As soon as it was light, Norah was awakened by Archie's voice outside her tent. He was speaking in Chiwemba, and she could hear Matao's monosyllabic replies.
Her call brought Archie to the doorway. She resisted an impulse to tell him to come in; he seemed so infinitely remote.
'You ought to be in bed,' she told him.
He assured her that he was better.
'What is it? Fever?'
'Yes. But it's down this morning.'
If he had not been standing with his back to the light, she could have seen from the colour of his eyes that it was not very far 'down.'
'You ought to have a day in bed and give yourself a chance,' she urged him.
'Can't. Every moment brings the rains nearer. No joke to be caught on a raft by a squall.'
She asked if the natives could not be left to work alone, or, she hesitated a moment, under Dick's charge.
He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on to get a buck with every round and not a day must be wasted. Ward, he said evenly, was in bed.
'You're an obstinate Scot, Archie,' she said with a little sigh. 'You must go your own way.'
'Afraid so,' he replied, with an effort at a smile. Then in a gentler tone than he had used since she'd met him in the hills, 'Thank you, it's nice of you to have bothered.'
Poor Archie, she thought, he was grateful for little enough.
He talked for a moment about the work. That day the felled and trimmed logs must be manhandled to the water's edge. There were too few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from hillside to lake all day.
Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.
But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. Then she dressed slowly. For a time she stood staring at the lake, which lay under the storm clouds grey as a salmon's scales. It was under a week, as calendars measure time, since she had first set eyes on the lake, welcoming it as the friend that pointed the way to Europe and happiness.
Well, she knew Tanganyika better now.
She turned her back on the lake and on the hopes it had once aroused. She would not see Europe, perhaps, until she was an old woman. The interview she was on her way to seek would, she supposed, make fast the bonds that stretched her on the altar of Africa.
She found Archie sitting on the wreck of a tree felled by the tireless destructiveness of white ants. She noticed how fever and pain had hollowed his face and bleached it under the sunburn, till it stared like a Cubist sculpture. The natives clustered in groups, chattering while Matao hacked a grip in the fifteen-foot log that lay at his feet, to attach the lushishi ropes.
'That will do,' said Archie, 'get on with it.'
The ropes were fastened and the gang split into two rows. Matao raised his voice in falsetto song and the deeper voices of the workers joined the chanty. At the first beat of each bar they hauled on the ropes, shuffling their feet in a bear-like measure to the unstressed beats, so that the log progressed by jerks.
'No good showing them how to pull like men instead of the Russian ballet,' said Archie. 'The Wemba have hauled trees that way since they came out of the West and they're going on.'
'To the same tune too,' added Norah.
'Probably/. Then, after a pause, 'Anything up?'
She reassured him.
'Then I think I'll keep with them and see they don't slack.'
With an effort of will she stopped him. 'Please, Archie.... Can't we talk? There's something I've got to say.'
He looked distressed. 'Need we?' he muttered. 'Isn't it better left alone?' Without awaiting her answer, he moved in the direction of the singing.
She stood firm. 'No, Archie, I must. You can go back to the work in a minute.'
He shouted for Matao. The singing ceased, while he ran to receive his orders. His return was signalled by a fresh outburst of the tune. Norah wished for a moment she had let Archie go. The start was intolerable. To gain time she asked how he had got his fever. He told her it was fording a river one day after elephant. She expressed her surprise. This was the first she had heard of elephant hunting.
He told her the size of his bag and the weight of the ivory. 'Not that it matters now,' he added, in spite of himself.
'D'you know, Archie,' she said, 'you never told me a word?'
He stared at her in silence. 'Nor I did,' he answered at last. 'But that was half the reason I went to the Congo.'
'And the other, the pure-bred bull,' she said sadly.
'Bull?' he was obviously puzzled, 'what bull?'
A measure of their old familiarity returned to her. 'Archie,' she said, 'you're maddening. Do you realise I haven't a notion what you've been doing from the day you left the farm till ... till we met here?'
So Archie struggled with his taciturnity and, helped out by Norah's questions, produced a more or less coherent story.
