On the wall behind him the leopard-skin still hung, looking now shrivelled at the edges in this extreme heat. On the wall in front of him the Congo bows and poisoned arrows looked more venomous and deadly than by the light of day. A scorpion twice the size of a penny was making a circuit of the walls just below the ceiling; you could hear a faint scratch from it as it travelled along, a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus's pen as it travelled across the paper.

He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette.

Sitting thus, meditating, pen in hand, he heard sounds: the sound of the night wind, the sound of one of the soldiers singing as he cleaned his rifle—the men always sang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun god—the scratch of the scorpion and the "creak, creak" of a joist warping and twisting to the heat.

But the sound of the wind was the most arresting. It would come over the forest and up the slope and round the guest house with a long-drawn, sweeping "Ha-a-a-r," and sob once or twice, and then die away down the slope and over the forest and away and beyond to the east, where Kilimanjaro was waiting for it, crowned with snow on his throne beneath the stars.

But the wind was almost dead now—the heat of the night had stifled it. The faintest breathing of air took the place of the strong puffs that had sent the flame of the lamp half up the glass chimney. As Meeus listened, on this faint breath from the forest he heard a sound—

"Boom—boom"—very faint, and as if someone were striking a drum in a leisurely manner.

"Boom—boom."

A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of M'Bonga like an evil spirit. He had wandered here, perhaps from the west coast forests. Driven away from his species—who knows?—for some crime. The natives of the fort had caught glimpses of him now and then; he was huge and old and gray, and now in the darkness of the forest was striking himself on the chest, standing there in the gloom of the leaves, trampling the plantains under foot, taller than the tallest man, smiting himself in the pride of his strength.

"Boom—boom."

It is a hair-lifting sound when you know the cause, but it left Meeus unmoved. His mind was too full of the business of writing his report to draw images or listen to imagination; all the same, this sinister drum-beat acted upon his subconscious self and, scarcely knowing why he did so, he got up from the table and came outside to the fort wall and looked over away into the dark.

There was not a star in the sky. A dense pall of cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, and the wind, as Meeus stepped from the veranda into the darkness, died away utterly.

He stood looking into the dark. He could make out the forest, a blackness humped and crouching in the surrounding blackness. There was not a ray of light from the sky, and now and again came the drum—

"Boom—boom."

Then it ceased, and a bat passed so close that the wind of it stirred his hair. He spat the taint of it from his mouth, and returning to the house, seated himself at the table and continued his work.

But the night was to be fateful in sounds and surprises. He had not been sitting five minutes when a voice from the blackness outside made him drop his pen and listen.

It was a European voice, shouting and raving and laughing, and Meeus, as he listened, clutched at the table, for the voice was known to him. It was the voice of Berselius!

Berselius, who was hundreds of miles away in the elephant country!

Meeus heard his own name. It came in to him out of the darkness, followed by a peal of laughter. Rapid steps sounded coming across the courtyard, and the sweat ran from Meeus's face and his stomach crawled as, with a bound across the veranda, a huge man framed himself in the doorway and stood motionless as a statue.

For the first moment Meeus did not recognize Adams. He was filthy and tattered, he wore no coat, and his hunting shirt was open at the neck, and the arms of it rolled up above the elbows.

Adams, for the space of ten seconds, stood staring at Meeus from under his pith helmet. The face under the helmet seemed cast from bronze.

Then he came in and shut the door behind him, walked to the table, took Meeus by the coat at the back of the neck, and lifted him up as a man lifts a dog by the scruff.

For a moment it seemed as if he were going to kill the wretched man without word or explanation, but he mastered himself with a supreme effort, put him down, took the vacant seat at the table and cried:

"Stand before me there."

Meeus stood. He held on to the table with his left hand and with his right he made pawing movements in the air.

The big man seated at the table did not notice. He sat for a few seconds with both hands clasped together, one making a cup for the other, just as a man might sit about to make a speech and carefully considering his opening words.

Then he spoke.

"Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?"

Meeus made no reply, but drew a step back and put out his hand, as if fending the question off, as if asking for a moment in which to explain. He had so many things to say, so many reasons to give, but he could say nothing, for his tongue was paralyzed and his lips were dry.

"Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?"

The awful man at the table was beginning to work himself up. He had risen at the second question, and at the third time of asking he seized Meeus by the shoulders. "Did you kill those people——?"

"Punishment," stuttered Meeus.

A cry like the cry of a woman and a crash that shook the plaster from the ceiling, followed the fatal word. Adams had swung the man aloft and dashed him against the wall with such force, that the wattling gave and the plaster fell in flakes.

Meeus lay still as death, staring at his executioner with a face expressionless and white as the plaster flakes around him.

"Get up," said Adams.

Meeus heard and moved his arms.

"Get up."

Again the arms moved and the body raised itself, but the legs did not move. "I cannot," said Meeus.

Adams came to him and bending down pinched his right thigh hard.

"Do you feel me touching you?"

"No."

Adams did the same to the other thigh.

"Do you feel that?"

"No."

"Lie there," said Adams.

He opened the door and went out into the night. A moment later he returned; after him came the two porters bearing Berselius between them.

Berselius was quiet now; the brain fever that had stricken him had passed into a muttering stage, and he let himself be carried, passive as a bag of meal, whilst Adams went before with the lamp leading the way into the bedroom. Here, on one of the beds, the porters laid their burden down. Then they came back, and under the directions of Adams lifted Meeus and carried him into the bedroom and placed him on the second bed.

Adams, with the lamp in his hand, stood for a moment looking at Meeus. His rage had spent itself; he had avenged the people at the Silent Pools. With his naked hands he had inflicted on the criminal before him an injury worse than the injury of fire or sword.

Meeus, frightened now by the pity in the face of the other, horribly frightened by the unknown thing that had happened to him, making him dead from the waist down, moved his lips, but made no sound.

"Your back is broken," replied Adams to the question in the other's eyes.

Then he turned to Berselius.

* * * * *

At midnight the rains broke with a crash of thunder that seemed to shake the universe.

Adams, worn out, was seated at the table in the living room smoking some tobacco he had found in a tin on the shelf, and listening to the rambling of Berselius, when the thunder-clap came, making the lamp shiver on the table.

Meeus, who had been silent since his death sentence had been read to him, cried out at the thunder, but Berselius did not heed—he was hunting elephants under a burning sun in a country even vaster than the elephant country.

Adams rose up and came to the door; not a drop of rain had fallen yet. He crossed the yard and stood at the fort wall looking into blackness. It was solid as ebony, and he could hear the soldiers, whose huts were outside the wall, calling to one another.

A great splash of light lit up the whole roof of the forest clear as day, and the darkness shut down again with a bang that hit the ear like a blow, and the echoes of it roared and rumbled and muttered, and died, and Silence wrapped herself again in her robe and sat to wait.

Now, there was a faint stirring of the air, increasing to a breeze, and far away a sound like the spinning of a top came on the breeze. It was the rain, miles away, coming over the forest in a solid sheet, the sound of it increasing on the great drum of the forest's roof to a roar.

Another flash lit the world, and Adams saw the rain.

He saw what it is given to very few men to see. From horizon to horizon, as if built by plumb, line and square, stretched a glittering wall, reaching from the forest to the sky. The base of this wall was lost in snow-white billows of spray and mist.

Never was there so tremendous a sight as this infinite wall and the Niagara clouds of spray, roaring, living, and lit by the great flash one second, drowned out by the darkness and the thunder the next.

Adams, terrified, ran back to the house, shut the door, and waited.

The house was solidly built and had withstood many rains, but there were times when it seemed to him that the whole place must be washed away bodily. Nothing could be heard but the rain, and the sound of such rain is far more terrifying than the sound of thunder or the rumble of the earthquake.

There were times when he said to himself, "This cannot last," yet it lasted. With the lamp in his hand he went into the sleeping room to see how Berselius and Meeus were doing. Berselius was still, to judge from the movements of his lips, delirious, and just the same. Meeus was lying with his hands on his breast. He might have been asleep, only for his eyes, wide open and bright, and following every movement of the man with the lamp.

Meeus, catching the other's eye, motioned to him to come near. Then he tried to speak, but the roar outside made it impossible to hear him. Adams pointed to the roof, as if to say, "Wait till it is over," then he came back to the sitting room, tore the leopard skin down from the wall, rolled it up for a pillow, and lay down with his head on it.

He had been through so much of late that he had grown callous and case-hardened; he did not care much whether the place was washed away or not—he wanted to sleep, and he slept.

