CHAPTER XXVITHE FADING MIST
They camped two hours before sundown. One of the few mercies of this country is the number of dead trees and the bushes from which one can always scrape the materials for a fire.
Adams, with his hunting knife and a small hatchet which was all steel and so had been uninjured in the catastrophe, cut wood enough for the fire. They had nothing to cook with, but fortunately the food they had with them did not require cooking.
The tent was practicable, for the pole, so well had it been spliced, was as good as new. They set it up, and having eaten their supper, crept under it, leaving the porters to keep watch or not as they chose.
Berselius, who had marched so well all day, had broken down at the finish. He seemed half dead with weariness, and scarcely spoke a word, eating mechanically and falling to sleep immediately on lying down.
But he was happy. Happy as the man who suddenly finds that he can outwalk the paralysis threatening him, or the man who finds the fog of blindness lifting before him, showing him again bit by bit the world he had deemed forever lost. Whilst this man sleeps in the tentbeside his companion and the waning moon breaks up over the horizon and mixes her light with the red flicker of the fire, a word about that past of which he was in search may not be out of place.
Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of Swedish descent, his mother of French.
Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky man. In other words, he had that keenness of intellect which enables the possessor to seize opportunities and to foresee events.
This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin’s Palace and to the Temple of Power. To know what will appreciate in value and what will depreciate, that is the art of success in life, and that was the art which made Armand Berselius a millionaire.
Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of money. His mother died when he was quite young. He had neither brothers nor sisters; his father, a chilly-hearted sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he was some other man’s son.
The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of the man who is always fearful of being swindled. Who cannot trust, cannot be trusted.
Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the boy, with great power for love in his heart, conceived a hatred for the man who misused him that was hellish in intensity.
But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will and restraint so remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He bound his hate withiron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed not a sign of pain or passion; when the old man committed that last outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it devoured it and grew.
The spring was poisoned at its source.
That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.
And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a spacious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and fed by an unfailing flood of energy.
The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation of his son, kept him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.
The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the devil than any other young man of his time. He passed through the college of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and when he had obtained his captaincy.
He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.
He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the Continent of Europe.Politicians and financiers under the guise of Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of intellect, who work their political and financial works quite unobtrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.
Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with periodic returns to the wilderness.
With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern; that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.
To keep up a large force of European police to make the blacks work on European terms, was out of the question. The expense would run away with half the profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all, other nations would say, “What are you doing with that huge army of men?” The word “slavery” had to be eliminated from the proceedings, else the conscience of Europe would be touched. He foresaw this, and he was lost in admiration at the native police idea. The stroke of genius that collected all the Félixes of the Congo basin into an army of darkness, and collected all the weak and defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his own heart.
Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became a member. He was not invited to the bloody banquet—he invited himself.
He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed; later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold’s idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.
He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole infernal machinery then and there. America had not yet, hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill, which she handed to Leopold on the 22d of April, 1884. Germany had not been roped in. England and France were still aloof, and Berselius, arriving at the psychological moment, did not mince matters.
The result was two million pounds to his credit during the next ten years.
So much for Berselius and his past.
An hour after dawn next day they started. The morning was windless, warm, and silent, and the sun shining broad on the land cast their shadows before them as they went, the porters with their loads piled on their heads, Adams carrying the tent-pole and tent, Berselius leading.
He had recovered from his weakness of the night before. He had almost recovered his strength, and he felt that newness of being which the convalescent feels—that feeling of new birth into the old world which pays one, almost, for the pains of the past sickness.
Never since his boyhood had Berselius felt that keen pleasure in the sun and the blue sky and the grass underhis feet; but it called up no memories of boyhood, for the mist was still there, hiding boyhood and manhood andeverythingup to the skyline.
But the mist did not frighten him now. He had found a means of dispelling it; the photographic plates were all there unbroken, waiting only to be collected and put together, and he felt instinctively that after a time, when he had collected a certain number, the brain would gain strength, and all at once the mist would vanish for ever, and he would be himself again.
Three hours after the start they passed a broken-down tree.
Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had passed on the hunt, shortly after turning from their path to follow the herd of elephants.
Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon they would come to the crucial point—the spot where they had turned at right angles to follow the elephants.
Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he get confused and go on in a straight line?
The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.
He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all the country to the north.
“We came from there,” he said, indicating the north. “We struck the elephant spoor just here, and turned due west.”
“How on earth do you know?” asked Adams. “I can’t see any indication, and for the life of me I couldn’ttell where we turned or whether we came from there,” indicating the north, “or there,” pointing to the south. “How do you know?”
“How do I know?” replied Berselius. “Why, this place and everything we reach and pass is as vivid to me as if I had passed it only two minutes ago.It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me.It is that which I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born—every memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were gods, they would see as I see.”
A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it triumphantly.
Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come across.
This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for the past comes to a man from a hundred close points—a thousand familiar things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have been as lost as Adams.
They wheeled to the north, following in their leader’s footsteps.
That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool near which Berselius had shot the rhinos.
Adams, to make sure, walked away to where the great bull had fought the cow before being laid low by the rifle of the hunter.
The bones were there, picked clean and bleached, exemplifying the eternal hunger of the desert, which is one of the most horrible facts in life. These two great brutes had been left nearly whole a few days ago; tons of flesh had vanished like snow in sunshine, mist in morning.
But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was not thinking of that; the marvel of their return filled his mind as he looked from the skeletons to where, against the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from the camp fire which the porters had lighted.
Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible, a bird was sailing along, sliding on the wind without a motion of the wings. It passed from sight and left the sky stainless, and the land lay around silent with the tremendous silence of evening, and lifeless as the bones bleaching at his feet.
CHAPTER XXVIII AM THE FOREST
The day after the next, two hours before noon, they passed an object which Adams remembered well.
It was the big tree which Berselius had pointed out to him as having been tusked by an elephant; and an hour after they had started from the mid-day rest, the horizon to the north changed and grew dark.
It was the forest.
The sky immediately above the dark line, from contrast, was extraordinarily bright and pale, and, as they marched, the line lifted and the trees grew.
“Look!” said Berselius.
“I see,” replied Adams.
A question was troubling his mind. Would Berselius be able to guide them amidst the trees? Here in the open he had a hundred tiny indications on either side of him, but amidst the trees how could he find his way? Was it possible that memory could lead him through that labyrinth once it grew dense?
It will be remembered that it was a two days’ march from Fort M’Bassa through the isthmus of woods to the elephant country. At the edge of the forest the treeswere very thinly set, but for the rest, and a day’s march from the fort, it was jungle.
Would Berselius be able to penetrate that jungle? Time would tell. Berselius knew nothing about it; he only knew what lay before his sight.
Toward evening the trees came out to meet them, baobab and monkey-bread, set widely apart; and they camped by a pool and lit their fire, and slept as men sleep in the pure air of the woods and the desert.
Next morning they pursued their journey, Berselius still confident. At noon, however, he began to exhibit slight signs of agitation and anxiety. The trees were thickening around them; he still knew the way, but the view before him was getting shorter and shorter as the trees thickened; that is to say, the mist was coming closer and closer. He knew nothing of the dense jungle before them; he only knew that the clear road in front of him was shortening up rapidly and horribly, and that if it continued to do so it would inevitably vanish.
The joy that had filled his heart became transformed to the grief which the man condemned to blindness feels when he sees the bright world fading from his sight, slowly but surely as the expiring flame of a lamp.
He walked more rapidly, and the more rapidly he went the shorter did the road before him grow.
All at once the forest—which had been playing, up to this, with Berselius as a cat plays with a mouse—all at once the forest, like a great green Sphinx, put down its great green paw and spoke from its cavernous heart—
“I am the Forest.”
They had passed almost at a step into the labyrinths. Plantain leaves hit them insolently in the face, lianas hung across their path like green ropes placed to bar them out, weeds tangled the foot.
Berselius, like an animal that finds itself trapped, plunged madly forward. Adams following closely behind heard him catching back his breath with a sob. They plunged on for a few yards, and then Berselius stood still.
