CHAPTER XIINIGHT AT THE FORT
The night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp in the guest house mixed its smell with the tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky odour that came from the night outside. Every now and then a puff of hot wind blew through the open doorway, hot and damp as though a great panther were breathing into the room.
The nights in the forest were chill, but up here at Fort M’Bassa they were stewing in a heat wave.
Adams, with his coat off, pipe in mouth, was leaning back in a basket chair with his feet on a sugar box. Berselius, in another easy chair, was smoking a cigar, and Meeus, sitting with his elbows on the table, was talking of trade and its troubles. There is an evil spirit in rubber that gives a lot of trouble to those who deal with it. The getting of it is bad enough, but the tricks of the thing itself are worse. It is subject to all sorts of influences, climatic and other, and tends to deteriorate on its journey to the river and the coast of Europe.
It was marvellous to see the passion with which this man spoke of this inanimate thing.
“And then, ivory,” said Meeus. “When I came herefirst, hundred-pound tusks were common; when you reach that district, M. le Capitaine, you will see for yourself, no doubt, that the elephants have decreased. What comes in now, even, is not of the same quality. Scrivelloes (small tusks), defective tusks, for which one gets almost nothing as a bonus. And with the decrease of the elephant comes the increased subterfuge of the natives. ‘What are we to do?’ they say. ‘We cannot make elephants.’ This is the worst six months for ivory I have had, and then, on top of this—for troubles always come together—I have this bother I told you of with these people down there by the Silent Pools.”
A village ten miles to the east had, during the last few weeks, suspended rubber payments, gone arrear in taxes, the villagers running off into the forest and hiding from their hateful work.
“What caused the trouble?” asked Berselius.
“God knows,” replied Meeus. “It may blow over—it may have blown over by this, for I have had no word for two days; anyhow, to-morrow I will walk over and see. If it hasn’t blown over, I will give the people very clearly to understand that there will be trouble. I will stay there for a few days and see what persuasion can do. Would you like to come with me?”
“I don’t mind,” said Berselius. “A few days’ rest will do the porters no harm. What do you say, Dr. Adams?”
“I’m with you,” said Adams. “Anything better than to stay back here alone. How do you find it here, M. Meeus, when you are by yourself?”
“Oh, one lives,” replied theChef de Poste, looking at the cigarette between his fingers with a dreamy expression, and speaking as though he were addressing it. “One lives.”
That, thought Adams, must be the worst part about it. But he did not speak the words. He was a silent man, slow of speech but ready with sympathy, and as he lounged comfortably in his chair, smoking his pipe, his pity for Meeus was profound. The man had been for two years in this benighted solitude; two years without seeing a white face, except on the rare occasion of a District Commissioner’s visit.
He ought to have been mad by this, thought Adams; and he was a judge, for he had studied madness and its causes.
But Meeus was not mad in the least particular. He was coldly sane. Lust had saved his reason, the lust inspired by Matabiche.
Berselius’s cook brought in some coffee, and when they had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort.
The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking like a boat-shaped Japanese lantern, lay above the forest. The forest, spectral-pale and misty, lay beneath the moon; the heat was sweltering, and Adams could not keep the palms of his hands dry, rub them with his pocket handkerchief or on his knees as much as he would.
This is the heat that makes a man feel limp as a wet rag; the heat that liquefies morals and manners andtemper and nerve force, so that they run with the sweat from the pores. Drink will not “bite” in this heat, and a stiff glass of brandy affects the head almost as little as a glass of water.
“It is over there,” said Meeus, pointing to the southeast, “that we are going to-morrow to interview those beasts.”
Adams started at the intensity of loathing expressed by Meeus in that sentence. He had spoken almost angrily at rubber and tusks, but his languid, complaining voice had held nothing like this before.
Those beasts! He hated them, and he would not have been human had he not hated them. They were his jailers in very truth, their work was his deliverance.
The revolt of this village would make him short of rubber; probably it would bring a reprimand from his superiors.
