CHAPTER XXXITHE VOICE OF THE FOREST BY NIGHT
The first thing to be done was to bury Meeus. And now came the question, How would the soldiers take the death of theChef de Poste? They knew nothing of it yet. Would they revolt, or would they seek to revenge him, guessing him to have been killed.
Adams did not know and he did not care. He half hoped there would be trouble. The Congo had burst upon his view, stripped of shams, in all its ferocity, just as the great scene of the killing had burst upon Berselius. All sorts of things—from the Hostage House of Yandjali to the Hostage House of M’Bassa, from Mass to Papeete’s skull—connected themselves up and made a skeleton, from which he constructed that great and ferocious monster, the Congo State. The soldiers, with their filed teeth, were part of the monster, and, such was the depth of fury in his heart, he would have welcomed a fight, so that he might express with his arms what his tongue ached to say.
The original man loomed large in Adams. God had given him a character benign and just, a heart tempered to mercy and kindliness; all these qualities had beenoutraged and were now under arms. They had given a mandate to the original man to act. The death of Meeus was the first result.
He went to the shelf where Meeus had kept his official letters and took Meeus’s Mauser pistol from it. It was in a holster attached to a belt. He strapped the belt round his waist, drew the pistol from the holster and examined it. It was loaded, and in an old cigar-box he found a dozen clips of cartridges. He put three of these in his pocket and with the pistol at his side came out into the courtyard.
Huge billows of white cloud filled the sky, broken here and there by a patch of watery blue. The whole earth was steaming and the forest was absolutely smoking. One could have sworn it was on fire in a dozen places when the spirals of mist rose and broke and vanished like the steam clouds from locomotive chimneys.
He crossed the courtyard to the go-down, undid the locking bar and found what he wanted. Half a dozen mattocks stood by the rubber bales—he had noticed them when the stores had been taken out for the expedition; they were still in the same place and, taking two of them, he went to the break in the wall that gave exit from the courtyard and called to the soldiers, who were busy at work rebuilding their huts.
They came running. He could not speak twenty words of their language, but he made them line up with a movement of his arm.
Then he addressed them in a perfectly unprintable speech. It was delivered in unshod American—alanguage he had not spoken for years. It took in each individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, cayotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each and individually with his own hands (and I believe by some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they were without hearts, souls or intellect, not responsible creatures, tools of villains that he, Adams, would expose and get even with yet.
Furthermore, that if by a look or movement they disobeyed his orders, he would make them sweat tears and weep blood, so help him God. Amen.
They understood what he said. At least they understood the gist of it. They had found a new and angry master, and not an eye was raised when Adams stood silent; some looked at their toes and some at the ground, some looked this way, some that, but none at the big, ferocious man, with three weeks’ growth of beard, standing before them and, literally, over them.
Then he chose two of them and motioned them to follow to the guest house. There he brought them into the sleeping room and pointed to the body of Meeus, motioning them to take it up and carry it out. The men rolled their eyes at the sight of theChef de Poste, but they said no word; one took the head, the other the feet, and between them they carried the burden, led by their new commander, through the dwelling room, across the veranda and then across the yard.
The rest of the soldiers were in a group near the gate. When they saw the two men and their burden, they setup a chattering like a flock of magpies, which, however, instantly ceased at the approach of Adams.
He pointed to the two mattocks which he had placed against the wall. They understood what he meant; the lastChef de Postehad shot himself in the presence of the District Commissioner, and they had dug his grave.
“Here,” said Adams, stopping and pointing to a spot at a convenient distance from the walls.
When the body was buried, Adams stood for a second looking at the mound of earth, wet and flattened down by blows of the spades.
He had no prayers to offer up. Meeus would have to go before his Maker just as he was, and explain things—explain all that business away there at the Silent Pools and other things as well. Prayers over his tomb or flowers on it would not help that explanation one little bit.
Then Adams turned away and the soldiers trooped after him.
He had looked into the office and seen the rifles and ammunition which they had placed there out of the wet. A weak man would have locked the office door and so have deprived the soldiers of their arms, but Adams was not a weak man.
