Part 9

“Did you think her better than Maude Lansing?” It was something new, at least, to have him notice a woman so closely.

Chalmers tasted his _pâté_ and half-nodded approvingly at it.

“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. She is the only woman I have ever seen who looked like the girl I married.”

I set down my glass quickly. I had drunk most of the whiskey, and therefore none of it was spilled. Chalmers married! Why--why--we knew all about him, from cradle to laboratory; or, at least, as much as men do know of other men who have no scrapes to be got out of. I looked narrowly at Chalmers. Was it possible that he had been lying low all these years, with the single intention of perpetrating eventually the supreme joke? And if he was merely a humorist of parts, why had he not assembled the crowd? Why had he selected only one of his intimates? His intimates! That was precisely what we were. Yet none of us knew that he had been married. Chalmers himself might easily not have mentioned a dead wife, but no end of people, first and last, had turned up and contributed to Chalmers’s biography, and it was odd that none of them should have mentioned his bereavement. Unless----

“No one knows I am married. No one has ever known. If I told you all about it, you’d see why. And I think I shall. That girl started it all up again.”

He leaned across the table and laid his hand on my arm. His eyes glinted encouragingly at me. “Cheer up, old man! You’re not in for anything sordid. But curious--oh, very, very curious! Yes, I think, without vanity, I may say _very_ curious.... I meant what I said just now, coming out of the theatre. There aren’t but three things worth while--and I mayn’t have them. I mayn’t fight, because I might get killed before I’ve a right to; I don’t drink, for the sake of the paltry hours that might be subtracted from the sum of my years if I did; and, being married, I naturally can’t very well make love. Can I?” He turned on me with such a tone of ingenuous query that I wondered if it was a joke, after all.

I tried to be cynical. “That depends....”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t!” It was the old Chalmers who smiled at me--ingratiating, youthful, adventurous, gay. I had often wondered why Chalmers looked adventurous, his habits being, if ever any man’s were, regular to the point of monotony. It occurred to me now that perhaps he looked adventurous because he had had his adventure already. In any case, it was very satisfactory to find at last something in his life that matched with the look in his eyes--something that would take the curse off his even temperament and equable ways.

“Very, very curious,” he repeated. “And all these years I’ve wanted to tell somebody, just in case I should drop out suddenly. I’ve left written instructions, but I should really like some one to understand. It’s all rather preposterous.”

“It’s preposterous that you should suddenly be married.”

“Yes--of course. Well--I’ve got on pretty well, and I’d rather you didn’t mention it to any of the others. But if anything should turn up, you can say you knew it all along.”

“Fire ahead.”

On the strength of the narrative about to come, I ordered another high-ball. Sometimes you want something to fiddle with, something to intervene between you and your friend when it is hard for eyes to meet. But he had promised me that it should be nothing sordid, and when the drink came I set it trustfully to one side--in reserve, as it were.

“Time was, when I knocked about the world a bit. My parents were dead, I had no close kin, and there was money enough to do what I wanted to, provided I wanted something modest. I had a great notion, when I came out of Göttingen, of a _wanderjahr_. Only I was determined it shouldn’t be hackneyed. There was a good deal of Wilhelm Meister in it, all the same, with a strong dash of Heine. I fancied myself, rather, at that time; wanted to be different--like every other young pilgrim. I didn’t want the common fate--not I. I hadn’t any grievance against the world, because I had a complete faith in the world’s giving me what I wanted, in the end. But I distinctly remember promising myself to be remarkable. I shan’t, of course, unless there is something in spectrum analysis. I used to quote Heine to myself:

‘Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt! Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz, Und jetzo bist du elend.’

Of course, I never believed that I should be ‘unendlich elend,’ but I should have preferred that to anything mediocre. At that age--you know what we’re like. The man who would look at the stars by daylight and tumbled into the well. That’s us, to the life.

“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people--or, at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were American--were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant, casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian interlude in my _wanderjahr_, more or less for the sake of doing so. I had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I stayed on even more because I liked the villa--an old Saracen stronghold on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort--than because I liked them, though they were pleasant enough.

