“Oh, no, it doesn’t!” It was the old Chalmers who smiled at
me--ingratiating, youthful, adventurous, gay. I had often wondered why
Chalmers looked adventurous, his habits being, if ever any man’s were,
regular to the point of monotony. It occurred to me now that perhaps he
looked adventurous because he had had his adventure already. In any
case, it was very satisfactory to find at last something in his life
that matched with the look in his eyes--something that would take the
curse off his even temperament and equable ways.
“Very, very curious,” he repeated. “And all these years I’ve wanted to
tell somebody, just in case I should drop out suddenly. I’ve left
written instructions, but I should really like some one to understand.
It’s all rather preposterous.”
“It’s preposterous that you should suddenly be married.”
“Yes--of course. Well--I’ve got on pretty well, and I’d rather you
didn’t mention it to any of the others. But if anything should turn up,
you can say you knew it all along.”
“Fire ahead.”
On the strength of the narrative about to come, I ordered another
high-ball. Sometimes you want something to fiddle with, something to
intervene between you and your friend when it is hard for eyes to meet.
But he had promised me that it should be nothing sordid, and when the
drink came I set it trustfully to one side--in reserve, as it were.
“Time was, when I knocked about the world a bit. My parents were dead, I
had no close kin, and there was money enough to do what I wanted to,
provided I wanted something modest. I had a great notion, when I came
out of Göttingen, of a _wanderjahr_. Only I was determined it shouldn’t
be hackneyed. There was a good deal of Wilhelm Meister in it, all the
same, with a strong dash of Heine. I fancied myself, rather, at that
time; wanted to be different--like every other young pilgrim. I didn’t
want the common fate--not I. I hadn’t any grievance against the world,
because I had a complete faith in the world’s giving me what I wanted,
in the end. But I distinctly remember promising myself to be remarkable.
I shan’t, of course, unless there is something in spectrum analysis. I
used to quote Heine to myself:
‘Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt!
Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich,
Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz,
Und jetzo bist du elend.’
Of course, I never believed that I should be ‘unendlich elend,’ but I
should have preferred that to anything mediocre. At that age--you know
what we’re like. The man who would look at the stars by daylight and
tumbled into the well. That’s us, to the life.
“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people--or,
at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were
American--were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her
somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go
into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among
the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant,
casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian
interlude in my _wanderjahr_, more or less for the sake of doing so. I
had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I
stayed on even more because I liked the villa--an old Saracen stronghold
on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort--than because
I liked them, though they were pleasant enough.
“At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was
just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by
day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you
were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea.
It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a
portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I
gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours
when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her
perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl
seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a
specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the
girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially.
“Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a
civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East
Africa. He had gone into the interior--more or less--on a job for the
Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money
in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial
reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with
the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not
permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman--or
Lourenço Marques, either. _I_ know. Damn their yellow, half-breed
souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the
interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I
imagine, had not been very far off.
“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval
of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were
unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very
unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they
couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was,
up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying,
exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be
infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with
headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters
did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward
vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to
break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country.
Can’t you imagine those letters--in quaint, bad English, on thin paper,
worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and
cried over? I never saw them, but I can.
“Well--I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details
that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the
girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame
was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly,
and considered herself virtually dead--entirely negligible at least, as
pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve
noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively
overweening about some special thing. The damned worms _won’t_ turn--any
more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her.
“She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in
Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred
remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the
time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left
hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving
with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already
stricken, got away--probably considering that there was a lively curse
on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A
few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who
would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal,
and by the time they turned in a report--to use formal language in a
case where it is a sore misfit--there was nothing to be done. I didn’t
get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me
everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all,
where it belongs.”
Chalmers stopped--he had been talking steadily--and lighted a cigarette.
I took the opportunity to sip a little whiskey. Through his
introduction, I had been staring at him fixedly. My own cigarette had
burned to ashes in my fingers; when I felt the spark touch them, I
dropped the thing, still without looking at it, into the tray. He
hunched his shoulders in the speckled brown coat and bent forward, his
arms folded on the table. The little movement of his head from side to
side was very like a tortoise.
“Well, you see ... of course she couldn’t go alone, and of course there
was no one to see her through a thing like that. I am sure she hadn’t
money enough to pay any one for going with her. If she had tried to go,
she wouldn’t have succeeded in doing much except get into the
newspapers. She had sense enough to realize it, or the C.’s had sense
enough to make her. But if she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t do
anything else. She simply sat and brooded, looking seaward. She
apparently intended, at least, not to let go of her idea. She may have
had some notion of mesmerizing the universe with her obsession--just by
sitting tight and never, for a moment, thinking of anything else. There
she sat, anyhow, and Madame C. sent out her doves in vain. They all came
back from the parapet, drenched with Mediterranean spray. So it went on.
