"...break through laws divine and human,And think them cobwebs spread for little man."J. DRYDEN.
"Abercorn," said Ross, lighting his third consecutive cigar, "was laid out some quarter of a century ago by a far-sighted and optimistic official on the lines of Paris. There are boulevards and 'rond points'; avenues of thuja and eucalyptus; terraces and squares. And at the present moment there are five dwelling-houses, a block of government offices, a jail and post office, one European and three native stores.
The settlement is served by two railway systems, one distant four hundred miles to the north, the other six hundred to the south.
I suppose it is what you writers call 'an outpost of civilisation,' but civilised it seemed to me after six weeks of ulendo through the bush! and urban, to the point of decadence, it must have looked to Archie emerging from the virginal bosom of the 'fly' belt.
Red Dog, Manitoba; Bloggsville, Wisconsin; Smitsdorp, Transvaal; from what I hear these spots breathe a red-blooded life dear to cinematograph producers, without being remarkable either for comfort or refinement.
How different these tiny Boma towns of North-Eastern Rhodesia that have only existed a decade or two! You are at once struck by the absence of red dust, corrugated iron, spittoons. Books may be found in every house, water colours or etchings too; comfortable arm-chairs and cushions; nice china and plate; occasionally a piano. The standard of comfort is above the average of an English country rectory. And the issues that confront the population are often as vital.
A few days before I reached Abercorn, short of two loads, whose carriers had fallen sick on the way, one of these crises had begun to darken the horizon. I was privileged to hear at least one side of the question that was dividing the township, the side of which Mrs. Lavater was protagonist. Lavater was the D.C., and very kindly he had housed me until my loads caught up and I could go on to my fishing camp.
Mrs. Lavater is one of those big-boned, deep-bosomed, high-coloured women, who have done so much to make the Empire what it is. Were they endowed with any sense of humour, would that Empire be what it is? It is a doubtful question.
'What I told Mackenzie,' she was saying as she poured out the China tea for which she was rightly famous, 'was that the money was raised by the golf club and it ought to be spent on improving the golf course. I say we could start a new nine holes.'
King Arthur could not have mentioned the Quest of the Holy Grail in tones of greater reverence.
'It's all because,' she sank her voice, 'Mrs. Mackenzie won—or so she told me—a silver inkstand in the mixed doubles at Eastbourne in 1913. That's why he's fussing about a tennis court.'
I was lost in banal admiration of our race. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there shall golf, tennis and the seeds of England's greatness be found.
'They find a desert and leave it a links,' I murmured.
Mrs. Lavater said she was delighted that I agreed with her about the second nine.... She stared firmly out of the window. Had her pince-nez been endowed with supernatural vision; could they have pierced a range of tree-clad hills and embraced a couple of hundred miles of forest and lake; she might at that moment have seen Archie's carriers splashing knee deep in the tepid water, tugging at the lushishi cords, which dragged the second raft, grating down its path of rollers, reluctantly on to the lake.
The other raft already rode on the mirror-like surface. On its rough-hewn timbers a pile of bedding had been arranged for Norah. Her neat white clothes looked incongruous, for the uncouth craft and the theatrical blue of sky and water seemed to demand for passenger some shaggy Crusoe of pantomime.
Rifle in hand, Archie knelt on a round black rock that projected into the lake, his neck stretched and his eyes intent for any sign that the crocodiles had not been scared away by the noise.
The singing rose louder as the second craft slipped jerkily into the water, sending angry little waves to slap against the logs that supported Norah.
As the work of balancing the loads progressed, Archie from his rock called out the names. 'Mulenga, behind the Mama. Benesh, on the other raft, beside the kitchen box....'
As he was named, each native raised his ragged clothes as high as decency and Norah's presence would permit and climbed to his place, poising on his head his few possessions—a torn reed mat or a black clay cooking pot, an iron spear or axe, and strips of dried meat that tainted the air. With each fresh comer's weight, the raft dipped and danced....
By the following Saturday Mr. Mackenzie had completed a house-to-house canvas of the ten adult inhabitants of Abercorn. Hume the Postmaster, the doctor and the Assistant Native Commissioner had rallied to the Mackenzie standard. At four o'clock their leader, girt in a stiff collar, called officially to inform Mrs. Lavater that a tennis court was demanded by the majority of the town.
He dropped his bomb and retreated outwardly triumphant, but in his heart uneasy, for he knew how hardly women like Mrs. Lavater accept defeat. A sudden scurry of rain sent him for shelter into the post office, where he confided in Hume that he had not liked 'the calm way she took it.'
At lake level that scurry of rain was magnified into a vicious little squall that nearly ended Archie's and Norah's problems before their destined time.
The rafts were crawling over the glassy surface under the slow urge of unaccustomed arms. Their course pointed from headland to headland of a bay that bit deep into the thickly wooded slope.
Archie, since a hippo, inquisitive or frightened, had risen under the baggage raft and tipped its crew into the crocodile-infested water, had left Matao in the bows to keep a look-out ahead and had posted himself in the stern of his craft, his rifle across his knees, his eyes plumbing the bottomless blue of the lake. Some instinct, or perhaps the continuous drone of Matao's voice, made him turn, to catch his lookout man absorbed in conversation with the bow paddler.
He snatched the steersman's paddle and the water churned as he headed the clumsy craft landwards. For where the headland should have shown clear in their path stood a blank wall of mist. Alive at last to their danger, the unskilled paddlers strained their strength to drive the heavy rafts to shore, but, in spite of their efforts, the squall gained on them. The sky darkened and they heard the oncoming howl of the wind.
Their breath hissed between their teeth, their muscles stood in knots on their arms and naked backs, as Archie, paddling with long, quick strokes, urged them on. Waves splashed over the raft, drenching Norah to the skin, and stinging her delicate body with their impact. The last slapped up full in her face, setting her spluttering with its brackish taste and clinging with her slim fingers to the knotted logs. Two of the loads broke loose and swept past her lakewards.
Archie dropped his paddle and, tearing up the bark rope that lashed the raft, looped the free end round her waist. Then the rain broke on them, driving in horizontal sheets. Norah shut her eyes to save her sight. She opened them to see Archie leap from the raft. Her heart stood still, till she saw him standing chest-high in the surf and heard him bellow to her to put her arms round his neck....
The day following that scurry of rain, Mrs. Lavater launched her counter attack, which proved to be nothing more sinister than the convention of the members of the Golf Club (a body differing from the population of Abercorn by the exclusion of children under twelve—see Rule Four) to discuss the motion 'that this meeting approves the enlargement of the links.'