The forest was very silent, and seemed listening. The evening light and the shade of the leaves cast gloom around them. Adams could hear his own heart thumping and the breathing of the porters behind him. If Berselius had lost his way, then they were lost indeed.
After a moment Berselius spoke, as a man speaks whose every hope in life is shattered.
“The path is gone.”
Adams’s only reply was a deep intake of the breath.
“There is nothing before me. I am lost.”
“Shall we try back?” said Adams, speaking in that hard tone which comes when a man is commanding his voice.
“Back? Of what use? I cannot go back; I must go forward. But here there is nothing.”
The unhappy man’s voice was terrible to hear. He had marched so triumphantly all day, drawing nearer at each step to himself, to that self which memory had hidden from him and which memory was disclosing bit by bit. And now the march was interrupted as if by a wall set across his path.
But Adams was of a type of man to whom despondency may be known, but never despair.
They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but they were not far, now, from Fort M’Bassa. The immediate necessity was rest and food.
There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm glimmer. One could see the lianas and the trees, the broad leaves shining with dew, some bright, some sketched in dimly, and all bathed in gauze green light; and they could hear the drip and patter of dew on leaf and branch.
This is a mournful sound—the most mournful of all the sounds that fill the great forests of the Congo. It is so casual, so tearful. One might fancy it the sound of the forest weeping to itself in the silence of the night.
CHAPTER XXVIIIGOD SENDS A GUIDE
To be lost in the desert or in a land like the elephant country is bad, but to be lost in the dense parts of the tropical forest is far worse.
You are in a horrible labyrinth, a maze, not of intricate paths but of blinding curtains. I am speaking now of that arrogant jungle, moist and hot, where life is in full ferment, and where the rubber vine grows and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that your hand, held before your face at arm’s length, is just a shadow. The westward part of the forest of M’Bonga projects a spur of the pestiferous rubber-bearing land into the isthmus of healthy woods. It was just at the tip of this spur that Berselius and his party were entangled and lost.
The two porters were Yandjali men, they knew nothing of these woods, and were utterly useless as guides; they sat now amidst the leaves near the tent eating their food; dark shadows in the glow-worm light, the glistening black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched by the glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and branch, seemed like marine foliage bathed in the watery light of a sea-cave.
Adams had lit a pipe, and he sat beside Berselius at the opening of the tent, smoking. The glare of the match had shown him the face of Berselius for a moment. Berselius, since his first outcry on finding the path gone, had said little, and there was a patient and lost look on his face, sad but most curious to see. Most curious, for it said fully what a hundred little things had been hinting since their start from the scene of the catastrophe—that the old Berselius had vanished and a new Berselius had taken his place. Adams had at first put down the change in his companion to weakness, but the weakness had passed, the man’s great vitality had reasserted itself, and the change was still there.
This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; this person might have been a mild twin-brother of the redoubtable Captain of the Avenue Malakoff, of Matadi and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, mild, inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself burdened with the tremendous past of the man he once had been?
Nothing is more true than that the human mind fromaccident, from grief, or from that mysterious excitement, during which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger “gets religion” and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a devil incarnate.
Was Berselius under the influence of forced amendment of this sort?
Adams was not even considering the matter, he was lost in gloomy thoughts.
He was smoking slowly, holding his index and middle fingers over the pipe-bowl to prevent the tobacco burning too quickly, for he had only a couple of pipefuls left. He was thinking that to-morrow evening the pouch would be empty, when, from somewhere in the forest near by, there came a sound which brought him to his feet and the two porters up on hands and knees like listening dogs.
It was the sound of a human voice raised in a sort of chant, ghostly and mournful as the sound of the falling dew. As it came, rising and falling, monotonous and rhythmical, the very plain song of desolation, Adams felt his hair lift and his flesh crawl, till one of the porters, springing erect from his crouching position, sent his voice through the trees—
“Ahi ahee!”
The song ceased; and then, a moment later, faintand wavering, and like the voice of a seagull, came the reply—
“Ahi aheee!”
“Man,” said the porter, turning white eyeballs and glinting teeth over his shoulder at Adams.
He called again, and again came the reply.
