“‘I don’t suppose Soerabaya will soon see the like of that dress again, Mrs. Dorrien.’ Itwasthe most civilized thing I’d seen in a long time, though of course I don’t frequent table d’hôtes in most places. Anyhow, you know how colonial Dutch women get themselves up. ‘Aren’t you afraid the lizards will spoil it?’
“‘This rag?’ The ‘rag’ was gold-colored, as she was, and her laugh clinked like gold. ‘I shall give it to the stewardess if she is half decent to me. We shall have to stop in Paris on the way back. I haven’t had so much as a newsarongsince we left America. My clothes are faded, tattered, fly-blown, tarnished with the sea.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Is it really so long since you’ve seen a well-dressed woman? Surely in India—’ That was the best she could do for badinage, and she looked uneasily towards the door as she spoke.
“Suddenly Dorrien appeared in the door. She was silent through our greetings, though I thought she watched him. Whatever it was would break before morning, if it wasn’t already at that instant giving way. They hadn’t many hours’ grace, those two. Why the devil hadn’t I stayed in some undiscoverable, soaking little basket-hovel in the nearest village until the next morning? I didn’t know the people, I didn’t like them; but both of them would cling to me because I was white and because they couldn’t agree about anything in the world. I’ve always wished I had stayed away twenty-four hours more, that time—always. There was no reason under high heaven why I should be in it. And they were nice people, mind you; and neither one of them meant to be a cad. Why, there was nothing either one ofthem wanted that wasn’t perfectly decent and desirable in itself. They only wanted different things for each other, with the best conscience in the world. And people go on marrying, every day!
“‘I hear you’re going, Dorrien.’ There was no use in trying to be irrelevant. They would have turned any remark into a comment on themselves.
“‘Did Agatha tell you so?’
“‘Yes. And D’Acunha mentioned it when I got in.’
“‘There’s a P. & O. boat from Singapore next week Thursday.’ She looked straight at him.
“‘There’s a Royal Dutch Mail from Batavia next week Saturday,’ he flung back.
“She drew a scarf round her shoulders, despite the steaming heat. ‘Who wants to go to Rotterdam? If we’re going, let’s go sanely.’
“‘We can’t go sanely.’ And Dorrien was white beneath his sunburn as he said it.
“Some other people came in, and I didn’t scruple to talk to them. If the Dorriens were going to break, I, out of sheer patriotism, didn’t want them to break before a public like that. Perhaps I still had some hope of getting away. I’ve forgotten about that, butit seems reasonable. I do remember that I staved it off until after dinner. But they didn’t let me alone. They wanted a referee, I imagine; some one who would keep them from screaming insults at each other, or decide between them when they did.
“There’s something morally disintegrating about heat. I fancy that’s been said before, butIknow how true it is. My own nerves were on edge with it. Why didn’t they go up into the mountains somewhere and dance with Dutch residents, instead of sticking to ports? But I suppose that would only have postponed the catastrophe. Anyhow, it couldn’t hurt either of them to get out of that rotten temperature, no matter where they went. She was whiter than chalk, and Dorrien was nervous as a cat. Her voice jangled, and he twitched all over when she spoke. I didn’t see that there was a penny to choose between them for merit, except that she was stronger than he. They’d both break, but he’d break half a minute sooner. Ugh! it was bad!”
Hoyting breathed in the wind that blew gently against us off the Mediterranean waves. “You don’t know anything about heat. Dry heat doesn’t matter. When there’s nothing but steam to breathe—everything hot and vaporous and reeking—temperate people lose their poise. Soerabaya was like holding your head over a teakettle. Yes, I was sorriest for Dorrien. But why didn’t they go to the mountains and have it out, if they had to, in paradise?”
He was silent for some moments over his vermouth. I didn’t interrupt. I knew the rest would come. Uneasy reminiscence of the kind then wrinkling his face would only expedite his narrative. When he began again, it was abruptly, with a change of tone; but his eyes had never moved from the harbor lights.
“I was sorriest for Dorrien. I asked him over to smoke on my porch. Your porch is your sitting-room, you know, and you don’t go inside until you have to. I said, ‘Let’s throw bananas to the monkeys.’ The heat had gone to my head a little, too—heat and annoyance. He moved off at once. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t I come and throw bananas to the monkeys?’ said Mrs. Dorrien. ‘Of course.’ We were all unnaturally serious, you see—a bad sign. I was in it, then, for as long as they chose to stay. What fool invented hospitality, I wonder?
“Dorrien had a little sense left. He began at once. ‘I’ve got a case of conscience to put to you, Hoyting.’ Even then I hoped I could stave it off.
“‘Conscience is a local matter,’ I answered; ‘territoriality of law. Don’t appeal to me. I’m an outsider.’
“‘Aren’t we all in Soerabaya together?’ Her voice rasped its way in.
“‘Yes; but I hope you don’t mean to decide anything according to Soerabaya.’
“‘Do you really think at the moment we’re capable of doing otherwise?’ She had me there: it was the mean truth. We weren’t. That reeking heat would decide for us. I don’t think she had meant him to appeal to me, but I fancy she didn’t mind. If he hadn’t done it, she would have. It was inevitable.
“Dorrien went on: ‘I had a letter when the mails came in two days ago, offering me a big post. Agatha and I don’t agree about it.’
“‘You don’t think it big enough?’ I was so relieved that I thought I could speak lightly—Heaven forgive my folly! If it was just some little feud oftheir ambitions, they’d be all right as soon as they were off the land. But her face didn’t relax.
