CHAPTER X

Norah woke before it was light. She made no attempt to recapture a

sleep that dreams had disturbed--dreams in which the ox was drowned

again, in which a crocodile pursued her leaden steps while the

Indian's crooked knife held Dick from her rescue. As soon as her

watch showed half-past four, she summoned Changalilo from the fire

which he had tended through the night, waking at intervals as a

native will. Yesterday it had been decided to strike camp before

dawn, giving him time to cook breakfast and carry their loads down to

the shore ready to start at the first gleam of light.

Breakfast finished, Dick led the way to the beach. When they were

twenty yards away, they heard a quick scrunch on the shingle and a

quiet plop in the water.

'Ngwene,' said Changalilo casually, and kept back from the lake's

edge, where the crocodile they had disturbed still might lurk.

They waited, Norah's hand in Dick's. The water was warmer than the

air, and a mist hung on its surface. Above the mist the mountains

across the lake were already outlined against a faint sky.

Voices on the _Mimi_, carried by the water, were audible.

'Damn Alibaba!' said Dick. 'Why can't he send the boat?'

Norah felt her last night's uneasiness return. 'But it's early yet,'

she said.

The talking on board continued. Alibaba's voice was recognisable,

raised in command or protest.

'He's having a job getting the boat's crew out,' said Dick, in answer

to an unspoken anxiety.

Dawn came suddenly, and the water showed a delicate misty blue, as if

it were seen through silvered crystal. Dick raised his voice in a

hail. The sounds on the steamer ceased. She was visible now, squat

and black on the water, but the distance was too great to distinguish

figures in the group that darkened the deck.

Dick hailed again.

A silence seemed to brood on the face of the waters till the banal

reassurance 'All right' floated to them on the motionless air.

'That wasn't Alibaba?' asked Norah.

Dick shrugged his shoulders in nervous irritation. He was angry with

Alibaba, angry with himself.

Soon, however, the sight of black figures climbing over the stern

dispelled his apprehension. 'That's better,' he sighed, 'but why

five of them? We don't want more than four oars.'

As the boat approached, Norah noticed that for the long row its crew

had discarded the unfamiliar European oar, reverting to the pointed

paddle of their fathers. This looked like business. She took a last

glance at the shore, where she had sensed such sinister influence,

and smiled at her unfulfilled forebodings.

What the devil's that blasted Hindoo doing in the boat?' cried Dick

suddenly.

Norah looked and saw the Indian's sardonic features momentarily

revealed over the rising and falling shoulder of the bow-paddler, an

ape-like negro, whose hunting knife, stuck in his belt, lent a

piratical air to a personality no doubt genial enough.

'I'll jolly soon have him out of that,' muttered Dick.

As if his intentions had been divined, the uplifted paddles were

checked and the silver water dripped from their narrow blades. The

boat swung broadside on, a stone's-throw from land, rocking gently.

Norah was near enough to see the perturbed, uneasy features of the

crew that contrasted with the ironic composure of the Indian. He

rose slowly to his feet from his seat in the stern. His thin lips

twisted into a smile. His beaklike nose and the naked, withered skin

of his neck reminded Norah of a vulture that had settled on a buck

she had shot on the farm.

He stood for a moment in silence, smiling at the Europeans.

'Yesterday,' he began nasally, 'the Sahib struck this slave for

remaining seated in the Sahib's presence. The slave now stands.'

'Cut that out,' shouted Dick, 'and paddle the boat inland at once.'

The habit of obeying white men stimulated the gorilla-like stoker to

dip his paddle in the water, but the Indian stopped him with a

gesture.

'Surely, Sahib, when my words are ended, we will paddle to land.'

His hand, waved gently towards the Belgian coast, explained his

meaning.

'Yesterday the Sahib forbade his slave to interfere in his affairs.

He will now lay the lake between himself and those affairs.'

He threw back his head and laughed noiselessly. Dick went red with

rage.

'The damned nigger...' he cried.

Under her breath Norah whispered to him to take his gun.

'It's him or us,' she said.

'Do you mean?...' began Dick, then broke off. 'Hell!' he shouted.

Why did I waste those cartridges yesterday?'

'Why----' began Norah.

'I emptied my magazine on a croc last night,' he confessed. 'I

thought I had another handful in my shooting jacket.'

'Then bluff him with the empty gun. If you can frighten the Indian,

the natives will turn.'

But if Dick was a bluffer, his was not the brand that pulls off

forlorn hopes. His belief in the avarice of the Indians who colonise

Africa suggested an easier plan. Holding out his purse, he shouted

promises of lavish reward, if the Indian would take them off.

The offer made to the crew might have had effect. Their simple minds

were free from hostility or mistrust. But in the dominant heart of

the Hindoo, vengeance, and doubt that promises would be honoured,

displaced cupidity.

He gave the order to paddle.

Too late Dick ran to the loads and snatched his gun. The dinghy had

drawn out into the lake. 'Stop,' shouted Dick, 'or I'll fire.' His

words recalled to Norah's brain the games of her childhood, and in

spite of her anxiety she had to smother a smile.

The Indian stopped laughing and crouched in the bottom of the boat,

urging speed on the paddlers. He put his faith in the increasing

range and the mist which still covered the water. For some seconds

after every one had recognised the pretence Dick stood, gun at

shoulder, theatrical, ridiculous. Then with an oath he dropped the

Mauser.

Already remote, the Indian's laugh rang out above the là! ... là! ...

là! ... of the paddlers, half chant, half grunt of exertion.

Then distance enveloped the sounds.

The position was desperate. Without ammunition or stores of food,

life was impossible on shore. Between shore and steamer the water

teemed with crocodiles. They had no boat or the materials to build

one. No help could be expected from the land, no rescue for many

days from the lake. When at last the relief party came, it was

doubtful if there would even be bones for them to find....

But Norah's courage, which had shrunk before the intangible menace of

the bay, rose to meet the concrete disaster that appeared to have

overwhelmed Dick. With Changalilo's help she unpacked the food boxes

and measured the margin between them and starvation.

Even the scant array of tins that Changalilo produced proved to be

misleading. It included such innutritious aids as baking and curry

powder, anchovies and Worcester sauce--the armoury of Colonials

against the monotony of ulendo meals. The solid residue was meagre,

for they had brought on board only enough food for the normal trip of

three days, counting for emergency on the ship's supplies and on

purchases from fishing villages. What was now left would last them

two bare days. And Alibaba had said that rescue could not come for

twelve.

Norah looked towards Dick, who had subsided on the pile of baggage,

his head in his hands. She decided to tell Changalilo first. He

accepted the position with the indifference of one accustomed to

famine, and with the native's inherited communism added his

rations--a cloth full of millet meal--to the common store.

'What are you doing?' asked Dick in a dull voice.

She turned to him a little brusquely. After all, if Dick hadn't

quarreled with the Indian, if he hadn't insisted on sleeping ashore,

if he hadn't wasted his ammunition, they wouldn't be in this mess.

He ought to pull himself together and help; there must be some way

that a man could find to retrieve the disaster.

She was conscious that she was unfair and feminine, but with all

their independence the present generation of young women admire a

muddler as little as did their grandmothers.

'Come on, Dick,' she said briskly, let's think this out.'

'I've done nothing else, since that swine rowed off,' said Dick.

She made him listen to the result of her commissariat calculations.

'That's worse than I thought,' he said; 'our number's up.'

'Of course it isn't. Don't be such a pessimist.'

Dick drummed on the boxes. 'Unless you can do a fortnight without

food,' he said.

She restrained her impatience.

'Are you sure you haven't any cartridges anywhere?'

'Quite--I looked through my kit last night. I could have sworn...'

And while he explained and excused his folly, Norah wondered what

would have happened half an hour before, had Dick's rifle been

loaded. A sudden doubt of his resolution assailed her. With a

loaded gun in his hand, would he have dominated the mutiny? In his

rage he might have fired, but in cold blood she doubted if, even to

secure their escape, he could have screwed himself to the killing

point.

Surprisingly she was sorry. Not, I think, from any hate of the

Indian, pre-eminently unlovable as he was, but from a feeling that if

logic barred all other paths a man should kill. And as a woman and

an aristocrat, if a life lay between her and safety, she

instinctively demanded a man's love to ... eliminate the obstacle.

In the comparative comfort and security of a deck chair on an ocean

liner, such sentiments seem blameworthy even in a woman. In her

father's stately home in the Shires or her father-in-law's

respectable legal circle in Scotland, I have no doubt that Norah,

whom I have presented to you as no paragon, would have shrunk from so

drastic a solution. But I suppose standards suffer when you are in

danger of life in Central Africa.

In justice I record that she did not pursue the thought; she turned

to wondering what Archie would have done. Probably nothing, she

decided. By the time he had weighed the advantages and disadvantages

of drastic action, opportunity would have flown. But when at last he

moved, she admitted that Archie generally went to the heart of the

matter.

Of one thing she was certain. His Scottish stubbornness would not

allow him to beg from a man who had insulted him and whom he had

struck. Nor would he offer money. She tried to put out of her mind

that picture of her lover, pale in the dawn, unconscious of the water

lapping over his feet, holding out his purse to his enemy.

In this, you may remark, she was unjust. At one moment she blamed

Dick for not securing her safety by a cold-blooded murder, at the

next she tried not to despise him for attempting to save her by the

much less reprehensible methods of bribery and a trifling surrender

of pride.

She was recalled from her reflections. Dick had ended his

explanation and had asked her a question.

'There must be a way out,' she said at random.

'Yes,' he laughed nervously. 'We could swim to the _Mimi_ ... at

least we could swim the first ten yards.... Norah,' he said

suddenly, 'I believe that would be the best thing to do.'

The part of Norah's brain that was not under Dick's spell wondered

cynically what he would say if she agreed. Then she felt ashamed of

her sneer. Was not the greater part of his distress on her behalf?

'We can't make a boat without tools,' he began again, and rekindled

her irritation. All this talk of what they couldn't do was utterly

vain. Her woman's brain had jumped to the only course that lay open,

moving along no path of reason, accepting the only practicable

picture that offered.

'Dick,' she said, 'we must strike inland.'

'And hardly any of these African woods float,' went on Dick,

monotonously pursuing his line of thought. There's no second boat on

board.' ... Then the hope that he had been repressing burst to the

surface. 'Norah,' he said, 'do you think there's a chance of those

paddlers bringing back the dinghy from the other side?'

'No, dear, I don't,' she said gently. Then, as if she were dealing

with an invalid, 'You see, they know they've behaved badly, and

natives in the wrong get frightened like naughty children. They'd be

afraid of being punished, if they came back.... No, as soon as the

Indian lets them go, they'll disappear to their villages.'

The last pitiful hope that had lingered, disappeared. In his heart,

he could almost have cursed the elopement, which threatened to prove

fatal to both of them. Yet, as he looked at Norah, the robuster part

of him declared her worth it. In the sea of blood spilt for women,

no fairer face can have been mirrored.

She stood bare-headed, her short hair stirring, her chin up and her

eyes bright with courage. He noticed where the lake sun had caught

the skin on her arms. It was borne on him that his attitude lacked

worth. An aristocrat-on-the-scaffold gesture was indicated. Or

perhaps something more tender. 'Darling,' he whispered, with his

faint Irish intonation, 'I'd die happy in your arms.'

As he laid his cheek against hers, he sensed a slight rigidity. Had

he struck the wrong note? Norah was sometimes disconcertingly

practical.

'"There is a time for marrying, and a time for giving in marriage,"'

she quoted under her breath. 'Now, be sensible, Dick,' she went on

aloud, 'and listen to me. There's no need to talk about dying, but

it's no good looking to the lake for help. Our best chance is to

strike inland and hope to hit a village or a native path leading to

one.'

Dick felt his flourish had miscarried; but in spite of himself, his

sinews were braced by Norah's example.

She developed her plan. Not wasting any of the forty-eight hours

that were assured to them, they must struggle up the mountain side,

the three of them, with the food on their backs. When night overtook

them, they would lie between two blazing fires to protect them

against beasts. Then push on in the dawn, till they had left the

sleeping sickness belt and reached inhabited country once again. If

their luck held, they should strike a village or a village path

before their food was gone.

'How are you going to get over that?' Dick waved his arm toward the

crater wall.

There must be a pass somewhere.'

'We may take days to find it.'

'We must leave something to chance.'

But Dick was no gambler, and the idea of laying out all their food on

the possibility that they would find a path frightened him. He

thought of the stories of travellers lost in the bush, walking in

despairing circles. Where they were, they at least had water.