He led his followers to the office, handed them their arms, carefully examining each rifle to see that it was clean and uninjured, drew them up on a line, addressed them in some more unprintable language but in a milder tone, dismissed them with a wave of his hand and returned to the house.
As he left them the wretched creatures all gave a shout—a shout of acclamation.
This was the man for them—very different from the pale-faced Meeus—this was a man they felt who would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of their huts with verve.
They were not physiognomists, these gentlemen.
Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunately there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with goats’ milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down again—not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. There were no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the old official letters and the half-written report which the dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.
Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of the storm.
Adams came out on the veranda to listen.
He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring belowin the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.
This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and its terror.
CHAPTER XXXIIMOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS
Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least shock or obstruction.
The man was too weak to talk, he could just say “Yes” and “No” in answer to a question, and it was always “Better” when he was asked how he felt, but he never spoke a word of his own volition.
Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different ways—from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun. Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for theywere the only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue or hinted at the tenderness of God.
All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic; it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to whom it bore no promise.
But the forest was the thing which filled Adams’s heart with a craving for freedom and escape that rose to a passion.
He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.
The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had gone back to his place and task—the forest had sucked him back. This gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered:There is no God in the forest of M’Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death.
The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare—his one desire in life now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when, rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the palmsbursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their foliage.
At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in the immeasurable south.
The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he did not feel terrified—it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed by a man who was now dead.
He could regret the acts of that man and he could seek to atone for them, but he felt no personal remorse. “He was not I,” would have reasoned the mind of Berselius; “those acts were not my acts, becausenow I could not commit them,” so he would have reasoned had he reasoned on the matter at all. But he did not. In that wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had screamed aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that fate had played it, by making it the slave of two personalities,and then torturing it by showing it the acts of the old personality through the eyes of the new.
When the brain fever had passed, it awoke untroubled; the junction had been effected, the new Berselius was It, and all the acts of the old Berselius were foreign to it and far away.
It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the great change comes on his brain. After the brain-storm and the agony of new birth comes the peace and the feeling that he is “another man.” He feels that all his sins are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense of responsibility for the crimes he committed in the old life, he has cast them off like an old suit of clothes. The old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for your vices by losing your smell and taste for vice, and slip out of your debt for crime by becoming another man?
Does the old man ever die?
The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, which is more especially interesting as it is prompted by a case not unique but almost typical.
The interesting point in Berselius’s case lay in the question as to whether his change of mind was initiated by the injury received in the elephant country or by the shock at the Silent Pools. In other words, was it due to some mechanical pressure on the brain produced by the accident, or was it due to “repentance” on seeing suddenly unveiled the hideous drama in which he had taken part?
This remains to be seen.
At the end of the fourth week Berselius was able to leave his bed, and every day now marked a steady improvement in strength.
Not a word about the past did he say, not a question did he ask, and what surprised Adams especially, not a question did he put about Meeus, till one day in the middle of the fifth week.
Berselius was seated in one of the arm chairs of the sitting room when he suddenly raised his head.
“By the way,” said he, “where is theChef de Poste?”
“He is dead,” replied Adams.
“Ah!” said Berselius; there was almost a note of relief in his voice. He said nothing more and Adams volunteered no explanation, for the affair was one entirely between Meeus, himself, and God.
A few minutes later, Berselius, who seemed deep in thought, raised his head again.
“We must get away from here. I am nearly strong enough to go now. It will be a rough journey in these rains, but it will be a much shorter road than the road we came by.”
“How so?”
“We came from Yandjali right through the forest before striking south to here; we will now make straight for the river, along the rubber road. I think the post on the river which we will reach is called M’Bina, it is a hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from there to Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out this morning.”
“How about a guide?”
“These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they often escort the loads.”
“Good,” said Adams. “I will have some sort of litter rigged up and we will carry you. I am not going to let you walk in your present condition.”
Berselius bowed his head.
“I am very sensible,” said he, “of the care and attention you have bestowed on me during the past weeks. I owe you a considerable debt, which I will endeavour to repay, at all events, by following your directions implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send me in the corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his own language and explain what is to be done.”
