The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe CraterThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The CraterAuthor: Robert Gore BrowneRelease date: March 23, 2022 [eBook #67694]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: George H. Doran Company, 1926Credits: Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRATER ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The CraterAuthor: Robert Gore BrowneRelease date: March 23, 2022 [eBook #67694]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: George H. Doran Company, 1926Credits: Al Haines
Title: The Crater
Author: Robert Gore Browne
Author: Robert Gore Browne
Release date: March 23, 2022 [eBook #67694]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: George H. Doran Company, 1926
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRATER ***
BY
ROBERT GORE-BROWNE
NEW YORKGEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926,BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NOTE: No white character in this novel is drawn from life.—R. G.-B.
THE CRATERPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE CRATER
"Her story," said Ross, aiming his cigar-end at a phosphorescent patch of ocean, "was discreditable enough to be true." He drew an immense red handkerchief from the pocket of his pyjamas, and wiped his extensive forehead, muttering, "As far as a woman ever tells the truth about herself."
I sat on in silence waiting for the epigrams to end and the narrative to begin.
It was a stifling night off the East Coast of Africa. A wind that blew from the Equator and followed a crowded ship made sleep impossible. Nightly it drove Ross and myself on deck to spend the intolerable hours in talk.
I did not know much about Ross; no one on board did. A big man with a walrus moustache and a bald head, he had joined the vessel at an unusual East Coast port with few possessions—a rifle or two, and a green kit bag. His preposterous opinions were enunciated with the precise utterance of a spinster, and punctuated by pulls at a virulent black cigar. He knew men and cities; he knew Africa at its heart, where are neither men nor cities.
Our mutual acquaintanceship exhausted, we had drifted to anecdotes of the improbabilities that happen daily in that improbable continent.
"You can never tell what the most normal folk will do," he had said. "One of the most charming girls I know—in three weeks she and her husband had reduced the Decalogue to ribbons...." He broke off, and I had difficulty in inducing him to begin again.
"The girl," he said at last, between puffs of his cigar, "came to me for advice. This implied no particular compliment to my wisdom, since I was the only disinterested white man for a hundred miles. I told her that only fools gave advice, and only wise men took it.
'God knows I'm not wise,' she said, 'but I'd do anything to...'
'My dear, I'll do my best,' I said when I saw that she did not mean to finish her sentence, 'but even for that I must hear a bit more.' She looked at me a little startled, then threw up her chin and plunged into her story. And, as I said, by most standards, it did her little enough credit. Unless courage covers as much as charity. Courage is even needed for a proud woman to tell a man whom she'd met half a dozen times the full story of her ... 'indiscretions' shall we call them?" He paused and seemed to ponder the qualities and failings of his heroine. "Still, most of the other animals have courage," he added. "And no doubt if she was to stay sane, she had to get things clear in her own head. Anyhow, she spared me no detail or digression in the telling of her deplorable history."
Ross got up and walked heavily to the rail where he stood staring down at the sea, which parted before our bows with the sound and motion of split silk. His voice came to me a little muted by the night.
"I didn't know the Sinclairs well," he continued, "but by using my eyes at our occasional meetings, I had a pretty correct idea how matters stood. And Archie told me as much as he told any one. More, while I was nursing him through three days of delirium."
I ventured to suggest that it would be more interesting for me if he began the story at the beginning instead of the end. He shook his head: "The writer of the Book of Genesis was the last story teller who could begin at the beginning. So much has gone before.
If you want the beginning, you'll have to listen, for instance, to the history of the house of Cleverly, from its first earl, the bandit, to its last earl, the bankrupt, while I trace you Norah's inheritance of the maxim of that race of rakes ... and occasional heroes—'Risk before Repute.'
And don't forget we'd have to blend in a survey of Archie's hard-headed lowland forbears, measure the immeasurable pride of his Highland mother, estimate the weight of the legal tradition he inherited from sire and grandsire, which sees both sides of everything, and commits itself to nothing, superimpose Archie's own Oxford training which forbade him ever to back his fancy—all that made him that loyal, hardworking, and in every way estimable stone of stumbling and rock of offence to poor Norah.
And then the scene is set in Africa. By now the power of Africa has passed into platitude, but like most platitude, there's something in it.
Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith, who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.
Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography, psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."
"Plainer men," went on Ross after a pause, "see there no strange gods, see rather the dangerous absence of that unromantic Deity, Public Opinion. In civilised life man's every action is preordained by the opinion of his fellows.
Your young revolutionary may deny this, claiming that he, at any rate, is a free agent. But is not he too bound on the wheel of revolutionary opinion? Does not the Bolshevik follow the tradition of his class—to spit at a bourgeois or whatever it may be—as slavishly as a Die-hard peer?
In the solitudes, the force is unborn and the individual is left, now hell is discredited, a law to himself.
So if you ask me to foretell the change that Africa would work in any given individual, I say, 'Take his ruling weakness, his Lowest Common Failing: cube it. The result will be the man when Africa has done with him.'"
Ross re-lit his atrocious cigar.
"By now," he said, "you must regret that you asked for the beginning of my story.
Are you not convinced that it is better to let me start in the middle of the story and incidentally in the middle of a lake in the middle of Africa?"
"Suppose yourself dead," he continued, taking my silence for assent, "and seeking variety from twanging harps round a glassy sea or banging tambourines in a medium's cabinet, you look down from the upper air, one day in October, 1921. Suppose your eye falls on Tanganyika—that sapphire coloured cleft which runs eight hundred miles long by fifty wide through the endless forests of Central Africa, with the old German Colony to the right, Belgian Congo to the left, North Eastern Rhodesia at the near end.
Not much humanity for you to patronise: every thirty miles or so along the edge of the water a cluster of thatched huts providing a measure of shelter for a handful of savages who live on fish and mangoes, careless of the future, indifferent to the past. Every 300 miles or so, at a Catholic Mission, a couple of white-robed Fathers issue rosaries to their less enlightened neighbours, who until the missionaries came had to rely on amulets made of python hearts. Between these centres of human endeavour, an uncharted belt of forest fringes the lake, and climbs the sides of the great cold crater, until these slope so steep that not even a creeper can catch hold. For the last thousand feet the rock is bare.
Forest rings the crater, stretching further than even you from your advantageous position can see. Nor can you see through the peacock-blue water to the bottom of the lake. They say it hasn't one.
On this particular day of your ethereal view, there is even a bit of human interest in that splendid but desolate vista. At the southern end of the lake a herald of European culture, a broad-beamed steam tug, lies black and ugly on the fantastically blue water. In the bows you may see two figures; from your remote standpoint, insignificant enough. You can discern the features no more than you can read the passions of the tiny puppets holding each other close, as if for defence against the indifferent majesty of nature.
