These made the most of their chance.
In the red, leather-bound volume of aphorisms which accompanied Dick in his wanderings, he found a remark of Balzac's which seemed to him full of promise:—
'Dans le monde de la realité,' that thinker had apparently concluded, 'comme dans le monde des fées, la femme appartient toujours à celui qui sait arriver à elle et la délivrer de la situation où elle languit.'
Here was the situation, here the woman languished, here was Dick ready for the part of Fairy Prince.
He reflected with satisfaction that while the heroine of fairy stories may very suitably be shepherdess, goose girl, beggar maid, the hero is inevitably a prince—never a cattle breeder. Did this not hint the triumph of Court over Farm, Athens over Bœotia, Capital over Colony?
If Dick was no prince, he was young, amusing, good-looking, rich enough to wander in comfort about Africa and bold enough to call such wandering 'exploration' (at any rate to the journalists at Southampton). The omens were favourable.
Dinner the first evening had been planned to suggest a tacit comparison between Norah's present lot and the world of civilised luxury whose gate his kiss would open.
He had shown Africa in damaging contrast with Europe. Now he applied himself to set the lover in high relief against the husband.
Too clever for tangible disparagement that would challenge Norah's loyalty, Dick applied himself silently to supply all that Archie in two years had left undone. Dick's 'boy' hung the pictures that had stood, faces wallwards, for eighteen months; Dick stretched an insect-proof ceiling of calico that he took from his stores of presents for headmen; Dick's carriers dug and levelled the flower garden that Archie had always promised 'next season.'
His long limbs and cool, unhurried gestures, his well-cut white flannels, and the faint swagger with which he wore them, had the unquestioned advantage of Archie's unremarkable presence.
In long tête-à-têtes he exerted all his charm of manner and person.
An afternoon when Nature seemed to work for him was the shooting expedition that he had promised. In deference to the foot, which furnished the excuse of his stay, it was decided to paddle down river to the flats where puku grazed and where at nightfall duck flighted.
Papyrus met over their heads in a tunnel of green silence, that the plash of a paddle hardly broke.
'If this would never end,' sighed Dick.
Norah shrugged her shoulders.
'"Momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
she quoted, as the stream bore them out into the daylight.
A bird like a black ibis, rigid and heraldic on the bank that here was firm and covered with short turf, kept jealous watch on the surface of the water. Their silent passage barely disturbed his fishing. Half-way between the river and the straight edge of the bush a pair of Karongo crane, true season after season to each other and their haunts, promenaded the flats. Their long necks swayed to their leisurely, fastidious stride.
The old boatman with the withered leg, who stood in the stern, bent forward and whispered excitedly.
'He can see a herd of puku,' said Norah.
Crouching low in the boat beneath the level of the bank, they drifted till a bend of the river brought them into long range. Peeping cautiously from behind a tuft of amatete reeds, Norah watched the little red-brown cluster of buck.
Five lengths ahead of his ewes the ram was grazing. Ever and again up jerked his head and he stood, broad-chested and solid, his mild eyes distended, his wet nostrils snuffing, alert for sign, scent, or sound. Then his head would sink and, reassured, he took up his grazing, moving onward as he fed.
Dick cocked his rifle and pushed it into Norah's hand.
'Now's your chance,' he whispered.
Norah shook her head.
'Too far for me,' she breathed. 'I don't want to wound.'
Helped by Dick, whose fingers lingered on her arm, she clambered up the bank, and began to creep on her knees, circling that the breeze might not carry her scent to the herd. But for all her care, the ram was uneasy. At shorter intervals his head jerked up, causing Norah each time to flatten herself to the ground.
Whether at last they caught her scent or whether general principles of caution prevailed, at some invisible sign from their leader the herd started into a skeltering gallop. The ground drummed under their hoofs until they came to a strip where reeds concealed a little marsh. There the red bodies emerged and disappeared with the bounding motion of rocking-horses. On the farther side they paused, long necks stretched, wide eyes astare. Then they fell quietly to grazing.
'I'm three parts glad I didn't get a shot,' said Norah, as she rejoined the canoe.
Dick commended her gentleness.
'Puku are such gallant little chaps,' she said, 'and they take such a lot of killing. Archie wounded one that dropped after she had run a mile. When they cut her up, they found the bullet in her heart."
This gave Dick a chance to talk about the state in which at an autopsy his heart would be found.
Norah laughed. 'You'll have forgotten I exist by the time you've been a week in London,' she prophesied.
Dick said this was hardly fair. It was seven years since he'd seen her last, and all the time...
'Anyhow it took you a good few minutes to recognise me in the bush,' she reminded him.
'But you'd grown more lovely yet,' he protested. 'And in breeches....'
