That Tanganyika was destined to be alike villain and setting of the drama which followed, first sight of the lake gave Norah no warning.
The lovers had waited on the farm for Dick's supplies to come till Norah would stay no longer. Leaving a letter for Archie, and replenishing Dick's stores from the reserves on the farm, that the Congo expedition had already diminished, they started on the three weeks' ulendo through the bush, Dick on a bicycle, Norah in her machila.1[1]
Lying uncomfortably on her back, she saw little of the country she was carried through. Her landscape was limited by ranks of trees on either side. Overhead she could stare at the African sky already banked with rain-clouds. Or she could lie on her side and watch the sandy path for hurrying streams of pre-occupied ants or for occasional spoor, the only manifestation of the shy life of the forest. Sometimes her eye would be caught by a bundle of scarlet flowered mistletoe, the alpine outline of a great ant heap, a tree curiously deformed, or the melancholy traces of an almost obliterated garden; till oppressed by the nearness and insignificance of these sights, she would shut her eyes and imagine the evening with Dick, when the camp fire would gild from below the interlacing boughs.
But now the ulendo was nearly done. For an hour the road had sloped precipitously from plateau level lakewards 3000 feet below. The tip and tilt of the machila was vertiginous. Broad leafed, dark trees obscured the sky: rampant undergrowth and luxurious herbage hid the ground. A native laboured up towards them; he was old and one-eyed. Her carriers called to him for news of the steamer, but he only stared. They were strangers in a strange land. The air felt warmer and clammier. Languid flies settled heavily on Norah's face and hands. She expected momentarily to see the lake below her feet, but the dark trees shut her in.
The machila-bearers stopped singing the mournful 'Mai illova,' 'Deep in the Ground,' that was their favourite carrying song, and started a brisk marching tune into which the name 'Tanganyika' came again and again. The swing of the hammock was barely tolerable. She caught the word 'malala' in the song—the sleeping sickness, for whose sake men shun the lake. They met a second native blind in one eye—was all this mutilation man's work or the lake's? A single mulombwa tree with bare boughs and canary yellow flowers stood out by the roadside, thirty feet high and as straight as a spear.
Suddenly the steeply tilted machila stopped with a jerk and shot her on to her feet.
Had that travel-stained hammock been Elijah's fiery chariot it could not have translated her more suddenly into a new universe. From the close forest that had so long confined her body and her mind, she was caught up into a blue firmament, a world of misty blue glass over which distant shadows played. As she gazed the blue mirror resolved into sky, mountains, water. Under heaven, the hills; under the hills, the lake with its horizon flung far above her head, above the tree tops.
This vision of a new world seemed to hint at the new life she was entering. A life of beauty and—inevitably—romance, free from the sordidness of daily struggle, cleared of the orts of a disastrous past. The child understood life as little as she understood the lake. Her inherited instinct was to play for the highest stakes and risk all, without weighing the cost, on a single throw. But this sudden revelation of beauty almost frightened her into taking thought. That such loveliness existed seemed a spur to its pursuit. Was she treading a path that led to it? Almost against her will she strained her eyes into the future.
Since the night that Dick's lantern had crossed the flats for the second time, she had kept her mind strapped to the present moment, fiercely contented in her passion for Dick, refusing regret, denying foresight.
Archie, whose memory her mind, like a tongue with a sensitive tooth, shunned but could not avoid, had failed her; Dick had come to the rescue. Dick was her slave; Archie was the slave of the farm. She loved Dick ... she was almost sure. She was surer she did not love Archie.
What would come of it all? The preliminaries she faced with contempt. Scandalous tongues, slights to be met, the ostrich-like antics of the Law, details in the Press (for she realised she would be good copy and might even run to posters). She would pass through this indifferently for what lay beyond.... If anything lay beyond. Romance had fooled her before. Was Life Repetition and Cycle? 'The thing that has been, is that which shall be: and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.'
She knew Dick's mind no better than the day he had come to the farm, than the day he had entered her ward seven years ago. She did not seem to penetrate the brilliant skin and glorious plumage. What lay behind? ... But surely Dick loved her, and why haggle over the endurance or value of that love? Why chill the warmth of the present by brooding over a future as fathomless as the lake, whose bottom had never been plumbed?
She left the chattering group of carriers to rejoice at the sight of their journey's end and sat down under the mulombwa tree to wait for Dick, who had found the path too steep and rough for his bicycle.
