CHAPTER XII
NIGHT AT THE FORT
The night was hot and close and the paraffin lamp in the guest house mixed its smell with the tobacco smoke and with a faint, faint musky odour that came from the night outside. Every now and then a puff of hot wind blew through the open doorway, hot and damp as though a great panther were breathing into the room.
The nights in the forest were chill, but up here at Fort M"Ba.s.sa they were stewing in a heat wave.
Adams, with his coat off, pipe in mouth, was leaning back in a basket chair with his feet on a sugar box. Berselius, in another easy chair, was smoking a cigar, and Meeus, sitting with his elbows on the table, was talking of trade and its troubles. There is an evil spirit in rubber that gives a lot of trouble to those who deal with it. The getting of it is bad enough, but the tricks of the thing itself are worse. It is subject to all sorts of influences, climatic and other, and tends to deteriorate on its journey to the river and the coast of Europe.
It was marvellous to see the pa.s.sion with which this man spoke of this inanimate thing.
"And then, ivory," said Meeus. "When I came here first, hundred-pound tusks were common; when you reach that district, M. le Capitaine, you will see for yourself, no doubt, that the elephants have decreased. What comes in now, even, is not of the same quality. Scrivelloes (small tusks), defective tusks, for which one gets almost nothing as a bonus. And with the decrease of the elephant comes the increased subterfuge of the natives. "What are we to do?" they say. "We cannot make elephants." This is the worst six months for ivory I have had, and then, on top of this--for troubles always come together--I have this bother I told you of with these people down there by the Silent Pools."
A village ten miles to the east had, during the last few weeks, suspended rubber payments, gone arrear in taxes, the villagers running off into the forest and hiding from their hateful work.
"What caused the trouble?" asked Berselius.
"G.o.d knows," replied Meeus. "It may blow over--it may have blown over by this, for I have had no word for two days; anyhow, to-morrow I will walk over and see. If it hasn"t blown over, I will give the people very clearly to understand that there will be trouble. I will stay there for a few days and see what persuasion can do. Would you like to come with me?"
"I don"t mind," said Berselius. "A few days" rest will do the porters no harm. What do you say, Dr. Adams?"
"I"m with you," said Adams. "Anything better than to stay back here alone.
How do you find it here, M. Meeus, when you are by yourself?"
"Oh, one lives," replied the _Chef de Poste_, looking at the cigarette between his fingers with a dreamy expression, and speaking as though he were addressing it. "One lives."
That, thought Adams, must be the worst part about it. But he did not speak the words. He was a silent man, slow of speech but ready with sympathy, and as he lounged comfortably in his chair, smoking his pipe, his pity for Meeus was profound. The man had been for two years in this benighted solitude; two years without seeing a white face, except on the rare occasion of a District Commissioner"s visit.
He ought to have been mad by this, thought Adams; and he was a judge, for he had studied madness and its causes.
But Meeus was not mad in the least particular. He was coldly sane. l.u.s.t had saved his reason, the l.u.s.t inspired by Matabiche.
Berselius"s cook brought in some coffee, and when they had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort.
The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking like a boat-shaped j.a.panese lantern, lay above the forest. The forest, spectral-pale and misty, lay beneath the moon; the heat was sweltering, and Adams could not keep the palms of his hands dry, rub them with his pocket handkerchief or on his knees as much as he would.
This is the heat that makes a man feel limp as a wet rag; the heat that liquefies morals and manners and temper and nerve force, so that they run with the sweat from the pores. Drink will not "bite" in this heat, and a stiff gla.s.s of brandy affects the head almost as little as a gla.s.s of water.
"It is over there," said Meeus, pointing to the southeast, "that we are going to-morrow to interview those beasts."
Adams started at the intensity of loathing expressed by Meeus in that sentence. He had spoken almost angrily at rubber and tusks, but his languid, complaining voice had held nothing like this before.
Those beasts! He hated them, and he would not have been human had he not hated them. They were his jailers in very truth, their work was his deliverance.
The revolt of this village would make him short of rubber; probably it would bring a reprimand from his superiors.
A great bat flitted by so close that the smell of it poisoned the air, and from the forest, far away to the west, came the ripping saw-like cry of a leopard on the prowl. Many fierce things were hunting in the forest that night, but nothing fiercer than Meeus, as he stood in the moonlight, cigarette in mouth, staring across the misty forest in the direction of the Silent Pools.
PART THREE
CHAPTER XIII
THE POOLS OF SILENCE
Next morning Berselius ordered Felix to have the tents taken from the go-down and enough stores for two days. Tents and stores would be carried by the "soldiers" of the fort, who were to accompany them on the expedition.
Adams noticed with surprise the childlike interest Meeus took in the belongings of Berselius; the green rot-proof tents, the latest invention of Europe, seemed to appeal to him especially; the Roorkee chairs, the folding baths, the mosquito nets of the latest pattern, the cooking utensils of pure aluminum, filled his simple mind with astonishment. His mind during his sojourn at Fort M"Ba.s.sa had, in fact, grown childlike in this particular; nothing but little things appealed to him.
