It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the
Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment;
like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to
tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent
Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with
the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above
his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it
together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s
part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography
by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man
inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s
jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he
got from me. That part--most of it--I’ll give you in the beginning.
After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I
shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could
reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles--Hoyting, his arms folded
on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to
unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end--oh, as if
Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the
sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told
him the end--if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know
Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe
the imperfectly visualized scene.
Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as
best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries,
and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The
public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until
the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do
know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him
for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked
out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy,
to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He
married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited
American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from
witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers
in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived
leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of
out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English
race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be
bloodlessly tragic.
Agatha Hewell--that is, Agatha Dorrien--was a special case, very
worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for
fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She
made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at
celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries
by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed
likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and
good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his
ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of
their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for
he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins
days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The
Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation,
and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and
commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth
into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though,
it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and
Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the
end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard
him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club,
no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat
against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on
account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha
said nothing.
Mrs. Dorrien was inexhaustibly pretty in a white and gold type, all
purity and lustre; and she wore endless French tea-gowns, each lovelier
than the last. They doubtless explained Dorrien’s sticking to his fat
and fashionable practice when his desire was to this or that new disease
out of Italy. Yet I’ve heard her take him lightly to task for letting
the dust grow thick in his laboratory. She certainly didn’t think she
wanted money. Nor, I fancy, in any bloated and disproportionate way did
she. She was, as I say, ambitious--muddle-headedly, sentimentally, but
incurably ambitious; and she seemed always, I’ve been told, to be
watching his career in the hope of its suddenly flaring into the
spectacular. It was she, I’ve also been told, who defended Dorrien from
outraged Hewells when he broke entirely with official tuberculosis and
turned his attention publicly to leprosy. There had been one of the
periodic “scares”; some respectable artisan in Kansas City had developed
it quite unaccountably. There was a good deal of the yellow peril in the
yellow journals. They sent for Dr. Dorrien. I’ve a notion that the
Misses Hewell were almost reconciled to him in that moment. Mrs.
Dorrien did not go to Kansas City with her husband. She stayed at home,
and explained to every one that leprosy was really becoming a public
menace, that the danger should be considered, that steps should be
taken, especially that research should be subsidized.
It had been a chance current that had swept me for a little into the
Dorriens’ world, and my main stream of life soon swept me out of it. At
the moment of my departure from America, the Kansas City scare was over,
and Dr. Dorrien had still done nothing that one could legitimately
present to one’s wife as spectacular. That was all I knew of them for
years--until I knew the last. The last set us all to wondering, and by
an odd chance I once wondered aloud before Hoyting. “Oh, the Dorriens?
Yes, of course, the Dorriens. I knew them.”
That was all, and it sufficed. Whatever Hoyting knew was sure to be the
right answer. It would take too long to expound Hoyting to those of you
who don’t know him. Those of you who do will understand my faith. He’s
like nothing so much, I’ve sometimes thought, as a badly tinkered craft
plying between obscure and unsafe ports. Sometimes he carries junk, and
sometimes treasure; you never know beforehand. But I always bargain for
the cargo. Hoyting has wandered so much: the mere dust on the crazy
little capstan may have blown from some unpronounceable paradise. He
doesn’t always know, himself; he “steams for steaming’s sake,” Hoyting
does. Somewhere inside his lurching bulk is an inexhaustible hunger for
life, which has made of two hemispheres an insufficient meal. For some
of us he’s an unfailing cache in the desert. Provided he has had life at
first hand, the jackals are welcome to do the rest. So I had only to
wait my moment. In Marseilles, that haven of ships, Hoyting’s tongue
would be loosed. I should not have to wait long.
* * * * *
“Vermouth,” said Hoyting; “yes, just vermouth. I always did like
Marseilles. Full of people who really want to get somewhere, and know
how to go, and don’t talk more than is necessary. Brindisi’s disgusting.
I never touch Brindisi if I can help it.”
“The Dorriens.” I held him to his promise.
“Oh, the Dorriens. Yes. Funny, the kind of thing a woman who looks like
that is sometimes willing to muck about in. She seemed like a good
sport, too. Ever been in Turkestan? I suppose not. If you go to places
in this world, you haven’t time left for anything else. So very likely
you never saw a Kirghiz nomad hunting on horseback with a golden eagle
on his wrist. Using it like a falcon, you know. They go after wildish
game--wolves and such. Ripping. But not very practical, after all. Mrs.
Dorrien was a little like that. She was ripping, too. But I’ve always
had a notion that Dorrien might have had better hunting with almost any
other kind of woman.
“I don’t understand modern medical science--scrapping with ultravisible
germs that good may come. Blood is different: when you see that, it’s
your business to stop it anyhow. A flow of blood is the devil at war
with man. You know it instinctively. I myself don’t hold much with
anything that doesn’t come by instinct. And as for deciding things by
theory! There wasn’t a mouldering idea any one had held since the
Christian era that Mrs. Dorrien didn’t drag out of its grave to get help
from. That was the trouble: all the mouldering ideas were knocking
about together in her mind. And therefore, exit Dorrien.
