After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings on that remarkable evening.
It appears that even the culminating evidence of the uniform case did not satisfy him, so reluctant ishomo sapiensto admit unwelcome truth. He wanted to know more. How could Archie be here? There was not time for him to have gone back to the farm, to have found Norah's letter, and followed. To catch them, a pursuer would have had to overtake before theMimiwas boarded—the only boat that called at the Rhodesian end of the lake.
But what about that wandering 'stiff' who, he remembered Norah saying, had started for the Congo with her husband. Might not this be he? Suppose he had stolen Sinclair's kit at Elizabethville and was making for an East Coast port?
Dick's reluctance to look truth in the eye was removed by Archie's return to the tent, where a couch of leaves had been heaped. One of the grunts, with which he settled himself, matured into more or less coherent speech, 'By the way, sorry ... my name's not Smith ... Sinclair.... Thought I ought to tell you.... Good-night.'
Even a purist when hit on the head with a hammer ceases to argue whether coal or sledge. Dick was reduced to accepting facts at face value.
A stronger man might have seized the moment to face it out, while Archie's words held the door open to confession. A line too direct for Dick. He did nothing—not from fear, as he explained no doubt truthfully to Norah, but from a sense of the supreme awkwardness of the position. That was how he put it: you would probably say 'seeing what a poor fish he'd look.'
It is possible, even easy, to seduce a man's wife with a certain air. The gesture has been made picturesque, amusing, sublime, according to the clothes, characters, circumstances of the puppets. Don Juan, Casanova, young Lochinvar were masters of the different genres.
But collect your troop on a desert island of limited acreage, give Menelaus the sole power of rescue, and the laughter veers round against Paris. Worse still, Helen might lead it. And when you throw in one loaded rifle and give it to Menelaus, the romantic farce may degenerate into tragedy.
Dick, whatever he told Norah, cannot have been long realising that his position was not only false but dangerous, and his life at the mercy of the man he had wronged. He may not have expected actual violence, for Norah's allusions to her husband at that date of her disillusionment would have outlined a deliberate, cautious, rather pale-blooded being in whom civilisation had destroyed all sudden impulse. One who had reduced 'soundness' to a vice and was lamentably sure 'to do the sensible thing'; who, meditating both sides of every question and avoiding the ill-considered move, had almost lost power of action. One of those irritating people who are too busy giving the devil his due to reach for the holy water.
Since Dick, like the rest of us, preferred to use labels and pigeon-holes instead of observation and thought, he did not stop to compare this pallid creation with the lean, taciturn individual who slept a few feet from him.
But although the eminently 'sound' man of Dick's and Norah's fancy does not go about shooting people even on considerable provocation, he is not, Dick argued, of the type that steps far out of the way to save the lives of enemies.
There are men who would never tolerate the unsavoury and dangerous business of murder, but who would make slight effort to prevent the death of an enemy out of sight and earshot—witness the mediæval popularity of the oubliette. So Dick did not find unconvincing the figure of an outraged husband who pursued his way to Abercorn and left the identified Mr. and Mrs. Brown to shift for themselves.
Fear of some such fate is the only excuse I can find for the scheme which he afterwards confessed to Norah. It was, he said, the only way out of the impasse. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there was anything unsporting in his plan, any gleam of the phosphorescent aura of treachery. If pressed, he might have produced the old excuse about Love and War; a sophism, which, pushed to logical extremes, justifies, I suppose, arsenic in the Burgundy and babies on the bayonet.
An acute moral sense was never Dick's weakness; still, one would have expected common sense to save him from the stupidity of confiding in Norah his happy thought of stealing her husband's gun and leaving him and his natives to ... fend for themselves. He must have been very sure of the spell his adoration cast.
No doubt Africa was probing him too deep. In the last twenty-four hours she had unmasked batteries too heavy for her victim. Blow on blow had been hammered at his weakest points. She had opened with her favourite gambit of starvation and had daunted his courage with its shadow. She had lowered his vitality by an interminable day of incessant toil and disappointed hope. She tormented him with the sudden display of a salvation that faded into a trap from which there was no honourable issue.
Her machinery was ponderous enough to shatter the morale of a finer man than Dick. It was like shooting rabbits with a field-gun. Dick was that not uncommon flower of our civilisation—a thoroughly charming fellow. Just the man for a dance at your house, a rubber at your club, a week-end at your partridges. Good-looking, well-dressed, well-mannered, it was impossible not to like him at sight.
Alas! the forest cares nothing for looks, clothes, or manners.
The mild fires of public-school and life about town had not tempered his metal hard enough. He had had an easy war, largely spent at Bolo House. In his spells at the front, he had the support of discipline, example, comradeship; responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. Now he had to fight a duel with Africa for an opponent.... And hate, that the war taught us so quickly kills all sense of sportsmanship, blindfolded him.
As he thought of his dependence on the man he had wronged, his heart contracted. He was so ignominiously at the mercy of one on whom he had hitherto bestowed a smile of pity.
And why? Not because his enemy was braver, or cleverer, or a better man in any way, but just because he had a loaded rifle. From whatever angle he regarded this intolerable triangle, the gun dominated. Looked at as a means of securing food, in Archie's prejudiced hands, it dictated terms. As a weapon of offence, it imposed no less. So long as Archie held this card, Dick and Norah were impotent, immobilised, compelled ignobly to confess their liaison and accept starvation or such humiliating terms as their master saw fit to stipulate.
Archie was the common enemy whose advantage must be torn from him without consideration of his ultimate fate.
The tent in which Dick and his intended victim were sleeping was small, some eight feet by six, a one man load. He could not help contrasting his own luxurious installation with double fly, bathroom and verandah. Here was barely room for the two men to sleep. On the ground between them lay the gun, but close to Archie's hand. The firelight showing through the canvas gave a dull gleam off the barrels. It was not a magazine rifle, and the two rounds in the chambers would not go far. Archie's ammunition bag, which lay behind his head, must be secured.
His deep breathing proclaimed sleep. God send the natives by the fire slept as sound.
Moving an inch at a time to minimise the creaking of the camp bed, Dick reached out and out till his muscles were ready to snap. At last he secured the strap and lifted the bag gently to him. The rifle fell an easier prey.
With heart throbbing in the silence he lay still, waiting for the flames to die down and mask his sortie. It seemed hours before the firelight faded. He must act before a native woke to heap on fresh fuel. With infinite pains not to break the silence, he rose from his bed. His heart stood still at a leopard's bark. There was no break in Archie's breathing. Picking his way through the stray leaves that strewed the ground, he tiptoed to the door.
He must have made a sound in unlacing the flap.
