Trader Horn; being the life and works of Alfred Aloysius Horn:

Front matter

rote ere srt

Hf jf

=r 1 reawee — ae racmnory sketch a fete Leg RRS Rice NR i .

Introduction

THIs is a true story of a real man. So real that I have thought it necessary to alter names here and there, includ- _ ing hisown surname. The Christian names I have kept, being loth to part with them: the first so redolent of the pre-Norman days from which his spirit seems not yet to have emerged, and the second mounting guard, so to speak, over old half-buried instincts of the Catholic, and ready to see him safely through the door of Heaven when the more barbarous Alfred fails to impress Saint Peter. In his own words:—‘‘Aloysius? ’Tis a saint’s name. It’s our custom to give alad two names. One to make his — way through life with and the other to be bugled out when he knocks at Heaven’s gate. That'll be the end of my travels. Unless there’s room for roamers there too. One can always hope there’s some forethought for human nature, be it Heaven or Hell. A feller that’s been a prospector, always with his eye somewhere else than what he’s standing on, won’t be too agreeably placed on those golden floors they speak of.”

When Aloysius Horn first swam into my ken I was about to settle down to a morning’s work on the stoep. With notebook and pencil, it being then ten o’clock of a bright Tuesday, and peace in the air, I approached the doorstep full of the possibilities of Chapter Fourteen,

’ which, before breakfast, had loomed very.clearly. On the mat stood an old man whose footsteps, coming f I

.

Sata 2 2 TRADER HORN up the eight steps from the garden, I had not heard. He was simply there.

He held a cluster of wire kitchen goods in his hand, neatly made and shining coppery in the sun: gridirons, toast-forks and the like.

Regarding me with a mild, but, as I now know, an all-seeing eye which dwelt on my possibilities, he began the business of selling to a person not wanting to buy.

The battle was short. I pleaded a kitchen replete with toast-fork and gridiron. Isaid I wasvery busy. I maintained that it was my principle never to buy on the stoep, which was my only study. |

With an abstracted eye on my notebooks he said mildly that it was a good habit and that he could well understand it. To show that his words were no idle boast he shouldered his bundle of goods and turned to the steps

"with a cheerful “good morning.”

But of course the battle went to him. Flinging victory away, as England nearly always does when it is hers, I raised my voice to stop him.

“T believe I could do with a new gridiron.”

There was something I could not bear in seeing that ready acquiescence with failure. What a reward, I thought, for a man too courteous to argue. Too English to bargain, bully and browbeat; to wheedle, whine or weep.

I suppose he knew this was coming. As if it had been his cue in a play and he had retired to the wings for a moment, he turned back and off-loaded the wire goods at my feet.

“Why, certainly, Ma’am. It is natural to all to experience a change of mind. Over little things as over great.

And both you and I are no more than children of nature.” That mild voice, rising, as I now know, from a past as infinitely full of repose, of restlessness, of action, of hidden hoards—spectres of bones and wreckage—from _the Past as the sea itself: as full, if so I may put it, of the quality of timelessness, that quality which keeps every roamer, from Ulysses to.Columbus, and from Columbus to—to Aloysius Horn, awash between year and year as if the shores of Time were forever theirs. Cradled like gulls, safe on the fiercest sea. Leaving all to the current and to the battering winds which are the breath of life to such as they.

Even after taking the gridiron I again nearly let him. go. My head was full of Chapter Fourteen. My note- _ books and pencil felt full of life, leaping, as they say, like the child unborn. re

But it was not for Chapter Fourteen they leapt and smote. I see now that they were trying to attract my attention to greater opportunities.

We had said our mutual thanks and adieux. The old man’s steps were again turned to the road when he paused

_ and said: “I could tell you how to make oatcakes if you’d like me to, Ma’am. You’d find it useful for that thing -you’ve bought.”

It was at that moment I said to myself: “This man is an artist. Having successfully sold a thing, he is not _ basely content with the money. It is necessary to him to put a sort of bloom and finish on the trafisaction which will lift it from commerce into art. From barter to friendliness.”

