Richard Harding Davis - Once Upon A Time

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[Illustration: "Then, how did you suppose your sister was going to read
it?"]

ONCE UPON A TIME

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1912

Copyright, 1910, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

TO

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS

CONTENTS

A Question of Latitude 1

The Spy 37

The Messengers 73

A Wasted Day 97

A Charmed Life 125

The Amateur 151

The Make-Believe Man 193

Peace Manoeuvres 247

ILLUSTRATIONS

"Then, how did you suppose your sister was going to
read it?" _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Schnitzel was smiling to himself 52

"Schnitzel, you certainly are a magnificent liar" 58

"I think," said Ainsley, "they have lost their way" 90

"Was it you," demanded young Andrews, in a puzzled
tone, "or your brother who tried to knife
me?" 108

Mr. Thorndike stood irresolute, and then sank back
into his chair 116

"Do I look as easy as that, or are you just naturally
foolish?" 182

She was easily the prettiest and most striking-looking
woman in the room 188

A QUESTION OF LATITUDE

Of the school of earnest young writers at whom the word muckraker had
been thrown in opprobrium, and by whom it had been caught up as a title
of honor, Everett was among the younger and less conspicuous. But, if in
his skirmishes with graft and corruption he had failed to correct the
evils he attacked, from the contests he himself had always emerged with
credit. His sincerity and his methods were above suspicion. No one had
caught him in misstatement, or exaggeration. Even those whom he
attacked, admitted he fought fair. For these reasons, the editors of
magazines, with the fear of libel before their eyes, regarded him as a
"safe" man, the public, feeling that the evils he exposed were due to
its own indifference, with uncomfortable approval, and those he
attacked, with impotent anger. Their anger was impotent because, in the
case of Everett, the weapons used by their class in "striking back" were
denied them. They could not say that for money he sold sensations,
because it was known that a proud and wealthy parent supplied him with
all the money he wanted. Nor in his private life could they find
anything to offset his attacks upon the misconduct of others. Men had
been sent to spy upon him, and women to lay traps. But the men reported
that his evenings were spent at his club, and, from the women, those who
sent them learned only that Everett "treats a lady just as though she
_is_ a lady."

Accordingly, when, with much trumpeting, he departed to investigate
conditions in the Congo, there were some who rejoiced.

The standard of life to which Everett was accustomed was high. In his
home in Boston it had been set for him by a father and mother who,
though critics rather than workers in the world, had taught him to
despise what was mean and ungenerous, to write the truth and abhor a
compromise. At Harvard he had interested himself in municipal reform,
and when later he moved to New York, he transferred his interest to the
problems of that city. His attack upon Tammany Hall did not utterly
destroy that organization, but at once brought him to the notice of the
editors. By them he was invited to tilt his lance at evils in other
parts of the United States, at "systems," trusts, convict camps,
municipal misrule. His work had met with a measure of success that
seemed to justify _Lowell's Weekly_ in sending him further afield; and
he now was on his way to tell the truth about the Congo. Personally,
Everett was a healthy, clean-minded enthusiast. He possessed all of the
advantages of youth, and all of its intolerance. He was supposed to be
engaged to Florence Carey, but he was not. There was, however, between
them an "understanding," which understanding, as Everett understood it,
meant that until she was ready to say, "I am ready," he was to think of
her, dream of her, write love-letters to her, and keep himself only for
her. He loved her very dearly, and, having no choice, was content to
wait. His content was fortunate, as Miss Carey seemed inclined to keep
him waiting indefinitely.

Except in Europe, Everett had never travelled outside the limits of his
own country. But the new land toward which he was advancing held no
terrors. As he understood it, the Congo was at the mercy of a corrupt
"ring." In every part of the United States he had found a city in the
clutch of a corrupt ring. The conditions would be the same, the methods
he would use to get at the truth would be the same, the result for
reform would be the same.

The English steamer on which he sailed for Southampton was one leased
by the Independent State of the Congo, and, with a few exceptions, her
passengers were subjects of King Leopold. On board, the language was
French, at table the men sat according to the rank they held in the
administration of the jungle, and each in his buttonhole wore the tiny
silver star that showed that for three years, to fill the storehouses of
the King of the Belgians, he had gathered rubber and ivory. In the
smoking-room Everett soon discovered that passengers not in the service
of that king, the English and German officers and traders, held aloof
from the Belgians. Their attitude toward them seemed to be one partly of
contempt, partly of pity.

