'I think,' he was saying, 'I ought to see to getting another pure bred bull to build up the herd a bit.'
At the familiar words 'build up the herd' Norah's restraint snapped. When you consider that she had loyally suppressed her feelings for over two years, perhaps her outburst may be forgiven her.
'What's the good of building up the precious herd, when you can't sell the brutes? Do you think I've come to live like a Hottentot in this desert to watch you acting midwife to a lot of humpbacked African cows for their sakes? I never see you all day, except at meals when you're eating, and in the evenings, when you're sleeping. I believe you think more of your heifers than you do of your wife.'
Slowly Archie answered.
'It's the only safe line, Norah. If we build up...' he checked himself in time. 'We've got the best herd in the country and it's getting better all the time. When times are normal, we'll sell well. It'll be easier for you in the new house, and it's only a question of time....'
'So's life, Archie, only a question of time. Three score years and ten of it, isn't it? And I've had twenty-four already. How long do you want us to go on?'
But you can supply without my help the stock complaints of an over-wrought woman.
The storm ended unusually for Norah in tears. Silently, Archie tried to soothe her. He was thinking harder than he had for many a day. Constant manual work leaves little room for thought. Typically, he gave no utterance to his meditation. He liked to work things out in his mind, bring his matured plan to a successful issue, and then, and not till then, announce his conclusion. That was his habit, and he pursued it now. Had he told Norah his thoughts, well, it would have spoiled my story and saved a life.
As it was, Norah retired to bed with her nerves in shreds, and Archie dined alone with his nomadic guest, whom a string of 'sundowners' seemed to stimulate. His shrill voice was audible through the mud walls till a late hour. Archie talked more than his wont, and seemed to be asking questions. Only once were any words distinguishable.
'It's a bargain,' said Mr. Jones of the Congo.
Next morning at dawn she was awakened by an unusual bustle. She supposed that their visitor had decided to decamp and that Archie was hospitably supplying him with the many necessaries he lacked, before speeding him on his way. She did not feel her presence was necessary at that ceremony, nor did she as yet want to meet Archie. She was sorry for last night's outburst because it must have hurt him. The look in his eyes had nearly checked her words. But if he cared for her, as his eyes seemed to say, as he once had cared for her, why did his words, his actions never show it now? He never asked her advice, sought her help. She had become part of his daily life, part of the farm, like Simoni, the ploughman. Well, one must expect six years of marriage to kill love, though it seemed a little hard that youth too should be wasted. But it wasn't fair to say things that hurt Archie. She must make it up to him for last night. But not now: she lacked courage to pretend at this time in the morning. And if Archie said the wrong thing she would give herself away, and hurt him afresh. So when he knocked at her door, she lay very still, and shammed sleep. He knocked twice, and hung about for some minutes, apparently undecided whether to make another onslaught. Then his steps receded, and the bustle died away.
When at length she came out to breakfast, wearing a flame coloured jumper that was a favourite of Archie's, she found neither of the men. Changalilo, standing at attention behind her chair, presented the following literary effort:—
'Dearest, have started for Elizabethville on cattle business. Will write from there. Jones is here.—ARCHIE.'"
Naturally, Norah was furious. Any one would be furious who was denied the doing of a gracious deed already rehearsed in mind.
She had come to breakfast with a generous act of submission, and an affectionate reconciliation prepared. The sort of thing that closes the story on the screen, but, alas! ends little in real life. And now Archie had gone without a word on 'cattle business,' to buy, that meant, the pure bred bull that had made the mischief—neglecting as if it had never been made, her protest. He hadn't even noticed that she was miserable; or if he had noticed, he hadn't cared. Last night's scene was now transfigured into a declaration of wrongs, a declaration brutally ignored. But wait till Archie came back with his bull, she'd make him take her into account; she wouldn't stay a day longer on the farm; if need be, alone she'd go back to a decent life in a decent country.
In this mood she finished her breakfast and walked out into the chequered sunlight of the forest behind the rondavels. Changalilo, obeying Archie's standing order, slipped after her with her rifle on his shoulder. They passed the sawpit and galvanised into momentary activity the sawyers, who were celebrating Archie's absence with a morning of idleness over a fire of sticks.
She climbed a rocky hill, whose eminence gave her a view above the all-surrounding trees, which, from the level, limited sight to a matter of yards. Looking over the carpet of tree tops, whose leaves at that season had taken the transparent colour of azalea flowers, she watched the shadows of the clouds marbling the distant hillside, reflecting that her life was as useless as yonder succession of light and shade. Presently Changalilo, in whose eyes a hill top was useful to locate game or landmarks, and who cared little for scenery or meditation, announced the approach of a 'ulendo wa musungu' (a travelling white man and his carriers).
Norah's slower eyes searched the forest in vain. But soon on a path that wound between the trees appeared a native with a hip-bath on his head. More natives, carrying on head or shoulder bundles of tents and bedding, boxes of food and kitchen utensils, straggled into sight at irregular intervals. As they approached, appearing and disappearing among the trees, Norah wondered who the traveller could be. It was rare to have two visitors in so short a space, but as there was no other white settlement for several days' journey, the traveller would certainly make a halt at the farm.
It was not Henderson, the Native Commissioner, for she would have seen him before his bath, walking ahead of his carriers on the look-out for game. The bath and the camp gear were too new for old Palmer, the trader, making his round of inspection of native storemen. If it were Father Dupont, of the French Fathers, she would not have expected a bath at all.
The deductive methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes failing her, she decided to see for herself. Scrambling downhill, through the litter of grey sandstone, split apart by trunks of trees, and crowned with euphorbias, she reached the path before the wayfarer had come in sight, and since conventions, even of the English, are sometimes superseded in lonely places, she advanced some way along it to meet him.
Where the path swerved to avoid a big mupundu tree, she found him. A tall young man, leaning on a stick, whipped off his sun helmet and grasped her hand.
She noticed that his hair curled and caught the sun. She noticed that his clothes, the ordinary clothes of a ulendo—khaki shirt and shorts, puttees and heavy boots—were newer than that part of the country generally saw. He bore himself with an air, and two tall natives at his back, shouldering guns, added a pleasantly piratical touch.
'My name's Ward,' he said. 'You must be Lady Norah Sinclair, whom I've heard so much about.'
'I don't know who from!' she laughed.
'Every one, since I landed at Cape Town,' he asserted, looking at her fixedly.
'They haven't forgotten how to tell pleasant lies in England,' she smiled back. 'I'll bet you never heard of our existence, till you stopped with the White Fathers on the Chambezi, three days' journey back.'
'I assure you,' he began, then broke off. 'Anyhow,you'veforgotten my existence.'
She stared at him. A light dawned.
'You looked different in pyjamas,' she said, and the flood of reminiscence burst. He had crashed at Brooklands in 1914, and lain for a fortnight in her ward. She remembered, amused, how his eyes had followed her about the room, and his boyish efforts to make conversation. She had liked him and was sorry when he was moved to another hospital.
