“It was the only thing he cared about, I tell you. Nature implants
something in every man that kills him in the end. Paramore wanted
recognition from a very small, almost undiscernible, group of people
whom neither you nor I nor any one else gives a damn for--a few old
gentlemen in frock coats and gold eye-glasses who raise their poor, thin
old eyebrows over the sins of Paris, but feel a tremulous pleasure in
the nastiness of Melanesia. Why did he? Just because he believed they
are a sacred sect. He honestly believed that anthropology was important.
He thought it was big and real and vital and solemn. He had supreme
respect for facts. He put every penny he had or ever hoped to have into
going out to acquire them in the bush. The bush isn’t nice. The climate
distressed him, the natives shocked him, the solitudes terrified him.
Why did he go? Because he held, quite austerely, the scientific attitude
towards data, evidence, material. Those old gentlemen needed more facts
to feed their theories with, and Paramore was the boy to get them. When
there’s neither health nor wealth nor pleasure to be got from doing a
thing, a man doesn’t do it except for an idea.”
“Fame?” I suggested.
“Fame? Well, even if Paramore had told the truth, he wouldn’t have had
any fame that you’d notice. It was just a pathetic belief in the
sanctity of those few old gentlemen who potter round among unclean
visions of primitive man. They can’t, in the nature of the case, be very
numerous. If you want fame, you go for the crowd. He could have done a
little fancy exploring if he’d wanted fame. No! Paramore had the
superstition.”
“What really happened in Australia?”
“The only interesting thing happened inside Paramore. He decided to
lie.”
“He must have been a bit of a coward. If he wanted so desperately to
collect those filthy facts, why didn’t he collect them?”
“Bad luck--nothing else. He went as far as he could. But he was no
seasoned traveller, you know. He just came to grief, as any man might,
there in the wilderness. The stars in their courses--and so forth. He
didn’t get so far west as he had meant to. Men went back on him, maps
turned out incorrect, supplies failed awkwardly, everything happened
that can happen. Then his interpreter died--his one absolutely
trustworthy man--and the whole game was up. He lost his head; he
believed his eyes; he believed lying natives. They made game of him, I
dare say, in some grim, neolithic way. They said anything and everything
about marriage customs--quite different things from group to group. He
had bad luck with his own men--half a dozen of them died of dysentery or
something--and he had to recruit on the spot. Why on earth should they
tell him the truth? It was more fun not to. And, of course, now and then
he pushed into some corner where the only use they had for him was to
eat him. From those places he had to withdraw speedily. It’s not an
anthropologist’s business to get killed unless he can be sure of
getting his note-books home. He’s more like a spy, apparently, than a
soldier.
“After eight or ten beastly months, despair was reeking round him like a
mist. I think he said that, himself. His mind tried to peer out through
it. He got nothing but a jumble of reports from those aborigines. Time
after time they’d promise to let him in on some rite, and then their
faces would be shamelessly blank when he kept his appointment. They said
nothing that wasn’t carefully contradicted. Certain things he did get
hold of, of course. Paramore swore to me that a good bit of his book was
true as truth--but not enough to prove anything, to found theories on.
About three of the note-books were genuine, but they made nothing
coherent, he said. He put everything down, always intending to check and
sift later.”
I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his
narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential
that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going
to be in your hands, and the more information you have the better. I’m
not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful.
I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people
would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of
incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having
luck against him.”
“No,” I protested stiffly; “for lying.”
“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier
if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you
never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re
quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I
advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole
business easier.”
“Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment,
go further than that.
Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had
been pleading with him not to stop.
“One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have
been a little off his head, you know.... He wouldn’t confess his
failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books;
he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A
good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his
learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been
authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently
plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and
he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze
the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if
he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he
corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and
parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in
some--a very few--of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And
then I would contradict a few things.’
“Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen
got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful
book. There were things that occurred to me--I put them in. Any one who
knows any folk-lore can make up customs with his eyes shut. After a
little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that
way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did.
But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote
it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later--much
later--at Whitaker’s place.’
“I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember
much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the
idea--his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the
work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the
notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In
the end his idea rode him--and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but
you can work that out for yourself--how his inspiration would have come,
and what would have happened.”
“But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the
‘lust of making a beautiful book’--quite the contrary.”
“Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve. _Place aux dames!_ ...
“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had
stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker.
There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and
made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local
histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was
a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah
and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks
before he finally started on his expedition--if you can call an
unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition.
The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There
was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him,
least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not
to have noticed the girl--rather deliberately not to have noticed her,
she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to
prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well
as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out.
The love affair went on all over the plantation, while Whitaker and
Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well
enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept
out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason
to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled
references--mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and
flow of the fever.
“But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I
suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest
feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated
research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able
to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about,
she had pricked his imagination once or twice--this bright creature that
flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and
Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration
was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said--it was aimless
nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t
love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what he
believed its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan
Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair
complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was
all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it
went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl
would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.
“Well--you can see the rest from here. He went back with his big, insane
idea, leaving despair farther behind him at every step. He struck
straight back again to Whitaker’s place, and after nuisances and delays
and impossible absurd misadventures, he got there. All the time, he
carried his idea carefully intact, like a cup filled with precious
liquid. He was most anxious to get to some place where he could sit down
with pens and ink. He didn’t doubt Whitaker would take him in.