"Are your English protectorates on the coast, then, so much better
administered?" Everett asked.

The English Coaster, who for ten years in Nigeria had escaped fever and
sudden death, laughed evasively.

"I have never been in the Congo," he said. "Only know what they tell
one. But you'll see for yourself. That is," he added, "you'll see what
they want you to see."

They were leaning on the rail, with their eyes turned toward the coast
of Liberia, a gloomy green line against which the waves cast up
fountains of foam as high as the cocoanut palms. As a subject of
discussion, the coaster seemed anxious to avoid the Congo.

"It was there," he said, pointing, "the _Three Castles_ struck on the
rocks. She was a total loss. So were her passengers," he added. "They
ate them."

Everett gazed suspiciously at the unmoved face of the veteran.

"_Who_ ate them?" he asked guardedly. "Sharks?"

"The natives that live back of that shore-line in the lagoons."

Everett laughed with the assurance of one for whom a trap had been laid
and who had cleverly avoided it.

"Cannibals," he mocked. "Cannibals went out of date with pirates. But
perhaps," he added apologetically, "this happened some years ago?"

"Happened last month," said the trader.

"But Liberia is a perfectly good republic," protested Everett. "The
blacks there may not be as far advanced as in your colonies, but they're
not cannibals."

"Monrovia is a very small part of Liberia," said the trader dryly. "And
none of these protectorates, or crown colonies, on this coast pretends
to control much of the Hinterland. There is Sierra Leone, for instance,
about the oldest of them. Last year the governor celebrated the
hundredth anniversary of the year the British abolished slavery. They
had parades and tea-fights, and all the blacks were in the street in
straw hats with cricket ribbons, thanking God they were not as other men
are, not slaves like their grandfathers. Well, just at the height of the
jubilation, the tribes within twenty miles of the town sent in to say
that they, also, were holding a palaver, and it was to mark the fact
that they _never_ had been slaves and never would be, and, if the
governor doubted it, to send out his fighting men and they'd prove it.
It cast quite a gloom over the celebration."

"Do you mean that only twenty miles from the coast--" began Everett.

"_Ten_ miles," said the Coaster. "Wait till you see Calabar. That's our
Exhibit A. The cleanest, best administered. Everything there is model:
hospitals, barracks, golf links. Last year, ten miles from Calabar, Dr.
Stewart rode his bicycle into a native village. The king tortured him
six days, cut him up, and sent pieces of him to fifty villages with the
message: 'You eat each other. _We_ eat white chop.' That was ten miles
from our model barracks."

For some moments the muckraker considered the statement thoughtfully.

"You mean," he inquired, "that the atrocities are not all on the side of
the white men?"

"Atrocities?" exclaimed the trader. "I wasn't talking of atrocities. Are
you looking for them?"

"I'm not running away from them," laughed Everett. "_Lowell's Weekly_ is
sending me to the Congo to find out the truth, and to try to help put an
end to them."

In his turn the trader considered the statement carefully.

"Among the natives," he explained, painstakingly picking each word,
"what you call 'atrocities' are customs of warfare, forms of punishment.
When they go to war they _expect_ to be tortured; they _know_, if
they're killed, they'll be eaten. The white man comes here and finds
these customs have existed for centuries. He adopts them, because--"

"One moment!" interrupted Everett warmly. "That does not excuse _him_.
The point is, that with him they have _not_ existed. To him they should
be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater
knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the native, not
sink to him."

The Coaster took his pipe from his mouth, and twice opened his lips to
speak. Finally, he blew the smoke into the air, and shook his head.

"What's the use!" he exclaimed.

"Try," laughed Everett. "Maybe I'm not as unintelligent as I talk."

"You must get this right," protested the Coaster. "It doesn't matter a
damn what a man _brings_ here, what his training _was_, what _he is_.
The thing is too strong for him."

"What thing?"

"That!" said the Coaster. He threw out his arm at the brooding
mountains, the dark lagoons, the glaring coast-line against which the
waves shot into the air with the shock and roar of twelve-inch guns.

