The Trader's Wife

OCTOBER, 1929

BY JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE

I

HARFORD watched his wife pack her clothes. It was a strange thing, he thought, that he could not modify her industry. AH her savings, the fruit of that life of drudgery from which their marriage had withdrawn her, were transmuted into furbelows that were tossed about the room. An open box received her bodice of green velvet, a lemon-colored dolman with fringe, a padded jacket — he fidgeted and gazed moodily at the padded jacket, remembering the West Coast. He sighed with a memory too heavy of its heavy air. He wished he could prepare his wife for Africa; he roused himself to try again, but she walked away from him into the dimmer end of the long room, to tauten the square end of her Paisley shawl, one end of which he found himself, incredibly, to be holding. Her white arms were busy with the many-colored fabric, folding it with large gestures, intent on bringing it into small compass. She had no inner ear for his warning.

‘I understand, Mr. Harford, it will be warm. But a lady must maintain her common state; those about her must be done the honor of an effort to please.’

‘Those about her!’ said Harford. ‘Who and where are they? I tell you, Lucy, there are not to be five white men in ten days’ journey — no, nor in a month of journeying.’ But he checked himself; he was not a man to persist in futile effort, and his wife’s eyes, wide at gaze, were empty of apprehension. She would dress, she said, for the five.

He suddenly wished that she were a sea captain’s daughter — there were many of these in the town of Newport. Surely a captain’s daughter would entertain some faint misgiving as to the isolations and miseries of the wilderness. And might — the idea visited him — be induced to stay at home. And would be, perhaps, likely enough, less romantic. He sighed. His animosities toward her passionate vanities died down, and in the ebb of these there emerged a fundamental misgiving of the circumstance. How came he to have married her? Not for her beauty — though she was good-looking, he thought, dwelling on her now in her vivid animations, white-armed among the velvets and silks of her novel and cherished wardrobe. A fine figure of a woman, pressing out into her future like a ship’s head, the figurehead on the Abundance, that ship on which he had last served his country — like that, with her skirts surging behind her activities like the garments of that eternally wind-blown eager image. Eager, that was the word — how came he to have married an eager woman? And the vast lassitudes of his African experience flowed in upon him. He drowned in that tide.

Copyright 1929, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

An hour from then he must dress in the room that was his and Lucy’s. He was forty-six years old and had not, until his marriage, occupied a common room. He would not, he thought, in Africa; there, he thought, he would take this matter in hand. ‘Before we settle down we will settle that’ — and he found himself remembering the bark cabin he had built himself on his last tour, silent in its forest clearing halfway round the world, empty of any civilized convenience; and a good thing, too, he told himself, looking about at the clutter of their quarters. His wife at the dressing table drew out the long sweep of her hair — white arms and black hair, the daffodil blossoms of the candles, and a golden light on her breast. He saw that her gesture was noble. Their eyes meeting in the mirror, hers fastened upon this appreciation, and, turning about, she offered her lips with a smiling assurance. Her innocent abandonment moved him; he proceeded in a lighter mood.

The weather was cold; he felt the comfort of the buffalo robe that covered them in the sleigh, and, with his faculties of appreciation sharpened by his African exile, he appreciated the glowing lights of the house into which they came, shedding their snow at the door. Warmth and warm lights gushed out upon them; they saw the stir of women with sleek hair, their dresses full about them like flowers. His misgiving that he was to suffer the untellable miseries of ennui fell away from his heart; he would be, he promised himself, the ten-day bridegroom that he was, and more truly his wife’s husband, taking thought of her pride and the value she put upon her conquest, which she had no art to cover. He swore he would not dwell on this to-night, and forced his attention from her frank display and her dovelike preenings.

He answered with the necessary civility the habitual questions about the West Coast, its climate, its comforts and provender, its peoples; and he watched with his habitual bitterness the uncomprehending laughter at things not humorous and the tentative returns to the aspect of the Negro and his nudity. A black maid was in waiting; she wore a gown of linsey over hoops; she paused in midstream to dwell upon his sayings, something haunted in her eyes. He thought, ‘There is a fine figure of a girl,’ and he saw her packed in the middle tray of a slaver, brought out to the air at sunrise and at sunset, sluiced down with water daily, and shivering in the advancing cold of the voyage. He felt the irony of her skirt and hoop; his civilized and determined urbanity was on the ebb, and when he had to answer the toast to his marriage, with its larded phrases of romantic anticipation, its allusions to his wife’s reputation as a poetess, — a tenth Muse, and now to be the Muse of travel, — he rose to his feet a rebel, disclaiming the romantic aspects of their future and hoping tersely that his wife would have the courage and the good sense to bear her lot in a dull and monotonous round.