'What is it?' came Archie's quiet voice.
'I heard something.'
'Lion?'
'Leopard, I thought.'
Archie was beside him.
'Thank you,' he said, and took the gun. Dick had already laid the cartridge bag on the ground.
Together they interrogated the sleepers by the fire. Archie—'damnably thorough,' thought Dick—searched for spoor with a hurricane lamp.
'I must have imagined it,' said Dick, when they had regained the tent.
'Looks like it,' replied Archie dryly. Then 'Wake me next time you want my gun,' he said.
But whatever suspicion he may have framed about his guest, it did not keep him awake, and soon his regular breathing formed an accompaniment to Dick's night thoughts. Not that they were very coherent. The grotesque failure of his plot, whose attempt, you must admit, had taken some resolution, left him physically exhausted and emptied. He lay crushed almost beyond feeling, while the hours that were left him to find a solution passed.
Consciousness of this flight of time forced him to bend his will to fresh scheming. But his anxious thought produced nothing more heroic than the decision to ask Norah what to do. After all it was she who had deserted Archie, and she ought to have her say in the handling of him. As soon as it was light he would slip down and lay the matter before her. 'Shift the responsibility on to her,' would have been honester phrasing, for Dick was by now a beaten man.
But even this wouldn't work. The curse of abortion seemed to descend on every plan he devised. If he left at dawn, Archie, his suspicions over the name question reinforced by the gun episode, would be only too glad to start on his way without wasting more time over an unsatisfactory individual who fortunately had disappeared.
And with Archie, intolerable thought, would vanish hope of life. Everything seemed to swing round in a vicious circle to focus the spotlight on the whip in Archie's hand.
Was there no other course than a full confession at the eleventh hour? To wake the man up and say, 'I've seduced your wife, I've told you a pack of lies. I've tried to steal your gun and leave you to starve. Now will you get me out of this hole, please?'
It wasn't thinkable. At the same time, it was inevitable. What else.... What else...."
* * * * * * *
"I have always," said Ross, "felt a profound admiration for the last Earl of Derwentwater who, when his army was surrounded at Preston in the '15, went to bed.
Dick in a similarly untenable position fell asleep."
The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of the guide who was to lead the way down the hills. Until he came there seemed no object in waking Brown or whatever his real name was.
By nature incurious, Archie could not help suspecting that there was something wrong about the man. It was not natural to find so feckless a being alone in the wilds. He seemed, moreover, to have something to conceal. Archie liked them with less looks and more honesty. What the devil had he been doing in the middle of the night with his gun? A queer bird.
But the man was in a hole—a baddish hole—and out here it was up to one white man to help another. He began to make plans. Most of them were blocked by the man's wife. You couldn't ask a woman to do too much. What sort of a wife would the chap have? Something fair and fluffy and adoring, he decided. He wasn't too sure they were married. That would explain some of the mystery ... not that it was any of his business.
As he came to this fallacious conclusion, the thin sweetness of whistling trickled through the quiet of the forest like tinsel against night.
'Another white man,' thought Archie. 'The place is like Piccadilly.' Then he reflected that Mrs. Brown must be coming up the hill to join her husband and wondered with a twist of his lip whether she would have the presence of mind to answer to that name.
The whistling started again, closer. Why did that syncopated phrase bring the colour of emeralds before his eyes? Were the words about emeralds? More like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the rest of the rural spots that American song writers ache to revisit.
Then he remembered: it was an emerald green shawl crossed tightly over a woman's flexible shoulders. The fringe hung to the ankle whose silk-clad movement caught and lost the light as her foot tapped to the rhythm. Her back was framed in the lighted blank of a long window that gave on to the London street where he stood smoking. Dawn was near, and a grey light invaded the ball-room, revealing the pallor of the electricity, the withering of the flowers, the weariness of the women.
She had half turned to her companion, and Archie, invisible in the square, had rested his gaze on the silhouetted curve of her cheek. She moved again, and it gripped his heart to see how tired her eyes were. What a little thing she looked with her figure held firmly by that emerald shawl!
Funny how the whistled tune recalled that picture of Norah and all that sort of life.... Ah, well! in a few months now, when the cattle deal was through and the ivory sold, he'd have made her happy by taking her back. The price of ivory must be somewhere about twelve shillings now, but...
At that moment Norah stepped into the sunlit clearing. Coming from under the close shadow of the forest, she was dazzled, the oblique rays of the sun shining in her face. Archie rose to meet her, amazed. How had she found him? What had brought her? What was her need of him?
Never free with words, wonder held him silent, conscious only of gladness that she was there. But gladness left him when recognition dawned in the shocked eyes she shaded from the sun. Not for him, they revealed, had she come.
Her arm raised against the sun went out, pushing something away, and her face as she looked down was bloodless. So she stood for a second, then up went her chin with the old defiant gesture.
'Why did you follow me?' she said, her deep voice damped down till he could hardly hear.
'Follow you?' he repeated.
'Didn't you understand what I wrote?' she asked.
The pause which followed was long, even for Archie's conversational methods. Speech was forced on her again.
'The letter I left you at the farm.'
'The farm? I've been in the Congo.'
'You don't know...?'
'Know what, Norah?' his voice, usually expressionless, seemed to plead; 'tell me, what has happened.'
'In a minute, Archie. Give me that packing-case to sit on, will you. I've been on short rations lately.'
She noticed that, bringing the box, he fumbled like a blind man.
He pressed her to have breakfast before she talked.
'No,' she said, 'I must get this over first,' and regretted the ungracious words when she saw him flinch. If you mind that...' she began. 'Archie, you mustn't mind anything about me. I can't bear you to mind.'
His reply fell so low that she had to strain her ears to catch it. The words confirmed her flash of understanding.
'You,' he murmured reluctantly, 'are the only thing I mind about. As long as nothing's happened to you.'
A few seconds had passed since Norah had stepped into the sun. In that space she had ranged the gamut of emotion. The first sight of Archie had dazzled her brain, as the sun her eyes. For a moment the earth had reeled in a vertigo. And its reeling hurled her into a lake of shame that stung like the fumes of ammonia: shame at the ludicrous, the indecent figure she cut. Anger succeeded. Anger with Archie, whose pursuit had put her in this intolerable position. How like a man, she thought, to come to recapture the woman he had not troubled to keep! How blundering! How undignified!
Archie's first words dispelled her resentment. And his patent sincerity was troubling. Was there some mistake? ... And somehow she saw Archie for the first time for months—or was it years?—saw something she had missed.... Archie's rigid face, his voice so resolutely kept from trembling told her there was another unconsidered facet in her romance. With all her high thinking, her regard for loyalty, bond, rights, she had missed the one factor that denied her freedom—that Archie might still care.