“At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea. It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially.

“Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East Africa. He had gone into the interior--more or less--on a job for the Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman--or Lourenço Marques, either. _I_ know. Damn their yellow, half-breed souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I imagine, had not been very far off.

“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was, up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying, exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country. Can’t you imagine those letters--in quaint, bad English, on thin paper, worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and cried over? I never saw them, but I can.

“Well--I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly, and considered herself virtually dead--entirely negligible at least, as pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively overweening about some special thing. The damned worms _won’t_ turn--any more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her.

“She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already stricken, got away--probably considering that there was a lively curse on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal, and by the time they turned in a report--to use formal language in a case where it is a sore misfit--there was nothing to be done. I didn’t get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all, where it belongs.”

Chalmers stopped--he had been talking steadily--and lighted a cigarette. I took the opportunity to sip a little whiskey. Through his introduction, I had been staring at him fixedly. My own cigarette had burned to ashes in my fingers; when I felt the spark touch them, I dropped the thing, still without looking at it, into the tray. He hunched his shoulders in the speckled brown coat and bent forward, his arms folded on the table. The little movement of his head from side to side was very like a tortoise.

“Well, you see ... of course she couldn’t go alone, and of course there was no one to see her through a thing like that. I am sure she hadn’t money enough to pay any one for going with her. If she had tried to go, she wouldn’t have succeeded in doing much except get into the newspapers. She had sense enough to realize it, or the C.’s had sense enough to make her. But if she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t do anything else. She simply sat and brooded, looking seaward. She apparently intended, at least, not to let go of her idea. She may have had some notion of mesmerizing the universe with her obsession--just by sitting tight and never, for a moment, thinking of anything else. There she sat, anyhow, and Madame C. sent out her doves in vain. They all came back from the parapet, drenched with Mediterranean spray. So it went on. The girl might have been watching for some fabulous creature to rise up from the waves and take her to her goal. She would cheerfully have embarked for East Africa on a dolphin, I think. At all events, she wouldn’t leave her parapet, she wouldn’t leave the villa, she wouldn’t descend to the conventional plane. I don’t mean that she didn’t talk like a sane woman; I mean only that she sat at the heart of her obsession, and that when you came within a few feet of her you knocked up against it, almost tangibly. A queer thing to meet, day after day.... It ended by my being distinctly impressed.

“Very like the girl in the play! Just the same blonde vagueness, just the same effect of being cast inevitably for an unimportant, a merely supplementary part. But one is never fooled twice by that sort of thing. I tell you Maude Lansing will find herself some day doing chambermaid to that girl’s heroine! If I was impressed, it was by the _cul-de-sac_ she had got herself into. She couldn’t go forward, and she wouldn’t go back. She sat there, waiting for the world to change. In the end--after Madame C. had wrung her hands for your benefit a few hundred times--you began to damn the world for not changing. It seemed to be up to the perverse elements to stop the regular business of the cosmos and waft her to her goal.

“I could hardly have talked to her about anything but her plight. It was a week or two before I talked to her at all; but, in the end, I found that if I wanted to continue to come to the villa, I should have to brave that presence on the parapet--domesticate myself in that pervasive and most logical gloom. So I did. She was a positive creature; there wasn’t the faintest hint of apology or deprecation in her manner. She would see you on business, and only on business--the business being her tragedy. Don’t misunderstand--” (Chalmers frowned a little as he looked at me.) “She was neither lachrymose nor hard; she was just infinitely and quite decently preoccupied with her one desire and her helplessness to achieve it. She didn’t magnify herself. It isn’t magnifying yourself to want a proper funeral for the person you love, is it? She was even grateful for sympathy, though she didn’t want a stream of words poured out over her. She--she was an awfully good sort.”

Chalmers dug his cigarette-end almost viciously into the tray, and watched the smoke go out. We both watched the smoke go out....