'It would be better if I went to find the way alone, without a load

on my back, and came back for you.'

'If you didn't find it, you'd have to come back just the same. We'd

be no further on, with a day wasted.'

'A dhow might have come in or a canoe from a village along the coast.'

Norah said nothing. Though she did not put into words the criticism

of her lover, she knew the futility of arguing with a man who prefers

a sixty-six to one miracle to a short price chance.

After a brief silence Dick expounded his scheme. There was a hope

that the valley of the yellow river led to a pass. He would follow

the stream to its source, from every vantage point searching with

field-glasses for sign of human life--boat on the lake, path, garden

or village in the forest.

Norah gave in. Human eyes she knew could penetrate short distance

into the forest, and she had small faith in the plan. But Dick had

taken the initiative, and she was not sure enough of her own scheme

to force its risk on him. In any case no time must be wasted in

argument.

'All right, dear; I'll come the first bit of the climb with you.'

Her new-born insight into his nature advised her to keep him under

way. Followed by Changalilo, they ascended the course of the yellow

stream.

Fantastically tangled roots, growing apparently in air, and a lattice

work of creepers formed a wall that forbade progress along the bank,

but, at that season of the year, it was possible to walk along a

strip of shingle that bordered the bed of the stream. Up this they

toiled until their advance was barred by a little waterfall, which

boiled through a gap in rocks worn smooth and red, and fell in spray

on the rounded boulders below.

Dick decided to deviate into the forest. From where they stood it

was possible to divine the course of the river through the trees,

until it disappeared circling round the base of a column or chimney

of natural rock, whose throat torn raggedly open showed where a small

volcano or blowhole had once belched its stream of lava. Dick

intended to slant through the forest and rejoin the river by the

chimney.

'I'll go back here,' said Norah. 'Changalilo, stay with Bwana Dick

to show him the way back to-night.'

'The Bwana said I was never to leave the Ba-Mama[1] alone in the

forest,' protested Changalilo.

[1] Ba-Mama--lit. "Grandmothers" (plur.). The respectful term for

all influential ladies--white women or native princesses.

'What Bwana?' asked Dick.

'Bwana A-ri-shy,'[2] replied Changalilo firmly.

[2] The Awemba cannot pronounce consecutive consonants without

inserting a vowel. Changalilo meant Archie.

As Norah retraced her steps, she repeated Changalilo's words. He

still regarded her as Archie's possession. In her scorn for the

condemnation of others, it had never entered her head to consider the

opinion of the natives on her flight with Dick. She knew that while

the Chiwemba tongue contains no word for a virgin--an ideal that is

unfamiliar to this direct people--they looked with an unsympathetic

eye on adultery. The code of the good old days, before the white men

came, allotted death, she believed, to the guilty pair.

Fantastically enough, the existence of this point of view in a

backward and little known people carried weight with her.

She dismissed it from her mind and faced the danger that confronted

her. The practical side of her nature was uppermost. She saw that

two factors--Time and Food--dominated the situation and threatened to

sign the death warrant. She could not shorten the days that must

precede a rescue, she could increase the food supply. Fish there

must be in the lake, fruit there might be in the ruins. As she had

no fishing tackle, she decided first to explore the mission.

As she approached the ruined tower, the superstitious dread which the

place inspired in her was reinforced by a more concrete fear of

snakes. She was a better zoologist than Omar, and knew that 'the

keeping of courts where Jamshyd gloried' was more probably entrusted

to puff adders and cobras than to lions and leopards.

But fruit trees would have been planted near monastery walls, and to

the need for food terrors, supernatural and material, must yield.

As she picked her way through the long grass which surrounded the

tower, her foot touched masonry. Treading cautiously, she identified

the remnants of a flight of broad steps that once, she supposed, led

to the lake. Now their easy gradient was distorted and reft. At one

point they ceased completely, at others they slanted drunkenly. The

grass that covered them, knee high, made the ascent dangerous.

She stood at the foot of the tower. To her right creeper-grown

mounds showed where the chancel lay. She penetrated a clump of

trees, dark like citrus, but she found them an outpost of the forest

and no domesticated variety. Now she could see a gaping, jagged

rift, following the bonding of the brickwork that explained the quick

destruction of the station. An earthquake had associated itself with

the more patient forces of the forest in the work of obliteration.

She wondered that the tower still stood.

Beyond the grass-covered mounds, into which the monastery walls had

decayed, she found a grove of mangoes ... the late sort whose fruit,

it seemed odd to reflect, might not be ripe till she was dead. In

what once had been the courtyard some oranges had reverted to stock.

Even so they were fruitless, their season past. Her biggest haul was

a handful of small, hard peaches from what had been an orchard. It

was doubtful if the trees had ever flourished in the great heat of

lake level.

There were no other European trees except the cypresses that edged

the terrace on which the monastery had stood, their dark spires

pointing men to heaven. But Norah was reminded of Archie's farm and

the avenue of young cypresses that led to the new house. She

remembered searching the forestry catalogue with Archie, and the

Latin name of the Italian cypress--_cypressus funebris_--crossed her

mind with significance now sinister.

Another clump of cypresses led her from the main ruins to an

enclosure whose containing wall the destroying forces had spared. As

she clambered through a gap she saw the reason of their tolerance.

It was the mission cemetery, and here the pride of man was already

humbled.

A crudely-hewn stone proclaimed that Alibaba's words had been

literal, and that at least one of the White Fathers had died at his

post. She wondered how long the news had taken to reach the French

village he had left so long ago, and whether there had been any

relatives to remember an old man who had endured exile, danger, and

death for his faith.

Round him, in their almost obliterated graves, lay his adopted people.

The Christian practices are only able to reduce, by a few years and

by the faint memory which mound and stone briefly preserve, the

eternity of oblivion that waits. Norah wondered if the old native

form of burial--an unmarked hole in the uncharted bush--was not at

once less pretentious and, when you bargain with infinity, as

effective.

With her miserable handful of peaches, she left the desolation of the

mission for the solitude of the shore.

She must face the problem of catching fish without tackle or net.

Changalilo's spear, she thought, might have served, had it not formed

the sole defence of the party in the hills. Her mind flew to Dick

where he felt his way through the forest. Why had she let him go

without her? Suppose, without a gun, he ran into lion or buffalo!

She pulled off the cording of the loads and set to work. After more

than two hours' labour, a net of sorts was finished. Clasping it,

she scrambled on to the breakwater of rocks that the _Mimi_ had

turned as she entered the bay.

From talk on the farm, she knew that tiger fish lie under white

cliffs. These rocks were white--great round boulders worn smooth

like marble in the years that had elapsed since they crumbled from

the cliffs above and piled haphazard one on another. She had noticed

divers and egrets sitting motionless on the edge. Where were fishing

birds there must be fish. As she clambered along the slippery

surface she surprised an otter, sitting in the sun with head alert

and paws spread like a Landseer lion. Her precarious approach

disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets,

who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had

endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with

slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost

hurt the eye.

Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of

no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.

But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these

waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour

she had caught nothing. Neither tiger fish with rat-trap teeth that

cut through wire casts, nor iron-grey ngombe, whose narrow head and

jaws fight the fisherman like a true salmon of the lake, nor yellow,

blue-blotched coupi, nor pande, the gigantic perch of Tanganyika,

rewarded the efforts of her aching arms.

The sun scorched pitilessly off the rocks, and, as pitilessly,

thought seared her brain. When Dick came back that night without

accomplishment, they would have one day left to eat. It seemed

incredible that in time of peace and in the twentieth century,

enjoying full health and strength, with money in her pocket, without

an enemy in the world, death should lurk so near. But her

appetite--for she had given Dick the lion's share of the day's

rations--confirmed her reasoning.

The sun was low above the mountains when she desisted from her

unavailing task and returned to camp. She noticed with relief that

the store of wood was not spent and she set to work to kindle a blaze.

How much longer would Dick be? Surely he would be back before dark!

What news would he bring? Her eyes searched the hillside in vain.

She took her field-glasses to the shore and looking back she tried to

penetrate the maze of trees. As she raked the hillside, hope leapt

within her. High up, near the torn throat of the little volcano, in

the fading light, she saw a native.

Dick must have found a village and help was coming.

Then her heart turned to lead. It was Changalilo ... alone. Her

worst fears had come true: something had happened to Dick. The

criticism that had been forming in her mind since the fiasco of the

dinghy fell to dust. Dick was dead or disabled. Her gallant, lovely

Dick.

She would have stumbled into the hills, but fear that she would miss

Changalilo in the dark restrained her. She waited.

* * * * * * *

An hour she waited, till Changalilo appeared noiselessly in the

firelight. He saluted in silence.

'What has happened?' she forced herself to ask.

He did not speak. Her eyes, which had been trying to read his

expressionless features, fell till they rested on his hand decorously

holding a letter. She snatched it.

'_Darling,_' it read, '_we're saved. Just seen a camp fire in the

bush. Chang says it's a white man. Will spend night with him and

join you to-morrow. All my love_.--DICK.'"

* * * * * * *

Ross broke off. He remarked that the air was a little cooler and

that he thought he could snatch a little sleep in the interval

between stifling night and sweltering day.

We went below. As we reached the companionway:--

"To-morrow," he said. "I'll tell you how optimistic was that letter.

No will-o'-the-wisp ever led wayfarer farther from safety than that

camp fire led Dick."

PART II

"The blooms of the almond tree grow in a night and vanish in a morn:

the flies _hœmerœ_ take life with the sun and die with the dew:

fancy that slippeth in with a gaze goeth out with a wink: and too

timely loves have ever the shortest length.

"I write this as thy grief and my folly."

R. GREENE.

CHAPTER I

It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the

odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on

his bald head.

His burly, masculine figure seemed incongruous among the welter of

empty deck-chairs and the futile debris of a voyage--women's wraps,

rope quoits, cushions and picture papers. Side by side we leant over

the rail, and for a while our tongues were busy with the idiocies

that pass for events on a liner--the ship's run, the latest quarrel,

and so forth. A pause gave me the opportunity to remind him that he

was in the middle of a story.

"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked, surprised. I said that I

was interested to know what happened, resisting the temptation to add

that I could spare some of the moralising with which he garnished his

facts.

"About the hour," he began again, "that Norah received the note, Dick

was finishing a second helping of roan antelope by the side of the

fire he had described.

'So I followed for hours,' he was saying, 'till the path stopped dead

at a drinking pool. Not a trace beyond.'

'Game track,' suggested the stranger on the other side of the fire.

'That's what my "boy" said when we struck it. I didn't believe a

path so well-used and hard-beaten could be anything but human-made.'

'There's not a human for miles,' said the other. 'Except ourselves,'

he added, glancing round the enclosure, where the firelight picked on

a cheekbone or a line of teeth, an eye-ball or the protuberance of a

hip to suggest rather than reveal the presence of a dozen natives.

'There must be rhino by the score,' persisted Dick, 'to flatten out a

path like that.'

'Zebra do a lot. The hoofs of a herd of zebra working regularly

between two drinking places.'

'Anyhow, neither was much help to me. So I decided to push back to

... to my base and try again to-morrow. Just before dark I saw your

fire.'

'Lucky we lit it early. They're frightened of lions. Always are in

uninhabited country.' He jerked his head in the direction of the

palisade which surrounded the camp. The farthest glint of the red

fire revealed a sort of ragged fence of saplings, eight or ten feet

high, sharpened and staked into the ground with leafy boughs laced in

between.

'You alone?' asked the stranger.

'I had only one "boy" with me, and I sent him back to camp,'

prevaricated Dick.

In telling his story he had avoided mention of Norah. This was only

prudent in a country, the affairs of whose tiny white population are

common property; but the result had made his tale a little like the

Book of Genesis without Eve, and he realised that to maintain this

discretion would be increasingly difficult. For the moment, however,

he temporised.

His first emotion on catching sight of that point of light through

the trees had been unqualified delight. His spirits, which his

intimate friends called 'mercurial,' had shot from the depths of

despair, where a day of futile wandering had lodged them, to an

almost arrogant elation. He only waited to scribble a line to Norah

before he plunged across country in the direction of the light.

But that beacon, as if it possessed the qualities of the hope it

inspired, proved illusive. Soon night overtook him struggling

through thickets and stumbling over outcrops. Perhaps those physical

obstacles imposed a pause for thought, for before he reached the

camp, he had begun to wonder with what cloak to cover his rather

ambiguous position. For the moment he could only decide on a policy

of caution. The line he took must vary with the number, condition,

and temper of his rescuers. It was possible that he only had to deal

with natives.

