The Pools of Silence

THE

POOLS OF SILENCE

BY

H. de VERE STACPOOLE

AUTHOR OF

“THE BLUE LAGOON,” “THE CRIMSON AZALEAS,”

“GARRYOWEN,” ETC.

NEW YORK

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1910

Copyright, 1910, by

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Published, July, 1910

THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

A LECTURE OF THENARD’S

The sun was setting over Paris, a blood-red and violent-looking sun, like the face of a bully staring in at the window of a vast chill room.

The bank of cloud above the west, corrugated by the wind, seemed not unlike the lowermost slats of a Venetian blind; one might have fancied that a great finger had tilted them up whilst the red, callous, cruel face took a last peep at the frost-bitten city, the frost-bound country—Montmartre and its windows, winking and bloodshot; Bercy and its barges; Notre Dame, where icicles, large as carrots, hung from the lips of the gargoyles, and the Seine clipping the cité and flowing to the clean but distant sea.

It was the fourth of January and the last day of Félix Thénard’s post-graduate course of lectures at the Beaujon Hospital.

Post-graduate lectures are intended not for students, using the word in its limited sense, but for fully fledged men who wish for extra training in some special subject, and Thénard, the famous neurologist of the Beaujon, had a class which practically represented the whole continent of Europe and half the world. Men from Vienna and Madrid, Germany and Japan, London and New York, crowded the benches of his lecture room. Even the Republic of Liberia was represented by a large gentleman, who seemed carved from solid night and polished with palm oil.

Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives of America at the lectures of Thénard, was just reaching the entrance of the Beaujon as the last rays of sunset were touching the heights of Montmartre and the first lamps of Paris were springing alight.

He had walked all the way from his rooms in the Rue Dijon, for omnibuses were slow and uncomfortable, cabs were dear, and money was, just at present, the most unpleasant thing that money can convert itself into—an object.

Adams was six feet two, a Vermonter, an American gentleman whose chest measurements were big, almost, as his instincts were fine. He had fought his way up, literally from the soil, putting in terms as seaside café waiter to help to pay his college fees; putting aside everything but honour in his grand struggle to freedom and individual existence, and finishing his college career with a travelling scholarship which brought him to Paris.

Individualism, the thing that lends something of greatness to each American, but which does not tend to the greatness of the nation, was the mainspring of this big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable rivers, and across whose shoulder one half divined the invisible axe of the pioneer.

He was just twenty-three years of age, yet he looked thirty: plain enough as far as features go, his face was a face to remember in time of trouble. It was of the American type that approximates to the Red Indian, and you guessed the power that lay behind it by the set of the cheek-bones, the breadth of the chin and the restfulness of the eyes. Like the Red Indian, Paul Quincy Adams was slow of speech. A silent man with his tongue.

He entered the hospital and passed down a long corridor to the cloakroom, where he left his overcoat and from there, by another corridor, he found his way to the swing-door of the lecture theatre. It wanted five minutes to the hour. He peeped over the muffing of the glass; the place was nearly full, so he went in and took his seat, choosing one at the right hand end of the first row of the stalls—students’ vernacular for the lowest row of the theatre benches.

The theatre was lit with gas. It had whitewashed walls bare as the walls of a barn; a permanent blackboard faced the audience, and the air was suffocatingly hot after the crisp, cold air of the streets. It would be like this till about the middle of the lecture, when Alphonse the porter would pull the rope of the skylight and ventilate the place with an arctic blast.

This room, which had once been an anatomical theatre, and always a lecture room, had known the erect form of Lisfranc; the stooping shoulders of Majendie had cast their shadow on its walls; Flourens had lectured here on that subject of which he had so profound a knowledge—the brain; the echoes of this room had heard the foundations of Medicine shift and change, the rank heresies of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day—and vice versa.

Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened his pencil, sat listening to the gas sizzling above his head; then he turned for a moment and glanced at the men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadly braided frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself to all men by the end of the clinical thermometer protruding from his waistcoat pocket; the two Japanese gentlemen—brown, incurious, and inscrutable—men from another world, come to look on; the republican from Liberia, and the rest. Then he turned his head, for the door on the floor of the theatre had opened, giving entrance to Thénard.

Thénard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock-coat; his beard was scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he had a depressed expression, the general air of a second-rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as he entered and crossed to the estrade where the lecture table stood and the glass of water, he shouted some words vehemently and harshly to Alphonse, the theatre attendant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place the box of coloured chalks on the table—the sacred chalks which the lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard.

One instantly took a dislike to this shabby-looking bourgeois, with the harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, as the lecture went on, one forgot him. It was not the profundity of the man’s knowledge, great though it was, that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or the lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his obvious disregard for everything earthly but Truth.

This was borne in on one by every expression of his face, every gesture of his body, every word and every tone and inflection of his voice.

This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. It was on the “Brain Conceived as a Machine Pure and Simple.”

It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over all other ideas—the Soul.

It was pitiless because it did these things, and it was terrible because it was spoken by Thénard, for he was just standing there, a little, oldish man, terribly convincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice, as ready to acknowledge the soul and its attributes as to refuse them, standing there twiddling his horsehair watch-chain, and speaking from the profundity of his knowledge with, at his elbow, a huge army of facts, instances, and cases, not one of which did not support his logical deductions.

I wish I could print his lecture in full. I can only give some few sentences taken at haphazard from the peroration.

“The fundamental basis of all morality can be expressed by the words Left—or Right. ‘Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot on my dinner?’

“The prehistoric man asking himself that question in the dawn of time laid the foundation of the world’s morality. Do we know how he answered it? Yes—undoubtedly he saved his dinner.

“The prehistoric woman crouching in the ferns, wakened from sleep by the cries of her child on the left and the shouting of her man on the right, found herself face to face with the question, ‘Shall I court self-destruction in attempting to save It, or shall I seek safety with Him?’ Do we know how she answered that question? Undoubtedly she took the path to the left.

