MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS
Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any
ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining
strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying
that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the
stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least
shock or obstruction.
The man was too weak to talk, he could just say "Yes" and "No" in answer
to a question, and it was always "Better" when he was asked how he felt,
but he never spoke a word of his own volition.
Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different
ways--from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to
beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun.
Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of
appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and
flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking
trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching
them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for they were the
only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue
or hinted at the tenderness of God.
All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic;
it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to
whom it bore no promise.
But the forest was the thing which filled Adams's heart with a craving for
freedom and escape that rose to a passion.
He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the
great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist
and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten
him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him
its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.
The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had
gone back to his place and task--the forest had sucked him back. This
gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and
the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what
the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered:
_There is no God in the forest of M'Bonga, no law but the law of the
leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death._
The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare--his one desire in life
now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when,
rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the
palms bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in
billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of
tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms
made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their
foliage.
At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could
raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident
that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was
still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and
nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in
the immeasurable south.
The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear
before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad
and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he
did not feel terrified--it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of
some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed
by a man who was now dead.
He could regret the acts of that man and he could seek to atone for them,
but he felt no personal remorse. "He was not I," would have reasoned the
mind of Berselius; "those acts were not my acts, because _now I could not
commit them_," so he would have reasoned had he reasoned on the matter at
all. But he did not. In that wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had
screamed aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that fate
had played it, by making it the slave of two personalities, and then
torturing it by showing it the acts of the old personality through the
eyes of the new.
When the brain fever had passed, it awoke untroubled; the junction had
been effected, the new Berselius was It, and all the acts of the old
Berselius were foreign to it and far away.
It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the great change comes on
his brain. After the brain-storm and the agony of new birth comes the
peace and the feeling that he is "another man." He feels that all his sins
are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense of responsibility
for the crimes he committed in the old life, he has cast them off like an
old suit of clothes. The old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for
your vices by losing your smell and taste for vice, and slip out of your
debt for crime by becoming another man?
Does the old man ever die?
The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, which is more
especially interesting as it is prompted by a case not unique but almost
typical.
The interesting point in Berselius's case lay in the question as to
whether his change of mind was initiated by the injury received in the
elephant country or by the shock at the Silent Pools. In other words, was
it due to some mechanical pressure on the brain produced by the accident,
or was it due to "repentance" on seeing suddenly unveiled the hideous
drama in which he had taken part?
This remains to be seen.
At the end of the fourth week Berselius was able to leave his bed, and
every day now marked a steady improvement in strength.
Not a word about the past did he say, not a question did he ask, and what
surprised Adams especially, not a question did he put about Meeus, till
one day in the middle of the fifth week.
Berselius was seated in one of the arm chairs of the sitting room when he
suddenly raised his head.
"By the way," said he, "where is the _Chef de Poste_?"
"He is dead," replied Adams.
"Ah!" said Berselius; there was almost a note of relief in his voice. He
said nothing more and Adams volunteered no explanation, for the affair was
one entirely between Meeus, himself, and God.
A few minutes later, Berselius, who seemed deep in thought, raised his
head again.
"We must get away from here. I am nearly strong enough to go now. It will
be a rough journey in these rains, but it will be a much shorter road than
the road we came by."
"How so?"
"We came from Yandjali right through the forest before striking south to
here; we will now make straight for the river, along the rubber road. I
think the post on the river which we will reach is called M'Bina, it is a
hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from there to
Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out this morning."
"How about a guide?"
"These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they often escort the
loads."
"Good," said Adams. "I will have some sort of litter rigged up and we will
carry you. I am not going to let you walk in your present condition."
Berselius bowed his head.
"I am very sensible," said he, "of the care and attention you have
bestowed on me during the past weeks. I owe you a considerable debt, which
I will endeavour to repay, at all events, by following your directions
implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send me in the
corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his own language and explain
what is to be done."
"Good," said Adams, and he went out and found the corporal and sent him in
to Berselius.
"Good!" The word was not capacious enough to express what he felt.
Freedom, Light, Humanity, the sight of a civilized face, for these he
ached with a great longing, and they were all there at the end of the
rubber road, only waiting to be met with.
He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest.
"Another ten days," said Adams.
The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thousands of years, waved
its branches to the wind.
A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams's cheek, and in the "hush"
of the trees there seemed a murmur of derision and the whisper of a
threat.
"It is not well to shake your fist at the gods--in the open."
Adams went back to the house to begin preparations, and for the next week
he was busy. From some spare canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a
litter strong enough to carry Berselius--he had to do nearly all the work
himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless as workmen. Then stores had
to be arranged and put together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes
had to be mended and patched--even his boots had to be cobbled with
twine--but at last all was ready, and on the day before they started the
weather improved. The sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right
to the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like ranges of
snow-covered mountains.
That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams announced his intention of
going on a little expedition of his own.
"I shall only be a few hours away," said he, "five at most."
"Where are you going?" asked Berselius.
"Oh, just down into the woods," replied Adams. Then he left the room
before his companion could ask any more questions and sought out the
corporal.
He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck down the slope in the
direction of the Silent Pools. When they reached the forest edge he
pointed before them and said, "Matabayo."
The man understood and led the way, which was not difficult, for the feet
of the rubber collectors had beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of
light, too, for the moon was already in the sky, only waiting for the sun
to sink before blazing out.
When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk fell on them suddenly,
and deepened almost to dark; then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest
around them glowed green to the light of the moon.
The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached them, lay in mist and
moonlight, making a picture unforgettable for ever.
It recalled to Adams that picture of Doré's, illustrating the scene from
the "Idylls of the King," where Arthur labouring up the pass "all in a
misty moonlight," had trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose
head the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn--the misty
tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting to receive it and hide it
in his robe.
The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones still unburied of
the creatures that a far-off king had murdered. The rain had washed them
about, and Adams had to search and search before he found what he had come
to find.
At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst
the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the
grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish
business the white man had come to find the thing.
Then Adams with the dreary bundle under his arm looked around him at the
other remains and swore--swore by the God who had made him, by the mother
who had borne him, and the manhood that lay in him, to rest not nor stay
till he had laid before the face of Europe the skull of Papeete and the
acts of the terrible scoundrel who for long years had systematically
murdered for money.
Then, followed by the savage, he turned and retook his road. At the wood's
edge he looked back at the silent scene, and it seemed to look at him with
the muteness and sadness of a witness who cannot speak, of a woman who
cannot tell her sorrow.