In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and
Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.
She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe
that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's
deepest desires. She stood still. The world--this new world drenched
in an unprecedented quality of moonlight--gradually became distinct.
She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of
verification.
As in his picture he seemed at once rugged and fine, resolute and
gentle. He was very quiet, like one who has willed to be so; but a
certain shyness remained in him, and presently announced itself to her.
Whereupon, remembering that she was beautiful, and that her beauty had
a way of troubling men, Lilla felt her own timidity transmuted into joy.
"Are your jungles better than this?" she asked.
"The charm of my jungles overlies a welter of stupid cruelty and deadly
waste. Would it surprise you to know that I should like to see all the
world as nobly ordered as this landscape?"
She did not grasp the meaning of the words, being too deeply occupied
with seizing upon those syllables, those living tones, and dropping
them one by one into the treasury of her heart.
Glancing down at the aquatic garden, he remarked:
"These three basins would please my Mohammedan friends, who like to see
their flowers inverted in still water, like a mirage come true."
"Yes, no doubt they have their ideals."
"And often dream of them in very pleasant places."
He described certain gardens of the East. He made her see nests of
color unexpectedly blooming in the midst of deserts, behind walls of
sundried mud overgrown with Persian roses, and with airy pavilions
mirrored in pools that were seldom darkened by a cloud. Under date
palms the white-robed Arabs sat smoking. From time to time black
slaves brought them coffee flavored with ambergris. After sundown, at
the hour called "maghrib," when the sky was turning green, having
performed their ceremonial ablutions, they prayed.
"For what?"
"Behind the formal words? Who knows? For whatever they desired most.
Probably for something that nobody would suspect."
"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.
In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible. Their
minds, restricted to puerilities, had never grown up. Their bodies
were so lax that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted
them. Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo
clocks and music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away
in caskets, then bedizening themselves all over again. Their servants,
who had known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave
markets, told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a
thousand devils of ingenuity and wit. And those scented ladies with
feeble flesh, hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening
for a while in vague regret, all at once became bored. Whereupon they
fell to playing parchesi and eating sweetmeats.
In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a
similarity to her own life. Or, at least, she felt that her life, if
he knew it in detail, would seem to him almost as trivial.
"Poor souls," she said. "But one surely finds others out there," she
persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it
intently. "White women, for example, the women of the empire builders?
At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be almost
inevitable. Each finds in the other an overwhelming congeniality? The
loneliness round about exerts a tremendous persuasion?"
"Oh, yes," he assented, with a smile. "Especially if the lady smokes a
pipe."
He told her of an Englishwoman whom he had met in the Masai veldt,
hunting for maneless lions--an amazon in breeches and boots, at the
head of her own safari. Week after week she had led her dark-skinned
retainers through the wilds, cheerily doctoring them in their
sicknesses, herself never ailing or weary. At the charge of a lion she
had withheld her fire till the last possible moment. By night, the
safari encamped, she had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one
knee cocked over the other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the
gossip of ragged wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and
the smell of burning fat.
"I find such women incomprehensible," Lilla declared, with a profound
animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves were
so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging lions,
who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the blood
that she had shed.
Lawrence Teck, after a moment's struggle with himself, blurted out:
"I assure you that when we fellows dream of women it's of a different
sort."
"Oh, of course. Of the one that you've left behind, I suppose."
Sometimes, he assented presently; in which case the one at home would
be immensely enriched by that wide separation. But it often happened
that such an exile, when no specially congenial woman had given him her
heart, constructed from his imagination an ideal, a vision capable of
brightening the wilderness with the most exquisite charms. Or else he
might find an unattainable ideal ready-made. Thus it was that uncouth
sailors, on long voyages, treasured the photographs of unknown
actresses in fancy costume, as a religious devotee might treasure an
ikon. Or thus a soldier in some Congo fort, while gradually succumbing
to the malefic spell of the encircling forests, yearned toward the
portrait of a princess that he had clipped from an old illustrated
magazine--toward a divinity whom he could never know, but whom he
adored because her nature and life were so different from his.
"How romantic men are!" she exclaimed, turning away her head.
He seemed abashed; but he returned:
"And are women never tempted to renounce that famous practicality of
theirs?"
She walked on along the terrace. The moonlight intensified her
ethereal aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the
contrast between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength.
At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according
with the faltering of her heart beats. But it was in an almost
indifferent tone that she inquired:
"You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?"
"Yes, everything's settled."
She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal
from that scene of its peculiar charm.
"Why are you returning?"
He hesitated. Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far
north of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the
stone city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were
supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the
fabled Land of Ophir. Who knew what ancient idols, what Himyarite
inscriptions, what trinkets of gold, might not be found there?
"How can such a matter be important enough to make you risk your life
amid deadly fevers and insects, venomous reptiles, wild beasts and
wilder men?"
In that respect the expedition would be tame. The journey into the
interior would consist of undramatic drudgeries and discomforts, of
association with a primitive folk whom he had never failed to make his
friends, of precautions that would confound the reptiles, the fevers,
and the disease-bearing insects. As for the wild beasts, they asked
nothing better than to be left alone.
"Oh, yes," she assented, trailing her fan along the balustrade, "a hero
must be modest on such points. Yet it seems to me an abnormal vanity
that drives one into those places, just in order that one may say,
'It's I who have found a new pile of ruins, a few scraps of gold, in a
jungle.'"
After a moment's reflection, he confessed:
"I gave you my secondary reason, because I thought you might find it
more interesting than my chief one."
