The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation of his son, kept him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.

The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the devil than any other young man of his time. He passed through the college of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and when he had obtained his captaincy.

He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.

He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the Continent of Europe. Politicians and financiers under the guise of Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of intellect, who work their political and financial works quite unobtrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.

Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with periodic returns to the wilderness.

With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern; that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.

To keep up a large force of European police to make the blacks work on European terms, was out of the question. The expense would run away with half the profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all, other nations would say, “What are you doing with that huge army of men?” The word “slavery” had to be eliminated from the proceedings, else the conscience of Europe would be touched. He foresaw this, and he was lost in admiration at the native police idea. The stroke of genius that collected all the Félixes of the Congo basin into an army of darkness, and collected all the weak and defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his own heart.

Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became a member. He was not invited to the bloody banquet—he invited himself.

He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed; later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold’s idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.

He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole infernal machinery then and there. America had not yet, hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill, which she handed to Leopold on the 22d of April, 1884. Germany had not been roped in. England and France were still aloof, and Berselius, arriving at the psychological moment, did not mince matters.