The river had widened out into a sort of lake. Reeds grew up through the water and blue lotuses starred its surface. A couple of small red-headed moorhens bobbed up from under the broad leaves as if they were made of cork.
This is a good place to wait for the duck to come over,' said Norah, and Dick fixed his twelve bore.
The sunlight had turned from white through gold to ochre. A few frogs had tentatively begun to croak. Too near the equator for twilight, it was Africa's heure du berger.
Dick began to talk. From what Norah told me, his themes seem to have dated from the early earnest years of the century. He pleaded the right of the Natural Mate over the Legal Spouse; he urged the barrenness of constancy Where Love is Not; he suggested that the world might be Well Lost for Love. And so on. For my part I never could see why 'All for Love' is a respectable sentiment and a subject for epics and tragedies, while other equally whole-hearted passions and sacrifices, say, 'All for Money' or 'for Food' are discredited. However, that's an opinion that neither Norah nor Dick shared.
Norah, of course, wasn't convinced by Dick's eloquence—no woman ever listened to what her lover said. But passion is as infectious as small-pox, and, if it lasts no longer, leaves no lighter scars. So, reluctantly on that perfect evening, her conscience gave ground and Dick's words began to reach her heart and his nearness her senses.
'Don't miss the best part of life,' he adjured her.
'Life looks its best from behind.'
'It isn't for any one as young and lovely to say that. Be brave, take a chance....'
This was perilous advice for the gambler's daughter.
'Supposing I wanted to take a chance ... with you, don't you see I've promised...'
'Are you willing to waste your whole life for two words mumbled in Hanover Square?'
'Don't be melodramatic, Dick!'
'It isn't melodrama, it's tragedy! Norah, come away with me, Norah....'
Just then the duck came over, and winging swiftly against the sunset, interrupted Dick's eloquence.
On the third evening Dick, progressing from words to action, forced her to decision. The sun had set and Norah was still sitting out of doors protected from wild beasts by a lamp on the table and by a gun at her feet. The lowing of the cattle had abated and the thud of their feet as they shouldered into the kraals had ceased. The air was heavy with spring and with the fleshy scent of the wild magnolias that overhung the river.
She knew it was time to go indoors, but any effort seemed intolerable. The harsh chorus of frogs in the marshes alone broke the silence. She sat on. A moth, as big as a swallow, brushed against her cheek, causing her to look up. A yellow light across the river caught her eye. 'Dick's camp fire,' she thought, and let her imagination play. But as she gazed she knew she was mistaken, for the light was dodging and swaying nearer. It was a hurricane lamp crossing the river. It could only be carried by Dick, and he was coming over to her.
She did not feel glad or sorry, but waited in inert prostration before an oncoming fate. The night denied motion, and she was held in a snare waiting the coming of the fowler. Her heart began to beat faster. A drum started to throb in a distant village and her blood seemed to pulse in time. Dick's lamp was an intolerable way off, so were the tropical stars, so was reality. Her world was that insistent drum and her galloping pulses.
At last she heard Dick's footsteps on the leaves. Without a word he lowered himself into the chair beside her and for a long time sat in silence, his face in the shadow.
'What holds you here?' he asked at last.
'Say "who" rather?' her deep voice replied, resenting the effort of speech.
'The flowers blossom and die in your forests,' he went on, 'and no man sees them.'
'Poetry!' she laughed. 'This is prose and daily bread.'
He groped after her mood.
'You could have poetry and cake.'
She threw up her head laughing and he saw where the sunburn stopped on her neck.
'Wedding cake?' she asked mischievously.
'If I'm not an angel, I'm not an absolute rotter,' he said quickly.
'It wouldn't have mattered in any case,' she murmured, 'if...'
'If what?'
She did not answer. In the distance the drum pounded on, inciting to the dance some isolated community of black men, sentient only of the whips of hunger and desire. She wondered if white civilisation at heart obeyed any different goad.
'That's all the music you'll hear,' Dick nodded his head in the direction of the sound.
'Life can be lived without stimulants,' she said.
'D'you call it life?'
He tried to take her hand. She moved it.
'Norah, you're driving me mad. Do you want to?'
'You know I don't,' she whispered.
'Don't you see? ... In a few days, my foot'll be well, I must go. Must I go alone, without hope, knowing I'll never see you again? I really think I'll kill myself.'
What about Archie?'
'Would he kill himself?' asked Dick quietly. 'Would he ... notice even?'
She did not answer.
'Be fair to him; but be fair to yourself; be generous to me.'
She was silent, listening to the message of the drums.