A great bat flitted by so close that the smell of it poisoned the air, and from the forest, far away to the west, came the ripping saw-like cry of a leopard on the prowl. Many fierce things were hunting in the forest that night, but nothing fiercer than Meeus, as he stood in the moonlight, cigarette in mouth, staring across the misty forest in the direction of the Silent Pools.
PART THREE
PART THREE
CHAPTER XIIITHE POOLS OF SILENCE
Next morning Berselius ordered Félix to have the tents taken from the go-down and enough stores for two days. Tents and stores would be carried by the “soldiers” of the fort, who were to accompany them on the expedition.
Adams noticed with surprise the childlike interest Meeus took in the belongings of Berselius; the green rot-proof tents, the latest invention of Europe, seemed to appeal to him especially; the Roorkee chairs, the folding baths, the mosquito nets of the latest pattern, the cooking utensils of pure aluminum, filled his simple mind with astonishment. His mind during his sojourn at Fort M’Bassa had, in fact, grown childlike in this particular; nothing but little things appealed to him.
Whilst the expedition was getting ready Adams strolled about outside the fort walls. The black “soldiers,” who were to accompany them, were seated in the sun near their hovels, some of them cleaning their rifles, others smoking; but for their rifles and fez caps they might, with a view of Carthage in the distance, have been taken for the black legionaries of Hamilcar, ferocious mercenarieswithout country or God, fierce as the music of the leopard-skin drums that led them to battle.
Turning, he walked round the west wall till he came to the wall on the north, which was higher than the others. Here, against the north wall, was a sheltered cover like an immense sty, indescribably filthy and evil-smelling; about thirty rings were fastened to the wall, and from each ring depended a big rusty chain ending in a collar.
It was the Hostage House of Fort M’Bassa. It was empty now, but nearly always full, and it stood there like a horrible voiceless witness.
A great disgust filled the mind of Adams; disgust of the niggers who had evidently lately inhabited this place, and disgust of the Belgians who had herded them there. He felt there was something very wrong in the state of Congo. The Hostage House of Yandjali had started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had deepened it; and now this.
But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal with niggers are. He felt that all this was slavery under a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and “trade,” but it was not his affair.
All work is slavery more or less pleasant. The doctor is the slave of his patients, the shopkeeper of his clients. These niggers were, no doubt, slaves of the Belgians, but they were not bought and sold; they had to work, it is true, but all men have to work. Besides, Berselius had told him that the Belgians had stopped the liquor traffic and stopped the Arab raiders. There was good and bad on the side of the Belgians, and the niggerswere niggers. So reasoned Adams, and with reason enough, though from insufficient data.
At eight o’clock in the blazing sunshine, that even then was oppressive, the expedition started. The white men leading, Félix coming immediately behind, and eleven of the soldiers, bearing the tents and stores for two days, following after.
They plunged into the forest, taking a dim track, which was the rubber track from the village of the Silent Pools and from half a dozen other villages to the west. The ground here was different from the ground they had traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of morass and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close and moist as the air of a steam-bath.
The forest of M’Bonga has great tracts of this boggy, pestiferous land, dreadful sloughs of despond caverned with foliage, and by some curse the rubber vines entrench themselves with these. The naked rubber collectors, shivering over their fires, are attacked by the rheumatism and dysentery and fever that lie in these swamps; diseases almost merciful, for the aches and pains they cause draw the mind away from the wild beasts and devils and phantoms that haunt the imagination of the rubber slaves.
It took them three hours to do the ten miles, and then at last the forest cleared away and fairyland appeared.
Here in the very depths of the hopeless jungle, as if laid out and forgotten by some ancient god, lie the SilentPools of Matabayo and the park-like lands that hold them. Like a beautiful song in some tragic and gloomy opera, a regret of the God who created the hopeless forest, sheltered by the great n’sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargrass ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds.
All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic picture; the rocketing palms bursting into sprays of emerald green, the n’sambyas with their trumpet-like yellow blossoms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in the water’s glass, all and each lent their motionless beauty to the completion of the perfect picture.
