They Do This Very Cleverly, But Shortsightedly,
More Africano, For They Spoil The Tempers Of Half The White Men Whom
They Have To Deal With.
It is not necessary to treat them brutally,
in fact it does not pay to do so, but it is necessary to treat them
severely, to keep a steady hand over them.
Never let them become
familiar, never let them see you have made a mistake. When you make
a mistake in giving them an order let it be understood that that way
of doing a thing is a peculiarly artful dodge of your own, and if it
fails, that it is their fault. They will quite realise this if it
is properly managed. I speak from experience; for example, once,
owing to the superior sex being on its back with fever and sending
its temperature up with worrying about getting some ebony logs off
to a bothering wretch of a river steamer that must needs come
yelling along for cargo just then, I said, "You leave it to me, I'll
get it shipped all right," and proceeded, with the help of three
Kruboys, to raft that ebony off. I saw as soon as I had embarked on
the affair, from the Kruboys' manner, I was down the wrong path, but
how, or why, I did not see until a neat arrangement of ebony billets
tied together with tie-tie was in the water. Then I saw that I had
constructed an excellent sounding apparatus for finding out the
depth of water in the river; and that ebony had an affinity for the
bottom of water, not for the top. The situation was a trying one
and the way the captain of the vessel kept dancing about his deck
saying things in a foreign tongue, but quite comprehensible, was
distracting; but I did not devote myself to giving him the
information he asked for, as to what PARTICULAR kind of idiot I was,
because he was neither a mad doctor nor an ethnologist and had no
right to the information; but I put a raft on the line of a very
light wood we had a big store of, and this held up the ebony, and
the current carried it down to the steamer all right. Then we
hauled the line home and sent him some more on the patent plan, but,
just to hurry up, you understand, and not delay the ship, a deadly
crime, SOME of that ebony went off in a canoe and all ended happily,
and the Kruboys regarded themselves as having been the spectators of
another manifestation of white intelligence. In defence of the
captain's observations, I must say he could not see me because I was
deploying behind a woodstack; nevertheless, I do not mean to say
this method of shipping ebony is a good one. I shall not try it
again in a hurry, and the situation cannot be pulled through unless
you have, as Allah gave me, a very swift current; and although, when
the thing went well, I DID say things from behind the woodstack to
the captain, I did not feel justified in accepting his apologetic
invitation to come on board and have a drink.
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