CHAPTER V.
THE MEETING-PLACE OF WATERS.
At Tabora there had been a long halt, a delay forced upon the travellers by the conditions of climate, by the sickness and the idleness of their caravan; but this interval of rest had not been altogether disagreeable. The place was a place of fatness, a settlement in the midst of a fertile plan where the flocks and herds, the Arab population, the pastoral life suggested those familiar pictures in that first book of ancient history which the child takes into his newly awakened consciousness; and which the hard and battered wayfarer—believer or agnostic—loves and admires to the end of life. In just such a scene as this Rebecca might have given Isaac the fateful draught of water from the wayside well; upon just such a level pasture Joseph and his brethren might have tended their flocks and watched the stars. The visions of the young dreamer would have shown him this pale milky azure, over-arching the rich level where the sheaves bowed down to his sheaves; and in just such a reposeful atmosphere would he have laid himself down for the noontide siesta, and let his fancy slide into the dim labyrinth of dreamland.
At Tabora there had been overmuch time for thought, and the yearning for a far-away face must needs have been in the hearts of both those young Englishmen, whose bronzed features were sternly and steadily set with the resolute calm of men who do not mean to waste in despair and die for love of the fairest woman upon earth.
Often and often in the dusk, Allan heard his comrade's rich baritone rolling out that old song—
"Shall I, wasting in despair,Die, because a woman's fair?Or make pale my cheeks with careBecause another's rosy are?"
"Shall I, wasting in despair,Die, because a woman's fair?Or make pale my cheeks with careBecause another's rosy are?"
"Shall I, wasting in despair,Die, because a woman's fair?Or make pale my cheeks with careBecause another's rosy are?"
"Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die, because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Because another's rosy are?"
The voice thrilled him. What a gift is that music which gives a man power over his fellow-men? Geoffrey's fiddle talked to them nearly every night beside the camp-fire, talked to them sometimes at daybreak, when its owner had been sleepless; for that restless spirit had watched too many long blank hours in the course of his travels. It had been hard work to convey that fiddle-case across the rolling woods, through swamp and river, guarded from the crass stupidity of native porters—from the obstinacy of the African donkey—the curiosity of the inhabitants of the villages on the way. Geoffrey had carried it himself for the greater part of the journey; refusing to trust Arab or Negroid with so precious a burden. Riding or walking, he had managed to take care of his little Amati, the smallest but not the least valuable of all his fiddles.
There were some among his dark followers to whom Geoffrey's Amati was an enchanted thing, a thing that ought to have been alive if it was not; indeed, there were some who secretly believed that it was a living creature. The velvet nest in which he kept the strange thing, the delicate care with which he laid it in that luxurious resting-place, or took it out into the light of day; the loving movement with which he rested his chin on the shining wood, while his long lissome fingers twined themselves caressingly about the creature's neck; the strange light that came into his eyes as he drew the bow across the strings, and the ineffable sounds which those strings gave forth; all these were tokens of a living presence, a something to be loved and feared.
When he tuned his fiddle, they thought that he was punishing it, and that it shrieked and groaned in its agony. Why else were those sounds so harsh and discordant, so unlike the melting strains which the thing gave forth when he laid his chin upon it and loved it, when his lips smiled, and his melancholy eyes looked far away into the purple distances, across the woods and the plains, to the remoteness of the mountain range beyond?
If it were not actually alive—if it had neither heart nor blood as they had, why, then, it was a familiar demon—a charm—by which he who possessed it could influence his fellow-men. He could rouse them to savage raptures, to shrieks and wild leaps that were meant for dancing. He could melt them to tears.
From the first hour when he played by the camp-fire, on the third night after they left Bagamoyo, Geoffrey's music had given him a hold over the more intelligent members of the caravan. They had listened at first almost as the dog listens, and had been ready to lift up their heads and howl as the dog howls. But gradually those singing sounds had exercised a soothing influence, they had sprawled at his feet, a ring of listeners, with elbows on the ground, looking up at him out of onyx eyes that flashed in the firelight.
