CHAPTER VIIITHE VOICE OF THE CONGO FOREST
Just after daybreak next morning the expedition started.
Berselius, Adams, the gun-bearers and Félix headed the line; a long way after came the porters and their loads, shepherded by half a dozen soldiers of the state specially hired for the business.
Before they had gone a mile on their route the sun was blazing strongly, sharp bird-calls came from the trees, and from the porters tramping under their loads a hum like the hum of an awakened beehive. These people will talk and chatter when the sun rises; club them, or threaten them, or load them with burdens as much as you please, the old instinct of the birds and beasts remains.
At first the way led through cassava and manioc fields and past clumps of palms; then, all at once, and like plunging under a green veil or into the heart of a green wave, they entered the forest.
The night chill was just leaving the forest, the great green gloom, festooned with fantastic rope-like tendrils, was drinking the sunlight with a million tongues; you could hear the rustle and snap of branches straighteningthemselves and sighing toward heaven after the long, damp, chilly night. The tropical forest at daybreak flings its arms up to the sun as if to embrace him, and all the teeming life it holds gives tongue. Flights of coloured and extraordinary birds rise like smoke wreaths from the steaming leaves, and the drone of a million, million insects from the sonorous depths comes like the sound of life in ferment.
The river lay a few miles to their left, and faintly from it, muffled by the trees, they could hear the shrill whistling of the river steamboat. It was like the “good-bye” of civilization.
The road they were pursuing through the forest was just a dim track beaten down by the feet of the copal and cassava gatherers bearing their loads to Yandjali. Here and there the forest thinned out and a riot of umbrella thorns, vicious, sword-like grass and tall, dull purple flowers, like hollyhocks made a scrub that choked the way and tangled the foot; then the trees would thicken up, and with the green gloom of a mighty wave the forest would fall upon the travellers and swallow them up.
Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.
The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage asit was, seemed part of the civilization and the life he had left behind him.
The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar. One may lose one’s direction, but one can never loseoneselfamidst the friendly pines, the beeches, the oaks, whose forms have been known to us from childhood.
But here, where the beard-moss hangs from unknown trees, as we tramp through the sweltering sap-scented gloom, we feel ourselves not in a forest but under a cover.
There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one’s brow, with the languor of one’s body, and the remembrance of one’s past, for the sight of an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust.
A great green room, where echo sounds of things unknown.
You can see nothing but the foliage, and the tree boles just around, yet the place is full of life and war and danger.
That crash followed by the shrieking of birds—you cannot tell whether it is half a mile away or quite close, or to the right, or to the left, or whether it is caused by a branch torn from a tree by some huge hand, or a tree a hundred years old felled at last by Time.
Time is the woodman of the Congo forests. Nobody else could do the work, and he works in his own lazyfashion, leaving things to right themselves and find their own salvation.
Just as there is eternal war to the death between the beasts of this jungle, so there is war to the death between the trees, the vines, and the weeds. A frightful battle between the vegetable things is going on; we scarcely recognize it, because the processes are so slow, but if five years of the jungle could be photographed week by week, and the whole series be run rapidly off on some huge cinematograph machine, you would see a heaving and rending struggle for existence, vegetation fed by the roaring tropical rains rising like a giant and flinging itself on the vegetation of yesterday; vines lengthening like snakes, tree felling tree, and weed choking weed.
Even in the quietude of a moment, standing and looking before one at the moss-bearded trees and the python-like loops of the lianas, one can see the struggle crystallized, just as in the still marble of the Laocoon one sees the struggle of life with death.
In this place which covers an unthinkable area of the earth, a vast population has dwelt since the beginning of time. Think of it. Shut off from the world which has progressed toward civilization, alone with the beasts and the trees, they have lived here without a guide and without a God. The instinct which teaches the birds to build nests taught them to build huts; the herd-instinct drove them into tribes.
Then, ages ago, before Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their heads and walkerect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see even the face of Art.
Yet there was a germ of civilization amongst them. They had villages and vague laws and art of a sort; the ferocious tribes drew to one side, hunting beasts and warring with each other, and the others, the milder and kindlier tribes, led their own comparatively quiet life; and Mohammed was born somewhere in the unknown North, and they knew nothing of the fact till the Arab slavers raided them, and robbed them of men and women and children, just as boys rob an orchard.
