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THE
POOLS OF SILENCE
BY
H. de VERE STACPOOLE
AUTHOR OF
"THE BLUE LAGOON," "THE CRIMSON AZALEAS,"
"GARRYOWEN," ETC.
NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1910
Copyright, 1910, by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
Published, July, 1910
THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Lecture Of Thenard's 3
II. Dr. Duthil 11
III. Captain Berselius 19
IV. Schaunard 30
V. Marseilles 42
PART TWO
VI. Matadi 51
VII. Yandjali 56
VIII. The Voice Of The Congo Forest 64
IX. Big Game 72
X. M'bassa 80
XI. Andreas Meeus 84
XII. Night at the Fort 94
PART THREE
XIII. The Pools of Silence 101
XIV. Behind the Mask 110
XV. The Punishment 115
XVI. Due South 123
XVII. Sun-washed Spaces 127
XVIII. Far Into Elephant Land 130
XIX. The Great Herd 140
XX. The Broken Camp 152
XXI. The Feast of the Vultures 159
XXII. The Lost Guide 164
XXIII. Beyond the Skyline 173
XXIV. The Sentence of the Desert 181
XXV. Toward the Sunset 187
XXVI. The Fading Mist 192
XXVII. I Am the Forest 200
XXVIII. God Sends a Guide 204
XXIX. The Vision of the Pools 212
PART FOUR
XXX. The Avenger 219
XXXI. The Voice of the Forest by Night 230
XXXII. Moonlight on the Pools 236
XXXIII. The River of Gold 245
XXXIV. The Substitute 252
XXXV. Paris 258
XXXVI. Dreams 266
XXXVII. Berselius Beholds His Other Self 273
XXXVIII. The Revolt of a Slave 280
XXXIX. Maxine 283
XL. Pugin 296
XLI. The Return of Captain Berselius 304
XLII. Amidst the Lilies 315
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
A LECTURE OF THENARD'S
The sun was setting over Paris, a blood-red and violent-looking sun, like
the face of a bully staring in at the window of a vast chill room.
The bank of cloud above the west, corrugated by the wind, seemed not
unlike the lowermost slats of a Venetian blind; one might have fancied
that a great finger had tilted them up whilst the red, callous, cruel face
took a last peep at the frost-bitten city, the frost-bound
country--Montmartre and its windows, winking and bloodshot; Bercy and its
barges; Notre Dame, where icicles, large as carrots, hung from the lips of
the gargoyles, and the Seine clipping the _cité_ and flowing to the clean
but distant sea.
It was the fourth of January and the last day of Félix Thénard's
post-graduate course of lectures at the Beaujon Hospital.
Post-graduate lectures are intended not for students, using the word in
its limited sense, but for fully fledged men who wish for extra training
in some special subject, and Thénard, the famous neurologist of the
Beaujon, had a class which practically represented the whole continent of
Europe and half the world. Men from Vienna and Madrid, Germany and Japan,
London and New York, crowded the benches of his lecture room. Even the
Republic of Liberia was represented by a large gentleman, who seemed
carved from solid night and polished with palm oil.
Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives of America at the
lectures of Thénard, was just reaching the entrance of the Beaujon as the
last rays of sunset were touching the heights of Montmartre and the first
lamps of Paris were springing alight.
He had walked all the way from his rooms in the Rue Dijon, for omnibuses
were slow and uncomfortable, cabs were dear, and money was, just at
present, the most unpleasant thing that money can convert itself into--an
object.
Adams was six feet two, a Vermonter, an American gentleman whose chest
measurements were big, almost, as his instincts were fine. He had fought
his way up, literally from the soil, putting in terms as seaside _café_
waiter to help to pay his college fees; putting aside everything but
honour in his grand struggle to freedom and individual existence, and
finishing his college career with a travelling scholarship which brought
him to Paris.
Individualism, the thing that lends something of greatness to each
American, but which does not tend to the greatness of the nation, was the
mainspring of this big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her
eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable rivers, and across
whose shoulder one half divined the invisible axe of the pioneer.
He was just twenty-three years of age, yet he looked thirty: plain enough
as far as features go, his face was a face to remember in time of trouble.
It was of the American type that approximates to the Red Indian, and you
guessed the power that lay behind it by the set of the cheek-bones, the
breadth of the chin and the restfulness of the eyes. Like the Red Indian,
Paul Quincy Adams was slow of speech. A silent man with his tongue.
He entered the hospital and passed down a long corridor to the cloakroom,
where he left his overcoat and from there, by another corridor, he found
his way to the swing-door of the lecture theatre. It wanted five minutes
to the hour. He peeped over the muffing of the glass; the place was nearly
full, so he went in and took his seat, choosing one at the right hand end
of the first row of the stalls--students' vernacular for the lowest row of
the theatre benches.
The theatre was lit with gas. It had whitewashed walls bare as the walls
of a barn; a permanent blackboard faced the audience, and the air was
suffocatingly hot after the crisp, cold air of the streets. It would be
like this till about the middle of the lecture, when Alphonse the porter
would pull the rope of the skylight and ventilate the place with an arctic
blast.