“The woman’s Right was the man’s Left, and she took it not from any motive of goodness but just because her child appealed to her as powerfully as his dinner appealed to the man. And which was the nobler instinct? In prehistoric times, gentlemen, they were both equally noble, for the instinct of the man was as essential to the fact that you and I are here gathered together in enlightened Paris, as the instinct of the woman.

“Right or Left? That is still the essence of morals—all the rest is embroidery. Whilst I am talking to you now, service is being held at the Madeleine, the Bourse is closed (looking at his watch), but other gaming houses are opening. The Café de Paris is filling, the Little Sisters of the Poor are visiting the sick.

“We feel keenly that some people are doing good and some people are doing evil. We wonder at the origin of it all, and the answer comes from the prehistoric forest.

“‘I am Determination. I can choose the Right or I can choose the Left. Whilst dwelling in the man’s heart my choice lies that way, in the woman’s heart that way.

“‘I am not religion, but between the man and the woman I have created an essential antagonism of motive which will be the basis of all future religions and systems of ethics. I have already dimly demarcated a line between ferocity and greed, and a thing which has yet no name, but which will in future ages be called Love.

“‘I am a constant quantity, but the dim plan I have traced in the plastic brain will be used by the ever-building years; spires and domes shall fret the skies, priests unroll their scrolls of papyri, infinite developments of the simple basic Right and Left laid down by me shall combine to build a Pantheon of a million shrines to a million gods—who are yet only three: the tramp of the mastodon, the cry of the child in the pterodactyl’s grip, and myself, who in future years shall be the only surviving god of the three—Determination.’

“The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. ‘There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,’ and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method.

“Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland is the last vestige of an eye which once belonged to a reptile long extinct. That is the new method; the results are not so pretty, but they are more exact.”

“You have finished your post-graduate work, and I suppose you are about to leave Paris like the others. Have you any plans?”

The lecture was over, the audience was pouring out of the theatre, and Adams was talking to Thénard, whom he knew personally.

“Well, no,” said Adams. “None very fixed just at present. Of course I shall practise in my own country, but I can’t quite see the opening yet.”

CHAPTER II

DR. DUTHIL

Thénard, with his case-book and a bundle of papers under his arm, stood for a moment in thought. Then he suddenly raised his chin.

“How would you like to go on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo?”

“Ask a child would it like pie,” said the American, speaking in English. Then, in French, “Immensely, monsieur. Only it is impossible.”

“Why?”

“Money.”

“Ah, that’s just it,” said Thénard. “A patient of mine, Captain Berselius, is starting on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo. He requires a medical man to accompany him, and the salary is two thousand francs a month and all things found——”

Adams’s eyes lit up.

“Two thousand a month!”

“Yes; he is a very rich man. His wife is a patient of mine. When I was visiting her yesterday the Captain put the thing before me—in fact, gave me carte blanche to choose for him. He requires the services of a medical man—an Englishman if possible——”

“But I’m an American,” said Adams.

“It is the same thing,” replied Thénard, with a little laugh. “You are all big and strong and fond of guns and danger.”

He had taken Adams by the arm and was leading him down the passage toward the entrance hall of the hospital.

“The primitive man is strong in you all, and that is why you are so vital and important, you Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Celts, and Anglo-Teutons. Come in here.”

He opened the door of one of the house-surgeon’s rooms.

A youngish looking man, with a straw-coloured beard, was seated before the fire, with a cigarette between his lips.

He rose to greet Thénard, was introduced to Adams, and, drawing an old couch a bit from the wall, he bade his guests be seated.

The armchair he retained himself. One of the legs was loose, and he was the only man in the Beaujon who had the art of sitting on it without smashing it. This he explained whilst offering cigarettes.

Thénard, like many another French professor, unofficially was quite one with the students. He would snatch a moment from his work to smoke a cigarette with them; he would sometimes look in at their little parties. I have seen him at a birthday party where the cakes and ale, to say nothing of the cigarettes and the unpawned banjo, were the direct products of a pawned microscope. I have seen him, I say, at a party like this, drinking a health to the microscope as the giver of all the good things on the table—he, the great Thénard, with an income of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, and a reputation solid as the four massive text-books that stood to his name.

“Duthil,” said Thénard, “I have secured, I believe, a man for our friend Berselius.” He indicated Adams with a half laugh, and Dr. Duthil, turning in his chair, regarded anew the colossus from the States. The great, large-hewn, cast-iron visaged Adams, beside whom Thénard looked like a shrivelled monkey and Duthil like a big baby with a beard.

“Good,” said Duthil.

“A better man than Bauchardy,” said Thénard.

“Much,” replied Duthil.

“Who, then, was Bauchardy?” asked Adams, amused rather by the way in which the two others were discussing him.

“Bauchardy?” said Duthil. “Why, he was the last man Berselius killed.”

“Silence,” said Thénard, then turning to Adams, “Berselius is a perfectly straight man. On these hunting expeditions of his he invariably takes a doctor with him; he is not a man who fears death in the least, but he has had bitter experience of being without medical assistance, so he takes a doctor. He pays well and is entirely to be trusted to do the right thing, as far as money goes. On that side the contract is all right. But there is another side—the character of Berselius. A man, to be the companion of Captain Berselius, needs to be big and strong in body and mind, or he would be crushed by the hand of Captain Berselius. Yes, he is a terrible man in a way—un homme affreux—a man of the tiger type—and he is going to the country of the big baboons, where there is the freedom of action that the soul of such a man desires——”

“In fact,” said Adams, “he is a villain, this Captain Berselius?”

“Oh, no,” said Thénard, “not in the least. Be quiet, Duthil, you do not know the man as I do. I have studied him; he is a Primitive——”

“An Apache,” said Duthil. “Come, dear master, confess that from the moment you heard that this Berselius was intent on another expedition, you determined to throw a foreigner into the breach. ‘No more French doctors, if possible,’ said you. Is not that so?”

Thénard laughed the laugh of cynical confession, buttoning his overcoat at the same time and preparing to go.