In the old days, long ago, before the land was exploited and the forest turned into a hunting ground for rubber, the lovely head of the oryx would push aside the long green blades of the speargrass; then, bending her lips to the lips of the oryx gazing up at her from the water, she would drink, shattering the reflection into a thousand ripples. The water-buck came here in herds from the elephant country away south, beyond the hour-glass-like constriction which divided the great forest, and the tiny dik-dik, smallest of all antelopes, came also to take its sip. But all that is past. The rifle and the trap, at the instigation of the devouring Government that eats rubber and antelope, ivory and palm-oil, cassava and copal, has thinned out the herds and driven them away. The “soldier” must be fed. Even the humble bush pig of the forest knows that fact.
It was four years since Berselius had hunted in thiscountry, and even in that short time he found enormous change. But he could not grumble. He was a shareholder in the company, and in twenty industries depending on it.
Close up to the forest, where the m’bina trees showed their balls of scarlet blossom, lay the village they had come to reason with. There were twenty-five or more low huts of wattle and mud, roofed with leaves and grass. No one was visible but an old woman, naked, all but for a slight covering about the loins. She was on all fours, grinding something between two stones, and as she sighted the party she looked backward over her shoulder at them like a frightened cat.
She cried out in a chattering voice, and from the huts six others, naked as herself, came, stared at the whites, and then, as if driven by the same impulse, and just like rabbits, darted into the forest.
But Meeus had counted on this, and had detached seven of his men to crawl round and post themselves at the back of the huts amidst the trees.
A great hullaballoo broke out, and almost immediately the soldiers appeared, driving the seven villagers before them with their rifle-butts.
They were not hurting them, just pushing them along, for this was, up to the present, not a punitive expedition but a fatherly visitation to point out the evils of laziness and insubordination, and to get, if possible, these poor wretches to communicate with the disaffected ones and make them return to their work.
Adams nearly laughed outright at the faces of thevillagers; black countenances drawn into all the contortions of fright, but the contortions of their bodies were more laughable still, as they came forward like naughty children, driven by the soldiers, putting their hands out behind to evade the prods of the gun-butts.
Berselius had ordered the tents to be raised on the sunlit grass, for the edge of the forest, though shady, was infested by clouds of tiny black midges—midges whose bite was as bad, almost, as the bite of a mosquito.
Meeus spoke to the people in their own tongue, telling them not to be afraid, and when the tents were erected he and Berselius and Adams, sitting in the shelter of the biggest tent, faced the seven villagers, all drawn up in a row and backed by the eleven soldiers in their red fez caps.
The villagers, backed by the soldiers and fronted by Meeus, formed a picture which was the whole Congo administration in a nutshell. In a sentence, underscored by the line of blood-red fezzes.
These seven undersized, downtrodden, hideously frightened creatures, with eyeballs rolling and the marks of old chain scars on their necks, were the representatives of all the humble and meek tribes of the Congo, the people who for thousands of years had lived a lowly life, humble as the coneys of Scripture; people who had cultivated the art of agriculture and had carried civilization as far as their weak hands would carry it in that benighted land. Literally the salt of that dark earth. Very poor salt, it is true, but the best they could make of themselves.
These eleven red-tipped devils, gun-butting the othersto make them stand erect and keep in line, were the representatives of the warlike tribes who for thousands of years had preyed on each other and made the land a hell. Cannibals most of them, ferocious all of them, heartless to a man.
Meeus was the white man who, urged by the black lust of money, had armed and drilled and brought under good pay all the warlike tribes of the Congo State and set them as task-masters over the humble tribes.
By extension, Berselius and Adams were the nations of Europe looking on, one fully knowing, the other not quite comprehending the tragedy enacted before their eyes.
I am not fond of parallels, but as these people have ranged themselves thus before my eyes, I cannot help pointing out the full meaning of the picture. A picture which is photographically true.
There was a little pot-bellied boy amongst the villagers, the old woman of the grindstone was holding him by the hand; he, of all the crowd, did not look in the least frightened. His eyeballs rolled, but they rolled in wonder.
The tent seemed to take his fancy immensely; then the big Adams struck his taste, and he examined him from tip to toe.
