A couple of afternoons later, Norah's fingers playing in his hair
roused Dick, somnolent from the heat.
'What's wrong with the engines?' she asked. Dick, who knew nothing
of machinery, went through the motions of intelligent auscultation.
'They are banging and clattering worse than yesterday,' she
persisted, with her head on one side; 'hurry, miss a beat, hurry.
And I'm sure we're going slower.'
'The _Mimi_ was never an ocean greyhound,' said Dick.
Now Norah mentioned it, the engines did sound odd. Why didn't he
know more about the damn things? It was monstrous running a British
boat with black officers and crew. Anything might happen. It would
be deuced awkward if they broke down; it might make them ridiculous.
But the odd noises he thought he noticed might be imaginary.
'She'll get us there before she sinks,' he said.
Norah pulled his hair a trifle harder. 'Nothing like an optimist,'
she remarked.
'It wouldn't be the first time.'
'What do you mean? Has she sunk before?'
'Been sunk. Before the war she was a deep-sea boat, carrying Hun
officials and mails between Dar-es-Salaam and Tanga. One day in 1915
she ran into a British light cruiser. The next two years she spent
at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.'
'Are you inventing this?' said Norah, taking a firmer grip on a
handful of hair.
'Not a word; you can see the shell-marks amidships.'
'I love you when you talk nautical, Dick!'
Dick dragged her to him and kissed her mocking lips.
'Don't, Dick, you'll distract the man at the wheel. Go on telling
me! How do you know all this?'
'One of the Boma men told me. Well, eventually our people raised
her, buried the bones of her captain and crew, and railed her in
sections to the lake. And here she's the only boat we've got.'
'No wonder her engines knock a bit.'
'They're good enough engines, I'm told, though they run red hot. But
they're too big for her hull. There's a sweepstake among the
half-dozen people who use the lake whether she goes up in flames or
the engines drop through her bottom first.'
'Go on, Dick, don't mind me.'
'Yes, I thought you'd like to know,' Dick put his arm round her
shoulders. 'Early this morning when you were sleeping like a lamb, I
was lying awake watching the metal work going a nice cherry red, and
selecting that flat bit of iron to beat off the crew from your place
in the dinghy when the ship burst into flames.'
Norah laughed. 'You think of everything,' she said. 'Why don't they
put on a new boat?'
'Money.' Dick got up and took a turn aft, where he could hear the
engines more clearly. He stood with his head cocked, listening. At
last he shrugged his shoulders and came back to Norah.
'The territory's about bankrupt, and all the cash there is goes in
building a new governor's palace to impress the noble savage.'
He sat down on his bed and fidgeted with the sheet.
'I believe you're right,' he said, 'the engines are about worn out.
They say that at the end of every trip Alibaba reports to the Railway
Workshops at Kigoma, something like this:--(he imitated the genial
obsequiousness and urbane gesticulation of the Arab skipper)--'Yes,
sir, thank you, sir, good run, sir. Boilers finish, sir. Want new
one. No, sir? Very good, sir, start Wednesday, sir.'
Norah's deep laugh rang out. Dick's Irish blood made him a good
mimic. Moreover, life since she left the farm was one long first day
of the holidays, and anything was good for a laugh.
'I adore Alibaba,' she said, 'but I daren't think what his toilet
will be, when he feels he knows us a little better.'
There was some ground for this apprehension. They had boarded the
vessel, scrambling up a rope from her dinghy on to her dirty iron
deck, to be welcomed by a corpulent, bowing figure clad in a khaki
jacket buttoned up to the chin, new red fez, vast trousers once
white, and patent leather boots. His pock-marked face had shone as
he 'escorted them to their quarters,' a ceremony which consisted of
kicking the deck clear of cooking utensils, baskets of meal,
firewood, chickens and goats, and helping Changalilo erect the beds.
But once under way, Alibaba's habit was to replace the new fez with a
dirty skull cap of broderie anglaise, unbutton his jacket from top to
bottom, unlace his boots largely and unhitch his trousers till they
bellied menacingly.
In this negligé he moved slowly between a moribund Madeira chair, the
wheel and the engine-room. Unlike any other skipper who ever sailed
the lake, he ran night as well as day, feeling his way by some extra
sense for squalls, islands, and rocks.
All the work on board was accomplished by him. If from some sense of
fitness, he issued orders which awakened no answering chord in the
crew, it was with unruffled amiability that he executed them himself.