From your elevation you can see a third figure. It is thrusting its way through the forest that borders the lake at the head of a train of diminutive black carriers. Ignorant of each other, the two groups of marionettes are drawn by wires of Fate, invisible even to you, into a contact all but fatal to both."
"If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard ... thou shalt enjoy her."—W. SHAKESPEARE.
"Whatever Norah lacked, it was not looks," said Ross, leaving the rail to fling himself into a deck-chair that creaked under his weight.
'Beauty and gay clothes, a merry heartAnd a good stomach to a feast are all,All the poor crimes you can charge her with,'"
he murmured.
"Not that her heart stayed very merry: while, for the matter of that, even her beauty was a good deal altered the last time I met her and heard from her lips the story I am going to tell you.
By then life and Africa had handled her and treated her as an etcher his plate with steel and acid, adding something which was not there before, call it a soul or a complex according to your creed.
Well, if from heaven that day you could have seen her clearly as she sat beside Dick Ward on the deck of theMimiyou would have remarked, a bit of a thing, who rode some seven stone, neatly cut as a Chinese carving, legs and ankles to make you praise the name of short skirts, short dark hair that entangled the gleam of shaded lamplight on mahogany, cheekbones curving out from cheeks, whose blood (unless that carmine could be claimed for lip salve) had ebbed to her mouth, on which a smile mocked more often than it flattered.
This smile, her pretty slimness, her moods, mobile as quicksilver, might have left her what old men call 'a divine imp,' and you could have forgotten her in the next pretty girl you saw, but for some subtle, elusive quality—like a barely perceptible perfume—that, troubling and tantalising, forbade oblivion."
Ross seemed to meditate.
"I doubt," he said at last, "if it be profitable to anatomise magic; but if I must satisfy your inquiring turn of mind, I would hazard that it was the presence of two conflicting strains in Norah that fascinated the senses.
At some time you must have visited the Small Cat House at the Zoo? Those drowsy, furry, definite, little entities. A trifle sensual, a trifle cruel. Lazy, individualistic, practical, wicked, fascinating. Small, pointed faces, red tongues, sharp claws, sudden motions, quick wits.... Behind the prettiness and softness something lurks, something of the night, of the wilds.
Well, there was a quality in Norah that provoked one to the same admiration. When you listened to her deep, caressing voice—as deep a voice as I've heard in a woman, (some undergraduate once compared it to the dusk of a summer's day)—you were in the presence of something as strange and as primordial as the dances of the East.
Or when you glanced discreetly (should you be a foreigner, 'when you stared admiringly') at the elusive line of her face, which fined down to that evanescent oval, common enough in Italy, so light, so feminine, or should I say 'so female,' you were aware of something ... well, there isn't a fair word. To describe by opposites it certainly was not spiritual. But neither was it animal. Perhaps 'Southern' is as good an adjective as any. Not that she could really trace any meridional blood. If the Cleverlies went to the Continent for their mistresses, they stuck to the Shires for their wives. But unless you are satisfied by a wave of the hand towards the Small Cat House, 'Southern' is as good an adjective as I can find you.
Then, when you thought you had her classified, you met the second strain. Your ears lost her voice, your gaze left the line of cheek and chin and travelled to her narrow eyes, dark as night before sunrise, as a velvet curtain hiding a smouldering fire; at once you passed to the presence of a different animal.
The Small Cats don't bother their heads about romance, adventure, rebellion or any generous folly. I doubt if any occupant of the Zoo does; for that look you must search the human prisons.
But Norah's eyes made you remember forlorn hopes, lost causes, desperate adventures, despairing loyalties; all that uncomfortable side of life which the prudent man avoids. And when they gazed at you under their arched, delicate brows, you felt admiration or pity according to your lights, for a fellow mortal, spurred by impractical generosities, dazzled by romantic imaginings, ridden by rebellious longings, who'd funk no fence that Life might offer—Life isn't only fences," broke off Ross to mutter. "It's the plough that kills the likes of her."
"Dick Ward," he went on, "was gazing, no doubt, into those romantic orbs at the minute my story begins, and reading a flattering message in their courageous depths.
One could not look at Dick without pleasure. He presented a Lucifer-son-of-the-morning effect.
The 'Greek god' type, which fluttered our grandmothers, lacks sufficient kick for the Neo-georgian maid. His hair was perhaps a shade too long for male taste, though women seem in this to be more lenient. That people, on first acquaintance, were apt to take him for an American was possibly due to his faint Irish intonation, and he was so wonderfully sure, so well poised, and so preposterously good looking.
During the war he served in the Air Force. When peace returned, a rich uncle's death saved him from the horrors of work. Wealth was added to charm, wit, good looks—unless vows matter, can you blame Norah so much?
'Marriage laws are drafted by the old,' he had just said, to calm some scruple, 'to be broken by the young.'
'Dick, don't be so Wilde!' she retorted. This isn't the setting. Look at the Lake....'
'I'd rather look at the woman!'
'Don't be an ass. The woman's there any day, Tanganyika——'
'I can't believe yet she will be. I'm afraid of waking up.'
'I feel I've dreamt away my life till now: I've only just woken up. Woken up from a bad dream about Africa.'
'Africa is nearly over. Two days up the Lake to the railway, then——'
'Do you so badly want the time to hurry?'
'Every second with you is worth a life, only——'
'Only you'd sooner catch the train.'
'Aren't you ever serious, Norah? You know I love you with——'
'I often wonder if you love me at all, Dick.'
'No one has ever loved a woman so.'
'Supposing, of course, there is such a thing as love.'
'Norah!'
'Love that survives appetite.'
'Darling!'.
'Well, you see, I loved before.'
'As much as ... now?'
'Differently, perhaps.'
'And my love is different. My love....'
But we'll leave Dick's amatory eloquence to the sufficient audience of Norah and the extinct volcanoes that ring the Lake. In their youth, they, too, had known outbursts of fire and passionate contortion: now cold and desolate, with puffs of cloud nestling like patches of snow in their hollow flanks, bluer than any precious stone, they stared down in unmoved silence.
All day theMimisteamed slowly and fussily, the sun beating fiercely on her crowded deck through the thin awning. Norah lay full length on the camp bed her body servant had put up. TheMimidid not run to cabins—you shared her deck with her doubtfully Arab captain, who lounged in a three-legged wicker chair. Other competitors for the narrow space were the negro crew with their household gods, the couple of lean goats, and the dozen lousy fowls that formed the vessel's food supply.
A portion aft was reserved for native passengers, a class represented this trip by one incredibly lean Indian, with a wiry beard and a blue and white check turban. He sat on a hatch, naked to the waist, his thin legs crossed, motionless for hours. Each time that Norah glanced in his direction his brows seemed to bend in a scowl at the two Europeans.
