Part 13

“Suddenly Dorrien appeared in the door. She was silent through our greetings, though I thought she watched him. Whatever it was would break before morning, if it wasn’t already at that instant giving way. They hadn’t many hours’ grace, those two. Why the devil hadn’t I stayed in some undiscoverable, soaking little basket-hovel in the nearest village until the next morning? I didn’t know the people, I didn’t like them; but both of them would cling to me because I was white and because they couldn’t agree about anything in the world. I’ve always wished I had stayed away twenty-four hours more, that time--always. There was no reason under high heaven why I should be in it. And they were nice people, mind you; and neither one of them meant to be a cad. Why, there was nothing either one of them wanted that wasn’t perfectly decent and desirable in itself. They only wanted different things for each other, with the best conscience in the world. And people go on marrying, every day!

“‘I hear you’re going, Dorrien.’ There was no use in trying to be irrelevant. They would have turned any remark into a comment on themselves.

“‘Did Agatha tell you so?’

“‘Yes. And D’Acunha mentioned it when I got in.’

“‘There’s a P. & O. boat from Singapore next week Thursday.’ She looked straight at him.

“‘There’s a Royal Dutch Mail from Batavia next week Saturday,’ he flung back.

“She drew a scarf round her shoulders, despite the steaming heat. ‘Who wants to go to Rotterdam? If we’re going, let’s go sanely.’

“‘We can’t go sanely.’ And Dorrien was white beneath his sunburn as he said it.

“Some other people came in, and I didn’t scruple to talk to them. If the Dorriens were going to break, I, out of sheer patriotism, didn’t want them to break before a public like that. Perhaps I still had some hope of getting away. I’ve forgotten about that, but it seems reasonable. I do remember that I staved it off until after dinner. But they didn’t let me alone. They wanted a referee, I imagine; some one who would keep them from screaming insults at each other, or decide between them when they did.

“There’s something morally disintegrating about heat. I fancy that’s been said before, but _I_ know how true it is. My own nerves were on edge with it. Why didn’t they go up into the mountains somewhere and dance with Dutch residents, instead of sticking to ports? But I suppose that would only have postponed the catastrophe. Anyhow, it couldn’t hurt either of them to get out of that rotten temperature, no matter where they went. She was whiter than chalk, and Dorrien was nervous as a cat. Her voice jangled, and he twitched all over when she spoke. I didn’t see that there was a penny to choose between them for merit, except that she was stronger than he. They’d both break, but he’d break half a minute sooner. Ugh! it was bad!”

Hoyting breathed in the wind that blew gently against us off the Mediterranean waves. “You don’t know anything about heat. Dry heat doesn’t matter. When there’s nothing but steam to breathe--everything hot and vaporous and reeking--temperate people lose their poise. Soerabaya was like holding your head over a teakettle. Yes, I was sorriest for Dorrien. But why didn’t they go to the mountains and have it out, if they had to, in paradise?”

He was silent for some moments over his vermouth. I didn’t interrupt. I knew the rest would come. Uneasy reminiscence of the kind then wrinkling his face would only expedite his narrative. When he began again, it was abruptly, with a change of tone; but his eyes had never moved from the harbor lights.

“I was sorriest for Dorrien. I asked him over to smoke on my porch. Your porch is your sitting-room, you know, and you don’t go inside until you have to. I said, ‘Let’s throw bananas to the monkeys.’ The heat had gone to my head a little, too--heat and annoyance. He moved off at once. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can’t I come and throw bananas to the monkeys?’ said Mrs. Dorrien. ‘Of course.’ We were all unnaturally serious, you see--a bad sign. I was in it, then, for as long as they chose to stay. What fool invented hospitality, I wonder?

“Dorrien had a little sense left. He began at once. ‘I’ve got a case of conscience to put to you, Hoyting.’ Even then I hoped I could stave it off.

“‘Conscience is a local matter,’ I answered; ‘territoriality of law. Don’t appeal to me. I’m an outsider.’

“‘Aren’t we all in Soerabaya together?’ Her voice rasped its way in.

“‘Yes; but I hope you don’t mean to decide anything according to Soerabaya.’

“‘Do you really think at the moment we’re capable of doing otherwise?’ She had me there: it was the mean truth. We weren’t. That reeking heat would decide for us. I don’t think she had meant him to appeal to me, but I fancy she didn’t mind. If he hadn’t done it, she would have. It was inevitable.

“Dorrien went on: ‘I had a letter when the mails came in two days ago, offering me a big post. Agatha and I don’t agree about it.’

“‘You don’t think it big enough?’ I was so relieved that I thought I could speak lightly--Heaven forgive my folly! If it was just some little feud of their ambitions, they’d be all right as soon as they were off the land. But her face didn’t relax.

