Chapter V: Part 5

“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.

“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.

“At the instant I didn’t place him--naturally! But as soon as she turned her face to me, I did. Only one thing could have induced that look of horror--horror in every strained feature, like the mask of some one who has seen the Medusa. I started to her, but stopped almost before I started; for I saw immediately that I was the Gorgon. It was for me that her face had changed. God knows what, two minutes before, her face had been saying to that half-lifeless form. It was about _me_ that she felt like that. Since, with all the years to work it out in, I’ve seen why; but just at the moment I was overwhelmed. She sat down in a chair and covered her face with her hands. I heard the man babbling tragic and insignificant details. I can’t say I listened, but before I could pull myself together and leave, I caught mention of fever, accident, loss of memory, broken limbs, miraculous co-operation of fate for good and evil alike--the whole mad history, I suppose, from his side, of the past year. I have sometimes wished I had caught it more clearly, but just then I could take in nothing except the insulting fact that this was the man whose grave we had not found. That was what her face had told me in that horrid instant. I never saw her face again. It was still bowed on her hands when I went out of the door.

“I don’t know how I got off--I don’t remember. I suppose I had the maniac’s speed. If I hadn’t been beside myself, I think I could recall more of what I did. The patriarchal creature under whose roof it had all happened helped me. I think I gave him a good many directions about the negroes and the kit. Or I may have paid them off, myself. I honestly don’t know. I know that I left nearly all of my money with him, and started off on horseback alone. I had a dull sense that I was causing her some practical difficulties, but I also had a very vivid sense that she would kill herself if she had to encounter me again. She had looked at me as if I were a monster from the mud. And the night before, on the verandah, in the lightning....”

Chalmers stopped and looked at me. The brilliancy had gone out of his eyes. He said nothing more.

“Well?” I asked finally.

“Well?” There came a wide shrug of the shoulders, a loosening of the lips. “I got back somehow. I seemed to be riding, day and night, straight to Hell. But eventually I got to Salisbury and took a train to Beira. It was immensely steadying to take a train. I think any more of the veldt would have driven me quite definitely mad.” He stopped; then, in a moment, jerked out: “That’s all.”

“Do you mean that you’ve never heard anything more?”

“Never a word. But I know that, eventually, she drew out every penny of her letter of credit. She had hardly dipped into it when we left Europe.”

“Good God!” I don’t know why I should have sat stolidly through the rest and have been bowled over by that one detail, but I was. It made the woman extraordinarily real.

“And of course she knows several places where a letter would reach me, if she ever had reason to write,” he went on. “Perhaps you see now why I have to hang on. By holding my tongue, I’ve been grub-staking them in Arcadia, you might say--but, damn it, I know so little about it! The time might come....”

“Why haven’t you divorced her long since?”

His face hardened. “Didn’t I mention that she was a Catholic? We were married by the most orthodox _padre_ imaginable. There’s no divorce for her. She’s the kind to chuck Heaven, perhaps, but not her church. And, unfortunately”--he spoke very slowly and meditatively--“our marriage, you see, just missed being the kind that can be annulled. ‘Unfortunately,’ I say, but, even now, I’m glad--damned glad. It’s quite on the cards, you know, that some day some priest may send her back to me. I might divorce; she couldn’t. So it seems decent for me not to.”

“Well, of all the--” I got no further. The whole Laokoönesque group had now completed itself before me.

Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from _Rigoletto_. Then: “Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I have to hang on, don’t you?”

I merely compressed my lips tightly, that no word should come.

“After all,” he said, turning his head away, “I should like a chance to get back at Romance, some day. And the time may come--what with spectrum analysis and all.”

I shook my head. “You love the woman still, Chalmers.”

“Not I.” His head-shake was more vehement than mine. “But I want to be on deck if anything should turn up. I want to see it through. At least--I can’t quite see that I’ve the right to go out.”

I sighed. Chalmers had always gone his own way; and certainly in this greatest matter he would be tenacious, if ever. He seemed for the moment to have forgotten me, and sat once more, his arms folded on the table, his shoulders hunched, as beneath a burden, in the speckled brown coat, his head moving slightly from side to side--again fantastically like the tortoise that bears up the world. I didn’t quite know what to do with him.

Then a charitable impulse came to me. The bar, I knew, didn’t close until one. I ordered up a bottle of brandy. When it came I poured out enough to set the brain of any abstemious man humming. Chalmers was still staring in front of him at the table. I wanted him to sleep that night at any cost. Pursuing my impulse, I pushed the glass across to him. “Here; you’d better take this,” I said. He reached out his hand mechanically, and mechanically drank. I waited. The stuff had no visible effect on him. Five minutes later, I repeated the dose. As before, he obeyed me with a mechanical, an almost mesmerized implicitness. Then I took him home in a cab and put him to bed. I never told, myself, but it leaked out--he had such a bad hang-over--and I was much and enviously congratulated. You see, we had all tried, for five years, to get Chalmers to take a drink.

THE DIVIDED KINGDOM

It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment; like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he got from me. That part--most of it--I’ll give you in the beginning. After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles--Hoyting, his arms folded on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end--oh, as if Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told him the end--if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe the imperfectly visualized scene.

Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries, and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy, to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be bloodlessly tragic.

Agatha Hewell--that is, Agatha Dorrien--was a special case, very worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation, and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though, it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club, no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha said nothing.

Mrs. Dorrien was inexhaustibly pretty in a white and gold type, all purity and lustre; and she wore endless French tea-gowns, each lovelier than the last. They doubtless explained Dorrien’s sticking to his fat and fashionable practice when his desire was to this or that new disease out of Italy. Yet I’ve heard her take him lightly to task for letting the dust grow thick in his laboratory. She certainly didn’t think she wanted money. Nor, I fancy, in any bloated and disproportionate way did she. She was, as I say, ambitious--muddle-headedly, sentimentally, but incurably ambitious; and she seemed always, I’ve been told, to be watching his career in the hope of its suddenly flaring into the spectacular. It was she, I’ve also been told, who defended Dorrien from outraged Hewells when he broke entirely with official tuberculosis and turned his attention publicly to leprosy. There had been one of the periodic “scares”; some respectable artisan in Kansas City had developed it quite unaccountably. There was a good deal of the yellow peril in the yellow journals. They sent for Dr. Dorrien. I’ve a notion that the Misses Hewell were almost reconciled to him in that moment. Mrs. Dorrien did not go to Kansas City with her husband. She stayed at home, and explained to every one that leprosy was really becoming a public menace, that the danger should be considered, that steps should be taken, especially that research should be subsidized.

It had been a chance current that had swept me for a little into the Dorriens’ world, and my main stream of life soon swept me out of it. At the moment of my departure from America, the Kansas City scare was over, and Dr. Dorrien had still done nothing that one could legitimately present to one’s wife as spectacular. That was all I knew of them for years--until I knew the last. The last set us all to wondering, and by an odd chance I once wondered aloud before Hoyting. “Oh, the Dorriens? Yes, of course, the Dorriens. I knew them.”