In fact, Archie had no clear thoughts. He felt that waves were

buffeting him: his bones ached with fever: his brain was numb. Like

Norah, he had turned his back to the future, and this fresh shuffling

of the bits of coloured glass that make the kaleidoscope of life, as

yet meant nothing to him. He could not focus his thinking.

Presently one thought emerged. Not a very lofty one. 'You've got

her back from Ward,' crooned his instinct of possession.

Then an idea flickered through his brain, stabbing like a white-hot

wire.

'Does this mean she still loves me?'

His body seemed to come to life and to flow with young, clean blood.

He must sound the amazing possibility at once and risk the pain that

denial would bring.

'Why are you ... what makes you give up Ward?' he stammered.

Norah felt explanation beyond her powers. Surely it was not demanded

of her to tell how she had come to despise and distrust her lover;

and how she had been driven to parry the danger she sensed.

'I can't go on,' she answered simply.

But Archie's stoicism had deserted him, and he found the suspense

more atrocious than yesterday's certitude.

'It wasn't because you thought you might...' His voice trailed away.

She understood what he wanted to ask, and sorrowfully shook her head.

She dared not start into a labyrinth of deception through which her

feet would have to drag every day of her life.

Archie's eyes, which had been alive with incredulous hope, died. He

sat down heavily on the stump, no longer sustained by any aspiration,

hope as dead and dry as bones in the sand.

'I had to tell you,' Norah murmured.

He nodded.

'Don't let's talk of it any more,' he said; 'we needn't settle

anything yet.'

For once he felt he must talk; the sound of his voice was preferable

to the bottomless vacancy of his heart.

'We've got to get out of here first. Then I dare say you'll like to

be taken back to England. Then we can see.'

In his disappointment he clutched at her offer of reconciliation. It

was something to know that she was not a total loss to him. He had,

it seemed, only to say the word and she would come back into his

life. If he did not set his demands on happiness too high something

might be saved out of the wreck.

Norah had been watching his face. Her heart had ached for him as she

saw the re-birth of hope and its deception. She had been tempted to

foster it; but why treat him like a child when his manliness made him

so admirable? She had lost confidence in herself and felt she

blundered in a dark room, bruising and crushing against her will.

She was distressed to see how ill and worn he looked now that hope

had left him. Finding no word that could help, she urged him to come

to his breakfast. To her surprise he consented. Together they

started downhill. Archie stumbled. In his disappointment, the fever

was mastering him. He stumbled again. Norah took his arm and led

him to camp. With Changalilo's help she put him to bed. He seemed

affected by her care for him. It gave him the momentary illusion

that nothing had happened and that their life together had not been

interrupted except perhaps by a night's dreaming. Hugging the

illusion, he fell asleep.

Towards evening the slanting rays of the sun entered his shelter and

woke him.

Two facts permeated his waking consciousness--a body sore in every

bone and a mind that grappled with the possibilities of Norah's offer

to come back to him--'if he wanted her.' How he wanted her! Was

there anything else he wanted?

But ever his reason forbade him to listen to his affections.

Whenever he smothered his common sense, retribution followed. Of

course it had been mad to think he could make a husband for Norah,

and it was mad to think he could hold her now.... But as yet nothing

need be determined. His first job was to get them out of this ...

but there was something that had to be done at once. What was it?

... Damn this fever.... Oh, yes! Johnny, the fundi, had reported a

herd of eland in the hills behind the ruins. With the rains coming,

they would not stay there. He must get one that evening and have the

meat dried into strips, as a stand-by on the rafts.

Painfully he lifted himself out of bed and, his head swimming with

weakness, got into his clothes. How heavy his .420 weighed! Pity

the handy little .303 had been smashed up by that wounded bull! A

near shave it had been!

He looked about for a native to carry his gun, but the camp was

empty. Resting the heavy rifle on his shrinking shoulder, he walked

shakily into the hills.

He looked up at the sun and saw that in under two hours it would be

dark. There was not much time. As he walked he searched the ground

for spoor. Padded footprints on a stretch of sand showed where one

of the smaller cats had stepped in the night. A genet probably; too

small for a serval. Norah had had a tame genet on the farm. 'Fred'

it had been called. He remembered the little blind thing he had

bought for a shilling from a native who would have eaten it. It used

to sleep all day in Norah's pocket; she had nursed it through

infancy, waking in the night to feed it on warm milk and water, but

it had died while still a kitten, bitten by a native dog.

Norah had always a liking for the little wild things of the forest;

some feeling of kinship, maybe....

His eye rested on the delicate footprints of a dwyka. The antelope's

bound had impressed its hard, slender toes into the baked earth. The

tracks were a day old ... was it thinkable that Norah and he would be

able to take up their life together from the point where she had

dropped it? Would memory let them? Was this ... adventure of

Norah's a mere episode that they could both forget or did it mean

more?...

He'd thought there were leopards about and those scratches on the

bark of that muputa tree showed where a leopard had sharpened his

claws. Leopardess, more likely, to judge by the height.... It was

too rocky ahead, he would have to work round behind the mission.

There wasn't a breath of wind, so it didn't matter which way he came

at the game....

Here were the ruins, the sweep of the hill had brought him out too

low. Funny how Norah hated the place--fancy, of course. Was that

her voice he heard? But quinine makes your ears sing and then you

imagine voices. Still those deep tones of Norah's.... He'd just

look round the tower to see if any chance had brought her there.

She'd be angry with him for leaving bed....

He rounded the ruined tower and stood as if paralysed by what he saw.

His right knee bent to advance began to tremble violently with slow,

separated jerks. He tried to raise his voice, but his lips had gone

dry. They felt swollen. He had not had this feeling since the

nightmares of his childhood when he had seemed to cower in a small

dark room, gasping for air, while a shapeless, colourless, nameless

body like a distorted featherbed or an obscene grand piano was

swelling, swelling and crushing him out of existence. The oncoming

of absolute and inevitable disaster.

So he stood, while not twenty yards from his eyes, Norah's body lay

fast held in Ward's arms. His kisses rained on her white face. Her

tired eyes were shut--he imagined the little blue veins in their

lids--and she seemed to swoon with pleasure.

In spite of the resolution he had taken in the hills, at moments

Archie's rage against Dick had rowelled him. Imagination had goaded

him with intolerable pictures of his wife's intimacy with her lover,

kissing, for instance, body to body, Dick's rather full lips crushed

into her carmine mouth. The vision always lashed him to a mute fury

in which he could feel his rival's throat bulge under his fingers.

Fever had given body to these visions and had reduced his

self-control. But except perhaps in dreams, such as Norah had

witnessed, the crisis was momentary and quickly overcome.

When, therefore, a few yards off, he saw his wife's pale face forced

back by the weight of her lover's kiss, her little body crushed by

the violence of his arms, the familiar process was started. Rage

blazed up to be as instantly curbed by will. Fiercely he commanded

his passion, until realisation dawned. This was no unhealthy,

torturing fancy, but an enactment in flesh and blood. And if the

picture before him was real, so was that throat real. At any rate

the weight of the gun on his shoulder was real. But where did

imagination start and reality end? Had he imagined Norah promising

him that morning to give up Ward and, if he said the word, come back

to him? No, that was real. Then this picture that seemed to sear

his eyes must be the work of fever in his brain. Norah did not lie.

And she had promised ... he then must be mad. Fever was not enough

to cast shadows so solid as those before his eyes.... Fact or fancy,

he'd stop it, by God!

He humped up his shoulder, and the barrel of the rifle fell into his

left palm. The familiar feel of the metal cleared his mind. Those

were real people over there, Dick Ward and Norah Sinclair; real,

mortal, vulnerable people. And Norah had lied to him that morning;

had come to him with her flesh a-tingle perhaps from Ward's kisses,

and had lied to make Ward safe. Well, she shouldn't get away with

the lie. Hot fury blazed in Archie's breast, and power of motion

returned.

He must have shouted, though he did not hear his voice; a startled

face turned towards him, and slowly, oh! slowly, Norah's eyes opened.

He saw his enemy drop Norah, start to his feet, snatch at a gun that

lay on the ground. With his right thumb Archie pushed over his

safety catch, and for an instant the barrel rested on Norah. She had

been fooling him all the time, perhaps all these years she had fooled

him.... Then the sights swung round and aligned on Dick. Some one

should pay him for this.

Before Ward could raise his rifle from hip to shoulder, a shot rang

through the ruins. His knees sagged, bent; then he toppled over with

his face rubbing the ground. His shoulders twitched and his hands

opened and clenched. A jerk, and he had twisted on to his back.

Thus he lay staring at the sky, and the tissue of enterprise and

weakness, frailty and charm that had been Dick Ward ceased to exist."

CHAPTER VII

When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood

without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his

ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeling beside the body,

fumbling with its collar. He remarked her skirt was in a pool of

dark blood. She would not, he reflected, be able to wear that dress

again.

He started to go to her, stopped, and stood in thought. If he went

to her he would hear her reproaches, see her grief, perhaps be

maddened to ... harm her. He knew he would be sorry later if he did.

Nothing in the world would make him sorry about Ward.

Without any conscious act of will he walked away into the forest. As

he walked he held at arm's length the knowledge of Norah's treachery.

That had better not be faced till his head was calm again. Thinking

about Ward did not matter.

His anger had vanished, but nothing like remorse took its place. His

mind handled the crime dispassionately, mathematically. Before his

... action he had, he now saw, been trying to solve an insoluble

problem. The world had been veiled in a thick fog of good and bad

intentions, mixed motives, false standards. Now he saw everything as

clear-cut and minute as if he looked through the wrong end of a

telescope. Ward's death had amazingly simplified life. In

retrospect he could see the death of one of them as the only

conceivable solution; there had not been room in the world for the

two men and their passions.

The only emotion he was conscious of was an almost impersonal

satisfaction. Once he had shot a lioness that had terrorised a

village; his sensations had been similar--at a certain risk to

himself the world was quit of a pest. He was satisfied, moreover, at

a clean job carried out efficiently with his own hands...."

Ross paused. "It's easy," he said, "to go wrong over Archie's

feelings. He was always so careful to suppress them. But that's the

best I can piece together from what he let fall, consciously and in

his delirium. The result is not what your psychologist, certainly

not what your moralist, would like.

If you are inclined to side with these wise men from the West, you

must remember that on the subject of Norah this hard-headed farmer

was not quite normal. His love was that dominant weakness through

which, according to my theory, Africa masters a man. So the kiss

that betrayed his love shocked him not only into murder, not only

into callousness, but into a different epoch of morality. The

atrocity of his discovery seems to have atrophied the segments of

brain that are latest developed in man--the convolutions that give

refuge to mercy, compassion, gentleness.

'The vigorous young world was ignorant

Of these restrictions; 'tis decrepit now,

Not more devout, but more decayed and cold.'

And Africa stood eager to welcome him to an older world where force,

not cunning, ruled; muscle, not money, dominated; where Jehovah was

God, where an eye for an eye was sound morality; where you killed

your enemy, dashed his children against the stones, and added his

wives to your harem. It was Jehovah's gospel, not Christ's, not

Mammon's, that the forest whispered in Archie's ear.

Another avenue to remorse did Africa close, that fear of discovery

and of punishment that leads men to contrition. Murder is so safe in

Central Africa. Let me advise you to take your enemies on a shooting

trip there. There in the solitude, far from coroners' inquests, are

a hundred agents of sudden and silent death--snake-bite, blackwater,

a crocodile, sunstroke, a lion ... and a sun that makes immediate

burial unavoidable.

Any of these or a dozen other fates could be adduced to explain

Dick's disappearance; the natives would ask no questions and carry no

tales; and a wife cannot, in English law, give evidence against her

husband.

So Africa was accessory after, as well as before, the fact. Archie

may not have recognised her proffered help; at the same time he can

have felt none of the anxiety and fear that so assist the workings of

conscience. He blundered on through the trees, caring only to set

space between himself and Norah, until chance brought him on the herd

of eland.

His eye, which took in no detail of his course, was caught by the

quick movement of a horned head plucking at a branch. The sight of

the great antelope focused his vision on the rest of the herd, whose

humped bodies were no more than shadows in the dappled gloom of the

forest.

Dropping flat, he began to crawl into easy range. No fancy shots,

with ammunition so scarce. As he got near, he saw that the animal he

stalked was a cow. Cautiously he knelt up and searched among the

trees for a bull. He thought involuntarily that, for the second time

that day, he had spared the female of the species. He raised his

rifle and aimed behind the shoulder of a magnificent bull who stood

head up guarding his cows, his horns hidden in the flat branches.

With faint surprise he found compunction in his heart. He was loath

now to tighten the trigger finger. Half an hour before he had felt

no such qualm.

It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier

than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull

on a line between eye socket and ear hole.

If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were

nothing--men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth.

Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the

sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this

fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated,

choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing

posture.

Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short

of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd

threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which

way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.

The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying

buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie

that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the

meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other

scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. Soon

the eland was hidden under a mound of foliage, black in the failing

light. He kicked a little earth over a pool of blood that might

attract a jackal or a hyæna. As he did so, another pool of blood

with a woman's skirt trailing in it rose before his eyes, and he

realised that what he did for an eland he must do for a man.

Ward must be buried. He could not be left to the ministrations of

the forest. Archie's prodigious impersonality had departed and he

was conscious of a violent distaste for the work before him. Either

his fever or his imagination brought physical sickness, and he sat

down on the ground till the nausea passed.

He started to drag himself home. His gun seemed an intolerable

weight now that his mood had weakened. For a moment he saw the

murder as a fault--not as a crime or an infraction of the law--for

the power of the forest was too absolute to let this lawyer care much

for legality--but as a failure in hospitality. Ward had come to him,

he remembered, for help, had put himself in his power. And the use

he had made of his power was to deal death where he promised escape.

Remorse passed as quickly as it had come when he thought of the kiss

which had forfeited Ward his claim to help, safety, life. But the

duty of burying Dick had never left his mind, where it bred a fresh

idea of his victim.

He no longer saw him in the abstract as the enemy, the defiler of

Norah's body, the pest which must be killed. He saw him as a dead

man. A poor dead man. _Un povero morte_, shut out from the

daylight, from sight and feel and smell, from love of women, from

hope and achievement. All he had now was stillness and a silence.

Archie felt no horror at his crime. He stood back from civilisation,

remote from society, away from the herd that had created morality to

make possible life in a herd. But pity took hold of him, pity for

his victim, who was also, he saw, the victim of exasperating

circumstance, of passions and stupidities. And heavily--if

justly--had he paid.

A growl of thunder diverted his attention. It did not sound very

distant. He hoped the rains would not break yet, but he quickened

his aching steps.

It was dark when he reached the ruins and found no trace of the body

he had come to bury. Even in the obscurity he expected that he would

have seen the white clothes. They would not be so white now, but

something should be visible. Had Norah had it carried into camp? If

she had, that showed beyond palliation that she was careless of her

husband's fate.

Had he come to the right spot? Yes, this was where he had stood.

Ward over there, with Norah. He had fallen forwards. His body

should lie here. Archie fancied he could smell the pool of blood,

and the light of a match justified his senses.

He lit another and saw that the grass was bent and broken. In Ward's

death agony? Or had the body been dragged away? He followed the

wake in the grass, striking matches as he went, till at a distance of

some fifty yards he came on the stained, white bundle. He had not

come in time. Hyaenas, a flicker of lightning revealed, had been

before him. The poor corpse was already mutilated. His pity for the

dead man gathered force. He had never admired Ward's good looks

(secretly he may have been jealous of them), but he knew they were

there, and against his will he had been conscious of the man's

light-hearted charm. Now this helpless, shapeless thing worried by

the beasts of night was all that remained.

It was the war again, he thought. Bodies of Germans hanging on the

wire--sons, husbands, lovers of some one bereaved in Germany. Only

here the consolation was lacking of sacrifice for a country. Ward

had died in no nobler quarrel than the fight of two dogs over a bitch.

For the first time it occurred to him that his victim was a human

being. He had seen and killed him as an abstraction--the betrayer of

Norah; he had seen him and pitied him as a corpse: now he knew that

he had been a human being with human faults and qualities, human

interests, human relationships; somewhere he had a family, friends, a

home.

And to-night he must bury him far from all that. He faced the

problem of the burial. The work must be done with his own hands and

the carriers must know nothing. He could give out that Ward had been

taken by a crocodile on the shore of the lake. The noise of shooting

would be explained by eland meat he would send them to fetch next

day. The first round fired would have missed. He passed to other

considerations.

The digging must be done with a broad bladed native hoe that was tied

on to one of his loads for general camp use. There was no spade.

The ground was iron-hard and the tool inefficient. It would take his

fever-weighted arms several hours to dig even a shallow grave.

Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the

hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away

hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find

Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.

It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by

word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had

faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect

of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his

body yet unburied. Yet, rather than cross to his camp and meet his

wife, he would have preferred to stay in the company of the

part-eaten corpse of the man he had shot down.

The pain he had felt, when he first learnt in that sunlit clearing

that Norah was untrue, had been diffuse. Grief attacked his heart

from many sides and numbed it. Despair mingled with puzzlement;

self-reproach merged into anger. Norah he had been slow to blame,

making his own shortcomings scapegoat and Ward's seduction. That she

was guiltless, that her chastity was intact he could not pretend; but

he found excuses and put his love at the five-barred gate of

prejudice. Love saved him the shock of his wife's sinfulness that

most men would have suffered, accepting the boom in virginity

engineered by a Church that is celibate at heart and the great ring

of women with plain daughters to marry.

But if Archie had tried to ignore his wife's infidelity and in his

heart had longed to forgive it, disillusionment now seared him with

hotter irons. His body and brain seemed to ache with the

question--why in the morning say she was ready to come back to him

and had left Dick Ward for ever, to be caught ere evening in his

passionate embrace?

There were only two answers:--

It might be that, faithless herself, she had not believed his promise

to bring her and her lover safe back to Abercorn. To make sure their

escape she had coldly tortured him with lying offers, had tricked him

with a flattering tale. Could it be true that the girl he had

worshipped as all that was loyal, all that was high-hearted, had

fallen to this treachery, grovelled in such cowardice and cruelty?

But if that was not the truth, then his clean, lovely Norah was a

harlot so wanton, so rotten, she could not keep for an hour out of a

man's arms, could not for a few days stay faithful. The day she was

left on the farm welcoming a lover; renouncing him as soon as her

husband found her; slinking back the same night.

He must accept, it seemed, one of these unendurable explanations.

Where both so base, did it matter which was true? He had married and

adored either a wanton or a traitress. Was further scrutiny

necessary? Was not the only manly course amputation, to cut the

woman out of his life?

When first he had learnt that she had left him, he had grieved for

Norah as one untimely dead, lost to him but still dear. Now he must

think of her not only as lost, but dishonoured. That he still loved

her, degraded him to her level. She had eaten her way into his life

like rust, had twined her fingers through his heart-strings. Before

it was too late, he must tear himself free of her magic.

He faced the issue squarely. Suppose he surrendered to the love,

which still impregnated his tormented being, and took Norah back,

what peace would there be for either? Could he ever for a moment

forget her character as this blinding moment had revealed it? Could

he ever trust her word? When she spoke to him he would divine a

hidden sense; when she kissed him he would see a lure. He would have

sold his manhood for deception and a mockery.

No, once he had rescued her from the danger of the moment, he must

break through the net that entangled him. The world would be bare

enough without Norah, without the farm, without mankind's major

compensations for living--love and work.

Even suicide was inadmissible. If he killed himself here, what would

happen to Norah?

Some heavy drops of rain recalled him to the work that faced him. He

must fetch the hoe. If he met Norah, he need not speak to her.

Sometime he must tell her what he had decided, that could wait.

There was now a man to be buried, a raft to be built, a journey to be

begun. Plenty for one man to do, with fever. Then he'd have to go

to the first Boma and give them a story of Ward's death. Unless, of

course, Norah betrayed him. That, and anything, was now possible.

He found it difficult to raise himself from the heap of masonry on

which he was sitting. His limbs seemed to have stiffened and he

shook with ague. Laboriously he dragged brushwood and creepers near

the corpse and put a match to the heap.

Then without looking round, he walked heavily to the camp. The

unsteady illumination of lightning showed him his path."

CHAPTER VIII

That afternoon when Norah had helped Archie down the hillside, where

the work of transporting the logs was in process and where she had

made her difficult offer of reconciliation, it had not been easy to

persuade him to take his fever to bed.

She had at last overcome his conviction that the carriers could not

be left alone by promising that she herself would watch the work. So

she had spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon walking

behind the gang in their slow passage between hillside and lake,

until the full number of logs that Archie needed to build the rafts

lay ranged on the shore.

Leaving the workers rolling lushishi ropes between the palm of their

hands and the flat of their thighs, with orders to make a certain

length before they knocked off for the night, she started in search

of Dick to tell him she was going back to Archie. She dreaded the

task before her. Her generosity shrank from the wreck she must work

in Dick's dreams. That morning she had had to sacrifice her pride;

now Dick's romance was the victim. Her days seemed a string of

unendurable tasks.

Somehow she had mismanaged her offer to Archie. Instead of relieving

him she had added to his distress. And the news she had for Dick, in

its nature, carried nothing but pain. She scourged her imagination

for some means to soften the blow.

As she meditated she caught sight of Dick's tall white-clad figure on

one of the mounds that marked where the monastery had stood. She

noticed that he had listened to Archie's monosyllabic advice, not to

go far afield without his gun, as the rocks might harbour leopards.

'That's where those two rounds come in,' Archie had muttered.

She shouted to Dick, but the distance absorbed her voice. Forgetting

fear of the ruins in dislike for her mission, she clambered up the

shattered stairway.

Dick was plainly glad to see her. She had not been near him since

dinner the night before, and she was struck by the change. He seemed

to have filled out to the dimensions of his old care-free self. The

storm of panic and jealousy had passed and left no mark, for Dick was

one of those fortunate beings who can emerge on the far side of the

Valley of the Shadow with an unimpaired flow of small talk.

I've just seen a water-spout,' he told her.

Norah examined him with wonder. His eyes were clear and happy, his

manner without embarrassment, his bearing debonair--the Dick she had

known and loved. He seemed unaffected by the heat, his hair well

brushed and white clothes spotless and tidy. With his white topee on

his head and the Mauser in his hand, he looked, she told him, like

the frontispiece of a South Sea novel.

Where was the water-spout, she asked him. It was over on the far

side, he said, a wisp of opaque mist joining the lake with a cloud.

Snow-white at its foot; grey where it met the cloud.

'A pillar?' asked Norah, putting off the moment she dreaded.

'No, it sort of trailed. Wide at the base and the top; pinched in at

the middle.'

She watched his hands as he tried to describe the vortex. He used

them in conversation more than most Englishmen, perhaps because they

were long and well shaped. She remembered how the touch of them had

once thrilled her.

That magic had departed; exorcised by her better knowledge of him; or

perhaps only overlaid. For the moment she was empty of all passion.

Suspense, shame, pity had squeezed her dry like a sponge. When life

flowed back into her veins, would the spell resume its dominion? Now

she was nothing but a brain dispassionately scheming the redress of

the wrong she had wrought, and grappling with the consequences. But

one day, when the crisis was over, she knew her body would come to

life. Would it then remember those well-shaped hands?

'Well,' she told herself unsympathetically, 'it would have to.' If

Archie had not her heart, he had her word. And ignorant of the blow

she must deal him, Dick talked gaily of a dozen different matters.

He pointed to a stretch of opposite coast that was blotted from

sight. The sky above the gap was a black fog that shredded into

streamers of cloud. The hills on either side of the gap lay clear

and clean in the sunlight.

'Rain,' said Dick, 'it'll be cooler here soon.' But since she had

told Archie her decision, Norah's anxiety about the heat and its

possible effects had been relieved.

'Dick,' she said, 'listen to me for a minute.' Pity poured into her.

Contempt had given way to understanding. For all his thirty years he

was only a boy. Good-looking, attractive, lovable. All his

possibilities were in sight. He had no reserves to draw on and, if

he had failed in the hour of test, the fire had been hot indeed.

'Dick, haven't you noticed,' she began, 'haven't you noticed that

nothing good lasts? Sooner or later one goes back to school.'

'What _is_ the matter?' he asked.

'Everything,' she said. 'But there's no need for you to mind. The

world's full of pretty women--and ones that won't let you down.'

'Optimist!' he laughed, 'what are you talking about?'

I'm trying to tell you.... It's all finished now, Dick. Oh, do

understand! we're through.'

Norah had counted on a painful reception of her words--prayers,

protests, despair. It had not occurred to her that she might be met

with blank incredulity.

'My dearest child,' he said, 'you're mad.'

She wanted to tell him that outside the natives she was the only sane

person in the bay, but he would not listen.

'You're nervy,' he said. 'I don't wonder. I was nervy myself

yesterday. I imagined all sorts of rubbish about Sinclair.'

'I'm going back to Archie,' she managed to put in.

'Yesterday I thought he'd got something up his sleeve,' Dick went on

without seeming to hear her, 'but I know I was wrong. I think he's

behaved jolly well. He doesn't mean to interfere with us in any way.

Of course it's rough on him, but that is life.'

Dick's mercurial temper had asserted itself. Starvation, death,

violence seemed very far away. His sky was clear.

'Oh, do listen!' cried Norah.

She was getting hysterical, he thought. No wonder, either. But he

must not give way to her fancies. He kept up a steady flow of

reassurance. When at last the stream ran dry--

'Dick, listen,' she spoke very slowly, dividing the syllables.