“‘He has been offered the chance of exiling himself on Molokai with eight hundred lepers.’ She had brought the jangling tones into a kind of ironic gamut. ‘_That_ is the kingdom he is offered. And he thinks--my God! he wants to go!’ She broke down utterly and wept, great sobs, like a man’s, coming up from her chest and shaking her frail body. Women don’t usually cry that way; there’s trouble in it when they do.

“‘But he isn’t going.’ It was only decent to comfort her. ‘You say you are sailing for Europe.’

“Dorrien did not speak. Her sobs slowed gradually. She was making a terrible effort for the power to speak coherently, to get in her arguments, her pleas, her threats. I suppose I was her last dim substitute for public opinion. She was trying to bring the world to bear on him in Soerabaya, and there was only I to be the world.

“Now, how could I have known I was going to run into a thing like that, out there on the other edge of Java? Do I look like Mrs. Grundy? She hated me, mind you; she was terribly afraid of me; she couldn’t a bit trust me to see the thing her way; but there was no one else. I was an American, and I had had the bad luck to know Dorrien long before. She wasn’t trying any feminine wiles; she was just pleading for civilization, as she understood it, against mad and monstrous ideas that she hadn’t dreamed existed, except inaccessibly. Caste goes deeper than sex--among us, anyhow. I don’t know what she thought about Dorrien, really. Probably he merely seemed to her, for the moment, to have obliterated deliberately all his caste-marks. I’ve always held that, if a man did the work, it wasn’t up to the woman to tell him how to do it; and I remembered how Dorrien had felt about leprosy. Probably he could do good work there. I fancied he knew what he wanted. Some one had to be at Molokai; why, or why not, Dorrien?

“I looked at him. He was sitting perfectly straight and uncomfortable, his mad eyes fixed, as if they were glass, on the palm-boughs out beyond the smoky porch-lamp. Nothing to be done there. And when I turned back to her, I simply--oh, abominably, I grant you--laughed aloud. The notion of expecting a woman like that to live on a leper island! It had been bad enough to see her in Soerabaya. I was sorry, fundamentally and genuinely sorry, for Dorrien; but it ought to have been patent even to him that Mrs. Dorrien couldn’t go to Molokai. Nothing but an exclusive love, the kind we’ve all heard about and never experienced, would have made her do it. She and Dorrien had nothing of that sort to go upon, I was absolutely sure.

“‘But you’re sailing.’ I clung to Dorrien’s explicit words.

“‘By Heaven, I’m not!’ His lips just moved. He looked like a statue conceived in madness, carved with scorn.

“‘I grant some one has to go’--she was apparently trying to be extraordinarily generous--‘but why he? It’s not his place or his life. It’s not what he’s fit for. It’s not asked of him. He has me; he has Virginia. Virginia!’ She had turned to me, her shoulder blotting out Dorrien. It seemed that they had to communicate through me; they had ceased to address each other. ‘Has he a right,’ she went on, ‘to take us to a place like that? Has a husband, a father, no responsibilities? Even if I don’t matter, must Virginia live and die among those monsters?’

“How could I say, I ask you, that Virginia must? I had never seen Virginia. I had nothing to do with these people. Why didn’t they see that? I don’t believe, you know, that they ever saw it. I might have been Rhadamanthus in a poor disguise.

“Mrs. Dorrien stopped, and cried quietly into her handkerchief. Her husband took up the talk.

“‘God knows I’ve wasted life long enough. It’s a chance in a million, man--the one chance in the whole world. Give me ten years there, and I’ll know, I tell you. I’ll find a cure. I’ll track the filthy germ. I’ve never had half a show, pulling old ladies through bronchitis. It’s no work for a man. I’ve been ashamed to look at myself in a glass for two years. I’ve gone a little way; I swear I’m on the right track. It’s the kind of thing I can do. I haven’t a bedside manner; Agatha has that. Those poor wretches don’t need a bedside manner. They need some one to avenge them. She’s ambitious. Well, let her give me my head for ten years, and she can cover herself with my medals. We’ll come back, when I’ve done my work, and she can queen it all over Europe.’

“He was incoherent, overweening, inconsequent, but terrifyingly in earnest. More probably than not, she would have a suicide on her hands, I thought, if she did take him home. It didn’t look as if she would get him past Suez.

“Mrs. Dorrien sat with her hands folded in her lap, breathing hard, but quite silent. They were appalling, that pair. I’d have given a good deal to hear a little repartee just then. But the mortal insult would have been to suggest that either one should speak to the other. The queerest night I ever spent, and I’ve been through some I didn’t believe in, myself, the next day. Well, all I wanted was to have it over; I didn’t care how brutally I hastened it.

