The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

On the night of the day upon which Berselius had paid his visit to M. Cambon, Adams, seated in the smoking room at a writing table before a broad sheet of white paper covered with words, suddenly took the paper, tore it up, and threw the pieces in a wastepaper-basket.

He had been trying to put in language the story of the Congo as it had been revealed to him.

It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dramatic poem: the great sunlit spaces of the elephant country watched over by the vultures, the eternal and illimitable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the ages; the river flooding to the sea, and the people to whom this place belonged, and the story of their misery and despair.

When he contrasted what he had written with what was in his mind, he recognized the hopelessness of his attempt. He had not the power to put on paper more than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew.

To represent that people under the heel of that Fate was a task for an Æschylus.

Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, there rose before his mind another picture he had seen that day. It was a large photograph of the Laocoon. He had seen it in Brentano’s window, and, now, with the eye of memory, he was looking at it again.

That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the ages, that epic in marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of God or pity; the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and as Adams gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest became alive in his mind, the snake-like rubber vine twined in coils, circling about and crushing a nation and its children, remote from help and from God, as Laocoon and his sons.

Ages have passed since the sculptor of that marble laid down his chisel and gazed at his completed work. Little dreamt he that thousands of years later it would stand as a parable, representing civilization in the form of the python which he had carved with such loathing yet such loving care.

Adams, in the grasp of this startling thought, was recalled from reverie by a sound behind him.

Someone had entered the room. It was Maxine Berselius.