Except that this guess was wrong, scrutiny of the figure, that sat

opposite with eyes shaded from the fire heat, revealed little. The

mystery may have been partly due to a lack of interest in third

parties habitual to Dick. But in truth there did not seem to be

anything very remarkable about the owner of the fire. He was

youngish, shortish, darkish. Not a missionary, one would say, or an

official or a trader, even had that desolate region offered souls for

saving, bodies for the governing, or wants for the supplying.

That he was no plutocrat progressing triumphantly across the

continent on a well-boomed shooting trip, the absence of blameless

hecatombs of slaughtered buck and poisoned carnivora proclaimed. The

modesty of his appointments--Dick was reposing his aching limbs on a

packing-case and his host was as ill-provided--and the shabbiness of

his torn shorts and frayed shirt underlined the point. Taken all

round, an unnoteworthy man whom you would never pick out of a crowd.

But as there was no crowd for a thousand miles to pick him from, the

appearance of the Apollo Belvedere could not have been more welcome,

or indeed more surprising.

Several leading questions designed to dispel the mystery were allowed

to fall to the ground unanswered.

It is not impossible that, irritated by these feelers, the stranger

was moved to repay in like coin. At any rate he followed up his

disconcerting, 'You alone?' with a no less awkward, 'I don't know

your name?'

'Brown,' said Dick Ward, after a moment's pause.

'Ah!' said the unknown, eyeing him, to Dick's mind, a trifle

aggressively. 'Mine's Smith,' he added after a pause.

Suspicion of mockery crossed Dick's mind, causing him to glance

quickly at his host. He appeared immersed in thought. At length he

produced the result of his deliberations.

'Better start at dawn,' he said.

'Start?' echoed Dick. 'Where for?'

'Abercorn,' was the monosyllabic reply.

The announcement was not to Dick's taste. In the first place he did

not like his plans made for him. Moreover, in his sanguine heart he

had reckoned on a loan of at least enough provisions to carry Norah

and himself to the nearest white settlement.

But now the man Smith was proposing--almost dictating--a double back

into Rhodesia and an amalgamation of forces that would discover

Norah's presence. And, as there were people at Abercorn who knew

both her and Archie, he would have to tell the truth.

A shade stiffly then (it would never occur to Dick that Smith was in

a position to offer whatever arrangement suited him) he replied that

he didn't think he could manage to make for Abercorn, adducing as an

excuse the state of his feet, which had suffered from the stony and

precipitous route he had that day followed.

Smith heard him out without any expression on his face that would

reveal his opinion. 'Matao,' he said to his capitao, 'the fire.' He

seemed to collapse into his thoughts.

A native, naked save for his blanket, extracted his sprawling limbs

from the fire-lit group that talked in sibilant whispers only broken

by suppressed laughter at some scandalous tale. From the firewood

pile he pulled the pale trunk of a tree long dead, eaten to a

skeleton by white ants, and pitched it on to the fire. The impact

released a shower of sparks and a flicker of flames that lit the

underside of the overhanging boughs, showing their leaves livid

against the richness of the sky, like the pattern on a brocade.

That's right, Matao,' said Smith, and relapsed into silence. Then,

with the tone of one who had been reasoning all the time--'You see,'

he said to Dick, 'you see, I haven't anything I can leave you. I

haven't any tins myself or meal for my carriers. So I can't give you

any.'

Dick, to whom salvation had seemed assured, felt as if he had been

pushed off a cliff. 'We're living on what I shoot,' went on Smith

after a pause; 'unfortunately I'm short of ammunition. Bloody short.

What guns have you got?'

'Seven point nine Mauser and a heavy Westley Richards,' replied Dick

dully.

'So, even if I could spare you any, it wouldn't fit.' Smith seemed

to muse. 'I've got a 7.9 at home,' he continued. 'I might have a

round or two in my bag. But not enough to be any use.'

A native rose from the fire and disappeared in the direction of the

tent, returning at once with the stranger's heavy rifle. Some word

understood in the conversation had recalled an unfulfilled task. He

took his place by the fire and, producing a bundle of bits of rag,

Rangoon oil and a pull-through, sat cross-legged cleaning the gun.

'That's Johnny, my fundi,'[1] said Smith. 'Saved my life the other

day. Didn't you, Johnny?'

The native, who did not understand a word, laughed and his teeth

flashed white in the darkness.

[1] "Fundi"--native hunter.

'So,' went on Smith, whose conversation seemed to follow his thoughts

rather than his words, 'we'll have to stick together and do long days

to Abercorn and live on what I shoot. I've got ammunition waiting at

Abercorn,' he added.

Dick saw that Norah's presence could no longer be concealed. He had

no other excuse for rejecting the stranger's scheme. He wished he

had been more open from the beginning. Confession was difficult now.

In any case a complete explanation to this not very sympathetic

stranger was unthinkable. He took the plunge.

'You see, there's my wife,' was his phrase.

The stranger looked at him as if he were going to speak. But when

ultimately he did, it was only to say, 'You didn't tell me Mrs. Brown

was with you.'

Dick saw that silence was his best defence, and held his tongue while

Smith submerged into one of his periods of thought. Dick waited

anxiously on the words of this rather mysterious being who held

Norah's life and his in his hands. Eventually the arbiter of

destinies spoke; more exactly, he whistled.

'We're in a bit of a hole,' he said.

That first person plural relaxed Dick's tautened muscles.

'We'd never get a lady as far as Abercorn,' Smith continued. Dick

agreed with a whole heart. 'I've only got enough carriers for my

loads. None for her kit, let alone a machila.... If I increased

their loads, we'd never make the distance.'

'How far is it?' asked Dick.

'God knows. I'm a stranger in this country, so are my natives. From

what you tell me of your trip up the lake we must be over two hundred

miles from the south end. Abercorn's twenty miles on.... That's by

water--dodging mountains and ravines makes it longer. For instance,

there's a road on the other side between M'pala and Badouinville.

It's three hours by water and two days on foot.'

'Then why Abercorn?' asked Dick, attaining his objective.

Smith explained that while he didn't know his way to any Boma or

settlement on this side of the water, Abercorn would be found by

following the lake. And touch need never be lost with drinking water.

'But it's out of the question now,' he declared. 'I was counting on

doing it in a fortnight. With the dozen odd rounds I've got, luck

and good shooting, we should have been all right for food. But Mrs.

Brown could never do twenty-five-mile days.'

Dick agreed.

'I suppose you think,' began Smith, and stopped. 'I'd better tell

you,' he began again, 'what I'm doing here without ammunition or

food. Else Mrs. Brown may wonder....'

Dick murmured a deprecatory phrase, which fortunately for his

curiosity was ignored.

The account which the stranger proceeded to give of himself was not

very detailed. He had, Dick gathered, been after elephant somewhere

in the Congo. Wonderful game country, not far from the lake. So

many elephant that he had used up most of his big bore ammunition.

He had plenty of .303 stuff, but his .303 rifle had been twisted into

scrap metal by the wounded bull Johnny had saved him from.

(Hundred-pound tusks he had.) Then he got into trouble with the

Bulamatadi. ('Poaching,' thought Dick.) So that there was question

of confiscating his ivory. He'd got too much to risk losing, and

he'd induced a fishing village to paddle him and his ulendo across to

the British side.

'A bit risky, wasn't it, in a canoe at this time of year?' suggested

Dick. 'What if a squall got up?'

'Risky?' repeated Smith. 'Yes, I suppose so. I had to pay the

paddlers pretty high. Or rather their headman. I couldn't get

enough canoes, either. That's why I left most of my stuff behind.'

He had crossed at night and landed a day's stage north of the present

camp. Dick mentally supplied the missing detail of a reverent burial

of the ivory on the beach. Now he was on his way to Abercorn.

'But of course I'll stay and see you and your wife through,' he added.

Dick was suitably grateful, but Smith was apparently already thinking

of something else.

'We'll have to see what can be done,' he went on. 'Maybe my chaps

could build a raft and we could edge our way along the coast till we

reach a fishing village.... I'd better move camp alongside of you

first thing to-morrow and get to work,' he reflected. A sudden

thought seemed to strike him, 'I suppose Mrs. Brown has got a gun.'

Dick explained that the gun was ammunitionless.

'But,' protested Smith, 'you can't leave her alone there without a

gun!'

'You're safe from crocs, on land, aren't you?'

'Yes, I think so, but...'

'She's got lots of firewood.' Dick was not as easy as he pretended,

but he resented his host's interference, 'and there's not a hope of

finding our way down in the dark. It's nearly vertical in parts, and

I'm not sure of the way. Even in the daylight we'll have to wait for

my "boy" to guide us.'

'Well, she's your wife, not mine,' said Smith, prompted possibly by

some attendant angel with a taste for Greek irony.

As if to dismiss the matter, he reached out and offered Dick a

cigarette. The metal of the case caught Dick's eye as he accepted,

for elephant hunters do not, as a rule, sport gold, and curiosity

impelled him to decipher the words engraved inside. The fire had

sunk to a glow, but the sardonic-minded angel, anxious to see the

fun, whispered to the stranger to kick the smouldering logs, and a

tongue of flame licked high enough for Dick to read the words 'Archie

from Norah' followed by a date that his retina had not recorded, ere

the light had sunk.

There shot through Dick's being a fear as luminous as that arrow of

fire and as quickly sped. Of course, even in the small white circle

of Central Africa there must be lots of men named 'Archie,' who were

given things by women called 'Norah.' Why should not Smith's

Christian name be Archie? 'Archie Smith,' a perfectly convincing

combination.

He could not help recalling with faint uneasiness that suspicion of

mockery when the stranger declared his name. Had he been given a

Roland for his Oliver, a Smith for his Brown?

But, even if his name were not Smith, why should it be Sinclair?

Archie Sinclair, who was hundreds of miles away 'on cattle business,'

presumably at Elizabethville.

With a start he realised that his host had asked him a question.

Intent on the problem of the man's identity, he chanced assent, and

was relieved when the answer proved adequate.

Of course the fellow might have found or even stolen the case. It

certainly was not natural for a hunter to possess such an article ...

if he were an elephant hunter. He was up to the knees in a morass of

uncertainties; there seemed no bottom to the mystery; but until he

was on firm ground, exhausted as he was, he knew he would not sleep.

How could he get at the truth? One couldn't very well say to a man,

'I say, Smith, is your name Sinclair? Because, if so, I'm sleeping

with your wife.' Nor could he interrogate natives in their master's

presence.

Whatever happened, he must escape from this morose tête-à-tête, whose

suppressions were driving him to idiocy. Conversation, he felt,

would choke him; without it solution was no nearer. He rose to his

feet with a gesture of weariness that was not assumed.

'You must take my bed,' said the putative Smith, moved again by the

Spirit with a taste for _double entendre_.

He escorted Dick to the tent and left him there while he went to give

orders for his own bed of leaves. Once alone, no pedantic delicacy

restrained Dick. With the flair of a private detective, he found a

handkerchief. Granted a good wife, this might solve the question.

But the emblem 'A.S.' that rewarded his search and testified to a

modicum of wifely devotion, only reduced the field to Archies,

Sinclair or Smith.

It was not until he thought of looking under the bed that the myth of

the latter's existence was exploded. There lay an old uniform case

which its owner had preserved from army days. Painted on it, he

read, '2nd Lieut. Archibald Sinclair, R.F.A.'"

CHAPTER II

After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed

discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told

me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings on that remarkable

evening.

It appears that even the culminating evidence of the uniform case did

not satisfy him, so reluctant is _homo sapiens_ to admit unwelcome

truth. He wanted to know more. How could Archie be here? There was

not time for him to have gone back to the farm, to have found Norah's

letter, and followed. To catch them, a pursuer would have had to

overtake before the _Mimi_ was boarded--the only boat that called at

the Rhodesian end of the lake.

But what about that wandering 'stiff' who, he remembered Norah

saying, had started for the Congo with her husband. Might not this

be he? Suppose he had stolen Sinclair's kit at Elizabethville and

was making for an East Coast port?

Dick's reluctance to look truth in the eye was removed by Archie's

return to the tent, where a couch of leaves had been heaped. One of

the grunts, with which he settled himself, matured into more or less

coherent speech, 'By the way, sorry ... my name's not Smith ...

Sinclair.... Thought I ought to tell you.... Good-night.'

Even a purist when hit on the head with a hammer ceases to argue

whether coal or sledge. Dick was reduced to accepting facts at face

value.