Adams, greatly taken with the blackamoor, puffed out his cheeks, closed one eye, and instantly, as if at the blow of a hatchet, the black face split, disclosing two white rows of teeth, and then hid itself, rubbing a snub nose against the old woman’s thigh.
But a rolling white eyeball reappeared in a moment,only to vanish again as Adams, this time, sucked in his cheeks and worked his nose, making, under his sun hat, a picture to delight and terrify the heart of any child.
All this was quite unobserved by the rest, and all this time Meeus gravely and slowly was talking to the villagers in a quiet voice. They were to send one of their number into the forest to find the defaulters and urge them to return. Then all would be well. That was the gist of his discourse; and the wavering line of niggers rolled their eyes and answered, “We hear, we hear,” all together and like one person speaking, and they were nearly tumbling down with fright, for they knew that all would not be well, and that what the awful white man with the pale, grave face said to them was lies, lies, lies—all lies.
Besides the old woman and the child there were two young girls, an old man, a boy of fifteen or so, with only one foot, and a pregnant woman very near her time.
Adams had almost forgotten the nigger child when a white eyeball gazing at him from between the old woman’s legs recalled its existence.
He thought he had never seen a jollier animal of the human tribe than that. The creature was so absolutely human and full of fun that it was difficult to believe it the progeny of these downtrodden, frightened looking folk. And the strange thing was, it had all the tricks of an English or American child.
The hiding and peeping business, the ready laugh followed by bashfulness and self-effacement, the old unalterable impudence, which is not least amidst theprimamobiliaof the childish mind. In another moment, he felt, the thing would forget its respect and return his grimaces, so he ignored it and fixed his attention on Meeus and the trembling wretches he was addressing.
When the lecture was over they were dismissed, and the boy with the amputated foot was sent off to the forest to find the delinquents and bring them back. Till sunrise on the following day was the term given him.
If the others did not begin to return by that time there would be trouble.
CHAPTER XIVBEHIND THE MASK
The Silent Pools and the woods around were the haunts of innumerable birds. Rose-coloured flamingoes and gorgeous ducks, birds arrayed in all the jewellery of the tropics, birds not much bigger than dragon-flies, and birds that looked like flying beetles.
When they had dined, Adams, leaving the others to smoke and take their siesta, went off by the water’s edge on a tour of the pools. They were three in number; sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the forest protecting these windless sheets of water; perhaps it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred the imagination. Who knows? The spirit of the scene was there. The spirit of deep and unalterable peace. The peace of shadowy lagoons, the peace of the cedar groves where the sheltering trees shaded the loveliness of Merope, the peace of the heart which passes all understanding and which men have named the Peace of God.
It was the first time since leaving Yandjali that Adamshad found himself alone and out of sight of his companions. He breathed deeply, as if breathing in the air of freedom, and as he strode along, tramping through the long grass, his mind, whilst losing no detail of the scene around him, was travelling far away, even to Paris, and beyond.
Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, bounding and beautiful in its freedom and grace, a small antelope passed with the swiftness of an arrow; after it, almost touching it, came another form, yellow and fierce and flashing through the grass and vanishing, like the antelope, amidst the high grasses on the edge of the pool.
The antelope had rushed to the water for protection, and the leopard had followed, carried forward by its impetus and ferocity, for Adams could hear its splash following the splash of the quarry; then a roar split the silence, echoed from the trees, and sent innumerable birds fluttering and crying from the edge of the forest and the edge of the pool.
Adams burst through the long speargrass to see what was happening, and, standing on the boggy margin, holding the grasses aside, gazed.
The antelope had vanished as if it had never been, and a few yards from the shore, in the midst of a lather of water that seemed beaten up with a great swizzle-stick, the leopard’s head, mouth open, roaring, horrified his eyes for a moment and then was jerked under the surface.
The water closed, eddied, and became still, and Silence resumed her sway over the Silent Pools.
Something beneath the water had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged theleopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the wind of its passage.
Another foot and the crocodile’s tail would have swept him to the fate of the antelope and leopard.
The place was alive with ferocity and horror, and it seemed to Adams that the Silent Pools had suddenly slipped the mask of silence and beauty and shown to him the face of hideous death.
