The Pools of Silence Part 23

Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of Swedish descent, his mother of French.

Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky man. In other words, he had that keenness of intellect which enables the possessor to seize opportunities and to foresee events.

This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin's Palace and to the Temple of Power. To know what will appreciate in value and what will depreciate, that is the art of success in life, and that was the art which made Armand Berselius a millionaire.

Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of money. His mother died when he was quite young. He had neither brothers nor sisters; his father, a chilly-hearted sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he was some other man's son.

The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of the man who is always fearful of being swindled. Who cannot trust, cannot be trusted.

Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the boy, with great power for love in his heart, conceived a hatred for the man who misused him that was h.e.l.lish in intensity.

But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will and restraint so remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He bound his hate with iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed not a sign of pain or pa.s.sion; when the old man committed that last outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it devoured it and grew.

The spring was poisoned at its source.

That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.

And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a s.p.a.cious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and fed by an unfailing flood of energy.

The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter d.a.m.nation of his son, kept him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.

The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the devil than any other young man of his time. He pa.s.sed through the college of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and when he had obtained his captaincy.

He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.

He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the Continent of Europe. Politicians and financiers under the guise of Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of intellect, who work their political and financial works quite un.o.btrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.

Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with periodic returns to the wilderness.

With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern; that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.

To keep up a large force of European police to make the blacks work on European terms, was out of the question. The expense would run away with half the profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all, other nations would say, "What are you doing with that huge army of men?" The word "slavery" had to be eliminated from the proceedings, else the conscience of Europe would be touched. He foresaw this, and he was lost in admiration at the native police idea. The stroke of genius that collected all the Felixes of the Congo basin into an army of darkness, and collected all the weak and defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his own heart.

Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became a member. He was not invited to the b.l.o.o.d.y banquet--he invited himself.

He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed; later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold's idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.

He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole infernal machinery then and there. America had not yet, hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill, which she handed to Leopold on the 22d of April, 1884. Germany had not been roped in. England and France were still aloof, and Berselius, arriving at the psychological moment, did not mince matters.

The result was two million pounds to his credit during the next ten years.

So much for Berselius and his past.

An hour after dawn next day they started. The morning was windless, warm, and silent, and the sun shining broad on the land cast their shadows before them as they went, the porters with their loads piled on their heads, Adams carrying the tent-pole and tent, Berselius leading.

He had recovered from his weakness of the night before. He had almost recovered his strength, and he felt that newness of being which the convalescent feels--that feeling of new birth into the old world which pays one, almost, for the pains of the past sickness.

Never since his boyhood had Berselius felt that keen pleasure in the sun and the blue sky and the gra.s.s under his feet; but it called up no memories of boyhood, for the mist was still there, hiding boyhood and manhood and _everything_ up to the skyline.

But the mist did not frighten him now. He had found a means of dispelling it; the photographic plates were all there unbroken, waiting only to be collected and put together, and he felt instinctively that after a time, when he had collected a certain number, the brain would gain strength, and all at once the mist would vanish for ever, and he would be himself again.

Three hours after the start they pa.s.sed a broken-down tree.

Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had pa.s.sed on the hunt, shortly after turning from their path to follow the herd of elephants.

Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon they would come to the crucial point--the spot where they had turned at right angles to follow the elephants.

Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he get confused and go on in a straight line?

The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.

He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all the country to the north.

"We came from there," he said, indicating the north. "We struck the elephant spoor just here, and turned due west."

"How on earth do you know?" asked Adams. "I can't see any indication, and for the life of me I couldn't tell where we turned or whether we came from there," indicating the north, "or there," pointing to the south. "How do you know?"

"How do I know?" replied Berselius. "Why, this place and everything we reach and pa.s.s is as vivid to me as if I had pa.s.sed it only two minutes ago. _It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me._ It is that which I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born--every memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were G.o.ds, they would see as I see."

A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it triumphantly.

Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come across.

This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for the past comes to a man from a hundred close points--a thousand familiar things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have been as lost as Adams.

They wheeled to the north, following in their leader's footsteps.

That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool near which Berselius had shot the rhinos.

Adams, to make sure, walked away to where the great bull had fought the cow before being laid low by the rifle of the hunter.

The bones were there, picked clean and bleached, exemplifying the eternal hunger of the desert, which is one of the most horrible facts in life.

These two great brutes had been left nearly whole a few days ago; tons of flesh had vanished like snow in sunshine, mist in morning.

But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was not thinking of that; the marvel of their return filled his mind as he looked from the skeletons to where, against the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from the camp fire which the porters had lighted.

Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible, a bird was sailing along, sliding on the wind without a motion of the wings. It pa.s.sed from sight and left the sky stainless, and the land lay around silent with the tremendous silence of evening, and lifeless as the bones bleaching at his feet.

CHAPTER XXVII

I AM THE FOREST

The day after the next, two hours before noon, they pa.s.sed an object which Adams remembered well.