A stronger man might have seized the moment to face it out, while

Archie's words held the door open to confession. A line too direct

for Dick. He did nothing--not from fear, as he explained no doubt

truthfully to Norah, but from a sense of the supreme awkwardness of

the position. That was how he put it: you would probably say 'seeing

what a poor fish he'd look.'

It is possible, even easy, to seduce a man's wife with a certain air.

The gesture has been made picturesque, amusing, sublime, according to

the clothes, characters, circumstances of the puppets. Don Juan,

Casanova, young Lochinvar were masters of the different genres.

But collect your troop on a desert island of limited acreage, give

Menelaus the sole power of rescue, and the laughter veers round

against Paris. Worse still, Helen might lead it. And when you throw

in one loaded rifle and give it to Menelaus, the romantic farce may

degenerate into tragedy.

Dick, whatever he told Norah, cannot have been long realising that

his position was not only false but dangerous, and his life at the

mercy of the man he had wronged. He may not have expected actual

violence, for Norah's allusions to her husband at that date of her

disillusionment would have outlined a deliberate, cautious, rather

pale-blooded being in whom civilisation had destroyed all sudden

impulse. One who had reduced 'soundness' to a vice and was

lamentably sure 'to do the sensible thing'; who, meditating both

sides of every question and avoiding the ill-considered move, had

almost lost power of action. One of those irritating people who are

too busy giving the devil his due to reach for the holy water.

Since Dick, like the rest of us, preferred to use labels and

pigeon-holes instead of observation and thought, he did not stop to

compare this pallid creation with the lean, taciturn individual who

slept a few feet from him.

But although the eminently 'sound' man of Dick's and Norah's fancy

does not go about shooting people even on considerable provocation,

he is not, Dick argued, of the type that steps far out of the way to

save the lives of enemies.

There are men who would never tolerate the unsavoury and dangerous

business of murder, but who would make slight effort to prevent the

death of an enemy out of sight and earshot--witness the mediæval

popularity of the oubliette. So Dick did not find unconvincing the

figure of an outraged husband who pursued his way to Abercorn and

left the identified Mr. and Mrs. Brown to shift for themselves.

Fear of some such fate is the only excuse I can find for the scheme

which he afterwards confessed to Norah. It was, he said, the only

way out of the impasse. It does not seem to have occurred to him

that there was anything unsporting in his plan, any gleam of the

phosphorescent aura of treachery. If pressed, he might have produced

the old excuse about Love and War; a sophism, which, pushed to

logical extremes, justifies, I suppose, arsenic in the Burgundy and

babies on the bayonet.

An acute moral sense was never Dick's weakness; still, one would have

expected common sense to save him from the stupidity of confiding in

Norah his happy thought of stealing her husband's gun and leaving him

and his natives to ... fend for themselves. He must have been very

sure of the spell his adoration cast.

No doubt Africa was probing him too deep. In the last twenty-four

hours she had unmasked batteries too heavy for her victim. Blow on

blow had been hammered at his weakest points. She had opened with

her favourite gambit of starvation and had daunted his courage with

its shadow. She had lowered his vitality by an interminable day of

incessant toil and disappointed hope. She tormented him with the

sudden display of a salvation that faded into a trap from which there

was no honourable issue.

Her machinery was ponderous enough to shatter the morale of a finer

man than Dick. It was like shooting rabbits with a field-gun. Dick

was that not uncommon flower of our civilisation--a thoroughly

charming fellow. Just the man for a dance at your house, a rubber at

your club, a week-end at your partridges. Good-looking,

well-dressed, well-mannered, it was impossible not to like him at

sight.

Alas! the forest cares nothing for looks, clothes, or manners.

The mild fires of public-school and life about town had not tempered

his metal hard enough. He had had an easy war, largely spent at Bolo

House. In his spells at the front, he had the support of discipline,

example, comradeship; responsibility had been lifted from his

shoulders. Now he had to fight a duel with Africa for an

opponent.... And hate, that the war taught us so quickly kills all

sense of sportsmanship, blindfolded him.

As he thought of his dependence on the man he had wronged, his heart

contracted. He was so ignominiously at the mercy of one on whom he

had hitherto bestowed a smile of pity.

And why? Not because his enemy was braver, or cleverer, or a better

man in any way, but just because he had a loaded rifle. From

whatever angle he regarded this intolerable triangle, the gun

dominated. Looked at as a means of securing food, in Archie's

prejudiced hands, it dictated terms. As a weapon of offence, it

imposed no less. So long as Archie held this card, Dick and Norah

were impotent, immobilised, compelled ignobly to confess their

liaison and accept starvation or such humiliating terms as their

master saw fit to stipulate.

Archie was the common enemy whose advantage must be torn from him

without consideration of his ultimate fate.

The tent in which Dick and his intended victim were sleeping was

small, some eight feet by six, a one man load. He could not help

contrasting his own luxurious installation with double fly, bathroom

and verandah. Here was barely room for the two men to sleep. On the

ground between them lay the gun, but close to Archie's hand. The

firelight showing through the canvas gave a dull gleam off the

barrels. It was not a magazine rifle, and the two rounds in the

chambers would not go far. Archie's ammunition bag, which lay behind

his head, must be secured.

His deep breathing proclaimed sleep. God send the natives by the

fire slept as sound.

Moving an inch at a time to minimise the creaking of the camp bed,

Dick reached out and out till his muscles were ready to snap. At

last he secured the strap and lifted the bag gently to him. The

rifle fell an easier prey.

With heart throbbing in the silence he lay still, waiting for the

flames to die down and mask his sortie. It seemed hours before the

firelight faded. He must act before a native woke to heap on fresh

fuel. With infinite pains not to break the silence, he rose from his

bed. His heart stood still at a leopard's bark. There was no break

in Archie's breathing. Picking his way through the stray leaves that

strewed the ground, he tiptoed to the door.

He must have made a sound in unlacing the flap.

'What is it?' came Archie's quiet voice.

'I heard something.'

'Lion?'

'Leopard, I thought.'

Archie was beside him.

'Thank you,' he said, and took the gun. Dick had already laid the

cartridge bag on the ground.

Together they interrogated the sleepers by the fire.

Archie--'damnably thorough,' thought Dick--searched for spoor with a

hurricane lamp.

'I must have imagined it,' said Dick, when they had regained the tent.

'Looks like it,' replied Archie dryly. Then 'Wake me next time you

want my gun,' he said.

But whatever suspicion he may have framed about his guest, it did not

keep him awake, and soon his regular breathing formed an

accompaniment to Dick's night thoughts. Not that they were very

coherent. The grotesque failure of his plot, whose attempt, you must

admit, had taken some resolution, left him physically exhausted and

emptied. He lay crushed almost beyond feeling, while the hours that

were left him to find a solution passed.

Consciousness of this flight of time forced him to bend his will to

fresh scheming. But his anxious thought produced nothing more heroic

than the decision to ask Norah what to do. After all it was she who

had deserted Archie, and she ought to have her say in the handling of

him. As soon as it was light he would slip down and lay the matter

before her. 'Shift the responsibility on to her,' would have been

honester phrasing, for Dick was by now a beaten man.

But even this wouldn't work. The curse of abortion seemed to descend

on every plan he devised. If he left at dawn, Archie, his suspicions

over the name question reinforced by the gun episode, would be only

too glad to start on his way without wasting more time over an

unsatisfactory individual who fortunately had disappeared.

And with Archie, intolerable thought, would vanish hope of life.

Everything seemed to swing round in a vicious circle to focus the

spotlight on the whip in Archie's hand.

Was there no other course than a full confession at the eleventh

hour? To wake the man up and say, 'I've seduced your wife, I've told

you a pack of lies. I've tried to steal your gun and leave you to

starve. Now will you get me out of this hole, please?'

It wasn't thinkable. At the same time, it was inevitable. What

else.... What else...."

* * * * * * *

"I have always," said Ross, "felt a profound admiration for the last

Earl of Derwentwater who, when his army was surrounded at Preston in

the '15, went to bed.

Dick in a similarly untenable position fell asleep."

CHAPTER III

The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had

dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of

the guide who was to lead the way down the hills. Until he came

there seemed no object in waking Brown or whatever his real name was.

By nature incurious, Archie could not help suspecting that there was

something wrong about the man. It was not natural to find so

feckless a being alone in the wilds. He seemed, moreover, to have

something to conceal. Archie liked them with less looks and more

honesty. What the devil had he been doing in the middle of the night

with his gun? A queer bird.

But the man was in a hole--a baddish hole--and out here it was up to

one white man to help another. He began to make plans. Most of them

were blocked by the man's wife. You couldn't ask a woman to do too

much. What sort of a wife would the chap have? Something fair and

fluffy and adoring, he decided. He wasn't too sure they were

married. That would explain some of the mystery ... not that it was

any of his business.

As he came to this fallacious conclusion, the thin sweetness of

whistling trickled through the quiet of the forest like tinsel

against night.

'Another white man,' thought Archie. 'The place is like Piccadilly.'

Then he reflected that Mrs. Brown must be coming up the hill to join

her husband and wondered with a twist of his lip whether she would

have the presence of mind to answer to that name.

The whistling started again, closer. Why did that syncopated phrase

bring the colour of emeralds before his eyes? Were the words about

emeralds? More like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the rest of the rural

spots that American song writers ache to revisit.

Then he remembered: it was an emerald green shawl crossed tightly

over a woman's flexible shoulders. The fringe hung to the ankle

whose silk-clad movement caught and lost the light as her foot tapped

to the rhythm. Her back was framed in the lighted blank of a long

window that gave on to the London street where he stood smoking.

Dawn was near, and a grey light invaded the ball-room, revealing the

pallor of the electricity, the withering of the flowers, the

weariness of the women.

She had half turned to her companion, and Archie, invisible in the

square, had rested his gaze on the silhouetted curve of her cheek.

She moved again, and it gripped his heart to see how tired her eyes

were. What a little thing she looked with her figure held firmly by

that emerald shawl!

Funny how the whistled tune recalled that picture of Norah and all

that sort of life.... Ah, well! in a few months now, when the cattle

deal was through and the ivory sold, he'd have made her happy by

taking her back. The price of ivory must be somewhere about twelve

shillings now, but...

At that moment Norah stepped into the sunlit clearing. Coming from

under the close shadow of the forest, she was dazzled, the oblique

rays of the sun shining in her face. Archie rose to meet her,

amazed. How had she found him? What had brought her? What was her

need of him?

Never free with words, wonder held him silent, conscious only of

gladness that she was there. But gladness left him when recognition

dawned in the shocked eyes she shaded from the sun. Not for him,

they revealed, had she come.

Her arm raised against the sun went out, pushing something away, and

her face as she looked down was bloodless. So she stood for a

second, then up went her chin with the old defiant gesture.

'Why did you follow me?' she said, her deep voice damped down till he

could hardly hear.

'Follow you?' he repeated.

'Didn't you understand what I wrote?' she asked.

The pause which followed was long, even for Archie's conversational

methods. Speech was forced on her again.

'The letter I left you at the farm.'

'The farm? I've been in the Congo.'

'You don't know...?'

'Know what, Norah?' his voice, usually expressionless, seemed to

plead; 'tell me, what has happened.'

'In a minute, Archie. Give me that packing-case to sit on, will you.

I've been on short rations lately.'

She noticed that, bringing the box, he fumbled like a blind man.

He pressed her to have breakfast before she talked.

'No,' she said, 'I must get this over first,' and regretted the

ungracious words when she saw him flinch. If you mind that...' she

began. 'Archie, you mustn't mind anything about me. I can't bear

you to mind.'

His reply fell so low that she had to strain her ears to catch it.

The words confirmed her flash of understanding.

'You,' he murmured reluctantly, 'are the only thing I mind about. As

long as nothing's happened to you.'

A few seconds had passed since Norah had stepped into the sun. In

that space she had ranged the gamut of emotion. The first sight of

Archie had dazzled her brain, as the sun her eyes. For a moment the

earth had reeled in a vertigo. And its reeling hurled her into a

lake of shame that stung like the fumes of ammonia: shame at the

ludicrous, the indecent figure she cut. Anger succeeded. Anger with

Archie, whose pursuit had put her in this intolerable position. How

like a man, she thought, to come to recapture the woman he had not

troubled to keep! How blundering! How undignified!

Archie's first words dispelled her resentment. And his patent

sincerity was troubling. Was there some mistake? ... And somehow she

saw Archie for the first time for months--or was it years?--saw

something she had missed.... Archie's rigid face, his voice so

resolutely kept from trembling told her there was another

unconsidered facet in her romance. With all her high thinking, her

regard for loyalty, bond, rights, she had missed the one factor that

denied her freedom--that Archie might still care.