Among their followers there were some Makololos from the Shire Valley, men of superior courage and determination, a finer race than the common herd of African porters, of the same race as those faithful followers of Livingstone's first great journey, who afterwards became chiefs and rulers of the land. These Makololos adored Geoffrey. His music, the achievements of his Winchester rifle, that ardent fitful temperament of his, exercised an extraordinary influence over these men; and it seemed as if they would have followed him without fee or reward, for sheer love of the man himself; not for meat, and cloth, and beads, and brass wire.
Never a word said Geoffrey or Allan of that one woman whose image filled the minds of both. They talked of other people freely enough. Each spoke of his mother tenderly, regretfully even, Allan taking comfort from the thought of Lady Emily's delight in her farm, the occupation and interest which every change of the seasons brought for her. Such letters as had reached him on his wanderings had been resigned and uncomplaining, although dwelling sorrowfully upon the husband she had lost.
"He used to live so much apart, shut in his library day after day, and only joining me in the evening, that I could hardly have believed my life could seem so empty without him. But I know now how much his presence in the house—even his silent, unseen presence—meant for me; and I realize now how often I used to go to him, interrupting his dreamy life with my petty household questions, my little bits of news from the farmyard or the cow-houses, or the garden. He was so kind and sympathetic. He would look up from his books to interest himself in some story about my Brahmas or my Cochins, and if he was bored, he never allowed me to see the faintest sign of impatience. I think he was the best and truest man that ever lived. And my Allan is like him. May God protect and bless my dearest, my only dear, in all the perils of the desert!"
Lady Emily's mental picture of Africa represented one far-reaching waste of level sand, a desert flatness incompatible with a spherical earth, pervaded by camels, and occasionally varied by a mirage. A pair of pyramids—like tall candlesticks at the end of a board-room table—a sphinx and a crocodily river occupied the north-east corner of this vast plateau, while the south-west was distinguished by a colony of ostriches, and the place to which Indian officials used to resort for change of air some fifty years since. To these narrow limits were restricted Lady Emily's notions of the continent on which her son was now a wanderer. She feared that if he got out of the way of the crocodiles he might fall in with the ostriches, which doubtless were dangerous when encountered in large numbers; and she shuddered at the sight of her feather fan.
Mrs. Wornock's letters were in a sadder strain. The key was distinctly minor. She wrote of her loneliness; of the monotonous days; the longing for the face that had vanished.
"My organ talks to me of you—Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, all tell me the same story. You are far away—away for a long time—and life is very sad."
There was not a word of Suzette in those letters. If she was ever at the Manor, if Mrs. Wornock retained her affection and found solace in her society, there was no hint of that consoling presence. It might be that the girl hated the house because of that vehement stormy love which had assailed her there; the love that would not let her be faithful to a more reasonable lover.
"And yet—and yet!" thought Geoffrey, hardly caring even in his own mind to put the question positively.
In his innermost consciousness there was the belief that she loved him—him, Geoffrey Wornock—that she had refused him perversely and foolishly, out of a mistaken sense of honour. She would not marry Allan whom she did not love; and she refused to marry Geoffrey whom she did love, in order to spare her jilted lover the pain of seeing a rival's triumph.
"But I am not beaten yet," Geoffrey told himself. "When I go back to England—if I but find her free—I shall try again. Allan's wounds will have healed by that time; and even her Quixotic temper will have satisfied itself by the sacrifice of two years of her lover's life."
"When I go back!" Musing sometimes on that prospect of the homeward journey, whether returning by the road they had come, or dropping down southward by Trivier's route to the Nyassa and the Zambesi, or by the more adventurous westward line by the forest and the Congo, the way by which Trivier had come to the Lake, whichever way were eventually chosen, Geoffrey asked himself if the three travellers would all go back?
"One shall be taken and the other left."
