THE VOICE OF THE FOREST BY NIGHT

The first thing to be done was to bury Meeus. And now came the question, How would the soldiers take the death of the _Chef de Poste_? They knew nothing of it yet. Would they revolt, or would they seek to revenge him, guessing him to have been killed.

Adams did not know and he did not care. He half hoped there would be trouble. The Congo had burst upon his view, stripped of shams, in all its ferocity, just as the great scene of the killing had burst upon Berselius.

All sorts of things--from the Hostage House of Yandjali to the Hostage House of M'Ba.s.sa, from Ma.s.s to Papeete's skull--connected themselves up and made a skeleton, from which he constructed that great and ferocious monster, the Congo State. The soldiers, with their filed teeth, were part of the monster, and, such was the depth of fury in his heart, he would have welcomed a fight, so that he might express with his arms what his tongue ached to say.

The original man loomed large in Adams. G.o.d had given him a character benign and just, a heart tempered to mercy and kindliness; all these qualities had been outraged and were now under arms. They had given a mandate to the original man to act. The death of Meeus was the first result.

He went to the shelf where Meeus had kept his official letters and took Meeus's Mauser pistol from it. It was in a holster attached to a belt. He strapped the belt round his waist, drew the pistol from the holster and examined it. It was loaded, and in an old cigar-box he found a dozen clips of cartridges. He put three of these in his pocket and with the pistol at his side came out into the courtyard.

Huge billows of white cloud filled the sky, broken here and there by a patch of watery blue. The whole earth was steaming and the forest was absolutely smoking. One could have sworn it was on fire in a dozen places when the spirals of mist rose and broke and vanished like the steam clouds from locomotive chimneys.

He crossed the courtyard to the go-down, undid the locking bar and found what he wanted. Half a dozen mattocks stood by the rubber bales--he had noticed them when the stores had been taken out for the expedition; they were still in the same place and, taking two of them, he went to the break in the wall that gave exit from the courtyard and called to the soldiers, who were busy at work rebuilding their huts.

They came running. He could not speak twenty words of their language, but he made them line up with a movement of his arm.

Then he addressed them in a perfectly unprintable speech. It was delivered in unshod American--a language he had not spoken for years. It took in each individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, cayotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each and individually with his own hands (and I believe by some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they were without hearts, souls or intellect, not responsible creatures, tools of villains that he, Adams, would expose and get even with yet.

Furthermore, that if by a look or movement they disobeyed his orders, he would make them sweat tears and weep blood, so help him G.o.d. Amen.

They understood what he said. At least they understood the gist of it.

They had found a new and angry master, and not an eye was raised when Adams stood silent; some looked at their toes and some at the ground, some looked this way, some that, but none at the big, ferocious man, with three weeks' growth of beard, standing before them and, literally, over them.

Then he chose two of them and motioned them to follow to the guest house.

There he brought them into the sleeping room and pointed to the body of Meeus, motioning them to take it up and carry it out. The men rolled their eyes at the sight of the _Chef de Poste_, but they said no word; one took the head, the other the feet, and between them they carried the burden, led by their new commander, through the dwelling room, across the veranda and then across the yard.

The rest of the soldiers were in a group near the gate. When they saw the two men and their burden, they set up a chattering like a flock of magpies, which, however, instantly ceased at the approach of Adams.

He pointed to the two mattocks which he had placed against the wall. They understood what he meant; the last _Chef de Poste_ had shot himself in the presence of the District Commissioner, and they had dug his grave.

"Here," said Adams, stopping and pointing to a spot at a convenient distance from the walls.

When the body was buried, Adams stood for a second looking at the mound of earth, wet and flattened down by blows of the spades.

He had no prayers to offer up. Meeus would have to go before his Maker just as he was, and explain things--explain all that business away there at the Silent Pools and other things as well. Prayers over his tomb or flowers on it would not help that explanation one little bit.

Then Adams turned away and the soldiers trooped after him.

He had looked into the office and seen the rifles and ammunition which they had placed there out of the wet. A weak man would have locked the office door and so have deprived the soldiers of their arms, but Adams was not a weak man.

He led his followers to the office, handed them their arms, carefully examining each rifle to see that it was clean and uninjured, drew them up on a line, addressed them in some more unprintable language but in a milder tone, dismissed them with a wave of his hand and returned to the house.

As he left them the wretched creatures all gave a shout--a shout of acclamation.

This was the man for them--very different from the pale-faced Meeus--this was a man they felt who would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of their huts with verve.

They were not physiognomists, these gentlemen.

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. There were no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the old official letters and the half-written report which the dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.

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 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; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.

This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and its terror.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS

Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least shock or obstruction.

The man was too weak to talk, he could just say "Yes" and "No" in answer to a question, and it was always "Better" when he was asked how he felt, but he never spoke a word of his own volition.

Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different ways--from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun.

Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for they were the only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue or hinted at the tenderness of G.o.d.

All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was t.i.tanic; it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to whom it bore no promise.

But the forest was the thing which filled Adams's heart with a craving for freedom and escape that rose to a pa.s.sion.

He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.

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 G.o.d in the forest of M'Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death._

The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare--his one desire in life now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when, rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay pa.s.sive, sun-stricken, the palms bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their foliage.

At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in the immeasurable south.

The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he did not feel terrified--it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed by a man who was now dead.

He could regret the acts of that man and he could seek to atone for them, but he felt no personal remorse. "He was not I," would have reasoned the mind of Berselius; "those acts were not my acts, because _now I could not commit them_," so he would have reasoned had he reasoned on the matter at all. But he did not. In that wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had screamed aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that fate had played it, by making it the slave of two personalities, and then torturing it by showing it the acts of the old personality through the eyes of the new.

When the brain fever had pa.s.sed, it awoke untroubled; the junction had been effected, the new Berselius was It, and all the acts of the old Berselius were foreign to it and far away.

It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the great change comes on his brain. After the brain-storm and the agony of new birth comes the peace and the feeling that he is "another man." He feels that all his sins are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense of responsibility for the crimes he committed in the old life, he has cast them off like an old suit of clothes. The old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for your vices by losing your smell and taste for vice, and slip out of your debt for crime by becoming another man?

Does the old man ever die?

The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, which is more especially interesting as it is prompted by a case not unique but almost typical.