“Good,” said Adams, and he went out and found the corporal and sent him in to Berselius.
“Good!” The word was not capacious enough to express what he felt. Freedom, Light, Humanity, the sight of a civilized face, for these he ached with a great longing, and they were all there at the end of the rubber road, only waiting to be met with.
He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest.
“Another ten days,” said Adams.
The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thousands of years, waved its branches to the wind.
A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams’s cheek, and in the “hush” of the trees there seemed a murmur of derision and the whisper of a threat.
“It is not well to shake your fist at the gods—in the open.”
Adams went back to the house to begin preparations,and for the next week he was busy. From some spare canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a litter strong enough to carry Berselius—he had to do nearly all the work himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless as workmen. Then stores had to be arranged and put together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes had to be mended and patched—even his boots had to be cobbled with twine—but at last all was ready, and on the day before they started the weather improved. The sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right to the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like ranges of snow-covered mountains.
That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams announced his intention of going on a little expedition of his own.
“I shall only be a few hours away,” said he, “five at most.”
“Where are you going?” asked Berselius.
“Oh, just down into the woods,” replied Adams. Then he left the room before his companion could ask any more questions and sought out the corporal.
He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck down the slope in the direction of the Silent Pools. When they reached the forest edge he pointed before them and said, “Matabayo.”
The man understood and led the way, which was not difficult, for the feet of the rubber collectors had beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of light, too, for the moon was already in the sky, only waiting for the sun to sink before blazing out.
When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk fell on them suddenly, and deepened almost to dark; then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest around them glowed green to the light of the moon.
The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached them, lay in mist and moonlight, making a picture unforgettable for ever.
It recalled to Adams that picture of Doré’s, illustrating the scene from the “Idylls of the King,” where Arthur labouring up the pass “all in a misty moonlight,” had trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose head the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn—the misty tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting to receive it and hide it in his robe.
The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones still unburied of the creatures that a far-off king had murdered. The rain had washed them about, and Adams had to search and search before he found what he had come to find.
At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish business the white man had come to find the thing.
Then Adams with the dreary bundle under his arm looked around him at the other remains and swore—swore by the God who had made him, by the mother who had borne him, and the manhood that lay in him, to rest not nor stay till he had laid before the face of Europe the skull of Papeete and the acts ofthe terrible scoundrel who for long years had systematically murdered for money.
Then, followed by the savage, he turned and retook his road. At the wood’s edge he looked back at the silent scene, and it seemed to look at him with the muteness and sadness of a witness who cannot speak, of a woman who cannot tell her sorrow.
CHAPTER XXXIIITHE RIVER OF GOLD
Next morning they started.
The corporal, three of the soldiers, and the two porters made up the escort.
Berselius, who was strong enough to walk a little way, began the journey on foot, but they had not gone five miles on their road when he showed signs of fatigue, and Adams insisted on him taking to the litter.
It was the same road by which Félix had led them, but it was very different travelling; where the ground had been hard underfoot it was now soft, and where it had been elastic it was now boggy; it was more gloomy, and the forest was filled with watery voices; where it dipped down into valleys, you could hear the rushing and mourning of waters. Tiny trickles of water had become rivulets—rivulets streams.
Away in the elephant country it was the same, the dry river-bed where they had found the carcass of the elephant, was now the bed of rushing water. The elephant and antelope herds were wandering in clouds on the plains. A hundred thousand streams from Tanganyika to Yandjali were leaping to form rivers flowing for one destination, the Congo and the sea.
On the second day of their journey, an accident happened; one of the porters, released for a spell from bearing the litter, and loitering behind, was bitten by a snake.
He died despite all Adams’s attempts to save him, and, leaving his body to be buried by the leopards, they passed on.
But the soldiers, especially the corporal, took the matter strangely. These bloodthirsty wretches, inured to death and thinking nothing of it, seemed cast down, and at the camping place they drew aside, chattered together for a few minutes, and then the corporal came to Berselius and began a harangue, his eyes rolling toward Adams now and then as he proceeded.
Berselius listened, spoke a few words, and then turned to Adams.