The girl might have been watching for some fabulous creature to rise up
from the waves and take her to her goal. She would cheerfully have
embarked for East Africa on a dolphin, I think. At all events, she
wouldn’t leave her parapet, she wouldn’t leave the villa, she wouldn’t
descend to the conventional plane. I don’t mean that she didn’t talk
like a sane woman; I mean only that she sat at the heart of her
obsession, and that when you came within a few feet of her you knocked
up against it, almost tangibly. A queer thing to meet, day after day....
It ended by my being distinctly impressed.
“Very like the girl in the play! Just the same blonde vagueness, just
the same effect of being cast inevitably for an unimportant, a merely
supplementary part. But one is never fooled twice by that sort of thing.
I tell you Maude Lansing will find herself some day doing chambermaid to
that girl’s heroine! If I was impressed, it was by the _cul-de-sac_ she
had got herself into. She couldn’t go forward, and she wouldn’t go back.
She sat there, waiting for the world to change. In the end--after Madame
C. had wrung her hands for your benefit a few hundred times--you began
to damn the world for not changing. It seemed to be up to the perverse
elements to stop the regular business of the cosmos and waft her to her
goal.
“I could hardly have talked to her about anything but her plight. It was
a week or two before I talked to her at all; but, in the end, I found
that if I wanted to continue to come to the villa, I should have to
brave that presence on the parapet--domesticate myself in that pervasive
and most logical gloom. So I did. She was a positive creature; there
wasn’t the faintest hint of apology or deprecation in her manner. She
would see you on business, and only on business--the business being her
tragedy. Don’t misunderstand--” (Chalmers frowned a little as he looked
at me.) “She was neither lachrymose nor hard; she was just infinitely
and quite decently preoccupied with her one desire and her helplessness
to achieve it. She didn’t magnify herself. It isn’t magnifying yourself
to want a proper funeral for the person you love, is it? She was even
grateful for sympathy, though she didn’t want a stream of words poured
out over her. She--she was an awfully good sort.”
Chalmers dug his cigarette-end almost viciously into the tray, and
watched the smoke go out. We both watched the smoke go out....
“Before long, we had talked together a good deal, especially during the
hour before dinner, when the sun and the sea were so miraculous that
any other miracle seemed possible. Such easy waters to cross, they
looked, in the sunset light! You forgot the blistering leagues beyond;
you forgot that it took money and men and courage and endurance, and all
kinds of things that are hard to come by, to get to the goal she was
straining for. I suppose it wouldn’t be honest to say that she ever
passed her personal fervor on to me--I couldn’t, in the nature of
things, care so much about recovering that poor chap’s bones as she
did--but I did end by wishing with all my heart that I could help.
Little by little it seemed a romantic thing to do--to go out searching
for the spot where he had died. Of course, getting the bones themselves,
except for extraordinary luck, was all moonshine; but she didn’t see
that, and her blindness affected me. Finally, my _wanderjahr_ began to
shape itself to new horizons. Why shouldn’t I have a try?... I dare say
I posed a little as a paladin, though not, I hope, to her. Anyhow, I
decided to broach it.
“I don’t suppose you can understand it--any of it--for the simple reason
that I can’t describe her. She was the kind of person who sees very
clearly the difference between the possible and the impossible; who
never attempts anything but the possible; yet who sets every one about
her itching to attain the impossible. Not ‘for her sake,’ in the
conventional sense; no, not that at all. Simply, she set before you so
clearly the reason why a thing couldn’t be done that you longed to
confute her, just as you sometimes long to confute fate. She was as
convincing and as maddening as a natural law. Each of us, sooner or
later, has tried to get the better of some little habit of the universe.
You felt like saying: ‘Stop looking like that; I’ll do it--see if I
don’t.’
“That was the spirit in which I went to her, late one afternoon, on her
parapet. The C.’s had been away all day and were not to return until
evening. Madame C. had exasperated me the night before by proposing,
quite baldly and kindly, that the girl be decoyed into a sanatorium. The
C.’s couldn’t keep her much longer--they were off for Biskra--and it was
up to me. I had lain awake half the night, exploring the last recesses
of disaster into which my idea might lead me; I had sailed far out on
the bright waters all day, perfecting my courage. I could have written
as bitter a little allegory about it all as Heine himself. Secretly, in
a tawdry corner of my mind, I thought Wilhelm Meister was a poor stick
compared with me. But it was honest romance; I was willing to pay.”
I finished my whiskey as Chalmers’s voice dropped and died down, and he
busied himself a little nervously with lighting a pipe. His green eyes
had flecks of brown in them. Once more, in the speckled brown figure
opposite me, I saw the tortoise beyond the reach of biology, which
upholds the world, which carries the burden of all human flesh and
spirit.