I listened to the only way of making oatcake, told with such zest and love that I said: “You must be Scotch.”

rs TRADER HORN

“Born thirteen miles out of Glasgow, Ma’am. I should say you were perhaps Scotch yourself? You are fair.”

“English,” I said, briefly.

“Oh.” The old visiter eyed me closely. “In that case—”

There was a pause.

“When I say I was born in Scotland, Ma’am, it’s not to say I’m a Scotchman myself.* They’re a poor lot, taken allin all. Lancashire’s always been good enough for one of the old Fist-and-Spear. My name’s Horn. Aloysius Horn of the Fist-and-Spear.”

I bowed and told him mine.

He sighed, as if this exchange of decent civilities had set something moving in his brain. His eyes, those farseeing, expectant eyes of age, gazed through me mildly. Washed free of definite colour, as is the way with the old, they were still large and clear. Contemplative eyes, set in large sockets. Calmly observant, they yet seemed fixed on the invisible. “)

“Aye. The old Wipe anda eteee Mea I could tell you—I’ve seen—” ‘

He came nearer, his outstretched hand all but touching my shoulder, his face gone under some influence of which I had not yet the secret. I know now that it was the rising pressure of a soul making its last effort to express itself

*In that delightful book Cambridge Cameos the Master of Christ’s reminds us that Charles Kingsley was born in Scotland, Devonshire or the West Indies according to the audience he was addressing. The same diplomatic instinct will surely, then, be forgiven in an old, friendless man, intent on the serious business of “seizing food” as he puts it, in a town hard as gold. We are further told by Sir Arthur Shipley that in a biography of Mr. Gladstone the reader is assured that the great man “was born more or less in Scotland.” So Aloysius Horn, also a Lancashire man from the day of his birth near Preston, lied in distinguished company, o haf Ry

TRADER HORN | F

_ before the walls of age and senility closed in, to leave its

_ shape and texture in a vanishing world.

He came closer ashe spoke, looking as Columbus might

_ have looked as he begged from door to door with his head _ full of the spaces of land and sea. The waxen skin and _ high, wide skull stretched over with parchment and a few gray hairs; the white beard, longish, narrow and pointed; visionary eyes that had seen a world and seen it whole—

_ an imperishable picture.

I stood still as the Wedding Guest; or as when a bird

_ comes nearer than usual—say a heron, as you stand on

_ the banks of a stream.

“Africa, Ma’am. Africa—as Nature meant her to be, the home of the black man and the quiet elephant. Never a sound, Ma’am, in a great landscape at noon—only the swish of elephants in grass. Lying still there in the water,

_ too,—and me the first white man (nay, I was a lad) to _ pry upon their happiness.

“Bound by the rites of Egbo, Ma’am, to be blood brother of cannibals. Look at my thumb, cut when I was eighteen in a fight with a savage and never grew again. Me? I’ve seen the skulls in the Josh House.

Blood brother to the priests, where no white man had

_ ever been until I came . . . But I was only a lad.

“And I knew Nina T-

, the cruellest woman in

West Africa. ... So they say. So they say. But her hair was dark auburn... .

““Goddess she was, in the Josh House there. .

“Why, I was only a lad when I took that other poor lady’s body down the river to try and get safe burial for it at Kangwe. Well of course they’d never seen a white

Ga TRADER HORN woman before, up at Samba Falls. Very natural they — should need such a unique body for muti. What won't any of us do for magic? We call it luck now and that’s the only difference. A hundred miles I took her, and no mishap from the arrows.

“A lad of eighteen has a natural reserve of chivalry. Aye, it grows like a flower in him then x

His voice slowed off, as if he stopped to look at something in his mind more intently. Something that was incredibly far away.

“Why, Ma’am, you may not believe it but I can talk French:—Oui, Monsieur, je baragouine ce jargon-la toujours ase bien pour me tirer d’affaires dans le commerce.’