“Do you know Soerabaya? No? It was there I saw them. I had known Dorrien
long ago somewhere. There wasn’t much of any one else in that crazy
thing that called itself a hotel--kept by a Portuguese Jew named
D’Acunha. It was in the town, mind you, not in the suburbs, and the
guests ran accordingly. Very good drinks, and plenty of
mosquito-netting, but everything else in the place that mosquito-netting
wouldn’t keep out. Mrs. Dorrien always dressed for dinner, I remember.
Dorrien wasn’t happy. She had come to please him, though just why to
Soerabaya I never made out, and was always reminding him of it, and he
wasn’t pleased. They had left the little girl at home, and I dare say
the mother wanted to get back to her. She kept saying she was afraid
Aunt Emma wouldn’t have Virginia’s teeth properly straightened.
Wonderful thing a woman is! Lizards climbing all round over the walls,
and the eternal promise of a snake coiling up on the tail of her dress,
and she’ll look past it all with her far-sighted eyes and say she is
afraid a safe little kid at home with steam-heat and a governess isn’t
having her teeth straightened.
“I didn’t come in on the Dorriens’ affairs at all at first, you
understand. I was there on my own business, and I supposed they were. At
least I supposed he was. I never could see what she got out of it: I’ll
swear she never looked at scenery, and there wasn’t anything in the
mucky little bazaars she wanted. Apparently they had no letters to
European residents; or if they had, they didn’t use them. If ever a
woman wasn’t meant for the tropics--” His voice trailed off for a
little, then boomed out again, softly resonant, like a ship’s gong going
intermittently somewhere beyond in the offing. “I admired her more than
a little. But I saw that Dorrien had no show. Women are apt to shout
with the majority. How is a husband going to be a majority, if he takes
a line of his own? Oh, Dorrien was down and out from the start.
“They must have been worrying along in Soerabaya for two weeks. I think
Dorrien stayed on like a cross child who knows he’s got to go home. He
drags at his nurse’s hand, and asks questions about every object they
pass. He wasn’t interested in the place, but at least it wasn’t a P. &
O. port. He saw perfectly that the next stop would be. If I had had him
alone, I could have amused him. Dorrien was the sort that finds an
absorbing interest in native--eh--customs, and that sort of thing. But
his wife naturally didn’t care about--sociology. She wandered around
under the teaks and tamarinds, waiting for his last shadow of an excuse
to fade out utterly. When he couldn’t chuck the bluff any more, she’d
have him, and she knew it. She’d march him home.
“I myself didn’t quite know at first why Dorrien wanted to stay out
there. One would have to have more general curiosity than the Dorriens
appeared to, in order to find Soerabaya interesting. I knew that if his
wife weren’t along, he’d drag me into every kind of native dive; but I
knew, too, that he hadn’t come for the dives. He didn’t seem to be very
much in love with the place. Who could be? He swore at everything,
beginning with the monkeys and ending with the prices. He just didn’t
want to go home--as if he knew he’d be put to bed in the dark and have
to go to sleep, when he got there. Queer guy! You remember how big he
was? He had a trick of looking round any room as if it were too small
for him. And that voice of his, with never a modulation, and those
red-brown eyes that seemed to take in everything and give back no
comment? Then, one night, I thought I had struck it. He came across to
my corner of porch about midnight.
“‘My wife’s gone to bed, and I think she’s gone to sleep,’ he said.
‘There’s no sleep in me, and I shall swear at the lizards if I turn in.
I should wake her. You know what these fool partitions are. Let’s talk.
You never have anything to do.’ It wasn’t very polite, but it was quite
true. I haven’t anything to do except see what things are like. When
I’ve made an exhaustive study of all the degrees of civilization, I’m
going home to vote. I don’t see that, until then, I’m equipped to.
“‘All right,’ I said. ‘I never sleep, I never write letters, and I never
criticize. Go ahead.’
“Odd thing: that happened to be just what he wanted--to ‘go ahead’
indefinitely. I learned a lot of things about Dorrien that night. I
made out from his talk that he must have mucked around a good deal with
tuberculosis at home, but he’d dropped it. He told me some queer things
about tuberculosis germs, but he had got tired of it. Exotic diseases
were more in his line. He asked the most extraordinary number of
questions about beri-beri and things like that. I never quite understood
it all; but I think the commonness of tuberculosis bored him. The
antipodes take men’s imaginations in different ways--who should know if
I don’t?--and they had simply taken his, across all the world, by their
physical malignancies. He didn’t give a copper cash for what you folk
call psychology, but his brown eyes used to rake the meanest little
streets in Soerabaya for any sign of disease. It might have been
unpleasant if he hadn’t been such a loud-voiced, businesslike chap. If
you ask me, I should say he had come to the East just as a sportsman
goes to Africa for big game. There’s good hunting in Canada, I’m told,
but some people want to hunt hippopotami just because hippopotami have
such queer complexions. Dorrien could get interested in what the human
body is capable of, regardless of unpleasantness. But he could as well
have stayed at home and stuck to cancer, if he had wanted mere
unpleasantness.
