Chapter 38

The commandant of the district, a melancholy, flaccid man with a saffron-colored visage that looked like a half-deflated balloon, a martyr to prickly heat, anaemia, and monotony, peered up from under the moving punkah, to inquire of his subordinate in the doorway:

"He is still sitting there alone?"

"In the same position," the subordinate assented.

"I wish now that I hadn't shown it to him," said the commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya, the district judge, the chief of the public works, the receiver of taxes, the collector of revenues, the postmaster, the poor exile prematurely aged by the African sun, the sorry "hero on the outposts of civilization."

The subordinate shrugged his shoulders, and retorted:

"They would have told him on the coast."

"No doubt," said the commandant, giving the other a veiled look of animosity, expressing thus a little of that loathing which had gradually come to embrace everything habitual to this pitiless and violently beautiful land. And when the subordinate had withdrawn, he muttered to himself, as he returned to his apathetic contemplation of the papers on his desk, "All the same, an ideal! And I killed it for him a few days before there was any real need."

The moist heat of the equatorial summer penetrated the embrasures of the fort, and made stifling even the dim, whitewashed room where Lawrence Teck was sitting. Dusky from the sun, and seeming more aquiline than ever in his gauntness, he remained like an effigy in the suit of white duck that hung round him in loose folds, without so much as a movement of his eyes. His hand rested on a tattered copy of an English journal.

The commandant had extracted this journal from a pile of newspapers and magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid some gossip about music in America, the announcement that "the widow of Lawrence Teck, the explorer," had married the young composer, David Verne.

Raising his eyes at last toward the casement in the embrasure, Lawrence Teck saw, against a glaring turquoise sky, the fronds of a borassus palm, which seemed, like all the rest of nature, to be sleeping. He leaped to his feet, realizing that he was in Africa, still far from the coast, and that at this moment, in another hemisphere----

The walls, the sleeping borassus palm, the patch of sky, all became red.

He walked to and fro, saying to himself in what seemed a jocular tone:

"Didn't wait long. A composer. Think of that!"

He stood still, his bearded face upturned toward the casement. He let out a peal of laughter that froze the blood of the white-robed servants who had been dozing in the stone corridor. They crept beyond earshot of the stranger who, with his hips wrapped in bark cloth, had suddenly appeared on the rim of the safe world against a background of shields painted with the devices of the terrible Mambava.

But Lawrence Teck quickly recovered an external impassiveness. He sat down, and considered:

"How naïve I was. That's when the sentimentalism gushes out, at the end of long journeys, at the novelty of elegance and sophistication. One deifies them then: one gives them a place much larger than they ought to take up in life. How Muene-Motapa would laugh! He, virtually a Neolithic man, never sinks below manly thoughts: his ambitions are never enfeebled by the malady of sentimental love. So when he suffers it is like a man, not like a descendant of medieval mystics and _cavalieri serventi_."

His body relaxed, and he muttered:

"A bit of romance for her in imitation of some favorite play or book. An emotional hour with the man from Africa--and now a musical fellow."

After a sharp expulsion of his breath he resumed that immobility which extended even to his eyes. He recalled the thoughts of her that had filled his captivity, all his memories of their union which had gained, from "the pathos of distance," and from the passage of time, an immaterial, an ideal, nobility, till at last, in the poetic fancy of his lonely heart, she had become more remote and diffuse than the moonlight on the mountain peaks, more intoxicating and elusive than the odors of the equatorial flowers, an influence rather than a woman, a vague hope, a sort of sanative faith.

It was, he reflected, all one with the romanticism that had driven him to those many wanderings, the longing for what was so dissimilar to him and yet intensely congenial--the magical deserts where one suffered from heat and thirst, the gaudy jungles where death lay in wait for one, the woman who concealed beneath an appearance of perfection an incapacity for a decent period of grief. Ah, there was the perfidy more deadly to him than all the plagues and vipers and weapons of Africa!

He felt a profound revulsion from his own nature, which was flawed with this sentimentalism, this jejune expectancy. At nightfall, rising wearily from his chair, he wondered how he was to go on living with himself.

"And after all is it her fault? I was dead. No doubt she shed some tears. Because I loved her I expected too much of her."

Through the casement he saw a world fading away beneath clouds as black as ink. A purplish-gray wall of rain was swiftly approaching the fort. A pink fork of lightning stood out against the clouds: the crash of thunder was followed by a noise like a thousand waterfalls; and everything turned black.

The rolling thunder recalled to him the thunder of the Mambava drums at the Dances of the Moon; and in the darkness he remembered the voice of Muene-Motapa pleading with him to cast off the old, to become a new man, to return amid the black forebears of mankind, kill hope and even conscience, forget and be at peace. In the turmoil of the storm around the fort and in his breast he even seemed to see the king in apparition before him, and to hear the words:

"Consent, Bangana. Consent."

"Bah! as if anything in life were worth all this. All sound and fury; all pompous silliness like this storm. Presently there will not be an echo or a trace of it."

He found the door, burst out into the corridor, then walked sedately under the flickering lamps toward the commandant's rooms. That yellow-visaged man jumped up from behind his desk, stammering:

"Yes, it's dinner time."

The candles on the dinner table jarred at the peals of thunder; but Lawrence Teck sat impassive. Toward the end of the meal he vouchsafed:

"Have you reported my showing up?"

"I was going to put it on the wire to-morrow morning."

"If it could be arranged I should like to precede the news to America."

The commandant, without knowing why, felt a touch of alarm.

"Then I'll send my report direct to the governor, and mark it confidential at your request."

That night the commandant, lying under his mosquito net, wakeful from prickly heat, was haunted by the face of Lawrence Teck. "She must be very beautiful," he sighed. "Why didn't they print her picture?" And he occupied himself with trying to imagine what she looked like.

By the time he was falling asleep he had decided that she must have yellow hair and large, blue eyes. Just as he dozed off he had a ravishing impression of her--a composite of an Austrian arch-duchess, whose likeness he had admired in a periodical, and a Neapolitan singer who had overwhelmed him in a music hall at home, long ago, when the world had seemed a place stored with love, fame, and wealth, instead of with prickly heat, malaria, and shiny, black faces.

"My angel!" breathed the poor commandant of Fort Pero d'Anhaya, sleeping for the first time in many a night with an infantile smile on his countenance that suggested a half-deflated balloon.