He spoke like a parrot, as if he had been using the same phrase on many doorsteps.

“French, Ma’am. A language for the PE a If God ever made a worse colonist than the French He hasn’t let me know about it. It takes more than a little straw hat and a cigarette and a thimbleful of absinthe all set out in a neat little office to open out Africa... .

“Aye, when a young lad first hears the dawn-cry of the gorilla and covers his ears . . . And when he sees slaves—women— |

“Seventeen I must have been. Or was it sixteen—I can’t remember clear.

“But I must not keep you from your work, Ma’am. I'll be getting along. Good day to you.”

I came to from my swound and hastily rang the front door bell, which was somewhere near my right ear.

When Ruth appeared, my coloured housekeeper and

TRADER HORN ”

friend, I whispered “Tea, please, Ruth. Very strong, and don’t pouritout. This gentleman will prefer to pour it out himself. Bread-and-butter, too—the home-made.”

The old visiter was faltering forlornly on the edge of the steps, the vision all washed out of his eyes. When

I said to hira ““Won’t you stay and have some tea?” he said, ‘“Why, it sure would be very pleasurable,” and sank down on the steps with a vast sigh of pleasure.

No, of reprieve.

Or was it the sigh of the artist at the moment of achievement.

I sat down beside him and said “Mr. Horn—your address, please. And can you make it convenient to come here and talk next week?”

The compact was made that, once a week, instead of trailing round with wire goods to the doors of vulnerable housewives whose husbands were away in town, Aloysius Horn should come and talk for an hour or two, earning a little more than could be made from a day’s sales.

‘All this six months ago. The result of our talks is in this book and in others to come.

Just as he rose to go my eye fell on the shining gridiron and a sudden thought struck me. More than a renee a suspicion.

“Mr. Horn,” I said, “you have told me how to ate oatcakes, but no one could make them on an open grid like this.”

“Why, no, Ma’am, I admit the truth of that. “I'would be against the law of gravitation if you took it literally.” He spoke soothingly. “But thinking you might be from the Land o’ Cakes, I thought it would please. I have picked up a considerable amount of knowledgable stuff in my wanderings, and if you’ll give me the loan of a pencil I’l] draw Botha’s portrait for you.”

He bent over my notebook for a moment.

“There you are, Ma’am. That’s a bit of wisdom saved me an empty stomach now and again when Botha was fashionable. Smuts was never the rage in South Africa as Botha was. A feller’d never touch the heart as Botha did. Excuse me if I keep the pencil a moment longer. Ill draw you a pipe made from the beak of an albatross. All the go at one time they were amongst us sailors. No fanciful lad’d go ashore without one.” ?

“But I thought you didn’t kill the albatross if you wanted luck?”

“Only on the homeward voyage, that is. When I was a lad any sailor would kill one on the voyage out. But not me. J was always one for the preservation of Nature when humanly possible. And believe me, Ma’am, when a lad that’s seen nothing bigger than the gulls and herons. o’ Lancashire first beholds that great white apparition of beauty men call Albatross sailing the southern elements he’ll not be the one to drain it of breath. Six feet o’ _ wafting snow—”

He began the descent of the steps.

“Good day to you, Ma’am. I must not outstay my welcome. I often suspect I’m getting somewhat childish. What with one thing and another.”

He paused half-way down.

“T often think it was a happy fad o’ Nature to throw a bright light on boyhood’s days as you’re getting old.

Aye, she jumbles up the perspective a bit when you’re over seventy and seen what I’ve seen. But it’s all for the good of man. When you're in a lodging house at a shilling a day in the Golden City and find your own food, it’s good to have your surroundings dimmed a bit or you might feel disposed to give way to complaint, which I should be sorry to do. ’Tis no gentleman’s way to give way to anything but philosophy.”

We had now reached the gate. He closed it carefully after him, raised his hat which, old and crusted, yet had a certain air of dog about it, and crept uprightly away, eyes on the ground, with the smooth and careful gait of some old men.

