CHAPTER X
“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut.”—French Proverb.
“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut.”—French Proverb.
The restless, tropical night seemed full of wings to Leoline’s ears as she lay on her back with hands clasped under her fragrant hair, and her wide eyes looking up into the bridal fall of the mosquito net. In spite of being alone she had gained no hint of sleep, nor had she expected it. The heat was intense, even though the bungalow was some way above the town up on the hillside, and the heaviness of the rains still seemed to hang in the air. The complaining, vicious note of a mosquito haunted the safe curtains, through which he could not find an entrance; and, as if in contempt of him, Leoline had flung off the covering sheet, and where the soft frills fell back her white body tempted the angry insect with sweets out of reach. It would have been a pity to mark that perfect skin; but the mosquito thought of his own desire above all artistic considerations—just as that much higher creation called Man might do if, for instance, he wished to feel the pressure of his own hand on hers.
Mrs. Lewin was hardly thinking as the long hours wore to morning, and the flutter of moths’ wings gave way to that of humming-birds, who had built their nests below the stoep,—she was simply suffering. It seemed to her that her mind was one blind pain and a bewildering humiliation. For it was not the thing in itself that horrified her—a man’s hand laid over hers for some sixty seconds seemed a trivial thing enough—but what it meant. She who had unconsciously put herself on a pedestal, found that she had fallen, not by the unimportant act but by the revelation it had brought of her own emotions. She had not been cool under Gregory’s touch; if she had she would have brushed the incident aside as a thing of no consequence, tiresome but to be disregarded; her blood had answered his, and beat in her veins, and made her whole body thrill and sicken as no touch had ever done before. A knowledge that she could no longer deny to herself dismayed her, showing her this first touch as the prelude to more that she dared not contemplate. It was the thin end of the wedge, the passing of a boundary line to a path that might lead her—anywhere. She knew it, and in the warm, soft darkness she did not lie to herself as she might have done in the decent day. A married woman is somewhat defenceless against herself, for she is forced to acknowledge her own emotions, and has legitimised their classification. While she is unmarried—whether by law or slighter bonds—she can theorise, but she can always excuse herself by saying that she does not know the meaning of her sex. Nor in a certain degree does she. It is, however, her husband’s useful province to deprive her of such a defence, and to make her horribly conscious of the meaning of starting pulses and too generous blood.
Ally had once told Chum, with a chuckle, that she took to married life as a duck takes to water. And, in truth, she did not quarrel with nature any more than any other healthy, clear-minded wife whose womanhood is ripe. But there was a nicety about her that was content to look on passion as a thing incidental to married life, but not to be dwelt upon, and her bodily relations with Alaric had never seemed to her of so much importance as those of her mind. There was again a hint of superiority in this, for she saw other women holding out grosser inducements to charm than she professed, and made a somewhat fastidious use of her physical advantages by contrast.
For once, and quite suddenly, it seemed to her that this attitude had after all been false. If she wore her frocks with a daintier grace than other women, did it not suggest that what lay beneath was daintier too? She thought with disgust of Mrs. Clayton’s bodices being actually unlaced; but her own bodices had been quite as tempting to the audacity of men’s thoughts, and she had meant them to be so. It was only that she promised and did not perform, while other women enjoyed the fulfilment of their own allurements. No man could say a word of her as they might of Beatrix Denver; but how many had envied Ally to the extent of fancying themselves in his place for one wicked blissful moment? And she had regarded that as legitimate, and a rightful compliment to them both.
Oh, but what did it matter, compared to this new fire in her veins—this mad possibility of painful happiness that was surely not sane, for she could find no reason to excuse it. Every yearning instinct of her, brain, body, and soul, seemed drawn out, beyond her power to will to restrain it, to a man who was not her husband, and who had not even such attractions as might excuse a physical passion. She thought of Ally’s handsome face, and easy, comfortable personality, contrasted with Evelyn Gregory’s harsh features and difficult nature. There would be nothing comfortable in a life with Gregory, unless indeed a woman were so at one with him as for their two personalities to harmonise without a discordant note. He would be overbearing and exacting, but strong both for himself and her; there came the renewed leap of heart, as all the woman in her craved for a master. She was tired of her disillusion, and of being the one to guide and act both at once. Gregory had appealed to her through the feeling of reliance with which he had filled her. There had been the snare and the excuse, if an excuse were possible for a feeling which seemed to her outside the pale of argument.