He cared. Must have cared all the time. The distress he failed to

conceal did not spring from the outraged vanity of a husband wounded

in his pride of possession. The hurt was deeper, deep in his

undemonstrative heart.

She was naturally sensitive to others' suffering, and it seemed to

her that not only Archie, not only herself, but the whole forest

vibrated with pain. She had created it: nothing she could do would

dull it.

She found herself resenting the pity that tore her heart--that

desolating, impotent, futile pity! What was the good of pity,

affection even, for Archie, when it was passion she felt for Dick.

All that remorse could do was to blunt, to sully that passion. It

was too late to think of Archie's feelings now. She could only go

forward.

'Archie!' she said. He was standing with his back turned to her, his

hands deep in his pockets, clenched, they must have been, and

tightly, for the veins on his arms to stand up like that. 'Archie,

stay there, don't turn round till I've told you.'

He made neither sign nor sound.

'Archie, I think I'm going to hurt you. I've only just seen...'

Words, words which altered nothing, spared nothing. She spoke

quickly, raising her voice. 'That letter, the letter that's waiting

at the farm, said I was ... was leaving you.'

'Leaving me,' he repeated her statement, his voice toneless like a

sleep-walker's.

Suddenly he whipped round, for the instant mastered by his emotion.

He caught her shoulder and held her at arm's length. That night she

found the bruise, but at the time she felt the pain no more than he

knew he inflicted it.

'Why, Norah, why? I thought we were going to be so happy. I never

knew. Never guessed. Tell me, why?'

She felt explanation impossible. Her hands came out to touch him,

but fell helpless to her sides.

'But I never meant to hurt you so, my dear,' she said.

He let go of her shoulder, slowly, regretfully, as though he touched

her body for the last time.

'There's nothing,' he said. 'Nothing I can do?'

She shook her head. His hopes must be killed.

'There's another man,' she said.

'That----'

'Dick Ward,' she interrupted him.

'That fellow who came to my fire last night?'

She nodded.

'Why in hell did I let them light the fire,' he said. 'He'd have

starved then.'

He walked abruptly to the tent and kicked at the flap.

'Come out of that!'

'What's the matter?' Dick's voice did not sound as unconcerned as he

would have wished.

'You come out!'

'No need to speak like that,' and Dick emerged. He thought it wise

to ignore Archie. 'Hallo, Norah,' he said. 'Why didn't you wait at

the camp?'

The assumption of ownership was ill-timed. Archie's sunburnt face

went brick red, and he came very close to Dick.

'If you don't clear out, I'll break you up.'

Dick Ward towered above his adversary, but there his advantage ended.

He carried too much flesh, and his splendid torso looked best under a

tennis shirt. But Archie's muscles had been worked into steel by

twenty-five-mile days after elephant, and made him as awkward an

opponent as a six-inch shell.

'My dear Sinclair,' said Dick, 'we must talk this over like men of

the world.' The tone of patronage alone would have been enough.

Archie's feet shifted and his right knee turned and bent for the

upper-cut that in another second would have smashed upwards under

Dick's jaw, when Norah's low voice broke in:--

'Archie! Dick! Don't; you're making things worse!'

Her instinct was to save her lover. He was in danger, he was her

lover. The pity she had lately felt for Archie was in a way

disloyalty to Dick.

The men stood tense. Archie did not relax his wound-up muscles.

'Archie!' she cried, whipping her nerves that anger might overlay

compassion, 'Archie, come here. For the love of God, behave like a

civilised being!'

'I told him to go,' said Archie sullenly. But he lowered his eyes

from his enemy's and his fist slowly loosened.

'How can he go?'

'Why not?'

'Where can he go to? Do you mean him to starve?'

Archie shrugged his shoulders. What happened to Dick was indifferent

to him, provided he went. Norah blew on the embers of her passion to

kindle a blaze that should scorch pity from her heart.

'Very well. We'll go,' she said.

Archie did not answer and silence closed in on them, a sinister

silence like the patch of calm in the centre of a typhoon. They

waited. Dick paced about the camp. He did not try to hide the

commotion of his nerves. To Norah sitting still on her box, time

seemed to be measured into lengths. Something must come now ... or

now ... or now.

And as she waited, she watched over the trees a falcon with the

blue-grey plumage of a dove hang under the hard blue heaven

motionless, save for its questing head. Then it swooped. Would

Archie's completed thought deal death like that?

But when he spoke it was in a lower tone.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I don't know what to do. Norah'--he

turned to her with appeal in his eyes--'I must be quiet, don't you

see, and think. I must get things clear.'

This was an Archie whom Norah knew better than the hard, decided,

almost fierce animal that had just threatened Dick. He wanted to

think things out.

'I must be alone,' he went on; then flamed out again. 'For God's

sake send him away for half an hour.'

'Dick,' said Norah steadily, 'you'd better go down to the camp.' His

eyes signalled to her to come too. Archie divined the intention.

'Norah,' he began, 'don't, just for now, don't...' then bitterness

broke over him. 'Oh, well, it doesn't matter by now, does it?'

She resigned herself to the rack and promised to stay with him while

Dick went down to the lake. But Archie spared her. He was going, he

said, to walk in the hills, and called Matao to give her breakfast.

'I ought to have seen that Ward had breakfast,' he said. Then as he

paced away into the forest she thought she could detect the words,

'they serve breakfast in the condemned cell....'

In moments of danger Norah's romanticism had a way of lapsing,

leaving her as practical as a Swiss hotel-keeper. She ate a good

meal of cold roan. She knew she would need all her strength to keep

Archie and Dick apart. Moreover, if this was to be her last

breakfast, it should be a good one.

She did not suppose that even this new, incalculable Archie

contemplated leaving her to starve; she was less sure about his plans

for Dick. And of course she would stay with Dick.

'Her honour rooted in dishonour stood.

And faith unfaithful kept her falsely true.'

A tag that Miss Briggs had taught her in the schoolroom as an example

of some eccentricity of grammar or other. It was sometimes true of

life.

She must be prepared for anything. Archie might not act in hot

blood: he might think things out, but she was not reassured. The

Archie she knew had a habit of logical thought. And if this

unfamiliar man of action came to the conclusion that it was not his

business to succour the enemy within his gates, he would translate

his ideas into deeds.

As she meditated the change she saw in Archie, a sound caught her

ear, and looking up she saw Dick signalling to her from the edge of

the clearing. With a shrug she walked across to him. She noticed

that his hair was still untidy and his clothes crumpled from the

night spent without his gear.

'This isn't fair!' she said, when she reached him.

'Is he here?' he asked anxiously.

'Archie's in the hills, but I promised ... why couldn't you wait?'

He stepped into the open. 'I couldn't, Norah, not alone; down on

that shore.'

'I did last night.' She did not tell him she had not dared sleep or

that she had taken to the hills as soon as she could see the white

mist that rose from the warm water of the lake.

'I didn't have much of a night either,' said Dick, and related how

Archie's identity had been disclosed.

He told his story in jerks, with quick glances over his shoulder and

exaggerated gestures. Norah guessed that his nerves were breaking

under the strain. His poise, his assurance was shattered. His

debonair bearing had shrunk to the rags of a swagger that he pulled

round him when fear allowed.

'What's he going to do, Norah? For Christ's sake, what is he going

to do?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know,' she said.

He jumped at a sudden snap of a branch. A carrier had stepped on a

dry twig.

'What was he saying to you? I couldn't hear.'

'That he must be alone and think.'

Dick's voice went shrill. 'You say he's sitting there, thinking in

cold blood whether he'll let us starve?'

She shrugged her shoulders. She believed Archie was doing more than

that. He was trying to save something out of a wrecked universe. If

she had not exaggerated the look in his eyes, he might even be

struggling for sanity.

Dick might be right that their fate swam in the crucible, but she was

so desolately unhappy it hardly seemed to matter. Dick's misery took

a less stoical form.

'It's awful,' he was saying, 'hanging about to hear what he settles.

We might be criminals in the dock. It's worse, for there the judge

is not your enemy.'

Norah made no comment. What was the good of all this talk? ... and,

well, she preferred Archie's way of taking a knock. Couldn't Dick

spare her this pitiful sight into his soul? Was she cursed to

torture her husband and debase her lover?

'You don't seem to see, Norah,' he went on after a glance over his

shoulder, 'if he turns us off, we've got food left for one day, for

one day, till to-morrow. Then three, four, or five days more we'll

suffer the tortures of starvation. About Sunday we'll die.' His

voice was out of his control. 'Die, do you understand?' He paused,

and his fingers twisted restlessly. 'By Tuesday, in a week's time,

Norah, by Tuesday we'll be rotten. Don't you understand?'

'Always the little ray of sunshine,' said Norah.

His hands went up to his head. 'Oh! you must think me a beast to say

these things to you, but don't you see, you must go to your husband

and get him to ... to stay. He'll listen to you, if you beg him. He

can't have the heart. Ask for time anyhow. Plead with him. If you

must, promise him...'

'To go back?' Her voice was hard.

Dick averted his eyes. 'Afterwards, things will be different.

Anything may happen ... provided we are alive.'

'Dick,' said Norah passionately, 'I may be a rotter and a whore:

d'you want to make me a coward too?'

'But don't you see...'

'For Heaven's sake shut up; you're making me hate you!'

When Archie left his camp, he had wandered aimlessly in the forest

until he noticed a boulder, and sat down. Below him lay the lake as

blue as the Virgin's robe. He could see the mountains of the farther

shore, their tops ruled straight by cloud. They reminded him of

Table Mountain and his landing with Norah at Cape Town when hope was

high.

At his back towered the nearer lip of the crater. Its height seemed

to disparage his emotion. How long would this mortal and his

ephemeral trouble endure? The bitterness, which had succeeded his

anger, passed and left him with a dazed sense of loss, in which

consecutive thought was stilled. Pictures of the happiness, turned

so suddenly to dust, rose in his mind:--

Norah's tawny hair, rebellious under her nurse's coif; Norah's

slender hands opposite him at dinner tinged by the shaded

candlelight; the way she used to throw herself into his arms when he

came back on leave; a fluffy sort of dressing-gown she once had; and

so on down the years of love and marriage till the moment when he

heard that ragtime tune in the forest, whistled so gaily ... before

she knew he was there.

That hurt worst of all. His mind ached into the vast query--Why?

Why had he lost her? He had never understood how she came to love

him, but what had he done to make that miracle cease? If she had

only told him!

Her outburst on the farm, which sent him hurrying to the Congo, had

come as a revelation. Manlike, he had assumed she liked the life she

had chosen. And all the time...

He felt no anger against Norah. By some illogical working of his

love she seemed to stand apart. Though his mind recorded her

infidelity and reeled at it, his heart was filled with gracious

recollections of her. What she was and had been, did not seem to be

obliterated by what she did and what was done to her.

His hate focused blindingly on Dick Ward. Imagination of that

coarseness defiling his wife's body drove the blood boiling to his

brain, but he never thought of her as defiled. He was tormented by

the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's

Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like

any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved,

still loved, would always love.

But the swine who had killed her--lust for his blood mounted. To

shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his

fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life

fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no

great thing. If the war had not already shown him that, these years

in the forest had dwarfed the importance of mankind. And his

standards had been warped by these last weeks spent in the slaughter

of monsters that take the three score years and ten of man's span to

reach the stature that fits them for killing.

So for a while his mind played with the killing of Dick Ward ...

until the memory that already the man's life was in his hands stayed

him. In his pain he had lost sight of the crisis that before his

appearance had faced Ward and Norah. He saw that he had only to

stand aside and execution would be done. Or rather, since no harm

must come to Norah, take her on alone with him, regaining his wife

and obliterating her lover.

But all the time he saw the impossibility. He could not leave a man

to die whom he had promised to help. Still less could he kill him.

In a way Ward was his guest; he had come to Archie without food, or

hope. His defencelessness protected him. And the duty that one

white man in the wilds owes another, backed by the African tradition

of help and hospitality, demanded his rescue.

Dick's helplessness, had he known it, was his strength.

So what Archie would have called 'being decent' prevailed, and,

painfully, he began to plan the immediate future. He welcomed,

indeed, anything that held his mind away from thought of his loss,

the three lives.

The outcome of that salvation--what would afterwards become of Norah,

Ward, and himself--he did not attempt to guess.

At last his ideas were in order. In spite of the heat he shivered as

he got up to return to camp."