“Before long, we had talked together a good deal, especially during the hour before dinner, when the sun and the sea were so miraculous that any other miracle seemed possible. Such easy waters to cross, they looked, in the sunset light! You forgot the blistering leagues beyond; you forgot that it took money and men and courage and endurance, and all kinds of things that are hard to come by, to get to the goal she was straining for. I suppose it wouldn’t be honest to say that she ever passed her personal fervor on to me--I couldn’t, in the nature of things, care so much about recovering that poor chap’s bones as she did--but I did end by wishing with all my heart that I could help. Little by little it seemed a romantic thing to do--to go out searching for the spot where he had died. Of course, getting the bones themselves, except for extraordinary luck, was all moonshine; but she didn’t see that, and her blindness affected me. Finally, my _wanderjahr_ began to shape itself to new horizons. Why shouldn’t I have a try?... I dare say I posed a little as a paladin, though not, I hope, to her. Anyhow, I decided to broach it.

“I don’t suppose you can understand it--any of it--for the simple reason that I can’t describe her. She was the kind of person who sees very clearly the difference between the possible and the impossible; who never attempts anything but the possible; yet who sets every one about her itching to attain the impossible. Not ‘for her sake,’ in the conventional sense; no, not that at all. Simply, she set before you so clearly the reason why a thing couldn’t be done that you longed to confute her, just as you sometimes long to confute fate. She was as convincing and as maddening as a natural law. Each of us, sooner or later, has tried to get the better of some little habit of the universe. You felt like saying: ‘Stop looking like that; I’ll do it--see if I don’t.’

“That was the spirit in which I went to her, late one afternoon, on her parapet. The C.’s had been away all day and were not to return until evening. Madame C. had exasperated me the night before by proposing, quite baldly and kindly, that the girl be decoyed into a sanatorium. The C.’s couldn’t keep her much longer--they were off for Biskra--and it was up to me. I had lain awake half the night, exploring the last recesses of disaster into which my idea might lead me; I had sailed far out on the bright waters all day, perfecting my courage. I could have written as bitter a little allegory about it all as Heine himself. Secretly, in a tawdry corner of my mind, I thought Wilhelm Meister was a poor stick compared with me. But it was honest romance; I was willing to pay.”

I finished my whiskey as Chalmers’s voice dropped and died down, and he busied himself a little nervously with lighting a pipe. His green eyes had flecks of brown in them. Once more, in the speckled brown figure opposite me, I saw the tortoise beyond the reach of biology, which upholds the world, which carries the burden of all human flesh and spirit.

“I told her that I was ready to go; that I could scrape together enough money for the expedition without entirely impoverishing myself. My figures hadn’t been quite so reassuring as that when I totted them up on a piece of hotel paper at dawn, but at least I had left magnificent margins for everything.

“She smiled--I had never seen her smile before, and at the moment it made her thanks seem profuse--but she shook her head. She was beautifully simple about it. I liked her for that.

“‘It wouldn’t do. Not that it isn’t divinely good of you! But, you see, the point is that--’ she stopped.

“‘Well?’ My heart was beating hard. I had become enamored of my idea. I no more wanted to be baulked than she did.

“‘The point has always been that I should go myself.’

“‘Then go yourself!’

“‘Carrying off all your money? I can’t--Don Quixote.’ There was nothing playful in her tone; and she had me all the more because there wasn’t. She was merely registering facts. Even the ‘Don Quixote’ was, to her mind, a fact that she was registering. She was splendidly literal.

“‘Come with me. I don’t propose that you should go alone.’

“She frowned a little; and in that frown I read all the weariness of the hours of past talk with Madame C. Presently she looked up at me, very kindly, a little questioningly, as if for the first time my personality in itself interested her.

“‘You know that--even for me--that is impossible.’

“I knew what she meant: that she would have been ready for any abnegation, being, herself, as I have said, negligible; but that the world must be able to pick no flaw in the rites paid to the shade.

“‘If you will many me, it is not impossible.’

“That is what I said--just like that. I had determined that nothing should be an obstacle. She didn’t change her posture or her expression by the fraction of a millimetre. She looked silently past me at the ilexes as if she had not heard. But she had heard. I think that at that moment--no, I don’t except all that came after--I touched the highest point of my romance.... She thought for a moment or two while I waited. I suppose she was considering what the world would say to that, and deciding that the world would have no right to say anything; that it would be, and legitimately so, between her and me. The dead themselves, of course, can be trusted to understand. It didn’t take her long--you see she was a girl of one idea, and of one idea only.