What Dick was feeling I can only guess. I had met him at the beginning of his shooting trip, or 'voyage of exploration,' as he preferred to see it, dining with the District Commissioner at rail-head. But that was before he fell into the meshes of Norah's beauty.
She, of course, told me what he said, and did, and looked like, but a woman's evidence for or against her lover isn't worth much.
Love-making is largely bluff. To get yourself taken, you must appear, if not a fine fellow, at least an interesting one. (It's true she'll probably love you for some absurdity you've forgotten to cover up, but that's not your fault.) Then, especially if love's illicit, men and women begin with different rules. As different as big game and bird shooting.
Your big game shot and your woman do the trick by stalking. They locate the victim, crawl up, taking cover behind each blade of grass, aim long and carefully with one eye shut. Your bird shot fires with both eyes open, by instinct rather than aim, before or behind him at birds which beaters, or circumstances, drive. Then he waits for the next covey. Some men even like pigeon shooting.
Dick, I suspect, started with the ideas of the bird shot. Since he left the railway, he had hardly seen a white woman, and he still carried the newcomer's prejudice against black. He would be in a susceptible mood, when he came on Norah that morning in the forest. If Joseph had been a month or two alone in the bush, and if Potiphar's wife had been in the same street with Norah, Holy Writ would have been altered. And, as the Americans say, Dick's second name wasn't Joseph. Nor for that matter was Norah's surname Potiphar. But circumstances, the uncongenial life, the errant husband's absence were all beating for Dick. His wits, quick where women were concerned, divined this and whispered that this loveliness was not unapproachable. And in the matter of rushing in, Dick was never on the side of the angels.
It was this idea that so swelled Dick's foot that he could not move it from the farm. Constant intercourse with Norah was not calculated to heal wound in foot or heart and hourly he fell deeper under her spell: under the spell, too, of his own manly eloquence. His visit the evening before Norah summoned Archie and called in vain, was undertaken, I should say, by an impetuous lover, who hoped that his mistress's interest was not severely platonic. His repulse added body to his passion since it is the nature of men only to prize the possession that is refused them.
Norah's absence, during her days of waiting for Archie, was of the nature that makes the heart grow fonder. He saw her continually across the river; in imagination he felt her lips on his, her body in his arms.
Tantalised by memory and proximity, goaded by the lust of the unobtainable, his passion had mastered all inhibitory instinct. The flood of his imagination rose and swept majestically over the weir of the Divorce Courts and breasted even the subsequent dam of Holy Matrimony. When I met him at rail-head, I got the impression that Dick was not the sort who would find it unpleasant, for example, to be cited as co-respondent with the daughter of a peer. So when in the end Norah consented to go away with him, the granting of the boon he craved could have caused him comparatively few qualms. He felt, however, more anxiety than Norah, who had flung her cap with a brave gesture, and it was with relief that he hailed the lake.
'The road lies open,' he cried to Norah. 'The highway to civilisation.'
'It's more like the gateway of Heaven,' she said, blinded by the beauty before her.
'It will be,' he answered.
As side by side they descended the path which turned from rock to sand, the view flattened and the horizon sank. The closely grouped thatch of a native village showed through the trees. Of white men and their works no sign. Throughout their flight, by avoiding the occasional Bomas and rarer farms, they had escaped the awkwardness of European encounter. Dick commented on their luck.
'Anyhow, down here, it's too hot to care,' said Norah. She felt already the atmosphere of lake level—a matter not only of heightened temperature and humidity but of changed values. 'High thermometer and low morals,' was the way she put it. She felt her remaining scruples dissolve in that mild air. Ideas of duty and discipline were left on the austere highlands, where scattered men scratch a precarious existence out of a thin soil. At lake level, life was no longer an epic of struggle with victory or defeat as stakes, but a drowsy eclogue ended by easy oblivion. The few thousand feet from the plateau to the lake seemed to bridge all degrees from Dumfries to Naples, from Calvin to Priapus.
The palm trees threw black shadows on the silver roofs. On the soundless air came the laughter of copper-coloured babies playing in and out of the lapping water. Crocodiles and water snakes people Tanganyika, but in their play the children were as unconscious of danger as Norah and Dick of the fate that bore down on them from the lake.”
[1] A hammock slung on one pole or two and carried between two or four natives, relieved at intervals.