H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of the storm.
Adams came out on the veranda to listen.
He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below 235 in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long ”

“ A faint, faint haze dulled the palms away on the other side; from the wharf, where ships were loading up with rubber, ivory, palm-oil, and bales of gum copal, the roar and rattle of steam-winches went across the water, far away across the glittering water, where the red flamingoes were flying, to that other shore where the palm trees showed their fringe of hot and hazy green.
The impression of heat which green, the coolest of all colours, can produce, damp heat, heart-weakening heat, that is the master impression produced by the Congo on the mind of man. ”

“ Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain.
He saw what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of spray and mist.
Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the darkness and the thunder the next. ”

“ The hot, pure, morning air came through the open window, bringing with it the chirruping and bickering of sparrows; a day of splendour and great heat was 312 breaking over Paris. Life and the joy of life filled the world, the lovely world which men contrive to make so terrible, so full of misery, so full of tears.
Suddenly Berselius turned his head, and his eyes found Adams with a not unkindly gaze in them.
“Well, doctor,” he said, in a voice stronger than the voice with which he had spoken to Maxine. “This is the end of our hunting, it seems.” ”

“ The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had gone back to his place and task—the forest had sucked him back. This gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered: There is no God in the forest of M’Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death. ”

“ The heat of the day was now strong on the land; the 189 porters sweated under their loads, and Adams, loaded like them, knew for once in his life what it was to be a slave and a beast of burden.
Berselius, who carried nothing, did not seem to feel the heat; weak though he must have been from his injury and the blood-letting. He marched on, ever on, apparently satisfied and well pleased as horizon lifted, giving place to new horizon, and plain of waving grass succeeded ridge of broken ground. ”

“ In Adams’s hand Papeete’s skull had been a talisman of terrible and magical power, for with it he had touched men, and the men touched had disclosed their worth and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which showed him society as it is.
The life and death of Berselius had been an object lesson for him, teaching vividly the fact that evil is indestructible; that wash yourself with holy water or wash yourself with soap, you will never wash away the evil being that you have constructed by long years of evil-doing and evil-thinking. ”

“ Berselius, Adams, the gun-bearers and Félix headed the line; a long way after came the porters and their loads, shepherded by half a dozen soldiers of the state specially hired for the business.
Before they had gone a mile on their route the sun was blazing strongly, sharp bird-calls came from the trees, and from the porters tramping under their loads a hum like the hum of an awakened beehive. These people will talk and chatter when the sun rises; club them, or threaten them, or load them with burdens as much as you please, the old instinct of the birds and beasts remains. ”

“ 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 niggers and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. ”

“ A man may spend years in an elephant district without once seeing an elephant. Driven by the necessity of food and the fear of man, the great herds wander in their wonderful and mysterious journeys for hundreds and hundreds of miles. Never lying down, sleeping as they stand, always on guard, dim of sight yet keen of smell, they pass where there are trees, feeding as they go, stripping branches of leaves. Alarmed, or seeking a new feeding place, a herd moves in the rainy season, when the ground is soft, with the silence and swiftness of a cloud shadow ”

“ There was a slight rise in the ground before them just here, and as they took it the stench became almost insupportable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought him forward to his side.
The rise in the ground had hidden from them a dried-up river-bed, and there before them in the sandy trough, huge amidst the boulders, lay the body of an elephant.
A crowd of birds busy about the carcass rose clamouring in the air and flew away. ”

“ Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful. It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment, until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.
Berselius’s case was a phase of this condition. ”

“ In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two figures remaining, the figures of Berselius and Félix. ”

“ A surgeon is as useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied, but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the situation.
Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Félix, lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung. ”

“ There is nothing of the perfume of the pine, nothing of the breeze in the branches, nothing of the beauty of the forest twilight here. We are in a great green room, festooned with vines and tendrils and hung about with leaves. Nothing is beautiful here, but everything is curious. It is a curiosity shop, where one pays with the sweat of one’s brow, with the languor of one’s body, and the remembrance of one’s past, for the sight of an orchid shaped like a bird, or a flower shaped like a jug, or a bird whose flight is a flash of sapphire dust. ”

