CHAPTER V

“Man is fire, and Woman is tow,And the Devil comes and begins to blow!”

“Man is fire, and Woman is tow,

And the Devil comes and begins to blow!”

—Old Saw.

It is not exactly good for any man to be a condensed force in his own person. An administrator represents a governor, who in his turn represents the Imperial Government and takes precedence of any stray royalty who may drift into his kingdom—provided he is not thefiggerheaditself. A representative power is very demoralising, because the reins of government are too concentrated—in spite of the Legislative Council. Six or seven thousand miles away is Westminster, and somebody who is called the Colonial Secretary, and who can write letters with censure in them; but on the spot, in such rat-traps as Key Island, for instance, is an administrator, and this unit is for the nonce a king in his own country if he has the confidence of the men over him. The effect of this is seen when such transitory monarchs go home, and walk into the Colonial Office to demand an extra six months’ leave. Then they learn their real importance, which is so great that they cannot be spared, and are sent back to their tiny kingdoms not at all appreciative of the compliment that has been paid them. A small corner of the British Empire is the very worst school in which to learn a sense of proportion; but Evelyn Gregory had been put in power in many of such corners, and had learned to see things from a proper distance even while he lived in the midst of them. It was the more surprising, therefore, that he always impregnated himself with his kingdom of the moment, and that particular spot (whether it were many thousand square miles in the centre of Africa or Northern India, or only the limited area of Key Island) was the problem which absorbed all his faculties until he had made himself its master. The raging energies of the man demanded an object on which to expend themselves in such a way, and had been his quality of success throughout his turbulent career. It was a little hard on Alaric Lewin, who was cast in another mould, that he should have been appointed under a man who was a glutton for work, and suffer as an ineffectual tool. But the Colonial Office is no respecter of individualities.

There was a meeting of the Executive Council on the morning of the Arthur Whites’ dinner; it was a small body, consisting of the Attorney-General himself, Bute Churton as officer in command of the forces, and the Colonial Treasurer, besides the Administrator. Gregory mounted his pony and rode down into town thinking of his plans and the future of Key Island, rather than of any social function, though he was to be one of the guests at the Harrac. He was not a dreamer, but his restless brains built fortresses where other men’s built castles in the air, and he projected schemes for the Empire in place of personal ambitions. The little streets opened out before him and revealed the ring of the bay and the two great rocks guarding the harbour entrance, and the Administrator’s keen sleepless eyes stared out through them as a lion’s through the bars of his cage. With the smell of the sunshine and the tropic life in his nostrils he jogged easily along, mechanically raising his hand to his helmet if any one saluted him, but seeing more of the sandbox and eucalyptus trees in the little central square where the band played, than of the people he passed.

If France developed the resources of Madagascar now, as this new interest in the Hovas seemed to indicate, that meant a spur in her trade, and more traffic with Africa. Nothing would have pleased Evelyn Gregory more than the least excuse for a quarrel if only he could have laid greedy hands on a portion of his huge neighbour. He knew Madagascar and her capabilities,—he held theories about the ore that he chafed to see neglected,—and he coveted her for his Government, who already found Key Island more trouble than she was worth. To turn his guns on the French ships as they came up the Channel, and be the base of British operations with the safe harbour and huge coaling stations, would have fed his fighting instincts and ambitions alike. He glanced at Tsofotra, the left gate and the more accessible of the two, where the guns could be dragged up somehow in case of hard necessity; and he felt a secret attraction towards those great sentinels, rising bare and grim to over two thousand feet above his harbour.

... A woman passed him, riding up towards Government House, the way he had come. He forgot the Lewins’ bungalow for the minute, and half-wondered where she was going. She bowed, and he saluted, before he remembered that she was Mrs. Lewin, the pretty wife of his incapable A.D.C., who had better have been the boy than the girl. But her face only brought a memory of her husband to his mind, and made his harsh features a trifle less ingratiating than usual.

Why on earth had they sent him such a show article as Lewin for the work he had before him! He wanted brains and energies, not muscles and trained animal courage—a man, not only a soldier. Gregory knew that as yet he had not his administration in the iron grip in which he would hold it by-and-by, and before casting a loving eye round the Channel,—Madagascar on one side, and Mozambique on the other,—he must make Key Island his own. The natives were cowed with the presence of the troops, but the root of the mischief was there still, and he had not yet probed down to it. He wanted certain things done, too, by the Home Government—the factories encouraged and enlarged, for he knew the value of sweating the devil out of his people, and minor industries, such as timber growing, given a helping hand; there were memoranda to make, reports to send back to England, a mass of clerical work to get through before Halton was recalled,—and Captain Lewin was the best polo player that the club could get on to their faulty ground, and in constant demand for tennis and gymkana. Truly the fates were unpropitious for both men.

