The Sky And The Forest (28 page)

He was not a very robust figure, and his face narrowed down from above to a pointed chin under the straggling fair beard. There were the remains of a weak good nature in his features -- the good nature which had led him, more sinned against than sinning, into one of the historic scandals of the Victorian Age, resulting in his resignation of his commission in the Green Jackets. His family had turned against him, his allowance had abruptly terminated, and he had been faced, unexpectedly and for the first time in his life, with the necessity of earning money enough to keep himself from actual starvation. So he had accepted a commission in the Army of the Independent State of the Congo. King Leopold of the Belgians was his master, and in the service of King Leopold men of weak good nature either died or changed their natures, and Talbot still lived.

The subtlest and most avaricious of all the public figures of Europe, Leopold, having contrived to obtain a mandate from the civilized world giving him Central Africa as his personal possession, was now proceeding to reap dividends from it. It had been a risky speculation -- as any speculation must be which brings in profits of thousands of millions to a single individual -- and for a brief while even Leopold, with his vast personal fortune and extensive credit, had been near to bankruptcy. The war with the Arabs, the building up of an army and an administration, had cost enormous sums. But now was the time of harvest. King Leopold's servants were flooding into Central Africa, Europeans with a hard taskmaster urging them on. They armed the native soldiers with European weapons, and gave them some semblance of European discipline, so that opposition to their advance was hopeless. Each new district conquered provided from the accumulation of ages an immediate supply of ivory and gold, and as soon as the looting was completed the inhabitants could be put to labour. Every district could be assessed to produce a quota of palm oil or rubber or ivory for sale for Leopold's benefit, and if that quota was not forthcoming Leopold was peevish, and wrote peevishly to his representatives, who in turn passed on his censures to their subordinates.

There could be no excuse for not producing the quota, for the men in local control had in their hands an instrument admirably adapted for the production of palm oil and rubber and ivory -- an instrument whose usefulness they had learned from the Arabs: the hippopotamus-hide whip, the kurbash; in Belgian-French slang, the chicotte. And to facilitate the application of the chicotte, and to open up fresh fields for its employment, there was the Army. That portion of the Army commanded by Captain Victor Augustus Talbot was engaged at this moment in a campaign to open up a fresh field. Someone in the Brussels office -- perhaps King Leopold himself -- had noticed on the map a large area not yet conquered, and had sent the peremptory orders which had put the Army on the march, with Loa's town as the objective.

Sergeant Fleuron, the product of a Brussels slum, came up to report to his captain.

“Well?” asked Talbot.

“Perhaps they believe what they have been telling me,” said Fleuron, “I do not.”

“You interrogated each prisoner separately?”

“I did,” said the sergeant.

In his hand there idly swung the hippopotamus-hide whip which he had employed in his search for truth.

“What did they say?”

“Mostly lies, as usual. Some of the lies we had heard before.”

“For example?”

Fleuron shrugged his shoulders before recounting the result of his investigations.

“There is a great king over there,” he said. “Some say his name is Loa and some say it is Lanu. Maybe ‘Loa' is their word for ‘king.' Or maybe Lanu is the king and Loa is the name of his god. Loa lives in a great town near the great river. In the middle of the town he has a sacred grove. Too sacred to speak about without persuasion.”

“Crucifixion trees, and skulls nailed to branches,” said Talbot, out of his experience of sacred African groves.

“And ivory perhaps. Perhaps even gold,” said Fleuron.

“Let's hope so,” agreed Talbot. “What else did they say?”

“Loa has a mighty army.”

“How many men?”

Fleuron shrugged again.

“These men never know. Fifty or five hundred -- it is all the same to them. Sometimes Lanu leads this army, and sometimes -- “

“Sometimes -- ?”

Fleuron went on with what he was saying with considerable reluctance.

“Sometimes they are led by two great warriors, brothers born at the same time.”

“Nonsense!”

“It sounds like nonsense, Captain, but all these fellows say the same thing even after tasting the chicotte”

“But they cannot mean twins.”

“It's twins that they mean. Captain, without a doubt. They use the very word for twins. It's strange to hear them. It's a surprise when they come out with it without any shame. As much a surprise as if a nun were to use a dirty word.”

“And who are these twins?” demanded Talbot.

“They are sons of Loa, or sons of Lanu -- who can know where the truth lies when they say such things? But they are so alike that no one can tell one from the other.”

