A COLORED GENTLEMAN

In his own time, a man is very modern.

JOSEPH CONRAD

At Madeira, the Mayumba disgorged seven of her passengers and took on only one, a heavyset one‑legged American as black as his coat, with snowy side chops descending past his strong jaw and wadded gray knots receding from his wide brow. He hobbled on his crutches directly to his berth. The night proved a rough one and the ship plunged through the turbulent water, sails trimmed, engine sputtering, her prow monotonously slapping down into the trough of every wave. By morning all was calm and the passengers gathered, bleary eyed, for their breakfast, but the American didn’t appear. It was not until afternoon that the doctor found him ensconced in the saloon sipping weak tea, genially charming the generally reticent Miss Fox. Though Doyle had half a mind to turn away, Miss Fox caught his eye and waved him into the conversation, announcing to her companion, “Here is our good Dr. Doyle.” Henry Garnet, for that was the American’s name, raised himself slightly in his chair, holding out a manicured hand, his lips parted suddenly in a smile too broad and too ready. A brief exchange followed in which it was revealed that he was the freshly appointed American consul to Liberia on his way to take up his post. To the doctor’s commiserating remark about the rough weather of the night before, Mr. Garnet offered the astonishing reply that he had hardly noticed, being distracted by his reading of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico . Was the doctor perhaps acquainted with this excellent volume?

Doyle pulled up a chair and settled into it with a sense of being snared by a complex web of previously unimaginable stickiness. He did indeed admire Prescott’s work. The consul enlarged upon the subject of recent histories, revealing his thorough familiarity with Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic . The conversation strayed to philosophical authors. The Negro confessed that in spite of certain reservations a strong favorite of his was Waldo Emerson. “One admires him for the felicity of his style, if not for the depth of his vision,” he concluded.

Had Mr. Garnet encountered the works of Oliver Wendell Holmes? Doyle earnestly inquired.

“Indeed,” was the reply. Mr. Holmes’s essay collection The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table had delighted him when he was a young man. He had followed them in The Atlantic with the greatest pleasure and benefit.

Doyle fairly rubbed his eyes in wonder. Surely this man had been born into slavery or was the son of a slave. How was it possible that he should have acquainted himself with Prescott and Motley; at what sort of table exactly had he enjoyed the “benefit” of Holmes’s table talk? Miss Fox interjected a remark Doyle didn’t follow, so deeply had he fallen into puzzlement. When he came to himself and sought to reenter the conversation, he found the black man’s black eyes twinkling with such evident amusement it was as if he had read his thoughts. Miss Fox shot Doyle a chilly, incomprehensible glance; had he spoken without his own knowledge? His wonder dissolved into something sour and defensive, and still the confounded Negro glittered at him, his mouth lifted at the corners, a faint chuckle issuing from the thick throat pressed tightly against his white cravat. He withdrew a folded handkerchief from his breast pocket, swabbed it over his gleaming forehead, and, folding it once, patted his moist upper lip. Miss Fox excused herself; she was off to her cabin to dress for dinner. As she swept past, Doyle caught again a cold, disapproving cast of her eye.

“A delightful woman,” Mr. Garnet observed.

“Indeed,” the doctor agreed, looking after her. He was stymied. Ladies were fond of him; that was the rule.

“Between us, I think she was a trifle bored by our conversation about books.”

Doyle turned his attention to the man, whose sonorous, cultured voice, the voice of a professional lecturer, was so at odds with his moist black amplitude. Beads of perspiration formed as mysteriously as dewdrops across his forehead. This time he applied the handkerchief in quick dabs. “When we left New York, it was snowing,” he observed. “And God willing, it was the last snow I shall see in this life.”

“Then you don’t intend to return to your home,” Doyle concluded.

“I am going to my home, dear Doctor, though I have never been there before,” was the consul’s enigmatic reply.

* * *

Two days out of Las Palmas, the Mayumba lost the trades and, all sails set, staggered through the tepid seas into a furnace. The sun, red with fury, hurled itself up, setting the very heavens ablaze. The sailors stumbled from the forecastle, stripped to their breeches, shoeless, their hair tied back in rags. The passengers had not the luxury of dishabille and their only recourse, once they had accomplished the arduous task of dressing, was to sit very still beneath the dull whir of the fan blades that paddled the torpid air in the saloon.