Whilst the expedition was getting ready Adams strolled about outside the fort walls. The black "soldiers," who were to accompany them, were seated in the sun near their hovels, some of them cleaning their rifles, others smoking; but for their rifles and fez caps they might, with a view of Carthage in the distance, have been taken for the black legionaries of Hamilcar, ferocious mercenaries without country or G.o.d, fierce as the music of the leopard-skin drums that led them to battle.
Turning, he walked round the west wall till he came to the wall on the north, which was higher than the others. Here, against the north wall, was a sheltered cover like an immense sty, indescribably filthy and evil-smelling; about thirty rings were fastened to the wall, and from each ring depended a big rusty chain ending in a collar.
It was the Hostage House of Fort M"Ba.s.sa. It was empty now, but nearly always full, and it stood there like a horrible voiceless witness.
A great disgust filled the mind of Adams; disgust of the n.i.g.g.e.rs who had evidently lately inhabited this place, and disgust of the Belgians who had herded them there. He felt there was something very wrong in the state of Congo. The Hostage House of Yandjali had started the impression; Meeus in some subtle way had deepened it; and now this.
But he fully recognized what difficult people to deal with n.i.g.g.e.rs are. He felt that all this was slavery under a thin disguise, this so-called taxation and "trade," but it was not his affair.
All work is slavery more or less pleasant. The doctor is the slave of his patients, the shopkeeper of his clients. These n.i.g.g.e.rs were, no doubt, slaves of the Belgians, but they were not bought and sold; they had to work, it is true, but all men have to work. Besides, Berselius had told him that the Belgians had stopped the liquor traffic and stopped the Arab raiders. There was good and bad on the side of the Belgians, and the n.i.g.g.e.rs were n.i.g.g.e.rs. So reasoned Adams, and with reason enough, though from insufficient data.
At eight o"clock in the blazing sunshine, that even then was oppressive, the expedition started. The white men leading, Felix coming immediately behind, and eleven of the soldiers, bearing the tents and stores for two days, following after.
They plunged into the forest, taking a dim track, which was the rubber track from the village of the Silent Pools and from half a dozen other villages to the west. The ground here was different from the ground they had traversed in coming to the fort. This was boggy; here and there the foot sank with a sough into the pulp of mora.s.s and rotten leaves; the lianas were thinner and more snaky, the greenery, if possible, greener, and the air close and moist as the air of a steam-bath.
The forest of M"Bonga has great tracts of this boggy, pestiferous land, dreadful sloughs of despond caverned with foliage, and by some curse the rubber vines entrench themselves with these. The naked rubber collectors, shivering over their fires, are attacked by the rheumatism and dysentery and fever that lie in these swamps; diseases almost merciful, for the aches and pains they cause draw the mind away from the wild beasts and devils and phantoms that haunt the imagination of the rubber slaves.
It took them three hours to do the ten miles, and then at last the forest cleared away and fairyland appeared.
Here in the very depths of the hopeless jungle, as if laid out and forgotten by some ancient G.o.d, lie the Silent Pools of Matabayo and the park-like lands that hold them. Like a beautiful song in some tragic and gloomy opera, a regret of the G.o.d who created the hopeless forest, sheltered by the great n"sambya trees, they lie; pools of shadowy and tranquil water, broken by reflections of branches and mirroring speargra.s.s ten feet high and fanlike fern fronds.
All was motionless and silent as a stereoscopic picture; the rocketing palms bursting into sprays of emerald green, the n"sambyas with their trumpet-like yellow blossoms, the fern fronds reduplicating themselves in the water"s gla.s.s, all and each lent their motionless beauty to the completion of the perfect picture.
In the old days, long ago, before the land was exploited and the forest turned into a hunting ground for rubber, the lovely head of the oryx would push aside the long green blades of the speargra.s.s; then, bending her lips to the lips of the oryx gazing up at her from the water, she would drink, shattering the reflection into a thousand ripples. The water-buck came here in herds from the elephant country away south, beyond the hour-gla.s.s-like constriction which divided the great forest, and the tiny dik-dik, smallest of all antelopes, came also to take its sip. But all that is past. The rifle and the trap, at the instigation of the devouring Government that eats rubber and antelope, ivory and palm-oil, ca.s.sava and copal, has thinned out the herds and driven them away. The "soldier" must be fed. Even the humble bush pig of the forest knows that fact.
It was four years since Berselius had hunted in this country, and even in that short time he found enormous change. But he could not grumble. He was a shareholder in the company, and in twenty industries depending on it.
Close up to the forest, where the m"bina trees showed their b.a.l.l.s of scarlet blossom, lay the village they had come to reason with. There were twenty-five or more low huts of wattle and mud, roofed with leaves and gra.s.s. No one was visible but an old woman, naked, all but for a slight covering about the loins. She was on all fours, grinding something between two stones, and as she sighted the party she looked backward over her shoulder at them like a frightened cat.
She cried out in a chattering voice, and from the huts six others, naked as herself, came, stared at the whites, and then, as if driven by the same impulse, and just like rabbits, darted into the forest.
But Meeus had counted on this, and had detached seven of his men to crawl round and post themselves at the back of the huts amidst the trees.