Poetry would never help her to do that, and if she felt herself irrevocably dedicated to the romantic she had best, he said, stay at home among her admirers, while he went abroad about his business. And he sat down, pleased neither with himself— knowing well the degree of his self-indulgence — nor with the company, who were past rallying. Lucy, who was pale, fixed him with a stricken eye, and he looked away from her to meet the gaze of the Negress, wide and fascinated. The glance he gave her was a blow and the very movement of his irritation. She vanished; and so, if he could have had his will, would have vanished the dinner company. But no, they were reviving, and soon he must agree with them that the antislavery activities of Mr. Garrison were unseemly and that the institution of slavery was holy, forecast in the Bible. To his own mind Mr. Garrison had been negligible, an idealist. He had neither read his speeches nor leaned to his reputed opinions, but he felt a present unsuspected repulsion and bitterness of negation of these people, so remote from blood and stench. They were telling, without imagination, of the ladies of Boston who had been but recently stoned for their antislavery pretensions.

II

Later he begged Lucy to stay at home. ‘You have n’t an idea of what it is like,’ he told her; ‘it is dreary — unspeakably; the surf is a wall, and the forest is another, about an empty room.’ And while he spoke to her of this, African solitudes possessed his heart like an enchantment. But they were not for her, he was sure. As for slavery and slaving — he could not think either she or her friends would survive the scent of a slave ship, let alone the sight of one or the sound. Lucy, looking at him, was startled out of her mood of self-pity. ‘ It is no more than my duty,’ she told him.

Lucy’s duty, which he had married with Lucy, was to be, he began to feel, a governing factor in his life. He wondered how much of his panic and rebellion was due to bile—the West Coast life, as he well knew, was a thing of bile and spleen; but Lucy was not to be told when he had a chill, else her duty to nurse him would be more than he could bear.

To church on Sunday, as Lucy’s duty, the two of them went, admirable in aspect, as was much observed. A stranger in the pulpit was preaching an abolition sermon — a zealous soul all tortured with his zeal. ‘This very day,’ he told them, ‘while you sit at ease in Zion, a free people in a free country, there are wretched blacks at sea, packed in trays like dried fish, stinking like fish, some of them to die before the sun has set and to be cast into the sea. Who are the murderers of these?’

‘The abolitionists do so much exaggerate,’Lucy told him on the way home. ‘They could not exaggerate,’ he said; and at that she wondered, not knowing how he could speak so, whose business had once been, in his youth, the Trade. She would have questioned him, but his grim look checked her.

‘My husband is a stern man,’ she told her friends, ‘but not with me’; and she contrived for their benefit a melting Harford, tender and yielding. She had really at first supposed this to be true — else why had he married her? She had only to remember the speed of their courtship to be reassured, even now, that he was tender and yielding. They were not three weeks met when they were married. Lucy and her friends thought this romantic. They had met in Captain Shaw’s house at a dinner. Lucy, in white with blue ribbons, had been that gay creature whose sorrows are hidden — all her friends knew this of her, and presently one of them told Harford : —

‘There is the pluckiest, the most brilliant girl in the city of Newport. To see her, you would never know that it is her fate to be a drudge. She is a drudge, sir — an orphan; nothing but her own courage and industry lies between her and want.’ It was told him further that she was much desired as a reader, and that her poetry, written in her rare leisure, was impassioned, noble, and uplifting.

That she was a pretty woman Harford had observed; but her local fame did not hang, it seemed, upon that. Indeed, her local fame was kept bright by her female friends; her schoolmates, grown up and married, assiduously told their husbands how superior a person Lucy Williams was, and the reports passed on to Harford were verbatim. Harford, meeting her, had them by heart, and in a conversation prematurely intimate he had from herself the sad story of her life. All her gayety omitted, she discovered to him her long struggle, her hours of labor late and early, and her present favorable reputation. Harford had, it seemed, read a long tale of hers in verse; he had thought it fine, and told her so. Tears filled her gray eyes; they brimmed on her curled lashes, and Harford was moved. The evoked image was clear, and it was quite true of him, as Lucy supposed, that he was vulnerable.