“I told her that I was ready to go; that I could scrape together enough
money for the expedition without entirely impoverishing myself. My
figures hadn’t been quite so reassuring as that when I totted them up on
a piece of hotel paper at dawn, but at least I had left magnificent
margins for everything.
“She smiled--I had never seen her smile before, and at the moment it
made her thanks seem profuse--but she shook her head. She was
beautifully simple about it. I liked her for that.
“‘It wouldn’t do. Not that it isn’t divinely good of you! But, you see,
the point is that--’ she stopped.
“‘Well?’ My heart was beating hard. I had become enamored of my idea. I
no more wanted to be baulked than she did.
“‘The point has always been that I should go myself.’
“‘Then go yourself!’
“‘Carrying off all your money? I can’t--Don Quixote.’ There was nothing
playful in her tone; and she had me all the more because there wasn’t.
She was merely registering facts. Even the ‘Don Quixote’ was, to her
mind, a fact that she was registering. She was splendidly literal.
“‘Come with me. I don’t propose that you should go alone.’
“She frowned a little; and in that frown I read all the weariness of the
hours of past talk with Madame C. Presently she looked up at me, very
kindly, a little questioningly, as if for the first time my personality
in itself interested her.
“‘You know that--even for me--that is impossible.’
“I knew what she meant: that she would have been ready for any
abnegation, being, herself, as I have said, negligible; but that the
world must be able to pick no flaw in the rites paid to the shade.
“‘If you will many me, it is not impossible.’
“That is what I said--just like that. I had determined that nothing
should be an obstacle. She didn’t change her posture or her expression
by the fraction of a millimetre. She looked silently past me at the
ilexes as if she had not heard. But she had heard. I think that at that
moment--no, I don’t except all that came after--I touched the highest
point of my romance.... She thought for a moment or two while I waited.
I suppose she was considering what the world would say to that, and
deciding that the world would have no right to say anything; that it
would be, and legitimately so, between her and me. The dead themselves,
of course, can be trusted to understand. It didn’t take her long--you
see she was a girl of one idea, and of one idea only.
“‘Very well, I will marry you.’ The words came as simply from her lips
as any others. We didn’t at that time, or at any time before our
marriage, have any discussion of the extremely--shall I
say?--individual nature of our relation. That was the one thing we
couldn’t have talked of. It would have been--you see?--quite impossible
for either to imply, by approaching the subject, that the other perhaps
didn’t understand. I couldn’t even be so crass as to say: ‘Look here, my
dear girl, of course I quite recognize that you don’t in any sense
belong to me’; or she be so crass as to say in turn: ‘I know it.’ No: I
suppose I have never been so near the summit as I was that evening after
she had ‘accepted’ me, and we had both silently laid our freedom on the
altar of that dead man. Neither of us realized all the inevitable
practical results of such a compact. We simply thought we had thrown the
ultimate sufficing sop to Cerberus, and that all our lives we should
hear him contentedly crunching it. I am quite sure that her mind turned
as blank a face to the future as mine. Quite.”
His voice rang authoritatively across the table. I said nothing. What
could I say? What is the proper greeting when you cross the threshold of
such a habitation? I offered him a silence that was at least
respectful.
“Well, I won’t bore you with too many details. She pulled herself
together and said her visit must end. We did not tell the C.’s. We
merely let them get off to Tunis. It would not have been easy for her to
explain to Madame C. all the things that we had never condescended to
explain to each other. She was a Catholic, by the way. We were married
by a parish priest in--no, on second thoughts, I won’t even tell you
where. The place has kept the secret hitherto. It is better so. I left
her at once to make arrangements for the quest. It took some time and a
good deal of frenzied journeying to realize on my securities. I gave her
a letter of credit, so that she could be in all incidental ways
independent of me. That was necessary, because I was to go out to
Mozambique first, and she was to follow only when I sent for her. Very
soon, you see, I began to realize the practical inconveniences of
travelling with a woman who bears your name and who is a total stranger
to you. It’s damned expensive, for one thing.” Chalmers’s smile was
nearer the authentic gleam of irony than anything I had seen before
during the evening.