'I've--told--Archie--I'll--go--back--to him.'

When the words had left her lips their brutality appalled her. She

had hurt Dick as she had hurt Archie. If only he had not forced her

to speak out.

Her calm impressed his optimism. He dropped his rifle, which clanged

against the hidden masonry.

'Good God!' he said, 'do you mean it?'

She nodded her head wearily.

'You've told Sinclair you'd chuck me? Damn it, Norah...' and his

disappointment found vent in anger and in abuse of Archie.

Norah saw she must stop him. Their short romance had been

disastrous: it need not be made ugly.

'Don't,' she cried, 'don't spoil it now. Leave it so that one day we

can look back without distaste. Part has been good. Don't throw

that away.' He opened his mouth to answer.

'Murder's better done in silence,' she said, and walked a few steps

away.

Dick's affection for Norah was real and shamed him into the silence

she begged. After a moment--'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I was a brute.

But it's such a shock.' Then coaxing her: 'Norah, say you don't mean

it, say it's all a nightmare.'

She sat down on a pile of rubble overgrown with creepers. He knelt

beside her and slipped his arm round her body.

'Norah, it can't be over yet. We'd only just started.' His face

came close to hers. 'It was going to be so heavenly.'

She made to rise but Dick held her fast and crushed his lips on to

hers.

What were Dick Ward's motives in kissing the mouth that had just

renounced him? He may have trusted to the caress, with the memories

it would revive, to soothe what he deemed disordered nerves. He may

have hoped to burn away her scruples in a kiss. Or, more simply, the

nearness of her body, so soon to be lost to him, may have set his

veins a-throb and deprived him of reason. He never had the

opportunity to explain.

In the hours that followed Norah was to curse the kiss so negligently

accepted--suffered, rather, in weariness and compassion. She felt a

great pity for Dick. With his gallant exterior and weakness beneath,

he was so ill-equipped for the hand-to-hand fight that is Life. So

easily hurt. She wanted in his dark hour to let him down as lightly

as she could. If every word of hers, every action, was to breed

suffering for the two men who loved her, it seemed ungenerous to

forbid anything that might ease the pain. If kissing her was any

help....

After all it seemed prudish to balk at a kiss from one who had so

recently possessed her. And since it stirred in her no breath of

passion, whom could it hurt? So if kissing made parting easier...?

And she was weary, mind and body; the interviews with Archie and Dick

had taken all her strength; for the moment she was as passive as the

dead. What did a kiss more or less matter?

The next moment, she was kneeling by a corpse.

Death, when it comes suddenly, is so incredible, that for some time

she worked to bring back consciousness.

At last she desisted and her senses and intelligence confirmed the

fact of death; still she took in nothing. Mechanically she closed

his eyes and mechanically stayed on her knees, trying to pray for a

spirit released on Eternity all unready. But she would have been

less astonished, when she opened her eyes at last, to see him

standing there gay and immaculate with a smile on his face and a word

of love on his tongue, than to find him lying stiff and contorted in

the disorder of violent death. Was it believable that the mouth,

which a matter of seconds before had so feverishly sought hers, was

set in that grimace as long as any flesh was on it? That the body,

whose warmth she felt against her heart, was growing colder, never to

be warm again ... unless putrefaction engenders heat?

To occupy her hands she lifted his rifle, playing with it aimlessly.

What deadly toys men had! She turned the weapon in her hands, half

opened the breech.

It was still in her grasp when she reached the camp, where Changalilo

took it from her to clean. She felt that henceforward life would

consist of minute, valueless acts like handing a rifle to a native,

changing a skirt, sitting down on a chair. Nothing would ever matter

again. 'All things are full of labour: man cannot utter it: the eye

is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.'

The workers were in sight, still rolling ropes of lushishi: even in

this backwater, life did not pause in the presence of death. She

felt she must get close to living beings, but when she had joined

them, she found in their proximity no relief. They were too calm and

unconcerned, too alien to her. She dismissed them for the day and

turned back to camp.

Her eye fell on Archie's shelter and travelled to the rain clouds....

With his fever ... his fever was bad. Perhaps if he had been normal

he would not have ... how was the quinine going? She fetched the

bottle and tipped out the tablets, counting them slowly. She lost

count and started again. The bottle would not last many more days.

She must warn Archie. She took up the flowers she had picked that

morning while she watched the log-hauling--purple orchids from a

patch of swampy ground by the yellow river. Their clear, bright

colour caught hold of her emptied mind. It seemed to matter more

than anything else that was left in the world. She pinned a bunch

against her white jumper. As she did so, she noticed they made her

hand smell of musk, and ever afterwards the odour of musk made her

think of blood.

Unpinning them, she discovered that she hated their sophisticated

little faces. She threw the bunch away and tried to wash the musk

from her hands. But the scent lingered faintly.

All the while, she was detached from her actions, as if her

intelligence had been carried high up into the air whence, at an

immense distance, it watched her body mooning about with flowers,

loving them and quarrelling with them like an idiot child in a limpid

poem by Wordsworth.

But inactivity increased her anguish. She had the sensation of

abominable things lurking behind her, ready to spring if she began to

think. She picked up the needlework she had been busy with on the

_Mimi_, and tried to stitch. Her fingers trembled too much and she

sat staring blankly at the sewing until she dropped it with a

despairing gesture. It was a sock of Dick's that she had started to

darn.

The trivial shock seemed at last to clear her brain and it bore on

her that Dick was dead and killed by Archie. That the calamity she

had foreseen had happened. She tried to believe that from the first

she had seen no human power could ride the storm of the two men's

passions. But in truth she had never doubted that her wit would find

a way. She had divined the danger, faced it and, she believed, by

the sacrifice of her every sensibility, had mastered it. Then one

act of pointless surrender had brought her contriving to bloody ruin!

The idea that Archie might see her loveless embrace and by it be

goaded to strike had never crossed her brain. Had her mind not been

dulled by the three days' ceaseless stress, it would have refused

Dick the fatal consolation of that barren kiss.

By her blind sympathy, by the abandonment of a moment, she had killed

him. To the two men she loved she had brought ruin and death. Her

own act had made her the wife of a murderer and the mistress of his

victim. Œdipus, slaying his father and marrying his mother,

Rigoletto stabbing his daughter for the seducer he had abetted, were

no more blood-guilty than she.

She tried to forget what was irreparable. What did the future hold?

One glimpse was enough. A black frame, in the middle of which a

body, with a cloth over its face, hung, twitching a little. She put

her hands over her eyes, but imagination had no mercy.

She waited now in the airless court, waited to hear Archie sentenced

to spend his youth in a prison or pay life for life. She saw the

indifferent, dispassionate features of the barristers; the old, grave

face of the judge; the inhuman pomp of Justice, only less terrible

than the degraded ceremonial of the scaffold.

And his father would be there. She would have to tell him.... How

could she save Archie? If payment was claimed, it was she who must

pay. She would force him to be prudent, to cover up the traces of

blood, to plan an escape.

At any moment, one of the carriers, released from work, wandering

afield looking for wild honey, might stumble on the corpse. She

braced herself for action and told Changalilo to collect the natives.

Anxiously she counted them; they were all there. How could she keep

them from the place of death?

'Tell them,' she bade the servant, 'to-night it will rain. They must

thatch their shelters, now, without waiting.'

She showed him where they were to pull the grass for thatching. She

stood over them to see they did not wander. Changalilo asked if he

should prepare Archie's bath. Where could Archie be all this time?

By now it was nearly dark. Changalilo said he had heard shots, the

last one just audible. The Bwana, he suggested, had wounded and

followed game.

His words evoked a fresh horror. That distant gun! For a terrible

moment she saw a second figure in the lonely hills, lying in its

blood.

She shut the image out. Archie, of all men, however little he wished

to live, would not leave her on this haunted shore to face starvation

alone. She wondered if he had collapsed from fever alone in the

bush. Only fear of what the natives might find on their way stopped

her from leading a search party.

It seemed that hours passed before the sound of slow footsteps in the

dead leaves fell on her ear and Archie's bowed figure crossed the

circle of the firelight. Even in the reddish glow his face was pale

and he walked as if each motion called for a separate effort of will.

She moved to meet him, to take his hand, but he kept his eyes turned

to the ground and carried his gun to the shelter. She heard the bed

creak under his weight. She had no inkling of the baseness he had

read into her acts, and only her respect for his obvious wish to be

left alone stopped her following him. Could he not see the urgent

need to give the natives some reason for Dick's ... absence? To

forestall curiosity? Talk spread through the villages and from the

villages might reach a Boma. Inquiry would follow, the carriers

would be sent for and the story pieced together. She forced herself

to keep quiet, crediting Archie with agony of conscience that he did

not, in fact, feel.

When she could endure inactivity no longer, she crossed to the

shelter and looked in. Archie was sitting on his bed, his chin dug

into his chest and his rifle across his knees.

'Archie,' she said softly.

He took no notice.

She repeated his name.

'For Christ's sake, Norah!' he said.

'No, listen to me,' she began again, 'don't think about ... what's

happened.'

'Not think about what's happened?' he echoed as if he could not

believe he heard her words right.

'Think what you'll tell the natives,' she said. But he only stared

as if he had never seen her before.

At last he spoke. 'Norah!' he began, then checked himself, and as

if, she thought, he was fleeing from her presence, shouldered his way

out of the shelter.

She stood where she was, unconscious of the repugnance she had

inspired. Had horror swept him beyond clear thought and speech? Or

did he think his company intolerable while his hands were wet with

her lover's blood? Where was he going? Out into the forest, driven

by his thoughts? Or maddened by remorse to betray himself?

He was calling Matao to him and speaking loud and in Chi-wemba, so

that the attentive group of carriers, sprawling by the fire, chewing

dried strips of yesterday's meat, could hear. She gathered the sense

of his words.

He had killed, he said, an eland in the hills. The announcement was

received with murmurs of contentment and the firelight caught the

gleams of teeth revealed by wide, smiling lips.

It was a big bull, he went on, and there would be much meat for every

one. The prone figures twisted over on to their knees and clapped

their hands softly in token of gratitude.

After he had taken them, he continued, to the meat at dawn, work

would start on the rafts, ready to leave the bay in the afternoon.

He began to speak lower, but his voice did not falter. Bwana Dick,

he said, was missing. He feared something had befallen him. His

words were received, it seemed to Norah, in complete apathy. The

goings on of the strange white man were no concern of the people.

The Bwana, said Archie, had started towards the northern arm of the

bay, looking for fish. He had not returned. Archie paused, but the

natives listened in a detached silence.

Shortly before dark, he continued, he had heard a sound like a cry.

It came from the beach. He looked at the natives, but no one made a

sound. He bade Matao inquire if any of them had heard it. Matao

saluted and whispering started. Archie waited awhile before he

finished his tale.

He had gone, he said at last, in the direction of the cry, and had

found Dick's footprints in the sand ... and the spoor of a crocodile.

He stopped speaking.

The natives were in eager discussion. They were interested, thought

Norah, in this version of Dick's death, not as a tragedy but as a

sort of sporting event between a man and a crocodile. Then her heart

stood still. Their unfailing interest in game of all sorts would

draw them next morning, however indifferent to Dick's fate, to the

beach to see the spoor and trace the struggle. And they would find

smooth shingle: not a mark to confirm the story. Why, oh! why had

Archie not consulted her? She could have devised a story less

vulnerable than that.

The whispering ceased as a native rose, helping himself up by his

spear struck into the ground. With quick gesture he told his story,

starting, as natives do, with happenings of days before. How Bwana

A-ri-shy had brought them in canoes across the lake; how Bwana Dick-i

had come by night; of the migration to the bay and the trees they had

felled.

Archie listened imperturbably to the rambling statement. At last the

man came to the point. He had been sent by Matao to soak some

lushishi in the margin of the lake. While he did so he heard a shout.

'Who shouted?' asked Archie quickly.

'It was like Bwana Dick-i's voice, but frightened.'

'At what hour?'

The native indicated the height of the sun in the heavens.

'From what direction?'

He pointed towards the northern arm of the bay, away from the ruins.

What had he thought?

He had thought nothing.

Norah breathed more freely. The black man's child-like anxiety to

stand in the limelight had brought confirmation to Archie's story.

He dismissed the two natives and retired to his shelter. Norah

watched the group by the fire resume their business of meat and

sleep. Presently she saw Archie with an unlit hurricane lamp in his

hand walk out of the circle of light in the direction of the latrine.

She saw him stoop and pick something off the ground. A hoe, she

knew, always lay about there. Then he disappeared in the direction

of the ruins.

She guessed where he was going and on how ghastly an errand. Why

wouldn't he confide in her? She would never have agreed to that

crocodile story, whose falsehood to-morrow would prove. How could

she undo the mistake he had made? How could the natives be kept from

the shore on some pretext not too transparent?

