CHAPTER IVSCHAUNARD
The young man turned down the Avenue Malakoff, after he had left Berselius’s house, in the direction of the Avenue des Champs Elysées.
In twenty-four hours a complete change had taken place in his life. His line of travel had taken a new and most unexpected course; it was as though a train on the North German had, suddenly, by some mysterious arrangement of points and tracks, found itself on the Paris-Lyons and Mediterranean Railway.
Yesterday afternoon the prospect before him, though vague enough, was American. A practice in some big central American town. It would be a hard fight, for money was scanty, and in medicine, especially in the States, advertisement counts for very much.
All that was changed now, and the hard, definite prospect that had elbowed itself out of vagueness stood before him: Africa, its palms and poisonous forests, the Congo—Berselius.
Something else besides these things also stood before him very definitely and almost casting them into shade. Maxine.
Up to this, a woman had never stood before him as apossible part of his future, if we except Mary Eliza Summers, the eleven-year-old daughter of old Abe Summers, who kept the store in Dodgeville, Vermont, years ago—that is to say, when Paul Quincy Adams was twelve, an orchard-robbing hooligan, whose chief worry in life was that, though he could thrash his eldest brother left-handed, he was condemned by the law of entail to wear his old pants.
When a man falls in love with a woman—really in love—though the attainment of his desire be all but impossible, he has reached the goal of life; no tide can take him higher toward the Absolute. He has reached life’s zenith, and never will he rise higher, even though he live to wield a sceptre or rule armies.
Adams reached the Place de la Concorde on foot, walking and taking his way mechanically, and utterly unconscious of the passers-by.
He was studying in minute detail Maxine Berselius, the pose of her head outlined against the tapestry, the curves of her lips that could speak so well without speaking, the little shell-like ears, the brown-gold coils of her hair, her hands, her dress.
He was standing undetermined as to his route, and whether he would cross over to the Rue St. Honoré or turn toward the Seine, when someone gripped his arm from behind, and, turning, he found himself face to face with Dr. Stenhouse, an English physician who had set up in Paris, practising in the Boulevard Haussmann and flourishing exceedingly.
“Well, this is luck,” said Stenhouse. “I lost youraddress, or I would have written, asking you to come and see us. I remembered it was over on the other side of the water somewhere, but where exactly I could not remember. What are you doing with yourself?”
“Nothing, just at present.”
“Well, see here. I’m going to the Rue du Mont Thabor to see a patient; walk along with me—it’s quite close, just behind the Rue St. Honoré.”
They crossed the Place de la Concorde.
“You have finished your post-graduate work, I expect,” said Stenhouse. “Are you going to practise in the States?”
“Ultimately, I may,” replied Adams. “I have always intended doing so; but I have to feel my way very cautiously, for the money market is not in a particularly flourishing state with me.”
“Good heavens!” said Stenhouse, “when is it with a medical man, especially when he is just starting? I’ve been through that. See here, why don’t you start in Paris?”
“Paris?”
“Yes, this is the place to make money. You say you are thinking of starting in some American city; well, let me tell you, there are very few American cities so full of rich Americans as Paris.”
“Well,” said Adams, “the idea is not a bad one, but just for the present I am fixed. I am going on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo.”
“As doctor?”
“Yes, and the salary is not bad—two thousandfrancs a month and everything found, to say nothing of the fun.”
“And the malaria?”
“Oh, one has to run risks.”
“Whom are you going with?”
“A man called Berselius.”
“Not Captain Berselius?” asked Stenhouse, stopping dead.
“Yes, Captain Berselius, of No. 14 Avenue Malakoff. I have just returned from havingdéjeunerwith him.”
Stenhouse whistled. They were in the Rue du Mont Thabor by this, in front of a smallcafé.
“Well,” said Adams, “what’s wrong?”
“Everything,” replied the other. “This is the house where my patient lives. Wait for me, for a moment, like a good fellow. I shan’t detain you long, and then we can finish our talk, for I have something to tell you.”
He darted into thecaféand Adams waited, watching the passers-by and somewhat perturbed in mind. Stenhouse’s manner impressed him uncomfortably, for, if Captain Berselius had been the devil, the Englishman could not have put more disfavour into his tone. And he (Adams) had made a compact with Captain Berselius.
The Rue du Mont Thabor is a somewhat gloomy little street, and it fitted Adams’s mood as he waited, watching the passers-by and the small affairs of the little shops.
At the end of five minutes Stenhouse returned.