"The first white man came to Sierra Leone five hundred years before
Christ," said the Coaster. "And, in twenty-two hundred years, he's got
just twenty miles inland. The native didn't need forts, or a navy, to
stop him. He had three allies: those waves, the fever, and the sun.
Especially the sun. The black man goes bare-headed, and the sun lets him
pass. The white man covers his head with an inch of cork, and the sun
strikes through it and kills him. When Jameson came down the river from
Yambuya, the natives fired on his boat. He waved his helmet at them for
three minutes, to show them there was a white man in the canoe. Three
minutes was all the sun wanted. Jameson died in two days. Where you are
going, the sun does worse things to a man than kill him: it drives him
mad. It keeps the fear of death in his heart; and _that_ takes away his
nerve and his sense of proportion. He flies into murderous fits, over
silly, imaginary slights; he grows morbid, suspicious, he becomes a
coward, and because he is a coward with authority, he becomes a bully.

"He is alone, we will suppose, at a station three hundred miles from any
other white man. One morning his house-boy spills a cup of coffee on
him, and in a rage he half kills the boy. He broods over that, until he
discovers, or his crazy mind makes him think he has discovered, that in
revenge the boy is plotting to poison him. So he punishes him again.
Only this time he punishes him as the black man has taught him to
punish, in the only way the black man seems to understand; that is, he
tortures him. From that moment the fall of that man is rapid. The heat,
the loneliness, the fever, the fear of the black faces, keep him on
edge, rob him of sleep, rob him of his physical strength, of his moral
strength. He loses shame, loses reason; becomes cruel, weak, degenerate.
He invents new, bestial tortures; commits new, unspeakable 'atrocities,'
until, one day, the natives turn and kill him, or he sticks his gun in
his mouth and blows the top of his head off."

The Coaster smiled tolerantly at the wide-eyed eager young man at his
side.

"And you," he mocked, "think you can reform that man, and that hell
above ground called the Congo, with an article in _Lowell's Weekly_?"

Undismayed, Everett grinned cheerfully.

"That's what I'm here for!" he said.

By the time Everett reached the mouth of the Congo, he had learned that
in everything he must depend upon himself; that he would be accepted
only as the kind of man that, at the moment, he showed himself to be.
This attitude of independence was not chosen, but forced on him by the
men with whom he came in contact. Associations and traditions, that in
every part of the United States had served as letters of introduction,
and enabled strangers to identify and label him, were to the white men
on the steamer and at the ports of call without meaning or value. That
he was an Everett of Boston conveyed little to those who had not heard
even of Boston. That he was the correspondent of _Lowell's Weekly_
meant less to those who did not know that _Lowell's Weekly_ existed.
And when, in confusion, he proffered his letter of credit, the very fact
that it called for a thousand pounds was, in the eyes of a "Palm Oil
Ruffian," sufficient evidence that it had been forged or stolen. He soon
saw that solely as a white man was he accepted and made welcome. That he
was respectable, few believed, and no one cared. To be taken at his face
value, to be refused at the start the benefit of the doubt, was a novel
sensation; and yet not unpleasant. It was a relief not to be accepted
only as Everett the Muckraker, as a professional reformer, as one holier
than others. It afforded his soul the same relaxation that his body
received when, in his shirt-sleeves in the sweltering smoking-room, he
drank beer with a _chef de poste_ who had been thrice tried for
murder.

Not only to every one was he a stranger, but to him everything was
strange; so strange as to appear unreal. This did not prevent him from
at once recognizing those things that were not strange, such as corrupt
officials, incompetence, mismanagement. He did not need the missionaries
to point out to him that the Independent State of the Congo was not a
colony administered for the benefit of many, but a vast rubber
plantation worked by slaves to fill the pockets of one man. It was not
in his work that Everett found himself confused. It was in his attitude
of mind toward almost every other question.

At first, when he could not make everything fit his rule of thumb, he
excused the country tolerantly as a "topsy-turvy" land. He wished to
move and act quickly; to make others move quickly. He did not understand
that men who had sentenced themselves to exile for the official term of
three years, or for life, measured time only by the date of their
release. When he learned that even a cablegram could not reach his home
in less than eighteen days, that the missionaries to whom he brought
letters were a three months' journey from the coast and from each other,
his impatience was chastened to wonder, and, later, to awe.

