Bones Of The River Part 2

THE MEDICAL OFFICER OF HEALTH.

For the use of Mr Augustus Tibbetts, Lieutenant of Houssas, and called by all and sundry "Bones," a hut had at one time been erected. It was a large hut, and in many ways a handsome hut, and would have accommodated 999 young officers out of a thousand. There was even a shower bath operating from a lofty barrel. But the interests of Bones were multifarious. His hobbies were many. They came and went, and in their pa.s.sing left on the shelves, in the cupboards and under the table and bed, distinct evidence of their existence. As the scientist may, by the examination of geological strata, trace the history of the world, so might an expert delving into the expensive litter of his hutment, follow Bones from the Devonian eras (represented by a pa.s.sionate search for rare and remarkable stamps) through Cretaceous, Tertiary, and Quarternary strata of study and recreation.

Another hut had been added to store his collection, and on its native-built shelves reposed old wireless sets that did not work and never had worked, volumes of self-improvers, piles of literature, thousands of samples ranging from linoleum to breakfast foods, boxes of scientific and quasi-scientific instruments (he took a correspondence course in mountain railway construction, although there were no mountains nearer than Sierra Leone), and rolls of electric flexes.

"What an infernal junk shop!" said Hamilton appalled.

He had come over to make a few caustic remarks about the key of the store-house which, as usual when Bones had its temporary custody, had been left all night in the door, thereby offering temptation to Hamilton's Houssas, who were loyal but dishonest.

"To your unscientific eyes, my dear old captain and comrade, yes," said Bones quietly. "To my shrewd old optics, no. Everything there has its value, its raison d'etre raison d'etre which is a French expression that is Greek to you, dear old Ham its its requirability." which is a French expression that is Greek to you, dear old Ham its its requirability."

"What is this?" asked Hamilton, picking up a queer-looking object.

"That," said Bones without hesitation, "is an instrument used in wireless it would take too long to explain, Ham. Unless you've got a groundin' in science, dear old ignoramus, any explanation would be undecipherable"

"Unintelligible is the word you want," said Hamilton, and read with difficulty the words stamped upon the steel side of the instrument. "'Robinson's Patent Safety Razor Strop' you don't mean 'wireless' you mean 'hairless.'"

"I wish to good gracious heavens you wouldn't mess things about," said Bones testily, as he fixed his monocle and glared at the unoffending strop.

"The truth is, Bones," said Hamilton when he reached the open and had drawn in long draughts of air with offensive ostentation, "you ought to burn all that rubbish. You'll be breeding disease of some kind."

Bones closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows.

"I am fightin' disease, dear old layman," he said gravely, and, going back to the hut, returned with a large wooden box. Holding this in the cross of his arm, he opened the lid and disclosed, lying between layers of cotton wool, a number of long, narrow, wooden cases.

"Good Lord!" gasped Hamilton in dismay. "Are you you going to do it?" going to do it?"

Bones nodded even more gravely.

"When did this come Sanders told me nothing about it?"

A faint and pitying smile dawned on the angular face of Bones.

"There are some things which our revered old excellency never tells anybody," he said gently. "You have surprised our secret, dear old Ham may I ask you, as a man of honour an' sensibility, dear old Peepin' Tom, not to mention the fact that I have told you? I trust you."

Hamilton went back to the residency, and, in defiance of the demand for secrecy, mentioned his discovery.

Mr Commissioner Sanders looked up from his work. "Vaccination lymph? Oh yes, it came this morning, and I sent it over to Bones. We may not want it, but Administration is worried about the outbreak in the French territory, and it may be necessary to inoculate the border people. Bones had better take charge they can't spare a doctor from HQ."

"G.o.d bless the lad!" said Hamilton in great relief. "I was afraid that I should be the goat."

Sanders nibbled the end of his penholder. "Bones has imagination, and I think he will want it when he comes to tackle the Lesser Isisi folk."

"He certainly is a ready liar," admitted Hamilton.

Government departments have a mania for labelling any man who occupies, temporarily or permanently, a post under their directions. There is this sense in the practice an official so labelled may be easily identified by the most obtuse of clerks. He may occupy a separate drawer in a filing cabinet, and to him, by reason of his labelling, may be attached responsibilities which fall within the designation they have found for him. Sanders received a wire from headquarters the wire had been working without interruption for a month owing to the elephants, who have a playful habit of uprooting the poles moving inland for the breeding season, and the message ran:

"No. 79174. Administration H. Re your wire No. 531 T. Lt A Tibbetts, King's Houssas, is appointed temporary Health Officer and Sanitary Inspector your territories, with additional pay three s.h.i.+llings per diem as from 4th instant until further notice. He will indent and report under letters HO and S1. Acknowledge."