Everything was to be completed before he sailed for England. The story
would have been very different, I’m inclined to think, and Paramore
might have been living to this day if the fiancé hadn’t turned out a bad
lot and been shipped--or if Paramore himself hadn’t been a bit of a
Puritan.
“He found Whitaker very much surprised to see him back so long before
the date he had set, but only too glad to have him stay; and he also
found the girl, no longer flitting about, but brooding on the bough. The
rest was inevitable....
“Paramore got to work at once--making love to Joan Whitaker in the
intervals, almost from the beginning. Then--mark the nature of the
man--he found that the two things he was doing were incompatible.
There’s no telling whether Joan Whitaker would have objected to his
idea, but he seems to have been sure that she would if she knew. His
idea rode him--the idea of getting the better of his bad luck. He didn’t
want to cheat his fellow scientists, who had done him no harm, but he
did want to cheat his mean destiny. He personified it like an enemy, I
fancy. It must have been an obsession with him. Day by day, he saw
better what the book--his revenge--was becoming; and in the end there
was no mistaking it for a monstrous, magnificent lie, out of all
proportion to what he had first intended. Some men might have managed
even so--the men who keep life in water-tight compartments. Not
Paramore. He didn’t see his way to offering Joan Whitaker a liar for a
husband. It apparently never occurred to him to put the case before her.
There are very few cases you can put to a girl of eighteen. And, as I’ve
said, his feeling for her was all reverence and illusion and reversion
to type. Any niceish girl would have done the trick for him; and any man
would have looked eligible to her smarting conceit. But it was no
marriage of true minds--just an affair of circumstance and of innocent
senses, riotously collaborating. Madame Pothier--a finished
creature--would have been a very different matter. But he had never seen
her then....
“Oh, well; you see how it went. He was virtually staking everything on
that book, which was virtually writing itself, ‘like a damned
planchette,’ he told me. But he couldn’t let her stake anything on it;
he couldn’t even ask her to. Moreover, it was one of those inconvenient
situations where no explanation except the right one is of the slightest
use. So he packed up his manuscript and left for some address, that he
didn’t give, in New South Wales.”
“Like that?” I asked. The sudden turns of the thing were beginning to
interest me, in spite of my Pharisaism.
“Oh, there were alarums and excursions, of course. But I had to guess
them myself. Paramore’s mind had other things to dwell on. You can see
it all, though: the girl, who had thought he was drifting towards a
proposal; the man, Whitaker, who wanted his daughter settled and happy,
and thought Paramore would do--oh, a lot of primitive instincts that we
don’t recognize until they’re baffled; Paramore behaving as well as he
knew how, granted his obsession; and they choosing to consider him a
blackguard. Nothing violent happened, apparently, but you can understand
the zest with which Whitaker probably spoke in London. There was black
hate in his truth-telling. I fancy what Paramore had done wouldn’t in
the least have shocked Whitaker if it had been done by his son-in-law.
He didn’t mention the girl in that famous interview, and Paramore never
knew what had become of her. I don’t think he cared. He never saw
Whitaker again.”
Hoyting rose and walked to the window. The gray eyes looked curiously
down on the rue de Rivoli, as if, for charity, he had taken a box at a
pageant that bored him.
“This isn’t in my line, you know,” he said finally, turning back--“any
of it. Paramore reeked of civilization--Great Russell Street, if you
like. Hang civilization! Yet he went down with fever like a sick Kruboy.
Well, I must get on with this. I wouldn’t stop in Paris another night
for anything you could offer me.”
He sat down, his big frame shaking the little gilded armchair. But he
seemed loath to begin. His gray eyes were closed.
“How did he get to Dakar?”
Hoyting’s eyes were still closed as he answered. “That was Paramore
trying to wash himself white again. He was discredited, deservedly. He
had lied, deliberately and rather long-windedly. No loophole anywhere
for excuse. Paramore himself was the last man to find any excuse for it.
He never carried a devil’s advocate about with him. Doubtless, at home,
his own conscience had returned to him, in place of the changeling
conscience that had dwelt with him in the wilderness. He knew his
reputation was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. But he
set himself to atone. Some men, feeling as he did, would have shaved
their heads and put on a hair shirt. Not Paramore--though he would have
saved me a lot of nuisance if he had. No; he wanted to retrieve himself
in kind, as you might say. He would spend his life and his few crumbling
bits of fortune in _doing_ the thing he had pretended to do. He
would go to an utterly new field and stay till he’d amassed a
treasure--priceless, authentic facts, each an unflawed pearl. That’s why
he went to the Upper Niger--and here is his treasure.”
Hoyting opened his eyes suddenly, bent forward, and tossed the packet
across to me.
“There you have it all. He went, he did the incredible thing, and then,
quite properly, he died. The rest--the rest is mere drama.” He sat back.
I put the packet down. “Do you mean that these are his documents, and
that you believe in them? Have you read them?”
“Have I read them? Do I look as if I would read an anthropologist’s
note-books? Of course, I can see the humor of throwing over
Christianity, lock, stock, and barrel, only to spend your life studying
totemism--and on top of that, calling it a ‘career.’ If you think the
absurdity of it is lost on me, you’re quite mistaken. But I would be
willing to take my oath before the Last Tribunal that there isn’t a
false word in that whole pile. Paramore did it--the more honor to him.
When it comes to expecting any one else to believe it--I’m not such a
fool. But I should think my word might suffice for you.”