After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings on that remarkable evening.
It appears that even the culminating evidence of the uniform case did not satisfy him, so reluctant is homo sapiens to admit unwelcome truth. He wanted to know more. How could Archie be here? There was not time for him to have gone back to the farm, to have found Norah's letter, and followed. To catch them, a pursuer would have had to overtake before the Mimi was boarded—the only boat that called at the Rhodesian end of the lake.
But what about that wandering 'stiff' who, he remembered Norah saying, had started for the Congo with her husband. Might not this be he? Suppose he had stolen Sinclair's kit at Elizabethville and was making for an East Coast port?
Dick's reluctance to look truth in the eye was removed by Archie's return to the tent, where a couch of leaves had been heaped. One of the grunts, with which he settled himself, matured into more or less coherent speech, 'By the way, sorry ... my name's not Smith ... Sinclair.... Thought I ought to tell you.... Good-night.'
Even a purist when hit on the head with a hammer ceases to argue whether coal or sledge. Dick was reduced to accepting facts at face value.
A stronger man might have seized the moment to face it out, while Archie's words held the door open to confession. A line too direct for Dick. He did nothing—not from fear, as he explained no doubt truthfully to Norah, but from a sense of the supreme awkwardness of the position. That was how he put it: you would probably say 'seeing what a poor fish he'd look.'
It is possible, even easy, to seduce a man's wife with a certain air. The gesture has been made picturesque, amusing, sublime, according to the clothes, characters, circumstances of the puppets. Don Juan, Casanova, young Lochinvar were masters of the different genres.
But collect your troop on a desert island of limited acreage, give Menelaus the sole power of rescue, and the laughter veers round against Paris. Worse still, Helen might lead it. And when you throw in one loaded rifle and give it to Menelaus, the romantic farce may degenerate into tragedy.
Dick, whatever he told Norah, cannot have been long realising that his position was not only false but dangerous, and his life at the mercy of the man he had wronged. He may not have expected actual violence, for Norah's allusions to her husband at that date of her disillusionment would have outlined a deliberate, cautious, rather pale-blooded being in whom civilisation had destroyed all sudden impulse. One who had reduced 'soundness' to a vice and was lamentably sure 'to do the sensible thing'; who, meditating both sides of every question and avoiding the ill-considered move, had almost lost power of action. One of those irritating people who are too busy giving the devil his due to reach for the holy water.
Since Dick, like the rest of us, preferred to use labels and pigeon-holes instead of observation and thought, he did not stop to compare this pallid creation with the lean, taciturn individual who slept a few feet from him.
But although the eminently 'sound' man of Dick's and Norah's fancy does not go about shooting people even on considerable provocation, he is not, Dick argued, of the type that steps far out of the way to save the lives of enemies.
There are men who would never tolerate the unsavoury and dangerous business of murder, but who would make slight effort to prevent the death of an enemy out of sight and earshot—witness the mediæval popularity of the oubliette. So Dick did not find unconvincing the figure of an outraged husband who pursued his way to Abercorn and left the identified Mr. and Mrs. Brown to shift for themselves.
Fear of some such fate is the only excuse I can find for the scheme which he afterwards confessed to Norah. It was, he said, the only way out of the impasse. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there was anything unsporting in his plan, any gleam of the phosphorescent aura of treachery. If pressed, he might have produced the old excuse about Love and War; a sophism, which, pushed to logical extremes, justifies, I suppose, arsenic in the Burgundy and babies on the bayonet.
An acute moral sense was never Dick's weakness; still, one would have expected common sense to save him from the stupidity of confiding in Norah his happy thought of stealing her husband's gun and leaving him and his natives to ... fend for themselves. He must have been very sure of the spell his adoration cast.
No doubt Africa was probing him too deep. In the last twenty-four hours she had unmasked batteries too heavy for her victim. Blow on blow had been hammered at his weakest points. She had opened with her favourite gambit of starvation and had daunted his courage with its shadow. She had lowered his vitality by an interminable day of incessant toil and disappointed hope. She tormented him with the sudden display of a salvation that faded into a trap from which there was no honourable issue.
Her machinery was ponderous enough to shatter the morale of a finer man than Dick. It was like shooting rabbits with a field-gun. Dick was that not uncommon flower of our civilisation—a thoroughly charming fellow. Just the man for a dance at your house, a rubber at your club, a week-end at your partridges. Good-looking, well-dressed, well-mannered, it was impossible not to like him at sight.