“I never know how these niggers tell each other apart anyway,” said Talbot. “They all look alike to me.”

Sergeant Fleuron had other views. He had the keen wits of the intelligent slum dweller, and in three years he had learned much about Central Africa, including so many languages that he was able to interpret almost any local dialect. Africans to him were distinct individuals, which made the application of the chtcotte a much more interesting exercise. But he had far too much sense to contradict his captain, so he went on with his report.

“They seem to worship this Loa in a quite devoted manner,” he said. “The tales they tell! It seems that a long time ago -- you can never be sure which century they are referring to -- Loa went away. To heaven, maybe. When he came back he brought these twins with him, and he started working miracles. Apparently it was then that he conquered the country roundabout. He made men travel on the water -- from the way they talk, one would think he had invented canoes.”

“We've heard about his canoes before,” said Talbot.

“Yes, Captain. He seems to have a navy, a genuine navy. He rules all this length of river, from these cataracts here to the falls above. A hundred miles of it, perhaps, and as far inland on each bank as his armies can reach. Fifty miles deep on each side, perhaps.”

“A regular potentate,” said Talbot. “I fancy we have enough rifles to deal with him.”

“Without a doubt, Captain. And there is much water coming down the river at present.”

“You mean?” asked the Captain.

“Now is the time to get the steamboat up the cataract.”

“Now if ever,” agreed Talbot.

He resented having to rouse himself to action. Getting the steamboat up the cataract would be a laborious and ticklish operation. Yet the approaching campaign would be much facilitated by command of the river; and there had been a good deal of sting in the last batch of orders from the Baron. He would have to act soon -- he would have to act immediately. If he found excuses Sergeant Fleuron might make a secret report on him. He groaned as he shifted in his chair.

“Are the prisoners still alive?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain. And they will live. I can put them to work. But I thought -- “

“What did you think?”

“I thought we could use their ears. For our next report for the Baron. They would be useful.”

“Oh, do as you like about that. Why ask
me
?''

Fighting a war of conquest for a miserly old blackguard in Brussels led to some curious complications. Any ordinary government in wartime never stopped to count the cost, but Leopold never stopped counting it. Every cartridge that was used meant several centimes out of his pocket, and he insisted on proof that as high a proportion of cartridges as possible had been expended to good purpose. He was so determined about it that his subordinates locally had to insist too. The Baron to whom Talbot reported used to ask for ears, and wrote irritating reprimands when the number of right ears sent in was less than half the number of cartridges expended. The prisoners Fleuron had been examining would each provide a right ear without the expenditure of a single cartridge, and even after that would still be available for the labour of collecting rubber.

“I'll attend to it. Captain,” said Fleuron.

Talbot groaned again as he hoisted his wasted and disease-racked body out of his camp chair.

“I'll come down and look at that damned cataract,” he said.

So the next operation of that portion of the Army of the Independent State of the Congo under Talbot's command was the warping of the stern-wheeler
Lady Stanley
and her subsidiary barges up the cataract. The racing currents there were far too strong for the
Lady Stanley
’s feeble engines -- her boiler had had to be carried on men's backs through the forest round the lower falls, so that it could not boast much thickness of metal -- but ingenuity and patience and the labour of a thousand men took her up in time. There were back eddies against the banks which sometimes gave them as much as a hundred yards of ascent at a time. At other times a cable had to be carried out ashore and attached to a stout tree. Then the
Lady Stanley
would wind herself up towards it -- aided by five hundred men at the tow ropes -- and drop an anchor to help hold her while another cable was carried up to another tree higher up. It was not an inexpensive operation, for the Army was always stepping into potholes in the river bottom and being swept away, or breaking legs and arms in wrestling with the cables -- forty men were drowned when one of the cables parted against a sharp rock -- and there was always disease to carry off the weaklings.

