THE MEETING-PLACE OF WATERS.
At Tabora there had been a long halt, a delay forced upon the
travellers by the conditions of climate, by the sickness and the
idleness of their caravan; but this interval of rest had not been
altogether disagreeable. The place was a place of fatness, a settlement
in the midst of a fertile plan where the flocks and herds, the Arab
population, the pastoral life suggested those familiar pictures
in that first book of ancient history which the child takes into
his newly awakened consciousness; and which the hard and battered
wayfarer--believer or agnostic--loves and admires to the end of life.
In just such a scene as this Rebecca might have given Isaac the fateful
draught of water from the wayside well; upon just such a level pasture
Joseph and his brethren might have tended their flocks and watched the
stars. The visions of the young dreamer would have shown him this pale
milky azure, over-arching the rich level where the sheaves bowed down
to his sheaves; and in just such a reposeful atmosphere would he have
laid himself down for the noontide siesta, and let his fancy slide into
the dim labyrinth of dreamland.
At Tabora there had been overmuch time for thought, and the yearning
for a far-away face must needs have been in the hearts of both those
young Englishmen, whose bronzed features were sternly and steadily set
with the resolute calm of men who do not mean to waste in despair and
die for love of the fairest woman upon earth.
Often and often in the dusk, Allan heard his comrade's rich baritone
rolling out that old song--
"Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die, because a woman's fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
Because another's rosy are?"
The voice thrilled him. What a gift is that music which gives a man
power over his fellow-men? Geoffrey's fiddle talked to them nearly
every night beside the camp-fire, talked to them sometimes at daybreak,
when its owner had been sleepless; for that restless spirit had
watched too many long blank hours in the course of his travels. It had
been hard work to convey that fiddle-case across the rolling woods,
through swamp and river, guarded from the crass stupidity of native
porters--from the obstinacy of the African donkey--the curiosity of the
inhabitants of the villages on the way. Geoffrey had carried it himself
for the greater part of the journey; refusing to trust Arab or Negroid
with so precious a burden. Riding or walking, he had managed to take
care of his little Amati, the smallest but not the least valuable of
all his fiddles.
There were some among his dark followers to whom Geoffrey's Amati
was an enchanted thing, a thing that ought to have been alive if
it was not; indeed, there were some who secretly believed that it
was a living creature. The velvet nest in which he kept the strange
thing, the delicate care with which he laid it in that luxurious
resting-place, or took it out into the light of day; the loving
movement with which he rested his chin on the shining wood, while his
long lissome fingers twined themselves caressingly about the creature's
neck; the strange light that came into his eyes as he drew the bow
across the strings, and the ineffable sounds which those strings gave
forth; all these were tokens of a living presence, a something to be
loved and feared.
When he tuned his fiddle, they thought that he was punishing it, and
that it shrieked and groaned in its agony. Why else were those sounds
so harsh and discordant, so unlike the melting strains which the
thing gave forth when he laid his chin upon it and loved it, when his
lips smiled, and his melancholy eyes looked far away into the purple
distances, across the woods and the plains, to the remoteness of the
mountain range beyond?
If it were not actually alive--if it had neither heart nor blood as
they had, why, then, it was a familiar demon--a charm--by which he who
possessed it could influence his fellow-men. He could rouse them to
savage raptures, to shrieks and wild leaps that were meant for dancing.
He could melt them to tears.
From the first hour when he played by the camp-fire, on the third
night after they left Bagamoyo, Geoffrey's music had given him a hold
over the more intelligent members of the caravan. They had listened at
first almost as the dog listens, and had been ready to lift up their
heads and howl as the dog howls. But gradually those singing sounds had
exercised a soothing influence, they had sprawled at his feet, a ring
of listeners, with elbows on the ground, looking up at him out of onyx
eyes that flashed in the firelight.
Among their followers there were some Makololos from the Shire Valley,
men of superior courage and determination, a finer race than the common
herd of African porters, of the same race as those faithful followers
of Livingstone's first great journey, who afterwards became chiefs and
rulers of the land. These Makololos adored Geoffrey. His music, the
achievements of his Winchester rifle, that ardent fitful temperament of
his, exercised an extraordinary influence over these men; and it seemed
as if they would have followed him without fee or reward, for sheer
love of the man himself; not for meat, and cloth, and beads, and brass
wire.
