Naturally, Norah was furious. Any one would be furious who was denied the doing of a gracious deed already rehearsed in mind.
She had come to breakfast with a generous act of submission, and an affectionate reconciliation prepared. The sort of thing that closes the story on the screen, but, alas! ends little in real life. And now Archie had gone without a word on 'cattle business,' to buy, that meant, the pure bred bull that had made the mischief—neglecting as if it had never been made, her protest. He hadn't even noticed that she was miserable; or if he had noticed, he hadn't cared. Last night's scene was now transfigured into a declaration of wrongs, a declaration brutally ignored. But wait till Archie came back with his bull, she'd make him take her into account; she wouldn't stay a day longer on the farm; if need be, alone she'd go back to a decent life in a decent country.
In this mood she finished her breakfast and walked out into the chequered sunlight of the forest behind the rondavels. Changalilo, obeying Archie's standing order, slipped after her with her rifle on his shoulder. They passed the sawpit and galvanised into momentary activity the sawyers, who were celebrating Archie's absence with a morning of idleness over a fire of sticks.
She climbed a rocky hill, whose eminence gave her a view above the all-surrounding trees, which, from the level, limited sight to a matter of yards. Looking over the carpet of tree tops, whose leaves at that season had taken the transparent colour of azalea flowers, she watched the shadows of the clouds marbling the distant hillside, reflecting that her life was as useless as yonder succession of light and shade. Presently Changalilo, in whose eyes a hill top was useful to locate game or landmarks, and who cared little for scenery or meditation, announced the approach of a 'ulendo wa musungu' (a travelling white man and his carriers).
Norah's slower eyes searched the forest in vain. But soon on a path that wound between the trees appeared a native with a hip-bath on his head. More natives, carrying on head or shoulder bundles of tents and bedding, boxes of food and kitchen utensils, straggled into sight at irregular intervals. As they approached, appearing and disappearing among the trees, Norah wondered who the traveller could be. It was rare to have two visitors in so short a space, but as there was no other white settlement for several days' journey, the traveller would certainly make a halt at the farm.
It was not Henderson, the Native Commissioner, for she would have seen him before his bath, walking ahead of his carriers on the look-out for game. The bath and the camp gear were too new for old Palmer, the trader, making his round of inspection of native storemen. If it were Father Dupont, of the French Fathers, she would not have expected a bath at all.
The deductive methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes failing her, she decided to see for herself. Scrambling downhill, through the litter of grey sandstone, split apart by trunks of trees, and crowned with euphorbias, she reached the path before the wayfarer had come in sight, and since conventions, even of the English, are sometimes superseded in lonely places, she advanced some way along it to meet him.
Where the path swerved to avoid a big mupundu tree, she found him. A tall young man, leaning on a stick, whipped off his sun helmet and grasped her hand.
She noticed that his hair curled and caught the sun. She noticed that his clothes, the ordinary clothes of a ulendo—khaki shirt and shorts, puttees and heavy boots—were newer than that part of the country generally saw. He bore himself with an air, and two tall natives at his back, shouldering guns, added a pleasantly piratical touch.
'My name's Ward,' he said. 'You must be Lady Norah Sinclair, whom I've heard so much about.'
'I don't know who from!' she laughed.
'Every one, since I landed at Cape Town,' he asserted, looking at her fixedly.
'They haven't forgotten how to tell pleasant lies in England,' she smiled back. 'I'll bet you never heard of our existence, till you stopped with the White Fathers on the Chambezi, three days' journey back.'
'I assure you,' he began, then broke off. 'Anyhow, you've forgotten my existence.'
She stared at him. A light dawned.
'You looked different in pyjamas,' she said, and the flood of reminiscence burst. He had crashed at Brooklands in 1914, and lain for a fortnight in her ward. She remembered, amused, how his eyes had followed her about the room, and his boyish efforts to make conversation. She had liked him and was sorry when he was moved to another hospital.
'This is the most marvellous thing that ever happened,' he exclaimed. 'How can we celebrate it in the forest?'
'Only lunch, I'm afraid,' she said. 'It's ready on the farm. My husband's away on ulendo'—at the memory her temper flamed—'but we'll manage alone.'