“Quick,” said Adams, seizing the arm of Berselius, who had risen, “there’s a native here somewhere about; he may guide us out of this infernal place; follow me, and for God’s sake keep close.”
Holding Berselius by the arm, and motioning the other native to follow, he seized the porter by the shoulder and pushed him forward. The man knew what was required and obeyed, advancing, calling, and listening by turns, till, at last, catching the true direction of the sound he went rapidly, Berselius and Adams following close behind. Sometimes they were half up to the knees in boggy patches, fighting their way through leaves that struck them like great wet hands; sometimes the call in the distance seemed farther away, and they held their pace, they held their breath, they clung to each other, listening, till, now, by some trick of the trees, though they had not moved and though there was no wind, the cry came nearer.
“Ahi, ahee!”
Then, at last, a dim red glow shone through the foliage before them and bursting their way through the leaves they broke into an open space where, alone, by a small fire of dry branches and brushwood, sat a native, stark naked, except for a scrap of dingy loincloth, and lookinglike a black gnome, a faun of this horrible place, and the very concretion of its desolation and death.
He was sitting when they caught their first glimpse of him, with his chin supported on his hand, but the instant he saw the faces of the white men he rose as if to escape, then the porter called out something that reassured him, and he sat down again and shivered.
He was one of the rubber collectors. He had reached this spot the day before, and had built himself a shelter of leaves and branches. He would be here for ten days or a fortnight, and his food, chiefly cassava, lay in a little pile in the shelter, covered over with leaves.
The porter continued speaking to the collector, who, now regaining the use of his limbs, stood up before the white men, hands folded in front of him, and his eyes rolling from Berselius to Adams.
“M’Bassa,” said Adams, touching the porter, pointing to the collector, and then away into the forest in the direction he fancied Fort M’Bassa to be.
The porter understood. He said a few words to the collector, who nodded his head furiously and struck himself on the breast with his open hand.
Then the porter turned again to Adams.
“M’Bassa,” said he, nodding his head, pointing to the collector, and then away into the forest.
That was all, but it meant that they were saved.
Adams gave a great whoop that echoed away through the trees, startling bats and birds in the branches and losing itself without an echo in the depths of thegloom. Then he struck himself a blow on the chest with his fist.
“My God!” said he, “the tent!”
They had only travelled an eighth of a mile or so from the camping place, but they had wandered this way and that before the porter had found the true direction of the call, and the tent, provisions, and everything else were lost as utterly and irrevocably as though they had been dropped in mid-ocean.
To step aside from a thing—even for a hundred yards—in this terrible place was to lose it; even the rubber collectors, from whom the forest holds few secrets have, in these thick places, to blaze a trail by breaking branches, tying lianas and marking tree trunks.
“True,” said Berselius in a weary voice, “we have lost even that.”
“No matter,” said Adams, “we have got a guide. Cheer up, this man will take us to Fort M’Bassa and there you will find the road again.”
“Are you sure?” said Berselius, a touch of hope in his voice.
“Sure? Certain. You’ve forgotten Fort M’Bassa. Well, when you see it, you will remember it, and it will lead you right away home. Cheer up, cheer up; we’ve got a fire and a bit of shelter for you to sleep under, and we’ll start bright and early in the morning, and this black imp of Satan will lead you straight back to your road and your memory—hey! Uncle Joe!”
He patted the collector on the naked shoulder anda faint grin appeared on that individual’s forlorn countenance; never had he come across a white man like this before. Then, bustling about, Adams piled up the fire with more sticks, got Berselius under the shelter of the collector’s wretched hut, sat himself down close to the fire, produced his pipe, and proceeded, in one glorious debauch, to finish the last of his tobacco.
This rubber collector, the last and the humblest creature on earth, had given them fire and shelter; they were also to be beholden to him for food. His wretched cassava cakes and his calabash of water gave them their breakfast next morning, and then they started, the collector leading, walking before them through the dense growth of the trees as assuredly as a man following a well-known road. It was a terrible thing for him to leave his post, but the white men were from M’Bassa and wished to return to M’Bassa, and M’Bassa was the head centre of his work and the terrible Mecca of his fears. White men from there and going to there must be obeyed.
