She entered her sitting room, locked the door, threw herself upon the
couch. Round lunch time there came a creaking in the corridor, a
knock. It was David in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud.
"No lunch. And perhaps no dinner. It's only a headache, dear. I
shall be all right."
"Your voice sounds----"
"Why not, since I'm suffering a little?"
The creaking sound died away.
At the first glimmer of dawn she was up. An hour later she entered
David's bedroom, dressed, hatted, and gloved. Her skin appeared
translucent. Her hands, drawing her cloak round her shivering body,
seemed almost too weak for that task.
"Why, where are you going?"
"To town. It seems that Parr has fallen ill."
She leaned over him quickly, thinking of all the kisses of betrayal
that had ever been bestowed upon the unaware. She went out leaving him
dumfounded by her appearance of feverish eagerness, energy, and illness.
On the ride to New York she lay back in the corner of the limousine,
her face burning, her lips pressed together. "He thinks I don't love
him, it seems!" That was the tender menace she hurled ahead of her, as
the car carried her swiftly--yet how slowly!--toward his rooms.
She remembered Anna Zanidov.
"The infallible clairvoyant! All that solemn nonsense! Ha, ha, ha!
Ha, ha, ha!"
She found herself at the door of his rooms, ringing, knocking, calling
his name through the panels. She recollected that she had the key in
her purse. The door swung back with a bang, and she ran through the
shaded apartment that was filled with the dull gleaming of weapons.
She stopped before the bed that had not been slept in. She returned to
the living room, and gazed at the withered petals lying round the gourd.
The doorway framed an undersized, obese old man who wore a skullcap of
black silesia. He was the janitor.
"Where is Mr. Teck?"
"Mr. Teck!" the janitor exclaimed in a shocked voice.
The words tumbled out of her mouth:
"He was here yesterday, surely. Didn't he leave any word?"
"Mr. Lawrence Teck?" the old fellow repeated, in consternation.
Behind him hesitated, in passing by, a young man with an inquisitive
face, who had under his arm a leather portfolio. She slammed the door
on them. In the shadowy room the very walls seemed to be crumbling.
She searched everywhere for a note, for some sign that he had been
here; but there was no object in the place not covered with dust.
Then, sunk in a stupor, she drove to the little house in Greenwich
Village. Her ring was answered by Parr's niece, the woman with the
sleek bandeaux. Mr. Teck had been here twice, the second time late
last night. On that occasion he had taken Parr away with him.
"Where to?"
"Ah, ma'am, if only I knew!"
Those faded, medieval eyes gazed at the benefactress in a sudden
understanding and intimacy; and Lilla thought, "You, too, perhaps in
some region far removed from your pots and pans, have had such a moment
as this!" And she would have liked to let her face fall forward upon
the bosom of that threadbare working dress, feel those toil-worn arms
close round her, and utter the plea, "Tell me how to bear such things,
to survive, to emerge into that strange serenity of yours."
She drove to Brantome's. The whole world was now tumbling down about
her ears.
Brantome rose from his desk, where perhaps he had been sketching out
some brilliant appreciation of _Marco Polo_. After one glance at Lilla:
"What's happened?"
She showed him a look of hatred that embraced the whole room; for it
was not only he, but also this abode of his, that had entrapped her.
In accents that lashed him like whips she told him everything.
The old Frenchman sat down with a thump, and let his ruined face droop
forward. She heard the hoarse rumble:
"What shall I do now?"
"Find him!"
She returned to the house in the country.
In the middle of the third night, the telephone beside her pillow gave
a buzz, more terrifying than a shout of fire, an earthquake, a knife at
the throat. Brantome was speaking. Parr had returned to the house in
Greenwich Village. Lawrence Teck had sailed secretly, that day, for
Africa.
She replaced the receiver on the hook, rested her head on her hands,
and remained thus for a long while. In the end she formed the words:
"That woman."
She was thinking of "the infallible clairvoyant."
PART III
CHAPTER XLVIII
In the early morning, while the trees round the house were still full
of mist, Lilla, in her sitting room, at the tall Venetian desk of green
and gold lacquer, redrafted for the twentieth time the message that she
wanted to send after Lawrence Teck by wireless. The rich
scintillations from the polished surfaces before her enveloped her
distracted countenance in a new, greenish pallor, as she traced, now
heavily, now very faintly, the words:
"If you knew what you've done----"
She paused; for the confusion of her brain made her think of a squirrel
frantically racing in a revolving cage. Then, seeing nothing except
the pen point, she wrote slowly, "What have you done? What have you
done?" And suddenly, in a convulsive hand that sprawled over half the
page, "Betrayed!" She stared at these words in amazement.
Hamoud-bin-Said entered the sitting room. He had on the dark blue joho
edged with a red pattern. His snowy under robe was bound with a blue
and red sash from which protruded the silver hilt of his dagger. His
tan-colored, clear-cut, delicately bearded face was expressionless, as
he said softly:
"The morning paper."
And she realized that the whole story had been discovered, scattered
broadcast.
For a time Hamoud regarded the prostration of her spirit from the
heights of fatalism. But presently, as he contemplated that limp pose,
which added one more novelty to her innumerable beautiful appearances,
the stoicism that had made him look mature gave way to the fervor of
youth--his limpid eyes turned to fire; his full, precisely chiseled
lips were distorted by a pang. He appeared as before, however, when
she raised her head and uttered:
"Burn it."
His reverie had a flavor of commiseration now, as though he were saying
to himself, "Who can catch all the leaves before they fall to the
ground? Who can sweep back the waves of the sea?" He responded:
"The men who make these things have been telephoning half the night.
And now they are here themselves."
"Here!"
"They are sitting on the steps," he affirmed, lost in a gloomy,
relishing consideration of the wonders of life. "They wish to talk to
you and to Mr. Verne."
He pronounced these words as if he had no idea of their enormity.
Her spirit stirred at this threat. All seemed lost except the
phenomenon of David living, by which, in her distraction, she hoped
somehow to justify herself. To the amazement of the world one might
oppose the fact of genius miraculously unfolding through her sacrifice.
But she thought, "The world! What is that?" And thereupon, "All the
same it shall not strike down this helpless creature." And the world
became a monster, unfeeling, indeed immeasurably malign, lying far off
with the teeming cells of its brain all plotting to rob her of her
wretched victory, and with the claws of one outstretched paw already
touching the threshold of this house.
"You are to drive them away."
She went on groping for phrases as one gropes for objects in the dark,
telling Hamoud that henceforth nobody from outside the house was to see
David till she had been informed, that all newspapers and letters must
come first to her, that the servants must not show by so much as a
look---- She became aware that among these phrases she was uttering,
with an air of calm consideration, others that had no intelligible
meaning, no relation to her objective thoughts. She heard herself say,
"Perhaps I had better see the servants myself. It would be a queer
thing if there were a draft from the pantry. There is a red pillow in
the fernery; it must be hidden--the spears, too----" She gazed in
perplexity at Hamoud, who appeared to be floating before her at the end
of a dark tunnel.
"For how long?" he sighed.
"For how long?" she repeated plaintively.
He seemed to grow taller. His face, which had taken on a blank aspect,
resembled the faces of those who, in Oriental tales, stand waiting to
fulfil a wish too sinister to have become an audible command. In that
instant she saw all problems rushing to their solution, except one; all
treasures recaptured, except the peace of conscience. She struggled as
one might to awake from some hypnotic spell in which one has been
assailed with frightful suggestions. She sprang up and transfixed him
with a look.
"Go! Do as I say!"
He bowed and departed.
At once she became so weary that she could hardly reach her couch.
"What am I to do?" she asked herself in a lost voice.
Somewhere, no doubt, there was another Lilla, sane, able to act as well
as to think, capable of solving even this dilemma. But that other
Lilla remained far away, perhaps in the realm of those who, with an
Alexandrian gesture, ruthlessly cut the knot of interwoven scruples,
and for a brief season triumphed over the accidents of life! Raising
her eyes in despair, she saw trembling on the ceiling a ray of light
that resembled the blade of a spear.
There descended upon her the full weight of her forebodings--the
superstitious dread that was typical of her emotional defectiveness,
and that had its origin, perhaps, in those two unhappy persons who had
been her parents. Yet when she moaned, "Ah, Anna Zanidov!" it was with
an accent of reproach as keen as though the prophetess of a tragedy
must be the cause of it.
The sunshine was dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her,
like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence
except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I
have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and
Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake
and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain."
She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague
smile:
"I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom
downstairs."
CHAPTER XLIX
Lilla descended the staircase in the transplendency of the many colored
windowpanes. The red of rubies, the blue of sapphires, the green of
emeralds, enwrapped her slim body that was still phenomenally moving in
its habitual harmoniousness. The serene progress of her person through
prismatic light, the smile that passed unchanged through rays of
varying resplendence, added another stanza to the poetry of flesh, a
stanza differing from all the rest, however, in its ominous quality of
strangeness. For now, bathed in the fortuitous magnificence of the
stained glass, she shone in herself with an unearthly bloom, as if an
abnormality that had always permeated her seductiveness were now at its
apogee--as if, with no one to witness, she had reached the utter
expression of her loveliness, which blazed forth for an instant
completely, before dissolving in this strange element that mingled with
it.
The multicolored lights released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed
round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond
the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the
wheel chair--the phantom because of which that other phantom was
traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her
footsteps. He remained with his head bowed forward, a prey, no doubt,
to such anxiety as ghosts experience. He expressed perfectly that
helplessness with which, when she had believed him to be real, he had
laid hold of her pity.
The outlines of all objects round her were clear and hard: everything
had assumed a look of preternatural density. She stood paralyzed by
the thought, "It is not illusion. It is reality."
He was looking at her.
What did he read in her face? Had he, too, heard the command that
seemed to have been shouted in her ears, "Tell him! Strike and be
free!"
"What is it?" he whispered.
Her lips parted, writhed, and uttered no sound. She was struck dumb,
no doubt by the feeling that if she spoke she would blurt out
everything, in obedience to that atrocious command.
All at once she seemed to have flames in her eyes. Everything had
turned the color of gold. She stood with her head thrown back, her
face changed by anguish; then she fled through that golden dazzle. On
the staircase the many-colored rays reached out to hold her, to restore
her to that exquisite transfiguration; she passed through them in a
flash; and indeed they could now have enhanced, instead of beauty, only
the triumph of that element which had made her beauty strange. She
stretched herself upon her couch, on her back, in the attitude of the
dead. She pronounced with an extreme rapidity, in muffled tones:
"I am on the ship----Faster! Faster!"
She uttered a cry that was heard all over the house.