So all that day they steamed over the Lake, whose sapphire waters were cool to the eye and tepid to the hand. Towards evening they anchored off a fishing village where the captain had told them an Arab was waiting with oxen to ship to a mission up the Lake. He had driven them from a village, a hundred miles to the south, where his father had settled in the days of the slave trade.
Norah was roused from drowsy contemplation of Dick's profile by a shout; she felt the engines go half speed and idly she watched a ragged silhouette sounding over the bows with a painted rod.
'Bili...bili—two fathoms ... two fathoms.' Another shout, and the engines were silent. She rose and took Dick's arm as he leaned over the bulwarks gazing landwards.
'What is it?' she asked.
'I was planning.'
'About us?'
When we're home. What we'll do; where'll we go; what we'll see.'
'Never anything stranger than this,' she nodded towards the shore.
Sheer red cliffs loomed above them. Like futurist painting, violent colours lay in slabs. A streak of faint green sky topped the sandstone wall off which blazed the refulgence of the declining sun; a strip of beach slid a tongue of silver between that fiery barrier and the deepening blue of the Lake.
'Pity you can't paint, Dick. Call it "Drink of Water in Hell," or something bright.'
'The village spoils it. Victorian almost.'
The village, which contrasted the pacificism of man with the violence of nature, stretched its single row of oblong huts under the compact shade of gray-green mango-trees. Their shadow fell black on the ragged thatch which fined from the chocolate colour of the peak, discoloured by innumerable cooking fires, to silver at the eaves.
Groups of placid or indifferent men squatted on the verandahs without motion save for the occasional act of taking snuff. The only sound came from a woman who knelt and pounded millet. The smooth wooden block raised with her two hands beat rhythmically in the worn mortar.
A group of naked babies splashed among wavelets too tiny to disturb even their slight equilibrium.
And Norah's heart warmed to the quiet humanity of the scene. A thought struck her: 'What about those babies and crocs?' she asked.
'Oh!' said Dick. 'There aren't crocs everywhere. It's uninhabited bays they like.'
The advent of the steamer created no stir. At last a family, more enterprising or more avaricious than the rest, was moved to abandon the quietude of their verandah for the yellow sunlight of the beach, where their naked forms were silhouetted, straining at the launch of one of the dozen grey dugouts that pointed in every direction on the sand. The example set, theMimiwas soon ringed by slim canoes laden with long bunches of bananas, purplish green mangoes, and fish of the lake.
'Better buy some, Dick, we haven't too much food with us,' counselled Norah. 'And we mayn't have another chance before Kigoma.'
'What about half a dozen of those?' he pointed to an odd looking yellow barbel with grotesque whiskers. It was as big as a child of ten.
Norah shuddered.
'What's that?' she asked in Swahili, pointing to another fish. 'Is it good eating?'
'Coupi, memsahib,' said the villager, holding up a sort of carp that looked as if it had been inexpertly dyed a poisonous saffron.
'See the blue marking on its belly!' said Dick. 'What a colour!'
'Lapis-lazuli, isn't it?'"
* * * * * * *
For some time Ross had seemed to try my credulity high.
"Do you mean to tell me," I cried, "that Lady Norah repeated to you the words of the most trivial conversations, minute details that caught her eye, vague impressions that darted across her brain?"
"Of course not," said Ross calmly, "but she told me enough to let me fill them in with certainty. You surely don't demand the 'or words to that effect' of the metropolitan police at each moment.
* * * * * * *
"The cattle dealer," he continued placidly, "who, for many days had been awaiting the boat's arrival, had driven two oxen knee-deep into the water. A couple of deck-hands tumbled, laughing and talking, into the ship's dinghy and paddled towards them.
Norah, whose attention was as easily caught by life's activities as any errand boy's, left the bargaining crowd to watch the boat's return.
Horns, muzzles, humps alone visible out of the water, the beasts swam tied to either rowlock. Supporting the head of one, its owner hung over the gunwale. The other less favoured ox submerged each time the slight swell struck him and, as he rose again above the surface, snorted stentorianly.
A cable, paid out from the ship, at a second attempt was noosed over one pair of wide horns. The firemen bent to the capstan, answering the long-drawn chant of their capitao 'oo-ère' with a staccato 'wére.' Slowly the derrick lifted the heavy beast by his horns into the air where he hung grotesquely, pawing and patient. A signal was given and the beam swung inboard, the ox slipping a little as his hoofs met the unfamiliar plates of the deck.
The second beast was more truculent. No sooner had he touched deck and felt his horns free of the noose than, lunging forward, he tossed one of the ship's goats into the hold. The crew laughed delightedly. The ox stood, his feelings outraged, scraping the deck with his hoof and swaying his lowered head.
'Look out, Dick,' cried Norah, wise in the ways of cattle. 'He's coming for you.'
But Dick would not have been quick enough to escape the fate of the goat, had not Norah presented a stick to the oncoming muzzle. Faced with the alternative of bumping his nose, or abandoning his objective, scared and nervy, rather than ugly-tempered, he shambled off, lowing, to the after end of the ship.
'Brute,' said Dick, but Norah followed and had her late opponent slobbering his wet muzzle into her sleeve.
His owner, the Arab, in a hurry to start his hundred-mile walk home, had rowed back to shore to collect his herd boys, who lay on the beach, at the edge of the lapping water. His white-robed figure was visible for a moment on the path leading into the hills behind the village, before it disappeared among the trees. The voices of his ragged followers were audible a little longer, then silence fell as the village settled for the night. Blue smoke rose through every roof and hovered in a mist over the village; the smell of wood fires and cooking was added to the faintly saline breath of the Lake. Presently the moon came up and touched with silver the crest of every ripple. Across the glittering pathway slid the silhouette of a canoe and, lying in her bows, an adolescent began to twang a native guitar."
Telling the story a fortnight later, Norah said that this evening offered her the last peace and contentment she was to know. I fancy one must have youth as well as a good digestion on one's side to feel peaceful and content a few weeks after deserting a devoted husband. But scruples, if women ever have them, lapse in love, and more fully I imagine when the game is played with so splendid a partner in so romantic a scene.
All her life, Norah had taken to romance, as other folk take to drink, or politics. The cure, you shall see, was drastic.
As a child, she had run wild. Her mother had died at her birth, and her father was interminably engaged in a series of unsuccessful operations on the markets, the turf, or the tables. A succession of governesses threw in their hands after a brief attempt, unbacked by any parental authority, to control her. From them, however, she learned to read and write, and from the coachman, to swear. Otherwise, she had little regular education.