Until Norah's outburst on that momentous evening at the farm, no intuition had warned him she hated the life they were living. Intuition, introspection, and so forth don't get the same scope with a pioneer working eleven hours a day on a ranch, as they do with a serious young man fulfilling himself in Chelsea. Archie's only excuse took the form of a tribute to Norah.
'You stuck it like a brick,' he said. 'You never gave a sign.'
'I'd have been pretty mean if I had,' she put in. 'I made you come out here.'
So when at last her restraint had snapped, he treated the revelation with even more than his normal solemnity. After his habit he looked at the issue from both sides. For his part, the life and the country were ideal. And he was, he believed, on the slow gradient that leads his kind of man to success. But then Norah, she told him, hated the farm, the forest, everything. And the issue she did not believe worth waiting for.
Archie thought too clearly to assume the right of any one, even an Englishman, to impose his wishes on a fellow man; so it did not occur to him that he might keep Norah in surroundings she disliked. At the same time his deep-seated, if unvocal, love for Norah turned down the solution that she should go back to England, while he stayed and worked the farm. The nearest he could now bring himself towards some expression of this was to murmur, 'I didn't think then I could do without you'—words which added remorse to the pity in Norah's breast.
His logical brain accepted the only choice that remained—to take Norah back to England and find work there.
Once he had decided, it was not his way to brood on the cost of abandoning the farm that had absorbed two years and over of his life. He chose without murmuring the lesser of the evils that confronted him. Many days would have followed of slow consideration of plans to realise his assets, had not the pace been forced by no less humble an instrument of Providence than 'Mr. Jones of the Congo.'
'That night at dinner,' explained Archie, 'I said I was thinking of selling the herd. Jones' eyes lit up and he told me he had a pal on the Katanga who'd buy them.'
Archie had not been greatly impressed until he learnt that Jones' friend was head compound manager of a group of mines. The contract for the miners' meat was in his hands.
'If you let me handle the deal,' Jones had said, 'I'll get you a better price for "live weight" than you'll get anywhere else for "dead."'
'Bribery all round,' said Archie to himself, 'but that's not my concern.'
'You've been good to me,' added the "stiff," 'I'll only take five per cent. on the transaction.'
This Archie, with his Scotch blood, thought excessive; Jones himself must have had some qualms, since he was willing to throw in a bit of information that might, he said, make Archie's fortune.
I've been offered that sort of tip before,' said Archie, 'and I wanted to know a bit more.'
Well, it wasn't an undiscovered gold field or pipe of diamonds, but the whereabouts of what Jones described as 'the elephants' home town.'
The year before he had stumbled on a little-known valley on the Congo side of Lake Tanganyika where elephant, he declared, were as thick as rabbits and as big as dinosaurs. Tusks up to 150 lbs.
'Not unnaturally I asked him why he didn't take a knock at them himself,' said Archie. 'But he had a yarn ready that he had lost his nerve for elephant.'
Well, to cut a long story short, Archie did not believe a word until Jones drew him a sort of map of the locality, marking the position of several villages. The name of one of the villages was familiar. Searching his brain, Archie remembered that he had that day written on a Congo native for mason's work, who gave that village as his home.
'More to score off Jones than because I believed there was anything in it, I sent for Wadia,' he told Norah. 'To my surprise he confirmed his story. Elephant, he said, were as plentiful there as the puku on our flats: their footprints were as long across as his arm.'
In the light of this support Archie's reply that he would think it over was characteristic. It did not, however, suit Jones. The D.C. at—he mentioned the name—had given him a hint not to stay too long in the country, and he must push on the next day. If Archie liked to come to Elizabethville and give him five per cent. on the sales he secured, well and good; if not, they'd leave it at that. Archie, without answering, worked out the suggested commission on the back of an envelope. He found that he stood to gain more than he gave. Making the further stipulation that the compound manager paid hard cash, he professed willingness to start the following morning.
'Right, it's a bargain,' said Jones.
Nora told Archie how she had overheard these words. 'If only I'd heard it all!' she said. 'Why on earth didn't you tell me, Archie?'
'Well, it seemed pretty wild. The whole thing might be a try on. And I didn't want to talk about it till I'd got the money and we could start home.'