This was the last phase of the great hunt. Berselius had been slowly stripped by the wilderness of everything now but the clothes he stood up in, his companion and two porters. Guns, equipment, tents, stores, the Zappo Zap, and the army of men under that ferocious lieutenant, had all “gone dam.” He was mud to the knees, his clothing was torn, he was mud to the elbows from having tripped last night and fallen in a quagmire, his face was white and drawn and grimy as the face of a London cabrunner, his hair was grayer and dull, but his eyes were bright and he was happy. At M’Bassa he wouldbe put upon the road again—the only road to the thing he craved for as burning Dives craved for water—himself.
But it was ordained that he should find that questionably desirous person before reaching M’Bassa.
They had been on the march for an hour when Adams, fussing like a person who is making his first journey by rail, stopped the guide to make sure he was leading them right.
“M’Bassa?” said Adams.
“M’Bassa,” replied the other, nodding his head. Then with outspread hand he pointed before them and made a semicircular sweep to indicate that he was leading them for some reason by a circuitous route.
He was making, in fact, for open ground that would bring them in the direction of the fort by a longer but much easier road than a direct line through the jungle. He was making also for water, for his scant supply had been exhausted by his guests, and he knew the road he was taking would lead him to broad pools of water. Adams nodded his head to imply that he understood, and the man led on.
CHAPTER XXIXTHE VISION OF THE POOLS
Somewhere about noon they halted for a rest and some food. It was less boggy here, and the sunlight showed stronger through the dense roof of foliage. The cassava cakes were tainted with must, and they had no water, but the increasing light made them forget everything but the freedom that was opening before them.
Adams pointed to the empty calabash which their guide carried, and the collector nodded and pointed before them, as if to imply that soon they would come to water and that all would be well.
Now, as they resumed their way, the trees altered and drew farther apart, the ground was solid under foot, and through the foliage of the euphorbia and raphia palm came stray glimmers of sunshine, bits of blue sky, birds, voices, and the whisper of a breeze.
“This is better,” said Berselius.
Adams flung up his head and expanded his nostrils.
“Better, my God!” said he; “this is heaven!”
It was heaven, indeed, after that hell of gloom; that bog roofed in with leaves, the very smell of which clings to one for ever like the memory of a fever dream.
All at once patches of sunlight appeared in front as well as above. They quickened their pace, the trees drew apart, and, suddenly, with theatrical effect, a park-like sward of land lay before them leading to a sheet of blue water reflecting tall feather-palms and waving speargrass, all domed over with blue, and burning in the bright, bright sunshine.
“The Silent Pools!” cried Adams. “The very place where I saw the leopard chasing the antelope! Great Scott!—Hi! hi! hi! you there!—where are you going?”
The collector had raced down to the water’s edge; he knew the dangers of the place, for he divided the grass, filled his calabash with water, and dashed back before anything could seize him. Then, without drinking, he came running with the calabash to the white men.
Adams handed the calabash first to his companion.
Berselius drank and then wiped his forehead; he seemed disturbed in his mind and had a dazed look.
He had never come so far along the edge of the pools as this, but there was something in the configuration of the place that stirred his sleeping memory.
“What is it?” asked Adams.
“I don’t know,” replied Berselius. “I have dreamt—I have seen—I remember something—somewhere—”
Adams laughed.
“I know,” said he; “you come along, and in a few minutes you will see something that will help your memory. Why, man, we camped near here, you and I andMeeus; when you see the spot you’ll find yourself on your road again. Come, let’s make a start.”
The collector was standing with the half-full calabash in his hands.
He had not dared to drink. Adams nodded to him, motioning him to do so, but he handed it first to the porter. Then, when the porter had drunk, the collector finished the remains of the water and the last few drops he flung on the ground, an offering, perhaps, to some god or devil of his own. Then he led on, skirting the water’s edge. The loveliness of the place had not lessened since Adams had seen it last; even the breeze that was blowing to-day did not disturb the spirit of sweet and profound peace which held in a charm this lost garden of the wilderness; the palms bent as if in sleep, the water dimpled to the breeze and seemed to smile, a flamingo, with rose-coloured wings, passed and flew before them and vanished beyond the rocking tops of the trees that still sheltered the camping place where once Berselius had raised his tent.
