The Pools of Silence Part 33

"Don't go."

Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office to chuckle over his joke, and Adams walked off down the Rue de la Paix.

Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end of the season, and the streets were thronged with foreigners--the Moor from Morocco, in his white burnous, elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had become a veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were packed, the _cafes_ crowded.

Austrian, Russian, English, and American gold was pouring into the city--pouring in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and by every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l'Est, and the Gare de Lyons.

To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, fresh from those great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant country and the tremendous cavern of the jungle, the city around him and the sights affected him with vividness and force.

Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen, he stood fresh from that primeval land.

He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair in disorder, her foot on the body of a naked slave and the haft of a blood-stained knife between her teeth, he was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in powder, Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of poets, philosophers, churchmen, placemen, politicians, and financiers.

It was a strange experience.

He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then to the Avenue Malakoff, and as he walked the face of the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind and was replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites in the world of thought often awaken images one of the other, just because of the fact that they are opposites.

Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at the railway station on the day of their arrival.

_La Joconde_ had been cabled for from Leopoldsville, and the great yacht had brought them to Ma.r.s.eilles. Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius's accident or illness, and Madame Berselius had departed for Trouville, quite unconscious of anything having happened to her husband.

Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in her father. She had done so at the very first sight of him, but as yet she had said no word.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

DREAMS

When Adams arrived at the Avenue Malakoff he found Berselius in the library. He was seated in a big armchair, and M. Pinchon, his secretary, a man dry-looking as an account-book, bald, and wearing spectacles, was just leaving the room with some shorthand notes of business letters to be typed.

Berselius was much changed; his hair was quite gray, his eyes, once so calm, forceful, and intrinsically brilliant, had lost their l.u.s.tre, his face wore the expression of a confirmed invalid.

Great discontent was the predominant feature of this expression.

It was only within the last few days that this had appeared. On recovering from the hards.h.i.+ps of the forest and on the voyage home, though weak enough, he had been serene, mild, amiable and rather listless, but during the last few days something was visibly troubling him.

He had "gone off," to use an expressive phrase sometimes employed by physicians.

A strange thing had happened to Berselius. Ever since the recovery of his memory his new self had contemplated the past from the heights of new birth, calmly conscious of the fact that this past belonged to a man who was dead. The more he examined this past the more he loathed the man to whom it had belonged, but the difference between that man and himself was so profound that he felt, rightly, that he was not _He_.

Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting s.h.i.+rt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.

He had awakened to his new self again with the full recognition in his mind that only a few moments ago he had been thinking with that other man's brain, acting under his pa.s.sions, living his life.

The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest connection with, or knowledge of, the Berselius of real life. Yet the Berselius of real life was very intimately connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all his actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them to the minutest detail.

The next night he did not dream at all--not so on the third night, when the scene of horror by the Silent Pools was reenacted, himself in the original _role_. The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping the sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few moments ago.

No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke.

Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was nothing to the fact which was now borne in on him--the fact that this new mentality was but a thin sh.e.l.l covering the old, as the thin sh.e.l.l of earth, with its flowers and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning h.e.l.l which is the earth's core.

The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid personality, and forty years of exuberant and self-willed life had at a stroke been checked and changed. The crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous pa.s.sions had pa.s.sed from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions, but the furnace was there beneath the flower garden just as it is in the case of the earth.

Captain Berselius was still alive, though suppressed and living in secrecy. At night, touched by the magic wand of sleep, he became awake, and became supreme master of the tenement in the cellars of which he was condemned to sleep by day.

So far from having been touched by death, Captain Berselius was now secure from death or change; a thing not to be reasoned with or altered--beyond human control--yet vividly alive as the fabled monster that inhabits the cellars of Glamis Castle.

Between the dual personalities of the man complete fission had taken place, a terrible accident of the sort condemning the cast-off personality to live in darkness beyond the voice of mind or amendment.

"Well," said Adams, as he entered the room. "How are you to-day?"

"Oh, about the same, about the same. If I could sleep properly I would mend, but my sleep is broken."

"I must give you something to alter that."

Berselius laughed.

"Drugs?"

"Yes, drugs. We doctors cannot always command health, but we can command sleep. Do you feel yourself able to talk for a bit?"

"Oh, yes, I feel physically well. Sit down, you will find some cigars in that cabinet."

Adams lit a cigar and took his seat in an armchair close to his companion.

All differences of rank and wealth were sunk between these two men who had gone through so much together. On their return, when Berselius had desired Adams to remain as his medical attendant, he had delegated M. Pinchon as intermediary to deal with Adams as to the financial side of the question.

Adams received a large salary paid monthly in advance by the secretary.

Berselius did not have any hand in the matter, thus the feeling of employer and employed was reduced to vanis.h.i.+ng point and the position rendered more equal.

"You know," said Adams, "I have always been glad to do anything I can for you, and I always shall be, but since I have come back to Paris I have been filled with unrest. You complain of sleeplessness--well, that is my disease."

"Yes?"

"It's that place over there; it has got into my blood. I declare to G.o.d that I am the last man in the world to sentimentalize, but that horror is killing me, and I must act--I must do something--even if I have to go into the middle of the Place de la Concorde and shout it aloud. I shall shout it aloud. I'm not made so that I can stand seeing a thing like that in silence."

Berselius sat with his eyes fixed on the carpet; he seemed abstracted and scarcely listening. He knew perfectly well that Adams was acquainted with the affair at the Silent Pools, but the subject had never been mentioned between them, nor was it now.

"That missionary I met on the return home at Leopoldsville," went on Adams, "he was a Baptist, a man, not a religion-machine. He gave me details from years of experience that turned my heart in me. With my own eyes I saw enough----"

Berselius held up his hand.

"Let us not speak of what we know," said he. "The thing is there--has been there for years--can you destroy the past?"

"No; but one can improve the future." Adams got up and paced the floor.

"Now, now as I am talking to you, that villainy is going on; it is like knowing that a murder is slowly being committed in the next house and that one has no power to interfere. When I look at the streets full of people amusing themselves; when I see the _cafes_ crammed, and the rich driving in their carriages; the churches filled with wors.h.i.+ppers wors.h.i.+pping a G.o.d who serenely sits in heaven without stretching a hand to help His poor, benighted creatures--when I see all this and contrast it with what I have seen, I could wors.h.i.+p _that_!"