The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of the guide who was to lead the way down the hills. Until he came there seemed no object in waking Brown or whatever his real name was.
By nature incurious, Archie could not help suspecting that there was something wrong about the man. It was not natural to find so feckless a being alone in the wilds. He seemed, moreover, to have something to conceal. Archie liked them with less looks and more honesty. What the devil had he been doing in the middle of the night with his gun? A queer bird.
But the man was in a hole—a baddish hole—and out here it was up to one white man to help another. He began to make plans. Most of them were blocked by the man's wife. You couldn't ask a woman to do too much. What sort of a wife would the chap have? Something fair and fluffy and adoring, he decided. He wasn't too sure they were married. That would explain some of the mystery ... not that it was any of his business.
As he came to this fallacious conclusion, the thin sweetness of whistling trickled through the quiet of the forest like tinsel against night.
'Another white man,' thought Archie. 'The place is like Piccadilly.' Then he reflected that Mrs. Brown must be coming up the hill to join her husband and wondered with a twist of his lip whether she would have the presence of mind to answer to that name.
The whistling started again, closer. Why did that syncopated phrase bring the colour of emeralds before his eyes? Were the words about emeralds? More like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the rest of the rural spots that American song writers ache to revisit.
Then he remembered: it was an emerald green shawl crossed tightly over a woman's flexible shoulders. The fringe hung to the ankle whose silk-clad movement caught and lost the light as her foot tapped to the rhythm. Her back was framed in the lighted blank of a long window that gave on to the London street where he stood smoking. Dawn was near, and a grey light invaded the ball-room, revealing the pallor of the electricity, the withering of the flowers, the weariness of the women.
She had half turned to her companion, and Archie, invisible in the square, had rested his gaze on the silhouetted curve of her cheek. She moved again, and it gripped his heart to see how tired her eyes were. What a little thing she looked with her figure held firmly by that emerald shawl!
Funny how the whistled tune recalled that picture of Norah and all that sort of life.... Ah, well! in a few months now, when the cattle deal was through and the ivory sold, he'd have made her happy by taking her back. The price of ivory must be somewhere about twelve shillings now, but...
At that moment Norah stepped into the sunlit clearing. Coming from under the close shadow of the forest, she was dazzled, the oblique rays of the sun shining in her face. Archie rose to meet her, amazed. How had she found him? What had brought her? What was her need of him?
Never free with words, wonder held him silent, conscious only of gladness that she was there. But gladness left him when recognition dawned in the shocked eyes she shaded from the sun. Not for him, they revealed, had she come.
Her arm raised against the sun went out, pushing something away, and her face as she looked down was bloodless. So she stood for a second, then up went her chin with the old defiant gesture.
'Why did you follow me?' she said, her deep voice damped down till he could hardly hear.
'Follow you?' he repeated.
'Didn't you understand what I wrote?' she asked.
The pause which followed was long, even for Archie's conversational methods. Speech was forced on her again.
'The letter I left you at the farm.'
'The farm? I've been in the Congo.'
'You don't know...?'
'Know what, Norah?' his voice, usually expressionless, seemed to plead; 'tell me, what has happened.'
'In a minute, Archie. Give me that packing-case to sit on, will you. I've been on short rations lately.'
She noticed that, bringing the box, he fumbled like a blind man.
He pressed her to have breakfast before she talked.
'No,' she said, 'I must get this over first,' and regretted the ungracious words when she saw him flinch. If you mind that...' she began. 'Archie, you mustn't mind anything about me. I can't bear you to mind.'
His reply fell so low that she had to strain her ears to catch it. The words confirmed her flash of understanding.
'You,' he murmured reluctantly, 'are the only thing I mind about. As long as nothing's happened to you.'
A few seconds had passed since Norah had stepped into the sun. In that space she had ranged the gamut of emotion. The first sight of Archie had dazzled her brain, as the sun her eyes. For a moment the earth had reeled in a vertigo. And its reeling hurled her into a lake of shame that stung like the fumes of ammonia: shame at the ludicrous, the indecent figure she cut. Anger succeeded. Anger with Archie, whose pursuit had put her in this intolerable position. How like a man, she thought, to come to recapture the woman he had not troubled to keep! How blundering! How undignified!