CHAPTER IV

The first face he saw was Dick's. In spite of the heat through

canvas, Norah had retired into the tent. Archie wondered if it was

to show she had not sent for Ward. 'Damn the fellow,' he muttered,

'can't he see he's asking for trouble.'

That wouldn't do, he reflected; in a minute he'd be at the man's

throat. Must be normal; what was it Norah had said--'Be civilised'?

His attempt at normality and civility would have made an angel laugh.

'Rain's coming,' he growled.

'Yes,' replied Dick, and wondered whether this was the small talk of

the tribunal before the black cap is assumed, 'that's why it's so

appallingly hot, I suppose.'

Archie stared at him inimically. Dick's face was wet with sweat and

his silk shirt stuck to his body. 'Heat or funk?' thought Archie

uncharitably. But the limpness of the leaves and the attentions of

the flies told him how hot it really was. And yet he was shivering.

Fever coming, he concluded. Damned nuisance just now.

'Yes,' he said aloud, 'the rains.'

He could stand the fellow's physical presence no longer, and turned

to the tent.

'Norah,' he said, 'we must make our plans.... I say, you oughtn't to

be in this furnace.'

'I promised you...' she replied slowly.

He stared at her. Then some promises were binding! That wouldn't do

either. If he was to go through this show decently he must rule out

bitterness as well as anger.

They walked into the shade. Dick followed. His restless eyes, his

fingers twining and loosing revealed his anxiety. Archie felt the

pervading suspense and saw that for all his distaste for explanation

he must declare himself. At last he broke the silence which seemed

so intolerable to Dick's tormented nerves. His words were

commonplace enough.

'This is a rotten position,' he said, and added, 'for all of us,'

then paused for thought. 'If we were anywhere else,' he went on,

'I'd go away. A long way away, and let time'--he felt for a

word--'mend things.' Another silence. 'Unless I called you out and

shot you'--his rapid whisper was more startling than a shout. 'But,

as it is, I can't clear out, or you'd both starve.'

Dick wiped his forehead.

'So we've got to stick together,' ended Archie, 'till we're out of

this hole.'

Norah felt no relief. Between them in their several ways, these men

made life more dreadful than death.

Archie began again. He was speaking now to Dick, though his eyes

looked beyond him. 'I make one condition,' he said. 'I must have

sole charge. You must do what I say. Otherwise I can't promise to

pull it off.' He might have added that if Dick was to oppose him at

every turn he couldn't promise restraint. 'Do you agree?' he asked

curtly.

In his relief Dick would have agreed to change his creed.

I'm sure you're right,' he said, 'unity of command.' The reprieve

had gone to his head like wine, and he talked light-headedly. 'By

Jove, the heat! I felt suffocated.' But no whisper of a breeze had

come to dissipate the heaviness that lay on the land. 'What's your

scheme to get away?' he asked.

Archie forced himself to answer.

'Move down to lake level first.'

'Why not go on up here?'

'Blast the man,' thought Archie. Then aloud, 'How many days will it

take us with Norah,' he hesitated before mentioning her Christian

name to this fellow, 'to find a village?'

Dick spread out his hands.

'Well, I don't know either. We might be out of ammunition first.

And what about water? And where are we going to get carriers for

your loads from?'

Dick agreed brightly that by sticking to the lake their water supply

was assured. It did not strike him that in his relief his words were

not very profound. The business of striking camp proceeded.

'You'll have my tent, Norah,' said Archie, and gave Matao directions

to have a shelter built for him.

Dick's exhilaration vanished. He opened his mouth to speak, but a

menace in Archie's eye dissuaded him. He kicked at a partly consumed

log and hummed gloomily. Archie's withdrawal to pack his kit at last

gave him the opportunity to murmur something to Norah about 'rubbing

things in.'

'Do you expect me to sleep with you under my husband's eyes?' she

asked. 'Aren't you a trifle _exigeant_? Besides,' she added

bitterly, 'you told me just now to make up to him.'

His retort was prevented by footsteps behind him. He turned and saw

that he was being offered a couple of cartridges.

'Two rounds of 7.9 stuff I brought by accident.' Archie explained.

'Found them in my kit. They'll fit your Mauser.'

When the loads were ready, the string of carriers, with Changalilo at

their head, straggled down the hill. The three Europeans, after a

visible hesitation, followed. If their mutual company was

unendurable, to descend singly at intervals would be grotesque. So

these two men and their woman, the prey of all the forces that

civilisation works to repress, hatred, love, fear, shame, pity,

danger, were constrained by their sense of--was it humour or

reticence?--to observe the usages of daily intercourse.

They passed the foot of the blow-hole chimney where Norah had sighted

Changalilo the night before, and the view that was revealed gave them

a momentary relief from the pain of thought.

All the week the clouds that herald the rains had packed closer and

closer on the horizon, till now they lay like a litter of discoloured

wool.

Across the lake the mountain tops which had been hidden in haze,

stood out in the sun-bathed clarity of a primitive painting. Their

crags and ravines, diminutive in the distance, looked as if human

fingers had pinched and dinted them into the powder-green relief of a

plaster map. Black against this green lay the foothills in the

shadow of the cloud bank. The foreground was blocked by the near

headland, heavily green with the green of English elms in August.

Every tree that grew there was distinct, and the grass at their feet.

At the water's edge gleamed pillars of white rock.

'I wish the rains would come,' said Norah at the end of a silence.

'I feel as if I were breathing hot fluff.'

But with the weight on her heart she would hardly have noticed the

stifling heat, had she not dreaded the working of that suffocation on

the men's nerves. As she glanced away from Archie's pale face she

tried to forget the tales of violence, murder, suicide committed

often on almost frivolous grounds in the exasperation of the heat

that heralds the rains.

Here at lake level, close to the equator, the dagger of jealousy and

despair hilt-deep in his brain, might not Archie find suicide or

murder the only solution?

It was agony to be so impotent to avert the doom that hung over the

two men she had loved and crucified. She felt, or imagined, their

hot, angry eyes on her, and dared not look up lest she loosed the

lightning. She alone could lay the passions she had so heedlessly

aroused; and any word, any gesture almost, might precipitate the

latent madness.

She was aware that the strain of the intolerable position could not

endure; unless she lessened it something would snap. And the life of

one or both of the men would pay. When death from starvation had

threatened, she had pictured herself in a short dark corridor of

days. In front stretched an iron-grey screen like a fireproof

curtain. Behind it lay ... what? Now danger of death had lifted,

and still the screen was there. Her mind was pinned to the emergency

of the moment, but even had that urgent menace receded, she would not

have dared to lift the curtain. What lay in store for her, she made

no attempt to divine. Life with Dick, life with Archie, life alone?

The future was too dreadful to contemplate, the ruin she had wrought

too radical. And if--what she dreaded--took place, she would be

making plans for men who would be dead at their fruition.

For the moment she anchored her conduct to the only course that she

felt could not do harm. By a manner resolutely matter of fact, she

might create a conventional atmosphere, might maintain the dangerous

equilibrium of the moment until the impulse to violence died.

Archie, it seemed, when the vulture that tore at his entrails would

let him, had resolved on the same conduct.

'What about resting here a bit?' he asked.

'I don't believe it's much good. It's as hot sitting as walking.

What wouldn't I give for a breeze!'

'It may be days before it breaks,' said Archie. 'But if you're not

tired the sooner we get down and start work the better.'

'What are you meaning to do?' asked Dick aggressively.

By now he had lost his fear of Archie. Enmity and suspicion had

taken its place. He paid with hatred for the panic that had gripped

his heart, for the doubts kindled in Norah's mind, for the glamour

stripped from him. Where once he had felt contemptuous pity, an

uncertain jealousy flickered. He hated Archie because he held the

whiphand; he hated and despised him for not using it. He despised

him that he might not despise himself. And he was uneasy. Why had

the man promised to save him? Why, above all things, had he given

him that ammunition? Was there a trap?

He wished he had not agreed to Sinclair's leadership. That

condition, now he examined it, left the way open to every treachery.

Was there a plot to separate him from Norah and let him starve?...

With all her drastic methods, Africa seems to have brought little out

in Dick but a certain animal cunning. It was in a spirit of

suspicious enmity that he asked the question which opened the

discussion.

'What am I meaning to do?' repeated Archie. He refrained from

adding, 'What in hell's that to you?'

'Yes,' said Dick.

'Build a raft, if you want to know.'

'A raft?'

'Look here----' said Archie, but Norah intervened in time.

'To get over to the _Mimi_, Archie?'

'To get along the coast.' Archie struggled with his instinct to

produce a completed job, discussing it neither before nor after. But

his reasonable nature told him that, where he gambled with the lives

of others, they had a right to see his play.

By now they had reached the camp by the ruins. Under a stream of

exhortation from Matao some of the carriers had started to pitch

Norah's tent; others were cutting boughs for the shelter.

Norah led the way into the shade. The men followed.

'As far as I can see,' Archie began, 'there are three ways out that

aren't too risky.'

He stopped and looked up at the sky, which was now heavy with cloud.

The heat, however, was fiercer, as though a lid had been shut down on

them.

'The weather matters too,' he explained.

'You were saying you had three plans,' said Dick.

Archie continued to address Norah. He told her that his first idea

had been to stay where they were and wait for rescue, relying on the

game they could shoot with the remaining ammunition, helped out

perhaps by fish from the lake. The objection to this simple plan was

that the game would move away and ammunition might be exhausted

before help came.

'Alibaba said twelve days,' put in Norah.

'Doubt it,' muttered Archie. 'One of the Bulamatadi boats is in dry

dock. Or so they told me at Songwe. They mightn't be in a hurry to

send. Anyhow, it's a risk.'

There was a distant rumble of thunder.

'That may go on for weeks before anything happens,' said Archie.

'Or,' he went on, 'we could ferry over to the _Mimi_. What you said.

I don't believe we'd be any better off. Any meat they could spare

wouldn't go far among all of us. They'll have wasted half. More

likely we'll have to feed them. And Ward's ammunition--that'll have

gone by now. No native can resist cartridges.'

Norah remembered what had looked like the ammunition chest at the

bottom of the disappearing dinghy. Its value would explain the

Hindoo's incorruptibility. She expressed her conviction, and, at the

mention of the Indian, Dick broke into curses.

'The third way,' Archie began again, 'has got the points of the other

two. If we made a couple of rafts, we can tap the _Mimi_ for

anything in her that's any use, and we can coast along the shore with

game and fish always handy. Sooner or later we must come to a

fishing village.

'Danger,' he added, 'is squalls and crocs.'

Dick considered the scheme. If there was a trap, it was well hidden.

'It seems all right,' he admitted.

'That's most gratifying,' replied Archie, and Norah reflected that

the squalls which would follow the coming of rain might be less

dangerous than the heat which came before it.

'We're wasting time,' said Archie, and calling Matao he gave him his

orders in Chi-wemba.

The hardwoods, he explained when he had finished, Kayimbi, Mulombwa,

Mubanga and the rest, would not float. But there was a little light

timber from which the natives cut their canoes.

'It's scattered about the hills,' he said. 'I'll have to blaze it

before we start felling'--but his eyes showed his hesitation to leave

his wife with her lover. She wondered what to do. If she offered to

come, Dick might be stung to dangerous speech.

'I'll go and lie down,' she said. 'I've got a headache.'

An hour later, the apparently deserted hills echoed with the resonant

chopping of axes. A dozen wooden bells seemed scattered in the

forest as the tall trunks sounded with a rhythmic _clop! clop!_ under

the soft native iron. A rending, splitting noise, and the first

tree, with the swish of a gigantic broom, tore through the boughs,

prostrating its neighbours. The wooden bells clanked on as its limbs

were hacked from it.

Soon Norah found the heat of the tent unbearable. She wandered to

the shore, where she hoped a breeze might be perceptible. But the

water was as smooth as a mirror. She faced inland. A tree top

taller than the rest caught her eye. It stirred. The wind must be

rising, although her wet face felt no breath. The tree trembled now.

Its boughs waved, although wind seemed no more than a memory of the

dead. The tree swayed. A modulated sway that lengthened with each

period, until with a splintering crash it submerged beneath the

ripple of the surrounding leaves. It was man's work she saw, not the

wind's.

A native issued from the dark line of the forest. The light caught

the tawny bundle he carried. Approaching the lake, he tossed a small

log into the water that the splash might scare any crocodile which

lurked there; then he bent and pushed the tangles of lushishi, broad

strips of flexible bark, into the silvery margin. He hooked his axe

over his naked shoulder and went off in search of more. To-morrow,

Norah knew, the sodden lushishi would be twisted into rough ropes to

lash the raft.