The storm was getting closer. Crashes of thunder were more frequent

and louder. The flicker of lightning was incessant. It revealed,

concealed, revealed the walls of the crater that had trapped them.

Those old hills, had they ever seen pain like this before? Pain, the

only rival in man's experience of their immortality. Peoples emerge

and disappear, gods are honoured and forgotten, pain alone endures.

A wind began to blow, cold wet gusts that drove the heavy stale air

before them. The night grew darker. A distant hissing sound came

nearer and clearer, like the approach of a railway train. The boughs

of the forest lashed and waved. The noise resolved into the slash of

rain on leaves. A moment of lightning disclosed the oncoming of an

opaque wall of water. The deluge burst on the camp.

Norah faced the rain, bending her body to withstand its violence.

Her eyes were blinded but her brain seemed to be cleared. Great

relief filled her heart, tempered by a foreboding that such luck

could not endure; for the traces of the imaginary struggle would be

washed from the shore before morning.

Near the crumbling shell of the church tower, which seemed in the

tremulous illumination of the storm to bob and stagger at each

recurring crash of thunder, naked to the waist, smeared with mud,

dripping with rain and sweat, Archie dug.

His lantern was perched on the heap of liquefying earth he had thrown

up behind him. Each gust reeled the flame over to the brink of

extinction and whistled sibilantly through the air holes.

He worked slowly, but without pausing even to throw off the water

which ran over his eyebrows and into his eyes, or to free his shorts

which flapped clammily against his legs. As he dug, the rain ran

into the grave, so that his boots squelched in the mud and once he

slipped, falling with his face in the loose earth he had thrown out.

Each hoeful had to be tossed up on to the heap, the hoe held by the

heel and handle. His lumbar muscles rose under the strain, catching

the dull gleam of the lamp.

When he had dug for a couple of hours, the moon appeared and the

clouds thinned to wisps of black vapour that scudded across her face.

The roar of the rain in the forest was lowered, till the drip of each

separate leaf seemed audible over an undertone of the surge of the

waves on the lake. The smell of the earth, wet after seven months'

drought, rose and the perfume of fresh green.

Archie clambered out of the hole and measured it depth with the

handle of his hoe. Apparently satisfied, he walked over to where

Ward's body lay and tried to lift it. But Dick had been a big man

and Archie was a small one, exhausted with fever and back-breaking

labour. With a shrug of the shoulders he abandoned the effort and

taking hold of the corpse by the collar he dragged it over the uneven

ground to the grave.

He laid it supine and endeavoured to straighten the twisted limbs.

Already the body was stiff and resisted him. So he pushed it into

the resting-place he had prepared. But in its bent-up attitude the

knees stuck out of the shallow grave and Archie had to roll it over

on to its side.

Without waiting he started to pull earth into the grave, using his

hoe sideways as a scraper. As the soil tumbled in, he reflected,

with wonder and no bitterness, that the face his wife had so lately

kissed was now pressed into the cold, wet earth....

Then he heaped broken bricks from the debris of the church on the

place, lest a hyæna should undo his work...."

PART III

"...break through laws divine and human,

And think them cobwebs spread for little man."

J. DRYDEN.

CHAPTER I

"Abercorn," said Ross, lighting his third consecutive cigar, "was

laid out some quarter of a century ago by a far-sighted and

optimistic official on the lines of Paris. There are boulevards and

'rond points'; avenues of thuja and eucalyptus; terraces and squares.

And at the present moment there are five dwelling-houses, a block of

government offices, a jail and post office, one European and three

native stores.

The settlement is served by two railway systems, one distant four

hundred miles to the north, the other six hundred to the south.

I suppose it is what you writers call 'an outpost of civilisation,'

but civilised it seemed to me after six weeks of ulendo through the

bush! and urban, to the point of decadence, it must have looked to

Archie emerging from the virginal bosom of the 'fly' belt.

Red Dog, Manitoba; Bloggsville, Wisconsin; Smitsdorp, Transvaal; from

what I hear these spots breathe a red-blooded life dear to

cinematograph producers, without being remarkable either for comfort

or refinement.

How different these tiny Boma towns of North-Eastern Rhodesia that

have only existed a decade or two! You are at once struck by the

absence of red dust, corrugated iron, spittoons. Books may be found

in every house, water colours or etchings too; comfortable arm-chairs

and cushions; nice china and plate; occasionally a piano. The

standard of comfort is above the average of an English country

rectory. And the issues that confront the population are often as

vital.

A few days before I reached Abercorn, short of two loads, whose

carriers had fallen sick on the way, one of these crises had begun to

darken the horizon. I was privileged to hear at least one side of

the question that was dividing the township, the side of which Mrs.

Lavater was protagonist. Lavater was the D.C., and very kindly he

had housed me until my loads caught up and I could go on to my

fishing camp.

Mrs. Lavater is one of those big-boned, deep-bosomed, high-coloured

women, who have done so much to make the Empire what it is. Were

they endowed with any sense of humour, would that Empire be what it

is? It is a doubtful question.

'What I told Mackenzie,' she was saying as she poured out the China

tea for which she was rightly famous, 'was that the money was raised

by the golf club and it ought to be spent on improving the golf

course. I say we could start a new nine holes.'

King Arthur could not have mentioned the Quest of the Holy Grail in

tones of greater reverence.

'It's all because,' she sank her voice, 'Mrs. Mackenzie won--or so

she told me--a silver inkstand in the mixed doubles at Eastbourne in

1913. That's why he's fussing about a tennis court.'

I was lost in banal admiration of our race. Wherever two or three

are gathered together, there shall golf, tennis and the seeds of

England's greatness be found.

'They find a desert and leave it a links,' I murmured.

Mrs. Lavater said she was delighted that I agreed with her about the

second nine.... She stared firmly out of the window. Had her

pince-nez been endowed with supernatural vision; could they have

pierced a range of tree-clad hills and embraced a couple of hundred

miles of forest and lake; she might at that moment have seen Archie's

carriers splashing knee deep in the tepid water, tugging at the

lushishi cords, which dragged the second raft, grating down its path

of rollers, reluctantly on to the lake.

The other raft already rode on the mirror-like surface. On its

rough-hewn timbers a pile of bedding had been arranged for Norah.

Her neat white clothes looked incongruous, for the uncouth craft and

the theatrical blue of sky and water seemed to demand for passenger

some shaggy Crusoe of pantomime.

Rifle in hand, Archie knelt on a round black rock that projected into

the lake, his neck stretched and his eyes intent for any sign that

the crocodiles had not been scared away by the noise.

The singing rose louder as the second craft slipped jerkily into the

water, sending angry little waves to slap against the logs that

supported Norah.

As the work of balancing the loads progressed, Archie from his rock

called out the names. 'Mulenga, behind the Mama. Benesh, on the

other raft, beside the kitchen box....'

As he was named, each native raised his ragged clothes as high as

decency and Norah's presence would permit and climbed to his place,

poising on his head his few possessions--a torn reed mat or a black

clay cooking pot, an iron spear or axe, and strips of dried meat that

tainted the air. With each fresh comer's weight, the raft dipped and

danced....

By the following Saturday Mr. Mackenzie had completed a

house-to-house canvas of the ten adult inhabitants of Abercorn. Hume

the Postmaster, the doctor and the Assistant Native Commissioner had

rallied to the Mackenzie standard. At four o'clock their leader,

girt in a stiff collar, called officially to inform Mrs. Lavater that

a tennis court was demanded by the majority of the town.

He dropped his bomb and retreated outwardly triumphant, but in his

heart uneasy, for he knew how hardly women like Mrs. Lavater accept

defeat. A sudden scurry of rain sent him for shelter into the post

office, where he confided in Hume that he had not liked 'the calm way

she took it.'

At lake level that scurry of rain was magnified into a vicious little

squall that nearly ended Archie's and Norah's problems before their

destined time.

The rafts were crawling over the glassy surface under the slow urge

of unaccustomed arms. Their course pointed from headland to headland

of a bay that bit deep into the thickly wooded slope.

Archie, since a hippo, inquisitive or frightened, had risen under the

baggage raft and tipped its crew into the crocodile-infested water,

had left Matao in the bows to keep a look-out ahead and had posted

himself in the stern of his craft, his rifle across his knees, his

eyes plumbing the bottomless blue of the lake. Some instinct, or

perhaps the continuous drone of Matao's voice, made him turn, to

catch his lookout man absorbed in conversation with the bow paddler.

He snatched the steersman's paddle and the water churned as he headed

the clumsy craft landwards. For where the headland should have shown

clear in their path stood a blank wall of mist. Alive at last to

their danger, the unskilled paddlers strained their strength to drive

the heavy rafts to shore, but, in spite of their efforts, the squall

gained on them. The sky darkened and they heard the oncoming howl of

the wind.

Their breath hissed between their teeth, their muscles stood in knots

on their arms and naked backs, as Archie, paddling with long, quick

strokes, urged them on. Waves splashed over the raft, drenching

Norah to the skin, and stinging her delicate body with their impact.

The last slapped up full in her face, setting her spluttering with

its brackish taste and clinging with her slim fingers to the knotted

logs. Two of the loads broke loose and swept past her lakewards.

Archie dropped his paddle and, tearing up the bark rope that lashed

the raft, looped the free end round her waist. Then the rain broke

on them, driving in horizontal sheets. Norah shut her eyes to save

her sight. She opened them to see Archie leap from the raft. Her

heart stood still, till she saw him standing chest-high in the surf

and heard him bellow to her to put her arms round his neck....

The day following that scurry of rain, Mrs. Lavater launched her

counter attack, which proved to be nothing more sinister than the

convention of the members of the Golf Club (a body differing from the

population of Abercorn by the exclusion of children under twelve--see

Rule Four) to discuss the motion 'that this meeting approves the

enlargement of the links.'

The Mackenzie faction, secure in their canvassed majority of five

against four (for the D.C. stood firm in his neutrality), arrived to

find the meeting enlarged by the presence of the eldest Lavater girl,

Dorothea, aged twelve and a half. Too late they realised that

Dorothea, whom lack of clubs had kept away from the links, had by the

workings of Anno Domini equalised the vote.

With superb self-control and diplomacy worthy of Whitehall, Mackenzie

rose to propose that, in view of the deadlock, the meeting be

postponed to that day fortnight.

Mrs. Lavater, prompted by a suspicion that Angus Mackenzie was due to

celebrate a thirteenth! birthday at the beginning of next month,

opposed the amendment on the indisputable grounds that, before the

fortnight was up, the N.C. would have gone on leave and the doctor

would have accompanied him as far as his tropical disease research

station in the Luangwa Valley.

But, suggested Mr. Mackenzie, since the doctor and the N.C. held

opposite opinions on the vexed question, would they not, so to speak,

pair with each other?

'So important a matter,' retorted Mrs. Lavater with crushing effect,

'must be settled by the whole community.'

On the morning of this eventful day, Matao, terrified into vigilance

by Archie's threat of degradation and a beating, signalled with a

yell of delight the thin blue smoke of a village hidden behind a

cluster of islets....

About the hour that Mrs. Lavater said 'check' to Mr. Mackenzie's

queen, Archie and his followers pushed on, leaving the village rich

in silver, but emptied of fruit, fish and canoes. Its young men had

agreed to take them to the south end of the lake, and as they paddled

they sang to keep their hearts up for the long adventure.

The old men and the women remaining in the village could hear the

singing, after the shadow flung by the chain of islands had swallowed

each canoe that vanished like a water rat, slanting into the darkness

of a hollow bank. So calm was the silver water that for a moment the

wake of each boat showed separately, when the hull that had cut it

had gone.

In the biggest of the canoes, paddled by a picked crew in charge of

the headman's eldest son, sat Norah and Archie.

'We're all right now,' said Archie.

This was as long a sentence as he had uttered since the night Dick

died; and not the violence of sun and rain beating on her defenceless

body, not the uncertainty and monotony of the food supply, not the

known and unknown dangers of their position had distressed Norah as

much as Archie's impenetrable reserve. He did not sulk or ignore

her. He was, she told me, as invariably courteous and considerate as

he would have been to a fellow passenger in a railway carriage. And

he had saved her life on the day of the squall.

But of what he felt or planned, of regret, fear or hope, he gave no

sign.

At first she had sought to bridge the gulf that had opened between

them. She tried to hint that she did not hold him answerable for

Dick's death: and once she slipped her hand over his. But his quick

disengagement from the contact of word or body would have discouraged

one less proud than Norah.

'It was as if he was buried along with Dick,' she said, 'and a foot

of earth between us.'

Now that it seemed sure that they would reach! their journey's end,

dread of the inquiries that must there be met, quickened; each sun

that rose through the morning's pale haze of silver and misty blue,

to climb across the scorching firmament of gold and azure and decline

into the tender green and saffron of a momentary twilight, brought

her nearer to officials, cross-examination and all the paraphernalia

of justice that women hate and distrust. Each repetition of the

crew's monotonous refrain, each stroke of the paddles carried her

nearer to ... what?