'This is the most marvellous thing that ever happened,' he exclaimed. 'How can we celebrate it in the forest?'
'Only lunch, I'm afraid,' she said. 'It's ready on the farm. My husband's away on ulendo'—at the memory her temper flamed—'but we'll manage alone.'
'Thanks awfully,' he said, and limped alongside of her. I don't know whether his wound had stiffened during the halt, but he leaned more heavily on his stick.
'You're lame,' she remarked.
Ward explained that he had been bitten on the foot by some anonymous insect, and the day's march had rubbed the wound into a sore.
'It's an awful nuisance on ulendo,' he added, and then—Dick was never the lad to lose anything for want of trying—'I'd been meaning, as I came along, to ask your husband to put me up for a couple of days, till I was right.'
Norah considered Dick for a moment, as women can, without looking at him. She had liked him well in hospital days and had been flattered by his obvious adoration. Then the changes and chances of life had wiped his picture clean from her mind till now his presence brought up details buried seven years deep—his bed in the corner of the ward, a passing irritation at a pretty girl's visit, the chrysanthemums she left.
She made up her mind.
'Mrs. Grundy hasn't got farther north than the railway will take her,' she said. 'You'll find a rest camp all ready by the new house across the river. You'll come over to meals, of course,' she added as his face fell. She felt a momentary awkwardness and changed the conversation to shooting, of which she said she did not get as much as she liked, since Archie could not often spare the time, and did not like her going far afield alone.
'You must let me take you out,' Ward interrupted.
'But what about your foot?' said Norah innocently.
She explained that she always wanted to invite her relations from England for shooting trips, but her husband could not leave his work to meet them at rail-head, and take them about the country.
'A farmer's wife sees a different side of Central Africa to the traveller who makes a short shooting trip to a good game area and goes back to London to write a book about it.'
'Is that one for me?' asked Ward penitently.
'No, one for myself,' she sighed, 'before I came out I believed it all.'
So Norah chattered on. She did not get much chattering on the farm. Her rare visitors, if women, talked about recipes and jam making. The men talked of game or natives. If Dick was a ghost from the past, ghosts can be very entertaining. And he was handsomer than ever.
Dick thought the same of Norah. Norah, in the formality of V.A.D. uniform, was only less fascinating than Norah in the boyishness of her farm wear—silk shirt open at the neck, breeches and canvas leggings. In Dick's opinion most women he had seen in breeches looked either bulbous or cinematographical; Norah was a twentieth century hamadryad—cool and restrained, save for her narrow eyes and her short dark hair that bubbled out from under her wide grey hat. The sun had burnt her neck to the colour of coffee and cream, but her arms still hinted at the whiteness of her body.
Dick could not keep his eyes off her.
'Lunch will be foul,' she was saying. 'Mysukhas gone to bury his father.'
'Why don't you take over mine?' Dick pressed her.
'D'you mean it?Suk-snatching isn't beyond me.'
'Of course I mean it! And, look here, do give your household a chance of getting straight and dine with me to-night.'
'Love to!' said Norah.
For the next three days Dick laid close siege to Norah's heart. Such siege of a woman alone on a lonely farm may not have been scrupulous. But when did Venus teach scruples? Her reputation was ill enough in the old Island years, and her latter day registration, under the Anglo-Saxon name of Natural Selection, has changed nothing.
The dinner was Dick's first move, and an intelligent one. The hours that succeeded it before Norah's eyes closed in forgetfulness testified its success. After the roseate glow of the Pommery, with which Dick's admirable table boy had plied her, had worn off, her mind still lingered among golden moments.
'I won't insult you with an iceless cocktail?' he had said.
'My last drink,' she retorted, 'was the mead the White Fathers brew at the Chambezi!'
'That curious compound of honey and fermented mealies?'
'The local gourmets walk a hundred miles to drink it.'
Dinner started, for the dweller in cities banally enough, with hors-d'œuvres. To Norah's reluctant rusticity, the tinned caviare shone with an unforgotten aura of shaded restaurant lamps, the bottled anchovies swam in a remembered sea of laughter and wit, the dried olives echoed with the lost lilt of ragtime orchestras.
There was no bathos in the courses that followed.
'Who cooks for you?' she asked. 'The angel Gabriel?'
'Is it hard to get cooks up here?' he replied innocently.
'Yesterday I found Alabedi rolling a rissole into shape on his naked chest,' she said. 'The one before used to wash his feet in the big saucepan.'
'The chef at the Ritz may have the same weaknesses,' put in Dick sympathetically.
'Yes, but he can at least cook. My criminals haven't an idea above "shtoo!"'
After dinner they sat in a shelter, fragrant with the fresh leaves and blossoms of the boughs that formed it.
'What about a tune?' asked Dick, as his personal boy, resplendent in white kanju and scarlet sash, presented a book of gramophone records.
'You choose,' she said, 'it's so long, since...'
Dick judged the jewelled eroticism of Puccini opportune; but when it was over...
'In my young days,' she commented, 'there wasn't any opera. It was thought rather German. Do put on a fox-trot.'
'I don't know that one,' she said at the end. 'Of course,' she added.
Dick searched, and found a one-step that dated back to the war.
She sighed. 'There's nothing that reminds like a tune. I take it the Recording Angel keeps a list of all one's most pricelessly associated tunes, and has them played to one in hell.'
'I'm sorry. I didn't think——' he lied.
'What is there on the back? Yes, let's have that. How sick one was of it!'
When the commonplace little tune was played, 'I can't bear any more,' she said. 'Give me a cigarette. If it's a "flag" I'll burst into tears.'
It wasn't, and they talked—or he told her—of dances, theatres, the marriages and divorces of their mutual friends and enemies.
'How soon do you go back?' she asked.
'That depends on——'
She did not give him time to say on whom it depended.
'And where do you go on to from here?'
He was vague. He was short of provisions. ['I'm sure I've eaten three years of pâté de foies gras to-night,' she interrupted.] He had to hang about for fresh supplies to catch him.
He brought the conversation round, by way of shops, to her frock, which he admired discreetly. He compared it favourably with the clothes they were now wearing in London.
'Two and a half years old,' she said. 'If I had the choice between an hour's talk with Paul Poiret or St. Paul, I wouldn't bother to learn Hebrew.'
'Where are your nearest shops?'
'There's a store three days' walk away, where you can buy white calico, or blue calico with white spots, and mouth organs or looking-glasses.'
'I think you're marvellous,' he said. 'Not many women...'
She did not answer, but Dick, watching closely, saw her breast rise in an involuntary sigh.
She sighed again as she lay sleepless, reckoning relentlessly what her bond to Archie would cost her. That loyalty was costing her youth, beauty, health; it exacted all, and gave nothing. She pictured herself in five years' time. Still young, as lives go, but her looks perished, her skin dried with the glare and sagging with the heat, her mind ruralised, her interests dwindled.
