On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated, and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real base of the expedition, leaving _La Joconde_ behind at Matadi.
"What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships," said Adams, turning in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. "What are the exports here?"
"Gum copal--nuts--rubber--tusks--everything you can get out of there," answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.
Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of Berselius's hand, "over there"; little did he dream of what those words held in their magic.
The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and tangling the trees.
Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She had come to Marseilles to see them off, and----
Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.
Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich--so rich that the contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman's money or assistance.
He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social temple by walking between the pillars of the portico, or smashing an entrance way through the wall with his fist.
He was a type of the true American man, the individual who trusts in himself; an unpleasant person very often, but the most essentially male creation in Nature.