The Pools of Silence Part 26

"Now," said Adams in triumph, "do you remember that?"

Berselius did not reply. He was walking along with his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not stop, or hesitate, or make any exclamation to indicate whether he remembered or not.

"Do you remember?" cried Adams.

But Berselius did not speak. He was making noises as if strangling, and suddenly his hands flew up to the neck of his hunting s.h.i.+rt, and tore at it till he tore it open.

"Steady, man, steady," cried Adams catching the other's arm. "Hi, you'll be in a fit if you don't mind--steady, I _say_."

But Berselius heard nothing, knew nothing but the scene before him, and Adams, who was running now after the afflicted man, who had broken away and was making straight for the trees beneath which the village had once been, heard and knew nothing of what lay before and around Berselius.

Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent man, and behold!

memory had suddenly fronted him with a h.e.l.l in which he was the chief demon.

He had no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the l.u.s.t for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a blow in the face.

Under that m'bina tree two soldiers, one with the haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains.

Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole. The remains of the miserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, and the trees blew their golden trumpets over all.

As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries was running about as a frantic woman runs about, to the bones on the ground, he guessed the tragedy of Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the torrid eloquence of madness.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE AVENGER

It was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent of the coming rains.

The door of the guest house stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp lay upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming a parallelogram of topaz across which were flitting continually great moth shadows big as birds.

Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table of the sitting room before a big blue sheet of paper. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing just at present; he was reading what he had written.

He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report for headquarters, and he found it difficult, because the last three months had brought in little rubber and less ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad.

Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one village, as we know, had revolted; then, vines had died from some mysterious disease in two of the very best patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was now putting on paper for the edification of the Congo Government. He was devoting a special paragraph to the revolt of the village by the Silent Pools, and the punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not a word was said of torture and slaughtering. "Drastic Measures" was the term he used, a term perfectly well understood by the people to whom he was writing.

On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, looking now shrivelled at the edges in this extreme heat. On the wall in front of him the Congo bows and poisoned arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the light of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was making a circuit of the walls just below the ceiling; you could hear a faint scratch from it as it travelled along, a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus's pen as it travelled across the paper.

He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette.

Sitting thus, meditating, pen in hand, he heard sounds: the sound of the night wind, the sound of one of the soldiers singing as he cleaned his rifle--the men always sang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun G.o.d--the scratch of the scorpion and the "creak, creak" of a joist warping and twisting to the heat.

But the sound of the wind was the most arresting. It would come over the forest and up the slope and round the guest house with a long-drawn, sweeping "Ha-a-a-r," and sob once or twice, and then die away down the slope and over the forest and away and beyond to the east, where Kilimanjaro was waiting for it, crowned with snow on his throne beneath the stars.

But the wind was almost dead now--the heat of the night had stifled it.

The faintest breathing of air took the place of the strong puffs that had sent the flame of the lamp half up the gla.s.s chimney. As Meeus listened, on this faint breath from the forest he heard a sound--

"Boom--boom"--very faint, and as if someone were striking a drum in a leisurely manner.

"Boom--boom."

A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of M'Bonga like an evil spirit. He had wandered here, perhaps from the west coast forests. Driven away from his species--who knows?--for some crime. The natives of the fort had caught glimpses of him now and then; he was huge and old and gray, and now in the darkness of the forest was striking himself on the chest, standing there in the gloom of the leaves, trampling the plantains under foot, taller than the tallest man, smiting himself in the pride of his strength.

"Boom--boom."

It is a hair-lifting sound when you know the cause, but it left Meeus unmoved. His mind was too full of the business of writing his report to draw images or listen to imagination; all the same, this sinister drum-beat acted upon his subconscious self and, scarcely knowing why he did so, he got up from the table and came outside to the fort wall and looked over away into the dark.

There was not a star in the sky. A dense pall of cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind, as Meeus stepped from the veranda into the darkness, died away utterly.

He stood looking into the dark. He could make out the forest, a blackness humped and crouching in the surrounding blackness. There was not a ray of light from the sky, and now and again came the drum--

"Boom--boom."

Then it ceased, and a bat pa.s.sed so close that the wind of it stirred his hair. He spat the taint of it from his mouth, and returning to the house, seated himself at the table and continued his work.

But the night was to be fateful in sounds and surprises. He had not been sitting five minutes when a voice from the blackness outside made him drop his pen and listen.

It was a European voice, shouting and raving and laughing, and Meeus, as he listened, clutched at the table, for the voice was known to him. It was the voice of Berselius!

Berselius, who was hundreds of miles away in the elephant country!

Meeus heard his own name. It came in to him out of the darkness, followed by a peal of laughter. Rapid steps sounded coming across the courtyard, and the sweat ran from Meeus's face and his stomach crawled as, with a bound across the veranda, a huge man framed himself in the doorway and stood motionless as a statue.

For the first moment Meeus did not recognize Adams. He was filthy and tattered, he wore no coat, and his hunting s.h.i.+rt was open at the neck, and the arms of it rolled up above the elbows.

Adams, for the s.p.a.ce of ten seconds, stood staring at Meeus from under his pith helmet. The face under the helmet seemed cast from bronze.

Then he came in and shut the door behind him, walked to the table, took Meeus by the coat at the back of the neck, and lifted him up as a man lifts a dog by the scruff.

For a moment it seemed as if he were going to kill the wretched man without word or explanation, but he mastered himself with a supreme effort, put him down, took the vacant seat at the table and cried:

"Stand before me there."

Meeus stood. He held on to the table with his left hand and with his right he made pawing movements in the air.

The big man seated at the table did not notice. He sat for a few seconds with both hands clasped together, one making a cup for the other, just as a man might sit about to make a speech and carefully considering his opening words.

Then he spoke.

"_Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?_"

Meeus made no reply, but drew a step back and put out his hand, as if fending the question off, as if asking for a moment in which to explain.

He had so many things to say, so many reasons to give, but he could say nothing, for his tongue was paralyzed and his lips were dry.

"_Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?_"