The first face he saw was Dick's. In spite of the heat through canvas, Norah had retired into the tent. Archie wondered if it was to show she had not sent for Ward. 'Damn the fellow,' he muttered, 'can't he see he's asking for trouble.'
That wouldn't do, he reflected; in a minute he'd be at the man's throat. Must be normal; what was it Norah had said—'Be civilised'?
His attempt at normality and civility would have made an angel laugh.
'Rain's coming,' he growled.
'Yes,' replied Dick, and wondered whether this was the small talk of the tribunal before the black cap is assumed, 'that's why it's so appallingly hot, I suppose.'
Archie stared at him inimically. Dick's face was wet with sweat and his silk shirt stuck to his body. 'Heat or funk?' thought Archie uncharitably. But the limpness of the leaves and the attentions of the flies told him how hot it really was. And yet he was shivering. Fever coming, he concluded. Damned nuisance just now.
'Yes,' he said aloud, 'the rains.'
He could stand the fellow's physical presence no longer, and turned to the tent.
'Norah,' he said, 'we must make our plans.... I say, you oughtn't to be in this furnace.'
'I promised you...' she replied slowly.
He stared at her. Then some promises were binding! That wouldn't do either. If he was to go through this show decently he must rule out bitterness as well as anger.
They walked into the shade. Dick followed. His restless eyes, his fingers twining and loosing revealed his anxiety. Archie felt the pervading suspense and saw that for all his distaste for explanation he must declare himself. At last he broke the silence which seemed so intolerable to Dick's tormented nerves. His words were commonplace enough.
'This is a rotten position,' he said, and added, 'for all of us,' then paused for thought. 'If we were anywhere else,' he went on, 'I'd go away. A long way away, and let time'—he felt for a word—'mend things.' Another silence. 'Unless I called you out and shot you'—his rapid whisper was more startling than a shout. 'But, as it is, I can't clear out, or you'd both starve.'
Dick wiped his forehead.
'So we've got to stick together,' ended Archie, 'till we're out of this hole.'
Norah felt no relief. Between them in their several ways, these men made life more dreadful than death.
Archie began again. He was speaking now to Dick, though his eyes looked beyond him. 'I make one condition,' he said. 'I must have sole charge. You must do what I say. Otherwise I can't promise to pull it off.' He might have added that if Dick was to oppose him at every turn he couldn't promise restraint. 'Do you agree?' he asked curtly.
In his relief Dick would have agreed to change his creed.
I'm sure you're right,' he said, 'unity of command.' The reprieve had gone to his head like wine, and he talked light-headedly. 'By Jove, the heat! I felt suffocated.' But no whisper of a breeze had come to dissipate the heaviness that lay on the land. 'What's your scheme to get away?' he asked.
Archie forced himself to answer.
'Move down to lake level first.'
'Why not go on up here?'
'Blast the man,' thought Archie. Then aloud, 'How many days will it take us with Norah,' he hesitated before mentioning her Christian name to this fellow, 'to find a village?'
Dick spread out his hands.
'Well, I don't know either. We might be out of ammunition first. And what about water? And where are we going to get carriers for your loads from?'
Dick agreed brightly that by sticking to the lake their water supply was assured. It did not strike him that in his relief his words were not very profound. The business of striking camp proceeded.
'You'll have my tent, Norah,' said Archie, and gave Matao directions to have a shelter built for him.
Dick's exhilaration vanished. He opened his mouth to speak, but a menace in Archie's eye dissuaded him. He kicked at a partly consumed log and hummed gloomily. Archie's withdrawal to pack his kit at last gave him the opportunity to murmur something to Norah about 'rubbing things in.'
'Do you expect me to sleep with you under my husband's eyes?' she asked. 'Aren't you a trifle exigeant? Besides,' she added bitterly, 'you told me just now to make up to him.'
His retort was prevented by footsteps behind him. He turned and saw that he was being offered a couple of cartridges.
'Two rounds of 7.9 stuff I brought by accident.' Archie explained. 'Found them in my kit. They'll fit your Mauser.'
When the loads were ready, the string of carriers, with Changalilo at their head, straggled down the hill. The three Europeans, after a visible hesitation, followed. If their mutual company was unendurable, to descend singly at intervals would be grotesque. So these two men and their woman, the prey of all the forces that civilisation works to repress, hatred, love, fear, shame, pity, danger, were constrained by their sense of—was it humour or reticence?—to observe the usages of daily intercourse.
They passed the foot of the blow-hole chimney where Norah had sighted Changalilo the night before, and the view that was revealed gave them a momentary relief from the pain of thought.
All the week the clouds that herald the rains had packed closer and closer on the horizon, till now they lay like a litter of discoloured wool.
