Adams put the skull on the table; curious and small and ferocious and repellent it looked. One would never have imagined the black face, the grin, and the rolling eyes of the creature to whom it had once belonged. One thing only about it touched the heart with sadness—its size.
“It is a child’s,” said Maxine.
“Yes; the child I told you of—all that remains of it.”
He was about to wrap the thing up again when the girl interposed.
“Let it lie there whilst you tell me; it will bring things nearer to me. I am not afraid of it—poor, poor creature. Tell me all you know—tell me the worst. I am not a young lady for the moment, please, just a person listening.”
He took his seat in an armchair opposite to her, and resting his elbows on his knees, talking just as if he were talking to a man, found the words he could not find when, pen in hand, half an hour ago, he had tried to express himself in writing.
He told of the Hostage House at Yandjali, and the wretched creatures penned like animals eating their miserable food; he told of M’Bassa and the Hostage House there, with its iron rings and chains; he told how all over that vast country these places were dotted, not by the hundred but by the thousand; he told of the misery of the men who were driven into the dismal forests, slaves of masters worse than tigers, and of a task that would never end as long as rubber grew and Christ was a name in Europe and not a power; he told the awful fact that murder there was used every day as an agricultural implement, that people were operated upon, and suffered amputation of limbs, not because of disease; and that their sex and age—those two last appeals of Nature to brutality—had no voice; he told the whole bitter tale of tears and blood, but he could not tell her all, for she was a girl, and it would be hard to speak even before a man of the crimes against Nature, the crimes against men, against women, and against children, that even if the Congo State were swept away to-morrow, will leave Belgium’s name in the world’s history more detestable than the names of the unspeakable cities sunk in the Dead Sea.
Maxine listened, entranced, swayed between the terror of the tale and the power of the man who was telling it.
Ah! if he could have spoken to Europe as he spoke to her; if he could have made Europe see as he made her see, what a whirlwind of indignation would have arisen; but he could not.
It was the magnet of her sympathy that marshalled the facts, clad them in burning language, and led them forth in battalions that stormed her mind and made her believe what seemed unbelievable. Without that sympathy, his words would have been cold and lifeless statements bearing little conviction.