He wiped the sweat from his brow. He was unarmed, and it seemed that a man, to walk in safety through this Garden of Eden, ought to be armed to the teeth. He turned back to the camp, walking slowly and seeing nothing of the beauties around him, nothing but the picture of the leopard’s face, the paws frantically beating the water, and a more horrible picture still, the water resuming its calmness and its peace.
When he reached the camp, he found Berselius and Meeus absent. After their siesta they had gone for a stroll by the water’s edge in the opposite direction to that which he had taken. The soldiers were on duty, keeping a watchful eye on the villagers; all were seated, the villagers in front of their huts and the soldiers in the shade, with their rifles handy; all, that is to say, except the nigger child, who was trotting about here and there, and who seemed quite destitute of fear or concern.
When this creature saw the gigantic Adams who looked even more gigantic in his white drill clothes, it laughed and ran away, with hands outspread and head half slewed round. Then it hid behind a tree. There isnothing more charming than the flight of a child when it wishes to be pursued. It is the instinct of women and children to run away, so as to lead you on, and it is the instinct of a rightly constituted man to follow. Adams came toward the tree, and the villagers seated before their huts and the soldiers seated in the shade all turned their heads like automata to watch.
“Hi there, you ink-bottle!” cried Adams. “Hullo there, you black dogaroo! Out you come, Uncle Remus!” Then he whistled.
He stood still, knowing that to approach closer would drive the dogaroo to flight or to tree climbing.
There was nothing visible but two small black hands clutching the tree bole; then the gollywog face, absolutely split in two with a grin, appeared and vanished.
Adams sat down.
The old, old village woman who was, in fact, the child’s grandmother, had been looking on nervously, but when the big man sat down she knew he was only playing with the child, and she called out something in the native, evidently meant to reassure it. But she might have saved her breath, for the black bundle behind the tree suddenly left cover and stood with hands folded, looking at the seated man.
He drew his watch from his pocket and held it up. It approached. He whistled, and it approached nearer. Two yards away it stopped dead.
“Tick-tick,” said Adams, holding up the watch.
“Papeete N’quong,” replied the other, or words to that effect.
It spoke in a hoarse, crowing voice not at all unpleasant. If you listen to English children playing in the street you will often hear this croaking sort of voice, like the voice of a young rook.
Papeete struck Adams as a good name for the animal and, calling him by it, he held out the watch as a bait.
The lured one approached closer, held out a black claw, and next moment was seized by the foot.
It rolled on the ground like a dog, laughing and kicking, and Adams tickled it; and the grim soldiers laughed, showing their sharp white teeth, and the old grandmother beat her hands together, palm to palm, as if pleased, and the other villagers looked on without the ghost of an expression on their black faces.
Then he jumped it on its feet and sent it back to its people with a slap on its behind, and returned to his tent to smoke till Berselius and Meeus returned.
But he had worked his own undoing, for, till they broke camp, Papeete haunted him like a buzz-fly, peeping at him, sometimes from under the tent, trotting after him like a dog, watching him from a distance, till he began to think of “haunts” and “sendings” and spooks.
When Berselius and his companion returned, the three men sat and smoked till supper time.
At dark the villagers were driven into their huts and at the door of each hut lay a sentry.
A big fire was lit, and by its light two more sentries kept watch over the others and their prisoners. Then the moon rose, spreading silver over the silence of the pools and the limitless foliage of the forest.
CHAPTER XVTHE PUNISHMENT
The sun rose, bringing with it a breeze. Above the stir and bustle of the birds you could hear the gentle wind in the tree-tops like the sound of a sea on a low-tide beach.
The camp was still in gloom, but the whole arc of sky above the pools was thrilled and filled with living light. Sapphire blue, dazzling and pale, but deep with infinite distance, it had an intrinsic brilliancy as though filled with sunbeams brayed to dust.
The palm tops had caught the morning splendour and then, rapidly, as though the armies of light were moving to imperious trumpet-calls, charging with golden spears, legion on legion, a hurricane of brightness, Day broke upon the pools.