“‘He has been offered the chance of exiling himself on Molokai with eight hundred lepers.’ She had brought the jangling tones into a kind of ironic gamut. ‘Thatis the kingdom he is offered. And he thinks—my God! he wants to go!’ She broke down utterly and wept, great sobs, like a man’s, coming up from her chest and shaking her frail body. Women don’t usually cry that way; there’s trouble in it when they do.
“‘But he isn’t going.’ It was only decent to comfort her. ‘You say you are sailing for Europe.’
“Dorrien did not speak. Her sobs slowed gradually. She was making a terrible effort for the power to speak coherently, to get in her arguments, her pleas, her threats. I suppose I was her last dim substitute for public opinion. She was trying to bring the world to bear on him in Soerabaya, and there was only I to be the world.
“Now, how could I have known I was going to run into a thing like that, out there on the other edge of Java? Do I look like Mrs. Grundy? Shehated me, mind you; she was terribly afraid of me; she couldn’t a bit trust me to see the thing her way; but there was no one else. I was an American, and I had had the bad luck to know Dorrien long before. She wasn’t trying any feminine wiles; she was just pleading for civilization, as she understood it, against mad and monstrous ideas that she hadn’t dreamed existed, except inaccessibly. Caste goes deeper than sex—among us, anyhow. I don’t know what she thought about Dorrien, really. Probably he merely seemed to her, for the moment, to have obliterated deliberately all his caste-marks. I’ve always held that, if a man did the work, it wasn’t up to the woman to tell him how to do it; and I remembered how Dorrien had felt about leprosy. Probably he could do good work there. I fancied he knew what he wanted. Some one had to be at Molokai; why, or why not, Dorrien?
“I looked at him. He was sitting perfectly straight and uncomfortable, his mad eyes fixed, as if they were glass, on the palm-boughs out beyond the smoky porch-lamp. Nothing to be done there. And when I turned back to her, I simply—oh, abominably, I grant you—laughed aloud. The notion of expecting a woman like that to live on a leper island! It had been bad enough to see her in Soerabaya. I was sorry, fundamentally and genuinely sorry, for Dorrien; but it ought to have been patent even to him that Mrs. Dorrien couldn’t go to Molokai. Nothing but an exclusive love, the kind we’ve all heard about and never experienced, would have made her do it. She and Dorrien had nothing of that sort to go upon, I was absolutely sure.
“‘But you’re sailing.’ I clung to Dorrien’s explicit words.
“‘By Heaven, I’m not!’ His lips just moved. He looked like a statue conceived in madness, carved with scorn.
“‘I grant some one has to go’—she was apparently trying to be extraordinarily generous—‘but why he? It’s not his place or his life. It’s not what he’s fit for. It’s not asked of him. He has me; he has Virginia. Virginia!’ She had turned to me, her shoulder blotting out Dorrien. It seemed that they had to communicate through me; they had ceased to address each other. ‘Has he a right,’ she wenton, ‘to take us to a place like that? Has a husband, a father, no responsibilities? Even if I don’t matter, must Virginia live and die among those monsters?’
“How could I say, I ask you, that Virginia must? I had never seen Virginia. I had nothing to do with these people. Why didn’t they see that? I don’t believe, you know, that they ever saw it. I might have been Rhadamanthus in a poor disguise.
“Mrs. Dorrien stopped, and cried quietly into her handkerchief. Her husband took up the talk.
“‘God knows I’ve wasted life long enough. It’s a chance in a million, man—the one chance in the whole world. Give me ten years there, and I’ll know, I tell you. I’ll find a cure. I’ll track the filthy germ. I’ve never had half a show, pulling old ladies through bronchitis. It’s no work for a man. I’ve been ashamed to look at myself in a glass for two years. I’ve gone a little way; I swear I’m on the right track. It’s the kind of thing I can do. I haven’t a bedside manner; Agatha has that. Those poor wretches don’t need a bedside manner. They need some one to avenge them. She’s ambitious.Well, let her give me my head for ten years, and she can cover herself with my medals. We’ll come back, when I’ve done my work, and she can queen it all over Europe.’
“He was incoherent, overweening, inconsequent, but terrifyingly in earnest. More probably than not, she would have a suicide on her hands, I thought, if she did take him home. It didn’t look as if she would get him past Suez.
“Mrs. Dorrien sat with her hands folded in her lap, breathing hard, but quite silent. They were appalling, that pair. I’d have given a good deal to hear a little repartee just then. But the mortal insult would have been to suggest that either one should speak to the other. The queerest night I ever spent, and I’ve been through some I didn’t believe in, myself, the next day. Well, all I wanted was to have it over; I didn’t care how brutally I hastened it.
“‘Why don’t you go alone?’
“He looked at me then; he had only spoken to me before. Dominated by that look, I began to piece together my own scraps of traveller’s knowledge. Then I kicked myself. I didn’t need all the unphraseable explanations that gathered silently in his eyes. I knew, of course, what he just refrained from replying. It was the last leash on him—the thinnest thread of control. If that snapped, if I jerked it, we should be saying, all three of us together, monstrous things. I held hard on the leash.
“‘He can’t go alone.’ Her voice was just a whisper. She was shocked to the core of her, and I saw that, to that extent at least, they had had it out. I was sorry for her then—sorry without regard to my fast-ebbing admiration. She had been flung on the horns of a dilemma, and they were goring her cruelly. They couldn’t, poor devils, get peace with honor.”
