The Pools of Silence Part 36

The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.

"And this happened to him," said she, "when he was trying to save a servant's life?"

"Ah," said Adams, "if you could have seen it, you would have called it something even higher than that--it was a sublime act."

He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with additions.

"I myself was paralyzed--I could only cling to the tree and watch. The fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind--I can put it no other way--like a wind that stripped one's mind of everything but just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as that--well, _he_ did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of the man who was lying drugged with hemp, and he found courage enough in his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.

"Without heart or soul----" Adams paused. There was something about Maxine Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in life--some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now s.h.i.+ning forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light of other people's lamps.

The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus's face a story that he never deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of n.i.g.g.e.rs and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these people would have told Maxine of their tears.

This instinct for the truth of things made her a reader of people. Adams had interested her at first sight, because she found him difficult to read. She had never met a man like him before; he belonged to a different race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the woman in her; they were physical affinities. She had told him this in a hundred ways half unconsciously and without speech before they parted at Ma.r.s.eilles, but the mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She did not know his mind, its stature or its bent, and until that knowledge came to her she could not love him.

As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that p.r.o.nouncement on the spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool were lying just as he had seen them last. Away to the east the burst elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where the leopards had left him.

Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred into speech by that thought he went on:

"A cannibal--a creature worse than a tiger--that was the being for whom your father risked his life."

"A cannibal?" said Maxine, opening her eyes wide.

"Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed to act as our guide."

"A soldier--but what Government employs cannibals as soldiers?"

"Oh," said Adams, "they call them soldiers, that is just a name. Slave drivers is the real name, but the Government that employs them does not use the word slave--oh, no, everyone would be shocked--_scoundrels_!"

He spoke the word with suddenly flas.h.i.+ng eyes, uplifted head, and a face as stern the face of Themis. He seemed for a moment fronting some invisible foe, then, smothering his wrath, he went on:

"I lose control of myself when I think of what I have seen--the suffering, the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the bones of murdered people--people whom I had seen walking about alive--lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little child I had talked to and played with----"

He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel.

He had turned his back on Maxine, and volumes could not have said more than what was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and turning away.

The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the mantelpiece and faced her again. There was no trace of emotion on his face, but the trace of a struggle with it. Maxine's eyes were filled with tears.

"I am sorry," said he, "that I should have dragged this subject before you at all. Why should I torment your heart as well as my own?"

She did not reply for a moment. She was tracing the vague pattern of the carpet with her eyes, her chin resting on her hand, and the light from above made a halo of the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning charm.

Then she said, speaking slowly, "I am not sorry. Surely if such things are, they ought to be known. Why should I turn away my face from suffering? I have never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as a girl can, but what you tell me is beyond what I have ever heard of, or read of, or dreamed. Tell me more, give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you, I cannot yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. I am like Thomas; I must put my fingers in the wounds."

"Are you brave enough to look at material evidence?" asked Adams.

"Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others if not my own----"

He left the room and in a few minutes later returned with a parcel. He took from it the skull he had brought with him through everything to civilization.

Maxine's eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but she did not turn pale, and she looked steadfastly at it as Adams turned it in his hands and showed her by the _foramen magnum_ the hacks in the bone caused by the knife.

She put out her finger and touched them, then she said, "I believe."

Adams put the skull on the table; curious and small and ferocious and repellent it looked. One would never have imagined the black face, the grin, and the rolling eyes of the creature to whom it had once belonged.

One thing only about it touched the heart with sadness--its size.

"It is a child's," said Maxine.

"Yes; the child I told you of--all that remains of it."

He was about to wrap the thing up again when the girl interposed.

"Let it lie there whilst you tell me; it will bring things nearer to me. I am not afraid of it--poor, poor creature. Tell me all you know--tell me the worst. I am not a young lady for the moment, please, just a person listening."

He took his seat in an armchair opposite to her, and resting his elbows on his knees, talking just as if he were talking to a man, found the words he could not find when, pen in hand, half an hour ago, he had tried to express himself in writing.

He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the wretched creatures penned like animals eating their miserable food; he told of M'Ba.s.sa and the Hostage House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how all over that vast country these places were dotted, not by the hundred but by the thousand; he told of the misery of the men who were driven into the dismal forests, slaves of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that would never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name in Europe and not a power; he told the awful fact that murder there was used every day as an agricultural implement, that people were operated upon, and suffered amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and that their s.e.x and age--those two last appeals of Nature to brutality--had no voice; he told the whole bitter tale of tears and blood, but he could not tell her all, for she was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before a man of the crimes against Nature, the crimes against men, against women, and against children, that even if the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will leave Belgium's name in the world's history more detestable than the names of the unspeakable cities sunk in the Dead Sea.

Maxine listened, entranced, swayed between the terror of the tale and the power of the man who was telling it.

Ah! if he could have spoken to Europe as he spoke to her; if he could have made Europe see as he made her see, what a whirlwind of indignation would have arisen; but he could not.

It was the magnet of her sympathy that marshalled the facts, clad them in burning language, and led them forth in battalions that stormed her mind and made her believe what seemed unbelievable. Without that sympathy, his words would have been cold and lifeless statements bearing little conviction.

When he had finished, she did that which a woman never does unless moved by the very highest excitement. She rose up and paced the floor thrice.

Without speaking, she walked the length of the room, then she turned to Adams.

"But this must cease."

"This shall cease," said he, "if I can only make myself heard.

To-day--to-night--just before you came in, I was trying to put the thing on paper--trying to put down what I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write seems nothing, nothing beside what I have seen. The mere statement that so many were killed, so many were tortured, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing is too big for me. G.o.d made it, I suppose; but I wish to G.o.d I had never seen it."

Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair.

She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was listening, but she was thinking as well.

"You cannot do everything yourself," said she, at last. "You must get others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, a.s.sist you. Will you go to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him to-morrow afternoon."

"Who is Monsieur Pugin?"

This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of "Absolution" and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin.

"Absolution," that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders with the other.

That, however, was not Pugin's fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely const.i.tuent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.

"I will go and see him," said Adams, when the girl had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. "A man like that could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have pa.s.sed from my mind."

"To mine," she replied. Then, with charming _navete_, she held out both hands to him.