We call it Day, but what is it, this splendour that comes from nowhere, and vanishes to nowhere, that strikes our lives rhythmically like the golden wing of a vast and flying bird, bearing us along with it in the wind of its flight?
The rotation of the earth? But in the desert, on the sea, in the spaces of the forest you will see in the dawn a vision divorced from time, a recurring glance of a beauty that is eternal, a ray as if from the bright world towardwhich the great bird Time is flying, caught and reflected to our eyes by every lift of the wing.
The dawn had not brought the truants back from the forest.
This point Meeus carefully verified. Even the boy who had been sent to communicate with them had not returned.
“No news?” said Berselius, as he stepped from his tent-door and glanced around him.
“None,” replied Meeus.
Adams now appeared, and the servants who had been preparing breakfast laid it on the grass. The smell of coffee filled the air; nothing could be more pleasant than this out-of-doors breakfast in the bright and lovely morning, the air fresh with the breeze and the voices of birds.
The villagers were all seated in a group, huddled together at the extreme left of the row of huts. They were no longer free, but tied together ankle to ankle by strips ofn’goji. Only Papeete was at liberty, but he kept at a distance. He was seated near the old woman, and he was exploring the interior of an empty tomato tin flung away by the cook.
“I will give them two hours more,” said Meeus, as he sipped his coffee.
“And then?” said Adams.
Meeus was about to reply when he caught a glance from Berselius.
“Then,” he said, “I will knock those mud houses of theirs to pieces. They require a lesson.”
“Poor devils!” said Adams.
Meeus during the meal did not display a trace of irritation. From his appearance one might have judged that the niggers had returned to their work, and that everything was going well. At times he appeared absent-minded, and at times he wore a gloomy but triumphant look, as though some business which had unpleasant memories attached to it had at last been settled to his satisfaction.
After breakfast he drew Berselius aside, and the two men walked away in the direction of the pools, leaving Adams to smoke his pipe in the shade of the tent.
They came back in about half an hour, and Berselius, after speaking a few words to Félix, turned to Adams.
“I must ask you to return to Fort M’Bassa and get everything in readiness for our departure. Félix will accompany you. I will follow in a couple of hours with M. Meeus. I am afraid we will have to pull these people’s houses down. It’s a painful duty, but it has to be performed. You will save yourself the sight of it.”
“Thanks,” said Adams. Not for a good deal of money would he have remained to see those wretched hovels knocked to pieces. He could perceive plainly enough that the thing had to be done. Conciliation had been tried, and it was of no avail. He was quite on the side of Meeus; indeed, he had admired the self-restraint of this very much triedChef de Poste. Not a hard word, not a blow, scarcely a threat had been used. The people had been spoken to in a fatherly manner, a messenger had been sent to the truants, and the messenger had joinedthem. At all events he had not returned. Then, certainly, pull their houses down. But he did not wish to see the sight. He had nothing to do with the affair, so filling and lighting another pipe, and leaving all his belongings to be brought on by Berselius, he turned with Félix and, saying good-bye to his companions, started.
They had nearly reached the edge of the forest when shouts from behind caused Adams to turn his head.
The soldiers were shouting to Papeete to come back.
The thing had trotted after Adams like a black dog. It was within a few yards of him.
“Go back,” shouted Adams.
“Tick-tick,” replied Papeete. It was the only English the creature knew.
It stood frying in the sun, grinning and glistening, till Adams, with an assumption of ferocity, made for it, then back it went, and Adams, laughing, plunged under the veil of leaves.
Berselius, seated at his tent door, looked at his watch. Meeus, seated beside Berselius, was smoking cigarettes.
“Give him an hour,” said Berselius. “He will be far away enough by that. Besides, the wind is blowing from there.”
“True,” said Meeus. “An hour.” And he continued to smoke. But his hand was shaking, and he was biting the cigarette, and his lips were dry so that he had to be continually licking them.
Berselius was quite calm, but his face was pale, and he seemed contemplating something at a distance.
When half an hour had passed, Meeus rose suddenly tohis feet and began to walk about, up and down, in front of the tent, up and down, up and down, as a man walks when he is in distress of mind.