Meeus, left alone, lay watching the glimmer of the lamp shining through the cracks of the door, and listening to the thunder of the rain.

This was the greatest rain he had experienced. He wondered if it would flood the go-down and get at the rubber stored there; he wondered if the soldiers had deserted their huts and taken refuge in the office. These thoughts were of not the slightest interest to him; they just came and strayed across his mind, which was still half-paralyzed by the great calamity that had befallen him.

For the last half-hour an iron hand seemed round his body just on a level with the diaphragm; this seemed growing tighter, and the tighter it grew the more difficult it was to breathe. The fracture had been very high up, but he knew nothing of this; he knew that his back was broken, and that men with broken backs die, but he did not fully realize that he was going to die till—all at once—his breathing stopped dead of its own accord, and then of its own accord went on rapidly and shallowly. Then he recognized that his breathing was entirely under the control of something over which he had no control.

This is the most terrible thing a man can know, for it is a thing that no man ever knows till he is in the hands of death.

* * * * *

It was daylight when Adams awoke, and the rain had ceased.

He went to the door and opened it. It was after sunrise, but the sun was not to be seen. The whole world was a vapour, but through which the forest was dimly visible. The soldiers were in the courtyard; they had just come out of the office where they had taken refuge during the night. Their huts had been washed away, but they did not seem to mind a bit; they showed their teeth in a grin, and shouted something when they saw the white man, and pointed to the rainswept yard and the sky.

Adams nodded, and then went back into the house and into the bedroom, where he found Meeus hanging head downward out of his bed.

Rubber would trouble Andreas Meeus no more; his soul had gone to join the great army of souls in the Beyond.

It is strange enough to look upon the body of a man you have killed. But Adams had no more pity or compunction in his mind than if Meeus had been a stoat.

He turned to Berselius, who was sleeping. The delirium had passed, and he was breathing evenly and well. There was hope for him yet—hope for his body if not for his mind.



CHAPTER XXXI

THE VOICE OF THE FOREST BY NIGHT

The first thing to be done was to bury Meeus. And now came the question, How would the soldiers take the death of the Chef de Poste? They knew nothing of it yet. Would they revolt, or would they seek to revenge him, guessing him to have been killed.

Adams did not know and he did not care. He half hoped there would be trouble. The Congo had burst upon his view, stripped of shams, in all its ferocity, just as the great scene of the killing had burst upon Berselius. All sorts of things—from the Hostage House of Yandjali to the Hostage House of M'Bassa, from Mass to Papeete's skull—connected themselves up and made a skeleton, from which he constructed that great and ferocious monster, the Congo State. The soldiers, with their filed teeth, were part of the monster, and, such was the depth of fury in his heart, he would have welcomed a fight, so that he might express with his arms what his tongue ached to say.

The original man loomed large in Adams. God had given him a character benign and just, a heart tempered to mercy and kindliness; all these qualities had been outraged and were now under arms. They had given a mandate to the original man to act. The death of Meeus was the first result.

He went to the shelf where Meeus had kept his official letters and took Meeus's Mauser pistol from it. It was in a holster attached to a belt. He strapped the belt round his waist, drew the pistol from the holster and examined it. It was loaded, and in an old cigar-box he found a dozen clips of cartridges. He put three of these in his pocket and with the pistol at his side came out into the courtyard.

Huge billows of white cloud filled the sky, broken here and there by a patch of watery blue. The whole earth was steaming and the forest was absolutely smoking. One could have sworn it was on fire in a dozen places when the spirals of mist rose and broke and vanished like the steam clouds from locomotive chimneys.

He crossed the courtyard to the go-down, undid the locking bar and found what he wanted. Half a dozen mattocks stood by the rubber bales—he had noticed them when the stores had been taken out for the expedition; they were still in the same place and, taking two of them, he went to the break in the wall that gave exit from the courtyard and called to the soldiers, who were busy at work rebuilding their huts.

They came running. He could not speak twenty words of their language, but he made them line up with a movement of his arm.

Then he addressed them in a perfectly unprintable speech. It was delivered in unshod American—a language he had not spoken for years. It took in each individual of the whole gang, it told them they were dogs and sons of dogs, killers of men, unmentionable carrion, cayotes, kites, and that he would have hanged them each and individually with his own hands (and I believe by some legerdemain of strength he would), but that they were without hearts, souls or intellect, not responsible creatures, tools of villains that he, Adams, would expose and get even with yet.

Furthermore, that if by a look or movement they disobeyed his orders, he would make them sweat tears and weep blood, so help him God. Amen.

They understood what he said. At least they understood the gist of it. They had found a new and angry master, and not an eye was raised when Adams stood silent; some looked at their toes and some at the ground, some looked this way, some that, but none at the big, ferocious man, with three weeks' growth of beard, standing before them and, literally, over them.

Then he chose two of them and motioned them to follow to the guest house. There he brought them into the sleeping room and pointed to the body of Meeus, motioning them to take it up and carry it out. The men rolled their eyes at the sight of the Chef de Poste, but they said no word; one took the head, the other the feet, and between them they carried the burden, led by their new commander, through the dwelling room, across the veranda and then across the yard.

The rest of the soldiers were in a group near the gate. When they saw the two men and their burden, they set up a chattering like a flock of magpies, which, however, instantly ceased at the approach of Adams.

He pointed to the two mattocks which he had placed against the wall. They understood what he meant; the last Chef de Poste had shot himself in the presence of the District Commissioner, and they had dug his grave.

"Here," said Adams, stopping and pointing to a spot at a convenient distance from the walls.

When the body was buried, Adams stood for a second looking at the mound of earth, wet and flattened down by blows of the spades.

He had no prayers to offer up. Meeus would have to go before his Maker just as he was, and explain things—explain all that business away there at the Silent Pools and other things as well. Prayers over his tomb or flowers on it would not help that explanation one little bit.

Then Adams turned away and the soldiers trooped after him.

He had looked into the office and seen the rifles and ammunition which they had placed there out of the wet. A weak man would have locked the office door and so have deprived the soldiers of their arms, but Adams was not a weak man.

He led his followers to the office, handed them their arms, carefully examining each rifle to see that it was clean and uninjured, drew them up on a line, addressed them in some more unprintable language but in a milder tone, dismissed them with a wave of his hand and returned to the house.

As he left them the wretched creatures all gave a shout—a shout of acclamation.

This was the man for them—very different from the pale-faced Meeus—this was a man they felt who would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of their huts with verve.

They were not physiognomists, these gentlemen.

Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunately there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with goats' milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down again—not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. There were no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the old official letters and the half-written report which the dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.

Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of the storm.

Adams came out on the veranda to listen.

He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.

This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and its terror.



CHAPTER XXXII

MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS

Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least shock or obstruction.

The man was too weak to talk, he could just say "Yes" and "No" in answer to a question, and it was always "Better" when he was asked how he felt, but he never spoke a word of his own volition.

Nearly every day it rained, and it rained in a hundred different ways—from the thunderous shower-bath rush of water that threatened to beat the roof in, to the light spitting shower shone through by the sun. Sometimes the clouds would divide, roll up in snow-white billows of appalling height, and over the fuming foliage a rainbow would form, and flocks of birds, as if released by some wizard, break from the reeking trees. Adams could hear their cries as he stood at the foot wall watching them circle in the air, and his heart went out to them, for they were the only living things in the world around him that spoke in a kindly tongue or hinted at the tenderness of God.

All else was vast and of tragic proportions. The very rainbow was titanic; it seemed primeval as the land over which it stretched and the people to whom it bore no promise.

But the forest was the thing which filled Adams's heart with a craving for freedom and escape that rose to a passion.

He had seen it silent in the dry season; he had seen it divided by the great rain-wall and answering the downpour with snow-white billows of mist and spray; he had heard it roaring in the dark; it had trapped him, beaten him with its wet, green hands, sucked him down in its quagmires, shown him its latent, slow, but unalterable ferocity, its gloom, its devilment.

The rubber collector who had helped to carry Berselius to the fort had gone back to his place and task—the forest had sucked him back. This gnome had explained without speaking what the gloom and the quagmire, and the rope-like lianas had hinted, what the Silent Pools had shouted, what the vulture and the kite had laid bare, what the heart had whispered: There is no God in the forest of M'Bonga, no law but the law of the leopard, no mercy but the mercy of Death.

The forest had become for Adams a living nightmare—his one desire in life now was to win free of it, and never did it look more sinister than when, rainbow-arched and silently fuming, it lay passive, sun-stricken, the palms bursting above the mist and the great clouds rolling away in billows, as if to expose fully the wonder of those primeval leagues of tree-tops sunlit, mist-strewn, where the feathery fingers of the palms made banners of the wrack and the baobabs held fog-banks in their foliage.

