CHAPTER XXXVIDREAMS
When Adams arrived at the Avenue Malakoff he found Berselius in the library. He was seated in a big armchair, and M. Pinchon, his secretary, a man dry-looking as an account-book, bald, and wearing spectacles, was just leaving the room with some shorthand notes of business letters to be typed.
Berselius was much changed; his hair was quite gray, his eyes, once so calm, forceful, and intrinsically brilliant, had lost their lustre, his face wore the expression of a confirmed invalid.
Great discontent was the predominant feature of this expression.
It was only within the last few days that this had appeared. On recovering from the hardships of the forest and on the voyage home, though weak enough, he had been serene, mild, amiable and rather listless, but during the last few days something was visibly troubling him.
He had “gone off,” to use an expressive phrase sometimes employed by physicians.
A strange thing had happened to Berselius. Ever since the recovery of his memory his new self had contemplatedthe past from the heights of new birth, calmly conscious of the fact that this past belonged to a man who was dead. The more he examined this past the more he loathed the man to whom it had belonged, but the difference between that man and himself was so profound that he felt, rightly, that he was notHe.
Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.
He had awakened to his new self again with the full recognition in his mind that only a few moments ago he had been thinking with that other man’s brain, acting under his passions, living his life.
The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest connection with, or knowledge of, the Berselius of real life. Yet the Berselius of real life was very intimately connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all his actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them to the minutest detail.
The next night he did not dream at all—not so on the third night, when the scene of horror by the Silent Pools was reenacted, himself in the originalrole. The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping thesweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few moments ago.
No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke.
Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was nothing to the fact which was now borne in on him—the fact that this new mentality was but a thin shell covering the old, as the thin shell of earth, with its flowers and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning hell which is the earth’s core.
The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid personality, and forty years of exuberant and self-willed life had at a stroke been checked and changed. The crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous passions had passed from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions, but the furnace was there beneath the flower garden just as it is in the case of the earth.
Captain Berselius was still alive, though suppressed and living in secrecy. At night, touched by the magic wand of sleep, he became awake, and became supreme master of the tenement in the cellars of which he was condemned to sleep by day.
So far from having been touched by death, Captain Berselius was now secure from death or change; a thing not to be reasoned with or altered—beyond human control—yet vividly alive as the fabled monster that inhabits the cellars of Glamis Castle.
Between the dual personalities of the man complete fission had taken place, a terrible accident of the sort condemning the cast-off personality to live in darkness beyond the voice of mind or amendment.
“Well,” said Adams, as he entered the room. “How are you to-day?”
“Oh, about the same, about the same. If I could sleep properly I would mend, but my sleep is broken.”
“I must give you something to alter that.”
Berselius laughed.
“Drugs?”
“Yes, drugs. We doctors cannot always command health, but we can command sleep. Do you feel yourself able to talk for a bit?”
“Oh, yes, I feel physically well. Sit down, you will find some cigars in that cabinet.”
Adams lit a cigar and took his seat in an armchair close to his companion. All differences of rank and wealth were sunk between these two men who had gone through so much together. On their return, when Berselius had desired Adams to remain as his medical attendant, he had delegated M. Pinchon as intermediary to deal with Adams as to the financial side of the question.
Adams received a large salary paid monthly in advance by the secretary. Berselius did not have any hand in the matter, thus the feeling of employer and employed was reduced to vanishing point and the position rendered more equal.
“You know,” said Adams, “I have always been gladto do anything I can for you, and I always shall be, but since I have come back to Paris I have been filled with unrest. You complain of sleeplessness—well, that is my disease.”
“Yes?”
“It’s that place over there; it has got into my blood. I declare to God that I am the last man in the world to sentimentalize, but that horror is killing me, and I must act—I must do something—even if I have to go into the middle of the Place de la Concorde and shout it aloud. I shall shout it aloud. I’m not made so that I can stand seeing a thing like that in silence.”
Berselius sat with his eyes fixed on the carpet; he seemed abstracted and scarcely listening. He knew perfectly well that Adams was acquainted with the affair at the Silent Pools, but the subject had never been mentioned between them, nor was it now.