Hoyting ordered more vermouth, and lighted the next of the undiminishing procession of cigarettes. He wandered away from the actual story for a little, and I let him, knowing that in the end he would get his fox and goose and bag of corn all safe across, like the man in the riddle.
“Dorrien wasn’t the sort of man you’d expect to find in scientific research. He was too human, too impressionable. A scientist oughtn’t to notice Javanese singing girls. They ought to be to him as thefemale of the flounder. I don’t mean for a minute that Dorrien was a cad, that he was anything but—complete. He was a scientist of sorts, at least by predilection; but he was also healthy and immensely masculine. He couldn’t personify Science and then treat her as if she were really a woman. He knew the difference. I’ve seen men who didn’t. They are the lucky ones. Dorrien was unlucky: he had no end of conflicting desires. He wanted abnormal conditionsplusa normal life; and he wanted a little fame thrown in. I dare say he also wanted Mrs. Dorrien and the little girl whose teeth had to be straightened. Just at that moment, he thought he wanted more than all the rest a chance to do his appointed work. But he was honest, damn him! honest. He knew that Science could never, for him, be a mistress, and he wasn’t a man to exist on merely Platonic relations. I’ve always admired him for not blinking facts when he must have been sorely tempted to. But what they must have gone through, of bitter exposition, those two, in the days of my absence! I didn’t see any way out of it. He wanted incompatible goods. And so, by heavens! did she.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his chest and closed his eyes wearily for a moment.
“If she had been a different sort, even, they might have pulled through. But look at it. She was ambitious and sentimental. She wanted his success. She’d have been willing enough to send him out alone if he had lied to her about possibilities. He had had the honesty to realize them, and the utter brutality to tell her—that was perfectly clear from the state of both of them. Probably he didn’t think he had a right to withhold the information from her; or he might have thought it would be a clinching argument for her going with him. If you ask me, I think she was very near hating him for having enlightened her as to the dangers. Women of her kind don’t like such assumptions. And it didn’t give her abeau rôle. There wasn’t anything, and wouldn’t be, God knows, for her to be jealous of. But there was everything prospectively, if he went, to pity him for. A wife couldn’t fling him into that; not when he wouldn’t even pose, not when he didn’t scruple to say what she was flinging him into. However much she may have wanted to say ‘Go,’ shecouldn’t. If he had only pretended to be other than he was, she could have made it out to herself that both of them were martyrs, he to his work, she to—oh, well, to the little girl. She was the kind of woman who could condone an infidelity, I imagine, in a cold, superior way; but her principles would hardly permit her to face it beforehand. And that wasn’t all—that wasn’t all. Of course she had asked him first of all—she would have—about the danger of infection; and it was evident from every suffering line in both their faces that he hadn’t hesitated to dot his i’s. She knew what was dangerous and what was not, and she knew that if Dorrien went alone he was lost. I pitied her. She had hunted, during two days, for abeau rôle, and she couldn’t find one. Her only hope was to get him home and trust that he would get over it, like some kind of fit. And he wouldn’t; that was clear. The only suggestion I could think of was that they should divorce, and that he should proceed to find another woman who adored him, and take her out there. That isn’t the kind of suggestion you make to people; it doesn’t sound sympathetic. It isn’t practical, either; it leaves too much to be done too quickly. Moreover, it had almost certainly never occurred to either of them that they didn’t love each other as much as any other two people did.
“And they expected me to say something! They had spent forty-eight hours trying, quite in vain, to find a way out, and then had the appalling cheek and the pathetic confidence to bring it to me!
“‘I can’t argue this matter,’ I said finally. ‘You must see that.’
“They didn’t see it. It was a perfectly impersonal clutch they were strangling me with. They hadn’t any notion of their own dismaying breach of reticence. We were all in Soerabaya—which was hell—together; and conventions didn’t exist. Also, I couldn’t any more get out of it than if we had been more literally in Hell and they ineluctable and imperishable shades. I had to go on.
“‘She won’t go,’ I said at last to Dorrien. ‘And you absolutely can’t go alone?’
“He didn’t speak, but he turned his eyes on me again. I seemed to read in them that the question had been put to him before, and that he would notagain go through the agony of answering. Not that the answer in those silent eyes wasn’t clear. Then, after a little, he did speak. ‘Ask her if she counsels me to go alone.’
“My very spirit revolted at the way they had laid hands on me. Anything I said was bound to be damnable for one or the other of them. I swore I’d get out of the thing non-partisan if I insulted them both.
“‘I won’t ask her,’ I said. ‘I won’t have anything more to do with it. It’s a devilish mess, and one of you has to go under. But I won’t lift a finger to determine which one. You may take that from me straight, both of you.’
“We ought by rights to have been tearing about that porch dramatically; but we all sat perfectly still in sheer exhaustion, dripping with sweat and breathing in quiet, regular pants. I wish—I wish it had never been.
“‘You won’t even tell him that he can’t go at all? Such a simple thing as that?’ She flung out her hands in a queer, uncertain way. She was very far gone.
“‘I won’t tell him anything. Good night.’ I pulled myself out of my chair and leaned over the railing. I don’t know how long I looked down into the hot little garden. I didn’t mean to be a beast. Were you ever in a place where you couldn’t stir a muscle without committing murder? No, I suppose not. Well, that’s what I felt like. It seemed inevitable that pretty soon they’d trap me into saying something that sounded like advice; and it looked to me as if any advice, once followed, would be fatal. There wasn’t any right way out, they being what they were. It was up to whatever Power had made them. It was absolutelynotup to me. I began counting lizards on the railing. Every bone in my body ached with stiffness when I finally turned round. They had gone.”
