AMIDST THE LILIES
One day in March, nine months later, at Champrosay, in the garden of a
little cottage near the Paris road, Maxine Berselius stood directing the
movements of an old man in a blue blouse--Father Champardy by name, and a
gardener by profession.
On the death of her father, Maxine had come to an arrangement with her
mother, eminently suited to the minds and tastes of both women.
Maxine absolutely refused to touch any part of the colossal fortune left
by her father. She knew how it had been come by, and as she had a small
fortune of her own, a very small fortune of some ten thousand francs a
year settled on her by an uncle at her birth, she determined to live on
it, and go her own way in life.
Art was to her far preferable to society, and in a little cottage with one
woman for a servant, ten thousand francs a year were affluence.
Madame Berselius, who had no scruple in using money obtained in any way
whatsoever, fell in with her daughter's views after a few formal
objections.
Gillette had furnished the cottage as only a French firm can furnish a
cottage, and the garden, which had gone to decay, Maxine had furnished
herself with the help of Father Champardy.
Adams, after the death of Berselius, had lingered on in Paris to settle up
his affairs, going back to the Rue Dijon and taking up his old life
precisely at the point where he had broken it off.
But he was richer by three things. Two days after Berselius's death, news
came to him from America of the death of an uncle whom he had never seen
and the fact that he had inherited his property. It was not very much as
money goes in America, but it was real estate in New York City and would
bring in some seven or eight hundred pounds a year. He was richer by the
experience he had gained and the Humanity he had discovered in himself,
and he was richer by his love for Maxine.
But love itself was subordinate in the mind of Adams to the burning
question that lay at his heart. He had put his hand to the plough, and he
was not the man to turn aside till the end of the furrow was reached. He
would have time to go to America, in any event, to look after his
property. He decided to stay some months in England; to attack the British
Lion in its stronghold; to explain the infamies of the Congo, and then
cross the Atlantic and put the matter before the American Eagle.
He did.
For seven months he had been away, and every week he had written to
Maxine, saying little enough about the progress of his work, and
frequently using the cryptic statement, "I will tell you everything when I
come back."
And "He will be back to-day," murmured Maxine, as she stood in the little
garden watching the old man at his work.
The newness and the freshness of spring were in the air, snow that had
fallen three days ago was nearly gone, just a trace of it lay on the black
earth of the flower beds; white crocuses, blue crocuses, snow-drops, those
first trumpeters of spring, blew valiantly in the little garden, the air
was sharp and clear, and the sky above blue and sparkling. Great masses of
white cloud filled the horizon, sun-stricken, fair, and snow-bright, solid
as mountains, and like far-off mountains filled with the fascination and
the call of distance.
"Spring is here," cried the birds from the new-budding trees.
The blackbird in Dr. Pons's garden to the left, answered a rapturous
thrush in the trees across the way, children's voices came from the Paris
road and the sounds of wheels and hoofs.
A sparrow with a long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine's garden,
a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the whole story of spring.
Maxine smiled as it vanished, then she turned; the garden gate had clicked
its latch, and a big man was coming up the path.
There was only Father Champardy to see; and as his back was turned, he saw
nothing and as he was deaf, he heard nothing. The old man, bent and warped
by the years, deaf, and blind to the little love-scene behind him, was,
without knowing it, also a poem of spring; but not so joyous as the poem
of the sparrow.
"And now tell me all," said Maxine, as they sat in the chintz-hung sitting
room before a bright fire of logs. They had finished their private
affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at
them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The
day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive
mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams had to
tell.
In Adams's hand Papeete's skull had been a talisman of terrible and
magical power, for with it he had touched men, and the men touched had
disclosed their worth and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which
showed him society as it is.
The life and death of Berselius had been an object lesson for him,
teaching vividly the fact that evil is indestructible; that wash yourself
with holy water or wash yourself with soap, you will never wash away the
evil being that you have constructed by long years of evil-doing and
evil-thinking.
His pilgrimage in search of mercy and redress for a miserable people had
emphasized the fact.
The great crime of the Congo stood gigantic, like a shadowy engine for the
murdering of souls.
"Destroy that," said the devil triumphantly. "You cannot, for it is past
destruction; it has passed into the world of the ideal. No man's hand may
touch it; it is beyond the reach like the real self of your friend
Berselius. Sweep the Congo State away to-morrow; this will remain. A thing
soul-destroying till the end of time. It began small in the brain of one
ruinous man, God whom I hate! look at it now.
"It has slain ten million men and it will slay ten million more, that is
nothing; it has ruined body and soul, the stokers who fed it and the
engineers who worked it, that is nothing; it has tangled in its wheels and
debased the consciences of five nations, that is nothing. It is
eternal--that is everything.
"Since I was flung out of heaven, I have made many things, but this is my
masterpiece. If I and all my works were swept away, leaving only this
thing, it would be enough. In the fiftieth century it will still have its
clutch on man, yea, and to the very end of time."
Cause and effect, my friend, in those two words you have the genius of
this machine which will exist forever in the world of consequence, a world
beyond divine or human appeal.
In England, Adams had found himself confronted with the dull lethargy of
the people, and the indifference of the Established Church. The two great
divisions of Christ's Church were at the moment at death grapples over the
question of Education. Only amongst the Noncomformists could be found any
real response to the question which was, and is, the test question which
will disclose, according to its answer, whether Christianity is a living
voice from on high, or an echo from the Pagan past; and a debased echo at
that. Debased, for if Adams could have stood in the Agora of Athens and
told his tale of horror and truth, could Demosthenes have taken up the
story; could Leopold the Barbarian have been a king in those days, and
have done in those days, under the mandate of a deluded Greece, what he
has done under the mandate of a deluded England; what a living spirit
would have run through Athens like a torch, how the phalanxes would have
formed, and the beaked ships at Piræus torn themselves from their
moorings, to bring to Athens in chains the ruffian who had murdered and
tortured in her name!
To complete the situation and give it a touch of hopelessness, he found
that others had striven well, yet almost vainly in the field. Men working
for truth and justice as other men work for gold, had attacked the public
with solid battalions of facts, tabulated infamies; there had been
meetings, discussions, words, _palabres_, as they say in the south; but
the murderer had calmly gone on with his work, and England had put out no
hand to stay him.
But it was not till he reached America, that Adams found himself fighting
the machine itself.
One great man with a living voice he found--Mark Twain--and one great
paper, at least. These had raised their voices calling for Justice--with
what result?
Two side facts the skull of Papeete showed to the searcher, as a lamp
shows up other things than the things searched for. The deadness of the
English Church to the spiritual, and the corruption of his own
countrymen.
When he had finished, it was dark outside. The firelight lit up the little
room. Glancing through the diamond-paned window at that happy interior,
one would never have guessed that the man by the fire had been telling the
girl by his side not a love story, but the story of the world's greatest
crime.
Maxine, whose hand was resting on the hand of her companion, said nothing
for a moment after he had ceased speaking. Then, in a half-whisper, and
leaning her forehead on his hand, "Poor things," sighed Maxine.
So attuned were her thoughts to the thoughts of her companion, that she
voiced the very words that were in his mind, as gazing beyond his own
happiness and a thousand miles of sea and forest, he saw again the
moonlight on the mist of the Silent Pools, and the bleached and miserable
bones.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Pools of Silence, by H. de Vere Stacpoole