Chum had ridden on in the sunshine, thinking as hard as Gregory. He would be at the Arthur Whites’ to-night, and he would talk of tennis and cricket matches to the best of his ability to the woman assigned him for dinner party, probably playing the part of courteous listener, if only she would do the talking—Mrs. Lewin was beginning to know his methods; and then, once the ladies had gone, he would draw nearer to the man who could really interest him, and talk of the island and the life there that woke him to more than surface attention,—but that man would not be Ally! No schooling would push Ally into the place she wanted him to take after her back was turned, and she herself was helpless. With feminine philosophy she dressed carefully that night, not for the Administrator, but because Chum never despised the advantage of facing the world fortified by being perfectly turned out. She was more successful than usual over her unruly hair, and the pretty ripples lay round her flat ears—not over them, for Ally’s warning!—and were massed down into the nape of her neck as if they loved her, and were glad to frame her beauty. She looked at the slope of her neck and the warm, white round of her shoulder, and because she was respectful of her Creator’s work, she fastened a big, black velvet rose to the shoulder-strap, where its artificial duskiness kissed the reality of her own seductive dimples. More than one man found himself vaguely conscious of that false flower before the dinner was over, and thought stealthily of Captain Lewin’s domestic bliss. Leoline was not exactly a woman whose influence was towards goodness, whatever she might be in herself. For though she had no vice of her own, she suggested all of them in turn to coarser and more masculine minds.

The Arthur Whites had placed their table well, and this is a great gift in Key Island, where guests are easily bored through constantly meeting each other. The host and hostess did not sit at either end of their square table, but because one side would accommodate almost as many as another they had a way of disposing themselves among their guests, and placing two instead of one at either end. It broke the usual solemn monotony of dinners, and accommodated a larger number. Thus it happened that Mrs. Lewin, who had been taken in by Captain Gilderoy, found that she was next the end of the table where her host should ordinarily have sat, but round the corner were the Administrator and Mrs. White. To sit next to Mr. Gregory was nothing, for what attention he had to give was Mrs. White’s. Chum smiled upon the garrison adjutant, and enjoyed herself with a continuation of the philosophy that had dressed her for conquest. Across the table she could see a woman, who was a stranger to her, neglecting her rightful partner, Major Churton, and talking at the Administrator through the medium of a projected water scheme in which she was not really interested, and noted her failure with as much sympathy as amusement. After all, they had all had their water-scheme trial, and failed also!

“Who is Major Churton’s partner?” she said idly to Gilderoy, under the buzz of the conversation round them.

“That is Mrs. Clayton of Mitsinjovy fame!” he answered. “They have only been out a month or so longer than you, and she was ill with fever at first, so it took some time for her questionable attractions to dawn on us.”

(“Then she does not know Mr. Gregory, and that is why she is wasting her energies on the water scheme!” thought Chum.) Aloud she said cautiously, “Do you know her?”

“Not personally, I am thankful to say, but I have a smiling acquaintance with her. I have to pass their house on my way down to town and to the garrison office every morning, and she is generally showing her ankles for my benefit on the stoep. I always smile, because as she has taken the trouble to get into her hammock, presumably on my account, it would be unkind not to do so.”

Mrs. Lewin looked at his rather rugged face, and found it curiously deceptive. For his eyes were quite friendly, and when he spoke in that pleasant tone it was difficult to realise his sneering insinuations about the lady sitting opposite, who was even now casting glances in his direction.

“What sort of acquaintance did you say you had?” she asked, laughing.

“Just a smiling one. Don’t you know that stage? I should say it was very inadvisable to go further and fare worse with the O.C.T.’s dinner partner!”

“Now I come to think of it I have had that degree of intimacy with people myself. It is rather fascinating, because though one can’t bow it is not in human nature not to recognise a familiar face in some way that evades the social law. But why should you judge Mrs. Clayton by her ankles?”

He shrugged his shoulders, and the dog-smile marred his face for a moment. “If a woman gives me such a flagrant invitation, what am I to think? They have not begun entertaining yet, but if you would rather wait and judge them by their tennis-cake and Bridge-markers pray do so. For me, I have my private opinion.”

