PARIS
One hot day in June Schaunard was seated in the little office just behind
his shop. He was examining an improved telescopic sight which had just
been put upon the market by an opponent, criticizing it as one poet
criticizes the poem of another poet--that is to say, ferociously.
To him, thus meditating, from the Rue de la Paix suddenly came a gush of
sound which as suddenly ceased.
The shop door had opened and closed again, and Schaunard leaving his
office came out to see who the visitor might be.
He found himself face to face with Adams. He knew him by his size, but he
would scarcely have recognized him by his face, so brown, so thin and so
different in expression was it from the face of the man with whom he had
parted but a few months ago.
"Good day," said Adams. "I have come to pay you for that gun."
"Ah, yes, the gun," said Schaunard with a little laugh, "this is a
pleasant surprise. I had entered it amidst my bad debts. Come in,
monsieur, come into my office, it is cooler there, and we can talk. The
gun, ah, yes. I had entered that transaction in Ledger D. Come in, come
in. There, take that armchair, I keep it for visitors. Well, and how did
the expedition go off?"
"Badly," said Adams. "We are only back a week. You remember what you said
to me when we parted? You said, 'Don't go.' I wish I had taken your
advice."
"Why, since you are back sound and whole, it seems to me you have not done
so badly--but perhaps you have got malaria?"
The old man's sharp eyes were investigating the face of the other.
Schaunard's eyes had this peculiarity, that they were at once friendly to
one and cruel, they matched the eternal little laugh which was ever
springing to his lips--the laugh of the eternal mocker.
Schaunard made observations as well as telescopic sights and
wind-gauges--he had been making observation for sixty years--he took
almost as much interest in individual human beings as in rifles, and much
more interest in Humanity than in God.
He was afflicted with the malady of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries--he did not believe in God, only instead of hiding his disease
under a cloak of mechanical religion, or temporizing with it, he frankly
declared himself to be what he was, an atheist.
This fact did not interfere with his trade--a godly gunmaker gets no more
custom than an atheistical one; besides, Schaunard did not obtrude his
religious opinions after the fashion of his class, he was a good deal of a
gentleman, and he was accustomed to converse familiarly with emperors and
kings.
"No, it is not malaria," replied Adams, following the old man who was
leading the way into the office. "I never felt better in my life. It is
just the Congo. The place leaves an impression on one's mind, M.
Schaunard, a flavour that is not good."
He took the armchair which Schaunard kept for visitors. He was only a week
back--all he had seen out there was fresh to him and very vivid, but he
felt in Schaunard an antagonistic spirit, and he did not care to go deeper
into his experiences.
Schaunard took down that grim joke, Ledger D, placed it on the table and
opened it, but without turning the leaves.
"And how is Monsieur le Capitaine?" asked he.
"He has been very ill, but he is much better. I am staying with him in the
Avenue Malakoff as his medical attendant. We only arrived at Marseilles a
week ago."
"And Madame Berselius, how is she?"
"Madame Berselius is at Trouville."
"The best place this weather. _Ma foi_, you must find it warm here even
after Africa--well, tell me how you found the gun to answer."
Adams laughed. "The gun went off--in the hands of a savage. All your
beautiful guns, Monsieur Schaunard, are now matchwood and old iron, tents,
everything went, smashed to pieces, pounded to pulp by elephants."
He told of the great herd they had pursued and how in the dark it had
charged the camp. He told of how in the night, listening by the camp fire,
he had heard the mysterious boom of its coming, and of the marvellous
sight he had watched when Berselius, failing in his attempt to waken the
Zappo Zap, had fronted the oncoming army of destruction.
Schaunard's eyes lit up as he listened.
"Ah," said he, "that is a man!"
The remark brought Adams to a halt.
He had become strangely bound up in Berselius; he had developed an
affection for this man almost brotherly, and Schaunard's remark hit him
and made him wince. For Schaunard employed the present tense.
"Yes," said Adams at last, "it was very grand." Then he went on to tell of
Berselius's accident, but he said nothing of his brain injury, for a
physician does not speak of his patient's condition to strangers, except
in the vaguest and most general terms.
"And how did you like the Belgians?" asked the old man, when Adams had
finished.
"The Belgians!" Adams, suddenly taken off his guard, exploded; he had said
nothing as yet about the Congo to anyone. He could not help himself now;
the horrors rushed to his mouth and escaped--the cry of the great mournful
country--the cry that he had brought to Europe with him in his heart,
found vent.
Schaunard sat amazed, not at the infamies pouring from Adams's mouth, for
he was well acquainted with them, but at the man's vehemence and energy.