“‘Why don’t you go alone?’

“He looked at me then; he had only spoken to me before. Dominated by that look, I began to piece together my own scraps of traveller’s knowledge. Then I kicked myself. I didn’t need all the unphraseable explanations that gathered silently in his eyes. I knew, of course, what he just refrained from replying. It was the last leash on him--the thinnest thread of control. If that snapped, if I jerked it, we should be saying, all three of us together, monstrous things. I held hard on the leash.

“‘He can’t go alone.’ Her voice was just a whisper. She was shocked to the core of her, and I saw that, to that extent at least, they had had it out. I was sorry for her then--sorry without regard to my fast-ebbing admiration. She had been flung on the horns of a dilemma, and they were goring her cruelly. They couldn’t, poor devils, get peace with honor.”

Hoyting ordered more vermouth, and lighted the next of the undiminishing procession of cigarettes. He wandered away from the actual story for a little, and I let him, knowing that in the end he would get his fox and goose and bag of corn all safe across, like the man in the riddle.

“Dorrien wasn’t the sort of man you’d expect to find in scientific research. He was too human, too impressionable. A scientist oughtn’t to notice Javanese singing girls. They ought to be to him as the female of the flounder. I don’t mean for a minute that Dorrien was a cad, that he was anything but--complete. He was a scientist of sorts, at least by predilection; but he was also healthy and immensely masculine. He couldn’t personify Science and then treat her as if she were really a woman. He knew the difference. I’ve seen men who didn’t. They are the lucky ones. Dorrien was unlucky: he had no end of conflicting desires. He wanted abnormal conditions _plus_ a normal life; and he wanted a little fame thrown in. I dare say he also wanted Mrs. Dorrien and the little girl whose teeth had to be straightened. Just at that moment, he thought he wanted more than all the rest a chance to do his appointed work. But he was honest, damn him! honest. He knew that Science could never, for him, be a mistress, and he wasn’t a man to exist on merely Platonic relations. I’ve always admired him for not blinking facts when he must have been sorely tempted to. But what they must have gone through, of bitter exposition, those two, in the days of my absence! I didn’t see any way out of it. He wanted incompatible goods. And so, by heavens! did she.”

Hoyting dropped his chin on his chest and closed his eyes wearily for a moment.

“If she had been a different sort, even, they might have pulled through. But look at it. She was ambitious and sentimental. She wanted his success. She’d have been willing enough to send him out alone if he had lied to her about possibilities. He had had the honesty to realize them, and the utter brutality to tell her--that was perfectly clear from the state of both of them. Probably he didn’t think he had a right to withhold the information from her; or he might have thought it would be a clinching argument for her going with him. If you ask me, I think she was very near hating him for having enlightened her as to the dangers. Women of her kind don’t like such assumptions. And it didn’t give her a _beau rôle_. There wasn’t anything, and wouldn’t be, God knows, for her to be jealous of. But there was everything prospectively, if he went, to pity him for. A wife couldn’t fling him into that; not when he wouldn’t even pose, not when he didn’t scruple to say what she was flinging him into. However much she may have wanted to say ‘Go,’ she couldn’t. If he had only pretended to be other than he was, she could have made it out to herself that both of them were martyrs, he to his work, she to--oh, well, to the little girl. She was the kind of woman who could condone an infidelity, I imagine, in a cold, superior way; but her principles would hardly permit her to face it beforehand. And that wasn’t all--that wasn’t all. Of course she had asked him first of all--she would have--about the danger of infection; and it was evident from every suffering line in both their faces that he hadn’t hesitated to dot his i’s. She knew what was dangerous and what was not, and she knew that if Dorrien went alone he was lost. I pitied her. She had hunted, during two days, for a _beau rôle_, and she couldn’t find one. Her only hope was to get him home and trust that he would get over it, like some kind of fit. And he wouldn’t; that was clear. The only suggestion I could think of was that they should divorce, and that he should proceed to find another woman who adored him, and take her out there. That isn’t the kind of suggestion you make to people; it doesn’t sound sympathetic. It isn’t practical, either; it leaves too much to be done too quickly. Moreover, it had almost certainly never occurred to either of them that they didn’t love each other as much as any other two people did.

“And they expected me to say something! They had spent forty-eight hours trying, quite in vain, to find a way out, and then had the appalling cheek and the pathetic confidence to bring it to me!

“‘I can’t argue this matter,’ I said finally. ‘You must see that.’

“They didn’t see it. It was a perfectly impersonal clutch they were strangling me with. They hadn’t any notion of their own dismaying breach of reticence. We were all in Soerabaya--which was hell--together; and conventions didn’t exist. Also, I couldn’t any more get out of it than if we had been more literally in Hell and they ineluctable and imperishable shades. I had to go on.