When Hamoud and the servants came running, they found her rigid; but
while they were telephoning for the nearest physician the convulsions
began. Tossing about, she showed intense fear of all who tried to
approach her. The women ran from the room. Hamoud remained, rigid at
the foot of the bed, his face a dingy white, staring before him as one
who meditates on some immense, intolerable injury. When her cries
burst forth, he laid his hand upon his dagger, as if against these
invisible forces, these jinn from the Pit, that had taken possession of
her.
The physician arrived to find the convulsions ended. Hamoud, now
gripping his dagger as if he would presently escape this scene by
plunging the blade into his breast, uttered:
"Dying?"
"It will pass," the physician answered, with a movement of reproof.
Hamoud, afflicted by disbelief, by a despair that swept away his
fatalism, by a fury that called for revenge, bared his teeth and
demanded:
"I shall bring him? We show her to him?"
"Who?"
Hamoud glanced malignantly toward the floor.
"Hardly!"
The physician resumed his contemplation of the patient, who had
descended into a stupor that was to last for days.
CHAPTER L
There was a hush over the house amid the old trees. The servants moved
softly through the corridors, paused to whisper to one another, then
hurried out of sight as David Verne appeared in his wheel chair, slowly
propelled toward the sick room by Hamoud.
She seemed hardly to breathe as she lay in the gloom through which
drifted the white uniforms of the nurses, amid a dim glamour from all
the charming objects that had been meant to please her senses. Her
hair was spread out on the pillow to frame her colorless face, which
had now attained indeed the look of the "angelic messenger." But the
angelic messenger, the bearer of life to him, seemed to David on the
point of returning to the source of life.
He sat at the bedside, sometimes unable to extend his hand to touch her
hand, as though his strength were wholly a reflection of her strength,
so that with the latter's waning the former must flicker out.
"What is it?" he thought, lost in misery and wonder.
The physicians and the nurse looked at him askance, their secret pent
in behind their lips.
He felt round him the pressure of this secret. The air was full of
thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness
of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt
withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these
shadows which he felt might be less agonizing than that flash of light.
There was no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being
mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria,
emotional collapse.
Ah, yes; but from what cause?
Even Hamoud, he was sure, knew something that he did not know. The
Arab, while apparently as solicitous as ever, was changed. He had
taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed
taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a
sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and
round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an
effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a
window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of
vengeance--with something sensual in its look of cruelty.
Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that
Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the
deepest mass of shadows. One could make out only the pale blotch that
was his white skullcap, and the long pale streak that was the uncovered
portion of his white under robe. The eyes, the expression of the face,
were lost in blackness.
"I thought you called."
And he was gone.
In his own room, having noiselessly closed and locked the door, he drew
from his bosom the Koran. Holding the book reverently in his small,
right hand, he raised his head, and stood waiting with closed eyes for
inspiration. Presently, opening the Koran, he read:
"The doom of God cometh to pass."
This text was the answer to his prayer for guidance?
He seated himself by the window, and gazed out into the darkness. He
considered piously the wonders of terrestrial life, a succession of
accidents all foreordained by God, an apparent drifting that was in
fact one steady propulsion by the hand of fate. From the rich,
ancestral house of coraline limestone across the sea to strange lands.
From dignity to abasement. From loneliness to this faint, delicious
fragrance in which the heart dissolved. From a dream of freedom to the
service of love through the agency of death.
CHAPTER LI
It was twilight. David Verne sat in the study, his chin on his breast.
Hamoud, appearing in the doorway, gazed round the room. He had a
folded newspaper in his hand.
He looked carefully at the fireplace, where logs were piled ready for
lighting over a heap of brushwood and crumpled wrapping paper. Then he
regarded the center table, on which stood the Venetian goblet, the
caraffe, and the bottle filled with the medicine prescribed by Dr.
Fallows. In the expiring daylight Hamoud, motionless in his robes,
loomed paler than usual, his handsome face very grave.
The piano attracted his attention. In the shadows it had the aspect of
a squatting monster that bared at him the teeth of its wide mouth. As
if he had been awaiting this grotesque effect of challenge, he moved
toward the hazy windows, and began to curtain them.
David murmured listlessly:
"Has the doctor gone?"
Hamoud gave a slight start. With his hand on the last window curtain,
he inclined his head, listening in awe to the tremor of that voice.
When he had passed his tongue over his lips he responded:
"Yes."
He drew the last curtain slowly. As he did so, his visage, sharpened
by the dying light, was turned toward David; his gemlike lips, without
parting, seemed to say, "Look! it is the world of sky and trees, of
sunrise and noon, sunset and night, that I am shutting out."
The study lay in darkness.
Through this darkness Hamoud moved silently toward the center table.
He tweaked the lamp cord: a gush of mellow rays leaped out to cover the
scattered piles of manuscript, the Venetian goblet, the bottle of
medicine. Hamoud moved the wheel chair closer to these objects, so
that David by reaching forth his hand might touch them if he wished.
Then, after stepping back to consider this arrangement with a strained
look, he went to the fireplace, lighted a match, blew it out, and laid
it on the hearth. David stared at him.
"You have not lighted the fire. It is cold tonight."
Again Hamoud listened in awe to the sound of that voice.
"It is cold," he assented softly, with a shiver.
Still kneeling on the hearth, he contemplated the other as though he
were seeing him now for the first time. The feeble, romantic face
before him was not so pallid as his face; those enlarged, questioning
eyes were not so strange as his eyes. At that stare of undefined alarm
he felt, despite all his jealousy, contempt, and hatred, a twinge of
weakness; he remembered all the other's helpless attitudes that he had
sustained and eased. Of a sudden the habit of protection grappled with
his resolve, and might have conquered, for a time at any rate, had he
not recalled the sufferings of the beloved.
He rose and approached the wheel chair. The newspaper was in his left
hand, half concealed, like a weapon, in the folds of his robe.
He heard a feeble cry:
"What has happened? What has happened?"
"And I who have eaten his bread," thought Hamoud, in sudden shame and
horror.
If only some one would come! But the shadowy perspective of the living
room remained empty; and there was nowhere any sound except the beating
of his heart.
He lifted the bottle containing the solution of arsenic.
"Have not taken any of this?" He pronounced in a tone of suffocation.
"Remember must never take it until Hamoud has dropped it."
He set down the bottle. It fell upon its side. But alas! it did not
break.
"Hamoud! what has happened?"
In mercy, with a violent gesture, with a sensation of sickness, he
thrust the newspaper into David's hands. "Done! No chance to turn
back now!" He rolled the folding doors together behind him and leaned
against them, his face beaded with sweat, panting as if in escaping
that room he had run a mile. He listened. How his heart thumped! He
heard nothing. "Has he the courage, though? Alone with those
thoughts!" Leaning against the door, through which came never a sound,
Hamoud began to weep, for the man whom he had served, for her, and for
himself.
Yes, the Omân stock, cruel and remorseless in its pristine state, had
deteriorated in the lax paradise of Zanzibar; the old impulses were
there, but in abortive form; and the deed that Hamoud's forefathers
would have done less indirectly, and without a twinge, aroused in
Hamoud that pity which an ironist has called "the mask of weakness."
Next morning, when they asked him to state his whole knowledge of the
matter, he told them that as he had been about to light the fire Mr.
Verne had seen, amid the brushwood, a bit of newspaper showing his name
in large type. It was there, no doubt, in consequence of the servants'
carelessness.
"But you gave it to him," the local chief of police remarked severely.
"Before I knew."
Their indignation was softened by his crushed mien, and by his inflamed
eyes. Having arrived at their verdict, they discussed Arabs--or, as
they called them, "Ayrabs"--and one honest old fellow even paid the
race a compliment, in saying:
"It's said that when they like a person they will do anything for them."
It was Hamoud who told her.
The nurse, stealing a nap on the couch in the sitting room, did not
stir as he passed into the bedchamber; but Lilla awoke at the command
of his eyes. When he had finished speaking:
"No!" she sighed, as the world burst into fragments, and, like the bits
of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, slid swiftly into a new pattern.
"Ah, the poor soul! The poor soul!" She saw him more clearly, she
understood him better, than in life. "All for nothing!"
No, surely not all for nothing!
At any rate, these were tears of convalescence.
CHAPTER LII
A fortnight later, as she sat in a deep chair in the living room,
Hamoud presented himself in the doorway, to announce:
"He is here."
Parr crept into her presence.
The little, grizzled fellow advanced a few steps, limping on his cane,
then halted, frightened by this thin, white-faced woman who, her chin
in her cupped hand, sat staring at him with the cold eyes of a queen
about to condemn a malefactor to death. She was wrapped in a negligée
of peach-colored silk from the flowing sleeves of which long tassels
trailed on the rug. The morning light, as though lured from all other
objects in the room by this motionless, fine figure, accentuated her
appearance of iciness. She spoke, too, in the voice of a stranger, in
accents that thrilled with a force produced incongruously from so
emaciated a body.
"Come closer. I want to look at you."
He resumed his tremulous advance very slowly, because he was so heavily
burdened by his loyalty to the beloved master and his treason to this
once gentle benefactress. Casting down his eyes, he stood before her
abjectly leaning on his cane. His honest, deeply lined face twitched
painfully; for he could feel her scorn passing over him like a winter
blast. He faltered:
"I was helpless, ma'am. I only did as he ordered. He thought it best.
He believed it wouldn't leak out. We took all precautions." He told
her how Lawrence Teck had taken him from the Greenwich Village house to
an obscure hotel, where they had found a strange gentleman, slender,
with a fatigued, nervous face, almost too fastidiously dressed to be
another traveler, smoking constantly, saying nothing. This gentleman's
name--it was altogether a disjointed, feverish business anyway--had
never been pronounced in Parr's hearing. The stranger had seemed at
once a torment and a comfort to Mr. Teck. Occasionally, when Parr
entered, it was as if he had interrupted a distressing scene. Mr. Teck
had then jumped up with a queer smile, knocking against the chairs as
he went to look out of the window. There the strange gentleman would
join him, to put his hand on his shoulder, soothe him in a low voice.
Then one morning Mr. Teck's rooms were empty; and the hotel clerk
handed Parr an envelope containing some banknotes and the scrawl,
"Good-by. God bless you. Remember, keep quiet."
"Here it is, ma'am."
She snatched the note from him, pored over it fiercely, and thrust it
into the bosom of her gown. Her lashes wearily veiled her implacable
stare.
"You fool. You should have seen that he wasn't in his senses. Where
is he now?"
"He should be there," Parr quavered. "By this time he might be inland."
She saw a stream of men flowing in through the jungle, a human river
doomed to roll at last over some tragic brink. She clenched her hands,
seemed about to rise and rush out, as she was, in pursuit. She said:
"You are going with me."
