Witch-Doctors

The author of eight novels and dozens of short stories, CHARLES BEADLE was a world traveler who was born at sea in 1881. When he was eighteen years old he expatriated from England and spent a doz-en years exploring South Africa, Rhodesia, Zambia, Uganda, the Congo, Mozambique, Borneo, and Morocco. In his mid-twenties he organized an expedition to Fez and traveled there disguised as a dancing girl to interview the sultan of Morocco. In the 1910s he lived in Montmartre, where he befriended his neighbor Beatrice Hastings, the mistress of Modigliani and translator of Max Jacob. Modigliani later portrayed Beadle in a drawing. During World War I he traveled to the United States, where he published his stories in Adventure and in the International, a cultural journal edited by Aleister Crowley. He returned to the City of Light in the fall of 1919, where he lived through-out most of the 1920s, eventually moving to the French Riviera. In 1938 Jack Kahane's Obelisk Press published Beadle's last novel, Dark Refuge: an unrecognized modern masterpiece that quickly fell into obscurity despite its literary merit and lyrical beauty. It contains thinly disguised portraits of Modigliani, Max Jacob, Beatrice Hastings, Léopold Zborowski, and various other figures who haunted the Parisian demimonde of this period. In 1941 Faber and Faber published Artist Quarter, a nonfiction work pseudonymously coauthored by Beadle with Douglas Goldring, which is still considered to be the urtext of Modigliani biography. Beadle is presumed to have died sometime in the 1940s, but the circumstances of his death remain a mystery.

In a bayou in the south-eastern corner of the Victoria Nyanza was the station of Ingonya, a brown scab on the face of the green earth. The round mud huts of the askaris were like two columns of khaki troops marching rigidly on each side of the parade ground. To the north, upon a slight rise of ground, were the white men's quarters; the non-commissioned officers had four bungalows to the south of the orderly room and Court House; and beyond a green plot flanked by a store house and an ordnance building, was a bigger bungalow, florid in the amplitude and colour of the red pillared verandah, the residence of the Kommandant, Herr Ober-Lieutenant Hermann von Schnitzler und zu Pfeiffer. On the northern side, overlooking the swamp and the distant lake, was a flagpole, before which paced an ebon sentry in a uniform of white knickers, tunic and lancer cap, red faced. The glow of sunrise stained the green of the moon with crimson. A trumpet blared. From the rear of the Residence marched with stiff-legged precision a squad of askaris and the stocky figure of a non-commissioned officer in a white helmet. Simultaneously appeared on the verandah of the large bungalow the tall form of a white man in pink silk pyjamas. The sergeant barked. The squad presented arms. A coloured ball slid up the flagpole.