At the end of the third week Berselius showed signs of amendment. He could raise himself now in bed and speak. He said little, but it was evident that his memory had completely returned, and it was evident that he was still the changed man. The iron-hearted Berselius, the man of daring and nerve, was not here, he had been left behind in the elephant country in the immeasurable south.

The mist had departed entirely from his mind; his whole past was clear before him, and with his new mind he could reckon it up and see the bad and the good. The extraordinary fact was that in reviewing this past he did not feel terrified—it seemed a dead thing and almost as the past of some other man. All those acts seemed to Berselius to have been committed by a man who was now dead.

He could regret the acts of that man and he could seek to atone for them, but he felt no personal remorse. "He was not I," would have reasoned the mind of Berselius; "those acts were not my acts, because now I could not commit them," so he would have reasoned had he reasoned on the matter at all. But he did not. In that wild outburst by the Silent Pools the ego had screamed aloud, raving against itself, raving against the trick that fate had played it, by making it the slave of two personalities, and then torturing it by showing it the acts of the old personality through the eyes of the new.

When the brain fever had passed, it awoke untroubled; the junction had been effected, the new Berselius was It, and all the acts of the old Berselius were foreign to it and far away.

It is thus the man who gets religion feels when the great change comes on his brain. After the brain-storm and the agony of new birth comes the peace and the feeling that he is "another man." He feels that all his sins are washed away; in other words, he has lost all sense of responsibility for the crimes he committed in the old life, he has cast them off like an old suit of clothes. The old man is dead. Ah, but is he? Can you atone for your vices by losing your smell and taste for vice, and slip out of your debt for crime by becoming another man?

Does the old man ever die?

The case of Berselius stirs one to ask the question, which is more especially interesting as it is prompted by a case not unique but almost typical.

The interesting point in Berselius's case lay in the question as to whether his change of mind was initiated by the injury received in the elephant country or by the shock at the Silent Pools. In other words, was it due to some mechanical pressure on the brain produced by the accident, or was it due to "repentance" on seeing suddenly unveiled the hideous drama in which he had taken part?

This remains to be seen.

At the end of the fourth week Berselius was able to leave his bed, and every day now marked a steady improvement in strength.

Not a word about the past did he say, not a question did he ask, and what surprised Adams especially, not a question did he put about Meeus, till one day in the middle of the fifth week.

Berselius was seated in one of the arm chairs of the sitting room when he suddenly raised his head.

"By the way," said he, "where is the Chef de Poste?"

"He is dead," replied Adams.

"Ah!" said Berselius; there was almost a note of relief in his voice. He said nothing more and Adams volunteered no explanation, for the affair was one entirely between Meeus, himself, and God.

A few minutes later, Berselius, who seemed deep in thought, raised his head again.

"We must get away from here. I am nearly strong enough to go now. It will be a rough journey in these rains, but it will be a much shorter road than the road we came by."

"How so?"

"We came from Yandjali right through the forest before striking south to here; we will now make straight for the river, along the rubber road. I think the post on the river which we will reach is called M'Bina, it is a hundred miles above Yandjali; we can get a boat from there to Leopoldsville. I have been thinking it all out this morning."

"How about a guide?"

"These soldiers here know the rubber track, for they often escort the loads."

"Good," said Adams. "I will have some sort of litter rigged up and we will carry you. I am not going to let you walk in your present condition."

Berselius bowed his head.

"I am very sensible," said he, "of the care and attention you have bestowed on me during the past weeks. I owe you a considerable debt, which I will endeavour to repay, at all events, by following your directions implicitly. Let the litter be made, and if you will send me in the corporal of those men, I will talk to him in his own language and explain what is to be done."

"Good," said Adams, and he went out and found the corporal and sent him in to Berselius.

"Good!" The word was not capacious enough to express what he felt. Freedom, Light, Humanity, the sight of a civilized face, for these he ached with a great longing, and they were all there at the end of the rubber road, only waiting to be met with.

He went to the fort wall and shook his fist at the forest.

"Another ten days," said Adams.

The forest, whose spirit counted time by tens of thousands of years, waved its branches to the wind.

A spit of rain from a passing cloud hit Adams's cheek, and in the "hush" of the trees there seemed a murmur of derision and the whisper of a threat.

"It is not well to shake your fist at the gods—in the open."

Adams went back to the house to begin preparations, and for the next week he was busy. From some spare canvas and bamboos in the go-down he made a litter strong enough to carry Berselius—he had to do nearly all the work himself, for the soldiers were utterly useless as workmen. Then stores had to be arranged and put together in a convenient form for carrying; clothes had to be mended and patched—even his boots had to be cobbled with twine—but at last all was ready, and on the day before they started the weather improved. The sun came out strong and the clouds drew away right to the horizon, where they lay piled in white banks like ranges of snow-covered mountains.

That afternoon, an hour before sunset, Adams announced his intention of going on a little expedition of his own.

"I shall only be a few hours away," said he, "five at most."

"Where are you going?" asked Berselius.

"Oh, just down into the woods," replied Adams. Then he left the room before his companion could ask any more questions and sought out the corporal.

He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck down the slope in the direction of the Silent Pools. When they reached the forest edge he pointed before them and said, "Matabayo."

The man understood and led the way, which was not difficult, for the feet of the rubber collectors had beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of light, too, for the moon was already in the sky, only waiting for the sun to sink before blazing out.

When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk fell on them suddenly, and deepened almost to dark; then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest around them glowed green to the light of the moon.

The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached them, lay in mist and moonlight, making a picture unforgettable for ever.

It recalled to Adams that picture of Dore's, illustrating the scene from the "Idylls of the King," where Arthur labouring up the pass "all in a misty moonlight," had trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose head the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn—the misty tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting to receive it and hide it in his robe.

The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones still unburied of the creatures that a far-off king had murdered. The rain had washed them about, and Adams had to search and search before he found what he had come to find.

At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish business the white man had come to find the thing.

Then Adams with the dreary bundle under his arm looked around him at the other remains and swore—swore by the God who had made him, by the mother who had borne him, and the manhood that lay in him, to rest not nor stay till he had laid before the face of Europe the skull of Papeete and the acts of the terrible scoundrel who for long years had systematically murdered for money.

Then, followed by the savage, he turned and retook his road. At the wood's edge he looked back at the silent scene, and it seemed to look at him with the muteness and sadness of a witness who cannot speak, of a woman who cannot tell her sorrow.



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE RIVER OF GOLD

Next morning they started.

The corporal, three of the soldiers, and the two porters made up the escort.

Berselius, who was strong enough to walk a little way, began the journey on foot, but they had not gone five miles on their road when he showed signs of fatigue, and Adams insisted on him taking to the litter.

It was the same road by which Felix had led them, but it was very different travelling; where the ground had been hard underfoot it was now soft, and where it had been elastic it was now boggy; it was more gloomy, and the forest was filled with watery voices; where it dipped down into valleys, you could hear the rushing and mourning of waters. Tiny trickles of water had become rivulets—rivulets streams.

Away in the elephant country it was the same, the dry river-bed where they had found the carcass of the elephant, was now the bed of rushing water. The elephant and antelope herds were wandering in clouds on the plains. A hundred thousand streams from Tanganyika to Yandjali were leaping to form rivers flowing for one destination, the Congo and the sea.

On the second day of their journey, an accident happened; one of the porters, released for a spell from bearing the litter, and loitering behind, was bitten by a snake.

He died despite all Adams's attempts to save him, and, leaving his body to be buried by the leopards, they passed on.

But the soldiers, especially the corporal, took the matter strangely. These bloodthirsty wretches, inured to death and thinking nothing of it, seemed cast down, and at the camping place they drew aside, chattered together for a few minutes, and then the corporal came to Berselius and began a harangue, his eyes rolling toward Adams now and then as he proceeded.

Berselius listened, spoke a few words, and then turned to Adams.

"He says you have brought something with you that is unlucky, and that unless you throw it away, we shall all die."

"I know what he means," replied Adams; "I have brought a relic from that village by the Silent Pools. I shall not throw it away. You can tell him so."

Berselius spoke to the man who still stood sullenly waiting, and who was opening his mouth to continue his complaints, when Adams seized him by the shoulders, turned him round, and with a kick, sent him back to his companions.

"You should not have done that," said Berselius; "these people are very difficult to deal with."

"Difficult!" said Adams. He stared at the soldiers who were grouped together, slapped the Mauser pistol at his side, and then pointed to the tent.