His jaw sagged. Gaping round him, taking the whole room as witness to
this folly, he cried out, "Where to?" When she began to speak he
sagged forward over his cane, drinking in the verification of her
incredible desire. Her attitude did not change; her face remained
cold; her lips hardly moved; but he was aware of a tremendous force
behind the words, of something inflexible, invincible, grand--perhaps
of a flame without heat that filled her empty heart with an unearthly
coruscation, like a radiance thrown back from the walls of a cavern of
ice.
"Do you want to die, ma'am?"
"I?" Her voice expressed in that syllable such arrogance as youth
feels at the thought of death; yet she did not look young--she looked
as old as eternity, and as passionless and overpowering.
He bowed his head beneath the pressure of this will, and the weight of
his obligation. He perceived the uselessness of describing to her the
dangers that she would run there, especially at the season that was
beginning. Still, for a moment he pondered the trouble he would have
in taking his broken body on that pilgrimage. "And this time it will
get me: just one or two little chills," he reflected, thinking of
black-water fever. The thought came to him, however, that his life was
no longer worth much, even to himself. This sitting with folded hands,
a cane between one's knees, in the tidy little house that she had given
him--and but for her it might have been the crutches!
Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more
with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering
against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the
crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded
stars.
CHAPTER LIII
She crossed the Atlantic, traveled swiftly down from Cherbourg to
Marseilles, embarked on a ship that steamed through the Mediterranean
toward the Orient. At last she saw Port Said, Suez, and the red and
purple lava islands of the Red Sea, splendid in a sunset of extravagant
hues.
The heat was intense.
But the ship emerged from the Gulf of Aden into a still greater heat;
and suddenly the air was saturated with moisture. The walls and the
ceiling of her cabin were covered with drops of water; exposed objects
were defaced by rust and mildew overnight; while the human body seemed
to be deliquescing in a torrid steam. A sickly breeze, filled with the
odors of a strange world, hardly rippled the languid sea.
On the right, beyond a heat mist through which flying fish were
darting, loomed a new coastline. Yellow beaches appeared, interrupted
by lagoons where the slow waves abruptly spouted high into the
air--white geysers against somber forests and jungles. From these dark
green fastnesses, ascending threads of smoke inveigled the gaze far
upward into space, to where, above a belt of hazy blue that one had
taken for the sky, mountain peaks revealed themselves, unrelated to the
earth, and half dissolved, like a mirage.
Night fell. The velvety blackness of the heavens was powdered with
star dust; in the wash of the ship there gleamed a profound
phosphorescence, as from a decaying ocean. The coast hung like a mass
of inky vapor above the fitful shimmer of the surf from which was
wafted a faint, interminable booming that suggested the roaring of
lions and the thunder of savage drums.
Lilla emerged from her cabin, crossed the deck, and laid her hands upon
the softly quivering rail. Close beside her the darkness gave up a
ghost--Hamoud, who also stood silent, gazing toward the coast. His
robes exhaled an odor of musk and aloes.
"Africa, madam," he uttered at last in a voice that lost itself in the
clinging darkness and the smothering heat.
And soon a languid ecstasy stole over him.
His heart swelled as he drank in, at the same time, the exhalations of
his native land and the faint fragrance of her hair. In the darkness
he perceived with his mind's eye both her beauty and the
well-remembered beauty of the spice isles. The palm-crowned hills
encircled the lapis-lazuli harbor of Zanzibar, on whose waters he saw
himself sailing, with this mortal treasure, in a handsome dhow, the
tasseled prow shaped like the head of the she-camel sent from heaven to
the Thamud tribesmen, the mast fluttering the pennants of ancient
sultans. Then the dhow with the camel prow became a panoplied camel,
on which he and she were being borne away to Omân, the land of his
fathers, which he had never seen. There, in those rugged mountains, he
would become, as his ancestors had been--vigorous of will, fierce and
great, triumphant in war and love.
For a long while he stood there trembling gently in unison with the
ship, thought linking itself to thought, and image to image, his
fancies growing ever more bizarre yet ever more distinct, as though he
were inhaling, instead of the faint perfume of her hair, the smoke of
hasheesh.
But she had forgotten him.
CHAPTER LIV
In the thick sunshine, below the cloudlike mountains, sandbanks
unrolled themselves between the mouths of the equatorial rivers flanked
by mangrove forests. At last, in the depths of a bay of glittering,
brownish water, the port town appeared, a mass of red-tiled roofs
spread along the gray seawall that suggested a fortress.
Through sandy thoroughfares bordered with acacia trees rode hollow-eyed
Europeans in little cars, which half-naked negroes pushed along a
narrow-gauge railway. The languor of those recumbent figures was
abruptly disturbed, at the apparition of a woman clad in snowy linen,
who advanced between a tall, young Zanzibar Arab and a small, limping
white man, with the step of a convalescent, but with eyes that were
filled with an extraordinary resolution. That evening, at the club
house, one brought word to the rest that she was Lawrence Teck's wife.
There was a chorus of profane surprise in half a dozen tongues; for
this was the end of March, the climax of the rainy summer, when the
land was full of rotting vegetation and mephitic vapors, of mosquitoes
and tsetse flies, malaria and fever.
"Is he coming out, then?" said one. "Where is he this time, by the
way?" "All the same," another remarked, "I'll wager that he isn't
aware of this. Looks as if she were planning a reconciliation by
surprise!"
"She seems ill already. She'll last in this place about as long as an
orchid in a saucepan."
"But, my friend, she wants to go in after him, it appears. She's with
the governor now."
At that moment, indeed, the governor was patiently repeating his
remonstrances to Lilla.
They sat in a large, white room with shuttered windows, beneath a
punkah that kept churning up the dead air, beside a carved table on
which stood a tray of untouched coffee cups. The governor was a
studious, sick-looking gentleman with a _pince-nez_ over his jaundiced
eyes, and with long mustaches frizzed out before his ears. He wore a
white duck uniform adorned with gilt shoulder straps, an aiguillette,
and a bar of service ribbons brilliantly plaided and striped. Anaemic
from malaria, and harassed by fever, he showed while he was talking to
Lilla a look of exhaustion and pain. Now and again, after puffing his
cigarette, he gave a feeble cough and rolled up his eyes. Then, in a
monotonous, dull tone he began again to express his various objections.
Mr. Teck had gone in from a northern port a month ago. He had passed
by Fort Pero d'Anhaya, telling the commandant there that he was bound
back for the region in which his principals might presently seek a
concession. He was, no doubt, at present in the gorges beyond the
forests of the Mambava. He had with him a strong safari and a
gentleman friend.
"What friend?" asked Lilla, who had been listlessly waiting for this
monologue to cease.
"I don't remember. But I can, of course, find out."
"It's not worth while. All that I want is----"
The governor raised his hand, which trembled visibly.
"Pray let me finish, madam. Mr. Teck is in a very dangerous place. We
have never conquered the Mambava; they are a ferocious people, and the
man who enters their country does so at his own risk. Had it not been
that Mr. Teck's venture, because of his peculiar relationship to King
Muene-Motapa, might end in winning over the Mambava to peaceful labor
and trade, we should never have given permission. As for you, madam,
such a journey is not to be thought of. I say nothing about the
climate at this season. But, if you will pardon me, as I look at you
the idea of your traveling inland on safari at any time of year--in
fact, I ask myself----" He stared round him at the mildewed, white
walls, and explained, "I ask myself, indeed, if you are real."
For even in her white terai and belted suit of white linen she was a
vision appropriate only to the far-off world that this man had left
behind him at the call of duty--a world of delicate living and subtle
sensations, of frail flesh in luxurious settings, of sophistication
that would have shrunk from every crudity, and exquisiteness that would
have shriveled at the touch of hardship. This studious-looking,
fever-stricken soldier, a nobleman under a bygone regime and in his
youth a great amateur of love, had known well many women of whom this
suppliant was the virtual counterpart, fragile, complex, too sensitive,
too ardent, the predestined prey of impulses and disabilities that none
but themselves, their adorers, and specialists in neurasthenia, could
conceive of. In the present woman he discerned the same lovely and
neurotic countenance, the same traces of mingled fastidiousness and
desperation, the same promises of exceptionally passionate and tragic
happenings.
"Ah, yes," he reflected, coughing feebly, so as not to make his head
ache, "ah, yes, she is fatal. Twenty years ago I would have killed men
for her with pleasure," he told himself, watching her pale, golden
face. "Fatal! fatal!"--but he did not ask himself what fatality had
brought her here. He knew her story, as by this time every one knew it
who had ever heard of Lawrence Teck, or David Verne, or her.
"So it is this one that she really loves?" he thought, contemplating
rather dismally her bitten lips, her lowered eyelashes, the throb of
her throat, the working of her slim fingers. "I know: now she must
find him quickly, quickly, quickly. She cannot sleep; she cannot eat;
but she can drink, because she is always burning; and she can think,
yes--but one thought, only. Ah, the lucky man!" he sighed, while
beginning to shiver from his evening chill.
As though she had read his mind, or at least had discerned his capacity
for understanding her, she leaned forward, laid her hand on his sleeve,
and murmured:
"You have told me why I must not go. Now give me permission."
"Do you then wish to risk death just at this time? I should have
thought----" He shook his head. "No, I will telegraph to Fort Pero
d'Anhaya; the commandant there will send messengers to the border of
the Mambava country; the Mambava will telephone your message through
their forests by drum beat, and in one night every village will have
the news. They will find him and tell him, and he will come here to
you."
"Too much time has passed already. Even now I may be too late.
Besides, he must not come to me; it's I who must go to him." She
blurted out in a soft voice, "On my knees, all the way----" She
recovered herself; but two tears suddenly rolled down her cheeks, and
she faltered, "Look here, you know, if you prevent me you'll be doing a
terrible thing."
He got up to pace the floor. He was of short stature, and his
shoulders were rounded by desk work and the debility from the tropics;
yet in the lost paradise of youth fair women had shed tears before him
and made him wax in their hands. He came back to the table,
absentmindedly drank a cup of tepid coffee, and said indignantly:
"Nevertheless, you look far from well at this moment."
"I have never been so strong," she retorted.
"She dares everything, and no doubt all the while she fears terribly
what she dares. She is sublime! Who am I, a lump of sick flesh in
this fever trap, to interfere so strictly with this thing of white
flame?"
He said to her:
"Listen. I will give you permission to travel on safari as far as Fort
Pero d'Anhaya. Beyond that point I cannot promise you protection; so
beyond you are not to go. Mr. Teck must come to you there. To-morrow
I will see these people of yours, to make sure that they are competent
men, able to take all possible precautions for your welfare. Now,
then, tell me at least that I am not as cruel and as stupid as you
thought."
When she had gone, a young man in a white uniform entered with a sheaf
of papers. The governor smothered a groan.
