12 Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV (4 page)

    "How is he treating the swellings?" Van Rieten enquired.

    "He slices them off clean down to flesh level, with his razor."

    "What?" Van Rieten shouted.

    Etcham made no answer but looked him steadily in the eyes.

    "I beg pardon," Van Rieten hastened to say. "You startled me. They can't be carbuncles. He'd have been dead long ago."

    "I thought I had said they are not carbuncles," Etcham lisped.

    "But the man must be crazy!" Van Rieten exclaimed.

    "Just so," said Etcham. "He is beyond my advice or control."

    "How many has he treated that way?" Van Rieten demanded.

    "Two, to my knowledge," Etcham said.

    "Two?" Van Rieten queried.

    Etcham flushed again.

    "I saw him," he confessed, "through a crack in the hut. I felt impelled to keep a watch on him, as if he was not responsible."

    "I should think not," Van Rieten agreed. "And you saw him do that twice?"

    "I conjecture," said Etcham, "that he did the like with all the rest."

    "How many has he had?" Van Rieten asked.

    "Dozens," Etcham lisped.

    "Does he eat?" Van Rieten enquired.

    "Like a wolf," said Etcham. "More than any two bearers."

    "Can he walk?" Van Rieten asked.

    "He crawls a bit, groaning," said Etcham simply.

    "Little fever, you say," Van Rieten ruminated.

    "Enough and too much," Etcham declared.

    "Has he been delirious?" Van Rieten asked.

    "Only twice," Etcham replied; "once when the first swelling broke, and once later. He would not let anyone come near him then. But we could hear him talking, talking steadily, and it scared the natives.

    "Was he talking their patter in delirium?" Van Rieten demanded.

    "No," said Etcham, "but he was talking some similar lingo. Hamed Burghash said he was talking Balunda. I know too little Balunda. I do not learn languages readily. Stone learned more Mang-Battu in a week than I could have learned in a year. But I seemed to hear words like Mang-Battu words. Anyhow, the Mang-Battu bearers were scared."

    "Scared?" Van Rieten repeated, questioningly.

    "So were the Zanzibar men, even Hamed Burghash, and so was I," said Etcham, "only for a different reason. He talked in two voices."

    "In two voices," Van Rieten reflected.

    "Yes," said Etcham, more excitedly than he had yet spoken. "In two voices, like a conversation. One was his own, one a small, thin, bleaty voice like nothing I ever heard. I seemed to make out, among the sounds the deep voice made, something like Mang-Battu words I knew, as nedru, metababa, and nedo, their terms for 'head,' 'shoulder,' 'thigh,' and perhaps kudra and nekere ('speak' and 'whistle'); and among the noises of the shrill voice matomipa, angunzi, and kamomami ('kill,' 'death,' and 'hate'). Hamed Burghash said he also heard those words. He knew Mang-Battu far better than I."

    "What did the bearers say?" Van Rieten asked.

    "They said, ', Lukundoo!'" Etcham replied. "I did not know the word; Hamed Burghash said it was Mang-Battu for 'leopard.'"

    "It's Mang-Battu for 'witchcraft,'" said Van Rieten.

    "I don't wonder they thought so," said Etcham. "It was enough to make one believe in sorcery to listen to those two voices."

    "One voice answering the other?" Van Rieten asked perfunctorily.

    Etcham's face went gray under his tan.

    "Sometimes both at once," he answered huskily.

    "Both at once!" Van Rieten ejaculated.

    "It sounded that way to the men, too," said Etcham. "And that was not all."

    He stopped and looked helplessly at us for a moment.

    "Could a man talk and whistle at the same time?" he asked.

    "How do you mean?" Van Rieten queried.

    "We could hear Stone talking away, his big, deep-cheated baritone rumbling along, and through it all we could hear a high, shrill whistle, the oddest, wheezy sound. You know, no matter how shrilly a grown man may whistle, the note has a different quality from the whistle of a boy or a woman or a little girl. They sound more treble, somehow. Well, if you can imagine the smallest girl who could whistle keeping it up tunelessly right along, that whistle was like that, only even more piercing, and it sounded right through Stone's bass tones."