“Well, there may be something in what you say, Duthil. However, there the offer is—a sound one financially. Yes. I must say I dread that two thousand francs a month will prove a fatal attraction, and, if Mr. Adams does not go, some weaker man will. Well, I must be off.”

“One moment,” said Adams. “Will you give me this man’s address? I don’t say I will take the post, but I might at least go and see him.”

“Certainly,” replied Thénard, and taking one of his own cards from his pocket, he scribbled on the back of it—

CAPTAIN ARMAND BERSELIUS

14 AVENUE MALAKOFF

Then he went off to a consultation at the Hotel Bristol on a Balkan prince, whose malady, hitherto expressed by evil living, had suddenly taken an acute and terrible turn and Adams found himself alone with Dr. Duthil.

“That is Thénard all over,” said Duthil. “He is the high priest of modernism. He and all the rest of the neurologists have divided up devilment into provinces, and labelled each province with names all ending in enia or itis. Berselius is a Primitive, it seems; this Balkan prince is—I don’t know what they call him—sure to be something Latin, which does not interfere in the least with the fact that he ought to be boiled alive in an antiseptic solution. Have another cigarette.”

“Do you know anything special against Captain Berselius?” asked Adams, taking the cigarette.

“I have never even seen the man,” replied Duthil, “but from what I have heard, he is a regular buccaneer of the old type, who values human life not one hair. Bauchardy, that last doctor he took with him, was a friend of mine. Perhaps that is why I feel vicious about the man, for he killed Bauchardy as sure as I didn’t.”

“Killed him?”

“Yes; with hardship and overwork.”

“Overwork?”

“Mon Dieu, yes. Dragged him through swamps after his infernal monkeys and tigers, and Bauchardy died in the hospital at Marseilles of spinal meningitis, brought on by the hardships of the expedition—died as mad as Berselius himself.”

“As mad as Berselius?”

“Yes; this infernal Berselius seemed to have infected him with his own hunting fever, and Bauchardy—mon Dieu, you should have seen him during his illness, shooting imaginary elephants, and calling for Berselius.”

“What I want to get at is this,” said Adams. “Was Bauchardy driven into these swamps you speak of, and made to hunt against his will—treated cruelly, in fact—or did Berselius take his own share of the hardships?”

“His own share! Why, from what I can understand, he did all the hunting. A man of iron with the ferocity of a tiger—a very devil, who made others follow him as poor Bauchardy did, to his death——”

“Well,” said Adams, “this man interests me somehow, and I intend to have a look at him.”

“The pay is good,” said Duthil, “but I have warned you fully, if Thénard hasn’t. Good evening.”

The Rue Dijon, where Adams lived, was a good way from the Beaujon. He made his way there on foot, studying the proposition as he went.

The sporting nature of the proposal coming from the sedate Thénard rather tickled him.

“He wants to pit me against this Berselius,” said Adams to himself, “same as if we were dogs. That’s the long and short of it. Yes, I can understand his meaning in part; he’s afraid if Berselius engages some week-kneed individual, he’ll give the weak-kneed individual more than he can take. He wants to stick a six-foot Yankee in the breach, instead of a five-foot froggie, all absinthe and cigarette ends. Well, he was frank, at all events. Hum, I don’t like the proposition—and yet there’s something—there’s something—there’s something about it I do like. Then there’s the two thousand francs a month, and not a penny out of pocket, and there’s the Congo, and the guggly-wuggly alligators, and the great big hairy apes, and the feel of a gun in one’s hand again. Oh, my!”

“All the same, it’s funny,” he went on, as he drew near the Boulevard St. Michel. “When Thénard spoke of Berselius there was something more than absence of friendship in his tone. Can old man Thénard have a down on this Berselius and does he in his heart of hearts imagine that by allotting P. Quincy Adams to the post of physician extraordinary to the expedition, he will get even with the Captain? My friend, remember that hymn the English Salvationists were yelling last Sunday outside the American Presbyterian Church in the Rue de Berry—‘Christian, walk carefully, danger is near.’ Not a bad motto for Paris, and I will take it.”

He walked into the Café d’Italie, which, as everyone knows, is next to Mouton’s, the pork shop, on the left-hand side of the Boul’ Miche, as you go from the Seine; called for a boc, and then plunged into a game of dominoes with an art student in a magenta necktie, whom he had never met before, and whom, after the game, he would, a million to one, never meet again.

That night, when he had blown out his candle, he reviewed Thénard’s proposition in the dark. The more he looked at it the more attraction it had for him, and—“Whatever comes of it,” said he to himself, “I will go and see this Captain Berselius to-morrow. The animal seems worth the trouble of inspection.”

CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN BERSELIUS

Next morning was chill and a white Seine mist wrapped Paris in its folds. It clung to the trees of the Avenue Champs Elysées, and it half veiled the Avenue Malakoff as Adams’s fiacre turned into that thoroughfare and drew up at No. 14, a house with a carriage drive, a porter’s lodge, and wrought-iron gates.

The American paid off his cab, rang at the porter’s lodge, was instantly admitted, and found himself in an enormous courtyard domed in with glass. He noted the orange and aloe trees growing in tubs of porcelain, as the porter led him to the big double glass doors giving entrance to the house.

“He’s got the money,” thought Adams, as the glass swing-door was opened by a flunkey as magnificent as a Lord Mayor’s footman, who took the visitor’s card and the card of M. Thénard and presented them to a functionary with a large pale face, who was seated at a table close to the door.

This personage, who was as soberly dressed as an archbishop, and had altogether a pontifical air, raised himself to his feet and approached the visitor.

“Has monsieur an appointment——”

“No,” said Adams. “I have come to see your master on business. You can take him my card—yes, that one—Dr. Adams, introduced by Dr. Thénard.”

The functionary seemed perplexed; the early hour, the size of the visitor, his decided manner, all taken together, were out of routine. Only for a moment he hesitated, then leading the way across the warm and flower-scented hall, he opened a door and said, “Will monsieur take a seat?” Adams entered a big room, half library, half museum; the door closed behind him, and he found himself alone.