Across the lake the mountain tops which had been hidden in haze, stood out in the sun-bathed clarity of a primitive painting. Their crags and ravines, diminutive in the distance, looked as if human fingers had pinched and dinted them into the powder-green relief of a plaster map. Black against this green lay the foothills in the shadow of the cloud bank. The foreground was blocked by the near headland, heavily green with the green of English elms in August. Every tree that grew there was distinct, and the grass at their feet. At the water's edge gleamed pillars of white rock.
'I wish the rains would come,' said Norah at the end of a silence. 'I feel as if I were breathing hot fluff.'
But with the weight on her heart she would hardly have noticed the stifling heat, had she not dreaded the working of that suffocation on the men's nerves. As she glanced away from Archie's pale face she tried to forget the tales of violence, murder, suicide committed often on almost frivolous grounds in the exasperation of the heat that heralds the rains.
Here at lake level, close to the equator, the dagger of jealousy and despair hilt-deep in his brain, might not Archie find suicide or murder the only solution?
It was agony to be so impotent to avert the doom that hung over the two men she had loved and crucified. She felt, or imagined, their hot, angry eyes on her, and dared not look up lest she loosed the lightning. She alone could lay the passions she had so heedlessly aroused; and any word, any gesture almost, might precipitate the latent madness.
She was aware that the strain of the intolerable position could not endure; unless she lessened it something would snap. And the life of one or both of the men would pay. When death from starvation had threatened, she had pictured herself in a short dark corridor of days. In front stretched an iron-grey screen like a fireproof curtain. Behind it lay ... what? Now danger of death had lifted, and still the screen was there. Her mind was pinned to the emergency of the moment, but even had that urgent menace receded, she would not have dared to lift the curtain. What lay in store for her, she made no attempt to divine. Life with Dick, life with Archie, life alone? The future was too dreadful to contemplate, the ruin she had wrought too radical. And if—what she dreaded—took place, she would be making plans for men who would be dead at their fruition.
For the moment she anchored her conduct to the only course that she felt could not do harm. By a manner resolutely matter of fact, she might create a conventional atmosphere, might maintain the dangerous equilibrium of the moment until the impulse to violence died.
Archie, it seemed, when the vulture that tore at his entrails would let him, had resolved on the same conduct.
'What about resting here a bit?' he asked.
'I don't believe it's much good. It's as hot sitting as walking. What wouldn't I give for a breeze!'
'It may be days before it breaks,' said Archie. 'But if you're not tired the sooner we get down and start work the better.'
'What are you meaning to do?' asked Dick aggressively.
By now he had lost his fear of Archie. Enmity and suspicion had taken its place. He paid with hatred for the panic that had gripped his heart, for the doubts kindled in Norah's mind, for the glamour stripped from him. Where once he had felt contemptuous pity, an uncertain jealousy flickered. He hated Archie because he held the whiphand; he hated and despised him for not using it. He despised him that he might not despise himself. And he was uneasy. Why had the man promised to save him? Why, above all things, had he given him that ammunition? Was there a trap?
He wished he had not agreed to Sinclair's leadership. That condition, now he examined it, left the way open to every treachery. Was there a plot to separate him from Norah and let him starve?...
With all her drastic methods, Africa seems to have brought little out in Dick but a certain animal cunning. It was in a spirit of suspicious enmity that he asked the question which opened the discussion.
'What am I meaning to do?' repeated Archie. He refrained from adding, 'What in hell's that to you?'
'Yes,' said Dick.
'Build a raft, if you want to know.'
'A raft?'
'Look here——' said Archie, but Norah intervened in time.
'To get over to the Mimi, Archie?'
'To get along the coast.' Archie struggled with his instinct to produce a completed job, discussing it neither before nor after. But his reasonable nature told him that, where he gambled with the lives of others, they had a right to see his play.
By now they had reached the camp by the ruins. Under a stream of exhortation from Matao some of the carriers had started to pitch Norah's tent; others were cutting boughs for the shelter.
Norah led the way into the shade. The men followed.
'As far as I can see,' Archie began, 'there are three ways out that aren't too risky.'
He stopped and looked up at the sky, which was now heavy with cloud. The heat, however, was fiercer, as though a lid had been shut down on them.
'The weather matters too,' he explained.
'You were saying you had three plans,' said Dick.
Archie continued to address Norah. He told her that his first idea had been to stay where they were and wait for rescue, relying on the game they could shoot with the remaining ammunition, helped out perhaps by fish from the lake. The objection to this simple plan was that the game would move away and ammunition might be exhausted before help came.
'Alibaba said twelve days,' put in Norah.
'Doubt it,' muttered Archie. 'One of the Bulamatadi boats is in dry dock. Or so they told me at Songwe. They mightn't be in a hurry to send. Anyhow, it's a risk.'
There was a distant rumble of thunder.
'That may go on for weeks before anything happens,' said Archie.
'Or,' he went on, 'we could ferry over to the Mimi. What you said. I don't believe we'd be any better off. Any meat they could spare wouldn't go far among all of us. They'll have wasted half. More likely we'll have to feed them. And Ward's ammunition—that'll have gone by now. No native can resist cartridges.'
