Part 11

“You see”--he went on--“she had been changing steadily, all through that march of ours. You would have said that the tropical sun had forced her growth. She had been a cold, immature thing in Italy--passions dormant and sealed. Now they had worked their way up to the surface and were just beneath the skin. She _would_ have shot the nigger. Before, I suppose, she had lived with ideas only; even _he_ must have been chiefly an idea, though a tremendous one. The daily contact with all sorts of unsuspected facts, the hopeless crudeness of the hinterlands most of us never get into, had worked on her. There may be something subtle in the tropics--people talk as if there were. I should say they were no more subtle than the slums. The body demands a hundred things, and it becomes a matter of the utmost moment whether you get them for it or not. You can’t achieve subtlety until the body is lulled. That life has complications of its own; but I shouldn’t call it subtle. Very far from it. And savages make you feel that it’s subtlety enough merely to have a white skin; there’s something irrelevant and ignoble in pushing subtlety further. In the end the sun wears you out, I suppose, and makes you want nothing very much; but at first it merely makes it intolerable not to have everything on the very instant.... I merely meant to explain that she was a changed creature--a good sport always, but inclined to impatiences, angers, delights, and fervors that I fancy she had never felt before. Her tongue was loosed; she was lyric about cool water, violent about native trickeries. I don’t mean--Heaven forbid!--that she was vulgar. She had a sweet distinction all her own. She was merely real and varied and vital. And I dare say the fundamental formality of our relation was all the subtlety we could stand. It put an edge on everything.

“We were very near the line of Rhodesia, and for various reasons we decided to cross over and come down far enough south through British territory to strike the Zambesi and its boats. If there was any information to be picked up, we should be more likely to find it in that direction than by going back the way we had come, which was utterly barren of clues. I had reason to suppose that the others who had survived the fever had gone on to the Rhodesian villages. We started in the cool of dawn, and I ought to say that there were no backward glances on her part. She was convinced that there was nothing in that precise spot for her; and I think she had hope of finding something in the miles just beyond. I could see that she did not more than half believe the identifications of the negro who had been on the earlier expedition. True, his guttural gibberish did not sound like information; but, after all, he was the only link we had with that supreme and sordid adventure. We pushed on.”

Chalmers threw back his head and stretched his arms, but went on presently in a more vibrant, a more intimately reminiscent tone. The club was nearly empty--it was getting on for midnight. I seemed to myself to be quite alone with the tortoise that upheld the world.

“I suppose this is the point in the narrative to say a rather difficult thing--though it ought to be clear that I’ve no cause or wish to paint myself anything but the mottled color most of us are. I spoke of what the tropics had done to her: fulfilled her in all kinds of ways. We had strange talks by the fire at night, moving on, after the necessary practical discussions, into regions of pure emotion. The emotion was all over the incidents we encountered; we marshalled our facts and made our decisions, and then leaned back and generalized with passion. Whatever Africa had done to her inwardly, it had at least taught her to talk. I had never had any particular sense of her being on guard--there _was_, from the very first, something strange and delicate in the flavor of our understanding--but now I had the sense of her being specifically and gloriously off her guard. We seemed to know each other awfully well.” Chalmers’s face, as he looked down at his pipe-bowl, was curiously boyish for an instant. He might have been speaking of a childhood playmate.

“Put it that I fell in love with her. I don’t choose to analyze my feeling more than that. There was everything in it to make me the prey of a passion for her--so long as we hadn’t begun, in Mozambique, by hating each other. She was straight, she was fine, she was thoroughly good; she was also, in her unfailing freshness and her astonishing health, infinitely desirable. By the law of every land she was my wife. There wasn’t a barrier between us except the frail one built of things that had never been said. Of course, I knew that, to her, the barrier doubtless looked insuperable. She considered herself the inalienable property of the man whose bones we were fantastically hunting for. Well: can’t you see that that very fact was peculiarly constructed to whet my hunger? It was maddening to know that shadows could effectually keep two strong, sinewy creatures apart. Our utter isolation in our adventure flung us upon each other.

“‘Doch es tritt ein styg’scher Schatten Nächtlich zwischen mich und ihn.’

“One night she had a bad dream; she moaned and cried out in her sleep, and I had to stand outside her tent and listen, while she woke and wept and finally quieted down with little sobs like a child’s. I couldn’t even go in and lay my hand on her forehead to soothe her.”

