For the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore
had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the
true tale of Paramore--the tale which has been left to me in trust by
Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was
nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes
unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if
Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian
bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol.
As a symbol, I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish
that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all
of you. His bad anthropology doesn’t matter--a dozen big people are
delightedly setting that straight--but the adventure of his soul
immensely does. Rightly read, it’s as sound as a homily and as dramatic
as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by opposing generals to
be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet
wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by
chance upon his breast.
I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more
merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I
do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the
general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every
field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most
important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age,
are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we--the
age--are personally injured and fall to “muck-raking.” It is typical
that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was
discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all
began to despise him. The situation, for that matter, was not without
elements of humor. The facts, as I and the general public knew them,
were these--before Hoyting, with his damnable inside information, came
into it.
Paramore sprang one day, full-armed, from some special academic
obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the
Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its
most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual
newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper
interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly emerging, laden
with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and
revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He
could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many
people read him. That, however, was not Paramore’s fault. His heart, I
believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists
have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet
picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large
measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won
theories about mother-right and group-marriage; and he didn’t hesitate
to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak
lightly of _The Golden Bough_. No scientist had ever spent so long at
primitive man’s very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous
achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect
than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won
him the momentary admiration of the public to which exogamy is a
ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot.
It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the
newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a
brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell
Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A
few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s
book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a
learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the
great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions--in
fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get more
out of Paramore than he can get out of himself--but do get down on your
knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost
fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to
discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker
was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him
on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in
London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all
should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about
Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew--as I learned afterward--but he
told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in
the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter
of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what
Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and
took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been
west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It
was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg,
etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying
(his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had
all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had
achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the
holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain
amount of time, but that was the net result.
Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an
accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was
hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a
happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next
thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to
the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been
stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle
press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I
certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic
spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly, as if
in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud,
Hoyting sent for me.
I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of
course, he hadn’t told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and
he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from
Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed
in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon, so close at hand, until
Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room.
I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn’t an idea of what he
wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without
preliminaries--except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was
a rather appalling preliminary.
“Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don’t know just why I had drifted to
Sénégal, except that I’ve come to feel that if there must be colonial
governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing
that pushed me, I’ve forgotten it.
“They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A
little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their
African inn, but not half so likely to go _fantee_ as the romantic
Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come
in, bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but, even so, there
wasn’t any particular reason for my staying so long in Dakar. I hung on
like an alarm that has been set. I couldn’t go off--or on--until the
moment I was set for. I don’t suppose the alarm-clock knows until the
vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull,
glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo basin,
which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of
provincial France. They do that everywhere--you’ll have noticed?
“I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to
dine with the Fathers. It isn’t that I hold with them much--Rome was
introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman--but all
travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable
missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with
savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was
they who introduced me to Paramore.”
“Oh, it’s Paramore!” I exclaimed. “Heaven, forgive you, Hoyting, you are
always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at
Paramore’s! By the way, I suppose you know that no one knows anything
except that he’s dead.”
“Umph! Well, I do,” returned Hoyting. “That’s what I was set for--like
the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in
there with fever. I don’t go hunting for things like that, you
understand. I’d as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier’s
_beaux yeux_.”
“I didn’t know you knew whether eyes were fine or not.”
“I suppose I don’t. But I can guess. There are always other people to
tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all for _le bon Dieu_ and Pothier.
She was a good sort--married out of a little provincial convent-school
to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She
loved him--for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever
noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam
across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have
about war! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers.
Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they
really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament.”
Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his
pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a
moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another
hemisphere.
“So he was taken to the Pothiers’.”
“You’re leaving out a lot,” I interrupted. “Why ‘so,’ and why to the
Pothiers? You said to the Mission.”
“Oh”--His brows knitted. He didn’t like filling up his own gaps. The
things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic
context! “The Mission was full of patients--an epidemic had been running
through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament
of baptism wasn’t some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it’s all
magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn’t a convert--he was by way of
being an agnostic, I imagine--and the Fathers weren’t, in a sense,
responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that
they’d never have sent him away if they hadn’t had a better place to
send him to. The Mission was no place at the moment for a man with
fever--sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who
were hiding _gri-gris_ under their armpits and looking more than askance
at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two
years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior.
