She stood firm. 'No, Archie, I must. You can go back to the work in a minute.'
He shouted for Matao. The singing ceased, while he ran to receive his orders. His return was signalled by a fresh outburst of the tune. Norah wished for a moment she had let Archie go. The start was intolerable. To gain time she asked how he had got his fever. He told her it was fording a river one day after elephant. She expressed her surprise. This was the first she had heard of elephant hunting.
He told her the size of his bag and the weight of the ivory. 'Not that it matters now,' he added, in spite of himself.
'D'you know, Archie,' she said, 'you never told me a word?'
He stared at her in silence. 'Nor I did,' he answered at last. 'But that was half the reason I went to the Congo.'
'And the other, the pure-bred bull,' she said sadly.
'Bull?' he was obviously puzzled, 'what bull?'
A measure of their old familiarity returned to her. 'Archie,' she said, 'you're maddening. Do you realise I haven't a notion what you've been doing from the day you left the farm till ... till we met here?'
So Archie struggled with his taciturnity and, helped out by Norah's questions, produced a more or less coherent story.
Until Norah's outburst on that momentous evening at the farm, no intuition had warned him she hated the life they were living. Intuition, introspection, and so forth don't get the same scope with a pioneer working eleven hours a day on a ranch, as they do with a serious young man fulfilling himself in Chelsea. Archie's only excuse took the form of a tribute to Norah.
'You stuck it like a brick,' he said. 'You never gave a sign.'
'I'd have been pretty mean if I had,' she put in. 'I made you come out here.'
So when at last her restraint had snapped, he treated the revelation with even more than his normal solemnity. After his habit he looked at the issue from both sides. For his part, the life and the country were ideal. And he was, he believed, on the slow gradient that leads his kind of man to success. But then Norah, she told him, hated the farm, the forest, everything. And the issue she did not believe worth waiting for.
Archie thought too clearly to assume the right of any one, even an Englishman, to impose his wishes on a fellow man; so it did not occur to him that he might keep Norah in surroundings she disliked. At the same time his deep-seated, if unvocal, love for Norah turned down the solution that she should go back to England, while he stayed and worked the farm. The nearest he could now bring himself towards some expression of this was to murmur, 'I didn't think then I could do without you'—words which added remorse to the pity in Norah's breast.
His logical brain accepted the only choice that remained—to take Norah back to England and find work there.
Once he had decided, it was not his way to brood on the cost of abandoning the farm that had absorbed two years and over of his life. He chose without murmuring the lesser of the evils that confronted him. Many days would have followed of slow consideration of plans to realise his assets, had not the pace been forced by no less humble an instrument of Providence than 'Mr. Jones of the Congo.'
'That night at dinner,' explained Archie, 'I said I was thinking of selling the herd. Jones' eyes lit up and he told me he had a pal on the Katanga who'd buy them.'
Archie had not been greatly impressed until he learnt that Jones' friend was head compound manager of a group of mines. The contract for the miners' meat was in his hands.
'If you let me handle the deal,' Jones had said, 'I'll get you a better price for "live weight" than you'll get anywhere else for "dead."'
'Bribery all round,' said Archie to himself, 'but that's not my concern.'
'You've been good to me,' added the "stiff," 'I'll only take five per cent. on the transaction.'
This Archie, with his Scotch blood, thought excessive; Jones himself must have had some qualms, since he was willing to throw in a bit of information that might, he said, make Archie's fortune.
I've been offered that sort of tip before,' said Archie, 'and I wanted to know a bit more.'
Well, it wasn't an undiscovered gold field or pipe of diamonds, but the whereabouts of what Jones described as 'the elephants' home town.'
The year before he had stumbled on a little-known valley on the Congo side of Lake Tanganyika where elephant, he declared, were as thick as rabbits and as big as dinosaurs. Tusks up to 150 lbs.
'Not unnaturally I asked him why he didn't take a knock at them himself,' said Archie. 'But he had a yarn ready that he had lost his nerve for elephant.'
Well, to cut a long story short, Archie did not believe a word until Jones drew him a sort of map of the locality, marking the position of several villages. The name of one of the villages was familiar. Searching his brain, Archie remembered that he had that day written on a Congo native for mason's work, who gave that village as his home.
'More to score off Jones than because I believed there was anything in it, I sent for Wadia,' he told Norah. 'To my surprise he confirmed his story. Elephant, he said, were as plentiful there as the puku on our flats: their footprints were as long across as his arm.'
In the light of this support Archie's reply that he would think it over was characteristic. It did not, however, suit Jones. The D.C. at—he mentioned the name—had given him a hint not to stay too long in the country, and he must push on the next day. If Archie liked to come to Elizabethville and give him five per cent. on the sales he secured, well and good; if not, they'd leave it at that. Archie, without answering, worked out the suggested commission on the back of an envelope. He found that he stood to gain more than he gave. Making the further stipulation that the compound manager paid hard cash, he professed willingness to start the following morning.
'Right, it's a bargain,' said Jones.
Nora told Archie how she had overheard these words. 'If only I'd heard it all!' she said. 'Why on earth didn't you tell me, Archie?'
'Well, it seemed pretty wild. The whole thing might be a try on. And I didn't want to talk about it till I'd got the money and we could start home.'
But if, he said, she hadn't been asleep when he came to say good-bye he'd have told her. In fact that's what he came to say.
Norah felt that the petty deception had been the fatal moment of her life.
He did not say much about his journey north. Quite early he had decided there was no object in accompanying Jones to Elizabethville and had made straight for the Valley of Ivory, as he named it. Sceptical to the last, Archie had to admit that the place came within measurable distance of Jones' enthusiasm. Of his adventures there he gave no account.
'You feel a bit of a swine the first elephant you shoot,' he mentioned. It's so big, so contemptuously trustful. You seem to have taken an unfair advantage of a large-minded opponent. And you've destroyed something older and longer in the making than yourself. Like burning an old master.'
The first hitch had come after he had shot his first two bulls. That was the number allowed him on his thousand franc license. He applied at the 'Poste' for the second license he had been promised, to be met with a bland refusal. No second licenses were being issued. He had considered his position. If he gave up the hunt, he would go back to Norah with a hundred or a hundred and fifty more sovereigns in his pocket. Even with a first-rate sale of his stock that wouldn't be much use.
