A thing built by the hands of white men and shone on by the sun--what could be more acceptable to the eye after the long, long tramp through the heart-breaking forest!
The fort of M"Ba.s.sa was quite small; the surrounding walls had gone to decay, but the "guest house" and the office, and the great go-down where the rubber was stored, were in good repair and well thatched.
Outside the walls were a number of wretched hovels inhabited by the "soldiers" and their wives, and one of these soldiers, a tall black, with the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then advanced to meet them.
He was a middle-sized man, with a melancholy face that showed very white under the shadow of the helmet; he was dressed in dingy white drill, and he had a cigarette between his lips.
He looked like a man who had never in his life smiled, yet his face was not an unpleasant face altogether, though there was much in it to give the observer pause.
His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, yet there was that in it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck Adams sharply and strangely; for the voice of Andreas Meeus, _Chef de Poste_ at M"Ba.s.sa, was the voice of a man who for two years had been condemned to talk the language of the natives. It had curious inflections, hesitancies, and a dulness that expressed the condition of a brain condemned for two years to think the thoughts of the natives in their own language.
Just as the voice of a violin expresses the condition of the violin, so does the voice of a man express the condition of his mind. And that is the fact that will strike you most if you travel in the wilds of the Congo State and talk to the men of your own colour who are condemned to live amongst the people.
One might have compared Meeus"s voice to the voice of a violin--a violin that had been attacked by some strange fungoid growth that had filled its interior and dulled the sounding board.
He had been apprised a month before of the coming of Berselius"s expedition, and one might imagine the servility which this man would show to the all-powerful Berselius, whose hunting expeditions were red-carpeted, who was hail-fellow-well-met with Leopold, who, by lifting his finger, could cause Andreas Meeus to be dismissed from his post, and by crooking his finger cause him to be raised to a Commissionership.
Yet he showed no servility at all. He had left servility behind him, just as he had left pride, just as he had left ambition, patriotism, country, and that divine something which blossoms into love of wife and child.
When he had shaken hands with Berselius and Adams, he led the way into the fort, or rather into the enclosure surrounded by the ruinous mud walls, an enclosure of about a hundred yards square.
On the right of the quadrangle stood the go-down, where the rubber and a small quant.i.ty of ivory was stored.
In the centre stood the misnamed guest house, a large mud and wattle building, with a veranda gone to decay.
The blinding sun shone on it all, showing up with its fierce light the true and appalling desolation of the place. There was not one thing in the enclosure upon which the eye could rest with thankfulness.
Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim sketch of Rome.
To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.
In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M"Bonga would roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms, the sombre green of the n"sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.
Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two rooms--rooms s.p.a.cious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges, hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo bows and arrows--bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when Fort M"Ba.s.sa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept away by rifle fire.
There was no picture torn from an ill.u.s.trated paper adorning the place, as in Verhaeren"s abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the same stack of "official letters," some of these two years old, some of last month, all dealing with trade.
Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of people he had known--the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of the _Cafe de Couronne_--all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.
Meeus was one of the "unfortunate men." He had held a small clerkship under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a fault of his own.
This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch, which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled down to live on a maiden aunt.
He called it looking for work.
She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped to support him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in those days that seemed so far distant from him now.
Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the _decla.s.se_, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows who sat in the _cafes_ and walked the boulevards and ogled the women.
He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his a.s.sistance with two hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable, but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer whose momentary support has gone to pieces.
Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but the Congo Government.
Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from n.i.g.g.e.rs continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten orange-peel picked up in the market-place; a man who has worn out his friends--and his clothes. A man without hope.
One would think for the work in hand they would choose the greatest blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence.
Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that.
It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.
Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new servitude.
This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he had to extract from the people round about.
Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by Secretary of State Van Estvelde.
The Bonus Proclamation.
According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his bonus would be.
Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, and so on.
The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid for it. And those were the terms on which he had to trade with the natives.
Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring in huge quant.i.ties of wax and copal for nothing, just as a tax owing to the State, a tax to the Government that was plundering and exploiting them.
Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell into this state of things as easily as a billiard ball falls into a pocket when skilfully directed.
The unfortunate man was absolutely a billiard ball in the hands of a professional player; the stroke of the cue had been given in Belgium, he rolled to his appointed post, fell into it, and was d.a.m.ned.
His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for money filled his soul.
His success in working the n.i.g.g.e.rs was so great that he was moved to a more difficult post at higher pay, and then right on to M"Ba.s.sa.
He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood he had been fond of animals, but Matabiche, the G.o.d-devil of the Congo, changed all that.
He saw nothing extortionate in his dealings, nothing wrong in them. When things were going well, then all was well; but when the natives resisted his charges and taxes, defrauding him of his bonus and lowering him in the eyes of his superiors, then Meeus became terrible.
And he was absolute master.
Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great M"Bonga rubber forest that was now speechless as a Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea in torment; here in the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the endless misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had time to think.
There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in distance.
Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another night. He knew what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake from his noonday siesta and see the same great awful splash of sunlight striking the same old s.p.a.ce of arid yard, where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain cast over by some n.i.g.g.e.r child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving of a sick child for some impossible toy.
Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that save you from _ennui_ and devilment, and give you heart to continue the journey from hour to hour in this world where we live. Your morning paper, the new book from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the monotony and breaking the prospect before him into short views.
Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, without a woman to help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him, there at Fort M"Ba.s.sa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became what he was.