Here--judge if hell, with all its power to damn,
Can add one curse to the foul thing I am--
There are some places in the world where a curse seems to brood in the
atmosphere. Msala was one of these. Perhaps these places are accursed by
the deeds that have been done there. Who can tell?
Could the trees--the two gigantic palms that stood by the river's
edge--could these have spoken, they might perhaps have told the tale of
this little inland station in that country where, as the founder of the
hamlet was in the habit of saying, no one knows what is going on.
All went well with the retreating column until they were almost in
sight of Msala, when the flotilla was attacked by no less than three
hippopotamuses. One canoe was sunk, and four others were so badly
damaged that they could not be kept afloat with their proper complement
of men. There was nothing for it but to establish a camp at Msala, and
wait there until the builders had repaired the damaged canoes.
The walls of Durnovo's house were still standing, and here Guy Oscard
established himself with as much comfort as circumstances allowed. He
caused a temporary roof of palm-leaves to be laid on the charred beams,
and within the principal room--the very room where the three organisers
of the great Simiacine scheme had first laid their plans--he set up his
simple camp furniture.
Oscard was too great a traveller, too experienced a wanderer, to be
put out of temper by this enforced rest. The men had worked very well
hitherto. It had, in its way, been a great feat of generalship, this
leading through a wild country of men unprepared for travel, scantily
provisioned, disorganised by recent events. No accident had happened,
no serious delay had been incurred, although the rate of progress had
necessarily been very slow. Nearly six weeks had elapsed since Oscard
with his little following had turned their backs for ever on the
Simiacine Plateau. But now the period of acute danger had passed away.
They had almost reached civilisation. Oscard was content.
When Oscard was content he smoked a slower pipe than usual--watching
each cloud of smoke vanish into thin air. He was smoking very slowly
this, the third evening of their encampment at Msala. There had been
heavy rain during the day, and the whole lifeless forest was dripping
with a continuous, ceaseless clatter of heavy drops on tropic foliage;
with a united sound like a widespread whisper.
Oscard was sitting in the windowless room without a light, for a light
only attracted a myriad of heavy-winged moths. He was seated before the
long French window, which, since the sash had gone, had been used as a
door. Before him, in the glimmering light of the mystic Southern Cross,
the great river crept unctuously, silently to the sea. It seemed to be
stealing away surreptitiously while the forest whispered of it. On its
surface the reflection of the great stars of the southern hemisphere ran
into little streaks of silver, shimmering away into darkness.
All sound of human life was still. The natives were asleep. In the next
room, Joseph in his hammock was just on the barrier between the waking
and the sleeping life--as soldiers learn to be. Oscard would not have
needed to raise his voice to call him to his side.
The leader of this hurried retreat had been sitting there for two hours.
The slimy moving surface of the river had entered into his brain; the
restless silence of the African forest alone kept him awake. He hardly
realised that the sound momentarily gaining strength within his ears was
that of a paddle--a single, weakly, irregular paddle. It was not a sound
to wake a sleeping man. It came so slowly, so gently through the whisper
of the dripping leaves that it would enter into his slumbers and make
itself part of them.
Guy Oscard only realised the meaning of that sound when a black shadow
crept on to the smooth evenness of the river's breast. Oscard was
eminently a man of action. In a moment he was on his feet, and in the
darkness of the room there was the gleam of a rifle-barrel. He came back
to the window--watching.
He saw the canoe approach the bank. He heard the thud of the paddle
as it was thrown upon the ground. In the gloom, to which his eyes were
accustomed, he saw a man step from the boat to the shore and draw the
canoe up. The silent midnight visitor then turned and walked up towards
the house. There was something familiar in the gait--the legs were
slightly bowed. The man was walking with great difficulty, staggering a
little at each step. He seemed to be in great pain.
Guy Oscard laid aside his rifle. He stepped forward to the open window.
“Is that you, Durnovo?” he said, without raising his voice.
“Yes,” replied the other. His voice was muffled, as if his tongue was
swollen, and there was a startling break in it.
Oscard stepped aside, and Durnovo passed into his own house.
“Got a light?” he said, in the same muffled way.