The four walls of the room showed a few books, but were mostly covered with arms and trophies of the chase. Japanese swords in solid ivory scabbards, swords of the old Samurai so keen that a touch of the edge would divide a suspended hair. Malay krisses, double-handed Chinese execution swords; old pepper-pot revolvers, such as may still be found on the African coast; knob-kerries, assegais, steel-spiked balls swinging from whips of raw hide; weapons wild and savage and primitive as those with which Attila drove before him the hordes of the Huns, and modern weapons of to-day and yesterday; the big elephant gun which has been supplanted by the express rifle; the deadly magazine rifle, the latest products of Schaunard of the Rue de la Paix and Westley Richards of London.

Adams forgot time as he stood examining these things; then he turned his attention to the trophies, mounted by Borchard of Berlin, that prince of taxidermists. Here stood a great ape, six feet and over—monstrum horrendum—head flung back, mouth open, shouting aloud to the imagination of the gazer in the language that was spoken ere the earliest man lifted his face to the chill mystery of the stars. In the right fist was clutched the branch of a M’bina tree, ready lifted to dash your brains out—the whole thing a miracle of the taxidermist’s art. Here crawled an alligator on a slab of granitic rock; an alligator—that is to say, the despair of the taxidermist—for you can make nothing out of an alligator; alive and not in motion he looks stuffed, stuffed, he looks just the same. Hartbeest, reedbuck, the maned and huge-eared roan antelope, gazelle, and bush-buck, all were here, skull or mask, dominated by the vast head of the wildebeest, with ponderous sickle-curved horns.

Adams had half completed the tour of the walls when the door of the library opened and Captain Berselius came in. Tall, black-bearded and ferocious looking—that was the description of man Adams was prepared to meet. But Captain Berselius was a little man in a frock-coat, rather worn, and slippers. He had evidently been in négligé and, to meet the visitor, slipped into the frock-coat, or possibly he was careless, taken up with abstractions, dreams, business affairs, plans. He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and he had a perpetual smile.

It is to be understood by this that Captain Berselius’s smile was, so to speak, hung on a hair-trigger; there was always a trace of it on his face round the lips, and in conversation it became accentuated.

At first sight, during your first moments of meeting with Captain Berselius, you would have said, “What a happy-faced and jolly little man!”

Adams, completely taken aback by the apparition before him, bowed.

“I have the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Adams, introduced by Dr. Thénard?” said Captain Berselius, motioning the visitor to a chair. “Pray take a seat, take a seat—yes——” He took a seat opposite the American, crossed his legs in a comfortable manner, caressed his chin, and whilst chatting on general subjects stared full at the newcomer, as though Adams had been a statue, examining him, without the least insolence, but in that thorough manner with which a purchaser examines the horse he is about to buy or the physician of an insurance company a proposer.

It was now that Adams felt he had to deal with no common man in Captain Berselius.

Never before had he conversed with a person so calmly authoritative, so perfectly at ease, and so commanding. This little commonplace-looking, negligently dressed man, talking easily in his armchair, made the spacious Adams feel small and of little account in the world. Captain Berselius filled all the space. He was the person in that room; Adams, though he had personality enough, was nowhere. And now he noticed that the perpetual smile of the Captain had no relation to mirth or kindliness, it was not worn as a mask, for Captain Berselius had no need for masks; it was a mysterious and unaccountable thing that was there.

“You know M. Thénard intimately?” said Captain Berselius, turning suddenly from some remarks he was making on the United States.

“Oh, no,” said Adams. “I have attended his clinics; beyond that——”

“Just so,” said the other. “Are you a good shot?”

“Fair, with the rifle.”

“You have had to do with big game?”

“I have shot bear.”

“These are some of my trophies,” said the Captain, rising to his feet. He took his stand before the great ape and contemplated it for a moment. “I shot him near M’Bassa on the West Coast two years ago. The natives at the village where we were camping said there was a big monkey in a tree near by. They seemed very much frightened, but they led me to the tree. He knew what a gun was; he knew what a man was, too. He knew that his hour of death had arrived, and he came roaring out of the tree to meet me. But when he was on the ground, with the muzzle of my Mannlicher two yards from his head, all his rage vanished. He saw death, and to shut out the sight he put his big hands before his face——”

“And you?”

“I shot him through the heart. This room does not represent all my work. The billiard room and the hall contain many of my trophies; they are interesting to me, for each has a history. That tiger skin there in front of the fireplace once covered a thing very much alive. He was a full-sized brute, and I met him in a rice field near Benares. I had not even time to raise my gun when he charged. Then I was on my back and he was on top of me. He had overshot the mark a bit—I was not even scratched. I lay looking up at his whiskers; they seemed thick as quills, and I counted them. I was dead to all intents and purposes, so I felt no fear. That was the lesson this gentleman taught me; it is as natural to be dead as to be alive. I have never been afraid of death since. Well, something must have distracted his attention and frightened him, for he lifted himself, passed over me like a cloud, and was gone. Well, so much for the tiger. And now for business. Are you prepared to act as medical attendant to my new expedition?”

“Well,” said Adams, “I would like a little time to consider——”

“Certainly,” said Captain Berselius, taking out his watch. “I will give you five minutes, as a matter of form. Thénard, in a note to me this morning, informs me he has given you all details as to salary.”

“Yes, he gave me the details. As you give me so short a time to make my decision about you, I suppose you have already made your decision about me?”

“Absolutely,” said Berselius. “Two minutes have passed. Why waste the other three? For you have already made up your mind to come.”

Adams sat down in a chair for a moment, and in that moment he did a great deal of thinking.

He had never met a man before at all like Berselius. He had never before come across a man with such a tremendous personality. Berselius fascinated yet repelled him. That there was evil in this man he felt, but he felt also that there was good. Much evil and much good. And beyond this he divined an animal ferocity latent—the ferocity of a tiger—a cold and pitiless and utterly divorced from reason ferociousness, the passion of a primitive man, who had never known law except the law of the axe wielded by the strongest. And yet there was something in the man that he liked. He knew by Berselius’s manner that if he did not take the offer now, he would lose it. He reckoned with lightning swiftness that the expedition would bring him in solid cash enough to start in a small way in the States. He was as poor as Job, as hungry for adventure as a schoolboy, and he only had a moment to decide in.

