The commandant of the district, a melancholy, flaccid man with a
saffron-colored visage that looked like a half-deflated balloon, a
martyr to prickly heat, anaemia, and monotony, peered up from under the
moving punkah, to inquire of his subordinate in the doorway:
"He is still sitting there alone?"
"In the same position," the subordinate assented.
"I wish now that I hadn't shown it to him," said the commandant of Fort
Pero d'Anhaya, the district judge, the chief of the public works, the
receiver of taxes, the collector of revenues, the postmaster, the poor
exile prematurely aged by the African sun, the sorry "hero on the
outposts of civilization."
The subordinate shrugged his shoulders, and retorted:
"They would have told him on the coast."
"No doubt," said the commandant, giving the other a veiled look of
animosity, expressing thus a little of that loathing which had
gradually come to embrace everything habitual to this pitiless and
violently beautiful land. And when the subordinate had withdrawn, he
muttered to himself, as he returned to his apathetic contemplation of
the papers on his desk, "All the same, an ideal! And I killed it for
him a few days before there was any real need."
The moist heat of the equatorial summer penetrated the embrasures of
the fort, and made stifling even the dim, whitewashed room where
Lawrence Teck was sitting. Dusky from the sun, and seeming more
aquiline than ever in his gauntness, he remained like an effigy in the
suit of white duck that hung round him in loose folds, without so much
as a movement of his eyes. His hand rested on a tattered copy of an
English journal.
The commandant had extracted this journal from a pile of newspapers and
magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from
perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all
still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This
London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid some gossip
about music in America, the announcement that "the widow of Lawrence
Teck, the explorer," had married the young composer, David Verne.
Raising his eyes at last toward the casement in the embrasure, Lawrence
Teck saw, against a glaring turquoise sky, the fronds of a borassus
palm, which seemed, like all the rest of nature, to be sleeping. He
leaped to his feet, realizing that he was in Africa, still far from the
coast, and that at this moment, in another hemisphere----
The walls, the sleeping borassus palm, the patch of sky, all became red.
He walked to and fro, saying to himself in what seemed a jocular tone:
"Didn't wait long. A composer. Think of that!"
He stood still, his bearded face upturned toward the casement. He let
out a peal of laughter that froze the blood of the white-robed servants
who had been dozing in the stone corridor. They crept beyond earshot
of the stranger who, with his hips wrapped in bark cloth, had suddenly
appeared on the rim of the safe world against a background of shields
painted with the devices of the terrible Mambava.
But Lawrence Teck quickly recovered an external impassiveness. He sat
down, and considered:
"How naïve I was. That's when the sentimentalism gushes out, at the
end of long journeys, at the novelty of elegance and sophistication.
One deifies them then: one gives them a place much larger than they
ought to take up in life. How Muene-Motapa would laugh! He, virtually
a Neolithic man, never sinks below manly thoughts: his ambitions are
never enfeebled by the malady of sentimental love. So when he suffers
it is like a man, not like a descendant of medieval mystics and
_cavalieri serventi_."
His body relaxed, and he muttered:
"A bit of romance for her in imitation of some favorite play or book.
An emotional hour with the man from Africa--and now a musical fellow."
After a sharp expulsion of his breath he resumed that immobility which
extended even to his eyes. He recalled the thoughts of her that had
filled his captivity, all his memories of their union which had gained,
from "the pathos of distance," and from the passage of time, an
immaterial, an ideal, nobility, till at last, in the poetic fancy of
his lonely heart, she had become more remote and diffuse than the
moonlight on the mountain peaks, more intoxicating and elusive than the
odors of the equatorial flowers, an influence rather than a woman, a
vague hope, a sort of sanative faith.
It was, he reflected, all one with the romanticism that had driven him
to those many wanderings, the longing for what was so dissimilar to him
and yet intensely congenial--the magical deserts where one suffered
from heat and thirst, the gaudy jungles where death lay in wait for
one, the woman who concealed beneath an appearance of perfection an
incapacity for a decent period of grief. Ah, there was the perfidy
more deadly to him than all the plagues and vipers and weapons of
Africa!
He felt a profound revulsion from his own nature, which was flawed with
this sentimentalism, this jejune expectancy. At nightfall, rising
wearily from his chair, he wondered how he was to go on living with
himself.
"And after all is it her fault? I was dead. No doubt she shed some
tears. Because I loved her I expected too much of her."
Through the casement he saw a world fading away beneath clouds as black
as ink. A purplish-gray wall of rain was swiftly approaching the fort.
A pink fork of lightning stood out against the clouds: the crash of
thunder was followed by a noise like a thousand waterfalls; and
everything turned black.
The rolling thunder recalled to him the thunder of the Mambava drums at
the Dances of the Moon; and in the darkness he remembered the voice of
Muene-Motapa pleading with him to cast off the old, to become a new
man, to return amid the black forebears of mankind, kill hope and even
conscience, forget and be at peace. In the turmoil of the storm around
the fort and in his breast he even seemed to see the king in apparition
before him, and to hear the words:
"Consent, Bangana. Consent."
"Bah! as if anything in life were worth all this. All sound and fury;
all pompous silliness like this storm. Presently there will not be an
echo or a trace of it."
He found the door, burst out into the corridor, then walked sedately
under the flickering lamps toward the commandant's rooms. That
yellow-visaged man jumped up from behind his desk, stammering:
"Yes, it's dinner time."
The candles on the dinner table jarred at the peals of thunder; but
Lawrence Teck sat impassive. Toward the end of the meal he vouchsafed:
"Have you reported my showing up?"
"I was going to put it on the wire to-morrow morning."
"If it could be arranged I should like to precede the news to America."
The commandant, without knowing why, felt a touch of alarm.
"Then I'll send my report direct to the governor, and mark it
confidential at your request."
That night the commandant, lying under his mosquito net, wakeful from
prickly heat, was haunted by the face of Lawrence Teck. "She must be
very beautiful," he sighed. "Why didn't they print her picture?" And
he occupied himself with trying to imagine what she looked like.
By the time he was falling asleep he had decided that she must have
yellow hair and large, blue eyes. Just as he dozed off he had a
ravishing impression of her--a composite of an Austrian arch-duchess,
whose likeness he had admired in a periodical, and a Neapolitan singer
who had overwhelmed him in a music hall at home, long ago, when the
world had seemed a place stored with love, fame, and wealth, instead of
with prickly heat, malaria, and shiny, black faces.
"My angel!" breathed the poor commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya,
sleeping for the first time in many a night with an infantile smile on
his countenance that suggested a half-deflated balloon.