The Mackenzie faction, secure in their canvassed majority of five against four (for the D.C. stood firm in his neutrality), arrived to find the meeting enlarged by the presence of the eldest Lavater girl, Dorothea, aged twelve and a half. Too late they realised that Dorothea, whom lack of clubs had kept away from the links, had by the workings of Anno Domini equalised the vote.
With superb self-control and diplomacy worthy of Whitehall, Mackenzie rose to propose that, in view of the deadlock, the meeting be postponed to that day fortnight.
Mrs. Lavater, prompted by a suspicion that Angus Mackenzie was due to celebrate a thirteenth! birthday at the beginning of next month, opposed the amendment on the indisputable grounds that, before the fortnight was up, the N.C. would have gone on leave and the doctor would have accompanied him as far as his tropical disease research station in the Luangwa Valley.
But, suggested Mr. Mackenzie, since the doctor and the N.C. held opposite opinions on the vexed question, would they not, so to speak, pair with each other?
'So important a matter,' retorted Mrs. Lavater with crushing effect, 'must be settled by the whole community.'
On the morning of this eventful day, Matao, terrified into vigilance by Archie's threat of degradation and a beating, signalled with a yell of delight the thin blue smoke of a village hidden behind a cluster of islets....
About the hour that Mrs. Lavater said 'check' to Mr. Mackenzie's queen, Archie and his followers pushed on, leaving the village rich in silver, but emptied of fruit, fish and canoes. Its young men had agreed to take them to the south end of the lake, and as they paddled they sang to keep their hearts up for the long adventure.
The old men and the women remaining in the village could hear the singing, after the shadow flung by the chain of islands had swallowed each canoe that vanished like a water rat, slanting into the darkness of a hollow bank. So calm was the silver water that for a moment the wake of each boat showed separately, when the hull that had cut it had gone.
In the biggest of the canoes, paddled by a picked crew in charge of the headman's eldest son, sat Norah and Archie.
'We're all right now,' said Archie.
This was as long a sentence as he had uttered since the night Dick died; and not the violence of sun and rain beating on her defenceless body, not the uncertainty and monotony of the food supply, not the known and unknown dangers of their position had distressed Norah as much as Archie's impenetrable reserve. He did not sulk or ignore her. He was, she told me, as invariably courteous and considerate as he would have been to a fellow passenger in a railway carriage. And he had saved her life on the day of the squall.
But of what he felt or planned, of regret, fear or hope, he gave no sign.
At first she had sought to bridge the gulf that had opened between them. She tried to hint that she did not hold him answerable for Dick's death: and once she slipped her hand over his. But his quick disengagement from the contact of word or body would have discouraged one less proud than Norah.
'It was as if he was buried along with Dick,' she said, 'and a foot of earth between us.'
Now that it seemed sure that they would reach! their journey's end, dread of the inquiries that must there be met, quickened; each sun that rose through the morning's pale haze of silver and misty blue, to climb across the scorching firmament of gold and azure and decline into the tender green and saffron of a momentary twilight, brought her nearer to officials, cross-examination and all the paraphernalia of justice that women hate and distrust. Each repetition of the crew's monotonous refrain, each stroke of the paddles carried her nearer to ... what?
The day the little fleet of canoes, sprinkled on the face of the great mountain-bound lake like specks of dust slowly rotating in a basin of water, reached the southern shores of the lake, I was again in Abercorn. By now I had settled into my fishing camp. My loads had arrived and Lavater had left Abercorn on a two days' ulendo into the bush to inspect the scene of an alleged infanticide.
But mail day and Mrs. Lavater's invitation to lunch brought me into town. After an excellent meal Mrs. Lavater's admirable black butler was handing us coffee on the verandah. The second nine holes were temporarily eclipsed by Mrs. Mackenzie's extravagance.
'Crêpe de chine and real Mechlin, my dear,' announced my hostess.
I was not her dear. That enviable position was held by the doctor's wife, a tall girl with red hair. Before her marriage, so Mrs. Lavater had informed me, she was a professional pianist. Whether in cinemas or the Queen's Hall, I had no means of telling. On the same authority she was to have a baby in March.
She now expressed no wonder at the richness of Mrs. Mackenzie's underlinen and indicated that, from the prices charged at her husband's store, it might well be sewn with diamonds....
'Who can that be on the road?' interrupted Mrs. Lavater.
We turned and stared down the road which, leading to the lake, runs straight for a mile or more outside the township. As the white man in ragged khaki, with a gun bearer at his heels, came near, to my surprise I recognised Archie.
'Do you know Captain Sinclair well?' I was asked when the first flood of conjecture had abated.
'I doubt if any one does,' was my reply, which, in my own mind, included his wife.
'Of course he's very nice,' said the red-haired girl, staring up the road, 'but don't you find him just a little bit dull? Now she's such a lively little thing.'
Mrs. Lavater contributed the inevitable platitude about opposites.
'His marriage must have been the adventure of his life,' persisted the other. 'You can't imagine anything much happening to Mr. Sinclair.'
The unromantic object of our interest was now nearly within hail. I noticed that he walked like a tired or an old man.
A gang of native prisoners were sweeping the footpath at the cross roads. The black policeman who guarded them stood to attention and saluted. Archie seemed to hesitate before he returned the salute. He paused for a moment, as if uncertain whether to come up to the verandah. At last he turned and made for the business part of the township.
'Where's he off to?' asked Mrs. Lavater, disappointed, I thought, that another should have first pull at the news. 'He'll be here in a minute,' she consoled herself.
But minutes passed and Archie did not come. For some imprecise reason faintly uneasy, I made an excuse to follow him. Passing the little group of red brick houses with their shady balconies and luxuriant pergolas, their tidy English beds of roses and carnations, I came to the trading store. Mackenzie was stock-taking.
'And three dozen is six hundred,' he said as I entered.
'Pleased to see you, Mr. Ross ... would you believe it, the ladies call these cups too dear at eleven pence! I give you my word they cost me ninepence and a fraction landed here, and that's without breakages or overhead charges.'
I sympathised and, as soon as I could, I asked if Sinclair had been there.
'It's not ten minutes since he got up from that chair,' I was told. 'He looked as if he needed a chair too.'
Mackenzie did not think it was fever. If it was, he'd never seen a go like it. Archie looked 'all endwise,' he said, and added that he hadn't seemed to know whether he was coming or going. He had stared at Mackenzie quite queerly when he told him about the golf-course scandal. But he was plainly glad to see the case of ammunition that was waiting for him in the meal store. He brought two rounds out of his pocket which he said were his last. Then he had gone to the shelves and ordered tinned fruit and vegetables by the dozen.
I interrupted to ask for news of Norah.
