THE VOICE OF THE FOREST BY NIGHT
The first thing to be done was to bury Meeus. And now came the question, How would the soldiers take the death of the Chef de Poste? They knew nothing of it yet. Would they revolt, or would they seek to revenge him, guessing him to have been killed.
Adams did not know and he did not care. He half hoped there would be trouble. The Congo had burst upon his view, stripped of shams, in all its ferocity, just as the great scene of the killing had burst upon Berselius. All sorts of things—from the Hostage House of Yandjali to the Hostage House of M’Bassa, from Mass to Papeete’s skull—connected themselves up and made a skeleton, from which he constructed that great and ferocious monster, the Congo State. The soldiers, with their filed teeth, were part of the monster, and, such was the depth of fury in his heart, he would have welcomed a fight, so that he might express with his arms what his tongue ached to say.
The original man loomed large in Adams. God had given him a character benign and just, a heart tempered to mercy and kindliness; all these qualities had been outraged and were now under arms. They had given a mandate to the original man to act. The death of Meeus was the first result.
He went to the shelf where Meeus had kept his official letters and took Meeus’s Mauser pistol from it. It was in a holster attached to a belt. He strapped the belt round his waist, drew the pistol from the holster and examined it. It was loaded, and in an old cigar-box he found a dozen clips of cartridges. He put three of these in his pocket and with the pistol at his side came out into the courtyard.
Huge billows of white cloud filled the sky, broken here and there by a patch of watery blue. The whole earth was steaming and the forest was absolutely smoking. One could have sworn it was on fire in a dozen places when the spirals of mist rose and broke and vanished like the steam clouds from locomotive chimneys.
He crossed the courtyard to the go-down, undid the locking bar and found what he wanted. Half a dozen mattocks stood by the rubber bales—he had noticed them when the stores had been taken out for the expedition; they were still in the same place and, taking two of them, he went to the break in the wall that gave exit from the courtyard and called to the soldiers, who were busy at work rebuilding their huts.
They came running. He could not speak twenty words of their language, but he made them line up with a movement of his arm.
Then he addressed them in a perfectly unprintable speech. It was delivered in unshod American—a language he had not spoken for years. It took in each individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, cayotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each and individually with his own hands (and I believe by some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they were without hearts, souls or intellect, not responsible creatures, tools of villains that he, Adams, would expose and get even with yet.
Furthermore, that if by a look or movement they disobeyed his orders, he would make them sweat tears and weep blood, so help him God. Amen.
They understood what he said. At least they understood the gist of it. They had found a new and angry master, and not an eye was raised when Adams stood silent; some looked at their toes and some at the ground, some looked this way, some that, but none at the big, ferocious man, with three weeks’ growth of beard, standing before them and, literally, over them.
Then he chose two of them and motioned them to follow to the guest house. There he brought them into the sleeping room and pointed to the body of Meeus, motioning them to take it up and carry it out. The men rolled their eyes at the sight of the Chef de Poste, but they said no word; one took the head, the other the feet, and between them they carried the burden, led by their new commander, through the dwelling room, across the veranda and then across the yard.
The rest of the soldiers were in a group near the gate. When they saw the two men and their burden, they set up a chattering like a flock of magpies, which, however, instantly ceased at the approach of Adams.
He pointed to the two mattocks which he had placed against the wall. They understood what he meant; the last Chef de Poste had shot himself in the presence of the District Commissioner, and they had dug his grave.
“Here,” said Adams, stopping and pointing to a spot at a convenient distance from the walls.
When the body was buried, Adams stood for a second looking at the mound of earth, wet and flattened down by blows of the spades.
He had no prayers to offer up. Meeus would have to go before his Maker just as he was, and explain things—explain all that business away there at the Silent Pools and other things as well. Prayers over his tomb or flowers on it would not help that explanation one little bit.
Then Adams turned away and the soldiers trooped after him.
He had looked into the office and seen the rifles and ammunition which they had placed there out of the wet. A weak man would have locked the office door and so have deprived the soldiers of their arms, but Adams was not a weak man.
He led his followers to the office, handed them their arms, carefully examining each rifle to see that it was clean and uninjured, drew them up on a line, addressed them in some more unprintable language but in a milder tone, dismissed them with a wave of his hand and returned to the house.
As he left them the wretched creatures all gave a shout—a shout of acclamation.
This was the man for them—very different from the pale-faced Meeus—this was a man they felt who would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of their huts with verve.
They were not physiognomists, these gentlemen.
Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunately there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with goats’ milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down again—not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. There were no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the old official letters and the half-written report which the dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.
Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of the storm.
Adams came out on the veranda to listen.
He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.
This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and its terror.