But the birth of Christ and the foundation of Christendom was the event which in far distant years was destined to be this unhappy people’s last undoing.
They had known the beasts of the forests, the storms, the rains, the Arab raiders, but Fate had reserved a new thing for them to know. The Christians. Alas! that one should have to say it, but here the fact is, that white men, Christian men, have taken these people, have drawn under the banner of Christianity and under Christian pay all the warlike tribes, armed them, and set them as task-masters over the humble and meek. And never in the history of the world has such a state of servitude been known as at present exists in the country of this forlorn people.
They had been marching some three hours when, from ahead came a sound as of some huge animal approaching. Berselius half turned to his gun-bearer for his rifle, but Félix reassured him.
“Cassava bearers,” said Félix.
It was, in fact, a crowd of natives; some thirty or forty, bearing loads of Kwanga (cassava cakes) to Yandjali. They were coming along the forest path in single file, their burdens on their heads, and when the leaders saw the white men they stopped dead. A great chattering broke out. One could hear it going back all along the unseen line, a rattlesnake of sound. Then Félix called out to them; the gun-bearers and the white men stood aside, and the cassava bearers, taking heart, advanced.
They were heavily laden, for most of them had from ten to twenty Kwanga on their heads, and besides this burden—they were mostly women—several of them had babies slung on their backs.
These people belonged to a village which lay within Verhaeren’s district. The tax laid on this village was three hundred cakes of cassava to be delivered at Yandjali every eight days.
The people of this village were a lazy lot, and if you have ever collected taxes in England, you can fancy the trouble of making such people—savages living in a tropical forest, who have no count of time and scarcely an idea of numbers—pay up.
Especially when one takes into consideration the fact that to produce three hundred cakes of cassava every eight days, the whole village must work literally like a beehive, the men gathering and the women grinding the stuff from dawn till dark.
Only by the heaviest penalties could such a desirable state of things be brought about, and the heavierand sharper the punishments inflicted at any one time, the easier was it for Verhaeren to work these people.
Adams watched the cassava bearers as they passed at a trot. They went by like automatic figures, without raising their eyes from the ground. There were some old women amongst them who looked more like shrivelled monkeys than human beings; extraordinary anatomical specimens, whose muscles, working as they ran, were as visible as though no skin covered them. There were young women, young children, and women far advanced in pregnancy; and they all went by like automatic figures, clockwork marionettes.
It was a pitiable spectacle enough, these laden creatures, mute looking as dumb beasts; but there was nothing especially to shock the eye of the European, for it is the long-prepared treason against this people, devised and carried out by nature, that their black mask covers a multitude of other people’s sins and their own untold sufferings.
Had they been white, the despairing look, the sunken eyes, the hundred signs that tell of suffering and slavery would have been visible, would have appealed to the heart; but the black mass could not express these things fully. They were niggers, uglier looking and more depressed looking than other niggers—that was all.
And so Adams passed on, without knowing what he had seen and the only impression the sight made on his mind was one of disgust.
One fact his professional eye noticed as the crowd passed by. Four of the women had lost their left hands.
The hands had been amputated just above the wrist in three cases, and one woman had suffered amputation at the middle of the forearm.
He spoke of this to Berselius, who did not seem to hear his remark.
At noon they halted for a three hours’ rest, and then pushed on, camping for the night, after a twenty-five miles’ journey, in a break of the forest.
CHAPTER IXBIG GAME
Just as going along the coast by Pondoland one sees English park scenery running down to the very sea edge, so the Congo has its surprises in strips of country that might, as far as appearance goes, have been cut out of Europe and planted here.
This glade which Félix had chosen for a camping place was strewn with rough grass and studded here and there with what at first sight seemed apple trees: they were in reality thorns.
The camp was pitched and the fires lit on the edge of the forest, and then Berselius proceeded to take tale of his people and found one missing. One of the cook boys had dropped behind and vanished. He had been lame shortly after the start. The soldiers had not seen him drop behind, but the porters had.
“How many miles away was it?” asked Berselius of the collected porters.
“Nkoto, nkoto (Very many, very many),” the answer came in a chorus, for a group of savages, if they have the same idea in common, will all shout together in response to an answer, like one man.
“Why had they not told?”