“Well, I went. I interviewed the proper people; I saw one of the
creatures who knew the spot where our man had died. Eventually I
arranged the expedition. Then I cabled for her. She took the _Dunvegan
Castle_ at Naples. By the time I met her at the steamer, she had grown
incredible to me. I could more easily have believed her a sharer in some
half-forgotten light adventure than my duly registered wife. She was
unreal to me, a figure recurring inexplicably in a dream, a memory--of
exactly what sort I was not quite sure. My feet lagged along the
pier.... She soon set all that straight. I had wondered if the sop to
Cerberus would require our seeming to kiss. She managed it somehow so
that no stage kiss was necessary. She dissipated the funk into which I
had fallen, by practical questions and preoccupations; she came upon my
fever like a cool breeze off the sea. She had made her point; she had
achieved her miracle; and in every incidental way, little and big, she
could afford to show what a serviceable soul she was. She was a good
thing to have about. There were times when the situation got on my
nerves, in Mozambique, before we started. It’s such a small hole that we
seemed always to be bumping into each other. I couldn’t make out her
private attitude towards me; I used to wonder if she had any, or if she
simply thought of me as a courier in her own class. I was so endlessly
occupied with engaging men and beasts and camping kit and supplies--what
was I but a courier? The paladin idea was fading a little; though now
and then, at night, I’d look up at the Southern Cross and let the
strangeness of the thing convince me all over again. I don’t think I
wanted anything so commonplace as gratitude from her; but I did want in
her some sense of the strangeness of our alliance, with all the things
it left unsaid. Perhaps I wanted her to realize that not every man would
have responded so quickly to the call of impersonal romance. I can look
back on all that egotism of youth and despise it; but there’s something
not wholly ignoble in an egotism that wants only good fame with one’s
self and one’s secret collaborator. Anyhow, there were moments when my
dedication seemed solemn; just as there were other moments when I seemed
like an inadequate tenor in a comic opera. I never knew just how she
hovered between those two conceptions. We were destined to see each
other only by lightning-flashes--never once in the clear light of day.
“I can’t tell you how I came to hate the Portuguese before we left that
mean little hole. You laughed at me once for rending Blakely to shreds
over Camoëns. I’ve read Camoëns in my day and hated him, as if something
in me had known beforehand that I was eventually to have good reason to
loathe every syllable of that damned language. My stock is Southern,
too--South Carolina--and you can imagine how I enjoyed seeing, at every
turn, the nigger the better man. Portugal ought to be wiped off the map
of Africa.
“Well--I got our arrangements made as well as I could. It was lucky I
had left handsome margins for everything, because the graft was
sickening. They wouldn’t let your own approved consignments leave the
dock without your handing out cash to at least three yellow dogs that
called themselves officials. I had hoped to find some sort of female
servant for her--I shook at the thought of having her go off on a trip
like that without another woman to do things for her that I, in the
circumstances, couldn’t very well do. But there wasn’t a wench of
either color or any of the intervening shades that a nice woman could
have had about her. She was very plucky about it all. As I say, she had
made her great point, and didn’t care. The morning we started, she stuck
a gentian in my buttonhole and another in hers--and she smiled. A smile
of hers carried very far. And so we started.
“I needn’t give you the details of our trip. People write books about
that sort of thing; keep diaries of their mishaps, and how Umgalooloo or
Ishbosheth or some other valuable assistant stole a bandanna
handkerchief and had to be mulcted of a day’s pay--all very interesting
to somebody, no doubt. To tell the truth, the concrete details maddened
me; and we seemed to live wholly in concrete terms of the smallest. I,
who had planned for my _wanderjahr_ a colossal, an almost forbidden
intimacy with Platonic abstractions! I had always rather meant to go in
for biology eventually, but I got over that in Africa; we were much too
near the lower forms of life. And to this day, as you well know, I can’t
bear hearing Harry Dawes talk about folk-lore. He’s driven me home from
the club a good many nights.”
I caught my breath. It was almost uncanny, the way Chalmers’s little
idiosyncrasies were explaining themselves, bit by bit. I felt the cold
wind of a deterministic law blowing over my shoulder--as cold as
Calvinism. I had always loved temperament and its vagaries. Now I wasn’t
sure I wanted the light in Chalmers’s eyes explained, to the last gleam.
Mightn’t any of us ever be inexplicable and irresponsible and
delightful?
“Of course they had given us maps in Mozambique--not official ones, oh,
no! Those would have come too high. The Nyassa Company had to pretend to
be amiable, but they didn’t fork out anything they didn’t have to. Small
loss the official maps were, I fancy; but those we had weren’t much
good. It wasn’t, however, a difficult journey to make, from that point
of view, and the cheerful savage who had abandoned our hero swore he
knew where to take us. In eight weeks, we reached the spot that he
declared to be the scene of the death from fever. I dare say he was
right; he knew the villages along the way; he had described the
topography, more or less, before we started, and it tallied. We pitched
camp and spent three horrible days there. It is needless to say that we
might as well have hunted for the poor fellow’s bones under the parapet
at Ravello. I saw--and if you’ll believe me, I positively hadn’t seen
before--what moonshine it all was. She ought to have been put to bed and
made to pray God to make her a good girl, before she dragged
anybody--even me--out on such a wild-goose chase as that. There wasn’t a
relic--except certain signs of some one’s having cleared ground there
before, and one or two indescribable fragments, picked up within a
five-hundred-yard radius, that might have been parts of tin cans. Why
should there have been? If there had been any plunder, natives would
have found and taken it, as they would inevitably have removed and
destroyed any corporal vestiges out of sheer superstition and hostility.