But the chink in the armor, if indeed it was over the heart, was not to be pierced by passion. Harford was compassionate to poverty; he knew her to be poor. Newly come from the isolations of Africa, he was more susceptible than was his habit to the appeal of a pretty woman. He was pursued, and he did not shy away. As for Lucy, she knew herself to be incapable of the indelicacies of a pursuit. She was not, she hoped, a woman to love a man unasked — there was that in him, she told her friends, that broke down her reserve. It cannot truly be said that Harford married her from an impulse of pity and in cold blood; it was one of those marriages that are fortuitous— the fruit of a favorable season. It is quite certain that if Harford had been married before he would not have married again.

They sailed upon the Arrow. Captain Rogers was in measure a partner in Harford’s trading venture, had known him for years, and had shipped more than one cargo for him before the slave trade had ceased to be, for Harford, a legitimate business. The captain had brought the trader to Newport, from which a line of goods was to be had of the sort that was replacing, for a growing demand, the slaver’s cargo. Rogers had Harford’s little fortune in the hold of the Arrow; the beads and calicoes and ironware — above all, the rum — were there. Harford would be trading for ivory, ebony, and palm oil. He had a theoretical passion for his venture; it was the fruit of a slowgrown conviction that the commercial future of Africa was dawning with the decline of the slave trade. He brought to his business a perfected technique of contact with the primitive African, and he felt himself to touch upon the time when his many projects, not realizable in the slave trade, would justify themselves. His designs pressed the more upon his attention because there was none with whom he might share them—not the captain, and certainly not his wife.

Captain Rogers had known Lucy Williams all her life, and for him her presence on his ship was a madness. He could not reconcile it with anything he knew either of the West Coast, which in itself he despised, or of Harford, whom he admired. He gave it up once at least every day. Lucy came aboard drowned in tears — and well, he thought, she did to cry. He gave her the best of his cabins, save his own. Vaguely he hoped, and he strangely expected, that she would be seasick the better part of the voyage. He had been sixty days at sea on his last return. He was unprepared for her appearance on deck the third day out and on the next day for her appearance at mess with her assembled airs and graces.

Lucy, pale but affable, put him ill at ease in his own saloon. It annoyed him to put his pipe aside when he entered there. It annoyed him to see his chief mate’s head sleeked with pomade and to smell it. It fretted him to find her at his elbow when at midday he took his reckonings, and he dreaded her questioning about the ship’s run and the morrow’s weather and about his personal adventures — in particular, about the slave trade. It was not in his experience to discuss the slave trade except as a business. He was not ashamed of it; he considered that his equipment was of the best and that his methods were as good as might be. He had never thrown a cargo into the sea — he recounted this to his credit, and he told Lucy of the time when he had with his own hands, after the death of his surgeon, dressed the more deadly sores of his poor wretches. But he found a strange complacency in this young lady who was reconciled to the noted miseries of the middle passage. He supposed that she could hardly know the truth of them, and, musing further, he sniffed the air of his cabin, suffering from an odor which it seemed to him had not quite gone off his ship.

‘I hate like hell the smell of those niggers,’ he told Harford. ‘The last lot had been a month in barracoon, and for that, or for some other cause, they smelled the worst of any cargo I ever carried. I had the ship painted in Baltimore, but I smell it even in my sleep.’ Harford, looking at the old man’s grimace, said he did n’t smell it; but he did, the whiff of it bringing back his own contacts with such cargoes in his time. It was curious that Lucy never spoke of this, the more as they were coming into tropical latitudes, when a ship gives up her essential odor of whatever kind.

III

Lucy, who had at first cried out all day upon the novelty of her circumstance, was now crying out upon its monotony, for with an unbroken easy monotony the ship slid into the tropics. It was a voyage without port of call, and without incident but one. Of this incident the captain loved to tell until the day he died; there was no mate to it in his experience. On the fortieth day out from Newport, the ship then being Lat. 9°, Long. 17°, and off the Ivory Coast, the morning being fair and the sea calm, the ship overhauled a man adrift on the flat of a squared log, very large. The log was such as is shipped from the West Coast, of African mahogany. It was the strangeness of that lonely craft, so dark on the wrinkled brilliance of the morning sea, that struck the captain’s imagination. The man was black; he lay upon the log asprawl — dead to the eye, or dying. But he did not die; the sailors tended him, and with evening he began to revive. Within a day or two he stood upon his legs that were shackled. Naked in his tattoo and chains, he stood before the captain. He had no word to say; he looked at the sea and the ship with a vacant eye. A rag was put about him, and he sat with his back against a capstan.