'I inquired after his lady,' said Mackenzie, 'but the Captain never seemed to hear me.' With national readiness to anticipate the worst, he added that he would be sorry if everything was not well there.
'If you're wanting to see him yourself,' he ended, 'you've only got to step round to the post office. He said he must send a wire to Kigoma about theMimi—you'll find him with Hume.'
But I did not. He had gone, said Hume, in the direction of the D.C.'s office. Hume too remarked how ill he looked. Fever, he diagnosed, and a bad go at that, although Sinclair had insisted that nothing was wrong.
Besides his mail—several weeks' accumulation of letters and newspapers—there had been a cable for him.
'You'd have thought it was bad news,' said Hume, 'the way he read it. As a matter of fact—I oughtn't to tell you, only I know it won't go any further—it was an Elizabethville cable confirming the purchase of Captain Sinclair's whole herd, at a big price too.'
But Archie had stared at the message, said Hume, as if it did not make sense. Then he'd laughed 'an odd kind of laugh' and torn the form to little bits. The pieces lay there still.
As I followed Archie to the Boma, I could not help wondering what had happened to this self-possessed Scot. I could hardly guess that in full Byronic blast that morning he had breasted the hill to Abercorn with the pride of Manfred or Cain in his heart. And now the well-kept roads, the grip of Mackenzie's industrious hand, the news of the great golf scandal—all this shouted at him that, in the well-padded hold of civilisation, Cain becomes Crippen.
I knocked at the door of the D.C.'s office. Joseph, the native clerk, immaculate in white duck and a black tarboosh, admitted me. The office was as spotless as its sole occupant—bundles of documents tied with tape, trays full of letters, rows of files, all the paraphernalia of administration.
The Bwana, said Joseph, had gone away after hearing that Bwana La-va-ta was on ulendo and that Bwana Jo-ne-si (Jones was the name of the Native Commissioner) had gone to England.
As I left the block of offices, I saw Foster, the A.N.C., with a crowd of black men on his verandah. His position in a deck chair, flanked by blue and red clad messengers and surrounded by an irregular circle of silent natives, indicated that a lawsuit was in progress. He appeared to ask a question and a native in the front of the circle, without moving his body or head, loosed a spate of words.
I listened, waiting my chance to ask Foster which road Archie had taken. Acause célèbreseemed to be in process. Tungati, an obese elder of Malekani's village, had followed King David's example in taking a third wife to comfort his age. The experiment had been a success, until a stranger from Kachilikila's ... A pause in the evidence enabled me to ask my question.
'Left a minute ago,' replied Foster, 'went towards Lavater's house by the back way. He stood and watched these blighters for ten minutes. Looked as sick as mud. You'd think it was his wife instead of Tungati's,' added the irreverent youth.
When I had closed my fruitless circle, Archie was already installed on the verandah of the D.C.'s house and Mrs. Lavater was making tea. As I walked up, I saw his illness had not been exaggerated. But while I shook hands, I wondered if health alone explained the sunken cheeks, the skin grey in spite of the sun, the dead eyes. He seemed stricken yet defiant: burnt out, but the ashes were hot.
Mrs. Lavater was pressing him to stay to dinner; but Norah, he said, was alone in camp ten miles out of the township ... yes, they had come off the lake that morning ... no, they hadn't come on theMimi... no, canoes ... yes, it had been hot ... yes, the rains hadn't helped....
I took no part in the cross-examination. If Archie was more than usually taciturn, there was something, no doubt, which he did not want to discuss. The same reasoning urged the ladies to fresh efforts. But their bag was meagre. Like the poet, they failed to elicit whence he had come, or whither going. At last a reply that roused Mrs. Lavater's hospitable instincts checked the hunt. Leaving us together, she went to see that milk and butter from the Boma herd, vegetables from her garden and eggs from her yard were sent off at once to Norah. The doctor's wife went with her.
To break the silence that followed their withdrawal, 'Lavater's expected back to-morrow,' I remarked.
My very ordinary words seemed to send a wave of emotion across Archie's face. Relief at first he seemed to feel, satisfaction almost. Then the slight smile faded, and a barely perceptible frown of anxiety or defiance settled on his features.
'So soon,' he said quietly.
His mood puzzled me. I had always liked Archie. There was something extremely lovable in his almost truculent sincerity. He was so straight; you knew where you were with him. But to-day a shadow stood between us. I didn't know in the least where I was.
He plainly did not want to talk and I suggested that he must be anxious to open the mail he held under his arm.
He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and pushed them into his pocket. Then he ripped off the wrapper of a newspaper. Indifferently he turned the leaves, till he seemed to come to something that interested him. In the silence that followed, I tried to analyse the strangeness of Archie's manner.
That faintly defiant jerk of his head. What did it defy? That vaguely puzzled look, as if he tried to grasp at a word whose syllables danced in the recesses of his brain, or struggled to locate some indistinct smell. What was eluding him?
My thoughts were interrupted by the swish of the newspaper falling from his fingers. My eye caught the headlines of the open page as it fluttered to the ground. They dealt with the bellicose caperings of Monsieur Poincaré and with the latest murder trial that was quickening the pulses of the great British public. I glanced up at Archie's grey face. It was no longer puzzled. He had found the word he sought.
And when he had gone, 'Don't you agree now,' said the red-haired girl, 'that Captain Sinclair is a tiny bit dull?'"
Within forty-eight hours, some of the questions I had asked myself on Mrs. Lavater's verandah were answered.
I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice. Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind, I would have recognised Norah's deep tones. I rose from my work, feeling after some passable excuse for having failed to visit their camp half a dozen miles away. My true reason had been an instinctive shrinking from other people's troubles.
But my first sight of Norah told me that forms might be forgotten. Her eyes, that the lamp of romance had once lit, now were dark with pain. Was it possible, you wondered, that they had ever laughed? Had even cried? Without suffering the decay of age, she had lost her youth. The wing of death, you guessed, was between her and the sun. Infinitely remote from her seemed the life that the rains set pulsing through each leaf, each blade of grass. She noticed nothing of the beauty that surrounded her, the shouts of green that the trees set up, the blue eye of the lake looking along the glade my carriers had cut. Her eyes were turned inwards on some private hell whose key lay in her bosom.
Her first words were banal enough. Some apology for intrusion that I waved away. My reply, inevitably trivial, sounded flippant in the face of her manifest grief and I subsided into an awkward silence.
Archie was ill, went on the low voice, and their quinine was finished: she had wondered...
By the time I returned with the bottle, I fancy she had decided to consult me.
