ANDREAS MEEUS
The Parthenon in all its glory could not have looked more beautiful to the
returning Greek than this half-ruined fort in the eyes of Adams.
A thing built by the hands of white men and shone on by the sun--what
could be more acceptable to the eye after the long, long tramp through the
heart-breaking forest!
The fort of M'Bassa was quite small; the surrounding walls had gone to
decay, but the "guest house" and the office, and the great go-down where
the rubber was stored, were in good repair and well thatched.
Outside the walls were a number of wretched hovels inhabited by the
"soldiers" and their wives, and one of these soldiers, a tall black, with
the eternal red fez on his head and a rifle slung on his back, was the
first to sight the coming expedition, and to notify its approach with a
yell that brought a dozen like him from the sun-baked hovels and, a moment
later from the office, a white man in a pith helmet, who stood for a
moment looking across the half-ruined wall at the newcomers, and then
advanced to meet them.
He was a middle-sized man, with a melancholy face that showed very white
under the shadow of the helmet; he was dressed in dingy white drill, and
he had a cigarette between his lips.
He looked like a man who had never in his life smiled, yet his face was
not an unpleasant face altogether, though there was much in it to give the
observer pause.
His voice was not an unpleasant voice, altogether, yet there was that in
it, as he greeted Berselius, which struck Adams sharply and strangely; for
the voice of Andreas Meeus, _Chef de Poste_ at M'Bassa, was the voice of a
man who for two years had been condemned to talk the language of the
natives. It had curious inflections, hesitancies, and a dulness that
expressed the condition of a brain condemned for two years to think the
thoughts of the natives in their own language.
Just as the voice of a violin expresses the condition of the violin, so
does the voice of a man express the condition of his mind. And that is the
fact that will strike you most if you travel in the wilds of the Congo
State and talk to the men of your own colour who are condemned to live
amongst the people.
One might have compared Meeus's voice to the voice of a violin--a violin
that had been attacked by some strange fungoid growth that had filled its
interior and dulled the sounding board.
He had been apprised a month before of the coming of Berselius's
expedition, and one might imagine the servility which this man would show
to the all-powerful Berselius, whose hunting expeditions were
red-carpeted, who was hail-fellow-well-met with Leopold, who, by lifting
his finger, could cause Andreas Meeus to be dismissed from his post, and
by crooking his finger cause him to be raised to a Commissionership.
Yet he showed no servility at all. He had left servility behind him, just
as he had left pride, just as he had left ambition, patriotism, country,
and that divine something which blossoms into love of wife and child.
When he had shaken hands with Berselius and Adams, he led the way into the
fort, or rather into the enclosure surrounded by the ruinous mud walls, an
enclosure of about a hundred yards square.
On the right of the quadrangle stood the go-down, where the rubber and a
small quantity of ivory was stored.
In the centre stood the misnamed guest house, a large mud and wattle
building, with a veranda gone to decay.
The blinding sun shone on it all, showing up with its fierce light the
true and appalling desolation of the place. There was not one thing in the
enclosure upon which the eye could rest with thankfulness.
Turning from the enclosure and looking across the fort wall to the
distance, one saw a world as far from civilization as the world that
Romulus looked at when he gazed across the wall outlining the first dim
sketch of Rome.
To the north, forest; to the south, forest; to the east, forest; and to
the west, eternal and illimitable forest. Blazing sun, everlasting haze
that in the rainy season would become mist and silence.
In the storms and under the rains the great rubber forest of M'Bonga would
roar like a reef-tormented sea, but on a day like this, when, gazing from
the high ground of the fort, the eye travelled across the swelling domes
and heat-stricken valleys of foliage, the pale green of the feather-palms,
the sombre green of the n'sambyas, to the haze that veiled all things
beyond, on a day like this, silence gazed at one Sphinx-like, and from the
distance of a million years. Silence that had brooded upon Africa before
Africa had a name, before Pharaoh was born, before Thebes was built.
Meeus led the way into the guest house, which contained only two
rooms--rooms spacious enough, but bare of everything except the ordinary
necessities of life. In the living room there was a table of white
deal-like wood and three or four chairs evidently made by natives from a
European design. A leopard skin, badly dried and shrivelling at the edges,
hung on one wall, presumably as an ornament; on another wall some Congo
bows and arrows--bows with enormously thick strings and arrows poisoned so
skilfully that a scratch from one would kill you, though they had been
hanging there for many years. They were trophies of the early days when
Fort M'Bassa was really a fort, and from those woods down there clouds of
soot-black devils, with filed teeth, raided the place, only to be swept
away by rifle fire.
There was no picture torn from an illustrated paper adorning the place, as
in Verhaeren's abode, but on a rudely constructed shelf there lay just the
same stack of "official letters," some of these two years old, some of
last month, all dealing with trade.
Meeus brought out cigarettes and gin, but Berselius, safe now at his base
of operations, to make a little festival of the occasion sent to the
stores, which his porters had deposited in the go-down, for a magnum of
champagne. It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his
veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull
eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of
people he had known--the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare
of the _Café de Couronne_--all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine.
Meeus was one of the "unfortunate men." He had held a small clerkship
under the Belgian Government, from which he had been dismissed through a
fault of his own.