Archie's first words dispelled her resentment. And his patent sincerity was troubling. Was there some mistake? ... And somehow she saw Archie for the first time for months—or was it years?—saw something she had missed.... Archie's rigid face, his voice so resolutely kept from trembling told her there was another unconsidered facet in her romance. With all her high thinking, her regard for loyalty, bond, rights, she had missed the one factor that denied her freedom—that Archie might still care.
He cared. Must have cared all the time. The distress he failed to conceal did not spring from the outraged vanity of a husband wounded in his pride of possession. The hurt was deeper, deep in his undemonstrative heart.
She was naturally sensitive to others' suffering, and it seemed to her that not only Archie, not only herself, but the whole forest vibrated with pain. She had created it: nothing she could do would dull it.
She found herself resenting the pity that tore her heart—that desolating, impotent, futile pity! What was the good of pity, affection even, for Archie, when it was passion she felt for Dick. All that remorse could do was to blunt, to sully that passion. It was too late to think of Archie's feelings now. She could only go forward.
'Archie!' she said. He was standing with his back turned to her, his hands deep in his pockets, clenched, they must have been, and tightly, for the veins on his arms to stand up like that. 'Archie, stay there, don't turn round till I've told you.'
He made neither sign nor sound.
'Archie, I think I'm going to hurt you. I've only just seen...' Words, words which altered nothing, spared nothing. She spoke quickly, raising her voice. 'That letter, the letter that's waiting at the farm, said I was ... was leaving you.'
'Leaving me,' he repeated her statement, his voice toneless like a sleep-walker's.
Suddenly he whipped round, for the instant mastered by his emotion. He caught her shoulder and held her at arm's length. That night she found the bruise, but at the time she felt the pain no more than he knew he inflicted it.
'Why, Norah, why? I thought we were going to be so happy. I never knew. Never guessed. Tell me, why?'
She felt explanation impossible. Her hands came out to touch him, but fell helpless to her sides.
'But I never meant to hurt you so, my dear,' she said.
He let go of her shoulder, slowly, regretfully, as though he touched her body for the last time.
'There's nothing,' he said. 'Nothing I can do?'
She shook her head. His hopes must be killed.
'There's another man,' she said.
'That——'
'Dick Ward,' she interrupted him.
'That fellow who came to my fire last night?'
She nodded.
'Why in hell did I let them light the fire,' he said. 'He'd have starved then.'
He walked abruptly to the tent and kicked at the flap.
'Come out of that!'
'What's the matter?' Dick's voice did not sound as unconcerned as he would have wished.
'You come out!'
'No need to speak like that,' and Dick emerged. He thought it wise to ignore Archie. 'Hallo, Norah,' he said. 'Why didn't you wait at the camp?'
The assumption of ownership was ill-timed. Archie's sunburnt face went brick red, and he came very close to Dick.
'If you don't clear out, I'll break you up.'
Dick Ward towered above his adversary, but there his advantage ended. He carried too much flesh, and his splendid torso looked best under a tennis shirt. But Archie's muscles had been worked into steel by twenty-five-mile days after elephant, and made him as awkward an opponent as a six-inch shell.
'My dear Sinclair,' said Dick, 'we must talk this over like men of the world.' The tone of patronage alone would have been enough. Archie's feet shifted and his right knee turned and bent for the upper-cut that in another second would have smashed upwards under Dick's jaw, when Norah's low voice broke in:—
'Archie! Dick! Don't; you're making things worse!'
Her instinct was to save her lover. He was in danger, he was her lover. The pity she had lately felt for Archie was in a way disloyalty to Dick.
The men stood tense. Archie did not relax his wound-up muscles.
'Archie!' she cried, whipping her nerves that anger might overlay compassion, 'Archie, come here. For the love of God, behave like a civilised being!'
'I told him to go,' said Archie sullenly. But he lowered his eyes from his enemy's and his fist slowly loosened.
'How can he go?'
'Why not?'
'Where can he go to? Do you mean him to starve?'
Archie shrugged his shoulders. What happened to Dick was indifferent to him, provided he went. Norah blew on the embers of her passion to kindle a blaze that should scorch pity from her heart.
'Very well. We'll go,' she said.