She made up for it in the great dilapidated library where she browsed, uncontrolled, among the great debris of the past. Poetry, drama, novels, history, it did not matter, so long as it had a story and a swing. Not a very high criterion, perhaps, but it led her to Shakespeare, and theArabian Nights, Marlowe and Webster, Froissart and Hakluyt, Chaucer, Drayton, Otway, Defoe, Byron. There seemed to be a wonderful world waiting for her, wonderful lands to visit, wonderful deeds to dare, wonderful men to meet.
The outbreak of war swung her from this world of books into life and a phase of life then strange enough to any of us.
She was seventeen when she started work as a V.A.D. and eighteen when she received her eventual discharge with the infraction of every rule to her discredit. In her first round with discipline that unimaginative force had won. She spent a night of tears and abasement, feeling that to have her way, she had failed her country and her class.
But the votaries of Romance are not easily, if indeed they are ever, discouraged. The next morning she joined a volunteer Red Cross column, which a wealthy humanitarian was raising for service with the Russian Armies.
In those days we still believed, if not in the great steam roller, at least in the great soul of Russia. Our stale, materialistic civilisation was to be quickened with an air blowing cold from the steppes. The way had been shown us, our enthusiasts instanced, by the Muscovite abnegation of vodka; forgetting that a Russian is only worth listening to when he is drunk. Regeneration was dawning, convincingly enough, in the east; they little knew how red that dawn.
Norah eagerly seized the chance of reinstating herself in her own esteem. And no doubt the glamour of the country of the Tsars called her. During her months with the V.A.D. her stout heart, quick wits, and clever fingers had picked up something of war-time nursing. It is not difficult to believe that her beauty, if not her skill, was welcome to the overworked, ill-equipped French and Russian doctors, who laboured day and night behind the Russian front at the first dressing station where worked the column."
Ross hesitated.
"She told me," he said, "a good many interesting things about this experience of hers—of operations by candle-light on the kitchen tables of abandoned farms, of a long-haired pope attached to the column whom horror drove mad one night in a shattered tavern; but the story will be long enough without any picturesque extras, and we'll go straight on to the day that the Sisters, for a joke, I suppose, crossed Norah's thread with Archie's.
Archie Sinclair was not, of course, in the least like Dick Ward.
In his adventures, the male unconsciously pursues one chosen type, finding in his mates, if only for a moment, an approximation to his dreams. Just as, in a palpable desert, it is the mirage of water that men follow, ignoring other less desired deception.
Deception it is. Alone the hermits of the Thebaid attained to the achievement of temptation without realisation. Less fortunate men find in possession the denial of the dream.
Women never follow this ideal of monotony. Their husbands, their lovers, are the glasses through which they survey the world. Sometimes one wants spectacles, sometimes lorgnettes, sometimes field-glasses.
Dick was successful, splendid, heroically moulded. He took the eye and filled the stage. Archie was small and unremarkable. He hated emotion, gestures in any degree. Expression made him uncomfortable; and any display of generous sentiment, noble aspiration or lofty ideal he met with embarrassed silence. But he lacked the self-confidence that would have qualified him for the slightly unfashionable ranks of Strong Silent Men. Meeting him casually, he struck you as irresolute. 'Cautious' was really a truer diagnosis.
Like Dick, he was a Celt. But while Dick was the type that fills parliaments and places where they talk, Archie was the dark, inconspicuous sort that is only dragged from its holes in the hills into public by outside force.
His father and grandfather had practised at the Scottish Bar; he was himself destined for the same career, but circumstances, in the obscure shape of a handful of Serbian assassins, landed him in a gun-pit in a picturesque valley at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.
As an earnest young Liberal at the Union Debating Society, Oxford, Archie had repeatedly proved the impossibility of war under modern conditions. In August, 1914, however, when Europe had failed to realise this impossibility, Archie, after two days of more than usual reticence, announced that he was off next day to Glasgow. Pressed to give his motives, he muttered that he supposed it was up to one to join. As he didn't think he'd make much of an officer, he'd enlisted.
Before very long Gunner Sinclair was drafted out to Flanders to replace casualties. He spent an evil winter in the mud of the Salient where endurance found more scope than dash. When Spring came to the desolate scene, he was sent home to receive a commission and to train with a Kitchener division.
At that time things were going badly in Russia. Sukomlinov, the war minister, was suspected not merely of the incompetence that is demanded of a war minister, or of the corruption which is expected of any Russian official, but of an active intelligence with the enemy, not tolerable in the early stages of a war.
It was found impossible to supply rifles and small arms ammunition, let alone artillery and shells, to the hitherto victorious army of the Grand Duke in the Carpathians; and it became necessary for the infantry—rude, unpolished fellows for the most part—to troop over the top without rifles or artillery support, against a well-equipped and entrenched enemy.
To limit the retreat which unexpectedly became necessary, the Russian Government applied to England for guns and munitions.
The War Office and the politicians, realising the seriousness of the position, and standing on the well-proved maxim that, 'if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing half,' fitted out several batteries of more or less obsolete twelve pounders—old Horse Artillery ware—and embarked them to the aid of their allies. Second Lieutenant Sinclair was a section commander in one of these units.
Archie, never communicative, told me little of his share in that disastrous campaign—disastrous, but not inglorious, if death and sacrifice can dignify. But for my story's sake, from the bald and insufficient facts he let fall, I must try to outline the last evening's fighting, that contrived the confluence of his and Norah's lives.
The scene, he said, was a gun-pit at the side of a muddy road, which led through a ransacked Galician village. Its wretched hovels had been gutted by the retiring troops, and from a window of the only two-storied house, the black-robed body of a Jew swung by the neck. A playful habit of the retreating Muscovite, designed to discourage espionage. By now the shadow of the mountain, under whose flank the village lay, mercifully obscured his features.
On the road that passed the gun-pit, bodies of men and horses lay like burst sacks to show where a direct hit had exploded the ammunition limber of Archie's second gun as the team was hooking in.
His section had been left to cover the brigade's withdrawal to a fresh position down the valley. When their unmolested retreat had been secured, his first gun, successfully extricated, had followed on down the hill.
The Austrian fire was ill-aimed, and spasmodic. The crash and dust of falling masonry at the far end of the straggling village, or spouts of black earth from the fields beyond, showed where the shells were falling. But the God of Battles decided that the moment selected by Archie to limber up his second gun should be chosen by the number 4 of an Austrian 120 mm. somewhere up the valley to insert a defective round. The shell dropped a quarter of a mile short of its fellows to score the direct hit on the limber.
When the smoke of the explosion had cleared, only Archie, his sergeant, one driver and one horse of the team were able to pick themselves up from the ground.
Archie's brain worked quicker than its wont. There were not many alternatives.
'Driver Evans,' he said, 'are you all right to ride?'
'Yessir!'
'Have a look at Dossie, and see if she will carry you.'
