THE MAN WHO WAS MISPLACED

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 237, 6 October 1928, Page 17 (Supplement)

THE MAN WHO WAS MISPLACED

* * This line is faced entirely the wrong way,” remarked the smartly dressed stranger sitting opposite me in the firstclass coach of the Nigerian Central Railway. It was 6.30 a.m., and a large, low sun stared redly through the open windows. “How do you mean?” I asked. “They’ve faced it north and south, so that one gets raked by all the morning and afternoon sun. So wc either have to drop the shutters and live in a poisonous dust-laden gloom or keep them open and get baked to a perspiring fritter. If they had faced it east and west wc could travel unsunned all day. A foolish over-sight.” “I suppose.” I ventured, 1 ‘they wanted to join up Northern Nigeria with the Gulf of Guinea.” “Why? Is there any logical or aesthetic connection? Why not join up Bornu with Senegambia? ” ••Probably it was the trade connection.” I said humbly. “Ah! Trade! Yes, you hit it there.’* He ground his teeth with an air of reflective malevolence. “It’s trade that turns the world into a squalid market where men’s eyes are glassy and their lingers itching with avarice. It’s trade that skins life of every particle of noblesse and romance. Trade that substitutes coarse gold for everything splendid that can’t be measured in gold. Trade! Sickening idea! ” The train started. I was alone with the speaker; my seat, however, was near the door, which, on passing out to the end platform of the coach, I could if necessary shut in his face. Wc were silent awhile as the train flashed on through the green airless jungle at a good fifteen miles per hour. “Do you realise,” he said suddenly, leaning forward and gazing intently at nothing. “What I might well have been but for this horrible incubus of trade?” “No” (I hardly liked to hint that, trade or no trade, he might well have been in a lunatic asylum). “My poor father! ’’ he went on with apparent irrelevance. “He started life as a human being.” “1 suppose he must have done,” 1 said gently. “He did. But v.hat is he now? Old iron. A rusted machine that’s finished making money and is good for nothing else. ‘l’ll get money.’ he said, ‘and then I*ll enjoy life.’ There’s the tragedy of trade. You start by aiming at money as a means and it becomes an end; and you finish by finding that nothing in life has zest except amassing more dead metal. But I’ve a worse grousj against trade. It’s made everything go too quickly. But for trade there would still be undiscovered regions beyond the Isles of the Blest. There would still be the unknown splendour and stealth of the East. Countries of pines and white mountain ranges would still lie virgin—ami all of them waiting for me! Ah, why didn’t they dump me down in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth! Trade’s mapped the world; there's nothing left to discover.” “ Perhaps.” I said, fired by his melancholy enthusiasm, “if your desire is intense enough you will have your chance yet. Transferred to the astral plane, you may go charting the jewels of Orion’s belt, or circumnavigating the Jess known satellites of Aldebaran. 1 shouldn’t mind joining you myself.” “Yes,” he sighed dreamily. “Let’s hope there’s another chance hidden away somewhere.” The sun, now yellow and blinding, flooded through the coach and filled it with glistening mobs. “Do you see that, young woman there?” inquired my companion suddenly, pointing out of the window. * ‘The one with no clothes on?” “Yes—and the man with her. Look at the poli.-h of their skins, the shimmer :«s the muscles go to and fro, the stream line of their limbs. But what are those people being taught* Is it to live content with their farms and hive-making, all the essential tune-ions of unspoiled humanity? No! They are being taught to work and scheme for the acquisition of base metal, for unnecessary and unhygienic clothes, of pernicious foods and drinks, of machines the use of which will extirpate or distort all that strength and beauty of limb. Having bound ourselves with gold chains about the feet of the Devil, we now proceed tu shackle these innocents down to the sam t > anchorage. It’s a crime.” ■•So you identify life’s summum Lonum with nudity and the perpetual contemplation of the yam?” wile glared at me. Before he could i speak the train jolted over points, j and we both locked out. One of Nigeria’s most flourishing trade centres up brazenly against the morning. Long linos of “pan” roofed stores and sheds; a landscape littered with oil puncheons; stacked bales of cocoa and kernels; everywhere the sticky, sickly r. ok of the pain*.. “ Weil,” said my companion abruptly, “this is where J get out.” * You can’t mean that?” I exclaimed. “Do you realise the character of this town? Don’t xou smell its vocation? Kook nt those casks; look at those wbite-skinned, black-hearted criminals in the ‘factories’ there, selling Manchester prints and Birmingham hardware to the innocent but corruptible .African. Scan those flaring names—‘Miller Brothers,’ ‘John Holt.’ Surely you know they are the twin high priests of your detested idol, pouring daily huge libations of palm oil at the shrine of the gross and golden guinea!”

“I know it too well,” he replied quietly. “I am the senior agent in this place of the West African Produce Company. Consistency,” he added, noticing my gasp, “is not attainable in this topsy-turvy world. See you again, perhaps. in Orion.” With these words he clutched his bag and vanished into oil.