POSTSCRIPT IN MONROVIA 311

'heart of darkness* was common to us both. Freud
has made us conscious as we have never been before
of those ancestral threads which still exist in our un-
conscious minds to lead us back. The need, of course,
has always been felt, to go back and begin again.
Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, Rimbaud, Conrad
represented only another method to Freud's, a more
costly, less easy method, calling for physical as well as
mental strength. The writers, Rimbaud and Conrad,
were conscious of this purpose, but one is not certain
how far the explorers knew the nature of the fascina-
tion which worked on them in the dirt, the disease,
the barbarity and the familiarity of Africa.

The captain leant over the rail, old and dissatisfied,
complaining of his men: **Boil the whole bloody lot
of the men in the ship together and you wouldn't
make an ordinary seaman"; he was looking back—to
the age of sail; At Freetown guests came on board
and we drank ourselves free from Africa. An officer
came and eyed me like an enemy across the table in
the smoking-room. 'Td send my ticket to the Board

of Trade, my dear friend, and tell them to-----I tell

you, my dear friend. . . ." The captain stuck his
fingers down his throat, brought up his drink and was
dead sober again, and the ship went out of harbour,
out of Africa. But their dissatisfaction was like a
navel-string that tied them to its coast.

For there are times when the nearest the European
has ever got to the interior, to the communal life
with its terror and its gentleness, seems to be the
Coast; Major Grant ringing tip the brothel in Savile
Row, the Old Etonian in Kensington Gardens, the
Nottingham 'tart' and the droshky-drivers of Ittga