I had learned their little ways, since Ravello. The rank soil in the wet
season would have done the rest. I wondered--cruelly, no doubt--whether
she had expected him to bury himself with a cairn atop and a few
note-books (locked up in a despatch-box) decorously waiting for her in
his grave. On the strength of the savage’s positive declaration that at
such a distance--two days--from the last village, beyond such a stream,
beneath such and such a clump of trees, he had seen the white man fall
in the last delirium, she searched the place, as you might say, with a
microscope. I thought it extremely likely that the fellow was lying for
the sake of our pay, but I had to admit that I couldn’t prove it.
Certainly, his information was the only thing we could reasonably go on;
we couldn’t invest all Portuguese East Africa with an army and set them
to digging up every square inch of soil in that God-forsaken country. If
this clue failed, we could only return. But there was a moment when, in
her baffled anguish, I think she could have taken a good close-range
shot at the inscrutable nigger who had been with him, and had left him,
and could not even bring us to his body. The girl on the stage to-night
was like that, though you don’t believe it. Vague, indeed! Maude
Lansing’s a fool if she keeps her on.
“You see”--Chalmers shifted his position and, ever so little, his tone
of voice. It was extraordinary how straight he went with his story,
considering that he had never told it before. He seemed to have dragged
it out from some receptacle, intact, not a thread frayed, in perfect
order, ready to spread before me. The pattern was as clear as if it were
just off the torturesome loom. He seemed to know it by heart.
“You see”--he went on--“she had been changing steadily, all through that
march of ours. You would have said that the tropical sun had forced her
growth. She had been a cold, immature thing in Italy--passions dormant
and sealed. Now they had worked their way up to the surface and were
just beneath the skin. She _would_ have shot the nigger. Before, I
suppose, she had lived with ideas only; even _he_ must have been chiefly
an idea, though a tremendous one. The daily contact with all sorts of
unsuspected facts, the hopeless crudeness of the hinterlands most of us
never get into, had worked on her. There may be something subtle in the
tropics--people talk as if there were. I should say they were no more
subtle than the slums. The body demands a hundred things, and it becomes
a matter of the utmost moment whether you get them for it or not. You
can’t achieve subtlety until the body is lulled. That life has
complications of its own; but I shouldn’t call it subtle. Very far from
it. And savages make you feel that it’s subtlety enough merely to have a
white skin; there’s something irrelevant and ignoble in pushing subtlety
further. In the end the sun wears you out, I suppose, and makes you want
nothing very much; but at first it merely makes it intolerable not to
have everything on the very instant.... I merely meant to explain that
she was a changed creature--a good sport always, but inclined to
impatiences, angers, delights, and fervors that I fancy she had never
felt before. Her tongue was loosed; she was lyric about cool water,
violent about native trickeries. I don’t mean--Heaven forbid!--that she
was vulgar. She had a sweet distinction all her own. She was merely real
and varied and vital. And I dare say the fundamental formality of our
relation was all the subtlety we could stand. It put an edge on
everything.
“We were very near the line of Rhodesia, and for various reasons we
decided to cross over and come down far enough south through British
territory to strike the Zambesi and its boats. If there was any
information to be picked up, we should be more likely to find it in that
direction than by going back the way we had come, which was utterly
barren of clues. I had reason to suppose that the others who had
survived the fever had gone on to the Rhodesian villages. We started in
the cool of dawn, and I ought to say that there were no backward glances
on her part. She was convinced that there was nothing in that precise
spot for her; and I think she had hope of finding something in the miles
just beyond. I could see that she did not more than half believe the
identifications of the negro who had been on the earlier expedition.
True, his guttural gibberish did not sound like information; but, after
all, he was the only link we had with that supreme and sordid adventure.
We pushed on.”
Chalmers threw back his head and stretched his arms, but went on
presently in a more vibrant, a more intimately reminiscent tone. The
club was nearly empty--it was getting on for midnight. I seemed to
myself to be quite alone with the tortoise that upheld the world.
“I suppose this is the point in the narrative to say a rather difficult
thing--though it ought to be clear that I’ve no cause or wish to paint
myself anything but the mottled color most of us are. I spoke of what
the tropics had done to her: fulfilled her in all kinds of ways. We had
strange talks by the fire at night, moving on, after the necessary
practical discussions, into regions of pure emotion. The emotion was all
over the incidents we encountered; we marshalled our facts and made our
decisions, and then leaned back and generalized with passion. Whatever
Africa had done to her inwardly, it had at least taught her to talk. I
had never had any particular sense of her being on guard--there _was_,
from the very first, something strange and delicate in the flavor of our
understanding--but now I had the sense of her being specifically and
gloriously off her guard. We seemed to know each other awfully well.”
Chalmers’s face, as he looked down at his pipe-bowl, was curiously
boyish for an instant. He might have been speaking of a childhood
playmate.
