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Updated: June 4, 2025
That evening he called Van Laer into the office. "Chef de Poste Meeus of Fort M'Bassa is dead," said De Wiart; "you will go there and take command. You will start to-morrow." Van Laer flushed. "It is a difficult post," said De Wiart, "wild country, and the natives are the laziest to be found in the whole of the state.
"Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?" Meeus made no reply, but drew a step back and put out his hand, as if fending the question off, as if asking for a moment in which to explain. He had so many things to say, so many reasons to give, but he could say nothing, for his tongue was paralyzed and his lips were dry. "Did you kill those people by the Silent Pools?"
Berselius, in another easy chair, was smoking a cigar, and Meeus, sitting with his elbows on the table, was talking of trade and its troubles. There is an evil spirit in rubber that gives a lot of trouble to those who deal with it. The getting of it is bad enough, but the tricks of the thing itself are worse.
A hundred million trees acacia and palm, m'bina and cottonwood, thorn and mimosa; in gloom, in shine, in valley and on rise, mist-strewn and sun-stricken, all bending under the deep sweet billows of the wind. At the edge of the forest Berselius and Adams took leave of Meeus. Neither Berselius nor Meeus showed any sign of the past day. They had "slept it off."
He was filthy and tattered, he wore no coat, and his hunting shirt was open at the neck, and the arms of it rolled up above the elbows. Adams, for the space of ten seconds, stood staring at Meeus from under his pith helmet. The face under the helmet seemed cast from bronze.
It was Cliquot, and as Meeus felt the glow of the wine in his veins, a flush came into his hollow cheeks and a brightness into his dull eyes; forgotten things stirred again in his memory, with the shadows of people he had known the glitter of lamplit streets in Brussels, the glare of the Café de Couronne all the past, such as it was, lay in the wine. Meeus was one of the "unfortunate men."
For such a step even pronounced liberals like Gendebien, Van de Weyer and Rouppe, the veteran burgomaster of the city, were not yet prepared; and they combined with the moderates, Count Felix de Mérode and Ferdinand Meeus, to form a Committee of Public Safety. While these were still struggling to maintain their authority, the States-General had met at the Hague on September 13.
A village ten miles to the east had, during the last few weeks, suspended rubber payments, gone arrear in taxes, the villagers running off into the forest and hiding from their hateful work. "What caused the trouble?" asked Berselius. "God knows," replied Meeus. "It may blow over it may have blown over by this, for I have had no word for two days; anyhow, to-morrow I will walk over and see.
Far better for a man to inhabit a cell in Dartmoor than a post in the desert of the forest. The walls are companionable things, but there is no companionship in distance. Meeus knew what it was to look over the walls of the fort and watch another sun setting on another day, and another darkness heralding another night.
How do you find it here, M. Meeus, when you are by yourself?" "Oh, one lives," replied the Chef de Poste, looking at the cigarette between his fingers with a dreamy expression, and speaking as though he were addressing it. "One lives." That, thought Adams, must be the worst part about it. But he did not speak the words.
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