Vanessa Pennington had a husband who was poor, with few extenuating
circumstances, and an admirer who, though comfortably rich, was cumbered
with a sense of honour. His wealth made him welcome in Vanessa's eyes,
but his code of what was right impelled him to go away and forget her, or
at the most to think of her in the intervals of doing a great many other
things. And although Alaric Clyde loved Vanessa, and thought he should
always go on loving her, he gradually and unconsciously allowed himself
to be wooed and won by a more alluring mistress; he fancied that his
continued shunning of the haunts of men was a self-imposed exile, but his
heart was caught in the spell of the Wilderness, and the Wilderness was
kind and beautiful to him. When one is young and strong and unfettered
the wild earth can be very kind and very beautiful. Witness the legion
of men who were once young and unfettered and now eat out their souls in
dustbins, because, having erstwhile known and loved the Wilderness, they
broke from her thrall and turned aside into beaten paths.
In the high waste places of the world Clyde roamed and hunted and
dreamed, death-dealing and gracious as some god of Hellas, moving with
his horses and servants and four-footed camp followers from one dwelling
ground to another, a welcome guest among wild primitive village folk and
nomads, a friend and slayer of the fleet, shy beasts around him. By the
shores of misty upland lakes he shot the wild fowl that had winged their
way to him across half the old world; beyond Bokhara he watched the wild
Aryan horsemen at their gambols; watched, too, in some dim-lit tea-house
one of those beautiful uncouth dances that one can never wholly forget;
or, making a wide cast down to the valley of the Tigris, swam and rolled
in its snow-cooled racing waters. Vanessa, meanwhile, in a Bayswater
back street, was making out the weekly laundry list, attending bargain
sales, and, in her more adventurous moments, trying new ways of cooking
whiting. Occasionally she went to bridge parties, where, if the play was
not illuminating, at least one learned a great deal about the private
life of some of the Royal and Imperial Houses. Vanessa, in a way, was
glad that Clyde had done the proper thing. She had a strong natural bias
towards respectability, though she would have preferred to have been
respectable in smarter surroundings, where her example would have done
more good. To be beyond reproach was one thing, but it would have been
nicer to have been nearer to the Park.
And then of a sudden her regard for respectability and Clyde's sense of
what was right were thrown on the scrap-heap of unnecessary things. They
had been useful and highly important in their time, but the death of
Vanessa's husband made them of no immediate moment.
The news of the altered condition of things followed Clyde with leisurely
persistence from one place of call to another, and at last ran him to a
standstill somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe. He would have found it
exceedingly difficult to analyse his feelings on receipt of the tidings.
The Fates had unexpectedly (and perhaps just a little officiously)
removed an obstacle from his path. He supposed he was overjoyed, but he
missed the feeling of elation which he had experienced some four months
ago when he had bagged a snow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day's
fruitless stalking. Of course he would go back and ask Vanessa to marry
him, but he was determined on enforcing a condition; on no account would
he desert his newer love. Vanessa would have to agree to come out into
the Wilderness with him.
The lady hailed the return of her lover with even more relief than had
been occasioned by his departure. The death of John Pennington had left
his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the
Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained
as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to
conceal our whereabouts. Certainly she was more independent now than
heretofore, but independence, which means so much to many women, was of
little account to Vanessa, who came under the heading of the mere female.
She made little ado about accepting Clyde's condition, and announced
herself ready to follow him to the end of the world; as the world was
round she nourished a complacent idea that in the ordinary course of
things one would find oneself in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park Corner
sooner or later no matter how far afield one wandered.
East of Budapest her complacency began to filter away, and when she saw
her husband treating the Black Sea with a familiarity which she had never
been able to assume towards the English Channel, misgivings began to
crowd in upon her. Adventures which would have presented an amusing and
enticing aspect to a better-bred woman aroused in Vanessa only the twin
sensations of fright and discomfort. Flies bit her, and she was
persuaded that it was only sheer boredom that prevented camels from doing
the same. Clyde did his best, and a very good best it was, to infuse
something of the banquet into their prolonged desert picnics, but even
snow-cooled Heidsieck lost its flavour when you were convinced that the
dusky cupbearer who served it with such reverent elegance was only
waiting a convenient opportunity to cut your throat. It was useless for
Clyde to give Yussuf a character for devotion such as is rarely found in
any Western servant. Vanessa was well enough educated to know that all
dusky-skinned people take human life as unconcernedly as Bayswater folk
take singing lessons.
And with a growing irritation and querulousness on her part came a
further disenchantment, born of the inability of husband and wife to find
a common ground of interest. The habits and migrations of the sand
grouse, the folklore and customs of Tartars and Turkomans, the points of
a Cossack pony--these were matter which evoked only a bored indifference
in Vanessa. On the other hand, Clyde was not thrilled on being informed
that the Queen of Spain detested mauve, or that a certain Royal duchess,
for whose tastes he was never likely to be called on to cater, nursed a
violent but perfectly respectable passion for beef olives.
Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband who added a
roving disposition to a settled income was a mixed blessing. It was one
thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make
oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its
virtue when one practised it in a tent.
Bored and disillusioned with the drift of her new life, Vanessa was
undisguisedly glad when distraction offered itself in the person of Mr.