But if, he said, she hadn't been asleep when he came to say good-bye he'd have told her. In fact that's what he came to say.
Norah felt that the petty deception had been the fatal moment of her life.
He did not say much about his journey north. Quite early he had decided there was no object in accompanying Jones to Elizabethville and had made straight for the Valley of Ivory, as he named it. Sceptical to the last, Archie had to admit that the place came within measurable distance of Jones' enthusiasm. Of his adventures there he gave no account.
'You feel a bit of a swine the first elephant you shoot,' he mentioned. It's so big, so contemptuously trustful. You seem to have taken an unfair advantage of a large-minded opponent. And you've destroyed something older and longer in the making than yourself. Like burning an old master.'
The first hitch had come after he had shot his first two bulls. That was the number allowed him on his thousand franc license. He applied at the 'Poste' for the second license he had been promised, to be met with a bland refusal. No second licenses were being issued. He had considered his position. If he gave up the hunt, he would go back to Norah with a hundred or a hundred and fifty more sovereigns in his pocket. Even with a first-rate sale of his stock that wouldn't be much use.
The alternative was to stay and poach.
'Everybody does it up there,' was the excuse he gave Norah.
But Archie never had cared for the example of other people; the force which urged this law-abiding Scot to break the law was his love for Norah. Where she was concerned, he stuck at nothing. He had not hesitated to abandon his farm and two years' work to satisfy what most men would call a fancy. A Bulamatadi law did not stand much chance. The pity is that he was so careful to conceal from Norah this one recklessness and its source.
Not that it was necessary to surcharge her cup. He had said enough to show that while she flirted with Dick his only thought had been her service.
But her last defence remained to be stormed.
'If only you had come when I sent,' was her cry.
Archie stared.
'The letter Jacketi brought,' she repeated.
'I never saw Jacketi,' he said slowly.
She told him of the despairing letter she had sent, of Jacketi's return without an answer, and of the days she had waited.
He dropped his hands hopelessly.
'Jacketi never came near me. He must have turned into some village for a beer-drink.'
'Damn him, damn him!' cried Norah, and then in a dead voice, 'No, it's I who am damned.'
The work gang returned trailing the lushishi ropes. Husband and wife stood silent while the capitao prepared another log for hauling.
When the workers had danced themselves out of sight, Archie saw that Norah was crying. His awkwardness returned. 'Don't cry,' he said, 'it's done now; we can't help it.' He searched his mind for comforting phrases.
'I wouldn't have gone,' she said like a child, 'if I'd known.'
What could he say? Why had she insisted on this useless laceration?
'I thought you didn't care,' she repeated again and again.
He felt that this was unendurable. All his energy was needed for action. Emotion might complete the harm that fever had begun. Norah too must spare herself. He took a tug at the strait waistcoat of stoicism he had condemned himself to wear, remarking dispassionately that he must go back to the work. Many more logs should have been transported by now.
But Norah's weakness had been momentary, and her courage reasserted itself. 'Wait!' she said, 'I haven't told you what I came to say.'
How could she allude to what had happened without hurting him? How could she tell him it was over without promising more than she could perform? The phrases formed in her mind. She rejected each in turn.
'I'm giving Dick up!' That sounded as if she grudged a sacrifice.
'Take me back!' held out hopes she could not justify.
'I've left Dick'—she might be a kept woman.
'Archie,' she said slowly, 'I wanted to tell you that I'm leaving Dick, whatever happens. If you want me still, I'll come back to the farm.'
Archie did not speak. Not even his expression altered. The pain he had suffered had dulled his senses. His silence, his undecipherable features spared Norah nothing of humiliation. What was he thinking of her? Like a child she wondered if any one was marking up her humiliation against the harm she had done. Her words rang in her ear. She could not force herself to add a syllable to them, though she saw how inadequate they were. How Archie must despise her! Unfaithful even in adultery. Taking a man and leaving him in a few weeks. Like any harlot: less constant than the animals, whose fidelity endures the breeding season.
In fact, Archie had no clear thoughts. He felt that waves were buffeting him: his bones ached with fever: his brain was numb. Like Norah, he had turned his back to the future, and this fresh shuffling of the bits of coloured glass that make the kaleidoscope of life, as yet meant nothing to him. He could not focus his thinking. Presently one thought emerged. Not a very lofty one. 'You've got her back from Ward,' crooned his instinct of possession.
