Part 5

"She was fumbling at her dress, loosening the top buttons close under her chin; then she ripped it clear, exposing her neck and back.

"'This is what was done to me when I was a child!'

"I leaned forward to see the closer. The poor child was one mass of hideous tattoo from her throat to her stays!

"'Now you know the whole story,' she sobbed, her eyes streaming tears; 'my heart is broken but I am satisfied. I could have stood anything but his loathing.'

"With this she fastened her dress and walked slowly out of the room, her head down, her whole figure one of abject misery."

Madame leaned forward, picked up her goblet of water, and remarking that walking in the wind always made her thirsty, drained its contents. Then she turned her head to hide her tears.

"A most extraordinary story, madame. Did the young fellow ever speak of the theft?" asked Herbert, the first of her listeners to speak.

"No," she answered slowly, in the effort to regain her composure, "he loved her too much to hear anything against her. He knew she had stolen it, for he had heard it from her own lips."

"And you never tried to clear her character?"

"How could I? It was her secret, not mine. To divulge it would have led to her other and more terrible secret, and that I was pledged to keep. She is dead, poor girl, or I would not have told you now."

"And what did you do, may I ask?" inquired Brierley.

"Nothing, except tell fibs. After she had gone the following morning I excused her to him, of course, on every ground that I could think of. I argued that she had a peculiar nature; that owing to her captivity she had perhaps lost that fine sense of what was her own and what was another's; that she had many splendid qualities; that she had only yielded to an impulse, just as a Bedouin does who steals an Arab horse and who, on second thought, returns it. That I had forgiven her, and had told her so, and as proof of it had tried, without avail, to make her keep the topaz. Only my husband knew the truth. 'Let it stay as it is, my dear,' he said to me; 'that girl has more knowledge of human nature than I credited her with. Once that young lover of hers had learned the cruel truth he wouldn't have lived with her another hour.'"

"I think I should have told him," remarked Louis slowly; the story seemed to have strangely moved him. "If he really loved her he'd have worn green spectacles and taken her as she was--I would. Bad business, this separating lovers."

"No, you wouldn't, Louis," remarked Herbert, "if you'd ever seen her neck. I know something of that tattoo, although mine was voluntary, and only covered a part of my arm. Madame did just right. There are times when one must tell anything but the truth."

Everybody looked at the speaker in astonishment. Of all men in the world he kept closest to the exact hair-line; indeed, one of Herbert's peculiarities, as I have said, was his always understating rather than overstating a fact.

"Yes," he continued, "the only way out is to 'lie like a gentleman,' as the saying is, and be done with it. I've been through it myself and know. Your story, madame, has brought it all back to me."

"It's about a girl, of course," remarked Louis, flashing a smile around the circle, "and your best girl, of course. Have a drop of cognac, old man," and he filled Herbert's tiny glass. "It may help you tell the _whole_ truth before you get through."

"No," returned Herbert calmly, pushing the cognac from him, a peculiar tenderness in his voice; "not my best girl, Louis, but a gray-haired woman of sixty--one I shall never forget."

Madame laid her hand quickly on Herbert's arm; she had caught the note in his voice.

"Oh! I'm so glad!" she said. "I love stories of old women; I always have. Please go on."

"If I could have made her young again, madame, you would perhaps have liked my story better."

"Why? Is it very sad?"

"Yes and no. It is not, I must say, exactly an after-dinner story, and but that it illustrates precisely how difficult it is sometimes to speak the truth, I would not tell it at all. Shall I go on?"

"Yes, please do," she pleaded, a tremor now in her own voice. It was astonishing how simple and girlish she could be when her sympathies were aroused.

"My gray-haired woman had an only son, a man but a few years younger than myself, a member of my own party, who had died some miles from our camp at Bangala, and it accordingly devolved upon me not only to notify his people of his death, but to forward to them the few trinkets and things he had left behind. As I was so soon to return to London I wrote his people that I would bring them with me.

"He was a fine young fellow, cool-headed, afraid of nothing, and was a great help to me and very popular with every one in the camp. Having been sent out by the company to which I belonged, as were many others during the first years of our stay on the Congo, he had already mastered both the language and the ways of the natives. When a powwow was to be held I always sent him to conduct it if I could not go myself. I did so, too, when he had to teach the natives a lesson--lessons they needed and never forgot, for he was as plucky as he was politic.

"I knew nothing of his people except that he was a Belgian whose mother, Madame Brion, occupied a villa outside of Brussels, where she lived with a married daughter.

"On presenting my card I was shown into a small library where the young woman received me with tender cordiality, and, after closing the door so that we might not be overheard, she gave me an outline of the ordeal I was about to go through. With her eyes brimming tears she told me how her mother had only allowed her son to leave home because of the pressure brought to bear upon her by his uncle, who was interested in the company; how she daily, almost hourly, blamed herself for his death; how, during the years of his absence, she had lived on his letters, and when mine came, telling her of his end, she had sat dazed and paralyzed for hours, the open page in her lap--no word escaping her--no tears--only the dull pain of a grief which seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. Since that time she had counted the days to my coming, that she might hear the details of his last illness and suffering.