“How many men are making up your party?” suddenly asked Adams.

“You and I alone,” replied Berselius, putting his watch in his pocket to indicate that the time was almost expired.

“I will come,” said Adams, and it seemed to him that he said the words against his will.

Captain Berselius went to a writing table, took a sheet of paper and wrote carefully and with consideration for the space of some five minutes. Then he handed the paper to Adams. “These are the things you want,” said he. “I am an old campaigner in the wilds, so you will excuse me for specifying them. Go for your outfit where you will, but for your guns to Schaunard, for he is the best. Order all accounts to be sent in to my secretary, M. Pinchon. He will settle them. Your salary you can take how you will. If it is useful to you, I can give you a cheque now on the Crédit Lyonnais, if you will state the amount.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Adams. “I have quite sufficient money for my needs, and, if it is the same to you, I would rather pay for my outfit myself.”

“As you please,” said Captain Berselius, quite indifferently. “But Schaunard’s account and the account for drugs and instruments you will please send to M. Pinchon; they are part of the expedition. And now,” looking at his watch, “will you do me the pleasure of staying to déjeuner?”

Adams bowed.

“I will notify you to-night at your address the exact date we start,” said Captain Berselius as he led the way from the room. “It will be within a fortnight. My yacht is lying at Marseilles, and will take us to Matadi, which will be our base. She will be faster than the mail-boats and very much more comfortable.”

They crossed the hall, Captain Berselius opened a door, motioned his companion to enter, and Adams found himself in a room, half morning room, half boudoir. A bright log fire was burning, and on either side of the fireplace two women—a girl of about eighteen and a woman of thirty-five or so—were seated.

The elder woman, Madame Berselius, a Parisienne, pale, stout, yet well-proportioned, with almond-shaped eyes; full lips exquisitely cut in the form of the true cupid’s bow; and with a face vigorous enough, but veiled by an expression at once mulish, blindish, and indolent—was a type.

The type of the poodle woman, the parasite. With the insolent expression of a Japanese lady of rank, an insult herself to the human race, you will see her everywhere in the highest social ranks of society. At the Zoölogical Gardens of Madrid on a Sunday, when the grandees of Spain take their pleasure amidst the animals at Longchamps, in Rotten Row, Washington Square, Unter den Linden, wherever money is, growing like an evil fungus, she flourishes.

Opposite Madame Berselius sat her daughter, Maxine.

Adams, after his first glance at the two women, saw only Maxine.

Maxine had golden-brown hair, worn after the fashion of Cléo de Mérode’s, gray eyes, and a wide mouth, with pomegranate-red lips. Goethe’s dictum that the highest beauty is unobtainable without something of disproportion was exemplified in the case of Maxine Berselius. “Her mouth is too wide,” said the women, who, knowing nothing of the philosophy of art, hit upon the defect that was Maxine’s main charm.

Berselius introduced Adams to his wife and daughter, and scarcely had he done so than a servant, in the blue-and-gold livery of the house, flung open the door and announced that déjeuner was served.

Adams scarcely noticed the room into which they passed; a room whose scheme of colour was that watery green which we associate with the scenery of early spring, the call of the cuckoo, and the river echoes where the weir foams and the willow droops.

The tapestry hanging upon the walls did not distract from this scheme. Taken from some château of Provence, and old almost as the story of Nicolete, it showed ladies listening to shepherds who played on flutes, capering lambs, daffodils blowing to the winds of early spring under a sky gray and broken by rifts of blue.

Adams scarcely noticed the room, or the tapestry, or the food placed before him; he was entirely absorbed by two things, Maxine and Captain Berselius.

Berselius’s presence at the table evidently cast silence and a cloak of restraint upon the women. You could see that the servants who served him dreaded him to the very tips of their fingers, and, though he was chatting easily and in an almost paternal manner, his wife and daughter had almost the air of children, nervous, and on their very best behaviour. This was noticeable, especially, in Madame Berselius. The beautiful, indolent, arrogant face became a very humble face indeed when she turned it on the man who was evidently, literally, her lord and master. Maxine, though oppressed by the presence, wore a different air; she seemed abstracted and utterly unconscious of what a beautiful picture she made against the old-world tapestry of spring.

Her eyes sometimes met the American’s. They scarcely spoke to each other once during the meal, yet their eyes met almost as frequently as though they had been conversing. As a matter of fact, Adams was a new type of man to her, and on that account interesting; very different was this son of Anak, with the restful, forceful face, to the curled and scented dandies of the Chaussée d’Antin, the “captains with the little moustaches,” the frequenters of the foyer de Ballet, the cigarette-dried mummies of the Grand Club. It was like the view of a mountain to a person who had only known hills.

Maxine, in her turn, was a new type of woman to Adams. This perfect flower from the Parisian hot-house was the rarest and most beautiful thing he had met in the way of womanhood. She seemed to him a rose only just unfolded, unconscious of its own freshness and beauty as of the dew upon its petals, and saying to the world, by the voice of its own loveliness, “Behold me!”

“Well,” said Captain Berselius, as he took leave of his guest in the smoking room, “I will let you know to-night the day and hour of our departure. All my business in Paris will be settled this afternoon. You had better come and see me the day before we start, so that we can make our last arrangements. Au revoir.”

CHAPTER IV

SCHAUNARD

The young man turned down the Avenue Malakoff, after he had left Berselius’s house, in the direction of the Avenue des Champs Elysées.

In twenty-four hours a complete change had taken place in his life. His line of travel had taken a new and most unexpected course; it was as though a train on the North German had, suddenly, by some mysterious arrangement of points and tracks, found itself on the Paris-Lyons and Mediterranean Railway.

