THE CRATER
BY
ROBERT GORE-BROWNE
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
_NOTE: No white character in this novel is drawn from life.--R. G.-B._
THE CRATER
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE CRATER
PROLOGUE
"Her story," said Ross, aiming his cigar-end at a phosphorescent
patch of ocean, "was discreditable enough to be true." He drew an
immense red handkerchief from the pocket of his pyjamas, and wiped
his extensive forehead, muttering, "As far as a woman ever tells the
truth about herself."
I sat on in silence waiting for the epigrams to end and the narrative
to begin.
It was a stifling night off the East Coast of Africa. A wind that
blew from the Equator and followed a crowded ship made sleep
impossible. Nightly it drove Ross and myself on deck to spend the
intolerable hours in talk.
I did not know much about Ross; no one on board did. A big man with
a walrus moustache and a bald head, he had joined the vessel at an
unusual East Coast port with few possessions--a rifle or two, and a
green kit bag. His preposterous opinions were enunciated with the
precise utterance of a spinster, and punctuated by pulls at a
virulent black cigar. He knew men and cities; he knew Africa at its
heart, where are neither men nor cities.
Our mutual acquaintanceship exhausted, we had drifted to anecdotes of
the improbabilities that happen daily in that improbable continent.
"You can never tell what the most normal folk will do," he had said.
"One of the most charming girls I know--in three weeks she and her
husband had reduced the Decalogue to ribbons...." He broke off, and
I had difficulty in inducing him to begin again.
"The girl," he said at last, between puffs of his cigar, "came to me
for advice. This implied no particular compliment to my wisdom,
since I was the only disinterested white man for a hundred miles. I
told her that only fools gave advice, and only wise men took it.
'God knows I'm not wise,' she said, 'but I'd do anything to...'
'My dear, I'll do my best,' I said when I saw that she did not mean
to finish her sentence, 'but even for that I must hear a bit more.'
She looked at me a little startled, then threw up her chin and
plunged into her story. And, as I said, by most standards, it did
her little enough credit. Unless courage covers as much as charity.
Courage is even needed for a proud woman to tell a man whom she'd met
half a dozen times the full story of her ... 'indiscretions' shall we
call them?" He paused and seemed to ponder the qualities and
failings of his heroine. "Still, most of the other animals have
courage," he added. "And no doubt if she was to stay sane, she had
to get things clear in her own head. Anyhow, she spared me no detail
or digression in the telling of her deplorable history."
Ross got up and walked heavily to the rail where he stood staring
down at the sea, which parted before our bows with the sound and
motion of split silk. His voice came to me a little muted by the
night.
"I didn't know the Sinclairs well," he continued, "but by using my
eyes at our occasional meetings, I had a pretty correct idea how
matters stood. And Archie told me as much as he told any one. More,
while I was nursing him through three days of delirium."
I ventured to suggest that it would be more interesting for me if he
began the story at the beginning instead of the end. He shook his
head: "The writer of the Book of Genesis was the last story teller
who could begin at the beginning. So much has gone before.
If you want the beginning, you'll have to listen, for instance, to
the history of the house of Cleverly, from its first earl, the
bandit, to its last earl, the bankrupt, while I trace you Norah's
inheritance of the maxim of that race of rakes ... and occasional
heroes--'Risk before Repute.'
And don't forget we'd have to blend in a survey of Archie's
hard-headed lowland forbears, measure the immeasurable pride of his
Highland mother, estimate the weight of the legal tradition he
inherited from sire and grandsire, which sees both sides of
everything, and commits itself to nothing, superimpose Archie's own
Oxford training which forbade him ever to back his fancy--all that
made him that loyal, hardworking, and in every way estimable stone of
stumbling and rock of offence to poor Norah.
And then the scene is set in Africa. By now the power of Africa has
passed into platitude, but like most platitude, there's something in
it.
Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of
whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith,
who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of
beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no
wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one
believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.
Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography,
psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are
living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is
woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult
to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if
insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored
swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller
than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed
mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."
"Plainer men," went on Ross after a pause, "see there no strange
gods, see rather the dangerous absence of that unromantic Deity,
Public Opinion. In civilised life man's every action is preordained
by the opinion of his fellows.
Your young revolutionary may deny this, claiming that he, at any
rate, is a free agent. But is not he too bound on the wheel of
revolutionary opinion? Does not the Bolshevik follow the tradition
of his class--to spit at a bourgeois or whatever it may be--as
slavishly as a Die-hard peer?
In the solitudes, the force is unborn and the individual is left, now
hell is discredited, a law to himself.
So if you ask me to foretell the change that Africa would work in any
given individual, I say, 'Take his ruling weakness, his Lowest Common
Failing: cube it. The result will be the man when Africa has done
with him.'"
Ross re-lit his atrocious cigar.
"By now," he said, "you must regret that you asked for the beginning
of my story.
Are you not convinced that it is better to let me start in the middle
of the story and incidentally in the middle of a lake in the middle
of Africa?"
"Suppose yourself dead," he continued, taking my silence for assent,
"and seeking variety from twanging harps round a glassy sea or
banging tambourines in a medium's cabinet, you look down from the
upper air, one day in October, 1921. Suppose your eye falls on
Tanganyika--that sapphire coloured cleft which runs eight hundred
miles long by fifty wide through the endless forests of Central
Africa, with the old German Colony to the right, Belgian Congo to the
left, North Eastern Rhodesia at the near end.
Not much humanity for you to patronise: every thirty miles or so
along the edge of the water a cluster of thatched huts providing a
measure of shelter for a handful of savages who live on fish and
mangoes, careless of the future, indifferent to the past. Every 300
miles or so, at a Catholic Mission, a couple of white-robed Fathers
issue rosaries to their less enlightened neighbours, who until the
missionaries came had to rely on amulets made of python hearts.
Between these centres of human endeavour, an uncharted belt of forest
fringes the lake, and climbs the sides of the great cold crater,
until these slope so steep that not even a creeper can catch hold.
For the last thousand feet the rock is bare.
Forest rings the crater, stretching further than even you from your
advantageous position can see. Nor can you see through the
peacock-blue water to the bottom of the lake. They say it hasn't one.
On this particular day of your ethereal view, there is even a bit of
human interest in that splendid but desolate vista. At the southern
end of the lake a herald of European culture, a broad-beamed steam
tug, lies black and ugly on the fantastically blue water. In the
bows you may see two figures; from your remote standpoint,
insignificant enough. You can discern the features no more than you
can read the passions of the tiny puppets holding each other close,
as if for defence against the indifferent majesty of nature.
From your elevation you can see a third figure. It is thrusting its
way through the forest that borders the lake at the head of a train
of diminutive black carriers. Ignorant of each other, the two groups
of marionettes are drawn by wires of Fate, invisible even to you,
into a contact all but fatal to both."
PART I
"If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a
supersubtle Venetian be not too hard ... thou shalt enjoy her."--W.
SHAKESPEARE.
CHAPTER I
"Whatever Norah lacked, it was not looks," said Ross, leaving the
rail to fling himself into a deck-chair that creaked under his weight.
'Beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart
And a good stomach to a feast are all,
All the poor crimes you can charge her with,'"
he murmured.
"Not that her heart stayed very merry: while, for the matter of that,
even her beauty was a good deal altered the last time I met her and
heard from her lips the story I am going to tell you.
By then life and Africa had handled her and treated her as an etcher
his plate with steel and acid, adding something which was not there
before, call it a soul or a complex according to your creed.
Well, if from heaven that day you could have seen her clearly as she
sat beside Dick Ward on the deck of the _Mimi_ you would have
remarked, a bit of a thing, who rode some seven stone, neatly cut as
a Chinese carving, legs and ankles to make you praise the name of
short skirts, short dark hair that entangled the gleam of shaded
lamplight on mahogany, cheekbones curving out from cheeks, whose
blood (unless that carmine could be claimed for lip salve) had ebbed
to her mouth, on which a smile mocked more often than it flattered.