The men ceased muttering, and came as beaten dogs come at the call of their master, seized the tent and put it up.

But Berselius still shook his head. He knew these people, their treachery, and their unutterable heartlessness.

"How far are we from the river now?" asked Adams, that night, as they sat by the fire, for which the corporal by some miracle of savagery had found sufficient dry fuel in the reeking woods around them.

"Another two days' march," replied Berselius, "I trust that we shall reach it."

"Oh, we'll get there," said Adams, "and shall I tell you why? Well, we'll get there just because of that relic I am carrying. God has given me it to take to Europe. To take to Europe and show to men that they may see the devilment of this place, and the work of Satan that is being carried out here."

Berselius bowed his head.

"Perhaps you are right," said he, at last, slowly and thoughtfully.

Adams said no more. The great change in his companion stood as a barrier between him and the loathing he would have felt if Berselius had been still himself.

The great man had fallen, and was now very low. That vision of him in his madness by the Silent Pools had placed him forever on a plane above others. God had dealt with this man very visibly, and the hand of God was still upon him.

Next day they resumed their journey. The soldiers were cheerful and seemed to have forgotten all about their grievance, but Berselius felt more uneasy than ever. He knew these people, and that nothing could move them to mirth and joy that was not allied to devilment, or treachery, or death.

But he said nothing, for speech was useless.

Next morning when they woke they found the soldiers gone; they had taken the porter with them, and as much of the provisions as they could steal without disturbing the white men.

"I thought so," said Berselius.

Adams raged and stormed, but Berselius was perfectly calm.

"The thing I fear most," said he, "is that they have led us out of our road. Did you notice whether we were in the track for the last mile or so of our journey yesterday?"

"No," replied Adams, "I just followed on. Good God! if it is so we are lost."

Now, the rubber road was just a track so faint, that without keeping his eyes on the ground where years of travel had left just a slight indication of the way, a European would infallibly lose it. Savages, who have eyes in their feet, hold it all right, and go along with their burdens even in the dark.

Adams searched, but he could find no track.

"We must leave all these things behind us," said Berselius, pointing to the tent and litter. "I am strong enough to walk; we must strike through the forest and leave the rest to chance."

"Which way?" asked Adams.

"It does not matter. These men have purposely lost us, and we do not know in the least the direction of the river."

Adams's eyes fell on a bundle wrapped in cloth. It was the relic.

He knelt down beside it, and carefully removed the cloth without disturbing the position of the skull.

He noted the direction in which the eye-holes pointed.

"We will go in that direction," said he. "We have lost ourselves, but God has not lost us."

"Let it be so," replied Berselius.

Adams collected what provisions he could carry, tied the skull to his belt with a piece of rope taken from the tent, and led the way amidst the trees.

Two days later, at noon, still lost, unutterably weary, they saw through the trees before them a sight to slay all hope.

It was the tent and the litter just as they had left them.

Two days' heart-breaking labour had brought them to this by all sorts of paths.

They had not wandered in a circle. They had travelled in segments of circles, and against all mathematical probability, had struck the camp.

But the camp was not tenantless. Someone was there. A huge man-like form, a monstrous gorilla, the evil spirit that haunted the forest, bent and gray and old-looking, was picking the things about, sniffing at them, turning them over.

When they saw him first, he was holding the tent-cloth between both his hands just as a draper holds a piece of cloth, then he ripped it up with a rending sound, flung the pieces away, and began turning over the litter.

He heard the steps of the human beings, and sat up, looking around him, sniffing the air. He could not see them, for he was purblind.

The human beings passed on into the terrible nowhere of the forest.

When you are lost like this, you cannot rest. You must keep moving, even though you are all but hopeless of reaching freedom.

Two days later they were still lost, and now entirely hopeless.

To torment their hearts still more, faint sun-rays came through the leaves overhead.

The sun was shining overhead; the sun they would never see again. It was the very end of all things, for they had not eaten for twelve hours now.

The sun-rays danced, for a breeze had sprung up, and they could hear it passing free and happily in the leaves overhead.

Berselius cast himself down by a huge tree and leaned his head against the bark. Adams stood for a moment with his hand upon the tree-bole. He knew that when he had cast himself down he would never rise again. It was the full stop which would bring the story of his life to a close.

He was standing like this when, borne on the breeze above the tree-tops, came a sound, stroke after stroke, sonorous and clear. The bell of a steamboat!

It was the voice of the Congo telling of Life, Hope, Relief.

* * * * *

Berselius did not hear it. Sunk in a profound stupor, he would not even raise his head.

Adams seized his companion in his arms and came facing the direction of the breeze. He walked like a man in his sleep, threading the maze of the trees on, on, on, till before him the day broke in one tremendous splash of light, and the humble frame-roof of M'Bina seemed to him the roofs of some great city, beyond which the river flowed in sheets of burnished gold.



CHAPTER XXXIV

THE SUBSTITUTE

District Commissioner De Wiart, chief at M'Bina, was a big man with a blond beard and a good-natured face. He worked the post at M'Bina with the assistance of a subordinate named Van Laer.

De Wiart was a man eminently fitted for his post. He had a genius for organization and overseeing. He would not have been worth a centime away up-country, for his heart was far too good to allow him to personally supervise the working of the niggers, but at M'Bina he was worth a good deal to the Government that employed him.

This man who would not hurt a fly—this man who would have made an excellent father of a family—was terrible to his subordinates when he took a pen in his hand. He knew the mechanism of every Chef de Poste in his district, and the sort of letter that would rouse him up, stimulate him to renewed action, and the slaves under him to renewed work.

Van Laer was of quite a different type. Van Laer had the appearance of a famished hound held back by a leash. He was tall and thin. He had been a schoolmaster dismissed from his school for a grave offence; he had been a billiard-marker; he had walked the streets of Brussels in a frock-coat and tall hat, a "guide" on the lookout for young foreigners who wished to enjoy the more dubious pleasures of the city. He had been many things, till, at the age of thirty-five, he became a servant of the crown.

The pale blue eyes of Van Laer held in them a shallowness and murderous cruelty, an expression of negation and coldness combined with mind such as one finds nowhere in the animal kingdom, save that branch of it which prides itself on its likeness to God. His thumbs were cruelly shaped and enormous. A man may disguise his soul, he may disguise his mind, he may disguise his face, but he cannot disguise his thumbs unless he wears gloves.

No one wears gloves on the Congo, so Van Laer's thumbs were openly displayed.

He had been six months now at M'Bina and he was sick of the place, accounts were of no interest to him. He was a man of action, and he wanted to be doing. He could make money up there in the forest at the heart of things; here, almost in touch with civilization, he was wasting his time. And he wanted money. The bonus-ache had seized him badly. When he saw the great tusks of green ivory in their jackets of matting, when he saw the bales of copal leafed round with aromatic unknown leaves, and speaking fervently of the wealth of the tropics and the riches of the primeval forests, when he saw the tons of rubber and remembered that this stuff, which in the baskets of the native collectors looks like fried potato chips, in Europe becomes, by the alchemy of trade, minted gold, a great hunger filled his hungry soul.

At M'Bina great riches were eternally flowing in and flowing out. Wealth in its original wrappings piled itself on the wharf in romantical packets and bales, piled itself on board steamers, floated away down the golden river, and was replaced by more wealth flowing in from the inexhaustible forests.

The sight of all this filled Van Laer with an actual physical hunger. He could have eaten that stuff that was wealth itself. He could have devoured those tusks. He was Gargantua as far as his appetite was concerned, and for the rest he was only Van Laer driving a quill in the office of De Wiart.

He did not know that he was here on probation; that the good-natured and seemingly lazy de Wiart was studying him and finding him satisfactory, that very soon his desires would be fulfilled, and that he would be let loose like a beast on the land of his longing, a living whip, an animated thumb-screw, a knife with a brain in its haft.

When the soldiers had lost Berselius and Adams, they struck at once for M'Bina, reaching it in a day's march.

Here they told their tale.

Chef de Poste Meeus was dead. They had escorted a sick white man and a big white man toward M'Bina. One night three leopards had prowled round the camp and the soldiers had gone in pursuit of them.

The leopards escaped, but the soldiers could not find the white men again.

De Wiart listened to this very fishy tale without believing a word of it, except in so far as it related to Meeus.

"Where did you lose the white men?" asked de Wiart.

The soldiers did not know. One does not know where one loses a thing; if one did, then the thing would not be lost.