The black soldiers also seemed uneasy, and the villagers huddled closer together like sheep. Papeete alone seemed undisturbed. He was playing now with the old tomato tin, out of which he had scraped and licked every vestige of the contents.
Suddenly Meeus began crying out to the soldiers in a hard, sharp voice like the yelping of a dog.
The time was up, and the soldiers knew. They ranged up, chattering and laughing, and all at once, as if produced from nowhere, two rhinoceros hide whips appeared in the hands of two of the tallest of the blacks. Rhinoceros hide is more than an inch thick; it is clear and almost translucent when properly prepared. In the form of a whip it is less an instrument of punishment than a weapon. These whips were not the smoothly prepared whips used for light punishment; they had angles that cut like sword edges. One wonders what those sentimental people would say—those sentimental people who cry out if a burly ruffian is ordered twenty strokes with the cat—could they see a hundredchicotteadministered with a whip that is flexible as india-rubber, hard as steel.
Two soldiers at the yelping orders of Meeus cut the old woman apart from her fellows and flung her on the ground.
The two soldiers armed with whips came to her, and she did not speak a word, nor cry out, but lay grinning at the sun.
Papeete, seeing his old grandmother treated like this,dropped his tomato tin and screamed, till a soldier put a foot on his chest and held him down.
“Two hundredchicotte,” cried Meeus, and like the echo of his words came the first dull, coughing blow.
The villagers shrieked and cried altogether at each blow, but the victim, after the shriek which followed the first blow, was dumb.
Free as a top which is being whipped by a boy, she gyrated, making frantic efforts to escape, and like boys whipping a top, the two soldiers with their whips pursued her, blow following blow.
A semicircle of blood on the ground marked her gyrations. Once she almost gained her feet, but a blow in the face sent her down again. She put her hands to her poor face, and the rhinoceros whips caught her on the hands, breaking them. She flung herself on her back and they beat her on the stomach, cutting through the walls of the abdomen till the intestines protruded. She flung herself on her face and they cut into her back with the whips till her ribs were bare and the fat bulged through the long slashes in the skin.
Verily it was a beating to the bitter end, and Meeus, pale, dripping with sweat, his eyes dilated to a rim, ran about laughing, shouting—
“Two hundred chicotte. Two hundred chicotte.”
He cried the words like a parrot, not knowing what he said.
And Berselius?
Berselius, also dripping with sweat, his eyes also dilatedto a rim, tottering like a drunken man, gazed, drinking, drinking the sight in.
Down, away down in the heart of man there is a trapdoor. Beyond the instincts of murder and assassination, beyond the instincts that make a Count Cajus or a Marquis de Sade, it lies, and it leads directly into the last and nethermost depths of hell, where sits in eternal damnation Eccelin de Romano.
Cruelty for cruelty’s sake: the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its most odious form: that is the passion which hides demon-like beneath this door, and that was the passion that held Berselius now in its grip.
He had drunk of all things, this man, but never of such a potent draught as this demon held now to his lips—and not for the first time. The draught would have been nothing but for the bitterness of it, the horror of it, the mad delight of knowing the fiendishness of it, and drinking, drinking, drinking, till reason, self-respect, and soul, were overthrown.
The thing that had been a black woman and, now, seemed like nothing earthly except a bundle of red rags, gave up the miserable soul it contained and, stiffening in the clutches of tetanus, became a hoop.
What happened then to the remaining villagers could be heard echoing for miles through the forest in the shrieks and wails of the tortured ones.
One cannot write of unnamable things, unprintable deeds. The screams lasted till noon.
At one o’clock the punitive expedition had departed,leaving the Silent Pools to their silence. The houses of the village had been destroyed and trampled out. The sward lay covered with shapeless remains, and scarcely had the last of the expedition departed, staggering and half drunk with the delirium of their deeds, than from the blue above, like a stone, dropped a vulture.
A vulture drops like a stone, with wings closed till it reaches within a few yards of the ground; then it spreads its wings and, with wide-opened talons, lights on its prey.
Then, a marabout with fore-slanting legs and domed-out wings, came sailing silently down to the feast, and another vulture, and yet another.