Yesterday afternoon the prospect before him, though vague enough, was American. A practice in some big central American town. It would be a hard fight, for money was scanty, and in medicine, especially in the States, advertisement counts for very much.

All that was changed now, and the hard, definite prospect that had elbowed itself out of vagueness stood before him: Africa, its palms and poisonous forests, the Congo—Berselius.

Something else besides these things also stood before him very definitely and almost casting them into shade. Maxine.

Up to this, a woman had never stood before him as a possible part of his future, if we except Mary Eliza Summers, the eleven-year-old daughter of old Abe Summers, who kept the store in Dodgeville, Vermont, years ago—that is to say, when Paul Quincy Adams was twelve, an orchard-robbing hooligan, whose chief worry in life was that, though he could thrash his eldest brother left-handed, he was condemned by the law of entail to wear his old pants.

When a man falls in love with a woman—really in love—though the attainment of his desire be all but impossible, he has reached the goal of life; no tide can take him higher toward the Absolute. He has reached life’s zenith, and never will he rise higher, even though he live to wield a sceptre or rule armies.

Adams reached the Place de la Concorde on foot, walking and taking his way mechanically, and utterly unconscious of the passers-by.

He was studying in minute detail Maxine Berselius, the pose of her head outlined against the tapestry, the curves of her lips that could speak so well without speaking, the little shell-like ears, the brown-gold coils of her hair, her hands, her dress.

He was standing undetermined as to his route, and whether he would cross over to the Rue St. Honoré or turn toward the Seine, when someone gripped his arm from behind, and, turning, he found himself face to face with Dr. Stenhouse, an English physician who had set up in Paris, practising in the Boulevard Haussmann and flourishing exceedingly.

“Well, this is luck,” said Stenhouse. “I lost your address, or I would have written, asking you to come and see us. I remembered it was over on the other side of the water somewhere, but where exactly I could not remember. What are you doing with yourself?”

“Nothing, just at present.”

“Well, see here. I’m going to the Rue du Mont Thabor to see a patient; walk along with me—it’s quite close, just behind the Rue St. Honoré.”

They crossed the Place de la Concorde.

“You have finished your post-graduate work, I expect,” said Stenhouse. “Are you going to practise in the States?”

“Ultimately, I may,” replied Adams. “I have always intended doing so; but I have to feel my way very cautiously, for the money market is not in a particularly flourishing state with me.”

“Good heavens!” said Stenhouse, “when is it with a medical man, especially when he is just starting? I’ve been through that. See here, why don’t you start in Paris?”

“Paris?”

“Yes, this is the place to make money. You say you are thinking of starting in some American city; well, let me tell you, there are very few American cities so full of rich Americans as Paris.”

“Well,” said Adams, “the idea is not a bad one, but just for the present I am fixed. I am going on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo.”

“As doctor?”

“Yes, and the salary is not bad—two thousand francs a month and everything found, to say nothing of the fun.”

“And the malaria?”

“Oh, one has to run risks.”

“Whom are you going with?”

“A man called Berselius.”

“Not Captain Berselius?” asked Stenhouse, stopping dead.

“Yes, Captain Berselius, of No. 14 Avenue Malakoff. I have just returned from having déjeuner with him.”

Stenhouse whistled. They were in the Rue du Mont Thabor by this, in front of a small café.

“Well,” said Adams, “what’s wrong?”

“Everything,” replied the other. “This is the house where my patient lives. Wait for me, for a moment, like a good fellow. I shan’t detain you long, and then we can finish our talk, for I have something to tell you.”

He darted into the café and Adams waited, watching the passers-by and somewhat perturbed in mind. Stenhouse’s manner impressed him uncomfortably, for, if Captain Berselius had been the devil, the Englishman could not have put more disfavour into his tone. And he (Adams) had made a compact with Captain Berselius.

The Rue du Mont Thabor is a somewhat gloomy little street, and it fitted Adams’s mood as he waited, watching the passers-by and the small affairs of the little shops.

At the end of five minutes Stenhouse returned.

“Well?” said Adams.

“I have had no luncheon yet,” replied Stenhouse. “I have been so rushed. Come with me to a little place I know in the Rue St. Honoré, where I can get a cup of tea and a bun. We will talk then.”

“Now,” said Stenhouse, when he was seated at a little marble-topped table with the cup of tea and the bun before him. “You say you have engaged yourself to go to the Congo with Captain Berselius.”

“Yes. What do you know about him?”

“That’s just the difficulty. I can only say this, and it’s between ourselves, the man’s name is a byword for a brute and a devil.”

“That’s cheerful,” said Adams.

“Mind you,” said Stenhouse, “he is in the very best society. I have met him at a reception at the Elysée. He goes everywhere. He belongs to the best clubs; he’s a persona grata at more courts than one, and an intimate friend of King Leopold of Belgium. His immense wealth, or part of it, comes from the rubber industry—motor tires and so forth. And he’s mad after big game. That’s his pleasure—killing. He’s a killer. That is the best description of the man. The lust of blood is in him, and the astounding thing, to my mind, is that he is not a murderer. He has killed two men in duels, and they say that it is a sight to see him fighting. Mind you, when I say ‘murderer,’ I do not mean to imply that he is a man who would murder for money. Give the devil his due. I mean that he is quite beyond reason when aroused, and if you were to hit Captain Berselius in the face he would kill you as certain as I’ll get indigestion from that bun I have just swallowed. The last doctor he took with him to Africa died at Marseilles from the hardships he went through—not at the hands of Berselius, for that would have aroused inquiry, but simply from the hardships of the expedition; but he gave frightful accounts to the hospital authorities of the way this Berselius had treated the natives. He drove that expedition right away from Libreville, in the French Congo, to God knows where. He had it under martial law the whole time, clubbing and thrashing the niggers at the least offence, and shooting with his own hand two of them who tried to desert.”

“You must remember,” said Adams, taking up the cudgels for Berselius and almost surprised himself at so doing, “that an expedition like that, if it is not held together by a firm hand, goes to pieces, and the result is disaster for everyone. And you know what niggers are.”