The day the little fleet of canoes, sprinkled on the face of the

great mountain-bound lake like specks of dust slowly rotating in a

basin of water, reached the southern shores of the lake, I was again

in Abercorn. By now I had settled into my fishing camp. My loads

had arrived and Lavater had left Abercorn on a two days' ulendo into

the bush to inspect the scene of an alleged infanticide.

But mail day and Mrs. Lavater's invitation to lunch brought me into

town. After an excellent meal Mrs. Lavater's admirable black butler

was handing us coffee on the verandah. The second nine holes were

temporarily eclipsed by Mrs. Mackenzie's extravagance.

'Crêpe de chine and real Mechlin, my dear,' announced my hostess.

I was not her dear. That enviable position was held by the doctor's

wife, a tall girl with red hair. Before her marriage, so Mrs.

Lavater had informed me, she was a professional pianist. Whether in

cinemas or the Queen's Hall, I had no means of telling. On the same

authority she was to have a baby in March.

She now expressed no wonder at the richness of Mrs. Mackenzie's

underlinen and indicated that, from the prices charged at her

husband's store, it might well be sewn with diamonds....

'Who can that be on the road?' interrupted Mrs. Lavater.

We turned and stared down the road which, leading to the lake, runs

straight for a mile or more outside the township. As the white man

in ragged khaki, with a gun bearer at his heels, came near, to my

surprise I recognised Archie.

'Do you know Captain Sinclair well?' I was asked when the first flood

of conjecture had abated.

'I doubt if any one does,' was my reply, which, in my own mind,

included his wife.

'Of course he's very nice,' said the red-haired girl, staring up the

road, 'but don't you find him just a little bit dull? Now she's such

a lively little thing.'

Mrs. Lavater contributed the inevitable platitude about opposites.

'His marriage must have been the adventure of his life,' persisted

the other. 'You can't imagine anything much happening to Mr.

Sinclair.'

The unromantic object of our interest was now nearly within hail. I

noticed that he walked like a tired or an old man.

A gang of native prisoners were sweeping the footpath at the cross

roads. The black policeman who guarded them stood to attention and

saluted. Archie seemed to hesitate before he returned the salute.

He paused for a moment, as if uncertain whether to come up to the

verandah. At last he turned and made for the business part of the

township.

'Where's he off to?' asked Mrs. Lavater, disappointed, I thought,

that another should have first pull at the news. 'He'll be here in a

minute,' she consoled herself.

But minutes passed and Archie did not come. For some imprecise

reason faintly uneasy, I made an excuse to follow him. Passing the

little group of red brick houses with their shady balconies and

luxuriant pergolas, their tidy English beds of roses and carnations,

I came to the trading store. Mackenzie was stock-taking.

'And three dozen is six hundred,' he said as I entered.

'Pleased to see you, Mr. Ross ... would you believe it, the ladies

call these cups too dear at eleven pence! I give you my word they

cost me ninepence and a fraction landed here, and that's without

breakages or overhead charges.'

I sympathised and, as soon as I could, I asked if Sinclair had been

there.

'It's not ten minutes since he got up from that chair,' I was told.

'He looked as if he needed a chair too.'

Mackenzie did not think it was fever. If it was, he'd never seen a

go like it. Archie looked 'all endwise,' he said, and added that he

hadn't seemed to know whether he was coming or going. He had stared

at Mackenzie quite queerly when he told him about the golf-course

scandal. But he was plainly glad to see the case of ammunition that

was waiting for him in the meal store. He brought two rounds out of

his pocket which he said were his last. Then he had gone to the

shelves and ordered tinned fruit and vegetables by the dozen.

I interrupted to ask for news of Norah.

'I inquired after his lady,' said Mackenzie, 'but the Captain never

seemed to hear me.' With national readiness to anticipate the worst,

he added that he would be sorry if everything was not well there.

'If you're wanting to see him yourself,' he ended, 'you've only got

to step round to the post office. He said he must send a wire to

Kigoma about the _Mimi_--you'll find him with Hume.'

But I did not. He had gone, said Hume, in the direction of the

D.C.'s office. Hume too remarked how ill he looked. Fever, he

diagnosed, and a bad go at that, although Sinclair had insisted that

nothing was wrong.

Besides his mail--several weeks' accumulation of letters and

newspapers--there had been a cable for him.

'You'd have thought it was bad news,' said Hume, 'the way he read it.

As a matter of fact--I oughtn't to tell you, only I know it won't go

any further--it was an Elizabethville cable confirming the purchase

of Captain Sinclair's whole herd, at a big price too.'

But Archie had stared at the message, said Hume, as if it did not

make sense. Then he'd laughed 'an odd kind of laugh' and torn the

form to little bits. The pieces lay there still.

As I followed Archie to the Boma, I could not help wondering what had

happened to this self-possessed Scot. I could hardly guess that in

full Byronic blast that morning he had breasted the hill to Abercorn

with the pride of Manfred or Cain in his heart. And now the

well-kept roads, the grip of Mackenzie's industrious hand, the news

of the great golf scandal--all this shouted at him that, in the

well-padded hold of civilisation, Cain becomes Crippen.

I knocked at the door of the D.C.'s office. Joseph, the native

clerk, immaculate in white duck and a black tarboosh, admitted me.

The office was as spotless as its sole occupant--bundles of documents

tied with tape, trays full of letters, rows of files, all the

paraphernalia of administration.

The Bwana, said Joseph, had gone away after hearing that Bwana

La-va-ta was on ulendo and that Bwana Jo-ne-si (Jones was the name of

the Native Commissioner) had gone to England.

As I left the block of offices, I saw Foster, the A.N.C., with a

crowd of black men on his verandah. His position in a deck chair,

flanked by blue and red clad messengers and surrounded by an

irregular circle of silent natives, indicated that a lawsuit was in

progress. He appeared to ask a question and a native in the front of

the circle, without moving his body or head, loosed a spate of words.

I listened, waiting my chance to ask Foster which road Archie had

taken. A _cause célèbre_ seemed to be in process. Tungati, an obese

elder of Malekani's village, had followed King David's example in

taking a third wife to comfort his age. The experiment had been a

success, until a stranger from Kachilikila's ... A pause in the

evidence enabled me to ask my question.

'Left a minute ago,' replied Foster, 'went towards Lavater's house by

the back way. He stood and watched these blighters for ten minutes.

Looked as sick as mud. You'd think it was his wife instead of

Tungati's,' added the irreverent youth.

When I had closed my fruitless circle, Archie was already installed

on the verandah of the D.C.'s house and Mrs. Lavater was making tea.

As I walked up, I saw his illness had not been exaggerated. But

while I shook hands, I wondered if health alone explained the sunken

cheeks, the skin grey in spite of the sun, the dead eyes. He seemed

stricken yet defiant: burnt out, but the ashes were hot.

Mrs. Lavater was pressing him to stay to dinner; but Norah, he said,

was alone in camp ten miles out of the township ... yes, they had

come off the lake that morning ... no, they hadn't come on the _Mimi_

... no, canoes ... yes, it had been hot ... yes, the rains hadn't

helped....

I took no part in the cross-examination. If Archie was more than

usually taciturn, there was something, no doubt, which he did not

want to discuss. The same reasoning urged the ladies to fresh

efforts. But their bag was meagre. Like the poet, they failed to

elicit whence he had come, or whither going. At last a reply that

roused Mrs. Lavater's hospitable instincts checked the hunt. Leaving

us together, she went to see that milk and butter from the Boma herd,

vegetables from her garden and eggs from her yard were sent off at

once to Norah. The doctor's wife went with her.

To break the silence that followed their withdrawal, 'Lavater's

expected back to-morrow,' I remarked.

My very ordinary words seemed to send a wave of emotion across

Archie's face. Relief at first he seemed to feel, satisfaction

almost. Then the slight smile faded, and a barely perceptible frown

of anxiety or defiance settled on his features.

'So soon,' he said quietly.

His mood puzzled me. I had always liked Archie. There was something

extremely lovable in his almost truculent sincerity. He was so

straight; you knew where you were with him. But to-day a shadow

stood between us. I didn't know in the least where I was.

He plainly did not want to talk and I suggested that he must be

anxious to open the mail he held under his arm.

He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and pushed them into

his pocket. Then he ripped off the wrapper of a newspaper.

Indifferently he turned the leaves, till he seemed to come to

something that interested him. In the silence that followed, I tried

to analyse the strangeness of Archie's manner.

That faintly defiant jerk of his head. What did it defy? That

vaguely puzzled look, as if he tried to grasp at a word whose

syllables danced in the recesses of his brain, or struggled to locate

some indistinct smell. What was eluding him?

My thoughts were interrupted by the swish of the newspaper falling

from his fingers. My eye caught the headlines of the open page as it

fluttered to the ground. They dealt with the bellicose caperings of

Monsieur Poincaré and with the latest murder trial that was

quickening the pulses of the great British public. I glanced up at

Archie's grey face. It was no longer puzzled. He had found the word

he sought.

And when he had gone, 'Don't you agree now,' said the red-haired

girl, 'that Captain Sinclair is a tiny bit dull?'"

CHAPTER II

Within forty-eight hours, some of the questions I had asked myself on

Mrs. Lavater's verandah were answered.

I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was

putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice.

Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind, I would have

recognised Norah's deep tones. I rose from my work, feeling after

some passable excuse for having failed to visit their camp half a

dozen miles away. My true reason had been an instinctive shrinking

from other people's troubles.

But my first sight of Norah told me that forms might be forgotten.

Her eyes, that the lamp of romance had once lit, now were dark with

pain. Was it possible, you wondered, that they had ever laughed?

Had even cried? Without suffering the decay of age, she had lost her

youth. The wing of death, you guessed, was between her and the sun.

Infinitely remote from her seemed the life that the rains set pulsing

through each leaf, each blade of grass. She noticed nothing of the

beauty that surrounded her, the shouts of green that the trees set

up, the blue eye of the lake looking along the glade my carriers had

cut. Her eyes were turned inwards on some private hell whose key lay

in her bosom.

Her first words were banal enough. Some apology for intrusion that I

waved away. My reply, inevitably trivial, sounded flippant in the

face of her manifest grief and I subsided into an awkward silence.

Archie was ill, went on the low voice, and their quinine was

finished: she had wondered...

By the time I returned with the bottle, I fancy she had decided to

consult me.

The words came jostling each other--Archie was delirious; the doctor

was away from Abercorn; the Kasama man would take a week to get here;

and anyhow ... She did not complete the sentence. He had never been

so bad as this; but the strain of the last week--was it blackwater,

did I think? And ... and they had come from the sleeping sickness

belt, could it be...?

She refused food, and when I had given my medicine chest to my fundi

to carry, we set out along a native path in the direction she had

come. Her obvious gratitude to me for coming was surprising. So

pretty a woman is rarely grateful. Men are too ready to help without.

To cut short her thanks, I inquired about Archie's symptoms and was

able to assure her that the fever was not blackwater. And certainly

not a forerunner of sleeping sickness. I was prepared to notice that

my words brought little relief. A husband delirious in the bush

might send a woman wild with anxiety, might drive her to the brink of

panic, it would not explain the hopelessness in Norah's eyes and

mouth.

I felt a wave of pity. She was too slim a little thing for this

burden, whatever it was. In violence to my principles I asked if I

could help.

'I don't think anything can help now,' she whispered, and so low that

I had to read her lips. 'Archie has killed ... some one.'"

"I was not particularly shocked," said Ross. "All this feeling

against straightforward assassination is quite modern.

You must discriminate, of course, between honest killing and

surreptitious murder. There has always been a prejudice against

that. The Borgias, for instance, have found critics in every

century, and until recent, sentimental years we burnt wives who

poisoned their husbands. But an honourable assassination, under

guises which varied from the ceremonial of mediæval tournament to the

violence of renaissance vendetta, and on to the more polished formulæ

of the duel, has lasted almost to our day.

With the duel passed the power to punish certain private injuries for

which the law furnishes no redress. And in fault of any regular

outlet, the man with strong feelings and a literal mind has to fall

back on murder."

Ross spoke with vehemence. Did his earnestness, I wondered, throw

any light on his own mysterious past? As if he read some shadow of

the suspicion on my face, he came back abruptly to the Sinclairs.

"That was how I came to hear Norah's story," he said. "Not in the

detail I have given you, nor in the order. But by the time we were

half-way to Archie's camp she had given me a clear enough outline.

I suggested that she had exaggerated the danger. We would have to

nurse Archie ourselves and keep outsiders away till he was clear of

delirium. And the natives, even if they suspected anything, would

keep quiet. They do not like Bomas, I said and enlarged on the

discretion of Africa.

She signed to me to stop.

'It's past that now,' she said. 'I haven't told you the end.'