He cared. Must have cared all the time. The distress he failed to conceal did not spring from the outraged vanity of a husband wounded in his pride of possession. The hurt was deeper, deep in his undemonstrative heart.
She was naturally sensitive to others' suffering, and it seemed to her that not only Archie, not only herself, but the whole forest vibrated with pain. She had created it: nothing she could do would dull it.
She found herself resenting the pity that tore her heart—that desolating, impotent, futile pity! What was the good of pity, affection even, for Archie, when it was passion she felt for Dick. All that remorse could do was to blunt, to sully that passion. It was too late to think of Archie's feelings now. She could only go forward.
'Archie!' she said. He was standing with his back turned to her, his hands deep in his pockets, clenched, they must have been, and tightly, for the veins on his arms to stand up like that. 'Archie, stay there, don't turn round till I've told you.'
He made neither sign nor sound.
'Archie, I think I'm going to hurt you. I've only just seen...' Words, words which altered nothing, spared nothing. She spoke quickly, raising her voice. 'That letter, the letter that's waiting at the farm, said I was ... was leaving you.'
'Leaving me,' he repeated her statement, his voice toneless like a sleep-walker's.
Suddenly he whipped round, for the instant mastered by his emotion. He caught her shoulder and held her at arm's length. That night she found the bruise, but at the time she felt the pain no more than he knew he inflicted it.
'Why, Norah, why? I thought we were going to be so happy. I never knew. Never guessed. Tell me, why?'
She felt explanation impossible. Her hands came out to touch him, but fell helpless to her sides.
'But I never meant to hurt you so, my dear,' she said.
He let go of her shoulder, slowly, regretfully, as though he touched her body for the last time.
'There's nothing,' he said. 'Nothing I can do?'
She shook her head. His hopes must be killed.
'There's another man,' she said.
'That——'
'Dick Ward,' she interrupted him.
'That fellow who came to my fire last night?'
She nodded.
'Why in hell did I let them light the fire,' he said. 'He'd have starved then.'
He walked abruptly to the tent and kicked at the flap.
'Come out of that!'
'What's the matter?' Dick's voice did not sound as unconcerned as he would have wished.
'You come out!'
'No need to speak like that,' and Dick emerged. He thought it wise to ignore Archie. 'Hallo, Norah,' he said. 'Why didn't you wait at the camp?'
The assumption of ownership was ill-timed. Archie's sunburnt face went brick red, and he came very close to Dick.
'If you don't clear out, I'll break you up.'
Dick Ward towered above his adversary, but there his advantage ended. He carried too much flesh, and his splendid torso looked best under a tennis shirt. But Archie's muscles had been worked into steel by twenty-five-mile days after elephant, and made him as awkward an opponent as a six-inch shell.
'My dear Sinclair,' said Dick, 'we must talk this over like men of the world.' The tone of patronage alone would have been enough. Archie's feet shifted and his right knee turned and bent for the upper-cut that in another second would have smashed upwards under Dick's jaw, when Norah's low voice broke in:—
'Archie! Dick! Don't; you're making things worse!'
Her instinct was to save her lover. He was in danger, he was her lover. The pity she had lately felt for Archie was in a way disloyalty to Dick.
The men stood tense. Archie did not relax his wound-up muscles.
'Archie!' she cried, whipping her nerves that anger might overlay compassion, 'Archie, come here. For the love of God, behave like a civilised being!'
'I told him to go,' said Archie sullenly. But he lowered his eyes from his enemy's and his fist slowly loosened.
'How can he go?'
'Why not?'
'Where can he go to? Do you mean him to starve?'
Archie shrugged his shoulders. What happened to Dick was indifferent to him, provided he went. Norah blew on the embers of her passion to kindle a blaze that should scorch pity from her heart.
'Very well. We'll go,' she said.
Archie did not answer and silence closed in on them, a sinister silence like the patch of calm in the centre of a typhoon. They waited. Dick paced about the camp. He did not try to hide the commotion of his nerves. To Norah sitting still on her box, time seemed to be measured into lengths. Something must come now ... or now ... or now.
And as she waited, she watched over the trees a falcon with the blue-grey plumage of a dove hang under the hard blue heaven motionless, save for its questing head. Then it swooped. Would Archie's completed thought deal death like that?
But when he spoke it was in a lower tone.
'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I don't know what to do. Norah'—he turned to her with appeal in his eyes—'I must be quiet, don't you see, and think. I must get things clear.'
This was an Archie whom Norah knew better than the hard, decided, almost fierce animal that had just threatened Dick. He wanted to think things out.
'I must be alone,' he went on; then flamed out again. 'For God's sake send him away for half an hour.'
'Dick,' said Norah steadily, 'you'd better go down to the camp.' His eyes signalled to her to come too. Archie divined the intention.
'Norah,' he began, 'don't, just for now, don't...' then bitterness broke over him. 'Oh, well, it doesn't matter by now, does it?'
She resigned herself to the rack and promised to stay with him while Dick went down to the lake. But Archie spared her. He was going, he said, to walk in the hills, and called Matao to give her breakfast.
'I ought to have seen that Ward had breakfast,' he said. Then as he paced away into the forest she thought she could detect the words, 'they serve breakfast in the condemned cell....'
In moments of danger Norah's romanticism had a way of lapsing, leaving her as practical as a Swiss hotel-keeper. She ate a good meal of cold roan. She knew she would need all her strength to keep Archie and Dick apart. Moreover, if this was to be her last breakfast, it should be a good one.
She did not suppose that even this new, incalculable Archie contemplated leaving her to starve; she was less sure about his plans for Dick. And of course she would stay with Dick.
'Her honour rooted in dishonour stood.And faith unfaithful kept her falsely true.'
A tag that Miss Briggs had taught her in the schoolroom as an example of some eccentricity of grammar or other. It was sometimes true of life.
She must be prepared for anything. Archie might not act in hot blood: he might think things out, but she was not reassured. The Archie she knew had a habit of logical thought. And if this unfamiliar man of action came to the conclusion that it was not his business to succour the enemy within his gates, he would translate his ideas into deeds.
As she meditated the change she saw in Archie, a sound caught her ear, and looking up she saw Dick signalling to her from the edge of the clearing. With a shrug she walked across to him. She noticed that his hair was still untidy and his clothes crumpled from the night spent without his gear.
'This isn't fair!' she said, when she reached him.
'Is he here?' he asked anxiously.
'Archie's in the hills, but I promised ... why couldn't you wait?'
He stepped into the open. 'I couldn't, Norah, not alone; down on that shore.'