Never a word said Geoffrey or Allan of that one woman whose image
filled the minds of both. They talked of other people freely enough.
Each spoke of his mother tenderly, regretfully even, Allan taking
comfort from the thought of Lady Emily's delight in her farm, the
occupation and interest which every change of the seasons brought
for her. Such letters as had reached him on his wanderings had been
resigned and uncomplaining, although dwelling sorrowfully upon the
husband she had lost.
"He used to live so much apart, shut in his library day after day,
and only joining me in the evening, that I could hardly have believed
my life could seem so empty without him. But I know now how much his
presence in the house--even his silent, unseen presence--meant for
me; and I realize now how often I used to go to him, interrupting his
dreamy life with my petty household questions, my little bits of news
from the farmyard or the cow-houses, or the garden. He was so kind
and sympathetic. He would look up from his books to interest himself
in some story about my Brahmas or my Cochins, and if he was bored, he
never allowed me to see the faintest sign of impatience. I think he was
the best and truest man that ever lived. And my Allan is like him. May
God protect and bless my dearest, my only dear, in all the perils of
the desert!"
Lady Emily's mental picture of Africa represented one far-reaching
waste of level sand, a desert flatness incompatible with a spherical
earth, pervaded by camels, and occasionally varied by a mirage. A
pair of pyramids--like tall candlesticks at the end of a board-room
table--a sphinx and a crocodily river occupied the north-east corner of
this vast plateau, while the south-west was distinguished by a colony
of ostriches, and the place to which Indian officials used to resort
for change of air some fifty years since. To these narrow limits were
restricted Lady Emily's notions of the continent on which her son
was now a wanderer. She feared that if he got out of the way of the
crocodiles he might fall in with the ostriches, which doubtless were
dangerous when encountered in large numbers; and she shuddered at the
sight of her feather fan.
Mrs. Wornock's letters were in a sadder strain. The key was distinctly
minor. She wrote of her loneliness; of the monotonous days; the longing
for the face that had vanished.
"My organ talks to me of you--Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, all
tell me the same story. You are far away--away for a long time--and
life is very sad."
There was not a word of Suzette in those letters. If she was ever at
the Manor, if Mrs. Wornock retained her affection and found solace in
her society, there was no hint of that consoling presence. It might
be that the girl hated the house because of that vehement stormy love
which had assailed her there; the love that would not let her be
faithful to a more reasonable lover.
"And yet--and yet!" thought Geoffrey, hardly caring even in his own
mind to put the question positively.
In his innermost consciousness there was the belief that she loved
him--him, Geoffrey Wornock--that she had refused him perversely and
foolishly, out of a mistaken sense of honour. She would not marry Allan
whom she did not love; and she refused to marry Geoffrey whom she did
love, in order to spare her jilted lover the pain of seeing a rival's
triumph.
"But I am not beaten yet," Geoffrey told himself. "When I go back to
England--if I but find her free--I shall try again. Allan's wounds
will have healed by that time; and even her Quixotic temper will have
satisfied itself by the sacrifice of two years of her lover's life."
"When I go back!" Musing sometimes on that prospect of the homeward
journey, whether returning by the road they had come, or dropping down
southward by Trivier's route to the Nyassa and the Zambesi, or by the
more adventurous westward line by the forest and the Congo, the way
by which Trivier had come to the Lake, whichever way were eventually
chosen, Geoffrey asked himself if the three travellers would all go
back?
"One shall be taken and the other left."