The alternative was to stay and poach.
'Everybody does it up there,' was the excuse he gave Norah.
But Archie never had cared for the example of other people; the force which urged this law-abiding Scot to break the law was his love for Norah. Where she was concerned, he stuck at nothing. He had not hesitated to abandon his farm and two years' work to satisfy what most men would call a fancy. A Bulamatadi law did not stand much chance. The pity is that he was so careful to conceal from Norah this one recklessness and its source.
Not that it was necessary to surcharge her cup. He had said enough to show that while she flirted with Dick his only thought had been her service.
But her last defence remained to be stormed.
'If only you had come when I sent,' was her cry.
Archie stared.
'The letter Jacketi brought,' she repeated.
'I never saw Jacketi,' he said slowly.
She told him of the despairing letter she had sent, of Jacketi's return without an answer, and of the days she had waited.
He dropped his hands hopelessly.
'Jacketi never came near me. He must have turned into some village for a beer-drink.'
'Damn him, damn him!' cried Norah, and then in a dead voice, 'No, it's I who am damned.'
The work gang returned trailing the lushishi ropes. Husband and wife stood silent while the capitao prepared another log for hauling.
When the workers had danced themselves out of sight, Archie saw that Norah was crying. His awkwardness returned. 'Don't cry,' he said, 'it's done now; we can't help it.' He searched his mind for comforting phrases.
'I wouldn't have gone,' she said like a child, 'if I'd known.'
What could he say? Why had she insisted on this useless laceration?
'I thought you didn't care,' she repeated again and again.
He felt that this was unendurable. All his energy was needed for action. Emotion might complete the harm that fever had begun. Norah too must spare herself. He took a tug at the strait waistcoat of stoicism he had condemned himself to wear, remarking dispassionately that he must go back to the work. Many more logs should have been transported by now.
But Norah's weakness had been momentary, and her courage reasserted itself. 'Wait!' she said, 'I haven't told you what I came to say.'
How could she allude to what had happened without hurting him? How could she tell him it was over without promising more than she could perform? The phrases formed in her mind. She rejected each in turn.
'I'm giving Dick up!' That sounded as if she grudged a sacrifice.
'Take me back!' held out hopes she could not justify.
'I've left Dick'—she might be a kept woman.
'Archie,' she said slowly, 'I wanted to tell you that I'm leaving Dick, whatever happens. If you want me still, I'll come back to the farm.'
Archie did not speak. Not even his expression altered. The pain he had suffered had dulled his senses. His silence, his undecipherable features spared Norah nothing of humiliation. What was he thinking of her? Like a child she wondered if any one was marking up her humiliation against the harm she had done. Her words rang in her ear. She could not force herself to add a syllable to them, though she saw how inadequate they were. How Archie must despise her! Unfaithful even in adultery. Taking a man and leaving him in a few weeks. Like any harlot: less constant than the animals, whose fidelity endures the breeding season.
In fact, Archie had no clear thoughts. He felt that waves were buffeting him: his bones ached with fever: his brain was numb. Like Norah, he had turned his back to the future, and this fresh shuffling of the bits of coloured glass that make the kaleidoscope of life, as yet meant nothing to him. He could not focus his thinking. Presently one thought emerged. Not a very lofty one. 'You've got her back from Ward,' crooned his instinct of possession.
Then an idea flickered through his brain, stabbing like a white-hot wire.
'Does this mean she still loves me?'
His body seemed to come to life and to flow with young, clean blood. He must sound the amazing possibility at once and risk the pain that denial would bring.
'Why are you ... what makes you give up Ward?' he stammered.
Norah felt explanation beyond her powers. Surely it was not demanded of her to tell how she had come to despise and distrust her lover; and how she had been driven to parry the danger she sensed.
'I can't go on,' she answered simply.
But Archie's stoicism had deserted him, and he found the suspense more atrocious than yesterday's certitude.
'It wasn't because you thought you might...' His voice trailed away.
She understood what he wanted to ask, and sorrowfully shook her head. She dared not start into a labyrinth of deception through which her feet would have to drag every day of her life.
Archie's eyes, which had been alive with incredulous hope, died. He sat down heavily on the stump, no longer sustained by any aspiration, hope as dead and dry as bones in the sand.
'I had to tell you,' Norah murmured.
He nodded.
'Don't let's talk of it any more,' he said; 'we needn't settle anything yet.'
For once he felt he must talk; the sound of his voice was preferable to the bottomless vacancy of his heart.
'We've got to get out of here first. Then I dare say you'll like to be taken back to England. Then we can see.'
In his disappointment he clutched at her offer of reconciliation. It was something to know that she was not a total loss to him. He had, it seemed, only to say the word and she would come back into his life. If he did not set his demands on happiness too high something might be saved out of the wreck.
Norah had been watching his face. Her heart had ached for him as she saw the re-birth of hope and its deception. She had been tempted to foster it; but why treat him like a child when his manliness made him so admirable? She had lost confidence in herself and felt she blundered in a dark room, bruising and crushing against her will.
She was distressed to see how ill and worn he looked now that hope had left him. Finding no word that could help, she urged him to come to his breakfast. To her surprise he consented. Together they started downhill. Archie stumbled. In his disappointment, the fever was mastering him. He stumbled again. Norah took his arm and led him to camp. With Changalilo's help she put him to bed. He seemed affected by her care for him. It gave him the momentary illusion that nothing had happened and that their life together had not been interrupted except perhaps by a night's dreaming. Hugging the illusion, he fell asleep.
Towards evening the slanting rays of the sun entered his shelter and woke him.
Two facts permeated his waking consciousness—a body sore in every bone and a mind that grappled with the possibilities of Norah's offer to come back to him—'if he wanted her.' How he wanted her! Was there anything else he wanted?
But ever his reason forbade him to listen to his affections. Whenever he smothered his common sense, retribution followed. Of course it had been mad to think he could make a husband for Norah, and it was mad to think he could hold her now.... But as yet nothing need be determined. His first job was to get them out of this ... but there was something that had to be done at once. What was it? ... Damn this fever.... Oh, yes! Johnny, the fundi, had reported a herd of eland in the hills behind the ruins. With the rains coming, they would not stay there. He must get one that evening and have the meat dried into strips, as a stand-by on the rafts.