'I did last night.' She did not tell him she had not dared sleep or that she had taken to the hills as soon as she could see the white mist that rose from the warm water of the lake.
'I didn't have much of a night either,' said Dick, and related how Archie's identity had been disclosed.
He told his story in jerks, with quick glances over his shoulder and exaggerated gestures. Norah guessed that his nerves were breaking under the strain. His poise, his assurance was shattered. His debonair bearing had shrunk to the rags of a swagger that he pulled round him when fear allowed.
'What's he going to do, Norah? For Christ's sake, what is he going to do?'
She shook her head. 'I don't know,' she said.
He jumped at a sudden snap of a branch. A carrier had stepped on a dry twig.
'What was he saying to you? I couldn't hear.'
'That he must be alone and think.'
Dick's voice went shrill. 'You say he's sitting there, thinking in cold blood whether he'll let us starve?'
She shrugged her shoulders. She believed Archie was doing more than that. He was trying to save something out of a wrecked universe. If she had not exaggerated the look in his eyes, he might even be struggling for sanity.
Dick might be right that their fate swam in the crucible, but she was so desolately unhappy it hardly seemed to matter. Dick's misery took a less stoical form.
'It's awful,' he was saying, 'hanging about to hear what he settles. We might be criminals in the dock. It's worse, for there the judge is not your enemy.'
Norah made no comment. What was the good of all this talk? ... and, well, she preferred Archie's way of taking a knock. Couldn't Dick spare her this pitiful sight into his soul? Was she cursed to torture her husband and debase her lover?
'You don't seem to see, Norah,' he went on after a glance over his shoulder, 'if he turns us off, we've got food left for one day, for one day, till to-morrow. Then three, four, or five days more we'll suffer the tortures of starvation. About Sunday we'll die.' His voice was out of his control. 'Die, do you understand?' He paused, and his fingers twisted restlessly. 'By Tuesday, in a week's time, Norah, by Tuesday we'll be rotten. Don't you understand?'
'Always the little ray of sunshine,' said Norah.
His hands went up to his head. 'Oh! you must think me a beast to say these things to you, but don't you see, you must go to your husband and get him to ... to stay. He'll listen to you, if you beg him. He can't have the heart. Ask for time anyhow. Plead with him. If you must, promise him...'
'To go back?' Her voice was hard.
Dick averted his eyes. 'Afterwards, things will be different. Anything may happen ... provided we are alive.'
'Dick,' said Norah passionately, 'I may be a rotter and a whore: d'you want to make me a coward too?'
'But don't you see...'
'For Heaven's sake shut up; you're making me hate you!'
When Archie left his camp, he had wandered aimlessly in the forest until he noticed a boulder, and sat down. Below him lay the lake as blue as the Virgin's robe. He could see the mountains of the farther shore, their tops ruled straight by cloud. They reminded him of Table Mountain and his landing with Norah at Cape Town when hope was high.
At his back towered the nearer lip of the crater. Its height seemed to disparage his emotion. How long would this mortal and his ephemeral trouble endure? The bitterness, which had succeeded his anger, passed and left him with a dazed sense of loss, in which consecutive thought was stilled. Pictures of the happiness, turned so suddenly to dust, rose in his mind:—
Norah's tawny hair, rebellious under her nurse's coif; Norah's slender hands opposite him at dinner tinged by the shaded candlelight; the way she used to throw herself into his arms when he came back on leave; a fluffy sort of dressing-gown she once had; and so on down the years of love and marriage till the moment when he heard that ragtime tune in the forest, whistled so gaily ... before she knew he was there.
That hurt worst of all. His mind ached into the vast query—Why? Why had he lost her? He had never understood how she came to love him, but what had he done to make that miracle cease? If she had only told him!
Her outburst on the farm, which sent him hurrying to the Congo, had come as a revelation. Manlike, he had assumed she liked the life she had chosen. And all the time...
He felt no anger against Norah. By some illogical working of his love she seemed to stand apart. Though his mind recorded her infidelity and reeled at it, his heart was filled with gracious recollections of her. What she was and had been, did not seem to be obliterated by what she did and what was done to her.
His hate focused blindingly on Dick Ward. Imagination of that coarseness defiling his wife's body drove the blood boiling to his brain, but he never thought of her as defiled. He was tormented by the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved, still loved, would always love.
But the swine who had killed her—lust for his blood mounted. To shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no great thing. If the war had not already shown him that, these years in the forest had dwarfed the importance of mankind. And his standards had been warped by these last weeks spent in the slaughter of monsters that take the three score years and ten of man's span to reach the stature that fits them for killing.
So for a while his mind played with the killing of Dick Ward ... until the memory that already the man's life was in his hands stayed him. In his pain he had lost sight of the crisis that before his appearance had faced Ward and Norah. He saw that he had only to stand aside and execution would be done. Or rather, since no harm must come to Norah, take her on alone with him, regaining his wife and obliterating her lover.
But all the time he saw the impossibility. He could not leave a man to die whom he had promised to help. Still less could he kill him. In a way Ward was his guest; he had come to Archie without food, or hope. His defencelessness protected him. And the duty that one white man in the wilds owes another, backed by the African tradition of help and hospitality, demanded his rescue.
Dick's helplessness, had he known it, was his strength.
So what Archie would have called 'being decent' prevailed, and, painfully, he began to plan the immediate future. He welcomed, indeed, anything that held his mind away from thought of his loss, the three lives.
The outcome of that salvation—what would afterwards become of Norah, Ward, and himself—he did not attempt to guess.
At last his ideas were in order. In spite of the heat he shivered as he got up to return to camp."
The first face he saw was Dick's. In spite of the heat through canvas, Norah had retired into the tent. Archie wondered if it was to show she had not sent for Ward. 'Damn the fellow,' he muttered, 'can't he see he's asking for trouble.'
That wouldn't do, he reflected; in a minute he'd be at the man's throat. Must be normal; what was it Norah had said—'Be civilised'?
His attempt at normality and civility would have made an angel laugh.
'Rain's coming,' he growled.
'Yes,' replied Dick, and wondered whether this was the small talk of the tribunal before the black cap is assumed, 'that's why it's so appallingly hot, I suppose.'
Archie stared at him inimically. Dick's face was wet with sweat and his silk shirt stuck to his body. 'Heat or funk?' thought Archie uncharitably. But the limpness of the leaves and the attentions of the flies told him how hot it really was. And yet he was shivering. Fever coming, he concluded. Damned nuisance just now.
'Yes,' he said aloud, 'the rains.'
He could stand the fellow's physical presence no longer, and turned to the tent.
'Norah,' he said, 'we must make our plans.... I say, you oughtn't to be in this furnace.'
