



Produced by Don Lainson





A QUESTION OF LATITUDE


By Richard Harding Davis



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