The words came jostling each other—Archie was delirious; the doctor was away from Abercorn; the Kasama man would take a week to get here; and anyhow ... She did not complete the sentence. He had never been so bad as this; but the strain of the last week—was it blackwater, did I think? And ... and they had come from the sleeping sickness belt, could it be...?
She refused food, and when I had given my medicine chest to my fundi to carry, we set out along a native path in the direction she had come. Her obvious gratitude to me for coming was surprising. So pretty a woman is rarely grateful. Men are too ready to help without.
To cut short her thanks, I inquired about Archie's symptoms and was able to assure her that the fever was not blackwater. And certainly not a forerunner of sleeping sickness. I was prepared to notice that my words brought little relief. A husband delirious in the bush might send a woman wild with anxiety, might drive her to the brink of panic, it would not explain the hopelessness in Norah's eyes and mouth.
I felt a wave of pity. She was too slim a little thing for this burden, whatever it was. In violence to my principles I asked if I could help.
'I don't think anything can help now,' she whispered, and so low that I had to read her lips. 'Archie has killed ... some one.'"
"I was not particularly shocked," said Ross. "All this feeling against straightforward assassination is quite modern.
You must discriminate, of course, between honest killing and surreptitious murder. There has always been a prejudice against that. The Borgias, for instance, have found critics in every century, and until recent, sentimental years we burnt wives who poisoned their husbands. But an honourable assassination, under guises which varied from the ceremonial of mediæval tournament to the violence of renaissance vendetta, and on to the more polished formulæ of the duel, has lasted almost to our day.
With the duel passed the power to punish certain private injuries for which the law furnishes no redress. And in fault of any regular outlet, the man with strong feelings and a literal mind has to fall back on murder."
Ross spoke with vehemence. Did his earnestness, I wondered, throw any light on his own mysterious past? As if he read some shadow of the suspicion on my face, he came back abruptly to the Sinclairs.
"That was how I came to hear Norah's story," he said. "Not in the detail I have given you, nor in the order. But by the time we were half-way to Archie's camp she had given me a clear enough outline.
I suggested that she had exaggerated the danger. We would have to nurse Archie ourselves and keep outsiders away till he was clear of delirium. And the natives, even if they suspected anything, would keep quiet. They do not like Bomas, I said and enlarged on the discretion of Africa.
She signed to me to stop.
'It's past that now,' she said. 'I haven't told you the end.'
Archie's visit to Abercorn had been paid with the object of reporting Dick's death to the Boma. So much information he had given Norah before he started up the hill, repeating the story he had told the natives on the night of the crime.
Her heart had ached to help him. If only he would let her be of some use, go with him and perjure herself for his sake. Fiercely she longed to save him, to avert the ultimate consequences of the havoc she had loosed. But with conventional words of leave-taking, Archie, followed by his gun-bearer, went up the road.
She took what comfort she could, remembering the efficiency he had shown throughout. If, thought she, her husband could cope with Lake Tanganyika, she need not doubt his dealings with the Boma. In which conclusion, she allowed him a woman's strength. When, at the beginning of this story, I tried to show you Norah, I spoke of the small cat house. Now cats, and women, do not herd. The hand they play is a lone one whether in Malay or Mayfair, and the war they wage with law, rules of conduct, codes of honour, is age old.
But men, and the animals that chew the cud, have the herd instinct. They see the value of solidarity and are glad to submit their wills to the herd. Until suffragettes were vouchsafed us, no Englishman had ever guessed that it was unnecessary to obey the law. Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to solitude.
Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.
So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human: something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the camp.
In silence Norah wondered. The senior officials, he had said, were away from the Boma and he had returned, his story untold. But relief or suspense, she knew, could not explain this change. Under her eyelashes all evening she watched him and sought in vain for some word that might allay his trouble. Throughout the night she heard the camp bed creak under his restless body.
Was it then that he was first aware of his fellowship with the men whose names shame alone preserves when quicklime has consumed their bodies? Did Dick's eyes again look pitifully into the muzzle of his .420? Did he strive once more to straighten the stiffened limbs and push the contorted body sideways into the wet grave? There can, I suppose, be little sleep on the first night you see yourself a murderer.
In the morning a glance told Norah that the fever, which had fantastically vanished after the rains had drenched him to the skin, was back. He sat huddled over the camp fire, only moving to call for logs. She urged him to return to bed, but he shook his head. He refused luncheon, and sat with pen and paper before him. Then he began to write. His hand shook with fever, but he wrote fairly quickly. He covered three sheets and addressed an envelope for each.
Still crouching over the fire, 'Norah,' he said, 'I think I ought to give it you to read.'
His tone told her she must brace herself for a shock.
'They won't bother you, I hope,' he went on, 'I've tried to make it all right for you.' He kept his eyes turned away from her, but his voice was more kind. His hand, which trembled a little, played with the letters on the table.
'This,' he continued, 'is to the solicitors. About the farm, the sale of the stock and so on. This,' he touched the second letter, 'is my will. Of course everything goes to you.'
He paused and, drawing the last document from its envelope, he handed it to Norah.
She forced herself to read, though her mind was too busy with his words to take in the symbols before her eyes. Suddenly, as if a blade of ice had been driven between her shoulders, she understood.
The letter was addressed to the District Commissioner, Abercorn, and began and ended officially enough, 'Sir, I have the honour to report ... I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, A. L. Sinclair.'
Between the formulæ, ran a story designed to shield her and convict himself. He wrote that Ward, at his request, had been escorting Norah to Kigoma. They were all to meet there. TheMimibroke down, but chance united them in the bay of the deserted mission. On the evening of the 25th he had gone out shooting with Ward. Their tempers had suffered from the heat. He had complained of Ward's over-liberal expenditure of ammunition, which was then short. A quarrel had ensued and he had shot Ward through the heart. With legal forethought he gave the exact position of the grave that the body might be identified and death established.
She read the bald story word by word to its end.
'For God's sake, Archie,' she asked him, although she knew his answer only too well, 'what are you going to do with this?'
He said that Matao must take it to Abercorn. His fever would not let him walk so far. He muttered something about feeling clean again.
'Don't, Archie, don't! Give it back to me!' Her voice made the natives break off their occupations and stare at the eccentricities of the white man. He looked in her face as if her eyes could show him her soul. Then he turned away shaking his head.
'But you've got fever,' she urged, 'you don't know what you're doing. Write what you were going to say yesterday.'
For answer he called Matao.
'One can pay too much, just to live,' he murmured.
'At least wait. Think it over in cold blood. Wait a day, one day.'
Lavater, he replied, came back that afternoon. The death would have to be reported at once, one version or the other. He now knew which version it must be.