She pictured the adventure of the raft and shrank from the heavy

hours that awaited the three of them cramped side by side on that

narrow platform.

Archie had said 'two rafts,' but one would carry the loads and the

carriers who were not needed to paddle their masters. It was a pity

a sense of the ridiculous did not allow one raft to each European.

Jealousy, shame, hatred demand more footage than a raft can give.

All the world may be too little.

But she was glad Archie had not decided to wait in the bay. Her

instinct that tragedy pervaded the deserted settlement had had

foundation. It now urged escape before tragedy deepened.

She heard a European tread on the shingle and turned to find Archie.

That's started,' he said. 'I'll ask Ward to keep an eye on them

while I try to get a buck.' Determined to pursue any indifferent

topic, she asked what sort of game he expected to find.

'Might be anything. But I must keep on till I find something big and

fairly eatable. Dwyka or klipspringer are too small to be worth a

cartridge, while zebra or waterbuck ... I tried eating zebra the

other day!"

She sympathised. There was a pause; both felt awkward.

'I've told off a man,' pursued Archie resolutely, 'to make snares and

things. Though I don't believe they ever catch much in them. Those

drop traps are the best. A beam poised over a gap in a bit of fence.

We might get some small stuff that way--a katiri or even a bush pig.

Doubt it, though.'

'Fish?' said Norah, remembering her efforts of the day before.

'Yes, that's what I wanted to ask you. I've told Matao to find some

one with ideas; when he comes will you keep an eye on him?'

'They're all Awemba, I suppose?' She knew that that once warlike

people had no water-lore.

'Yes, and Matao was shocked when I told him to find one with an

Awisa[1] mother.'

[1] The Awisa, with a certain knowledge of the simpler arts of peace,

were conquered and swamped by the purely predatory Awemba.

After a moment of hesitation Archie left her. She saw him speak to

Dick, then with his gun under his arm he disappeared into the trees.

As she watched him go, she could not restrain a feeling of

admiration. In days past she had jibbed at his thoroughness. She

saw its value now. The practical man might not cut a romantic

figure; but for coping with romantic situations, he could give a

stone to any Lohengrin or Lancelot. His cautious, deliberate nature,

how it used to irritate her! How irresolute she had often thought

him! But now she sighed for a little less resolution in his handling

of Dick. Only the deliberate humour she had once despised could

avert tragedy. But how formidable the forces against its return!"

CHAPTER V

Two or three big drops of rain fell. Norah made her way slowly back

to camp. Near the ruins she was stopped by Dick, already tired of

watching the woodcutters. She noticed that access to his shaving

tackle had restored his freshness.

'Norah,' he said, with his hint of a brogue, 'why have you been

keeping away from me all day, the day I needed you most?'

Norah, never less inclined for sentiment, found two answers ready to

her lips; the first, that any attention to him might set Archie at

his throat, too melodramatic; the second, that in his present mood he

was best left alone, too brutal. So she remained silent.

'What was Sinclair saying to you on the beach?' he asked.

'Nothing much. Being decent.'

Dick's face darkened.

'You mean I'm not?'

'Well, the way you come to me the moment his back's turned, makes me

look pretty cheap,' she said dispassionately.

'How can I talk to you before him? Be fair, Norah.'

'Is there anything to talk about?' she asked. 'Isn't all as bad as

we can make it without more talk?'

'All right,' said Dick, 'I'll go back to the wood-cutting. If you'd

rather talk to Sinclair...'

'Oh! Dick,' she cried. 'Don't let's quarrel. It's horrible enough,

without that!'

'Our love's horrible?'

'I didn't mean that. The world's horrible; life's ugly, cruel. I

thought I was finding something beautiful, and all I've done is to

hurt, betray, spoil....'

Dick's jealousy boiled over.

'What makes you suddenly so careful of Sinclair's feelings?' he

asked. 'He had his chance of you. He wasn't man enough to keep you.'

Norah was silent. Why couldn't Dick shut up?

'But he's trying to get you back. I know it.'

'You think he'd take me back?' she asked the question half bitterly,

half soberly, and for a moment she fingered the sheet, draping a

future that lay as imperturbable as a corpse.

'Do you want him to?' said Dick violently. 'I'd rather see you dead

first.'

'It isn't on the cards,' she stated quietly. She had no clear idea

of her own hopes, let alone Archie's intentions. She said as much to

Dick. He caught up her words.

'Yes, what's he up to, Norah?' Dick's voice was eager. 'What's his

game? Hasn't he given any idea?'

'Has he any "game"?' she asked wearily. 'Unless fighting with beasts

in your heart is a game.'

'Why did he give me those cartridges?' persisted Dick. 'He wasn't

keen on me touching his ammunition last night!' he added with a

laugh, and made Norah the confidante of his nocturnal adventure.

As a word, or a tune, or a scent may fire a train of latent memory

and illumine or connect experiences till then dark and unrelated, so

Dick's story threw across his actions a beam as unsparing as the blue

glare of some great arc light in a main street that midnight, rain,

and frost had emptied.

Memories crossed her mind like pictures on a screen. Again Dick

humbled himself on the shore of the lake, and again she heard the

paddles splash as the Hindoo disappeared across the water. She saw

Dick's helpless stare as he sat limply on the pile of baggage

contemplating the disaster he had provoked and was impotent to stem.

She felt him tugging at her sleeves in naked terror of Archie's

decision in the hills. His breath was warm on her face, urging her

to beg the man they had wronged for a few days' life. She blushed

with shame at his advice to offer to go back, a promise, said he,

that need not be kept.

A dozen times he was convicted of meanness, ingratitude, treachery.

She saw for a bungler and a coward the man she had left all to

follow. The man she had loved--that she still loved for all she

knew. Feeling was dried out of her by pain and anxiety, but her

brain told her that, if ever the crisis passed, she would find the

image of Dick still near her heart.

And Archie, while she could see each of his virtues--pluck, loyalty,

gentleness--written in letters of fire, she knew that never again

could he quicken her pulses.

Hot scorn of herself and her lover filled her veins, but she did not

voice it. All her wit was devoted to the task of keeping the men

from each other's throats. She scrutinised every word before she

spoke it, that nothing she said might send the precarious triangle,

at whose apex she stood, heeling to disaster.

So while her realisation of Dick's unworth penetrated her brain as

lead is melted and poured into a mould, she was guiding the

conversation to soothe his ruffled vanity: and not until she felt her

end attained did she leave him on the excuse that she must see about

the fishing.

On her way to the beach she was met by a note from Archie asking her

to send six men to carry in a hartebeeste he had shot. With a sigh

of relief she dismissed one anxiety. There was food now for all for

a day or two.

It was dusk before the procession returned in pairs, the dismembered

limbs of the buck swinging from freshly-cut poles that rested on

their bowed shoulders. Anxious to regain the firelight before dark,

their knees were bent and their hips swung in a gliding trot. One

arm supported the pole, the other held a spear or axe. Behind them

walked Archie with his gun over his shoulder. He gave orders for the

meat to be spread on the ground beside the fire and bade the tense,

black circle stand farther back.

'In this heat the stuff will be rotten by to-morrow night,' he

remarked. 'They won't mind, though.'

He told Changalilo to take the saddle for the European table, and

watched while Matao with an axe divided the rest between the natives.

They knelt and clapped their hands in salutation before they

withdrew, clasping each man his sanguinary portion. Soon a ring of

bright little fires half-burnt, half-smoked the spitted meat, and the

night was full of soft voices and high-pitched laughter.

Archie subsided into a deck-chair and sat silent, his head in his

hands. Nervous of his thoughts, Norah inquired about the kill.

He had had to cover a lot of ground, he answered, uttering his words

carefully. No, there wasn't a herd; a solitary ram, turned out

probably for his bad temper; grazing behind an anthill. He was

hoping she would not hear his teeth clattering against each other.

Pains that started from the base of his skull and shot across his

head assured him that an attack of malaria threatened.

With an effort he answered Norah, who, anxious to cover Dick's

silence, had asked another question.

'One round,' he said, 'heart shot.'

When at last dinner came he could not eat it. As soon as the others

had done, he withdrew to his shelter. Though she guessed he was ill,

Norah did not dare to follow, and after enduring Dick's sullen

monologue retired early to the tent Archie had allotted her. Body

triumphed over mind, and she slept as soon as she had stretched

herself on her bed.

In the early hours of the morning she woke. She was conscious at

once, before thought returned, of the oppression of impending

disaster that had been her waking burden. Then she remembered.

Refreshed by sleep, her brain took up its round, searching for the

path that led to safety. She saw at last why that search had been

futile. Till now she had not dared face the future, to imagine what

lay behind the curtain. A flash of insight revealed that she must

pledge her future if she was to cope with the present.... For a time

she fought off the question that clawed at her brain. At last she

confronted it--'Must I give up Dick?' she asked herself.

With reluctant clearness she saw that, if she gave up her lover and

told her husband, she would sterilise the soil so fertile with

violence. But could she pay the price of sacrifice and humiliation?

Could she let Dick go? Though all passion was buried under ashes,

Dick was still a part of her subconscious life. She could not at

once uproot the vivid memories of their few weeks together. Her

emotions were in a state of suspended animation, shut off, not dead.

What needs might not arise in that future she shrank from visualising!

Moreover, Dick loved her. Must he pay the price as well? Must she

go on racking the men who loved her and inflict on Dick the anguish

Archie seemed to suffer?

When she was sinking into a morass of conflicting emotion, pride came

to her help. Whatever else she felt for Dick, she knew that she

despised him. Contempt makes an ill bedfellow. A woman can love a

weak man whom she pities; she is too practical to trust her life to a

man she despises.

Almost against her will, Norah's mood hardened. The tent stifled

her. She must make this cruel decision in the open air. Slipping

into a cloak, she stepped into the moonlight.

The natives, less black than their shadows, slept in contorted

postures about the ground. Here was an arm flung out, as if a

declamatory gesture had beep stilled in sleep; there was a knee drawn

up as if pain had found cessation in death. The ruined tower threw

its shadow across the sleepers, a shadow which seemed to Norah the

visible presentation of the doom she had divined.

In the distance a hyæna howled like a ship's syren and reminded her

that it was not safe to move beyond the arc of light flung by the

fire. As she took the chair Dick had left, she was startled by a

voice she did not recognise. She could distinguish no words.

Quietly she picked her way between the sleeping bodies to the shelter

where Archie lay. The moonlight fell in flecks between the leaves,

and she could see Archie sprawling on his back, nearly naked, his

lips muttering in fever. As she picked up the clothes her arm

brushed against him. He caught at it with hot, dry hands. A string

of curses poured from his unconscious lips as he gripped her wrist

with his two hands, digging his thumbs into her flesh. The pressure

was so painful she felt she must wake him, but with a final twist

under which her skin tore, he let go.

'You won't touch her again,' he muttered. 'Damn you, not ever again!'

She pulled the clothes on to the bed and tucked them in, then fetched

another blanket from her tent and spread it over him, that he might

sweat out the fever. He had enough to endure without that.

She bathed her arm and sat down, her hesitation gone. The manner of

Archie's dreaming proved that her fears were not imaginary. It lay

with her that dreams did not pass into deeds.

Nor could she leave Archie to fight his fever alone; but until she

had made clear her position between the two men, it was not possible

for her to take up her duty by her husband's sick-bed. As another

man's acting mistress she had no right there. The sight of her might

even make him worse.

She would not feel clean till she had humbled herself before Archie,

told him she renounced Dick, and offered to fulfil the contract she

had vowed and broken. Archie might well refuse the spoiled remnants

of her loyalty, but she would at least have done the little she could

to repair the irreparable wrong. And Dick ... she did not dare to

think of Dick. Before she spoke to Archie she must tell Dick. He

had a right to hear from her lips. She had to tell him that their

love must end ... was ended. She would have to launch upon a

hopeless explanation of motives she barely understood and reasons

which he would refuse. Every shred of reticence would be torn to

tatters. Agonised but inflexible, she would have to listen to his

reproaches, arguments, prayers.

Could she trust her will under that fire? Would she not be wiser to

tell Archie before she told Dick? Once she had offered to her

husband the remainder of her burnt-out life, honour would keep her

weak flesh from yielding to her lover's entreaties.

Nor was that all. Dick jilted, his love and vanity ableed, would be

in the mood to provoke Archie, not yet aware of his wife's

renunciation, to fatal action; and the tragedy she had given her love

to avert would be consummated in a death grapple between the two men

she had loved and left.