“He says you have brought something with you that is unlucky, and that unless you throw it away, we shall all die.”
“I know what he means,” replied Adams; “I have brought a relic from that village by the Silent Pools. I shall not throw it away. You can tell him so.”
Berselius spoke to the man who still stood sullenly waiting, and who was opening his mouth to continue his complaints, when Adams seized him by the shoulders, turned him round, and with a kick, sent him back to his companions.
“You should not have done that,” said Berselius; “these people are very difficult to deal with.”
“Difficult!” said Adams. He stared at the soldierswho were grouped together, slapped the Mauser pistol at his side, and then pointed to the tent.
The men ceased muttering, and came as beaten dogs come at the call of their master, seized the tent and put it up.
But Berselius still shook his head. He knew these people, their treachery, and their unutterable heartlessness.
“How far are we from the river now?” asked Adams, that night, as they sat by the fire, for which the corporal by some miracle of savagery had found sufficient dry fuel in the reeking woods around them.
“Another two days’ march,” replied Berselius, “I trust that we shall reach it.”
“Oh, we’ll get there,” said Adams, “and shall I tell you why? Well, we’ll get there just because of that relic I am carrying. God has given me it to take to Europe. To take to Europe and show to men that they may see the devilment of this place, and the work of Satan that is being carried out here.”
Berselius bowed his head.
“Perhaps you are right,” said he, at last, slowly and thoughtfully.
Adams said no more. The great change in his companion stood as a barrier between him and the loathing he would have felt if Berselius had been still himself.
The great man had fallen, and was now very low. That vision of him in his madness by the Silent Pools had placed him forever on a plane above others. God had dealtwith this man very visibly, and the hand of God was still upon him.
Next day they resumed their journey. The soldiers were cheerful and seemed to have forgotten all about their grievance, but Berselius felt more uneasy than ever. He knew these people, and that nothing could move them to mirth and joy that was not allied to devilment, or treachery, or death.
But he said nothing, for speech was useless.
Next morning when they woke they found the soldiers gone; they had taken the porter with them, and as much of the provisions as they could steal without disturbing the white men.
“I thought so,” said Berselius.
Adams raged and stormed, but Berselius was perfectly calm.
“The thing I fear most,” said he, “is that they have led us out of our road. Did you notice whether we were in the track for the last mile or so of our journey yesterday?”
“No,” replied Adams, “I just followed on. Good God! if it is so we are lost.”
Now, the rubber road was just a track so faint, that without keeping his eyes on the ground where years of travel had left just a slight indication of the way, a European would infallibly lose it. Savages, who have eyes in their feet, hold it all right, and go along with their burdens even in the dark.
Adams searched, but he could find no track.
“We must leave all these things behind us,” saidBerselius, pointing to the tent and litter. “I am strong enough to walk; we must strike through the forest and leave the rest to chance.”
“Which way?” asked Adams.
“It does not matter. These men have purposely lost us, and we do not know in the least the direction of the river.”
Adams’s eyes fell on a bundle wrapped in cloth. It was the relic.
He knelt down beside it, and carefully removed the cloth without disturbing the position of the skull.
He noted the direction in which the eye-holes pointed.
“We will go in that direction,” said he. “We have lost ourselves, but God has not lost us.”
“Let it be so,” replied Berselius.
Adams collected what provisions he could carry, tied the skull to his belt with a piece of rope taken from the tent, and led the way amidst the trees.
Two days later, at noon, still lost, unutterably weary, they saw through the trees before them a sight to slay all hope.
It was the tent and the litter just as they had left them.
Two days’ heart-breaking labour had brought them to this by all sorts of paths.
They had not wandered in a circle. They had travelled in segments of circles, and against all mathematical probability, had struck the camp.
But the camp was not tenantless. Someone was there. A huge man-like form, a monstrous gorilla, the evil spiritthat haunted the forest, bent and gray and old-looking, was picking the things about, sniffing at them, turning them over.
When they saw him first, he was holding the tent-cloth between both his hands just as a draper holds a piece of cloth, then he ripped it up with a rending sound, flung the pieces away, and began turning over the litter.
