Fear Drive My Feet Read Online Free PDF Page B

that made him look like the prophet Isaiah. And
there was Bob Sherman, an Englishman, whose glossy black whiskers reminded me of
a melodrama villain. If he had suddenly exclaimed, ‘Ha, my proud beauty! Out into
the snow!’ it would have seemed quite in keeping with his appearance.
    The meal consisted of bully beef, sweet potatoes, and papaw, and no great plenty
at that. When it was finished, tobacco was produced, pipes filled and cigarettes
rolled. For weeks not one of them had smoked a shred of proper tobacco, and ancient
pieces of newspaper had taken the place of cigarette-papers. Some smoked the trade
twist that was issued to the natives – foul black stuff made, I should say, from
the sweepings from cigar factories and bound together with molasses in plaited sticks.
Others rolled their own cigars from brus, the native-grown leaf tobacco, purchased
from the kanakas in nearby villages. This too, was terribly strong. After a couple
of brus cigars a Capstan seemed tasteless.
    The hurricane-lamp cast its smoky glow on the bearded faces of Bill and Bob as they
played their evening game of chess. I saw that a number of chessmen were missing
and had been replaced by buttons and bottle-tops. Faces grave, eyes deep-sunken,
and foreheads lined, the two men made each move deliberately, shading their eyes from the lantern and occasionally brushing off with patient hand a more than usually
vicious mosquito.
    Another bearded patriarch of twenty-two, not so long-suffering, cursed and swore
as he slapped at the mosquitoes swarming round his head. He was doing his best to
write a letter home on a rather grubby piece of canteen paper.
    A fourth man, who might also have stepped out of the Old Testament, was attending
to his beard with all the care that a botanist would have lavished upon a rare specimen.
With comb and mirror and folding nail-scissors he preened and pruned with loving
care, until he achieved precisely that degree of elegance on which he had set his
heart. Several reasons were given for this cult of the beard: one was that razor-blades
were almost unobtainable; another, that beards were protection against mosquitoes,
and useful camouflage in jungle fighting. While true to some extent, these were rationalizations.
The real reason was that it helped to pass the time. It was a trifling diversion
that helped bored men to endure a weary time of isolation, privation, and danger.
    From time to time one of them would wind up the wheezy old gramophone and play a
record. There were about twenty discs, which they told me had been taken, with the
gramophone, from an abandoned house in Wau. When one group of men grew sick of the
records the outfit was passed to another hut, with strict instructions to look after
the only gramophone needle. It was carefully sharpened and resharpened till it was
ground down to the merest stub.
    The songs were a rubbishy lot – worn-out popular tunes and sentimental tangoes. The
tinny sound of the banal words was flat and false as it disappeared into the surrounding
darkness of the jungle. In that wilderness, a fruity tenor voice crying plaintively
to men who had not seen a white woman for six months, ‘The night was made for love’,
was about as appropriate as a juke-box on Judgment Day. But somehow the phoney sentiment
struck home. We were all so starved for love and tenderness and all the deeply cherished
private things that had made our individual lives worthwhile, that we seized upon
even this fly-blown imitation to keep memory alive. And even today those tunes have
a queerly evocative power. When I hear one of them memories crowd in upon me. I see
bearded figures playing chess, surrounded by the brooding blackness of a fever-ridden
camp; I hear the dull murmur of the Wampit rushing past, and see the wasted yet smiling
faces of comrades who, side by side, faced jungle, hunger, and a savage enemy. Where
they are today I do not know, but they were a good crowd, and it seems strange that
a stupid,