“‘The only thing I know anything about is leprosy,’ he said, that night,
after a lot of queer talk. I very seldom argue; I just smoke and wait.
You’ve _got_ to assume that people know their own business best. Dorrien
had run down to Molokai while his wife stayed in Honolulu. I’ve never
been there myself. He told me a lot about it that same night. He wasn’t
romantic _pour deux sous_, Dorrien wasn’t; but he talked about it as if
his heart were in it. I remember an old missionary chap who went on in
the same way about the Fijis. Not that Dorrien held with the
missionaries; but they both spoke with passion--as if sin and disease
could draw men like lovers, panting with blind desire, sheer across the
planet, just to help, and then die. Men will go out and overturn the
stew-pots, and preach vegetarianism to cannibals, and go into the
stew-pot themselves in the end, who couldn’t stand a week of Salvation
Army slum-work. Dorrien was something like that, only with the idealism
left out. He seemed all passionate perception, like a child. Yet
somewhere in him was that thin little adamantine streak of pure
intellectualism. If it hadn’t been there, he’d never have held together
at all: there _must_ have been something inflexible for all that clay to
mass itself upon. And so he somehow cared, when it came to leprosy. I
suppose, some time or other, the thing had baffled him--tantalized him
like an unscrupulous woman.
“It’s no use saying, ‘Why didn’t he love elsewhere?’ He happened not to.
Meanwhile his wife was taking him home to a fashionable practice which
he was sadly endangering by absence. And there were the little girl’s
teeth, you see. There had been some excuse of a holiday combined with
study of special conditions in the Orient, but all excuses had expired.
He was facing a P. & O. boat, and he was just sparring for time. It was
all rather a mess, as I had learned by three in the morning. But it
distinctly wasn’t a mess that an outsider had anything to do with. To
tell the truth, if Mrs. Dorrien hadn’t seemed such a good sport, I’d
have had more faith in him; but who can ever tell? He left me finally
and went to bed, and the next day Mrs. Dorrien went into the town to
look up steamer connections while he made up sleep. At least, that was
the account she gave.
“I went off into the interior for a few days; pretended I was going to
look up a lot of ruins that, of course, I’d seen before--tombs of Arab
priests and such. The hotel had got on my nerves, and the suburbs, full
of Europeans, were even less what I was looking for. Besides, the
Dorriens weren’t my affair; yet Dorrien was beginning to clutch me as if
they were. I wouldn’t run away from any solitary creature, either man or
woman--and I’ve been in some strange galleys, too--but when it comes to
man and wife, ‘_ruf’ nicht die Polizei_,’ as the Germans have it. The
Dorriens looked to me pretty near the breaking-point. I hoped they would
either leave or have it out before I got back. When I got away, I forgot
about it. I’m foot-loose, and nobody’s business is really mine. Fancy
being responsible to and for a white-and-gold creature like Mrs.
Dorrien! The very thought of it makes you want to take ship.
“That particular interior wasn’t much good--eternal rice-fields, and
little villages, one just like another, full of little people. The
vegetation was something you couldn’t dream, even on hashish, but I’m
dead used to vegetation. I nosed around for a few days, and then decided
to quit the island entirely. I had engagements elsewhere, if I chose to
think so. Anyhow, I wanted something doing. So I went back to Soerabaya.
You get boats from there all over.
“They said at the hotel that the Dorriens were leaving the next day. I
didn’t look them up; but when I came down to dinner, Mrs. Dorrien was in
her place, waiting for her husband. She beckoned to me and smiled, and I
had to go over, though she looked more like a Frenchwoman than ever, and
I was more a sweep than usual. I had to go; but I went thinking what a
damn subtle thing marriage is at home, and how glad I was to be single.
There are other sides to it, of course; but that’s the permanent one.
Think of being married to a woman who would dress like that for an
undercooked, half-caste dinner in a steaming Soerabaya hotel! Think,
that is, of what she must be like at close range. She made me sit down.
“‘We are leaving to-morrow, Mr. Hoyting.’
“‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t screw out more.
“‘Yes. We’ve had our mail. We have to go.’ She straightened her
shoulders and swept the room with a bored look, as if it were a ballroom
full of men who danced badly. I didn’t know whether she was lying about
the mail or not. I never get letters, thank God! I haven’t any address.
What was certain was that I did not want her to tell me what was in
their mail. I sidestepped.
“‘I don’t suppose Soerabaya will soon see the like of that dress again,
Mrs. Dorrien.’ It _was_ the 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 new _sarong_ since 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 of them 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, but it 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, but _I_ know 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 of their 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. ‘_That_ is 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? She
hated 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 went on, ‘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 the female 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 conditions _plus_ a 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 a
_beau 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,’ she couldn’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 a _beau 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
not again 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 absolutely _not_ up 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 of them 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 began to 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 detail of 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.