Well might the _Mimi_ be called the Democrat's Utopia. Instance the
business of dropping anchor. As the _Mimi_ came inshore, Alibaba
would blow his syren rapturously and rattle through a string of
polyglot orders while the crew listened with a gratified smile, in
complete immobility. Without the slightest sign of mortification,
Alibaba would waddle forward and, with a push of his patent leather
boot, propel the tiny anchor into the lake. A sublime gesture worth
pages of philosophic writing or communist propaganda.
'Is his name really Alibaba?' asked Norah, laying her hand over
Dick's well-kept fingers.
'I think it's because of the crew,' Dick explained. 'Alibaba and the
forty thieves.'
'Is he an Arab or what?' Mildly interested, she liked hearing Dick's
voice.
'"Or what" about describes him,' he replied. 'I should say every
race on the East Coast took a hand. Let's see. His grandfather
would be a Eurasian stationmaster....'
'And his grandmother a Zanzibari dancing girl.'
'While his mother was kept by a Greek barman.'
'But was unfaithful to him with the Goanese cook.'
They laughed together delightedly. The engines seemed to run
smoother, and Dick's mind was easier. If Dick was happy, Norah was
happy too. Was she not on her honeymoon, the sweeter if stolen? And
after the shuttered years on the farm, how savoury this foretaste of
the busy world of men!
Like a demon in a pantomime, the pitch black head of a fireman popped
up through an iron hatch, hung over the side gleaming with sweat and
drank greedily the brackish water of the lake, flicking it
dexterously with straight fingers into a cavernous mouth. Then he
began to pass armfuls of short logs from the firewood stacked on the
deck to an invisible comrade by the boilers.
A shutter or door was opened in the bowels of the ship and a noise of
hammering issued. Hammering and oaths in an unknown tongue. A blast
of scorching, oil-saturated air reached Dick. It was as concrete as
a hot hand laid on his face.
'By Jove, the heat must be terrific down there.' he said, 'it's
sufficiently torrid on deck.'
It had been cool enough that morning when they left the fishing
village where the oxen had been embarked. Dawn had streaked the
motionless water with fragile pink and silver. The boat rode so low
in the water that Norah's head on her pillow had been almost level
with the lake. Never before had she felt so near nature, absorbed
into beauty, trespassing on mystery.
Her thoughts had jerked back to Archie. Poor lad, how this beauty
would have bored him and how he would have glowered at Dick's
rhapsodies....
Poor Archie, you couldn't help liking him, even if you didn't love
him. And she must have done that once, unimaginable as it now was."
"Dead Love," mused Ross, "seems to leave slighter memory even than
its mortal begetters. If Archie had died, she would still have
remembered every detail of his body and habits. But the love he had
once inspired--that had passed like a last year's sunrise, leaving at
the most a certain sadness for a glory ephemeral.
She stared over the side. The steamer was following a deep-water
channel, indiscernible to other eyes than Alibaba's, winding her way
very close to shore through a screen of densely wooded islets, black
against the pale sky of dawn, the debris of the crater wall. Here
and there, among many islands that were merely cliffs crowned with
tightly packed trees, glimpses of enticing coves and silvery beaches
called to the lovers to linger.
But, like the comrades of Odysseus, Alibaba stopped his ears and
signed to the tall negro at the helm whose high cheekbones and white
beretta-like cap lent him a certain episcopal dignity, as he spun the
wheel and steered the vessel out into the lake.
What was the use, thought Norah, of letting her mind dwell on Archie
now she had left him for good. If she had endured something of the
agony of a Samson pulling down the pillars of the loyalty that
supported her world, she did not mean to look over her shoulder at
the ruins.
Norah's thought did not run on subtle lines. Life for her fell into
watertight compartments. She had loved Archie with a whole-hearted
romantic passion. That was over, many months dead and shut away in
its own little coffin. The succeeding phase of wifely duty, half
kindly, half grudging, was over too and disposed in its less honoured
grave. Now she stood, as she thought, on the threshold of a new
world, a reborn Norah with no past to catch her feet."
"When she propounded that illusion," said Ross, "I really couldn't
help laughing. As if we, prisoners lying in the dark, blindfolded
with every shade of prejudice, handcuffed with immemorial habits,
fettered by years of education, accidental or deliberate, chained to
almost automatic reactions, could ever start afresh. We who don't
get a fresh start in the womb, where too we're the slaves of a past
that drags us along from amœba to ape.