They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her
fine eyes, I believe--oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of
ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the
world--and a bit of a Puritan to boot.
“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting
walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the
eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in
any one of those taxis. And Paramore _was_ a bit of a Puritan, for all
his years of fake anthropology.”
His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me.
“I was involved in Paramore’s case. I’ve been to the bottom of this
thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed--emptied himself like a well; and
at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void,
up to the black brim. Then he died--quite vacuous. He had simply poured
out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar, swimming in the
infernal pool of Paramore’s cerebrations. You can’t, on the banks of the
Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic,
I could have turned his case over to the Bishop. But bishops had nothing
to do with Paramore. And that’s where you come in.”
“Oh, I come in, do I?” I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come
in where Hoyting leaves off.
“Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You’ll take
this packet when you leave. You don’t suppose I’m going to London!”
“I didn’t know Paramore.”
“No; but I did. And when I’ve told you, you’ll see. I don’t take a trip
like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt.”
“Go on.” It’s what one always says to Hoyting.
“I can’t tell it coherently--though I can tell it, I suppose, more
coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?”
The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and
muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after
all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that
in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been
believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story
out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I
know of has ever tried to be a _raconteur_ for Hoyting. He has use only
for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid a _précis_
as I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it.
When I had finished: “He’s completely discredited, then?”
I waved my hands. “My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore’s word
about the manners and customs of his own household.”
“It’s a pity,” said Hoyting simply. “It makes it harder for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do with Paramore. If there’s one thing that interests
me less than his disaster, it’s his rehabilitation.” I didn’t mean to be
flippant, but Hoyting’s ominousness invited it.
“Oh, rehabilitation--no; I dare say, between us, we couldn’t manage
that. I merely want to get the truth off my hands.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette. The atmosphere of my room was already
densely blue, and I opened the window. His hand shot up. “Shut that,
please. I can’t be interrupted by all those savage noises. God! for a
breath of sea air!”
I sat down and faced him. After all, the man has never lived who could
stage-manage Hoyting.
“Did you ever meet the Australian?” he asked.
“Whitaker? No.”
“A pretty bad lot, I gather.”
“Do you mean that he lied?”
“Oh, no. From what Paramore said, I should think that was just the one
thing he didn’t do.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his breast and narrowed his eyes. Then he
shook his head very slowly. “At my time of life it’s silly to be always
saying how strange things are, and how clever life is, and all that
literary nonsense; but, on my word, if ever a scene was arranged to make
a man a protagonist in spite of himself, this was it. Every element in
that Dakar situation was contrived to bring Paramore out. He had fever
and the prescience of death--which is often mistaken, but works just as
well notwithstanding; he had performed his extraordinary task; he was in
love with Madame Pothier. The cup was spilling over, and I was there to
wipe up the overflow.”
Hoyting was silent for a moment. Then he spoke irritably.
“I don’t know where to begin. There isn’t any beginning to this story.
It hasn’t any climax--or else it’s all climax. It’s just a mess. Well, I
shall have to begin, I suppose, if Paramore didn’t. Perhaps the first
thing was his sitting up in bed one morning and peering out at me
through his mosquito-netting. It gave him a queer, caged look. His voice
went with it--that cracked and throaty voice they have, you know. ‘Do
you know Whitaker?’ he asked.
“‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘You’d better lie down.’
“If you could have seen him then, you’d have felt, as I did, that he’d
better not talk; that he wouldn’t say anything one wanted to hear.
“‘It was Whitaker that finished me.’ Still he peered out at me.
“‘You’re not finished.’ I remember lying quite peevishly about it. He so
obviously _was_ finished.
“‘Yes, I am. And Whitaker did it. Oh, I mean I really did it.’
“I give you my word that he was startling, with that unnatural voice,
that cunning look in his eyes the sick often get, and those little white
cross-bars pressed against his face.
“‘Lie down,’ I said again. ‘What did Whitaker do?’
“He shook his head a little, and the netting moved on his face. It was
horrid.