"The summary of the hut tax, Excellency. The post-office reports for
last month. The reports of new public works--by the way, the new
bridge at Maquival has been finished."
"Ah," said the governor profoundly, staring into space, "the new bridge
of Maquival has been finished!"
CHAPTER LV
The equatorial wilds spread before the safari its wealth of extravagant
hues and forms, all its perfidies veiled for the allurement of mortals
who would trust nature in her richest manifestations. The sun shone on
a rain-drenched world; the earth steamed; and through a mist like that
which prefaced the second Biblical version of creation the splendor of
the jungle seemed to be taking shape for the first time, at the command
of a power for whom beauty was synonymous with peril.
Nevertheless, the safari men were singing.
Askaris led the way, Somalis in claret-colored fezzes and khaki
uniforms, bare legged, with bandoliers across their chests and rifles
over their shoulders. Their small, dark faces were sharp and fierce;
they marched with the swing of desert men; their glances expressed
their pride, their contempt for the humble, melodious horde that
followed after them.
Four negroes, naked to the waist, supported a machilla, a canopied
hammock of white duck that swung from a bamboo pole. They were Wasena,
specially trained for this fatiguing work, maintaining a smooth step
over the roughest ground. Lilla reclined in the hammock. Her face,
half concealed by the fringe of the awning, appeared opalescent in the
filtered sunlight. Her tapering figure had the grace of Persian queens
and Roman empresses floating along in their litters on ripples of dusky
muscles.
So this delicate, white product of modernity, this embodiment of
civilization's perceptions and all that it pays for them, was borne at
last into the primordial world on the shoulders of savages.
Behind her streamed a hundred porters balancing on their heads the
personal baggage, rolled tents, chop boxes, sacks of safari food. They
were men from Manica, Sofala, and Tete, some of pure strain, others
with Arab and Latin blood in their veins. Their bare torsoes were the
color of chocolate, of ebony, or even of saddle leather; but all their
foreheads bulged out in the same way, all their noses were short and
flat, all their chins receded. On their breasts and arms were charms
of crocodiles' teeth and leopards' claws, to keep them safe from
beasts, rheumatism, arrows, pneumonia, snake bite, and skin diseases.
In the distended lobes of their ears were stuffed cigarettes, horn
snuffboxes, or flowers from the port town.
They were followed by the camp servants in long, white robes,
Beira-boys and Swahilis, driving before them a little flock of sheep.
Parr, at the head of another squad of askaris, brought up the rear,
riding a Muscat donkey. He raised his head, and his withered mouth,
emerging from the shadow of his helmet, showed a melancholy smile.
He was drinking in the smell of Africa, and listening to the song of
the safari.
At times the song died down into a hum. But soon a quavering falsetto
was heard formulating a new motive, expressing a new thought. Other
voices joined the leader's; a minor refrain swept up and down the line;
and abruptly the climax swelled out in a diapason descending far into
the bass. So that every one could sing, the improvisor had phrased his
thoughts in Swahili, the inter-tribal language of Africa. He sang of
the Bibi from afar, her skin like a bowl of milk, who was traveling as
a bride to Fort Pero d'Anhaya.
"She is rich. She is the daughter of a sultan. She is ill, but she
will be well. She is sad, but she will be happy. We shall eat much
meat at her wedding."
The deep chorus rolled out to a banging of sticks on the sides of the
balanced boxes.
"Wah! This Bibi is rich! We shall eat much meat at her wedding!"
"They sing of you," said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her
face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched
her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared
in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of
steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell
of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the
machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to
strew themselves over her soft body. It was as if the machilla had
suddenly become a bier.
"God forbid it!" Hamoud muttered, averting his face from that sign.
He wore a tight turban of many colored stripes cocked up over one ear;
he had bared his legs, and bound sandals on his small feet; and round
his waist, over the sash that held his dagger, he had fastened a web
belt sustaining a bolstered pistol. He never left the side of the
moving machilla.
They soon put behind them the mangroves of the coast. They passed
through brakes of white-tipped feathery reeds, beyond which expanded
forests whose velvety foliage was mingled with gray curtains of moss.
On their left a little river kept reappearing. From the islands of
marsh grass that floated down the stream, egrets and kingfishers flew
away. On sandbars some dingy, log-like shapes, beginning stealthily to
move toward the water, were revealed as crocodiles.
In a bend of the river cashew trees overshadowed the thatch of fishing
huts. Beyond fields of lilies one made out, flitting away, sooty
wanderers clad in ragged kilts and carrying thin-bladed spears. Then
marshes spread afar: the transparent stalks of papyrus trembled above
the bluish pallor of lotuses. As the declining sun poured its gold
across the world, the air over the marshes was jeweled from a great
rush of geese, ducks, heron, ibises, and storks.
They camped on the clean, white sand beside the stream.
The luxury that had always been her atmosphere still clung round her
here, taking on an Oriental quality from this host of unfettered
slaves, these dusky armed guards, these scurrying, white-robed servants
who, in the light of the sunset, composed with the speed of enchantment
her habitation for the night. The green tent, its fly extended like an
awning, awaited her entrance. The floor sheet was strewn with rugs;
the snowy camp bed was made; her toilet case stood open on the folding
table. The tent boys, their faces obsequiously lowered, were pouring
hot water into the canvas tub.
Bareheaded, but wrapped in a tan polo coat, she emerged from the tent
to find the dinner table ready under the fly. They offered _hors
d'oeuvres_, a jellied soup, a curry, fruit tarts, and coffee. She
shook her head, and continued to stare at the candles on the table.
Fluffy, white moths were burning themselves in the flames.
Parr protested that she must eat. In this climate one did not fast
with impunity.
"I sha'n't collapse," she replied, that stony look returning to her
face.
Night fell like the abruptly loosened folds of a great curtain. The
air became vibrant with the shrilling of insects. Fireflies filled the
darkness with a twinkling mist, so that the immense spangle of the
purple sky seemed to have invaded the purple ambiguities of earth. But
along the river bank shone the fires of the safari--points of flame
that outlined, like a binding of copper wire, the silhouettes of
squatting men, or turned a half-inchoate face to molten bronze, or
illuminated, against the lustrous blackness of the water, the fragment
of a muscular back, the crook of an arm, a stare of eyeballs, a display
of teeth that seemed to be swimming there unrelated to a head.
The babble of the camp--a continuous chattering, crooning, and
guffawing, blended with the indignant cries of monkeys. It was, she
thought, all one threnody of purely natural creatures, of which one
species, by some accident of structure and unplanned immunity, had
enlarged its powers of experiment and imitation to this point of
triumph--the kindling of fires, the eating of cooked food, the
gradually enhanced capacity for suffering.
"Are you religious, Parr?" she asked the little man who sat huddled in
a faded ulster, sucking at a cold pipe. What she meant was, "Do you
believe, poor traveler, that you have a soul--some spark that these
black savages share with you perhaps, but that those chattering monkeys
lack?"
His pinched, gray countenance took on a timid look.
"I hope so, ma'am," he stammered, and tried to assume an expression of
befitting dignity.
"So you can pray without laughing at yourself!"
Her cold voice was replete with the bitterness of those who have got
from suffering nothing except rancor, as if at some vast hoax.
Parr was frightened by this glimpse into her disillusionment; and
prayer, which he himself had abandoned in his childhood, seemed
suddenly worthy of his timid championship. He mumbled something about
faith; he had, it appeared, seen some of its achievements. He recalled
the faith of strong men, which had accomplished prodigies; the
confidence of youth----
"And when one is old and weak? So it is all a physical phenomenon?"
When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want
of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes
fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching
her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the
tent-fly. But Parr, not utterly crushed, proffered faintly that he
knew he could not argue with the likes of her, being without education,
having taken life as it came, mostly obeying orders----
"Like Hamoud," she commented. "Hamoud has taken life as it came,
obeying the orders of fate. What is your word for resignation, Hamoud?
The word that brought you across the ocean into Mr. Verne's service,
and then back across the ocean into this place?"
"Mektoub," he vouchsafed, after lowering his eyes so that she should
not see the flames in them. "And why not, since none can hope to
escape his destiny? We--this whole safari--are here in the palm of
God's hand. None knows what God has prepared for us; yet every
footprint that we make has been marked before our feet."
On these words, his handsome, lightly bearded visage was touched with a
look of beatitude, as though speaking in his sleep he was dreaming of
some unrevealed delight.
"Then our will is nothing?"
"Ah, if our will is victorious it is the will of God."
As she made no response, and since the hour called "Isheh" was
approaching, he rose and departed to pray.
"Will!" she thought. "No, there is nothing else. Will is the
Thing-in-Itself."
The tent curtain fell behind her. She heard Parr's voice call out the
command for silence. His words were taken up by the askaris on guard.
The camp noises ceased; one heard only the scolding of the monkeys, the
drumming of partridges, and the far-off roar of a lion that had eaten
his fill. The earth seemed to tremble slightly from that distant sound.
She lay on her bed, under the muslin mosquito net through which
strained the pearly gleam of a lantern. Once more it was all an
illusion which must be allowed to endure till reality could be gained.
For Lilla, the only reality was comprised at this moment into one more
meeting with him, in the sight of his living face, in the sound of his
voice pronouncing words of forgiveness, of love, perhaps even of
remorse. Should she reach him too late for that--find this longing
also part of the illusion? The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a
still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions
in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from
the greenish infiltration of the moonlight.
Another lion roared in the depths of the night.
"Why should one fear even these strange forms of death? What has my
life been that I should find it precious? What does anything matter
except one hour with him? I really ask only a moment. No, all that I
fear is death before I find him, before I've won from him a last kiss
of understanding and pardon. Will! That shall be my strength and my
immunity all the way!"
At last she dozed, to dream that Hamoud had confronted a lion just as
the beast was about to pounce upon Madame Zanidov, who, wearing the
dress of oxidized silver barbarically painted, crouched in a moonlit
clearing. "No, Hamoud, let him have her!" Hamoud, with a smile, stood
aside. Then she saw Lawrence approaching, his face and body wrapped in
a white cloth. "Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when
she sat up in bed with a scream.
Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the
bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered
the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of
other voices broke like a wave.
"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round
the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but,
kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net,
to take her hand and press it to his brow.
"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to
you."
"And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp.
"Oh, Hamoud, and dreams?"
In the pearly light, beneath the cloudy net, in the air that was
fragrant with the odors of soap and cologne, her upturned countenance
and swelling throat gave forth a gleam as if of flesh transfigured by
love instead of grief. He felt himself falling through space into a
bottomless anguish. He clutched at the thought, "Yet who knows His
designs?" and hung in that void alive, his secret still locked in his
breast, the delicious pain of her daily condescension still assured to
him.