This smile, her pretty slimness, her moods, mobile as quicksilver,
might have left her what old men call 'a divine imp,' and you could
have forgotten her in the next pretty girl you saw, but for some
subtle, elusive quality--like a barely perceptible perfume--that,
troubling and tantalising, forbade oblivion."
Ross seemed to meditate.
"I doubt," he said at last, "if it be profitable to anatomise magic;
but if I must satisfy your inquiring turn of mind, I would hazard
that it was the presence of two conflicting strains in Norah that
fascinated the senses.
At some time you must have visited the Small Cat House at the Zoo?
Those drowsy, furry, definite, little entities. A trifle sensual, a
trifle cruel. Lazy, individualistic, practical, wicked, fascinating.
Small, pointed faces, red tongues, sharp claws, sudden motions, quick
wits.... Behind the prettiness and softness something lurks,
something of the night, of the wilds.
Well, there was a quality in Norah that provoked one to the same
admiration. When you listened to her deep, caressing voice--as deep
a voice as I've heard in a woman, (some undergraduate once compared
it to the dusk of a summer's day)--you were in the presence of
something as strange and as primordial as the dances of the East.
Or when you glanced discreetly (should you be a foreigner, 'when you
stared admiringly') at the elusive line of her face, which fined down
to that evanescent oval, common enough in Italy, so light, so
feminine, or should I say 'so female,' you were aware of something
... well, there isn't a fair word. To describe by opposites it
certainly was not spiritual. But neither was it animal. Perhaps
'Southern' is as good an adjective as any. Not that she could really
trace any meridional blood. If the Cleverlies went to the Continent
for their mistresses, they stuck to the Shires for their wives. But
unless you are satisfied by a wave of the hand towards the Small Cat
House, 'Southern' is as good an adjective as I can find you.
Then, when you thought you had her classified, you met the second
strain. Your ears lost her voice, your gaze left the line of cheek
and chin and travelled to her narrow eyes, dark as night before
sunrise, as a velvet curtain hiding a smouldering fire; at once you
passed to the presence of a different animal.
The Small Cats don't bother their heads about romance, adventure,
rebellion or any generous folly. I doubt if any occupant of the Zoo
does; for that look you must search the human prisons.
But Norah's eyes made you remember forlorn hopes, lost causes,
desperate adventures, despairing loyalties; all that uncomfortable
side of life which the prudent man avoids. And when they gazed at
you under their arched, delicate brows, you felt admiration or pity
according to your lights, for a fellow mortal, spurred by impractical
generosities, dazzled by romantic imaginings, ridden by rebellious
longings, who'd funk no fence that Life might offer--Life isn't only
fences," broke off Ross to mutter. "It's the plough that kills the
likes of her."
"Dick Ward," he went on, "was gazing, no doubt, into those romantic
orbs at the minute my story begins, and reading a flattering message
in their courageous depths.
One could not look at Dick without pleasure. He presented a
Lucifer-son-of-the-morning effect.
The 'Greek god' type, which fluttered our grandmothers, lacks
sufficient kick for the Neo-georgian maid. His hair was perhaps a
shade too long for male taste, though women seem in this to be more
lenient. That people, on first acquaintance, were apt to take him
for an American was possibly due to his faint Irish intonation, and
he was so wonderfully sure, so well poised, and so preposterously
good looking.
During the war he served in the Air Force. When peace returned, a
rich uncle's death saved him from the horrors of work. Wealth was
added to charm, wit, good looks--unless vows matter, can you blame
Norah so much?
'Marriage laws are drafted by the old,' he had just said, to calm
some scruple, 'to be broken by the young.'
'Dick, don't be so Wilde!' she retorted. This isn't the setting.
Look at the Lake....'
'I'd rather look at the woman!'