“That missionary I met on the return home at Leopoldsville,” went on Adams, “he was a Baptist, a man, not a religion-machine. He gave me details from years of experience that turned my heart in me. With my own eyes I saw enough——”
Berselius held up his hand.
“Let us not speak of what we know,” said he. “The thing is there—has been there for years—can you destroy the past?”
“No; but one can improve the future.” Adams got up and paced the floor. “Now, now as I am talking to you, that villainy is going on; it is like knowing that a murder is slowly being committed in the next houseand that one has no power to interfere. When I look at the streets full of people amusing themselves; when I see thecaféscrammed, and the rich driving in their carriages; the churches filled with worshippers worshipping a God who serenely sits in heaven without stretching a hand to help His poor, benighted creatures—when I see all this and contrast it with what I have seen, I could worshipthat!”
He stopped, and pointed to the great gorilla shot years ago in German West Africa by Berselius. “That was a being at least sincere. Whatever brutalities he committed in his life, he did not talk sentiment and religion and humanitarianism as he pulled his victims to pieces, and he did not pull his victims to pieces for the sake of gold. He was an honest devil, a far higher thing than a dishonest man.”
Again Berselius held up his hand.
“What would you do?”
“Do? I’d break that infernal machine which calls itself a State, and I’d guillotine the ruffian that invented it. I cannot do that, but I can at least protest.”
Berselius, who had helped to make the machine, and who knew better than most men its strength, shook his head sadly.
“Do what you will,” said he. “If you need money my funds are at your disposal, but you cannot destroy the past.”
Adams, who knew nothing of Berselius’s dream-obsession, could not understand the full meaning of these words.
But he had received permission to act, and the promise of that financial support without which individual action would be of no avail.
He determined to act; he determined to spare neither Berselius’s money nor his own time.
But the determination of man is limited by circumstance, and circumstance was at that moment preparing and rehearsing the last act of the drama of Berselius.
CHAPTER XXXVIIBERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF
On the morning after Berselius’s conversation with Adams, Berselius left the Avenue Malakoff, taking his way to the Avenue des Champs Elysées on foot.
The change in the man was apparent even in his walk. In the old days he was rapid in his movements, erect of head, keen of eye. The weight of fifteen years seemed to have suddenly fallen on his shoulders, bowing them and slowing his step. He was in reality carrying the most terrible burden that a man can carry—himself.
A self that was dead, yet with which he had to live. A past which broke continually up through his dreams.
He was filled with profound unrest, irritation and revolt; everything connected with that other one, even the money he had made and the house he had built for himself and the pursuits he had followed, increased this irritation and revolt. He had already formed plans for taking a new house in Paris, but to-day, as he walked along the streets, he recognized that Paris itself was a house, every corner of which belonged to that other one’s past.
In the Avenue Champs Elysées, he hailed afiacreand drove to the house of his lawyer, M. Cambon, which was situated in the Rue d’Artiles.
Cambon had practically retired from his business, which was carried on now by his son. But for a few old and powerful clients, such as Berselius, he still acted personally.
He was at home, and Berselius was shown into a drawing room, furnished heavily after the heart of the prosperous Frenchbourgeois.
He had not to wait long for the appearance of the lawyer, a fat, pale-faced gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, tightly buttoned up in a frock-coat, the buttonhole of which was adorned with the red rosette of the Legion of Honour.
Cambon had known Berselius for years. The two men were friends, and even more, for Cambon was the depository of Berselius’s most confidential affairs.
“Well,” said the lawyer, “you have returned. I saw a notice of your return in theEcho de Paris, and indeed, this very day I had promised myself the pleasure of calling on you. And how is Madame Berselius?”
“She is at Trouville.”
“I had it in my mind that you proposed to remain away twelve months.”
“Yes, but our expedition came to an end.”
Berselius, in a few words, told how the camp had been broken up, without referring, however, to his accident; and the fat and placid Cambon listened, pleased as a child with the tale. He had never seen an elephant except at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. He would have run from a milch-cow. Terrible in the law courts, in life he was themildest of creatures, and the tale had all the attraction that the strong has for the weak and the ferocious for the mild.
