The Pools of Silence Part 20

"You know your name?"

"Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. My mind is clear, my memory is clear, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp fire of last night, everything is a thick mist--I am afraid!"

He took Adams's big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and the action.

The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a little child, and saying, "I am afraid!"

And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so different from the voices of common men.

"It will pa.s.s," said Adams. "It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out.

He had to learn his alphabet again."

Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.

Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful.

It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment, until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.

Berselius's case was a phase of this condition. He knew his name--everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that, he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.

If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.

Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other words, he had lost his past.

CHAPTER XXIII

BEYOND THE SKYLINE

Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred yards from the camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling and flickering beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark that made the camping place determinable many miles away.

Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct brought him to a stand, saying, "You are safe."

He knew the country well, and the thirty miles that separated him from the eastern forest, where he could obtain food and shelter, were nothing to him. He could have run nearly the whole distance and reached there in a few hours' time.

But time was also nothing to him. He had fed well, and could last two days without food. It was not his intention to desert the camp yet; for at the camp, under that tree away to the west, lay a thing that he l.u.s.ted after as men l.u.s.t for drink or love: the desire of his dark soul--the elephant gun.

Before Adams drove him away from the camp he had made up his mind to steal it. Sneak off with it in the night and vanish with it into his own country away to the northeast, leaving B'selius and his broken camp to fend for themselves. This determination was still unshaken; the thing held him like a charm, and he sat down, squatting in the gra.s.s with his knees drawn up to his chin and his eyes fixed westward, waiting for evening.

An hour before sunset he made for the camp, reaching within a mile of it as the light left the sky. He watched the camp fire burning, and made for it. Toward midnight, crawling on his belly, soundless as a snake, he crept right up beside Adams, seized the gun and the cartridge bag, and with them in his hands stood erect.

He had no fear now. He knew he could outrun anyone there. He held the gun by the barrels. Adams's white face, as he lay with mouth open, snoring and deep in slumber, presented an irresistible mark for the heavy gun-b.u.t.t, and all would have been over with that sleeper in this world, had not the attention of the savage been drawn to an object that suddenly appeared from beneath the folds of the improvised tent.

It was the hand of Berselius.

Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power, struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog.

B'selius was alive and able to clench his fist. That fact was enough for Felix, and next moment he was gone, and the moonlight cast his black shadow as he ran, making northeast, a darkness let loose on life and on the land.

Adams awoke at sun-up to find the gun and the cartridge bag gone. The porters knew nothing. He had picked up enough of their language to interrogate them, but they could only shake their heads, and he was debating in his own mind whether he ought to kick them on principle, when Berselius made his appearance from the tent.

His strength had come back to him. The dazed look of the day before had left his face, but the expression of the face was altered. The half smile which had been such a peculiar feature of his countenance was no longer there. The level eye that raised to no man and lowered before no man, the aspect of command and the ease of perfect control and power--where were they?

Adams, as he looked at his companion, felt a pang such as we feel when we see a human being suddenly and terribly mutilated.

Who has not known a friend who, from an accident in the hunting field, the shock of a railway collision, or some great grief, has suddenly changed; of whom people say, "Ah, yes, since the accident he has never been the same man"?

A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty, full of will power and brain, and who to-day is a different person with drooping under-lip, lack-l.u.s.tre eye, and bearing in every movement the indecision which marks the inferior mind.

Berselius's under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner lack the ordinary decision of a healthy man; the change in him was slight, but it was startlingly evident. So high had Nature placed him above other men, that a crack in the pedestal was noticeable; as to the injury to the statue itself, the ladder of time would be required before that could be fully discovered.

So far from being downcast this morning, Berselius was mildly cheerful. He washed and had his wound dressed, and then sat down to a miserable breakfast of cold tinned meat and ca.s.sava cakes, with water fetched from the pool in a cracked calabash.

He said nothing about the mist in his head, and Adams carefully avoided touching on the question.

"Sleep has put him all right," said Adams to himself. "All the same, he's not the man he was. He's a dozen times more human and like other men.

Wonder how long it will last. Just as long as he's feeling sick, I expect."

He rose to fetch his pipe when Berselius, who had finished eating and had also risen to his feet, beckoned him to come close.

"That is the road we came by?" said Berselius, pointing over the country toward the west.

"Yes," said Adams, "that is the road."

"Do you see the skyline?" said Berselius.

"Yes, I see the skyline."

"Well, my memory carries me to the skyline, but not beyond."

"Oh, Lord!" said Adams to himself, "here he is beginning it all over again!"

"I can remember," said Berselius, "everything that happened as far as my eye carries me. For instance, by that tree a mile away a porter fell down.

He was very exhausted. And when we had pa.s.sed that ridge near the skyline we saw two birds fighting; two bald-headed vultures----"

"That is so," said Adams.

"But beyond the skyline," said Berselius, suddenly becoming excited and clutching his companion's arm, "I see nothing. I know nothing. All is mist--all is mist."

"Yes, yes," said the surgeon. "It's only memory blindness. It will come back."

"Ah, but will it? If I can get to the skyline and see the country beyond, and if I remember that, and if I go on and on, the way we came, and if I remember as I go, then, then, I will be saved. But if I get to that skyline and if I find that the mist stops me from seeing beyond, then I pray you kill me, for the agony of this thing is not to be borne."

Suddenly he ceased, and then, as if to some unseen person, he cried out--

"I have left my memory on that road."