Painfully he lifted himself out of bed and, his head swimming with weakness, got into his clothes. How heavy his .420 weighed! Pity the handy little .303 had been smashed up by that wounded bull! A near shave it had been!
He looked about for a native to carry his gun, but the camp was empty. Resting the heavy rifle on his shrinking shoulder, he walked shakily into the hills.
He looked up at the sun and saw that in under two hours it would be dark. There was not much time. As he walked he searched the ground for spoor. Padded footprints on a stretch of sand showed where one of the smaller cats had stepped in the night. A genet probably; too small for a serval. Norah had had a tame genet on the farm. 'Fred' it had been called. He remembered the little blind thing he had bought for a shilling from a native who would have eaten it. It used to sleep all day in Norah's pocket; she had nursed it through infancy, waking in the night to feed it on warm milk and water, but it had died while still a kitten, bitten by a native dog.
Norah had always a liking for the little wild things of the forest; some feeling of kinship, maybe....
His eye rested on the delicate footprints of a dwyka. The antelope's bound had impressed its hard, slender toes into the baked earth. The tracks were a day old ... was it thinkable that Norah and he would be able to take up their life together from the point where she had dropped it? Would memory let them? Was this ... adventure of Norah's a mere episode that they could both forget or did it mean more?...
He'd thought there were leopards about and those scratches on the bark of that muputa tree showed where a leopard had sharpened his claws. Leopardess, more likely, to judge by the height.... It was too rocky ahead, he would have to work round behind the mission. There wasn't a breath of wind, so it didn't matter which way he came at the game....
Here were the ruins, the sweep of the hill had brought him out too low. Funny how Norah hated the place—fancy, of course. Was that her voice he heard? But quinine makes your ears sing and then you imagine voices. Still those deep tones of Norah's.... He'd just look round the tower to see if any chance had brought her there. She'd be angry with him for leaving bed....
He rounded the ruined tower and stood as if paralysed by what he saw. His right knee bent to advance began to tremble violently with slow, separated jerks. He tried to raise his voice, but his lips had gone dry. They felt swollen. He had not had this feeling since the nightmares of his childhood when he had seemed to cower in a small dark room, gasping for air, while a shapeless, colourless, nameless body like a distorted featherbed or an obscene grand piano was swelling, swelling and crushing him out of existence. The oncoming of absolute and inevitable disaster.
So he stood, while not twenty yards from his eyes, Norah's body lay fast held in Ward's arms. His kisses rained on her white face. Her tired eyes were shut—he imagined the little blue veins in their lids—and she seemed to swoon with pleasure.
In spite of the resolution he had taken in the hills, at moments Archie's rage against Dick had rowelled him. Imagination had goaded him with intolerable pictures of his wife's intimacy with her lover, kissing, for instance, body to body, Dick's rather full lips crushed into her carmine mouth. The vision always lashed him to a mute fury in which he could feel his rival's throat bulge under his fingers. Fever had given body to these visions and had reduced his self-control. But except perhaps in dreams, such as Norah had witnessed, the crisis was momentary and quickly overcome.
When, therefore, a few yards off, he saw his wife's pale face forced back by the weight of her lover's kiss, her little body crushed by the violence of his arms, the familiar process was started. Rage blazed up to be as instantly curbed by will. Fiercely he commanded his passion, until realisation dawned. This was no unhealthy, torturing fancy, but an enactment in flesh and blood. And if the picture before him was real, so was that throat real. At any rate the weight of the gun on his shoulder was real. But where did imagination start and reality end? Had he imagined Norah promising him that morning to give up Ward and, if he said the word, come back to him? No, that was real. Then this picture that seemed to sear his eyes must be the work of fever in his brain. Norah did not lie. And she had promised ... he then must be mad. Fever was not enough to cast shadows so solid as those before his eyes.... Fact or fancy, he'd stop it, by God!
He humped up his shoulder, and the barrel of the rifle fell into his left palm. The familiar feel of the metal cleared his mind. Those were real people over there, Dick Ward and Norah Sinclair; real, mortal, vulnerable people. And Norah had lied to him that morning; had come to him with her flesh a-tingle perhaps from Ward's kisses, and had lied to make Ward safe. Well, she shouldn't get away with the lie. Hot fury blazed in Archie's breast, and power of motion returned.
He must have shouted, though he did not hear his voice; a startled face turned towards him, and slowly, oh! slowly, Norah's eyes opened.
He saw his enemy drop Norah, start to his feet, snatch at a gun that lay on the ground. With his right thumb Archie pushed over his safety catch, and for an instant the barrel rested on Norah. She had been fooling him all the time, perhaps all these years she had fooled him.... Then the sights swung round and aligned on Dick. Some one should pay him for this.
Before Ward could raise his rifle from hip to shoulder, a shot rang through the ruins. His knees sagged, bent; then he toppled over with his face rubbing the ground. His shoulders twitched and his hands opened and clenched. A jerk, and he had twisted on to his back. Thus he lay staring at the sky, and the tissue of enterprise and weakness, frailty and charm that had been Dick Ward ceased to exist."
When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeling beside the body, fumbling with its collar. He remarked her skirt was in a pool of dark blood. She would not, he reflected, be able to wear that dress again.
He started to go to her, stopped, and stood in thought. If he went to her he would hear her reproaches, see her grief, perhaps be maddened to ... harm her. He knew he would be sorry later if he did. Nothing in the world would make him sorry about Ward.
Without any conscious act of will he walked away into the forest. As he walked he held at arm's length the knowledge of Norah's treachery. That had better not be faced till his head was calm again. Thinking about Ward did not matter.
His anger had vanished, but nothing like remorse took its place. His mind handled the crime dispassionately, mathematically. Before his ... action he had, he now saw, been trying to solve an insoluble problem. The world had been veiled in a thick fog of good and bad intentions, mixed motives, false standards. Now he saw everything as clear-cut and minute as if he looked through the wrong end of a telescope. Ward's death had amazingly simplified life. In retrospect he could see the death of one of them as the only conceivable solution; there had not been room in the world for the two men and their passions.