I returned to my table and wrote the notes now used here.

For the first two or three weeks this old visiter fluttered round in a circle of subjects like one, as he himself said, somewhat childish. He repeated himself over and over, as the aged will, forgetting what he had told me.

“Egbo, Ma’amr I’ve been blood brother to the cannibals. No need to say been. I stillam. Nothing destroys the bond but death. Cannibals . . . The most moral race on earth. The women chaste and the men faithful. Aye, I’ve lived amongst ’em like a brother, a young lad clean and safe. Safer than what he’d ’a been in London and other centres given over to civilization. Victoria Street, Westminster and soon. If you doubt what I say, look at this thumb. An inch shorter than the other. Never grew, after the fight I had on the Ogowe River... .

“Why, I can speak French, if you'll believe me

Ma’am:—Oui, Monsieur, je baragouine ce jargon-la toujours assez bien pour me tirer d’affaires dans le commerce.”

‘A poor lot, the French. Dogs in the manger. Snap up a bit o’ good land half the size o’ Europe and stand yapping over it for their taxes and duties. So taken up with yapping they forget to develop it.

“Did I tell you I’d heard the gorilla first when I was a lad of seventeen? Or was it eighteen ... He’s mad, they say. The natives’ll always tell you he’smad. Something shaped in his brain that’s similar to the mistakes in the brain of a madman. Nature’s always got a hankering after experiments.

““Ma’am, did I mention to you that I’ve seen a white woman goddess of Isorga? Nina T her name. But best not mention that name. I’ve no wish to betray the tragedies of a noble English family. A handsome girl, Auburn... her hair was. Dark auburn. Seventeen I was. Or was it eighteen... .”

It was not until the third or fourth visit that the idea came.to me how much less wasteful of time it would be for the old man to write his adventures in his own way and for me to devote two hours or so of his weekly visit in making notes, not of his adventures so much as of his outlook on life, and all sorts of experiences which would never come into any written account of his doings on the West Coast: and to use such notes as a sort of chorus between his chapters, somewhat after the manner of Mrs. Markham’s History.

The plan worked well. All unconsciously I hit upon the key to unlock an extraordinary memory which the struggle for life, as age advanced, had almost closed up oe : TRADER HORN IT forever. How nearly lost it was will be gauged by the fact than even at the fourth and fifth meeting he began - our talk by reminding me—as if I had never heard of them on the previous occasions—of the four or five things branded on his brain as a youth: Egbo, Nina T , the wicked French, gorillas, his shortened thumb, he still wove into a vivid monologue, varying the order in which they came into his mind and seeing more and more of the detail of the past as he dwelt upon it. :

Sometimes a look came in his eyes as if he had met, in his memory, some old face or scene he had never thought to see again. For instance, it was not till the third visit that he remembered Du Chaillu’s musical box and compass. He had begun with Nina T ; “Aye, she gave me the warning that I was to be attacked. She stood on the bank and I was in the old Pioneer. Livingstone’s boat that had been. At the engine I was standing and my men all in proper formation along the bank in their canoes. She stood there and called me to come ashore. ‘It’s not safe for you,’ she said. Aye, she remembered a little English. A strange look she gave me. Eighteen I was. Perhaps seventeen . . . Did you know I can speak French, Ma’am? Oui, Monsieur . ... ’cré nom de Dieu, puis que je vous dis qu’il n’y a rien a declarer! |

“Aye, but the rite of Egbo’s a safer accomplishment than French when you’re hunting ivory. French is a language writ in water on the earth’s surface. Water and scent. And if the English in pursuit of top-dog happen to have left a little bloody writing here and there, there’s no man that is a man but’ll agree "tis a better medium to write in than this chypre, as they call it, and their little dregs of absinthe. ... I found du Chaillu’s musical box in one of the chief’s huts up there. Musical box and his compass. There was still a bit of a tinkle in it when I saw it. Trovatore or something. Picture of a lady in one of these chignons. There’s a weakness, Ma’am, in all dago music, and never more so than when heard in a cannibal’s hut.

