the wharf to greet the steamer stood the District Commissioner, Commander Verhaeren; behind him six or seven half-naked, savage-looking blacks, each topped with a red fez and armed with an Albini rifle, stood gazing straight before them with wrinkled eyes at the approaching boat.
Verhaeren and Berselius were seemingly old friends; they shook hands and Berselius introduced Adams; then the three left the wharf and walked up to the District Commissioner’s house, a frame building surrounded by palm trees and some distance from the mud huts of the soldiers and porters.
The Yandjali of this story, not to be confounded with Yandjali notorious in Congo history for its massacre, is not in a rubber district, though on the fringe of one; it is a game district and produces cassava. The Congo State has parcelled out its territory. There are the rubber districts, the gum copal districts, the food districts, and the districts where ivory is obtained. In each of these districts the natives are made to work and bring in rubber, gum copal, food, or ivory, as a tax. The District Commissioner, or Chef de Poste, in each district draws up a schedule of what is required. Such and such a village must produce and hand over so many kilos of rubber, or copal, so much cassava, so many tusks, etc.
Verhaeren was a stout, pale-faced man, with a jet-black beard, a good-tempered looking man, with that strange, lazy, semi-Oriental look which the Belgian face takes when the owner of it is fixed to a post, with nothing to do but oversee trade, and when the post is on the confines of civilization.
Away up country, lost in the dim, green, heat-laden wilderness, you will find a different type of man; more alert and nervy, a man who never smiles, a preoccupied looking man who, ten years or five years ago, lost his berth in an office for misconduct, or his commission in the army. A déclassé. He is the man who really drives the Congo machine, the last wheel in the engine, but the most important; the man whose deeds are not to be written.
Verhaeren’s living room in the frame house was furnished with steamer deck chairs, a table and some shelves. Pinned to the wall and curling up at the corners was a page torn from La Gaudriole, the picture of a girl in tights; on one of the shelves lay a stack of old newspapers, on another a stack of official papers, reports from subordinates, invoices, and those eternal “official letters,” with which the Congo Government deluges its employees, and whose everlasting purport is “Get more ivory, get more rubber, get more copal.”
Verhaeren brought out some excellent cigars and a bottle of Vanderhum, and the three men smoked and talked. He had acted as Berselius’s agent for the expedition, and had collected all the gun-bearers and porters necessary, and a guide. It was Berselius’s intention to strike a hundred miles west up river almost parallel to the Congo, and then south into the heart of the elephant country. They talked of the expedition, but Verhaeren showed little knowledge of the work and no enthusiasm. The Belgians of the Congo have no feeling for sport. They never hunt the game at their doors, except for food.
When they had discussed matters, Verhaeren led the way out for Berselius to inspect his arrangements.
The porters were called up. There were forty of them, and Adams thought that he had never before seen such a collection of depressed looking individuals; they were muscular enough, but there was something in their faces, their movements and their attitude, that told a tale of spirits broken to servitude by terror.
The four gun-bearers and the headman were very different. The headman was a Zappo Zap, a ferocious looking nigger, fez-tipped, who could speak twenty words of French, and who was nicknamed Félix. The gun-bearers were recruited from the “soldiers” of the state by special leave from headquarters.
Adams looked with astonishment at the immense amount of luggage they were bringing. “Chop boxes,” such as are used on the east coast, contained stores; two big tents, a couple of “Roorkee” chairs, folding-beds and tables, cork mattresses, cooking utensils, made up the pile, to say nothing of the guns which had just been taken from their cases.
“What did you bring this thing for?” asked Berselius, pointing to Adams’s elephant gun, which the Zappo Zap headman was just stripping from its covering.
“To shoot with,” said Adams, laughing.
Berselius looked at the big man handling the big gun, and gave a short laugh.
“Well, bring it,” said he; “but I don’t envy your gun-bearers.”
But Félix, the headman, did not seem of the same opinion. The enormous rifle evidently appealed to his ferocious heart. It was a god-gun this, and no mistake, and its lustre evidently spread to Adams, the owner of it.
Félix was a very big man, almost as big as Adams: a member of the great cannibal fighting tribe of Zappo Zaps, he had followed Verhaeren, who had once held a post in the Bena Pianga country, to Yandjali; he had a sort of attachment for Verhaeren, which showed that he possessed some sort of heart. All the Zappo Zaps have been enrolled by the Congo Government as “soldiers”; they have a bad name and cause a lot of heart-searching to the Brussels administration, for when they are used in punitive expeditions to burn villages of recalcitrant rubber-getters, they, to use a local expression, “will eat when they have killed.” When they are used en masse, the old cannibal instinct breaks out; when the killing is over they go for the killed, furious as dogs over bones. God help the man who would come between them and their food!
Of these men Félix was a fine specimen. A nature man, ever ready to slay, and cruel as Death. A man from the beginning of the world.
If Félix had possessed a wife, he and she might have stood for the man and woman mentioned by Thénard in his lecture.
The basic man and woman in whose dim brains Determination had begun to work, sketching the vague line on either side of which lies the Right and Left of moral action.
A true savage, never to be really civilized. For it is the fate of the savage that he will never become one of us. Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God shapes and devil shapes.
He will never become one of us. Extraordinary paradox—he never can become a Leopold or a Félix Fuchs!
Berselius disbanded the porters with a wave of the hand, and he and his companions began a round of the station. Verhaeren, with a cigar in his mouth, led the way.
He opened the door of a go-down, and Adams in the dim light, saw bale upon bale of stuff; gum copal it proved to be, for Yandjali tapped a huge district where this stuff is found, and which lies forty miles to the south. There was also cassava in large quantities, and the place had a heady smell, as if fermentation were going on amidst the bales.
Verhaeren shut the door and led on till, rounding a corner, a puff of hot air brought a stench which caused Adams to choke and spit.
Verhaeren laughed.
It was the Hostage House that sent its poisonous breath to meet them.
A native corporal and two soldiers stood at the palisade which circled the Hostage House. The women and children had just been driven back from the fields where they had been digging and weeding, and they had been served with their wretched dinners. They were eating these scraps of food like animals, some in the sun amidst the tufts of grass and mounds of ordure in the little yard, some in the shadow of the house.
There were old, old women like shrivelled
