MATADI
It was evening. _La Joconde_, Berselius's yacht, lay moored at the wharf
of Matadi; warpling against the starboard plates, whimpering, wimpling,
here smooth as glass, here eddied and frosted, a sea of golden light, a
gliding mirror, went the Congo.
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. All the other impressions
are--to paraphrase Thénard--embroideries on this.
Yet how many other impressions there are! The Congo is Africa in a frank
mood. Africa, laying her hand on her heart and speaking, or rather,
whispering the truth.
This great river flooding from Stanley Pool and far away beyond, draws
with it, like a moving dream, the pictures of the roaring rapids and the
silent pools, the swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous
life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the
hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as
it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What
things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past
Matadi--and wallowed in it? Its faint perfume hints at that.
On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated,
and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow
they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real
base of the expedition, leaving _La Joconde_ behind at Matadi.
The yacht would return to France.
"What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships," said Adams, turning
in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased
for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. "What are the exports
here?"
"Gum copal--nuts--rubber--tusks--everything you can get out of there,"
answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.
Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of
Berselius's hand, "over there"; little did he dream of what those words
held in their magic.
Then Berselius went below.
The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver
lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the
moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and
tangling the trees.
Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his
cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She
had come to Marseilles to see them off, and----
Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not
hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of
that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.
Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate
possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as
mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich--so rich that the
contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the
idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world
for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman's money or assistance.
He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social
temple by walking between the pillars of the portico, or smashing an
entrance way through the wall with his fist.
He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in
himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male
creation in Nature.
Though he could not contemplate Maxine as a wife, he did as a woman. In a
state of savagery he would have carried her off in his arms; surrounded as
he was by the trammels of civilization, he contented himself with
imagining her in that position.
It is quite possible that no other woman would ever inspire the same
passion in him. He knew this, yet he did not grumble; for he was
practical, and his practical nature had a part in his wildest dreams.
Go to New York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-scrapers built by the
Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest
dreams of architecture. Yet they don't fall down; they serve their
purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at bottom practical men.
As he paced the deck, smoking and contemplating the moonlit river, Maxine
gave place in his mind to her father.
Berselius up to this had shown himself in no unfavourable light. Up to
this he had been almost companionable.
Almost! They had dined together, paced the deck together, discussed all
sorts of subjects, yet not by the fraction of an inch had he advanced in
his knowledge of the man. A wall of ice divided Berselius from his
fellow-men. Between him and them a great gulf was fixed, a gulf narrow
enough to speak across, but of an impenetrable depth. Berselius was always
so assured, so impassively calm, so authoritative, his conversation so
penetrative, so lit by intuition and acquired knowledge, that Adams
sometimes in his company felt that elation which comes to us when we find
ourselves in the presence of a supreme mind. At other times this
overpowering personality weighed upon him so much that he would leave the
saloon and pace the deck so as to become himself again.
* * * * *
Next morning they left by rail for Leopoldville, where they found waiting
for them the _Leopold_, a shallow-draught steamer of some two hundred
tons.