In the next room Joseph could be heard striking a match, and a moment
later he entered the room, throwing a flood of light before him.
“GOOD GOD!” cried Guy Oscard. He stepped back as if he had been struck,
with his hand shielding his eyes.
“Save us!” ejaculated Joseph in the same breath.
The thing that stood there--sickening their gaze--was not a human being
at all. Take a man's eyelids away, leaving the round balls staring,
blood-streaked; cut away his lips, leaving the grinning teeth and red
gums; shear off his ears--that which is left is not a man at all. This
had been done to Victor Durnovo. Truly the vengeance of man is crueller
than the vengeance of God!
Could he have seen himself, Victor Durnovo would never have shown that
face--or what remained of it--to a human being. He could only have
killed himself. Who can tell what cruelties had been paid for, piece
by piece, in this loathsome mutilation? The slaves had wreaked their
terrible vengeance; but the greatest, the deepest, the most inhuman
cruelty was in letting him go.
“They've made a pretty mess of me,” said Durnovo in a sickening,
lifeless voice--and he stood there, with a terrible caricature of a
grin.
Joseph set down the lamp with a groan, and went back into the dark room
beyond, where he cast himself upon the ground and buried his face in his
hands.
“O Lord!” he muttered. “O God in heaven--kill it, kill it!”
Guy Oscard never attempted to run away from it. He stood slowly gulping
down his nauseating horror. His teeth were clenched; his face, through
the sunburn, livid; the blue of his eyes seemed to have faded into an
ashen grey. The sight he was looking on would have sent three men out of
five into gibbering idiocy.
Then at last he moved forward. With averted eyes he took Durnovo by the
arm.
“Come,” he said, “lie down upon my bed. I will try and help you. Can you
take some food?”
Durnovo threw himself down heavily on the bed. There was a punishment
sufficient to expiate all his sins in the effort he saw that Guy Oscard
had had to make before he touched him. He turned his face away.
“I haven't eaten anything for twenty-four hours,” he said, with a
whistling intonation.
“Joseph,” said Oscard, returning to the door of the inner room--his
voice sounded different, there was a metallic ring in it--“get something
for Mr. Durnovo--some soup or something.”
Joseph obeyed, shaking as if ague were in his bones.
Oscard administered the soup. He tended Durnovo with all the gentleness
of a woman, and a fortitude that was above the fortitude of men. Despite
himself, his hands trembled--big and strong as they were; his whole
being was contracted with horror and pain. Whatever Victor Durnovo had
been, he was now an object of such pity that before it all possible
human sins faded into spotlessness. There was no crime in all that
human nature has found to commit for which such cruelty as this would be
justly meted out in punishment.
Durnovo spoke from time to time, but he could see the effect that his
hissing speech had upon his companion, and in time he gave it up. He
told haltingly of the horrors of the Simiacine Plateau--of the last
grim tragedy acted there--how, at last, blinded with his blood, maimed,
stupefied by agony, he had been hounded down the slope by a yelling,
laughing horde of torturers.
There was not much to be done, and presently Guy Oscard moved away
to his camp-chair, where he sat staring into the night. Sleep was
impossible. Strong, hardened, weather-beaten man that he was, his nerves
were all a-tingle, his flesh creeping and jumping with horror. Gradually
he collected his faculties enough to begin to think about the future.
What was he to do with this man? He could not take him to Loango. He
could not risk that Jocelyn or even Maurice Gordon should look upon this
horror.
Joseph had crept back into the inner room, where he had no light, and
could be heard breathing hard, wide awake in his hammock.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a loud cry:
“Oscard! Oscard!”
In a moment Joseph and Oscard were at the bedside.
Durnovo was sitting up, and he grabbed at Oscard's arm.
“For God's sake!” he cried. “For God's sake, man, don't let me go to
sleep!”
“What do you mean?” asked Oscard. They both thought that he had gone
mad. Sleep had nothing more to do with Durnovo's eyes--protruding,
staring, terrible to look at.
“Don't let me go to sleep,” he repeated. “Don't! Don't!”
“All right,” said Oscard soothingly; “all right. We'll look after you.”
