I’d refused to miss a second of this momentous occasion and had watched, from just before dawn, the brawny “Scousers”—Liverpudlians whose own language was as salty and unrefined as their smell—begin their work under Ral’s supervision. I’d caught him staring brazenly at me several times, and I found it unsettling but not unpleasant.
I was impressed with this brawny American. He was quite the administrator and had, over the previous months, procured and methodically coordinated every possible aspect of this undertaking, while at the same time miraculously assuaging Mother’s doubts and fears that should, by all rights, have been
doubled
with my accompanying my father on this trek into the “green hell,” as she called it.
I concluded that Ral was nothing short of remarkable. Father, too, was pleased with the expedition leader. He put his whole trust in the man. Perhaps that was why I’d fallen into fantasy about Mr. Conrath. Begun to imagine myself as “Mrs. Conrath.”
Was it such an outrageous idea?
He was a hardscrabble American, but so had my father been. He was big and handsome and, I had to admit, masculine in the extreme. I could for the first time in my life imagine myself as a wife—part of an adventuring team, one that would travel the world seeking exploits and enterprises, never shying from risk or hazard. It was true I did not love the man yet. His harsh outbursts grated on me. In fact, I had taken to making a jest of them to him, as I was not one to stay silent about such things. This way I could acknowledge that I saw this flaw in his character and mildly disapproved.
So far, while my tactic had not provoked anger from him, neither had it improved his disposition. But what was one fault in a man? Would not such a partnership be the perfect antidote to my mother’s soul-killing idea of marriage to an effete, upper-crust Englishman?
Father had already boarded the
Evangeline,
claiming the need to make ready our cabins for the journey. “Out into the sea on a large ship” was one of my firsts. I’d rowed many times on the River Cam, sailed on Lake Como on a trip the family had taken to Italy, and even taken a ferry across the Channel to France. But this was a proper voyage. Two weeks on board. Crossing the Bay of Biscay into the wild Atlantic. Stops at several ports along the way—the Canary Isles and Sierra Leone. Away to another continent and to a clime that was as unfamiliar to me as a fish to desert dunes. The heat, my father told me, could be stifling and unrelenting, many times worse than the hottest English summer. Another first. I relished the thought.
“Idiots!”
I was blasted from my reverie by Ral Conrath’s rude outburst. I turned back to the ramp where four stevedores were grappling with a long wooden crate, one corner of which was about to hit the concrete pier. The dockworker who had let the thing slip used his prodigious muscles to catch it before it crashed to the ground but overcorrected, tilting the crate to vertical.
“Damn you!” Ral shouted. “Keep the thing horizontal!”
“It’s horizontal you want it?” said the Scouser who had mishandled his corner. “I’ll give you horizontal, ye little turd.” With a nod to his mates they all let the crate drop with a rattling crash and, saluting their taskmaster with a barrage of rude gestures, sauntered away without another word.
I could see a distinctly murderous look in Ral’s eye, but the moment he caught sight of me staring at him he began to compose himself. I likewise set my features into an even expression, neither disapproving nor joking.
“The contents of the crate must be quite valuable,” I said, striving for a tone of equanimity.
“I’ll say they are.” Ral pulled a small pry bar from his work belt and began opening the box to the tune of screeching nails. “If they’ve damaged it, I’ll wring their filthy necks.”
Now the treasure was revealed, and it came as quite a surprise to me.
“Gatling guns don’t run cheap,” he said. “Their mechanisms are more delicate than you’d think.”
I squatted down and examined the immense gun and the folded tripod legs upon which it would stand. I knew Ral was regarding me with interest, I in the most unladylike of postures, taking keen interest in the most masculine of objects.
“The Gatling gun is a rapid-fire weapon,” he said, as a lecturer would speak to a student, “the most important invention of warfare in hundreds of years, used to great effect in the American Civil War. It shoots eight hundred rounds in a minute.”
“Why on earth do we need such a thing on our expedition?” I demanded to know in the moment before I realized he might take offense.
An offense was, indeed, taken. I could see it blazing in his eyes. But as he had done moments before, he reined in his emotions. Ral managed a crooked grin.