A fog seemed to spring up from below, over her eyes. She would have thrown herself at his feet if Matao had not stood gravely waiting.
'For my sake then, Archie!'
'How should I know,' he said looking away from her. 'How should I know that this time too...?'
He felt the harshness of his words and let them die away.
'Matao,' he said quickly, his voice rough in his throat. 'Take this to Bwana Lavater at his office. The sun will have set before you arrive. Sleep at M'pala and return in the morning.'
Norah saw Matao salute and swing round. She did not see him disappear into the trees, for she had fainted."
Archie, when we reached his camp, was lying on his back with open eyes that saw nothing visible to us. The bedclothes were in a heap on the ground and he resisted Norah when she replaced them. Except that his head rolled heavily from side to side, I had no difficulty in taking his temperature. It was 104°.
Norah said that at about midnight she had heard him muttering. He did not know her, though she sat by his side for the rest of the night, keeping the clothes on his tossing limbs. Sometimes she had had to hold him down, for he shouted that he must see Lavater at once and struggled to rise.
I asked if the D.C. had had the fatal letter. Public morality might demand that Archie should be nursed to life to be turned over to the hangman. But putting friendship before morals, it seemed to me that he might be allowed to die, if not quietly, at least in his bed.
Norah's hands were clenched and white, while Matao was spinning his rigmarole.
'Then Bwana Lavater is not back?' she asked at the end, 'what did you do with the letter?'
Joseph, the D.C.'s clerk, had promised he would give it to the D.C. as soon as he came back. Joseph was an Angoni, said Matao, and all Angoni are liars; but he had not left the office until he had seen the letter laid on Bwana La-va-ta's big table.
So the confession lay unread: there was hope, then, and Archie's life was still worth saving. I felt that I could not leave Norah, whose nerves had been strained to the fainting point, unaided to nurse him, and I sent my fundi back with orders to strike camp and bring on carriers and loads.
I looked round for a bit of level ground for my camp. Archie, with an eye to the comfort of his much-enduring carriers, had pitched his tent on the outskirts of the first village he had come to on his way up from the lake. The ground was a net-work of little obstructed paths, trodden between the raised beds which make an African village garden resemble a pauper cemetery of circular graves. The green of ground nuts, cassava, gourds and beans, straggled sparsely over the mounds. High, splintery, black stumps showed where the trees had been lopped, two or three feet from the ground, and burnt to enrich the soil with their potash. Only the biggest trunks, that had been too much trouble to cut, remained.
Meaning to ask in the village for a guide to show me a more shady and level spot, I penetrated the squalid cluster of dilapidated mud huts. The villagers, I found, were absent at work, no doubt in distant gardens. One old woman, the headman's eldest wife I guessed her to be, sat under the untidy overhang of her thatched roof. Her stomach was enormous; on her head she wore a tan-coloured wig made of puku skin. She bent forward and clapped her hands in salutation, but she was too shy to answer my question.
Beyond the village I found the twenty-foot road that the last D.C. had cut through the forest to connect Abercorn with the lake. Its earth surface was deeply scored by ruts which the occasional ox-wagons that carried freight to theMimihad cut. Rain had poured down the channels, scouring them till the white roots showed. A path, trodden hard by bare feet, straggled from side to side of the road, and down its centre a bicycle had marked its track on the wet earth.
As I chose my site, what a chance, I reflected, for any one with a taste for allegory! Side by side, the pathetic makeshift of the savage and the masterful puerility of the European, on a background of bottomless lake, immemorial hill, interminable forest. Which in the history of the globe would prevail?
The first hour of my vigil by Archie's bed passed in silence. The African day is so much quieter than the night. Some insect humming, a bird calling.... From time to time I moistened Archie's dry lips or arranged his disordered bed.
I had gone outside for a drink of tea when his voice recalled me. It was not me he called, but a bombardier who had been killed at his side six years before in Flanders. I sat by him while he revisited all his life's hours of stress. Now shells were dropping on his O.P. at Armentières; now the hump-backed African oxen jibbed in the plough or the brick-makers let the kiln fires go out; in the Carpathian darkness with his dying men he waited for the Austrians; or his hoe struck rock before Dick's grave was deep enough.
And through it all ran his love for Norah, like the theme of a fugue or the thread on which a rosary of pain was strung.
As the day wore on, his earlier memories were blocked by the horror of the last fortnight. I felt no shame at eavesdropping on his soul. To save him, I must gauge the malady of mind, as well as body.
So, during days and nights of delirium, I pieced together some sequence of what Archie had suffered on the shores of Tanganyika. It was screamed at me in oaths and prayers; whispered in obscene words; veiled in symbolism of delirium. With foul names he assailed the woman of his life; with writhing fingers he tore at Dick's throat; hyænas with blind eyes swarmed on to the rafts; the lake changed from azure to blood; Dick grinned on the ground by the filled-in grave and Norah screamed under the wet earth....
From the insane medley, one clear fact emerged. Archie was racked, less by his guilt than his love. The shadow, not of his crime, but of something that Norah had done, pursued him inexorably. One phrase again and again seemed to burst, rather from his chest, than from his cracking lips.
'Norah, why did you? ... Norah, why did you?'
When night fell, his cries sank to a murmur that, by the time Norah came to relieve me, had yielded to sleep.
'Is he going to live?' were her first words.
'Does he want to?' I countered, 'doyouwant him to?'
Her grave eyes considered me.
'Is that how I appear to you?' she said at last.
'I'm neutral by creed,' I answered, 'but you don't understand me. Do you want him to live ... for what awaits him?'
'It mustn't,' she stammered a little in her eagerness, 'we must save him.'
'From himself then,' I added, without her confidence. Then as she did not reply, 'It isn't the police we've got to fear, it's his own despair.'
'Because he feels he's a murderer?'
'Partly.'
'And——?'
'Because his heart's dead.'
She lifted her head to say that she must undo what she had done. I wondered how far that can ever be effected. Some gesture must have revealed my doubt.
'You think I can't,' she said, 'and you don't know how much there is to undo. I haven't told you....'
Thus began the re-telling of her tragic story, partly I fancy, to ease the load that lay so heavy on her heart, partly to track down some clue that might yet save Archie.
On ran her narrative, when neither Archie's needs nor our own desire for sleep took precedence, during the seventy-two hours of his illness. It was not now the naked bones of the tragedy that she showed me. In her search for any word and moment in the tragedy that might throw light on the dark places of Archie's heart, she laid bare before my eyes, that were at least pitiful, all she had seen, imagined, suffered.
By the second midnight, when Archie was quiet and we sat together by the fire, the story had wound its indirect way as far as her promise to renounce Dick and return to her husband.