“Is that the usual test out here—how one entertains? I am still on my probation then, because we have no courts, and have not started Bridge. Ally and I only give whiskey-and-soda dinners at present.”

“Well, that is excellent, or sounds so!” he retorted, turning to look at her more closely. Captain Gilderoy always retained his air of being a gentleman whatever he said or did, but he was also, at times, a man—the black rose that Chum was wearing was on his side, not the Administrator’s, and he was well content with his lot, so much so that when Diana Churton loudly claimed his attention to pronounce judgment on a short issue of Victorian stamps, he turned reluctantly to answer, leaving Mrs. Lewin for the moment unmonopolised.

The dinner was practically over, but there was just that pause of desultory talk before Mrs. White rose that kept the men from their cigarettes—in this house the women were, officially, not supposed to smoke—and Chum knew that her hostess would look at her in a minute, and altered her attitude to one of more alertness; but she had a school-girl trick of slipping off her shoes under the dinner-table, and for the minute the little right-hand slipper was missing.

She was feeling about for it with a distressed silk foot, when an inspiration flashed into her head, filling her eyes with brilliant laughter. The Administrator was not at the moment occupied any more than herself; he was leaning back in his chair, his eyes for once cast down, his massive face inwardly absorbed, but one nervous hand playing with the fruit knife betraying the active, working brain. Mrs. Lewin looked at him ... were they all wrong? Had Mrs. Clayton and the water scheme failed to arrest his attention for exactly the same reason that her own tentative efforts had not succeeded—that they had all appealed to the wrong side of the man? How would audacity do instead?...

She leaned forward, her face flushed with her own uncertain daring, her eyes still full of laughter, half excited, half amused at the experiment, and spoke hurriedly under her breath.

“Mr. Gregory, will you try and find my shoe for me?”

The hand that played with the fruit knife stopped as if by clockwork, and the Administrator raised his hard eyes and looked full into hers in his amazement. A half-smile softened his own lips in answer to her apologetic dimples.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Lewin?”

“My shoe!” said Chum with apparent impatience. “I have a foolish habit of slipping them off at meals and I’ve lost one, and Mrs. White will look at me and rise in a minute, and I can’t go. Do feel for it! It must be somewhere near you.”

His face flushed dark red with suppressed laughter, as, more awake to the situation than she had ever known him, he sat back and felt cautiously about in the unseen space of floor. A minute later he had really found it, and caught it between his feet. The little soft satin thing felt utterly alien and feminine, and yielded to the pressure of his feet, yet just because it was so empty it suggested to his senses the foot that would fill it. He pushed it carefully towards Mrs. Lewin, his eyes still fixed upon her.

“Have you found it?” she said eagerly, without a trace of consciousness in her charming face. “Thank you so much!... Yes, I have it!... That’s all right!”

He had inevitably touched the little unslippered foot in its silk stocking, but she did not seem to be aware of the fact as he was. Mrs. White had risen, and Mrs. Lewin rose too, with one brilliant smile of thanks at him—nothing more. The Administrator was nearest to the door; he got out of his seat and held it for the ladies, looking down on them from his unusual height as they passed,—Mrs. Arthur White in dull white silk, a comfortable, portly presence—Mrs. Clayton, still trying to attract attention with a jingle of bangles, but his eyes were blank;—Diana Churton, hard and metallic and burnt to the collar-line, beneath which her bare neck was startlingly fair;—then a tall woman with a well-groomed head, and a black velvet rose nestling against the rich whiteness of her skin. He scanned her as keenly as though he saw her for the first time, and he felt sure she did not notice it as she went calmly by, so softly unconscious of him that she was as easily graceful as though no strong masculine eyes were searching her from the crown of her head to the little foot that had a new meaning to him.

Mr. Gregory held the door until the last silk skirts had swept into the further room. Then he went back to his seat and sat down, and the talk buzzed round him of sugar works and hemp-crops, and mixtures of races in Key Island, while a few men talked promotion and the chances of the army. Between his feet, as he sat there discussing his favourite topics, he could still feel the strange yielding softness of a little satin slipper....

As Mrs. Lewin entered the drawing-room the coffee came in from the servants’ quarters. She sat down in the nearest chair, which happened to be beside a little table where a fancy mirror lay with some other trifles. The other women had crossed over to the coffee-tray; Chum took up the glass deliberately, and looked at herself; first on this side and then on that. The inspection was entirely satisfactory.