The only emotion he was conscious of was an almost impersonal satisfaction. Once he had shot a lioness that had terrorised a village; his sensations had been similar—at a certain risk to himself the world was quit of a pest. He was satisfied, moreover, at a clean job carried out efficiently with his own hands...."
Ross paused. "It's easy," he said, "to go wrong over Archie's feelings. He was always so careful to suppress them. But that's the best I can piece together from what he let fall, consciously and in his delirium. The result is not what your psychologist, certainly not what your moralist, would like.
If you are inclined to side with these wise men from the West, you must remember that on the subject of Norah this hard-headed farmer was not quite normal. His love was that dominant weakness through which, according to my theory, Africa masters a man. So the kiss that betrayed his love shocked him not only into murder, not only into callousness, but into a different epoch of morality. The atrocity of his discovery seems to have atrophied the segments of brain that are latest developed in man—the convolutions that give refuge to mercy, compassion, gentleness.
'The vigorous young world was ignorantOf these restrictions; 'tis decrepit now,Not more devout, but more decayed and cold.'
And Africa stood eager to welcome him to an older world where force, not cunning, ruled; muscle, not money, dominated; where Jehovah was God, where an eye for an eye was sound morality; where you killed your enemy, dashed his children against the stones, and added his wives to your harem. It was Jehovah's gospel, not Christ's, not Mammon's, that the forest whispered in Archie's ear.
Another avenue to remorse did Africa close, that fear of discovery and of punishment that leads men to contrition. Murder is so safe in Central Africa. Let me advise you to take your enemies on a shooting trip there. There in the solitude, far from coroners' inquests, are a hundred agents of sudden and silent death—snake-bite, blackwater, a crocodile, sunstroke, a lion ... and a sun that makes immediate burial unavoidable.
Any of these or a dozen other fates could be adduced to explain Dick's disappearance; the natives would ask no questions and carry no tales; and a wife cannot, in English law, give evidence against her husband.
So Africa was accessory after, as well as before, the fact. Archie may not have recognised her proffered help; at the same time he can have felt none of the anxiety and fear that so assist the workings of conscience. He blundered on through the trees, caring only to set space between himself and Norah, until chance brought him on the herd of eland.
His eye, which took in no detail of his course, was caught by the quick movement of a horned head plucking at a branch. The sight of the great antelope focused his vision on the rest of the herd, whose humped bodies were no more than shadows in the dappled gloom of the forest.
Dropping flat, he began to crawl into easy range. No fancy shots, with ammunition so scarce. As he got near, he saw that the animal he stalked was a cow. Cautiously he knelt up and searched among the trees for a bull. He thought involuntarily that, for the second time that day, he had spared the female of the species. He raised his rifle and aimed behind the shoulder of a magnificent bull who stood head up guarding his cows, his horns hidden in the flat branches. With faint surprise he found compunction in his heart. He was loath now to tighten the trigger finger. Half an hour before he had felt no such qualm.
It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull on a line between eye socket and ear hole.
If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were nothing—men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth. Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated, choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing posture.
Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.
The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. Soon the eland was hidden under a mound of foliage, black in the failing light. He kicked a little earth over a pool of blood that might attract a jackal or a hyæna. As he did so, another pool of blood with a woman's skirt trailing in it rose before his eyes, and he realised that what he did for an eland he must do for a man.
Ward must be buried. He could not be left to the ministrations of the forest. Archie's prodigious impersonality had departed and he was conscious of a violent distaste for the work before him. Either his fever or his imagination brought physical sickness, and he sat down on the ground till the nausea passed.
He started to drag himself home. His gun seemed an intolerable weight now that his mood had weakened. For a moment he saw the murder as a fault—not as a crime or an infraction of the law—for the power of the forest was too absolute to let this lawyer care much for legality—but as a failure in hospitality. Ward had come to him, he remembered, for help, had put himself in his power. And the use he had made of his power was to deal death where he promised escape.
Remorse passed as quickly as it had come when he thought of the kiss which had forfeited Ward his claim to help, safety, life. But the duty of burying Dick had never left his mind, where it bred a fresh idea of his victim.
He no longer saw him in the abstract as the enemy, the defiler of Norah's body, the pest which must be killed. He saw him as a dead man. A poor dead man.Un povero morte, shut out from the daylight, from sight and feel and smell, from love of women, from hope and achievement. All he had now was stillness and a silence.
Archie felt no horror at his crime. He stood back from civilisation, remote from society, away from the herd that had created morality to make possible life in a herd. But pity took hold of him, pity for his victim, who was also, he saw, the victim of exasperating circumstance, of passions and stupidities. And heavily—if justly—had he paid.
A growl of thunder diverted his attention. It did not sound very distant. He hoped the rains would not break yet, but he quickened his aching steps.
It was dark when he reached the ruins and found no trace of the body he had come to bury. Even in the obscurity he expected that he would have seen the white clothes. They would not be so white now, but something should be visible. Had Norah had it carried into camp? If she had, that showed beyond palliation that she was careless of her husband's fate.
Had he come to the right spot? Yes, this was where he had stood. Ward over there, with Norah. He had fallen forwards. His body should lie here. Archie fancied he could smell the pool of blood, and the light of a match justified his senses.
He lit another and saw that the grass was bent and broken. In Ward's death agony? Or had the body been dragged away? He followed the wake in the grass, striking matches as he went, till at a distance of some fifty yards he came on the stained, white bundle. He had not come in time. Hyaenas, a flicker of lightning revealed, had been before him. The poor corpse was already mutilated. His pity for the dead man gathered force. He had never admired Ward's good looks (secretly he may have been jealous of them), but he knew they were there, and against his will he had been conscious of the man's light-hearted charm. Now this helpless, shapeless thing worried by the beasts of night was all that remained.
It was the war again, he thought. Bodies of Germans hanging on the wire—sons, husbands, lovers of some one bereaved in Germany. Only here the consolation was lacking of sacrifice for a country. Ward had died in no nobler quarrel than the fight of two dogs over a bitch.
For the first time it occurred to him that his victim was a human being. He had seen and killed him as an abstraction—the betrayer of Norah; he had seen him and pitied him as a corpse: now he knew that he had been a human being with human faults and qualities, human interests, human relationships; somewhere he had a family, friends, a home.