Hoyting lighted a cigarette. He had finished it, and lighted another, before he spoke again.
“The next morning I got off on a filthy little tramp steamer at four o’clock. It wasn’t a steamer the Dorriens could possibly take. I don’t think they would even have known about it. Then I made straight for China; I was pretty sure neither one ofthem would think of China. And by that time I had got back nerve enough to be quite sure that I had done right in keeping my hands off. But—I never asked any one what became of them. Now you say you know.”
“Oh, yes, I know. Dorrien’s dead.”
“They went back?”
“Yes, they went back. That was eight years ago?”
Hoyting began to count up the continents on his fingers. “Australia last year—South America—Siberia—the Transvaal, before that. Yes, it would have been eight years ago.”
To my surprise, I found myself reluctant to bring out the truth. Hoyting, as he talked, had been so vividly aware of the Dorriens, had made it so evident how real to him and repellent was that remembered scene, that my hesitation was not unnatural.
“He practised at home for a number of years, doing some research when he had time. He went back into public work to some extent—boards and commissions again. Her family seemed to manage him entirely.” Then I stopped.
Hoyting waited. The lights in the harbor beganto lessen, great patches of shadow spacing them. I waited, too, to gather strength. It had all become horrible to me now, and permeated with the sordidness that spoils tragedy.
“He shot himself.”
“He cared so much as that?” Hoyting’s huge finger flicked off the cigarette ash before there was need.
“He had—oh, I only heard it, Hoyting!” I cried. “I don’t know the whole of it. Who does? But those damned Hewells took it up—I suppose by way of condoning the suicide—and made a martyr of him.”
“Go on.”
“He had somehow in the laboratory—you know the danger; and Dorrien was a reckless chap, those last years, not like himself, his friends said. They all used to worry over his riding, his shooting, his yachting—everything.”
I broke off. It was extremely hard to tell the man who apparently knew most about Dorrien, even though he had never called Dorrien friend. “He had somehow, through a cut, the slip of an instrument—I don’t know the sickening scientific detailof it—inoculated himself with a disease he was working with. He made nothing of it at the time, I’m told. Everybody had forgotten it. Suddenly—when he found out what he was in for, I suppose—he shot himself. After what you’ve told me, I should say it was probably from disgust. Why blame him?”
“What was it?” Hoyting had not stirred, but his voice had changed immeasurably.
“Tuberculosis.”
The great shoulders shrugged once. I felt impelled to explain—a miserable little feverish strut. And before Hoyting, of all men!
“It gives the measure of his revolt—a man who had cured so many, and could have cured himself mechanically, you might say; a man whose special business in life had been to snap his fingers at that particular plague. That’s why, until you told me all this, I never understood. Now it’s clear enough.”
I shut my eyes, glad to put the ironic thing away, glad to be at peace, with no further need to speak of it. When I opened them again, I was alone. Hoyting, the foot-loose, was gone.
Forthe sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the true tale of Paramore—the tale which has been left to me in trust by Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol. As a symbol, I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all of you. His bad anthropology doesn’t matter—a dozen big people are delightedly setting that straight—but the adventure of his soul immensely does. Rightly read, it’s assound as a homily and as dramatic as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by opposing generals to be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by chance upon his breast.
I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age, are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we—the age—are personally injured and fall to “muck-raking.” It is typical that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all began to despise him. The situation, for that matter, was not without elements of humor. The facts, as I and the general public knew them, were these—beforeHoyting, with his damnable inside information, came into it.
Paramore sprang one day, full-armed, from some special academic obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly emerging, laden with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many people read him. That, however, was not Paramore’s fault. His heart, I believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won theories about mother-right and group-marriage; and he didn’t hesitate to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak lightly ofThe Golden Bough. No scientist had ever spent so long at primitive man’s very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won him the momentary admiration of the public to which exogamy is a ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot.
It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions—in fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get moreout of Paramore than he can get out of himself—but do get down on your knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew—as I learned afterward—but he told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn,Heidelberg, etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying (his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain amount of time, but that was the net result.
Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly,as if in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud, Hoyting sent for me.
I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of course, he hadn’t told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon, so close at hand, until Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room.
I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn’t an idea of what he wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without preliminaries—except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was a rather appalling preliminary.
“Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don’t know just why I had drifted to Sénégal, except that I’ve come to feel that if there must be colonial governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing that pushed me, I’ve forgotten it.
“They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their African inn,but not half so likely to gofanteeas the romantic Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come in, bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but, even so, there wasn’t any particular reason for my staying so long in Dakar. I hung on like an alarm that has been set. I couldn’t go off—or on—until the moment I was set for. I don’t suppose the alarm-clock knows until the vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull, glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo basin, which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of provincial France. They do that everywhere—you’ll have noticed?
“I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to dine with the Fathers. It isn’t that I hold with them much—Rome was introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman—but all travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was they who introduced me to Paramore.”
“Oh, it’s Paramore!” I exclaimed. “Heaven, forgive you, Hoyting, you are always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at Paramore’s! By the way, I suppose you know that no one knows anything except that he’s dead.”
“Umph! Well, I do,” returned Hoyting. “That’s what I was set for—like the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in there with fever. I don’t go hunting for things like that, you understand. I’d as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier’sbeaux yeux.”
“I didn’t know you knew whether eyes were fine or not.”
“I suppose I don’t. But I can guess. There are always other people to tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all forle bon Dieuand Pothier. She was a good sort—married out of a little provincial convent-school to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She loved him—for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have aboutwar! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers. Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament.”
Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another hemisphere.
“So he was taken to the Pothiers’.”
“You’re leaving out a lot,” I interrupted. “Why ‘so,’ and why to the Pothiers? You said to the Mission.”
“Oh”—His brows knitted. He didn’t like filling up his own gaps. The things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic context! “The Mission was full of patients—an epidemic had been running through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament of baptism wasn’t some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it’s all magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn’t a convert—he was by way of being an agnostic, I imagine—and the Fathers weren’t, in a sense, responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that they’d never have sent him away if they hadn’t had a better place to send him to. The Mission was no place at the moment for a man with fever—sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who were hidinggri-grisunder their armpits and looking more than askance at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior. They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her fine eyes, I believe—oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the world—and a bit of a Puritan to boot.
“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in any one of those taxis. And Paramorewasa bit of a Puritan, for all his years of fake anthropology.”
His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me.
“I was involved in Paramore’s case. I’ve been tothe bottom of this thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed—emptied himself like a well; and at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void, up to the black brim. Then he died—quite vacuous. He had simply poured out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar, swimming in the infernal pool of Paramore’s cerebrations. You can’t, on the banks of the Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic, I could have turned his case over to the Bishop. But bishops had nothing to do with Paramore. And that’s where you come in.”
“Oh, I come in, do I?” I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come in where Hoyting leaves off.
“Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You’ll take this packet when you leave. You don’t suppose I’m going to London!”
“I didn’t know Paramore.”
“No; but I did. And when I’ve told you, you’ll see. I don’t take a trip like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt.”
“Go on.” It’s what one always says to Hoyting.
“I can’t tell it coherently—though I can tell it,I suppose, more coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?”
The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I know of has ever tried to be araconteurfor Hoyting. He has use only for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid aprécisas I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it.
When I had finished: “He’s completely discredited, then?”
I waved my hands. “My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore’s word about the manners and customs of his own household.”
“It’s a pity,” said Hoyting simply. “It makes it harder for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do with Paramore. If there’s one thing that interests me less than his disaster, it’s his rehabilitation.” I didn’t mean to be flippant, but Hoyting’s ominousness invited it.
“Oh, rehabilitation—no; I dare say, between us, we couldn’t manage that. I merely want to get the truth off my hands.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette. The atmosphere of my room was already densely blue, and I opened the window. His hand shot up. “Shut that, please. I can’t be interrupted by all those savage noises. God! for a breath of sea air!”
I sat down and faced him. After all, the man has never lived who could stage-manage Hoyting.
“Did you ever meet the Australian?” he asked.
“Whitaker? No.”
“A pretty bad lot, I gather.”
“Do you mean that he lied?”
“Oh, no. From what Paramore said, I should think that was just the one thing he didn’t do.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his breast and narrowed his eyes. Then he shook his head very slowly. “At my time of life it’s silly to be always saying how strange things are, and how clever life is, andall that literary nonsense; but, on my word, if ever a scene was arranged to make a man a protagonist in spite of himself, this was it. Every element in that Dakar situation was contrived to bring Paramore out. He had fever and the prescience of death—which is often mistaken, but works just as well notwithstanding; he had performed his extraordinary task; he was in love with Madame Pothier. The cup was spilling over, and I was there to wipe up the overflow.”
Hoyting was silent for a moment. Then he spoke irritably.
“I don’t know where to begin. There isn’t any beginning to this story. It hasn’t any climax—or else it’s all climax. It’s just a mess. Well, I shall have to begin, I suppose, if Paramore didn’t. Perhaps the first thing was his sitting up in bed one morning and peering out at me through his mosquito-netting. It gave him a queer, caged look. His voice went with it—that cracked and throaty voice they have, you know. ‘Do you know Whitaker?’ he asked.
“‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘You’d better lie down.’
“If you could have seen him then, you’d have felt, as I did, that he’d better not talk; that he wouldn’t say anything one wanted to hear.
“‘It was Whitaker that finished me.’ Still he peered out at me.
“‘You’re not finished.’ I remember lying quite peevishly about it. He so obviouslywasfinished.
“‘Yes, I am. And Whitaker did it. Oh, I mean I really did it.’
“I give you my word that he was startling, with that unnatural voice, that cunning look in his eyes the sick often get, and those little white cross-bars pressed against his face.
“‘Lie down,’ I said again. ‘What did Whitaker do?’
“He shook his head a little, and the netting moved on his face. It was horrid.
“‘He told them I couldn’t have done the stuff I’d brought back.’
“‘Did he know?’
“‘He didn’t know anything about folk-lore, but he did know where I’d been.’
“He spoke so impersonally that it led me on to ask questions. After all, I had told Madame Pothier Iwould stay with him through the morning, and I had to make the time go somehow for both of us. It was remittent fever without the chills, and there were fairish mornings at first. The afternoons and nights, when the malady rose like a wave and broke horribly after midnight—oh, those were bad. Madame Pothier and the regimental doctor took care of those. It looked fairly hopeful when he arrived, but finally all the worst symptoms came out, and before the end it was very bad. It was one of those cases that might, at the last, be yellow fever and just technically isn’t. Poor Paramore! Did I say that his face looked as old as all time under that shock of sun-bleached hair? It did.
