Daniel lighted the lamp in his room, and then looked around to see whether old Jordan was at home. Jordan’s room was dark. He closed the door and took a seat opposite Benda. He was breathing heavily.
What meaning can be attached to the preliminary questions and answers that invariably accompany such a meeting after such a long separation? “How are you? How long are you going to stay in town? You still have the same old habits of life? Tell me about yourself.” What do such questions mean? They mean virtually nothing. The protagonists thereby simply remove the rubbish from the channels which have been choked up in the course of years, and try to build new bridges carrying them over abysses that must be crossed if the conversation is to be connected and coherent.
Benda had grown somewhat stout. His face was brownish yellow, about the colour of leather. The deep wrinkles around his forehead and mouth told of the hardships he had gone through. His eye was completely changed: it had the strong, vivacious, and yet quiet appearance of the eye of a hunter or a peasant.
“You may well imagine that I have already told the story of my adventures in Africa a hundred times and in the same way,” said Benda. “It has all been written down, and will shortly appear in book form, where you can read it. It was an unbroken chain of toil and trouble. Frequently I was as close to death as I am to this wall. I devoured enough quinine to fill a freight car, and yet it was always the same old story, fever to-day, to-morrow, for six months in the year. I have, I fear, ruined my health; I am afraid my old heart will not last much longer. The eternal vigilance I was obliged to exercise, the incessant fight for so simple a thing as a path, or for more urgent things such as food and drink, has told on me. I suffered terribly from the sun; also from the rain. I had very few of the comforts of life; I was often forced to sleep on the ground. And there was no one to talk to, no sense of security.”
“And yet,” he continued, “I had my reward. When I look back on it all, there is not an hour that I would care to have wiped from my memory. I accomplished a great deal. I made some important discoveries, brought back enough work to keep me busy for years to come, thirty-six boxes of plant preparations, and this despite the fact that the entire fruit of my first seven years of effort was burned in a tent near Nembos. But apart from what I have actually done, there is something so real and solemn about such a life. You live with the sky above you and savages round about you. These savages are like children. This state of affairs is, to be sure, being rapidly changed: Europe is breathing its pest into the paradise. The wiles and weaknesses of these savages are in a way touching; you feel sorry for them as you feel sorry for a dumb, harassed beast. I had taken a boy along with me from the boundless, primeval forests north of the Congo. He was a little bit of a fellow, almost a dwarf. I liked him; I even loved him. And obedient! I merely had to make a sign, and he was ready. Well, we came back to the Italian lakes, where I wished to remain for a while for the sake of the climate before returning to England. What happened? At the sight of the snow-covered mountain peaks he was seized with deathly fear; he became homesick; and in a few days he died of pneumonia.”
“Why is it that there was such a long period that we never heard from you?” asked Daniel, with a timidity and shyness that made Benda’s heart ache.
“That is a long story,” said Benda. “It took me two years to get through that fearful forest and out to a lake called Albert-Nyanza. From there I wanted to get over to Egypt, but the country was in a state of revolution and was occupied by the soldiers of the Mahdi. I was forced to take the route to the Northwest, ran into a pathless wilderness, and for five years was a captive of a tribe of the Wadai. The Niam-Niam, who were at war with the Wadai, liberated me. I could move about with relative freedom among them, but I could not go beyond their boundaries, for they held me in high esteem as a medicine man and were afraid I would bewitch them if I ever got out of their personal control. I had lost my guides, and I had no money to hire new ones. The things I needed, because of the delicacy of my constitution, as compared with theirs, I secured through the chieftain from a band of Arabian merchants. This was all very well so far as it went, but the chieftain was careful to keep me concealed from the Arabs. I finally succeeded in coming into personal touch with a Sheik to whom I could make myself understood. It was high time, for I could not have stood it another year.”
Daniel was silent. It was all so strange; he could hardly adapt himself to Benda’s voice and manner. Memory failed him. The world of Benda was all too foreign, unknown to him. What he himself felt had no weight with his friend; it did not even have meaning. With the old sense of dim defiance, he coaxed the ghost of disappointment into his soul; and his soul was weighed down by the nocturnal darkness like the glass of his window.
“Now I am enjoying my home,” said Benda thoughtfully, “I am enjoying a milder light, a more ordered civilisation. I have come to look upon Germany as a definite figure, to love it as a composite picture. Nature, really great, grand nature such as formerly seemed beyond the reach of my longings, such as constituted my idea, my presentiment of perfection, I have experienced in person; I have lived it. It enticed me, taught me, and almost destroyed me. All human organisation, on the contrary, has developed more and more into an idea. In hours that were as full of the feeling of things as the heart is full of blood, I have seen the scales of the balance move up and down with the weight of two worlds. The loneliness, the night, the heavens at night, the forest, the desert have shown me their true faces. The terribleness that at times proceeds from them has no equal in any other condition of existence. I understood for the first time the law that binds families, peoples, states together. I have repudiated all thought of rebellion, and sworn to co-operate, to do nothing but co-operate.