And to-night he must bury him far from all that. He faced the problem of the burial. The work must be done with his own hands and the carriers must know nothing. He could give out that Ward had been taken by a crocodile on the shore of the lake. The noise of shooting would be explained by eland meat he would send them to fetch next day. The first round fired would have missed. He passed to other considerations.
The digging must be done with a broad bladed native hoe that was tied on to one of his loads for general camp use. There was no spade. The ground was iron-hard and the tool inefficient. It would take his fever-weighted arms several hours to dig even a shallow grave. Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.
It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his body yet unburied. Yet, rather than cross to his camp and meet his wife, he would have preferred to stay in the company of the part-eaten corpse of the man he had shot down.
The pain he had felt, when he first learnt in that sunlit clearing that Norah was untrue, had been diffuse. Grief attacked his heart from many sides and numbed it. Despair mingled with puzzlement; self-reproach merged into anger. Norah he had been slow to blame, making his own shortcomings scapegoat and Ward's seduction. That she was guiltless, that her chastity was intact he could not pretend; but he found excuses and put his love at the five-barred gate of prejudice. Love saved him the shock of his wife's sinfulness that most men would have suffered, accepting the boom in virginity engineered by a Church that is celibate at heart and the great ring of women with plain daughters to marry.
But if Archie had tried to ignore his wife's infidelity and in his heart had longed to forgive it, disillusionment now seared him with hotter irons. His body and brain seemed to ache with the question—why in the morning say she was ready to come back to him and had left Dick Ward for ever, to be caught ere evening in his passionate embrace?
There were only two answers:—
It might be that, faithless herself, she had not believed his promise to bring her and her lover safe back to Abercorn. To make sure their escape she had coldly tortured him with lying offers, had tricked him with a flattering tale. Could it be true that the girl he had worshipped as all that was loyal, all that was high-hearted, had fallen to this treachery, grovelled in such cowardice and cruelty?
But if that was not the truth, then his clean, lovely Norah was a harlot so wanton, so rotten, she could not keep for an hour out of a man's arms, could not for a few days stay faithful. The day she was left on the farm welcoming a lover; renouncing him as soon as her husband found her; slinking back the same night.
He must accept, it seemed, one of these unendurable explanations. Where both so base, did it matter which was true? He had married and adored either a wanton or a traitress. Was further scrutiny necessary? Was not the only manly course amputation, to cut the woman out of his life?
When first he had learnt that she had left him, he had grieved for Norah as one untimely dead, lost to him but still dear. Now he must think of her not only as lost, but dishonoured. That he still loved her, degraded him to her level. She had eaten her way into his life like rust, had twined her fingers through his heart-strings. Before it was too late, he must tear himself free of her magic.
He faced the issue squarely. Suppose he surrendered to the love, which still impregnated his tormented being, and took Norah back, what peace would there be for either? Could he ever for a moment forget her character as this blinding moment had revealed it? Could he ever trust her word? When she spoke to him he would divine a hidden sense; when she kissed him he would see a lure. He would have sold his manhood for deception and a mockery.
No, once he had rescued her from the danger of the moment, he must break through the net that entangled him. The world would be bare enough without Norah, without the farm, without mankind's major compensations for living—love and work.
Even suicide was inadmissible. If he killed himself here, what would happen to Norah?
Some heavy drops of rain recalled him to the work that faced him. He must fetch the hoe. If he met Norah, he need not speak to her. Sometime he must tell her what he had decided, that could wait. There was now a man to be buried, a raft to be built, a journey to be begun. Plenty for one man to do, with fever. Then he'd have to go to the first Boma and give them a story of Ward's death. Unless, of course, Norah betrayed him. That, and anything, was now possible.
He found it difficult to raise himself from the heap of masonry on which he was sitting. His limbs seemed to have stiffened and he shook with ague. Laboriously he dragged brushwood and creepers near the corpse and put a match to the heap.
Then without looking round, he walked heavily to the camp. The unsteady illumination of lightning showed him his path."
That afternoon when Norah had helped Archie down the hillside, where the work of transporting the logs was in process and where she had made her difficult offer of reconciliation, it had not been easy to persuade him to take his fever to bed.
She had at last overcome his conviction that the carriers could not be left alone by promising that she herself would watch the work. So she had spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon walking behind the gang in their slow passage between hillside and lake, until the full number of logs that Archie needed to build the rafts lay ranged on the shore.
Leaving the workers rolling lushishi ropes between the palm of their hands and the flat of their thighs, with orders to make a certain length before they knocked off for the night, she started in search of Dick to tell him she was going back to Archie. She dreaded the task before her. Her generosity shrank from the wreck she must work in Dick's dreams. That morning she had had to sacrifice her pride; now Dick's romance was the victim. Her days seemed a string of unendurable tasks.
Somehow she had mismanaged her offer to Archie. Instead of relieving him she had added to his distress. And the news she had for Dick, in its nature, carried nothing but pain. She scourged her imagination for some means to soften the blow.
As she meditated she caught sight of Dick's tall white-clad figure on one of the mounds that marked where the monastery had stood. She noticed that he had listened to Archie's monosyllabic advice, not to go far afield without his gun, as the rocks might harbour leopards. 'That's where those two rounds come in,' Archie had muttered.
She shouted to Dick, but the distance absorbed her voice. Forgetting fear of the ruins in dislike for her mission, she clambered up the shattered stairway.
Dick was plainly glad to see her. She had not been near him since dinner the night before, and she was struck by the change. He seemed to have filled out to the dimensions of his old care-free self. The storm of panic and jealousy had passed and left no mark, for Dick was one of those fortunate beings who can emerge on the far side of the Valley of the Shadow with an unimpaired flow of small talk.
I've just seen a water-spout,' he told her.
Norah examined him with wonder. His eyes were clear and happy, his manner without embarrassment, his bearing debonair—the Dick she had known and loved. He seemed unaffected by the heat, his hair well brushed and white clothes spotless and tidy. With his white topee on his head and the Mauser in his hand, he looked, she told him, like the frontispiece of a South Sea novel.