With his hand pressed to his side, where a piece of flying metal had caught him, he examined the damage done to the gun. The sergeant was at work with Archie's revolver among the wounded horses.
The driver reported that, bar a bit of skin gone, the off-leader would do.
'Good,' said Archie. 'Then mount and follow the battery hell for blast. If they have gone to their new positions, find them. Tell the major what has happened. Say the gun is worth saving, if he can get a team up in the night. There are no Austrians in sight; if they are not here before dark, they will probably wait till dawn. Tell him none of us can walk except Sergeant Yates and myself. Understand?'
Evans saluted, and swung round on his heel. Archie and the sergeant busied themselves with first-aid dressings and fetching water for the wounded. Whenever the stoicism of his kind let a sufferer ask what was happening:—
'Driver Evans is finding the Major,' said Archie. 'When it's dark, he'll send up to pull the gun and us out.'
It was not, he knew, as simple as that. The battery had a long start, and would by now be concealed in a new position. In a strange country and with a foreign tongue, the driver would be very lucky if he found it. But there seemed no better plan.
To look for civilian transport in the scarred desert that the retreating army left in its wake was to waste time. Time that was all too short, even if the Austrian advance guard, accustomed to the almost defenceless condition of the Russian rear at that date, and misled by the English expenditure of ammunition, advanced with unjustified caution.
The hours passed. Archie watched the shadow of the western hills, as it spread across the valley, and still no attack came.
I tactlessly asked him what he felt like as he waited.
He stared at me.
'Felt like?' he repeated. 'I didn't register feelings. I was talking to the men.'
'What did you talk about?'
'I forget. Football, I think. And boxing. One of the men had been Army Welter Champion in India. Poor devil. I don't suppose he boxed again.'
All the same, I can't help thinking that in such a situation the alternatives of sudden death, prison or salvation must have danced their round in the brain of even the least imaginative of men.
At last darkness fell, and the enemy's fire ceased. Archie stood up and strained his ears for any sound that might betray an advance, but all he heard was the painful breathing of his wounded men, or a groan from the layer, who was hit in the stomach, and unlikely to live the night.
'Sergeant,' whispered Archie, 'time you were off.'
'Beg pardon, sir?'
'One of us is enough to stay with these chaps till help comes.'
'You don't mean me to go, sir?'
'Yes, sergeant! Get back to the battery. Besides, you can hurry them up.'
Reluctantly, Sergeant Yates disappeared and Archie was left in the dark with his disabled gun and his dead and dying men. His side hurt him, and his heart ached for his companions. He calculated and re-calculated how soon help could come, till, as the long hours passed, doubt became certainty that his message had miscarried.
He could hardly guess that his destiny had been crossed by the fortunes of Private Pyotr Pavlovitch of the Seventh Siberian Rifles. Pyotr had been holding remarkable hands at 'vint' that morning in the trenches before he and his battalion had been withdrawn under the cover of the British guns. He had won a shirt from Ivan Ilyitch, and ten (pre-revolution) roubles from Dmitri Kalkanov. Can it be wondered that having traversed the cheaper stages of loquacity and truculence, he now lay in deep slumber across the road?
Observe, moreover, the careful dispositions of Providence. Had he held a trump less, and won a kopeck fewer, he would have fallen a moment sooner into the ditch at the side of the road. In that case his prostrate body would not have brought, poor, tired, off-leader Dossie down in a heap, nor sent Driver Evans with a broken leg and concussion to Norah's first dressing station. Neither would the board have been set for the game which was to be played five years later on Lake Tanganyika.
Norah's hand was on her compatriot's head when his eyes opened, and her ear close to his lips that demanded feebly to continue his search for the battery. She shook her head and pointed to his leg. Driver Evans persisted and explained his persistence.
She invoked the aid of the chief doctor of the column, a celebrated French surgeon.
'I will do all I can for your compatriots, Lady Norah,' he said, 'but I'm afraid it isn't much.'
Norah's foot tapped the floor while he scribbled a note and gave it to his orderly.
'Nobody here would know where the battery is; Peter will carry this note to the brigadier. However...' he shrugged his shoulders and turned to the case he was dressing.
Norah heard him murmur to his assistant: 'A cette heure-ci le Russe sera certainement couché avec une poule quelconque. Pas moyen de l'y déranger pour une telle bagatelle que les vies de ses soldats.'
Norah bit her lip and went back to Driver Evans. How masculine it all was! Discipline and routine and inefficiency. While the surgeon shrugged his shoulders and the General slept with his woman, her men were dying.
She made up her mind, and, bending over Evans, plied him with as many questions as he could answer. Then, with her comic little air of decision, she crammed a round grey astrachan hat on her head, swung a black Caucasian cloak of pony skin on to her shoulders and made for the stables.
The sleepy transport sergeant was dragged out of his bed and set to start the Ford box-car, which carried the personal baggage of the column. Grumbling, but obedient to her English air of certainty, he swung the engine into life."
"I've spent too long on this episode introducing to your notice Norah Cleverly, and Archie Sinclair," said Ross with a yawn, "to allow me to describe to you her ride. On horseback, it would have claimed a poet's pen. As the mount was a Ford car, I can only say the road was abominable, scored into deep ruts, strewn with boulders, and, without lights, invisible. How the car kept together and the girl's strength held out and how they escaped total wreck, I can't imagine. A stoutish bit of work. Eventually—about the time that Archie's layer died in his arms—the Ford came to a full stop in the sand with its wheels spinning round tyre-deep.
Norah jumped out and pushed. The car did not stir. She looked for stones to put under the wheels to give them grip. She saw nothing but sand and immovable boulders. She sat on the step, the tears hot in her eyes. Not from fear at her position in the route of the victorious Austrian army, but from anger at her failure, and from pity for the men she had failed to rescue.
After a time she heard a voice raised in song. Russians, she knew, sing about the Volga, Teutons about the 'Heimat.' When, therefore, she heard the words:—
'And when I die, don't bury me at all,Just pickle my bones in al-co-hol...'
she recognised a compatriot.
'God bless my soul,' said Sergeant Yates, a minute later.
* * * * * * *
'Listen,' said Archie to the survivors of his party, a little before dawn, 'isn't that a Ford?'
'Then they 'ave them in 'ell too,' groaned a cockney driver, who was sure he would die of his wounds before the morning. The rattle ceased behind the shattered cottages. A pause interminable to Archie ensued. He stood fingering his revolver. Had the Austrians got round behind them? Were they preparing the rush which would end all? Two figures visible against the crumbling white walls detached themselves from the dark. He wondered whether to challenge them or trust to the cover of darkness. They loomed closer, picking their way slowly over the battle-torn ground. Archie waited till they were at arm's length, before he pressed the button of his torch.
The white circle of light framed a young girl's face: yellow mud was smeared on her cheek, and she shook a tumble of curls out of her eyes."