If she had still loved Archie, she would have thrown all this at his feet, as carelessly as she had risked her life for him. But her passion had vanished, had followed her illusion, in an almost unnoticed, almost painless decease, killed by some inward unsoundness, some hidden cancer or malnutrition. And to-day Archie had proved his entire dissociation from her.
The same morning, as if sent by the Devil, had appeared an Adonis, whose words, whose eyes proclaimed an interest, a devotion that was ready to flame into...
But her word bound her to Archie, and by her word she abode. With more reason than many of her generation, Norah had no clear religious or moral principles. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father knew his way about Ruff's Guide better than the Bible. But loyalty was a class virtue that she had not escaped, and for the first of many sleepless nights during the two unhappy years, she began to probe its foundations. No doubt the shade of Dick, cool, handsome, debonair, encouraged her.
To what Moloch had Archie offered her loyalty?
To this fetish of a farm which swallowed all his money, thoughts, energy. On the same altar were laid her heritage by sex and class of careless, elegant living; her place in the life of the day; all that her youth demanded.
And now Archie had proved that he despised her sacrifice. He did not even refuse her claims so long choked back, combat her protest voiced at last. It was sufficient to ignore them."
"I can't help feeling," said Ross, "that Archie's idiotic taciturnity almost earned him Norah's defection.
Had he been able to overcome his distaste for expression—emotion he called it; had he tried to conquer his passion for finishing a job before he mentioned it; had he, in short, told Norah that he was going to Elizabethville to sell his herd in order to satisfy her wishes and take her back to England, Dick Ward would never have secured foothold in her heart.
Instead, Archie held his tongue and left the field to the Devil and to Dick."
These made the most of their chance.
In the red, leather-bound volume of aphorisms which accompanied Dick in his wanderings, he found a remark of Balzac's which seemed to him full of promise:—
'Dans le monde de la realité,' that thinker had apparently concluded, 'comme dans le monde des fées, la femme appartient toujours à celui qui sait arriver à elle et la délivrer de la situation où elle languit.'
Here was the situation, here the woman languished, here was Dick ready for the part of Fairy Prince.
He reflected with satisfaction that while the heroine of fairy stories may very suitably be shepherdess, goose girl, beggar maid, the hero is inevitably a prince—never a cattle breeder. Did this not hint the triumph of Court over Farm, Athens over Bœotia, Capital over Colony?
If Dick was no prince, he was young, amusing, good-looking, rich enough to wander in comfort about Africa and bold enough to call such wandering 'exploration' (at any rate to the journalists at Southampton). The omens were favourable.
Dinner the first evening had been planned to suggest a tacit comparison between Norah's present lot and the world of civilised luxury whose gate his kiss would open.
He had shown Africa in damaging contrast with Europe. Now he applied himself to set the lover in high relief against the husband.
Too clever for tangible disparagement that would challenge Norah's loyalty, Dick applied himself silently to supply all that Archie in two years had left undone. Dick's 'boy' hung the pictures that had stood, faces wallwards, for eighteen months; Dick stretched an insect-proof ceiling of calico that he took from his stores of presents for headmen; Dick's carriers dug and levelled the flower garden that Archie had always promised 'next season.'
His long limbs and cool, unhurried gestures, his well-cut white flannels, and the faint swagger with which he wore them, had the unquestioned advantage of Archie's unremarkable presence.
In long tête-à-têtes he exerted all his charm of manner and person.
An afternoon when Nature seemed to work for him was the shooting expedition that he had promised. In deference to the foot, which furnished the excuse of his stay, it was decided to paddle down river to the flats where puku grazed and where at nightfall duck flighted.
Papyrus met over their heads in a tunnel of green silence, that the plash of a paddle hardly broke.
'If this would never end,' sighed Dick.
Norah shrugged her shoulders.
'"Momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
she quoted, as the stream bore them out into the daylight.
A bird like a black ibis, rigid and heraldic on the bank that here was firm and covered with short turf, kept jealous watch on the surface of the water. Their silent passage barely disturbed his fishing. Half-way between the river and the straight edge of the bush a pair of Karongo crane, true season after season to each other and their haunts, promenaded the flats. Their long necks swayed to their leisurely, fastidious stride.
The old boatman with the withered leg, who stood in the stern, bent forward and whispered excitedly.
'He can see a herd of puku,' said Norah.
Crouching low in the boat beneath the level of the bank, they drifted till a bend of the river brought them into long range. Peeping cautiously from behind a tuft of amatete reeds, Norah watched the little red-brown cluster of buck.
Five lengths ahead of his ewes the ram was grazing. Ever and again up jerked his head and he stood, broad-chested and solid, his mild eyes distended, his wet nostrils snuffing, alert for sign, scent, or sound. Then his head would sink and, reassured, he took up his grazing, moving onward as he fed.
Dick cocked his rifle and pushed it into Norah's hand.
'Now's your chance,' he whispered.
Norah shook her head.
'Too far for me,' she breathed. 'I don't want to wound.'
Helped by Dick, whose fingers lingered on her arm, she clambered up the bank, and began to creep on her knees, circling that the breeze might not carry her scent to the herd. But for all her care, the ram was uneasy. At shorter intervals his head jerked up, causing Norah each time to flatten herself to the ground.
Whether at last they caught her scent or whether general principles of caution prevailed, at some invisible sign from their leader the herd started into a skeltering gallop. The ground drummed under their hoofs until they came to a strip where reeds concealed a little marsh. There the red bodies emerged and disappeared with the bounding motion of rocking-horses. On the farther side they paused, long necks stretched, wide eyes astare. Then they fell quietly to grazing.
'I'm three parts glad I didn't get a shot,' said Norah, as she rejoined the canoe.
Dick commended her gentleness.
'Puku are such gallant little chaps,' she said, 'and they take such a lot of killing. Archie wounded one that dropped after she had run a mile. When they cut her up, they found the bullet in her heart."
This gave Dick a chance to talk about the state in which at an autopsy his heart would be found.
Norah laughed. 'You'll have forgotten I exist by the time you've been a week in London,' she prophesied.
Dick said this was hardly fair. It was seven years since he'd seen her last, and all the time...
'Anyhow it took you a good few minutes to recognise me in the bush,' she reminded him.
'But you'd grown more lovely yet,' he protested. 'And in breeches....'
The river had widened out into a sort of lake. Reeds grew up through the water and blue lotuses starred its surface. A couple of small red-headed moorhens bobbed up from under the broad leaves as if they were made of cork.
This is a good place to wait for the duck to come over,' said Norah, and Dick fixed his twelve bore.
The sunlight had turned from white through gold to ochre. A few frogs had tentatively begun to croak. Too near the equator for twilight, it was Africa'sheure du berger.