Then an idea flickered through his brain, stabbing like a white-hot wire.
'Does this mean she still loves me?'
His body seemed to come to life and to flow with young, clean blood. He must sound the amazing possibility at once and risk the pain that denial would bring.
'Why are you ... what makes you give up Ward?' he stammered.
Norah felt explanation beyond her powers. Surely it was not demanded of her to tell how she had come to despise and distrust her lover; and how she had been driven to parry the danger she sensed.
'I can't go on,' she answered simply.
But Archie's stoicism had deserted him, and he found the suspense more atrocious than yesterday's certitude.
'It wasn't because you thought you might...' His voice trailed away.
She understood what he wanted to ask, and sorrowfully shook her head. She dared not start into a labyrinth of deception through which her feet would have to drag every day of her life.
Archie's eyes, which had been alive with incredulous hope, died. He sat down heavily on the stump, no longer sustained by any aspiration, hope as dead and dry as bones in the sand.
'I had to tell you,' Norah murmured.
He nodded.
'Don't let's talk of it any more,' he said; 'we needn't settle anything yet.'
For once he felt he must talk; the sound of his voice was preferable to the bottomless vacancy of his heart.
'We've got to get out of here first. Then I dare say you'll like to be taken back to England. Then we can see.'
In his disappointment he clutched at her offer of reconciliation. It was something to know that she was not a total loss to him. He had, it seemed, only to say the word and she would come back into his life. If he did not set his demands on happiness too high something might be saved out of the wreck.
Norah had been watching his face. Her heart had ached for him as she saw the re-birth of hope and its deception. She had been tempted to foster it; but why treat him like a child when his manliness made him so admirable? She had lost confidence in herself and felt she blundered in a dark room, bruising and crushing against her will.
She was distressed to see how ill and worn he looked now that hope had left him. Finding no word that could help, she urged him to come to his breakfast. To her surprise he consented. Together they started downhill. Archie stumbled. In his disappointment, the fever was mastering him. He stumbled again. Norah took his arm and led him to camp. With Changalilo's help she put him to bed. He seemed affected by her care for him. It gave him the momentary illusion that nothing had happened and that their life together had not been interrupted except perhaps by a night's dreaming. Hugging the illusion, he fell asleep.
Towards evening the slanting rays of the sun entered his shelter and woke him.
Two facts permeated his waking consciousness—a body sore in every bone and a mind that grappled with the possibilities of Norah's offer to come back to him—'if he wanted her.' How he wanted her! Was there anything else he wanted?
But ever his reason forbade him to listen to his affections. Whenever he smothered his common sense, retribution followed. Of course it had been mad to think he could make a husband for Norah, and it was mad to think he could hold her now.... But as yet nothing need be determined. His first job was to get them out of this ... but there was something that had to be done at once. What was it? ... Damn this fever.... Oh, yes! Johnny, the fundi, had reported a herd of eland in the hills behind the ruins. With the rains coming, they would not stay there. He must get one that evening and have the meat dried into strips, as a stand-by on the rafts.
Painfully he lifted himself out of bed and, his head swimming with weakness, got into his clothes. How heavy his .420 weighed! Pity the handy little .303 had been smashed up by that wounded bull! A near shave it had been!
He looked about for a native to carry his gun, but the camp was empty. Resting the heavy rifle on his shrinking shoulder, he walked shakily into the hills.
He looked up at the sun and saw that in under two hours it would be dark. There was not much time. As he walked he searched the ground for spoor. Padded footprints on a stretch of sand showed where one of the smaller cats had stepped in the night. A genet probably; too small for a serval. Norah had had a tame genet on the farm. 'Fred' it had been called. He remembered the little blind thing he had bought for a shilling from a native who would have eaten it. It used to sleep all day in Norah's pocket; she had nursed it through infancy, waking in the night to feed it on warm milk and water, but it had died while still a kitten, bitten by a native dog.
Norah had always a liking for the little wild things of the forest; some feeling of kinship, maybe....
