With Edged Tools Part 28

"Children gone to bed?" he asked anxiously.

She paused in her slow, deft arrangement of the little table.

"Yes," she answered.

He nodded as if the news were eminently satisfactory. "Nestorius," he said, adhering to Meredith's pleasantry, "is the jolliest little chap I have met for a long time."

"Yes," she answered softly. "Yes--but listen!"

He raised his head, listening as she did--both looking down the river into the gathering darkness.

"I hear the sound of paddles," she said. "And you?"

"Not yet. My ears are not so sharp as yours."

"I am accustomed to it," the woman said, with some emotion in her voice which he did not understand then. "I am always listening."

Oscard seemed to be struck with this description of herself. It was so very apt--so comprehensive. The woman's att.i.tude before the world was the att.i.tude of the listener for some distant sound.

She poured out his coffee, setting the cup at his elbow. "Now you will hear," she said, standing upright with that untrammelled dignity of carriage which is found wherever African blood is in the veins. "They have just come round Broken Tree Bend. There are two boats."

He listened, and after a moment heard the regular glug-glug of the paddles stealing over the waters of the still tropic river, covering a wonderful distance.

"Yes," he said, "I hear. Mr. Meredith said he would be back to-night."

She gave a strange, little low laugh--almost the laugh of a happy woman.

"He is like that, Mr. Meredith," she said; "what he says he does"--in the pretty English of one who has learnt Spanish first.

"Yes, Marie--he is like that."

She turned, in her strangely subdued way, and went into the house to prepare some supper for the new-comers.

It was not long before the sound of the paddles was quite distinct, and then--probably on turning a corner of the river and coming in sight of the lights of Msala--Jack Meredith's cheery shout came floating through the night. Oscard took his pipe from his lips and sent back an answer that echoed against the trees across the river. He walked down to the water's edge, where he was presently joined by Joseph with a lantern.

The two boats came on to the sloping sh.o.r.e with a grating sound, and by the light of the waving lantern Oscard saw Durnovo and Jack land from the same boat.

The three men walked up to the house together. Marie was at the door, and bowed her head gravely in answer to Jack's salutation. Durnovo nodded curtly and said nothing.

In the sitting-room, by the light of the paraffin lamp, the two Englishmen exchanged a long questioning glance, quite different from the quick interrogation of a woman's eyes. There was a smile on Jack Meredith's face.

"All ready to start to-morrow?" he inquired.

"Yes," replied Oscard.

And that was all they could say. Durnovo never left them alone together that night. He watched their faces with keen, suspicious eyes. Behind the moustache his lips were pursed up in restless anxiety. But he saw nothing--learnt nothing. These two men were inscrutable.

At eleven o'clock the next morning the Simiacine seekers left their first unhappy camp at Msala. They had tasted of misfortune at the very beginning, but after the first reverse they returned to their work with that dogged determination which is a better spirit than the wild enthusiasm of departure, where friends shout and flags wave, and an artificial hopefulness throws in its jarring note.

They had left behind them with the artifice of civilisation that subtle handicap of a woman's presence; and the little flotilla of canoes that set sail from the terrace at Msala one morning in November, not so many years ago, was essentially masculine in its bearing. The four white men--quiet, self-contained, and intrepid--seemed to work together with a perfect unity, a oneness of thought and action which really lay in the brain of one of them. No man can define a true leader; for one is too autocratic and the next too easily led; one is too quick-tempered, another too reserved. It would almost seem that the ideal leader is that man who knows how to extract from the brains of his subordinates all that is best and strongest therein--who knows how to suppress his own individuality, and merge it for the time being into that of his fellow-worker--whose influence is from within and not from without.

The most successful Presidents of Republics have been those who are, or pretend to be, nonent.i.ties, content to be mere pegs, standing still and lifeless, for things to be hung upon. Jack Meredith was, or pretended to be, this. He never a.s.sumed the airs of a leader. He never was a leader.

He merely smoothed things over, suggested here, laughed there, and seemed to stand by, indifferent all the while.

In less than a week they left the river, hauling their canoes up on the bank, and hiding them in the tangle of the virgin underwood. A depot of provisions, likewise hidden, was duly made, and the long, weary march began.

The daily routine of this need not be followed, for there were weeks of long monotony, varied only by a new difficulty, a fresh danger, or a deplorable accident. Twice the whole company had to lay aside the baggage and a.s.sume arms, when Guy Oscard proved himself to be a cool and daring leader. Not twice, but two hundred times, the ring of Joseph's unerring rifle sent some naked savage crawling into the brake to die, with a sudden wonder in his half-awakened brain. They could not afford to be merciful; their only safeguard was to pa.s.s through this country, leaving a track of blood and fire and dread behind them.