Dick began to talk. From what Norah told me, his themes seem to have dated from the early earnest years of the century. He pleaded the right of the Natural Mate over the Legal Spouse; he urged the barrenness of constancy Where Love is Not; he suggested that the world might be Well Lost for Love. And so on. For my part I never could see why 'All for Love' is a respectable sentiment and a subject for epics and tragedies, while other equally whole-hearted passions and sacrifices, say, 'All for Money' or 'for Food' are discredited. However, that's an opinion that neither Norah nor Dick shared.
Norah, of course, wasn't convinced by Dick's eloquence—no woman ever listened to what her lover said. But passion is as infectious as small-pox, and, if it lasts no longer, leaves no lighter scars. So, reluctantly on that perfect evening, her conscience gave ground and Dick's words began to reach her heart and his nearness her senses.
'Don't miss the best part of life,' he adjured her.
'Life looks its best from behind.'
'It isn't for any one as young and lovely to say that. Be brave, take a chance....'
This was perilous advice for the gambler's daughter.
'Supposing I wanted to take a chance ... with you, don't you see I've promised...'
'Are you willing to waste your whole life for two words mumbled in Hanover Square?'
'Don't be melodramatic, Dick!'
'It isn't melodrama, it's tragedy! Norah, come away with me, Norah....'
Just then the duck came over, and winging swiftly against the sunset, interrupted Dick's eloquence.
On the third evening Dick, progressing from words to action, forced her to decision. The sun had set and Norah was still sitting out of doors protected from wild beasts by a lamp on the table and by a gun at her feet. The lowing of the cattle had abated and the thud of their feet as they shouldered into the kraals had ceased. The air was heavy with spring and with the fleshy scent of the wild magnolias that overhung the river.
She knew it was time to go indoors, but any effort seemed intolerable. The harsh chorus of frogs in the marshes alone broke the silence. She sat on. A moth, as big as a swallow, brushed against her cheek, causing her to look up. A yellow light across the river caught her eye. 'Dick's camp fire,' she thought, and let her imagination play. But as she gazed she knew she was mistaken, for the light was dodging and swaying nearer. It was a hurricane lamp crossing the river. It could only be carried by Dick, and he was coming over to her.
She did not feel glad or sorry, but waited in inert prostration before an oncoming fate. The night denied motion, and she was held in a snare waiting the coming of the fowler. Her heart began to beat faster. A drum started to throb in a distant village and her blood seemed to pulse in time. Dick's lamp was an intolerable way off, so were the tropical stars, so was reality. Her world was that insistent drum and her galloping pulses.
At last she heard Dick's footsteps on the leaves. Without a word he lowered himself into the chair beside her and for a long time sat in silence, his face in the shadow.
'What holds you here?' he asked at last.
'Say "who" rather?' her deep voice replied, resenting the effort of speech.
'The flowers blossom and die in your forests,' he went on, 'and no man sees them.'
'Poetry!' she laughed. 'This is prose and daily bread.'
He groped after her mood.
'You could have poetry and cake.'
She threw up her head laughing and he saw where the sunburn stopped on her neck.
'Wedding cake?' she asked mischievously.
'If I'm not an angel, I'm not an absolute rotter,' he said quickly.
'It wouldn't have mattered in any case,' she murmured, 'if...'
'If what?'
She did not answer. In the distance the drum pounded on, inciting to the dance some isolated community of black men, sentient only of the whips of hunger and desire. She wondered if white civilisation at heart obeyed any different goad.
'That's all the music you'll hear,' Dick nodded his head in the direction of the sound.
'Life can be lived without stimulants,' she said.
'D'you call it life?'
He tried to take her hand. She moved it.
'Norah, you're driving me mad. Do you want to?'
'You know I don't,' she whispered.
'Don't you see? ... In a few days, my foot'll be well, I must go. Must I go alone, without hope, knowing I'll never see you again? I really think I'll kill myself.'
What about Archie?'
'Would he kill himself?' asked Dick quietly. 'Would he ... notice even?'
She did not answer.
'Be fair to him; but be fair to yourself; be generous to me.'
She was silent, listening to the message of the drums.
He interpreted her silence to his wishes, and slid his hand up her arm. She did not resist; it seemed so much simpler to accept the philosophy of the drum and surrender to the primeval forces. Dick's lips were on hers, but his kisses reminded her of her husband's early love-making. Without much conviction, she pushed them away and stood upright, her breasts heaving. Dick seized her small hands as they pushed at his chest, pulling her against him. His arm went round her body and lifted her to him till her toes barely touched the ground. He smothered her white, upturned face with kisses. She could hardly breathe. For a moment she was tense and tingling; her senses shot up like firelight, then narrowed to a pin point. Heaviness descended on her and remorse. Her own voice rang in her ears—'What about Archie?'
She struggled and he released her.
'Go now, Dick,' she said, her deep voice husky, and picking up the lamp she left him.
He waited silent in his chair for hours it seemed; then, as she made no sign, he rose, swinging his hurricane lamp. She watched the light stagger away across the river with a feeling of utter desolation.
Next morning she sat down at her writing-table. Outside the window squatted Jacketi waiting impassively for her letter.
Jacketi was a bad lot, he liked beer and women better and spared truth further than most natives, but he had perfect manners and wonderful legs. Sixty miles in thirty hours he would do, and overtake in a day and a night the three days' stages of a white man. For this Norah had summoned him to carry a letter to Archie.
Africa was silent in the daylight and traditions of loyalty and chastity asserted themselves. She resented the struggle and thought cynically how much simpler it would have been, if Dick had imposed his will on her: like Montaigne's lady, who, after a troop of cavalry had been billeted in her house, wrote in her diary, This night, praise the Virgin, I am satisfied without sin.'
She had decided to call to Archie to come and, if his presence did not stem the flood which threatened to sweep her away, at least she would talk things out aboveboard and honestly with him. Painfully she drafted a letter: not an easy one to write. She tore up her first attempt and scrawled, 'Dear Archie, If you love me, come straight back.—NORAH.' She sealed it and handed it through the window to the waiting Jacketi. Then she wrote a note to Dick, telling him to keep his side of the river till she sent for him. Norah never did things by halves.
A few days later Jacketi was standing again on the verandah, tired but smiling.
'Well, Jacketi, did you find the Bwana?'
'Yes, indeed, mistress.'
'Did he give you a letter?'
'No, indeed, mistress....'
'What did the Bwana say?'
Jacketi imitated Archie's manner and voice.
'"All right, Jacketi."'
'Was that all?'
Jacketi nodded his head composedly. She flung him a shilling. 'You can go now,' and re-entered the darkened room.
Had Archie ignored this appeal too and pushed forward on his 'cattle business'? If so ... But since he was as saving with letters as with words, he might even now be on his way back to her. She must have patience and wait. He should reach the farm not later than Wednesday."
Ross flung out his arm with a deprecatory gesture. At least that is how I interpreted the path of his glowing cigar-end.