He shook his head, and over his face crept the shadow of the burdened.

“Well, that was what I was in for, and I knew I was in for it as long as I should desire her. Finally, I only prayed that we might get safely back to Mozambique, where I could leave her forever. I knew that before my fever ebbed, it would rise in a horrid flood. I wanted her desperately; I should want her more desperately before I got through with it; and I had, for my honor’s sake, not to let her know. It’s odd how many situations there are in life that make it an insult to tell a woman you love her. But I think you’ll agree with me that this is rather an extraordinary case of it.

“All this time, I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what she felt: whether she knew, or what she would have thought of me if she had known. There’s something tremendous in the power of ideas. Think of how easy it would have been for me--I won’t say to take what I wanted, though against that background it wouldn’t have seemed such a preposterous thing to do--to insist on her talking it out with me, some night by the fire; how little she could have turned her back on me if I had wanted to ask her a question. But I was as tongue-tied as if we had been in a drawing-room, surrounded with all the paraphernalia of chaperonage. And yet sometimes it didn’t seem possible, with her face and her speech changing like that, week by week, that there shouldn’t be some change in it for me.

“I often wondered if she ever had moments, as I did, of thinking that that man had never lived. But I could only go on assuming that she gave him every thought she had. I never knew, by the way, what she felt--she never told me. I said, a little while back, that we never saw each other in the clear light of day--only in lightning-flashes. In spite of our semblance of intimacy, that was true. For when a man is obsessed with the notion of wanting to make very definite love to a woman, her impersonal conversation is a kind of haze at best. I know that we talked; but I know that, after the fiasco, when we ate our meals, when we rode side by side along those unspeakable trails, when we sat by the fire in the evening, I hardly knew or cared what we talked of. I kept a kind of office in my brain quite tidy for the transaction of business; the rest was just a sort of House of Usher where I wandered, wanting her. By the time we struck the first Rhodesian village, I didn’t even feel sure I could hold my tongue all the way south and east again. I only prayed to God to deliver me from being an utter and unspeakable brute. That was what my romance had led me to--that I was hanging on to common decency by the eyelids!

“You see, there was added to my most inconvenient and unfitting passion for the girl all the psychology of return from a lost battle-field--if you could in name so dignify that pitiful clearing which was our frustration. Everything was over, and why the devil shouldn’t something else begin? That was the refrain my blood kept pounding out. I dare say you don’t understand--you live among the civilized, and are used to reckoning with shadows. It’s different out there on the well-nigh uninhabited veldt. A platitude, I know. Funny how people despise platitudes, when they’re usually the truest things going! A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude at all. Humph!

“We struck into northeastern Rhodesia--days and days over the veldt; and after the rains it was blooming like the rose. Gladiolus everywhere--‘white man’s country, past disputing.’ No ‘baked karroo’ there. Pretty starkly uninhabited, though. Of course, we were hundreds of miles north of the mines and the other activities on the edge of the Transvaal. Mashonaland, it would really be more properly called; and it describes it better, sounds wilder--as it was. We were heading west across the tail of Nyassa, and then south--to the Zambesi or the railroad, it didn’t much matter which. That man was as lost to us, every corporal vestige of him, as if his ashes had been scattered like Wycliffe’s. But there on the rampart above Ravello both she and I had felt that the search was imperative: I no less than she. We were both pretty young.”

His head dropped on his breast for a moment. He looked as if he felt his burden. I suppose the tortoise sometimes wonders why....

“Then, one afternoon, we dropped into the heart of a storm--tropical thunder, tropical lightning, skies blacker than you’ve ever seen, a wind that churned the heavens into a pot of inky broth. I had been wondering, for days, what we should do when we struck something besides the eternal huddled villages of the natives, with their tobacco-plots and mealie-fields, their stupid curiosities, their impudent demands for gifts--something more like a house, people you could count people, with a touch of white in their complexions. Strange coincidence, that it was by the real lightning-flash that, for the only time in my life, I saw her clear; strange, too, that the revelation should have come on the heels of our first approach to anything like civilization. It was only the plantation of a man who had made his little pile by trading in Kimberley, and had trekked up to the edge of the wilderness to live there in peace with his aged wife, and his cattle, and the things that without too much trouble he could coax out of the good-humored soil. His establishment was the first earnest of European activities seething somewhat to the southward; the first reminder of Europe that we had had since leaving the last Portuguese outpost on the way to the Nyassa. The trip had not been hard, as such trips go: we had run into no wars; no famine or drought or disease had visited us. We had been in luck; for I was a shocking amateur, and anything like a real expedition I could not have managed, of course. Yet, even so, I had been straining my eyes for the sight of a white man; for some form of life that more nearly suited my definition of ‘colonial.’

