The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.