“‘He told them I couldn’t have done the stuff I’d brought back.’
“‘Did he know?’
“‘He didn’t know anything about folk-lore, but he did know where I’d
been.’
“He spoke so impersonally that it led me on to ask questions. After all,
I had told Madame Pothier I would stay with him through the morning,
and I had to make the time go somehow for both of us. It was remittent
fever without the chills, and there were fairish mornings at first. The
afternoons and nights, when the malady rose like a wave and broke
horribly after midnight--oh, those were bad. Madame Pothier and the
regimental doctor took care of those. It looked fairly hopeful when he
arrived, but finally all the worst symptoms came out, and before the end
it was very bad. It was one of those cases that might, at the last, be
yellow fever and just technically isn’t. Poor Paramore! Did I say that
his face looked as old as all time under that shock of sun-bleached
hair? It did.
“That questioning was the first of it. It fixed the name of Whitaker in
my mind. I thought I’d find out something about him. You never can tell
what will comfort a man in that state. But the Pothiers had never heard
of him, or the Fathers at the Mission. I only mention those first
remarks of Paramore’s to show you how I came into it. I had never heard
of Paramore himself until that time in Dakar. I never read newspapers.
All those good people said Paramore was a ‘grand savant,’ but they
seemed a little vague, themselves. The only person who wasn’t vague was
a lean, old, parchment-colored Father who was waiting for the next boat
to take him home. He had been twenty years in the interior, and he was
worn out--all except his voice, which was startlingly deep. He said no
one could afford to study fetich but a priest. Père Bernard had no
respect for anthropologists--thought they took a collector’s interest in
preserving various primeval forms of sin, I suppose. I didn’t care for
his mediæval manners, and I went back to Paramore with more sympathy.
What a world! I always wondered if Paramore had some time, somewhere at
the back of beyond, got him on the raw. Well, we shall never know. And
yet I dare say the reverend old gentleman is here in Paris at this very
moment. What a world! Nothing in it, according to Père Bernard, that
isn’t magic--either white or black.
“I can’t tell you by what steps Paramore led me to his tragedy. I don’t
remember those days separately at all. They went in jagged ups and
downs--times when he talked, times when he was dumb, times when he
might be said to rave. Then, too, he brought things out in no order at
all. It was as if he lay in a world beyond perspective and expected you
to sit outside of Space and Time, too, and see it all whole, as he did.
That was rather unpleasant--he had so the manner of being dead and
seeing his life from so far off that one thing in it was as near and as
real as another. There was absolutely no selection. It was only by
recurrence of certain things that you got any stress. And out of it all
I managed to get the three main facts: the Royal Anthropological
Institute, Whitaker, and the soul of Paramore. Madame Pothier was a
close fourth, but she was only an accessory after the fact. That I
swear. You believe it?”
I jerked my head up. “Good Heavens, Hoyting, how do I know? You haven’t
told me anything yet.”
He rubbed his hands over his brows and frowned with closed eyes. “No; I
beg your pardon. But, as I say, I see the whole thing. It’s hard to
tell. It never was told to me. And I didn’t want you to think it was one
of those silly tales of a man’s turning hero because he’s in love with a
woman. If Paramore had asked me to tell Madame Pothier the story I’m
telling you, I’d have turned on my heel and left him, if he’d been at
the death gasp. I swear I would.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette--the world’s supply must be
inexhaustible!--and seemed to brace his huge body for concentrated
effort.
“Well, here it is. Paramore had one passion in life--one
double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion--and that passion was
anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical
devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want
to understand.”
I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of
that neat _précis_ I had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come,
Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars--not even when
they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.”
One look at Hoyting’s gigantic lassitude put me in the wrong. It would
take more than Paramore to upset Hoyting. He was perfectly firm, though
very much bored. Imagine neurasthenia and Hoyting bunking together! One
can’t. Hoyting smiled.
“No, it’s not nerves. Only you people who want everything all of a
piece--you irritate me. The point about Paramore is that he combined
contradictions. He was magnificently human. And as I am in possession of
facts, I ask you to suspend your silly judgment until I’ve done. If you
know anything about me, you know that I don’t go in for theories.”