“What does it matter,” she thought wearily, “since I am proved a fraud on all accounts. I am not what I thought I was—all my theories with regard to myself seem to have been mere vapours to vanish with the first ray of sun. But I can fight still—I can—I can.”
She set her little white teeth, and gripped the pain as though it were a tangible thing. And then, because she was just a good girl and no heroine, she threw aside the mosquito net and knelt down beside the bed to pray to a God whom she believed had sent an ugly tragedy into her life, not to take it away, but to help her to hide it after the fashion of women. She was ready to trust Him where she no longer trusted herself, and having certain sturdy principles born and bred in her, she had not even the advantage of excusing self-indulgence upon the plea of possessing the “artistic temperament,” which is a very convenient back door for immorality to the modern woman. It generally means lack of exercise and hysteria; but Leoline Lewin’s digestion being a good one, she had no claim to such an immunity from inconvenient virtue.
Towards morning she fell asleep, but not into the same sound oblivion as on the night when Ally lay in a drunken slumber next door. She could control her waking thoughts, but her dreams were cruel, and were haunted by such forbidden joy as made her glad when the broad sun struck through the venetian shutters and brought the sick, hot day.
The mail came in that morning, and all Port Victoria went down to the harbour to meet it. The town was cut off from all save chance communication with the outer world for a whole month, and so the arrival of news was a greater event than in a larger colony. The wharf was a rendezvous, therefore, on mail days, and the U.C.L. officers of the incoming boat could have laid themselves up with cého in the first half-hour, if they had accepted all the hospitality offered them, and drunk the liqueur fast enough. Leoline rode down to town early, and sat patiently on Liscarton’s back among the coal-dust and the smell of fessikh, or salted fish, which is as the smell of unutterable decay, and believed by many to be nothing but dried nigger, and high game at that. The little colony gathered gradually about her, and for the first time the sameness of the faces struck her with a kind of horror. She had met them over and over again, and they had not so oppressed her; now she realised that there were only some forty white people in the immediate neighbourhood to know, and that she must go on meeting them for all the remainder of the time that Ally was stationed there, until the social life seemed like a circle. There were one or two newer faces out at China Town, or Port Albert, perhaps,—a Planter or so scattered beyond the Pass or up on the Tableland; but even these belonged to the same community. She looked at the blue bay, the forest of masts, the one big ship at the quay, the line of ravenalas along the shore with their lifted fans like spread fingers, the warm wooded hills that shut it all in,—and Halton’s words returned to her with meaning for the first time.—
“We are in a rat-trap!”
A sort of terror seized her, a feeling that she must get away from the dangerous monotony of it all. She could face and wrestle with the situation threatening her at the moment, while her senses were still alert with the shock of her awakening; but how would it be as the months rolled on, and time inevitably lessened her sense of danger and dulled her watchfulness! She began to realise that Ally had not been all to blame for his weakness, and that Miss Denver had no other distraction for her idle days; they might both be of feebler natures than her own, but at least there were extenuating circumstances. She could think that with broader possibilities they might have made a better fight for it.
“We are in a rat-trap!”
She looked round her slowly, at the familiar figures in the flaccid sunlight, and wished that she did not know every face turned to her. The very smile that came inevitably as their eyes met seemed a weary proof of having them before her yesterday, and to-day, and to-morrow. There was Mrs. Gilderoy, in an old riding skirt that smacked forlornly of Bond Street long ago, and a limp white shirt; there was her husband, equally inevitable, in a grey flannel suit, with a Madras helmet hiding his face down to the ragged tawny moustache. As if by common consent they made straight for Leoline, who was seized with a wild impulse to pull Liscarton round and ride out of the sameness of the scene. She even thought she knew the very words they said before they uttered them.
“How are you, my dear?” Mrs. Gilderoy spoke first. “Anything left of you from yesterday? I shall take a month to recover. I always wonder, after we have exerted ourselves like that to bore our friends, why we did it. So does Wray; he thinks he lost several pounds from that ride down to the valley.”