His eye rested on the delicate footprints of a dwyka. The antelope's bound had impressed its hard, slender toes into the baked earth. The tracks were a day old ... was it thinkable that Norah and he would be able to take up their life together from the point where she had dropped it? Would memory let them? Was this ... adventure of Norah's a mere episode that they could both forget or did it mean more?...
He'd thought there were leopards about and those scratches on the bark of that muputa tree showed where a leopard had sharpened his claws. Leopardess, more likely, to judge by the height.... It was too rocky ahead, he would have to work round behind the mission. There wasn't a breath of wind, so it didn't matter which way he came at the game....
Here were the ruins, the sweep of the hill had brought him out too low. Funny how Norah hated the place—fancy, of course. Was that her voice he heard? But quinine makes your ears sing and then you imagine voices. Still those deep tones of Norah's.... He'd just look round the tower to see if any chance had brought her there. She'd be angry with him for leaving bed....
He rounded the ruined tower and stood as if paralysed by what he saw. His right knee bent to advance began to tremble violently with slow, separated jerks. He tried to raise his voice, but his lips had gone dry. They felt swollen. He had not had this feeling since the nightmares of his childhood when he had seemed to cower in a small dark room, gasping for air, while a shapeless, colourless, nameless body like a distorted featherbed or an obscene grand piano was swelling, swelling and crushing him out of existence. The oncoming of absolute and inevitable disaster.
So he stood, while not twenty yards from his eyes, Norah's body lay fast held in Ward's arms. His kisses rained on her white face. Her tired eyes were shut—he imagined the little blue veins in their lids—and she seemed to swoon with pleasure.
In spite of the resolution he had taken in the hills, at moments Archie's rage against Dick had rowelled him. Imagination had goaded him with intolerable pictures of his wife's intimacy with her lover, kissing, for instance, body to body, Dick's rather full lips crushed into her carmine mouth. The vision always lashed him to a mute fury in which he could feel his rival's throat bulge under his fingers. Fever had given body to these visions and had reduced his self-control. But except perhaps in dreams, such as Norah had witnessed, the crisis was momentary and quickly overcome.
When, therefore, a few yards off, he saw his wife's pale face forced back by the weight of her lover's kiss, her little body crushed by the violence of his arms, the familiar process was started. Rage blazed up to be as instantly curbed by will. Fiercely he commanded his passion, until realisation dawned. This was no unhealthy, torturing fancy, but an enactment in flesh and blood. And if the picture before him was real, so was that throat real. At any rate the weight of the gun on his shoulder was real. But where did imagination start and reality end? Had he imagined Norah promising him that morning to give up Ward and, if he said the word, come back to him? No, that was real. Then this picture that seemed to sear his eyes must be the work of fever in his brain. Norah did not lie. And she had promised ... he then must be mad. Fever was not enough to cast shadows so solid as those before his eyes.... Fact or fancy, he'd stop it, by God!
He humped up his shoulder, and the barrel of the rifle fell into his left palm. The familiar feel of the metal cleared his mind. Those were real people over there, Dick Ward and Norah Sinclair; real, mortal, vulnerable people. And Norah had lied to him that morning; had come to him with her flesh a-tingle perhaps from Ward's kisses, and had lied to make Ward safe. Well, she shouldn't get away with the lie. Hot fury blazed in Archie's breast, and power of motion returned.
He must have shouted, though he did not hear his voice; a startled face turned towards him, and slowly, oh! slowly, Norah's eyes opened.
He saw his enemy drop Norah, start to his feet, snatch at a gun that lay on the ground. With his right thumb Archie pushed over his safety catch, and for an instant the barrel rested on Norah. She had been fooling him all the time, perhaps all these years she had fooled him.... Then the sights swung round and aligned on Dick. Some one should pay him for this.
Before Ward could raise his rifle from hip to shoulder, a shot rang through the ruins. His knees sagged, bent; then he toppled over with his face rubbing the ground. His shoulders twitched and his hands opened and clenched. A jerk, and he had twisted on to his back. Thus he lay staring at the sky, and the tissue of enterprise and weakness, frailty and charm that had been Dick Ward ceased to exist.”