Alas! the forest cares nothing for looks, clothes, or manners.
The mild fires of public-school and life about town had not tempered his metal hard enough. He had had an easy war, largely spent at Bolo House. In his spells at the front, he had the support of discipline, example, comradeship; responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. Now he had to fight a duel with Africa for an opponent.... And hate, that the war taught us so quickly kills all sense of sportsmanship, blindfolded him.
As he thought of his dependence on the man he had wronged, his heart contracted. He was so ignominiously at the mercy of one on whom he had hitherto bestowed a smile of pity.
And why? Not because his enemy was braver, or cleverer, or a better man in any way, but just because he had a loaded rifle. From whatever angle he regarded this intolerable triangle, the gun dominated. Looked at as a means of securing food, in Archie's prejudiced hands, it dictated terms. As a weapon of offence, it imposed no less. So long as Archie held this card, Dick and Norah were impotent, immobilised, compelled ignobly to confess their liaison and accept starvation or such humiliating terms as their master saw fit to stipulate.
Archie was the common enemy whose advantage must be torn from him without consideration of his ultimate fate.
The tent in which Dick and his intended victim were sleeping was small, some eight feet by six, a one man load. He could not help contrasting his own luxurious installation with double fly, bathroom and verandah. Here was barely room for the two men to sleep. On the ground between them lay the gun, but close to Archie's hand. The firelight showing through the canvas gave a dull gleam off the barrels. It was not a magazine rifle, and the two rounds in the chambers would not go far. Archie's ammunition bag, which lay behind his head, must be secured.
His deep breathing proclaimed sleep. God send the natives by the fire slept as sound.
Moving an inch at a time to minimise the creaking of the camp bed, Dick reached out and out till his muscles were ready to snap. At last he secured the strap and lifted the bag gently to him. The rifle fell an easier prey.
With heart throbbing in the silence he lay still, waiting for the flames to die down and mask his sortie. It seemed hours before the firelight faded. He must act before a native woke to heap on fresh fuel. With infinite pains not to break the silence, he rose from his bed. His heart stood still at a leopard's bark. There was no break in Archie's breathing. Picking his way through the stray leaves that strewed the ground, he tiptoed to the door.
He must have made a sound in unlacing the flap.
'What is it?' came Archie's quiet voice.
'I heard something.'
'Lion?'
'Leopard, I thought.'
Archie was beside him.
'Thank you,' he said, and took the gun. Dick had already laid the cartridge bag on the ground.
Together they interrogated the sleepers by the fire. Archie—'damnably thorough,' thought Dick—searched for spoor with a hurricane lamp.
'I must have imagined it,' said Dick, when they had regained the tent.
'Looks like it,' replied Archie dryly. Then 'Wake me next time you want my gun,' he said.
But whatever suspicion he may have framed about his guest, it did not keep him awake, and soon his regular breathing formed an accompaniment to Dick's night thoughts. Not that they were very coherent. The grotesque failure of his plot, whose attempt, you must admit, had taken some resolution, left him physically exhausted and emptied. He lay crushed almost beyond feeling, while the hours that were left him to find a solution passed.
Consciousness of this flight of time forced him to bend his will to fresh scheming. But his anxious thought produced nothing more heroic than the decision to ask Norah what to do. After all it was she who had deserted Archie, and she ought to have her say in the handling of him. As soon as it was light he would slip down and lay the matter before her. 'Shift the responsibility on to her,' would have been honester phrasing, for Dick was by now a beaten man.
But even this wouldn't work. The curse of abortion seemed to descend on every plan he devised. If he left at dawn, Archie, his suspicions over the name question reinforced by the gun episode, would be only too glad to start on his way without wasting more time over an unsatisfactory individual who fortunately had disappeared.
And with Archie, intolerable thought, would vanish hope of life. Everything seemed to swing round in a vicious circle to focus the spotlight on the whip in Archie's hand.
Was there no other course than a full confession at the eleventh hour? To wake the man up and say, 'I've seduced your wife, I've told you a pack of lies. I've tried to steal your gun and leave you to starve. Now will you get me out of this hole, please?'
It wasn't thinkable. At the same time, it was inevitable. What else.... What else...."
* * * * * * *
"I have always," said Ross, "felt a profound admiration for the last Earl of Derwentwater who, when his army was surrounded at Preston in the '15, went to bed.
Dick in a similarly untenable position fell asleep.”