The Pools of Silence Part 6

Then the swell of the Gulf of Lyons took _La Joconde_ as a nurse takes an infant and rocks it on her knee, and France and civilization were slowly wrapped from sight under the veils of distance.

PART TWO

CHAPTER VI

MATADI

It was evening. _La Joconde_, Berselius's yacht, lay moored at the wharf of Matadi; warpling against the starboard plates, whimpering, wimpling, here smooth as gla.s.s, here eddied and frosted, a sea of golden light, a gliding mirror, went the Congo.

A faint, faint haze dulled the palms away on the other side; from the wharf, where ships were loading up with rubber, ivory, palm-oil, and bales of gum copal, the roar and rattle of steam-winches went across the water, far away across the glittering water, where the red flamingoes were flying, to that other sh.o.r.e where the palm trees showed their fringe of hot and hazy green.

The impression of heat which green, the coolest of all colours, can produce, damp heat, heart-weakening heat, that is the master impression produced by the Congo on the mind of man. All the other impressions are--to paraphrase Thenard--embroideries on this.

Yet how many other impressions there are! The Congo is Africa in a frank mood. Africa, laying her hand on her heart and speaking, or rather, whispering the truth.

This great river flooding from Stanley Pool and far away beyond, draws with it, like a moving dream, the pictures of the roaring rapids and the silent pools, the swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past Matadi--and wallowed in it? Its faint perfume hints at that.

On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated, and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real base of the expedition, leaving _La Joconde_ behind at Matadi.

The yacht would return to France.

"What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships," said Adams, turning in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. "What are the exports here?"

"Gum copal--nuts--rubber--tusks--everything you can get out of there,"

answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.

Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of Berselius's hand, "over there"; little did he dream of what those words held in their magic.

Then Berselius went below.

The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and tangling the trees.

Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She had come to Ma.r.s.eilles to see them off, and----

Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.

Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich--so rich that the contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman's money or a.s.sistance.

He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social temple by walking between the pillars of the portico, or smashing an entrance way through the wall with his fist.

He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male creation in Nature.

Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as he was by the trammels of civilization, he contented himself with imagining her in that position.

It is quite possible that no other woman would ever inspire the same pa.s.sion in him. He knew this, yet he did not grumble; for he was practical, and his practical nature had a part in his wildest dreams.

Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-sc.r.a.pers built by the Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest dreams of architecture. Yet they don't fall down; they serve their purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom practical men.

As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the moonlit river, Maxine gave place in his mind to her father.

Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavourable light. Up to this he had been almost companionable.

Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck together, discussed all sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always so a.s.sured, so impa.s.sively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this overpowering personality weighed upon him so much that he would leave the saloon and pace the deck so as to become himself again.

Next morning they left by rail for Leopoldville, where they found waiting for them the _Leopold_, a shallow-draught steamer of some two hundred tons.

CHAPTER VII

YANDJALI

The _Leopold_ was officered entirely by Belgians, and it would have been almost impossible to find a pleasanter set of men. Tilkins, the captain, especially, won Adams's regard. He was a huge man, with a wife and family in Antwerp, and he was eternally d.a.m.ning the Congo and wishing himself back in Antwerp.

They transhipped to a smaller boat, the _Couronne_, and one morning shortly after breakfast three strokes on the steamer bell announced their approach to Yandjali.

Imagine a rough landing-stage, a handful of houses, mostly mud-built, the funereal heat-green of palm and banana, a flood of tropical sunshine lighting the little wharf, crammed with bales of merchandise.

Such was Yandjali, and beyond Yandjali lay the forest, and in front of Yandjali flowed the river, and years ago _boom-boom_ down the river's shining surface, from away up there where the great palms gave place to reeds and water-gra.s.s, you might have heard the sound of the hippopotami bellowing to the sun, a deep organ note, unlike the sound emitted by any other creature on earth. You do not hear it now. The great brutes have long ago been driven away by man.

On the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner, Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.

Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to the District Commissioner's house, a frame building surrounded by palm trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.

The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its ma.s.sacre, is not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces ca.s.sava. The Congo State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District Commissioner, or _Chef de Poste_, in each district draws up a schedule of what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much ca.s.sava, so many tusks, etc.

Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a good-tempered looking man, with that strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is on the confines of civilization.

Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden wilderness, you will find a different type of man; more alert and nervy, a man who never smiles, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. A _decla.s.se_. He is the man who really drives the Congo machine, the last wheel in the engine, but the most important; the man whose deeds are not to be written.

Verhaeren's living room in the frame house was furnished with steamer deck chairs, a table and some shelves. Pinned to the wall and curling up at the corners was a page torn from _La Gaudriole_, the picture of a girl in tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices, and those eternal "official letters," with which the Congo Government deluges its employees, and whose everlasting purport is "Get more ivory, get more rubber, get more copal."

Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a bottle of Vanderhum, and the three men smoked and talked. He had acted as Berselius's agent for the expedition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius's intention to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the elephant country. They talked of the expedition, but Verhaeren showed little knowledge of the work and no enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo have no feeling for sport. They never hunt the game at their doors, except for food.

When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led the way out for Berselius to inspect his arrangements.

The porters were called up. There were _forty_ of them, and Adams thought that he had never before seen such a collection of depressed looking individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in their faces, their movements and their att.i.tude, that told a tale of spirits broken to servitude by terror.

The four gun-bearers and the headman were very different. The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking n.i.g.g.e.r, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Felix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the "soldiers" of the state by special leave from headquarters.

Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing. "Chop boxes," such as are used on the east coast, contained stores; two big tents, a couple of "Roorkee" chairs, folding-beds and tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.