"Just so," said De Wiart, agreeing to this very evident axiom, and more than ever convinced that the story was a lie. Meeus was dead and the men had come to report. They had delayed on the road to hold some jamboree of their own, and this lie about the white men was to account for their delay.

"Did anyone else come with you as well as the white men?" asked De Wiart.

"Yes, there was a porter, a Yandjali man. He had run away."

De Wiart pulled his blond beard meditatively, and looked at the river.

From the office where he was sitting the river, great with the rains and lit by the sun which had broken through the clouds, looked like a moving flood of gold. One might have fancied that all the wealth of the elephant country, all the teeming riches of the forest, flowing by a thousand streams and disdaining to wait for the alchemy of trade, had joined in one Pactolian flood flowing toward Leopoldsville and the sea.

De Wiart was not thinking this. He dismissed the soldiers and told them to hold themselves in readiness to return to M'Bassa on the morrow.

That evening he called Van Laer into the office.

"Chef de Poste Meeus of Fort M'Bassa is dead," said De Wiart; "you will go there and take command. You will start to-morrow."

Van Laer flushed.

"It is a difficult post," said De Wiart, "wild country, and the natives are the laziest to be found in the whole of the state. The man before Meeus did much harm; he had no power or control, he was a weak man, and the people frankly laughed at him. Actually rubber came in here one-third rubbish, the people were half their time in revolt, they cut the vines in two districts. I have a report of his saying, 'There is no ivory to be got. The herds are very scarce, and the people say they cannot make elephants.' Fancy writing nigger talk like that in a report. I replied in the same tone. I said, 'Tell the people they must make them: and make them in a hurry. Tell them that they need not trouble to make whole elephants, just the tusks will do—eighty-pound tusks, a hundred-pound if possible.' But sarcasm was quite thrown away on him. He listened to the natives. Once a man does that he is lost, for they lose all respect for him. They are just like children, these people; once let children get in the habit of making excuses and you lose control.

"Meeus was a stronger man, but he left much to be desired. He had too much whalebone in his composition, not enough steel, but he was improving.

"You will find yourself at first in a difficult position. It always is so when a Chef de Poste dies suddenly and even a few days elapse before he is replaced. The people get out of hand, thinking the white man is gone for ever. However, you will find yourself all right in a week or so, if you are firm."

"Thank you," said Van Laer. "I have no doubt at all that I will be able to bring these people into line. I do not boast. I only ask you to keep your eye on the returns."

Next day Van Laer, escorted by the soldiers, left M'Bina to take up the station at Fort M'Bassa left vacant by the death of Chef de Poste Andreas Meeus.

Three days later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house by shouts from the sentinels on duty saw, coming toward him in the blazing sunshine, a great man who stumbled and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead.

Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The man erect had, tied to his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a skull.

Fit emblem of the forest he had passed through and the land that lay behind it.



CHAPTER XXXV

PARIS

One hot day in June Schaunard was seated in the little office just behind his shop. He was examining an improved telescopic sight which had just been put upon the market by an opponent, criticizing it as one poet criticizes the poem of another poet—that is to say, ferociously.

To him, thus meditating, from the Rue de la Paix suddenly came a gush of sound which as suddenly ceased.

The shop door had opened and closed again, and Schaunard leaving his office came out to see who the visitor might be.

He found himself face to face with Adams. He knew him by his size, but he would scarcely have recognized him by his face, so brown, so thin and so different in expression was it from the face of the man with whom he had parted but a few months ago.

"Good day," said Adams. "I have come to pay you for that gun."

"Ah, yes, the gun," said Schaunard with a little laugh, "this is a pleasant surprise. I had entered it amidst my bad debts. Come in, monsieur, come into my office, it is cooler there, and we can talk. The gun, ah, yes. I had entered that transaction in Ledger D. Come in, come in. There, take that armchair, I keep it for visitors. Well, and how did the expedition go off?"

"Badly," said Adams. "We are only back a week. You remember what you said to me when we parted? You said, 'Don't go.' I wish I had taken your advice."

"Why, since you are back sound and whole, it seems to me you have not done so badly—but perhaps you have got malaria?"

The old man's sharp eyes were investigating the face of the other. Schaunard's eyes had this peculiarity, that they were at once friendly to one and cruel, they matched the eternal little laugh which was ever springing to his lips—the laugh of the eternal mocker.

Schaunard made observations as well as telescopic sights and wind-gauges—he had been making observation for sixty years—he took almost as much interest in individual human beings as in rifles, and much more interest in Humanity than in God.

He was afflicted with the malady of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—he did not believe in God, only instead of hiding his disease under a cloak of mechanical religion, or temporizing with it, he frankly declared himself to be what he was, an atheist.

This fact did not interfere with his trade—a godly gunmaker gets no more custom than an atheistical one; besides, Schaunard did not obtrude his religious opinions after the fashion of his class, he was a good deal of a gentleman, and he was accustomed to converse familiarly with emperors and kings.

"No, it is not malaria," replied Adams, following the old man who was leading the way into the office. "I never felt better in my life. It is just the Congo. The place leaves an impression on one's mind, M. Schaunard, a flavour that is not good."

He took the armchair which Schaunard kept for visitors. He was only a week back—all he had seen out there was fresh to him and very vivid, but he felt in Schaunard an antagonistic spirit, and he did not care to go deeper into his experiences.

Schaunard took down that grim joke, Ledger D, placed it on the table and opened it, but without turning the leaves.

"And how is Monsieur le Capitaine?" asked he.

"He has been very ill, but he is much better. I am staying with him in the Avenue Malakoff as his medical attendant. We only arrived at Marseilles a week ago."

"And Madame Berselius, how is she?"

"Madame Berselius is at Trouville."

"The best place this weather. Ma foi, you must find it warm here even after Africa—well, tell me how you found the gun to answer."

Adams laughed. "The gun went off—in the hands of a savage. All your beautiful guns, Monsieur Schaunard, are now matchwood and old iron, tents, everything went, smashed to pieces, pounded to pulp by elephants."

He told of the great herd they had pursued and how in the dark it had charged the camp. He told of how in the night, listening by the camp fire, he had heard the mysterious boom of its coming, and of the marvellous sight he had watched when Berselius, failing in his attempt to waken the Zappo Zap, had fronted the oncoming army of destruction.

Schaunard's eyes lit up as he listened.

"Ah," said he, "that is a man!"

The remark brought Adams to a halt.

He had become strangely bound up in Berselius; he had developed an affection for this man almost brotherly, and Schaunard's remark hit him and made him wince. For Schaunard employed the present tense.

"Yes," said Adams at last, "it was very grand." Then he went on to tell of Berselius's accident, but he said nothing of his brain injury, for a physician does not speak of his patient's condition to strangers, except in the vaguest and most general terms.

"And how did you like the Belgians?" asked the old man, when Adams had finished.

"The Belgians!" Adams, suddenly taken off his guard, exploded; he had said nothing as yet about the Congo to anyone. He could not help himself now; the horrors rushed to his mouth and escaped—the cry of the great mournful country—the cry that he had brought to Europe with him in his heart, found vent.

Schaunard sat amazed, not at the infamies pouring from Adams's mouth, for he was well acquainted with them, but at the man's vehemence and energy.

"I have come to Europe to expose him," finished Adams.

"Expose who?"

"Leopold, King of the Belgians."

"But, my dear Monsieur Adams, you have come to waste your time; he is already exposed. Expose Leopold, King of the Belgians! Say at once that you are going to expose the sun. He doesn't care. He exposes himself. His public and his private life are common property."

"You mean to say that everyone knows what I know?"

"Precisely, and perhaps even more, but everyone has not seen what you have seen, and that's all the difference."

"How so?"

"In this way, monsieur; let us suppose that you have just seen a child run over in the Rue de la Paix. You come in here and tell me of it; the horror of it is in your mind, but you cannot convey that horror to me, simply because I have not seen what you have seen. Still, you can convey a part of it, for I know the Rue de la Paix, it is close to me, outside my door, and I know French children.

"You come to me and tell me of hideous sights you have seen in Africa. That does not move me a tenth so much, for Africa is very far away—it is, in fact, for me a geographical expression; the people are niggers I have never seen, dwelling in a province I have never heard of. You come to seek sympathy for this people amongst the French public? Well, I tell you frankly you are like a man searching in a dark room for a black hat that is not there."

"Nevertheless I shall search."