'I promised you...' she replied slowly.
He stared at her. Then some promises were binding! That wouldn't do either. If he was to go through this show decently he must rule out bitterness as well as anger.
They walked into the shade. Dick followed. His restless eyes, his fingers twining and loosing revealed his anxiety. Archie felt the pervading suspense and saw that for all his distaste for explanation he must declare himself. At last he broke the silence which seemed so intolerable to Dick's tormented nerves. His words were commonplace enough.
'This is a rotten position,' he said, and added, 'for all of us,' then paused for thought. 'If we were anywhere else,' he went on, 'I'd go away. A long way away, and let time'—he felt for a word—'mend things.' Another silence. 'Unless I called you out and shot you'—his rapid whisper was more startling than a shout. 'But, as it is, I can't clear out, or you'd both starve.'
Dick wiped his forehead.
'So we've got to stick together,' ended Archie, 'till we're out of this hole.'
Norah felt no relief. Between them in their several ways, these men made life more dreadful than death.
Archie began again. He was speaking now to Dick, though his eyes looked beyond him. 'I make one condition,' he said. 'I must have sole charge. You must do what I say. Otherwise I can't promise to pull it off.' He might have added that if Dick was to oppose him at every turn he couldn't promise restraint. 'Do you agree?' he asked curtly.
In his relief Dick would have agreed to change his creed.
I'm sure you're right,' he said, 'unity of command.' The reprieve had gone to his head like wine, and he talked light-headedly. 'By Jove, the heat! I felt suffocated.' But no whisper of a breeze had come to dissipate the heaviness that lay on the land. 'What's your scheme to get away?' he asked.
Archie forced himself to answer.
'Move down to lake level first.'
'Why not go on up here?'
'Blast the man,' thought Archie. Then aloud, 'How many days will it take us with Norah,' he hesitated before mentioning her Christian name to this fellow, 'to find a village?'
Dick spread out his hands.
'Well, I don't know either. We might be out of ammunition first. And what about water? And where are we going to get carriers for your loads from?'
Dick agreed brightly that by sticking to the lake their water supply was assured. It did not strike him that in his relief his words were not very profound. The business of striking camp proceeded.
'You'll have my tent, Norah,' said Archie, and gave Matao directions to have a shelter built for him.
Dick's exhilaration vanished. He opened his mouth to speak, but a menace in Archie's eye dissuaded him. He kicked at a partly consumed log and hummed gloomily. Archie's withdrawal to pack his kit at last gave him the opportunity to murmur something to Norah about 'rubbing things in.'
'Do you expect me to sleep with you under my husband's eyes?' she asked. 'Aren't you a trifleexigeant? Besides,' she added bitterly, 'you told me just now to make up to him.'
His retort was prevented by footsteps behind him. He turned and saw that he was being offered a couple of cartridges.
'Two rounds of 7.9 stuff I brought by accident.' Archie explained. 'Found them in my kit. They'll fit your Mauser.'
When the loads were ready, the string of carriers, with Changalilo at their head, straggled down the hill. The three Europeans, after a visible hesitation, followed. If their mutual company was unendurable, to descend singly at intervals would be grotesque. So these two men and their woman, the prey of all the forces that civilisation works to repress, hatred, love, fear, shame, pity, danger, were constrained by their sense of—was it humour or reticence?—to observe the usages of daily intercourse.
They passed the foot of the blow-hole chimney where Norah had sighted Changalilo the night before, and the view that was revealed gave them a momentary relief from the pain of thought.
All the week the clouds that herald the rains had packed closer and closer on the horizon, till now they lay like a litter of discoloured wool.
Across the lake the mountain tops which had been hidden in haze, stood out in the sun-bathed clarity of a primitive painting. Their crags and ravines, diminutive in the distance, looked as if human fingers had pinched and dinted them into the powder-green relief of a plaster map. Black against this green lay the foothills in the shadow of the cloud bank. The foreground was blocked by the near headland, heavily green with the green of English elms in August. Every tree that grew there was distinct, and the grass at their feet. At the water's edge gleamed pillars of white rock.
'I wish the rains would come,' said Norah at the end of a silence. 'I feel as if I were breathing hot fluff.'
But with the weight on her heart she would hardly have noticed the stifling heat, had she not dreaded the working of that suffocation on the men's nerves. As she glanced away from Archie's pale face she tried to forget the tales of violence, murder, suicide committed often on almost frivolous grounds in the exasperation of the heat that heralds the rains.
Here at lake level, close to the equator, the dagger of jealousy and despair hilt-deep in his brain, might not Archie find suicide or murder the only solution?
It was agony to be so impotent to avert the doom that hung over the two men she had loved and crucified. She felt, or imagined, their hot, angry eyes on her, and dared not look up lest she loosed the lightning. She alone could lay the passions she had so heedlessly aroused; and any word, any gesture almost, might precipitate the latent madness.
She was aware that the strain of the intolerable position could not endure; unless she lessened it something would snap. And the life of one or both of the men would pay. When death from starvation had threatened, she had pictured herself in a short dark corridor of days. In front stretched an iron-grey screen like a fireproof curtain. Behind it lay ... what? Now danger of death had lifted, and still the screen was there. Her mind was pinned to the emergency of the moment, but even had that urgent menace receded, she would not have dared to lift the curtain. What lay in store for her, she made no attempt to divine. Life with Dick, life with Archie, life alone? The future was too dreadful to contemplate, the ruin she had wrought too radical. And if—what she dreaded—took place, she would be making plans for men who would be dead at their fruition.
For the moment she anchored her conduct to the only course that she felt could not do harm. By a manner resolutely matter of fact, she might create a conventional atmosphere, might maintain the dangerous equilibrium of the moment until the impulse to violence died.
Archie, it seemed, when the vulture that tore at his entrails would let him, had resolved on the same conduct.
'What about resting here a bit?' he asked.
'I don't believe it's much good. It's as hot sitting as walking. What wouldn't I give for a breeze!'
'It may be days before it breaks,' said Archie. 'But if you're not tired the sooner we get down and start work the better.'
'What are you meaning to do?' asked Dick aggressively.
By now he had lost his fear of Archie. Enmity and suspicion had taken its place. He paid with hatred for the panic that had gripped his heart, for the doubts kindled in Norah's mind, for the glamour stripped from him. Where once he had felt contemptuous pity, an uncertain jealousy flickered. He hated Archie because he held the whiphand; he hated and despised him for not using it. He despised him that he might not despise himself. And he was uneasy. Why had the man promised to save him? Why, above all things, had he given him that ammunition? Was there a trap?