"Ah, if you were of my faith you would have heard that life is all a
dream, that there is no reality except paradise and hell."
He rose, and stole away from paradise to hell.
CHAPTER LVI
In the dawn Parr hobbled down the line of yawning porters, checking the
reapportionment of burdens. The machilla men, still nibbling at chunks
of cold porridge, approached with the hammock swinging from their
shoulders.
The safari resumed its march.
Its course was northwest, through jungles of bamboo, round the rims of
marshes, past forests filmed with the blue and yellow of convolvulus.
The mountains remained apparently as far away as ever, now indistinct
behind the heat mist of the lowlands, now disappearing beyond the
rainstorms that swept across the plateaux like the robes of colossal
gods.
The safari passed leopard traps, graves decked with broken pottery and
little banners of rags, then, circling fields of maize, entered a
village. The huts stood in a ring inside a rude stockade. The village
headman advanced, bending forward from the waist and scraping first one
foot and then the other. He made obeisance before the machilla, in
which men of his own kind bore up a delicate, pale prodigy, an
incredible creature from another aeon or planet.
He was a wizened, old man with shreds of white wool on his chin. His
eyeballs were tinctured with yellow. His right shoulder was a mass of
long-healed scars from the claws and teeth of some beast. Behind him,
against a solid wall of his people, young girls with shaved heads,
awe-stricken, held gourds of beer as pink as coral and as thick as
gruel.
The village headman revealed the news of the wilds, which had been
transmitted from tribe to tribe by native travelers, or by the
far-carrying beat of wooden gongs. A safari, passing to the north, had
penetrated the land of the Mambava. In that safari there were two
white men and many askaris. They had now journeyed through the forests
of the people of Muene-Motapa. They were in the granite gorges of the
waterfalls.
He pointed toward where the floating mountains rose in a peak that was
lightly silvered with snow.
Parr, on the Muscat donkey, looking more haggard than ever in the
sunshine, demanded:
"Is it the white man who is called the Bwana Bangana?"
That was the name that had accompanied the news.
The safari marched faster than before, toward the exalted masses that
trembled behind the heat. They emerged upon rolling plains remotely
dotted with herds of zebras and antelope. In the blinding sky they saw
kites, buzzards, and crows, rising from the carcasses that had been
left half devoured by noctambulant beasts of prey. At nightfall the
lightning flashed above the mountains in yellow sheets or rosy zigzags.
Thunder rolled out across the plain in majestic detonations.
Lilla, watching the storm from the doorway of her tent, told herself
that he, too, must hear these sounds; that she had come near enough to
share with him at any rate this sensation--unless her dread had already
been realized, and he had sunk into a sleep from which even such noises
could not wake him.
Hamoud appeared at her side. He quoted from the _Uncreated Book_:
"He showeth you the lightning, a source of awe and hope."
Her heart swelled; she turned to that fervent, handsome face beneath
the turban a look of peculiar tenderness like a sword thrust, and
responded in liquid tones:
"What should I have done without you?"
CHAPTER LVII
Lawrence Teck was not in the gorges of the waterfalls.
While marching in through the lowlands he had been seized with a fever
that he had failed to shake off on the plateaux. Every day he had
grown a little worse, indeed, till finally the choice had seemed to lie
between resignation of his work and serious illness. Turning back
toward the coast, he had now regained the forests of the Mambava.
Here, in his second night's camp, he had suffered a collapse.
He lay abed in his tent. On the waterproof floor cloth squatted a
Mambava warrior, a messenger from King Muene-Motapa.
"Give the word, Bangana. Give the word, Brother of the King. We will
carry you to the King's town on a litter as soft as the clouds. The
wizards shall work their charms to make you well. The Dances of the
Moon are about to begin: it is the time of answered prayers. Your
medicines have failed; now try ours. One word, Bangana! Gladden the
heart of the King!"
The messenger's almost Semitic visage, upturned in the lamplight, was
smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore
a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer;
his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there
throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very
essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, as he
repeated the conjuration:
"Speak! Speak the word!"
Lawrence Teck returned:
"Say this to Muene-Motapa. The medicine that might cure me is far
beyond the sea. I thought I might do without it; but see what the lack
of it has brought me to. A little chill, a headache--the strong man
rejoicing in the world shakes his shoulders and they are gone. But
death in one of its multitude of forms stands at the door of the heart
that has ceased to take pleasure in life."
His voice was feeble. His bearded face, bending forward under the net,
was blank from exhaustion and unnaturally flushed. His teeth clashed
together, as he concluded:
"There is no medicine in this land to cure this sickness."
The messenger groaned, and said compassionately:
"It is sad to see the great deserted by their gods. Yet our gods
remain!" He pressed his palms on the floor sheet and leaned forward,
his filmy headdress drifting over his glittering eyes. "Surely,
Bangana, now is the time to renounce the old, to embrace the true! To
cast the spear of scorn and come in behind our shields till you are
strong again. We will make you forget! Give yourself up but once to
our ancient mysteries! Have you forgotten the Dances of the Moon?"
There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these
forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene
was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their
appearance and actions, to be human--beings that danced in regiments
with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums,
that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the
witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of
the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest
stronghold; it was that which hovers like an echo over the suave,
ordered landscapes of civilization; it was the seductive horror that
invades the modern brain in dreams, or in some moment of utter
bitterness and despair.
For a moment he still leaned forward, peering into those glittering,
dark eyes, though what he saw was something beyond that face--the
destruction of all the toil of fifty thousand years, the suicide of a
soul. With a shudder he lay back upon the bed.
"Return to the King."
For five minutes the messenger sat motionless; but Lawrence Teck did
not speak again. Rising at last, in a fluff of his marabout plumes, he
armed himself with his spear and his oval shield covered with an
heraldic design.
"The King will weep," he said. "And the little sisters of the King,
and all those who loved you, oh, dead man."
He raised the curtain, and stalked away through the camp, clashing
superbly between the fires, while the clustered askaris and porters
regarded him dismally.
A white man in a fleece-lined coat, who had been waiting in the open
for the messenger to depart, entered the tent and sat down beside the
bed.
He was Cornelius Rysbroek.
"Shall you try to march to-morrow?"
Lawrence Teck did not reply. There was no strength in him even to move
his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though
half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek,
believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.
In his eyes appeared, perfected, the light that had made them
exceptional for years, a flash from that psychical lake of fire and
brimstone in which his heart had so long been burning up. For the
tables were turned at last: the weak one, the inferior, had become the
stronger, the better. A thousand wounds seemed to heal themselves in
him as he contemplated the prostration of the enemy whom he had hated,
just from premonition, even before his appearance. There was true
madness in that look, arising from the long privation, the interminable
jealousy, the consequent monomania of revenge. "He will die," he
reflected, gloating with half-shut eyes, his face, that had once been
puerile, now dignified by triumph. "He will never leave this forest,"
he sang to himself, curling up his mouse-colored mustaches as if at a
mirror before sallying out to some pleasure in which there was no
sting. But suddenly he remembered that this prostrate rival was still
his conqueror, had won what he had not been able to win, would recall,
no doubt, in his last moment of consciousness, that love in all its
details.
Out of the silent night the spirit of Africa crept into the dim tent,
completing his madness.
To one of the little fires came softly Lawrence Teck's tent boy, a
turbaned Persian, lemon-hued, with the beak of a parrot and the mouth
of a cruel woman. He sat down close beside a Swahili gun bearer, who
was frying a mess of white ants.
"Our Bwana has fallen asleep," he uttered in a voice that would have
been inaudible to white men. "The other Bwana is sitting by the bed."
He waited till the ants were cooked to a turn, then murmured, in a tone
like aeolian harp strings caressed by the faintest zephyr, "If our
Bwana does not die of the fever the other Bwana will kill him."
The brown Swahili, his pan half raised, turned his face which seemed to
have been smashed flat, and gave the speaker a slow, fierce look of
inquiry. The Persian breathed:
"With our Bwana's own pistol. As if he had killed himself. I peeped
through the curtain. The pistol was hanging from the tent-pole. When
he looked at it, and then at our Bwana, I read everything in his mind.
But if this also is the will of God it will not happen until some hour
when the camp is still--when we are all asleep."
CHAPTER LVIII
The safari that was seeking him marched and camped, marched and camped,
marched and camped.
Every afternoon the northeastern monsoon wafted in its sticky moisture,
releasing in the jungles the nauseating sweetness of incredible
flowers. Smoky-brown flies were seen on the necks of the sheep. The
beasts began to sicken and die. The porters ate fresh meat.
But the porters no longer sang. The Wasena, who bore the hammock,
muttered to one another dolefully as they shuffled along. All knew by
this time that they were not headed for Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Avoiding
that last outpost of civilization, they were approaching the country of
the Mambava, which lay behind the steamy sunshine, below the blue and
lavender battlements of granite, in the uplands covered with forests.
The askaris alone, the lean, khaki-clad Somalia, remained indifferent
to this atmosphere of disquiet that was more debilitating to the
porters than the fever-laden mists. For these fierce, restless men
from the northern deserts were of a breed that found its true
contentment in danger and violence. They were cheered, perhaps, by the
possibility of bloodshed, sustained by the automatism resulting from
their faith, and, despite their disdain of women, inspired by their
admiration of this frail personage who was always urging more speed
toward the fabulous regions of peril.
As for her, she no longer saw anything except that deep green zone
which quivered behind the heat.
"I shall find him not in the gorges, but in those forests."
For the scene of Anna Zanidov's prophecy was laid in a forest.
She lay in the machilla like a tightly drawn bow. Her skin, now ashen,
now bright from a touch of fever, stretched over a visage of apparently
new contours: round her cheekbones and jaws were suggestions of
previously unsuspected strength. Her tender lips had assumed an almost
cruel aspect; her sunken eyes, growing ever larger in her diminishing
face, were harder than gems. She was the personification of will.
And Parr, sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat
donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their
rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the
camp boys, were only the instrument that her will had welded together.
They were wraiths obediently advancing her dream of one fleeting moment
of triumph over fate. They were nothing, since she had summoned them
out of the void of this world by an imperious cry. They were
everything; for without them her dream would fade.
Sometimes the green zone of the uplands was lost in a blur not of heat,
but of fever. Sharp pains stabbed her temples, and, when the dream
became distinct again, she saw black men walking like giants, their
heads in the white-hot sky. But just as she had conquered fear, so, by
a supreme resolution, she conquered her vertigo, the burning of her
emaciated limbs, the quaking of her body which a moment before had been
bathed in moisture. At sunset she descended from the machilla to give
Hamoud a look of astonishment, while replying:
"No, I am well."
Yet she cast a look of dread at the rising tent, thinking of the hours
of sleeplessness, of appalling thoughts on the borderline between
nightmares and flashes of fever.