But even as he listened, sitting there in his armchair, he was examining his visitor with minute attention, trying to discover some clue to the meaning of the change in him.
“And now,” said Berselius, when he had finished, “to business.”
He had several matters to consult the lawyer about, and the most important was the shifting of his money from the securities in which they were placed.
Cambon, who was a large holder of rubber industries, grew pale beneath his natural pallor when he discovered that Berselius was about to place his entire fortune elsewhere.
Instantly he put two and two together. Berselius’s quick return, his changed appearance, the fact that suddenly and at one sweep he was selling his stock. All these pointed to one fact—disaster.
The elephant story was all a lie, so resolved Cambon, and, no sooner had he bowed his visitor out, than he rushed to the telephone, rang up his broker, and ordered him to sell out his rubber stock at any price.
Berselius, when he left the lawyer’s house, drove to his club. The selling of his rubber industry shares had been prompted by no feeling of compunction; it was an act entirely dictated by the profound irritation he felt against the other one who had made his fortune out of those same rubber industries.
He wished to break every bond between himself and theinfernal entity that dominated him by night. Surely it was enough to be that other one at night, without being perpetually haunted by that other one’s traces by day.
In the Place de L’Opera, hisfiacrepaused in a crowd of vehicles. Berselius heard himself hailed. He turned his head. In a barouche drawn up beside his carriage, was seated a young and pretty woman. It was Sophia Melmotte, a flame from his past life, burning now for a space in the life of a Russian prince.
“Ma foi,” said Sophia, as her carriage pushed up till it was quite level with Berselius. “So you are back from—where was it you went to? And how are the tigers? Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you look. One would think you had swallowed a hearse and had not digested the trappings——”
To all of which Berselius bowed.
“Youare just the same as ever,” said he.
The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was something in Berselius’s tone that made the simple words an insult. Before she could reply, however, the block in the traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on Berselius bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a stranger with whom he had spoken for a moment, and whom he had never seen before.
At the club in the smoking room, where he went for an absinthe before luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very man who had presided at the banquet given to him on the day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who had been his friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt pleasure, was now obnoxious to him. And after a while theweird fact was borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him. Tirard was talking to the man who was dead—the other Berselius. The new rifle for the army, which filled Tirard’s conversation, would have been an interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to the new.
Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized that all the friends, pursuits, and interests that had filled his life till this, were useless to him and dead as the cast-off self that had once dominated his being. Not only useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He would have to re-create a world of interests for himself out of new media. He was living in a world where all the fruit and foliage and crops had been blighted by some wizard’s wand; he would have to re-plant it over anew, and at the present moment he did not know where to cast about him for a single seed.
Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person persisting in some disagreeable medicine, hoping to become accustomed to it, he continued his conversation with Tirard.
After luncheon, he sat down to a game of écarté in the card-room with an old acquaintance, but after half an hour’s play he left the table on the plea of indisposition and left the club, taking his way homeward on foot.
Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents which, in tragic lives, appear less incidents than occurrences prepared by Fate, as though she would say, “Look and deny me if you dare.”
Toward Berselius was approaching a victoria drawnby two magnificent horses, and in the victoria lolled a man. An old man with a gray beard, who lolled on the cushions of the carriage, and looked about him with the languid indifference of a king and the arrogance of a megalomaniac.
It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.
When Berselius’s eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in nameless debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to have been expiated on the scaffold, and whose life ought to have been cut short by the executioner of justice, many, many years ago.
It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other self, the self that haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, and in the light of day.
The terrible old man in the carriage passed on his way and Berselius on his.
When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was handing his hat to a servant, Maxine appeared at the door of the library. Her beauty, innocence, and sweetness formed a strange vision contrasted with that other vision he had seen near the Madeleine. Was it possible that God’s world could hold two such creatures, and that God’s air should give them breath? For a week or ten days after this,Berselius remained in his own suite of apartments without leaving the house.
It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that he was but the wraith of what he had been.
CHAPTER XXXVIIITHE REVOLT OF A SLAVE
The day after that on which Berselius had seen Leopold, Madame Berselius, moved by one of those fits of caprice common to women of her type, came back suddenly from Trouville.
