Bones of the River Read online

  “I’ll go into this matter after tiffin,” he said ominously. “You are supposed to be stores officer –”

  “If there is anything that I’m not supposed to be, dear old Ham,” said Bones, with marked patience, “you might mention it, dear old soul. I’m OC Bathrooms and GOC Dustbins, and CIC Chicken-houses. In addition to which, Ham, I’m Inspector-General of Shirts an’ Military Controller of Corns–”

  “I’ll see you after lunch in my official capacity,” said his superior. “As a human being, I will give you a long and tingling drink if you will come to my room.”

  “Barley water?” asked Bones suspiciously.

  “Whisky, with aerated water and large and globous chunks of ice.”

  “Lead me to it, my jolly old Satan,” said Bones.

  As they were crossing to the residency:

  “You really must get out those accounts, Bones,” said Hamilton. “I’ve had a perfectly awful letter from HQ. Besides which, the new half-yearly supply is on its way, and Sanders may want you to go with him into the bush at any minute. And dim the unholy fire in your eyes, Bones – if those accounts are not ready by tomorrow, I will accompany the Commissioner and you can stay.”

  “Have a heart, dear old fellow creature!” said Bones reproachfully. “I’ve got quite enough trouble, dear lad. Let me take the accounts with me–”

  “If you were going to heaven I wouldn’t let you take them,” said the firm Hamilton. “And nothing is less likely.”

  “That I would take ’em, dear old cynic?” said Bones. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right. I’ll say ‘when,’” he added, as Hamilton uncorked a bottle, “and don’t forget, Ham, that drownin’ a baby’s petty larceny, but drownin’ good whisky’s a naughty old felony.”

  It is a fact that Bones had, as he claimed, sufficient trouble. And it was trouble of an unusual kind. It had begun some eight months before, when he had received a letter, delicately scented, and postmarked in Madeira.

  “Dear Unknown,” it began, and Bones had blushed pleasantly.

  It was the story of a young and beautiful woman who had seen him once when the boat on which she was travelling had stopped at the river’s mouth to land the mail. She sent her photograph: she told him her life history. She was married to a man forty years her senior. She craved life and youth and freedom. She had for the moment her dreams, and in the very heart of brilliant and soothing visions was “a tall, grave Englishman, whose blue eyes are like flowers in a desert.”

  Bones spent that day so tall and so grave that Hamilton thought he had a sore throat. He sat up all one rainy night inditing an epistle which was, in a way, a model. It counselled pacience and currage, it embodied sage and fatherly advice, and finished up with all that Bones could remember of a poem which seemed appropriate.

  When skys are dark dark and glumy

  And every prospecs prospects sad

  Look for the jolly old sillver linen

  For nothings as bad as it seams to be.

  It was not good poetry, but the sentiments were sound.

  In answer to her second letter (her blessed name was Anita Gonsalez) which came by return of post, Bones was not so fatherly. He was not even brotherly. He was, in fact, skittish. The correspondence proceeded on those lines until there came a black morning in June, and the letter which Bones so eagerly expected did not come. Instead, there arrived a stiff and typewritten document, signed Alfonso Roderique y Trevisa y Gonsalez.

  And it demanded the name of Mr Tibbetts’ lawyer, and threatened divorce proceedings and social ruin. There were several enclosures and a PS.

  “Already the watching of my wife, interception of letters, etc., etc., by first-class detectives has cost me five hundred pounds (English). Am I to let this matter slide and sacrifice expense I have been put to?”

  Bones did not reply. Once he was on the point of confiding in Hamilton, but the fear of ridicule (Mr Gonsalez had sent copies of all his letters) made such a confession impossible.

  He left a second and a third letter unanswered, and each was more horrific than the last. So that when, that evening, he brought triumphantly a reasonably accurate copy of the clothing account to his chief, and Hamilton, giving it a grudging approval, said: “You’re leaving at daybreak, Bones – don’t keep the Commissioner waiting as you did the last time,” Bones had that sense of overshadowed joy which is experienced by a man respited from a death sentence.