Archie's visit to Abercorn had been paid with the object of reporting

Dick's death to the Boma. So much information he had given Norah

before he started up the hill, repeating the story he had told the

natives on the night of the crime.

Her heart had ached to help him. If only he would let her be of some

use, go with him and perjure herself for his sake. Fiercely she

longed to save him, to avert the ultimate consequences of the havoc

she had loosed. But with conventional words of leave-taking, Archie,

followed by his gun-bearer, went up the road.

She took what comfort she could, remembering the efficiency he had

shown throughout. If, thought she, her husband could cope with Lake

Tanganyika, she need not doubt his dealings with the Boma. In which

conclusion, she allowed him a woman's strength. When, at the

beginning of this story, I tried to show you Norah, I spoke of the

small cat house. Now cats, and women, do not herd. The hand they

play is a lone one whether in Malay or Mayfair, and the war they wage

with law, rules of conduct, codes of honour, is age old.

But men, and the animals that chew the cud, have the herd instinct.

They see the value of solidarity and are glad to submit their wills

to the herd. Until suffragettes were vouchsafed us, no Englishman

had ever guessed that it was unnecessary to obey the law.

Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a

bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more

enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to

solitude.

Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.

So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard

outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a

figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human:

something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the

camp.

In silence Norah wondered. The senior officials, he had said, were

away from the Boma and he had returned, his story untold. But relief

or suspense, she knew, could not explain this change. Under her

eyelashes all evening she watched him and sought in vain for some

word that might allay his trouble. Throughout the night she heard

the camp bed creak under his restless body.

Was it then that he was first aware of his fellowship with the men

whose names shame alone preserves when quicklime has consumed their

bodies? Did Dick's eyes again look pitifully into the muzzle of his

.420? Did he strive once more to straighten the stiffened limbs and

push the contorted body sideways into the wet grave? There can, I

suppose, be little sleep on the first night you see yourself a

murderer.

In the morning a glance told Norah that the fever, which had

fantastically vanished after the rains had drenched him to the skin,

was back. He sat huddled over the camp fire, only moving to call for

logs. She urged him to return to bed, but he shook his head. He

refused luncheon, and sat with pen and paper before him. Then he

began to write. His hand shook with fever, but he wrote fairly

quickly. He covered three sheets and addressed an envelope for each.

Still crouching over the fire, 'Norah,' he said, 'I think I ought to

give it you to read.'

His tone told her she must brace herself for a shock.

'They won't bother you, I hope,' he went on, 'I've tried to make it

all right for you.' He kept his eyes turned away from her, but his

voice was more kind. His hand, which trembled a little, played with

the letters on the table.

'This,' he continued, 'is to the solicitors. About the farm, the

sale of the stock and so on. This,' he touched the second letter,

'is my will. Of course everything goes to you.'

He paused and, drawing the last document from its envelope, he handed

it to Norah.

She forced herself to read, though her mind was too busy with his

words to take in the symbols before her eyes. Suddenly, as if a

blade of ice had been driven between her shoulders, she understood.

The letter was addressed to the District Commissioner, Abercorn, and

began and ended officially enough, 'Sir, I have the honour to report

... I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, A. L.

Sinclair.'

Between the formulæ, ran a story designed to shield her and convict

himself. He wrote that Ward, at his request, had been escorting

Norah to Kigoma. They were all to meet there. The _Mimi_ broke

down, but chance united them in the bay of the deserted mission. On

the evening of the 25th he had gone out shooting with Ward. Their

tempers had suffered from the heat. He had complained of Ward's

over-liberal expenditure of ammunition, which was then short. A

quarrel had ensued and he had shot Ward through the heart. With

legal forethought he gave the exact position of the grave that the

body might be identified and death established.

She read the bald story word by word to its end.

'For God's sake, Archie,' she asked him, although she knew his answer

only too well, 'what are you going to do with this?'

He said that Matao must take it to Abercorn. His fever would not let

him walk so far. He muttered something about feeling clean again.

'Don't, Archie, don't! Give it back to me!' Her voice made the

natives break off their occupations and stare at the eccentricities

of the white man. He looked in her face as if her eyes could show

him her soul. Then he turned away shaking his head.

'But you've got fever,' she urged, 'you don't know what you're doing.

Write what you were going to say yesterday.'

For answer he called Matao.

'One can pay too much, just to live,' he murmured.

'At least wait. Think it over in cold blood. Wait a day, one day.'

Lavater, he replied, came back that afternoon. The death would have

to be reported at once, one version or the other. He now knew which

version it must be.

A fog seemed to spring up from below, over her eyes. She would have

thrown herself at his feet if Matao had not stood gravely waiting.

'For my sake then, Archie!'

'How should I know,' he said looking away from her. 'How should I

know that this time too...?'

He felt the harshness of his words and let them die away.

'Matao,' he said quickly, his voice rough in his throat. 'Take this

to Bwana Lavater at his office. The sun will have set before you

arrive. Sleep at M'pala and return in the morning.'

Norah saw Matao salute and swing round. She did not see him

disappear into the trees, for she had fainted."

CHAPTER III

Archie, when we reached his camp, was lying on his back with open

eyes that saw nothing visible to us. The bedclothes were in a heap

on the ground and he resisted Norah when she replaced them. Except

that his head rolled heavily from side to side, I had no difficulty

in taking his temperature. It was 104°.

Norah said that at about midnight she had heard him muttering. He

did not know her, though she sat by his side for the rest of the

night, keeping the clothes on his tossing limbs. Sometimes she had

had to hold him down, for he shouted that he must see Lavater at once

and struggled to rise.

I asked if the D.C. had had the fatal letter. Public morality might

demand that Archie should be nursed to life to be turned over to the

hangman. But putting friendship before morals, it seemed to me that

he might be allowed to die, if not quietly, at least in his bed.

Norah's hands were clenched and white, while Matao was spinning his

rigmarole.

'Then Bwana Lavater is not back?' she asked at the end, 'what did you

do with the letter?'

Joseph, the D.C.'s clerk, had promised he would give it to the D.C.

as soon as he came back. Joseph was an Angoni, said Matao, and all

Angoni are liars; but he had not left the office until he had seen

the letter laid on Bwana La-va-ta's big table.

So the confession lay unread: there was hope, then, and Archie's life

was still worth saving. I felt that I could not leave Norah, whose

nerves had been strained to the fainting point, unaided to nurse him,

and I sent my fundi back with orders to strike camp and bring on

carriers and loads.

I looked round for a bit of level ground for my camp. Archie, with

an eye to the comfort of his much-enduring carriers, had pitched his

tent on the outskirts of the first village he had come to on his way

up from the lake. The ground was a net-work of little obstructed

paths, trodden between the raised beds which make an African village

garden resemble a pauper cemetery of circular graves. The green of

ground nuts, cassava, gourds and beans, straggled sparsely over the

mounds. High, splintery, black stumps showed where the trees had

been lopped, two or three feet from the ground, and burnt to enrich

the soil with their potash. Only the biggest trunks, that had been

too much trouble to cut, remained.

Meaning to ask in the village for a guide to show me a more shady and

level spot, I penetrated the squalid cluster of dilapidated mud huts.

The villagers, I found, were absent at work, no doubt in distant

gardens. One old woman, the headman's eldest wife I guessed her to

be, sat under the untidy overhang of her thatched roof. Her stomach

was enormous; on her head she wore a tan-coloured wig made of puku

skin. She bent forward and clapped her hands in salutation, but she

was too shy to answer my question.

Beyond the village I found the twenty-foot road that the last D.C.

had cut through the forest to connect Abercorn with the lake. Its

earth surface was deeply scored by ruts which the occasional

ox-wagons that carried freight to the _Mimi_ had cut. Rain had

poured down the channels, scouring them till the white roots showed.

A path, trodden hard by bare feet, straggled from side to side of the

road, and down its centre a bicycle had marked its track on the wet

earth.

As I chose my site, what a chance, I reflected, for any one with a

taste for allegory! Side by side, the pathetic makeshift of the

savage and the masterful puerility of the European, on a background

of bottomless lake, immemorial hill, interminable forest. Which in

the history of the globe would prevail?

The first hour of my vigil by Archie's bed passed in silence. The

African day is so much quieter than the night. Some insect humming,

a bird calling.... From time to time I moistened Archie's dry lips

or arranged his disordered bed.

I had gone outside for a drink of tea when his voice recalled me. It

was not me he called, but a bombardier who had been killed at his

side six years before in Flanders. I sat by him while he revisited

all his life's hours of stress. Now shells were dropping on his O.P.

at Armentières; now the hump-backed African oxen jibbed in the plough

or the brick-makers let the kiln fires go out; in the Carpathian

darkness with his dying men he waited for the Austrians; or his hoe

struck rock before Dick's grave was deep enough.

And through it all ran his love for Norah, like the theme of a fugue

or the thread on which a rosary of pain was strung.

As the day wore on, his earlier memories were blocked by the horror

of the last fortnight. I felt no shame at eavesdropping on his soul.

To save him, I must gauge the malady of mind, as well as body.

So, during days and nights of delirium, I pieced together some

sequence of what Archie had suffered on the shores of Tanganyika. It

was screamed at me in oaths and prayers; whispered in obscene words;

veiled in symbolism of delirium. With foul names he assailed the

woman of his life; with writhing fingers he tore at Dick's throat;

hyænas with blind eyes swarmed on to the rafts; the lake changed from

azure to blood; Dick grinned on the ground by the filled-in grave and

Norah screamed under the wet earth....

From the insane medley, one clear fact emerged. Archie was racked,

less by his guilt than his love. The shadow, not of his crime, but

of something that Norah had done, pursued him inexorably. One phrase

again and again seemed to burst, rather from his chest, than from his

cracking lips.

'Norah, why did you? ... Norah, why did you?'

When night fell, his cries sank to a murmur that, by the time Norah

came to relieve me, had yielded to sleep.

'Is he going to live?' were her first words.

'Does he want to?' I countered, 'do _you_ want him to?'

Her grave eyes considered me.

'Is that how I appear to you?' she said at last.

'I'm neutral by creed,' I answered, 'but you don't understand me. Do

you want him to live ... for what awaits him?'

'It mustn't,' she stammered a little in her eagerness, 'we must save

him.'

'From himself then,' I added, without her confidence. Then as she

did not reply, 'It isn't the police we've got to fear, it's his own

despair.'

'Because he feels he's a murderer?'

'Partly.'

'And----?'

'Because his heart's dead.'

She lifted her head to say that she must undo what she had done. I

wondered how far that can ever be effected. Some gesture must have

revealed my doubt.

'You think I can't,' she said, 'and you don't know how much there is

to undo. I haven't told you....'

Thus began the re-telling of her tragic story, partly I fancy, to

ease the load that lay so heavy on her heart, partly to track down

some clue that might yet save Archie.

On ran her narrative, when neither Archie's needs nor our own desire

for sleep took precedence, during the seventy-two hours of his

illness. It was not now the naked bones of the tragedy that she

showed me. In her search for any word and moment in the tragedy that

might throw light on the dark places of Archie's heart, she laid bare

before my eyes, that were at least pitiful, all she had seen,

imagined, suffered.

By the second midnight, when Archie was quiet and we sat together by

the fire, the story had wound its indirect way as far as her promise

to renounce Dick and return to her husband.

'And then he found Dick kissing me!' she cried in a strained voice.

'No wonder if...' she lapsed into silence, staring into the fire with

eyes that watching had sunk deep. Presently she turned her head

aside and I guessed she was crying.

'Wasn't it that kiss that killed his heart?' she asked at last.

Snatches of raving rang in my ears as I shrugged my shoulders.

She seemed to gather herself together. 'I'll bring it back to life,'

she said.

Then, as if she read scepticism in my silence, 'I'm not pretending to

you--I've told you too much--that I love Archie as once I did. Nor

will I pretend with Archie. He'd see through me, suffering sharpens

the eyes. But...' she stood up and, for the first time since she had

sought me, I had a girl before me, 'I can and will prove I'm not what

I've let him think.'

'What Archie pursues,' I said rather pompously, 'and in himself

achieves is loyalty, cleanness....'

'While I'm unloyal, dirtied,' she broke in. 'Yes, I am. But I'll

show him my ideals are his.'

Her voice broke a little and flattened. 'Yes, you're right, what is

the good of ideals one throws on the scrap heap? But I'll serve him,

cherish him.... Though I can't love him with passion, if only he can

love me again, I'll serve him honestly for better or for worse, till

death....'

I suppose my instinctive mistrust of promises led me to point out

that that parting was not likely to be remote unless--

'Unless?' she asked and repeated, 'I'll save him. I will save him.'

'You've got to save him from two dangers.'

'For heaven's sake don't speak in riddles,' she said, her nerves on

edge.

'From himself and from the herd.'

'You think that even if he...' she hesitated, 'even if I can make him

believe I'm worth his love, he'll still give himself up?'