"Some of the blame," he said, "should you be old-fashioned enough to think in terms of blame and praise, must be reserved for Africa.
To understand the problem of Norah's ... fall, bid for self-expression, or whatever your brand of morality calls it, apply my formula for gauging what Africa will make of a man:—'Lowest Common Failing cubed' if you remember. Our first task is the ever congenial one of spotting the L.C.F., the ruling weakness. Poor Norah, the field is big enough. So big, selection is difficult; for, outside courage and honesty, she had few noteworthy virtues.
Pride, hot temper—neither was missing, but neither ruled her. Irreverence—a full share, but nothing notable for the century. A free tongue, a gambler's heart—I feel we are 'warmer.' Rebelliousness, generosity—which of these two failings to choose?
From her cradle she had been a rebel. I have mentioned a few instances—her expulsion from the Red Cross, her defiance of the rules of war when she rescued Archie, and of the rules of common sense when she married him, her preference of Africa to Edinburgh, and so on. To Norah a custom established, a practice accepted, dared her to its disregard or breach. The temptation to break with her sex's tradition of, at any rate overt, chastity must have been overwhelming, while to the itch to break through rules, she could only oppose fidelity to her promise.
Generosity, my second choice, had ever made it hard for her to say 'no' or to withhold what lay in her power to give. As a child she had lavished her pennies on the utterly undeserving poor. As a girl, disregarding the cost, she had always been at the call of any friend, or stranger for that matter, in a difficulty. And now she could by an act, not in itself uncomfortable, grant Dick a boon he craved, whose refusal he hinted would make him desperate ... while Archie, it seemed ... did not care.
So, if you wish, you may charge her ultimate surrender to her double weakness exploited by Africa; if you prefer, to her single strength betrayed by Archie's silence, that loyalty to her bond long and savagely honoured.
As an English writer you may be trusted not to impute her fall to mere weakness of the flesh. You would never admit that a woman of your nation and class would take a lover from so disinterested a motive. Adultery on grounds of spite, altruism, jealousy, poverty, revenge, avarice, or even absence of mind is admissible. From passion, unthinkable.
Well, the decisive Wednesday came without sign or rumour of Archie.
On Saturday night Dick's lantern a second time came swinging across the river."
That Tanganyika was destined to be alike villain and setting of the drama which followed, first sight of the lake gave Norah no warning.
The lovers had waited on the farm for Dick's supplies to come till Norah would stay no longer. Leaving a letter for Archie, and replenishing Dick's stores from the reserves on the farm, that the Congo expedition had already diminished, they started on the three weeks' ulendo through the bush, Dick on a bicycle, Norah in her machila.1[1]
[1] A hammock slung on one pole or two and carried between two or four natives, relieved at intervals.
Lying uncomfortably on her back, she saw little of the country she was carried through. Her landscape was limited by ranks of trees on either side. Overhead she could stare at the African sky already banked with rain-clouds. Or she could lie on her side and watch the sandy path for hurrying streams of pre-occupied ants or for occasional spoor, the only manifestation of the shy life of the forest. Sometimes her eye would be caught by a bundle of scarlet flowered mistletoe, the alpine outline of a great ant heap, a tree curiously deformed, or the melancholy traces of an almost obliterated garden; till oppressed by the nearness and insignificance of these sights, she would shut her eyes and imagine the evening with Dick, when the camp fire would gild from below the interlacing boughs.
But now the ulendo was nearly done. For an hour the road had sloped precipitously from plateau level lakewards 3000 feet below. The tip and tilt of the machila was vertiginous. Broad leafed, dark trees obscured the sky: rampant undergrowth and luxurious herbage hid the ground. A native laboured up towards them; he was old and one-eyed. Her carriers called to him for news of the steamer, but he only stared. They were strangers in a strange land. The air felt warmer and clammier. Languid flies settled heavily on Norah's face and hands. She expected momentarily to see the lake below her feet, but the dark trees shut her in.
The machila-bearers stopped singing the mournful 'Mai illova,' 'Deep in the Ground,' that was their favourite carrying song, and started a brisk marching tune into which the name 'Tanganyika' came again and again. The swing of the hammock was barely tolerable. She caught the word 'malala' in the song—the sleeping sickness, for whose sake men shun the lake. They met a second native blind in one eye—was all this mutilation man's work or the lake's? A single mulombwa tree with bare boughs and canary yellow flowers stood out by the roadside, thirty feet high and as straight as a spear.
Suddenly the steeply tilted machila stopped with a jerk and shot her on to her feet.
Had that travel-stained hammock been Elijah's fiery chariot it could not have translated her more suddenly into a new universe. From the close forest that had so long confined her body and her mind, she was caught up into a blue firmament, a world of misty blue glass over which distant shadows played. As she gazed the blue mirror resolved into sky, mountains, water. Under heaven, the hills; under the hills, the lake with its horizon flung far above her head, above the tree tops.
This vision of a new world seemed to hint at the new life she was entering. A life of beauty and—inevitably—romance, free from the sordidness of daily struggle, cleared of the orts of a disastrous past. The child understood life as little as she understood the lake. Her inherited instinct was to play for the highest stakes and risk all, without weighing the cost, on a single throw. But this sudden revelation of beauty almost frightened her into taking thought. That such loveliness existed seemed a spur to its pursuit. Was she treading a path that led to it? Almost against her will she strained her eyes into the future.
Since the night that Dick's lantern had crossed the flats for the second time, she had kept her mind strapped to the present moment, fiercely contented in her passion for Dick, refusing regret, denying foresight.
Archie, whose memory her mind, like a tongue with a sensitive tooth, shunned but could not avoid, had failed her; Dick had come to the rescue. Dick was her slave; Archie was the slave of the farm. She loved Dick ... she was almost sure. She was surer she did not love Archie.
What would come of it all? The preliminaries she faced with contempt. Scandalous tongues, slights to be met, the ostrich-like antics of the Law, details in the Press (for she realised she would be good copy and might even run to posters). She would pass through this indifferently for what lay beyond.... If anything lay beyond. Romance had fooled her before. Was Life Repetition and Cycle? 'The thing that has been, is that which shall be: and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.'
She knew Dick's mind no better than the day he had come to the farm, than the day he had entered her ward seven years ago. She did not seem to penetrate the brilliant skin and glorious plumage. What lay behind? ... But surely Dick loved her, and why haggle over the endurance or value of that love? Why chill the warmth of the present by brooding over a future as fathomless as the lake, whose bottom had never been plumbed?
She left the chattering group of carriers to rejoice at the sight of their journey's end and sat down under the mulombwa tree to wait for Dick, who had found the path too steep and rough for his bicycle.
What Dick was feeling I can only guess. I had met him at the beginning of his shooting trip, or 'voyage of exploration,' as he preferred to see it, dining with the District Commissioner at rail-head. But that was before he fell into the meshes of Norah's beauty.
She, of course, told me what he said, and did, and looked like, but a woman's evidence for or against her lover isn't worth much.