“That questioning was the first of it. It fixed the name of Whitaker in my mind. I thought I’d find out something about him. You never can tell what will comfort a man in that state. But the Pothiers had never heard of him, or the Fathers at the Mission. I only mention those first remarks of Paramore’s to show you how I came into it. I had never heard of Paramore himself until that time in Dakar. I never read newspapers. All those good people said Paramore was a ‘grand savant,’ but they seemed a little vague, themselves. The only person who wasn’t vague was a lean, old, parchment-colored Father who was waiting for the next boat to take him home. He had been twenty years in the interior, and he was worn out—all except his voice, which was startlingly deep. He said no one could afford to study fetich but a priest. Père Bernard had no respect for anthropologists—thought they took a collector’s interest in preserving various primeval forms of sin, I suppose. I didn’t care for his mediæval manners, and I went back to Paramore with more sympathy. What a world! I always wondered if Paramore had some time, somewhere at the back of beyond, got him on the raw. Well, we shall never know. And yet I dare say the reverend old gentleman is here in Paris at this very moment. What a world! Nothing in it, according to Père Bernard, that isn’t magic—either white or black.
“I can’t tell you by what steps Paramore led me to his tragedy. I don’t remember those days separately at all. They went in jagged ups and downs—times when he talked, times when he was dumb,times when he might be said to rave. Then, too, he brought things out in no order at all. It was as if he lay in a world beyond perspective and expected you to sit outside of Space and Time, too, and see it all whole, as he did. That was rather unpleasant—he had so the manner of being dead and seeing his life from so far off that one thing in it was as near and as real as another. There was absolutely no selection. It was only by recurrence of certain things that you got any stress. And out of it all I managed to get the three main facts: the Royal Anthropological Institute, Whitaker, and the soul of Paramore. Madame Pothier was a close fourth, but she was only an accessory after the fact. That I swear. You believe it?”
I jerked my head up. “Good Heavens, Hoyting, how do I know? You haven’t told me anything yet.”
He rubbed his hands over his brows and frowned with closed eyes. “No; I beg your pardon. But, as I say, I see the whole thing. It’s hard to tell. It never was told to me. And I didn’t want you to think it was one of those silly tales of a man’s turning hero because he’s in love with a woman. If Paramore had asked me to tell Madame Pothier the story I’m telling you, I’d have turned on my heel and left him, if he’d been at the death gasp. I swear I would.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette—the world’s supply must be inexhaustible!—and seemed to brace his huge body for concentrated effort.
“Well, here it is. Paramore had one passion in life—one double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion—and that passion was anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want to understand.”
I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of that neatprécisI had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come, Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars—not even when they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.”
One look at Hoyting’s gigantic lassitude put me in the wrong. It would take more than Paramore to upset Hoyting. He was perfectly firm, though very much bored. Imagine neurasthenia and Hoyting bunking together! One can’t. Hoyting smiled.
“No, it’s not nerves. Only you people who wanteverything all of a piece—you irritate me. The point about Paramore is that he combined contradictions. He was magnificently human. And as I am in possession of facts, I ask you to suspend your silly judgment until I’ve done. If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t go in for theories.”
I was silent.
“It was the only thing he cared about, I tell you. Nature implants something in every man that kills him in the end. Paramore wanted recognition from a very small, almost undiscernible, group of people whom neither you nor I nor any one else gives a damn for—a few old gentlemen in frock coats and gold eye-glasses who raise their poor, thin old eyebrows over the sins of Paris, but feel a tremulous pleasure in the nastiness of Melanesia. Why did he? Just because he believed they are a sacred sect. He honestly believed that anthropology was important. He thought it was big and real and vital and solemn. He had supreme respect for facts. He put every penny he had or ever hoped to have into going out to acquire them in the bush. The bush isn’t nice. Theclimate distressed him, the natives shocked him, the solitudes terrified him. Why did he go? Because he held, quite austerely, the scientific attitude towards data, evidence, material. Those old gentlemen needed more facts to feed their theories with, and Paramore was the boy to get them. When there’s neither health nor wealth nor pleasure to be got from doing a thing, a man doesn’t do it except for an idea.”
“Fame?” I suggested.
“Fame? Well, even if Paramore had told the truth, he wouldn’t have had any fame that you’d notice. It was just a pathetic belief in the sanctity of those few old gentlemen who potter round among unclean visions of primitive man. They can’t, in the nature of the case, be very numerous. If you want fame, you go for the crowd. He could have done a little fancy exploring if he’d wanted fame. No! Paramore had the superstition.”
“What really happened in Australia?”
“The only interesting thing happened inside Paramore. He decided to lie.”
“He must have been a bit of a coward. If hewanted so desperately to collect those filthy facts, why didn’t he collect them?”
“Bad luck—nothing else. He went as far as he could. But he was no seasoned traveller, you know. He just came to grief, as any man might, there in the wilderness. The stars in their courses—and so forth. He didn’t get so far west as he had meant to. Men went back on him, maps turned out incorrect, supplies failed awkwardly, everything happened that can happen. Then his interpreter died—his one absolutely trustworthy man—and the whole game was up. He lost his head; he believed his eyes; he believed lying natives. They made game of him, I dare say, in some grim, neolithic way. They said anything and everything about marriage customs—quite different things from group to group. He had bad luck with his own men—half a dozen of them died of dysentery or something—and he had to recruit on the spot. Why on earth should they tell him the truth? It was more fun not to. And, of course, now and then he pushed into some corner where the only use they had for him was to eat him. From those places he had to withdraw speedily. It’s not an anthropologist’s business to get killed unless he can be sure of getting his note-books home. He’s more like a spy, apparently, than a soldier.