"You can imagine how I felt. I have never been able to face a woman when she is broken down with grief, and but that she was expecting me every minute, and had set her heart on my coming, I think I should have been cowardly enough to have left the house.

"When the servant returned, I was conducted up the broad staircase and into a small room hung with wonderful embroideries and pictures and filled with flowers. In one corner on an easel was Brion's portrait in the uniform of an officer, while all about were other portraits--some taken when he was a child, others as a boy--a kind of sanctuary, really, in which the mother worshipped this one idol of her life."

Herbert stopped, drew the tiny glass of cognac toward him, sipped its contents slowly, the tenderness of tone increasing as he went on:

"She greeted me simply and kindly, and led me to a seat on the sofa beside her, where she thanked me for the trouble I had taken, her soft blue eyes fixed on mine, her gentle, high-bred features illumined with her gratitude, her silver-gray hair forming an aureole in the light of the window behind her, as she poured out her heart. Then followed question after question; she wanting every incident, every word he had uttered; what his nursing had been--all the things a mother would want to know. Altogether it was the severest ordeal I had been through since I left home--and I have had some trying ones.

"For three hours I sat there, giving her minute accounts of his illness, his partial recovery, his relapse; what remedies I had used; how he failed after the fourth day; how his delirium had set in, and how at the last he had passed peacefully away. Next I described the funeral, giving a succinct account of the preparations; how we buried him on a little hill near a spring, putting a fence around the grave to keep any one from walking over it. Then came up the question of a small head-stone. This she insisted she would order cut at once and sent out to me--or perhaps one could be made ready so that I might take it with me. All this I promised, of course, even to taking it with me were there time, which, after all, I was able to do, for my steamer was delayed. And so I left her, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes fixed on mine in gratitude for all I had done for her dead son."

"Oh!--the poor, dear lady!" cried madame la marquise, greatly moved, her hands tight clasped together. "Yes, I believe you--nothing in all your experience could have been as painful!"

Brierley raised his head and looked at Herbert:

"Rather a tight place, old man, awful tight place," and his voice trembled. "But where does the lie come in? You told her the truth, after all."

"Told her the truth! I thought you understood. Why I lied straight through! There _was_ no grave--there never had been! Her son and his three black carriers had been trapped by cannibals and eaten."

Madame started from her chair and clutched Herbert's hand.

"Oh!--how terrible! No! you could not have told her!--I would never have liked you again if you had told her. Oh! I am so glad you didn't!"

"There was nothing else to do, madame," said Herbert thoughtfully, his eyes gazing into space as if the recital had again brought the scene before him.

"Pray God she never found out!" said the marquise under her breath.

"That has always been my consolation, madame. So far as I know she never did find out. She is dead now."

"And I wish we had never found out either!" groaned Louis. "Why in the world do you want to make goose-flesh crawl all over a fellow! An awful, frightful story. I say, Herbert, if you've got any more horrors keep 'em for another night. I move we have a rest. Drag out that spinet, Brierley, and give us some music."

"No, please don't!" cried the marquise. "Tell us another. I wish this one of Monsieur Herbert's was in print, so that I could read it over and over. Think how banal is our fiction; how we are forever digging in the same dry ground, turning up the same trivialities--affairs of the heart, domestic difficulties--thin, tawdry romances of olden times, all the characters masquerading in modern thought--all false and stupid. Oh! how sick I am of it all! But this epic of Monsieur Herbert means the clash of races, the meeting of two civilizations, the world turning back, as it were, to measure swords with that from which it sprung. And think, too, how rare it is to meet a man who in his own life has lived them both--the savage and the civilized. So please, Monsieur Herbert, tell us another--something about the savage himself. You know so many things and you _are so human_."

"He doesn't open his lips, madame, until I get some fresh air!" cried Louis. "Throw back that door, Lemois, and let these hobgoblins out! No more African horrors of any kind! Ladies and gentlemen, you will now hear the distinguished spinetist, Herr Brierley, of Pont du Sable, play one of his soul-stirring melodies! Up with you, Brierley, and take the taste out of our mouths!"

V

IN WHICH THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CANNIBAL AND A FREE-BOOTER IS CLEARLY SET FORTH

To-night the circle around the table welcomed the belated Le Blanc, bringing with him his friend, The Architect, who had designed some of the best villas on the coast, and whose fad when he was not bending over his drawing-board was writing plays. Marc, to every one's regret, did not come. After returning with madame to her villa the night of her visit, he had, according to Le Blanc, been lost to the world.

