He worked himself into a state of indignation over Adams’s story; as a matter of fact he knew the whole thing well; but he was too polite to discount his visitor’s grievance, besides it gave him an opportunity to declaim—and of course the fact that a king was at the bottom of it all, added keenness to the arrows of his invective.
As Adams listened, delighted to have awakened such a trumpet; as he listened to Ferminard thundering against all that over there, speaking as though he were addressing the Chambre, and as though he had known Africa intimately from his childhood, he noticed gradually and with alarm that the topic was changing; just a moment ago it was Africa and its luckless niggers; the Provençal imagination picturing them in glowing colours, and the Provençal tongue rolling off their disabilities and woes. One would have fancied from the fervour of the man that is was Ferminard who had just returned from the Congo, not Adams.
Well, a moment after, and Africa had quite fallen out of the discussion. As a child lets a Noah’s Ark fall from its hands—elephants, zebras and all on to the floor whilst he grasps for a new toy—so Ferminard let Africa tumble whilst he grasped for Socialism, found it and swung it like a rattle, and Socialism went the way of Africa as he seized at last that darling toy—himself. The speech, in its relationship to the subject in point, was the intellectual counterpart of the cry of those mechanical pigs which the street venders blow up, and which, standing on a board, scream in the face of Oxford Street, loudly at first, and then, as the figure collapses, weakening in voice to the buzzing of a fly.
Ferminard was, in fact, a great child with a good heart, a Provençal imagination, a power of oratory, a quickness in seizing upon little things and making them seem great, coupled with a rather obscure understanding as to the relative value of mountains and mole-hills. A noise maker of a first-class description, but useless for any serious work. Feu de bruit was his motto, and he lived up to it.
It is only when you try to enlist men on your side in some great and holy cause, that you come to some knowledge of the general man’s weakness and want of holiness—your own included. Adams, during the fortnight that followed his visit to Pugin, had this fact borne in on him. All the thinking minds of the centre of civilization were so busy thinking thoughts of their own making, that it was impossible to attract their attention for more than a moment; from Bostoc the dramatist to Bastiche the anarchist, each individual was turning his own crank diligently, and not to be disturbed, even by Papeete’s skull.
With such a thing in one’s hand, picked up like some horrible talisman which, if not buried, will eventually cast its spell upon human thought and the future of the world; with such a thing in one’s hand, surely the Church would present itself to the mind as a court of appeal.
But as the Roman Catholic Church had actually put its broad back against the door of the torture chamber, and was, in fact, holding it tight shut whilst Papeete’s head was being hacked from his body, it would scarcely be logical to bring out the victim’s skull hoping for redress. Other denominations being of such little power in France, Adams determined to leave the attempt to rouse them till he reached England, whither he determined to go as soon as Berselius’s health would permit him.
One evening, a fortnight after his visit to Pugin, on his return to the Avenue Malakoff, Maxine met him in the hall.
He saw at once from her face that something had happened.
Berselius was worse; that afternoon he had suddenly developed acute neuralgia of the right side of the head, and this had been followed almost immediately by twitching and numbness of the left arm. Thénard had been summoned and he had diagnosed pressure on the brain, or, at least, irritation from depressed bone, due to the accident.