“I felt it dripping away,” said Captain Gilderoy in his pleasant voice. “I have lost something like three stone since I came to this abominable hole.”
“It was a terribly hot night,” said Chum, striving for her usual manner by instinct. “I think the heat increases.”
“It does not vary much in the tropics,” said Mrs. Gilderoy, shrugging her shoulders. “I have not been dry for eighteen months, but I am growing used to it. Oh, how I envy the Commissioner! Think of going Home, and the East winds, and sitting on deck to wait for the first shiver!”
“A jacket would be quite an excitement, wouldn’t it? And I believe it would be a new experience to catch cold. Do you notice that no one catches cold here? We go down with influenza, and chills, and fever, and horrid things like that, but sneezing is a lost art!”
“You have been out nine months, haven’t you, Chum, and you are beginning to feel it? You did not take that view on your arrival, did you? At first sight the Station strikes you as a merry little place, where we all wear white clothes and pretend that we like each other.”
“And by-and-by we realise the coal-dust,” said Mrs. Lewin, with veiled bitterness. “You are quite right—one easily gets to feel soiled in Port Victoria!”
“I think when the rains come the wet heat oozes into one’s bones somehow. You will have to go up to Victoria if you feel limp.”
“We ought to make up a party,” said Captain Gilderoy. “Mrs. Clayton would join with pleasure, I am sure, and Miss Denver. They had great games there last year—some of the men from ‘By-Jovey’ got leave and went too. Have you had your mail yet? We can sit here in comfort while Wray goes and gets them for us, if you like.”
“Thanks. Don’t bring my husband’s, though, please, Captain Gilderoy. He likes to fetch his mail himself.”
The post-office was close to the wharf, behind a block of store-houses, where the big firms received their imports and placed them for unpacking. Captain Gilderoy disappeared behind a wall of coal, and Mrs. Gilderoy and Mrs. Lewin sat still on their ponies in the shade, now chatting to some acquaintance who had joined them, now watching the cargo being dumped down into the grit and dirt of the quay.
“We can go on board as soon as that mess is cleared off!” said Mrs. Gilderoy, with a nod towards the bales that would feed her during the next month. “But it is so uncomfortable while they are all running about and falling over each other round the hatches. Mrs. Ritchie Stern is on board. Her husband’s boat is coming in to-day to coal, she says, and she followed him in the mail. They will be here for some days. Captain Nugent is bursting with excitement, and planning a ball for every night that they spend here!”
“Heaven help them!” said Chum, laughing. “What is Captain Stern’s boat?”
“TheGreville, I think.” She dropped her voice a note lower, and leaned over her saddle. “Have you heard that there is trouble on the East Coast, up at Port Cecil?”
“No!” Something in the tone startled Chum, though the words meant nothing to her. “Port Cecil!” she repeated vaguely. “Is that——”
“No, not in Key Island at all—on the African coast, in British East Africa, and dangerously near the German frontier. I believe it never has been rightly settled as to whether Port Cecil is British or German territory. I wish they had handed it over with Mafia. It would be so much more sensible! There is nothing officially stated, but a rumour of trouble has leaked out. The Capetown authorities have cabled through to our man to send some one up at once. You see, it is so much nearer than it would be for them, and it’s a very delicate kind of mission. Wray calls it handling a meerkat with boxing-gloves on! We can’t offend the natives, and we won’t offend Germany for some reason just now. It’s to be all tact and no soldiers this time.”
“Then Mr. Halton is the right man to go.”
“Undoubtedly; and as Gregory has his own little threatened rows to amuse him, I suppose they think at Capetown that it’s safe to let him use his own discretion as to who he sends. Otherwise I should be afraid of his going himself and setting the country in a blaze, if I were the man above him.”
“I don’t think he would do that while the natives here seem still so unsettled. But what a disappointment for Mr. Halton! He told me he was longing to get home.”
“Oh, my dear, it’s awful! The town is not only the Naboth’s vineyard of our coast and Germany’s, but it is unhealthy. They say the white soldiers can hardly live there. Do you know that Wray thinks they will send up the 28th from Natal?”
“Ally’s regiment! But I thought there was to be no fighting?”