Sanders duly acknowledged and communicated the momentous news to his subordinate. Bones received the intelligence very gravely.

"Of course, dear old excellency, I shall do my best," he said seriously. "The responsibility is simply fearful."

Thereafter, to use Hamilton's own expressive language, life became simply h.e.l.l.

At breakfast, Bones invariably came late, smelling strongly of disinfectant, his manner subdued, his tone severely professional.

"Good morning, excellency...Ham Ham!"

"What the devil's the matter with you?" demanded the startled Ham.

"Have you washed your hands, dear old officer?"

"That's sunburn, you jacka.s.s!"

Bones shook his head. "Use a weak solution of carbolic acid, dear old infectious one," he murmured. "Can't be too careful in these days."

He invariably carried a sheet of white paper, which he laid on the chair before he sat down, and he insisted upon a cup of boiling-hot water being placed on the table so that he might sterilise his fork and knife.

When, one morning, Sanders came into breakfast and found the dining-room reeking with carbolic, he struck.

"Bones, I appreciate your conscientious efforts on behalf of hygiene, but if you don't mind, I'd rather die of disease than endure this stink."

"Microbes, dear old excellency," murmured Bones. "This is stuff that makes naughty old Mike go red in the face."

"I prefer that he remains pale," said Sanders, and called his orderly to open the windows.

More annoying was the practice which Bones initiated of inspecting his superiors' sleeping quarters. Hamilton found him in his bedroom with a tape measure and a look of profound distress.

"Ham, old fugg-wallah, this won't do at all!" said Bones, shaking his head reprovingly. "Bless my jolly old life and soul, you'd be dead dead if I hadn't come in! How many cubic feet do you think you've got?" if I hadn't come in! How many cubic feet do you think you've got?"

"I've got two feet," answered the exasperated Hamilton, "and if you're not out of this room in three twinks, I'm going to use one of them!"

"And what's all this?" Bones stirred a heap of clothing with the end of his stick. "Trousers, dear old thing, coats an' hats don't get peevish, Ham. Us medical lads"

"'Us'," sneered Hamilton. "You illiterate hound! Get out!"

It is very trying to be brought into daily and hourly contact with a man who smelt alternately of lysol and naphthaline. It was maddening to find dinner delayed because Bones had strolled into the kitchen and had condemned the cooking arrangements; but the culmination of his infamy came when he invented a new filter that turned the drinking water a deep, rich pink that made it taste of iron filings.

"Can't you telegraph to headquarters and have him reduced to the ranks, sir?" asked Hamilton savagely, after he had found crystals of pure carbolic acid in his shaving mug. "I'm being sanitised to death!"

Happily a tax-collecting tour was due, and Sanders was not sorry. Bones, of course, ordered the thorough fumigation of the Zaire Zaire, and for three days after the little steamer started on her voyage, the unhappy crew breathed sulphur fumes and drank sulphur water and ate sulphurated rice.

Bones came down to the quay, a strange and awesome spectacle; a thin veil of antiseptic gauze hung from the edges of his helmet like a curtain, and on his hands were odorous gloves.

"Hail to the bride!" snarled Hamilton from the bridge. "Where's your orange blossom, Birdie?"

"I order you to keep away from the Ochori," cried Bones in a m.u.f.fled voice. "There's measles there drink nothing but Lithia water..."

Hamilton replied offensively.

There runs between the Pool of the Silent Ones and the Lesser Isisi, a strip of land which is neither forest nor swamp, and yet is of the nature of both. Here grow coa.r.s.e trees that survive even the parasitical growths which shoot upward in one humid night to the height of a tall man; and here come the silent ones to sleep between trees, secure in the swamps that surround them and the guardians.h.i.+p of those little birds who love crocodiles and stand sentinel over them when they slumber. Of other birds there are few; other beasts do not come to the Wood of the Waters, and the elephants' playing ground is on the firmer sh.o.r.e of the river. Here they have levelled the trees and stamped the earth flat, so that they may gambol and chase one another, and the calves may fight to the applause of trumpetings and waving trunks. There are many rotting huts in the Wood of the Waters, for the Isisi send here the old, the blind, and the mad, that they may die without distressing the whole and the sane. Sometimes they kill one another, but generally a scaly form creeps up from the mud and knocks them into the water with its quick tail, and there is an end.