“And so we stumbled into his compound at eight in the evening, after endless floundering about in the storm. We had had to dismount from our donkeys and lead the frightened beasts by the bridle. Eventually we could discard them for horses or oxcarts, but for a little while still we might need them, and we clung to them, though the temptation was to let them go--with a kick.”

Chalmers hesitated. “Why do I find it so confoundedly hard to come at? I’m not writing a diary of accidents and self-congratulations like the explorer fellows. The only point in the whole thing is just what I can’t manage to bring out!” He mused for a moment. “The whole place white with hail after the storm ... thick on the thatch of the big, rambling house ... the verandah eaves dripping ... then the rain stopping, and a miraculous silence after the tumult ... no light anywhere except long, low, continual flashes on the horizon at the edge of the veldt--and then she came out, dressed in something of the poor old vrouw’s that hung about her lovely, slim figure like a carnival joke. I was wondering thickly where I should spend the night. I had introduced her as my wife, of course ... and they had muttered something about the other room’s being in use. The good old souls had gone off to bed with the ceasing of the storm, after our little caravan was housed down in the farm niggers’ quarters. But naturally I couldn’t have explained to them, anyhow.... The lightning was about as regular as a guttering candle set in a draught--but about a thousand candle-power when it did come. And, by one apocalyptic flash, I saw her face. She didn’t say anything; she merely laid her hand on my shoulder. And I, who had been bursting with the wish to talk, to tell her, to lay my head on her knees and weep, out of pure self-pity and desire--all those cub-like emotions--didn’t say anything either. I only saw--in that one flash--the working of her lips, the prophetic brilliancy of her eyes. We turned and went into the house without a word. She wanted me, too; that was what it came to. Other things being equal, the utter isolation of a man and a woman must do one of two things--must put a burning fire or the polar ice between them. I knew what it had done to me; I hadn’t been able to guess what it had done to her. I had rather been betting on the polar ice.”

Chalmers ruffled both hands through his hair and leaned back from the table. His mouth took on a legal twist. “It’s the only thing I blame myself for--bar all the egotism that youth has to slough, and that I think I sloughed forever before I reached the damned coast. I ought to have known that half her impulse was the mere clinging of the frightened child, and the other half the strangeness of our journey, which made us both feel that all laws had ceased to work and that all signs had failed. I ought to have reflected, to have put her off, to have made sure, before I ever took her into my arms. And yet I’m glad I didn’t--though I’m ashamed of being glad. Even then, you know, I didn’t envisage the rest of life. I still thought, as for months I had thought, that there could be no conventional future for that adventure. When my curious _wanderjahr_ was over, I expected to die. And I wanted to have some other face than the barren visage of Romance--the painted hussy!--press itself to mine before I went out. I got it; and I’m not yet over being glad, though it has made a coil that grows tighter rather than looser with the years.”

I made no answer. There was nothing to say. He had not got to the end, and until the end what was there for me to do but light another weary cigarette, and summon all the sympathy I could to my non-committal eyes? On the face of it, it was merely an extraordinary situation in which, if a man were once caught, he could do little--a new and singular kind of hard-luck story. But, as he told it, with those tones, those inflections, those stresses, he certainly did not seem to be painting himself _en beau_. I looked at the patient figure opposite me--Chalmers always seemed pre-eminently patient--and, for very perplexity, held my tongue.

“The next morning, I got breakfast early and went to see about my men and beasts. I was a little afraid of finding the men drunk, but they weren’t--only full-fed and lazy and half mutinous. The guide who had led us to the historic spot had vanished--deserted in the night, with half his pay owing him. No one in that black crew could explain. We had had desertions before, and I should have considered us well enough off simply with one coast nigger the less, if he hadn’t been my interpreter as well. There were very few things I could say to the others without him, and, though we were out of the woods, we were by no means done with our retinue. I strode back to the house in a fine rage. I think I minded the inconvenience most, since it would be the inconvenience that would most affect her. Frankly, you see, I couldn’t suppose she felt, any longer, a special concern with that particular black sample of human disloyalty.