His education began at Matadi, where he waited until the river steamer
was ready to start for Leopoldville. Of the two places he was assured
Matadi was the better, for the reason that if you still were in favor
with the steward of the ship that brought you south, he might sell you a
piece of ice.

Matadi was a great rock, blazing with heat. Its narrow, perpendicular
paths seemed to run with burning lava. Its top, the main square of the
settlement, was of baked clay, beaten hard by thousands of naked feet.
Crossing it by day was an adventure. The air that swept it was the
breath of a blast-furnace.

Everett found a room over the shop of a Portuguese trader. It was caked
with dirt, and smelled of unnamed diseases and chloride of lime. In it
was a canvas cot, a roll of evil-looking bedding, a wash-basin filled
with the stumps of cigarettes. In a corner was a tin chop-box, which
Everett asked to have removed. It belonged, the landlord told him, to
the man who, two nights before, had occupied the cot and who had died in
it. Everett was anxious to learn of what he had died. Apparently
surprised at the question, the Portuguese shrugged his shoulders.

"Who knows?" he exclaimed. The next morning the English trader across
the street assured Everett there was no occasion for alarm. "He didn't
die of any disease," he explained. "Somebody got at him from the
balcony, while he was in his cot, and knifed him."

The English trader was a young man, a cockney, named Upsher. At home he
had been a steward on the Channel steamers. Everett made him his most
intimate friend. He had a black wife, who spent most of her day in a
four-post bed, hung with lace curtains and blue ribbon, in which she
resembled a baby hippopotamus wallowing in a bank of white sand.

At first the black woman was a shock to Everett, but after Upsher
dismissed her indifferently as a "good old sort," and spent one evening
blubbering over a photograph of his wife and "kiddie" at home, Everett
accepted her. His excuse for this was that men who knew they might die
on the morrow must not be judged by what they do to-day. The excuse did
not ring sound, but he dismissed the doubt by deciding that in such heat
it was not possible to take serious questions seriously. In the fact
that, to those about him, the thought of death was ever present, he
found further excuse for much else that puzzled and shocked him. At
home, death had been a contingency so remote that he had put it aside as
something he need not consider until he was a grandfather. At Matadi, at
every moment of the day, in each trifling act, he found death must be
faced, conciliated, conquered. At home he might ask himself, "If I eat
this will it give me indigestion?" At Matadi he asked, "If I drink this
will I die?"

Upsher told him of a feud then existing between the chief of police and
an Italian doctor in the State service. Interested in the outcome only
as a sporting proposition, Upsher declared the odds were unfair,
because the Belgian was using his black police to act as his body-guard
while for protection the Italian could depend only upon his sword-cane.
Each night, with the other white exiles of Matadi, the two adversaries
met in the Cafe Franco-Belge. There, with puzzled interest, Everett
watched them sitting at separate tables, surrounded by mutual friends,
excitedly playing dominoes. Outside the cafe Matadi lay smothered and
sweltering in a black, living darkness, and, save for the rush of the
river, in a silence that continued unbroken across a jungle as wide as
Europe. Inside the dominoes clicked, the glasses rang on the iron
tables, the oil lamps glared upon the pallid, sweating faces of clerks,
upon the tanned, sweating skins of officers; and the Italian doctor and
the Belgian lieutenant, each with murder in his heart, laughed,
shrugged, gesticulated, waiting for the moment to strike.

"But why doesn't some one _do_ something?" demanded Everett. "Arrest
them, or reason with them. Everybody knows about it. It seems a pity not
to _do_ something."

Upsher nodded his head. Dimly he recognized a language with which he
once had been familiar. "I know what you mean," he agreed. "Bind 'em
over to keep the peace. And a good job, too! But who?" he demanded
vaguely. "That's what I say! Who?" From the confusion into which
Everett's appeal to forgotten memories had thrown it, his mind suddenly
emerged. "But what's the use!" he demanded. "Don't you see," he
explained triumphantly, "if those two crazy men were fit to listen to
_sense_, they'd have sense enough not to kill each other!"

Each succeeding evening Everett watched the two potential murderers with
lessening interest. He even made a bet with Upsher, of a bottle of fruit
salt, that the chief of police would be the one to die.