  He took Hamilton aside before he went to his hut, and made a request, and the indignant Captain of Houssas all but kicked him.

  “Open your letters? Of course I shan’t open your letters, you silly ass!”

  Bones wriggled in his embarassment and confusion. “The fact of it is, dear old officer…a letter from a lady, dear old sir.”

  But Hamilton was really annoyed.

  A day or two after Sanders and Bones had left, there arrived an intermediate mail-boat which brought little correspondence but a source of considerable trouble.

  Hamilton had gone down to the beach to take the mail-bag from one of the ship’s officers, when, to his surprise, the life-ship’s cutter drove its nose into the soft sand and an elegantly dressed gentleman stepped delicately ashore. One glance told Hamilton both the nationality and the character of the visitor.

  “Mr Sanders, I presume?” said Senhor Pinto Fernandez, with an expansive smile on his somewhat unprepossessing face.

  He had never worked this part of the coast, and it was his faith that he was unknown in the territory.

  “You presume too much, my friend,” said Hamilton, eyeing the visitor unfavourably.

  “Then you must be Captain Hamilton,” said the unabashed Pinto.

  He was dressed in the height of European fashion, wearing a tail coat, striped trousers, white spats, and a grey top hat, which in itself was an offence.

  “I am Dom Gonsalez from Funchal.”

  “Then you’d better hurry, for your boat’s pulling away,” said Hamilton, but, with a graceful wave of his hand, and a smile which was even more genial, Mr Pinto Fernandez conveyed his intention of remaining.

  Though Sanders regarded unauthorised visitors as little less than criminals, there was really nothing to prevent any free citizen of almost any nation from landing on the residency beach. And nobody knew this better than Pinto Fernandez.

  “The Commissioner is not here, and I am alone on the station,” said Hamilton. “If there is any information I can give you, I shall be most happy, but I strongly advise you to keep the boat waiting.”

  “I am staying,” said Pinto Fernandez decisively. “I am here on a very delicate mission, and one which concerns the honour, if I may use the term–”

  “You may,” said Hamilton, as the other paused.

  “ – the honour of one who is, perhaps, a dear friend of yours – Lieutenant Tibbetts.”

  “The devil it does!” said Hamilton in surprise. “Well, you won’t be able to see Mr Tibbetts either, because he’s in the bush and is unlikely to return for a week.”

  “Then I will stay a week,” said Pinto coolly. “Perhaps you will direct me to your hotel?”

  Hamilton did not like coloured people. He loved natives, he tolerated white men, but of all the types of half-breed he had reason to dislike, there was none approaching in loathsomeness to the Portuguese.

  “There’s a hut in the residency garden you can have,” he said shortly. “Or” – as a thought struck him – “I can lend you a canoe and paddlers to take you to the Isisi River, where you will probably find Mr Tibbetts.”

  To his surprise, the man readily agreed to this suggestion, and it was with mingled relief and apprehension that Hamilton saw him depart, watching the grey tall hat, fascinated, until it disappeared, with its owner, round the bend of the river.

  The object of Pinto’s visit can be briefly stated, though in his modesty he omitted such a confession. He had come to secure £500, and he was perfectly willing to accept half. That Bones would pay rather than face an expo
sure he had no doubt at all. Other men had paid: a young chief clerk at Lagos had paid £300; a middle-aged Commissioner at Nigeria had paid even more before he realised what a fool he had been, and circularised a description of Mr Fernandez, alias Gonsalez, up and down the coast. Of this disquieting action Pinto was blissfully unaware.

  The rôle of the outraged husband, unexpectedly appearing to the victim in the bush, away from the counsel of interfering lawyers and the devastating advice of friends, usually, in Mr Pinto’s experience, had the desired effect. In Lagos, where he was known, there might have been difficulties, but even these had not arisen. Men who live in the bush carry large sums of ready money. Their belt is their banker, and Pinto did not doubt that Bones could produce from the leathern ceinture about his thin middle, sufficient to keep Pinto Fernandez and his erratic wife in comfort through many a long and pleasing siesta. As he paddled gently up the river, he did not dream of failure, and the existence of D’lama was unknown to him.