“How you do love to second-guess me, little lady,” he quipped.
Then setting the top back on the crate, he pulled a hammer from his belt and nailed it shut with all the force I imagined he would have liked to hammer in the skulls of those dockworkers.
“Do me a favor and keep your eye on this,” he said. “I need a word with the captain of this tub.”
Ral stood and with a polite tip of his head strode up the gangway and bordered the
Evangeline.
I stood, unsure whether I was pleased to be given the responsibility as a member of the team, or irked by this raw, churlish fellow. Perhaps, I thought, it was not worth debating.
It was simply another first.
* * *
“So, yer takin’ yerself off to the wilds of Africa and you’ve not read
Heart of Darkness
?” our Captain Kelly badgered the prim English missionaries sitting to his right at the dinner table. The Irishman had proved to be an intelligent and widely read person, one for whom Father and I were every day gathering more admiration. Meals at the captain’s table were intimate affairs, as the
Evangeline
was carrying very few passengers on this voyage. It was the only time all of us gathered in one place during the long, otherwise uneventful days.
“The book might scare the bejesus outta ye,” Kelly continued, “but you’d have a wee taste of what ye were gettin’ yerself into.”
The bland-faced young man, Brother Roderick Smead, sat stiff and straight, with a tight smile stretching the bottom of his face into a grimace.
Father and I had several times argued amusedly about just how far the stick must be lodged up the man of God’s rectum. We had so far controlled ourselves in impugning and provoking him, as Brother Roderick had become the captain’s favorite sparring partner (or perhaps “target” would be more precise) at the evening meals. It had become clear in the past several days that Kelly had lost patience with the man’s narrowness and naïveté. Tonight might prove the showdown.
After the captain’s last provocation, I could see Mr. Smead’s wife, Ellen, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. A plump partridge of a woman, she had so far on this journey remained the perfect wife, adoring and respectful of her husband and almost entirely silent on any matters that strayed from the trivial or domestic.
“God will look after us, Captain Kelly,” the missionary replied, and his wife nodded in pious agreement. “The evangelization of the Asian and African continents is His work, and He takes care of His own.”
I felt my blood begin to boil. I was surprised that Father had not jumped down Smead’s throat. He had nothing but contempt for all proselytizing religions, but in the next moment the captain continued his own assault.
“I’ve taken a slew of German Lutherans to their missionary posts,” said Kelly to Brother Roderick, “and they’ve got a sight more consideration for foreign peculiarities and cultures than you lot do.”
Ellen Smead looked scandalized at such an idea. Everyone at the table was startled when she spoke up with great fervor. “What is the point of a native’s conversion if he is not …
converted
? I believe…”
Brother Roderick turned to his wife with such astonishment it occurred to me that he had never once heard uttered from those lips the words “I believe.”
Sister Ellen went on, “… that the convert must live in a permanent
upright
house with a chimney in it. He must no longer be befuddled by its hot smoky atmosphere, or degraded by creeping into it.” She spoke the word “creeping” as though it evoked the loathsomeness of a poisonous snake. “He must be
decently
clothed and…”
“That is enough, Ellen,” Brother Roderick hissed at his wife.
Instantly she was silent and slunk down in her seat.
“I think you misunderstand us,” Brother Roderick said to the captain. “We are all, even the lesser races, God’s children. In the Bantu tribe, there is a rich folklore that demonstrates conscience in a
marvelous
way.”
“Conscience?” Father barked. He had come to the end of his patience with this young man. “How kind of you to grant them the attribute. And how, may I ask, does their polygamy—even after conversion—fit into your standards of ‘Christian morality’?”
“That’s easy,” I interjected. “Men reign supreme in every culture. They have what they want whether they are an African tribesman with several wives, or an Englishman with a mistress on the side. It is very simply a ‘man’s world.’”
Captain Kelly sat up a bit straighter, and his eyes shifted with the anticipation of a proper scrap. “So,” he began, “do I have a ‘wild woman’ at my table, then?”