I nodded, 'And his confession is on the D.C.'s desk.'

She seemed to brush this aside. 'Why can't he see it as I do?' she

cried. 'A nightmare to be forgotten, if we can. Not to sacrifice

to. He was mad at the time, mad with jealousy and fever. Why should

his life be thrown after Dick's?'

It takes a woman to reach these heights of common sense. Conscience

is the curse of Adam; while Eve's punishment, if I remember right,

was nothing less practical than the pangs of child-birth and a dread

of snakes.

And if women have no consciences, I reflected, neither do they admit

any debt to society. They are free lances, privateers: if they and

their men are safe, society can fend for itself. But I did not speak

my thoughts, as Norah sat down again and in the low, even voice of

one who thinks aloud, resumed her story.

Again she described the last meeting she was to have with Dick on

earth, again his arms clutched her immobile body, as Archie and his

rifle emerged from the shadow of the ruined tower. So vivid were her

words, I felt I was an eyewitness: I saw Dick start up; the barrel of

the .420 wavered from Norah's breast to his; he fumbled with his

gun....

The dusky voice had stopped in the middle of a word. I looked round

to see what had interrupted her.

The natives detailed to tend the fire slept soundlessly at our feet,

nothing stirred in the circle of the fire, there was even a lull in

the noises of the night. Norah was staring straight in front of her

and I understood that it was something her mind had seen that had

arrested her.

'I'll do it,' she murmured, 'I can do it. I'm strong enough.'

And strong she looked. Despair had dropped from her like a garment,

her face shone with courage. So must Kate Douglas have looked, who

thrust her arm through the empty staples to bar the door, behind

which whispered the murderers of her king.

So, her dark eyes moist but triumphant, must Norah Cleverly have

looked the night in the Carpathians she saved the life she was so

nearly to spoil.

In turns we watched, made plans and slept, until, about three next

afternoon, Archie's temperature subsided and he fell into a quiet

sleep.

Norah stood looking at the thin face. Then she drew me out of the

tent. Did I think it safe for her to leave him for the afternoon,

she asked? I must have looked astonished, for she laughed and said

she was going into Abercorn.

It would be dark, I objected, by the time she got there.

'The darker the better,' she replied, still laughing.

I wondered if relief had made her hysterical; a queer exhilarated

light shone in her dark eyes; there was something at once fey and

fanatical about her. The pythoness at the oracle, the martyr at the

stake must have had, I imagined, such eyes. Under the power of the

inspiration, whatever it was, her beauty had bloomed again, like

Africa when the rains have come.

But even so it seemed no reason to be caught by the fall of night on

a motiveless walk to Abercorn. I said so.

She promised to take Changalilo, a gun and a hurricane lamp.

I said bluntly I could not see why she wanted to go. She became

serious.

'I'm going to see Mr. Lavater,' she said.

I raised my eyebrows.

'What's the good?' I asked, 'what are you going to say?'

'I don't know yet. It depends on him.'

'But you must have some plan!'

'Do they listen to confessions made in delirium?'

'Will Lavater believe it was?'

'Why not?'

I pointed out that he would come to see Archie as soon as he was

convalescent ... and hear a repetition of the same confession. We

both knew Archie's obstinacy.

If he does, if I can't make Archie change,' she looked up quickly,

'I'll swear on the Bible it was I that killed Dick.'

Woman, the greatest egoist of created beings ... and the most

selfless! I looked at Norah with admiration. When she gave, she

gave herself. But I admired her courage more than her sense.

'And Archie will swear on another Bible, that _he_ did it,' I

objected.

'He may; they can't hang us both,' she said with triumphant logic.

What evidence was there, she insisted, to support either story? Why

should they believe Archie before her?

I held my tongue. Unless the prosecuting counsel was a fool, I was

sure that he would turn her story inside out. The elopement would be

dragged to light and every presumption of motive would point to

Archie's guilt. True that was not evidence, but what seemed to me to

stamp with futility any struggle or shift of Norah's, was Archie's

own soul as his ravings had revealed it. He saw himself a murderer,

his wife a treacherous wanton. If Norah's subterfuge saved his life

from the hands of the Law, could she secure it from his own?

I hesitated. In spite of post-war philosophy, courage seems to me

admirable and rare enough. But to win, she must face issues.

I hinted my doubts.

'I know,' she said, 'I know all that.'

When I came back from escorting her as far as the road, Archie was

awake.

He smiled weakly and tried to greet me, but his voice was inaudible.

He was glad to obey me and lie quiet, though his eyes wandered in

search of Norah.

'She's sleeping,' I lied, wishing to keep Abercorn and what it held

out of his thoughts.

CHAPTER IV

Archie's convalescence was rapid; within a week he was well enough to

receive a visitor. During the days of his recovery I had come to

know him better than ever before. The strangeness or remoteness I

had sensed in him at Abercorn had gone. He was gentle and grateful

for little things. I found him very human, and, since humanity is

tragic, rather touching. He seemed to have won the sad tranquillity

of old people on fine days. One could not grudge him a peace he had

bought, he believed, at the price of his life or freedom.

He sat wrapped up, savouring the warmth of the sun, watching the

natives at their trivial and absorbing occupations, inhaling as it

were the beauty and activity of the world. And counting, I could not

help imagining, the hours that remained for its enjoyment. Partly to

escape such disquieting thoughts, partly to make Archie dependent on

Norah and to draw him to her, I spent most of the day in my own camp.

His first visitor came to me, in my capacity of medical adviser, for

permission to pay a call.

As I issued from the semi-darkness of my tent into the mellow

sunlight of the late afternoon, I found him squatting in the shadow.

The sunlight sliding through the trees that had been thinned by the

needs of the villagers, fell on his wrinkled face and made him pucker

his patient eyes. I recognised Ntula, the headman of the village

against which we had camped.

Arranging the folds of the faded purple cloth that draped his

emaciated limbs, he lay back on the ground and, with the courtesy of

the old school, clapped his hands behind his head. Invoking peace on

him and his village, I asked what he wished.

He had brought, he said, these unimportant presents--the little meal

that famine among his people permitted, the handful of eggs that the

hens would lay in the time of rain and a few chickens that had

escaped the hawks.

He waved his hand towards the deeper shadow where I could imperfectly

see the outline of the old lady with the puku skin wig, mounting

guard over a flat basket of meal and a bundle of squawking fowls,

tied together by the legs.

These, Ntula continued, he wished to take to the Bwana, whom the hand

of Death had spared.

Pondering the cause of this deference, I led the old diplomat to

Archie's camp, his obese consort following with a perfectly naked

daughter of six, who carried a minute basket of eggs on her graceful

head.

I found Archie in his usual place and ready to see the old man. He

expected, he said, that some complaint against the conduct of his

Wemba carriers prompted this visit of ceremony.

Ntula repeated his compliments, while his wife and daughter knelt

behind the presents, clapping their hands. Archie expressed his

thanks and sent Matao to find calico and salt for the return gifts.

Polite conversation proceeded, volubly on the headman's part,

monosyllabically on Archie's.

At length when the course of the rains, the prospect of the crops and

the abundance of game had been passed in review, there came a pause.

Was there anything, asked Archie, that he could do for his visitor?

The headman appeared pained at the idea. He had come, he repeated,

to announce his satisfaction at the chief's recovery from grave

sickness.... But since the chief suggested it, if it so happened

that one day he saw Bwana La-va-ta...

'Is Bwana Lavater back at M'pala?'[1] asked Archie quickly.

[1] M'pala is the native name for Abercorn.

Ntula replied that his eldest son had seen Bwana La-va-ta bicycling

into Abercorn as it grew dark. Now should the chief happen to speak

to...

'How long ago was that?' said Archie.

It was the evening of the day that the zebra had eaten the young

mealies in his nephew Chisulo's garden ... well, that was five days

ago.

'The evening I got better,' calculated Archie. 'Are you sure?' he

asked, and the old man became courteously emphatic.

'Well,' said Archie, anxious for the visit to end, 'if I see Bwana

Lavater...?'

We came circuitously to the point. It appeared that Ntula owed tax

for himself and three wives, ten shillings a head, not only for the

current year, but also for the last. And the Boma was putting men

who did not pay their taxes in chains. If the chief would one day

condescend to look at his gardens and his village, and see how poor

the soil and how few the men, perhaps he could persuade Bwana

Lavater....

Archie for all his stoicism winced. He leant forward and spoke to me

in English. 'It wouldn't be much use _my_ speaking to the Boma. May

I tell the old man you'll try?'

I nodded and Ntula withdrew, with manifold expressions of pleasure at

Archie's recovery and gratitude for his promise.

Archie sat down by the fire. Changalilo was on his knees blowing the

embers into flame.

'If Lavater has been back in Abercorn for five days,' said Archie,

'something must have happened to my letter.'

I urged him to return to bed as night was at hand. He did not seem

to hear me. Presently he announced that he would have a machila made

the next day and be carried up to Abercorn in the afternoon.

'It's no use waiting,' he added.

The moment, I felt, was critical; once Archie made up his mind

nothing would stop him. I turned my head and succeeded in catching

Norah's eye. She was preparing invalid's food in the camp kitchen.

Since the day she had gone to Abercorn I had seen little of her. She

was exhausted on her return, and I had had to content myself with her

nod and some ambiguous words to the effect that all was well 'so

far.' She made no further allusion to her scheme, and I felt she

avoided me. This was natural, for my lack of enthusiasm made me a

bad confidant in the matter of a forlorn hope. Desperation needs no

cold water. For my part I was glad to escape the thankless role of

critic.

But now the hour had struck for her intervention.

'Oughtn't you to be in bed?' she asked Archie as she joined us.

He shrugged his shoulders and told her that next day he was going to

Abercorn.

Norah took a deep quick breath like a man about to dive.

'Archie,' she said, 'is it because of me?'

From his seat he looked up at her slim figure whose intensity seemed

to quiver like a spear struck into the ground. He was, I saw,

reluctant to speak.

Ntula's chickens came to his rescue with a sudden squawking and a

beating of wings. Archie signed to Changalilo to untie their legs

and to give the basket of meal to the carriers to divide among them.

Norah stood motionless, her short hair flambant in the slanting rays

of the sun. She repeated the question that Archie had not answered.

He looked round him as if seeking escape.

'Norah,' he said, 'what's the good of going into all this? It's done

now.'

'Even so,' she said, her voice as calm as the evening light, 'even if

it is, is it fair to either of us--to me,' she corrected, 'this

silence?'

Archie reflected. You could always lever up Archie with the word

'unfair.'

I turned away with a feeling of intrusion. Yet Norah might need my

support. I watched in the top branches of a tree a fishing eagle,

sitting solid in the yellow sunlight. The big white bird with its

square black head looked as if it had been chopped out of wood with

rough, sure blows.

'No,' I heard Archie say almost casually, 'I do not want to go on

living without you.'

'Then live with me,' cried Norah. The spear seemed to crumple, to

collapse, and turn to a girl crouched on her knees at her husband's

feet, fumbling for his hand.

The fishing eagle flapped slowly and as if contemptuously into the

gathering darkness.

I could not hear all that Norah said. Naturally I did not try. I

wanted to leave them, but the battle was joined, not won; at any

moment I might be called on.

From the scattered words that reached my ear, I knew that she was

telling him how the kiss in the ruins was given and in what spirit it

was accepted. She told him how in the hills she had come to see he

cared, and how the knowledge had brought her back to her place at his

side. If she could not give him passion--passion was trodden out of

her, she said--she could give him affection, if he could accept it....

It was dark now and some one in the village behind us began

listlessly to tap a drum. It covered Norah's voice. While she

fought for Archie's life, did she hear, I wondered, another drum and

see a swinging light that had guided another man to her and on, so

quickly, to his death?

At last Archie spoke, and I heard his male tones above the drum.

'You've taken away the bitterness,' he said, 'the bitterness of

believing ... that about you. You must forgive me for doubting....'

'And you have to forgive so much,' I heard her break in.

They sat in silence; in the light of the fire I could see his fingers

tangling her tawny hair. The drummer had begun to play in earnest

and the syncopated, staccato throb seemed to force the wall of the

forest to yield a little to its urgency before closing behind it,

like a thick velvet curtain. Archie spoke at last and I saw Norah

draw in her breath. His words came to me in fragments.

He was glad, so glad she had told him, but it could not alter ...

letter to Lavater somewhere at the Boma ... found sooner or later ...

intolerable to wait on its chance discovery ... must see Lavater

himself to-morrow.

Norah's first weapon I saw had broken. I had never thought it a

strong one. She could give Archie the comfort that she was not the

trull he had judged her, she could not give him hope that she loved

him. She could suppress a reason for not living, she could not make

him want to live.

In the second round she held stronger cards. I saw her lips move,

pleading with Archie's obstinacy. I could not hear the words. She

was offering him a paper.