  D’lama-m’popo was of the forest, and owing little but the nebulous allegiance which is given by the forest folk to the nearest paramount chief. And where loyalty is largely determined by propinquity, treason is a word which it was absurd to employ. Thus, D’lama had committed many small misdeeds, and at least one of serious importance.

  D’lama owed a fisherman half a bag of salt, and the fisherman, in despair of securing a just settlement, offered D’lama the equivalent of the other half bag, together with a fat dog, a mythical cache of ivory and the freedom of the village, on condition that D’lama, who was a bachelor, took to his hut the fisherman’s daughter Kobali, by her father’s account a virgin, indubitably unmarried, and old by the river standard, for she had seen eighteen rainy seasons.

  Now, when a woman of the river reaches the advanced age of eighteen without finding for herself a husband, a hut, and a share of the cooking, there is usually something wrong, and what was wrong with Kobali was her ability to converse with birds, a most disconcerting accomplishment, for birds know the secrets of all, since they listen in unsuspected and hidden places, and are great gossips among themselves.

  There was a man in the far-away Ituri Forest who understood their cheep-twit talk, and he became a king and died honoured, and some say that on the day of his passing no bird was seen for a hundred miles.

  There was another man whose career was less glorious, and there was the mad woman of Bolongo. And there was Kobali. Her father would have kept her secret, for people with supernatural powers are unpopular, and are sometimes furtively “chopped” on dark nights, but she was overseen by an elder of the village talking earnestly to three little birds that sat on a bough with their heads perked on one side, and these birds were in a state of such excitement that the elder knew that she was telling them about the wife he had left in the forest to die, because she was sick and old. And, sure enough, a week later, came Mr Commissioner Sanders with four soldiers, searching for the woman. They found all that the beasts had left, and the elder went down to the Village of Irons with a steel chain dragging from ankle to ankle.

  D’lama-m’popo listened to the proposal without enthusiasm, squatting before his crazy hut and playing with the dust, from which he never raised his eyes.

  “O man,” he said at last, “it is true I owe you a bag-that-is-not-a-bag of salt, and when the little monkeys come back from their mysterious breeding place, I will kill many and sell them to the Government, and then I will bring you so much salt. But this woman Kobali is a witch, and who marries a witch loses his eyes. That is well known, for witches must have many eyes to see their way in the dark.”

  “That is foolish, D’lama,” said her father – he was a mild and skinny man and incapable of violence. “For has she taken mine? She is a very fine girl…”

  He proceeded to enumerate her physical attractions with a frankness which is not common in the fathers of civilisation, employing the language of superlatives which adorns the pages of a bloodstock catalogue.

  “She may be this, and she may be that,” said D’lama, unimpressed at the end of a long recital, “but I am a lonely man and have no wish for women.”

  Thereupon the father of the paragon was inspired to lie.

  “The birds have told my little woman that you will take her to your hut.”

  Whereupon the countenance of D’lama fell. “O ko!” he said. “That means that I shall go mad! For who but a madman would take as his wife a Bird Witch? Ko ko! This is terrible to me!”

  The father went back to his house by the river, and there he found Kobali sitting under a tree where the weaver birds made their home, and she was gazing upward to the excited throng above her, so intent upon all that she was hearing that until her parent had called her twice she did not heed him.

  “Woman,” he said, “you go to the hut of D’lama of the woods. He is a capable hunter, and he owes me salt. Now, on the last night of the moon, I will have a great dance for you.”

  “You make no wedding dance for me, husband of my mother,” she said, “for the birds have told me that I shall marry a white man.”

  The jaw of the fisherman dropped. “Woman,” he gasped, “now I know that you are mad! This must come in palaver before Sandi, who is near by, so that I shall not be blamed for your foolish talk.”

  His daughter did not quail. “The birds speak, and it is,” she said simply. “Now, I tell you this, that if, in two moons, I do not marry a white man, I will go to the hut of D’lama, though he is a man of no people and is a killer of the weak. For the birds told me that he chopped an old woman for the ring she wore about her neck.”