It was true, he said, that he hoped to find a new Zimbabwe there; but
his principal task would be to make a geological survey of some
territory believed to be very rich in certain minerals. He was going
for a group of capitalists who, if he brought back an encouraging
report, would obtain large concessions for exploiting the land. It was
a gamble; the territory in question was virtually unexplored. That
region, moreover, was peopled by a tribe opposed to exploitation, and,
for that matter, even to visits from their white-skinned nominal
rulers. But he had always been successful in dealing with savages; so,
since this was to be as much a diplomatic mission as a geological
survey, he had seemed the one for the task.
From this explanation she derived the idea that he was not a rich man,
that perhaps until recently he had never thought of money as important,
but that now, for some reason, he had determined that his fortune must
be increased.
The waltz had ended. The dancers were appearing on the terrace. Some,
descending the staircases between the pools, wandered away through the
gardens. Here and there a match flared up against unnaturally tinted
foliage. Farther on, a spangled dress shimmered beside a fountain,
then, accompanied by a dark shadow, disappeared into a charmille. A
clock in the valley struck eleven, its last vibrations mingling with a
laugh that rose, through the moonbeams, from a marble kiosk enveloped
in flowers. And as the breeze, heavy with the fragrance of many
blossoms, caressed her face, Lilla felt that the gardens must be full
of hidden persons each of whom had at last found the amorous complement.
At the end of the esplanade, in the light of the French windows,
Cornelius Rysbroek's face appeared, then drifted away.
"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck. "Just now he wanted
me to take him along to Africa. He seemed quite unhappy, especially
when I had to tell him no. Indeed, he gave me a rather curious
impression of misery and recklessness. What is it? An unfortunate
love affair?"
"So it's that," she vouchsafed, staring at him intently, "which starts
men off to the wilds?"
"Sometimes it's that which brings them back from the wilds. I could
give you an instance----"
They, too, were now descending the steps between the pools.
The leafy alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that
had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They
came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone
benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was
lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure
with a convulsive energy, while her upturned face wore a look of
happiness. Lawrence Teck made the comment:
"It appears that a rather primitive Greek gentleman has found a nymph
bathing in a pool. If I remember, mortals who tried to capture nymphs
were liable to die."
"Yes," she assented, staring at the upturned face of the captive. "He
should not have tried."
"But no doubt it's hard for them to be reasonable at such times,
especially when the person that they try to catch seems so strange, yet
so overwhelmingly congenial--the embodied dream."
"Then she should have prevented him."
"Perhaps she tried to, with the usual success when it's a question of
love in opposition to fear."
Lilla turned aside, drawing a cloud of golden tulle around her slender
shoulders. "Does that acuteness also come to one in the jungle?" She
seated herself upon the nearest stone bench. "What is that story of
yours?"
"A story of one of those sentimental exiles and the picture of his
ideal."
The man, he said, had found the picture in a tattered magazine in the
Afrika Hotel at Zanzibar. Of all the thousands of fair faces that he
had seen depicted or in the flesh, it was this face whose peculiar
beauty clutched suddenly at his pulse. But it was not so much the
physical beauty that exerted the spell; nor was it, in this instance,
the attractiveness of the incomprehensible. For the man divined from
his contemplation of those features the nature of the woman, all her
complexities, and even her emotional fragilities. There came to him
the well-known conviction, "It's she that I've always been seeking."
At dawn, smothering under his mosquito net, with the din of Arab and
Hindu, Masai and Swahili voices drifting in through his shutters, his
first waking thought was of her.
He cut out the picture and kept it in his notebook.
It was there, against his breast, for many months. It traveled into
still stranger places. It passed, through Gallaland and Abyssinia,
into the country of the Blue Nile spearmen, across Darfur and Wadai,
where the Emir's men rode out in the helmets and chain mail that their
ancestors had copied from the Crusaders. It crossed the Sahara,
skirting the strongholds of the Senussia Brotherhood, penetrating the
wastes patrolled by the Tuaregs, ferocious camel riders whose mouths
were always muffled in black bandages. It went north to the steppes of
the Ziban, from which the tribe of the Ouled Nail scattered their
feather-crowned dancing girls from Ceuta to Suez. And in the Atlas it
entered the hill castles of Kabyles, whose unveiled, fierce-eyed,
red-haired women, drenched with half a dozen perfumes, and clattering
with silver, coral, turquoise and gold, were swifter than snakes with
their knives.
At last it was yellow and crinkled, that picture of the fair unknown,
which had become for him, in consequence of so many vivid reveries,
like a living companion.
There were days when he forgot her. Then suddenly, under those desert
constellations, he remembered her with a thrill. Or else, before the
tent of some nomad sheikh, all at once she fluttered from the notebook
to the silken carpet, on which girls with little brown feet had just
been making their cuirasses of gold coins leap to the music of
flageolets and drums.
And sometimes, though he had never before been superstitious, he felt
that this picture was a sort of amulet. For twice when he was in
danger, and there seemed to be small hope of his survival, there had
come to him the fortifying thought, "Not yet, because I haven't found
her in reality."
"Just a picture!" Lilla uttered, thinking of another picture that had
been hardly less potent.
Yes, but when he returned home, after a dozen efforts and
discouragements one day, merely by chance, he saw her alive, breathing.
She whirled past in a limousine. She disappeared into the haze of a
city street in summer. Whereupon he thought, "I was not mistaken; it's
inevitable." He accepted the fatalism of his Arab friends, who believe
that every man's destiny is fixed.
"He found her again?"
"Finally. There were difficulties."
"And they were happy ever after?"
He did not reply.
She looked over this magical garden toward the future, which now
appeared like one of those deserts, but bereft of all enchantment, and
covered with clouds that were not positive enough to rain. Then,
gazing at the marble warrior that had seized the marble nymph, she said:
"I suppose it was you?"
"Yes," he assented, and pressed her hand to his lips.