Again, with theatrical effect, as the pools had burst upon them on leaving the forest, the camping place unveiled itself.
“Now,” said Adams in triumph, “do you remember that?”
Berselius did not reply. He was walking along with his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not stop, or hesitate, or make any exclamation to indicate whether he remembered or not.
“Do you remember?” cried Adams.
But Berselius did not speak. He was making noisesas if strangling, and suddenly his hands flew up to the neck of his hunting shirt, and tore at it till he tore it open.
“Steady, man, steady,” cried Adams catching the other’s arm. “Hi, you’ll be in a fit if you don’t mind—steady, Isay.”
But Berselius heard nothing, knew nothing but the scene before him, and Adams, who was running now after the afflicted man, who had broken away and was making straight for the trees beneath which the village had once been, heard and knew nothing of what lay before and around Berselius.
Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent man, and behold! memory had suddenly fronted him with a hell in which he was the chief demon.
He had no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a blow in the face.
Under that m’bina tree two soldiers, one with the haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains.
Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole. The remains of themiserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, and the trees blew their golden trumpets over all.
As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries was running about as a frantic woman runs about, to the bones on the ground, he guessed the tragedy of Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the torrid eloquence of madness.
PART FOUR
PART FOUR
CHAPTER XXXTHE AVENGER
It was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent of the coming rains. The door of the guest house stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp lay upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming a parallelogram of topaz across which were flitting continually great moth shadows big as birds.
Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table of the sitting room before a big blue sheet of paper. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing just at present; he was reading what he had written.
He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report for headquarters, and he found it difficult, because the last three months had brought in little rubber and less ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad. Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one village, as we know, had revolted; then, vines had died from some mysterious disease in two of the very best patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was now putting on paper for the edification of the Congo Government. He was devoting a special paragraph to the revolt of the village by the Silent Pools, and the punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not aword was said of torture and slaughtering. “Drastic Measures” was the term he used, a term perfectly well understood by the people to whom he was writing.
On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, looking now shrivelled at the edges in this extreme heat. On the wall in front of him the Congo bows and poisoned arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the light of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was making a circuit of the walls just below the ceiling; you could hear a faint scratch from it as it travelled along, a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus’s pen as it travelled across the paper.
He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette.
Sitting thus, meditating, pen in hand, he heard sounds: the sound of the night wind, the sound of one of the soldiers singing as he cleaned his rifle—the men always sang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun god—the scratch of the scorpion and the “creak, creak” of a joist warping and twisting to the heat.
But the sound of the wind was the most arresting. It would come over the forest and up the slope and round the guest house with a long-drawn, sweeping “Ha-a-a-r,” and sob once or twice, and then die away down the slope and over the forest and away and beyond to the east, where Kilimanjaro was waiting for it, crowned with snow on his throne beneath the stars.
But the wind was almost dead now—the heat of the night had stifled it. The faintest breathing of air took the place of the strong puffs that had sent the flame of the lamp half up the glass chimney. AsMeeus listened, on this faint breath from the forest he heard a sound—
“Boom—boom”—very faint, and as if someone were striking a drum in a leisurely manner.
“Boom—boom.”
A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of M’Bonga like an evil spirit. He had wandered here, perhaps from the west coast forests. Driven away from his species—who knows?—for some crime. The natives of the fort had caught glimpses of him now and then; he was huge and old and gray, and now in the darkness of the forest was striking himself on the chest, standing there in the gloom of the leaves, trampling the plantains under foot, taller than the tallest man, smiting himself in the pride of his strength.
“Boom—boom.”
It is a hair-lifting sound when you know the cause, but it left Meeus unmoved. His mind was too full of the business of writing his report to draw images or listen to imagination; all the same, this sinister drum-beat acted upon his subconscious self and, scarcely knowing why he did so, he got up from the table and came outside to the fort wall and looked over away into the dark.
