Each time we were sure it would succeed, but the yellow bank
stood like rock, and, beaten back, the wave would rise in white
spray to the height of a three-story house, hang glistening in the
sun and then, with the crash of a falling wall, tumble at the feet
of the bungalows.
We stopped at Grand Bassam to put ashore a young English girl who
had come out to join her husband. His factory is a two days' launch
ride up the lagoon, and the only other white woman near it does not
speak English. Her husband had wished her, for her health's sake, to
stay in his home near London, but her first baby had just died, and
against his unselfish wishes, and the advice of his partner, she had
at once set out to join him. She was a very pretty, sad, unsmiling
young wife, and she spoke only to ask her husband's partner
questions about the new home. His answers, while they did not seem
to daunt her, made every one else at the table wish she had remained
safely in her London suburb.
Through our glasses we all watched her husband lowered from the iron
pier into a canoe and come riding the great waves to meet her.
The Kroo boys flashed their trident-shaped paddles and sang and
shouted wildly, but he sat with his sun helmet pulled over his eyes
staring down into the bottom of the boat; while at his elbow,
another sun helmet told him yes, that now he could make out the
partner, and that, judging by the photograph, that must be She in
white under the bridge.
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