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