He heard the steps of the human beings, and sat up, looking around him, sniffing the air. He could not see them, for he was purblind.
The human beings passed on into the terrible nowhere of the forest.
When you are lost like this, you cannot rest. You must keep moving, even though you are all but hopeless of reaching freedom.
Two days later they were still lost, and now entirely hopeless.
To torment their hearts still more, faint sun-rays came through the leaves overhead.
The sun was shining overhead; the sun they would never see again. It was the very end of all things, for they had not eaten for twelve hours now.
The sun-rays danced, for a breeze had sprung up, and they could hear it passing free and happily in the leaves overhead.
Berselius cast himself down by a huge tree and leaned his head against the bark. Adams stood for a moment with his hand upon the tree-bole. He knew that when he had cast himself down he would never rise again.It was the full stop which would bring the story of his life to a close.
He was standing like this when, borne on the breeze above the tree-tops, came a sound, stroke after stroke, sonorous and clear. The bell of a steamboat!
It was the voice of the Congo telling of Life, Hope, Relief.
Berselius did not hear it. Sunk in a profound stupor, he would not even raise his head.
Adams seized his companion in his arms and came facing the direction of the breeze. He walked like a man in his sleep, threading the maze of the trees on, on, on, till before him the day broke in one tremendous splash of light, and the humble frame-roof of M’Bina seemed to him the roofs of some great city, beyond which the river flowed in sheets of burnished gold.
CHAPTER XXXIVTHE SUBSTITUTE
District Commissioner De Wiart, chief at M’Bina, was a big man with a blond beard and a good-natured face. He worked the post at M’Bina with the assistance of a subordinate named Van Laer.
De Wiart was a man eminently fitted for his post. He had a genius for organization and overseeing. He would not have been worth a centime away up-country, for his heart was far too good to allow him to personally supervise the working of the niggers, but at M’Bina he was worth a good deal to the Government that employed him.
This man who would not hurt a fly—this man who would have made an excellent father of a family—was terrible to his subordinates when he took a pen in his hand. He knew the mechanism of everyChef de Postein his district, and the sort of letter that would rouse him up, stimulate him to renewed action, and the slaves under him to renewed work.
Van Laer was of quite a different type. Van Laer had the appearance of a famished hound held back by a leash. He was tall and thin. He had been a schoolmasterdismissed from his school for a grave offence; he had been a billiard-marker; he had walked the streets of Brussels in a frock-coat and tall hat, a “guide” on the lookout for young foreigners who wished to enjoy the more dubious pleasures of the city. He had been many things, till, at the age of thirty-five, he became a servant of the crown.
The pale blue eyes of Van Laer held in them a shallowness and murderous cruelty, an expression of negation and coldness combined with mind such as one finds nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it which prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs were cruelly shaped and enormous. A man may disguise his soul, he may disguise his mind, he may disguise his face, but he cannot disguise his thumbs unless he wears gloves.
No one wears gloves on the Congo, so Van Laer’s thumbs were openly displayed.
He had been six months now at M’Bina and he was sick of the place, accounts were of no interest to him. He was a man of action, and he wanted to be doing. He could make money up there in the forest at the heart of things; here, almost in touch with civilization, he was wasting his time. And he wanted money. The bonus-ache had seized him badly. When he saw the great tusks of green ivory in their jackets of matting, when he saw the bales of copal leafed round with aromatic unknown leaves, and speaking fervently of the wealth of the tropics and the riches of the primeval forests, when he saw the tons of rubber and remembered that this stuff, whichin the baskets of the native collectors looks like fried potato chips, in Europe becomes, by the alchemy of trade, minted gold, a great hunger filled his hungry soul.
At M’Bina great riches were eternally flowing in and flowing out. Wealth in its original wrappings piled itself on the wharf in romantical packets and bales, piled itself on board steamers, floated away down the golden river, and was replaced by more wealth flowing in from the inexhaustible forests.
The sight of all this filled Van Laer with an actual physical hunger. He could have eaten that stuff that was wealth itself. He could have devoured those tusks. He was Gargantua as far as his appetite was concerned, and for the rest he was only Van Laer driving a quill in the office of De Wiart.