“We did not know,” came the irrelevant answer in chorus.
Berselius knew quite well that they had not told simply from heedlessness and want of initiative. He would have flogged the whole lot soundly, but he wanted them fresh for the morrow’s work. Cutting down their rations would but weaken them, and as for threatening to dock their pay, such a threat has no effect on a savage.
“Look!” said Berselius.
He had just dismissed the porters with a reprimand when his keen eye caught sight of something far up the glade. It wanted an hour of sunset.
Adams, following the direction in which Berselius was gazing, saw, a great distance off, to judge by the diminishing size of the thorn trees, a form that made his heart to leap in him.
Massive and motionless, a great creature stood humped in the level light; the twin horns back-curving and silhouetted against the sky told him at once what it was.
“Bull rhinoceros,” said Berselius. “Been lying up in the thick stuff all day; come out to feed.” He made a sign to Félix who, knowing exactly what was wanted, dived into the tent and came back with a .400 cordite rifle and Adams’s elephant gun.
“Come,” said Berselius, “the brute is evidently thinking. They stay like that for an hour sometimes. If we have any luck, we may get a shot sideways before he moves. There’s not a breath of wind.”
They started, Félix following with the guns.
“I would not bother about him,” said Berselius,“only the meat will be useful, and it will be an experience for you. You will take first shot, and, if he charges, aim just behind the shoulder—that’s the spot for a rhino if you can reach it; for other animals aim at the neck, no matter what animal it is, or whether it is a lion or a buck; the neck shot is the knock-out blow. I have seen a lion shot through the heart travel fifty yards and kill a man; had he been struck in the neck he would have fallen in his tracks.”
“Cow,” said Félix from behind.
Out of the thick stuff on the edge of the forest another form had broken. She was scarcely smaller than the bull, but the horns were shorter; she was paler in colour, too, and showed up not nearly so well. Then she vanished into the thick stuff, but the bull remained standing, immovable as though he were made of cast iron, and the two awful horns, now more distinct, cut the background like scimitars.
The rhinoceros, like the aboriginal native of the Congo, has come straight down from pre-Adamite days almost without change. He is half blind now; he can scarcely see twenty yards, he is still moving in the night of the ancient world, and the smell of a man excites the wildest apprehension in his vestige of a mind. He scents you, flings his heavy head from side to side, and then to all appearances he charges you.
Nothing could appear more wicked, ferocious, and full of deadly intent than this charge; yet, in reality, the unfortunate brute is not seeking you at all, but running away from you; for the rhino when running away alwaysruns in the direction from which the wind is blowing. You are in that direction, else your scent could not reach him; as your scent grows stronger and stronger, the more alarmed does he become and the quicker he runs. Now he sights you, or you fire. If you miss, God help you, for he charges the flash with all his fright suddenly changed to fury.
They had got within four hundred yards from the brute when a faint puff of wind stirred the grass, and instantly the rhino shifted his position.
“He’s got our scent,” said Berselius, taking the cordite rifle from Félix, who handed his gun also to Adams. “He’s got it strong. We will wait for him here.”
The rhino, after a few uneasy movements, began to “run about.” One could see that the brute was ill at ease; he went in a half-circle, and then, the wind increasing, and bringing the scent strong, he headed straight for Berselius and his companions, and charged.
The sound of him coming was like the sound of a great drum beaten by a lunatic.
“Don’t fire till I give the word,” cried Berselius, “and aim just behind the shoulder.”
Adams, who was to the left of the charging beast, raised the rifle and looked down the sights. He knew that if he missed, the brute would charge the flash and be on him perhaps before he could give it the second barrel.
It was exactly like standing before an advancing express engine. An engine, moreover, that had the power of leaving the metals to chase you should you not derail it.
Would Berselius never speak! Berselius all the time was glancing from the rhino to Adams.
“Fire!”
The ear-blasting report of the elephant gun echoed from the forest, and the rhino, just as if he had been tripped by an invisible wire fence, fell, tearing up the ground and squealing like a pig.
“Good,” said Berselius.
Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had never gone through a moment of more deadly nerve tension.
He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched stiff and stark, when he was arrested by Félix.
“Cow,” said Félix again.
The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.
Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull had done—ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged right in the eye of the wind.
“Mine,” said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.
Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams’s respect for him.
Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this strange man exercised. Hisreprimand to the porters for the loss of the boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.
Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American’s nerve to a nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been passed.
The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world, and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.
Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius. He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit was passed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the sweat-drops running on his face like ants, and even Félix swallowed like a man who is trying to choke down something nauseous. It was amagnificent exhibition of daring and self-restraint and cool assurance.
At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up the grass, it came right up to Berselius’s feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, “fussed” just as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he had died.
And now from the camp rose a great outcry, “Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!).” From the soldiers, from the gun-bearers, from the porters it came. There were no longer soldiers, or gun-bearers, or porters; every distinction was forgotten; they were all savages, voicing the eternal cry of the jungle, “Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!).”
In the last rays of the sunset the two gigantic forms lay stretched forever in death. They lay as they had composed themselves after that long stiff stretch which every animal takes before settling itself for eternal sleep; and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks tipped with the murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with his gun butt resting on his boot, stood watching with a brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed like ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his direction, to cut them up. Then the meat was brought into camp. The tails and the best parts of the carcasses, including the kidneys, were reserved for the white men,and the rations from the rest of the meat were served out; but a dozen porters who had been last in the line, and who were accountable for letting the boy drop behind, got nothing.
It was pitiable to see their faces. But they deserved their punishment, notwithstanding the fact that in the middle of the meat distribution the missing boy limped into camp. He had a thorn half an inch long in his foot, which Adams extracted. Then the camp went to bed.
Adams in his tent under the mosquito net slept soundly and heard and knew nothing of the incidents of the night. Berselius was also sleeping soundly when, at about one o’clock in the morning, Félix aroused him.
One of the porters had been caught stealing some of the meat left over from the distribution of the night before.
The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.
He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give trouble anyway. His crime was great.
Berselius sent Félix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. Then the body was flung into the forest where the roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was splitting the dark.
CHAPTER XM’BASSA
Seven days’ march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart of the great rubber district of M’Bonga.
Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.
It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n’sambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m’binas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining woods.
But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber vine, that mysterious plant which requires a glass-house atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubberforest of M’Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourglass; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Félix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction.
In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M’Bassa. They were making for this place now, which was to be the base from which they would start on the great hunt.
The fort of M’Bassa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now “soldiers,” and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by the Government.
In the great forest of M’Bonga the rubber vines are not equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone.
Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.
Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents,it is only to be found in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of their viscous sap.
Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.
These are the conditions of the rubber collector’s task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.
These woods through which Félix led them were to the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.
Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous, and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quantitiesthat the bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.
On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting juice mixed itself with the smell of decay.
It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would dip down into an unseen valley; you felt yourself going down hill, down, down, and then you knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stagnation of the air. Open spaces, when they came, showed little sky, and they were less open spaces than rooms in the surrounding prison.
Félix was not leading them through the uttermost depths of this place; he was following the vague indications of a road by which the rubber from M’Bassa was carted to the river.
They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the dimmest indication of a track where other men have been before is a thing which robs the wilderness of much of its terror.
The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in those vast depths where the rubber collectors have to go alone, I leave you to imagine.
At last, at noon, on the third day of their journey to this place they struck rising ground where the trees fell away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven lay above their heads, and before them on the highest point of the rise, Fort M’Bassa burning in the sun.
CHAPTER XIANDREAS MEEUS
The Parthenon in all its glory could not have looked more beautiful to the returning Greek than this half-ruined fort in the eyes of Adams.
A thing built by the hands of white men and shone on by the sun—what could be more acceptable to the eye after the long, long tramp through the heart-breaking forest!
The fort of M’Bassa was quite small; the surrounding walls had gone to decay, but the “guest house” and the office, and the great go-down where the rubber was stored, were in good repair and well thatched.
Outside the walls were a number of wretched hovels inhabited by the “soldiers” and their wives, and one of these soldiers, a tall black, with the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced to meet them.
He was a middle-sized man, with a melancholy facethat showed very white under the shadow of the helmet; he was dressed in dingy white drill, and he had a cigarette between his lips.
He looked like a man who had never in his life smiled, yet his face was not an unpleasant face altogether, though there was much in it to give the observer pause.
