The Pools of Silence Part 31

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 x.x.xIV

THE SUBSt.i.tUTE

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 a.s.sistance 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs, 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 every _Chef de Poste_ in 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 schoolmaster dismissed 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 G.o.d. 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, which in 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 appet.i.te 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 Poste_ Meeus 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'Ba.s.sa on the morrow.

That evening he called Van Laer into the office.

"_Chef de Poste_ Meeus of Fort M'Ba.s.sa 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 a _Chef de Poste_ dies suddenly and even a few days elapse before he is replaced. The people 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'Ba.s.sa left vacant by the death of _Chef de Poste_ Andreas 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 pa.s.sed through and the land that lay behind it.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

PARIS

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.