At first she can hardly have seemed credible to Archie, momentarily expecting the end. In the middle of death and destruction, suddenly this vivid beauty. And not an academic, ideal beauty demanding worship of brain or senses, but a practical travel-stained young woman holding rescue in her hands. His feelings can't have been very clear. When hope of life suddenly dawns, men don't bother much with the outlying emotions. Moreover, Archie was busy getting his wounded men, as gently as the ground would allow, into the box-car. But he must have been conscious of a great wonder, wonder at this eleventh hour salvation, wonder at her beauty and courage.
It was not till afterwards, in his bunk at the dressing station, when his broken ribs had been strapped, that he settled into the steady devotion which was to be his guide and his torment in days to come. From the start he was a humble lover, asking little, diffident of his fortune. Whether the fortune was good or ill, no outsider can say: but on that night of battle, at first sight, Archie was loved by Norah. It was the old story of Ares and Aphrodite entangled in the net, but a net spread by artificers, more cunning even than Hephæstus—Romance and Pity.
Archie, seeing the fight out, and standing by his men wounded and dead, his clothes torn by the explosion, his face discoloured with dust, smoke and blood, his eyes ravaged with sleeplessness and pain, seemed to Norah a figure heroically proportioned in its tenacity, devotion and isolation. And while her spirit paid tribute to the hero, her heart ached to mother the poor, tired boy.
Archie's broken rib and some hitch in clearing the wounded from the dressing station to the base, gave scope to this aspiration and the sick-bed completed what the battlefield had begun. To such purpose, that, as soon as Archie's bones and Norah's duties allowed, they were married.
Every marriage is said to be pre-ordained by the female, and baited for the male with the illusion of choice. Whether this is always true, I have no doubt that here Norah took the lead. Of course Archie would have sold his soul for her, but where would he find the decision to tell her so? She must have helped him out, her love translating his silences into mute eloquence, his caution into noble modesty, his reticence into silent strength. She was young enough to demand perfection in the object of her affections, and deep enough in love to find it. Obstacles and conventions only acted as spurs to her hot blood. Her natural bent was to put all her money on one horse and that for a win, never a place. In this the war lent her reason, urging her to pluck the day ere night fell, to take and give what life offered before death laid his claim. It needs, I think, an old head and a cold heart to condemn these war marriages.
Archie, whose Scottish nature appreciated the unfavourable side of everything, no doubt saw each of the hundred reasons against the marriage. He may have realised their difference of temper, foreseen the parental disapproval of the solid Scots lawyer and the impecunious English peer, calculated money difficulties, guessed that Norah was in love with an aspect of him, which peace time—should he survive the war—would never call into being.
But can any man, even a Scot, let this weigh when he is fast in love with an incredible apparition, who has saved his life and lets him see that his love is not unacceptable? To my mind, Archie deserves neither blame nor pity—beauty and guts mayn't be a pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, but they carry a girl a long way towards Holy Matrimony.
Judge it as you may, the marriage took place not many weeks after their meeting in that Carpathian valley, as soon in fact as Norah had got home and Archie had been released from his London hospital.
In spite of the quietness of the wedding, our modern Argus got hold of the story and billed them as 'Red Cross Romance: Peer's Daughter Rescues Artillery Lieutenant.'
The Peer let it be felt that he regretted the rescue; while the father of the lieutenant indicated that if he went his own way, he must pay it.
This lack of enthusiasm emphasised the romantic nature of the union, and the happiness of the young couple was only interrupted by the end of Archie's sick leave, and his return to Flanders.
From then life began to thrust them apart, as surely as a tree-root forces asunder two stones in a wall. Not that these two stones can ever have been very truly laid. Archie's reserved devotion can never have satisfied Norah's capacity for passion. She asked for the wine of life and got its breakfast food. But while that Carpathian picture was not effaced, she would see no flaws in her hero. Nor, during his long absences at the front, and his short visits on leave, did she perceive the difference between the man and the picture. She longed passionately for his return and loved him dearly when he came. But apart from his brief periods of leave, the first hours of which were always wasted in a sort of strangerhood, they had no life in common to buttress up Romance and to let picture tone into fact.
Norah did not lack humour, and had war allowed, daily companionship would have built up affection for the man to supplement and in time supplant adoration of the hero. The daily letters which passed between the flat in Baker Street and the dug-out in Flanders—Archie's rather formal chronicles and Norah's passionate little notes—could not take the place of the personal intercourse which war denied them.
I know it is the thought of meeting the object of their passion daily at breakfast that heads off many a Benedict and Beatrice. But it is only by submitting to the humanising influence of small daily contacts that love will provide a working basis for marriage. Without this humanising, love does not develop but starves."
"I didn't know you were married, Ross," I interrupted.
"I'm not," he replied, and went on with his story.
"Norah's environment did not help her to keep in touch with her husband. In his absence she was absorbed into the circle of her family, by none of whom was Archie known or appreciated. A different atmosphere was created in which Archie drew no breath. New points of view and standards of life presented themselves to her young eyes. This was her first taste of London, and a strange world lay at her feet. No wonder her head was a little dizzied. She drove an ambulance by day, and by night she danced. Her beauty, vivacity and birth made her acceptable to that set which won the war by going to charity matinées. She did not like it, but found its glitter stimulating. At the houses of her relations she met celebrated, handsome, and amusing men. And, in truth, though the comparison never presented itself, they were a good deal better company than poor, silent Archie.
After three years of this the war ended, and Archie came home. He was far too devoted to Norah to ask her to alter her way of life, and while his gratuity lasted, he took her to dinners, theatres, races, dances, night clubs; all that hostesses, restaurateurs and impresarios pass off on us for 'pleasure.'
I don't suppose Archie showed at his best in these surroundings. He had scant small talk, and probably an indifferent tailor.
During these weeks, disillusionment first reared its head. For both their sakes I hope the process was gradual, but I think passion would desert Norah's quick heart as capriciously as it visited it.
Archie must have looked forward to the time when his gratuity would be exhausted and the two-pences for the merry-go-round would no longer be forthcoming. Then they would have to retire to Edinburgh and live on their small income, while Archie made his way at the Scottish Bar, like his fathers before him. Unfortunately, his nature was to keep his views to himself. He did not disclose them until one evening at supper at Giro's. The disclosure was disastrous.
They had dined, a trifle noisily, at the mansion of a South African Jew, whose acquaintance Norah had made during the war when only aliens could procure luxuries. I had known their host before he became respectable—too well, indeed, to be dropped—and had also been invited.