His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, yet there was that in it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck Adams sharply and strangely; for the voice of Andreas Meeus,Chef de Posteat M’Bassa, was the voice of a man who for two years had been condemned to talk the language of the natives. It had curious inflections, hesitancies, and a dulness that expressed the condition of a brain condemned for two years to think the thoughts of the natives in their own language.
Just as the voice of a violin expresses the condition of the violin, so does the voice of a man express the condition of his mind. And that is the fact that will strike you most if you travel in the wilds of the Congo State and talk to the men of your own colour who are condemned to live amongst the people.
One might have compared Meeus’s voice to the voice of a violin—a violin that had been attacked by some strange fungoid growth that had filled its interior and dulled the sounding board.
He had been apprised a month before of the coming of Berselius’s expedition, and one might imagine the servility which this man would show to the all-powerful Berselius, whose hunting expeditions were red-carpeted, who was hail-fellow-well-met with Leopold, who, by liftinghis finger, could cause Andreas Meeus to be dismissed from his post, and by crooking his finger cause him to be raised to a Commissionership.
Yet he showed no servility at all. He had left servility behind him, just as he had left pride, just as he had left ambition, patriotism, country, and that divine something which blossoms into love of wife and child.
When he had shaken hands with Berselius and Adams, he led the way into the fort, or rather into the enclosure surrounded by the ruinous mud walls, an enclosure of about a hundred yards square.
On the right of the quadrangle stood the go-down, where the rubber and a small quantity of ivory was stored.
In the centre stood the misnamed guest house, a large mud and wattle building, with a veranda gone to decay.
The blinding sun shone on it all, showing up with its fierce light the true and appalling desolation of the place. There was not one thing in the enclosure upon which the eye could rest with thankfulness.
Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim sketch of Rome.
To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.
In the storms and under the rains the great rubberforest of M’Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n’sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.
Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two rooms—rooms spacious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges, hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo bows and arrows—bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when Fort M’Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept away by rifle fire.
There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper adorning the place, as in Verhaeren’s abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the same stack of “official letters,” some of these two years old, some of last month, all dealing with trade.
Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of people he had known—the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of theCafé de Couronne—all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.
Meeus was one of the “unfortunate men.” He had held a small clerkship under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a fault of his own.
This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down to live on a maiden aunt.
He called it looking for work.
She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped tosupport him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in those days that seemed so far distant from him now.
Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of thedéclassé, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows who sat in thecafésand walked the boulevards and ogled the women.
He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his assistance with two hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable, but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer whose momentary support has gone to pieces.
Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but the Congo Government.
Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten orange-peel picked up in the market-place; a man who has worn out his friends—and his clothes. A man without hope.
One would think for the work in hand they wouldchoose the greatest blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence. Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that. It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.
Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new servitude.
This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he had to extract from the people round about.
Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by Secretary of State Van Estvelde.
The Bonus Proclamation.
According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his bonus would be.
Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, and so on.
The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid for it. And those were the terms on which he had to trade with the natives.
Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring in huge quantities of wax and copal for nothing, just as a tax owing to the State, a tax to the Government that was plundering and exploiting them.
Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell into this state of things as easily as a billiard ball falls into a pocket when skilfully directed.
The unfortunate man was absolutely a billiard ball in the hands of a professional player; the stroke of the cue had been given in Belgium, he rolled to his appointed post, fell into it, and was damned.
His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for money filled his soul. His success in working the niggers was so great that he was moved to a more difficult post at higher pay, and then right on to M’Bassa.
He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood he had been fond of animals, but Matabiche, the god-devil of the Congo, changed all that.
He saw nothing extortionate in his dealings, nothing wrong in them. When things were going well, then allwas well; but when the natives resisted his charges and taxes, defrauding him of his bonus and lowering him in the eyes of his superiors, then Meeus became terrible.
And he was absolute master.
Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great M’Bonga rubber forest that was now speechless as a Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea in torment; here in the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the endless misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had time to think.
There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in distance.
Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another night. He knew what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake from his noonday siesta and see the same great awful splash of sunlight striking the same old space of arid yard, where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a sick child for some impossible toy.
Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that save you fromennuiand devilment, and give you heart to continue the journey from hour to hour in this worldwhere we live. Your morning paper, the new book from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony and breaking the prospect before him into short views.
Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, without a woman to help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M’Bassa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became what he was.