Mr Commissioner Sanders was mad, but not slayable, by reason of his soldiers, his long-nosed "wung-wung" (so they called his hotchkiss) and the bra.s.s-jacketted guns that said "ha-ha-ha!"

n.o.body but a madman would go squelching through the noisome mud of the wood, peering into foul huts, raking over ground for signs of skeletons (all that the crocodiles did not take was the little red ants' by right). Yet this is what Sandi did. He slowed his fine boat and brought her to the bank.

"I have impressed upon Lulaga the impropriety of hastening the deaths of his relatives," he said to Captain Hamilton of the Houssas, "and he has sworn by M's.h.i.+mba and his own particular devil that there shall be no more blinding or old-age pensioning," he added grimly.

Hamilton smiled wearily. "'The customs of the country must not be lightly overridden or checked,'" he quoted from a famous Instruction received from the Colonial Office in bygone days there isn't a Commissioner from K'sala to Tuli Drift who cannot recite it by heart, especially after dinner.

"'Nor,'" he went on, "'should his religious observances or immemorial practices be too rudely suppressed, remembering that the native, under G.o.d's providence, is a man and a brother.'"

"Shut up!" snarled Sanders, but the inexorable Houssa was not to be suppressed.

"'He should be approached gently,'" he went on, "'with arguments and ill.u.s.trations obvious to his simple mind. Corporal punishment must under no circ.u.mstances be inflicted save in exceptionally serious crimes, and then only by order of the supreme judiciary of the country '"

"That looks to me like a new hut," said Sanders, and stepped over the hastily rigged gangway, twirling a mahogany stick in his thin, brown hand.

Threading his way through a green and anaemic plantation, he came to the hut, and there he found B'saba, sometime headman of the village of M'fusu, and B'saba was mad and silly and was chuckling and whimpering alternately, being far gone in sleeping sickness, which turns men into beasts. He was blind, and he had not been blind very long.

The nose of Sandi elaka elaka wrinkled. wrinkled.

"O man, I see you, but you cannot see me. I am Sandi, who gives justice. Now tell me, who brought you here?"

"Lulaga the king," said the old man woefully. "Also he has taken my pretty eyes."

He died that night, Sanders squatting on the ground by his side and feeding the fire that warmed him. And they buried him deep, and Sanders spoke well of him, for he had been a faithful servant of Government for many years.

In the dawn-grey he turned the nose of the Zaire Zaire against the push of the black waters and came to the village of the chief, to that man's uneasiness. against the push of the black waters and came to the village of the chief, to that man's uneasiness.

The lokalis lokalis beat a summons to a great palaver, and in the reed-roofed hut Sanders sat in judgment. beat a summons to a great palaver, and in the reed-roofed hut Sanders sat in judgment.

"Lord!" said the trembling Lulaga. "I did this because of a woman of mine who was mocked by the old man in his madness."

"Let her come here," said Sanders, and they brought her, a mature woman of sixteen, very slim, supple and defiant.

"Give me your medal, Lulaga," said Sanders, and the chief lifted the cord that held his silver medal of chieftains.h.i.+p. And when Sanders had placed it upon the neck of a trustworthy man, and this man had eaten salt from the palm of the Commissioner's hand, soldiers tied Lulaga to a tree, and one whipped him twenty times across the shoulders, and the whip had nine tails, and each was a yard in length.

"Old men and madmen shall die in good time," said Sanders. "This is the law of my King, and if this law be broken I will come with a rope. Hear me! The palaver is finished."

There came to him, as he made his way back to the s.h.i.+p, an elderly man who, by the peculiar shape of his spear, he knew was from the inner lands.

"Lord, I am M'kema of the village by the Frenchi," he said, "being a chief of those parts. Now, it seems to me that you have taken away the magic which our fathers gave to us, for all men know that the sick and old are nests where devils breed, and unless we kill them gently there will be sickness in the land. On the other side of the little river the Frenchi people are very sick, and some say that the sickness will come to us. What magic do you give us?"

Sanders was instantly alert.

"Any men of the Frenchi tribes who cross the river you shall drive back with your spears," he said, "and if they will not go, you shall kill them and burn their bodies. And I will send Tibbetti, who carries many wonders in a little box, so that you shall not be harmed."

On the way down river, Sanders was unusually thoughtful. Not less so was Captain Hamilton, for, as the elder man had said, from the beginning of time every tribe, save the Ochori, had carried its ancient men and women into the forest and left them there to die. Sanders had threatened; he had on occasions caught men in the act of carrying off their uncomfortable relatives; but never before had he punished so definitely for a custom which the ages had sanctioned.

They smelt headquarters before they saw the grey quay and the flowering palm-tops that hid the residency. Suddenly Sanders sniffed.

"What in the name of Heaven !" he asked.