'Don't be an ass. The woman's there any day, Tanganyika----'
'I can't believe yet she will be. I'm afraid of waking up.'
'I feel I've dreamt away my life till now: I've only just woken up.
Woken up from a bad dream about Africa.'
'Africa is nearly over. Two days up the Lake to the railway,
then----'
'Do you so badly want the time to hurry?'
'Every second with you is worth a life, only----'
'Only you'd sooner catch the train.'
'Aren't you ever serious, Norah? You know I love you with----'
'I often wonder if you love me at all, Dick.'
'No one has ever loved a woman so.'
'Supposing, of course, there is such a thing as love.'
'Norah!'
'Love that survives appetite.'
'Darling!'.
'Well, you see, I loved before.'
'As much as ... now?'
'Differently, perhaps.'
'And my love is different. My love....'
But we'll leave Dick's amatory eloquence to the sufficient audience
of Norah and the extinct volcanoes that ring the Lake. In their
youth, they, too, had known outbursts of fire and passionate
contortion: now cold and desolate, with puffs of cloud nestling like
patches of snow in their hollow flanks, bluer than any precious
stone, they stared down in unmoved silence.
All day the _Mimi_ steamed slowly and fussily, the sun beating
fiercely on her crowded deck through the thin awning. Norah lay full
length on the camp bed her body servant had put up. The _Mimi_ did
not run to cabins--you shared her deck with her doubtfully Arab
captain, who lounged in a three-legged wicker chair. Other
competitors for the narrow space were the negro crew with their
household gods, the couple of lean goats, and the dozen lousy fowls
that formed the vessel's food supply.
A portion aft was reserved for native passengers, a class represented
this trip by one incredibly lean Indian, with a wiry beard and a blue
and white check turban. He sat on a hatch, naked to the waist, his
thin legs crossed, motionless for hours. Each time that Norah
glanced in his direction his brows seemed to bend in a scowl at the
two Europeans.
So all that day they steamed over the Lake, whose sapphire waters
were cool to the eye and tepid to the hand. Towards evening they
anchored off a fishing village where the captain had told them an
Arab was waiting with oxen to ship to a mission up the Lake. He had
driven them from a village, a hundred miles to the south, where his
father had settled in the days of the slave trade.
Norah was roused from drowsy contemplation of Dick's profile by a
shout; she felt the engines go half speed and idly she watched a
ragged silhouette sounding over the bows with a painted rod.
'_Bili_ ... _bili_--two fathoms ... two fathoms.' Another shout, and
the engines were silent. She rose and took Dick's arm as he leaned
over the bulwarks gazing landwards.
'What is it?' she asked.
'I was planning.'
'About us?'
When we're home. What we'll do; where'll we go; what we'll see.'
'Never anything stranger than this,' she nodded towards the shore.
Sheer red cliffs loomed above them. Like futurist painting, violent
colours lay in slabs. A streak of faint green sky topped the
sandstone wall off which blazed the refulgence of the declining sun;
a strip of beach slid a tongue of silver between that fiery barrier
and the deepening blue of the Lake.
'Pity you can't paint, Dick. Call it "Drink of Water in Hell," or
something bright.'
'The village spoils it. Victorian almost.'
The village, which contrasted the pacificism of man with the violence
of nature, stretched its single row of oblong huts under the compact
shade of gray-green mango-trees. Their shadow fell black on the
ragged thatch which fined from the chocolate colour of the peak,
discoloured by innumerable cooking fires, to silver at the eaves.
Groups of placid or indifferent men squatted on the verandahs without
motion save for the occasional act of taking snuff. The only sound
came from a woman who knelt and pounded millet. The smooth wooden
block raised with her two hands beat rhythmically in the worn mortar.
A group of naked babies splashed among wavelets too tiny to disturb
even their slight equilibrium.
And Norah's heart warmed to the quiet humanity of the scene. A
thought struck her: 'What about those babies and crocs?' she asked.
'Oh!' said Dick. 'There aren't crocs everywhere. It's uninhabited
bays they like.'
