He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox—he never can become a Leopold or a Félix Fuchs!
Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his mouth, led the way.
He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the dim light, saw bale upon bale of stuff; gum copal it proved to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There was also cassava in large quantities, and the place had a heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.
Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.
Verhaeren laughed.
It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.
A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scraps of food like animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.
There were old, old women like shrivelled monkeys; girls of twelve and fifteen, some almost comely; middle-aged women, women about to become mothers, and a woman who had become a mother during the past night lying there in the shelter of the Hostage House. There were little pot-bellied nigger children, tiny black dots, who had to do their bit of work in the fields with the others; and when the strangers appeared and looked over the rail, these folk set up a crying and chattering, and ran about distractedly, not knowing what new thing was in store for them. They were the female folk and children of a village, ten miles away south; they were here as “hostages,” because the village had not produced its full tale of cassava. They had been here over a month.
The soldiers laughed, and struck with the butts of their rifles on the palisading, as if to increase the confusion. Adams noticed that the young girls and women were of all the terrified crowd seemingly the most terrified. He did not know the reason; he could not even guess it. A good man himself, and believing in a God in heaven, he could not guess the truth. He knew nothing of the reason of these women’s terror, and he looked with disgust at the scene before him, not entirely comprehending. Those creatures, so filthy, so animal-like, created in his mind such abhorrence that he forgot to make allowances for the fact that they were penned like swine, and that perchance in their own native state, free in their own villages, they might be cleaner and less revolting. He could not hear the dismal cry of the “Congo niggers,” who of all people on the earth are the most miserable, the most abused, the most sorrow-stricken, the most dumb. He did not know that he was looking at one of the filthy acts in the great drama that a hundred years hence will be read with horror by a more enlightened world.
They turned from the degrading sight and went back to Verhaeren’s house for dinner.