“Tis notably thin stuff. But, as magic, a notable addition to voodoo in that part of the world. That and the compass he left. Aye, they feared that little trembling finger more than the sounds in the musical box. ‘Too quiet to be very reassuring. . . . The mariner’s compass. One of Nature’s discoveries that’ll never be commonised by the sons of men. Aye, something above the edicts of the mechanical.”

If regular once a week talking unlocked the past and admitted me to a strange jumble of memories of which nothing was ever begun or ended, it is very certain that the regular writing down of his adventures on the Ivory Coast brought back the mechanism of a vanishing intellect. Just as artificial respiration may bring back the breath and the life, so did the use of pencil and paper induce life to return to the dyinguntellect. The assurance that what he wrote would be read with interest brought back whole tracts of memory, and of knowledge lost for, want of use.

He wrote on Mondays, a day when every man left the _ doss-house after the strain of Sunday, and when there was no one about his path and about his bed and spying out all his ways: ways which, to those who only knew him as Zambesi Jack, the old wire seller, must often have seemed those of a madman. Now, after six months of it, the writing fills his whole mind. It is a tremendous obsession, this saving and cherishing of memories that have flowed so near the edge of oblivion. Not only has the new task filled his mind in the daytime but it wakes him in the night. Taps him on the brain with some recovered picture of youth, some old song or line of poetry _ which gives him no rest until he has recorded it.

“Ma’am, I’ve had a great loss. I woke in the night— I suppose it must have been a dream—and saw us all lively in our beds in the dormitory at St. Edwards. On a summer night it must ha’ been—didn’t seem quite dark yet. There was a boy I knew up in the corner there—I knew his face and I should ’a’ got his name in a minute— sitting up and singing a song we all knew in those days— and I was just beginning to wake up and sing it, to get it right and look for the matches. . . .

“That feller in the next bed thought I was having a dream and the hollering he made to wake me up put it all out of my head. Quite a nice feller, a bricklayer that’s out o’ work from drink, but lacking in imagination. It’s a notable loss to the book. Bright as a picture it all - was, until I woke up and felt myself in the dark. Beds about me sure enough but not occupied by boys. Aye, they’ve gone again, into this so-called limbo of forgetfulness.” .¢

Another day the loss was a more serious one.

“TI was just listening to Tommy Bamber describe the fight off Galveston. He was hidden in the withies along the shore—and a feller comes in drunk and wakes us all up knocking things over in the dark. . . . Methylated always makes ’em so silly. Not like authorised spirits. It’s only a fancy drink for the demi-monde. Ladies with yellow hair and apt with hysterics. ... But it might come again to me if I think about it closely when I fall

“asleep.”

In such chancey ways has this book grown.

The arrival of my colleague once a week, with a roll of eight to a dozen foolscap sheets closely written in pencil (his week’s work) and with all a writer’s restlessness to see its effect on a reader, and the writer’s irresistible desire to map out the next chapter, became almost as big a landmark in my week as in his. That next chapter: seeing it always in scenes and phrases that had taken possession of the mind; scenes that have been his for sixty years, lit up in the wane of life by words and phrases that often filled him with a blaze of excitement as he spoke them aloud to his audience. Yet never did his words and phrases retain that same living quality when the time came for him to pin them down to paper. Elusive as his dreams, they only fell out unconsciously during speech, that speech that was like the release of a long-dammed torrent.

I can see why words which came naturally to him in speech appear so rarely or so transformed in his writing. For one thing, the atmosphere of doss-house was pressing heavily all about him. Even the literal atmosphere of doss-house, in this country, is one of extremes, too hot or too cold. Without the encouraging environment, the _ proximity of a listener, he was like flint without steel. For another thing, he would, at his age, entertain an oldfashioned idea that the written word must be elegant

_ rather than colloquial.

