Take heed of still waters; they quick pass away.
Guy Oscard was sitting on the natural terrace in front of Durnovo's
house at Msala, and Marie attended to his simple wants with that patient
dignity which suggested the recollection of better times, and appealed
strongly to the manhood of her fellow-servant Joseph.
Oscard was not good at the enunciation of those small amenities which
are supposed to soothe the feelings of the temporarily debased. He
vaguely felt that this woman was not accustomed to menial service, but
he knew that any suggestion of sympathy was more than he could compass.
So he merely spoke to her more gently than to the men, and perhaps she
understood, despite her chocolate-coloured skin.
They had inaugurated a strange, unequal friendship during the three days
that Oscard had been left alone at Msala. Joseph had been promoted to
the command of a certain number of the porters, and his domestic duties
were laid aside. Thus Marie was called upon to attend to Guy Oscard's
daily wants.
“I think I'll take coffee,” he was saying to her in reply to a question.
“Yes--coffee, please, Marie.”
He was smoking one of his big wooden pipes, staring straight in front of
him with a placidity natural to his bulk.
The woman turned away with a little smile. She liked this big man with
his halting tongue and quiet ways. She liked his awkward attempts to
conciliate the coquette Xantippe--to extract a smile from the grave
Nestorius, and she liked his manner towards herself. She liked the
poised pipe and the jerky voice as he said, “Yes--coffee, please,
Marie.”
Women do like these things--they seem to understand them and to attach
some strange, subtle importance of their own to them. For which power
some of us who have not the knack of turning a pretty phrase or throwing
off an appropriate pleasantry may well be thankful.
Presently she returned, bringing the coffee on a rough tray, also a box
of matches and Oscard's tobacco pouch. Noting this gratuitous attention
to his comfort, he looked up with a little laugh.
“Er--thank you,” he said. “Very kind.”
He did not put his pipe back to his lips--keenly alive to the fact
that the exigency of the moment demanded a little polite exchange of
commonplace.
“Children gone to bed?” he asked anxiously.
She paused in her slow, deft arrangement of the little table.
“Yes,” she answered.
He nodded as if the news were eminently satisfactory. “Nestorius,” he
said, adhering to Meredith's pleasantry, “is the jolliest little chap I
have met for a long time.”
“Yes,” she answered softly. “Yes--but listen!”
He raised his head, listening as she did--both looking down the river
into the gathering darkness.
“I hear the sound of paddles,” she said. “And you?”
“Not yet. My ears are not so sharp as yours.”
“I am accustomed to it,” the woman said, with some emotion in her voice
which he did not understand then. “I am always listening.”
Oscard seemed to be struck with this description of herself. It was so
very apt--so comprehensive. The woman's attitude before the world was
the attitude of the listener for some distant sound.
She poured out his coffee, setting the cup at his elbow. “Now you will
hear,” she said, standing upright with that untrammelled dignity of
carriage which is found wherever African blood is in the veins. “They
have just come round Broken Tree Bend. There are two boats.”
He listened, and after a moment heard the regular glug-glug of the
paddles stealing over the waters of the still tropic river, covering a
wonderful distance.
“Yes,” he said, “I hear. Mr. Meredith said he would be back to-night.”
She gave a strange, little low laugh--almost the laugh of a happy woman.
“He is like that, Mr. Meredith,” she said; “what he says he does”--in
the pretty English of one who has learnt Spanish first.
“Yes, Marie--he is like that.”
She turned, in her strangely subdued way, and went into the house to
prepare some supper for the new-comers.
It was not long before the sound of the paddles was quite distinct, and
then--probably on turning a corner of the river and coming in sight of
the lights of Msala--Jack Meredith's cheery shout came floating through
the night. Oscard took his pipe from his lips and sent back an answer
that echoed against the trees across the river. He walked down to the
water's edge, where he was presently joined by Joseph with a lantern.
The two boats came on to the sloping shore with a grating sound, and by
the light of the waving lantern Oscard saw Durnovo and Jack land from
the same boat.
The three men walked up to the house together. Marie was at the door,
and bowed her head gravely in answer to Jack's salutation. Durnovo
nodded curtly and said nothing.
In the sitting-room, by the light of the paraffin lamp, the two
Englishmen exchanged a long questioning glance, quite different from
the quick interrogation of a woman's eyes. There was a smile on Jack
Meredith's face.
“All ready to start to-morrow?” he inquired.
“Yes,” replied Oscard.
And that was all they could say. Durnovo never left them alone together
that night. He watched their faces with keen, suspicious eyes. Behind
the moustache his lips were pursed up in restless anxiety. But he saw
nothing--learnt nothing. These two men were inscrutable.
At eleven o'clock the next morning the Simiacine seekers left their
first unhappy camp at Msala. They had tasted of misfortune at the very
beginning, but after the first reverse they returned to their work
with that dogged determination which is a better spirit than the wild
enthusiasm of departure, where friends shout and flags wave, and an
artificial hopefulness throws in its jarring note.
They had left behind them with the artifice of civilisation that subtle
handicap of a woman's presence; and the little flotilla of canoes that
set sail from the terrace at Msala one morning in November, not so many
years ago, was essentially masculine in its bearing. The four white
men--quiet, self-contained, and intrepid--seemed to work together with
a perfect unity, a oneness of thought and action which really lay in the
brain of one of them. No man can define a true leader; for one is too
autocratic and the next too easily led; one is too quick-tempered,
another too reserved. It would almost seem that the ideal leader is that
man who knows how to extract from the brains of his subordinates all
that is best and strongest therein--who knows how to suppress his
own individuality, and merge it for the time being into that of his
fellow-worker--whose influence is from within and not from without.