Dinner over and the cigarettes lighted, the men pushed back their chairs; Louis spreading himself on the sofa or great lounge; Brierley in a chair by the fire, with Peter cuddled up in his arms, and the others where they would be the most comfortable; Lemois, as usual, at the coffee-table.

The talk, as was to be expected, still revolved around the extraordinary woman who had so charmed us the night before; Le Blanc expressing his profound regret at not having been present, adding that he would rather listen to her talk than to that of any other woman in Europe, and I had just finished giving him a résumé of her story about the tattooed girl and her sufferings, when Brierley, who is peculiarly sympathetic, let the dog slip to the floor, and rising to his feet broke out in a tirade against all savage tribes from Dyaks to cannibals, closing his outburst with the hope that the next fifty years would see them all exterminated. Soon the table had taken sides, The Architect, who had lived in Nevada and the far West, defending the noble red man so cruelly debauched by the earlier settlers; Le Blanc siding with Brierley, while Lemois and I watched the discussion, Louis, from his sofa, putting in his oar whenever he thought he could jostle the boat, grewsome discussions not being to his liking.

Herbert, who, dinner over, had been leaning back in his chair, the glow of the firelight touching both his own and the two carved heads above him, and who, up to this time, had taken no part in the talk--Herbert, not the heads, suddenly straightened up, threw away his cigarette, and rested his hands on the table.

"I have not been among the savage tribes in lower Borneo," he said, addressing The Architect; "neither do I know the red Indian as the Americans or their grandfathers may have known him. But I do know the cannibal"--here he looked straight at Le Blanc--"and he is not as black as he is painted. In fact, the white man is often ten times blacker in the same surroundings."

"Not when they roasted your Belgian friend?" cried Louis, with some anger.

"Not even then. There were two sides to that question."

"The brown and the underdone, I suppose," remarked Louis _sotto voce_.

"No, the human."

"But you don't excuse the devils, do you?" broke in Le Blanc. "Their cruelties are incredible. A friend of mine once met a man in Zanzibar who told him he had seen a group of slaves, mostly young girls, who, after being fattened up, were tied together and marched from one of the villages to the other that the buyers might select and mark upon their bodies the particular cuts they wanted."

"I haven't a doubt of it. It's all true," replied Herbert. "I once saw the same thing myself when I was helpless to prevent it, as I was in hiding at the time and dared not expose myself. Yet I recognized even then that the savage was only following out the traditions of centuries, with no one to teach him any better. We ourselves have savage tastes that are never criticised; to do so would be considered mawkish and sentimental. We feel, for instance, no regret when we wring the neck of a pigeon--that is, we didn't," Herbert added with a dry smile, "until Lemois advanced his theories of 'mercy' the other night. We still feed our chickens in coops, stuff our geese to enlarge their livers, fatten our hogs until they can barely stagger, and, after parading them around the market-places, kill and eat them just as the African does his human product. Even Lemois, with equal nonchalance, hacks up his lobsters while they are alive or plunges them into boiling water--he wouldn't dare serve them to us in any other way. The only difference is that we persuade ourselves that our pigs and poultry are ignorant of what is going to happen to them, while the captured African begins to suffer the moment he is pounced upon by his captors."

"And you mean to tell me you don't blame these wretches!" burst out Le Blanc. "I'd burn 'em alive!"

"Yes, I am quite sure you would--that is the usual civilized, twentieth-century way, a continuation of the eye-for-an-eye dogma, but it isn't always efficacious, and it is seldom just. The savage has his good side; he can really teach some of us morals and manners, though you may not believe it. Please don't explode again--not now; wait until I get through. And I go even farther, for my experience teaches me that the savage never does anything which he himself thinks to be wrong. I say this because I have been among them for a good many years, speak their dialects, and have had, perhaps, a better opportunity of studying them than most travellers. And these evidences of a better nature can be found, let me tell you, not only among the tribes in what is known as 'White Man's Africa,' opened up by the explorers, but in the more distant parts--out of the beaten track--often where no white man has ever stepped--none at least before me. Even among the cannibal tribes I have often been staggered at discovering traits which were as mysterious as they were amazing--deep human notes of the heart which put the white man to shame. These traits are all the more extraordinary because they are found in a race who for centuries have been steeped in superstition with its attendant cruelty, and who are considered incapable even of love because they sell their women.

"You, Le Blanc, naturally break out and want to burn them alive. Lemois, more humane, as he always is, would exercise more patience if he could see anything to build upon. You are both wrong. Indeed, between the educated white man freed from all restraint and turned loose in a savage wilderness, and the uneducated savage I would have more hope of the cannibal than the freebooter, and I say this because the older I grow the more I am convinced that with a great majority of men, public opinion, and public opinion only, keeps them straight, and that when they are far from these restraints they often stoop to a lower level than the savage, unless some form of religion controls their actions. To make this clear I will tell you two stories.