Throughout the record of African travel, there is that dark feature
of the story; the traveller who is left behind. Sometimes it is the
fever fiend that lays a scorching hand upon the fearless adventurer,
flings him down to suffer thirst and pain and heaviness, and delirious
horrors, in the foul darkness of a bee-hive hut, to die in a dream
of home, with shadowy faces looking down at him, familiar voices
talking with him. Sometimes he falls in a ring of savage foes, hemmed
round with hideous faces, foes as fierce and implacable as lion or
leopard; foes who kill for the sake of killing; or cannibals, for
whom a murdered man provides the choicest banquet. The hazards of the
pilgrimage take every shape, death by drowning, death by massacre,
death by small-pox or jungle fever, death by starvation, by the
bursting of a gun, by beasts of prey. In every story of travel there
is always that dark page which tells of the man who is left. Dillon,
Farquhar, the two Pococks, Jameson, Bartelott, Weissemburger--the
ghosts that haunt the pathways of tropical Africa are many; but those
melancholy shadows exercise no deterring influence on the traveller who
sets out to-day, strong, elate, hopeful, inspired by an eager curiosity
which takes no heed of trouble or of risk.
"Which of us three is to stay behind?" Geoffrey asked himself in a
gloomy wonder. Not Patrington. He had come to the stage at which the
traveller bears a charmed life. It is seldom the experienced wanderer,
the man of many journeys, who falls by the wayside. Hot-headed youth,
bold in its ignorance of danger, perishes like a bird caught in a trap.
The strong frame of the trained athlete shrivels like a leaf in the hot
blast of fever. The careless boatman tempts the perils of a difficult
passage, and is swept over the stony bed of the torrent, and vanishes
in the fathomless pool. The hardened traveller knows what he is about,
and can reckon with the forces of that gigantic nature which he faces
and defies. It is the tyro who pays the price of his inexperience, and,
in the history of African travel, the survival of the fittest is the
rule.
"Which of us?" That question had entered into the very fabric of
Geoffrey's thoughts. Sometimes, sitting by the camp-fire as the
chillness of night crept round them, a grisly fancy would flash across
his reverie, and he would think that the pale mist that rose about
Allan's figure, on the other side of the circle, was the shroud which
the Highlander sees upon the shoulders of a friend marked for death.
"Would it be Allan?" If it were Allan, he, Geoffrey, would hasten
home to tell the sad story, and then--to claim her whose too-tender
conscientiousness had refused happiness at Allan's expense. Allan gone,
there would be no reason why she should deny her love.
"For I know, I know that she loves me," Geoffrey repeated to himself.
He had been telling himself that story ever since he left England. No
denial from those lovely lips, no words of scorn, would convince him
that he was unloved. He could recall looks and tones that told another
story. He had seen the gradual change in her which told of an awakening
heart.
"She never knew what love means till she knew me," he told himself.
Did he wish for Allan's death? No, there was no such hideous thought
in the dark labyrinth of his mind; or, at least, he believed that
there was not. One must perish! He had so brooded over the story
of former victims that he had taught himself to look upon one lost
life as inevitable. But the lot was as likely to fall upon him as
upon Allan. More likely, since his habits were more reckless and more
adventurous than Allan's. If there was danger to be found, he and his
Makololos courted it. Shooting expeditions, raids upon unfriendly
villages, hand-to-hand skirmishes with Mirambo's brigand tribes; he
and his Makololos were ready for anything. He had travelled over
hundreds of miles with his warlike little gang--exploring, shooting,
fighting--while Patrington and Allan were living in dreamy inaction,
waiting for better weather, or for the recovery of half a dozen
ailing pagazis. Assuredly he who ran such superfluous risks was the
more likely to fall by the way. Well, death is a solution of all
difficulties.
"If I am dead, it will matter to me very little that my bright,
ineffable coquette is transformed into a sober, middle-aged wife,
and that she and Allan are smiling at each other across the family
breakfast-table, in their calm heaven of domestic hum-drum. But while I
live and am young I shall think of her and long for her, and hate the
lucky wretch who wins her. If we should both go back; if Patrington's
tough bones are the bones that are to whiten by the way, and not
Allan's or mine; why, then, we shall again be rivals; and the years of
exile will be only a dream that we have dreamt."
It was a strange position in which these two young men found
themselves. Friends, almost as brothers in the close intimacy of that
solitude of three, only three civilized thinking beings amidst a crowd
of creatures who seemed as far apart as if they had belonged to the
forest fauna--the great antelope family--or the simian race; these two,
so nearly of an age, reared in the same country and the same social
sphere, united and sympathetic at every point of contact between mind
and mind, and yet keeping this one deep gulf of silence between them.