The most successful Presidents of Republics have been those who are, or
pretend to be, nonentities, content to be mere pegs, standing still and
lifeless, for things to be hung upon. Jack Meredith was, or pretended to
be, this. He never assumed the airs of a leader. He never was a leader.
He merely smoothed things over, suggested here, laughed there, and
seemed to stand by, indifferent all the while.
In less than a week they left the river, hauling their canoes up on the
bank, and hiding them in the tangle of the virgin underwood. A depot of
provisions, likewise hidden, was duly made, and the long, weary march
began.
The daily routine of this need not be followed, for there were weeks
of long monotony, varied only by a new difficulty, a fresh danger, or
a deplorable accident. Twice the whole company had to lay aside the
baggage and assume arms, when Guy Oscard proved himself to be a cool and
daring leader. Not twice, but two hundred times, the ring of Joseph's
unerring rifle sent some naked savage crawling into the brake to die,
with a sudden wonder in his half-awakened brain. They could not afford
to be merciful; their only safeguard was to pass through this country,
leaving a track of blood and fire and dread behind them.
This, however, is no record of travel in Central Africa. There are many
such to be had at any circulating library, written by abler and more
fantastic pens. Some of us who have wandered in the darkest continent
have looked in vain for things seen by former travellers--things which,
as the saying is, are neither here nor there. Indeed, there is not
much to see in a vast, boundless forest with little life and no
variety--nothing but a deadly monotony of twilit tangle. There is
nothing new under the sun--even immediately under it in Central Africa.
The only novelty is the human heart--Central Man. That is never stale,
and there are depths still unexplored, heights still unattained, warm
rivers of love, cold streams of hatred, and vast plains where strange
motives grow. These are our business.
We have not to deal so much with the finding of the Simiacine as with
the finders, and of these the chief at this time was Jack Meredith. It
seemed quite natural that one duty after another should devolve upon
him, and he invariably had time to do them all, and leisure to comment
pleasantly upon it. But his chief care was Victor Durnovo.
As soon as they entered the forest, two hundred miles above Msala, the
half-breed was a changed man. The strange restlessness asserted itself
again--the man was nervous, eager, sincere. His whole being was given up
to this search; his whole heart and soul were enveloped in it. At
first he worked steadily, like a mariner treading his way through known
waters; but gradually his composure left him, and he became incapable of
doing other work.
Jack Meredith was at his side always. By day he walked near him as he
piloted the column through the trackless forest. At night he slept
in the same tent, stretched across the doorway. Despite the enormous
fatigue, he slept the light sleep of the townsman, and often he was
awakened by Durnovo talking aloud, groaning, tossing on his narrow bed.
When they had been on the march for two months--piloted with
marvellous instinct by Durnovo--Meredith made one or two changes in the
organisation. The caravan naturally moved slowly, owing to the enormous
amount of baggage to be carried, and this delay seemed to irritate
Victor Durnovo to such an extent that at last it was obvious that the
man would go mad unless this enormous tension could be relieved.
“For God's sake,” he would shout, “hurry those men on! We haven't done
ten miles to-day. Another man down--damn him!”
And more than once he had to be dragged forcibly away from the fallen
porter, whom he battered with both fists. Had he had his will, he would
have allowed no time for meals, and only a few hours' halt for rest.
Guy Oscard did not understand it. His denser nerves were incapable of
comprehending the state of irritation and unreasoning restlessness into
which the climate and excitement had brought Durnovo. But Meredith,
in his finer organisation, understood the case better. He it was who
soothingly explained the necessity for giving the men a longer rest.
He alone could persuade Durnovo to lie down at night and cease his
perpetual calculations. The man's hands were so unsteady that he could
hardly take the sights necessary to determine their position in this
sea-like waste. And to Jack alone did Victor Durnovo ever approach the
precincts of mutual confidence.
“I can't help it, Meredith,” he said one day, with a scared look, after
a particularly violent outburst of temper. “I don't know what it is. I
sometimes think I am going mad.”
And soon after that the change was made.
An advance column, commanded by Meredith and Durnovo, was selected to
push on to the Plateau, while Oscard and Joseph followed more leisurely
with the baggage and the slower travellers.
One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of
commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the
main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range--unmarked on
any map, unnamed by any geographer--to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau.
It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could
pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked,
untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a
thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no
longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across
a country untrodden by a white man's foot; it was a wild rush in a
straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct
that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the
party--Jack Meredith--had to choose between madness and rest. He knew
enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief
to this tension was success.
Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where
the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said,
in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork,
then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and
death could only follow.
To save his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his
food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative,
billow-like inequalities--the deposit of a glacial age--Durnovo refused
to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy
tinned meat as they went along, the four men--three blacks and one
white--followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.
“We're getting to the mountains--we're getting to the mountains! We
shall be there to-night! Think of that, Meredith--to-night!” he kept
repeating with a sickening monotony. And all the while he stumbled on.
The perspiration ran down his face in one continuous stream; at times he
paused to wipe it from his eyes with the back of his hands, and as these
were torn and bleeding, there were smears of blood across his cheeks.
The night fell; the moon rose, red and glorious, and the beasts of
this untrodden forest paused in their search for meat to watch with
wondering, fearless eyes that strange, unknown animal--man.
It was Durnovo who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees
ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were
all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale.
Durnovo reached the summit first. A faint, pleasant odour was wafted
into their faces. They stood on the edge of a vast table-land melting
away in the yellow moonlight. Studded all over, like sheep in a meadow,
were a number of little bushes, and no other vegetation.
Victor Durnovo stooped over one of these. He buried his face among the
leaves of it, and suddenly he toppled over.
“Yes,” he cried as he fell, “it's Simiacine!”
And he turned over with a groan of satisfaction, and lay like a dead
man.