Love-making is largely bluff. To get yourself taken, you must appear, if not a fine fellow, at least an interesting one. (It's true she'll probably love you for some absurdity you've forgotten to cover up, but that's not your fault.) Then, especially if love's illicit, men and women begin with different rules. As different as big game and bird shooting.
Your big game shot and your woman do the trick by stalking. They locate the victim, crawl up, taking cover behind each blade of grass, aim long and carefully with one eye shut. Your bird shot fires with both eyes open, by instinct rather than aim, before or behind him at birds which beaters, or circumstances, drive. Then he waits for the next covey. Some men even like pigeon shooting.
Dick, I suspect, started with the ideas of the bird shot. Since he left the railway, he had hardly seen a white woman, and he still carried the newcomer's prejudice against black. He would be in a susceptible mood, when he came on Norah that morning in the forest. If Joseph had been a month or two alone in the bush, and if Potiphar's wife had been in the same street with Norah, Holy Writ would have been altered. And, as the Americans say, Dick's second name wasn't Joseph. Nor for that matter was Norah's surname Potiphar. But circumstances, the uncongenial life, the errant husband's absence were all beating for Dick. His wits, quick where women were concerned, divined this and whispered that this loveliness was not unapproachable. And in the matter of rushing in, Dick was never on the side of the angels.
It was this idea that so swelled Dick's foot that he could not move it from the farm. Constant intercourse with Norah was not calculated to heal wound in foot or heart and hourly he fell deeper under her spell: under the spell, too, of his own manly eloquence. His visit the evening before Norah summoned Archie and called in vain, was undertaken, I should say, by an impetuous lover, who hoped that his mistress's interest was not severely platonic. His repulse added body to his passion since it is the nature of men only to prize the possession that is refused them.
Norah's absence, during her days of waiting for Archie, was of the nature that makes the heart grow fonder. He saw her continually across the river; in imagination he felt her lips on his, her body in his arms.
Tantalised by memory and proximity, goaded by the lust of the unobtainable, his passion had mastered all inhibitory instinct. The flood of his imagination rose and swept majestically over the weir of the Divorce Courts and breasted even the subsequent dam of Holy Matrimony. When I met him at rail-head, I got the impression that Dick was not the sort who would find it unpleasant, for example, to be cited as co-respondent with the daughter of a peer. So when in the end Norah consented to go away with him, the granting of the boon he craved could have caused him comparatively few qualms. He felt, however, more anxiety than Norah, who had flung her cap with a brave gesture, and it was with relief that he hailed the lake.
'The road lies open,' he cried to Norah. 'The highway to civilisation.'
'It's more like the gateway of Heaven,' she said, blinded by the beauty before her.
'It will be,' he answered.
As side by side they descended the path which turned from rock to sand, the view flattened and the horizon sank. The closely grouped thatch of a native village showed through the trees. Of white men and their works no sign. Throughout their flight, by avoiding the occasional Bomas and rarer farms, they had escaped the awkwardness of European encounter. Dick commented on their luck.
'Anyhow, down here, it's too hot to care,' said Norah. She felt already the atmosphere of lake level—a matter not only of heightened temperature and humidity but of changed values. 'High thermometer and low morals,' was the way she put it. She felt her remaining scruples dissolve in that mild air. Ideas of duty and discipline were left on the austere highlands, where scattered men scratch a precarious existence out of a thin soil. At lake level, life was no longer an epic of struggle with victory or defeat as stakes, but a drowsy eclogue ended by easy oblivion. The few thousand feet from the plateau to the lake seemed to bridge all degrees from Dumfries to Naples, from Calvin to Priapus.
The palm trees threw black shadows on the silver roofs. On the soundless air came the laughter of copper-coloured babies playing in and out of the lapping water. Crocodiles and water snakes people Tanganyika, but in their play the children were as unconscious of danger as Norah and Dick of the fate that bore down on them from the lake."
A couple of afternoons later, Norah's fingers playing in his hair roused Dick, somnolent from the heat.
'What's wrong with the engines?' she asked. Dick, who knew nothing of machinery, went through the motions of intelligent auscultation.
'They are banging and clattering worse than yesterday,' she persisted, with her head on one side; 'hurry, miss a beat, hurry. And I'm sure we're going slower.'
'TheMimiwas never an ocean greyhound,' said Dick.
Now Norah mentioned it, the engines did sound odd. Why didn't he know more about the damn things? It was monstrous running a British boat with black officers and crew. Anything might happen. It would be deuced awkward if they broke down; it might make them ridiculous. But the odd noises he thought he noticed might be imaginary.
'She'll get us there before she sinks,' he said.
Norah pulled his hair a trifle harder. 'Nothing like an optimist,' she remarked.
'It wouldn't be the first time.'
'What do you mean? Has she sunk before?'
'Been sunk. Before the war she was a deep-sea boat, carrying Hun officials and mails between Dar-es-Salaam and Tanga. One day in 1915 she ran into a British light cruiser. The next two years she spent at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.'
'Are you inventing this?' said Norah, taking a firmer grip on a handful of hair.
'Not a word; you can see the shell-marks amidships.'
'I love you when you talk nautical, Dick!'
Dick dragged her to him and kissed her mocking lips.
'Don't, Dick, you'll distract the man at the wheel. Go on telling me! How do you know all this?'
'One of the Boma men told me. Well, eventually our people raised her, buried the bones of her captain and crew, and railed her in sections to the lake. And here she's the only boat we've got.'
'No wonder her engines knock a bit.'
'They're good enough engines, I'm told, though they run red hot. But they're too big for her hull. There's a sweepstake among the half-dozen people who use the lake whether she goes up in flames or the engines drop through her bottom first.'
'Go on, Dick, don't mind me.'
'Yes, I thought you'd like to know,' Dick put his arm round her shoulders. 'Early this morning when you were sleeping like a lamb, I was lying awake watching the metal work going a nice cherry red, and selecting that flat bit of iron to beat off the crew from your place in the dinghy when the ship burst into flames.'
Norah laughed. 'You think of everything,' she said. 'Why don't they put on a new boat?'
'Money.' Dick got up and took a turn aft, where he could hear the engines more clearly. He stood with his head cocked, listening. At last he shrugged his shoulders and came back to Norah.
'The territory's about bankrupt, and all the cash there is goes in building a new governor's palace to impress the noble savage.'
He sat down on his bed and fidgeted with the sheet.
'I believe you're right,' he said, 'the engines are about worn out. They say that at the end of every trip Alibaba reports to the Railway Workshops at Kigoma, something like this:—(he imitated the genial obsequiousness and urbane gesticulation of the Arab skipper)—'Yes, sir, thank you, sir, good run, sir. Boilers finish, sir. Want new one. No, sir? Very good, sir, start Wednesday, sir.'