He wished he had not agreed to Sinclair's leadership. That condition, now he examined it, left the way open to every treachery. Was there a plot to separate him from Norah and let him starve?...
With all her drastic methods, Africa seems to have brought little out in Dick but a certain animal cunning. It was in a spirit of suspicious enmity that he asked the question which opened the discussion.
'What am I meaning to do?' repeated Archie. He refrained from adding, 'What in hell's that to you?'
'Yes,' said Dick.
'Build a raft, if you want to know.'
'A raft?'
'Look here——' said Archie, but Norah intervened in time.
'To get over to theMimi, Archie?'
'To get along the coast.' Archie struggled with his instinct to produce a completed job, discussing it neither before nor after. But his reasonable nature told him that, where he gambled with the lives of others, they had a right to see his play.
By now they had reached the camp by the ruins. Under a stream of exhortation from Matao some of the carriers had started to pitch Norah's tent; others were cutting boughs for the shelter.
Norah led the way into the shade. The men followed.
'As far as I can see,' Archie began, 'there are three ways out that aren't too risky.'
He stopped and looked up at the sky, which was now heavy with cloud. The heat, however, was fiercer, as though a lid had been shut down on them.
'The weather matters too,' he explained.
'You were saying you had three plans,' said Dick.
Archie continued to address Norah. He told her that his first idea had been to stay where they were and wait for rescue, relying on the game they could shoot with the remaining ammunition, helped out perhaps by fish from the lake. The objection to this simple plan was that the game would move away and ammunition might be exhausted before help came.
'Alibaba said twelve days,' put in Norah.
'Doubt it,' muttered Archie. 'One of the Bulamatadi boats is in dry dock. Or so they told me at Songwe. They mightn't be in a hurry to send. Anyhow, it's a risk.'
There was a distant rumble of thunder.
'That may go on for weeks before anything happens,' said Archie.
'Or,' he went on, 'we could ferry over to theMimi. What you said. I don't believe we'd be any better off. Any meat they could spare wouldn't go far among all of us. They'll have wasted half. More likely we'll have to feed them. And Ward's ammunition—that'll have gone by now. No native can resist cartridges.'
Norah remembered what had looked like the ammunition chest at the bottom of the disappearing dinghy. Its value would explain the Hindoo's incorruptibility. She expressed her conviction, and, at the mention of the Indian, Dick broke into curses.
'The third way,' Archie began again, 'has got the points of the other two. If we made a couple of rafts, we can tap theMimifor anything in her that's any use, and we can coast along the shore with game and fish always handy. Sooner or later we must come to a fishing village.
'Danger,' he added, 'is squalls and crocs.'
Dick considered the scheme. If there was a trap, it was well hidden.
'It seems all right,' he admitted.
'That's most gratifying,' replied Archie, and Norah reflected that the squalls which would follow the coming of rain might be less dangerous than the heat which came before it.
'We're wasting time,' said Archie, and calling Matao he gave him his orders in Chi-wemba.
The hardwoods, he explained when he had finished, Kayimbi, Mulombwa, Mubanga and the rest, would not float. But there was a little light timber from which the natives cut their canoes.
'It's scattered about the hills,' he said. 'I'll have to blaze it before we start felling'—but his eyes showed his hesitation to leave his wife with her lover. She wondered what to do. If she offered to come, Dick might be stung to dangerous speech.
'I'll go and lie down,' she said. 'I've got a headache.'
An hour later, the apparently deserted hills echoed with the resonant chopping of axes. A dozen wooden bells seemed scattered in the forest as the tall trunks sounded with a rhythmicclop! clop!under the soft native iron. A rending, splitting noise, and the first tree, with the swish of a gigantic broom, tore through the boughs, prostrating its neighbours. The wooden bells clanked on as its limbs were hacked from it.
Soon Norah found the heat of the tent unbearable. She wandered to the shore, where she hoped a breeze might be perceptible. But the water was as smooth as a mirror. She faced inland. A tree top taller than the rest caught her eye. It stirred. The wind must be rising, although her wet face felt no breath. The tree trembled now. Its boughs waved, although wind seemed no more than a memory of the dead. The tree swayed. A modulated sway that lengthened with each period, until with a splintering crash it submerged beneath the ripple of the surrounding leaves. It was man's work she saw, not the wind's.
A native issued from the dark line of the forest. The light caught the tawny bundle he carried. Approaching the lake, he tossed a small log into the water that the splash might scare any crocodile which lurked there; then he bent and pushed the tangles of lushishi, broad strips of flexible bark, into the silvery margin. He hooked his axe over his naked shoulder and went off in search of more. To-morrow, Norah knew, the sodden lushishi would be twisted into rough ropes to lash the raft.
She pictured the adventure of the raft and shrank from the heavy hours that awaited the three of them cramped side by side on that narrow platform.
Archie had said 'two rafts,' but one would carry the loads and the carriers who were not needed to paddle their masters. It was a pity a sense of the ridiculous did not allow one raft to each European. Jealousy, shame, hatred demand more footage than a raft can give. All the world may be too little.
But she was glad Archie had not decided to wait in the bay. Her instinct that tragedy pervaded the deserted settlement had had foundation. It now urged escape before tragedy deepened.
She heard a European tread on the shingle and turned to find Archie.
That's started,' he said. 'I'll ask Ward to keep an eye on them while I try to get a buck.' Determined to pursue any indifferent topic, she asked what sort of game he expected to find.
'Might be anything. But I must keep on till I find something big and fairly eatable. Dwyka or klipspringer are too small to be worth a cartridge, while zebra or waterbuck ... I tried eating zebra the other day!"
She sympathised. There was a pause; both felt awkward.
'I've told off a man,' pursued Archie resolutely, 'to make snares and things. Though I don't believe they ever catch much in them. Those drop traps are the best. A beam poised over a gap in a bit of fence. We might get some small stuff that way—a katiri or even a bush pig. Doubt it, though.'
'Fish?' said Norah, remembering her efforts of the day before.
'Yes, that's what I wanted to ask you. I've told Matao to find some one with ideas; when he comes will you keep an eye on him?'
'They're all Awemba, I suppose?' She knew that that once warlike people had no water-lore.
'Yes, and Matao was shocked when I told him to find one with an Awisa[1] mother.'
[1] The Awisa, with a certain knowledge of the simpler arts of peace, were conquered and swamped by the purely predatory Awemba.
After a moment of hesitation Archie left her. She saw him speak to Dick, then with his gun under his arm he disappeared into the trees.