Now and then, as she escaped shivering from the hot bath, she lost hold
of her new strength.
"If you knew!" she whimpered.
The lost, safe life rose before her. She saw against the green tent
walls the painting by Bronzino, the jeweled perspective of Fifth Avenue
at night, Fanny Brassfield's necklace sparkling in the blaze of the
opera house. The music of waltzes mingled with the strains of David's
tone poem; and she smelled at the same time the tanbark of the horse
show, the pastilles at Brantome's, and the flowers surrounding the
marble warrior and the marble nymph. She was seized with panic, on
realizing the remoteness of security.
"Where am I? Africa! But why?"
She stood motionless, aghast at her inability to remember why she was
here.
Hamoud's voice came to her from beyond the curtain:
"There is going to be a shauri, a talk with these porters of yours."
"Ah, my God! What is it now?"
Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:
"Rebellion."
She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.
Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:
"Madam, all is ready."
She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed,
her eyes as cold as ice.
On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their
rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great
semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire
shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had
turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low
murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds
of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above
this spectacle.
Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla
bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the
sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal
and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance,
persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from
the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.
An askari spat to the left contemptuously.
The leader of the porters from Tete sprang forward with a cry of
exasperation. For this occasion he had bound round his waist the pelt
of one of the slaughtered sheep, and had made a head-dress of draggled
turaco feathers. He waved his sinewy arms, crouched, postured, tossed
back his head. His oration was less coherent than the Wasena's, but
more dramatic.
"The first moon since the rains! The season when the Mambava hold
their great dances! It is now that their forest will be full of music,
while their warriors gather in the place that they know of, to dance to
the moon. We will not enter the country of the Mambava while they
dance to the moon!"
A hoarse outcry rose toward the multitude of stars:
"We will not enter the country of the Mambava when they dance to the
moon!"
The askaris, their fezzes cocked jauntily, impatiently shuffled their
sandals of giraffe hide, and hitched up their belts in which were
thrust broad-bladed Somali knives.
"They are rabbits," the askaris affirmed. "Even this lady shames them.
They are less than women." They turned their fierce eyes toward Lilla,
calling out to her, "Here we stand, Ya Bibi!" There was a savage
insinuation in that cry.
In order to respond, Parr sat down in a chair, the immemorial symbol of
authority. He spoke in Swahili. After each sentence he paused, so
that his words might be translated by the headmen of the porters into
their tribal dialects. His voice rose faintly, almost ineffectually
contending against the sounds of the insects. He looked very small and
ghastly in the firelight; he was sick to his bones, feeling just as he
had felt before the black-water fever. The great semicircle of hostile
eyes perceived all his weakness. In the opinion of his antagonists his
face bore the seal of death. This representative of the white-skinned
super-race was revealed as weaker than they--no trace of the white
man's conquering will was to be discerned in his feeble countenance.
Why listen any more?
Their leaders no longer troubled to translate his words.
He went on, however, with the last of his strength holding fast to the
thought of paying his debt in full.
In that land, he declared, none would dare to hurt the friends of
Muene-Motapa's friend. They should return telling how they had passed
unharmed, even honored, through the country of the Mambava. He
promised them double pay--while groping for some further argument, he
seemed to be sinking in upon himself. His face drooped forward.
From the horde of porters came scattered shouts:
"Enough! The shauri is over! In the morning we return!"
"What do they say, Hamoud?"
"They say that in the morning they will return to the coast."
She sat stunned.
The orator from Tete moved with a kind of spasmodic dancing gait toward
Parr. Never thus had the white man's genius lain prostrate before him.
He was the symbol of a race abruptly exalted from inferiority to
dominance. There came over him a frenzy of pride and malice; it was
the realization of the dreams that burn the brains of all the dark
people of the earth. "Do you hear?" he howled, and brandished his
fists as though about to strike that lowered head.
An askari glided forward reversing his rifle. There was a cracking
sound as the gun butt struck the orator from Tete in the middle of the
forehead. With a drowsy look the smitten man sank down as gently as if
falling into a mound of feathers, and deliberately composed himself in
sleep, his brown face against the brown earth.
In all that throng there was suddenly not the slightest movement, and
no sound was to be heard except the trill of the insects.
She was standing, staring from the prostrate body to the mass of
porters, whose eyes were fixed upon the victim with one look, of
mournful awakening. Then they saw her whom they had forgotten, or, in
their transport, considered negligible. But when they had read her
face it was they who were frightened.
"You! You! To stop me!"
And a homicidal gesture completed her appearance of fury.
"Wallahi!" the askaris called out to one another. "She has given the
order!"
They spread out to right and left with a clicking of their rifle locks;
they drove the porters together, close to the fire. A soft moan arose
from the huddled crowd. They had seen the whips of hippopotamus hide,
long and flexible, translucent in the firelight like streams of amber.
As the lash described a flourish above the first outstretched back she
turned away to her tent. Hamoud was before her, raising the curtain.
He said:
"They will speak no more about the coast when we are through with them."
CHAPTER LIX
At dawn he came to tell her that Parr had the black-water fever.
The sick man was unconscious when they sent him off, in the machilla,
toward Fort Pero d'Anhaya, with three of the askaris and fifteen of the
porters. They soon disappeared into a jungle of spear grass, above
which the sunrise was spreading its bands of smoky gold and rose. The
chosen porters forgot their lacerated bodies; a song floated back from
them to those who must still press onward.
"I have killed him, Hamoud."
"Who knows? It is true that he is old and has had this fever before.
But we do not need him. Maybe he has fulfilled his destiny. And we
have not." In the glory of the sunrise he turned to meditate over her
thin, tortured face. He observed, with a lyrical sadness, "What is
life? A running this way and that after mirages. A thirsting for
sweet wells of which one has heard in a dream. Does one ever taste
those waters? Are they sweet or bitter? Perhaps this is the
secret--that to taste them is death."
The safari marched on. She rode the Muscat donkey, which was dying
from the bites of tsetse flies.
CHAPTER LX
Next morning she marched afoot in the blaze of the sun. Trailing
thorns pierced her ankles; the stipa shrubs showered her with little
barbs, and from another bush was detached an invisible pollen that
penetrated her clothing and burned her skin. At the noon halt they
made a hammock of tent cloth, in which she was carried all the
afternoon by four porters. At nightfall they saw, across a valley, the
edge of the Mambava forests, the towering tree trunks banked with huge
thickets and bound together by nets of vines.
They camped in the valley, where a stream flowed through a tangle of
indigo plants. The warm bath steamed in her tent; the fresh evening
garments were laid out; everything was the same in this canvas ark that
proceeded farther and farther into the wilds with its atmosphere of
rude luxury intact. When she emerged from the tent, in her polo coat
and suede mosquito boots, the table glistened with its china and
glassware.
She sat looking at the black forest.
"He is there!"
But she was very tired.
Ah, to lie down, grope no longer for her will, drift away into a region
where there was no love or remorse, sleep forever! Why should she feel
like this with the goal so near at last, unless from a premonition that
all her efforts were useless?
Never before had this land and its phenomena appeared so cruel, so
perfectly the manifestation of a superhuman force that clothed its
malignancy in a primordial splendor. Here, she reflected, was the
quintessence of earthly beauty inextricable from the quintessence of
horror; here was the source of all that she had trusted elsewhere in
countless perfidious disguises and refinements.
Poisonous in some subtle element behind its visible vapors, it
corrupted not only the flesh, but also the souls that had emerged
elsewhere into forms of affection and compassion. Two nights ago even
she had greeted the crack of the whips with the furious thought,
"Strike again!"--and now there stole into her brain, together with the
light hallucinations of fever, a hatred of these cringing black men who
for a moment had dared to stand before her as antagonists. The evening
breeze brought to her, from the porters' fires, the odor of savage
bodies that had labored and been beaten for the cause of love; and her
disgust was tinctured with the fierce intolerance of all those
impressionable beings from what is called civilization, whom Africa had
debased--or else, made "natural" again.
Through the buzz of insects there came from the forest, gradually
blending over wide distances, a gentle throbbing. The porters lifted
their round heads beyond the fires. The sharp profiles of the askaris
were motionless. A wail floated over the camp:
"The drums of the Mambava!"
The throbbing died away. But soon it began again in the north, then in
the south, and swelled to a continuous rumbling.
On the edge of the sky the moon appeared, blood red, nearly full.
There was a rush of feet, a scuffle in the bushes, and two askaris
advanced into the firelight, dragging between them a creature that they
seemed to have plucked out of some grotesque dream.
He was an albino. His gray skin, because of its lack of pigmentation,
was splotched with eczema; his wool was a dirty, yellowish white; his
features were permanently distorted because of his lifelong efforts to
keep the light from paining his pink eyes. The askaris threw this
monstrosity upon his face before Lilla's chair. He lay moaning and
feebly moving his hands, as if he were caressing the earth.
Suddenly he sat up on his haunches. His body jumped from the beating
of his heart. He fixed on Lilla a look that was the utmost caricature
of terror and entreaty.
An askari let out a neighing laugh:
"So this is one of the dangerous Mambava!"
But the albino was not one of the Mambava.
He was a man of the Manyazombe, who dwelt in the north--an exile, a
solitary wanderer, a lost soul. Who knew what aversion, what
indefinable dread, his dissimilarity had produced in his own people,
what village calamities he had been blamed for, what persecutions he
had suffered? For some reason he had fled from his own tribe, to be
greeted at the outskirts of alien villages with showers of spears. He
had learned to reciprocate the horror of mankind. Then he had dwelt in
the jungle, joining the furtive beasts. But still, moved by an
obscure, invincible need, he crept in thickets from which he might
watch the life of human beings, feasting his eyes on the fire-splashed
bodies of men and women, listening to the songs and the laughter,
filling his nostrils with the savor of his kind, as a damned spirit
might creep back to the warmth of life from a desolate hereafter.
But what did he see now? Was she who sat before him human or
divine--one of those who must be placated by strict deeds, by charms or
the blood of animals and captives; some spirit of the jungle that had
made herself visible, in her marvelous pallor and uncanny costume, amid
a retinue of mortals inured to her magic?
"Tell him that he is safe," she said, with a movement of loathing.
Falling forward, he embraced her boots with his hands.
A porter who understood his language was summoned to question him. The
albino had just now crept through the country of the Mambava. He had
not dared to linger there; for on all the forest trails bands of
warriors were moving in toward the rendezvous where, as soon as the
moon was full, they would hold the dances. Yet in the midst of those
forests he had seen the camp of white men.
"He has seen it!" she cried, leaning forward to devour with her eyes
that hideous and precious instrument of fate. "Hamoud, he has seen
him! He can guide us there!" And with a look of tenderness she
murmured, "You will show us the way? Ah, I will give you--I will give
you----"
She saw herself pouring gold over the pariah.