It is no accident, this Victorian style of his. As will be seen in the conversations, he thinks a very great deal about Style. And that is why I have altered nothing in his written narrative, but have left it untouched, as I, or,

_ any writer, would wish my work untouched. To have written, at his age, and in such surroundings, with an

_ empty pocket (and, I fear, at first often an empty stomach) _ such a vigorous account of his life on the Ivory Coast fifty years ago, is achievement enough without any officious

_ painting of the lily or gilding the gold on the part of his chronicler. But when I realised that his best literary quality is in speech rather than in the written word I cer-

_ tainly then began to take notes of his conversation much more carefully. If I have presented our conversations in the form of monologue rather than dialogue it is because, by repressing my own share, I have been better able to

- get the tone of Aloysius Horn when in full spate.

Spate is the word. No words of mine will make clear what a tremendous outpouring this weekly talk of an hour or two has been. It is an outpouring of a past into which

“not a soul remained in the world who wished to gaze with sympathy or interest. And if it is a past which not always

_—some may say not often—reflects the tranquil scenes of the virtuous life; and if at times the reflection is distorted

- or mistaken by reason of the great distance of years over

_which he is looking backwards—and over what leagues of land and sea, what worlds of faces, black and white,— much will surely be forgiven an old man who had already prepared to meet Death in the dumb way of the patient poor, life all unspoken in his breast like a saga unsung.

Whatever his shortcomings, whatever his record, Aloysius Horn is no sniggerer. I have never heard him laugh with cynicism, nor speak with any expression of slyness or a meaning look. The double entendre is invariably accidental in his speech, and is only remarked as such by myself and the reader. Had it not been so this literary partnership could not have traversed so many strange byways and entered occasionally such doubtful company. One or two of the old man’s experiences and expressions of opinion in this book were told to my husband on days when I was absented during part of the visit: prefaced, in his unfailingly punctilious manner, by some such speech as: ‘You will understand, Sir, being of scientific turn as you are, that there are some things no gentleman could speak of to a lady, which yet should be trumpeted to the . world.”

My poor old friend keeps his Victorian illusions by the — simple expedient of never reading.

Our weekly conversation has always followed a meal prepared, as much as is possible in this country, in the English tradition. Grilled chops, nice raw steaks, cold beef and pickles, potatoes baked in their jackets, thick pea soup, buck—I should say, venison—with jelly, Cheddar cheese. All this is part of the scheme I followed of loosing an English tongue. Ruth, my cook, so caught the spirit of the adventure that one day she said :—‘‘What about stewed pears, Missis? Do you think they would be English enough for Mr. Horn?”

“Ruth,” I said, “it is an inspiration. But they must taste of cloves and have a faint aroma of orange peel about them. We used to have them at Sunday night supper after church when I was young and it was autumn, and I feel sure Mr. Horn must have had the same. They might remind him, too, of family prayers and prayer-books lying about the hall when you go to bed feeling a bit excited and yet melancholy.”

“Yes, Missis” said Ruth, and returned to the kitchen to try and capture that Victorian flavour. Tobacco and a weekly tot of brandy have also played their part in unlocking the past; from the day, a very hot one, on which I said to the old man as he crept up the steps, “You look very gone-in to-day. I think you'd better havea little brandy to pick youup.” To which he replied: “Ma’am, I should appreciate an incentive. We get nothing but this so-called tea and coffee. Poor stuff, when you’re seeking an inspiration. I should sure appreciate a more useful drink. From Ben Jonson downwards the use of an incentive has been recognised as nothing less nor more than natural in the interests of literature.” But long before he had this classic habit “’a babbled o’ green fields” as the old do. The fields, for Aloysius Horn, are not only green but must be growing in good Lancashire earth. Yes, ’a babbles of Lancashire. With all the passion of the exile caught in the meshes of old age, his eyes forever turn to his county. The end of the rainbow, his span of life, stands, to his eyes, in Lancashire soil, touching the gold of Lancashire hearts. The other end is on the banks of an African river in the gorgeous peace of fifty years ago, a peace whose primeval depth was still unrippled.