Part 14

“Bad luck--nothing else. He went as far as he could. But he was no seasoned traveller, you know. He just came to grief, as any man might, there in the wilderness. The stars in their courses--and so forth. He didn’t get so far west as he had meant to. Men went back on him, maps turned out incorrect, supplies failed awkwardly, everything happened that can happen. Then his interpreter died--his one absolutely trustworthy man--and the whole game was up. He lost his head; he believed his eyes; he believed lying natives. They made game of him, I dare say, in some grim, neolithic way. They said anything and everything about marriage customs--quite different things from group to group. He had bad luck with his own men--half a dozen of them died of dysentery or something--and he had to recruit on the spot. Why on earth should they tell him the truth? It was more fun not to. And, of course, now and then he pushed into some corner where the only use they had for him was to eat him. From those places he had to withdraw speedily. It’s not an anthropologist’s business to get killed unless he can be sure of getting his note-books home. He’s more like a spy, apparently, than a soldier.

“After eight or ten beastly months, despair was reeking round him like a mist. I think he said that, himself. His mind tried to peer out through it. He got nothing but a jumble of reports from those aborigines. Time after time they’d promise to let him in on some rite, and then their faces would be shamelessly blank when he kept his appointment. They said nothing that wasn’t carefully contradicted. Certain things he did get hold of, of course. Paramore swore to me that a good bit of his book was true as truth--but not enough to prove anything, to found theories on. About three of the note-books were genuine, but they made nothing coherent, he said. He put everything down, always intending to check and sift later.”

I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going to be in your hands, and the more information you have the better. I’m not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful. I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having luck against him.”

“No,” I protested stiffly; “for lying.”

“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole business easier.”

“Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment, go further than that.

Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had been pleading with him not to stop.

“One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have been a little off his head, you know.... He wouldn’t confess his failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books; he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in some--a very few--of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And then I would contradict a few things.’

“Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful book. There were things that occurred to me--I put them in. Any one who knows any folk-lore can make up customs with his eyes shut. After a little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did. But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later--much later--at Whitaker’s place.’

“I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the idea--his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In the end his idea rode him--and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but you can work that out for yourself--how his inspiration would have come, and what would have happened.”

“But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the ‘lust of making a beautiful book’--quite the contrary.”

“Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve. _Place aux dames!_ ...

“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker. There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks before he finally started on his expedition--if you can call an unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition. The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him, least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not to have noticed the girl--rather deliberately not to have noticed her, she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out. The love affair went on all over the plantation, while Whitaker and Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled references--mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and flow of the fever.

“But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about, she had pricked his imagination once or twice--this bright creature that flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said--it was aimless nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what he believed its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.

“Well--you can see the rest from here. He went back with his big, insane idea, leaving despair farther behind him at every step. He struck straight back again to Whitaker’s place, and after nuisances and delays and impossible absurd misadventures, he got there. All the time, he carried his idea carefully intact, like a cup filled with precious liquid. He was most anxious to get to some place where he could sit down with pens and ink. He didn’t doubt Whitaker would take him in. Everything was to be completed before he sailed for England. The story would have been very different, I’m inclined to think, and Paramore might have been living to this day if the fiancé hadn’t turned out a bad lot and been shipped--or if Paramore himself hadn’t been a bit of a Puritan.

“He found Whitaker very much surprised to see him back so long before the date he had set, but only too glad to have him stay; and he also found the girl, no longer flitting about, but brooding on the bough. The rest was inevitable....