Where was the water-spout, she asked him. It was over on the far side, he said, a wisp of opaque mist joining the lake with a cloud. Snow-white at its foot; grey where it met the cloud.
'A pillar?' asked Norah, putting off the moment she dreaded.
'No, it sort of trailed. Wide at the base and the top; pinched in at the middle.'
She watched his hands as he tried to describe the vortex. He used them in conversation more than most Englishmen, perhaps because they were long and well shaped. She remembered how the touch of them had once thrilled her.
That magic had departed; exorcised by her better knowledge of him; or perhaps only overlaid. For the moment she was empty of all passion. Suspense, shame, pity had squeezed her dry like a sponge. When life flowed back into her veins, would the spell resume its dominion? Now she was nothing but a brain dispassionately scheming the redress of the wrong she had wrought, and grappling with the consequences. But one day, when the crisis was over, she knew her body would come to life. Would it then remember those well-shaped hands?
'Well,' she told herself unsympathetically, 'it would have to.' If Archie had not her heart, he had her word. And ignorant of the blow she must deal him, Dick talked gaily of a dozen different matters. He pointed to a stretch of opposite coast that was blotted from sight. The sky above the gap was a black fog that shredded into streamers of cloud. The hills on either side of the gap lay clear and clean in the sunlight.
'Rain,' said Dick, 'it'll be cooler here soon.' But since she had told Archie her decision, Norah's anxiety about the heat and its possible effects had been relieved.
'Dick,' she said, 'listen to me for a minute.' Pity poured into her. Contempt had given way to understanding. For all his thirty years he was only a boy. Good-looking, attractive, lovable. All his possibilities were in sight. He had no reserves to draw on and, if he had failed in the hour of test, the fire had been hot indeed.
'Dick, haven't you noticed,' she began, 'haven't you noticed that nothing good lasts? Sooner or later one goes back to school.'
'Whatisthe matter?' he asked.
'Everything,' she said. 'But there's no need for you to mind. The world's full of pretty women—and ones that won't let you down.'
'Optimist!' he laughed, 'what are you talking about?'
I'm trying to tell you.... It's all finished now, Dick. Oh, do understand! we're through.'
Norah had counted on a painful reception of her words—prayers, protests, despair. It had not occurred to her that she might be met with blank incredulity.
'My dearest child,' he said, 'you're mad.'
She wanted to tell him that outside the natives she was the only sane person in the bay, but he would not listen.
'You're nervy,' he said. 'I don't wonder. I was nervy myself yesterday. I imagined all sorts of rubbish about Sinclair.'
'I'm going back to Archie,' she managed to put in.
'Yesterday I thought he'd got something up his sleeve,' Dick went on without seeming to hear her, 'but I know I was wrong. I think he's behaved jolly well. He doesn't mean to interfere with us in any way. Of course it's rough on him, but that is life.'
Dick's mercurial temper had asserted itself. Starvation, death, violence seemed very far away. His sky was clear.
'Oh, do listen!' cried Norah.
She was getting hysterical, he thought. No wonder, either. But he must not give way to her fancies. He kept up a steady flow of reassurance. When at last the stream ran dry—
'Dick, listen,' she spoke very slowly, dividing the syllables. 'I've—told—Archie—I'll—go—back—to him.'
When the words had left her lips their brutality appalled her. She had hurt Dick as she had hurt Archie. If only he had not forced her to speak out.
Her calm impressed his optimism. He dropped his rifle, which clanged against the hidden masonry.
'Good God!' he said, 'do you mean it?'
She nodded her head wearily.
'You've told Sinclair you'd chuck me? Damn it, Norah...' and his disappointment found vent in anger and in abuse of Archie.
Norah saw she must stop him. Their short romance had been disastrous: it need not be made ugly.
'Don't,' she cried, 'don't spoil it now. Leave it so that one day we can look back without distaste. Part has been good. Don't throw that away.' He opened his mouth to answer.
'Murder's better done in silence,' she said, and walked a few steps away.
Dick's affection for Norah was real and shamed him into the silence she begged. After a moment—'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I was a brute. But it's such a shock.' Then coaxing her: 'Norah, say you don't mean it, say it's all a nightmare.'
She sat down on a pile of rubble overgrown with creepers. He knelt beside her and slipped his arm round her body.
'Norah, it can't be over yet. We'd only just started.' His face came close to hers. 'It was going to be so heavenly.'
She made to rise but Dick held her fast and crushed his lips on to hers.
What were Dick Ward's motives in kissing the mouth that had just renounced him? He may have trusted to the caress, with the memories it would revive, to soothe what he deemed disordered nerves. He may have hoped to burn away her scruples in a kiss. Or, more simply, the nearness of her body, so soon to be lost to him, may have set his veins a-throb and deprived him of reason. He never had the opportunity to explain.
In the hours that followed Norah was to curse the kiss so negligently accepted—suffered, rather, in weariness and compassion. She felt a great pity for Dick. With his gallant exterior and weakness beneath, he was so ill-equipped for the hand-to-hand fight that is Life. So easily hurt. She wanted in his dark hour to let him down as lightly as she could. If every word of hers, every action, was to breed suffering for the two men who loved her, it seemed ungenerous to forbid anything that might ease the pain. If kissing her was any help....
After all it seemed prudish to balk at a kiss from one who had so recently possessed her. And since it stirred in her no breath of passion, whom could it hurt? So if kissing made parting easier...? And she was weary, mind and body; the interviews with Archie and Dick had taken all her strength; for the moment she was as passive as the dead. What did a kiss more or less matter?
The next moment, she was kneeling by a corpse.
Death, when it comes suddenly, is so incredible, that for some time she worked to bring back consciousness.
At last she desisted and her senses and intelligence confirmed the fact of death; still she took in nothing. Mechanically she closed his eyes and mechanically stayed on her knees, trying to pray for a spirit released on Eternity all unready. But she would have been less astonished, when she opened her eyes at last, to see him standing there gay and immaculate with a smile on his face and a word of love on his tongue, than to find him lying stiff and contorted in the disorder of violent death. Was it believable that the mouth, which a matter of seconds before had so feverishly sought hers, was set in that grimace as long as any flesh was on it? That the body, whose warmth she felt against her heart, was growing colder, never to be warm again ... unless putrefaction engenders heat?