Norah's deep laugh rang out. Dick's Irish blood made him a good mimic. Moreover, life since she left the farm was one long first day of the holidays, and anything was good for a laugh.
'I adore Alibaba,' she said, 'but I daren't think what his toilet will be, when he feels he knows us a little better.'
There was some ground for this apprehension. They had boarded the vessel, scrambling up a rope from her dinghy on to her dirty iron deck, to be welcomed by a corpulent, bowing figure clad in a khaki jacket buttoned up to the chin, new red fez, vast trousers once white, and patent leather boots. His pock-marked face had shone as he 'escorted them to their quarters,' a ceremony which consisted of kicking the deck clear of cooking utensils, baskets of meal, firewood, chickens and goats, and helping Changalilo erect the beds. But once under way, Alibaba's habit was to replace the new fez with a dirty skull cap of broderie anglaise, unbutton his jacket from top to bottom, unlace his boots largely and unhitch his trousers till they bellied menacingly.
In this negligé he moved slowly between a moribund Madeira chair, the wheel and the engine-room. Unlike any other skipper who ever sailed the lake, he ran night as well as day, feeling his way by some extra sense for squalls, islands, and rocks.
All the work on board was accomplished by him. If from some sense of fitness, he issued orders which awakened no answering chord in the crew, it was with unruffled amiability that he executed them himself.
Well might theMimibe called the Democrat's Utopia. Instance the business of dropping anchor. As theMimicame inshore, Alibaba would blow his syren rapturously and rattle through a string of polyglot orders while the crew listened with a gratified smile, in complete immobility. Without the slightest sign of mortification, Alibaba would waddle forward and, with a push of his patent leather boot, propel the tiny anchor into the lake. A sublime gesture worth pages of philosophic writing or communist propaganda.
'Is his name really Alibaba?' asked Norah, laying her hand over Dick's well-kept fingers.
'I think it's because of the crew,' Dick explained. 'Alibaba and the forty thieves.'
'Is he an Arab or what?' Mildly interested, she liked hearing Dick's voice.
'"Or what" about describes him,' he replied. 'I should say every race on the East Coast took a hand. Let's see. His grandfather would be a Eurasian stationmaster....'
'And his grandmother a Zanzibari dancing girl.'
'While his mother was kept by a Greek barman.'
'But was unfaithful to him with the Goanese cook.'
They laughed together delightedly. The engines seemed to run smoother, and Dick's mind was easier. If Dick was happy, Norah was happy too. Was she not on her honeymoon, the sweeter if stolen? And after the shuttered years on the farm, how savoury this foretaste of the busy world of men!
Like a demon in a pantomime, the pitch black head of a fireman popped up through an iron hatch, hung over the side gleaming with sweat and drank greedily the brackish water of the lake, flicking it dexterously with straight fingers into a cavernous mouth. Then he began to pass armfuls of short logs from the firewood stacked on the deck to an invisible comrade by the boilers.
A shutter or door was opened in the bowels of the ship and a noise of hammering issued. Hammering and oaths in an unknown tongue. A blast of scorching, oil-saturated air reached Dick. It was as concrete as a hot hand laid on his face.
'By Jove, the heat must be terrific down there.' he said, 'it's sufficiently torrid on deck.'
It had been cool enough that morning when they left the fishing village where the oxen had been embarked. Dawn had streaked the motionless water with fragile pink and silver. The boat rode so low in the water that Norah's head on her pillow had been almost level with the lake. Never before had she felt so near nature, absorbed into beauty, trespassing on mystery.
Her thoughts had jerked back to Archie. Poor lad, how this beauty would have bored him and how he would have glowered at Dick's rhapsodies....
Poor Archie, you couldn't help liking him, even if you didn't love him. And she must have done that once, unimaginable as it now was."
"Dead Love," mused Ross, "seems to leave slighter memory even than its mortal begetters. If Archie had died, she would still have remembered every detail of his body and habits. But the love he had once inspired—that had passed like a last year's sunrise, leaving at the most a certain sadness for a glory ephemeral.
She stared over the side. The steamer was following a deep-water channel, indiscernible to other eyes than Alibaba's, winding her way very close to shore through a screen of densely wooded islets, black against the pale sky of dawn, the debris of the crater wall. Here and there, among many islands that were merely cliffs crowned with tightly packed trees, glimpses of enticing coves and silvery beaches called to the lovers to linger.
But, like the comrades of Odysseus, Alibaba stopped his ears and signed to the tall negro at the helm whose high cheekbones and white beretta-like cap lent him a certain episcopal dignity, as he spun the wheel and steered the vessel out into the lake.
What was the use, thought Norah, of letting her mind dwell on Archie now she had left him for good. If she had endured something of the agony of a Samson pulling down the pillars of the loyalty that supported her world, she did not mean to look over her shoulder at the ruins.
Norah's thought did not run on subtle lines. Life for her fell into watertight compartments. She had loved Archie with a whole-hearted romantic passion. That was over, many months dead and shut away in its own little coffin. The succeeding phase of wifely duty, half kindly, half grudging, was over too and disposed in its less honoured grave. Now she stood, as she thought, on the threshold of a new world, a reborn Norah with no past to catch her feet."
"When she propounded that illusion," said Ross, "I really couldn't help laughing. As if we, prisoners lying in the dark, blindfolded with every shade of prejudice, handcuffed with immemorial habits, fettered by years of education, accidental or deliberate, chained to almost automatic reactions, could ever start afresh. We who don't get a fresh start in the womb, where too we're the slaves of a past that drags us along from amœba to ape.
And that is inside ourselves: the outside world does not stand aside, hat in hand, to let us start afresh.
Still Norah was perhaps freer than some of us. She felt no moral qualms. The seventh—is it?—commandment to her had always seemed an over-rated affair, a question to be solved more by fastidiousness than morality. She had always assumed the right to please herself. And now she was well pleased. Dick was the ideal lover—happy, charming, attentive. She had found the mate Nature had created for her—lion-hearted and debonair, the match for any emergency life might produce, ready for any risk, game for battle with the gods, who, when at last she had yielded to his entreaties, had shouted with Troilus that he would 'throw his glove to Death himself.'
Yes, she had chosen well this time. All idols hadn't feet of clay, some surely were pure gold. The old and disillusioned could not be right. She turned from that distasteful theory to the beauty of the lake.
As the islands and the shore receded, the formation of the 800-mile-long crater revealed itself.
Outside towered a circle of hyacinthine blue from whose summit perhaps at a time before there were men to suffer, the great cone had been hurled, leaving a lip here straight as a sword, here jagged as a jaw of shattered teeth. Inwards from the torn sides of the stupendous bowl radiated, like fingers from a monstrous hand, hills, in these days thick with trees, dimpled with valleys.
These spurs or buttresses gave on to the lake sometimes in a cliff or tumble of boulders, sometimes in a sloping facet like the hip of a slate roof. Down the valleys between them swift streams hurried or, failing to find a bed, fell in cascades down thousands of feet. In spite of the beauty Norah shivered.