In the week after this adventure Lucy had a birthday, and said so; the captain then made her a present of the man.

‘He is lost from a slaver, ma’am, either by way of escape or because he was thrown away with others when the ship was overhauled by a cruiser — though that would not be likely; those that are put over the side in such a time are weighted. Well, we’ll never know from him. He has a look of the people of the Niger — he will be a handsome nigger when his sores are healed and he has put a stone or two on his bones. I trust he will do you many years’ service. Bring him aft,’ he told the steward, ‘and see that he comes decent to the lady.’

Lucy thought this a most romantic present. She waited, smiling, in the pool of the cabin light until the Negro was thrust in and stood by the door. He was now recovered from the blight of his privations; the steward had put a red cloth about his loins. His age would be near to thirty; he was of a good black, tall, and elegant with an animal elegance. In his face that was a tragic mask his eyes were shocking in their vitality — they looked about the world in vain. Coming to light upon Lucy, they rested, they were stayed with wonder; wonder then possessed them, and the poor wretch who had long not known ease from rage and fear was eased by a preoccupation.

Lucy was intimidated by the strangeness of that creature breathing presently so close to her, for the captain had the steward bring him forward, and himself with his hand on the nape of the Negro’s neck made him kneel. He bent his dark body beside her white skirt.

‘This be your big Massa,’ the captain told him, and by that word ‘Massa,’ or by some intimation that hung in the air, the Negro was informed — Harford knew it; he knew too that the Negro was enchanted by his wonder, asking himself if this were a boy or a girl or a woman, looking with an immediate hunger of curiosity into Lucy’s face, pale between bands of dark hair.

Harford saw his wife fluttered. She had thought of a slave as she had known slaves — civilized and broken, dressed in linsey-woolsey, and saying, ‘Yes, ma’am’; but this man — so striding and so wild, looking at her with such wide eyes — she did not feel to be a slave.

She looked at her husband, and he drew the Negro’s eyes. ‘Get up!’ he told him, and the man rose. Smart fellow, Harford thought, and had him led away.

Thereafter Lucy’s slave was pupil to the steward and began to learn the difference between a towel and a pillow case. Harford, who had taught many a black boy to lay the cloth, thought well of this one. He gave him the name Atemba. The possession of Atemba was a burning pride in the heart of his mistress, and she became habituated to it. In the letters she wrote home she exploited this event, and a kind of epic account of it appeared a year from then, in the Newport News. Old sea captains read it and grinned at Lucy Williams’s account of her nigger.

But Harford saw it as a reconciling clement in his wife’s introduction to the Coast. His imagination began to be busy with this difficulty; he had no illusions as to the bleakness of the prospect, and the captain, with the best will in the world, did nothing to help him. The customary West Coast gossip recurred; the deaths by fever, the misadventures and extremes of nostalgia, the fatalities by poison, by snake bite, the lonely madnesses — all these familiar makings of African biography were, as ever, common talk at the table. Only there were none of the crew so hardy as to talk of women — for all Lucy heard, the white man in West Africa was a celibate.

The ship’s course was set to Gaboon, where the captain would take on his Kru boys, discharge his cargo, and turn his vessel over to the Spaniards, with whom his agreement was made and who would assume command and ship the slaves that were gathered and waiting in barracoons. Under Spanish colors the Arrow, as the Esperanza, would make for a South American port. ‘But never fear,’the captain told Lucy; ‘the Arrow will come to anchor off Newport as clean as she left it, for I’ll have her painted once she is discharged at Bahia. Any little thing you will be sending your friends for a present I’ll put into their hands myself. An ivory tusk, now; or a grass mat made by the Galway people — though my wife complained when I brought her a mat; she said it smelled of mould. And so it did, ma’am — you’ll see for yourself there is a smell of mould that hangs about the equator.’