He fell back on the bed. In the flickering light his eyeballs gleamed.
Then quite suddenly he rose to a sitting position again with a wild
effort.
“I've got it! I've got it!” he cried.
“Got what?”
“The sleeping sickness!”
The two listeners knew of this strange disease. Oscard had seen a whole
village devastated by it, the habitants lying about their own doors,
stricken down by a deadly sleep from which they never woke. It is known
on the West Coast of Africa, and the cure for it is unknown.
“Hold me!” cried Durnovo. “Don't let me sleep!”
His head fell forward even as he spoke, and the staring wide-open eyes
that could not sleep made a horror of him.
Oscard took him by the arms, and held him in a sitting position.
Durnovo's fingers were clutching at his sleeve.
“Shake me! God! shake me!”
Then Oscard took him in his strong arms, and set him on his feet. He
shook him gently at first, but as the dread somnolence crept on he shook
harder, until the mutilated inhuman head rolled upon the shoulders.
“It's a sin to let that man live,” exclaimed Joseph, turning away in
horror.
“It's a sin to let ANY man die,” replied Oscard, and with his great
strength he shook Durnovo like a garment.
And so Victor Durnovo died. His stained soul left his body in Guy
Oscard's hands, and the big Englishman shook the corpse, trying to awake
it from that sleep which knows no earthly waking.
So, after all, Heaven stepped in and laid its softening hand on the
judgment of men. But there was a strange irony in the mode of death. It
was strange that this man, who never could have closed his eyes again,
should have been stricken down by the sleeping sickness.
They laid the body on the floor, and covered the face, which was less
gruesome in death, for the pity of the eyes had given place to peace.
The morning light, bursting suddenly through the trees as it does in
Equatorial Africa, showed the room set in order and Guy Oscard sleeping
in his camp-chair. Behind him, on the floor, lay the form of Victor
Durnovo. Joseph, less iron-nerved than the great big-game hunter, was
awake and astir with the dawn. He, too, was calmer now. He had seen
death face to face too often to be appalled by it in broad daylight.
So they buried Victor Durnovo between the two giant palms at Msala, with
his feet turned towards the river which he had made his, as if ready to
arise when the call comes and undertake one of those marvellous journeys
of his which are yet a household word on the West Coast.
The cloth fluttered as they lowered him into his narrow resting-place,
and the face they covered had a strange mystic grin, as if he saw
something that they could not perceive. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he saw
the Simiacine Plateau, and knew that, after all, he had won the last
throw; for up there, far above the table-lands of Central Africa, there
lay beneath high Heaven a charnel-house. Hounded down the slope by his
tormentors, he had left a memento behind him surer than their torturing
knives, keener than their sharpest steel--he had left the sleeping
sickness behind him.
His last journey had been worthy of his reputation. In twenty days he
had covered the distance between the Plateau and Msala, stumbling on
alone, blinded, wounded, sore-stricken, through a thousand daily valleys
of death. With wonderful endurance he had paddled night and day down
the sleek river without rest, with the dread microbe of the sleeping
sickness slowly creeping through his veins.
He had lived in dread of this disease, as men do of a sickness which
clutches them at last; but when it came he did not recognise it. He
was so racked by pain that he never recognised the symptoms; he was so
panic-stricken, so paralysed by the nameless fear that lay behind him,
that he could only think of pressing forward. In the night hours he
would suddenly rise from his precarious bed under the shadow of a fallen
tree and stagger on, haunted by a picture of his ruthless foes pressing
through the jungle in pursuit. Thus he accomplished his wonderful
journey alone through trackless forests; thus he fended off the sickness
which gripped him the moment that he laid him down to rest.
He had left it--a grim legacy--to his torturers, and before he reached
the river all was still on the Simiacine Plateau.
And so we leave Victor Durnovo. His sins are buried with him, and
beneath the giant palms at Msala lies Maurice Gordon's secret.
And so we leave Msala, the accursed camp. Far up the Ogowe river, on the
left bank, the giant palms still stand sentry, and beneath their shade
the crumbling walls of a cursed house are slowly disappearing beneath
luxuriant growths of grass and brushwood.