This room, which had once been an anatomical theatre, and always a lecture
room, had known the erect form of Lisfranc; the stooping shoulders of
Majendie had cast their shadow on its walls; Flourens had lectured here on
that subject of which he had so profound a knowledge--the brain; the
echoes of this room had heard the foundations of Medicine shift and
change, the rank heresies of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day--and
_vice versa_.
Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened his pencil, sat listening
to the gas sizzling above his head; then he turned for a moment and
glanced at the men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadly braided
frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself to all men by the end of
the clinical thermometer protruding from his waistcoat pocket; the two
Japanese gentlemen--brown, incurious, and inscrutable--men from another
world, come to look on; the republican from Liberia, and the rest. Then he
turned his head, for the door on the floor of the theatre had opened,
giving entrance to Thénard.
Thénard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock-coat; his beard was
scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he had a depressed expression, the
general air of a second-rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as
he entered and crossed to the _estrade_ where the lecture table stood and
the glass of water, he shouted some words vehemently and harshly to
Alphonse, the theatre attendant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place
the box of coloured chalks on the table--the sacred chalks which the
lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard.
One instantly took a dislike to this shabby-looking _bourgeois_, with the
harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, as the lecture went on, one
forgot him. It was not the profundity of the man's knowledge, great though
it was, that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or the
lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his obvious disregard for
everything earthly but Truth.
This was borne in on one by every expression of his face, every gesture of
his body, every word and every tone and inflection of his voice.
This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. It was on the "Brain
Conceived as a Machine Pure and Simple."
It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and
romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the
idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over all other
ideas--the Soul.
It was pitiless because it did these things, and it was terrible because
it was spoken by Thénard, for he was just standing there, a little, oldish
man, terribly convincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice,
as ready to acknowledge the soul and its attributes as to refuse them,
standing there twiddling his horsehair watch-chain, and speaking from the
profundity of his knowledge with, at his elbow, a huge army of facts,
instances, and cases, not one of which did not support his logical
deductions.
I wish I could print his lecture in full. I can only give some few
sentences taken at haphazard from the peroration.
"The fundamental basis of all morality can be expressed by the words
Left--or Right. 'Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is
being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to
the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot on my dinner?'
"The prehistoric man asking himself that question in the dawn of time laid
the foundation of the world's morality. Do we know how he answered it?
Yes--undoubtedly he saved his dinner.
"The prehistoric woman crouching in the ferns, wakened from sleep by the
cries of her child on the left and the shouting of her man on the right,
found herself face to face with the question, 'Shall I court
self-destruction in attempting to save _It_, or shall I seek safety with
_Him_?' Do we know how she answered that question? Undoubtedly she took
the path to the left.
"The woman's Right was the man's Left, and she took it not from any motive
of goodness but just because her child appealed to her as powerfully as
his dinner appealed to the man. And which was the nobler instinct? In
prehistoric times, gentlemen, they were both equally noble, for the
instinct of the man was as essential to the fact that you and I are here
gathered together in enlightened Paris, as the instinct of the woman.
"Right or Left? That is still the essence of morals--all the rest is
embroidery. Whilst I am talking to you now, service is being held at the
Madeleine, the Bourse is closed (looking at his watch), but other gaming
houses are opening. The _Café de Paris_ is filling, the Little Sisters of
the Poor are visiting the sick.
"We feel keenly that some people are doing good and some people are doing
evil. We wonder at the origin of it all, and the answer comes from the
prehistoric forest.
"'I am Determination. I can choose the Right or I can choose the Left.
Whilst dwelling in the man's heart my choice lies _that_ way, in the
woman's heart _that_ way.
"'I am not religion, but between the man and the woman I have created an
essential antagonism of motive which will be the basis of all future
religions and systems of ethics. I have already dimly demarcated a line
between ferocity and greed, and a thing which has yet no name, but which
will in future ages be called Love.
"'_I_ am a constant quantity, but the dim plan I have traced in the
plastic brain will be used by the ever-building years; spires and domes
shall fret the skies, priests unroll their scrolls of papyri, infinite
developments of the simple basic Right and Left laid down by me shall
combine to build a Pantheon of a million shrines to a million gods--who
are yet only three: the tramp of the mastodon, the cry of the child in the
pterodactyl's grip, and myself, who in future years shall be the only
surviving god of the three--Determination.'
* * * * *
"The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Descartes declared it to be
the seat of the soul. 'There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,'
and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method.
"Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland is the last vestige of an
eye which once belonged to a reptile long extinct. That is the new method;
the results are not so pretty, but they are more exact."
* * * * *
"You have finished your post-graduate work, and I suppose you are about to
leave Paris like the others. Have you any plans?"
The lecture was over, the audience was pouring out of the theatre, and
Adams was talking to Thénard, whom he knew personally.
"Well, no," said Adams. "None very fixed just at present. Of course I
shall practise in my own country, but I can't quite see the opening yet."