He bowed his head till his dirty, yellowish poll nearly touched his
gray knees that were covered with callouses. Amid the close-packed,
silent audience a smothered phrase rose to the ears of the interpreter.
Hamoud, turning away his face, cast forth the words:
"Too late."
For the albino, while creeping round that camp in the Mambava forests,
had heard of a strange thing, of the shooting of one of the white men
in the night. Those discussing the matter had not known how it had
happened, since they had all been asleep. The white man was then
dying. By this time, no doubt, he was dead.
She sank back as if she, too, had received a bullet. But after a time,
during which that dark throng had not stirred, she rose and entered her
tent. There Hamoud found her standing, swaying slightly, with closed
eyes. An invisible hand had brushed across her countenance, effacing
the last traces of her beauty.
"Do we still go on?" breathed Hamoud.
Without opening her eyes she returned, in a loud voice:
"He shall not die till I get there."
Hamoud's look of sadness gave place to a look of peace.
CHAPTER LXI
At daybreak the safari entered the forest.
Two askaris went first, guarding the albino. Next, since the forest
trail was too narrow for hammock travel, Lilla came afoot with Hamoud,
seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling no physical weariness or pain.
Behind her the rest of the askaris herded along the porters.
The huge tree trunks sprang up toward a firmament of somber green, from
which descended dense festoons of vines. Through this twilight flitted
birds of brilliant plumage and long-haired monkeys. The place had a
morose, nefarious beauty, like the forest in the prophecy of Anna
Zanidov.
Now and then a glade appeared, hung with flowers of mustard yellow or
diaphanous purple. Then again the tunnel-like trail, the green
twilight, the flapping of carmine wings, and a shaft of sunshine
piercing the canopy to rest upon the gnawed bones of a forest deer.
Here and there stood clumps of brown reeds, without twigs or buds, as
though a band of warriors had buried their spear blade down in the
earth before vanishing into the thickets. But one saw no faces except
those of the monkeys.
They camped in a glade beside a spring. The drums filled the night
with their throbbing, which seemed part of the throbbing in Lilla's
feverish head. The askaris kept double guard; but at dawn eleven of
the porters were missing.
Ahead of the marching safari, in a clearing spotted with large,
dirty-white blossoms, six black men sat motionless round the ashes of a
camp fire. They were watchers posted here to see that no strangers
entered their land at the season of the dances.
Although they could not take part in those mysteries they wore the full
dance regalia. They were crowned with towering shakoes of
black-and-white monkey hair, fastened under their chins with beaded
straps, and bristling with egrets. Their bodies were smeared with
indigo and blotched with large discs of white paint; their faces were
painted white, but their noses were covered with soot. They wore not a
scrap of clothing; but around their necks and on their arms and legs
they had a wealth of talismans--tiny figures fashioned from clay, from
iron, from copper and from stones, in which one might discern the
characteristics of Phoenician images debased by thousands of years of
savage inspiration. In their painted, plumed, bedizened immobility
they appeared inhuman, or perhaps less than human--the personifications
of Africa's blind and vivid soul, the full efflorescence of this
gloomy, white-splotched clearing.
They raised their heads as a seventh, crowned and painted as they were,
stood forth from a curtain of vines. On his left arm he wore a shield
covered with black-and-white patterns; above the shield rim glittered
the blades of three spears.
He described what he had seen.
He told of a train of dark-skinned men, guided by one with
unexceptional features, but with yellowish wool and a skin that
resembled the belly of a dead fish. These intruders served a personage
such as had never been seen. For she--if indeed a woman--was tall,
with a face the color of the highest mountain peaks, and eyes gleaming
like strange stones. She walked as if in a trance; but in her
trancelike face was a cold grief, or maybe a cold fury, like that of
some goddess whose taboos had been broken, and who was marching to
vengeance.
They sat awe-stricken, filled with that dread of the supernatural which
possesses the savage who is confronted with anything unheard of.
Besides, the spell of the dances was upon them, remote though they were
from that scene--the far-off frenzies that were preparing had begun to
trouble their nerves. But at last their leader rose. Moved by the
mysticism of the season, when every act must take on a liturgical
quality, he chanted the question:
"Who is the woman with the cold face who enters our country at the time
of the Dances of the Moon?"
All his companions repeated his question in a low, singing tone,
touching their amulets, and raising their whitened visages toward the
interlaced branches and vines.
The leader's high, tremulous voice was heard again:
"Is it a woman of flesh and blood; or is it the Lady of the Moon?"
It was the genius of the ancient Phoenicians, the spirit of Astoreth,
surviving distorted through all these ages in the depths of the jungle,
exerting its spell.
But a look of cunning entered his blood-shot eyes; and his flexible
mask of white was creased by a smile. He cried out in a new voice:
"If she is the Lady of the Moon our spears will not hurt her!"
He bounded into the air, stamped his feet, shook his headdress, and
crouched in an attitude of war.
"But if she is flesh and blood our spears will tell us so!"
All leaped to their feet. Their brandished spears made nimbuses over
their heads; and this time their response was like the baying of
hounds. Then, one by one, stepping lightly, they slipped through the
curtain of vines.
CHAPTER LXII
Trees, trees, trees. They were colossal, draped in moss and lichen,
ferns growing from the crooks of their limbs, above the impenetrable
thickets of broad-leaved plants from which came the tinkle of rills.
Here and there had fallen across the narrow corridor a tree trunk
riddled by ants; as Lilla stepped over it blue scorpions scuttled away.
Hour after hour there floated before her the fezzes and khaki-covered
backs of the two leading askaris, trim, narrow, jaunty backs flanking
the leprous shoulders of the albino. Now and again Hamoud, a robed
figment always beside her, addressed her in an unintelligible language.
"Dying. Dying. Dying."
Too late, perhaps, even for that last embrace of glances, that moment
of pardon and love which was all that she had asked. Closed eyes,
sealed lips, a similacrum to mock her will, left behind by the spirit
that had gone where she and the safari could not follow.
"All the same, I shall not be far behind you! My spirit, when it has
shaken off this flesh, will travel faster than yours, on the wings of a
supreme necessity. I shall find you!"
She stopped short, bewildered by a new hallucination--a flash of
silvery light across her face. She saw one of the leading askaris
kneel down and stretch himself upon his face, as if trying to press
against the ground a thin shaft that seemed to be lying crosswise under
his chest. Then she heard an explosion, and perceived a film of smoke
full of horizontal gleams--the blades of flying spears.
She had a fleeting impression of Hamoud, his arm outstretched, his hand
spitting fire. Beyond him the albino vanished in mid-air. The second
askari, his rifle lowered, was staring in vague surmise at his breast,
from which protruded a piece of polished wood. At that moment she
found herself surrounded by khaki-clad forms all moving with catlike
grace. The dark faces under the fezzes were changed by the fervor of
battle; the bared teeth shone out beside the locks of the rifles.
These thin, hard bodies, buffeting her about, formed round her a
rampart from which the blades of steel were answered by blades of flame.
Hamoud rose from the ground at her feet, drawing his dagger. An askari
grunted and sat down with a thud. Then she saw that they were in the
midst of a glade. Among the bushes flitted the pattern of a shield, a
clump of egrets, a whitened visage that seemed to lack a nose. The
askaris' rifles rose, spouted fire, sank down with a click, rose,
crashed again. Silence fell.
The blue veil of smoke rose slowly, all in one piece.
Then, without warning, came the charge.
She became aware of an incredible apparition--a sort of naked
harlequin, magnified by a towering headdress, sailing high, twisting
over his shield like a pole vaulter over a pole, coming down asprawl in
a bed of crimson flowers. Another followed, crouching--or else this
was only a swiftly advancing shield, topped by a tuft of egrets. But
from one side of the shield darted out along, indigo arm, releasing a
spear: an askari leaned against Lilla, coughed, and slipped to the
ground. The advancing shield doubled up, to reveal a warrior who, with
a somersault, a rattle of amulets, a blur of broad polka dots, lay
flat, his face blown away.
More shields were rushing upon the guns, however.
The Mambava, shot through and through, feeling death upon them,
maintained their momentum long enough to drive their weapons through
the khaki jackets, or, at the least, to go down with their teeth buried
in the riflemen's necks, as if that draught of blood might reanimate
them. The wrestlers sank to earth inextricably mingled, a fist perhaps
sticking up above the tangle and slowly relinquishing a broad-bladed
Somali knife.
One remained apart, some dozen yards away, shot through the hips, but
still dragging himself forward. From his open month, yawning black in
the whitened face, issued roars like those of a crippled lion, as with
a lion's courage he still came on, his legs trailing, his body scraping
the soil, a spear in one clenched paw.
Lilla stood paralyzed, alone before that inexorable advance.
For the rampart of askaris had become a circle of dead men, expressing
with their last gestures a deep desire to be remerged with this rich,
dark, ancient earth.
But all at once, as though a bit of blue sky had fallen into the glade,
there appeared between Lilla and the crawling warrior, a figure of
trailing blue robes, bent double, running. It was Hamoud, his turban
gone, his cheek smeared with loam, one shoulder of his robe stained a
deep violet.
Clapping his sandaled foot upon the spear blade, he seized the Mambava
by his plume of egrets. The painted head was dragged back. The
Zanzibar dagger shone through the ribbons of smoke.
Her mouth twisted in abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out.
"Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could,
and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose,
as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude.
How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to
smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees,
there was something sacrificial in that tableau--the blue robe, the wet
dagger, the plumed head pulled back, with glazed eyes fixed on the
woman who stood rigid, her arms upstretched, transformed from the giver
of life into the giver of death.
She fled, stumbled, stood still in the entrance to the back-trail. In
that leafy tunnel, as far as the eye could see, was no one living or
dead. The porters, the tent boys, all were gone in a stampede for
safety. The baggage lay scattered among the fern beds. She saw
bundles of green canvas, chop boxes, rags, bursting sacks of grain.
Beside a mossy rock lay her dressing case smashed open, its mirror,
brushes, and vials trampled into the mud.
"Ah, my mirror is broken."
She wandered through the wreckage, uttering peals of laughter.
CHAPTER LXIII
The light of the full moon, penetrating the high canopy of leaves,
illuminated the contorted vines that hung motionless in mid-air like
pythons of silver. Here, miles beyond the place of battle, apart from
the trail, in a covert that seemed made for them, the woman and the man
sat resting, she on a mound of moss as soft as a pile of velvet
cushions, he at her feet. A moonbeam rested on her loosened hair and
her dress that was torn to tatters. She raised her head as the sound
of the drums came to her from far away.