'And then he found Dick kissing me!' she cried in a strained voice. 'No wonder if...' she lapsed into silence, staring into the fire with eyes that watching had sunk deep. Presently she turned her head aside and I guessed she was crying.
'Wasn't it that kiss that killed his heart?' she asked at last.
Snatches of raving rang in my ears as I shrugged my shoulders.
She seemed to gather herself together. 'I'll bring it back to life,' she said.
Then, as if she read scepticism in my silence, 'I'm not pretending to you—I've told you too much—that I love Archie as once I did. Nor will I pretend with Archie. He'd see through me, suffering sharpens the eyes. But...' she stood up and, for the first time since she had sought me, I had a girl before me, 'I can and will prove I'm not what I've let him think.'
'What Archie pursues,' I said rather pompously, 'and in himself achieves is loyalty, cleanness....'
'While I'm unloyal, dirtied,' she broke in. 'Yes, I am. But I'll show him my ideals are his.'
Her voice broke a little and flattened. 'Yes, you're right, what is the good of ideals one throws on the scrap heap? But I'll serve him, cherish him.... Though I can't love him with passion, if only he can love me again, I'll serve him honestly for better or for worse, till death....'
I suppose my instinctive mistrust of promises led me to point out that that parting was not likely to be remote unless—
'Unless?' she asked and repeated, 'I'll save him. I will save him.'
'You've got to save him from two dangers.'
'For heaven's sake don't speak in riddles,' she said, her nerves on edge.
'From himself and from the herd.'
'You think that even if he...' she hesitated, 'even if I can make him believe I'm worth his love, he'll still give himself up?'
I nodded, 'And his confession is on the D.C.'s desk.'
She seemed to brush this aside. 'Why can't he see it as I do?' she cried. 'A nightmare to be forgotten, if we can. Not to sacrifice to. He was mad at the time, mad with jealousy and fever. Why should his life be thrown after Dick's?'
It takes a woman to reach these heights of common sense. Conscience is the curse of Adam; while Eve's punishment, if I remember right, was nothing less practical than the pangs of child-birth and a dread of snakes.
And if women have no consciences, I reflected, neither do they admit any debt to society. They are free lances, privateers: if they and their men are safe, society can fend for itself. But I did not speak my thoughts, as Norah sat down again and in the low, even voice of one who thinks aloud, resumed her story.
Again she described the last meeting she was to have with Dick on earth, again his arms clutched her immobile body, as Archie and his rifle emerged from the shadow of the ruined tower. So vivid were her words, I felt I was an eyewitness: I saw Dick start up; the barrel of the .420 wavered from Norah's breast to his; he fumbled with his gun....
The dusky voice had stopped in the middle of a word. I looked round to see what had interrupted her.
The natives detailed to tend the fire slept soundlessly at our feet, nothing stirred in the circle of the fire, there was even a lull in the noises of the night. Norah was staring straight in front of her and I understood that it was something her mind had seen that had arrested her.
'I'll do it,' she murmured, 'I can do it. I'm strong enough.'
And strong she looked. Despair had dropped from her like a garment, her face shone with courage. So must Kate Douglas have looked, who thrust her arm through the empty staples to bar the door, behind which whispered the murderers of her king.
So, her dark eyes moist but triumphant, must Norah Cleverly have looked the night in the Carpathians she saved the life she was so nearly to spoil.
In turns we watched, made plans and slept, until, about three next afternoon, Archie's temperature subsided and he fell into a quiet sleep.
Norah stood looking at the thin face. Then she drew me out of the tent. Did I think it safe for her to leave him for the afternoon, she asked? I must have looked astonished, for she laughed and said she was going into Abercorn.
It would be dark, I objected, by the time she got there.
'The darker the better,' she replied, still laughing.
I wondered if relief had made her hysterical; a queer exhilarated light shone in her dark eyes; there was something at once fey and fanatical about her. The pythoness at the oracle, the martyr at the stake must have had, I imagined, such eyes. Under the power of the inspiration, whatever it was, her beauty had bloomed again, like Africa when the rains have come.
But even so it seemed no reason to be caught by the fall of night on a motiveless walk to Abercorn. I said so.
She promised to take Changalilo, a gun and a hurricane lamp.
I said bluntly I could not see why she wanted to go. She became serious.
'I'm going to see Mr. Lavater,' she said.
I raised my eyebrows.
'What's the good?' I asked, 'what are you going to say?'
'I don't know yet. It depends on him.'
'But you must have some plan!'
'Do they listen to confessions made in delirium?'
'Will Lavater believe it was?'
'Why not?'
I pointed out that he would come to see Archie as soon as he was convalescent ... and hear a repetition of the same confession. We both knew Archie's obstinacy.
If he does, if I can't make Archie change,' she looked up quickly, 'I'll swear on the Bible it was I that killed Dick.'
Woman, the greatest egoist of created beings ... and the most selfless! I looked at Norah with admiration. When she gave, she gave herself. But I admired her courage more than her sense.
'And Archie will swear on another Bible, thathedid it,' I objected.
'He may; they can't hang us both,' she said with triumphant logic.
What evidence was there, she insisted, to support either story? Why should they believe Archie before her?
I held my tongue. Unless the prosecuting counsel was a fool, I was sure that he would turn her story inside out. The elopement would be dragged to light and every presumption of motive would point to Archie's guilt. True that was not evidence, but what seemed to me to stamp with futility any struggle or shift of Norah's, was Archie's own soul as his ravings had revealed it. He saw himself a murderer, his wife a treacherous wanton. If Norah's subterfuge saved his life from the hands of the Law, could she secure it from his own?
I hesitated. In spite of post-war philosophy, courage seems to me admirable and rare enough. But to win, she must face issues.
I hinted my doubts.
'I know,' she said, 'I know all that.'
When I came back from escorting her as far as the road, Archie was awake.
He smiled weakly and tried to greet me, but his voice was inaudible. He was glad to obey me and lie quiet, though his eyes wandered in search of Norah.
'She's sleeping,' I lied, wishing to keep Abercorn and what it held out of his thoughts.
Archie's convalescence was rapid; within a week he was well enough to receive a visitor. During the days of his recovery I had come to know him better than ever before. The strangeness or remoteness I had sensed in him at Abercorn had gone. He was gentle and grateful for little things. I found him very human, and, since humanity is tragic, rather touching. He seemed to have won the sad tranquillity of old people on fine days. One could not grudge him a peace he had bought, he believed, at the price of his life or freedom.