"As monsieur wills, only don't knock yourself against the chairs and tables. Ah, monsieur, monsieur, you are young and a medical man. Remain so, and don't lose your years and your prospects fighting the impossible. Now listen to me, for it is old Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix who is speaking to you. The man you would expose, as you term it, is a king to begin with; to go on with, he is far and away the cleverest king in Christendom. That man has brains enough to run what you in America call a department store. Every little detail of his estate out there, even to the cap guns and rifles of the troops, he looks after himself; that's why it pays. It is a bad-smelling business, but it doesn't poison the nose of Europe, because it is so far away. Still, smells are brought over in samples by missionaries and men like you, and people say 'Faugh!' Do you think he did not take that into his consideration when he planned the affair and laid down the factory? If you think so, you would be vastly mistaken. He has agents everywhere—I have met them, apologists everywhere—in the Press, in Society, in the Church. The Roman Catholic Church is entirely his; he is triple-ringed with politicians, priests, publicists, and financiers, all holding their noses to keep out the stench and all singing the Laus Leopold at the top of their voices.

"Ah! you don't know Europe. I do, from the Ballplatz to Willhelmstrasse, from the Winter Palace to the Elysee, my trade has brought me everywhere, and if you could see with my eyes, you would see the great, smooth plain of ice you hope to warm with your poor breath in the name of Humanity."

"At all events I shall try," replied Adams, rising to go.

"Well, try, but don't get frozen in making the trial——"

"Oh, the gun—well, look here—you are starting on another hunting expedition, it seems to me, a more dangerous one, too, than the last, for there is no forest where one loses oneself more fatally than the forest of social reform—pay me when you come back."

"Very well," said Adams, laughing.

"Only if you are successful though."

"Very well."

"And, see here, in any event come and tell me the result. Bon jour, monsieur, and a word in your ear——"

The old man was opening the shop door.

"Yes?"

"Don't go."

Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office to chuckle over his joke, and Adams walked off down the Rue de la Paix.

Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end of the season, and the streets were thronged with foreigners—the Moor from Morocco, in his white burnous, elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had become a veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were packed, the cafes crowded. Austrian, Russian, English, and American gold was pouring into the city—pouring in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and by every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l'Est, and the Gare de Lyons.

To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, fresh from those great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant country and the tremendous cavern of the jungle, the city around him and the sights affected him with vividness and force.

Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen, he stood fresh from that primeval land.

He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair in disorder, her foot on the body of a naked slave and the haft of a blood-stained knife between her teeth, he was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in powder, Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of poets, philosophers, churchmen, placemen, politicians, and financiers.

It was a strange experience.

He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then to the Avenue Malakoff, and as he walked the face of the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind and was replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites in the world of thought often awaken images one of the other, just because of the fact that they are opposites.

Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at the railway station on the day of their arrival.

La Joconde had been cabled for from Leopoldsville, and the great yacht had brought them to Marseilles. Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius's accident or illness, and Madame Berselius had departed for Trouville, quite unconscious of anything having happened to her husband.

Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in her father. She had done so at the very first sight of him, but as yet she had said no word.



CHAPTER XXXVI

DREAMS

When Adams arrived at the Avenue Malakoff he found Berselius in the library. He was seated in a big armchair, and M. Pinchon, his secretary, a man dry-looking as an account-book, bald, and wearing spectacles, was just leaving the room with some shorthand notes of business letters to be typed.

Berselius was much changed; his hair was quite gray, his eyes, once so calm, forceful, and intrinsically brilliant, had lost their lustre, his face wore the expression of a confirmed invalid.

Great discontent was the predominant feature of this expression.

It was only within the last few days that this had appeared. On recovering from the hardships of the forest and on the voyage home, though weak enough, he had been serene, mild, amiable and rather listless, but during the last few days something was visibly troubling him.

He had "gone off," to use an expressive phrase sometimes employed by physicians.

A strange thing had happened to Berselius. Ever since the recovery of his memory his new self had contemplated the past from the heights of new birth, calmly conscious of the fact that this past belonged to a man who was dead. The more he examined this past the more he loathed the man to whom it had belonged, but the difference between that man and himself was so profound that he felt, rightly, that he was not He.

Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.

He had awakened to his new self again with the full recognition in his mind that only a few moments ago he had been thinking with that other man's brain, acting under his passions, living his life.

The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest connection with, or knowledge of, the Berselius of real life. Yet the Berselius of real life was very intimately connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all his actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them to the minutest detail.

The next night he did not dream at all—not so on the third night, when the scene of horror by the Silent Pools was reenacted, himself in the original role. The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping the sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few moments ago.

No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke.

Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was nothing to the fact which was now borne in on him—the fact that this new mentality was but a thin shell covering the old, as the thin shell of earth, with its flowers and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning hell which is the earth's core.

The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid personality, and forty years of exuberant and self-willed life had at a stroke been checked and changed. The crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous passions had passed from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions, but the furnace was there beneath the flower garden just as it is in the case of the earth.

Captain Berselius was still alive, though suppressed and living in secrecy. At night, touched by the magic wand of sleep, he became awake, and became supreme master of the tenement in the cellars of which he was condemned to sleep by day.

So far from having been touched by death, Captain Berselius was now secure from death or change; a thing not to be reasoned with or altered—beyond human control—yet vividly alive as the fabled monster that inhabits the cellars of Glamis Castle.

Between the dual personalities of the man complete fission had taken place, a terrible accident of the sort condemning the cast-off personality to live in darkness beyond the voice of mind or amendment.

"Well," said Adams, as he entered the room. "How are you to-day?"

"Oh, about the same, about the same. If I could sleep properly I would mend, but my sleep is broken."

"I must give you something to alter that."

Berselius laughed.

"Drugs?"

"Yes, drugs. We doctors cannot always command health, but we can command sleep. Do you feel yourself able to talk for a bit?"

"Oh, yes, I feel physically well. Sit down, you will find some cigars in that cabinet."

Adams lit a cigar and took his seat in an armchair close to his companion. All differences of rank and wealth were sunk between these two men who had gone through so much together. On their return, when Berselius had desired Adams to remain as his medical attendant, he had delegated M. Pinchon as intermediary to deal with Adams as to the financial side of the question.

Adams received a large salary paid monthly in advance by the secretary. Berselius did not have any hand in the matter, thus the feeling of employer and employed was reduced to vanishing point and the position rendered more equal.

"You know," said Adams, "I have always been glad to do anything I can for you, and I always shall be, but since I have come back to Paris I have been filled with unrest. You complain of sleeplessness—well, that is my disease."

"Yes?"

"It's that place over there; it has got into my blood. I declare to God that I am the last man in the world to sentimentalize, but that horror is killing me, and I must act—I must do something—even if I have to go into the middle of the Place de la Concorde and shout it aloud. I shall shout it aloud. I'm not made so that I can stand seeing a thing like that in silence."

Berselius sat with his eyes fixed on the carpet; he seemed abstracted and scarcely listening. He knew perfectly well that Adams was acquainted with the affair at the Silent Pools, but the subject had never been mentioned between them, nor was it now.

"That missionary I met on the return home at Leopoldsville," went on Adams, "he was a Baptist, a man, not a religion-machine. He gave me details from years of experience that turned my heart in me. With my own eyes I saw enough——"

Berselius held up his hand.

"Let us not speak of what we know," said he. "The thing is there—has been there for years—can you destroy the past?"

"No; but one can improve the future." Adams got up and paced the floor. "Now, now as I am talking to you, that villainy is going on; it is like knowing that a murder is slowly being committed in the next house and that one has no power to interfere. When I look at the streets full of people amusing themselves; when I see the cafes crammed, and the rich driving in their carriages; the churches filled with worshippers worshipping a God who serenely sits in heaven without stretching a hand to help His poor, benighted creatures—when I see all this and contrast it with what I have seen, I could worship that!"

He stopped, and pointed to the great gorilla shot years ago in German West Africa by Berselius. "That was a being at least sincere. Whatever brutalities he committed in his life, he did not talk sentiment and religion and humanitarianism as he pulled his victims to pieces, and he did not pull his victims to pieces for the sake of gold. He was an honest devil, a far higher thing than a dishonest man."

Again Berselius held up his hand.

"What would you do?"

"Do? I'd break that infernal machine which calls itself a State, and I'd guillotine the ruffian that invented it. I cannot do that, but I can at least protest."

Berselius, who had helped to make the machine, and who knew better than most men its strength, shook his head sadly.

"Do what you will," said he. "If you need money my funds are at your disposal, but you cannot destroy the past."

Adams, who knew nothing of Berselius's dream-obsession, could not understand the full meaning of these words.

But he had received permission to act, and the promise of that financial support without which individual action would be of no avail.

He determined to act; he determined to spare neither Berselius's money nor his own time.