'Thanks awfully,' he said, and limped alongside of her. I don't know whether his wound had stiffened during the halt, but he leaned more heavily on his stick.
'You're lame,' she remarked.
Ward explained that he had been bitten on the foot by some anonymous insect, and the day's march had rubbed the wound into a sore.
'It's an awful nuisance on ulendo,' he added, and then—Dick was never the lad to lose anything for want of trying—'I'd been meaning, as I came along, to ask your husband to put me up for a couple of days, till I was right.'
Norah considered Dick for a moment, as women can, without looking at him. She had liked him well in hospital days and had been flattered by his obvious adoration. Then the changes and chances of life had wiped his picture clean from her mind till now his presence brought up details buried seven years deep—his bed in the corner of the ward, a passing irritation at a pretty girl's visit, the chrysanthemums she left.
She made up her mind.
'Mrs. Grundy hasn't got farther north than the railway will take her,' she said. 'You'll find a rest camp all ready by the new house across the river. You'll come over to meals, of course,' she added as his face fell. She felt a momentary awkwardness and changed the conversation to shooting, of which she said she did not get as much as she liked, since Archie could not often spare the time, and did not like her going far afield alone.
'You must let me take you out,' Ward interrupted.
'But what about your foot?' said Norah innocently.
She explained that she always wanted to invite her relations from England for shooting trips, but her husband could not leave his work to meet them at rail-head, and take them about the country.
'A farmer's wife sees a different side of Central Africa to the traveller who makes a short shooting trip to a good game area and goes back to London to write a book about it.'
'Is that one for me?' asked Ward penitently.
'No, one for myself,' she sighed, 'before I came out I believed it all.'
So Norah chattered on. She did not get much chattering on the farm. Her rare visitors, if women, talked about recipes and jam making. The men talked of game or natives. If Dick was a ghost from the past, ghosts can be very entertaining. And he was handsomer than ever.
Dick thought the same of Norah. Norah, in the formality of V.A.D. uniform, was only less fascinating than Norah in the boyishness of her farm wear—silk shirt open at the neck, breeches and canvas leggings. In Dick's opinion most women he had seen in breeches looked either bulbous or cinematographical; Norah was a twentieth century hamadryad—cool and restrained, save for her narrow eyes and her short dark hair that bubbled out from under her wide grey hat. The sun had burnt her neck to the colour of coffee and cream, but her arms still hinted at the whiteness of her body.
Dick could not keep his eyes off her.
'Lunch will be foul,' she was saying. 'My suk has gone to bury his father.'
'Why don't you take over mine?' Dick pressed her.
'D'you mean it? Suk-snatching isn't beyond me.'
'Of course I mean it! And, look here, do give your household a chance of getting straight and dine with me to-night.'
'Love to!' said Norah.
For the next three days Dick laid close siege to Norah's heart. Such siege of a woman alone on a lonely farm may not have been scrupulous. But when did Venus teach scruples? Her reputation was ill enough in the old Island years, and her latter day registration, under the Anglo-Saxon name of Natural Selection, has changed nothing.
The dinner was Dick's first move, and an intelligent one. The hours that succeeded it before Norah's eyes closed in forgetfulness testified its success. After the roseate glow of the Pommery, with which Dick's admirable table boy had plied her, had worn off, her mind still lingered among golden moments.
'I won't insult you with an iceless cocktail?' he had said.
'My last drink,' she retorted, 'was the mead the White Fathers brew at the Chambezi!'
'That curious compound of honey and fermented mealies?'
'The local gourmets walk a hundred miles to drink it.'
Dinner started, for the dweller in cities banally enough, with hors-d'œuvres. To Norah's reluctant rusticity, the tinned caviare shone with an unforgotten aura of shaded restaurant lamps, the bottled anchovies swam in a remembered sea of laughter and wit, the dried olives echoed with the lost lilt of ragtime orchestras.
There was no bathos in the courses that followed.
'Who cooks for you?' she asked. 'The angel Gabriel?'
'Is it hard to get cooks up here?' he replied innocently.
'Yesterday I found Alabedi rolling a rissole into shape on his naked chest,' she said. 'The one before used to wash his feet in the big saucepan.'