"I have come to Europe to expose him," finished Adams.
"Expose who?"
"Leopold, King of the Belgians."
"But, my dear Monsieur Adams, you have come to waste your time; he is
already exposed. Expose Leopold, King of the Belgians! Say at once that
you are going to expose the sun. He doesn't care. He exposes himself. His
public and his private life are common property."
"You mean to say that everyone knows what I know?"
"Precisely, and perhaps even more, but everyone has not seen what you have
seen, and that's all the difference."
"How so?"
"In this way, monsieur; let us suppose that you have just seen a child run
over in the Rue de la Paix. You come in here and tell me of it; the horror
of it is in your mind, but you cannot convey that horror to me, simply
because I have not seen what you have seen. Still, you can convey a part
of it, for I know the Rue de la Paix, it is close to me, outside my door,
and I know French children.
"You come to me and tell me of hideous sights you have seen in Africa.
That does not move me a tenth so much, for Africa is very far away--it is,
in fact, for me a geographical expression; the people are niggers I have
never seen, dwelling in a province I have never heard of. You come to seek
sympathy for this people amongst the French public? Well, I tell you
frankly you are like a man searching in a dark room for a black hat that
is not there."
"Nevertheless I shall search."
"As monsieur wills, only don't knock yourself against the chairs and
tables. Ah, monsieur, monsieur, you are young and a medical man. Remain
so, and don't lose your years and your prospects fighting the impossible.
Now listen to me, for it is old Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix who is
speaking to you. The man you would expose, as you term it, is a king to
begin with; to go on with, he is far and away the cleverest king in
Christendom. That man has brains enough to run what you in America call a
department store. Every little detail of his estate out there, even to the
cap guns and rifles of the troops, he looks after himself; that's why it
pays. It is a bad-smelling business, but it doesn't poison the nose of
Europe, because it is so far away. Still, smells are brought over in
samples by missionaries and men like you, and people say 'Faugh!' Do you
think he did not take that into his consideration when he planned the
affair and laid down the factory? If you think so, you would be vastly
mistaken. He has agents everywhere--I have met them, apologists
everywhere--in the Press, in Society, in the Church. The Roman Catholic
Church is entirely his; he is triple-ringed with politicians, priests,
publicists, and financiers, all holding their noses to keep out the stench
and all singing the _Laus Leopold_ at the top of their voices.
"Ah! you don't know Europe. I do, from the Ballplatz to Willhelmstrasse,
from the Winter Palace to the Elysée, my trade has brought me everywhere,
and if you could see with my eyes, you would see the great, smooth plain
of ice you hope to warm with your poor breath in the name of Humanity."
"At all events I shall try," replied Adams, rising to go.
"Well, try, but don't get frozen in making the trial----"
"Oh, the gun--well, look here--you are starting on another hunting
expedition, it seems to me, a more dangerous one, too, than the last, for
there is no forest where one loses oneself more fatally than the forest of
social reform--pay me when you come back."
"Very well," said Adams, laughing.
"Only if you are successful though."
"Very well."
"And, see here, in any event come and tell me the result. _Bon jour_,
monsieur, and a word in your ear----"
The old man was opening the shop door.
"Yes?"
"Don't go."
Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office to chuckle over his
joke, and Adams walked off down the Rue de la Paix.
Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end of the season, and the
streets were thronged with foreigners--the Moor from Morocco, in his white
burnous, elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had become a
veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were packed, the _cafés_ crowded.
Austrian, Russian, English, and American gold was pouring into the
city--pouring in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and by
every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l'Est, and
the Gare de Lyons.
To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, fresh from those
great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant country and the tremendous
cavern of the jungle, the city around him and the sights affected him with
vividness and force.
Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the world has ever
seen, he stood fresh from that primeval land.
He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair in disorder, her foot
on the body of a naked slave and the haft of a blood-stained knife between
her teeth, he was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in powder,
Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of poets, philosophers,
churchmen, placemen, politicians, and financiers.
It was a strange experience.
He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then to the Avenue Malakoff,
and as he walked the face of the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind
and was replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites in the world
of thought often awaken images one of the other, just because of the fact
that they are opposites.
Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at the railway station on
the day of their arrival.
_La Joconde_ had been cabled for from Leopoldsville, and the great yacht
had brought them to Marseilles. Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius's
accident or illness, and Madame Berselius had departed for Trouville,
quite unconscious of anything having happened to her husband.
Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in her father. She had
done so at the very first sight of him, but as yet she had said no word.