Dobrinton, a chance acquaintance whom they had first run against in the
primitive hostelry of a benighted Caucasian town. Dobrinton was
elaborately British, in deference perhaps to the memory of his mother,
who was said to have derived part of her origin from an English governess
who had come to Lemberg a long way back in the last century. If you had
called him Dobrinski when off his guard he would probably have responded
readily enough; holding, no doubt, that the end crowns all, he had taken
a slight liberty with the family patronymic. To look at, Mr. Dobrinton
was not a very attractive specimen of masculine humanity, but in
Vanessa's eyes he was a link with that civilisation which Clyde seemed so
ready to ignore and forgo. He could sing "Yip-I-Addy" and spoke of
several duchesses as if he knew them--in his more inspired moments almost
as if they knew him. He even pointed out blemishes in the cuisine or
cellar departments of some of the more august London restaurants, a
species of Higher Criticism which was listened to by Vanessa in
awe-stricken admiration. And, above all, he sympathised, at first
discreetly, afterwards with more latitude, with her fretful discontent at
Clyde's nomadic instincts. Business connected with oil-wells had brought
Dobrinton to the neighbourhood of Baku; the pleasure of appealing to an
appreciative female audience induced him to deflect his return journey so
as to coincide a good deal with his new aquaintances' line of march. And
while Clyde trafficked with Persian horse-dealers or hunted the wild grey
pigs in their lairs and added to his notes on Central Asian game-fowl,
Dobrinton and the lady discussed the ethics of desert respectability from
points of view that showed a daily tendency to converge. And one evening
Clyde dined alone, reading between the courses a long letter from
Vanessa, justifying her action in flitting to more civilised lands with a
more congenial companion.
It was distinctly evil luck for Vanessa, who really was thoroughly
respectable at heart, that she and her lover should run into the hands of
Kurdish brigands on the first day of their flight. To be mewed up in a
squalid Kurdish village in close companionship with a man who was only
your husband by adoption, and to have the attention of all Europe drawn
to your plight, was about the least respectable thing that could happen.
And there were international complications, which made things worse.
"English lady and her husband, of foreign nationality, held by Kurdish
brigands who demand ransom" had been the report of the nearest Consul.
Although Dobrinton was British at heart, the other portions of him
belonged to the Habsburgs, and though the Habsburgs took no great pride
or pleasure in this particular unit of their wide and varied possessions,
and would gladly have exchanged him for some interesting bird or mammal
for the Schoenbrunn Park, the code of international dignity demanded that
they should display a decent solicitude for his restoration. And while
the Foreign Offices of the two countries were taking the usual steps to
secure the release of their respective subjects a further horrible
complication ensued. Clyde, following on the track of the fugitives, not
with any special desire to overtake them, but with a dim feeling that it
was expected of him, fell into the hands of the same community of
brigands. Diplomacy, while anxious to do its best for a lady in
misfortune, showed signs of becoming restive at this expansion of its
task; as a frivolous young gentleman in Downing Street remarked, "Any
husband of Mrs. Dobrinton's we shall be glad to extricate, but let us
know how many there are of them." For a woman who valued respectability
Vanessa really had no luck.
Meanwhile the situation of the captives was not free from embarrassment.
When Clyde explained to the Kurdish headmen the nature of his
relationship with the runaway couple they were gravely sympathetic, but
vetoed any idea of summary vengeance, since the Habsburgs would be sure
to insist on the delivery of Dobrinton alive, and in a reasonably
undamaged condition. They did not object to Clyde administering a
beating to his rival for half an hour every Monday and Thursday, but
Dobrinton turned such a sickly green when he heard of this arrangement
that the chief was obliged to withdraw the concession.
And so, in the cramped quarters of a mountain hut, the ill-assorted trio
watched the insufferable hours crawl slowly by. Dobrinton was too
frightened to be conversational, Vanessa was too mortified to open her
lips, and Clyde was moodily silent. The little Limberg _negociant_
plucked up heart once to give a quavering rendering of "Yip-I-Addy," but
when he reached the statement "home was never like this" Vanessa
tearfully begged him to stop. And silence fastened itself with growing
insistence on the three captives who were so tragically herded together;
thrice a day they drew near to one another to swallow the meal that had
been prepared for them, like desert beasts meeting in mute suspended
hostility at the drinking pool, and then drew back to resume the vigil of
waiting.
Clyde was less carefully watched than the others. "Jealousy will keep
him to the woman's side," thought his Kurdish captors. They did not know
that his wilder, truer love was calling to him with a hundred voices from
beyond the village bounds. And one evening, finding that he was not
getting the attention to which he was entitled, Clyde slipped away down
the mountain side and resumed his study of Central Asian game-fowl. The
remaining captives were guarded henceforth with greater rigour, but
Dobrinton at any rate scarcely regretted Clyde's departure.
The long arm, or perhaps one might better say the long purse, of
diplomacy at last effected the release of the prisoners, but the
Habsburgs were never to enjoy the guerdon of their outlay. On the quay
of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came once more into
contact with civilisation, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been indiscriminating. The
victim did not wait for symptoms of rabies to declare themselves, but
died forthwith of fright, and Vanessa made the homeward journey alone,
conscious somehow of a sense of slightly restored respectability. Clyde,
in the intervals of correcting the proofs of his book on the game-fowl of
Central Asia, found time to press a divorce suit through the Courts, and
as soon as possible hied him away to the congenial solitudes of the Gobi
Desert to collect material for a work on the fauna of that region.
Vanessa, by virtue perhaps of her earlier intimacy with the cooking rites
of the whiting, obtained a place on the kitchen staff of a West End club.
It was not brilliant, but at least it was within two minutes of the Park.