“‘She won’t go,’ I said at last to Dorrien. ‘And you absolutely can’t go alone?’

“He didn’t speak, but he turned his eyes on me again. I seemed to read in them that the question had been put to him before, and that he would not again go through the agony of answering. Not that the answer in those silent eyes wasn’t clear. Then, after a little, he did speak. ‘Ask her if she counsels me to go alone.’

“My very spirit revolted at the way they had laid hands on me. Anything I said was bound to be damnable for one or the other of them. I swore I’d get out of the thing non-partisan if I insulted them both.

“‘I won’t ask her,’ I said. ‘I won’t have anything more to do with it. It’s a devilish mess, and one of you has to go under. But I won’t lift a finger to determine which one. You may take that from me straight, both of you.’

“We ought by rights to have been tearing about that porch dramatically; but we all sat perfectly still in sheer exhaustion, dripping with sweat and breathing in quiet, regular pants. I wish--I wish it had never been.

“‘You won’t even tell him that he can’t go at all? Such a simple thing as that?’ She flung out her hands in a queer, uncertain way. She was very far gone.

“‘I won’t tell him anything. Good night.’ I pulled myself out of my chair and leaned over the railing. I don’t know how long I looked down into the hot little garden. I didn’t mean to be a beast. Were you ever in a place where you couldn’t stir a muscle without committing murder? No, I suppose not. Well, that’s what I felt like. It seemed inevitable that pretty soon they’d trap me into saying something that sounded like advice; and it looked to me as if any advice, once followed, would be fatal. There wasn’t any right way out, they being what they were. It was up to whatever Power had made them. It was absolutely _not_ up to me. I began counting lizards on the railing. Every bone in my body ached with stiffness when I finally turned round. They had gone.”

Hoyting lighted a cigarette. He had finished it, and lighted another, before he spoke again.

“The next morning I got off on a filthy little tramp steamer at four o’clock. It wasn’t a steamer the Dorriens could possibly take. I don’t think they would even have known about it. Then I made straight for China; I was pretty sure neither one of them would think of China. And by that time I had got back nerve enough to be quite sure that I had done right in keeping my hands off. But--I never asked any one what became of them. Now you say you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know. Dorrien’s dead.”

“They went back?”

“Yes, they went back. That was eight years ago?”

Hoyting began to count up the continents on his fingers. “Australia last year--South America--Siberia--the Transvaal, before that. Yes, it would have been eight years ago.”

To my surprise, I found myself reluctant to bring out the truth. Hoyting, as he talked, had been so vividly aware of the Dorriens, had made it so evident how real to him and repellent was that remembered scene, that my hesitation was not unnatural.

“He practised at home for a number of years, doing some research when he had time. He went back into public work to some extent--boards and commissions again. Her family seemed to manage him entirely.” Then I stopped.

Hoyting waited. The lights in the harbor began to lessen, great patches of shadow spacing them. I waited, too, to gather strength. It had all become horrible to me now, and permeated with the sordidness that spoils tragedy.

“He shot himself.”

“He cared so much as that?” Hoyting’s huge finger flicked off the cigarette ash before there was need.

“He had--oh, I only heard it, Hoyting!” I cried. “I don’t know the whole of it. Who does? But those damned Hewells took it up--I suppose by way of condoning the suicide--and made a martyr of him.”

“Go on.”

“He had somehow in the laboratory--you know the danger; and Dorrien was a reckless chap, those last years, not like himself, his friends said. They all used to worry over his riding, his shooting, his yachting--everything.”

I broke off. It was extremely hard to tell the man who apparently knew most about Dorrien, even though he had never called Dorrien friend. “He had somehow, through a cut, the slip of an instrument--I don’t know the sickening scientific detail of it--inoculated himself with a disease he was working with. He made nothing of it at the time, I’m told. Everybody had forgotten it. Suddenly--when he found out what he was in for, I suppose--he shot himself. After what you’ve told me, I should say it was probably from disgust. Why blame him?”

“What was it?” Hoyting had not stirred, but his voice had changed immeasurably.

“Tuberculosis.”

The great shoulders shrugged once. I felt impelled to explain--a miserable little feverish strut. And before Hoyting, of all men!

“It gives the measure of his revolt--a man who had cured so many, and could have cured himself mechanically, you might say; a man whose special business in life had been to snap his fingers at that particular plague. That’s why, until you told me all this, I never understood. Now it’s clear enough.”

I shut my eyes, glad to put the ironic thing away, glad to be at peace, with no further need to speak of it. When I opened them again, I was alone. Hoyting, the foot-loose, was gone.

THE CASE OF PARAMORE