THE CAREER OF A "PALM-OIL RUFFIAN”

LOQUACITY is not a Coaster's strong point. Traders and officials returned on leave from West Africa will agree with me, I fancy, that it is not easy to answer-with enthusiasm the kind of questions which friends and acquaintances think it necessary to ask.

"Hot out there, isn't it?" is one of them. And whatever form the answer takes-a jerk, or a nod, or a monosyllable-usually it fills the Coaster who is expected to make it with a feeling of supreme foolishness. It is a question so superfluous as to seem patronizing. Another inquiry I have in mind is better described as exasperating: "Is it really the White Man's Grave?" Enough.

The fact is that in West Africa-away from the coast towns, I mean the social amenities simply cease; and, knowing less about conversation as a pastime, we are more suspicious of it. It is far commoner for a white man here to be living hermitwise in the lonely outpost for months and months and months than in other parts of this fascinating continent or, let us say, in India. White women adorn, no doubt, and mitigate the hardships of other tropical areas and share their husbands' lives, at intervals, as a matter of course; but here for West Africa is a big place, and the total number of white women is small indeed-we do not think in terms

of social "6 doings" at all. Small-talk, let our querying acquaintance be informed, has passed out of our vocabulary. The obvious is forbidden. Indeed, to " make conversation in any circumstances is to commit, in the Coaster's view, the crime of crimes. Silence, he says, may not be golden, but it is tremendously more precious than chatter.

It is a little pathetic, all the same, that a sufficiently useful breed of exiles (if I may so term them), merely because their way of living disposes them to reticence, should be so woefully misrepresented in the eyes and on the lips of stayat-home Europeans. We are familiar, on the one hand, with the exaggerations of White Cargo and its lurid sensationalism; and must contend, on the other, with the pretty-pretty persuasions of those excellent folk who think that everything in the West African garden is really growing lovelier and lovelier. To the White Cargo fallacies I will refer a little later; to these others-now; but only to beg the inspired idealists to say, in so many words, that a new Riviera is opening out in the equatorial Atlantic, and that the oppor

there, the Coaster may enjoy the staple satisfactions of a bed and, maybe, some Madeira furniture and a roof; and food, which may be irregular in arriving from headquarters, or slow-coming to the gun, is nevertheless, on a year's average, adequate. Attendance is never a difficulty-in fact, a valet or two may be included in the personnel of such a ménage as this, without counting the cost. That part of comfort which is related to a satisfied dignity, therefore, is sure. But the tyro will be learning, at the same time, to put up with little shocks to his system in the shape of all the nauseating insects and minor reptiles that infest his habitation and cannot be kept away by any means known to man; and his person is not sacred to any such, from mosquitoes, via centipedes and tarantulas, to bush-beetles that draw blood, and scorpions and snakes. He will be acquiring a toleration for water-borne infections like kraw-kraw (a kind of unglorified ring-worm which affects any part of the body and is an immense irritation); for chiggars that burrow, unseen, in the toes and lay eggs there, till the chiggars-plus-eggs are as large as a pea and must be gouged out by a boy with a burnt needle; for curious itches, of the Dobie family and the "trench-fever" family, that visit where they list for the most plebeian kind of boils that appear anywhere and are related, often as not, to ordinary malarial infection; and for many other minor and major ills which are too trifling and too frequently recurring to be catalogued in an ordinary Coaster's ordinary account of the Coast. The tyro will be getting used to these things and getting over them, or he will have sown the seeds of failure. So it will be with the tsetses on the lagoons and the aching bumps they raise; with the earliest bouts of fever (trying, for a novice); with the heat, which mostly in these latitudes is reminiscent, day by day and night by night, of a steam-laundry; and with the odours and vapours everywhere, which make the motor fumes of the Metropolis seem like the rarest perfumes.

It will not be good enough, either, if the individual who contemplates this kind of career is over-concerned with the mortality statistics and his own particular expectation of life. Whatever the apologists may pretend, and disdaining the slogan about the Grave, the truth is that West Africa is the half-way house-at least, for the imprudent and the unlucky on the road to Extinction. If he calls this kind of thing "trouble," then he is going, in this place, to meet trouble half-way. He may not, on the one hand, take liberties with the climate or himself; he may not dare, on the other hand, to be over-careful, and, thinking all the

time about the state of his health, become a prey to the diseases of the imagination. He will miss many of the “civilized” ills, maybe, and it is most unlikely that he will be despatched from this life by wheels under metal bodies; but he is taking a more sporting risk with his physical being, on the whole, than in most other parts of the world, and more chances, by these same tokens, than Colonial Offices and the commercial interests will ever admit. But there ! If he cannot see the whimsical side of a premature translation to Elsewhere, then he will do better, this person, to stay where he is.

We

Thus, then, some general arguments for and against a trading career on this Coast and a few misconceptions, in principle, exposed. It will be gayer now to look at the relative merits, not of climate, or comfort, or morals, or mortality, but of outlook in the philosophic sense. We are not thinking here of the leisured and income'd explorer; or of the butterfly-traveller with a publisher's commission to write an expensive book entitled My Days in the Grave; or of nervous directors of commercial corporations out for a six weeks' visit ; or even of Government officials, with their shorter spells of service and prerogatives of exchange. are would-be resident traders, considering this much-abused and yet much-glorified territory from the standpoint of a commercial job in it; of an increasing salary as the years go by; of contracts renewed and growing gradually shorter; of promotion one day to Agent-General's rank in the firm; and of-thereafter a decent enough pension on retirement, with or without a seat on the Board in Liverpool, London, or wherever head office may be. be. And here are some comforting comparisons, I think, with the outlook of many a young Englishman whose circumstances or inclinations have kept him in commercial employment at home:

Leave looms large on the credit side of the Coaster's account. It is a sop to the amour-propre of any rightvisioned man to be able to spread himself for four whole months, or six whole months, on holiday in England, even though he has waited two years or three years for the privilege, and must serve as long again before the next leave is due. It is more romantic, that is to say, than the fortnight at Blackpool or Broadstairs. In the first place, the employee from the Coast has money to burn and a real background to his enjoyment. Secondly-and very humanly-he may visit former acquaintances at their City desks at times and seasons when it seems that only the most important people in the world are free to go about in this