I presented my most demure smile. “A ‘
new
woman,’ perhaps.” The term I suggested was held by conservative thinkers to denote a woman of lax morals, overarching ambition, and other “unnatural” desires, such as rivalry with men and attendance at university.
I relished the title.
Brother Roderick fixed me with a glacial glare. “I’ve heard of these new women and their manly ambitions. They throw the whole social order into disarray. It’s said that if given free rein they could conceivably bring down the whole of the British Empire.”
I snorted derisively.
Mr. Smead grew very red in the face. His missus looked as though she had stopped breathing altogether.
“It’s my understanding,” Father offered, “that these young ladies simply want the same education, the same employment, and the same rights of citizenship that men have. That doesn’t seem so out of line to me. What do you think, Mr. Conrath?”
Ral was taken quite off guard by the question. He’d been only half listening to the dinner conversation. Just as we’d sat down at the table he had been handed a telegram. After reading it with a scowl, he returned to it time and again. His answer to Father’s question was un-thought-out and therefore perhaps a more honest one than he had wished.
“The female sex is different from the male. Women are weaker, simpler, purer creatures than men are. They need our supervision and protection.”
“I don’t need a man,” I said in as even a tone as my rebellious heart would allow. “I may
want
one,” I plunged on, “but not at the expense of my education and independence.” Ellen Smead gasped and stared down at her plate, afraid to meet another pair of eyes. “Hasn’t anyone else noticed that once a woman is married, she’s treated under law with exactly the same rights as idiots, children, and the insane?”
“Tommyrot!” Smead cried, quite out of his missionarial character.
Captain Kelly was enjoying himself. He called for the galley mate to fill everyone’s glass with wine. When the missionaries put their hands over their glasses, he muttered “stuffed shirts” loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Roderick Smead pushed back his chair and stood. His wife followed suit. “Good evening,” he said with that tight-lipped grimace and, taking Ellen by the arm, frog-marched her out of the dining room.
“That pair’ll have one helluva time in the bush,” Kelly said.
The rest of the dinner passed in lively conversation. More than a little wine was imbibed, and of “new women” and “God’s will” nothing more was said.
* * *
Sleep evaded me that night, the dinner conversation having stimulated me sufficiently that even the reading of Eugène Dubois’s monograph of the whale larynx—something that always put me to sleep—failed to make me the least bit drowsy. I’d thrown a long shawl around my nightgown and gone padding out barefoot onto the
Evangeline
’s rear deck.
Phrases kept repeating themselves in my head: the “lesser races,” “the evangelization of the Asian and African continents,” the “befuddled” African native creeping through his smoky hut’s doorway. It upset me that pompous imbeciles like the Smeads were being sent in droves all over the empire to wring and bully from these ancient cultures everything that made them unique. People like them believed themselves so honorable, so righteous. Little by little the world was being dissected like a cadaver, those bits thought unnecessary sliced out and discarded—thrown in a tin pail at the feet of the chosen few believing themselves worthy of the cutting. The wealthy. The educated. The “noble.”
I was part of the problem; I knew that. It always concerned me, the conundrum of my privileged position in the world. I was thankful, of course. I never wished I had been born a washerwoman’s daughter.
No one was more fortunate than me, yet on nights like this I felt wretched, weighted down with guilt at the reckless colonial imperative that, like a mania, had gripped the entire world. I felt helpless to remedy suffering. I was no Florence Nightingale. On the contrary, I was selfishly ambitious. Perhaps Brother Roderick was right. Enough women like me might indeed bring the empire crashing down around our ears. But would that, in the end, be such a tragedy?
“So, you don’t need a man, do you?”
It was Ral Conrath. He was very close behind me. So close I could feel his breath on my neck when he whispered, “But you might
want
a man.”
“And you believe women are ‘weak’ and ‘simple’ and need protecting and supervision by men,” I said without turning.
“Some women. Not all women.”
I felt his hands on my shoulders, then his fingers at the nape of my neck. He’d reached under my loosed hair—I’d not tied it up before leaving my cabin, never thinking I’d be anything but alone on the deck in the middle of the night.