She knew of her husband’s return, but she knew nothing of the injury or of the alteration that had come in him until Maxine, who met her at the station, hinted at the fact. Berselius was standing at the window of his private sitting room when Madame Berselius was announced.
He turned to greet her; even as he turned she perceived the change. This was not the man who had left her a few months ago, strong, confident, impassive; the man who had been her master and before whom she had shrunk like a slave. Intuition told her that the change was not the change wrought by sickness—Berselius was not ill, he was gone, leaving another man in his place. They conversed for some time on indifferent matters, and then Madame Berselius took her departure for her own apartments.
But she left the room of Berselius a changed woman, just as he had returned to it a changed man.
The slave in her had found her freedom. Utterly without the capacity for love and without honour, without conscience and with a vague superstition to serve for religion, Madame Berselius had, up to this, been held in her place by the fear of her husband. His will up to this had been her law; she had moved in the major affairs of life under his direction, and even in the minor affairs of life everything had to be surrendered at his word.
And now she hated him.
She had never hated him before, she had admired him; indeed, as far as her power of admiration went, his strength had appealed to her as only strength can appeal to a woman of her type; but now that his strength was gone hatred of him rose up in her heart, petty yet powerful, a dwarf passion that had been slumbering for years.
When the engine seizes the engineer in its wheels, when the slave gets power over his master, cruel things happen, and they were to happen in the case of Berselius.
Madame’s rooms were so far away from the rooms of her husband that they might have been living in different houses. There was none of the intimacy of married life between this couple; they met formally at meal times, and it was atdéjeuneron the morning after her return that she showed openly before Adams, Maxine, and the servants her contempt for the man who had once held her in subjection. Without a rude word, simply by her manner, her tone, and her indifference to him,she humbled to the dust the stricken man and proclaimed the full measure of his disaster.
As day followed day the dominance of the woman and the subjection of the man became more marked. Madame would, if the spirit took her, countermand her husband’s orders; once, with absolute rudeness, she, at table and before the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a guest, turned to ridicule a remark which Berselius had let escape. The flush that came to his cheek told Maxine that her father’s sensibilities were not dead—he was dominated.
Nothing could be stranger than this reduction of a man from greatness to insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free, wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her creature, an object of pity to his daughter and of derision to his servants.
Eight days after her return Madame Berselius, now free and her own mistress, left Paris for Vaux on a short visit to some friends, little dreaming of the momentous event that was to cause her return.
CHAPTER XXXIXMAXINE
On the night of the day upon which Berselius had paid his visit to M. Cambon, Adams, seated in the smoking room at a writing table before a broad sheet of white paper covered with words, suddenly took the paper, tore it up, and threw the pieces in a wastepaper-basket.
He had been trying to put in language the story of the Congo as it had been revealed to him.
It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dramatic poem: the great sunlit spaces of the elephant country watched over by the vultures, the eternal and illimitable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the ages; the river flooding to the sea, and the people to whom this place belonged, and the story of their misery and despair.
When he contrasted what he had written with what was in his mind, he recognized the hopelessness of his attempt. He had not the power to put on paper more than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew.
To represent that people under the heel of that Fate was a task for an Æschylus.
Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, there rose before his mind another picture he had seen that day. It was a large photograph of the Laocoon. He had seen it in Brentano’s window, and, now, with the eye of memory, he was looking at it again.
That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the ages, that epic in marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of God or pity; the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and as Adams gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest became alive in his mind, the snake-like rubber vine twined in coils, circling about and crushing a nation and its children, remote from help and from God, as Laocoon and his sons.
Ages have passed since the sculptor of that marble laid down his chisel and gazed at his completed work. Little dreamt he that thousands of years later it would stand as a parable, representing civilization in the form of the python which he had carved with such loathing yet such loving care.
Adams, in the grasp of this startling thought, was recalled from reverie by a sound behind him.
Someone had entered the room. It was Maxine Berselius.
They had seen very little of each other since his return. Adams, indeed, had purposely avoided her as much as it is possible for one person to avoid another when both are dwelling in the same house.
The pride of manhood warned him against this woman who was rich and the daughter of the man from whom he received a salary.
Maxine knew nothing of the pride of manhood; she only knew that he avoided her.