“Well?” said Adams.
“I have had no luncheon yet,” replied Stenhouse. “I have been so rushed. Come with me to a little placeI know in the Rue St. Honoré, where I can get a cup of tea and a bun. We will talk then.”
“Now,” said Stenhouse, when he was seated at a little marble-topped table with the cup of tea and the bun before him. “You say you have engaged yourself to go to the Congo with Captain Berselius.”
“Yes. What do you know about him?”
“That’s just the difficulty. I can only say this, and it’s between ourselves, the man’s name is a byword for a brute and a devil.”
“That’s cheerful,” said Adams.
“Mind you,” said Stenhouse, “he is in the very best society. I have met him at a reception at the Elysée. He goes everywhere. He belongs to the best clubs; he’s apersona grataat more courts than one, and an intimate friend of King Leopold of Belgium. His immense wealth, or part of it, comes from the rubber industry—motor tires and so forth. And he’s mad after big game. That’s his pleasure—killing. He’s a killer. That is the best description of the man. The lust of blood is in him, and the astounding thing, to my mind, is that he is not a murderer. He has killed two men in duels, and they say that it is a sight to see him fighting. Mind you, when I say ‘murderer,’ I do not mean to imply that he is a man who would murder for money. Give the devil his due. I mean that he is quite beyond reason when aroused, and if you were to hit Captain Berselius in the face he would kill you as certain as I’ll get indigestion from that bun I have just swallowed. The last doctor he took with him to Africa died at Marseilles from the hardships he wentthrough—not at the hands of Berselius, for that would have aroused inquiry, but simply from the hardships of the expedition; but he gave frightful accounts to the hospital authorities of the way this Berselius had treated the natives. He drove that expedition right away from Libreville, in the French Congo, to God knows where. He had it under martial law the whole time, clubbing and thrashing the niggers at the least offence, and shooting with his own hand two of them who tried to desert.”
“You must remember,” said Adams, taking up the cudgels for Berselius and almost surprised himself at so doing, “that an expedition like that, if it is not held together by a firm hand, goes to pieces, and the result is disaster for everyone. And you know what niggers are.”
“There you are,” laughed Stenhouse. “The man has obsessed you already, and you’ll come back, if you go, like Bauchardy, the man who died in the hospital at Marseilles, cursing Berselius, yet so magnetized by the power of the chap that you would be ready to follow him again if he said ‘Come,’ and you had the legs to stand on. That is how Bauchardy was.”
“The man, undoubtedly, has a great individuality,” said Adams. “Passing him in the street one might take him for a very ordinary person. Meeting him for the first time, he looks all good nature; that smile——”
“Always,” said Stenhouse. “Beware of a man with a perpetual smile on his face.”
“Yes, I know that, but this smile of Berselius’s is not worn as a cloak. It seems quite natural to the man, yetsomehow bad, as if it came from a profound and natural cynicism directed against all things—including all things good.”
“You have put it,” said Stenhouse, “in four words.”
“But, in spite of everything,” said Adams, “I believe the man to have great good qualities: some instinct tells me so.”
“My dear sir,” said Stenhouse, “did you ever meet a bad man worth twopence at his trade who had not good qualities? The bad man who is half good—so to speak—is a much more dangerous villain than the barrier bully without heart or soul. When hell makes a super-excellent devil, the devil puts goodness in just as a baker puts soda in his bread to make it rise. Look at Verlaine.”
“Well,” said Adams, “I have promised Berselius, and I will have to go. Besides, there are other considerations.”
He was thinking of Maxine, and a smile lit up his face.
“You seem happy enough about it,” said Stenhouse, rising to go. “Well, ‘he who will to Cupar maun to Cupar.’ When do you start?”
“I don’t know yet, but I shall hear to-night.”
They passed out into the Rue St. Honoré, where they parted.
“Good luck,” said Stenhouse, getting into afiacre.
“Good-bye,” replied Adams, waving his hand.
Being in that quarter of the town, and having nothing especial to do, he determined to go to Schaunard’s in the Rue de la Paix, and see about his guns.
Schaunard personally superintends his own shop,which is the first gun-shop on the Continent of Europe. Emperors visit him in person and he receives them as an equal, though far superior to them in the science of sport. An old man now, with a long white beard, he remembers the fowling-pieces and rifles which he supplied to the Emperor Maximilian before that unfortunate gentleman started on his fatal expedition in search of a throne. He is a mathematician as well as a maker of guns; his telescopic sights and wind gauges are second to none in the world, and his shop front in the Rue de la Paix exposes no wares—it has just a wire blind, on which are blazoned the arms of Russia, England, and Spain.