To occupy her hands she lifted his rifle, playing with it aimlessly. What deadly toys men had! She turned the weapon in her hands, half opened the breech.
It was still in her grasp when she reached the camp, where Changalilo took it from her to clean. She felt that henceforward life would consist of minute, valueless acts like handing a rifle to a native, changing a skirt, sitting down on a chair. Nothing would ever matter again. 'All things are full of labour: man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.'
The workers were in sight, still rolling ropes of lushishi: even in this backwater, life did not pause in the presence of death. She felt she must get close to living beings, but when she had joined them, she found in their proximity no relief. They were too calm and unconcerned, too alien to her. She dismissed them for the day and turned back to camp.
Her eye fell on Archie's shelter and travelled to the rain clouds.... With his fever ... his fever was bad. Perhaps if he had been normal he would not have ... how was the quinine going? She fetched the bottle and tipped out the tablets, counting them slowly. She lost count and started again. The bottle would not last many more days. She must warn Archie. She took up the flowers she had picked that morning while she watched the log-hauling—purple orchids from a patch of swampy ground by the yellow river. Their clear, bright colour caught hold of her emptied mind. It seemed to matter more than anything else that was left in the world. She pinned a bunch against her white jumper. As she did so, she noticed they made her hand smell of musk, and ever afterwards the odour of musk made her think of blood.
Unpinning them, she discovered that she hated their sophisticated little faces. She threw the bunch away and tried to wash the musk from her hands. But the scent lingered faintly.
All the while, she was detached from her actions, as if her intelligence had been carried high up into the air whence, at an immense distance, it watched her body mooning about with flowers, loving them and quarrelling with them like an idiot child in a limpid poem by Wordsworth.
But inactivity increased her anguish. She had the sensation of abominable things lurking behind her, ready to spring if she began to think. She picked up the needlework she had been busy with on theMimi, and tried to stitch. Her fingers trembled too much and she sat staring blankly at the sewing until she dropped it with a despairing gesture. It was a sock of Dick's that she had started to darn.
The trivial shock seemed at last to clear her brain and it bore on her that Dick was dead and killed by Archie. That the calamity she had foreseen had happened. She tried to believe that from the first she had seen no human power could ride the storm of the two men's passions. But in truth she had never doubted that her wit would find a way. She had divined the danger, faced it and, she believed, by the sacrifice of her every sensibility, had mastered it. Then one act of pointless surrender had brought her contriving to bloody ruin! The idea that Archie might see her loveless embrace and by it be goaded to strike had never crossed her brain. Had her mind not been dulled by the three days' ceaseless stress, it would have refused Dick the fatal consolation of that barren kiss.
By her blind sympathy, by the abandonment of a moment, she had killed him. To the two men she loved she had brought ruin and death. Her own act had made her the wife of a murderer and the mistress of his victim. Œdipus, slaying his father and marrying his mother, Rigoletto stabbing his daughter for the seducer he had abetted, were no more blood-guilty than she.
She tried to forget what was irreparable. What did the future hold?
One glimpse was enough. A black frame, in the middle of which a body, with a cloth over its face, hung, twitching a little. She put her hands over her eyes, but imagination had no mercy.
She waited now in the airless court, waited to hear Archie sentenced to spend his youth in a prison or pay life for life. She saw the indifferent, dispassionate features of the barristers; the old, grave face of the judge; the inhuman pomp of Justice, only less terrible than the degraded ceremonial of the scaffold.
And his father would be there. She would have to tell him.... How could she save Archie? If payment was claimed, it was she who must pay. She would force him to be prudent, to cover up the traces of blood, to plan an escape.
At any moment, one of the carriers, released from work, wandering afield looking for wild honey, might stumble on the corpse. She braced herself for action and told Changalilo to collect the natives. Anxiously she counted them; they were all there. How could she keep them from the place of death?
'Tell them,' she bade the servant, 'to-night it will rain. They must thatch their shelters, now, without waiting.'
She showed him where they were to pull the grass for thatching. She stood over them to see they did not wander. Changalilo asked if he should prepare Archie's bath. Where could Archie be all this time? By now it was nearly dark. Changalilo said he had heard shots, the last one just audible. The Bwana, he suggested, had wounded and followed game.
His words evoked a fresh horror. That distant gun! For a terrible moment she saw a second figure in the lonely hills, lying in its blood.
She shut the image out. Archie, of all men, however little he wished to live, would not leave her on this haunted shore to face starvation alone. She wondered if he had collapsed from fever alone in the bush. Only fear of what the natives might find on their way stopped her from leading a search party.
It seemed that hours passed before the sound of slow footsteps in the dead leaves fell on her ear and Archie's bowed figure crossed the circle of the firelight. Even in the reddish glow his face was pale and he walked as if each motion called for a separate effort of will.
She moved to meet him, to take his hand, but he kept his eyes turned to the ground and carried his gun to the shelter. She heard the bed creak under his weight. She had no inkling of the baseness he had read into her acts, and only her respect for his obvious wish to be left alone stopped her following him. Could he not see the urgent need to give the natives some reason for Dick's ... absence? To forestall curiosity? Talk spread through the villages and from the villages might reach a Boma. Inquiry would follow, the carriers would be sent for and the story pieced together. She forced herself to keep quiet, crediting Archie with agony of conscience that he did not, in fact, feel.
When she could endure inactivity no longer, she crossed to the shelter and looked in. Archie was sitting on his bed, his chin dug into his chest and his rifle across his knees.
'Archie,' she said softly.
He took no notice.
She repeated his name.
'For Christ's sake, Norah!' he said.
'No, listen to me,' she began again, 'don't think about ... what's happened.'
'Not think about what's happened?' he echoed as if he could not believe he heard her words right.
'Think what you'll tell the natives,' she said. But he only stared as if he had never seen her before.
At last he spoke. 'Norah!' he began, then checked himself, and as if, she thought, he was fleeing from her presence, shouldered his way out of the shelter.
She stood where she was, unconscious of the repugnance she had inspired. Had horror swept him beyond clear thought and speech? Or did he think his company intolerable while his hands were wet with her lover's blood? Where was he going? Out into the forest, driven by his thoughts? Or maddened by remorse to betray himself?