A thousand men, Talbot disposed of, of all shades of black and brown; men with teeth filed to needlepoints, men with shields of plaited reed, men with shields of hippopotamus hide, men armed with spears, with clubs, with bows, with axes -- and two hundred men armed with Remington rifles for whom the
Lady Stanley
carried two hundred cartridges per man. The Baron would want to see twenty thousand right ears by the time those cartridges were all used up! (He had not yet laid down any anatomical equivalent for the six-pounder shells for the gun which was mounted on the
Lady Stanley
's strengthened bow.) A thousand men were under Talbot's command, with a white sergeant and eight white corporals -- his two lieutenants had died of fever -- and a couple of drunken white engineers to attend to the boiler of the
Lady Stanley
. One of them was a white-haired old reprobate who -- according to his own account -- had shipped with Semmes in the
Alabama
and had gone down with her when the
Kearsarge
sank her off Cherbourg. Neither engineer ever paid any particular attention to Talbot's orders. They both knew their own value too well, and the chicotte and the hangman's rope which maintained a savage discipline among the coloured troops were not for them.

Talbot stood beside the cataract, watching a working party bringing up the lower warp for attachment to the tree by which he stood. They had to wade in the shallows with their burden, slipping and stumbling, but doing their best to keep their footing, not merely in fear of their lives but in fear of the whip in the hand of the white corporal wading beside them. Talbot could trust nobody beside himself to supervise the actual fastening of the cable to the tree -- experience had taught him a good deal to supplement the sketchy knowledge acquired during his instruction in field engineering at Sandhurst. He stood moodily looking on as the working party splashed towards him; there were the two barges to be dragged up the cataract after the
Lady Stanley
had made the ascent, and time was passing and losses were mounting.

From the forest some way lower down on his side of the river came the distant report of a rifle, flattened and distorted in its journey to his ear through the heated air between the trees. Talbot scowled; one of Fleuron's sentries, half asleep, must have pulled the trigger, wasting a cartridge without an ear to show for it. Well, whoever it was had an ear, anyway. But he had hardly thought this all out when there were further reports, a regular fusillade, climaxed by the rapid fire of a revolver. Fleuron was the only person in that direction armed with a revolver. The natives must be attacking there, and fiercely, too, for Fleuron to be personally engaged. Talbot's own guard sprang into attitudes of attention, their fingers on their triggers, chattering to each other and peering into the twilight of the forest towards where their sentries were posted. But Talbot stood fast where he was -- Fleuron would have to fight it out or fall unassisted; Talbot had had too much experience of forest warfare to attempt to hurry to his relief in a rash movement through the forest, which might well lead into an ambush. The working party came hastily up with the warp, glad to be under the protection of Talbot's riflemen, and would have joined in the chatter if Talbot's harsh orders to the corporal had not put them to work carrying the cable round the tree while Talbot saw to the knotting of it.

The firing down the river died away with startling suddenness; everything was quiet. Talbot glanced down to the
Lady Stanley
lying to the lower warp and her anchor, the current foaming round her bow as though she was tearing along although she was stationary. Everything was ready for the next move provided the fighting had ceased, so he picked up the white signal flag and stepped to the water's edge and waved it. He saw the French engineer wave a red flag in reply from the
Lady Stanley
's deck. Then down the river a black crowd of men emerged from the trees at the water's edge and split into two, each half taking one of the two man-power ropes and moving up the stream to take the strain on them. A white man directed their movements, and by his helmet and his fragments of uniform Talbot recognized Fleuron, who had evidently survived the attack, whatever it was.

When the man-power ropes were taut and the men braced ready a white flag fluttered beside Fleuron, and Masson answered it with a white flag. Talbot saw him step to the steam capstan. The warp by which Talbot stood began to tighten, rising out of the river in an ever-flattening arc from which the water spouted in fountains, while the coils round the tree groaned and creaked. There was always desperate anxiety in Talbot's mind at this moment in case the warp should part. But the men at the ropes hauled away lustily under the lash of their headmen's whips, and the
Lady Stanley
slowly crawled up against the current. She picked up her anchor as she came up to it, crept on, with Masson at the wheel battling to keep her bows pointing outwards against the tug of the warp. She had made a full hundred yards' gain before she was so nearly up to Talbot's tree that it was useless to haul farther on the warp. Her whistle sounded as Masson pulled the lanyard, and the men at the ropes lay back against the strain as he dropped the anchor, necessarily wasting a few precious yards as he allowed the boat to drift back a trifle so that the anchor could bite and divide the strain with the warp. Then, and only then, did Masson wave his white flag again as a signal for those in charge of the lower warp to cast off and begin to carry it up above the one Talbot stood beside, and for the men who towed to relax their efforts and fall gasping on the bank.