"I am stupid this morning," he said. "Had a bad night. I wanted you to do something for me--read a label, as a matter of fact--and it never occurred to me that I might bring the label to you. Cazi Moto, go get my box of medicines."
"I do not quite understand," replied the Leopard Woman. "What is it you would have me do?"
"Read a label--on a bottle."
"Why is it you do not read it yourself?"
"My eyes do not focus well this morning."
"I see," she said slowly. "And you would have me indicate for you the remedy. That is it?"
"Yes, that is it. I"ve stupidly forgotten which the bottle is I want."
He heard her moving slightly here and there. He strained his ears to understand what she was about.
"You are blind!" she cried suddenly.
"Temporarily--until I get my remedy. How did you know?"
"The look of you; and just this moment I thrust suddenly at your face."
Cazi Moto arrived with the medicine chest which he placed at his master"s feet, and opened. Kingozi extracted the three bottles.
"The table is directly in front of you," came the Leopard Woman"s voice.
He reached out, and after a moment deposited the vials on the table.
"It"s one of these," he said, "but I don"t know which. Just read them for me."
"This remedy will cure you?"
"It will give me my sight. I have what is known as glaucoma. It is an undue expansion of the pupil. This remedy contracts it again. The only real cure is an operation."
A silence ensued.
"Well?" asked Kingozi at length.
"It interests me," came her voice. "Suppose you had not this remedy?"
"I should remain blind," replied Kingozi simply.
"Until you obtained the remedy?"
"Probably for always. One must not let glaucoma run or it becomes chronic. It"s G.o.d"s own luck that I have this stuff with me--it"s the pilocarpin I told you of. The other stuff--atropin--would blind me for sure!"
He thrust forward the three bottles.
"Here," he urged.
"If you had not the remedy--this what-you-call--pilocarpin, what would you do?" An edge of eagerness had crept into her tones.
"Do?" said Kingozi, a little impatiently. "I"d streak it for a surgeon.
I have no desire to lose my sight."
Another pause.
"I shall not read your labels," she decided. Her voice now was low and decided.
"What!" cried Kingozi.
He could hear the rustle of her clothes as she leaned forward.
"Listen," she said. "Why should I do this for you? You have treated me as a man treats his dog, his horse, his servant, his child--not as a man treats a woman. Do you think because I have been the meek one, the quiet one, that I have not cared?"
"But this--my sight----"
"Your sight is safe. You tell me so yourself. Go back to your surgeon.
And if you suffer inconvenience on the way--or pain--or humiliation--or anger--why that is what you have made me suffer."
"I----?"
"You! You have treated me with scorn, with contempt, like a little child, as though I did not exist! You have--what-you-call--ridden over--overridden what I propose, what I try to do. You and your lordly way! You are not a man--you are a fish of cold blood; a statue of iron!
You have nothing but the head! You "know nothing whatever about vegetables"--nor women! Bah! Shall I read your labels and give you your sight? Ah, no! ah, _non!_"
Kingozi was stunned. Idly his hand slid forward across the table. It encountered and closed upon her wrist. Instantly she struggled to be free, whereupon mechanically he tightened his clasp. She made a desperate effort to do something. His other hand sought hers. It grasped one of the three bottles, and even as he determined this fact, she tried again to hurl it to the ground. Frustrated, she relaxed her grip, and he released her.
He could hear the fling of her body as she stood upright; could catch the indrawing of her breath.
"Read them for yourself!" was her parting shot as she withdrew.
Kingozi sat very still for a long time. Then he arose abruptly and commanded Cazi Moto to return with him to his own camp. There he caused his chair to be placed in the shade.
"Cazi Moto," said he, "listen well. You are my other hands; now you must be something else. I am sick in the eyes; I can see nothing. In one of these bottles is the medicine that will cure me, and in one of them is the medicine that will make me blind forever. I do not know which it is; and I cannot read the _barua_ because I cannot see it. And Bibi-ya-chui cannot read it. So you must be my eyes. Take a stick, and make on the ground marks exactly like those on the _barua_. Make them deep, so that I may feel them with my hands."
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""Cazi Moto, take a stick and make on the ground marks exactly like those on the _barua_. Make them deep, so that I may feel them with my hands""]
Cazi Moto sharpened a stick, smoothed out a piece of earth, and squatted beside it.
The Central African native is untrained either to express himself or to see pictorially. We have been so trained since the building blocks of our infancy, so that a photograph of a scene is to us an exact replica of that scene in miniature. As a matter of fact, it is only an arbitrary and conventional arrangement of black and white. A raw native sees nothing more than that even in a portrait of him self.
So Cazi Moto went at this task absolutely unequipped both of brain and of hand. In addition the label was rather difficult. The printed body of it contained the firm name of the chemists and their address; the drug itself was written, Kingozi remembered with exasperation, in his own not very legible script.
"Dashed fool!" he told himself aloud in his usual habit. "Deserve what you"ve got. Ought to have segregated the drugs--ought to have printed the labels--no use thinking of that now."
Cazi Moto worked painstakingly, his shrewd and wizened face puckered in absorption. He accomplished a legible _Borroughs & Wellcome_ after many trials. Then he proceeded with the script. It seemed impossible to make a start; he did not even begin at the beginning, but was inclined to view the work as an ent.i.ty and to begin drawing it at the top of the middle. Kingozi corrected that. At last the white man"s fingers made out distinctly a capital M. He erased it with a sweep of the hand.
"That part of the _barua_ again," he ordered.
After a time Cazi Moto repeated the feat.