She was dressed entirely in white with a row of pearls for her only ornament. She had just returned from some social function, and Adams as he rose to meet her noticed that she had closed the door.
“Dr. Adams,” said the girl, “forgive me for disturbing you at this hour. For days I have wished to speak to you about my father. I have put it off, but I feel I must speak—what has happened to him?”
She took a seat in an armchair, and Adams stood before her with his back to the mantelpiece and his hands behind him.
The big man did not answer for a moment. He stood there like a statue, looking at his questioner gravely and contemplatively, as a physician looks at a patient whose case is not quite clear.
Then he said, “You notice a change in your father?”
“No,” said Maxine, “it is more than a change. He is quite different—he is another man.”
“When we were hunting out there,” said Adams, “Captain Berselius had an accident. In trying to rescue a servant he was caught by an elephant and flung some distance; he hurt his head, and when he recovered consciousness his memory was quite gone. It slowly returned——” He paused, for it was impossible to give details, then he went on—“I noticed, myself, as the memorywas returning, that he seemed changed; when he had fully recovered his memory, the fact was obvious. He was, as you say, quite different—in fact, just as you see him now.”
“But can an injury change a person like that?”
“Yes; an injury to the head can change a person completely.”
Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of her father; she had never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.
The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.
“And this happened to him,” said she, “when he was trying to save a servant’s life?”
“Ah,” said Adams, “if you could have seen it, you would have called it something even higher than that—it was a sublime act.”
He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with additions.
“I myself was paralyzed—I could only cling to the tree and watch. The fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind—I can put it no other way—like a wind that stripped one’s mind of everything but just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as that—well,hedid not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of the man who was lying drugged with hemp,and he found courage enough in his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.
“Without heart or soul——” Adams paused. There was something about Maxine Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in life—some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine’s pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light of other people’s lamps.
The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus’s face a story that he never deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of niggers and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these people would have told Maxine of their tears.
This instinct for the truth of things made her a reader of people. Adams had interested her at first sight, because she found him difficult to read. She had nevermet a man like him before; he belonged to a different race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the woman in her; they were physical affinities. She had told him this in a hundred ways half unconsciously and without speech before they parted at Marseilles, but the mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She did not know his mind, its stature or its bent, and until that knowledge came to her she could not love him.
As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that pronouncement on the spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool were lying just as he had seen them last. Away to the east the burst elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where the leopards had left him.
Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred into speech by that thought he went on:
“A cannibal—a creature worse than a tiger—that was the being for whom your father risked his life.”
“A cannibal?” said Maxine, opening her eyes wide.
“Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed to act as our guide.”
“A soldier—but what Government employs cannibals as soldiers?”
“Oh,” said Adams, “they call them soldiers, that is just a name. Slave drivers is the real name, but the Government that employs them does not use the word slave—oh, no, everyone would be shocked—scoundrels!”
He spoke the word with suddenly flashing eyes, uplifted head, and a face as stern the face of Themis. He seemed for a moment fronting some invisible foe, then, smothering his wrath, he went on:
“I lose control of myself when I think of what I have seen—the suffering, the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the bones of murdered people—people whom I had seen walking about alive—lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little child I had talked to and played with——”
He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel. He had turned his back on Maxine, and volumes could not have said more than what was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and turning away.
The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the mantelpiece and faced her again. There was no trace of emotion on his face, but the trace of a struggle with it. Maxine’s eyes were filled with tears.
“I am sorry,” said he, “that I should have dragged this subject before you at all. Why should I torment your heart as well as my own?”
She did not reply for a moment. She was tracing the vague pattern of the carpet with her eyes, her chin resting on her hand, and the light from above made a haloof the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning charm.
Then she said, speaking slowly, “I am not sorry. Surely if such things are, they ought to be known. Why should I turn away my face from suffering? I have never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as a girl can, but what you tell me is beyond what I have ever heard of, or read of, or dreamed. Tell me more, give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you, I cannot yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. I am like Thomas; I must put my fingers in the wounds.”
“Are you brave enough to look at material evidence?” asked Adams.
“Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others if not my own——”
He left the room and in a few minutes later returned with a parcel. He took from it the skull he had brought with him through everything to civilization.