“Put it that I fell in love with her. I don’t choose to analyze my
feeling more than that. There was everything in it to make me the prey
of a passion for her--so long as we hadn’t begun, in Mozambique, by
hating each other. She was straight, she was fine, she was thoroughly
good; she was also, in her unfailing freshness and her astonishing
health, infinitely desirable. By the law of every land she was my wife.
There wasn’t a barrier between us except the frail one built of things
that had never been said. Of course, I knew that, to her, the barrier
doubtless looked insuperable. She considered herself the inalienable
property of the man whose bones we were fantastically hunting for. Well:
can’t you see that that very fact was peculiarly constructed to whet my
hunger? It was maddening to know that shadows could effectually keep two
strong, sinewy creatures apart. Our utter isolation in our adventure
flung us upon each other.
“‘Doch es tritt ein styg’scher Schatten
Nächtlich zwischen mich und ihn.’
“One night she had a bad dream; she moaned and cried out in her sleep,
and I had to stand outside her tent and listen, while she woke and wept
and finally quieted down with little sobs like a child’s. I couldn’t
even go in and lay my hand on her forehead to soothe her.”
He shook his head, and over his face crept the shadow of the burdened.
“Well, that was what I was in for, and I knew I was in for it as long as
I should desire her. Finally, I only prayed that we might get safely
back to Mozambique, where I could leave her forever. I knew that before
my fever ebbed, it would rise in a horrid flood. I wanted her
desperately; I should want her more desperately before I got through
with it; and I had, for my honor’s sake, not to let her know. It’s odd
how many situations there are in life that make it an insult to tell a
woman you love her. But I think you’ll agree with me that this is rather
an extraordinary case of it.
“All this time, I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what she felt: whether
she knew, or what she would have thought of me if she had known. There’s
something tremendous in the power of ideas. Think of how easy it would
have been for me--I won’t say to take what I wanted, though against that
background it wouldn’t have seemed such a preposterous thing to do--to
insist on her talking it out with me, some night by the fire; how little
she could have turned her back on me if I had wanted to ask her a
question. But I was as tongue-tied as if we had been in a drawing-room,
surrounded with all the paraphernalia of chaperonage. And yet sometimes
it didn’t seem possible, with her face and her speech changing like
that, week by week, that there shouldn’t be some change in it for me.
“I often wondered if she ever had moments, as I did, of thinking that
that man had never lived. But I could only go on assuming that she gave
him every thought she had. I never knew, by the way, what she felt--she
never told me. I said, a little while back, that we never saw each other
in the clear light of day--only in lightning-flashes. In spite of our
semblance of intimacy, that was true. For when a man is obsessed with
the notion of wanting to make very definite love to a woman, her
impersonal conversation is a kind of haze at best. I know that we
talked; but I know that, after the fiasco, when we ate our meals, when
we rode side by side along those unspeakable trails, when we sat by the
fire in the evening, I hardly knew or cared what we talked of. I kept a
kind of office in my brain quite tidy for the transaction of business;
the rest was just a sort of House of Usher where I wandered, wanting
her. By the time we struck the first Rhodesian village, I didn’t even
feel sure I could hold my tongue all the way south and east again. I
only prayed to God to deliver me from being an utter and unspeakable
brute. That was what my romance had led me to--that I was hanging on to
common decency by the eyelids!
“You see, there was added to my most inconvenient and unfitting passion
for the girl all the psychology of return from a lost battle-field--if
you could in name so dignify that pitiful clearing which was our
frustration. Everything was over, and why the devil shouldn’t something
else begin? That was the refrain my blood kept pounding out. I dare say
you don’t understand--you live among the civilized, and are used to
reckoning with shadows. It’s different out there on the well-nigh
uninhabited veldt. A platitude, I know. Funny how people despise
platitudes, when they’re usually the truest things going! A thing has
to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude at all. Humph!
“We struck into northeastern Rhodesia--days and days over the veldt; and
after the rains it was blooming like the rose. Gladiolus
everywhere--‘white man’s country, past disputing.’ No ‘baked karroo’
there. Pretty starkly uninhabited, though. Of course, we were hundreds
of miles north of the mines and the other activities on the edge of the
Transvaal. Mashonaland, it would really be more properly called; and it
describes it better, sounds wilder--as it was. We were heading west
across the tail of Nyassa, and then south--to the Zambesi or the
railroad, it didn’t much matter which. That man was as lost to us, every
corporal vestige of him, as if his ashes had been scattered like
Wycliffe’s. But there on the rampart above Ravello both she and I had
felt that the search was imperative: I no less than she. We were both
pretty young.”
His head dropped on his breast for a moment. He looked as if he felt his
burden. I suppose the tortoise sometimes wonders why....