Throughout the record of African travel, there is that dark feature of the story; the traveller who is left behind. Sometimes it is the fever fiend that lays a scorching hand upon the fearless adventurer, flings him down to suffer thirst and pain and heaviness, and delirious horrors, in the foul darkness of a bee-hive hut, to die in a dream of home, with shadowy faces looking down at him, familiar voices talking with him. Sometimes he falls in a ring of savage foes, hemmed round with hideous faces, foes as fierce and implacable as lion or leopard; foes who kill for the sake of killing; or cannibals, for whom a murdered man provides the choicest banquet. The hazards of the pilgrimage take every shape, death by drowning, death by massacre, death by small-pox or jungle fever, death by starvation, by the bursting of a gun, by beasts of prey. In every story of travel there is always that dark page which tells of the man who is left. Dillon, Farquhar, the two Pococks, Jameson, Bartelott, Weissemburger—the ghosts that haunt the pathways of tropical Africa are many; but those melancholy shadows exercise no deterring influence on the traveller who sets out to-day, strong, elate, hopeful, inspired by an eager curiosity which takes no heed of trouble or of risk.
"Which of us three is to stay behind?" Geoffrey asked himself in a gloomy wonder. Not Patrington. He had come to the stage at which the traveller bears a charmed life. It is seldom the experienced wanderer, the man of many journeys, who falls by the wayside. Hot-headed youth, bold in its ignorance of danger, perishes like a bird caught in a trap. The strong frame of the trained athlete shrivels like a leaf in the hot blast of fever. The careless boatman tempts the perils of a difficult passage, and is swept over the stony bed of the torrent, and vanishes in the fathomless pool. The hardened traveller knows what he is about, and can reckon with the forces of that gigantic nature which he faces and defies. It is the tyro who pays the price of his inexperience, and, in the history of African travel, the survival of the fittest is the rule.
"Which of us?" That question had entered into the very fabric of Geoffrey's thoughts. Sometimes, sitting by the camp-fire as the chillness of night crept round them, a grisly fancy would flash across his reverie, and he would think that the pale mist that rose about Allan's figure, on the other side of the circle, was the shroud which the Highlander sees upon the shoulders of a friend marked for death.
"Would it be Allan?" If it were Allan, he, Geoffrey, would hasten home to tell the sad story, and then—to claim her whose too-tender conscientiousness had refused happiness at Allan's expense. Allan gone, there would be no reason why she should deny her love.
"For I know, I know that she loves me," Geoffrey repeated to himself.
He had been telling himself that story ever since he left England. No denial from those lovely lips, no words of scorn, would convince him that he was unloved. He could recall looks and tones that told another story. He had seen the gradual change in her which told of an awakening heart.
"She never knew what love means till she knew me," he told himself. Did he wish for Allan's death? No, there was no such hideous thought in the dark labyrinth of his mind; or, at least, he believed that there was not. One must perish! He had so brooded over the story of former victims that he had taught himself to look upon one lost life as inevitable. But the lot was as likely to fall upon him as upon Allan. More likely, since his habits were more reckless and more adventurous than Allan's. If there was danger to be found, he and his Makololos courted it. Shooting expeditions, raids upon unfriendly villages, hand-to-hand skirmishes with Mirambo's brigand tribes; he and his Makololos were ready for anything. He had travelled over hundreds of miles with his warlike little gang—exploring, shooting, fighting—while Patrington and Allan were living in dreamy inaction, waiting for better weather, or for the recovery of half a dozen ailing pagazis. Assuredly he who ran such superfluous risks was the more likely to fall by the way. Well, death is a solution of all difficulties.
"If I am dead, it will matter to me very little that my bright, ineffable coquette is transformed into a sober, middle-aged wife, and that she and Allan are smiling at each other across the family breakfast-table, in their calm heaven of domestic hum-drum. But while I live and am young I shall think of her and long for her, and hate the lucky wretch who wins her. If we should both go back; if Patrington's tough bones are the bones that are to whiten by the way, and not Allan's or mine; why, then, we shall again be rivals; and the years of exile will be only a dream that we have dreamt."