Maxine’s eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but she did not turn pale, and she looked steadfastly at it as Adams turned it in his hands and showed her by theforamen magnumthe hacks in the bone caused by the knife.
She put out her finger and touched them, then she said, “I believe.”
Adams put the skull on the table; curious and small and ferocious and repellent it looked. One would never have imagined the black face, the grin, and the rolling eyes of the creature to whom it had once belonged.One thing only about it touched the heart with sadness—its size.
“It is a child’s,” said Maxine.
“Yes; the child I told you of—all that remains of it.”
He was about to wrap the thing up again when the girl interposed.
“Let it lie there whilst you tell me; it will bring things nearer to me. I am not afraid of it—poor, poor creature. Tell me all you know—tell me the worst. I am not a young lady for the moment, please, just a person listening.”
He took his seat in an armchair opposite to her, and resting his elbows on his knees, talking just as if he were talking to a man, found the words he could not find when, pen in hand, half an hour ago, he had tried to express himself in writing.
He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the wretched creatures penned like animals eating their miserable food; he told of M’Bassa and the Hostage House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how all over that vast country these places were dotted, not by the hundred but by the thousand; he told of the misery of the men who were driven into the dismal forests, slaves of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that would never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name in Europe and not a power; he told the awful fact that murder there was used every day as an agricultural implement, that people were operated upon, and suffered amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and that their sex and age—those two last appeals of Nature to brutality—had no voice; he told the whole bitter taleof tears and blood, but he could not tell her all, for she was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before a man of the crimes against Nature, the crimes against men, against women, and against children, that even if the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will leave Belgium’s name in the world’s history more detestable than the names of the unspeakable cities sunk in the Dead Sea.
Maxine listened, entranced, swayed between the terror of the tale and the power of the man who was telling it.
Ah! if he could have spoken to Europe as he spoke to her; if he could have made Europe see as he made her see, what a whirlwind of indignation would have arisen; but he could not.
It was the magnet of her sympathy that marshalled the facts, clad them in burning language, and led them forth in battalions that stormed her mind and made her believe what seemed unbelievable. Without that sympathy, his words would have been cold and lifeless statements bearing little conviction.
When he had finished, she did that which a woman never does unless moved by the very highest excitement. She rose up and paced the floor thrice. Without speaking, she walked the length of the room, then she turned to Adams.
“But this must cease.”
“This shall cease,” said he, “if I can only make myself heard. To-day—to-night—just before you came in, I was trying to put the thing on paper—trying to put down what I have seen with my own eyes, and heardwith my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write seems nothing, nothing beside what I have seen. The mere statement that so many were killed, so many were tortured, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing is too big for me. God made it, I suppose; but I wish to God I had never seen it.”
Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair. She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was listening, but she was thinking as well.
“You cannot do everything yourself,” said she, at last. “You must get others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, assist you. Will you go to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him to-morrow afternoon.”
“Who is Monsieur Pugin?”
This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of “Absolution” and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin. “Absolution,” that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders with the other.
That, however, was not Pugin’s fault; he had donehis best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.
“I will go and see him,” said Adams, when the girl had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. “A man like that could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have passed from my mind.”
“To mine,” she replied. Then, with charmingnaïveté, she held out both hands to him.
“Good night.”
As he held the door open, and as she passed out, he realized that, during the last few months, his faith in the goodness of God—the old simple faith of his childhood—had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish hands from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, it had been returned.
It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put it back.
Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned on the electric light in her sitting room, and sat down at once to write to the friend who was a friend of Pugin’s.
This friend was Sabatier.
She had studied art under him, and between artist and pupil lay that mysterious bond which unites craftsmen. For Maxine was great in knowledge and power, and above all in that instinct without which an artistis at best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion of mechanical force.
As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy burning in her heart and moving to eloquence her pen, was a thing born not from the sufferings of an afflicted people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind begotten by the man she had just left, and whom, that night, she had learned to love.
CHAPTER XLPUGIN
Pugin lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He had begun life quite low down in the Parisian world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, a jew book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, whose money has been dispersed, whose name has been forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth but the few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin.
Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years before he obtained recognition. The garret and starvation act had been unduly prolonged in the case of this genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in thatcour des Miracleswhere the Bohemians camp, he had found, like a crystal vase, his exquisite style, preserved it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and carried it safely at last to the hands of Fame.
He was very rich now, very powerful, and very fortunate. Charitable, too, and ever ready to assist a fellow-worker in straitened circumstances, and to-day as he sat reading in the cool recesses of his library, and listening to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the warm June air through the open window, he felt atpeace with all the world and in a mood to do justice to his bitterest enemy.
The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, letting pass only a diffused and honey-coloured twilight; a great bowl of roses filled the room with the simple and deep poetry of summer, the story of the hedges and the fields, of orchards shot through with the voices of birds, of cattle knee-deep in cool water where the dragon-flies keep up their eternal dance to the flute-like ripple of the river amidst the reeds.
Pugin, his book upon his knees, was enjoying these pictures of summer woven by perfume, when a servant entered and handed him Adams’s card and the letter of introduction written by Sabatier.
He ordered the visitor to be shown in. Adams, when he entered, found himself before a small man with a big head; an ugly little man, with a look of kindness and a very gracious and charming manner.
To Pugin Adams seemed a giant. A giant bronzed by unknown suns, talking French indifferently well, and with a foreign accent. An interesting person, indeed, but a being quite beyond his range of knowledge.
Pugin, in physical matters, was timid as a rabbit. He had never travelled farther than Trouville or Ostend, and when he indicated a chair, and when these two sat down to talk to each other, the mastiff-man felt instinctively the presence of the rabbit-man, and was at a loss how to begin.
Not for long, though. Bluffly, and with little grace enough, but with earnestness and a cunning one wouldnever have suspected, he told of Maxine’s great admiration for the author’s work, and how she had suggested the enlistment of the said author in the crusade against crime which he, Adams, was endeavouring to raise.
Pugin listened, making little bows, sniffing the lettuce which the mastiff-man had so cunningly placed before his nose.
Then honestly and plainly and well, Adams told his tale, and the rabbit held up its hands in horror at the black doings disclosed to it. But it was horror divorced from sentiment. Pugin felt almost as great a revulsion toward the negroes upon whom these things were done as toward the doers.
He could not see the vast drama in its true proportions and its poetical setting of forest, plain, and sky. The outlandish names revolted him; he could not see Yandjali and its heat-stricken palms or M’Bassa burning in the sun.
But he listened politely and it was this that chilled the heart of the story-teller who instinctively felt that though he had shocked his hearer, he had not aroused that high spirit of revolt against injustice which converts a man into a living trumpet, a living axe, or a living sword.
Pugin would have been a great force could his sentiment have been awakened; but he could not see palm trees.
“What would you have? You cannot grow baobabs on the Boulevards.”
“Ma foi!” said he, “it is terrible what you tell me, but what are we to do?”
“I thought you might help,” said Adams.
“I? With all the power possible and goodwill. It is evident to me that should you wish for success in this matter, you should found a society.”
“Yes?”
“There is nothing done in a public way without coöperation. You must found a society; you may use my name. I will even let you put it on the committee list. I will also subscribe.”
Now Pugin was on the committee lists of half a dozen charitable and humanitarian concerns. His secretary had them all down in a book; but Pugin himself, lost in his art and the work of his life, had forgotten their very names. So would it be with this.
“Thanks,” said the visitor.
Pugin would lend his purse to the cause, and his name, but he would not lend his pen—simply because he could not. To every literary man there are dead subjects; this question was dead to the author of “Absolution”—as uninspiring as cold mutton.
“Thanks,” said Adams, and rose to take his leave. His rough-hewn mind understood with marvellous perspicuity Pugin’s position.
“And one moment,” cried the little man, after he had bidden his visitor good-bye and the latter was leaving the room. “One moment; why did I not think of it before? You might go and see Ferminard.”
He ran to a desk in the corner of the room, took a visiting card and scribbled Ferminard’s address upon it, explaining as he wrote that Ferminard was the deputy for —— in Provence; a Socialist it is true, but a terribleman when roused; that the very name of injustice was sufficient to bring this lion from his den.