But the determination of man is limited by circumstance, and circumstance was at that moment preparing and rehearsing the last act of the drama of Berselius.



CHAPTER XXXVII

BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF

On the morning after Berselius's conversation with Adams, Berselius left the Avenue Malakoff, taking his way to the Avenue des Champs Elysees on foot.

The change in the man was apparent even in his walk. In the old days he was rapid in his movements, erect of head, keen of eye. The weight of fifteen years seemed to have suddenly fallen on his shoulders, bowing them and slowing his step. He was in reality carrying the most terrible burden that a man can carry—himself.

A self that was dead, yet with which he had to live. A past which broke continually up through his dreams.

He was filled with profound unrest, irritation and revolt; everything connected with that other one, even the money he had made and the house he had built for himself and the pursuits he had followed, increased this irritation and revolt. He had already formed plans for taking a new house in Paris, but to-day, as he walked along the streets, he recognized that Paris itself was a house, every corner of which belonged to that other one's past.

In the Avenue Champs Elysees, he hailed a fiacre and drove to the house of his lawyer, M. Cambon, which was situated in the Rue d'Artiles.

Cambon had practically retired from his business, which was carried on now by his son. But for a few old and powerful clients, such as Berselius, he still acted personally.

He was at home, and Berselius was shown into a drawing room, furnished heavily after the heart of the prosperous French bourgeois.

He had not to wait long for the appearance of the lawyer, a fat, pale-faced gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, tightly buttoned up in a frock-coat, the buttonhole of which was adorned with the red rosette of the Legion of Honour.

Cambon had known Berselius for years. The two men were friends, and even more, for Cambon was the depository of Berselius's most confidential affairs.

"Well," said the lawyer, "you have returned. I saw a notice of your return in the Echo de Paris, and indeed, this very day I had promised myself the pleasure of calling on you. And how is Madame Berselius?"

"She is at Trouville."

"I had it in my mind that you proposed to remain away twelve months."

"Yes, but our expedition came to an end."

Berselius, in a few words, told how the camp had been broken up, without referring, however, to his accident; and the fat and placid Cambon listened, pleased as a child with the tale. He had never seen an elephant except at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. He would have run from a milch-cow. Terrible in the law courts, in life he was the mildest of creatures, and the tale had all the attraction that the strong has for the weak and the ferocious for the mild.

But even as he listened, sitting there in his armchair, he was examining his visitor with minute attention, trying to discover some clue to the meaning of the change in him.

"And now," said Berselius, when he had finished, "to business."

He had several matters to consult the lawyer about, and the most important was the shifting of his money from the securities in which they were placed.

Cambon, who was a large holder of rubber industries, grew pale beneath his natural pallor when he discovered that Berselius was about to place his entire fortune elsewhere.

Instantly he put two and two together. Berselius's quick return, his changed appearance, the fact that suddenly and at one sweep he was selling his stock. All these pointed to one fact—disaster.

The elephant story was all a lie, so resolved Cambon, and, no sooner had he bowed his visitor out, than he rushed to the telephone, rang up his broker, and ordered him to sell out his rubber stock at any price.

Berselius, when he left the lawyer's house, drove to his club. The selling of his rubber industry shares had been prompted by no feeling of compunction; it was an act entirely dictated by the profound irritation he felt against the other one who had made his fortune out of those same rubber industries.

He wished to break every bond between himself and the infernal entity that dominated him by night. Surely it was enough to be that other one at night, without being perpetually haunted by that other one's traces by day.

In the Place de L'Opera, his fiacre paused in a crowd of vehicles. Berselius heard himself hailed. He turned his head. In a barouche drawn up beside his carriage, was seated a young and pretty woman. It was Sophia Melmotte, a flame from his past life, burning now for a space in the life of a Russian prince.

"Ma foi," said Sophia, as her carriage pushed up till it was quite level with Berselius. "So you are back from—where was it you went to? And how are the tigers? Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you look. One would think you had swallowed a hearse and had not digested the trappings——"

To all of which Berselius bowed.

"You are just the same as ever," said he.

The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was something in Berselius's tone that made the simple words an insult. Before she could reply, however, the block in the traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on Berselius bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a stranger with whom he had spoken for a moment, and whom he had never seen before.

At the club in the smoking room, where he went for an absinthe before luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very man who had presided at the banquet given to him on the day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who had been his friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt pleasure, was now obnoxious to him. And after a while the weird fact was borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him. Tirard was talking to the man who was dead—the other Berselius. The new rifle for the army, which filled Tirard's conversation, would have been an interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to the new.

Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized that all the friends, pursuits, and interests that had filled his life till this, were useless to him and dead as the cast-off self that had once dominated his being. Not only useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He would have to re-create a world of interests for himself out of new media. He was living in a world where all the fruit and foliage and crops had been blighted by some wizard's wand; he would have to re-plant it over anew, and at the present moment he did not know where to cast about him for a single seed.

Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person persisting in some disagreeable medicine, hoping to become accustomed to it, he continued his conversation with Tirard.

After luncheon, he sat down to a game of ecarte in the card-room with an old acquaintance, but after half an hour's play he left the table on the plea of indisposition and left the club, taking his way homeward on foot.

Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents which, in tragic lives, appear less incidents than occurrences prepared by Fate, as though she would say, "Look and deny me if you dare."

Toward Berselius was approaching a victoria drawn by two magnificent horses, and in the victoria lolled a man. An old man with a gray beard, who lolled on the cushions of the carriage, and looked about him with the languid indifference of a king and the arrogance of a megalomaniac.

It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.

When Berselius's eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in nameless debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to have been expiated on the scaffold, and whose life ought to have been cut short by the executioner of justice, many, many years ago.

It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other self, the self that haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, and in the light of day.

The terrible old man in the carriage passed on his way and Berselius on his.

When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was handing his hat to a servant, Maxine appeared at the door of the library. Her beauty, innocence, and sweetness formed a strange vision contrasted with that other vision he had seen near the Madeleine. Was it possible that God's world could hold two such creatures, and that God's air should give them breath? For a week or ten days after this, Berselius remained in his own suite of apartments without leaving the house.

It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that he was but the wraith of what he had been.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE REVOLT OF A SLAVE

The day after that on which Berselius had seen Leopold, Madame Berselius, moved by one of those fits of caprice common to women of her type, came back suddenly from Trouville.

She knew of her husband's return, but she knew nothing of the injury or of the alteration that had come in him until Maxine, who met her at the station, hinted at the fact. Berselius was standing at the window of his private sitting room when Madame Berselius was announced.

He turned to greet her; even as he turned she perceived the change. This was not the man who had left her a few months ago, strong, confident, impassive; the man who had been her master and before whom she had shrunk like a slave. Intuition told her that the change was not the change wrought by sickness—Berselius was not ill, he was gone, leaving another man in his place. They conversed for some time on indifferent matters, and then Madame Berselius took her departure for her own apartments.

But she left the room of Berselius a changed woman, just as he had returned to it a changed man.

The slave in her had found her freedom. Utterly without the capacity for love and without honour, without conscience and with a vague superstition to serve for religion, Madame Berselius had, up to this, been held in her place by the fear of her husband. His will up to this had been her law; she had moved in the major affairs of life under his direction, and even in the minor affairs of life everything had to be surrendered at his word.

And now she hated him.

She had never hated him before, she had admired him; indeed, as far as her power of admiration went, his strength had appealed to her as only strength can appeal to a woman of her type; but now that his strength was gone hatred of him rose up in her heart, petty yet powerful, a dwarf passion that had been slumbering for years.

When the engine seizes the engineer in its wheels, when the slave gets power over his master, cruel things happen, and they were to happen in the case of Berselius.

Madame's rooms were so far away from the rooms of her husband that they might have been living in different houses. There was none of the intimacy of married life between this couple; they met formally at meal times, and it was at dejeuner on the morning after her return that she showed openly before Adams, Maxine, and the servants her contempt for the man who had once held her in subjection. Without a rude word, simply by her manner, her tone, and her indifference to him, she humbled to the dust the stricken man and proclaimed the full measure of his disaster.

As day followed day the dominance of the woman and the subjection of the man became more marked. Madame would, if the spirit took her, countermand her husband's orders; once, with absolute rudeness, she, at table and before the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was a guest, turned to ridicule a remark which Berselius had let escape. The flush that came to his cheek told Maxine that her father's sensibilities were not dead—he was dominated.

Nothing could be stranger than this reduction of a man from greatness to insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free, wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her creature, an object of pity to his daughter and of derision to his servants.