On the forty-seventh day out, the Arrow passed within landfall of the lovely small island of Elobi, ringed in its white surf. Every creature on the ship rejoiced to see it shining in an afternoon light on a pale sea. Lucy, holding the captain’s glass to an inexpert eye, saw it swing into the empty air, perfectly brilliant. Vines hung down its white cliffs, and on the white sands below dark groups of people gathered and scattered and hailed the ship, their voices lost at sea. The captain told Lucy of a trader who had been killed there, the Benga people claiming that he had robbed them. The captain had rescued the trader’s wife, calling a month after the murder; he had found her in a little hut on the west side of the island, where she had kept herself without harm. The women of the island had fed her, but she had come aboard ship all but dead, and she had died at sea. ‘It’s a hard country for a lady, ma’am,’ the captain told Lucy, who said that any country was hard for a dishonest man or woman of a poor spirit. And she watched the embowered island set in its ring of surf. She had no question to ask of that woman whose body, as the captain sometimes unhappily remembered, had been let down into the sea. ‘Your lady has a brave spirit,’ he told Harford, ‘but not an idea of this country.’

With the next morning Lucy woke to the odor of land; past her porthole green trees drifted, and she heard the quartermaster chanting the mark on the lead line. She had slept while the ship came about into the Gaboon estuary. But Harford had hardly slept the night; he saw the daylight come above the low dark land; presently the morning sky was pricked by the crests of the great trees that stood at the water’s edge where the eyes of mariners looked to take their bearings. The surf running up the beach broke enormously, and, when the ship made the bar, broke there. With the sight of that surf, so familiar to him in his wandering, he accepted Africa afresh; the feeling of it came to him across the waters; what had seemed so strange to him in his chosen life as he had thought of it in civilized countries returned to inhabit his very soul, not stranger now than his own breath. Only his absence from these circumscribed and familiar things began already to seem strange; and, already almost forgotten, the sights and the sounds of the North began to sink down over the slope of the sea as the ship came about into the still waters of the estuary.

Atemba leaned on the rail; he looked landward with an empty face. Harford judged that he was not a beach man and that he had no hope of a home beside the sea — of an inland tribe, doubtless, and certainly without the tribal marks of these parts. Harford was familiar with the tribes about the Gaboon; he had gone over this country with a fair degree of interest when he was planning his present venture. And his mind, fresh from his absence, sprang to meet his prospects; he told himself that he had the finest stock of trade goods that had ever been put ashore on these beaches, and the only stock of trade that was not for slaving. He could watch the slave trade perish, as he knew it must, without regret. The day for a legitimate trade had dawned, and he was ready for it.

IV

Two schooners lay at anchor off the settlement of Glass. They carried the Spanish flag and he knew them for slavers, and he wondered whether old mates of his were aboard them. Neither had taken cargo as yet; their captains would wait for the dark to load, and would load, when they did, in one night; their trade was now precarious, and their cargo would be brought down in canoes from some hidden point upriver. A third steamer, a four-master, he made out to be the Straw; she was taking lumber over the side. He rejoiced to see her, as he must come to agreements with her master. The sound of her winches, faint across the water, was sweet to him; he would be giving her cargo on her next voyage — pray God it would not be long. From the villages that lay along the north shore, and where the small huts were now visible, he heard the rhythm of drums — or did not hear them, so well he knew that sound. He marked the long wall of Taylor’s barracoon and that no smoke of fires rose above the wattled walls — it must be that Taylor no longer kept his slaves there and that it was in disuse since the Patrol had become stricter.

When Lucy brushed in between him and the motionless Atemba, Harford was shocked to see her, so utterly had she perished from his mind. Now she leaned on the rail, her sleek hair unruffled in the slight way of the ship, her cheek brown and red from the long voyage, not yet heated, her white dress spreading over the hoops she had resumed. Atemba looked at her without focus; for him she was not there, while for Harford she was there — strangely present. She began to ask questions; why had he not prepared himself for these?

He answered her with a half-attention. The Kru boys, laughing and shouting, were coming alongside in canoes, climbing the rope with their bundles in their teeth. His two or three friends were coming in their gigs; they would be looking for their rare letters. Taylor was first on deck, pulling at the collar of his shirt when he saw a woman, and, when he saw her to be a lady, entirely confounded. His poor face, so pallid under the eye of Harford, fresh from home, was unshorn; his white cotton suit, entirely clean, was threadbare. He bowed as he had not done these five years, and he told Mrs. Harford, ‘I am proud to meet you, ma’am.’ He woke with a start when Harford told him they must beg his hospitality for the day or two before they should go up the river. Taylor was then painfully preoccupied, casting about in his mind, as Harford well knew, to remember the state of his quarters. And presently he rushed away.