As she watched him go, she could not restrain a feeling of admiration. In days past she had jibbed at his thoroughness. She saw its value now. The practical man might not cut a romantic figure; but for coping with romantic situations, he could give a stone to any Lohengrin or Lancelot. His cautious, deliberate nature, how it used to irritate her! How irresolute she had often thought him! But now she sighed for a little less resolution in his handling of Dick. Only the deliberate humour she had once despised could avert tragedy. But how formidable the forces against its return!"
Two or three big drops of rain fell. Norah made her way slowly back to camp. Near the ruins she was stopped by Dick, already tired of watching the woodcutters. She noticed that access to his shaving tackle had restored his freshness.
'Norah,' he said, with his hint of a brogue, 'why have you been keeping away from me all day, the day I needed you most?'
Norah, never less inclined for sentiment, found two answers ready to her lips; the first, that any attention to him might set Archie at his throat, too melodramatic; the second, that in his present mood he was best left alone, too brutal. So she remained silent.
'What was Sinclair saying to you on the beach?' he asked.
'Nothing much. Being decent.'
Dick's face darkened.
'You mean I'm not?'
'Well, the way you come to me the moment his back's turned, makes me look pretty cheap,' she said dispassionately.
'How can I talk to you before him? Be fair, Norah.'
'Is there anything to talk about?' she asked. 'Isn't all as bad as we can make it without more talk?'
'All right,' said Dick, 'I'll go back to the wood-cutting. If you'd rather talk to Sinclair...'
'Oh! Dick,' she cried. 'Don't let's quarrel. It's horrible enough, without that!'
'Our love's horrible?'
'I didn't mean that. The world's horrible; life's ugly, cruel. I thought I was finding something beautiful, and all I've done is to hurt, betray, spoil....'
Dick's jealousy boiled over.
'What makes you suddenly so careful of Sinclair's feelings?' he asked. 'He had his chance of you. He wasn't man enough to keep you.'
Norah was silent. Why couldn't Dick shut up?
'But he's trying to get you back. I know it.'
'You think he'd take me back?' she asked the question half bitterly, half soberly, and for a moment she fingered the sheet, draping a future that lay as imperturbable as a corpse.
'Do you want him to?' said Dick violently. 'I'd rather see you dead first.'
'It isn't on the cards,' she stated quietly. She had no clear idea of her own hopes, let alone Archie's intentions. She said as much to Dick. He caught up her words.
'Yes, what's he up to, Norah?' Dick's voice was eager. 'What's his game? Hasn't he given any idea?'
'Has he any "game"?' she asked wearily. 'Unless fighting with beasts in your heart is a game.'
'Why did he give me those cartridges?' persisted Dick. 'He wasn't keen on me touching his ammunition last night!' he added with a laugh, and made Norah the confidante of his nocturnal adventure.
As a word, or a tune, or a scent may fire a train of latent memory and illumine or connect experiences till then dark and unrelated, so Dick's story threw across his actions a beam as unsparing as the blue glare of some great arc light in a main street that midnight, rain, and frost had emptied.
Memories crossed her mind like pictures on a screen. Again Dick humbled himself on the shore of the lake, and again she heard the paddles splash as the Hindoo disappeared across the water. She saw Dick's helpless stare as he sat limply on the pile of baggage contemplating the disaster he had provoked and was impotent to stem. She felt him tugging at her sleeves in naked terror of Archie's decision in the hills. His breath was warm on her face, urging her to beg the man they had wronged for a few days' life. She blushed with shame at his advice to offer to go back, a promise, said he, that need not be kept.
A dozen times he was convicted of meanness, ingratitude, treachery. She saw for a bungler and a coward the man she had left all to follow. The man she had loved—that she still loved for all she knew. Feeling was dried out of her by pain and anxiety, but her brain told her that, if ever the crisis passed, she would find the image of Dick still near her heart.
And Archie, while she could see each of his virtues—pluck, loyalty, gentleness—written in letters of fire, she knew that never again could he quicken her pulses.
Hot scorn of herself and her lover filled her veins, but she did not voice it. All her wit was devoted to the task of keeping the men from each other's throats. She scrutinised every word before she spoke it, that nothing she said might send the precarious triangle, at whose apex she stood, heeling to disaster.
So while her realisation of Dick's unworth penetrated her brain as lead is melted and poured into a mould, she was guiding the conversation to soothe his ruffled vanity: and not until she felt her end attained did she leave him on the excuse that she must see about the fishing.
On her way to the beach she was met by a note from Archie asking her to send six men to carry in a hartebeeste he had shot. With a sigh of relief she dismissed one anxiety. There was food now for all for a day or two.
It was dusk before the procession returned in pairs, the dismembered limbs of the buck swinging from freshly-cut poles that rested on their bowed shoulders. Anxious to regain the firelight before dark, their knees were bent and their hips swung in a gliding trot. One arm supported the pole, the other held a spear or axe. Behind them walked Archie with his gun over his shoulder. He gave orders for the meat to be spread on the ground beside the fire and bade the tense, black circle stand farther back.
'In this heat the stuff will be rotten by to-morrow night,' he remarked. 'They won't mind, though.'
He told Changalilo to take the saddle for the European table, and watched while Matao with an axe divided the rest between the natives. They knelt and clapped their hands in salutation before they withdrew, clasping each man his sanguinary portion. Soon a ring of bright little fires half-burnt, half-smoked the spitted meat, and the night was full of soft voices and high-pitched laughter.
Archie subsided into a deck-chair and sat silent, his head in his hands. Nervous of his thoughts, Norah inquired about the kill.
He had had to cover a lot of ground, he answered, uttering his words carefully. No, there wasn't a herd; a solitary ram, turned out probably for his bad temper; grazing behind an anthill. He was hoping she would not hear his teeth clattering against each other. Pains that started from the base of his skull and shot across his head assured him that an attack of malaria threatened.
With an effort he answered Norah, who, anxious to cover Dick's silence, had asked another question.
'One round,' he said, 'heart shot.'
When at last dinner came he could not eat it. As soon as the others had done, he withdrew to his shelter. Though she guessed he was ill, Norah did not dare to follow, and after enduring Dick's sullen monologue retired early to the tent Archie had allotted her. Body triumphed over mind, and she slept as soon as she had stretched herself on her bed.
In the early hours of the morning she woke. She was conscious at once, before thought returned, of the oppression of impending disaster that had been her waking burden. Then she remembered.
Refreshed by sleep, her brain took up its round, searching for the path that led to safety. She saw at last why that search had been futile. Till now she had not dared face the future, to imagine what lay behind the curtain. A flash of insight revealed that she must pledge her future if she was to cope with the present.... For a time she fought off the question that clawed at her brain. At last she confronted it—'Must I give up Dick?' she asked herself.