The advent of the steamer created no stir. At last a family, more
enterprising or more avaricious than the rest, was moved to abandon
the quietude of their verandah for the yellow sunlight of the beach,
where their naked forms were silhouetted, straining at the launch of
one of the dozen grey dugouts that pointed in every direction on the
sand. The example set, the _Mimi_ was soon ringed by slim canoes
laden with long bunches of bananas, purplish green mangoes, and fish
of the lake.
'Better buy some, Dick, we haven't too much food with us,' counselled
Norah. 'And we mayn't have another chance before Kigoma.'
'What about half a dozen of those?' he pointed to an odd looking
yellow barbel with grotesque whiskers. It was as big as a child of
ten.
Norah shuddered.
'What's that?' she asked in Swahili, pointing to another fish. 'Is
it good eating?'
'_Coupi_, memsahib,' said the villager, holding up a sort of carp
that looked as if it had been inexpertly dyed a poisonous saffron.
'See the blue marking on its belly!' said Dick. 'What a colour!'
'Lapis-lazuli, isn't it?'"
* * * * * * *
For some time Ross had seemed to try my credulity high.
"Do you mean to tell me," I cried, "that Lady Norah repeated to you
the words of the most trivial conversations, minute details that
caught her eye, vague impressions that darted across her brain?"
"Of course not," said Ross calmly, "but she told me enough to let me
fill them in with certainty. You surely don't demand the 'or words
to that effect' of the metropolitan police at each moment.
* * * * * * *
"The cattle dealer," he continued placidly, "who, for many days had
been awaiting the boat's arrival, had driven two oxen knee-deep into
the water. A couple of deck-hands tumbled, laughing and talking,
into the ship's dinghy and paddled towards them.
Norah, whose attention was as easily caught by life's activities as
any errand boy's, left the bargaining crowd to watch the boat's
return.
Horns, muzzles, humps alone visible out of the water, the beasts swam
tied to either rowlock. Supporting the head of one, its owner hung
over the gunwale. The other less favoured ox submerged each time the
slight swell struck him and, as he rose again above the surface,
snorted stentorianly.
A cable, paid out from the ship, at a second attempt was noosed over
one pair of wide horns. The firemen bent to the capstan, answering
the long-drawn chant of their capitao 'oo-ère' with a staccato
'wére.' Slowly the derrick lifted the heavy beast by his horns into
the air where he hung grotesquely, pawing and patient. A signal was
given and the beam swung inboard, the ox slipping a little as his
hoofs met the unfamiliar plates of the deck.
The second beast was more truculent. No sooner had he touched deck
and felt his horns free of the noose than, lunging forward, he tossed
one of the ship's goats into the hold. The crew laughed delightedly.
The ox stood, his feelings outraged, scraping the deck with his hoof
and swaying his lowered head.
'Look out, Dick,' cried Norah, wise in the ways of cattle. 'He's
coming for you.'
But Dick would not have been quick enough to escape the fate of the
goat, had not Norah presented a stick to the oncoming muzzle. Faced
with the alternative of bumping his nose, or abandoning his
objective, scared and nervy, rather than ugly-tempered, he shambled
off, lowing, to the after end of the ship.
'Brute,' said Dick, but Norah followed and had her late opponent
slobbering his wet muzzle into her sleeve.
His owner, the Arab, in a hurry to start his hundred-mile walk home,
had rowed back to shore to collect his herd boys, who lay on the
beach, at the edge of the lapping water. His white-robed figure was
visible for a moment on the path leading into the hills behind the
village, before it disappeared among the trees. The voices of his
ragged followers were audible a little longer, then silence fell as
the village settled for the night. Blue smoke rose through every
roof and hovered in a mist over the village; the smell of wood fires
and cooking was added to the faintly saline breath of the Lake.
Presently the moon came up and touched with silver the crest of every
ripple. Across the glittering pathway slid the silhouette of a canoe
and, lying in her bows, an adolescent began to twang a native guitar."