They spoke to each other freely of all things, except of her; and
yet each knew that she was the one absorbing subject in the mind of
the other. Each knew that her image went along with them, was never
absent, never less distinctly lovely, even when the way was fullest of
hardship and peril, when every yard of progress meant a struggle with
thorns that tore them, and brambles that lashed them, and the tough,
rank verdure-carpet that clogged their feet. Neither had ever ceased to
remember her, or to think of these adventurous days as anything else
than exile from her. Whatever interest or enjoyment there might be in
that varied experience of a land where beauty and ugliness alternated
with startling transitions, it was not possible that either Allan or
Geoffrey could forget the reason they were there, far from the fair
faces of women, and from all the ease and pleasantness of civilized
life.
Geoffrey had the better chance of oblivion, since those wild excursions
and explorations of his afforded the excitement of the untrodden and
the hazardous. The caravan road from the coast to Ujiji, with all its
varieties of hardship, was too beaten a track for this fiery spirit.
At every halting-place he went off at a tangent; and if his comrades
threatened not to wait for his return, he would pledge himself to
rejoin them further on, laughing to scorn every suggestion that he and
his little company of Makololos and Wanyamwesis could lose themselves
in the wilderness.
He was more in touch with the men than Allan--as familiar with their
ways and ideas as Patrington after many years of travel. He had learnt
their languages with a marvellous quickness--not the copious language
of civilization and literature, be it remembered, but the concise
vocabulary of the camp and the hunting-ground, the river and the
road. He understood his men and their different temperaments as few
travellers learn to understand, or desire to understand them. And yet
there was but little Christian benevolence at the root of this quick
sympathy and comprehension. Although, as an Englishman, Geoffrey would
have given no sanction to the sale and barter of his fellow-creatures,
these dark servants were to him no more than slaves--so much carrying
power and so much fighting power, subject to his domination. It pleased
him to know their characters, to be able to play upon their strength
and weakness, their ferocity and their greed, just as surely as he
manipulated the stops of the great organ at Discombe.
These Africans gave a name of their own choosing to almost everybody.
They christened the great Sultan of the interior Tippo-Tib, because
of a curious blinking of his eyes. Captain Trivier obtained his
nickname on account of his eye-glass. Another man was named after
his spectacles. The Sultan of Ujiji was called Roumariza--"It is
ended,"--because he had succeeded in reducing belligerent tribes to
peaceful settlement. For the Englishman in particular, Africa could
always find a nickname, based on some insignificant detail of manner or
appearance. For Englishmen in general she had found a nobler-sounding
name. She called them Sons of Fire.
Geoffrey, with his tireless energy, his rapid decision, his angry
impatience of delay, seemed to his followers the very highest exemplar
of the fiery race that can persevere and conquer difficulties which the
native of the soil recoils from as insurmountable.
Sons of Fire! Were they not worthy of the name, these white men, when
far out in midstream, while the boatmen bent and cowered over their
paddles, these Englishmen looked in the face of the lightning and
sat calm and unmoved while day darkened to the pitchy blackness of a
starless midnight, and the thunder reverberated from hill to hill,
with roar upon roar and peal upon peal, like the booming of heavy
batteries, and anon crashed and rattled with a sharper, nearer sound.
Blinding lightning, torrential rain, war of thunder and tempestuous
waters, were all as nothing to these sons of fire. Their spirits rose
amidst hurricane or thunderstorm; they were full of life and gaiety
while the cockleshell canoes were being tossed upon the short, choppy
sea, like forest leaves upon a forest brook, and when every sudden gust
threatened destruction. They laughed at peril, and insisted upon having
the canoes out when their native followers saw danger riding on the
wind and death brooding over the waters. They met the spirit of murder,
and were not afraid. They lay down to sleep in the midst of an unknown
wilderness, with savage beasts lurking in the darkness that surrounded
their tents. They forded rivers that swarmed with crocodiles--horrible
stealthy creatures, swimming deep down below the surface of the water,
the placid, beautiful water, with lotus flowers sleeping in the
sunlight, and scaly monsters waiting underneath in the shadow.