But, inside, the place is a joy to a rightly constituted man. Behind glass cases the long processions of guns and rifles, smooth, sleek, nut-brown and deadly, are a sight for the eyes of a sportsman.
The duelling pistol is still a factor in Continental life, and the cases containing them at Schaunard’s are worth lingering over, for the modern duelling pistol is a thing of beauty, very different from the murderous hair-trigger machines of Count Considine—though just as deadly.
To Schaunard, pottering amongst his wares, appeared Adams.
The swing-door closed, shutting out the sound of the Rue de la Paix, and the old gun-merchant came forward through the silence of his shop to meet his visitor.
Adams explained his business. He had come to buy some rifles for a big-game expedition. Captain Berselius had recommended him.
“Ah! Captain Berselius?” said Schaunard, and an interested look came into his face. “True, he is a customer of mine. As a matter of fact, his guns for his new expedition are already boxed and directed for Marseilles. Ah, yes—you require a complete outfit, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Adams. “I am going with him.”
“Going with Captain Berselius as a friend?”
“No, as a doctor.”
“True, he generally takes a doctor with him,” said Schaunard, running his fingers through his beard. “Have you had much experience amidst big game, and can you make out your own list of requirements, or shall I help you with my advice?”
“I should be very glad of your advice. No, I have not had much experience in big-game shooting. I have shot bears, that’s all——”
“Armand!” cried Schaunard, and a pale-faced young man came forward from the back part of the shop.
“Open me this case.”
Armand opened a case, and the deft hand of the old man took down a double-barrelled cordite rifle, light-looking and of exquisite workmanship.
“These are the guns we shoot elephants with nowadays,” said Schaunard, handling the weapon lovingly. “A child could carry it, and there is nothing living it will not kill.” He laughed softly to himself, and then directed Armand to bring forward an elephant gun of the old pattern. In an instant the young man returned, staggering under the weight of the immense rifle, shod with a heel of india-rubber an inch thick.
Adams laughed, took the thing up with one hand, and raised it to his shoulder as though it had been a featherweight.
“Ah!” said he, “here’s a gun worth shooting with.”
Schaunard looked on with admiration at the giant handling the gigantic gun.
“Oh, for you,” said he, “it’s all very well.Ma foi, but you suit one another, you both are of another day.”
“God bless you,” said Adams, “you can pick me up by the bushel in the States. I’msmall. Say, how much is this thing?”
“That!” cried Schaunard. “Why, what on earth could you want with such an obsolete weapon as that?”
“Tell me—does this thing hit harder, gun for gun—not weight for weight, mind you—but gun for gun—than that double-barrel you are holding in your hands?”
“Oh, yes,” said Schaunard, “it hits harder, just as a cannon would hit harder, but——”
“I’ll have her,” said Adams. “I’ve taken a fancy to her. See here, Captain Berselius is paying for my guns; they are his, part of the expedition—I want this as my own, and I’ll pay you for her out of my own pocket. How much is she?”
Schaunard, whose fifty years of trading had explained to him the fact that when an American takes a whim into his head it is best for all parties to let him have his own way, ran his fingers through his beard.
“The thing has no price,” said he. “It is a curiosity. But if you must have it—well, I will let you have it for two hundred francs.”
“Done,” said Adams. “Have you any cartridges?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Schaunard. “Heaps. That is to say, I have the old cartridges, and I can have a couple of hundred of them emptied and re-filled and percussioned. Ah, well, monsieur, you must have your own way. Armand, take the gun; have it attended to and packed. And now that monsieur has his play-toy,” finished the old man, with one of his silent little laughs, “let us come to business.”
They did, and nearly an hour was spent whilst the American chose a double hammerless-ejector cordite rifle and a .256 sporting Mannlicher, for Schaunard was a man who, when he took an interest in a customer, could be very interesting.
When business was concluded Schaunard gave his customer various tips as to the treatment of guns. “And now,” said he, opening the door as Adams was taking his departure, “I will give you one more piece of advice about this expedition. It is a piece of private advice, and I will trust you not to tell the Captain that I gave it to you.”
“Yes. What is the advice?”
“Don’t go.”
Adams laughed as he turned on his heel, and Schaunard laughed as he closed the door.
A passer-by might have imagined that the two men had just exchanged a good joke.