A gentle wind, blowing in from the sea, carried to him a strange and penetrating odour. It was not exactly the smell of tar, nor was it the scent which one a.s.sociates with a burning soap factory. It combined the pungent qualities of both. Later, Sanders learnt that, in his absence, a trading steamer had called and had landed half-a-dozen carboys of creosote for the use of the Health Officer, and that Bones, in his enthusiasm and in that capacity, had tried the experiment of a general fumigation. The fire whereon the creosote had been transformed into its natural gases, still smouldered in the centre of the square, and Bones, a fearsome object in a gas mask, and without any a.s.sistance his men had practically mutinied and flown to their huts was continuing the experiment when, in sheer self-defence, Sanders pulled the siren of the Zaire Zaire and emitted so blood-curdling a yell that it reached beyond the protective covering of Bones' mask. and emitted so blood-curdling a yell that it reached beyond the protective covering of Bones' mask.

"For the love of Mike, what are you trying to do?" gasped Hamilton, spluttering and coughing.

Bones made signs. After his helmet had been removed, he propounded the results of his experiments.

"There isn't a jolly old rat left alive," he said triumphantly; "the beetles have turned in their jolly old numbers, and the mosquitos have quietly pa.s.sed away!"

"Are any of the company left?" demanded Hamilton. "Phew!"

"Creosote," began Bones, in his professorial manner, "is one of those jolly old bug-haters"

"Bones, I've got a job for you," said Sanders hastily. "Get steam in the Wiggle Wiggle and go up to the Lesser Isisi and on to the French frontier. Near a village which I gather is M'taka there is smallpox. Vaccinate everybody within a ten mile radius and be happy." and go up to the Lesser Isisi and on to the French frontier. Near a village which I gather is M'taka there is smallpox. Vaccinate everybody within a ten mile radius and be happy."

"And keep away from the French territory," warned Hamilton.

Bones smiled contemptuously. "Am I a ravin' old a.s.s?"

"Not 'old,'" said Hamilton.

Within two hours Bones was on his way, a huge pipe clenched between his teeth, a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles ("And G.o.d knows where he got those from!" said Hamilton in despair) on his nose, and, balanced upon his knees, a ponderous medical tome. The fact that it was a surgical work dealing with nerve centres made no difference to Bones, it was the only medical work he had it had been sent to him, in response to his written request to a London publisher for a novel that was enjoying some popularity at the time. And if, reading Bones' vile handwriting, the publisher translated his request for "Walter Newman's Sister" into "Watts' Diseases of the Nervous System," he was hardly to blame.

In course of time he came to the Lesser Isisi, and was received with great honour by the new chief. It seemed that every man, woman and child in the village had turned out to meet him. But there were no marks of special enthusiasm, nor did any of the people smile. And the folk of the Lesser Isisi are only too ready to laugh.

"Lord," said the new chief, "all men know that you bring great magic in your two hands, for Sandi has spoken well of you, and it is known that you are a friend of ju-jus and ghosts. Therefore, my people have come that they may see this magic which is greater than the magic of our fathers."

This he said publicly, for all men to hear. In the privacy of his hut, he told another story.

"The people have anger in their stomachs, because Sandi whipped Lulaga, and there have been secret palavers," he said. "And, lord, I think they will make an end to me. Also, there is a saying that Sandi loves death and hates the people of the lsisi, so that he would be glad if the cooking-pots were broken and the roofs of the village were fallen."

Thus he symbolised death, for when a man of the Isisi pa.s.ses, the pots wherein his food was cooked are broken on his grave, and no man tends his hut until the winds and the rain bring it sagging to the ground.

"That is foolish talk," said Bones, "since Sandi has sent me to make all people well by the wonder which is in my little box. Behold, I will put into their arms a great medicine, so that they shall laugh at ghosts and mock at devils. For I am very honoured in my land because of my great wisdom with medicine," added Bones immodestly.

Accompanied by four soldiers, he marched two days into the forest and came at last to the village by the water, and arrived only in time; for, in defiance of Sandi's orders, three men from the Frenchi village had crossed in the night and were being entertained by the headman himself. They left hurriedly and noisily, Bones chasing them to their canoe, and whacking at them with his walking stick until they were out of reach of his arm. Then he came back to the village and called a palaver. In the palaver house, placed upon an upturned drum, and covered with one of his famous sanitary handkerchiefs, were innumerable little tubes and a bright lancet.

"O people," said Bones in his glib Bomongo and he spoke the language like a native "Sandi has sent me because I am greater than ju-jus and more wonderful than devils. And I will put into your bodies a great magic, that shall make the old men young and the young men like leopards, and shall make your women beautiful and your little children stronger than elephants!"