Doyle sat in a stupor before a cup of tepid tea, his eyes resting on the bright cubes of sugar in the silver bowl. The pristine whiteness, the sharp architectural edges, put him in mind of the great ice floes that had hemmed in the Hope during his Arctic adventure. How their looming purity had fascinated him on those days without nights, when he strode the deck bristling with energy, alert to the tireless pumping of his own blood in his veins. Once the mate invited him to take the wheel and he felt the whole quivering, breathing enterprise of the ship through the chilled flesh of his hand. Such light, such clarity; a world without shadow in which to take a breath was to experience an influx of health.

A dull whine near his ear materialized as a fly lazily circled the sugar cubes before landing on the edge of the bowl. After a moment of anthropoidal dithering, the creature set out upon the white landscape, manically working its spindly legs and rotating its compound eyes. A visceral revulsion caused the doctor to stretch his upper lip down and draw his head back on its stem, as if he’d encountered putrefaction. Absently his thumb and index finger smoothed the surface of his mustache. It was damp. His eyebrows held back a line of perspiration; he could feel it gathering there. Though he made no decision to do so, his hand sought out his breast pocket and pulled forth the folded handkerchief, unfurling it like a flag, and mopping his brow. A trickle of sweat escaped from the nape of his neck, rushed down his back, cooling him as the limp linen of his shirt absorbed it. The fly had gotten itself so jammed between two white cubes that it had actually managed to dislodge one from the other.

“Sadly, I report that it is no cooler on deck,” a voice informed him. “I thought there might be a breeze.”

The doctor lifted his eyes to the frankly sweating visage of the American consul. It interested him that the black man’s perspiration held together in round globules, which sparkled over the pores from which they issued. Did Negro skin perspire differently, or was it only the dark background that made the droplets appear to stand out so? “Hello, Garnet,” he said.

The American lowered himself into a chair, easing down from his crutches with practiced skill. “I don’t think tea is the proper prescription for this climate,” he observed, nodding at the half‑empty cup.

“No? What do you recommend? Coffee? That surely heats the blood.”

“I recommend water,” Garnet said. “Though I believe the preferred spirit of the British colonialist is gin.” He grinned his toothy grin, like a bridge of yellowish stones connecting the white clouds of his sideburns, and raised his hand to the waiter who was unloading a tray of this very remedy at the next table. Although summoned by the black man, the waiter addressed his attention to the white. “Let us have a pitcher of tonic, a bottle of gin, and two glasses,” Doyle commanded. As the waiter drifted away, his tray lifted above his shoulder in a show of youthful confidence, Doyle addressed his companion gloomily. “I take it you don’t approve of the Colonial enterprise.”

Garnet chuckled, raising his eyebrows and bugging out his eyes, evidently delighted by this opening salvo. There was no offending the man, Doyle observed, nor was he capable of giving offense. He oiled his way through the world with a jovial brand of ironic courtesy. “I’m not against exploration,” he began. “Who can speak against discovering the grand variety of the wide world? No, if the adventure is undertaken as a tourist, I approve that human impulse. I would be an explorer of foreign parts myself, if my health would bear it.”

“But when it’s not so wonderfully various or grand,” Doyle countered, “and one has the means to improve the lives of those who suffer needlessly–”

“Oh yes,” Garnet interrupted. “You are speaking as a doctor and a healer. As such you are welcome everywhere you go. But it isn’t troops of doctors we see trekking through the underbrush with rifles and bayonets.”

Doyle smiled at the idea of troops of doctors. It didn’t strike him as absurd.

“Doctors,” Garnet continued, “and tourists. These will improve the lives of the impoverished and the suffering in this great continent. But missionaries and soldiers, we can do without.”

Doyle noted the pronoun. “So you see yourself as an African.”

Here the drinks arrived and were set down between them while the consul indulged in a disturbing hoot of laughter. “Doctor,” he said, when he had recovered his breath. “Look at me.”