“Tell him Pugin said so,” cried he, following his visitor this time out on the landing and patting him on the shoulder in a fatherly manner, “and you will find him in the Rue Auber, No. 14; it is all on the card; and convey my kind regards to Mademoiselle ——, that charming lady to whose appreciation of my poor work I owe the pleasure of your visit.”
“Nice little man,” said Adams to himself as he walked down the Boulevard Haussmann.
He found Ferminard at home, in an apartment smelling of garlic and the south. Ferminard, a tall, black-bearded creature, with a glittering eye; a brigand from the Rhone Valley who had flung himself into the politics of his country as a torpedo flings itself into the sea, greeted Adams with effusion, when he read Pugin’s card; gave him cigarettes, and shut the open window in honour of his guest.
He worked himself into a state of indignation over Adams’s story; as a matter of fact he knew the whole thing well; but he was too polite to discount his visitor’s grievance, besides it gave him an opportunity to declaim—and of course the fact that a king was at the bottom of it all, added keenness to the arrows of his invective.
As Adams listened, delighted to have awakened such a trumpet; as he listened to Ferminard thundering against all that over there, speaking as though he were addressing the Chambre, and as though he had knownAfrica intimately from his childhood, he noticed gradually and with alarm that the topic was changing; just a moment ago it was Africa and its luckless niggers; the Provençal imagination picturing them in glowing colours, and the Provençal tongue rolling off their disabilities and woes. One would have fancied from the fervour of the man that is was Ferminard who had just returned from the Congo, not Adams.
Well, a moment after, and Africa had quite fallen out of the discussion. As a child lets a Noah’s Ark fall from its hands—elephants, zebras and all on to the floor whilst he grasps for a new toy—so Ferminard let Africa tumble whilst he grasped for Socialism, found it and swung it like a rattle, and Socialism went the way of Africa as he seized at last that darling toy—himself. The speech, in its relationship to the subject in point, was the intellectual counterpart of the cry of those mechanical pigs which the street venders blow up, and which, standing on a board, scream in the face of Oxford Street, loudly at first, and then, as the figure collapses, weakening in voice to the buzzing of a fly.
Ferminard was, in fact, a great child with a good heart, a Provençal imagination, a power of oratory, a quickness in seizing upon little things and making them seem great, coupled with a rather obscure understanding as to the relative value of mountains and mole-hills. A noise maker of a first-class description, but useless for any serious work.Feu de bruitwas his motto, and he lived up to it.
It is only when you try to enlist men on your sidein some great and holy cause, that you come to some knowledge of the general man’s weakness and want of holiness—your own included. Adams, during the fortnight that followed his visit to Pugin, had this fact borne in on him. All the thinking minds of the centre of civilization were so busy thinking thoughts of their own making, that it was impossible to attract their attention for more than a moment; from Bostoc the dramatist to Bastiche the anarchist, each individual was turning his own crank diligently, and not to be disturbed, even by Papeete’s skull.
With such a thing in one’s hand, picked up like some horrible talisman which, if not buried, will eventually cast its spell upon human thought and the future of the world; with such a thing in one’s hand, surely the Church would present itself to the mind as a court of appeal.
But as the Roman Catholic Church had actually put its broad back against the door of the torture chamber, and was, in fact, holding it tight shut whilst Papeete’s head was being hacked from his body, it would scarcely be logical to bring out the victim’s skull hoping for redress. Other denominations being of such little power in France, Adams determined to leave the attempt to rouse them till he reached England, whither he determined to go as soon as Berselius’s health would permit him.
One evening, a fortnight after his visit to Pugin, on his return to the Avenue Malakoff, Maxine met him in the hall.
He saw at once from her face that something had happened.
Berselius was worse; that afternoon he had suddenly developed acute neuralgia of the right side of the head, and this had been followed almost immediately by twitching and numbness of the left arm. Thénard had been summoned and he had diagnosed pressure on the brain, or, at least, irritation from depressed bone, due to the accident.
He declared himself for operation, and he had gone now to make arrangements for nurses and assistants.
“He will operate this evening,” said Maxine.
“And Madame Berselius?”
“I have telegraphed for her.”