he
was dominated.

Nothing could be stranger than this reduction of a man from greatness to
insignificance. The old Berselius dying, bound in chains, would have
mastered this woman with one glance of his eye. The new Berselius, free,
wealthy, and with all his material powers at command, was yet her
creature, an object of pity to his daughter and of derision to his
servants.

Eight days after her return Madame Berselius, now free and her own
mistress, left Paris for Vaux on a short visit to some friends, little
dreaming of the momentous event that was to cause her return.

CHAPTER XXXIX

MAXINE

On the night of the day upon which Berselius had paid his visit to M.
Cambon, Adams, seated in the smoking room at a writing table before a
broad sheet of white paper covered with words, suddenly took the paper,
tore it up, and threw the pieces in a wastepaper-basket.

He had been trying to put in language the story of the Congo as it had
been revealed to him.

It was all there in his mind like a tremendous dramatic poem: the great
sunlit spaces of the elephant country watched over by the vultures, the
eternal and illimitable forests old as Memnon, young as Spring, unwithered
and unbroken by the suns and rains and storms of the ages; the river
flooding to the sea, and the people to whom this place belonged, and the
story of their misery and despair.

When he contrasted what he had written with what was in his mind, he
recognized the hopelessness of his attempt. He had not the power to put on
paper more than the shadow of what he had seen and of what he knew.

To represent that people under the heel of that Fate was a task for an
AEschylus.

Sitting thus before the picture he could not reproduce, there rose before
his mind another picture he had seen that day. It was a large photograph
of the Laocoon. He had seen it in Brentano's window, and, now, with the
eye of memory, he was looking at it again.

That wonderful work of art washed up to us by the ages, that epic in
marble, expressed all that words refused to say: the father and the
children in the toils of Fate; the hand upholding for a moment the
crushing coil of the serpent, the face raised to a sky devoid of God or
pity; the agony, the sweat and the cruelty, all were there; and as Adams
gazed, the python-like lianas of the forest became alive in his mind, the
snake-like rubber vine twined in coils, circling about and crushing a
nation and its children,