“Paramore got to work at once--making love to Joan Whitaker in the intervals, almost from the beginning. Then--mark the nature of the man--he found that the two things he was doing were incompatible. There’s no telling whether Joan Whitaker would have objected to his idea, but he seems to have been sure that she would if she knew. His idea rode him--the idea of getting the better of his bad luck. He didn’t want to cheat his fellow scientists, who had done him no harm, but he did want to cheat his mean destiny. He personified it like an enemy, I fancy. It must have been an obsession with him. Day by day, he saw better what the book--his revenge--was becoming; and in the end there was no mistaking it for a monstrous, magnificent lie, out of all proportion to what he had first intended. Some men might have managed even so--the men who keep life in water-tight compartments. Not Paramore. He didn’t see his way to offering Joan Whitaker a liar for a husband. It apparently never occurred to him to put the case before her. There are very few cases you can put to a girl of eighteen. And, as I’ve said, his feeling for her was all reverence and illusion and reversion to type. Any niceish girl would have done the trick for him; and any man would have looked eligible to her smarting conceit. But it was no marriage of true minds--just an affair of circumstance and of innocent senses, riotously collaborating. Madame Pothier--a finished creature--would have been a very different matter. But he had never seen her then....

“Oh, well; you see how it went. He was virtually staking everything on that book, which was virtually writing itself, ‘like a damned planchette,’ he told me. But he couldn’t let her stake anything on it; he couldn’t even ask her to. Moreover, it was one of those inconvenient situations where no explanation except the right one is of the slightest use. So he packed up his manuscript and left for some address, that he didn’t give, in New South Wales.”

“Like that?” I asked. The sudden turns of the thing were beginning to interest me, in spite of my Pharisaism.

“Oh, there were alarums and excursions, of course. But I had to guess them myself. Paramore’s mind had other things to dwell on. You can see it all, though: the girl, who had thought he was drifting towards a proposal; the man, Whitaker, who wanted his daughter settled and happy, and thought Paramore would do--oh, a lot of primitive instincts that we don’t recognize until they’re baffled; Paramore behaving as well as he knew how, granted his obsession; and they choosing to consider him a blackguard. Nothing violent happened, apparently, but you can understand the zest with which Whitaker probably spoke in London. There was black hate in his truth-telling. I fancy what Paramore had done wouldn’t in the least have shocked Whitaker if it had been done by his son-in-law. He didn’t mention the girl in that famous interview, and Paramore never knew what had become of her. I don’t think he cared. He never saw Whitaker again.”

Hoyting rose and walked to the window. The gray eyes looked curiously down on the rue de Rivoli, as if, for charity, he had taken a box at a pageant that bored him.

“This isn’t in my line, you know,” he said finally, turning back--“any of it. Paramore reeked of civilization--Great Russell Street, if you like. Hang civilization! Yet he went down with fever like a sick Kruboy. Well, I must get on with this. I wouldn’t stop in Paris another night for anything you could offer me.”

He sat down, his big frame shaking the little gilded armchair. But he seemed loath to begin. His gray eyes were closed.

“How did he get to Dakar?”

Hoyting’s eyes were still closed as he answered. “That was Paramore trying to wash himself white again. He was discredited, deservedly. He had lied, deliberately and rather long-windedly. No loophole anywhere for excuse. Paramore himself was the last man to find any excuse for it. He never carried a devil’s advocate about with him. Doubtless, at home, his own conscience had returned to him, in place of the changeling conscience that had dwelt with him in the wilderness. He knew his reputation was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. But he set himself to atone. Some men, feeling as he did, would have shaved their heads and put on a hair shirt. Not Paramore--though he would have saved me a lot of nuisance if he had. No; he wanted to retrieve himself in kind, as you might say. He would spend his life and his few crumbling bits of fortune in _doing_ the thing he had pretended to do. He would go to an utterly new field and stay till he’d amassed a treasure--priceless, authentic facts, each an unflawed pearl. That’s why he went to the Upper Niger--and here is his treasure.”

Hoyting opened his eyes suddenly, bent forward, and tossed the packet across to me.

“There you have it all. He went, he did the incredible thing, and then, quite properly, he died. The rest--the rest is mere drama.” He sat back.

I put the packet down. “Do you mean that these are his documents, and that you believe in them? Have you read them?”