Eight days after her return Madame Berselius, now free and her own mistress, left Paris for Vaux on a short visit to some friends, little dreaming of the momentous event that was to cause her return.



CHAPTER XXXIX

MAXINE

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 AEschylus.

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.

They had seen very little of each other since his return. Adams, indeed, had purposely avoided her as much as it is possible for one person to avoid another when both are dwelling in the same house.

The pride of manhood warned him against this woman who was rich and the daughter of the man from whom he received a salary.

Maxine knew nothing of the pride of manhood; she only knew that he avoided her.

She was dressed entirely in white with a row of pearls for her only ornament. She had just returned from some social function, and Adams as he rose to meet her noticed that she had closed the door.

"Dr. Adams," said the girl, "forgive me for disturbing you at this hour. For days I have wished to speak to you about my father. I have put it off, but I feel I must speak—what has happened to him?"

She took a seat in an armchair, and Adams stood before her with his back to the mantelpiece and his hands behind him.

The big man did not answer for a moment. He stood there like a statue, looking at his questioner gravely and contemplatively, as a physician looks at a patient whose case is not quite clear.

Then he said, "You notice a change in your father?"

"No," said Maxine, "it is more than a change. He is quite different—he is another man."

"When we were hunting out there," said Adams, "Captain Berselius had an accident. In trying to rescue a servant he was caught by an elephant and flung some distance; he hurt his head, and when he recovered consciousness his memory was quite gone. It slowly returned——" He paused, for it was impossible to give details, then he went on—"I noticed, myself, as the memory was returning, that he seemed changed; when he had fully recovered his memory, the fact was obvious. He was, as you say, quite different—in fact, just as you see him now."

"But can an injury change a person like that?"

"Yes; an injury to the head can change a person completely."

Maxine sighed. She had never seen the dark side of her father; she had never loved him in the true sense of the word, but she had respected him and felt a pride in his strength and dominance.

The man who had returned from Africa seemed to her an inferior being; the wreck, in fact, of the man she had always known.

"And this happened to him," said she, "when he was trying to save a servant's life?"

"Ah," said Adams, "if you could have seen it, you would have called it something even higher than that—it was a sublime act."

He told her the details, even as he had told them to Schaunard, but with additions.

"I myself was paralyzed—I could only cling to the tree and watch. The fury of that storm of beasts coming down on one was like a wind—I can put it no other way—like a wind that stripped one's mind of everything but just the power of sight. I can imagine now the last day, when the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood. It was as bad as that—well, he did not lose his mind or nerve, he found time to think of the man who was lying drugged with hemp, and he found courage enough in his heart to attempt to save him. He was fond of the man, for the man was a great hunter though an absolute savage, without heart or soul.

"Without heart or soul——" Adams paused. There was something about Maxine Berselius that made her different from the ordinary woman one meets in life—some inheritance from her father, perhaps, who knows? But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light of other people's lamps.

The Hostage House of Yandjali would have told Maxine infinitely more than it told Adams. She would have read in Meeus's face a story that he never deciphered; she would have seen in the people of the Silent Pools a whole nation in chains, when he with his other-people-begotten ideas of niggers and labour only saw a few recalcitrant blacks. It wanted skulls and bones to bring him to a sense of the sorrow around him; the sight of these people would have told Maxine of their tears.

This instinct for the truth of things made her a reader of people. Adams had interested her at first sight, because she found him difficult to read. She had never met a man like him before; he belonged to a different race. The man in him appealed powerfully to the woman in her; they were physical affinities. She had told him this in a hundred ways half unconsciously and without speech before they parted at Marseilles, but the mind in him had not appealed to the mind in her. She did not know his mind, its stature or its bent, and until that knowledge came to her she could not love him.

As he stood with his back to the fireplace after that pronouncement on the spiritual and moral condition of the Zappo Zap, his thoughts strayed for a moment with a waft of the wing right across the world to the camping place by the great tree. Out there now, under the stars, the tree and the pool were lying just as he had seen them last. Away to the east the burst elephant gun was resting just where it had been dropped; the bones of the giraffe, clean-picked and white, were lying just where the gun had laid them; and the bones of the man who had held the gun were lying just where the leopards had left him.

Adams knew nothing of this triangle drawn by death; he still fancied the Zappo Zap alive and deadly. Stirred into speech by that thought he went on:

"A cannibal—a creature worse than a tiger—that was the being for whom your father risked his life."

"A cannibal?" said Maxine, opening her eyes wide.

"Yes; a soldier of the Government who was detailed to act as our guide."

"A soldier—but what Government employs cannibals as soldiers?"

"Oh," said Adams, "they call them soldiers, that is just a name. Slave drivers is the real name, but the Government that employs them does not use the word slave—oh, no, everyone would be shocked—scoundrels!"

He spoke the word with suddenly flashing eyes, uplifted head, and a face as stern the face of Themis. He seemed for a moment fronting some invisible foe, then, smothering his wrath, he went on:

"I lose control of myself when I think of what I have seen—the suffering, the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the bones of murdered people—people whom I had seen walking about alive—lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little child I had talked to and played with——"

He stopped and turned to the fireplace and rested his elbow on the mantel. He had turned his back on Maxine, and volumes could not have said more than what was expressed by that abrupt stoppage of speech and turning away.

The girl scarcely breathed till the man turned from the mantelpiece and faced her again. There was no trace of emotion on his face, but the trace of a struggle with it. Maxine's eyes were filled with tears.

"I am sorry," said he, "that I should have dragged this subject before you at all. Why should I torment your heart as well as my own?"

She did not reply for a moment. She was tracing the vague pattern of the carpet with her eyes, her chin resting on her hand, and the light from above made a halo of the burnished red-gold hair that was her crowning charm.

Then she said, speaking slowly, "I am not sorry. Surely if such things are, they ought to be known. Why should I turn away my face from suffering? I have never done so in Paris, and I have seen much of the misery of Paris, for I have gone amongst it as much as a girl can, but what you tell me is beyond what I have ever heard of, or read of, or dreamed. Tell me more, give me facts; for, frankly, though I believe you, I cannot yet fully realize, and with my mind fully believe. I am like Thomas; I must put my fingers in the wounds."

"Are you brave enough to look at material evidence?" asked Adams.

"Yes; brave enough to face the suffering of others if not my own——"

He left the room and in a few minutes later returned with a parcel. He took from it the skull he had brought with him through everything to civilization.

Maxine's eyes dilated when she saw the thing, but she did not turn pale, and she looked steadfastly at it as Adams turned it in his hands and showed her by the foramen magnum the hacks in the bone caused by the knife.

She put out her finger and touched them, then she said, "I believe."

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.

When he had finished, she did that which a woman never does unless moved by the very highest excitement. She rose up and paced the floor thrice. Without speaking, she walked the length of the room, then she turned to Adams.

"But this must cease."

"This shall cease," said he, "if I can only make myself heard. To-day—to-night—just before you came in, I was trying to put the thing on paper—trying to put down what I have seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, but the ink seems ice. What I write seems nothing, nothing beside what I have seen. The mere statement that so many were killed, so many were tortured, conveys nothing of the reality. The thing is too big for me. God made it, I suppose; but I wish to God I had never seen it."

Maxine was standing now with her hands resting on the back of an armchair. She seemed scarcely listening to what her companion was saying. She was listening, but she was thinking as well.

"You cannot do everything yourself," said she, at last. "You must get others to help, and in this I can, perhaps, assist you. Will you go to-morrow and see Monsieur Pugin? I do not know him personally, but I know a friend of his. I will send him a note early to-morrow morning, and the servant can bring back the letter of introduction. You could call upon him to-morrow afternoon."

"Who is Monsieur Pugin?"

This question, showing such a boundless ignorance of every-day French life and literature, rather shocked Maxine. She explained that Ary Pugin, the author of "Absolution" and twenty other works equally beautiful, was above all other men fitted to bring home to France the story of this great sin. "Absolution," that masterpiece, had shown France her cruelty in the expulsion of the religious orders. France had read it weeping, drying her tears with one hand and continuing the expulsion of the religious orders with the other.

That, however, was not Pugin's fault; he had done his best. It was not his fault that logic and sentiment are so largely constituent of the French nature, making between them that paradox, the French mind.

"I will go and see him," said Adams, when the girl had explained what Pugin was, what Pugin did, and what Pugin had written. "A man like that could do more with a stroke of his pen, than I with weary years of blundering attempts to write. I can never thank you enough for listening to me. It is strange, but half the weight of the thing seems to have passed from my mind."