This was five years ago. Up to his dismissal he had led the peddling and
sordid life that a small government clerk on the Continent leads if he has
nothing to save him from himself and from his fellows: the dry rot of
official life had left him useless for anything but official life. A
sensualist in a small way, he enlarged his sphere on the day of his
dismissal, when he found himself cut off from work and adrift in the
world, with five hundred francs in his pocket. In one glorious debauch,
which lasted a week, he spent the five hundred francs, and then he settled
down to live on a maiden aunt.
He called it looking for work.
She lasted for a year and nine months, and then she died, and her annuity
died with her. He felt her loss deeply, for not only had her money helped
to support him, but she was his only real friend, and he had a heart in
those days that seemed so far distant from him now.
Then it was that Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and
with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the
_déclassé_, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a
living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows
who sat in the _cafés_ and walked the boulevards and ogled the women.
He tramped the streets of Brussels, at first in seedy clothes and at last
in filth and horrible rags. A relative came to his assistance with two
hundred francs; he bought himself clothes and made himself respectable,
but, in a fortnight, found himself relapsing again, sinking like a swimmer
whose momentary support has gone to pieces.
Just as the waves were again about to close over his benighted head, an
acquaintance got him a post under Government. Not under the Belgian but
the Congo Government.
Andreas Meeus was exactly the type of man this Government required, and
still requires, and still uses and must continue to use as long as the
infernal machine which it has invented for the extraction of gold from
niggers continues to work. A man, that is to say, who has eaten
orange-peel picked up in the market-place; a man who has worn out his
friends--and his clothes. A man without hope.
One would think for the work in hand they would choose the greatest
blackguards possible: convicts convicted of the worst crimes of violence.
Not at all. These men would be for one thing too intractable; for another
thing, too unstable, and for another thing (strange to say), possessed of
too much heart. The Congo Government knows its work far too well for that.
It does not take the murderer or the violent criminal from the
penitentiary to do its work; it takes from the streets the man without
hope. The educated man who has fallen, the man who can still think.
Meeus went to Africa just as a man goes to prison. He hated the idea of
going, but he had to go, or stay and starve. He was stationed three months
at Boma and then he was moved to a post on the Upper Congo, a small and
easily worked post, where he found out the full conditions of his new
servitude.
This post had to do with what they call in the jargon of the Congo
administration, Forest Exploitation. Gum copal and wax was the stuff he
had to extract from the people round about.
Here he found himself morally in the clutches of that famous and infamous
proclamation issued from Brussels on the twentieth of June, 1892, by
Secretary of State Van Estvelde.
The Bonus Proclamation.
According to the terms of this proclamation, Meeus found that besides his
pay he could get a bonus on every kilo of wax and copal he could extract
from the natives, and that the cheaper he could get the stuff the more his
bonus would be.
Thus, for every kilo of wax or copal screwed out of the natives at a cost
of five centimes or less, he received into his pocket a bonus of fifteen
centimes, that is to say the bonus to Meeus was three times what the
natives got; if by any laxity or sense of justice, the cost of the wax or
copal rose to six centimes a kilo, Meeus only got ten centimes bonus, and
so on.
The cheaper he got the stuff the more he was paid for it. And those were
the terms on which he had to trade with the natives.
Then there were the taxes. The natives had to bring in huge quantities of
wax and copal for nothing, just as a tax owing to the State, a tax to the
Government that was plundering and exploiting them.
Meeus, who had a spice of the tradesman in him, fell into this state of
things as easily as a billiard ball falls into a pocket when skilfully
directed.
The unfortunate man was absolutely a billiard ball in the hands of a
professional player; the stroke of the cue had been given in Belgium, he
rolled to his appointed post, fell into it, and was damned.
His fingers became crooked and a dull hunger for money filled his soul.
His success in working the niggers was so great that he was moved to a
more difficult post at higher pay, and then right on to M'Bassa.
He was not naturally a cruel man. In his childhood he had been fond of
animals, but Matabiche, the god-devil of the Congo, changed all that.
He saw nothing extortionate in his dealings, nothing wrong in them. When
things were going well, then all was well; but when the natives resisted
his charges and taxes, defrauding him of his bonus and lowering him in the
eyes of his superiors, then Meeus became terrible.
And he was absolute master.
Away here in the lonely fort, in the midst of the great M'Bonga rubber
forest that was now speechless as a Sphinx, now roaring at him like a sea
in torment; here in the endless sunlight of the dry seasons and the
endless misery of the rains, Meeus driven in upon himself, had time to
think.
There is no prison so terrible as a limitless prison. Far better for a man
to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The
walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in
distance.
Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch
another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another
night. He knew what it was to watch infinite freedom and to know it for
his captor and jailer. He knew what it was to wake from his noonday siesta
and see the same great awful splash of sunlight striking the same old
space of arid yard, where the empty tomato tin lay by the rotten plantain
cast over by some nigger child. He knew what it was to lie and hear the
flies buzzing and wonder what tune of the devil it was they were trying to
imitate. He knew what it was to think of death with the impotent craving
of a sick child for some impossible toy.
Look into your own life and see all the tiny things that save you from
_ennui_ and devilment, and give you heart to continue the journey from
hour to hour in this world where we live. Your morning paper, the new book
from the library you have just got to read, the pipe you hope to smoke
when you return from work, the very details of your work; a hundred and
one petty things that make up the day of an ordinary man, breaking the
monotony and breaking the prospect before him into short views.
Meeus had none of these. Without literature or love, without a woman to
help him through, without a child to care for or a dog to care for him,
there at Fort M'Bassa in the glaring sunshine he faced his fate and became
what he was.