“When I entered the house, I saw her at once. Her back was turned to me, and she was talking with a man I had not hitherto seen--evidently some inmate of the house whom we had not encountered the previous evening. The other room had been in use, I reflected, in a flash. He was stretched on a ramshackle sofa with some sort of animal skin thrown over him. He--but I won’t describe him. I know every feature of his face, though I saw him, all told, not more than five minutes, and have never seen him since. I have a notion”--Chalmers’s voice grew very precise, and his mouth looked more legal than ever--“that, when he wasn’t pulled down with a long illness and protracted suffering, he would be very good-looking. As it was, he was unhealthy white, like the wrong kind of ghost. One arm was quite limp.

“At the instant I didn’t place him--naturally! But as soon as she turned her face to me, I did. Only one thing could have induced that look of horror--horror in every strained feature, like the mask of some one who has seen the Medusa. I started to her, but stopped almost before I started; for I saw immediately that I was the Gorgon. It was for me that her face had changed. God knows what, two minutes before, her face had been saying to that half-lifeless form. It was about _me_ that she felt like that. Since, with all the years to work it out in, I’ve seen why; but just at the moment I was overwhelmed. She sat down in a chair and covered her face with her hands. I heard the man babbling tragic and insignificant details. I can’t say I listened, but before I could pull myself together and leave, I caught mention of fever, accident, loss of memory, broken limbs, miraculous co-operation of fate for good and evil alike--the whole mad history, I suppose, from his side, of the past year. I have sometimes wished I had caught it more clearly, but just then I could take in nothing except the insulting fact that this was the man whose grave we had not found. That was what her face had told me in that horrid instant. I never saw her face again. It was still bowed on her hands when I went out of the door.

“I don’t know how I got off--I don’t remember. I suppose I had the maniac’s speed. If I hadn’t been beside myself, I think I could recall more of what I did. The patriarchal creature under whose roof it had all happened helped me. I think I gave him a good many directions about the negroes and the kit. Or I may have paid them off, myself. I honestly don’t know. I know that I left nearly all of my money with him, and started off on horseback alone. I had a dull sense that I was causing her some practical difficulties, but I also had a very vivid sense that she would kill herself if she had to encounter me again. She had looked at me as if I were a monster from the mud. And the night before, on the verandah, in the lightning....”

Chalmers stopped and looked at me. The brilliancy had gone out of his eyes. He said nothing more.

“Well?” I asked finally.

“Well?” There came a wide shrug of the shoulders, a loosening of the lips. “I got back somehow. I seemed to be riding, day and night, straight to Hell. But eventually I got to Salisbury and took a train to Beira. It was immensely steadying to take a train. I think any more of the veldt would have driven me quite definitely mad.” He stopped; then, in a moment, jerked out: “That’s all.”

“Do you mean that you’ve never heard anything more?”

“Never a word. But I know that, eventually, she drew out every penny of her letter of credit. She had hardly dipped into it when we left Europe.”

“Good God!” I don’t know why I should have sat stolidly through the rest and have been bowled over by that one detail, but I was. It made the woman extraordinarily real.

“And of course she knows several places where a letter would reach me, if she ever had reason to write,” he went on. “Perhaps you see now why I have to hang on. By holding my tongue, I’ve been grub-staking them in Arcadia, you might say--but, damn it, I know so little about it! The time might come....”

“Why haven’t you divorced her long since?”

His face hardened. “Didn’t I mention that she was a Catholic? We were married by the most orthodox _padre_ imaginable. There’s no divorce for her. She’s the kind to chuck Heaven, perhaps, but not her church. And, unfortunately”--he spoke very slowly and meditatively--“our marriage, you see, just missed being the kind that can be annulled. ‘Unfortunately,’ I say, but, even now, I’m glad--damned glad. It’s quite on the cards, you know, that some day some priest may send her back to me. I might divorce; she couldn’t. So it seems decent for me not to.”

“Well, of all the--” I got no further. The whole Laokoönesque group had now completed itself before me.

Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from _Rigoletto_. Then: “Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I have to hang on, don’t you?”

I merely compressed my lips tightly, that no word should come.

“After all,” he said, turning his head away, “I should like a chance to get back at Romance, some day. And the time may come--what with spectrum analysis and all.”

I shook my head. “You love the woman still, Chalmers.”