“Have I read them? Do I look as if I would read an anthropologist’s note-books? Of course, I can see the humor of throwing over Christianity, lock, stock, and barrel, only to spend your life studying totemism--and on top of that, calling it a ‘career.’ If you think the absurdity of it is lost on me, you’re quite mistaken. But I would be willing to take my oath before the Last Tribunal that there isn’t a false word in that whole pile. Paramore did it--the more honor to him. When it comes to expecting any one else to believe it--I’m not such a fool. But I should think my word might suffice for you.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

Hoyting lighted another cigarette, folded his arms on the table, and looked at me. “I knew everything there was to know about Paramore before he died,” he affirmed. “I didn’t in the least want to know any of it, but it was inevitable. He had no control over his mental muscles--complete paralysis of the reticent nerve, you might say. I know, I tell you. If you don’t choose to believe it--you’ll have doubted my word, that’s all. I have all the evidence there is; and why should I lie about it?”

“Oh, I believe it--but it’s extraordinary.”

“Should I be here if it weren’t extraordinary? It’s preposterous. But there it is.”

“And the rest, you said, was drama?”

Hoyting looked out. “Let’s go to a café,” he said; “I want a rest.”

I assented. There is something in the transitoriness of a café crowd that quiets Hoyting. No one can be expected to stay overnight in a café. He likes the restlessness, the ridiculous suggestion that every one else may be as foot-loose as he. Besides, Hoyting is always restive under the strain of a story; he chafes at the bounds and limits of any rounded episode. He needs to draw breath and come back to it, as it were, from very far. So we ordered things; sitting on the very edge of the boulevard, we sipped and watched for an hour. In the end I saw signs of his return to the matter in hand.

“Beauty--” he began suddenly, pushing his glass aside, “it’s something I never see. But now and then a man or a woman delights me curiously. Madame Pothier was like that. She showed you what civilization of the older sort can do when it likes. And Paramore saw it, too. He was clean gone on her. He would have told her everything if he had had any right to. I said it wasn’t a silly tale of woman’s ennobling influence, didn’t I? No more it was. Yet he saw her as soon as he reached Africa, and I am sure he carried her image into the interior with him--as he once did Joan Whitaker’s, only with an immense difference, after all. This time he brought back truth instead of lies. So at least it couldn’t have been a bad image to live with.

“I got all this that I’ve been telling you, in bits and snatches, while I sat with him. The fever didn’t seem so bad at first--the doctor thought we could pull him through. You absolutely never know. I never thought he would pull through. Those very first questions of his, when he sat peering out at me through the mosquito-netting of his bed, didn’t seem to come from a man who had life before him. And when I had got those early details out of him, I somehow felt sure he’d go. I’m no pessimist; but I didn’t see life giving him a second chance. It was too much to hope that life would let him make good after all. And yet--he so nearly did. Damn fever!...

“Madame Pothier did everything she could. She was a good sort. I’ve always wondered, as much as it is permitted to wonder, whether she felt anything for Paramore. If she did, I am sure that she never knew it. There are women like that, you know. I don’t mean the women who gaze out of cold, sexless depths at the fires burning above, and wonder pruriently why the fires burn. She wasn’t that kind. I mean the women who, when they become wives, remain women only for their husbands. I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to her that any man save Marcel Pothier could look upon her with romantic interest. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, but I know that it exists. A woman like that simply assumes that she is no longer a wandering lure constantly crossing the path of the male. She thinks all men’s eyes are veiled because hers are. A very pretty, pathetic ostrich trick. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but astonishingly often it does. With Paramore it did. All I mean is that she hadn’t dreamed Paramore worshipped her. She remembered him as a friend they had made two years before, and of course he was to come to them out of that pitiful Mission Hospital. No one in Dakar knew anything about Paramore’s fiasco. He wasn’t precisely famous, you see. Dakar was perfectly provincial. And Paramore was hoping, I dare say, that he could stave off the tale of his lie until he could lay before her the news of his atonement as well. The hardest thing he had to bear, probably, was dying and leaving his story to the telling of chance tongues, not knowing in what form it would eventually come to her. That, I am convinced, is why he told me so much--let his parched lips articulate those memories for me. But not once did he break down and ask me to tell her. Oh, I’ve good reason for respecting Paramore--a second-rate respect it must always be, I dare say, granted that extraordinary crumpling-up in Australia. But he never crumpled up again.