A few nights later a man, groaning beneath his balcony, disturbed his
slumbers. He cursed the man, and turned his pillow to find the cooler
side. But all through the night the groans, though fainter, broke into
his dreams. At intervals some traditions of past conduct tugged at
Everett's sleeve, and bade him rise and play the good Samaritan. But,
indignantly, he repulsed them. Were there not many others within
hearing? Were there not the police? Was it _his_ place to bind the
wounds of drunken stokers? The groans were probably a trick, to entice
him, unarmed, into the night. And so, just before the dawn, when the
mists rose, and the groans ceased, Everett, still arguing, sank with a
contented sigh into forgetfulness.

When he woke, there was beneath his window much monkey-like chattering,
and he looked down into the white face and glazed eyes of the Italian
doctor, lying in the gutter and staring up at him. Below his
shoulder-blades a pool of blood shone evilly in the blatant sunlight.

Across the street, on his balcony, Upsher, in pajamas and mosquito
boots, was shivering with fever and stifling a yawn. "You lose!" he
called.

Later in the day, Everett analyzed his conduct of the night previous.
"At home," he told Upsher, "I would have been telephoning for an
ambulance, or been out in the street giving the man the 'first-aid'
drill. But living as we do here, so close to death, we see things more
clearly. Death loses its importance. It's a bromide," he added. "But
travel certainly broadens one. Every day I have been in the Congo, I
have been assimilating new ideas." Upsher nodded vigorously in assent.
An older man could have told Everett that he was assimilating just as
much of the Congo as the rabbit assimilates of the boa-constrictor, that
first smothers it with saliva and then swallows it.

Everett started up the Congo in a small steamer open on all sides to
the sun and rain, and with a paddle-wheel astern that kicked her forward
at the rate of four miles an hour. Once every day, the boat tied up to a
tree and took on wood to feed her furnace, and Everett talked to the
white man in charge of the wood post, or, if, as it generally happened,
the white man was on his back with fever, dosed him with quinine. On
board, except for her captain, and a Finn who acted as engineer, Everett
was the only other white man. The black crew and "wood-boys" he soon
disliked intensely. At first, when Nansen, the Danish captain, and the
Finn struck them, because they were in the way, or because they were
not, Everett winced, and made a note of it. But later he decided the
blacks were insolent, sullen, ungrateful; that a blow did them no harm.

According to the unprejudiced testimony of those who, before the war, in
his own country, had owned slaves, those of the "Southland" were always
content, always happy. When not singing close harmony in the
cotton-fields, they danced upon the levee, they twanged the old banjo.
But these slaves of the Upper Congo were not happy. They did not dance.
They did not sing. At times their eyes, dull, gloomy, despairing,
lighted with a sudden sombre fire, and searched the eyes of the white
man. They seemed to beg of him the answer to a terrible question. It was
always the same question. It had been asked of Pharaoh. They asked it of
Leopold. For hours, squatting on the iron deck-plates, humped on their
naked haunches, crowding close together, they muttered apparently
interminable criticisms of Everett. Their eyes never left him. He
resented this unceasing scrutiny. It got upon his nerves. He was sure
they were evolving some scheme to rob him of his tinned sausages, or,
possibly, to kill him. It was then he began to dislike them. In reality,
they were discussing the watch strapped to his wrist. They believed it
was a powerful juju, to ward off evil spirits. They were afraid of it.

One day, to pay the chief wood-boy for a carved paddle, Everett was
measuring a _bras_ of cloth. As he had been taught, he held the cloth in
his teeth and stretched it to the ends of his finger-tips. The wood-boy
thought the white man was giving him short measure. White men always
_had_ given him short measure, and, at a glance, he could not recognize
that this one was an Everett of Boston.

So he opened Everett's fingers.

All the blood in Everett's body leaped to his head. That he, a white
man, an Everett, who had come so far to set these people free, should
be accused by one of them of petty theft!

He caught up a log of fire wood and laid open the scalp of the black
boy, from the eye to the crown of his head. The boy dropped, and
Everett, seeing the blood creeping through his kinky wool, turned ill
with nausea. Drunkenly, through a red cloud of mist, he heard himself
shouting, "The _black_ nigger! The _black nigger!_ He touched me! I
_tell_ you, he touched me!" Captain Nansen led Everett to his cot and
gave him fizzy salts, but it was not until sundown that the trembling
and nausea ceased.

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