He did not know that he was here on probation; that the good-natured and seemingly lazy de Wiart was studying him and finding him satisfactory, that very soon his desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let loose like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an animated thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft.
When the soldiers had lost Berselius and Adams, they struck at once for M’Bina, reaching it in a day’s march.
Here they told their tale.
Chef de PosteMeeus was dead. They had escorted a sick white man and a big white man toward M’Bina. One night three leopards had prowled round the camp and the soldiers had gone in pursuit of them.
The leopards escaped, but the soldiers could not find the white men again.
De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believing a word of it, except in so far as it related to Meeus.
“Where did you lose the white men?” asked de Wiart.
The soldiers did not know. One does not know where one loses a thing; if one did, then the thing would not be lost.
“Just so,” said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident axiom, and more than ever convinced that the story was a lie. Meeus was dead and the men had come to report. They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of their own, and this lie about the white men was to account for their delay.
“Did anyone else come with you as well as the white men?” asked De Wiart.
“Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away.”
De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river.
From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving flood of gold. One might have fancied that all the wealth of the elephant country, all the teeming riches of the forest, flowing by a thousand streams and disdaining to wait for the alchemy of trade, had joined in one Pactolian flood flowing toward Leopoldsville and the sea.
De Wiart was not thinking this. He dismissed the soldiers and told them to hold themselves in readiness to return to M’Bassa on the morrow.
That evening he called Van Laer into the office.
“Chef de PosteMeeus of Fort M’Bassa is dead,” said De Wiart; “you will go there and take command. You will start to-morrow.”
Van Laer flushed.
“It is a difficult post,” said De Wiart, “wild country, and the natives are the laziest to be found in the whole of the state. The man before Meeus did much harm; he had no power or control, he was a weak man, and the people frankly laughed at him. Actually rubber came in here one-third rubbish, the people were half their time in revolt, they cut the vines in two districts. I have a report of his saying, ‘There is no ivory to be got. The herds are very scarce, and the people say they cannot make elephants.’ Fancy writing nigger talk like that in a report. I replied in the same tone. I said, ‘Tell the people they must make them: and make them in a hurry. Tell them that they need not trouble to make whole elephants, just the tusks will do—eighty-pound tusks, a hundred-pound if possible.’ But sarcasm was quite thrown away on him. He listened to the natives. Once a man does that he is lost, for they lose all respect for him. They are just like children, these people; once let children get in the habit of making excuses and you lose control.
“Meeus was a stronger man, but he left much to be desired. He had too much whalebone in his composition, not enough steel, but he was improving.
“You will find yourself at first in a difficult position. It always is so when aChef de Postedies suddenly and even a few days elapse before he is replaced. Thepeople get out of hand, thinking the white man is gone for ever. However, you will find yourself all right in a week or so, if you are firm.”
“Thank you,” said Van Laer. “I have no doubt at all that I will be able to bring these people into line. I do not boast. I only ask you to keep your eye on the returns.”
Next day Van Laer, escorted by the soldiers, left M’Bina to take up the station at Fort M’Bassa left vacant by the death ofChef de PosteAndreas Meeus.
Three days later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house by shouts from the sentinels on duty saw, coming toward him in the blazing sunshine, a great man who stumbled and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead.
Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The man erect had, tied to his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a skull.
Fit emblem of the forest he had passed through and the land that lay behind it.
CHAPTER XXXVPARIS
One hot day in June Schaunard was seated in the little office just behind his shop. He was examining an improved telescopic sight which had just been put upon the market by an opponent, criticizing it as one poet criticizes the poem of another poet—that is to say, ferociously.
To him, thus meditating, from the Rue de la Paix suddenly came a gush of sound which as suddenly ceased.
The shop door had opened and closed again, and Schaunard leaving his office came out to see who the visitor might be.
He found himself face to face with Adams. He knew him by his size, but he would scarcely have recognized him by his face, so brown, so thin and so different in expression was it from the face of the man with whom he had parted but a few months ago.
“Good day,” said Adams. “I have come to pay you for that gun.”