He interpreted her silence to his wishes, and slid his hand up her arm. She did not resist; it seemed so much simpler to accept the philosophy of the drum and surrender to the primeval forces. Dick's lips were on hers, but his kisses reminded her of her husband's early love-making. Without much conviction, she pushed them away and stood upright, her breasts heaving. Dick seized her small hands as they pushed at his chest, pulling her against him. His arm went round her body and lifted her to him till her toes barely touched the ground. He smothered her white, upturned face with kisses. She could hardly breathe. For a moment she was tense and tingling; her senses shot up like firelight, then narrowed to a pin point. Heaviness descended on her and remorse. Her own voice rang in her ears—'What about Archie?'
She struggled and he released her.
'Go now, Dick,' she said, her deep voice husky, and picking up the lamp she left him.
He waited silent in his chair for hours it seemed; then, as she made no sign, he rose, swinging his hurricane lamp. She watched the light stagger away across the river with a feeling of utter desolation.
Next morning she sat down at her writing-table. Outside the window squatted Jacketi waiting impassively for her letter.
Jacketi was a bad lot, he liked beer and women better and spared truth further than most natives, but he had perfect manners and wonderful legs. Sixty miles in thirty hours he would do, and overtake in a day and a night the three days' stages of a white man. For this Norah had summoned him to carry a letter to Archie.
Africa was silent in the daylight and traditions of loyalty and chastity asserted themselves. She resented the struggle and thought cynically how much simpler it would have been, if Dick had imposed his will on her: like Montaigne's lady, who, after a troop of cavalry had been billeted in her house, wrote in her diary, This night, praise the Virgin, I am satisfied without sin.'
She had decided to call to Archie to come and, if his presence did not stem the flood which threatened to sweep her away, at least she would talk things out aboveboard and honestly with him. Painfully she drafted a letter: not an easy one to write. She tore up her first attempt and scrawled, 'Dear Archie, If you love me, come straight back.—NORAH.' She sealed it and handed it through the window to the waiting Jacketi. Then she wrote a note to Dick, telling him to keep his side of the river till she sent for him. Norah never did things by halves.
A few days later Jacketi was standing again on the verandah, tired but smiling.
'Well, Jacketi, did you find the Bwana?'
'Yes, indeed, mistress.'
'Did he give you a letter?'
'No, indeed, mistress....'
'What did the Bwana say?'
Jacketi imitated Archie's manner and voice.
'"All right, Jacketi."'
'Was that all?'
Jacketi nodded his head composedly. She flung him a shilling. 'You can go now,' and re-entered the darkened room.
Had Archie ignored this appeal too and pushed forward on his 'cattle business'? If so ... But since he was as saving with letters as with words, he might even now be on his way back to her. She must have patience and wait. He should reach the farm not later than Wednesday."
Ross flung out his arm with a deprecatory gesture. At least that is how I interpreted the path of his glowing cigar-end.
"Some of the blame," he said, "should you be old-fashioned enough to think in terms of blame and praise, must be reserved for Africa.
To understand the problem of Norah's ... fall, bid for self-expression, or whatever your brand of morality calls it, apply my formula for gauging what Africa will make of a man:—'Lowest Common Failing cubed' if you remember. Our first task is the ever congenial one of spotting the L.C.F., the ruling weakness. Poor Norah, the field is big enough. So big, selection is difficult; for, outside courage and honesty, she had few noteworthy virtues.
Pride, hot temper—neither was missing, but neither ruled her. Irreverence—a full share, but nothing notable for the century. A free tongue, a gambler's heart—I feel we are 'warmer.' Rebelliousness, generosity—which of these two failings to choose?
From her cradle she had been a rebel. I have mentioned a few instances—her expulsion from the Red Cross, her defiance of the rules of war when she rescued Archie, and of the rules of common sense when she married him, her preference of Africa to Edinburgh, and so on. To Norah a custom established, a practice accepted, dared her to its disregard or breach. The temptation to break with her sex's tradition of, at any rate overt, chastity must have been overwhelming, while to the itch to break through rules, she could only oppose fidelity to her promise.
Generosity, my second choice, had ever made it hard for her to say 'no' or to withhold what lay in her power to give. As a child she had lavished her pennies on the utterly undeserving poor. As a girl, disregarding the cost, she had always been at the call of any friend, or stranger for that matter, in a difficulty. And now she could by an act, not in itself uncomfortable, grant Dick a boon he craved, whose refusal he hinted would make him desperate ... while Archie, it seemed ... did not care.
So, if you wish, you may charge her ultimate surrender to her double weakness exploited by Africa; if you prefer, to her single strength betrayed by Archie's silence, that loyalty to her bond long and savagely honoured.
As an English writer you may be trusted not to impute her fall to mere weakness of the flesh. You would never admit that a woman of your nation and class would take a lover from so disinterested a motive. Adultery on grounds of spite, altruism, jealousy, poverty, revenge, avarice, or even absence of mind is admissible. From passion, unthinkable.
Well, the decisive Wednesday came without sign or rumour of Archie.
On Saturday night Dick's lantern a second time came swinging across the river.”