“Then, one afternoon, we dropped into the heart of a storm--tropical
thunder, tropical lightning, skies blacker than you’ve ever seen, a wind
that churned the heavens into a pot of inky broth. I had been wondering,
for days, what we should do when we struck something besides the eternal
huddled villages of the natives, with their tobacco-plots and
mealie-fields, their stupid curiosities, their impudent demands for
gifts--something more like a house, people you could count people, with
a touch of white in their complexions. Strange coincidence, that it was
by the real lightning-flash that, for the only time in my life, I saw
her clear; strange, too, that the revelation should have come on the
heels of our first approach to anything like civilization. It was only
the plantation of a man who had made his little pile by trading in
Kimberley, and had trekked up to the edge of the wilderness to live
there in peace with his aged wife, and his cattle, and the things that
without too much trouble he could coax out of the good-humored soil. His
establishment was the first earnest of European activities seething
somewhat to the southward; the first reminder of Europe that we had had
since leaving the last Portuguese outpost on the way to the Nyassa. The
trip had not been hard, as such trips go: we had run into no wars; no
famine or drought or disease had visited us. We had been in luck; for I
was a shocking amateur, and anything like a real expedition I could not
have managed, of course. Yet, even so, I had been straining my eyes for
the sight of a white man; for some form of life that more nearly suited
my definition of ‘colonial.’
“And so we stumbled into his compound at eight in the evening, after
endless floundering about in the storm. We had had to dismount from our
donkeys and lead the frightened beasts by the bridle. Eventually we
could discard them for horses or oxcarts, but for a little while still
we might need them, and we clung to them, though the temptation was to
let them go--with a kick.”
Chalmers hesitated. “Why do I find it so confoundedly hard to come at?
I’m not writing a diary of accidents and self-congratulations like the
explorer fellows. The only point in the whole thing is just what I can’t
manage to bring out!” He mused for a moment. “The whole place white with
hail after the storm ... thick on the thatch of the big, rambling house
... the verandah eaves dripping ... then the rain stopping, and a
miraculous silence after the tumult ... no light anywhere except long,
low, continual flashes on the horizon at the edge of the veldt--and then
she came out, dressed in something of the poor old vrouw’s that hung
about her lovely, slim figure like a carnival joke. I was wondering
thickly where I should spend the night. I had introduced her as my wife,
of course ... and they had muttered something about the other room’s
being in use. The good old souls had gone off to bed with the ceasing of
the storm, after our little caravan was housed down in the farm niggers’
quarters. But naturally I couldn’t have explained to them, anyhow....
The lightning was about as regular as a guttering candle set in a
draught--but about a thousand candle-power when it did come. And, by one
apocalyptic flash, I saw her face. She didn’t say anything; she merely
laid her hand on my shoulder. And I, who had been bursting with the wish
to talk, to tell her, to lay my head on her knees and weep, out of pure
self-pity and desire--all those cub-like emotions--didn’t say anything
either. I only saw--in that one flash--the working of her lips, the
prophetic brilliancy of her eyes. We turned and went into the house
without a word. She wanted me, too; that was what it came to. Other
things being equal, the utter isolation of a man and a woman must do one
of two things--must put a burning fire or the polar ice between them. I
knew what it had done to me; I hadn’t been able to guess what it had
done to her. I had rather been betting on the polar ice.”
Chalmers ruffled both hands through his hair and leaned back from the
table. His mouth took on a legal twist. “It’s the only thing I blame
myself for--bar all the egotism that youth has to slough, and that I
think I sloughed forever before I reached the damned coast. I ought to
have known that half her impulse was the mere clinging of the frightened
child, and the other half the strangeness of our journey, which made us
both feel that all laws had ceased to work and that all signs had
failed. I ought to have reflected, to have put her off, to have made
sure, before I ever took her into my arms. And yet I’m glad I
didn’t--though I’m ashamed of being glad. Even then, you know, I didn’t
envisage the rest of life. I still thought, as for months I had thought,
that there could be no conventional future for that adventure. When my
curious _wanderjahr_ was over, I expected to die. And I wanted to have
some other face than the barren visage of Romance--the painted
hussy!--press itself to mine before I went out. I got it; and I’m not
yet over being glad, though it has made a coil that grows tighter rather
than looser with the years.”
I made no answer. There was nothing to say. He had not got to the end,
and until the end what was there for me to do but light another weary
cigarette, and summon all the sympathy I could to my non-committal eyes?
On the face of it, it was merely an extraordinary situation in which, if
a man were once caught, he could do little--a new and singular kind of
hard-luck story. But, as he told it, with those tones, those
inflections, those stresses, he certainly did not seem to be painting
himself _en beau_. I looked at the patient figure opposite me--Chalmers
always seemed pre-eminently patient--and, for very perplexity, held my
tongue.