It was a strange position in which these two young men found themselves. Friends, almost as brothers in the close intimacy of that solitude of three, only three civilized thinking beings amidst a crowd of creatures who seemed as far apart as if they had belonged to the forest fauna—the great antelope family—or the simian race; these two, so nearly of an age, reared in the same country and the same social sphere, united and sympathetic at every point of contact between mind and mind, and yet keeping this one deep gulf of silence between them.
They spoke to each other freely of all things, except of her; and yet each knew that she was the one absorbing subject in the mind of the other. Each knew that her image went along with them, was never absent, never less distinctly lovely, even when the way was fullest of hardship and peril, when every yard of progress meant a struggle with thorns that tore them, and brambles that lashed them, and the tough, rank verdure-carpet that clogged their feet. Neither had ever ceased to remember her, or to think of these adventurous days as anything else than exile from her. Whatever interest or enjoyment there might be in that varied experience of a land where beauty and ugliness alternated with startling transitions, it was not possible that either Allan or Geoffrey could forget the reason they were there, far from the fair faces of women, and from all the ease and pleasantness of civilized life.
Geoffrey had the better chance of oblivion, since those wild excursions and explorations of his afforded the excitement of the untrodden and the hazardous. The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit. At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves in the wilderness.
He was more in touch with the men than Allan—as familiar with their ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. He had learnt their languages with a marvellous quickness—not the copious language of civilization and literature, be it remembered, but the concise vocabulary of the camp and the hunting-ground, the river and the road. He understood his men and their different temperaments as few travellers learn to understand, or desire to understand them. And yet there was but little Christian benevolence at the root of this quick sympathy and comprehension. Although, as an Englishman, Geoffrey would have given no sanction to the sale and barter of his fellow-creatures, these dark servants were to him no more than slaves—so much carrying power and so much fighting power, subject to his domination. It pleased him to know their characters, to be able to play upon their strength and weakness, their ferocity and their greed, just as surely as he manipulated the stops of the great organ at Discombe.
These Africans gave a name of their own choosing to almost everybody. They christened the great Sultan of the interior Tippo-Tib, because of a curious blinking of his eyes. Captain Trivier obtained his nickname on account of his eye-glass. Another man was named after his spectacles. The Sultan of Ujiji was called Roumariza—"It is ended,"—because he had succeeded in reducing belligerent tribes to peaceful settlement. For the Englishman in particular, Africa could always find a nickname, based on some insignificant detail of manner or appearance. For Englishmen in general she had found a nobler-sounding name. She called them Sons of Fire.
Geoffrey, with his tireless energy, his rapid decision, his angry impatience of delay, seemed to his followers the very highest exemplar of the fiery race that can persevere and conquer difficulties which the native of the soil recoils from as insurmountable.
Sons of Fire! Were they not worthy of the name, these white men, when far out in midstream, while the boatmen bent and cowered over their paddles, these Englishmen looked in the face of the lightning and sat calm and unmoved while day darkened to the pitchy blackness of a starless midnight, and the thunder reverberated from hill to hill, with roar upon roar and peal upon peal, like the booming of heavy batteries, and anon crashed and rattled with a sharper, nearer sound. Blinding lightning, torrential rain, war of thunder and tempestuous waters, were all as nothing to these sons of fire. Their spirits rose amidst hurricane or thunderstorm; they were full of life and gaiety while the cockleshell canoes were being tossed upon the short, choppy sea, like forest leaves upon a forest brook, and when every sudden gust threatened destruction. They laughed at peril, and insisted upon having the canoes out when their native followers saw danger riding on the wind and death brooding over the waters. They met the spirit of murder, and were not afraid. They lay down to sleep in the midst of an unknown wilderness, with savage beasts lurking in the darkness that surrounded their tents. They forded rivers that swarmed with crocodiles—horrible stealthy creatures, swimming deep down below the surface of the water, the placid, beautiful water, with lotus flowers sleeping in the sunlight, and scaly monsters waiting underneath in the shadow.