    "And you didn't go to him?" Van Rieten cried.

    "He is not given to threats," Etcham disclaimed. "But he had threatened, not volubly, nor like a sick man, but quietly and firmly, that if any man of us (he lumped me in with the men) came near him while he was in his trouble, that man should die. And it was not so much his words as his manner. It was like a monarch commanding respected privacy for a deathbed. One simply could not transgress."

    "I see," said Van Rieten shortly.

    "He's ve'y seedy," Etcham repeated helplessly. "I thought perhaps…"

    His absorbing affection for Stone, his real love for him, shone out through his envelope of conventional training. Worship of Stone was plainly his master passion.

    Like many competent men, Van Rieten had a streak of hard selfishness in him. It came to the surface then. He said we carried our lives in our hands from day to day just as genuinely as Stone; that he did not forget the ties of blood and calling between any two explorers, but that there was no sense in imperiling one party for a very problematical benefit to a man probably beyond any help; that it was enough of a task to hunt for one party; that if two were united, providing food would be more than doubly difficult; that the risk of starvation was too great. Deflecting our march seven full days' journey (he complimented Etcham on his marching powers) might ruin our expedition entirely.

    

    

    Van Rieten had logic on his side and he had a way with him. Etcham sat there apologetic and deferential, like a fourth-form schoolboy before a head master. Van Rieten wound up.

    "I am after pigmies, at the risk of my life. After pigmies I go."

    "Perhaps, then, these will interest you," said Etcham, very quietly.

    He took two objects out of the sidepocket of his blouse, and handed them to Van Rieten. They were round, bigger than big plums, and smaller than small peaches, about the right size to enclose in an average hand. They were black, and at first I did not see what they were.

    "Pigmies!" Van Rieten exclaimed. "Pigmies, indeed! Why, they wouldn't be two feet high! Do you mean to claim that these are adult heads?"

    "I claim nothing," Etcham answered evenly. "You can see for yourself."

    Van Rieten passed one of the heads to me. The sun was just setting and I examined it closely. A dried head it was, perfectly preserved, and the flesh as hard as Argentine jerked beef. A bit of a vertebra stuck out where the muscles of the vanished neck had shriveled into folds. The puny chin was sharp on a projecting jaw, the minute teeth white and even between the retracted lips, the tiny nose was flat, the little forehead retreating, there were inconsiderable clumps of stunted wool on the Lilliputian cranium. There was nothing babyish, childish or youthful about the head; rather it was mature to senility.

    "Where did these come from?" Van Rieten enquired.

    "I do not know," Etcham replied precisely. "I found them among Stone's effects while rummaging for medicines or drugs or anything that could help me to help him. I do not know where he got them. But I'll swear he did not have them when we entered this district."

    "Are you sure?" Van Rieten queried, his eyes big and fixed on Etcham's.

    "Ve'y sure," lisped Etcham.

    "But how could he have come by them without your knowledge?" Van Rieten demurred.

    "Sometimes we were apart ten days at a time hunting," said Etcham. "Stone is not a talking man. He gave me no account of his doings, and Hamed Burghash keeps a still tongue and a tight hold on the men."

    "You have examined these heads?" Van Rieten asked.

    "Minutely," said Etcham.

    Van Rieten took out his notebook. He was a methodical chap. He tore out a leaf, folded it and divided it equally into three pieces. He gave one to me and one to Etcham.

    "Just for a test of my impressions," he said, "I want each of us to write separately just what he is most reminded of by these heads. Then I want to compare the writings."

    I handed Etcham a pencil and he wrote. Then he handed the pencil back to me and I wrote.

    "Read the three," said Van Rieten, handing me his piece.

    Van Rieten had written:

    "An old Balunda witch-doctor."

    Etcham had written:

    "An old Mang-Battu fetish-man."

    I had written:

    "An old Katongo magician."

    "There!" Van Rieten exclaimed. "Look at that! There is nothing Wagabi or Batwa or Wambuttu or Wabotu about these heads. Nor anything pigmy either."