“There you are,” laughed Stenhouse. “The man has obsessed you already, and you’ll come back, if you go, like Bauchardy, the man who died in the hospital at Marseilles, cursing Berselius, yet so magnetized by the power of the chap that you would be ready to follow him again if he said ‘Come,’ and you had the legs to stand on. That is how Bauchardy was.”

“The man, undoubtedly, has a great individuality,” said Adams. “Passing him in the street one might take him for a very ordinary person. Meeting him for the first time, he looks all good nature; that smile——”

“Always,” said Stenhouse. “Beware of a man with a perpetual smile on his face.”

“Yes, I know that, but this smile of Berselius’s is not worn as a cloak. It seems quite natural to the man, yet somehow bad, as if it came from a profound and natural cynicism directed against all things—including all things good.”

“You have put it,” said Stenhouse, “in four words.”

“But, in spite of everything,” said Adams, “I believe the man to have great good qualities: some instinct tells me so.”

“My dear sir,” said Stenhouse, “did you ever meet a bad man worth twopence at his trade who had not good qualities? The bad man who is half good—so to speak—is a much more dangerous villain than the barrier bully without heart or soul. When hell makes a super-excellent devil, the devil puts goodness in just as a baker puts soda in his bread to make it rise. Look at Verlaine.”

“Well,” said Adams, “I have promised Berselius, and I will have to go. Besides, there are other considerations.”

He was thinking of Maxine, and a smile lit up his face.

“You seem happy enough about it,” said Stenhouse, rising to go. “Well, ‘he who will to Cupar maun to Cupar.’ When do you start?”

“I don’t know yet, but I shall hear to-night.”

They passed out into the Rue St. Honoré, where they parted.

“Good luck,” said Stenhouse, getting into a fiacre.

“Good-bye,” replied Adams, waving his hand.

Being in that quarter of the town, and having nothing especial to do, he determined to go to Schaunard’s in the Rue de la Paix, and see about his guns.

Schaunard personally superintends his own shop, which is the first gun-shop on the Continent of Europe. Emperors visit him in person and he receives them as an equal, though far superior to them in the science of sport. An old man now, with a long white beard, he remembers the fowling-pieces and rifles which he supplied to the Emperor Maximilian before that unfortunate gentleman started on his fatal expedition in search of a throne. He is a mathematician as well as a maker of guns; his telescopic sights and wind gauges are second to none in the world, and his shop front in the Rue de la Paix exposes no wares—it has just a wire blind, on which are blazoned the arms of Russia, England, and Spain.

But, inside, the place is a joy to a rightly constituted man. Behind glass cases the long processions of guns and rifles, smooth, sleek, nut-brown and deadly, are a sight for the eyes of a sportsman.

The duelling pistol is still a factor in Continental life, and the cases containing them at Schaunard’s are worth lingering over, for the modern duelling pistol is a thing of beauty, very different from the murderous hair-trigger machines of Count Considine—though just as deadly.

To Schaunard, pottering amongst his wares, appeared Adams.

The swing-door closed, shutting out the sound of the Rue de la Paix, and the old gun-merchant came forward through the silence of his shop to meet his visitor.

Adams explained his business. He had come to buy some rifles for a big-game expedition. Captain Berselius had recommended him.

“Ah! Captain Berselius?” said Schaunard, and an interested look came into his face. “True, he is a customer of mine. As a matter of fact, his guns for his new expedition are already boxed and directed for Marseilles. Ah, yes—you require a complete outfit, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Adams. “I am going with him.”

“Going with Captain Berselius as a friend?”

“No, as a doctor.”

“True, he generally takes a doctor with him,” said Schaunard, running his fingers through his beard. “Have you had much experience amidst big game, and can you make out your own list of requirements, or shall I help you with my advice?”

“I should be very glad of your advice. No, I have not had much experience in big-game shooting. I have shot bears, that’s all——”

“Armand!” cried Schaunard, and a pale-faced young man came forward from the back part of the shop.

“Open me this case.”

Armand opened a case, and the deft hand of the old man took down a double-barrelled cordite rifle, light-looking and of exquisite workmanship.

“These are the guns we shoot elephants with nowadays,” said Schaunard, handling the weapon lovingly. “A child could carry it, and there is nothing living it will not kill.” He laughed softly to himself, and then directed Armand to bring forward an elephant gun of the old pattern. In an instant the young man returned, staggering under the weight of the immense rifle, shod with a heel of india-rubber an inch thick.

Adams laughed, took the thing up with one hand, and raised it to his shoulder as though it had been a featherweight.

“Ah!” said he, “here’s a gun worth shooting with.”

Schaunard looked on with admiration at the giant handling the gigantic gun.

“Oh, for you,” said he, “it’s all very well. Ma foi, but you suit one another, you both are of another day.”

“God bless you,” said Adams, “you can pick me up by the bushel in the States. I’m small. Say, how much is this thing?”

“That!” cried Schaunard. “Why, what on earth could you want with such an obsolete weapon as that?”

“Tell me—does this thing hit harder, gun for gun—not weight for weight, mind you—but gun for gun—than that double-barrel you are holding in your hands?”

“Oh, yes,” said Schaunard, “it hits harder, just as a cannon would hit harder, but——”

“I’ll have her,” said Adams. “I’ve taken a fancy to her. See here, Captain Berselius is paying for my guns; they are his, part of the expedition—I want this as my own, and I’ll pay you for her out of my own pocket. How much is she?”

Schaunard, whose fifty years of trading had explained to him the fact that when an American takes a whim into his head it is best for all parties to let him have his own way, ran his fingers through his beard.

“The thing has no price,” said he. “It is a curiosity. But if you must have it—well, I will let you have it for two hundred francs.”

“Done,” said Adams. “Have you any cartridges?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Schaunard. “Heaps. That is to say, I have the old cartridges, and I can have a couple of hundred of them emptied and re-filled and percussioned. Ah, well, monsieur, you must have your own way. Armand, take the gun; have it attended to and packed. And now that monsieur has his play-toy,” finished the old man, with one of his silent little laughs, “let us come to business.”