“No; but they must have soldiers in case of accidents, and they want to treat Port Cecil as separate from the rest of the Protectorate. It was not included in the treaty of 1895, or some such bungle, and so there is always being a row about it. Wray tried to explain it to me, but I nevercanunderstand. Anyhow, it is a diplomatic mission, and enough to turn Mr. Halton’s hair grey, unless he knows something about the place. Has he ever been in that part?”
“I don’t think so; but Mr. Gregory spoke one day of a friend of his—a man he seems to think very able—who has been consul, or something of that sort, there for years. I wonder that the Government did not leave him to settle matters.”
“My dear Chum, don’t you know that our Government never does use the man on the spot who has gained experience and really could manage? The instant there is trouble they send some one who has never heard of the place, and is bound to blunder at first, and they ‘commission him to inquire,’ etc. We are mad on commissions. It’s a national disease. I think sometimes that it’s a farce we play to gain them.”
“Here comes Captain Gilderoy,” said Mrs. Lewin absently. She was wondering if this new billet would keep Halton longer in Key Island, for she felt that the sooner he went the safer she should be. Yet he was emphatically the only man at hand whom Gregory had to send to Port Cecil, for Arthur White was no diplomatist, and Major Churton’s position so strictly military as to make his presence a menace. Captain Gilderoy handed her two letters—one from her home, far off in the hunting county of Leicestershire, and one in the handwriting of an old school friend, who had since married a man high in authority, and had a dangerous desire to dabble in state-craft. She knew of appointments and the pulling of strings before theGazettehad ratified them, and her wisdom was a thing that even her husband sometimes feared. It chanced that Leoline Lewin opened this letter before her father’s, read the first few sentences, which were merely a heading, and suddenly became immersed, to the exclusion even of the smell of fessikh and the ever-recurring faces around her.
“But my real news,” wrote Chum’s school-mate, “refers to you, or, I hope, will do so if you have only gained the good-will of your Administrator. Cyril Ernest has come into the Rignold title, and that means resigning his commission and going into Parliament—he was always a politician rather than a soldier. He was A.D.C. to old Sir Geoffrey Vaughan, who is a great crony of mine. I met the old fellow at Victoria House the other night, and buttonholed him in a corner. Don’t tell me I am not a good friend, Chum, for I thought of you at once, and tried to impress Ally’s virtues on him. He hummed and hawed a little, but he remembered Ally; he said there were two nice boys to whom he gave the preference—your husband and Brissy Nugent, who, I think, was at Sandhurst with him. I am afraid I belittled Brissy in your interest. It is so unfortunate that they are stationed at the same place, for I could gain no absolute promise from Sir Geoffrey. All he would say was that he would leave it to Evelyn Gregory to give the casting vote, and he has written to him unofficially. Weaker men are fond of leaving the decision with Gregory. Now, my dear girl, it all depends on you. Youmustmanage your man in office so that he shall recommend Ally, and not Captain Nugent. It is a settled thing that Sir Geoffrey will go to Malta, unless he has something even better—a home command, it might be. Don’t believe any one who talks about the African generals; I know better. Even my husband is not in my confidence about the appointment yet, but you may take my word for it, and I am telling you because it gives you a start over Mrs. Nugent—I never did like that woman—and you are on the spot, too, and she is not. I have only just time to catch the mail,” etc.
Mrs. Lewin turned the pages breathlessly, and the lines danced before her eyes. Here were two appointments confidentially placed in the hands of the man Government hardly professed to trust; but she was not thinking of the unofficial way in which the Empire was really worked, or the incalculable value of the force which is politely termed “Influence.” Her personal stake in the matter drove even the question of the trouble in East Africa out of her head, though before her friend’s letter she was keenly interested in it as in some sort concerning Gregory. She saw only that here was the escape for which she had prayed, and the old French saying, that “What a woman wishes, God wishes,” recurred to her mind like a blessing. Malta or England—the words spelt rescue, however one read them. Her eyes followed every line of the great quiescent liner hungrily, while, in her fevered fancy, she saw it carrying her out of danger—her and Ally together—beyond the rat-trap where the rats were already beginning to menace each other because they could not get out.