“The next morning, I got breakfast early and went to see about my men
and beasts. I was a little afraid of finding the men drunk, but they
weren’t--only full-fed and lazy and half mutinous. The guide who had led
us to the historic spot had vanished--deserted in the night, with half
his pay owing him. No one in that black crew could explain. We had had
desertions before, and I should have considered us well enough off
simply with one coast nigger the less, if he hadn’t been my interpreter
as well. There were very few things I could say to the others without
him, and, though we were out of the woods, we were by no means done with
our retinue. I strode back to the house in a fine rage. I think I minded
the inconvenience most, since it would be the inconvenience that would
most affect her. Frankly, you see, I couldn’t suppose she felt, any
longer, a special concern with that particular black sample of human
disloyalty.
“When I entered the house, I saw her at once. Her back was turned to me,
and she was talking with a man I had not hitherto seen--evidently some
inmate of the house whom we had not encountered the previous evening.
The other room had been in use, I reflected, in a flash. He was
stretched on a ramshackle sofa with some sort of animal skin thrown over
him. He--but I won’t describe him. I know every feature of his face,
though I saw him, all told, not more than five minutes, and have never
seen him since. I have a notion”--Chalmers’s voice grew very precise,
and his mouth looked more legal than ever--“that, when he wasn’t pulled
down with a long illness and protracted suffering, he would be very
good-looking. As it was, he was unhealthy white, like the wrong kind of
ghost. One arm was quite limp.
“At the instant I didn’t place him--naturally! But as soon as she turned
her face to me, I did. Only one thing could have induced that look of
horror--horror in every strained feature, like the mask of some one who
has seen the Medusa. I started to her, but stopped almost before I
started; for I saw immediately that I was the Gorgon. It was for me that
her face had changed. God knows what, two minutes before, her face had
been saying to that half-lifeless form. It was about _me_ that she felt
like that. Since, with all the years to work it out in, I’ve seen why;
but just at the moment I was overwhelmed. She sat down in a chair and
covered her face with her hands. I heard the man babbling tragic and
insignificant details. I can’t say I listened, but before I could pull
myself together and leave, I caught mention of fever, accident, loss of
memory, broken limbs, miraculous co-operation of fate for good and evil
alike--the whole mad history, I suppose, from his side, of the past
year. I have sometimes wished I had caught it more clearly, but just
then I could take in nothing except the insulting fact that this was the
man whose grave we had not found. That was what her face had told me in
that horrid instant. I never saw her face again. It was still bowed on
her hands when I went out of the door.
“I don’t know how I got off--I don’t remember. I suppose I had the
maniac’s speed. If I hadn’t been beside myself, I think I could recall
more of what I did. The patriarchal creature under whose roof it had all
happened helped me. I think I gave him a good many directions about the
negroes and the kit. Or I may have paid them off, myself. I honestly
don’t know. I know that I left nearly all of my money with him, and
started off on horseback alone. I had a dull sense that I was causing
her some practical difficulties, but I also had a very vivid sense that
she would kill herself if she had to encounter me again. She had looked
at me as if I were a monster from the mud. And the night before, on the
verandah, in the lightning....”
Chalmers stopped and looked at me. The brilliancy had gone out of his
eyes. He said nothing more.
“Well?” I asked finally.
“Well?” There came a wide shrug of the shoulders, a loosening of the
lips. “I got back somehow. I seemed to be riding, day and night,
straight to Hell. But eventually I got to Salisbury and took a train to
Beira. It was immensely steadying to take a train. I think any more of
the veldt would have driven me quite definitely mad.” He stopped; then,
in a moment, jerked out: “That’s all.”
“Do you mean that you’ve never heard anything more?”
“Never a word. But I know that, eventually, she drew out every penny of
her letter of credit. She had hardly dipped into it when we left
Europe.”
“Good God!” I don’t know why I should have sat stolidly through the rest
and have been bowled over by that one detail, but I was. It made the
woman extraordinarily real.
“And of course she knows several places where a letter would reach me,
if she ever had reason to write,” he went on. “Perhaps you see now why I
have to hang on. By holding my tongue, I’ve been grub-staking them in
Arcadia, you might say--but, damn it, I know so little about it! The
time might come....”
“Why haven’t you divorced her long since?”
His face hardened. “Didn’t I mention that she was a Catholic? We were
married by the most orthodox _padre_ imaginable. There’s no divorce for
her. She’s the kind to chuck Heaven, perhaps, but not her church. And,
unfortunately”--he spoke very slowly and meditatively--“our marriage,
you see, just missed being the kind that can be annulled.
‘Unfortunately,’ I say, but, even now, I’m glad--damned glad. It’s
quite on the cards, you know, that some day some priest may send her
back to me. I might divorce; she couldn’t. So it seems decent for me not
to.”
“Well, of all the--” I got no further. The whole Laokoönesque group had
now completed itself before me.
Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from _Rigoletto_. Then:
“Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But
immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I
have to hang on, don’t you?”