Archie did not answer and silence closed in on them, a sinister silence like the patch of calm in the centre of a typhoon. They waited. Dick paced about the camp. He did not try to hide the commotion of his nerves. To Norah sitting still on her box, time seemed to be measured into lengths. Something must come now ... or now ... or now.
And as she waited, she watched over the trees a falcon with the blue-grey plumage of a dove hang under the hard blue heaven motionless, save for its questing head. Then it swooped. Would Archie's completed thought deal death like that?
But when he spoke it was in a lower tone.
'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I don't know what to do. Norah'—he turned to her with appeal in his eyes—'I must be quiet, don't you see, and think. I must get things clear.'
This was an Archie whom Norah knew better than the hard, decided, almost fierce animal that had just threatened Dick. He wanted to think things out.
'I must be alone,' he went on; then flamed out again. 'For God's sake send him away for half an hour.'
'Dick,' said Norah steadily, 'you'd better go down to the camp.' His eyes signalled to her to come too. Archie divined the intention.
'Norah,' he began, 'don't, just for now, don't...' then bitterness broke over him. 'Oh, well, it doesn't matter by now, does it?'
She resigned herself to the rack and promised to stay with him while Dick went down to the lake. But Archie spared her. He was going, he said, to walk in the hills, and called Matao to give her breakfast.
'I ought to have seen that Ward had breakfast,' he said. Then as he paced away into the forest she thought she could detect the words, 'they serve breakfast in the condemned cell....'
In moments of danger Norah's romanticism had a way of lapsing, leaving her as practical as a Swiss hotel-keeper. She ate a good meal of cold roan. She knew she would need all her strength to keep Archie and Dick apart. Moreover, if this was to be her last breakfast, it should be a good one.
She did not suppose that even this new, incalculable Archie contemplated leaving her to starve; she was less sure about his plans for Dick. And of course she would stay with Dick.
'Her honour rooted in dishonour stood.
And faith unfaithful kept her falsely true.'
A tag that Miss Briggs had taught her in the schoolroom as an example of some eccentricity of grammar or other. It was sometimes true of life.
She must be prepared for anything. Archie might not act in hot blood: he might think things out, but she was not reassured. The Archie she knew had a habit of logical thought. And if this unfamiliar man of action came to the conclusion that it was not his business to succour the enemy within his gates, he would translate his ideas into deeds.
As she meditated the change she saw in Archie, a sound caught her ear, and looking up she saw Dick signalling to her from the edge of the clearing. With a shrug she walked across to him. She noticed that his hair was still untidy and his clothes crumpled from the night spent without his gear.
'This isn't fair!' she said, when she reached him.
'Is he here?' he asked anxiously.
'Archie's in the hills, but I promised ... why couldn't you wait?'
He stepped into the open. 'I couldn't, Norah, not alone; down on that shore.'
'I did last night.' She did not tell him she had not dared sleep or that she had taken to the hills as soon as she could see the white mist that rose from the warm water of the lake.
'I didn't have much of a night either,' said Dick, and related how Archie's identity had been disclosed.
He told his story in jerks, with quick glances over his shoulder and exaggerated gestures. Norah guessed that his nerves were breaking under the strain. His poise, his assurance was shattered. His debonair bearing had shrunk to the rags of a swagger that he pulled round him when fear allowed.
'What's he going to do, Norah? For Christ's sake, what is he going to do?'
She shook her head. 'I don't know,' she said.
He jumped at a sudden snap of a branch. A carrier had stepped on a dry twig.
'What was he saying to you? I couldn't hear.'
'That he must be alone and think.'
Dick's voice went shrill. 'You say he's sitting there, thinking in cold blood whether he'll let us starve?'
She shrugged her shoulders. She believed Archie was doing more than that. He was trying to save something out of a wrecked universe. If she had not exaggerated the look in his eyes, he might even be struggling for sanity.
Dick might be right that their fate swam in the crucible, but she was so desolately unhappy it hardly seemed to matter. Dick's misery took a less stoical form.
'It's awful,' he was saying, 'hanging about to hear what he settles. We might be criminals in the dock. It's worse, for there the judge is not your enemy.'