Doyle tipped a splash of gin into the glass and filled it with tonic. He was uncomfortable, and not just from the heat, though that was, he noted again, astounding. Why should he have known that an emissary of the American government thought himself adequate to speak for all Africans, to say we need this and we do not do that? He glowered at the liquid in his glass – there was a dab of quinine in the tonic, but not enough to ward off malaria, if indeed quinine was actually prophylactic even in large doses. Garnet took up the tonic pitcher and filled his glass to the brim. “Yes, dear Doctor,” he continued. “Even an African can be edified by the table talk of Mr. Holmes.”

Though there had clearly been an edge of hostility in this remark, when Doyle lifted his eyes he found the self‑proclaimed African gazing at the sleepily rotating fan blades with an expression of rueful melancholy. “I’ve traveled widely,” he said, addressing the fan. “I’ve been to your country.”

“Have you?”

Garnet smiled and turned his attention to the doctor. “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” he said. “The church in Scotland offered me its gracious hospitality some years ago. When I was a boy I sailed to Cuba and Jamaica. I’ve traveled in England as well. But it has been the dream of my life to put my foot on the land of my ancestors. My father was a slave in Maryland, but his father was a Mandinka prince.”

So it was pride of descent. Pride of descent Doyle could understand; the sense of having come down, which he had imbibed at his own mother’s breast. We are come down, that was the message. From the Plantagenets, from the Packs and the Percys, from the D’Oyleys, a lineage to be proud of, a family descended from the highest families, with crests and seals, variously connected, even to royalty, albeit his own family of eight lived in three furnished rooms and his father was confined to an asylum. And here was Henry Garnet, looking beyond his own parents’ tumultuous fall, come down all the way to slavery, clinging to the cherished family legend of an African prince, who, though he may have worn rings in his nose and danced with his subjects around a fire, served no man and was held in esteem by many. This was what made all the wit and good cheer possible. Garnet was a man among men, a rightful heir to an estate that he would, in time, regain and rebuild.

“You must be eager to arrive and begin your work,” Doyle observed.

Garnet was frowning at his glass. “My work,” he repeated, as if the word had a certain novelty for him.

The fly, having pawed over every millimeter of the sugar cubes, hoisted itself onto the rim of the bowl. Both men watched as it teetered drunkenly over the table, disappearing with a sudden cessation of its infernal buzzing engine, into the pure white folds of the doctor’s napkin.

* * *

Doyle didn’t speak to the American consul again. Henry Garnet stayed in his berth, doubtless reading The Conquest of Mexico , and when the ship docked in Monrovia, he was whisked ashore by a pompous delegation dressed in garish nightshirts waiting on the wharf. It was not until the Mayumba was steaming determinedly toward Grand Bassam that Miss Fox, finding the doctor listlessly thumbing a back number of Punch in the passenger lounge, enlightened him on Mr. Garnet’s true mission in Africa. “He’s a dying man,” she said. “He won’t live a month. He wanted to die on African soil, so his friends got together and secured him the consul post, but it’s all a sham. It’s just to pay the passage and have a place for him to rest when he arrives.”

“But how do you know this?”

“He told me. Of course I knew who he was at once. He was a tireless abolitionist in New York before the war and some say Liberia is his creation. Really, he’s quite a famous man.” Miss Fox drew herself up so that she could gaze down her nose upon the spectacle of the young doctor’s colossal ignorance.

A famous man. A dying man. But how was it possible? He had betrayed no sign of illness. His breathing wasn’t labored, his mind was clear. His appetite was good. The sclera of his eyes was perhaps tinged with yellow, but Doyle had taken that to be a feature of his race. And as to his fame as an abolitionist – he had shown more interest in Motley than in the struggles of the emancipated American Negro. His chaffing about tourism and imperialism had been more speculative than heartfelt. Or so it had seemed to Dr. Doyle, who had surely not made the trip to Africa to be condescended to by the likes of the self‑appointed know‑all Miss Fox.

“I really must go and have a look in at the Fairfax boy,” he said, pushing up from his chair and away from the line of Miss Fox’s long nose. “He has a cough and I don’t like the sound of it. I fear his lungs may be affected.”

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 556