CHAPTER XVIDUE SOUTH
When Berselius and Meeus returned to Fort M’Bassa Adams, who met them, came to the conclusion that Berselius had been drinking. The man’s face looked stiff and bloated, just as a man’s face looks after a terrible debauch. Meeus looked cold and hard and old, but his eyes were bright and he was seemingly quite himself.
“To-morrow I shall start,” said Berselius. “Not to-day. I am tired and wish to sleep.” He went off to the room where his bed was, and cast himself on it and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The innocent may wonder how such a man would dare to sleep—dare to enter that dark country so close to the frontier of death. But what should the innocent know of a Berselius, who was yet a living man and walked the earth but a few years ago, and whose prototype is alive to-day. Alive and powerful and lustful, great in mind, body, and estate.
Before sunrise next morning the expedition was marshalled in the courtyard for the start.
A great fire burned in the space just before the house,and by its light the stores and tents were taken from the go-down. The red light of the fire lit up the black glistening skins of the porters as they loaded themselves with the chop boxes and tents and guns; lit up the red fez caps of the onlooking “soldiers,” their glittering white teeth, their white eyeballs, and the barrels of their rifles.
Beyond and below the fort the forest stretched in the living starlight like an infinite white sea. The tree-tops were roofed with a faint mist, no breath of wind disturbed it, and in contrast to the deathly stillness of all that dead-white world the sky, filled with leaping stars, seemed alive and vocal.
It was chill up here just before dawn. Hence the fire. Food had been served out to the porters, and they ate it whilst getting things ready and loading up. Berselius and his companions were breakfasting in the guest house and the light of the paraffin lamp lay on the veranda yellow as topaz in contrast with the red light of the fire in the yard.
Everything was ready for the start. They were waiting now for the sun.
Then, away to the east, as though a vague azure wind had blown up under the canopy of darkness, the sky, right down to the roof of the forest, became translucent and filled with distance.
A reef of cloud like a vermilion pencil-line materialized itself, became a rose-red feather tipped with dazzling gold, and dissolved as if washed away by the rising sea of light.
A great bustle spread through the courtyard. The remaining stores were loaded up, and under the direction of Félix, the porters formed in a long line, their loads on their heads.
As the expedition left the compound it was already day. The edge of the sun had leaped over the edge of the forest, the world was filled with light, and the sky was a sparkling blue.
What a scene that was! The limitless sea of snow-white mist rippled over by the sea of light, the mist billowed and spiralled by the dawn wind, great palm tops bursting through the haze, glittering effulgent with dew, birds breaking to the sky in coloured flocks, snow, and light, and the green of tremendous vegetation, and over all, new-built and beautiful, the blue, tranquil dome of sky.
It was song materialized in colour and form, the song of the primeval forests breaking from the mists of chaos, tremendous, triumphant, joyous, finding day at last, and greeting him with the glory of the palms, with the rustle of the n’sambyas tossing their golden bugles to the light, the drip and sigh of the euphorbia trees, the broad-leaved plantains and the thousand others whose forms hold the gloom of the forest in the mesh of their leaves.
“I have awakened, O God! I have awakened. Behold me, O Lord! I am Thine!”
Thus to the splendour of the sun and led by the trumpet of the wind sang the forest. A hundred million trees lent their voices to the song. A hundred million trees—acacia and palm, m’bina and cottonwood, thorn andmimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist-strewn and sun-stricken, all bending under the deep sweet billows of the wind.
At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed any sign of the past day. They had “slept it off.” As for Adams, he knew nothing, except that the villagers had been punished and their houses destroyed.
The way lay due south. They were now treading that isthmus of woods which connects the two great forests which, united thus, make the forest of M’Bonga. The trees in this vast connecting wood are different from the trees in the main forests. You find here enormous acacias, monkey-bread trees, raphia palms and baobabs; less gloom, and fewer creeping and hanging plants.
Berselius, as a rule, brought with him a taxidermist, but this expedition was purely for sport. The tusks of whatever elephants were slain would be brought back, but no skins; unless, indeed, they were fortunate enough to find some rare or unknown species.