‘I ’ll not bring her ashore until evening,’ Harford told him.

‘You damn fool, to bring a lady to this hole!’ Taylor hissed as he passed him.

Harford sighed; neither he nor Taylor would have thought it a hole if it had not been for Lucy, and the two of them had a day’s business pressing them that would not wait. The captain himself must turn his eyes from his proper concerns because the Mpongwe girls, until to-day so welcome, had begun to clutter the deck. He began to bully them — what were the little sluts doing aboard a decent ship like his? ‘You take them beach girls for slop side,’ he told a tall grave Mpongwe youth, who was Taylor’s headman, and who had serious business aboard ship.

‘Them beach girls be fine too much,’ said the youth, and he was indignant; ‘what for they no be fit for live for deck?’

‘ You no see white woman? You take them beach girls for slop side — white woman no be fit for like them beach girls!’

But the captain was wrong. Between the Mpongwe girls and Lucy there was a strong magnetism and a passionate curiosity. Lucy was looking upon the flower of a notable tribe; those heads so smoothly dressed and set with fretted combs of ivory were all turned her way. Those dark faces, emptied by wonder of any lesser feeling, all fed upon her strangeness. They drifted to her softly, they softly knelt beside her, and when she smiled they laughed, clapping their hands. The odor of the dye of their bright cloths and of trade scent was all about her — a strange odor; their healthy bodies, their dark smooth skins, their dark bright eyes, their white teeth between their laughing brown lips, were strangely near her, in a great perfection of vigor and freedom. Her own image shone in their every eye. They were entirely enchanted by her presence and her sex. Only a mulattress, very slim, with tawny hair and a golden skin, leaned against the cabin wall, withdrawn from Lucy’s successes. A small boy, very black, approached Lucy with a gift of pawpaws; the fruit, like yellow melons in a basket, he laid at her feet. And presently all the bright fruits that had come aboard for the crew were heaped before Lucy.

Harford, passing by, was struck by the opulent aspect of that group of girls and fruit. Beauty moved him freshly, and he was released from a burden of care. The evening stole over the estuary of Gaboon — how infinitely sweet it was, with a remembered sweetness. With the failure of the sunlight the shore drew near; he saw the settlement beside the water, — that would be Glass, — and behind the plateau he saw the great trees by which mariners had laid their course for generations, as they would do for years to come. Like acorns fallen from great oaks were the little cabins of the settlements of Gaboon. His business with the captain must wait until the morning. He and Atemba gathered up the weary Lucy and her spoils, intimidating with their busy ways the Mpongwe girls. The captain came to wish her farewell (Harford knew his thought — that she would not live the year out: ‘And a fine woman too, but has n’t an idea of the country’), and Lucy went over the side, laughing at the difficulties of the ladder, and little knowing how she was observed through the captain’s glass of the French ship that lay to leeward of the Straw. She would like it if she knew, thought Harford, when he was at leisure in the canoe.

The canoe was his own, and a fine one. It had been made for him in the year of his absence. The young captain of the crew of six was his headman — a Fang. Harford had a liking for the forest tribes; his business, he hoped, would come more and more to be with them, and he had himself trained a group of Fang traders. No other had done so, and no other had set himself against the custom of trust that was so smooth a beginning and so inevitable a destruction of friendship. He told the Fang that the canoe was a good one and that he would be paid for it in the morning. They spoke together of the things of trade.

Lucy listened to that strange tongue; the canoers sang and paddled; the shadow of evening was in the water; her attention, weary with strain, drowsed, and they came to shore. Harford gave her a hand as she left the canoe. He thought to himself suddenly, ‘Never again to be the same!’ He thought of the change that waits the white man in Africa — Lucy did not know of this change. She left herself there in the canoe and did not know that it must be so. She gave herself to Africa without thought. She passed the little houses by the sea and did not know that these were now her town; she went up the steps to the door of Taylor’s house and did not mark that it was a house with a verandah — a deck house. She was met by a desperate Taylor and did not guess that he was sick with excitement, or that he had never thought to see a formidable white woman there.