Panther, crocodile, tempest, fever, or sunstroke, poisoned arrows from murderous foes, were only so many varieties in the story of adventure. Through every vicissitude the ready wit and calm courage of the Englishmen rose superior to accident, discomfort, or danger; and to the native temper these wanderers from a far country, an island which they had heard of as a speck in a narrow sea, seemed men of iron with souls of fire.
Geoffrey would admit no malingering, would accept no idle pretexts for inaction or delay. His little band, picked out from the ruck of their porters, were always on the move, save in those rainy interludes which made movement impossible; and even then Geoffrey fretted and fumed, and was inclined to question the impracticability of a hunting expedition through those torrential rains.
"Did you ever hear of a fox-hunter stopping at home because of a wet day?" he asked Cecil Patrington, impatiently.
"Did you ever see such rain as this in a fox-hunting country?" retorted Patrington, pointing through an opening in the door of the hut to the sheet of falling water, which blotted out all beyond, and splashed with a thud into the pool that filled the enclosure.
The deep eaves kept the rain out of the huts, but not without occasional accident—spoilt provisions, damp gunpowder. It was a rude awakening from dreams of home to find one's bed afloat on a pond of rising waters.
Geoffrey had taken upon himself the task of providing meat for the party, Patrington's lazy, happy-go-lucky temper readily ceding that post of distinction to the new-comer. A man who had shot every species of beast that inhabits the great continent could easily surrender the privilege of finding meat-dinners along the route; so he only used his gun when the quarry was worthy and his humour prompted; and for the most part smoked the pipe of peace and read Dickens in the repose of a day's halt, while Geoffrey roamed off with his Winchester rifle and his little band of obsequious dark-skins.
And now in this period of waiting there was the great inland sea to explore; those romantic shores with their wealth of animal life; those waters teeming with fish, hemmed round and guarded by the majesty of mountains whose lofty peaks and hollows no foot of man had ever trodden. There was plenty of scope for movement and adventure here, so long as the rains held off; and the three men made good use of their time, and the canoes were rarely idle, or the rowers allowed to shirk upon the favourite pretence of bad weather.
So long as there was something to be done, Geoffrey and Allan were happy; but with every interval of repose there came the familiar heartache, the longing for home-faces, the sense of disappointment and loss.
Sometimes alone by the lake, while the lamp was shining on the faces of his two friends yonder in the verandah, where they sat playing chess, alone in the awful stillness of that vast mountain gorge, the waters rippling with placid movement, only faintly flecked with whiteness here and there in the blue distance, Geoffrey's longing for that vanished face grew to an almost unendurable agony. He felt as if he could bear this anguish of severance no more. He began to calculate the length of the homeward journey. Oh, the weariness of it! for him for whose impatience the fastest express train would be too slow. He shrank appalled from the contemplation of the distance that he had put between himself and the woman he loved, the intolerable distance—thousands and thousands of miles—and the difficulties and vicissitudes of the journey; all the forces of tropical nature to contend with, dependent upon savages, subject to fevers that hinder and stop the eager feet, and lay the weary body low, a helpless log—to waste days and nights in burning agony—to awaken and find a caravan dwindled by desertion, luggage plundered, new impediments to progress.
Why had he been so mad as to come here? That was the question which he asked himself again and again in the stillness of night, when the mountain-peaks stood out in silvery whiteness and the mountain-chasms were pits of blackest shadow. Why had he, a free agent, master of his life and its golden opportunities, made himself a voluntary exile?
