IX.

She had at one time fancied that Letts was fond of her, and she had thought that her liking for him was no mere fancy. A young woman with good looks and a pleasant manner and a young man with a career before him are very apt to have fancies in respect to each other on the West Coast of Africa, where good looks and pleasant manners are not to be met with daily. Of course when Gertrude had gone home for some months, and had met Major Minton, she became aware of the fact that her liking for Letts was the merest fancy; and perhaps when she returned with the story of her having promised (under certain conditions) to marry Major Minton, Letts had also come to the conclusion that his feeling towards Miss Hope was also a fancy. This is, however, not quite so certain. At any rate, Letts and she had always been very good friends.

For half-an-hour she talked to him quite pleasantly at first, then quite earnestly—didactically and sarcastically—on the subject of his foolish prejudice. She called it foolish when she was pleasant, and she called it contemptible when she ceased to be pleasant, on a matter which she, for her part, thought had been long ago passed out of the region of controversy. Surely a man of Mr Letts’ intelligence and observation could not be serious in objecting to dine with Dr Koomadhi simply because he chanced to be a negro.

But Mr Letts assured her that he was quite serious in the matter. He didn’t pretend, he said, to be superior in point of intelligence or power of observation to men who made no objection to meet on terms of perfect equality the whole Ethiopian race; but he had had certain experiences, he said, and so long as he retained a recollection of these experiences he would decline to sit at the same table with Dr Koomadhi or any of his race. Then it was that Mrs Minton ceased to be altogether pleasant as to the phrases which she employed in order to induce Mr Letts to change his mind.

“You are not the only one with experiences,” she said. “I have had experience not merely of negroes generally, but of Dr Koomadhi in particular, and, as I told you some time ago, I have reason to believe him to be a generous, Christian gentleman. That is why I wish to do all that is in my power to make him understand that I regard his possession of the characteristics of a gentleman and a Christian as more than placing him on a level with us. I feel that I am inferior to Dr Koomadhi in those qualities which our religion teaches us to regard as noblest.”

“And I hope with all my soul that you will never have a different experience of him,” said Letts.

“I know that I shall have no different experience of him,” said she, with confidence in her pose and in her tone.

He made no reply to this. And then she went on to ask him some interesting questions regarding the general design of the Maker of the Universe, and His intention in respect of the negro; and though Letts answered all to the best of his ability, he was not persuaded to accept Mrs Minton’s invitation to dinner.

She was naturally very angry, and even went so far as to assure Mr Letts that his refusal to accept the invitation which she offered him might be prejudicial to his being offered any future invitations to dine at her table—an assurance which he received without emotion.

She told her father of her failure, and though he shook his head with due seriousness, yet he refrained from saying “I told you so.” But when her husband heard that Letts would not be persuaded, he treated the incident with a really remarkable degree of levity, declaring that if he himself were independent, he would see Koomadhi and all the nigger race sent to a region of congenial blackness before he would sit down to dinner with the best of them. He thought Letts, however, something of an ass for not swallowing his prejudices in a neighbourhood where there were so few decent billiard-players. For himself, he said he would have no objection to dine with bandits and cut-throats if they consented to join in a good pool afterwards.

When Dr Koomadhi received his invitation to dine at the Residency—it was in the handwriting of Mrs Minton—he smiled. His smiles worked at low pressure in the daytime; he felt that he could not be too careful in this respect; he might, if taken suddenly, be led on to smile naturally in the presence of a man with a kodak, and where would he be then?

He smiled. He went to the drawer where he kept the curious stones, and looked at them for some time, but without touching them. Then he went to the drawer in which he kept the verses that he had written expressive of the effect of Miss Hope’s eyes upon his soul. By a poetic licence he assumed that he had a soul, and he liked to write about it: it gave him an opportunity of making it the last word in a line following one that ended with the word “control.” He read some of the pages, and honestly believed that they were covered with poetry of the highest character. He felt convinced that there was not another man in the whole Ashantee country who could write as good poetry; and perhaps he was not wrong in his estimate of his own powers, and the powers of his Ashantee brethren.

As he closed the door with a bang his face would have seemed to any one who might have chanced to see it one mass of ivory. This effect, startling though it was, was due merely to an incidental change of expression. He had ceased to smile; his teeth were tightly closed, and his lips had receded from them as a tidal wave recedes from the strand of a coral island, disclosing an unsuspected reef. His lips hid in their billowy depths the remainder of his face, and only that fearful double ridge of locked teeth would have been visible to any one, had any one been present.

The words that Dr Koomadhi managed to utter without unlocking his teeth were undoubtedly suggestive of very strong feeling; but no literary interest attaches to their repetition.

He seated himself at his desk—after an interval—and wrote a letter which was rather over than under the demands made by politeness upon a man who has been asked to dinner in a rather formal way. He said it would give him the greatest pleasure to accept the most kind invitation with which he had been honoured by the Commissioner and Mrs Minton; and then he added a word or two, which an ordinary gentleman would possibly have thought superfluous, regarding the pride which he felt at being the recipient of such a distinction.

It could not be said, however, that there was anything in his mode of conducting himself at the dinner-table that suggested any want of familiarity on his part with the habits of good society. He did not eat with his knife, though he might have done so without imperilling in any degree the safety of his mouth, nor did he make any mistake regarding his ice-pudding or his jelly. He also drank his champagne out of the right glass, and he did not take it for granted that the water in his finger-bowl was for any but external use.

As he lay back in his chair, with his serviette across his knees and a cigarette between his fingers, discussing with the Commissioner, with that mild forbearance which one assumes towards one’s host, the political situation of the hour, when Mrs Minton had left the room, he looked the picture of a model English gentleman—a silhouette picture. He hoped that the Conservatives would not go to the country without a programme. What were the leaders thinking of that they hadn’t familiarised the country with the policy they meant to pursue should they be returned to power? Home Rule for Ireland! Was there ever so ridiculous a demand seriously made to the country? Why, the Irish were, he assured his host, very little better than savages: he should know—he had been in Ireland for close upon a fortnight. He had some amusing Irish stories. He imitated the brogue of the peasantry. He didn’t say it was unmusical; but Home Rule!... the idea was too ridiculous to be entertained by any one who knew the people.

His political views were sound beyond a doubt. They were precisely the views of the Commissioner and his son-in-law, and the green chartreuse was velvety as it should be.

For this evening only Major Minton sang to his wife’s accompaniment a sentimental song which dwelt upon the misery of meeting daily with smiles a certain person, while his, the singer’s, heart was breaking. He sang it with well-simulated feeling. One would never have thought that there was a banjo in the house.

Then Mrs Minton sang a lovely Scotch song about a burn; but it turned out that the burn was water and not fire, and the Commissioner dozed in a corner.

At last Major Minton suggested a game of billiards, and the suggestion was acted on without delay.

After playing a game with Dr Koomadhi, while her husband looked on and criticised the strokes from the standpoint of a lenient if discriminating observer, Mrs Minton said “goodnight”; she was tired, she said, and she knew that her husband and Dr Koomadhi meant to play all night, so she thought she might as well go soon as late.

Of course Dr Koomadhi entreated her not to leave them. They would, he assured her, do anything to retain her; they would even play a four game—abhorred of billiard-players—if she would stay. Her husband did not join in the entreaties of their guest. He played tricky cannons until she had left the room.