'The chef at the Ritz may have the same weaknesses,' put in Dick sympathetically.
'Yes, but he can at least cook. My criminals haven't an idea above "shtoo!"'
After dinner they sat in a shelter, fragrant with the fresh leaves and blossoms of the boughs that formed it.
'What about a tune?' asked Dick, as his personal boy, resplendent in white kanju and scarlet sash, presented a book of gramophone records.
'You choose,' she said, 'it's so long, since...'
Dick judged the jewelled eroticism of Puccini opportune; but when it was over...
'In my young days,' she commented, 'there wasn't any opera. It was thought rather German. Do put on a fox-trot.'
'I don't know that one,' she said at the end. 'Of course,' she added.
Dick searched, and found a one-step that dated back to the war.
She sighed. 'There's nothing that reminds like a tune. I take it the Recording Angel keeps a list of all one's most pricelessly associated tunes, and has them played to one in hell.'
'I'm sorry. I didn't think——' he lied.
'What is there on the back? Yes, let's have that. How sick one was of it!'
When the commonplace little tune was played, 'I can't bear any more,' she said. 'Give me a cigarette. If it's a "flag" I'll burst into tears.'
It wasn't, and they talked—or he told her—of dances, theatres, the marriages and divorces of their mutual friends and enemies.
'How soon do you go back?' she asked.
'That depends on——'
She did not give him time to say on whom it depended.
'And where do you go on to from here?'
He was vague. He was short of provisions. ['I'm sure I've eaten three years of pâté de foies gras to-night,' she interrupted.] He had to hang about for fresh supplies to catch him.
He brought the conversation round, by way of shops, to her frock, which he admired discreetly. He compared it favourably with the clothes they were now wearing in London.
'Two and a half years old,' she said. 'If I had the choice between an hour's talk with Paul Poiret or St. Paul, I wouldn't bother to learn Hebrew.'
'Where are your nearest shops?'
'There's a store three days' walk away, where you can buy white calico, or blue calico with white spots, and mouth organs or looking-glasses.'
'I think you're marvellous,' he said. 'Not many women...'
She did not answer, but Dick, watching closely, saw her breast rise in an involuntary sigh.
She sighed again as she lay sleepless, reckoning relentlessly what her bond to Archie would cost her. That loyalty was costing her youth, beauty, health; it exacted all, and gave nothing. She pictured herself in five years' time. Still young, as lives go, but her looks perished, her skin dried with the glare and sagging with the heat, her mind ruralised, her interests dwindled.
If she had still loved Archie, she would have thrown all this at his feet, as carelessly as she had risked her life for him. But her passion had vanished, had followed her illusion, in an almost unnoticed, almost painless decease, killed by some inward unsoundness, some hidden cancer or malnutrition. And to-day Archie had proved his entire dissociation from her.
The same morning, as if sent by the Devil, had appeared an Adonis, whose words, whose eyes proclaimed an interest, a devotion that was ready to flame into...
But her word bound her to Archie, and by her word she abode. With more reason than many of her generation, Norah had no clear religious or moral principles. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father knew his way about Ruff's Guide better than the Bible. But loyalty was a class virtue that she had not escaped, and for the first of many sleepless nights during the two unhappy years, she began to probe its foundations. No doubt the shade of Dick, cool, handsome, debonair, encouraged her.
To what Moloch had Archie offered her loyalty?
To this fetish of a farm which swallowed all his money, thoughts, energy. On the same altar were laid her heritage by sex and class of careless, elegant living; her place in the life of the day; all that her youth demanded.
And now Archie had proved that he despised her sacrifice. He did not even refuse her claims so long choked back, combat her protest voiced at last. It was sufficient to ignore them."
"I can't help feeling," said Ross, "that Archie's idiotic taciturnity almost earned him Norah's defection.
Had he been able to overcome his distaste for expression—emotion he called it; had he tried to conquer his passion for finishing a job before he mentioned it; had he, in short, told Norah that he was going to Elizabethville to sell his herd in order to satisfy her wishes and take her back to England, Dick Ward would never have secured foothold in her heart.
Instead, Archie held his tongue and left the field to the Devil and to Dick.”