And that is inside ourselves: the outside world does not stand aside,
hat in hand, to let us start afresh.
Still Norah was perhaps freer than some of us. She felt no moral
qualms. The seventh--is it?--commandment to her had always seemed an
over-rated affair, a question to be solved more by fastidiousness
than morality. She had always assumed the right to please herself.
And now she was well pleased. Dick was the ideal lover--happy,
charming, attentive. She had found the mate Nature had created for
her--lion-hearted and debonair, the match for any emergency life
might produce, ready for any risk, game for battle with the gods,
who, when at last she had yielded to his entreaties, had shouted with
Troilus that he would 'throw his glove to Death himself.'
Yes, she had chosen well this time. All idols hadn't feet of clay,
some surely were pure gold. The old and disillusioned could not be
right. She turned from that distasteful theory to the beauty of the
lake.
As the islands and the shore receded, the formation of the
800-mile-long crater revealed itself.
Outside towered a circle of hyacinthine blue from whose summit
perhaps at a time before there were men to suffer, the great cone had
been hurled, leaving a lip here straight as a sword, here jagged as a
jaw of shattered teeth. Inwards from the torn sides of the
stupendous bowl radiated, like fingers from a monstrous hand, hills,
in these days thick with trees, dimpled with valleys.
These spurs or buttresses gave on to the lake sometimes in a cliff or
tumble of boulders, sometimes in a sloping facet like the hip of a
slate roof. Down the valleys between them swift streams hurried or,
failing to find a bed, fell in cascades down thousands of feet. In
spite of the beauty Norah shivered.
'Don't you feel like a mouse in a bucket?' she said.
As the sun rose higher and hotter, the irregularity of the engines
became more marked--in Alibaba's words, 'worse as before, sir.'
Dick's features had drawn into a frown which even Norah could not
lighten and irritably he paced the narrow deck.
Noon was announced by an access of activity among the deck hands, who
bestirred themselves to eat their thick pink porridge of cooked
millet, dipping fingers into the common bowl. They were a
chattering, good-humoured crowd, clad in the remains of blue serge
with white beretta-shaped caps on their shiny black heads.
Changalilo became visible threading his way through them with a plate
of soup in each hand. With lunch he brought a tale of violence and
interference on the part of the lean Indian passenger. A rambling
story, like all native plaints, it was, starting from the moment of
reaching the _Mimi_ and leading from borrowed pans and stolen cutlery
to high words that ended in a blow.
Dick's nerves had been set on edge by the heat and by anxiety over
the engines. He would not listen to advice to follow Gallio. He had
always hated, he said, the Indians in Africa, low-caste pedlars
battening on the ignorant native, and he wasn't going to stand for
any interference with his servants. He strode angrily down the hot
iron deck, his white coat flapping. The deck hands followed in a
curious mob.
Norah heard his voice raised in the stern, angry and a little shrill.
'I found the brute squatting half naked on his hatch,' he reported
later, 'eating rice and spilling it into his beard. I asked him if
he understood English, and he bowed in a condescending sort of way.
That made me lose my temper a bit and I told him if he didn't leave
our boys alone, I'd pitch him into the lake. The swine didn't stir a
muscle except to smile. A nasty quiet sort of smile. It made me
wild to see him sitting there, cross-legged and grinning, as if he'd
bought the ship, and I told him to get up when a white man spoke to
him. Again he didn't move, but went on picking some grains of rice
out of his beard. He even had the cheek to close his eyes as if he
were tired.
'That was a trifle too much, and I took him by the scruff, lifting
him none too gently on to his feet. I was going to give him a good
cuffing, but he slid out of my hand like a snake, and disappeared
behind the galley. By his face as he went, I shouldn't say he was
exactly brimming over with brotherly love.... I'd have followed him,
but it wouldn't have looked dignified.'
'I'm jolly glad you didn't,' said Norah. 'He might have stuck a
knife into you. Do be careful, Dick.'
'I'd like to see him try,' said Dick, 'but pluck's not his strong
suit ... the odd thing was the way the crew seemed to side with him.
Usually the nigger hates the Hindoo, but these blighters looked upset
when I went for the swine.'
Dick was a bit upset himself. No one cares to feel he has played a
poorish part. It needed all Norah's admiration to restore his
equanimity, and the physical contact of her cool white hand.