The war had left me lame, and Norah, in whom modish hardness hid a compassionate heart, insisted on picking me up in her taxi. She was looking, I thought, very adorable. Her frock was made of some sort of shot silk, very bright. It fitted her straight little figure closely down to her waist, spreading out below in scalloped flounces. The suggestion was a fin-de-siècle shepherdess, strayed from Arcady to Park Lane.
Over her shoulders hung a cloak lined with green brocade. Its upright collar of monkey fur framed with spikes the piquancy of her face. Her high cheekbones were rouged, her wide mouth drooped a little at the corners.
Archie made a good background. He was slight and dark. Typically, he wore a dinner jacket instead of the tail-coat that the rest of the party would sport. His hair was close-cropped and grew high on his forehead. His face was clean shaven and rather weather-beaten, with a well formed nose and an obstinate chin. His supra-orbital sinus, as the anatomists call the bar of the eyebrows, was pronounced and his grey eyes seemed sunken beneath it. He looked uncommonly wiry, giving an impression of 'no waste'—no spare flesh, no spare words, no spare emotions. Condemning emotion he substituted Reason, thereby coming more of a mucker than the ordinary irrational man. His anxiety to be reasonable gave him an irresolute air. He was still balancing questions which years before ordinary men had settled by instinct, prejudice or indifference.
After dinner we went to the last act of the last revue, though why the discomfort of a box should be sought for conversation that could perfectly well be held at home, I never know. When the theatre was over, and the party had broken up, I heard Norah tell Archie she was too tired to go home and wanted supper.
Apparently the supper was not a success. Archie ordered champagne. Norah tasted it, and made a face.
'My dear,' she said, 'the stuff's undrinkable. Do order something a little less like what they give you in church!'
Archie, in whose opinion wine began and ended with port, said nothing, and beckoned the wine waiter.
Unfortunately, he betrayed his thoughts by a slight shrug. Norah, who was tired and nervy, saw it.
'All right, I won't have it then. I suppose you think we can't afford it.' Archie shook his head. Much of his conversation was by sign. When you asked him a question, he paused before answering. A stranger would think he had not heard, and would repeat his question; but Archie was only thinking over his reply—a habit which may make valuable contribution to thought, but does not help small talk. Sometimes it would be your penultimate remark which he answered, having duly considered the question during the intermediate talk. No, Archie was not a conversationalist. But now Norah felt the need of opening her heart.
'I wishyou'ddrink a bit more fizz, Archie. It might binge you up a bit. You sat all through dinner looking as bored as sin, and you didn't smile once at the play or even at Tony Moorhouse.'
That gilded youth, after a conscientious patronage of the magnate's cellar, had subjected the revue artistes to a flow of not very witty interruption. The party had shrieked with laughter, and Archie had flattered himself that he, too, had gone through the motions of being amused.
'I'm sorry,' he protested, 'I was thinking——'
'My poor boy, you don't go to the play to think. What on earth were you thinking about?'
Now, one of Archie's habits which more than any other unfitted him for polite society was his tendency to tell the truth. So now he blurted out, 'I was thinking you'd miss all this in Edinburgh.'
Norah's delicate eyebrows rose, and her lips tightened.
'What's that about Edinburgh, Archie?'
'Well, some day we must settle down to work.'
'But, my poor friend, why Edinburgh? what's wrong with East Ham?'
'You know. Family connection, and all that. Solicitors. I wouldn't have a chance at the London Bar; now, at Edinburgh, in five years——'
'Yes, darling, go on——'
'In five or six years I ought to be clearing at least five hundred a year.'
'Say it again slowly, Archie.... You don't seriously mean to shut me up for five or six years in Edinburgh to earn five hundred a year! Why, I'd sooner be bricked into a convent wall!'
'Edinburgh's not a bad place; we'd know lots of people there.'
'The same applies to hell, dear.' And so the argument went on, Archie more and more obstinate, and Norah more outrageous. Archie was determined that his only safe prospect was the Bar and the Scottish Bar at that. The Bar might be slow, but, for him, it was sure, and success was only a question of time. Norah urged him to chance his arm at something quicker, more lucrative, and in London. She quoted the successful among her friends whom post-war poverty had driven to work.
'Look at Bobby Anstruther. His garage is making three thousand a year, hiring out defunct Daimlers. You have to book one days ahead.'
'He'll be bust in a year when every one's spent their money.'
Well, look at young Peter Carey, making thousands on the Stock Exchange. And what about that Rhodesian man we met at dinner to-night? He said there were pots of money to be made in mealies in Africa. He said any fool could grow them.'
'Not in London?'
'No, darling. But if I can't be in London, I'd rather be in Jericho or Tierra del Fuego than in a blasted provincial town. Listen, Archie,' and she went on to repeat what the South African had told her, how the Chartered Company were giving tracts of 3000 acres in Northern Rhodesia to approved ex-officers, free for the asking, provided they occupied and worked them.
Archie shook his head. 'I might be able to make farming pay,' he said, 'I was brought up on a farm. But it's a hard life, and, in spite of your friend, it's slow money. You'd like it worse than Edinburgh and the Bar.'
'If you mention Edinburgh or the Bar again, I'll tell the head waiter that I don't know who you are, and you've accosted me.'
Then with one of her sudden changes of moods:
'Archie, I'm sorry. I'm being a beast to you to-night. I don't mean to be, dear, but I'm tired, and Edinburgh ... say you forgive me, darling, and I won't say another word about it.'
But Norah had got her toes in and her husband's opposition to the African plan only made her dig them in deeper. Though Archie was as obstinate as they make them, his will was weakened by his anxiety to please his wife. Like most men, he was attracted by the idea of an outdoor life; but that northern pre-vision of the disadvantages of any agreeable course, held him back, and by birth and breeding he was mistrustful of anything new and unproven. Moreover, he did not believe that Norah would like the life.
She herself had no doubts. Her restless, adventurous hands grasped at anything fresh and strange. Of all the siren lands that had lured her girlhood, Africa's voice had rung the clearest. Women and the lower animals do not reason. Pictures present themselves before their minds, and they choose as the pictures entice or repel.
So as she re-read the travels of the great adventurers, she saw a sunlit vision of palms and orchids, savages as noble as princes, and as faithful as dogs, wild beasts to be hunted at pleasure, lands of mystery to be explored at will, fortunes to be won in the intervals as a diver gathers pearls. And at the end a triumphant return to the luxury of home with spoils that would lay London at her feet.
Her final storming of Archie's opposition was characteristic. She had driven him to his last line of defence—a plea of insufficient capital. Had Archie ever understood women, he would have known the danger of setting up one concrete objection. She put on her furs and an hour later returned with a handful of banknotes.
'Where did this come from?' he asked.
'My pearls,' was the reply.
"That is the way they always defeat us," said Ross.
One day, towards the end of the dry season in Central Africa more than two years later, Norah was sitting on an empty packing-case under the shade of an acacia, watching the tiling of her house.