Before Adams had taken three steps, the door of the shop re-opened, and Schaunard’s voice called again.
“Monsieur.”
“Yes?” said Adams, turning.
“You need not pay me for the gun till you come back.”
“Right,” said Adams, laughing. “I will call in and pay you for it when I come back.Au revoir.”
“Adieu.”
CHAPTER VMARSEILLES
On the day of departure Berselius was entertained atdéjeunerby the Cerele Militaire. He brought Adams with him as a guest.
Nearly all the sporting members of the great club were present to speed the man who after Schillings was reckoned on the Continent the most adventurous big-game hunter in the world.
Despite what Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find a place in Adams’s mind.
Guest at a table surrounded by sixty of the wealthiest and most powerful officers of a military nation, Berselius did not forget his companion, but introduced him with painstaking care to the chief men present, included him in his speech of thanks, and made him feel that though he was taking Berselius’s pay, he was his friend and on a perfect social equality with him.
Adams felt this keenly. On qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to anAmerican, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants’ hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build the cities and bridge the rivers, and lay the iron roads, making rail-heads of the roar of the Atlantic and the thunder of the Pacific.
This gentleman treated Adams as a paid attendant and in such a manner that Adams one morning lifted him from his bed by the slack of his silk pajamas and all but drowned him in his own bath.
He could not but remember the incident as he sat watching Berselius so calm, so courtly, so absolutely destitute of mannerism, so incontestably the superior, in some magnetic way, of all the other men who were present.
Maxine and M. Pinchon, the secretary, were to accompany them to Marseilles.
A cold, white Paris fog covered the city that night as they drove to the station, and the fog detonators and horns followed them as they glided out slowly from beneath the great glass roof. Slowly at first, then more swiftly over rumbling bridges and clicking point, more swiftly still, breaking from the fog-banked Seine valley, through snarling tunnel and chattering cutting, faster now and freer, by long lines of poplar trees, mist-strewn, and moonlit ponds and fields, spectral whiteroads, little winking towns; and now, as if drawn by the magnetic south, swaying to the rock-a-bye of speed, aiming for the lights of Dijon far away south, to the tune of the wheels, “seventy-miles-an-hour—seventy-miles-an-hour.”
Civilization, whatever else she has done, has written one poem, the “Rapide.” True to herself, she makes it pay a dividend, and prostitutes it to the service of stockbrokers, society folk, and gamblers bound for Monaco—but what a poem it is that we snore through between a day in Paris and a day in Marseilles. A poem, swiftly moving, musical with speed, a song built up of songs, telling of Paris, its chill and winter fog, of the winter fields, the poplar trees and mist; vineyards of the Côte d’Or; Provence with the dawn upon it, Tarascon blowing its morning bugle to the sun; the Rhone, and the vineyards, and the olives, and the white, white roads; ending at last in that triumphant blast of music, light and colour, Marseilles.
La Joconde, Berselius’s yacht, was berthed at the Messagerie wharf, and afterdéjeunerat the Hotel Noailles, they took their way there on foot.
Adams had never seen the south before as Marseilles shows it. The vivid light and the black shadows, the variegated crowd of the Canabier Prolongue had for him an “Arabian Nights” fascination, but the wharves held a deeper fascination still.
Marseilles draws its most subtle charm from far away in the past. Beaked triremes have rubbed their girding cables against the wharves of the old Phocée; thesunshine of a thousand years has left some trace of its gold, a mirage in the air chilled by the mistral and perfumed by the ocean.
At Marseilles took place the meeting between Mary Magdalen and Laeta Acilia, so delightfully fabled by Anatole France. The Count of Monte Cristo landed here after he had discovered his treasure, and here Caderouse after the infamy at “La Reservée” watched old Dantès starving to death. Multitudes of ships, fabled and real, have passed from the harbour to countries curious and strange, but never one of them to a stranger country than that to whichLa Jocondewas to bear Berselius and his companion.
Gay as Naples with colour, piercing the blue sky with a thousand spars, fluttering the flags of all nations to the wind, shot through with the sharp rattle of winch-chains, and perfumed with garlic, vanilla, fumes of coal tar, and the tang of the sea, the wharves of Marseilles lay before the travellers, a great counter eternally vibrating to the thunder of trade; bales of carpets from the Levant, tons of cheeses from Holland, wood from Norway, copra, rice, tobacco, corn, silks from China and Japan, cotton from Lancashire; all pouring in to the tune of the winch-pauls, the cry of the stevedores, and the bugles of Port Saint Jean, shrill beneath the blue sky and triumphant as the crowing of the Gallic cock.