She laid down the mirror, and smiled as if distinctly amused. For it had occurred to her that they had all been fools and had wasted much valuable time, and when women are fools the men will not help them out of their folly.

“He is only a man!” she said a little contemptuously, going back to her first comment.

By the time the men came into the drawing-room, most of the women had drifted out on to the stoep, but the two Bridge tables were placed and waiting, and the Bridge players sat down to the serious business of their evening, while Hamilton Gurney of the Wessex wheeled the piano out into the cool darkness and fortified by cého began to sing. He had that gift of the gods a real tenor voice, and when he sang he was suddenly transformed from an ordinary young man in a Line Regiment to a satellite of the Angel Israfil, with power over his fellow-creatures to wring their hearts and bring tears into their eyes. It is a little pitiful of human nature that intense pleasure always shows itself most simply in weeping; for when the senior sub. of the Wessex had dropped his last soft note into a listening silence most of his hearers had uncomfortable lumps in their throats, and believed that it was a foretaste of Heaven.

Mrs. Lewin had seated herself in a basket chair as far from other listeners as she could, for she was selfish over music, and felt inclined to turn and rend any one who interrupted her enjoyment of it. It represented the only violent emotion that she had really experienced, and she objected to facing the public with quivering nerves. To-night she was to be more than usually harrowed because Mr. Gurney, in a fit of sentimentalism engendered by her own black rose, had chosen a song with her name interwoven—a song that Blumenthal loved best of all he wrote, and which seems as if the accompaniment were born of the air. It is called “Leoline,” but Chum missed the reference to herself as completely as she lost sight of the pink-and-white young man at the piano who was casting glances at her shadowy corner. Hamilton Gurney did not realise that he was merely the vehicle of his own gift, and therefore he made the mistake of accepting the attention he knew he received not only as for his voice, but for his very unimportant self.

“One night we sat below the porchAnd out in that warm air,A firefly, like a dying star,Fell tangled in her hair;But I kissed him lightly off againAnd he fluttered up the vine,And died into the darknessFor the love of Leoline!”

“One night we sat below the porch

And out in that warm air,

A firefly, like a dying star,

Fell tangled in her hair;

But I kissed him lightly off again

And he fluttered up the vine,

And died into the darkness

For the love of Leoline!”

Mrs. Lewin had drifted away into a sea of pain, as the rich notes played over her nerves. Had she thought about him she would have been positive that the Administrator was playing Bridge at Major Churton’s table, but she was not thinking of him, nor did she realise until long after the song was over that he was standing near her, a tall dark shadow behind her chair, looking with very far-seeing eyes from Mr. Gurney’s obvious application of his song to Mrs. Lewin’s equal ignoring of it.

“We sang our songs together,Till the stars shook in the skies;We spoke—we spoke of common things—But the tears were in our eyes!And my hand I know it trembledTo each light warm touch of thine ...Yet we are friends, and only friends,My lost love, Leoline!”

“We sang our songs together,

Till the stars shook in the skies;

We spoke—we spoke of common things—

But the tears were in our eyes!

And my hand I know it trembled

To each light warm touch of thine ...

Yet we are friends, and only friends,

My lost love, Leoline!”

“That’s her name, eh!” said Mr. Gregory, with some dry amusement. “And that young fool is trying to catch her attention to the fact. It’s a pity that he can’t realise his position of a Man behind a Voice.”

Chum moved her head restlessly, conscious that her heart was beating thickly as only the slow rich notes ever made it beat. It frightened her to have even the suspicion of an emotion she could not control, and this was certainly a thing that seemed apart from her. Life had been most comfortably manageable so far.

“I wonder what her husband calls her?” mused the Administrator, his eyes absently fixed on the point of a little satin slipper, showing beneath the frills of her skirt. “Leoline—Lena—Leo—she is not a woman to lack a pet name, for all her inches!”

“Chum!” said Captain Lewin, strolling across the stoep with his hands in his pockets. “Come in and drink Mr. White’s health—there’s cého going!”

And a dozen voices seemed to echo his words from the lighted windows—“Chum, are you out there?” “Chum—excuse me, Mrs. Lewin, it’s so catching!—but do come in.” “Come along, Chum!”

“At all events,” said the Administrator, with an ugly smile, “that name is not sacred to one person!”

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