“After eight or ten beastly months, despair was reeking round him like a mist. I think he said that, himself. His mind tried to peer out through it. He got nothing but a jumble of reports from those aborigines. Time after time they’d promise to let him in on some rite, and then their faces would be shamelessly blank when he kept his appointment. They said nothing that wasn’t carefully contradicted. Certain things he did get hold of, of course. Paramore swore to me that a good bit of his book was true as truth—but not enough to prove anything, to found theories on. About three of the note-books were genuine, but they made nothing coherent, he said. He put everything down, always intending to check and sift later.”
I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going to be in your hands, and the more informationyou have the better. I’m not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful. I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having luck against him.”
“No,” I protested stiffly; “for lying.”
“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole business easier.”
“Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment, go further than that.
Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had been pleading with him not to stop.
“One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have been a little off his head, youknow.... He wouldn’t confess his failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books; he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in some—a very few—of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And then I would contradict a few things.’
“Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful book. There were things that occurred to me—I put them in. Any one who knows any folk-lore can make upcustoms with his eyes shut. After a little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did. But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later—much later—at Whitaker’s place.’
“I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the idea—his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In the end his idea rode him—and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but you can work that out for yourself—how his inspiration would have come, and what would have happened.”
“But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the ‘lust of making a beautiful book’—quite the contrary.”
“Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve.Place aux dames!...
“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker. There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks before he finally started on his expedition—if you can call an unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition. The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him, least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not to have noticed the girl—rather deliberately not to have noticed her, she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out. The love affair went on all over the plantation, whileWhitaker and Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled references—mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and flow of the fever.
“But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about, she had pricked his imagination once or twice—this bright creature that flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said—it was aimless nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what hebelieved its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.
“Well—you can see the rest from here. He went back with his big, insane idea, leaving despair farther behind him at every step. He struck straight back again to Whitaker’s place, and after nuisances and delays and impossible absurd misadventures, he got there. All the time, he carried his idea carefully intact, like a cup filled with precious liquid. He was most anxious to get to some place where he could sit down with pens and ink. He didn’t doubt Whitaker would take him in. Everything was to be completed before he sailed for England. The story would have been very different, I’m inclined to think, and Paramore might have been living to this day if the fiancé hadn’t turned out a bad lot and been shipped—or if Paramore himself hadn’t been a bit of a Puritan.
“He found Whitaker very much surprised to see him back so long before the date he had set, but only too glad to have him stay; and he also found the girl, no longer flitting about, but brooding on the bough. The rest was inevitable....
“Paramore got to work at once—making love to Joan Whitaker in the intervals, almost from the beginning. Then—mark the nature of the man—he found that the two things he was doing were incompatible. There’s no telling whether Joan Whitaker would have objected to his idea, but he seems to have been sure that she would if she knew. His idea rode him—the idea of getting the better of his bad luck. He didn’t want to cheat his fellow scientists, who had done him no harm, but he did want to cheat his mean destiny. He personified it like an enemy, I fancy. It must have been an obsession with him. Day by day, he saw better what the book—his revenge—was becoming; and in the end there was no mistaking it for a monstrous, magnificent lie, out of all proportion to what he had first intended. Some men might have managed even so—the men who keep life in water-tight compartments. Not Paramore. He didn’t see his way to offering Joan Whitaker a liar for a husband. It apparently never occurred to him to put the case before her. There are very few cases you can put to a girl of eighteen. And, as I’ve said, his feeling for her was all reverence and illusion and reversion to type. Any niceish girl would have done the trick for him; and any man would have looked eligible to her smarting conceit. But it was no marriage of true minds—just an affair of circumstance and of innocent senses, riotously collaborating. Madame Pothier—a finished creature—would have been a very different matter. But he had never seen her then....
“Oh, well; you see how it went. He was virtually staking everything on that book, which was virtually writing itself, ‘like a damned planchette,’ he told me. But he couldn’t let her stake anything on it; he couldn’t even ask her to. Moreover, it was one of those inconvenient situations where no explanation except the right one is of the slightest use. So he packed up his manuscript and left for some address, that he didn’t give, in New South Wales.”
“Like that?” I asked. The sudden turns of the thing were beginning to interest me, in spite of my Pharisaism.
“Oh, there were alarums and excursions, of course. But I had to guess them myself. Paramore’s mind had other things to dwell on. You can see it all, though: the girl, who had thought he was drifting towards a proposal; the man, Whitaker, who wanted his daughter settled and happy, and thought Paramore would do—oh, a lot of primitive instincts that we don’t recognize until they’re baffled; Paramore behaving as well as he knew how, granted his obsession; and they choosing to consider him a blackguard. Nothing violent happened, apparently, but you can understand the zest with which Whitaker probably spoke in London. There was black hate in his truth-telling. I fancy what Paramore had done wouldn’t in the least have shocked Whitaker if it had been done by his son-in-law. He didn’t mention the girl in that famous interview, and Paramore never knew what had become of her. I don’t think he cared. He never saw Whitaker again.”
Hoyting rose and walked to the window. The gray eyes looked curiously down on the rue de Rivoli, as if, for charity, he had taken a box at a pageant that bored him.
“This isn’t in my line, you know,” he said finally,turning back—“any of it. Paramore reeked of civilization—Great Russell Street, if you like. Hang civilization! Yet he went down with fever like a sick Kruboy. Well, I must get on with this. I wouldn’t stop in Paris another night for anything you could offer me.”
He sat down, his big frame shaking the little gilded armchair. But he seemed loath to begin. His gray eyes were closed.
“How did he get to Dakar?”