Norah remembered what had looked like the ammunition chest at the bottom of the disappearing dinghy. Its value would explain the Hindoo's incorruptibility. She expressed her conviction, and, at the mention of the Indian, Dick broke into curses.
'The third way,' Archie began again, 'has got the points of the other two. If we made a couple of rafts, we can tap the Mimi for anything in her that's any use, and we can coast along the shore with game and fish always handy. Sooner or later we must come to a fishing village.
'Danger,' he added, 'is squalls and crocs.'
Dick considered the scheme. If there was a trap, it was well hidden.
'It seems all right,' he admitted.
'That's most gratifying,' replied Archie, and Norah reflected that the squalls which would follow the coming of rain might be less dangerous than the heat which came before it.
'We're wasting time,' said Archie, and calling Matao he gave him his orders in Chi-wemba.
The hardwoods, he explained when he had finished, Kayimbi, Mulombwa, Mubanga and the rest, would not float. But there was a little light timber from which the natives cut their canoes.
'It's scattered about the hills,' he said. 'I'll have to blaze it before we start felling'—but his eyes showed his hesitation to leave his wife with her lover. She wondered what to do. If she offered to come, Dick might be stung to dangerous speech.
'I'll go and lie down,' she said. 'I've got a headache.'
An hour later, the apparently deserted hills echoed with the resonant chopping of axes. A dozen wooden bells seemed scattered in the forest as the tall trunks sounded with a rhythmic clop! clop! under the soft native iron. A rending, splitting noise, and the first tree, with the swish of a gigantic broom, tore through the boughs, prostrating its neighbours. The wooden bells clanked on as its limbs were hacked from it.
Soon Norah found the heat of the tent unbearable. She wandered to the shore, where she hoped a breeze might be perceptible. But the water was as smooth as a mirror. She faced inland. A tree top taller than the rest caught her eye. It stirred. The wind must be rising, although her wet face felt no breath. The tree trembled now. Its boughs waved, although wind seemed no more than a memory of the dead. The tree swayed. A modulated sway that lengthened with each period, until with a splintering crash it submerged beneath the ripple of the surrounding leaves. It was man's work she saw, not the wind's.
A native issued from the dark line of the forest. The light caught the tawny bundle he carried. Approaching the lake, he tossed a small log into the water that the splash might scare any crocodile which lurked there; then he bent and pushed the tangles of lushishi, broad strips of flexible bark, into the silvery margin. He hooked his axe over his naked shoulder and went off in search of more. To-morrow, Norah knew, the sodden lushishi would be twisted into rough ropes to lash the raft.
She pictured the adventure of the raft and shrank from the heavy hours that awaited the three of them cramped side by side on that narrow platform.
Archie had said 'two rafts,' but one would carry the loads and the carriers who were not needed to paddle their masters. It was a pity a sense of the ridiculous did not allow one raft to each European. Jealousy, shame, hatred demand more footage than a raft can give. All the world may be too little.
But she was glad Archie had not decided to wait in the bay. Her instinct that tragedy pervaded the deserted settlement had had foundation. It now urged escape before tragedy deepened.
She heard a European tread on the shingle and turned to find Archie.
That's started,' he said. 'I'll ask Ward to keep an eye on them while I try to get a buck.' Determined to pursue any indifferent topic, she asked what sort of game he expected to find.
'Might be anything. But I must keep on till I find something big and fairly eatable. Dwyka or klipspringer are too small to be worth a cartridge, while zebra or waterbuck ... I tried eating zebra the other day!"
She sympathised. There was a pause; both felt awkward.
'I've told off a man,' pursued Archie resolutely, 'to make snares and things. Though I don't believe they ever catch much in them. Those drop traps are the best. A beam poised over a gap in a bit of fence. We might get some small stuff that way—a katiri or even a bush pig. Doubt it, though.'
'Fish?' said Norah, remembering her efforts of the day before.
'Yes, that's what I wanted to ask you. I've told Matao to find some one with ideas; when he comes will you keep an eye on him?'
'They're all Awemba, I suppose?' She knew that that once warlike people had no water-lore.
'Yes, and Matao was shocked when I told him to find one with an Awisa[1] mother.'
After a moment of hesitation Archie left her. She saw him speak to Dick, then with his gun under his arm he disappeared into the trees.
As she watched him go, she could not restrain a feeling of admiration. In days past she had jibbed at his thoroughness. She saw its value now. The practical man might not cut a romantic figure; but for coping with romantic situations, he could give a stone to any Lohengrin or Lancelot. His cautious, deliberate nature, how it used to irritate her! How irresolute she had often thought him! But now she sighed for a little less resolution in his handling of Dick. Only the deliberate humour she had once despised could avert tragedy. But how formidable the forces against its return!”