There was not a star in the sky. A dense pall of cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind, as Meeus stepped from the veranda into the darkness, died away utterly.
He stood looking into the dark. He could make out the forest, a blackness humped and crouching in thesurrounding blackness. There was not a ray of light from the sky, and now and again came the drum—
“Boom—boom.”
Then it ceased, and a bat passed so close that the wind of it stirred his hair. He spat the taint of it from his mouth, and returning to the house, seated himself at the table and continued his work.
But the night was to be fateful in sounds and surprises. He had not been sitting five minutes when a voice from the blackness outside made him drop his pen and listen.
It was a European voice, shouting and raving and laughing, and Meeus, as he listened, clutched at the table, for the voice was known to him. It was the voice of Berselius!
Berselius, who was hundreds of miles away in the elephant country!
Meeus heard his own name. It came in to him out of the darkness, followed by a peal of laughter. Rapid steps sounded coming across the courtyard, and the sweat ran from Meeus’s face and his stomach crawled as, with a bound across the veranda, a huge man framed himself in the doorway and stood motionless as a statue.
For the first moment Meeus did not recognize Adams. He was filthy and tattered, he wore no coat, and his hunting shirt was open at the neck, and the arms of it rolled up above the elbows.
Adams, for the space of ten seconds, stood staring at Meeus from under his pith helmet. The face under the helmet seemed cast from bronze.
Then he came in and shut the door behind him, walked to the table, took Meeus by the coat at the back of the neck, and lifted him up as a man lifts a dog by the scruff.
For a moment it seemed as if he were going to kill the wretched man without word or explanation, but he mastered himself with a supreme effort, put him down, took the vacant seat at the table and cried:
“Stand before me there.”
Meeus stood. He held on to the table with his left hand and with his right he made pawing movements in the air.
The big man seated at the table did not notice. He sat for a few seconds with both hands clasped together, one making a cup for the other, just as a man might sit about to make a speech and carefully considering his opening words.
Then he spoke.
“Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?”
Meeus made no reply, but drew a step back and put out his hand, as if fending the question off, as if asking for a moment in which to explain. He had so many things to say, so many reasons to give, but he could say nothing, for his tongue was paralyzed and his lips were dry.
“Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?”
The awful man at the table was beginning to work himself up. He had risen at the second question, and at the third time of asking he seized Meeus by the shoulders. “Did you kill those people——?”
“Punishment,” stuttered Meeus.
A cry like the cry of a woman and a crash that shook the plaster from the ceiling, followed the fatal word.Adams had swung the man aloft and dashed him against the wall with such force, that the wattling gave and the plaster fell in flakes.
Meeus lay still as death, staring at his executioner with a face expressionless and white as the plaster flakes around him.
“Get up,” said Adams.
Meeus heard and moved his arms.
“Get up.”
Again the arms moved and the body raised itself, but the legs did not move. “I cannot,” said Meeus.
Adams came to him and bending down pinched his right thigh hard.
“Do you feel me touching you?”
“No.”
Adams did the same to the other thigh.
“Do you feel that?”
“No.”
“Lie there,” said Adams.
He opened the door and went out into the night. A moment later he returned; after him came the two porters bearing Berselius between them.
Berselius was quiet now; the brain fever that had stricken him had passed into a muttering stage, and he let himself be carried, passive as a bag of meal, whilst Adams went before with the lamp leading the way into the bedroom. Here, on one of the beds, the porters laid their burden down. Then they came back, and under the directions of Adams lifted Meeus and carried him into the bedroom and placed him on the second bed.
Adams, with the lamp in his hand, stood for a moment looking at Meeus. His rage had spent itself; he had avenged the people at the Silent Pools. With his naked hands he had inflicted on the criminal before him an injury worse than the injury of fire or sword.
Meeus, frightened now by the pity in the face of the other, horribly frightened by the unknown thing that had happened to him, making him dead from the waist down, moved his lips, but made no sound.
“Your back is broken,” replied Adams to the question in the other’s eyes.
Then he turned to Berselius.
At midnight the rains broke with a crash of thunder that seemed to shake the universe.
