Part 10

“I can’t tell you how I came to hate the Portuguese before we left that mean little hole. You laughed at me once for rending Blakely to shreds over Camoëns. I’ve read Camoëns in my day and hated him, as if something in me had known beforehand that I was eventually to have good reason to loathe every syllable of that damned language. My stock is Southern, too--South Carolina--and you can imagine how I enjoyed seeing, at every turn, the nigger the better man. Portugal ought to be wiped off the map of Africa.

“Well--I got our arrangements made as well as I could. It was lucky I had left handsome margins for everything, because the graft was sickening. They wouldn’t let your own approved consignments leave the dock without your handing out cash to at least three yellow dogs that called themselves officials. I had hoped to find some sort of female servant for her--I shook at the thought of having her go off on a trip like that without another woman to do things for her that I, in the circumstances, couldn’t very well do. But there wasn’t a wench of either color or any of the intervening shades that a nice woman could have had about her. She was very plucky about it all. As I say, she had made her great point, and didn’t care. The morning we started, she stuck a gentian in my buttonhole and another in hers--and she smiled. A smile of hers carried very far. And so we started.

“I needn’t give you the details of our trip. People write books about that sort of thing; keep diaries of their mishaps, and how Umgalooloo or Ishbosheth or some other valuable assistant stole a bandanna handkerchief and had to be mulcted of a day’s pay--all very interesting to somebody, no doubt. To tell the truth, the concrete details maddened me; and we seemed to live wholly in concrete terms of the smallest. I, who had planned for my _wanderjahr_ a colossal, an almost forbidden intimacy with Platonic abstractions! I had always rather meant to go in for biology eventually, but I got over that in Africa; we were much too near the lower forms of life. And to this day, as you well know, I can’t bear hearing Harry Dawes talk about folk-lore. He’s driven me home from the club a good many nights.”

I caught my breath. It was almost uncanny, the way Chalmers’s little idiosyncrasies were explaining themselves, bit by bit. I felt the cold wind of a deterministic law blowing over my shoulder--as cold as Calvinism. I had always loved temperament and its vagaries. Now I wasn’t sure I wanted the light in Chalmers’s eyes explained, to the last gleam. Mightn’t any of us ever be inexplicable and irresponsible and delightful?

“Of course they had given us maps in Mozambique--not official ones, oh, no! Those would have come too high. The Nyassa Company had to pretend to be amiable, but they didn’t fork out anything they didn’t have to. Small loss the official maps were, I fancy; but those we had weren’t much good. It wasn’t, however, a difficult journey to make, from that point of view, and the cheerful savage who had abandoned our hero swore he knew where to take us. In eight weeks, we reached the spot that he declared to be the scene of the death from fever. I dare say he was right; he knew the villages along the way; he had described the topography, more or less, before we started, and it tallied. We pitched camp and spent three horrible days there. It is needless to say that we might as well have hunted for the poor fellow’s bones under the parapet at Ravello. I saw--and if you’ll believe me, I positively hadn’t seen before--what moonshine it all was. She ought to have been put to bed and made to pray God to make her a good girl, before she dragged anybody--even me--out on such a wild-goose chase as that. There wasn’t a relic--except certain signs of some one’s having cleared ground there before, and one or two indescribable fragments, picked up within a five-hundred-yard radius, that might have been parts of tin cans. Why should there have been? If there had been any plunder, natives would have found and taken it, as they would inevitably have removed and destroyed any corporal vestiges out of sheer superstition and hostility. I had learned their little ways, since Ravello. The rank soil in the wet season would have done the rest. I wondered--cruelly, no doubt--whether she had expected him to bury himself with a cairn atop and a few note-books (locked up in a despatch-box) decorously waiting for her in his grave. On the strength of the savage’s positive declaration that at such a distance--two days--from the last village, beyond such a stream, beneath such and such a clump of trees, he had seen the white man fall in the last delirium, she searched the place, as you might say, with a microscope. I thought it extremely likely that the fellow was lying for the sake of our pay, but I had to admit that I couldn’t prove it. Certainly, his information was the only thing we could reasonably go on; we couldn’t invest all Portuguese East Africa with an army and set them to digging up every square inch of soil in that God-forsaken country. If this clue failed, we could only return. But there was a moment when, in her baffled anguish, I think she could have taken a good close-range shot at the inscrutable nigger who had been with him, and had left him, and could not even bring us to his body. The girl on the stage to-night was like that, though you don’t believe it. Vague, indeed! Maude Lansing’s a fool if she keeps her on.

“You see”--Chalmers shifted his position and, ever so little, his tone of voice. It was extraordinary how straight he went with his story, considering that he had never told it before. He seemed to have dragged it out from some receptacle, intact, not a thread frayed, in perfect order, ready to spread before me. The pattern was as clear as if it were just off the torturesome loom. He seemed to know it by heart.

“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.