Winds of Enchantment Read Online Free Page B

noise.
    Left of the port straggle, there were wharves and traders’ sheds, and still farther to the left a small white colony, composed chiefly of traders. A few houses fronted the beaten sea road, set well apart in hedged plots.
    It was to one of these dwellings that Pat drove with her father. Built of white-distempered mud and raised on stone piles, it was large and well-ventilated, though there was only a living-room, two bedrooms and a built-on kitchen. The roof, of thick palm-thatching, sloped right out to cover the veranda and provide relief from the glare of the sun.
    The rooms were sparsely furnished in local woods and wicker. The beds were of iron, painted green and fitted with a framework to hold mosquito netting. Although the previous occupant had been gone only two weeks, the bedding was musty and had to be cleaned and dried before use. Pat also found other signs of disintegration, but she was not disturbed. She was learning fast that Africa was a torrid, primitive law unto itself.
    There were two other women among the traders.
    Both were in their forties and neither had children. Grey-haired Mrs. Melville rarely went out. Mrs. Barker had once lived among the Government officials at the other end of Kanos. She and her husband, she confided, were well-off enough to retire, but after so many years in Africa, she didn’t fancy the cool climate of England, or the servant problem.
    Besides Melville and Barker, who were more or less of Bill’s type, there was Wenham, a dour individual who had once been a lawyer, and a younger man in his late twenties, Cliff Grey. Cliff was dark and brooding, and a little too fond of his drink.
    With Cliff Grey, Pat was instantly at her ease. He pretended to be amused that the others could be so affected by the presence of an attractive girl. For a man not yet thirty he was extremely cynical, soaked in a kind of personal disillusion.
    “Why am I here?” he said once, repeating her question. “I forged my father’s name on a cheque. You don’t believe that? Very well. I was driven here by a woman ... it comes to the same thing. I forged the cheque for a woman. You still don’t believe it? I don’t blame you. It was something far worse than either, too utterly sinister for your nice little ears.”
    Pat didn’t believe that, either. She thought her father nearer the truth when he said that Cliff had come out seeking adventure and lost what it takes to get back into the world again.
    Kanos was new to Bill, but just as he had given his life’s blood to Monrovia and Accra and Calabar, so he offered it now to this steaming spell-binding gate to the jungle. He was happier than she had ever seen him. From the cool shade of the veranda she would watch him down on the beach. Clad in shorts and singlet, a khaki sun-helmet tipped to the back of his head, he would rest his jot-book on a bale and yell orders.
    The boys would load and unburden the trucks; the mountains of groundnuts would subside and rise, the barrels of palm oil dwindle and be replenished. Surf - boats plied between the sheds and the steamers beyond the bar. Bill would curse and laugh and sometimes exercise his vibrant baritone on ditties he never sang in the house.
    Once she had gone down to help him at the sheds, but the heat of the sun, even with a breeze from the sea at her back, had nearly laid her flat.
    Tornadoes swept the coast The palms threshed their fans in the endless flaming flicker of lightning; trees snapped; the house, shuttered and snug, creaked resentfully. Then came the rains.
    It was on a day of relentless torrential rain that Bill was summoned by native messenger to meet an old friend at the governmental end of Kanos. The heavy curtain of rain made driving impossible, so he set off in oilskins and thigh-boots, expecting to return within a couple of hours.
    The afternoon passed slowly. The clouds shut out the light, and all sounds were lost in the steady roar of falling water. Pat had the boy make her