To-night there was a new accent in that throbbing, a wilder cadence, a
suggestion of tumult, a hint of the infernal. In her fancy she
perceived a multitude of naked, painted figures dancing in the glamor
of great fires.
A shudder passed through her from head to foot, as she said:
"Now you will confess that we have come into a place where God does not
exist."
He cast round her his blood-stained robe. Through a rent in his white
kanzu, which was glued to his body, his shoulder appeared, covered with
a black encrustation.
"Wherever we turn," he answered, "there is the face of God."
"So you still believe? You could even pray, perhaps?"
By way of response, casting up his dark eyes, he pronounced the
Fatihah, his low voice mingling with the mutter of the drums:
"In the name of God, the Compassionate! Praise belongeth to God, the
Lord of the Worlds, the King of the Day of Doom. Thee do we serve, and
of Thee do we ask aid. Guide us in the straight path, the path of
those to whom Thou hast been gracious, not of those with whom Thou art
angered, or of those who stray. Amen."
"Delusion!" she moaned.
His gaze embraced her in pity. His precisely modeled face, still so
youthful despite his delicate beard, and almost spiritually handsome in
the moonlight, yearned toward her as he returned, with a caressing
gentleness:
"Yes, surely this present life is only a play, a pastime. This world,
and all in it, are shadows cast upon the screen of eternity. But God
is real. Everything may go to destruction, but not the face of God.
Ah," he sighed, "if only the Lord had opened your heart to Islam, had
willed that you might feel the Inner Light! No matter what may happen,
there is peace." He dreamed sadly for a time, then said, "Fair-seeming
to men are women; but God--goodly the home with him!" And he averted
his head from her, as though from a temptation to apostasy.
Something moved in the bushes. Hamoud raised a rifle from the moss
into his lap. Amid the leaves two balls of green fire appeared and
disappeared. It was a leopard that had peeped out at them.
The drum music swelled through the forest.
"To-morrow they will find us," she reflected.
"Meanwhile we live in this flesh, subject to its beliefs, still able to
trust in its seeming powers of delight."
So, after a long hush, he took from his bosom a little glass bottle of
square surfaces enameled with gold, uncorked it, and held it out to
her. There came to her nostrils the odor of her own perfume, which she
had worn in a lost world.
"Clothe yourself in this sweetness," he whispered. "Touch it once more
to your temples, your hair, your lips. Let it float about you like a
veil that covers a beauty remembered from old dreams. These rags will
become cloth of gold on the body of the Sultana of Sultanas. I shall
sit while still alive in those gardens beneath whose shades the rivers
flow--those charming abodes that are in the Garden of Eden. This, and
not Paradise, shall be the great bliss."
She poured the few drops of perfume into her palms, and held out her
hands.
"Ah, Hamoud----"
"Do not speak," he protested, catching her hands in his. "It is this
moment for which I became a servant, did things that you will never
know of, and followed you here."
She sat in the blood-stained robe, in the dark forest vibrating from
the drums and rustling with stealthy beasts, lost, bereft of beauty and
faith, yet aware of one more miracle--realizing that even now, out of
her poverty, she could still bestow happiness.
CHAPTER LXIV
At daybreak they went on.
With his shoulders bowed under a distended sack and a canvas water
bottle, and with his rifle at trail, he guided her feeble steps along
the path. Now and then he besought her to rest. She shook her head.
Bees hummed above them in the festoons of flowers. Purple parrots with
scarlet crests went fluttering away. At noon they paused, ate some
biscuits, then pressed ahead, she driven by her obsession and he, as he
believed, by the purposes of Allah.
Just as a rosy warmth was invading the upper foliage, Hamoud pushed her
from him, and struck at the ground with his gun butt. He had stepped
upon a puff adder.
He sat down to examine his ankle, on which four tiny pinpricks were
visible. He looked up with a fixed smile.
There it lay, a little, crushed reptile, a trivial fragment of matter,
its triangular head flattened out, its scales of pinkish gray, black,
slate, and lemon yellow already turning dull. Yet the man, a rational
being, with power for good as well as evil, for love as well as hatred,
was even now dying from it. But his face expressed the fortitude that
was at the same time the blessing and the curse of his religion, as he
said to her:
"Go. I do not wish you to see me die this death."
She knelt down to peer at those almost imperceptible punctures.
"From that?"
As she spoke he seized his leg above the knee, to choke back the first
excruciating pang. Rocking backward and forward, he began to repeat
scattered texts from the Koran:
"The recompense of the life to come is better, for those who have
believed and feared God----" With a groan he let go of his leg and
clutched at his abdomen. He gasped, "Adorned shall they be with golden
bracelets and with pearls, and their raiment shall be of silk---- Go!
go! Oh, my star, I do not want you to see me die this death!" He
arched his back, then lay flat, his skin colorless, bedewed with a
sudden moisture. "Praise be to God, who hath allowed release from all
this, my Master, the Knowing, the Wise! Into gardens beneath whose
shades---- Ah, but you will not be there! You will not be there!"
He was silent, twisting like the serpent whose head he had crushed.
CHAPTER LXV
Night was falling: it was the time when the beasts of prey begin to
stir from their lairs. Sitting beside the semblance of Hamoud, she
examined in the last of the twilight the well-worn Koran. She hurled
the book from her. It was swallowed by the gloom. "You have won," she
thought, regarding the murky thickets that were hung with morbific
blossoms, the trees that remained a labyrinth even while they dissolved
in the night.
In her progress hither she had cast off, one by one, all her
repugnances and terrors, all her proud and luxurious impulses, all her
charms. Nothing had remained except a love that expected and desired
no physical rewards, and a power of will that she had conjured up
apparently out of nothing.
Now both will and love lay vanquished.
The drums were not yet beating. Silence filled the forest that should
have been alive with little furtive noises. Nature, of which this
place was the core and utmost manifestation, seemed to brood with bated
breath.
She began to speak, urgently, seductively:
"When they come you will wake up and protect me, Hamoud? You love me,
and I once read somewhere that love can be stronger than death. But
now sleep; get back your strength. I'll keep watch. I'm not afraid;
for I have only to reach out my hand to touch you."
She touched the cold forehead and muttered, "How chilly you are!" and
threw over the body of the martyr the torn joho, which she had been
wearing round her shoulders. There was long silence. The whole forest
sighed softly, as if weary of waiting.
"What did you say, Hamoud? A play of shadows? And above it a
permanence that you call the face of God? What queer things your God
must see in this shadow play of ours!"
She laughed indulgently, then caught her breath. The darkness was
filled with an amazing sight.
Before her a great pyramid of bodies rose toward an apex surrounded by
flashes of pink lightning--the seething bodies of all humanity, and of
all the animals and reptiles of the earth. Each struggled to extricate
itself from the rest, to surmount its neighbors, to wriggle toward the
apex. The bare breasts of women, whose handsome ball gowns were torn
and covered with mud, strained to be free from the enwrapping trunks of
elephants, and the coils of pythons. The torsoes of dusky savages and
the limbs of white men writhed under the fangs of lions and hyenas,
which were transfixed by spears, or lacerated by wounds that they had
inflicted on one another. The countless faces exposed on that quaking
mountain of flesh, male and female, light and dark, fair and hideous,
brutish and sensitive, expressed one look of stupid and yet agonized
desire--all eyes were turned upward toward the summit wreathed with
lightning. There those who had just gained their goal, lightly touched
by the tips of the rose-colored bolts, sank back inanimate, went
tumbling down the slope with astonishment frozen on their faces,
scattering broadcast from their hands a cascade of treasures--jewels,
scraps of paper, purses, images of gold and ivory, wreaths of laurel or
of lilies, scepters, and objects in which no one could have discovered
any meaning or any worth.
But what was the goal toward which this mass of flesh was striving so
frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the
lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and
yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure
at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of
human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging
itself to death.
The whole vision vanished.
"Hamoud! Hamoud! Now I'm afraid!"
But she could not wake the protector. She was alone.
"God, then!"
And in one last flash of distracted irony:
"If I called God in Arabic?"
She had an idea that the silently brooding forest was smiling in the
darkness.
Yes, she felt, alone; since even the God of Hamoud could not be aware
of this world, in which everything desired by the senses, or
apprehensible by them, was going to destruction--so futile a tragedy,
so contemptible a fleeting dream, a nothingness of which the miserable
woman seemed to see herself, at last, as the most insignificant part.
"But I have cast it off, left it all behind me! You must hear me! You
shall hear me!"
When her voice, a thin blade of sound, pierced the silence of the black
forest, without a premonitory thud the rumble of the drums began, as
though the roused spirit of the jungle were trying to drown out this
cry. The drum music swelled louder and louder in the breathless night,
its mingled rhythms combining into a thunder. But once more the cry,
"Hear me!" rose to contest with that demoniacal uproar.
When she had remained motionless for a while with upturned face,
weariness rolled down upon her like an avalanche.
The moonlight, creeping through the tangles, covered her prostrate
body. She was dreaming that Anna Zanidov stood before her in the
barbarically painted evening gown. She sat up with a bound. Hands had
embraced her feet. A grayish form crouched before her.
The albino had heard her.
CHAPTER LXVI
Sitting back upon his heels, hugging against his breast a small bow and
a handful of arrows, the albino scrutinized the fallen divinity. Yes,
by some pass of magic she had been changed into a helpless human being,
full of human despair. The poor pariah contemplated her in her
abasement from an eminence of pity.
He rose with an uncouth gesture of invitation. He guided her through
the mottled labyrinth. Stumbling over the roots, bursting her way
through the vines, she pressed after the bent figure whose very
loathsomeness now seemed precious to her.
He had found the lost path. He crept forward more quickly, halted at
last, and pointed. Ahead there expanded a wide sheen of moonlight, in
the midst of which she discerned a man standing like a statue, a fez on
his head and a rifle over his arm.
The albino was gone.
A challenge rang out as she stood forth on the edge of the clearing.
Beyond the sentinel she saw red embers and tents, rising black skulls,
and agitated fezzes. But in the midst of a broad pool of moonlight was
spread a tent cloth through which appeared the outline of a body.
She sank down upon her knees, turned back the tent cloth from the
inscrutable face.
It was the face of Cornelius Rysbroek, who, in the dead of night,
beside his sleeping rival, while drawing the pistol from the holster,
had been shot in the back.
She perceived, on the curtain of a tent before her, a hand that thrust
back the folds, a hand that moved, that lived. Under the tent fly
emerged a man cadaverous from fever, to gaze at another chimera, of
tatters and gaunt pallor, in which he found at last a resemblance to
the woman he had loved. Though Lawrence was sure that this could not
be reality, life bubbled up in him as she drew nearer. He found
somehow the power to stand firm, to hold her fast when she sagged down
in his arms.