'Don't you feel like a mouse in a bucket?' she said.
As the sun rose higher and hotter, the irregularity of the engines became more marked—in Alibaba's words, 'worse as before, sir.' Dick's features had drawn into a frown which even Norah could not lighten and irritably he paced the narrow deck.
Noon was announced by an access of activity among the deck hands, who bestirred themselves to eat their thick pink porridge of cooked millet, dipping fingers into the common bowl. They were a chattering, good-humoured crowd, clad in the remains of blue serge with white beretta-shaped caps on their shiny black heads.
Changalilo became visible threading his way through them with a plate of soup in each hand. With lunch he brought a tale of violence and interference on the part of the lean Indian passenger. A rambling story, like all native plaints, it was, starting from the moment of reaching theMimiand leading from borrowed pans and stolen cutlery to high words that ended in a blow.
Dick's nerves had been set on edge by the heat and by anxiety over the engines. He would not listen to advice to follow Gallio. He had always hated, he said, the Indians in Africa, low-caste pedlars battening on the ignorant native, and he wasn't going to stand for any interference with his servants. He strode angrily down the hot iron deck, his white coat flapping. The deck hands followed in a curious mob.
Norah heard his voice raised in the stern, angry and a little shrill.
'I found the brute squatting half naked on his hatch,' he reported later, 'eating rice and spilling it into his beard. I asked him if he understood English, and he bowed in a condescending sort of way. That made me lose my temper a bit and I told him if he didn't leave our boys alone, I'd pitch him into the lake. The swine didn't stir a muscle except to smile. A nasty quiet sort of smile. It made me wild to see him sitting there, cross-legged and grinning, as if he'd bought the ship, and I told him to get up when a white man spoke to him. Again he didn't move, but went on picking some grains of rice out of his beard. He even had the cheek to close his eyes as if he were tired.
'That was a trifle too much, and I took him by the scruff, lifting him none too gently on to his feet. I was going to give him a good cuffing, but he slid out of my hand like a snake, and disappeared behind the galley. By his face as he went, I shouldn't say he was exactly brimming over with brotherly love.... I'd have followed him, but it wouldn't have looked dignified.'
'I'm jolly glad you didn't,' said Norah. 'He might have stuck a knife into you. Do be careful, Dick.'
'I'd like to see him try,' said Dick, 'but pluck's not his strong suit ... the odd thing was the way the crew seemed to side with him. Usually the nigger hates the Hindoo, but these blighters looked upset when I went for the swine.'
Dick was a bit upset himself. No one cares to feel he has played a poorish part. It needed all Norah's admiration to restore his equanimity, and the physical contact of her cool white hand.
If Norah's hand was cool, it was the only thing on board the boat in that condition. For, as the day wore on, the heat of the failing engines, added to the blaze of the sun, was intolerable. The sickly smell of hot oil filled the nostrils; the dazzle off the water scorched the eyeballs. Mirage with a magician's wand lifted island and headland off the horizon as the lake took a colour of deepest emerald, its surface networked irregularly with violet shadows.
About three in the afternoon, the engines gave a final jerk and fetched up soundless. The Chief—and only—Engineer emerged for emphatic converse with Alibaba.
He was an obese Indian with a naturally depressed air and an easy flow of perspiration. His hair and drooping moustaches were grey. I fancy a day or two in the engine-room of theMimiwould send Phœbus Apollo a bit grey.
Skipper and engineer disappeared, but the sounds of hammering between decks indicated their continued existence. After half an hour they emerged, dirtier than ever and swimming in sweat. Dick, now thoroughly uneasy, thought the time for direct action had arrived, and joined the party. Norah, watching from the bows, guessed from the bowing, shrugging, and upturned palms that the situation was not satisfactory. She was right.
'I can't understand engine-room shop in a mixture of Swahili and Hindustani,' confided Dick, 'but I gather from Alibaba it's case of "that engine no good, sir," and "big rod he very sick, sir, he wantee for die."'
'I suppose we'll have to make for the nearest White Fathers,' said Norah, 'though I do feel an adulterous couple a bit "de trop" at a mission.'
'Alibaba says there isn't a mission anywhere for 100 miles either way up or down this side of the lake.'
'Can't we do that slowly?'
'He says not.'
'What about crossing over to the other side?'
'That's forty miles or so from here, and the engines are good for another ten at the most. No, what they want is to put into a little bay just out of sight round that headland, where there's good anchorage for the night.'
'I suppose there'll be a village where we can get food,' said Norah.
'In any case,' added Dick, 'there's really no choice. We can do ten miles at the most. I'd better tell them to get on with it.'
Much firewood was shot into the furnace and much steam hissed out into the air, before the engines clanked regretfully into life. Alibaba took his place at the wheel, and, dragging like a wounded buck that has outdistanced the hunter, theMimidrew inshore. Across her bows loomed a rocky promontory that dropped in sheer cliff to the water. Alibaba swung her wide to miss the piled boulders, which had crumbled from its face to form a breakwater to the bay and a council chamber for the grave, black, diving birds who, bolt upright, stretched their necks in the sun.
The view that was revealed as the steamer heeled slowly round the bar and the divers with raucous cries flapped heavily into the air, presented an appearance of habitation that momentarily relieved the wayfarers.
At the feet of the densely wooded hills that sloped from the sheer cliffs of the encircling mountains, a square red brick tower proclaimed the constructive instinct of white men. Its style revealed the faith of the Catholic Fathers, who, since the days of the slave trade, have proselytised the lake shores.
Help seemed at hand, though the travellers' relief was marred by the falsehood of their position. Then, as the steamer drew painfully abreast of the tower, they recognised the handicraft of a Presence alike indifferent to hopes of human aid and feelings of delicacy. The assurance of Alibaba that 'missionary he finish die long time' was not required to identify the technique of death and desolation.
The windows of the tower gaped blankly, the round Spanish tiles were broken or missing, trees and creepers had obliterated all trace of the dwelling of kindly men. Not even the squalor of a native village struggled with the silent supremacy of nature. The ruined church tower stood alone to establish a passing triumph of faith. Other buildings that may have once existed had failed to resist the pressure of the forest. Even in the bright sunshine, Norah felt the wing of tragedy over the deserted station, and she wished Alibaba endowed with enough imagination to have avoided this haunted valley for their night's sojourn.
But that astute seafarer had not, as it proved, underrated the endurance of his engines. Already panting had degenerated into hiccoughing. Slower and slower theMimitrailed her wounded way towards the land, heading for the northern arm of the bay, where a swift little river pouring yellow into the lake promised anchorage inshore.
When she was within a hundred yards of its mouth, the end came. The engines raced ear-shatteringly. A grinding noise succeeded, and a cloud of steam masking the hurrying black forms of the firemen. Then a dead silence and theMimirolled lifelessly lakewards, carried out by the yellow current."