“Ah, yes, the gun,” said Schaunard with a little laugh, “this is a pleasant surprise. I had entered it amidst my bad debts. Come in, monsieur, come into my office, it is cooler there, and we can talk. The gun, ah, yes. Ihad entered that transaction in Ledger D. Come in, come in. There, take that armchair, I keep it for visitors. Well, and how did the expedition go off?”
“Badly,” said Adams. “We are only back a week. You remember what you said to me when we parted? You said, ‘Don’t go.’ I wish I had taken your advice.”
“Why, since you are back sound and whole, it seems to me you have not done so badly—but perhaps you have got malaria?”
The old man’s sharp eyes were investigating the face of the other. Schaunard’s eyes had this peculiarity, that they were at once friendly to one and cruel, they matched the eternal little laugh which was ever springing to his lips—the laugh of the eternal mocker.
Schaunard made observations as well as telescopic sights and wind-gauges—he had been making observation for sixty years—he took almost as much interest in individual human beings as in rifles, and much more interest in Humanity than in God.
He was afflicted with the malady of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—he did not believe in God, only instead of hiding his disease under a cloak of mechanical religion, or temporizing with it, he frankly declared himself to be what he was, an atheist.
This fact did not interfere with his trade—a godly gunmaker gets no more custom than an atheistical one; besides, Schaunard did not obtrude his religious opinions after the fashion of his class, he was a good deal of a gentleman, and he was accustomed to converse familiarly with emperors and kings.
“No, it is not malaria,” replied Adams, following the old man who was leading the way into the office. “I never felt better in my life. It is just the Congo. The place leaves an impression on one’s mind, M. Schaunard, a flavour that is not good.”
He took the armchair which Schaunard kept for visitors. He was only a week back—all he had seen out there was fresh to him and very vivid, but he felt in Schaunard an antagonistic spirit, and he did not care to go deeper into his experiences.
Schaunard took down that grim joke, Ledger D, placed it on the table and opened it, but without turning the leaves.
“And how is Monsieur le Capitaine?” asked he.
“He has been very ill, but he is much better. I am staying with him in the Avenue Malakoff as his medical attendant. We only arrived at Marseilles a week ago.”
“And Madame Berselius, how is she?”
“Madame Berselius is at Trouville.”
“The best place this weather.Ma foi, you must find it warm here even after Africa—well, tell me how you found the gun to answer.”
Adams laughed. “The gun went off—in the hands of a savage. All your beautiful guns, Monsieur Schaunard, are now matchwood and old iron, tents, everything went, smashed to pieces, pounded to pulp by elephants.”
He told of the great herd they had pursued and how in the dark it had charged the camp. He told of how in the night, listening by the camp fire, he had heard the mysterious boom of its coming, and of the marvelloussight he had watched when Berselius, failing in his attempt to waken the Zappo Zap, had fronted the oncoming army of destruction.
Schaunard’s eyes lit up as he listened.
“Ah,” said he, “that is a man!”
The remark brought Adams to a halt.
He had become strangely bound up in Berselius; he had developed an affection for this man almost brotherly, and Schaunard’s remark hit him and made him wince. For Schaunard employed the present tense.
“Yes,” said Adams at last, “it was very grand.” Then he went on to tell of Berselius’s accident, but he said nothing of his brain injury, for a physician does not speak of his patient’s condition to strangers, except in the vaguest and most general terms.
“And how did you like the Belgians?” asked the old man, when Adams had finished.
“The Belgians!” Adams, suddenly taken off his guard, exploded; he had said nothing as yet about the Congo to anyone. He could not help himself now; the horrors rushed to his mouth and escaped—the cry of the great mournful country—the cry that he had brought to Europe with him in his heart, found vent.
Schaunard sat amazed, not at the infamies pouring from Adams’s mouth, for he was well acquainted with them, but at the man’s vehemence and energy.
“I have come to Europe to expose him,” finished Adams.
“Expose who?”
“Leopold, King of the Belgians.”
“But, my dear Monsieur Adams, you have come to waste your time; he is already exposed. Expose Leopold, King of the Belgians! Say at once that you are going to expose the sun. He doesn’t care. He exposes himself. His public and his private life are common property.”