Panther, crocodile, tempest, fever, or sunstroke, poisoned arrows from
murderous foes, were only so many varieties in the story of adventure.
Through every vicissitude the ready wit and calm courage of the
Englishmen rose superior to accident, discomfort, or danger; and to
the native temper these wanderers from a far country, an island which
they had heard of as a speck in a narrow sea, seemed men of iron with
souls of fire.
Geoffrey would admit no malingering, would accept no idle pretexts for
inaction or delay. His little band, picked out from the ruck of their
porters, were always on the move, save in those rainy interludes which
made movement impossible; and even then Geoffrey fretted and fumed, and
was inclined to question the impracticability of a hunting expedition
through those torrential rains.
"Did you ever hear of a fox-hunter stopping at home because of a wet
day?" he asked Cecil Patrington, impatiently.
"Did you ever see such rain as this in a fox-hunting country?" retorted
Patrington, pointing through an opening in the door of the hut to the
sheet of falling water, which blotted out all beyond, and splashed with
a thud into the pool that filled the enclosure.
The deep eaves kept the rain out of the huts, but not without
occasional accident--spoilt provisions, damp gunpowder. It was a rude
awakening from dreams of home to find one's bed afloat on a pond of
rising waters.
Geoffrey had taken upon himself the task of providing meat for the
party, Patrington's lazy, happy-go-lucky temper readily ceding that
post of distinction to the new-comer. A man who had shot every species
of beast that inhabits the great continent could easily surrender the
privilege of finding meat-dinners along the route; so he only used his
gun when the quarry was worthy and his humour prompted; and for the
most part smoked the pipe of peace and read Dickens in the repose of a
day's halt, while Geoffrey roamed off with his Winchester rifle and his
little band of obsequious dark-skins.
And now in this period of waiting there was the great inland sea to
explore; those romantic shores with their wealth of animal life; those
waters teeming with fish, hemmed round and guarded by the majesty
of mountains whose lofty peaks and hollows no foot of man had ever
trodden. There was plenty of scope for movement and adventure here, so
long as the rains held off; and the three men made good use of their
time, and the canoes were rarely idle, or the rowers allowed to shirk
upon the favourite pretence of bad weather.
So long as there was something to be done, Geoffrey and Allan were
happy; but with every interval of repose there came the familiar
heartache, the longing for home-faces, the sense of disappointment and
loss.
Sometimes alone by the lake, while the lamp was shining on the faces of
his two friends yonder in the verandah, where they sat playing chess,
alone in the awful stillness of that vast mountain gorge, the waters
rippling with placid movement, only faintly flecked with whiteness here
and there in the blue distance, Geoffrey's longing for that vanished
face grew to an almost unendurable agony. He felt as if he could bear
this anguish of severance no more. He began to calculate the length
of the homeward journey. Oh, the weariness of it! for him for whose
impatience the fastest express train would be too slow. He shrank
appalled from the contemplation of the distance that he had put between
himself and the woman he loved, the intolerable distance--thousands
and thousands of miles--and the difficulties and vicissitudes of the
journey; all the forces of tropical nature to contend with, dependent
upon savages, subject to fevers that hinder and stop the eager feet,
and lay the weary body low, a helpless log--to waste days and nights
in burning agony--to awaken and find a caravan dwindled by desertion,
luggage plundered, new impediments to progress.
Why had he been so mad as to come here? That was the question which
he asked himself again and again in the stillness of night, when the
mountain-peaks stood out in silvery whiteness and the mountain-chasms
were pits of blackest shadow. Why had he, a free agent, master of his
life and its golden opportunities, made himself a voluntary exile?