This, however, is no record of travel in Central Africa. There are many such to be had at any circulating library, written by abler and more fantastic pens. Some of us who have wandered in the darkest continent have looked in vain for things seen by former travellers--things which, as the saying is, are neither here nor there. Indeed, there is not much to see in a vast, boundless forest with little life and no variety--nothing but a deadly monotony of twilit tangle. There is nothing new under the sun--even immediately under it in Central Africa.

The only novelty is the human heart--Central Man. That is never stale, and there are depths still unexplored, heights still unattained, warm rivers of love, cold streams of hatred, and vast plains where strange motives grow. These are our business.

We have not to deal so much with the finding of the Simiacine as with the finders, and of these the chief at this time was Jack Meredith. It seemed quite natural that one duty after another should devolve upon him, and he invariably had time to do them all, and leisure to comment pleasantly upon it. But his chief care was Victor Durnovo.

As soon as they entered the forest, two hundred miles above Msala, the half-breed was a changed man. The strange restlessness a.s.serted itself again--the man was nervous, eager, sincere. His whole being was given up to this search; his whole heart and soul were enveloped in it. At first he worked steadily, like a mariner treading his way through known waters; but gradually his composure left him, and he became incapable of doing other work.

Jack Meredith was at his side always. By day he walked near him as he piloted the column through the trackless forest. At night he slept in the same tent, stretched across the doorway. Despite the enormous fatigue, he slept the light sleep of the townsman, and often he was awakened by Durnovo talking aloud, groaning, tossing on his narrow bed.

When they had been on the march for two months--piloted with marvellous instinct by Durnovo--Meredith made one or two changes in the organisation. The caravan naturally moved slowly, owing to the enormous amount of baggage to be carried, and this delay seemed to irritate Victor Durnovo to such an extent that at last it was obvious that the man would go mad unless this enormous tension could be relieved.

"For G.o.d's sake," he would shout, "hurry those men on! We haven't done ten miles to-day. Another man down--d.a.m.n him!"

And more than once he had to be dragged forcibly away from the fallen porter, whom he battered with both fists. Had he had his will, he would have allowed no time for meals, and only a few hours' halt for rest.

Guy Oscard did not understand it. His denser nerves were incapable of comprehending the state of irritation and unreasoning restlessness into which the climate and excitement had brought Durnovo. But Meredith, in his finer organisation, understood the case better. He it was who soothingly explained the necessity for giving the men a longer rest.

He alone could persuade Durnovo to lie down at night and cease his perpetual calculations. The man's hands were so unsteady that he could hardly take the sights necessary to determine their position in this sea-like waste. And to Jack alone did Victor Durnovo ever approach the precincts of mutual confidence.

"I can't help it, Meredith," he said one day, with a scared look, after a particularly violent outburst of temper. "I don't know what it is. I sometimes think I am going mad."

And soon after that the change was made.

An advance column, commanded by Meredith and Durnovo, was selected to push on to the Plateau, while Oscard and Joseph followed more leisurely with the baggage and the slower travellers.

One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range--unmarked on any map, unnamed by any geographer--to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau.

It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked, untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across a country untrodden by a white man's foot; it was a wild rush in a straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the party--Jack Meredith--had to choose between madness and rest. He knew enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief to this tension was success.

Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said, in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork, then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and death could only follow.

To save his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative, billow-like inequalities--the deposit of a glacial age--Durnovo refused to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy tinned meat as they went along, the four men--three blacks and one white--followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.

"We're getting to the mountains--we're getting to the mountains! We shall be there to-night! Think of that, Meredith--to-night!" he kept repeating with a sickening monotony. And all the while he stumbled on.

The perspiration ran down his face in one continuous stream; at times he paused to wipe it from his eyes with the back of his hands, and as these were torn and bleeding, there were smears of blood across his cheeks.

The night fell; the moon rose, red and glorious, and the beasts of this untrodden forest paused in their search for meat to watch with wondering, fearless eyes that strange, unknown animal--man.

It was Durnovo who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees ahead. He gave a m.u.f.fled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale.

Durnovo reached the summit first. A faint, pleasant odour was wafted into their faces. They stood on the edge of a vast table-land melting away in the yellow moonlight. Studded all over, like sheep in a meadow, were a number of little bushes, and no other vegetation.

Victor Durnovo stooped over one of these. He buried his face among the leaves of it, and suddenly he toppled over.