"My first is about a young fellow, a graduate of one of the first universities of Europe. I am not going to preach, nor throw any blame. Some of us in our twenties might have done what that white man did. I am only trying to prove my statement that the cannibal in his cruelties is only following out the instincts and traditions of his race, which have existed for centuries, while the white man goes back on every one of his. I wish to prove to you if I can that there is more in the heart of a savage than most of us realize--more to build upon, as Lemois puts it.

"Some years ago I met, on the Upper Congo, a young fellow named Goringe, of about twenty-four or five, who had a contract with the company for providing carriers to be sent to the coast for the supplies to be brought back and delivered to the several camps, mine among the others. He, like many an adventurer drawn to that Eldorado of adventure, was a man of more than ordinary culture, a brilliant talker, and of very great executive ability. It was his business to visit the different villages, buy, barter, or steal able-bodied men for so much a month, and rush them in gangs to the coast under charge of an escort. On their return the company paid them and him so much a head. There were others besides Goringe, of course, engaged in the same business, but none of them attained his results, as I had learned from time to time from those who had come across his caravans in their marches through the jungle.

"One morning a runner came into my camp with a message from Goringe, telling me that he intended passing within a mile or so of where I was; that he was pressed for time or would do himself the honor of calling upon me, and that he would deem it a great favor if I would meet him at a certain crossing where he meant to rest during the heat of the day. I, of course, sent him word that I should be on hand. I hadn't seen him for some years--few other white men, for that matter--and I wanted to learn for myself the secret of his marvellous success. When in London he had worn correct evening clothes, a decoration in his button-hole, and was a frequenter of the best and most exclusive clubs--rather a poor training, one would suppose, for the successful life he had of late been leading in the jungle--and it _was_ successful so far as the profits of the home company were concerned. While their other agents would hire ten men--or twenty--in a long march of months, gathering up former carriers out of work, some of whom had served Stanley in his time, Goringe would get a hundred or more of fresh recruits, all able-bodied savages capable of carrying a load of sixty-five pounds no matter what the heat or how rough the going.

"I arrived at the crossing first and waited--waited an hour, perhaps two--before his vanguard put in an appearance. Then, to use one of Louis' expressions, I 'sat up and began to take notice.' I had seen a good many barbaric turnouts in my time--one in India when I was the guest of a maharaja, who received me at the foot of a steep hill flanked on either side by a double row of elephants in gorgeous trappings, with armed men in still more gorgeous costumes filling the howdahs; another in Ceylon, and another in southern Spain at Easter time--but Goringe's march was the most unique and the most startling spectacle I had ever laid my eyes on, so much so that I hid myself in a mass of underbrush and let the last man pass me before I made myself known.

"The vanguard was composed of some twenty naked men, black as tar, of course, and armed with spears and rawhide shields. These were the fighters, clearing the way for my lord, the white man. These were followed by a dozen others carrying light articles: the great man's india-rubber bath-tub, his guns, ammunition, medicine-chest, tobacco, matches, and toilette articles--with such portions of his wardrobe as he might choose to enjoy. Separated from the contaminating touch of those in front by a space of some twenty feet and by an equal distance from those behind, came Goringe, walking alone, like a potentate of old. As he passed within a few yards of where I lay concealed I had ample opportunity to study every detail of his personality and make-up. I was not quite sure that it was he; then I got his smile and the peculiar debonair lift of his head. Except that he was fifty pounds heavier, he was the man with whom I had dined so often in London.

"On his head was a pith helmet that had once been white, round which was wound a yard or more of bright-red calico. A dozen strings of gaudy beads bound his throat and half covered his bare chest. After that there was nothing but his naked skin--back and front, as far down as his waist, from which hung a frock of blue denim falling to his knees--then more bare skin, and then his feet wrapped in goat-skins. In his hand he carried a staff which he swung from side to side as he walked with lordly stride.

"His harem followed: thirty girls in single file, dressed in the prevailing fashion of the day--a petticoat of plantain leaves and a string of beads. Each of them carried a gaudy paper umbrella like those sold at home for sixpence. Some of the girls were slim and tall, some fat; but all were young and all bore themselves with an air of calm distinction, as if conscious of their alliance with a superior race. Bringing up the rear was a long line of carriers loaded down with tents, provisions, and other camp equipage.

"When it had all passed I stepped quickly through the forest, got abreast of my lord the white man, and shouted:

"'Goringe!'

"He turned suddenly, lifted the edge of his helmet, threw his staff to one of his men, and came quickly toward me.

"'By the Eternal, but I'm glad to see you! I was afraid you were going back on me! It was awfully decent in you to come. You didn't mind my sending for you, did you? I've got to make the next village by sundown, and then I'm going up into the Hill Country, and may not be this way again for months--perhaps never. How well you look! What do you think of my turnout?'