Surely Ally’s appointment must be a foregone conclusion! She had already done what her friend counselled, in her forethought for the future, and had gained the ear of the Administrator. In their increasing confidence she had spoken frankly though delicately of her husband, and had acknowledged that she was ambitious for him, and wished him to rise. And Gregory had sympathised, even though he might not believe in Ally’s capabilities. Surely he would help her!
She did not trouble over Brissy much as a rival, for Evelyn Gregory thought no more of him than of his A.D.C. Brissy was not the stumbling-block in the way of success—it was unfortunately Ally himself who was his own enemy. But forewarned is forearmed, and she must this time force him to a strategic management of his chief for both their sakes. Her very muscles felt tense and braced for the effort, as she sat in the shade of the coal walls, mechanically nodding and smiling at the people round her. As soon as might be she would get out of all this, and ride home and wait for Ally. They must talk it over, and arrange the campaign the instant they could do so without arousing suspicion. She wondered if her own precious news had “leaked out” as well as the African appointment; but it was unlikely. The woman who had told her prided herself on knowing such secrets long before they were even private property.
On the further side of the wharf Brissy Nugent himself was reading stale news from an old paper with the avidity of a starved dog, while he also waited to go on board the mail boat; but the Naval and Military intelligence told him nothing of his own possible fortune, and in fact he never dreamed of gaining any advantage from the paper beyond a passing amusement. He was sitting on a pile of logwood waiting for shipment in a sailing vessel, with a Madras helmet spread like an umbrella over his head and shoulders, side by side with Clayton of the A.S.C.
“I see that Bobs was talking to the Sandhurst Cadets the other day,” said Clayton, turning his own paper, posted from England a month since, “and he said it was all nonsense to suppose that no man can get on in the Army without influence. My firm conviction is that without influence in the Army one might as well make up one’s mind to achieve nothing but the ordinary promotion which comes with time.”
“Oh, the system which should be adopted is to do away with rewards altogether,” said Nugent simply. “Either a man does his duty, or he does not. If he does, well and good. If he doesn’t, then he ought to be kicked out.” His soulless eyes went out over the paper he was holding in search of his acquaintance, and he saluted Miss Denver, who was passing on her pony, with a flash of white teeth under his black moustache. He was more interested in her at the moment than in what he was saying, albeit it was his honest conviction.
“That’s a beautifully simple creed, Brissy, and I have no doubt that if it were adopted there would be fewer of the absolutely useless men who encumber the Service. They do nothing either one way or the other; they usually have money, are in no way dependent on their profession, and care nothing for it, except in so far as it affords them amusement. There’s a case not five miles from here!” he added significantly.
“You mean old Ally Sloper. Yes, I don’t suppose he’ll ever do much. But, then, he don’t need to.”
“Exactly!” said Clayton with frank bitterness. “And because he hasn’t got it in him to push himself, a beneficent Providence has given him friends in office, and a wife with brains and ambition. That woman means him to get on, Brissy, and she could make something even of you or me.”
“I saw her here a moment ago,” said Brissy, to whom abstract references always suggested actual things. “She was on Liscarton, by the coal heap over there. She seems to have gone now!”
Mrs. Lewin’s place was indeed empty, but he did not know in what relation that affected him. For Chum had gone home, and when Captain Lewin appeared among the chattering crowd on the wharf, he learned from the Gilderoys that she had left a message for him to the effect that heat and coal-dust threatened to transform her to a nigger, but he would find her cleaned and awaiting him at luncheon time. Ally, jocund and social, moved among his friends, as pleased to be off work as a school-boy out of school.
“Chum’s off colour a bit, I think,” he said confidentially to Diana Churton. “She couldn’t sleep last night for the heat.”
“We’ll get out to Vohitra—it’s about time,” said Di good-naturedly. “I’m thinking of making up a party. You can’t get back to lunch at the bungalow, Ally; it’s too late. Come on board the mail, and see Mrs. Ritchie Stern. TheGrevillehas just passed the Gates.”
Ally vacillated, and looked at his watch. “Chum expected me to lunch at home!” he said.
“Send Brissy in your place!” said Di, with a short laugh. “No, tell Bute; he’s got to ride up to Government House, and he’ll take a message.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Ally, and his face cleared to its own gay good-humour, “I’ll telephone; I can ring up from the post-office. Wait for me, Di, and we’ll go on board together.”