She accepted the poverty of that poor shelter as exceptional — she did not know that there was no better shelter within a month’s journey. She did not see a woman’s dress hanging on the rude plank wall of Taylor’s bedroom, and she did not miss that dress when it was whisked away by a stricken Taylor. She sat at table on Taylor’s verandah without thought of its fine red and white checked cloth; spreading her wide white skirts, she leaned on her hand and looked out to sea, where three vessels hung their lights against the dusk — and she had no knowledge of the ageless intervals when there was no ship there to prick the evening with her lights.

The nostalgias of Taylor, pushed back into brief surcease, did not weigh upon the air. All went well, thought Taylor, and so it did. What an escape! What a day of escape, and a night! How long, he wondered vaguely, with his eyes upon Lucy. But he did not envy Harford — no, it would be too difficult. He thought of his Iwengosono, with her tawny hair and yellow eyes. She was going to have a baby, and perhaps it would be a black baby — he hoped she would keep well out of the way. Iveki, as good a steward as he could put his hand on, was serving at the table, Mpongwe hauteur giving dignity to his crude fashion. There was palm oil and other country chop on the table; wine, too, and fine fruit. Behind Lucy stood Atemba, sunk in his own despair — as lost among the Mpongwe as he had been in the sea. Harford supposed that he must have seen the landfall with some hope of his own tribe and country.

With the hour the land breeze fell, and there was a stillness before the sea breeze should rise at eight o’clock; the hurricane lamp brimmed its circle of light, laving the faces that were half in shadow; the sea sighed; the plumes of the bamboo whispered; and in the dark about them — where there was a murmur of comment and laughter — were the curious who gathered to see the white people fresh from the sea. Harford heard the legato of the Mpongwe and the staccato of the Fang tongues. He wished to be seeing his own Fang, who had come down the river in three canoes — they would be bedded near by in Taylor’s compound, where they would be without doubt the butt of the fine Mpongwe. He rose, excusing himself. Taylor, in a panic, rose with him, and Lucy was left to look about that bamboo shelter where the white sand drifted on the gray plank of the floor.

Within a little room a bed was spread for her with a bright country cloth. A mirror, gray in a tarnished frame, gave back her image dimmed. Atemba held the lantern for her self-scrutiny, and he looked at himself without a smile. There was a great earthen basin and a jug of water; these were brightly flowered and bore the name of King Toko. The night came in at the windows, where there was no glass, only a shutter that Lucy barred and then threw open again, leaning out to feel against her cheek the stir of the sea breeze. And then, from the dark, dark voices spoke to her softly; Iwengosono and her girl friends were watching her from the ground below the window. They admired her, speaking to her in Mpongwe, which certainly she did not understand; but they saw her smiling in the lamplight. They laughed, and would have come in to her, but the voice of an old woman spoke sharply, and they went away.

Lucy sighed with pleasure. She felt herself deliciously free of the ship; she could not be still in that empty room, and she passionately desired to be abroad. Atemba followed her, the lantern swinging at his knee. She smelt the frangipani that blossoms in beach settlements, and the odor of wood fires. Taylor’s little house stood in a trodden clearing surrounded by a brush fence. Beyond this there was a camp ground; the sound of laughter and of drumming came from this compound.

Through a breach in the stockade Lucy saw Africa at play — dark bodies leaping to incredibly accurate rhythms, dark voices joining in an unintelligible phrase and recurrent sudden shout. There were a hundred people there, and on the ground the blaze of twenty fires; there was such a freedom as Lucy had not known. A long time she watched those free people eddying in a dance without logic, struck with firelight and with moonlight. Harford, coming back with Taylor, found her there, Atemba beside her; he drew her with him to the house; he was struck by a lack of focus in her dazzled eyes. She had not complained of the heat — Harford was to find her uncomplaining.

Three days later, facing her in the canoe as they pointed upriver, he heard her join the Fang paddlers in their boat song. The Fang shouted with laughter; singing the songs of free men, they shot past the old barracoon. The estuary was clean silver over its whole expanse, and without a sail, the slaves having been loaded in the night and the ships having cleared before dawn. Harford’s ten canoes of barter trailed the canoe of the ‘Big Massa,’ who was richer now, the Fang told each other, by a woman. A fine woman, bought with a great price, surely. And much goods besides, in his many canoes.

(To be continued)