Adams, worn out, was seated at the table in the living room smoking some tobacco he had found in a tin on the shelf, and listening to the rambling of Berselius, when the thunder-clap came, making the lamp shiver on the table.
Meeus, who had been silent since his death sentence had been read to him, cried out at the thunder, but Berselius did not heed—he was hunting elephants under a burning sun in a country even vaster than the elephant country.
Adams rose up and came to the door; not a drop of rain had fallen yet. He crossed the yard and stood at the fort wall looking into blackness. It was solid as ebony, and he could hear the soldiers, whose huts were outside the wall, calling to one another.
A great splash of light lit up the whole roof of the forest clear as day, and the darkness shut down again with a bang that hit the ear like a blow, and the echoes of it roared and rumbled and muttered, and died, and Silence wrapped herself again in her robe and sat to wait.
Now, there was a faint stirring of the air, increasing to a breeze, and far away a sound like the spinning of a top came on the breeze. It was the rain, miles away, coming over the forest in a solid sheet, the sound of it increasing on the great drum of the forest’s roof to a roar.
Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain.
He saw what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of spray and mist.
Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the darkness and the thunder the next.
Adams, terrified, ran back to the house, shut the door, and waited.
The house was solidly built and had withstood many rains, but there were times when it seemed to him that the whole place must be washed away bodily. Nothing could be heard but the rain, and the sound of such rain is far more terrifying than the sound of thunder or the rumble of the earthquake.
There were times when he said to himself, “This cannot last,” yet it lasted. With the lamp in his hand hewent into the sleeping room to see how Berselius and Meeus were doing. Berselius was still, to judge from the movements of his lips, delirious, and just the same. Meeus was lying with his hands on his breast. He might have been asleep, only for his eyes, wide open and bright, and following every movement of the man with the lamp.
Meeus, catching the other’s eye, motioned to him to come near. Then he tried to speak, but the roar outside made it impossible to hear him. Adams pointed to the roof, as if to say, “Wait till it is over,” then he came back to the sitting room, tore the leopard skin down from the wall, rolled it up for a pillow, and lay down with his head on it.
He had been through so much of late that he had grown callous and case-hardened; he did not care much whether the place was washed away or not—he wanted to sleep, and he slept.
Meeus, left alone, lay watching the glimmer of the lamp shining through the cracks of the door, and listening to the thunder of the rain.
This was the greatest rain he had experienced. He wondered if it would flood the go-down and get at the rubber stored there; he wondered if the soldiers had deserted their huts and taken refuge in the office. These thoughts were of not the slightest interest to him; they just came and strayed across his mind, which was still half-paralyzed by the great calamity that had befallen him.
For the last half-hour an iron hand seemed round his body just on a level with the diaphragm; this seemed growing tighter, and the tighter it grew the more difficultit was to breathe. The fracture had been very high up, but he knew nothing of this; he knew that his back was broken, and that men with broken backs die, but he did not fully realize that he was going to die till—all at once—his breathing stopped dead of its own accord, and then of its own accord went on rapidly and shallowly. Then he recognized that his breathing was entirely under the control of something over whichhehad no control.
This is the most terrible thing a man can know, for it is a thing that no man ever knows till he is in the hands of death.
It was daylight when Adams awoke, and the rain had ceased.
He went to the door and opened it. It was after sunrise, but the sun was not to be seen. The whole world was a vapour, but through which the forest was dimly visible. The soldiers were in the courtyard; they had just come out of the office where they had taken refuge during the night. Their huts had been washed away, but they did not seem to mind a bit; they showed their teeth in a grin, and shouted something when they saw the white man, and pointed to the rainswept yard and the sky.
Adams nodded, and then went back into the house and into the bedroom, where he found Meeus hanging head downward out of his bed.
Rubber would trouble Andreas Meeus no more; his soul had gone to join the great army of souls in the Beyond.
It is strange enough to look upon the body of a manyou have killed. But Adams had no more pity or compunction in his mind than if Meeus had been a stoat.
He turned to Berselius, who was sleeping. The delirium had passed, and he was breathing evenly and well. There was hope for him yet—hope for his body if not for his mind.