Before she fell asleep again, her mind was made up that first Archie

must hear she had given up Dick for ever. Then Dick must be told."

CHAPTER VI

As soon as it was light, Norah was awakened by Archie's voice outside

her tent. He was speaking in Chiwemba, and she could hear Matao's

monosyllabic replies.

Her call brought Archie to the doorway. She resisted an impulse to

tell him to come in; he seemed so infinitely remote.

'You ought to be in bed,' she told him.

He assured her that he was better.

'What is it? Fever?'

'Yes. But it's down this morning.'

If he had not been standing with his back to the light, she could

have seen from the colour of his eyes that it was not very far 'down.'

'You ought to have a day in bed and give yourself a chance,' she

urged him.

'Can't. Every moment brings the rains nearer. No joke to be caught

on a raft by a squall.'

She asked if the natives could not be left to work alone, or, she

hesitated a moment, under Dick's charge.

He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd

regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on

to get a buck with every round and not a day must be wasted. Ward,

he said evenly, was in bed.

'You're an obstinate Scot, Archie,' she said with a little sigh.

'You must go your own way.'

'Afraid so,' he replied, with an effort at a smile. Then in a

gentler tone than he had used since she'd met him in the hills,

'Thank you, it's nice of you to have bothered.'

Poor Archie, she thought, he was grateful for little enough.

He talked for a moment about the work. That day the felled and

trimmed logs must be manhandled to the water's edge. There were too

few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from

hillside to lake all day.

Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's

resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie

stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy

alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.

But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to

offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered

on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. Then she

dressed slowly. For a time she stood staring at the lake, which lay

under the storm clouds grey as a salmon's scales. It was under a

week, as calendars measure time, since she had first set eyes on the

lake, welcoming it as the friend that pointed the way to Europe and

happiness.

Well, she knew Tanganyika better now.

She turned her back on the lake and on the hopes it had once aroused.

She would not see Europe, perhaps, until she was an old woman. The

interview she was on her way to seek would, she supposed, make fast

the bonds that stretched her on the altar of Africa.

She found Archie sitting on the wreck of a tree felled by the

tireless destructiveness of white ants. She noticed how fever and

pain had hollowed his face and bleached it under the sunburn, till it

stared like a Cubist sculpture. The natives clustered in groups,

chattering while Matao hacked a grip in the fifteen-foot log that lay

at his feet, to attach the lushishi ropes.

'That will do,' said Archie, 'get on with it.'

The ropes were fastened and the gang split into two rows. Matao

raised his voice in falsetto song and the deeper voices of the

workers joined the chanty. At the first beat of each bar they hauled

on the ropes, shuffling their feet in a bear-like measure to the

unstressed beats, so that the log progressed by jerks.

'No good showing them how to pull like men instead of the Russian

ballet,' said Archie. 'The Wemba have hauled trees that way since

they came out of the West and they're going on.'

'To the same tune too,' added Norah.

'Probably/. Then, after a pause, 'Anything up?'

She reassured him.

'Then I think I'll keep with them and see they don't slack.'

With an effort of will she stopped him. 'Please, Archie.... Can't

we talk? There's something I've got to say.'

He looked distressed. 'Need we?' he muttered. 'Isn't it better left

alone?' Without awaiting her answer, he moved in the direction of

the singing.

She stood firm. 'No, Archie, I must. You can go back to the work in

a minute.'

He shouted for Matao. The singing ceased, while he ran to receive

his orders. His return was signalled by a fresh outburst of the

tune. Norah wished for a moment she had let Archie go. The start

was intolerable. To gain time she asked how he had got his fever.

He told her it was fording a river one day after elephant. She

expressed her surprise. This was the first she had heard of elephant

hunting.

He told her the size of his bag and the weight of the ivory. 'Not

that it matters now,' he added, in spite of himself.

'D'you know, Archie,' she said, 'you never told me a word?'

He stared at her in silence. 'Nor I did,' he answered at last. 'But

that was half the reason I went to the Congo.'

'And the other, the pure-bred bull,' she said sadly.

'Bull?' he was obviously puzzled, 'what bull?'

A measure of their old familiarity returned to her. 'Archie,' she

said, 'you're maddening. Do you realise I haven't a notion what

you've been doing from the day you left the farm till ... till we met

here?'

So Archie struggled with his taciturnity and, helped out by Norah's

questions, produced a more or less coherent story.

Until Norah's outburst on that momentous evening at the farm, no

intuition had warned him she hated the life they were living.

Intuition, introspection, and so forth don't get the same scope with

a pioneer working eleven hours a day on a ranch, as they do with a

serious young man fulfilling himself in Chelsea. Archie's only

excuse took the form of a tribute to Norah.

'You stuck it like a brick,' he said. 'You never gave a sign.'

'I'd have been pretty mean if I had,' she put in. 'I made you come

out here.'

So when at last her restraint had snapped, he treated the revelation

with even more than his normal solemnity. After his habit he looked

at the issue from both sides. For his part, the life and the country

were ideal. And he was, he believed, on the slow gradient that leads

his kind of man to success. But then Norah, she told him, hated the

farm, the forest, everything. And the issue she did not believe

worth waiting for.

Archie thought too clearly to assume the right of any one, even an

Englishman, to impose his wishes on a fellow man; so it did not occur

to him that he might keep Norah in surroundings she disliked. At the

same time his deep-seated, if unvocal, love for Norah turned down the

solution that she should go back to England, while he stayed and

worked the farm. The nearest he could now bring himself towards some

expression of this was to murmur, 'I didn't think then I could do

without you'--words which added remorse to the pity in Norah's breast.

His logical brain accepted the only choice that remained--to take

Norah back to England and find work there.

Once he had decided, it was not his way to brood on the cost of

abandoning the farm that had absorbed two years and over of his life.

He chose without murmuring the lesser of the evils that confronted

him. Many days would have followed of slow consideration of plans to

realise his assets, had not the pace been forced by no less humble an

instrument of Providence than 'Mr. Jones of the Congo.'

'That night at dinner,' explained Archie, 'I said I was thinking of

selling the herd. Jones' eyes lit up and he told me he had a pal on

the Katanga who'd buy them.'

Archie had not been greatly impressed until he learnt that Jones'

friend was head compound manager of a group of mines. The contract

for the miners' meat was in his hands.

'If you let me handle the deal,' Jones had said, 'I'll get you a

better price for "live weight" than you'll get anywhere else for

"dead."'

'Bribery all round,' said Archie to himself, 'but that's not my

concern.'

'You've been good to me,' added the "stiff," 'I'll only take five per

cent. on the transaction.'

This Archie, with his Scotch blood, thought excessive; Jones himself

must have had some qualms, since he was willing to throw in a bit of

information that might, he said, make Archie's fortune.

I've been offered that sort of tip before,' said Archie, 'and I

wanted to know a bit more.'

Well, it wasn't an undiscovered gold field or pipe of diamonds, but

the whereabouts of what Jones described as 'the elephants' home town.'

The year before he had stumbled on a little-known valley on the Congo

side of Lake Tanganyika where elephant, he declared, were as thick as

rabbits and as big as dinosaurs. Tusks up to 150 lbs.

'Not unnaturally I asked him why he didn't take a knock at them

himself,' said Archie. 'But he had a yarn ready that he had lost his

nerve for elephant.'

Well, to cut a long story short, Archie did not believe a word until

Jones drew him a sort of map of the locality, marking the position of

several villages. The name of one of the villages was familiar.

Searching his brain, Archie remembered that he had that day written

on a Congo native for mason's work, who gave that village as his home.

'More to score off Jones than because I believed there was anything

in it, I sent for Wadia,' he told Norah. 'To my surprise he

confirmed his story. Elephant, he said, were as plentiful there as

the puku on our flats: their footprints were as long across as his

arm.'

In the light of this support Archie's reply that he would think it

over was characteristic. It did not, however, suit Jones. The D.C.

at--he mentioned the name--had given him a hint not to stay too long

in the country, and he must push on the next day. If Archie liked to

come to Elizabethville and give him five per cent. on the sales he

secured, well and good; if not, they'd leave it at that. Archie,

without answering, worked out the suggested commission on the back of

an envelope. He found that he stood to gain more than he gave.

Making the further stipulation that the compound manager paid hard

cash, he professed willingness to start the following morning.

'Right, it's a bargain,' said Jones.

Nora told Archie how she had overheard these words. 'If only I'd

heard it all!' she said. 'Why on earth didn't you tell me, Archie?'

'Well, it seemed pretty wild. The whole thing might be a try on.

And I didn't want to talk about it till I'd got the money and we

could start home.'

But if, he said, she hadn't been asleep when he came to say good-bye

he'd have told her. In fact that's what he came to say.

Norah felt that the petty deception had been the fatal moment of her

life.

He did not say much about his journey north. Quite early he had

decided there was no object in accompanying Jones to Elizabethville

and had made straight for the Valley of Ivory, as he named it.

Sceptical to the last, Archie had to admit that the place came within

measurable distance of Jones' enthusiasm. Of his adventures there he

gave no account.

'You feel a bit of a swine the first elephant you shoot,' he

mentioned. It's so big, so contemptuously trustful. You seem to

have taken an unfair advantage of a large-minded opponent. And

you've destroyed something older and longer in the making than

yourself. Like burning an old master.'

The first hitch had come after he had shot his first two bulls. That

was the number allowed him on his thousand franc license. He applied

at the 'Poste' for the second license he had been promised, to be met

with a bland refusal. No second licenses were being issued. He had

considered his position. If he gave up the hunt, he would go back to

Norah with a hundred or a hundred and fifty more sovereigns in his

pocket. Even with a first-rate sale of his stock that wouldn't be

much use.

The alternative was to stay and poach.

'Everybody does it up there,' was the excuse he gave Norah.

But Archie never had cared for the example of other people; the force

which urged this law-abiding Scot to break the law was his love for

Norah. Where she was concerned, he stuck at nothing. He had not

hesitated to abandon his farm and two years' work to satisfy what

most men would call a fancy. A Bulamatadi law did not stand much

chance. The pity is that he was so careful to conceal from Norah

this one recklessness and its source.

Not that it was necessary to surcharge her cup. He had said enough

to show that while she flirted with Dick his only thought had been

her service.

But her last defence remained to be stormed.

'If only you had come when I sent,' was her cry.

Archie stared.

'The letter Jacketi brought,' she repeated.

'I never saw Jacketi,' he said slowly.

She told him of the despairing letter she had sent, of Jacketi's

return without an answer, and of the days she had waited.

He dropped his hands hopelessly.

'Jacketi never came near me. He must have turned into some village

for a beer-drink.'

'Damn him, damn him!' cried Norah, and then in a dead voice, 'No,

it's I who am damned.'

The work gang returned trailing the lushishi ropes. Husband and wife

stood silent while the capitao prepared another log for hauling.

When the workers had danced themselves out of sight, Archie saw that

Norah was crying. His awkwardness returned. 'Don't cry,' he said,

'it's done now; we can't help it.' He searched his mind for

comforting phrases.

'I wouldn't have gone,' she said like a child, 'if I'd known.'

What could he say? Why had she insisted on this useless laceration?

'I thought you didn't care,' she repeated again and again.

He felt that this was unendurable. All his energy was needed for

action. Emotion might complete the harm that fever had begun. Norah

too must spare herself. He took a tug at the strait waistcoat of

stoicism he had condemned himself to wear, remarking dispassionately

that he must go back to the work. Many more logs should have been

transported by now.

But Norah's weakness had been momentary, and her courage reasserted

itself. 'Wait!' she said, 'I haven't told you what I came to say.'

How could she allude to what had happened without hurting him? How

could she tell him it was over without promising more than she could

perform? The phrases formed in her mind. She rejected each in turn.

'I'm giving Dick up!' That sounded as if she grudged a sacrifice.

'Take me back!' held out hopes she could not justify.

'I've left Dick'--she might be a kept woman.

'Archie,' she said slowly, 'I wanted to tell you that I'm leaving

Dick, whatever happens. If you want me still, I'll come back to the

farm.'

Archie did not speak. Not even his expression altered. The pain he

had suffered had dulled his senses. His silence, his undecipherable

features spared Norah nothing of humiliation. What was he thinking

of her? Like a child she wondered if any one was marking up her

humiliation against the harm she had done. Her words rang in her

ear. She could not force herself to add a syllable to them, though

she saw how inadequate they were. How Archie must despise her!

Unfaithful even in adultery. Taking a man and leaving him in a few

weeks. Like any harlot: less constant than the animals, whose

fidelity endures the breeding season.