“You mean to say that everyone knows what I know?”
“Precisely, and perhaps even more, but everyone has not seen what you have seen, and that’s all the difference.”
“How so?”
“In this way, monsieur; let us suppose that you have just seen a child run over in the Rue de la Paix. You come in here and tell me of it; the horror of it is in your mind, but you cannot convey that horror to me, simply because I have not seen what you have seen. Still, you can convey a part of it, for I know the Rue de la Paix, it is close to me, outside my door, and I know French children.
“You come to me and tell me of hideous sights you have seen in Africa. That does not move me a tenth so much, for Africa is very far away—it is, in fact, for me a geographical expression; the people are niggers I have never seen, dwelling in a province I have never heard of. You come to seek sympathy for this people amongst the French public? Well, I tell you frankly you are like a man searching in a dark room for a black hat that is not there.”
“Nevertheless I shall search.”
“As monsieur wills, only don’t knock yourself against the chairs and tables. Ah, monsieur, monsieur, youare young and a medical man. Remain so, and don’t lose your years and your prospects fighting the impossible. Now listen to me, for it is old Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix who is speaking to you. The man you would expose, as you term it, is a king to begin with; to go on with, he is far and away the cleverest king in Christendom. That man has brains enough to run what you in America call a department store. Every little detail of his estate out there, even to the cap guns and rifles of the troops, he looks after himself; that’s why it pays. It is a bad-smelling business, but it doesn’t poison the nose of Europe, because it is so far away. Still, smells are brought over in samples by missionaries and men like you, and people say ‘Faugh!’ Do you think he did not take that into his consideration when he planned the affair and laid down the factory? If you think so, you would be vastly mistaken. He has agents everywhere—I have met them, apologists everywhere—in the Press, in Society, in the Church. The Roman Catholic Church is entirely his; he is triple-ringed with politicians, priests, publicists, and financiers, all holding their noses to keep out the stench and all singing theLaus Leopoldat the top of their voices.
“Ah! you don’t know Europe. I do, from the Ballplatz to Willhelmstrasse, from the Winter Palace to the Elysée, my trade has brought me everywhere, and if you could see with my eyes, you would see the great, smooth plain of ice you hope to warm with your poor breath in the name of Humanity.”
“At all events I shall try,” replied Adams, rising to go.
“Well, try, but don’t get frozen in making the trial——”
“Oh, the gun—well, look here—you are starting on another hunting expedition, it seems to me, a more dangerous one, too, than the last, for there is no forest where one loses oneself more fatally than the forest of social reform—pay me when you come back.”
“Very well,” said Adams, laughing.
“Only if you are successful though.”
“Very well.”
“And, see here, in any event come and tell me the result.Bon jour, monsieur, and a word in your ear——”
The old man was opening the shop door.
“Yes?”
“Don’t go.”
Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office to chuckle over his joke, and Adams walked off down the Rue de la Paix.
Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end of the season, and the streets were thronged with foreigners—the Moor from Morocco, in his white burnous, elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had become a veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were packed, thecaféscrowded. Austrian, Russian, English, and American gold was pouring into the city—pouring in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and by every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est, and the Gare de Lyons.
To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, fresh from those great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant country and the tremendous cavern of the jungle, thecity around him and the sights affected him with vividness and force.
Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen, he stood fresh from that primeval land.
He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair in disorder, her foot on the body of a naked slave and the haft of a blood-stained knife between her teeth, he was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in powder, Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of poets, philosophers, churchmen, placemen, politicians, and financiers.
It was a strange experience.
He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then to the Avenue Malakoff, and as he walked the face of the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind and was replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites in the world of thought often awaken images one of the other, just because of the fact that they are opposites.
Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at the railway station on the day of their arrival.
La Jocondehad been cabled for from Leopoldsville, and the great yacht had brought them to Marseilles. Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius’s accident or illness, and Madame Berselius had departed for Trouville, quite unconscious of anything having happened to her husband.
Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in her father. She had done so at the very first sight of him, but as yet she had said no word.