    "I thought as much," said Etcham.

    "And you say he did not have them before?"

    "To a certainty he did not," Etcham asserted.

    "It is worth following up," said Van Rieten. "I'll go with you. And first of all, I'll do my best to save Stone."

    He put out his hand and Etcham clasped it silently. He was grateful all over.

    

    

    Nothing but Etcham's fever of solicitude could have taken him in five days over the track. It took him eight days to retrace with full knowledge of it and our party to help. We could not have done it in seven, and Etcham urged us on, in a repressed fury of anxiety, no mere fever of duty to his chief, but a real ardor of devotion, a glow of personal adoration for Stone which blazed under his dry conventional exterior and showed in spite of him.

    We found Stone well cared for. Etcham had seen to a good, high thorn zareeba round the camp, the huts were well built, and thatched and Stone's was as good as their resources would permit. Hamed Burghash was not named after two Seyyids for nothing. He had in him the making of a sultan. He had kept the Mang-Battu together, not a man had slipped off, and he had kept them in order. Also he was a deft nurse and a faithful servant.

    The two other Zanzibaris had done some creditable hunting. Though all were hungry, the camp was far from starvation.

    Stone was on a canvas cot and there was a sort of collapsible camp-stool-table, like a Turkish tabouret, by the cot. It had a water-bottle and some vials on it and Stone's watch, also his razor in its case.

    Stone was clean and not emaciated, but he was far gone; not unconscious, but in a daze; past commanding or resisting anyone. He did not seem to see us enter or to know we were there. I should have recognized him anywhere. His boyish dash and grace had vanished utterly, of course. But his head was even more leonine; his hair was still abundant, yellow and wavy; the close, crisped blond beard he had grown during his illness did not alter him. He was big and big-cheated yet. His eyes were dull and he mumbled and babbled mere meaningless syllables, not words.

    Etcham helped Van Rieten to uncover him and look him over. He was in good muscle for a man so long bedridden. There were no scars on him except about his knees, shoulders and chest. On each knee and above it he had a full score of roundish cicatrices, and a dozen or more on each shoulder, all in front. Two or three were open wounds and four or five barely healed. He had no fresh swellings, except two, one on each side, on his pectoral muscles, the one on the left being higher up and farther out than the other. They did not look like boils or carbuncles, but as if something blunt and hard were being pushed up through the fairly healthy flesh and skin, not much inflamed.

    "I should not lance those," said Van Rieten, and Etcham assented.

    They made Stone as comfortable as they could, and just before sunset we looked in at him again. He was lying on his back, and his chest showed big and massive yet, but he lay as if in a stupor. We left Etcham with him and went into the next hut, which Etcham had resigned to us. The jungle noises were no different than anywhere else for months past, and I was soon fast asleep.

    

    

    Sometime in the pitch dark I found myself awake and listening. I could hear two voices, one Stone's, the other sibilant and wheezy. I knew Stone's voice after all the years that had passed since I heard it last. The other was like nothing I remembered. It had less volume than the wail of a new-born baby, yet there was an insistent carrying power to it, like the shrilling of an insect. As I listened I heard Van Rieten breathing near me in the dark; then he heard me and realized that I was listening, too. Like Etcham I knew little Balunda, but I could make out a word or two. The voices alternated, with intervals of silence between.

    Then suddenly both sounded at once and fast. Stone's baritone basso, full as if he were in perfect health, and that incredibly stridulous falsetto, both jabbering at once like the voices of two people quarreling and trying to talk each other down.

    "I can't stand this," said Van Rieten. "Let's have a look at him."

    He had one of those cylindrical electric night-candles. He fumbled about for it, touched the button and beckoned me to come with him. Outside the hut he motioned me to stand still, and instinctively turned off the light, as if seeing made listening difficult.

    Except for a faint glow from the embers of the bearers' fire we were in complete darkness, little starlight struggled through the trees, the river made but a faint murmur. We could hear the two voices together and then suddenly the creaking voice changed into a razor-edged, slicing whistle, indescribably cutting, continuing right through Stone's grumbling torrent of croaking words.