THE SUBSTITUTE
District Commissioner De Wiart, chief at M'Bina, was a big man with a
blond beard and a good-natured face. He worked the post at M'Bina with the
assistance of a subordinate named Van Laer.
De Wiart was a man eminently fitted for his post. He had a genius for
organization and overseeing. He would not have been worth a centime away
up-country, for his heart was far too good to allow him to personally
supervise the working of the niggers, but at M'Bina he was worth a good
deal to the Government that employed him.
This man who would not hurt a fly--this man who would have made an
excellent father of a family--was terrible to his subordinates when he
took a pen in his hand. He knew the mechanism of every _Chef de Poste_ in
his district, and the sort of letter that would rouse him up, stimulate
him to renewed action, and the slaves under him to renewed work.
Van Laer was of quite a different type. Van Laer had the appearance of a
famished hound held back by a leash. He was tall and thin. He had been a
schoolmaster dismissed from his school for a grave offence; he had been a
billiard-marker; he had walked the streets of Brussels in a frock-coat and
tall hat, a "guide" on the lookout for young foreigners who wished to
enjoy the more dubious pleasures of the city. He had been many things,
till, at the age of thirty-five, he became a servant of the crown.
The pale blue eyes of Van Laer held in them a shallowness and murderous
cruelty, an expression of negation and coldness combined with mind such as
one finds nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it which
prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs were cruelly shaped and
enormous. A man may disguise his soul, he may disguise his mind, he may
disguise his face, but he cannot disguise his thumbs unless he wears
gloves.
No one wears gloves on the Congo, so Van Laer's thumbs were openly
displayed.
He had been six months now at M'Bina and he was sick of the place,
accounts were of no interest to him. He was a man of action, and he wanted
to be doing. He could make money up there in the forest at the heart of
things; here, almost in touch with civilization, he was wasting his time.
And he wanted money. The bonus-ache had seized him badly. When he saw the
great tusks of green ivory in their jackets of matting, when he saw the
bales of copal leafed round with aromatic unknown leaves, and speaking
fervently of the wealth of the tropics and the riches of the primeval
forests, when he saw the tons of rubber and remembered that this stuff,
which in the baskets of the native collectors looks like fried potato
chips, in Europe becomes, by the alchemy of trade, minted gold, a great
hunger filled his hungry soul.
At M'Bina great riches were eternally flowing in and flowing out. Wealth
in its original wrappings piled itself on the wharf in romantical packets
and bales, piled itself on board steamers, floated away down the golden
river, and was replaced by more wealth flowing in from the inexhaustible
forests.
The sight of all this filled Van Laer with an actual physical hunger. He
could have eaten that stuff that was wealth itself. He could have devoured
those tusks. He was Gargantua as far as his appetite was concerned, and
for the rest he was only Van Laer driving a quill in the office of De
Wiart.
He did not know that he was here on probation; that the good-natured and
seemingly lazy de Wiart was studying him and finding him satisfactory,
that very soon his desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let
loose like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an animated
thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft.
When the soldiers had lost Berselius and Adams, they struck at once for
M'Bina, reaching it in a day's march.
Here they told their tale.
_Chef de Poste_ Meeus was dead. They had escorted a sick white man and a
big white man toward M'Bina. One night three leopards had prowled round
the camp and the soldiers had gone in pursuit of them.
The leopards escaped, but the soldiers could not find the white men
again.
De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believing a word of it,
except in so far as it related to Meeus.
"Where did you lose the white men?" asked de Wiart.
The soldiers did not know. One does not know where one loses a thing; if
one did, then the thing would not be lost.
"Just so," said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident axiom, and more
than ever convinced that the story was a lie. Meeus was dead and the men
had come to report. They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of
their own, and this lie about the white men was to account for their
delay.
"Did anyone else come with you as well as the white men?" asked De Wiart.
"Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away."
De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river.
From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and
lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving
flood of gold. One might have fancied that all the wealth of the elephant
country, all the teeming riches of the forest, flowing by a thousand
streams and disdaining to wait for the alchemy of trade, had joined in one
Pactolian flood flowing toward Leopoldsville and the sea.
De Wiart was not thinking this. He dismissed the soldiers and told them to
hold themselves in readiness to return to M'Bassa on the morrow.
That evening he called Van Laer into the office.
"_Chef de Poste_ Meeus of Fort M'Bassa is dead," said De Wiart; "you will
go there and take command. You will start to-morrow."
Van Laer flushed.
"It is a difficult post," said De Wiart, "wild country, and the natives
are the laziest to be found in the whole of the state. The man before
Meeus did much harm; he had no power or control, he was a weak man, and
the people frankly laughed at him. Actually rubber came in here one-third
rubbish, the people were half their time in revolt, they cut the vines in
two districts. I have a report of his saying, 'There is no ivory to be
got. The herds are very scarce, and the people say they cannot make
elephants.' Fancy writing nigger talk like that in a report. I replied in
the same tone. I said, 'Tell the people they must make them: and make them
in a hurry. Tell them that they need not trouble to make whole elephants,
just the tusks will do--eighty-pound tusks, a hundred-pound if possible.'
But sarcasm was quite thrown away on him. He listened to the natives. Once
a man does that he is lost, for they lose all respect for him. They are
just like children, these people; once let children get in the habit of
making excuses and you lose control.
"Meeus was a stronger man, but he left much to be desired. He had too much
whalebone in his composition, not enough steel, but he was improving.
"You will find yourself at first in a difficult position. It always is so
when a _Chef de Poste_ dies suddenly and even a few days elapse before he
is replaced. The people get out of hand, thinking the white man is gone
for ever. However, you will find yourself all right in a week or so, if
you are firm."
"Thank you," said Van Laer. "I have no doubt at all that I will be able to
bring these people into line. I do not boast. I only ask you to keep your
eye on the returns."
Next day Van Laer, escorted by the soldiers, left M'Bina to take up the
station at Fort M'Bassa left vacant by the death of _Chef de Poste_
Andreas Meeus.
Three days later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house by shouts from the
sentinels on duty saw, coming toward him in the blazing sunshine, a great
man who stumbled and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was
bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead.
Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The man erect had, tied to
his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a skull.
Fit emblem of the forest he had passed through and the land that lay
behind it.