He sat wrapped up, savouring the warmth of the sun, watching the natives at their trivial and absorbing occupations, inhaling as it were the beauty and activity of the world. And counting, I could not help imagining, the hours that remained for its enjoyment. Partly to escape such disquieting thoughts, partly to make Archie dependent on Norah and to draw him to her, I spent most of the day in my own camp.
His first visitor came to me, in my capacity of medical adviser, for permission to pay a call.
As I issued from the semi-darkness of my tent into the mellow sunlight of the late afternoon, I found him squatting in the shadow. The sunlight sliding through the trees that had been thinned by the needs of the villagers, fell on his wrinkled face and made him pucker his patient eyes. I recognised Ntula, the headman of the village against which we had camped.
Arranging the folds of the faded purple cloth that draped his emaciated limbs, he lay back on the ground and, with the courtesy of the old school, clapped his hands behind his head. Invoking peace on him and his village, I asked what he wished.
He had brought, he said, these unimportant presents—the little meal that famine among his people permitted, the handful of eggs that the hens would lay in the time of rain and a few chickens that had escaped the hawks.
He waved his hand towards the deeper shadow where I could imperfectly see the outline of the old lady with the puku skin wig, mounting guard over a flat basket of meal and a bundle of squawking fowls, tied together by the legs.
These, Ntula continued, he wished to take to the Bwana, whom the hand of Death had spared.
Pondering the cause of this deference, I led the old diplomat to Archie's camp, his obese consort following with a perfectly naked daughter of six, who carried a minute basket of eggs on her graceful head.
I found Archie in his usual place and ready to see the old man. He expected, he said, that some complaint against the conduct of his Wemba carriers prompted this visit of ceremony.
Ntula repeated his compliments, while his wife and daughter knelt behind the presents, clapping their hands. Archie expressed his thanks and sent Matao to find calico and salt for the return gifts.
Polite conversation proceeded, volubly on the headman's part, monosyllabically on Archie's.
At length when the course of the rains, the prospect of the crops and the abundance of game had been passed in review, there came a pause. Was there anything, asked Archie, that he could do for his visitor? The headman appeared pained at the idea. He had come, he repeated, to announce his satisfaction at the chief's recovery from grave sickness.... But since the chief suggested it, if it so happened that one day he saw Bwana La-va-ta...
'Is Bwana Lavater back at M'pala?'[1] asked Archie quickly.
[1] M'pala is the native name for Abercorn.
Ntula replied that his eldest son had seen Bwana La-va-ta bicycling into Abercorn as it grew dark. Now should the chief happen to speak to...
'How long ago was that?' said Archie.
It was the evening of the day that the zebra had eaten the young mealies in his nephew Chisulo's garden ... well, that was five days ago.
'The evening I got better,' calculated Archie. 'Are you sure?' he asked, and the old man became courteously emphatic.
'Well,' said Archie, anxious for the visit to end, 'if I see Bwana Lavater...?'
We came circuitously to the point. It appeared that Ntula owed tax for himself and three wives, ten shillings a head, not only for the current year, but also for the last. And the Boma was putting men who did not pay their taxes in chains. If the chief would one day condescend to look at his gardens and his village, and see how poor the soil and how few the men, perhaps he could persuade Bwana Lavater....
Archie for all his stoicism winced. He leant forward and spoke to me in English. 'It wouldn't be much usemyspeaking to the Boma. May I tell the old man you'll try?'
I nodded and Ntula withdrew, with manifold expressions of pleasure at Archie's recovery and gratitude for his promise.
Archie sat down by the fire. Changalilo was on his knees blowing the embers into flame.
'If Lavater has been back in Abercorn for five days,' said Archie, 'something must have happened to my letter.'
I urged him to return to bed as night was at hand. He did not seem to hear me. Presently he announced that he would have a machila made the next day and be carried up to Abercorn in the afternoon.
'It's no use waiting,' he added.
The moment, I felt, was critical; once Archie made up his mind nothing would stop him. I turned my head and succeeded in catching Norah's eye. She was preparing invalid's food in the camp kitchen.
Since the day she had gone to Abercorn I had seen little of her. She was exhausted on her return, and I had had to content myself with her nod and some ambiguous words to the effect that all was well 'so far.' She made no further allusion to her scheme, and I felt she avoided me. This was natural, for my lack of enthusiasm made me a bad confidant in the matter of a forlorn hope. Desperation needs no cold water. For my part I was glad to escape the thankless role of critic.
But now the hour had struck for her intervention.
'Oughtn't you to be in bed?' she asked Archie as she joined us.
He shrugged his shoulders and told her that next day he was going to Abercorn.
Norah took a deep quick breath like a man about to dive.
'Archie,' she said, 'is it because of me?'
From his seat he looked up at her slim figure whose intensity seemed to quiver like a spear struck into the ground. He was, I saw, reluctant to speak.
Ntula's chickens came to his rescue with a sudden squawking and a beating of wings. Archie signed to Changalilo to untie their legs and to give the basket of meal to the carriers to divide among them.
Norah stood motionless, her short hair flambant in the slanting rays of the sun. She repeated the question that Archie had not answered. He looked round him as if seeking escape.
'Norah,' he said, 'what's the good of going into all this? It's done now.'
'Even so,' she said, her voice as calm as the evening light, 'even if it is, is it fair to either of us—to me,' she corrected, 'this silence?'
Archie reflected. You could always lever up Archie with the word 'unfair.'
I turned away with a feeling of intrusion. Yet Norah might need my support. I watched in the top branches of a tree a fishing eagle, sitting solid in the yellow sunlight. The big white bird with its square black head looked as if it had been chopped out of wood with rough, sure blows.
'No,' I heard Archie say almost casually, 'I do not want to go on living without you.'
'Then live with me,' cried Norah. The spear seemed to crumple, to collapse, and turn to a girl crouched on her knees at her husband's feet, fumbling for his hand.
The fishing eagle flapped slowly and as if contemptuously into the gathering darkness.
I could not hear all that Norah said. Naturally I did not try. I wanted to leave them, but the battle was joined, not won; at any moment I might be called on.
From the scattered words that reached my ear, I knew that she was telling him how the kiss in the ruins was given and in what spirit it was accepted. She told him how in the hills she had come to see he cared, and how the knowledge had brought her back to her place at his side. If she could not give him passion—passion was trodden out of her, she said—she could give him affection, if he could accept it....
It was dark now and some one in the village behind us began listlessly to tap a drum. It covered Norah's voice. While she fought for Archie's life, did she hear, I wondered, another drum and see a swinging light that had guided another man to her and on, so quickly, to his death?
At last Archie spoke, and I heard his male tones above the drum.
'You've taken away the bitterness,' he said, 'the bitterness of believing ... that about you. You must forgive me for doubting....'