They did, and nearly an hour was spent whilst the American chose a double hammerless-ejector cordite rifle and a .256 sporting Mannlicher, for Schaunard was a man who, when he took an interest in a customer, could be very interesting.

When business was concluded Schaunard gave his customer various tips as to the treatment of guns. “And now,” said he, opening the door as Adams was taking his departure, “I will give you one more piece of advice about this expedition. It is a piece of private advice, and I will trust you not to tell the Captain that I gave it to you.”

“Yes. What is the advice?”

“Don’t go.”

Adams laughed as he turned on his heel, and Schaunard laughed as he closed the door.

A passer-by might have imagined that the two men had just exchanged a good joke.

Before Adams had taken three steps, the door of the shop re-opened, and Schaunard’s voice called again.

“Monsieur.”

“Yes?” said Adams, turning.

“You need not pay me for the gun till you come back.”

“Right,” said Adams, laughing. “I will call in and pay you for it when I come back. Au revoir.”

“Adieu.”

CHAPTER V

MARSEILLES

On the day of departure Berselius was entertained at déjeuner by the Cerele Militaire. He brought Adams with him as a guest.

Nearly all the sporting members of the great club were present to speed the man who after Schillings was reckoned on the Continent the most adventurous big-game hunter in the world.

Despite what Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find a place in Adams’s mind.

Guest at a table surrounded by sixty of the wealthiest and most powerful officers of a military nation, Berselius did not forget his companion, but introduced him with painstaking care to the chief men present, included him in his speech of thanks, and made him feel that though he was taking Berselius’s pay, he was his friend and on a perfect social equality with him.

Adams felt this keenly. On qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants’ hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build the cities and bridge the rivers, and lay the iron roads, making rail-heads of the roar of the Atlantic and the thunder of the Pacific.

This gentleman treated Adams as a paid attendant and in such a manner that Adams one morning lifted him from his bed by the slack of his silk pajamas and all but drowned him in his own bath.

He could not but remember the incident as he sat watching Berselius so calm, so courtly, so absolutely destitute of mannerism, so incontestably the superior, in some magnetic way, of all the other men who were present.

Maxine and M. Pinchon, the secretary, were to accompany them to Marseilles.

A cold, white Paris fog covered the city that night as they drove to the station, and the fog detonators and horns followed them as they glided out slowly from beneath the great glass roof. Slowly at first, then more swiftly over rumbling bridges and clicking point, more swiftly still, breaking from the fog-banked Seine valley, through snarling tunnel and chattering cutting, faster now and freer, by long lines of poplar trees, mist-strewn, and moonlit ponds and fields, spectral white roads, little winking towns; and now, as if drawn by the magnetic south, swaying to the rock-a-bye of speed, aiming for the lights of Dijon far away south, to the tune of the wheels, “seventy-miles-an-hour—seventy-miles-an-hour.”

Civilization, whatever else she has done, has written one poem, the “Rapide.” True to herself, she makes it pay a dividend, and prostitutes it to the service of stockbrokers, society folk, and gamblers bound for Monaco—but what a poem it is that we snore through between a day in Paris and a day in Marseilles. A poem, swiftly moving, musical with speed, a song built up of songs, telling of Paris, its chill and winter fog, of the winter fields, the poplar trees and mist; vineyards of the Côte d’Or; Provence with the dawn upon it, Tarascon blowing its morning bugle to the sun; the Rhone, and the vineyards, and the olives, and the white, white roads; ending at last in that triumphant blast of music, light and colour, Marseilles.

La Joconde, Berselius’s yacht, was berthed at the Messagerie wharf, and after déjeuner at the Hotel Noailles, they took their way there on foot.

Adams had never seen the south before as Marseilles shows it. The vivid light and the black shadows, the variegated crowd of the Canabier Prolongue had for him an “Arabian Nights” fascination, but the wharves held a deeper fascination still.

Marseilles draws its most subtle charm from far away in the past. Beaked triremes have rubbed their girding cables against the wharves of the old Phocée; the sunshine of a thousand years has left some trace of its gold, a mirage in the air chilled by the mistral and perfumed by the ocean.

At Marseilles took place the meeting between Mary Magdalen and Laeta Acilia, so delightfully fabled by Anatole France. The Count of Monte Cristo landed here after he had discovered his treasure, and here Caderouse after the infamy at “La Reservée” watched old Dantès starving to death. Multitudes of ships, fabled and real, have passed from the harbour to countries curious and strange, but never one of them to a stranger country than that to which La Joconde was to bear Berselius and his companion.

Gay as Naples with colour, piercing the blue sky with a thousand spars, fluttering the flags of all nations to the wind, shot through with the sharp rattle of winch-chains, and perfumed with garlic, vanilla, fumes of coal tar, and the tang of the sea, the wharves of Marseilles lay before the travellers, a great counter eternally vibrating to the thunder of trade; bales of carpets from the Levant, tons of cheeses from Holland, wood from Norway, copra, rice, tobacco, corn, silks from China and Japan, cotton from Lancashire; all pouring in to the tune of the winch-pauls, the cry of the stevedores, and the bugles of Port Saint Jean, shrill beneath the blue sky and triumphant as the crowing of the Gallic cock.

Between the breaks in the shipping one could see the sea-gulls fishing and the harbour flashing, here spangled with coal tar, here whipped to deepest sapphire by the mistral; the junk shops, grog shops, parrot shops, rope-walks, ships’ stores and factories lining the quays, each lending a perfume, a voice, or a scrap of colour to the air vibrating with light, vibrating with sound, shot through with voices; hammer blows from the copper sheathers in the dry docks, the rolling of drums from Port St. Nicholas, the roaring of grain elevators, rattling of winch-chains, trumpeting of ship sirens, mewing of gulls, the bells of Notre Dame and the bells of St. Victor, all fused, orchestrated, into one triumphant symphony beneath the clear blue sky and the trade flags of the world.