“‘Very well, I will marry you.’ The words came as simply from her lips as any others. We didn’t at that time, or at any time before our marriage, have any discussion of the extremely--shall I say?--individual nature of our relation. That was the one thing we couldn’t have talked of. It would have been--you see?--quite impossible for either to imply, by approaching the subject, that the other perhaps didn’t understand. I couldn’t even be so crass as to say: ‘Look here, my dear girl, of course I quite recognize that you don’t in any sense belong to me’; or she be so crass as to say in turn: ‘I know it.’ No: I suppose I have never been so near the summit as I was that evening after she had ‘accepted’ me, and we had both silently laid our freedom on the altar of that dead man. Neither of us realized all the inevitable practical results of such a compact. We simply thought we had thrown the ultimate sufficing sop to Cerberus, and that all our lives we should hear him contentedly crunching it. I am quite sure that her mind turned as blank a face to the future as mine. Quite.”

His voice rang authoritatively across the table. I said nothing. What could I say? What is the proper greeting when you cross the threshold of such a habitation? I offered him a silence that was at least respectful.

“Well, I won’t bore you with too many details. She pulled herself together and said her visit must end. We did not tell the C.’s. We merely let them get off to Tunis. It would not have been easy for her to explain to Madame C. all the things that we had never condescended to explain to each other. She was a Catholic, by the way. We were married by a parish priest in--no, on second thoughts, I won’t even tell you where. The place has kept the secret hitherto. It is better so. I left her at once to make arrangements for the quest. It took some time and a good deal of frenzied journeying to realize on my securities. I gave her a letter of credit, so that she could be in all incidental ways independent of me. That was necessary, because I was to go out to Mozambique first, and she was to follow only when I sent for her. Very soon, you see, I began to realize the practical inconveniences of travelling with a woman who bears your name and who is a total stranger to you. It’s damned expensive, for one thing.” Chalmers’s smile was nearer the authentic gleam of irony than anything I had seen before during the evening.

“Well, I went. I interviewed the proper people; I saw one of the creatures who knew the spot where our man had died. Eventually I arranged the expedition. Then I cabled for her. She took the _Dunvegan Castle_ at Naples. By the time I met her at the steamer, she had grown incredible to me. I could more easily have believed her a sharer in some half-forgotten light adventure than my duly registered wife. She was unreal to me, a figure recurring inexplicably in a dream, a memory--of exactly what sort I was not quite sure. My feet lagged along the pier.... She soon set all that straight. I had wondered if the sop to Cerberus would require our seeming to kiss. She managed it somehow so that no stage kiss was necessary. She dissipated the funk into which I had fallen, by practical questions and preoccupations; she came upon my fever like a cool breeze off the sea. She had made her point; she had achieved her miracle; and in every incidental way, little and big, she could afford to show what a serviceable soul she was. She was a good thing to have about. There were times when the situation got on my nerves, in Mozambique, before we started. It’s such a small hole that we seemed always to be bumping into each other. I couldn’t make out her private attitude towards me; I used to wonder if she had any, or if she simply thought of me as a courier in her own class. I was so endlessly occupied with engaging men and beasts and camping kit and supplies--what was I but a courier? The paladin idea was fading a little; though now and then, at night, I’d look up at the Southern Cross and let the strangeness of the thing convince me all over again. I don’t think I wanted anything so commonplace as gratitude from her; but I did want in her some sense of the strangeness of our alliance, with all the things it left unsaid. Perhaps I wanted her to realize that not every man would have responded so quickly to the call of impersonal romance. I can look back on all that egotism of youth and despise it; but there’s something not wholly ignoble in an egotism that wants only good fame with one’s self and one’s secret collaborator. Anyhow, there were moments when my dedication seemed solemn; just as there were other moments when I seemed like an inadequate tenor in a comic opera. I never knew just how she hovered between those two conceptions. We were destined to see each other only by lightning-flashes--never once in the clear light of day.