"What demon of revolt and impatience drove me out into the wilderness,
when I ought to have followed her and refused to believe in her
unkindness, and insisted upon being heard, and heard again, and
rejected again, only to be accepted later? Did I not know, in my heart
of hearts, that she loved me? And now she will believe no more in my
love. The man who could leave her, who could try to cure himself of
his passion for her--such a man is unworthy to be remembered. Some
one else will appear upon the scene--that unknown rival whom no man
fears or foresees till the hour sounds and he is there--some arrogant
lover, utterly unlike Allan or me--who will not adore her as we have
adored--who will approach her not as a slave, but as a master, who will
win her in a month, in a week, with fierce swift wooing, startle and
scare her into loving him, win her by a _coup de main_. That is the
sort of thing that will happen. It is happening now, perhaps. While
I am standing by these African waters, sick with longing for her. Is
it night and moonlight in England, I wonder? Are she and her new
lover walking in the old sleepy garden? No, it is winter there; they
are sitting at the piano, perhaps, in the lamplight, her little hands
moving about the keys--he listening and pretending to admire, knowing
and caring no more about music than the coarsest of my Pagazis. Oh, it
is maddening to think of how I am losing her! And I came here to cure
myself of loving her. Cure! There is no cure for such a passion as
mine. It grows with absence--it strengthens with time."
And now the Masika, the dreaded rainy season began; the rain-sun burnt
with a sickly oppressive heat; and over all nature there crept the
deathlike silence that comes before a storm. No longer was heard the
wail of the fish-eagle calling his mate, and the answering call from
afar. No diver flitted, black, long, and lanky, over the waters. The
big white and grey kingfisher had vanished from his perch upon the
branches that overhang the lake. Even the ranæ in the sedges, noisiest
of birds for the most part, were mute in anticipatory terror. Thick
darkness brooded over the long line of hills on the further side of
the lake; and from Ujiji nothing could be seen but a waste of livid
waters touched here and there with patches of white. Then through that
dreadful stillness rolled the long low muttering of the thunder, and
lightning flashes, pale and sickly, pierced the overhanging pall of
night-in-day--and then the tempest, in all its majesty of terror, the
roar of winds and waters, the artillery of heaven pealing, crackling,
rattling, booming from yonder fortress of unseen giants, the citadel of
untrodden hills.
And after the storm the rain, the ceaseless, hopeless, melancholy rain,
a wall of water shutting out the world. There was nothing for it but to
sit in the rough shelter of the tembe, and amuse one's self as best one
might, cleaning guns and fishing-tackle, mending nets, playing cards or
chess, reading, talking, disputing, execrating the enforced inaction,
the deadly monotony. For Geoffrey's restless spirit that rainy season
was absolute torture; and it needed all the forbearance and good
nature of his companions to bear with his irritability and fretful
complaining against inexorable nature.
Even Patrington, the best-tempered, most easy-going of men, was
disgusted at Geoffrey's feverish impatience.
"I begin to admire the wisdom of a vulgar proverb--two's company,
three's none," he said to Allan across the chess-board, as they
arranged their men, sitting in the light of the wood fire, while
Geoffrey lay fast asleep in his hammock after the weariness of
sleepless nights. "Your friend is a very bad traveller--a fine-weather
traveller, a man who must have sport and variety and progress all
along the route. That kind of man isn't a pleasant companion in
Central Africa. If courage and activity are essential, patience is no
less needed. Your friend has plenty of pluck; but there's too much
quicksilver in his veins. He exercises an extraordinary influence upon
the men; but he is just the kind of fellow to quarrel with them and
get murdered by them, if he were left too much to his own devices.
It would need very little for them to think that fiddle of his an
evil spirit, and smash his skull with it. On the whole, Carew, I wish
you and I were alone, for with yonder gentleman," pointing to the
motionless figure under the striped rug, "I feel as if I had undertaken
the care of a troublesome child; and Africa, don't you know, isn't the
right place for spoilt brats."
"Geoffrey will be himself again when these beastly rains are over. He's
a splendid fellow, and I know you like him."
"Like him? Of course I like him. Nobody could help liking him. He has
the knack of making himself liked, loved almost, but he's a crank for
all that. Allan, mark my words, that young man is a crank."
Allan's heart sank at this expression of opinion, short, sharp,
decisive. He remembered what he had heard of Geoffrey's birth from the
lips of Geoffrey's mother. Could one expect perfect soundness of brain,
perfect balance of mind and judgment in a man who had entered life in a
world of dreams and hallucinations?