'But that's the letter I wrote to Lavater,' he cried. She nodded,

her eyes dancing in the firelight.

'How on earth did you get it?'

The drum ceased abruptly. Silence swept up like a wave.

'Stole it,' said Norah, and told him how.

She had reached, she said, the Boma before sunset. Lavater, so

Joseph told her, had been expected all the afternoon. If she cared

to wait, he would be sure to look in at the office on his way home.

As she sat there, her mind worked ceaselessly on the cause she had

come to fight, while her eyes darted nervously about the room. They

were arrested by a familiar writing on the table in front of her.

The blue envelope was addressed in Archie's hand.... It contained

his confession.

Her brain leapt from perception to plan. Joseph she sent on an

errand to the store. The moment he left the room, she seized a pen

and scribbled a note of thanks for the milk and vegetables. This she

slipped into the envelope that had contained the fatal letter. With

the office gum she re-fastened the flap.

As she replaced it, Lavater's shadow crossed the window. She went to

meet him with her heart beating noisily, she thought, against the

stolen paper. She had come, she said, to ask leave to borrow some

drugs from the Boma stores. And Lavater suspected nothing, but with

expressions of concern found her the medicines.

The end of her recital was drowned in a fresh burst of drumming, but

I was glad to see that civilisation had not recaptured Archie

completely. Admiration for Norah's resource shone on his thin face.

Admiration and gratitude. Then the sadness which had lifted returned.

'Norah,' he said, 'what a brick you are! I think it's the most

sporting effort I've ever heard of. No one but you.... But you see,

don't you? I can't profit by what you've done.' He turned the paper

in his hands. 'I've got to go through with it now.' Norah, worsted

in the second encounter, rose to her feet and faced him. Her lips

framed the word "Why?"

'Because I'm a murderer,' he said, looking over her head, blindly,

into the darkness.

As she did not speak, he went on carefully, dispassionately.

At first, he said, he had justified himself. In the forest, he had

seemed to stand outside the Law... But Abercorn with its trim roads,

its comfortable houses, its kind, commonplace inhabitants had drawn

him back into its fold. Obscurely he felt that by accepting the

standards of Jehovah and of the forest, he was deserting from the

forces that for twenty or thirty centuries had fought for order, to

make things shipshape, sane, reasonable.

White men went native sometimes, abjured their heritage, married

black wives, lived in mud huts, ate native food. Well, if he set up

in his heart the values he had found in the forest, he'd be a

renegade like them.

Norah, who had bitten on her lip till it nearly bled, broke in with a

cry of indignation.

What had this, she asked, to do with Dick's death? Why should Archie

sacrifice his own life for vague ideas about Abercorn and society!

What had society ever done for him? Let society look after itself!

'I'm not being clear,' said Archie; 'what I mean is that until I saw

Abercorn standing like an advance guard in the fight for...' He felt

his words were high-flown and he said, 'all that' with a dismissing

wave of the hand. 'I did not feel I had done wrong. Abercorn showed

me that I had. Now I must pay for what I did.'

'But Archie, Archie! What's the good? Dick's dead and nothing you

can do will bring him to life.'

He was silent.

'All you'll do will be to agonise your father, your relations and

friends. And me. _You'll_ pay, you say. But what about us?'

His lips moved but I heard no word.

'If it did any good,' she went on, 'we'd--I'd be glad, proud to

suffer for you. But all for nothing! For an idea!'

Archie shrugged his shoulders. 'Don't some people say ideas are

everything?' he asked me.

They had begun to dance in the village. Hand-clapping strengthened

the beat of the drum and the shrill monotonous voices of women

singing, as they jogged to the rhythm.

'You were provoked, you were ill with fever,' Norah began.

'I haven't told you all,' Archie interrupted. 'Have you thought what

life now holds for me?'

Without expiation he could never again have peace of mind. He must

be ready at any moment to lie to his friends. At any moment a

sincere word might be his ruin. Never would he feel clean. And as,

to one of his nature, long duplicity was intolerable, he would have

to live alone to escape. Alone, what memories would haunt him! What

escape would there be from the vision of the defenceless man he had

murdered.

The dance had come to an end and the singing ceased. I looked at

Norah feeling she was beaten and was surprised to see her poise

herself as if to deliver a blow.

'Defenceless, Archie? Murdered? It was fair fight.'

'Fair fight?' he echoed.

'Dick would have killed you if you hadn't killed him!'

I shared Archie's astonishment.

'I didn't give him much chance then,' he said grimly.

'But Dick fired first, he fired at you first!' cried Norah.

Archie passed his hand over his eyes.

'It's all blurred like a bad dream,' he said, 'but I fired before his

rifle was up.'

Norah's reply was unexpected. 'Changalilo,' she called.

Changalilo emerged from the kitchen.

'Changalilo, there are some cartridges missing.' The native was

silent.

'How many cartridges were there for Bwana Dick's gun?'

'Two, Mama.'

'There's only one now.'

With deference Changalilo reminded her that one had been fired the

night the Bwana had shot the eland, the night that Bwana Dick-i...

'Are you sure one was fired then?' said Archie slowly and as if he

dreaded the answer.

Changalilo was emphatic, and added that he had cleaned the fouled

gun, when the Mama had brought it back to camp.

Norah dismissed the native. 'Do you believe me now?' she asked.

Archie sank back into his chair with his head between his hands.

'I saw Dick,' she said, putting every ounce of her will into her

speech, 'pick up his rifle and fire at you from his hip. He missed

you and you killed him before he could fire the second shot. Is that

murder?'

There was a long pause. The drumming and singing burst out again.

Men's voices singing, I judged, a song of war. They had thrown dried

grass on to their fire, lighting the underside of the trees into pale

silver. The shadows of the invisible dancers leapt and flapped like

fantastic birds.

I caught a glimpse of Norah's triumphant eyes before the grass was

burnt and the light fell. Lying at Archie's feet, I saw a paper torn

in four."

EPILOGUE

Ross smoked a time in silence. At length he spoke. "Archie did not

give in at once," he said. "His Scottish instincts put up a

rearguard action. But Norah's account of Dick's death had won the

day.

He protested indeed, but without his old conviction, that he must

stand his trial and be formally exonerated. I dropped heavily on the

suggestion. What was he thinking of? I asked. What was the use of

dragging Norah through the mud of the courts, of giving to the press

the story of her elopement? Was it fair to sacrifice her name on the

altar of his exoneration?

Archie collapsed; it was never hard to put him in the wrong. Soon I

left for bed. Husband and wife sat on by the fire. Bad perhaps for

his fever but to the good of his happiness.

It was long before I slept. The duel I had witnessed was fought

again in my head. At last I fell asleep, still wondering if Norah

had told an inspired lie; if she had been rash enough to teach

Changalilo the tale he had repeated; or if Dick had really fired

before he died.

It was Changalilo who enlightened me.

Next day Norah went up to the Boma to report Ward's disappearance.

She would not, I suppose, trust Archie in Abercorn. She gave me

instructions to see to his soup in the middle of the morning. About

eleven I went to the kitchen to find out if it was ready. I found

Changalilo and the sukambali squatting on the ground, stirring a

saucepan, with their backs towards me. I was wearing tennis shoes

and my approach was unheard.

'Did the Mama think I had stolen the cartridge?' Changalilo was

saying; 'I do not know.'

He went back to relate the original discovery of the two rounds that

fitted Dick's 7.9 Mauser, and how they had lain in its magazine till

the day of the eland.

'I was making the chief's dinner,' said Changalilo, 'on the fire. I

heard from the hills not far off, first the boom'--he imitated the

sound--'of Bwana Ar-i-shy's gun for elephant. Then not a moment

later the crack'--again an imitation--'of the little gun.'

Soon after the Mama brought him the little gun with only one

cartridge in the magazine and he had cleaned the barrel. Now she had

forgotten that she had fired at the eland and missed. So he was

blamed.

'Yes, indeed,' said the sukambali, 'the chief forgets and the slave

is beaten.'

'First the boom of the elephant gun; then the crack of Dick's gun.'

I could guess what had happened.

Archie had shot Dick through the heart. As he fell, his contracting

fingers closed on the trigger of his 7.9 and the bullet went into the

air, into the ground. Archie, deafened by the explosion from his

heavy weapon and dizzy with fever, had not heard that posthumous, as

one might call it, shot. When Norah had first told me her story, she

related how she had picked up Dick's rifle and automatically had

opened the breech. Some fresh point had crossed her brain, and she

had not told me she had noticed the empty cartridge case. Memory of

that detail had burst on her when she retold the story, and saw how

it could be manipulated by a wife who was brave enough to shoulder

the weight of her husband's crime."

Ross stopped speaking.

After a long silence broken only by the throbbing of the engines, "Is

that the end?" I asked.

"The worst of you writers," said Ross, "is that you expect a story to

have a beginning and an end. Life isn't so tidy. Death itself

doesn't end the story, except possibly for the dead man....

Who is the platitude-monger who talks about the ever-widening circle

of ripples started by any stone you care to fling into the duck-pond

of life? Well, the wash started by that ill-timed kiss of Dick's

came near, as I have shown you, to swamping the Sinclairs' boat. It

may still swamp it."

"I saw them off," he continued, "on their slow ulendo to the coast,

within a week of that momentous conversation, myself taking in hand

the sale of the cattle, the disposal of the farm, the disinterment of

the ivory.

But now that they are back in England, do you fancy they have

forgotten? Forgetting is not as easy as you happy-ending merchants

make out. And the Sinclairs have plenty to forget....

Don't you think that sometimes, in some chance combination of words,

Norah hears Dick Ward speak...? Suppose she comes across his

friends, his relations.... Sometimes, on nights when she cannot

sleep, will not the burden of the guilt she shouldered seem too

heavy...?

Archie too. Don't you think he ever sees a face, a face that is

partly eaten away by a hyæna, a face on which he is raking the wet

earth? When Norah whistles--it is a habit of hers--doesn't he see

her saunter into that sunlit clearing and watch the light die in her

eyes as she recognises him?"

Ross began ponderously to pace the deck, his bulk visible against the

eastern sky. I fell into step beside him.

"The Come-back of the Erring Wife isn't as simple as it looks at the

end of Reel Five," he said. "Those silver-haired husbands with

wistful faces, whose lines are caressed by the glow of the dying

fire, as they lay a hand of forgiveness on the girl wife's golden

head, they aren't found in every home.

Still Norah stood a fair chance with Archie. He always thought for

himself and never accepted as gold the counters that pass for ideas.

He would grant, I fancy, that courage may be as valuable a feature in

a wife as chastity."

"Who was it said that purity is the bull point of the plain woman?"

Ross asked me.

I did not reply. It sounded to me much like Ross.

"Well, there's something in it," he resumed. "Why do men love the

memories of the fair and frail and forget good wives and mothers?

Why will Queen Cleopatra's fame increase when Queen Victoria is

forgotten?" He paused and seemed to expect an answer. I said

something about Shakespeare.

"Rubbish," he replied, "how many people have read that play? But

you're taking me off my point. Men marry widows and, as far as Dick

was concerned, Norah might nearly rank as a widow. They say that

patriotism died with the war and virginity with the higher education

of women. Well, if it did, Archie would be one of those who would

make the best of a bad job. I don't mean that he'd sit by, while his

wife climbed in and out of other men's beds like the heroines of Mr.

Arlen's novels. On the contrary, you've seen he had a pretty short

way with the other man. But he never subscribed to the view of the

Church of Paul that sex was the only thing that mattered. And in his

darkest hour, he had never been able to conquer his love for Norah."

I suggested that her indifference would in the end effect that

conquest.

"Indifference?" said Ross quickly. "To run off with a man, when you

think your husband ignores you, is not indifference. Any more than

it is indifference to load his crime on your guilty shoulders."

"In any case," I protested, "she told you she didn't love him."

"For the time, the tragedy she had brought about had trodden out of

her that blend of illusion and realism we call 'love,' leaving her

potent for no impulse more romantic than devotion. When she reached

home and the horror had receded, her quick-blooded nature would need

to twine round some man's heart. She would think more than twice

before she looked beyond her husband a second time. And now she

knows his strength no less than his weakness. Not a bad basis for

love."

The flippancy which Ross affected was momentarily laid aside. "I

believe," he said slowly, "I pray, that by now Norah and Archie

Sinclair's hearts are so locked together by sympathy, understanding

and affection that they can face together the black hours they cannot

hope to escape."

"In any case," I said, "he cannot judge her."

"Because he'd killed Dick?"

I nodded.

"So you agree with Archie, that was wrong?"

"Don't you?" I asked.

I shivered in the chill that comes before the dawn. Land was visible

on the port and I guessed we were rounding Gardafui. Before us lay

Europe, behind us Africa.

Life was stirring on the liner. Clattering his pail, a sailor

started to swab the deck.

_Congo River--Marcham--Capri._

1924-25.

THE END