — tabu so far as I am concerned — was as fitting as an apple of gold. In my heart I had been saying: ‘When you cross the Nlong River, pay fifteen centimes for Mbataka — that is ferriage for an ass!'

‘Okukut!’ says Ze Temba, with a malice that is brother to my malice.

This is our revenge upon Mbataka, who has harried our last night’s camp with long tales of his life-history, and the history of his financial misadventures, and the income overdue from the sale of his sister, and the consequent delay in the purchase of a wife. It is a serious ass, about to set out on a beggar’s drive. We tell him good-night and good-bye, secretly vowing to pass through his village in the dark before the dawn, when the veil of smoke is ever so faint above the thatch, and before the first door is open.

But there in the dark of the dawn, in the street of that village, is Mbataka. He hails our little creeping caravan in that windy voice of his. He cannot have slept at all. He has lain awake all night, thinking of most exciting personal grievances, of which he has not yet told the white woman. He takes his square of beaten bark-cloth from the ground, where it has lain all night in the dew, and he girds himself. He tells us he means to walk in our company to the town of Mbita, where he plans to negotiate a loan.

And more of this he will tell us; but I walk away. I forget him in the dawn that is like moonlight, — a pallor and a shadow: a more radiant pallor and a blacker shadow, — and then the day. Now the huts are evident in the little clearings under the shadow of the forest walls. The man with the lantern puts it out. The little trail slips out of the open into that great shadow; the little caravan takes cover there, and is lost. The scent of dawn and of fallen leaves is in that place. It is the ineffable hour.

I hurry ahead of my carriers, and I think I am alone. In the deep forest, where the light will never be too violent and where the people will never be too many, I am released from the pressure of my profession. An enchantment of solitude too sweet to be enduring is broken by the hollow moaning of a horn. It is as if I did not hear it; and then I hear it and then it follows me. And when I come to a hut in the forest where I mean to breakfast, the horn, its anguish unabated, draws near and broods about the house and moans.

It is Mbataka, I am told. Mbataka himself comes in, and says yes, it is he — none other. And has he any particular meaning with his horn? And he has, yes, he is saying with his horn:—

' It is I! I have arrived!’

It is not the custom of the white woman, he is told, to approach the villages with proud announcements.

‘But I must do it,’ says Mbataka, ‘because I am just learning it. This horn is new to me; I bought it on the path, and I paid a great price for it!’

We think it strange, and we tell him so, that he, who is so poor as to be abroad on a beggar’s errand, should yet be a buyer of horns.

‘But this horn,’ says Mbataka, ‘is a necessity — it is to call the people of my village to prayers in the early morning! ’

‘Why not with a bottle?’ we ask him. ‘You who are a beggar, might you not have begged an old bottle, and breathing into that bottle, have called your brothers to prayers?’

‘Truly,’ says Mbataka; ‘if I had been as wise before I bought the horn as you have made me, I would now be walking without a horn!’

It is then the inspired Ze Temba tells me ever so lightly that Mbataka is a fool. And I think, there in that little smoky hut, of Malvolio, and am pleased to remember that he was cast in prison for a season.

It is pitiful of Mbataka that he cannot live without appreciation, for he is entirely without art. There is many another with the same hunger, but with better technique. There is a man on the Ngoé path who cannot live without approval; for this reason and for no other, he celebrates me when we meet — plucking at the strings of a kind of little harp he has, and singing extemporaneous, most vivid praise of the white woman. Never will I be able to resist this, he knows — singing about how wonderful I am, and thinking about how wonderful he is. And hardly has silence fallen between us, when he urges me to say that he is clever. ‘Am I not clever?’

I tell him that he is clever. I appreciate him audibly and at length. I make him happy for 1 ho sake of an old memory, and a regret for a little creature long dead and her skill gone with her into the grave. I remember that I never saw her dance her little dances or heard her sing her little songs, though these were many a time commended to me. I cannot think how this came to be. I caught her wandering about in the villages, — a creature ever so little; the smallest adult ever I saw, — with a face the most shadowed, a face in the deepest shadow of the deepest jungle of the human mind. It took a hundred people to convince me she was not an ill-used and starving child. A hundred times they told me how clever she was; that she was everywhere welcome; that headmen begged her to visit them, promising her a present in the hand if she would dance and sing for them. And that her dancing was a thing of skill, her singing a thing to catch the heart. Not a thing of laughter, as I perversely suggested, but a thing of sorrow. ‘You feel sorrow in your heart, her skill being of that kind. Her songs are orphan songs; and when you have heard them, you put a present in her hand and you beg her to stay in your town; but she wanders.’

Like a headman, I invite her visit. I offer her a roof, and a daily cassava bread, and pity. She brings her little shadowed face under the thatch of the girls’ house, where she performs innumerable things of malice. I move her to the hospital— I have a civilized feeling that anyone so wicked must be ill. I cannot think why they would ever be giving her presents. I am tormented by her.

And — if you will believe it — I never ask her to dance or to sing!

And yet on moonlit nights she dances, singing her little orphan songs, to the delight and anguish of the entire assembled black population of our clearing. I hear of these things, that they are things of wonder. Who would laugh, I am asked, at the things of beauty and of sorrow? All are struck to the heart!

Why did I never see her dance? Why was the white woman’s heart so cold and so slow? Why did I never mark that little skill, so much acclaimed, and flowering like a poor little night-blooming cereus under the moon in our own clearing? And was it strange that she who ran away from headmen who approved her, giving her a present in that little hand, should run away from me?

Often I heard of her and her minstrel reputation. Word would come of her from local merrymakings, where she dropped her little tincture of bitterness in the common cup — as desired. And I wished for her return. I had a peculiar wish for her return. Once I met her on the trail; she considered me without words while I wondered what it was that I must say to her. And when I said: ‘Come back to my town and dance for me! ’ I was glad, because that was the pass-word.

A quiver of light passed over the shadowed pool of that little face, and, ‘Truly!’ she said.

It was a promise, but she never came. Soon after, she died, taking her little skill with her into the grave. Many a time I have thought of her as, often, we think of the dead — wishing that we had dealt with them other than we did; finding other words to speak to them than the words we spoke.