If Norah's hand was cool, it was the only thing on board the boat in
that condition. For, as the day wore on, the heat of the failing
engines, added to the blaze of the sun, was intolerable. The sickly
smell of hot oil filled the nostrils; the dazzle off the water
scorched the eyeballs. Mirage with a magician's wand lifted island
and headland off the horizon as the lake took a colour of deepest
emerald, its surface networked irregularly with violet shadows.
About three in the afternoon, the engines gave a final jerk and
fetched up soundless. The Chief--and only--Engineer emerged for
emphatic converse with Alibaba.
He was an obese Indian with a naturally depressed air and an easy
flow of perspiration. His hair and drooping moustaches were grey. I
fancy a day or two in the engine-room of the _Mimi_ would send
Phœbus Apollo a bit grey.
Skipper and engineer disappeared, but the sounds of hammering between
decks indicated their continued existence. After half an hour they
emerged, dirtier than ever and swimming in sweat. Dick, now
thoroughly uneasy, thought the time for direct action had arrived,
and joined the party. Norah, watching from the bows, guessed from
the bowing, shrugging, and upturned palms that the situation was not
satisfactory. She was right.
'I can't understand engine-room shop in a mixture of Swahili and
Hindustani,' confided Dick, 'but I gather from Alibaba it's case of
"that engine no good, sir," and "big rod he very sick, sir, he wantee
for die."'
'I suppose we'll have to make for the nearest White Fathers,' said
Norah, 'though I do feel an adulterous couple a bit "de trop" at a
mission.'
'Alibaba says there isn't a mission anywhere for 100 miles either way
up or down this side of the lake.'
'Can't we do that slowly?'
'He says not.'
'What about crossing over to the other side?'
'That's forty miles or so from here, and the engines are good for
another ten at the most. No, what they want is to put into a little
bay just out of sight round that headland, where there's good
anchorage for the night.'
'I suppose there'll be a village where we can get food,' said Norah.
'In any case,' added Dick, 'there's really no choice. We can do ten
miles at the most. I'd better tell them to get on with it.'
Much firewood was shot into the furnace and much steam hissed out
into the air, before the engines clanked regretfully into life.
Alibaba took his place at the wheel, and, dragging like a wounded
buck that has outdistanced the hunter, the _Mimi_ drew inshore.
Across her bows loomed a rocky promontory that dropped in sheer cliff
to the water. Alibaba swung her wide to miss the piled boulders,
which had crumbled from its face to form a breakwater to the bay and
a council chamber for the grave, black, diving birds who, bolt
upright, stretched their necks in the sun.
The view that was revealed as the steamer heeled slowly round the bar
and the divers with raucous cries flapped heavily into the air,
presented an appearance of habitation that momentarily relieved the
wayfarers.
At the feet of the densely wooded hills that sloped from the sheer
cliffs of the encircling mountains, a square red brick tower
proclaimed the constructive instinct of white men. Its style
revealed the faith of the Catholic Fathers, who, since the days of
the slave trade, have proselytised the lake shores.
Help seemed at hand, though the travellers' relief was marred by the
falsehood of their position. Then, as the steamer drew painfully
abreast of the tower, they recognised the handicraft of a Presence
alike indifferent to hopes of human aid and feelings of delicacy.
The assurance of Alibaba that 'missionary he finish die long time'
was not required to identify the technique of death and desolation.
The windows of the tower gaped blankly, the round Spanish tiles were
broken or missing, trees and creepers had obliterated all trace of
the dwelling of kindly men. Not even the squalor of a native village
struggled with the silent supremacy of nature. The ruined church
tower stood alone to establish a passing triumph of faith. Other
buildings that may have once existed had failed to resist the
pressure of the forest. Even in the bright sunshine, Norah felt the
wing of tragedy over the deserted station, and she wished Alibaba
endowed with enough imagination to have avoided this haunted valley
for their night's sojourn.
But that astute seafarer had not, as it proved, underrated the
endurance of his engines. Already panting had degenerated into
hiccoughing. Slower and slower the _Mimi_ trailed her wounded way
towards the land, heading for the northern arm of the bay, where a
swift little river pouring yellow into the lake promised anchorage
inshore.
When she was within a hundred yards of its mouth, the end came. The
engines raced ear-shatteringly. A grinding noise succeeded, and a
cloud of steam masking the hurrying black forms of the firemen. Then
a dead silence and the _Mimi_ rolled lifelessly lakewards, carried
out by the yellow current."