'And you have to forgive so much,' I heard her break in.
They sat in silence; in the light of the fire I could see his fingers tangling her tawny hair. The drummer had begun to play in earnest and the syncopated, staccato throb seemed to force the wall of the forest to yield a little to its urgency before closing behind it, like a thick velvet curtain. Archie spoke at last and I saw Norah draw in her breath. His words came to me in fragments.
He was glad, so glad she had told him, but it could not alter ... letter to Lavater somewhere at the Boma ... found sooner or later ... intolerable to wait on its chance discovery ... must see Lavater himself to-morrow.
Norah's first weapon I saw had broken. I had never thought it a strong one. She could give Archie the comfort that she was not the trull he had judged her, she could not give him hope that she loved him. She could suppress a reason for not living, she could not make him want to live.
In the second round she held stronger cards. I saw her lips move, pleading with Archie's obstinacy. I could not hear the words. She was offering him a paper.
'But that's the letter I wrote to Lavater,' he cried. She nodded, her eyes dancing in the firelight.
'How on earth did you get it?'
The drum ceased abruptly. Silence swept up like a wave.
'Stole it,' said Norah, and told him how.
She had reached, she said, the Boma before sunset. Lavater, so Joseph told her, had been expected all the afternoon. If she cared to wait, he would be sure to look in at the office on his way home.
As she sat there, her mind worked ceaselessly on the cause she had come to fight, while her eyes darted nervously about the room. They were arrested by a familiar writing on the table in front of her. The blue envelope was addressed in Archie's hand.... It contained his confession.
Her brain leapt from perception to plan. Joseph she sent on an errand to the store. The moment he left the room, she seized a pen and scribbled a note of thanks for the milk and vegetables. This she slipped into the envelope that had contained the fatal letter. With the office gum she re-fastened the flap.
As she replaced it, Lavater's shadow crossed the window. She went to meet him with her heart beating noisily, she thought, against the stolen paper. She had come, she said, to ask leave to borrow some drugs from the Boma stores. And Lavater suspected nothing, but with expressions of concern found her the medicines.
The end of her recital was drowned in a fresh burst of drumming, but I was glad to see that civilisation had not recaptured Archie completely. Admiration for Norah's resource shone on his thin face. Admiration and gratitude. Then the sadness which had lifted returned.
'Norah,' he said, 'what a brick you are! I think it's the most sporting effort I've ever heard of. No one but you.... But you see, don't you? I can't profit by what you've done.' He turned the paper in his hands. 'I've got to go through with it now.' Norah, worsted in the second encounter, rose to her feet and faced him. Her lips framed the word "Why?"
'Because I'm a murderer,' he said, looking over her head, blindly, into the darkness.
As she did not speak, he went on carefully, dispassionately.
At first, he said, he had justified himself. In the forest, he had seemed to stand outside the Law... But Abercorn with its trim roads, its comfortable houses, its kind, commonplace inhabitants had drawn him back into its fold. Obscurely he felt that by accepting the standards of Jehovah and of the forest, he was deserting from the forces that for twenty or thirty centuries had fought for order, to make things shipshape, sane, reasonable.
White men went native sometimes, abjured their heritage, married black wives, lived in mud huts, ate native food. Well, if he set up in his heart the values he had found in the forest, he'd be a renegade like them.
Norah, who had bitten on her lip till it nearly bled, broke in with a cry of indignation.
What had this, she asked, to do with Dick's death? Why should Archie sacrifice his own life for vague ideas about Abercorn and society! What had society ever done for him? Let society look after itself!
'I'm not being clear,' said Archie; 'what I mean is that until I saw Abercorn standing like an advance guard in the fight for...' He felt his words were high-flown and he said, 'all that' with a dismissing wave of the hand. 'I did not feel I had done wrong. Abercorn showed me that I had. Now I must pay for what I did.'
'But Archie, Archie! What's the good? Dick's dead and nothing you can do will bring him to life.'
He was silent.
'All you'll do will be to agonise your father, your relations and friends. And me.You'llpay, you say. But what about us?'
His lips moved but I heard no word.
'If it did any good,' she went on, 'we'd—I'd be glad, proud to suffer for you. But all for nothing! For an idea!'
Archie shrugged his shoulders. 'Don't some people say ideas are everything?' he asked me.
They had begun to dance in the village. Hand-clapping strengthened the beat of the drum and the shrill monotonous voices of women singing, as they jogged to the rhythm.
'You were provoked, you were ill with fever,' Norah began.
'I haven't told you all,' Archie interrupted. 'Have you thought what life now holds for me?'
Without expiation he could never again have peace of mind. He must be ready at any moment to lie to his friends. At any moment a sincere word might be his ruin. Never would he feel clean. And as, to one of his nature, long duplicity was intolerable, he would have to live alone to escape. Alone, what memories would haunt him! What escape would there be from the vision of the defenceless man he had murdered.
The dance had come to an end and the singing ceased. I looked at Norah feeling she was beaten and was surprised to see her poise herself as if to deliver a blow.
'Defenceless, Archie? Murdered? It was fair fight.'
'Fair fight?' he echoed.
'Dick would have killed you if you hadn't killed him!'
I shared Archie's astonishment.
'I didn't give him much chance then,' he said grimly.
'But Dick fired first, he fired at you first!' cried Norah.
Archie passed his hand over his eyes.
'It's all blurred like a bad dream,' he said, 'but I fired before his rifle was up.'
Norah's reply was unexpected. 'Changalilo,' she called.
Changalilo emerged from the kitchen.
'Changalilo, there are some cartridges missing.' The native was silent.
'How many cartridges were there for Bwana Dick's gun?'
'Two, Mama.'
'There's only one now.'
With deference Changalilo reminded her that one had been fired the night the Bwana had shot the eland, the night that Bwana Dick-i...
'Are you sure one was fired then?' said Archie slowly and as if he dreaded the answer.
Changalilo was emphatic, and added that he had cleaned the fouled gun, when the Mama had brought it back to camp.
Norah dismissed the native. 'Do you believe me now?' she asked. Archie sank back into his chair with his head between his hands.
'I saw Dick,' she said, putting every ounce of her will into her speech, 'pick up his rifle and fire at you from his hip. He missed you and you killed him before he could fire the second shot. Is that murder?'
There was a long pause. The drumming and singing burst out again. Men's voices singing, I judged, a song of war. They had thrown dried grass on to their fire, lighting the underside of the trees into pale silver. The shadows of the invisible dancers leapt and flapped like fantastic birds.
I caught a glimpse of Norah's triumphant eyes before the grass was burnt and the light fell. Lying at Archie's feet, I saw a paper torn in four."