HIS case illustrated the risks explorers run. Not the physical sort, which are apt to be overestimated, hut the psychological dangers. He had lived so long among savages, studying their ways, that he had fallen into a completely detached mental habit; and when he finally returned to civilization, he couldn't quite get back into touch with it—he remained an outsider.
I met him but once myself. I was in the publishing business at the time, and, hearing that this man was in New York, I thought I might as well see him about his next book. Telephoning him, therefore, at his hotel, I asked him to dine with me on the following Friday.
"What is 'Friday'?" said he. He spoke English perfectly.
"It is the twenty-sixth," I answered.
He said: "The twenty-sixth what? Oh, I know," he continued; "Friday is
a day of the week. Thank you very much, but I do not keep track of my dinners as carefully as that."
This rather odd answer I passed over, at the moment, thinking I had misunderstood him; and we arranged that he would come some day to my office, instead—"after lunch."
The next that I heard, he had called there at a quarter to five, the hour at which I always leave. My secretary explained to him that I had gone.
He looked at my desk, on which lay some unfinished business, and said to my secretary, "Why?"
The man courteously responded, "Because it is a quarter to five."
The explorer thereat laughed weirdly and went off.
I now perceived I had to deal with a most eccentric character; but that being a necessary evil in the publishing business, I went to his hotel at nine o'clock that evening. I found him down in the restaurant eating oatmeal and succotash, and we then and there had the following extravagant interview,—which I give without comment.
"The book I mean to write." he said, staring at me, "is a study of actual religions. Other writers have told the world what men of all countries suppose their religions to be. I shall tell what they really are."
SAID that our house would prefer an account of his travels; but he paid no attention.
"Men's real religions," he announced, "are unknown to themselves. You may have heard of the Waam Islanders," he leisurely continued. "They, for instance, have a deity called Bashwa, who is splendidly worshiped on the first of each lunar month. No Waam Islander would ever acknowledge he had any other God but Bashwa. But a stranger soon notices that in every hut in that country, hanging beside the water-jar, is a long sleeping mat, and on that mat sometimes is a rough pattern, like a face. 'What is that?' I asked them. G'il,' they answered, carelessly; so carelessly that one might suppose 'G'il' (or 'Gheel,' as they often pronounced it) entirely unimportant. I thought so myself until I observed—as I say—that G'il was in every hut, and that submissive references to him, or it, were far more numerous than those to Bashwa. That made me begin collecting those references; and presently I found that most things of which that tribe approved were spoken of as being g'il, or very g'il, and things they didn't like were damned as na-g'il. G'il, so far as I could make out, typified the hut, or the hut point of view. Marriage was g'il, and good manners and building materials, because they made for hut-life. Inhospitality was na-g'il, and the infidelity of women, and earthquakes, and leaks.
"They sometimes personified G'il and talked of him as he. 'G'il loves not Wheesha (the wind); 'G'il comforts the weary'; 'G'il says, "Get more children." ' But all this was only in their fanciful moments. At other times G'il was simply the mat by the water-jar. When I said to them, 'G'il is your real God, they laughed at my stupidity—good humoredly, as though there were something, perhaps, in my idea, yet with a complacent assurance that I was preposterous. I did not argue with them. One couldn't, you know. I simply continued my observations, corroborating my theory at every turn. To give you an instance: Bashwa is supposed to think highly of hunters and sailors, and the Waam-folk always profess to think highly of them too. That attitude, however, is only official, not real. Very few of them actually become sailors. The life is na-g'il."
He came to a pause.
WONDER whether we, too, have a G'il," I said, to humor him. "We shall have to ask some of your Waam-folk to come here and tell us."
The explorer looked me over as though he were "continuing his observations" of my manners and customs. "Yes," he said, "there's a white man's G'il."
I regretted having mentioned it.