“For a day or two he hung in the balance. Then, after one exceedingly bad night, which left Madame Pothier blue under her fine eyes and white round her carved lips, he had his last coherent hours on earth....

“I shall never forget that morning. Pothier was away on duty. There were only the doctor, Madame Pothier, and I, and one or two frightened servants who wouldn’t come near. They thought it was yellow fever. Old Séraphine, Madame Pothier’s Auvergnat maid, hovered round in the corridors with a rosary. You could hear the click and shake of it in the still intervals. Once a ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce,’ cut across a delirious whispered oath. The pitiful part of it was that there was nothing to do. We just had to lift him through the agony and weakness as best we could until the coma should set in. There is nothing romantic about coast fever. It attacks you in the most sordid ways--deprives you first of dignity and then of life. Yet poor Paramore’s death-bed had a kind of nobility; perhaps because Madame Pothier was there. She was dressed in white and looked as wan and distant and compassionate as a nun. The straight black masses of her hair, arranged in an odd, angular way, looked like some kind of conventual cap. Paramore’s eyes followed her about....

“It was that morning he gave me the packet--told me where it was, made me get it out and take formal possession of it before him. Once, when the demon was leaving him a little quiet, he lifted his right hand. ‘I swear by--by all I hold sacred’ (his eyes were fixed on her, though he was speaking to me) ‘that I have told nothing there that is not true. All secondhand reports are in a note-book by themselves. It is labelled. Tell Beckwith especially about the Sabbath. Beckwith ought to follow it up. I sat in the hut by the sorcerer in his trance and waited for his spirit to come back. When he waked, he said he had delivered my message. He had delivered it. Three days later, the man I had sent for came running into the village. The sorcerer had told him, as he said he would, on the way to the Sabbath. I depose solemnly that the man came. His village was three days away. He had heard a voice at his door the night of the Sabbath--a voice that gave my message, that said it was in haste and could not stay. Very curious. Beckwith ought to know. It’s all there; but tell him. Of course, I never could get anything out of the sorcerer about the Sabbath. But Beckwith might put it in a foot-note, if they won’t print _me_.’ Then the sordid agony again.... Madame Pothier and the doctor didn’t understand English, by the way, and of course didn’t, in any case, understand the situation. They hadn’t listened to what I had listened to, all those earlier days. So when the doctor told me fussily that Paramore oughtn’t to talk and that death was only a few hours off, I paid no attention. Why shouldn’t he talk if death was so near? The only thing I could do for Paramore was to let him talk when he had strength. I sat tight and listened.”

Hoyting stopped. The lights winked out along the boulevard. Night had fallen with capricious suddenness. I ordered more drinks quietly. Hoyting was breathing hard; tired out, and, as I thought, very weary of it all, longing to slip the leash and be off. The air was cool and soft, and the crowd was thinning a little. People were dining and making ready to “go on.” I couldn’t have stirred, but that worn packet suddenly felt very heavy in my pocket.

Hoyting began sipping vermouth again. Finally he spoke. “He didn’t say a great deal more. The end was too near. But he spoke very clearly when he did speak; and whenever his eyes were open, they were fixed on Madame Pothier. Towards the last he put out his hand to me. I was holding the note-books--I shouldn’t have dared put them down so long as he was conscious. ‘There is only one woman in the world,’ he said, ‘and she belongs to Pothier. Look at her.’ I didn’t look at her, and he went on: ‘There may be other women alive, but I can’t believe it. Do you believe it?’

“He wasn’t wandering, you know. His mind had merely stripped his situation to its essentials; he was quite alone with the only facts that counted. He had summed life up, and didn’t have to keep truce any longer with mortal perspectives. He drew the real things round him like a cloak.... Absurd to talk of inconsequence; there was no inconsequence.