Hoyting’s eyes were still closed as he answered. “That was Paramore trying to wash himself white again. He was discredited, deservedly. He had lied, deliberately and rather long-windedly. No loophole anywhere for excuse. Paramore himself was the last man to find any excuse for it. He never carried a devil’s advocate about with him. Doubtless, at home, his own conscience had returned to him, in place of the changeling conscience that had dwelt with him in the wilderness. He knew his reputation was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. But he set himself to atone. Some men, feeling as he did, would have shaved their heads and put on a hairshirt. Not Paramore—though he would have saved me a lot of nuisance if he had. No; he wanted to retrieve himself in kind, as you might say. He would spend his life and his few crumbling bits of fortune indoingthe thing he had pretended to do. He would go to an utterly new field and stay till he’d amassed a treasure—priceless, authentic facts, each an unflawed pearl. That’s why he went to the Upper Niger—and here is his treasure.”
Hoyting opened his eyes suddenly, bent forward, and tossed the packet across to me.
“There you have it all. He went, he did the incredible thing, and then, quite properly, he died. The rest—the rest is mere drama.” He sat back.
I put the packet down. “Do you mean that these are his documents, and that you believe in them? Have you read them?”
“Have I read them? Do I look as if I would read an anthropologist’s note-books? Of course, I can see the humor of throwing over Christianity, lock, stock, and barrel, only to spend your life studying totemism—and on top of that, calling it a ‘career.’ If you think the absurdity of it is lost on me, you’requite mistaken. But I would be willing to take my oath before the Last Tribunal that there isn’t a false word in that whole pile. Paramore did it—the more honor to him. When it comes to expecting any one else to believe it—I’m not such a fool. But I should think my word might suffice for you.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Hoyting lighted another cigarette, folded his arms on the table, and looked at me. “I knew everything there was to know about Paramore before he died,” he affirmed. “I didn’t in the least want to know any of it, but it was inevitable. He had no control over his mental muscles—complete paralysis of the reticent nerve, you might say. I know, I tell you. If you don’t choose to believe it—you’ll have doubted my word, that’s all. I have all the evidence there is; and why should I lie about it?”
“Oh, I believe it—but it’s extraordinary.”
“Should I be here if it weren’t extraordinary? It’s preposterous. But there it is.”
“And the rest, you said, was drama?”
Hoyting looked out. “Let’s go to a café,” he said; “I want a rest.”
I assented. There is something in the transitoriness of a café crowd that quiets Hoyting. No one can be expected to stay overnight in a café. He likes the restlessness, the ridiculous suggestion that every one else may be as foot-loose as he. Besides, Hoyting is always restive under the strain of a story; he chafes at the bounds and limits of any rounded episode. He needs to draw breath and come back to it, as it were, from very far. So we ordered things; sitting on the very edge of the boulevard, we sipped and watched for an hour. In the end I saw signs of his return to the matter in hand.
“Beauty—” he began suddenly, pushing his glass aside, “it’s something I never see. But now and then a man or a woman delights me curiously. Madame Pothier was like that. She showed you what civilization of the older sort can do when it likes. And Paramore saw it, too. He was clean gone on her. He would have told her everything if he had had any right to. I said it wasn’t a silly tale of woman’s ennobling influence, didn’t I? No more it was. Yet he saw her as soon as he reached Africa, and I am sure he carried her image into the interior with him—ashe once did Joan Whitaker’s, only with an immense difference, after all. This time he brought back truth instead of lies. So at least it couldn’t have been a bad image to live with.
“I got all this that I’ve been telling you, in bits and snatches, while I sat with him. The fever didn’t seem so bad at first—the doctor thought we could pull him through. You absolutely never know. I never thought he would pull through. Those very first questions of his, when he sat peering out at me through the mosquito-netting of his bed, didn’t seem to come from a man who had life before him. And when I had got those early details out of him, I somehow felt sure he’d go. I’m no pessimist; but I didn’t see life giving him a second chance. It was too much to hope that life would let him make good after all. And yet—he so nearly did. Damn fever!...
“Madame Pothier did everything she could. She was a good sort. I’ve always wondered, as much as it is permitted to wonder, whether she felt anything for Paramore. If she did, I am sure that she never knew it. There are women like that, you know. I don’t mean the women who gaze out of cold, sexless depths at thefires burning above, and wonder pruriently why the fires burn. She wasn’t that kind. I mean the women who, when they become wives, remain women only for their husbands. I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to her that any man save Marcel Pothier could look upon her with romantic interest. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, but I know that it exists. A woman like that simply assumes that she is no longer a wandering lure constantly crossing the path of the male. She thinks all men’s eyes are veiled because hers are. A very pretty, pathetic ostrich trick. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but astonishingly often it does. With Paramore it did. All I mean is that she hadn’t dreamed Paramore worshipped her. She remembered him as a friend they had made two years before, and of course he was to come to them out of that pitiful Mission Hospital. No one in Dakar knew anything about Paramore’s fiasco. He wasn’t precisely famous, you see. Dakar was perfectly provincial. And Paramore was hoping, I dare say, that he could stave off the tale of his lie until he could lay before her the news of his atonement as well. The hardest thing he had to bear, probably, was dying and leaving his story to the telling of chance tongues, not knowing in what form it would eventually come to her. That, I am convinced, is why he told me so much—let his parched lips articulate those memories for me. But not once did he break down and ask me to tell her. Oh, I’ve good reason for respecting Paramore—a second-rate respect it must always be, I dare say, granted that extraordinary crumpling-up in Australia. But he never crumpled up again.