Between the breaks in the shipping one could see the sea-gulls fishing and the harbour flashing, here spangled with coal tar, here whipped to deepest sapphire by the mistral; the junk shops, grog shops, parrot shops,rope-walks, ships’ stores and factories lining the quays, each lending a perfume, a voice, or a scrap of colour to the air vibrating with light, vibrating with sound, shot through with voices; hammer blows from the copper sheathers in the dry docks, the rolling of drums from Port St. Nicholas, the roaring of grain elevators, rattling of winch-chains, trumpeting of ship sirens, mewing of gulls, the bells of Notre Dame and the bells of St. Victor, all fused, orchestrated, into one triumphant symphony beneath the clear blue sky and the trade flags of the world.
La Jocondewas berthed beside a Messagerie boat which they had to cross to reach her.
She was a palatial cruising yacht of twelve hundred tons’ burden, built somewhat on the lines of Drexel’sLa Margharita, but with less width of funnel.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they went on board; all the luggage had arrived, steam was up, the port arrangements had been made, and Berselius determined to start at once.
Maxine kissed him, then she turned to Adams.
“Bon voyage.”
“Good-bye,” said Adams.
He held her hand for a fraction of a second after his grasp had relaxed.
Then she was standing on the deck of the Messagerie boat, waving good-bye across the lane of blue water widening betweenLa Jocondeand her berth mate.
At the harbour mouth, looking back across the blue wind-swept water, he fancied he could still see her, a microscopic speck in the great picture of terracedMarseilles, with its windows, houses, flags, and domes glittering and burning in the sun.
Then the swell of the Gulf of Lyons tookLa Jocondeas a nurse takes an infant and rocks it on her knee, and France and civilization were slowly wrapped from sight under the veils of distance.
PART TWO
PART TWO
CHAPTER VIMATADI
It was evening.La Joconde, Berselius’s yacht, lay moored at the wharf of Matadi; warpling against the starboard plates, whimpering, wimpling, here smooth as glass, here eddied and frosted, a sea of golden light, a gliding mirror, went the Congo.
A faint, faint haze dulled the palms away on the other side; from the wharf, where ships were loading up with rubber, ivory, palm-oil, and bales of gum copal, the roar and rattle of steam-winches went across the water, far away across the glittering water, where the red flamingoes were flying, to that other shore where the palm trees showed their fringe of hot and hazy green.
The impression of heat which green, the coolest of all colours, can produce, damp heat, heart-weakening heat, that is the master impression produced by the Congo on the mind of man. All the other impressions are—to paraphrase Thénard—embroideries on this.
Yet how many other impressions there are! The Congo is Africa in a frank mood. Africa, laying her hand on her heart and speaking, or rather, whispering the truth.
This great river flooding from Stanley Pool and far away beyond, draws with it, like a moving dream, thepictures of the roaring rapids and the silent pools, the swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past Matadi—and wallowed in it? Its faint perfume hints at that.
On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated, and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real base of the expedition, leavingLa Jocondebehind at Matadi.
The yacht would return to France.
“What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships,” said Adams, turning in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. “What are the exports here?”
“Gum copal—nuts—rubber—tusks—everything you can get out of there,” answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.
Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of Berselius’s hand, “over there”; little did he dream of what those words held in their magic.
Then Berselius went below.
The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf anda broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and tangling the trees.
Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She had come to Marseilles to see them off, and——
Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.
Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich—so rich that the contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman’s money or assistance.
He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social temple by walking between the pillars of the portico, or smashing an entrance way through the wall with his fist.
He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male creation in Nature.
Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as he was by thetrammels of civilization, he contented himself with imagining her in that position.
It is quite possible that no other woman would ever inspire the same passion in him. He knew this, yet he did not grumble; for he was practical, and his practical nature had a part in his wildest dreams.
Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-scrapers built by the Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest dreams of architecture. Yet they don’t fall down; they serve their purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom practical men.
As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the moonlit river, Maxine gave place in his mind to her father.
Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavourable light. Up to this he had been almost companionable.
Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck together, discussed all sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this overpowering personality weighed upon him so muchthat he would leave the saloon and pace the deck so as to become himself again.
Next morning they left by rail for Leopoldville, where they found waiting for them theLeopold, a shallow-draught steamer of some two hundred tons.