He was calling Matao to him and speaking loud and in Chi-wemba, so that the attentive group of carriers, sprawling by the fire, chewing dried strips of yesterday's meat, could hear. She gathered the sense of his words.
He had killed, he said, an eland in the hills. The announcement was received with murmurs of contentment and the firelight caught the gleams of teeth revealed by wide, smiling lips.
It was a big bull, he went on, and there would be much meat for every one. The prone figures twisted over on to their knees and clapped their hands softly in token of gratitude.
After he had taken them, he continued, to the meat at dawn, work would start on the rafts, ready to leave the bay in the afternoon.
He began to speak lower, but his voice did not falter. Bwana Dick, he said, was missing. He feared something had befallen him. His words were received, it seemed to Norah, in complete apathy. The goings on of the strange white man were no concern of the people.
The Bwana, said Archie, had started towards the northern arm of the bay, looking for fish. He had not returned. Archie paused, but the natives listened in a detached silence.
Shortly before dark, he continued, he had heard a sound like a cry. It came from the beach. He looked at the natives, but no one made a sound. He bade Matao inquire if any of them had heard it. Matao saluted and whispering started. Archie waited awhile before he finished his tale.
He had gone, he said at last, in the direction of the cry, and had found Dick's footprints in the sand ... and the spoor of a crocodile. He stopped speaking.
The natives were in eager discussion. They were interested, thought Norah, in this version of Dick's death, not as a tragedy but as a sort of sporting event between a man and a crocodile. Then her heart stood still. Their unfailing interest in game of all sorts would draw them next morning, however indifferent to Dick's fate, to the beach to see the spoor and trace the struggle. And they would find smooth shingle: not a mark to confirm the story. Why, oh! why had Archie not consulted her? She could have devised a story less vulnerable than that.
The whispering ceased as a native rose, helping himself up by his spear struck into the ground. With quick gesture he told his story, starting, as natives do, with happenings of days before. How Bwana A-ri-shy had brought them in canoes across the lake; how Bwana Dick-i had come by night; of the migration to the bay and the trees they had felled.
Archie listened imperturbably to the rambling statement. At last the man came to the point. He had been sent by Matao to soak some lushishi in the margin of the lake. While he did so he heard a shout.
'Who shouted?' asked Archie quickly.
'It was like Bwana Dick-i's voice, but frightened.'
'At what hour?'
The native indicated the height of the sun in the heavens.
'From what direction?'
He pointed towards the northern arm of the bay, away from the ruins.
What had he thought?
He had thought nothing.
Norah breathed more freely. The black man's child-like anxiety to stand in the limelight had brought confirmation to Archie's story.
He dismissed the two natives and retired to his shelter. Norah watched the group by the fire resume their business of meat and sleep. Presently she saw Archie with an unlit hurricane lamp in his hand walk out of the circle of light in the direction of the latrine. She saw him stoop and pick something off the ground. A hoe, she knew, always lay about there. Then he disappeared in the direction of the ruins.
She guessed where he was going and on how ghastly an errand. Why wouldn't he confide in her? She would never have agreed to that crocodile story, whose falsehood to-morrow would prove. How could she undo the mistake he had made? How could the natives be kept from the shore on some pretext not too transparent?
The storm was getting closer. Crashes of thunder were more frequent and louder. The flicker of lightning was incessant. It revealed, concealed, revealed the walls of the crater that had trapped them. Those old hills, had they ever seen pain like this before? Pain, the only rival in man's experience of their immortality. Peoples emerge and disappear, gods are honoured and forgotten, pain alone endures.
A wind began to blow, cold wet gusts that drove the heavy stale air before them. The night grew darker. A distant hissing sound came nearer and clearer, like the approach of a railway train. The boughs of the forest lashed and waved. The noise resolved into the slash of rain on leaves. A moment of lightning disclosed the oncoming of an opaque wall of water. The deluge burst on the camp.
Norah faced the rain, bending her body to withstand its violence. Her eyes were blinded but her brain seemed to be cleared. Great relief filled her heart, tempered by a foreboding that such luck could not endure; for the traces of the imaginary struggle would be washed from the shore before morning.
Near the crumbling shell of the church tower, which seemed in the tremulous illumination of the storm to bob and stagger at each recurring crash of thunder, naked to the waist, smeared with mud, dripping with rain and sweat, Archie dug.
His lantern was perched on the heap of liquefying earth he had thrown up behind him. Each gust reeled the flame over to the brink of extinction and whistled sibilantly through the air holes.
He worked slowly, but without pausing even to throw off the water which ran over his eyebrows and into his eyes, or to free his shorts which flapped clammily against his legs. As he dug, the rain ran into the grave, so that his boots squelched in the mud and once he slipped, falling with his face in the loose earth he had thrown out. Each hoeful had to be tossed up on to the heap, the hoe held by the heel and handle. His lumbar muscles rose under the strain, catching the dull gleam of the lamp.
When he had dug for a couple of hours, the moon appeared and the clouds thinned to wisps of black vapour that scudded across her face. The roar of the rain in the forest was lowered, till the drip of each separate leaf seemed audible over an undertone of the surge of the waves on the lake. The smell of the earth, wet after seven months' drought, rose and the perfume of fresh green.
Archie clambered out of the hole and measured it depth with the handle of his hoe. Apparently satisfied, he walked over to where Ward's body lay and tried to lift it. But Dick had been a big man and Archie was a small one, exhausted with fever and back-breaking labour. With a shrug of the shoulders he abandoned the effort and taking hold of the corpse by the collar he dragged it over the uneven ground to the grave.
He laid it supine and endeavoured to straighten the twisted limbs. Already the body was stiff and resisted him. So he pushed it into the resting-place he had prepared. But in its bent-up attitude the knees stuck out of the shallow grave and Archie had to roll it over on to its side.
Without waiting he started to pull earth into the grave, using his hoe sideways as a scraper. As the soil tumbled in, he reflected, with wonder and no bitterness, that the face his wife had so lately kissed was now pressed into the cold, wet earth....
Then he heaped broken bricks from the debris of the church on the place, lest a hyæna should undo his work...."