"What demon of revolt and impatience drove me out into the wilderness, when I ought to have followed her and refused to believe in her unkindness, and insisted upon being heard, and heard again, and rejected again, only to be accepted later? Did I not know, in my heart of hearts, that she loved me? And now she will believe no more in my love. The man who could leave her, who could try to cure himself of his passion for her—such a man is unworthy to be remembered. Some one else will appear upon the scene—that unknown rival whom no man fears or foresees till the hour sounds and he is there—some arrogant lover, utterly unlike Allan or me—who will not adore her as we have adored—who will approach her not as a slave, but as a master, who will win her in a month, in a week, with fierce swift wooing, startle and scare her into loving him, win her by acoup de main. That is the sort of thing that will happen. It is happening now, perhaps. While I am standing by these African waters, sick with longing for her. Is it night and moonlight in England, I wonder? Are she and her new lover walking in the old sleepy garden? No, it is winter there; they are sitting at the piano, perhaps, in the lamplight, her little hands moving about the keys—he listening and pretending to admire, knowing and caring no more about music than the coarsest of my Pagazis. Oh, it is maddening to think of how I am losing her! And I came here to cure myself of loving her. Cure! There is no cure for such a passion as mine. It grows with absence—it strengthens with time."
And now the Masika, the dreaded rainy season began; the rain-sun burnt with a sickly oppressive heat; and over all nature there crept the deathlike silence that comes before a storm. No longer was heard the wail of the fish-eagle calling his mate, and the answering call from afar. No diver flitted, black, long, and lanky, over the waters. The big white and grey kingfisher had vanished from his perch upon the branches that overhang the lake. Even the ranæ in the sedges, noisiest of birds for the most part, were mute in anticipatory terror. Thick darkness brooded over the long line of hills on the further side of the lake; and from Ujiji nothing could be seen but a waste of livid waters touched here and there with patches of white. Then through that dreadful stillness rolled the long low muttering of the thunder, and lightning flashes, pale and sickly, pierced the overhanging pall of night-in-day—and then the tempest, in all its majesty of terror, the roar of winds and waters, the artillery of heaven pealing, crackling, rattling, booming from yonder fortress of unseen giants, the citadel of untrodden hills.
And after the storm the rain, the ceaseless, hopeless, melancholy rain, a wall of water shutting out the world. There was nothing for it but to sit in the rough shelter of the tembe, and amuse one's self as best one might, cleaning guns and fishing-tackle, mending nets, playing cards or chess, reading, talking, disputing, execrating the enforced inaction, the deadly monotony. For Geoffrey's restless spirit that rainy season was absolute torture; and it needed all the forbearance and good nature of his companions to bear with his irritability and fretful complaining against inexorable nature.
Even Patrington, the best-tempered, most easy-going of men, was disgusted at Geoffrey's feverish impatience.
"I begin to admire the wisdom of a vulgar proverb—two's company, three's none," he said to Allan across the chess-board, as they arranged their men, sitting in the light of the wood fire, while Geoffrey lay fast asleep in his hammock after the weariness of sleepless nights. "Your friend is a very bad traveller—a fine-weather traveller, a man who must have sport and variety and progress all along the route. That kind of man isn't a pleasant companion in Central Africa. If courage and activity are essential, patience is no less needed. Your friend has plenty of pluck; but there's too much quicksilver in his veins. He exercises an extraordinary influence upon the men; but he is just the kind of fellow to quarrel with them and get murdered by them, if he were left too much to his own devices. It would need very little for them to think that fiddle of his an evil spirit, and smash his skull with it. On the whole, Carew, I wish you and I were alone, for with yonder gentleman," pointing to the motionless figure under the striped rug, "I feel as if I had undertaken the care of a troublesome child; and Africa, don't you know, isn't the right place for spoilt brats."
"Geoffrey will be himself again when these beastly rains are over. He's a splendid fellow, and I know you like him."
"Like him? Of course I like him. Nobody could help liking him. He has the knack of making himself liked, loved almost, but he's a crank for all that. Allan, mark my words, that young man is a crank."
Allan's heart sank at this expression of opinion, short, sharp, decisive. He remembered what he had heard of Geoffrey's birth from the lips of Geoffrey's mother. Could one expect perfect soundness of brain, perfect balance of mind and judgment in a man who had entered life in a world of dreams and hallucinations?