CHAPTER VIIYANDJALI
TheLeopoldwas officered entirely by Belgians, and it would have been almost impossible to find a pleasanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain, especially, won Adams’s regard. He was a huge man, with a wife and family in Antwerp, and he was eternally damning the Congo and wishing himself back in Antwerp.
They transhipped to a smaller boat, theCouronne, and one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes on the steamer bell announced their approach to Yandjali.
Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, mostly mud-built, the funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical sunshine lighting the little wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise.
Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and years agoboom-boomdown the river’s shining surface, from away up there where the great palms gave place to reeds and water-grass, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature on earth.You do not hear it now. The great brutes have long ago been driven away by man.
On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner, Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.
Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to the District Commissioner’s house, a frame building surrounded by palm trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.
The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its massacre, is not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District Commissioner, orChef de Poste, in each district draws up a schedule of what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much cassava, so many tusks, etc.
Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a good-tempered looking man, with thatstrange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is on the confines of civilization.
Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden wilderness, you will find a different type of man; more alert and nervy, a man who never smiles, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. Adéclassé. He is the man who really drives the Congo machine, the last wheel in the engine, but the most important; the man whose deeds are not to be written.
Verhaeren’s living room in the frame house was furnished with steamer deck chairs, a table and some shelves. Pinned to the wall and curling up at the corners was a page torn fromLa Gaudriole, the picture of a girl in tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices, and those eternal “official letters,” with which the Congo Government deluges its employees, and whose everlasting purport is “Get more ivory, get more rubber, get more copal.”
Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a bottle of Vanderhum, and the three men smoked and talked. He had acted as Berselius’s agent for the expedition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius’s intention to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the elephantcountry. They talked of the expedition, but Verhaeren showed little knowledge of the work and no enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo have no feeling for sport. They never hunt the game at their doors, except for food.
When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led the way out for Berselius to inspect his arrangements.
The porters were called up. There werefortyof them, and Adams thought that he had never before seen such a collection of depressed looking individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in their faces, their movements and their attitude, that told a tale of spirits broken to servitude by terror.
The four gun-bearers and the headman were very different. The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the “soldiers” of the state by special leave from headquarters.
Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing. “Chop boxes,” such as are used on the east coast, contained stores; two big tents, a couple of “Roorkee” chairs, folding-beds and tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.
“What did you bring this thing for?” asked Berselius, pointing to Adams’s elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering.
“To shoot with,” said Adams, laughing.
Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh.
“Well, bring it,” said he; “but I don’t envy your gun-bearers.”
But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this, and no mistake, and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of it.
Félix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as “soldiers”; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, “willeat when they have killed.” When they are useden masse, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. God help the man who would come between them and their food!
Of these men Félix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.
If Félix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and woman mentioned by Thénard in his lecture.
The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and Left of moral action.
A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God shapes and devil shapes.
He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox—he never can become a Leopold or a Félix Fuchs!
Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his mouth, led the way.
He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the dim light, saw bale upon bale of stuff; gum copal it proved to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There was also cassava in large quantities, and the place had a heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.
Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.
Verhaeren laughed.
It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.
A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scraps of food like animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.
There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; girls of twelve and fifteen, some almost comely; middle-aged women, women about to become mothers, and a woman who had become a mother during the past night lying there in the shelter of the Hostage House. There were little pot-bellied nigger children, tiny black dots, who had to do their bit of work in the fields with the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked over the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, and ran about distractedly, not knowing what new thing was in store for them. They were the female folk and children of a village, ten miles away south; they were here as “hostages,” because the village had not produced its full tale of cassava. They had been here over a month.
The soldiers laughed, and struck with the butts of their rifles on the palisading, as if to increase the confusion. Adams noticed that the young girls and women were of all the terrified crowd seemingly the most terrified. He did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A good man himself, and believing in a God in heaven, he could not guess the truth. He knew nothing of the reason of these women’s terror, and he looked with disgustat the scene before him, not entirely comprehending. Those creatures, so filthy, so animal-like, created in his mind such abhorrence that he forgot to make allowances for the fact that they were penned like swine, and that perchance in their own native state, free in their own villages, they might be cleaner and less revolting. He could not hear the dismal cry of the “Congo niggers,” who of all people on the earth are the most miserable, the most abused, the most sorrow-stricken, the most dumb. He did not know that he was looking at one of the filthy acts in the great drama that a hundred years hence will be read with horror by a more enlightened world.
They turned from the degrading sight and went back to Verhaeren’s house for dinner.