THE FADING MIST
They camped two hours before sundown. One of the few mercies of this
country is the number of dead trees and the bushes from which one can
always scrape the materials for a fire.
Adams, with his hunting knife and a small hatchet which was all steel and
so had been uninjured in the catastrophe, cut wood enough for the fire.
They had nothing to cook with, but fortunately the food they had with them
did not require cooking.
The tent was practicable, for the pole, so well had it been spliced, was
as good as new. They set it up, and having eaten their supper, crept under
it, leaving the porters to keep watch or not as they chose.
Berselius, who had marched so well all day, had broken down at the finish.
He seemed half dead with weariness, and scarcely spoke a word, eating
mechanically and falling to sleep immediately on lying down.
But he was happy. Happy as the man who suddenly finds that he can outwalk
the paralysis threatening him, or the man who finds the fog of blindness
lifting before him, showing him again bit by bit the world he had deemed
forever lost. Whilst this man sleeps in the tent beside his companion and
the waning moon breaks up over the horizon and mixes her light with the
red flicker of the fire, a word about that past of which he was in search
may not be out of place.
Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of Swedish descent, his
mother of French.
Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky man. In other words,
he had that keenness of intellect which enables the possessor to seize
opportunities and to foresee events.
This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin's Palace and to
the Temple of Power. To know what will appreciate in value and what will
depreciate, that is the art of success in life, and that was the art which
made Armand Berselius a millionaire.
Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of money. His mother died
when he was quite young. He had neither brothers nor sisters; his father,
a chilly-hearted sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure
reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he was some other
man's son.
The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of the man who is always
fearful of being swindled. Who cannot trust, cannot be trusted.
Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the boy, with great power for
love in his heart, conceived a hatred for the man who misused him that was
hellish in intensity.
But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will and restraint so
remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He
bound his hate with iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from
pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed
not a sign of pain or passion; when the old man committed that last
outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him
before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an
eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it
devoured it and grew.
The spring was poisoned at its source.
That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off
from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.
And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a
spacious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and
fed by an unfailing flood of energy.
The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation of his son, kept
him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.
The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the
devil than any other young man of his time. He passed through the college
of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and
when he had obtained his captaincy.
He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million
francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.
He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics
and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the
Continent of Europe. Politicians and financiers under the guise of
Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of
intellect, who work their political and financial works quite
unobtrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.
Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with
periodic returns to the wilderness.
With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge
chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew
the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the
rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the
great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern;
that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the
work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.
To keep up a large force of European police to make the blacks work on
European terms, was out of the question. The expense would run away with
half the profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all, other nations
would say, "What are you doing with that huge army of men?" The word
"slavery" had to be eliminated from the proceedings, else the conscience
of Europe would be touched. He foresaw this, and he was lost in admiration
at the native police idea. The stroke of genius that collected all the
Félixes of the Congo basin into an army of darkness, and collected all the
weak and defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his own
heart.
Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became
a member. He was not invited to the bloody banquet--he invited himself.
He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed;
later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of
Leopold's idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.
He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole infernal machinery then
and there. America had not yet, hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill,
which she handed to Leopold on the 22d of April, 1884. Germany had not
been roped in. England and France were still aloof, and Berselius,
arriving at the psychological moment, did not mince matters.
The result was two million pounds to his credit during the next ten
years.
So much for Berselius and his past.
An hour after dawn next day they started. The morning was windless, warm,
and silent, and the sun shining broad on the land cast their shadows
before them as they went, the porters with their loads piled on their
heads, Adams carrying the tent-pole and tent, Berselius leading.
He had recovered from his weakness of the night before. He had almost
recovered his strength, and he felt that newness of being which the
convalescent feels--that feeling of new birth into the old world which
pays one, almost, for the pains of the past sickness.
Never since his boyhood had Berselius felt that keen pleasure in the sun
and the blue sky and the grass under his feet; but it called up no
memories of boyhood, for the mist was still there, hiding boyhood and
manhood and _everything_ up to the skyline.
But the mist did not frighten him now. He had found a means of dispelling
it; the photographic plates were all there unbroken, waiting only to be
collected and put together, and he felt instinctively that after a time,
when he had collected a certain number, the brain would gain strength, and
all at once the mist would vanish for ever, and he would be himself
again.
Three hours after the start they passed a broken-down tree.
Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had passed on the hunt,
shortly after turning from their path to follow the herd of elephants.
Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon they would come to the
crucial point--the spot where they had turned at right angles to follow
the elephants.
Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he get confused and go on in a
straight line?
The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.
He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all
the country to the north.
"We came from there," he said, indicating the north. "We struck the
elephant spoor just here, and turned due west."
"How on earth do you know?" asked Adams. "I can't see any indication, and
for the life of me I couldn't tell where we turned or whether we came from
there," indicating the north, "or there," pointing to the south. "How do
you know?"
"How do I know?" replied Berselius. "Why, this place and everything we
reach and pass is as vivid to me as if I had passed it only two minutes
ago. _It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me._ It is that which
I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily
vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born--every
memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there
were gods, they would see as I see."
A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it
triumphantly.
Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this
rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon,
was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come
across.
This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for
the past comes to a man from a hundred close points--a thousand familiar
things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to
them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing
was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius
had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have
been as lost as Adams.
They wheeled to the north, following in their leader's footsteps.
That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool near which Berselius
had shot the rhinos.
Adams, to make sure, walked away to where the great bull had fought the
cow before being laid low by the rifle of the hunter.
The bones were there, picked clean and bleached, exemplifying the eternal
hunger of the desert, which is one of the most horrible facts in life.
These two great brutes had been left nearly whole a few days ago; tons of
flesh had vanished like snow in sunshine, mist in morning.
But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was not thinking of that;
the marvel of their return filled his mind as he looked from the skeletons
to where, against the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from
the camp fire which the porters had lighted.
Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible, a bird was
sailing along, sliding on the wind without a motion of the wings. It
passed from sight and left the sky stainless, and the land lay around
silent with the tremendous silence of evening, and lifeless as the bones
bleaching at his feet.