With reluctant clearness she saw that, if she gave up her lover and told her husband, she would sterilise the soil so fertile with violence. But could she pay the price of sacrifice and humiliation? Could she let Dick go? Though all passion was buried under ashes, Dick was still a part of her subconscious life. She could not at once uproot the vivid memories of their few weeks together. Her emotions were in a state of suspended animation, shut off, not dead. What needs might not arise in that future she shrank from visualising!
Moreover, Dick loved her. Must he pay the price as well? Must she go on racking the men who loved her and inflict on Dick the anguish Archie seemed to suffer?
When she was sinking into a morass of conflicting emotion, pride came to her help. Whatever else she felt for Dick, she knew that she despised him. Contempt makes an ill bedfellow. A woman can love a weak man whom she pities; she is too practical to trust her life to a man she despises.
Almost against her will, Norah's mood hardened. The tent stifled her. She must make this cruel decision in the open air. Slipping into a cloak, she stepped into the moonlight.
The natives, less black than their shadows, slept in contorted postures about the ground. Here was an arm flung out, as if a declamatory gesture had beep stilled in sleep; there was a knee drawn up as if pain had found cessation in death. The ruined tower threw its shadow across the sleepers, a shadow which seemed to Norah the visible presentation of the doom she had divined.
In the distance a hyæna howled like a ship's syren and reminded her that it was not safe to move beyond the arc of light flung by the fire. As she took the chair Dick had left, she was startled by a voice she did not recognise. She could distinguish no words. Quietly she picked her way between the sleeping bodies to the shelter where Archie lay. The moonlight fell in flecks between the leaves, and she could see Archie sprawling on his back, nearly naked, his lips muttering in fever. As she picked up the clothes her arm brushed against him. He caught at it with hot, dry hands. A string of curses poured from his unconscious lips as he gripped her wrist with his two hands, digging his thumbs into her flesh. The pressure was so painful she felt she must wake him, but with a final twist under which her skin tore, he let go.
'You won't touch her again,' he muttered. 'Damn you, not ever again!'
She pulled the clothes on to the bed and tucked them in, then fetched another blanket from her tent and spread it over him, that he might sweat out the fever. He had enough to endure without that.
She bathed her arm and sat down, her hesitation gone. The manner of Archie's dreaming proved that her fears were not imaginary. It lay with her that dreams did not pass into deeds.
Nor could she leave Archie to fight his fever alone; but until she had made clear her position between the two men, it was not possible for her to take up her duty by her husband's sick-bed. As another man's acting mistress she had no right there. The sight of her might even make him worse.
She would not feel clean till she had humbled herself before Archie, told him she renounced Dick, and offered to fulfil the contract she had vowed and broken. Archie might well refuse the spoiled remnants of her loyalty, but she would at least have done the little she could to repair the irreparable wrong. And Dick ... she did not dare to think of Dick. Before she spoke to Archie she must tell Dick. He had a right to hear from her lips. She had to tell him that their love must end ... was ended. She would have to launch upon a hopeless explanation of motives she barely understood and reasons which he would refuse. Every shred of reticence would be torn to tatters. Agonised but inflexible, she would have to listen to his reproaches, arguments, prayers.
Could she trust her will under that fire? Would she not be wiser to tell Archie before she told Dick? Once she had offered to her husband the remainder of her burnt-out life, honour would keep her weak flesh from yielding to her lover's entreaties.
Nor was that all. Dick jilted, his love and vanity ableed, would be in the mood to provoke Archie, not yet aware of his wife's renunciation, to fatal action; and the tragedy she had given her love to avert would be consummated in a death grapple between the two men she had loved and left.
Before she fell asleep again, her mind was made up that first Archie must hear she had given up Dick for ever. Then Dick must be told."
As soon as it was light, Norah was awakened by Archie's voice outside her tent. He was speaking in Chiwemba, and she could hear Matao's monosyllabic replies.
Her call brought Archie to the doorway. She resisted an impulse to tell him to come in; he seemed so infinitely remote.
'You ought to be in bed,' she told him.
He assured her that he was better.
'What is it? Fever?'
'Yes. But it's down this morning.'
If he had not been standing with his back to the light, she could have seen from the colour of his eyes that it was not very far 'down.'
'You ought to have a day in bed and give yourself a chance,' she urged him.
'Can't. Every moment brings the rains nearer. No joke to be caught on a raft by a squall.'
She asked if the natives could not be left to work alone, or, she hesitated a moment, under Dick's charge.
He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on to get a buck with every round and not a day must be wasted. Ward, he said evenly, was in bed.
'You're an obstinate Scot, Archie,' she said with a little sigh. 'You must go your own way.'
'Afraid so,' he replied, with an effort at a smile. Then in a gentler tone than he had used since she'd met him in the hills, 'Thank you, it's nice of you to have bothered.'
Poor Archie, she thought, he was grateful for little enough.
He talked for a moment about the work. That day the felled and trimmed logs must be manhandled to the water's edge. There were too few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from hillside to lake all day.
Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.
But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. Then she dressed slowly. For a time she stood staring at the lake, which lay under the storm clouds grey as a salmon's scales. It was under a week, as calendars measure time, since she had first set eyes on the lake, welcoming it as the friend that pointed the way to Europe and happiness.
Well, she knew Tanganyika better now.
She turned her back on the lake and on the hopes it had once aroused. She would not see Europe, perhaps, until she was an old woman. The interview she was on her way to seek would, she supposed, make fast the bonds that stretched her on the altar of Africa.
She found Archie sitting on the wreck of a tree felled by the tireless destructiveness of white ants. She noticed how fever and pain had hollowed his face and bleached it under the sunburn, till it stared like a Cubist sculpture. The natives clustered in groups, chattering while Matao hacked a grip in the fifteen-foot log that lay at his feet, to attach the lushishi ropes.
'That will do,' said Archie, 'get on with it.'
The ropes were fastened and the gang split into two rows. Matao raised his voice in falsetto song and the deeper voices of the workers joined the chanty. At the first beat of each bar they hauled on the ropes, shuffling their feet in a bear-like measure to the unstressed beats, so that the log progressed by jerks.
'No good showing them how to pull like men instead of the Russian ballet,' said Archie. 'The Wemba have hauled trees that way since they came out of the West and they're going on.'
'To the same tune too,' added Norah.
'Probably/. Then, after a pause, 'Anything up?'
She reassured him.
'Then I think I'll keep with them and see they don't slack.'
With an effort of will she stopped him. 'Please, Archie.... Can't we talk? There's something I've got to say.'
He looked distressed. 'Need we?' he muttered. 'Isn't it better left alone?' Without awaiting her answer, he moved in the direction of the singing.