Norah made no comment. What was the good of all this talk? ... and, well, she preferred Archie's way of taking a knock. Couldn't Dick spare her this pitiful sight into his soul? Was she cursed to torture her husband and debase her lover?
'You don't seem to see, Norah,' he went on after a glance over his shoulder, 'if he turns us off, we've got food left for one day, for one day, till to-morrow. Then three, four, or five days more we'll suffer the tortures of starvation. About Sunday we'll die.' His voice was out of his control. 'Die, do you understand?' He paused, and his fingers twisted restlessly. 'By Tuesday, in a week's time, Norah, by Tuesday we'll be rotten. Don't you understand?'
'Always the little ray of sunshine,' said Norah.
His hands went up to his head. 'Oh! you must think me a beast to say these things to you, but don't you see, you must go to your husband and get him to ... to stay. He'll listen to you, if you beg him. He can't have the heart. Ask for time anyhow. Plead with him. If you must, promise him...'
'To go back?' Her voice was hard.
Dick averted his eyes. 'Afterwards, things will be different. Anything may happen ... provided we are alive.'
'Dick,' said Norah passionately, 'I may be a rotter and a whore: d'you want to make me a coward too?'
'But don't you see...'
'For Heaven's sake shut up; you're making me hate you!'
When Archie left his camp, he had wandered aimlessly in the forest until he noticed a boulder, and sat down. Below him lay the lake as blue as the Virgin's robe. He could see the mountains of the farther shore, their tops ruled straight by cloud. They reminded him of Table Mountain and his landing with Norah at Cape Town when hope was high.
At his back towered the nearer lip of the crater. Its height seemed to disparage his emotion. How long would this mortal and his ephemeral trouble endure? The bitterness, which had succeeded his anger, passed and left him with a dazed sense of loss, in which consecutive thought was stilled. Pictures of the happiness, turned so suddenly to dust, rose in his mind:—
Norah's tawny hair, rebellious under her nurse's coif; Norah's slender hands opposite him at dinner tinged by the shaded candlelight; the way she used to throw herself into his arms when he came back on leave; a fluffy sort of dressing-gown she once had; and so on down the years of love and marriage till the moment when he heard that ragtime tune in the forest, whistled so gaily ... before she knew he was there.
That hurt worst of all. His mind ached into the vast query—Why? Why had he lost her? He had never understood how she came to love him, but what had he done to make that miracle cease? If she had only told him!
Her outburst on the farm, which sent him hurrying to the Congo, had come as a revelation. Manlike, he had assumed she liked the life she had chosen. And all the time...
He felt no anger against Norah. By some illogical working of his love she seemed to stand apart. Though his mind recorded her infidelity and reeled at it, his heart was filled with gracious recollections of her. What she was and had been, did not seem to be obliterated by what she did and what was done to her.
His hate focused blindingly on Dick Ward. Imagination of that coarseness defiling his wife's body drove the blood boiling to his brain, but he never thought of her as defiled. He was tormented by the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved, still loved, would always love.
But the swine who had killed her—lust for his blood mounted. To shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no great thing. If the war had not already shown him that, these years in the forest had dwarfed the importance of mankind. And his standards had been warped by these last weeks spent in the slaughter of monsters that take the three score years and ten of man's span to reach the stature that fits them for killing.
So for a while his mind played with the killing of Dick Ward ... until the memory that already the man's life was in his hands stayed him. In his pain he had lost sight of the crisis that before his appearance had faced Ward and Norah. He saw that he had only to stand aside and execution would be done. Or rather, since no harm must come to Norah, take her on alone with him, regaining his wife and obliterating her lover.
But all the time he saw the impossibility. He could not leave a man to die whom he had promised to help. Still less could he kill him. In a way Ward was his guest; he had come to Archie without food, or hope. His defencelessness protected him. And the duty that one white man in the wilds owes another, backed by the African tradition of help and hospitality, demanded his rescue.
Dick's helplessness, had he known it, was his strength.
So what Archie would have called 'being decent' prevailed, and, painfully, he began to plan the immediate future. He welcomed, indeed, anything that held his mind away from thought of his loss, the three lives.
The outcome of that salvation—what would afterwards become of Norah, Ward, and himself—he did not attempt to guess.
At last his ideas were in order. In spite of the heat he shivered as he got up to return to camp.”