Archie had been two years building it. He was so thorough that he sometimes maddened her. Moreover, every brick and tile had to be moulded and burnt on the farm; anthill clay for mortar dug and carried; shells for lime pointing dredged from the river and burnt in kilns; timber felled, dragged and hand sawn; doors and windows made in the shop; bolts and iron work wrought in the forge; and natives taught to do all this.
At last the white walls were up, the verandah pillars stood square and solid, and the skeleton of the king post roof reared its symmetry across the cloudless blue sky. A string of naked black urchins herded by an objurgatory black capitao formed a chattering procession carrying tiles, two in each hand and one on each head, to the tile hangers, who crouched like black apes on the rafters.
Norah felt no elation at the thought of good work nearly done, and stared blankly across a prospect of profitless and laborious years. True, she would be heartily glad to be quit of her temporary habitation of the last thirty months. From where she sat, she could see the cluster of wattle-and-daub rondavels, where they lived while the permanent house was building. It was across a little river that ran swift as a mill race, bordered by marshy banks hidden in papyrus rushes with heads like mops. Waterfowl, black, white, and grey, rose into the air from time to time with harsh, melancholy cries. On either bank of the river lay the flats, where grew the dry season grass for Archie's cattle. The edge of the bush, as straight as if drawn with a ruler, fringed the flats. Desolation gained her when she thought how many square miles of trees lay between her and her nearest white neighbour. Beyond the tops of the trees she could see the rounded slopes of the hills, blue in the distance, as bright as a child's painting.
On the flats, which stayed green when the scanty grass of the bush had turned orange, she could see Archie's beloved herds and, going his rounds, looking out for sick and ailing beasts, Archie himself. To-day the disreputable grey double terai had for company a dirty white topee. A wandering 'stiff' had descended on the farm some evenings before with a ulendo[1] of two carriers. They had few visitors, a dozen or two in the year, traders, missionaries, Boma[2] officials, and occasionally a 'stiff,' some unfortunate with insufficient kit and carriers, his presence in the country imperfectly explained by an ostensible search for work where none was to be found. Such were usually chary of giving their names or their business. This one, a wizened little fellow with a half-hearted beard and a game leg, answered, when he remembered, to the name of Jones, and purported to have come from the Congo, over whose frontier he admitted to have been escorted by Belgian askari. He had a repertory of elephant stories and tales of tusks of incredible size, but became elusive if pressed as to locality. He was now, no doubt, giving Archie a wealth of inexpert advice on the treatment of cattle, and Norah smiled as she imagined the impenetrable silence with which it would be received.
[1] "Ulendo"—journey or the necessary components of a journey.
[2] "Boma"—lit. enclosure, hence the Government posts.
Archie had proved to have a knack with cattle. Brought up on the farm his mother had inherited, he had learnt a good deal of veterinary work in the gunners. The herd of native cattle he had collected was as good as any in the country, and for grass his farm was unrivalled. But lack of markets and the distance from rail-head, which made freight prohibitive and the amenities of civilisation rare, held him up. The only market which was not at the moment barred by the embargoes of God or man—tsetse fly belts or prohibited areas—was the Katanga, the district of the Congo copper mines, whose vast compounds of native workers consumed unlimited meat. The depreciated Belgian exchange, however, made it unprofitable for Archie to sell there. So, while his herds increased and multiplied, his bank balance, under the constant drain of working expenses, ebbed.
The cattle were already streaming to their kraals on the high ground. Amid the shouting of the herd-boys, they snatched at a last bite of grass as they shouldered their way and a little mist of dust rose from their hoofs. Norah got up with a sigh as the sun sank behind the darkened hills. Cattle attract lions and leopards, and it was not safe for man or domestic beast to be abroad after dark.
She reached the ferry and stepped into the dug-out canoe, manned by an elderly native with a withered leg, whom Archie employed from charity. He pointed the nose of the canoe up-stream and pushed off. Carried by the current, the boat swung round and bumped into the rough steps on the farther bank. She sprang out bidding good-night to the old man, who knelt down and clapped his hands in salutation.
Archie had not reached the rondavels before her; he would be seeing the cattle safely kraaled for the night. Her 'boy,' Changalilo, brought quinine and silently prepared a hip-bath for her.
Silence, discretion, and resource, were Changalilo's rare qualifications. His tribe, the Awemba, a dignified, well-mannered, and once warlike race, are as a rule too irresponsible to make good servants. Norah explained the exception that was Changalilo by attributing to him Arab blood. His lips and jaw showed no trace of negroid thickness, and it was likely enough that in passage some Arab slave trader had sired one of his parents.
His slimness and his white kanju made him look taller than he really was, and his grave restrained manner lent him an aloofness which was probably absent from his simple heart. Now he lingered in the room soundlessly creating an impression, as native courtesy directs, that there was something more to be said.
'What is it, Changalilo?' asked Norah.
'Io, mwkai—nothing, mistress,' came the disclaimer imposed by good form on any speaker with news to impart.
Further interrogation elicited the fact that the sukambali, a lad of fourteen who hewed wood, drew water, and washed plates, stated that his father was ill, and that he wanted to go to his village.
'Is it true?' asked Norah.
Changalilo's silence indicated scepticism.
'In any case, he cannot start to-night,' she decided.
This was just her luck, with a guest in the house. She supposed she would have to let the little beast go, and of course another sukambali would appear in a day or two, but work in the kitchen would be completely disorganised. Unless she cooked with her own hands, food would be uneatable. How she hated housewifery. She had to do it, though. Archie took over the whole work of the farm, and the house fell to her share.
Her days seemed a round of ignoble detail—thwarting the table-boy's appetite for sugar, driving the sukambali to wash the saucepans before they were used, giving out paraffin, and watching that it was not stolen from the lamps. That's what pioneering meant. Well, she must stick it now. She promised Changalilo she would interview the sukambali on the morrow, and dismissed him. There was a sound of inharmonious humming outside, and Archie entered. He was in good spirits, his day's work done, and his visitor bestowed for the moment in the guest house. Norah, forcing a smile, inquired dutifully after the farm.
'Wasted most of the day listening to Jones' rubbish,' was the reply. 'He knows more about elephant than cattle. I hope so, anyhow. Telling me how to control the sex of calves. Pure superstition, of course. His theory is that...' But Norah was not listening. Her gaze wandered from a patch in the bulging wall, where the stakes showed through the dull red mud, to the sagging thatch of the ceilingless roof, whence insects were liable to drop. Her mind contrasted this unromantic squalor with the spacious poverty of her own home, and with the splendour of her London days, exaggerated, no doubt, across the two-year gap of barren makeshift. Bravely, she forced the picture out of her mind and bent her attention to Archie's monosyllabic conversation.