“ The brain reeled with the heat and the dazzle, but the column halted not nor stayed. The energy of Berselius drove it forward as the energy of steam drives an engine. His voice, his very presence, put life into flagging legs and sight into dazzled eyes. He spared neither himself nor others; the game was ahead, the spoor was hot, and the panther in his soul drove him forward.
Toward noon they halted for two hours where some bushes spread their shade. The porters lay down on their bellies, with arms outspread, having taken a draught of water and a bite of food ”

“ 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. ”

“ One would have fancied from the fervour of the man that is was Ferminard who had just returned from the Congo, not Adams.
Well, a moment after, and Africa had quite fallen out of the discussion. As a child lets a Noah’s Ark fall from its hands—elephants, zebras and all on to the floor whilst he grasps for a new toy—so Ferminard let Africa tumble whilst he grasped for Socialism, found it and swung it like a rattle, and Socialism went the way of Africa as he seized at last that darling toy—himself. ”

“ Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunately there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with goats’ milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down again—not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. ”

“ It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.
When Berselius’s eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of gold ”

“ Adams advanced to meet him. There was a dry, dull glaze about the creature’s lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to where the birds were again congregating, cried “Gr-r-r,” as a man cries to a dog that has misbehaved, and flung the rifle to his shoulder.
Félix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, and bounding as a buck antelope bounds with a leopard at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering report of the great rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust broke from the ground near the black bounding figure. ”

“ It is that which I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born—every memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were gods, they would see as I see.”
A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it triumphantly.
Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come across. ”

“ Here crawled an alligator on a slab of granitic rock; an alligator—that is to say, the despair of the taxidermist—for you can make nothing out of an alligator; alive and not in motion he looks stuffed, stuffed, he looks just the same. Hartbeest, reedbuck, the maned and huge-eared roan antelope, gazelle, and bush-buck, all were here, skull or mask, dominated by the vast head of the wildebeest, with ponderous sickle-curved horns.
Adams had half completed the tour of the walls when the door of the library opened and Captain Berselius came in. ”

“ Berselius was quite calm, but his face was pale, and he seemed contemplating something at a distance.
When half an hour had passed, Meeus rose suddenly to 119 his feet and began to walk about, up and down, in front of the tent, up and down, up and down, as a man walks when he is in distress of mind.
The black soldiers also seemed uneasy, and the villagers huddled closer together like sheep. Papeete alone seemed undisturbed. He was playing now with the old tomato tin, out of which he had scraped and licked every vestige of the contents. ”

“ He had never met a man before at all like Berselius. 25 He had never before come across a man with such a tremendous personality. Berselius fascinated yet repelled him. That there was evil in this man he felt, but he felt also that there was good. Much evil and much good. And beyond this he divined an animal ferocity latent—the ferocity of a tiger—a cold and pitiless and utterly divorced from reason ferociousness, the passion of a primitive man, who had never known law except the law of the axe wielded by the strongest. ”

“ Adams, tramping beside Berselius, tried vainly to analyze the extraordinary and new sensations to which this place gave birth in him.
The forest had taken him. It seemed to him, on entering it, that he had died to all the things he had ever known. At Yandjali he had felt himself in a foreign country, but still in touch with Europe and the past; a mile deep in the forest and Yandjali itself, savage as 66 it was, seemed part of the civilization and the life he had left behind him.
The forests of the old world may be vast, but their trees are familiar. ”

“ A hundred million trees lent their voices to the song. A hundred million trees—acacia and palm, m’bina and cottonwood, thorn and 126 mimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist-strewn and sun-stricken, all bending under the deep sweet billows of the wind.
At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed any sign of the past day. They had “slept it off.” As for Adams, he knew nothing, except that the villagers had been punished and their houses destroyed. ”

“ Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American’s nerve to a nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been passed.
The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. ”