  The agitated father carried the news to D’lama, who was sufficiently uncultured to show his relief.

  “Who knows,” he said, “that such a wonder may not happen? For this woman of yours is very cunning and understands magic, and by her cleverness she may grow a white man out of the ground.”

  The old fisherman blinked. “That is true, D’lama,” he said, “for Kobali speaks with the birds and learns strange mysteries. This day she told me that once upon a time you killed an old woman in the bush because of the brass ring she wore upon her neck.”

  Being a native, D’lama did not faint, but he was silent for a very long time.

  “If such things come to the ears of Sandi,” he said a little huskily, “there will be a hanging palaver. Get this woman married, and I will give you more than two bags of salt.”

  The old man went back to his daughter and wrangled and argued with her throughout the night, without shaking her from her determination. The next morning he took his canoe and paddled three hours in the slack shore water to the juncture of the Isisi River, where a white paddle-wheel gunboat was moored while Sanders held palaver.

  He sat alone in judgment, for Bones had been sent up the Isisi River to arrest a certain petty chief who had sanctioned witchcraft in his territory. Under the striped awning on the after-deck of the Zaire Sanders listened to complaints, tried matrimonial suits, offered advice and admonition briefly and, at times, a little brutally. To him came the fisherman with his story of woe. Sanders listened without interruption until, in the way of litigants, the old man began his recital over again.

  “Go back to your daughter, fisherman,” said Sanders, “and tell her that white men do not marry black women – in my territory. And if she be, as you say, a witch, then there is punishment for that, as all the lands and people know.”

  “Lord,” said the fisherman, “she speaks with the birds, and they tell her she will come to no harm.”

  “She has not spoken with the right bird,” said Sanders grimly, and dismissed him.

  It was the end of the palaver, and he rose a little stiffly, and walked forward, leaning over the rail and watching incuriously the broad river flowing to the sea. As he looked, there came into his zone of vision a long canoe, which he recognised, by its shape and the rhythmical action of the paddlers, as from headquarters. He lifted a pair of binoculars and scanned the oncoming craft, expecting to find
Hamilton in the little leaf-roofed cabin at the stern.

  “Jumping Moses!” said Sanders, and, putting down the glasses, he waited until the canoe drew alongside and Mr Pinto Fernandez, complete in grey top hat and somewhat soiled white spats, stepped on board.

  “Mr Tibbetts, I presume?” said Pinto sternly.

  Sanders smiled. “No, I am not Mr Tibbetts,” he said. “I am the Commissioner in these parts. What can I do for you, my man?”

  “I wish to see Mr Tibbetts on a matter of delicacy and honour,” said Pinto glibly, and Sanders’ eyes narrowed.

  “Take off your hat,” he said curtly; “you needn’t fear sunstroke. You are a coloured man, I see.”

  “I am a Portuguese subject,” said Pinto with dignity, but obeyed.

  Sanders looked at him for a very long time, “Now, will you please tell me the object of your visit?” he said softly.

  “It is a matter for Mr Tibbetts’ ears alone.”

  “It is nothing to do, by any chance, with a correspondence in which Mr Tibbetts has been engaged?” asked Sanders, and did not fail to observe the start of surprise. “Because there was a gentleman, if I remember rightly, in Nigeria, who had an indiscreet correspondence with a lady in Funchal, and was induced to part with a considerable sum of money,” said Sanders. “That fact came to me through official correspondence. What is your name?”

  “Gonsalez,” said Pinto,

  Sanders rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That isn’t the name – but I seem to remember your face,” he said. “I have seen a photograph somewhere – oh yes, your name is Pinto Fernandez, and you are wanted by the Nigerian police for embezzlement. Curiously enough” – he was speaking as though to himself – “I never connected you with the ingenious blackmailer, and I don’t suppose anybody else has.”

  “I want to say, Mr Sanders,” said Pinto loudly, and slightly flustered, “that your Tibbetts has been corresponding with my foolish wife–”

  Sanders stopped him with a gesture. “According to the police report I have had from Nigeria, that was the basis of your argument with another gentleman.”