When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeling beside the body, fumbling with its collar. He remarked her skirt was in a pool of dark blood. She would not, he reflected, be able to wear that dress again.
He started to go to her, stopped, and stood in thought. If he went to her he would hear her reproaches, see her grief, perhaps be maddened to ... harm her. He knew he would be sorry later if he did. Nothing in the world would make him sorry about Ward.
Without any conscious act of will he walked away into the forest. As he walked he held at arm's length the knowledge of Norah's treachery. That had better not be faced till his head was calm again. Thinking about Ward did not matter.
His anger had vanished, but nothing like remorse took its place. His mind handled the crime dispassionately, mathematically. Before his ... action he had, he now saw, been trying to solve an insoluble problem. The world had been veiled in a thick fog of good and bad intentions, mixed motives, false standards. Now he saw everything as clear-cut and minute as if he looked through the wrong end of a telescope. Ward's death had amazingly simplified life. In retrospect he could see the death of one of them as the only conceivable solution; there had not been room in the world for the two men and their passions.
The only emotion he was conscious of was an almost impersonal satisfaction. Once he had shot a lioness that had terrorised a village; his sensations had been similar—at a certain risk to himself the world was quit of a pest. He was satisfied, moreover, at a clean job carried out efficiently with his own hands...."
Ross paused. "It's easy," he said, "to go wrong over Archie's feelings. He was always so careful to suppress them. But that's the best I can piece together from what he let fall, consciously and in his delirium. The result is not what your psychologist, certainly not what your moralist, would like.
If you are inclined to side with these wise men from the West, you must remember that on the subject of Norah this hard-headed farmer was not quite normal. His love was that dominant weakness through which, according to my theory, Africa masters a man. So the kiss that betrayed his love shocked him not only into murder, not only into callousness, but into a different epoch of morality. The atrocity of his discovery seems to have atrophied the segments of brain that are latest developed in man—the convolutions that give refuge to mercy, compassion, gentleness.
'The vigorous young world was ignorant
Of these restrictions; 'tis decrepit now,
Not more devout, but more decayed and cold.'
And Africa stood eager to welcome him to an older world where force, not cunning, ruled; muscle, not money, dominated; where Jehovah was God, where an eye for an eye was sound morality; where you killed your enemy, dashed his children against the stones, and added his wives to your harem. It was Jehovah's gospel, not Christ's, not Mammon's, that the forest whispered in Archie's ear.
Another avenue to remorse did Africa close, that fear of discovery and of punishment that leads men to contrition. Murder is so safe in Central Africa. Let me advise you to take your enemies on a shooting trip there. There in the solitude, far from coroners' inquests, are a hundred agents of sudden and silent death—snake-bite, blackwater, a crocodile, sunstroke, a lion ... and a sun that makes immediate burial unavoidable.
Any of these or a dozen other fates could be adduced to explain Dick's disappearance; the natives would ask no questions and carry no tales; and a wife cannot, in English law, give evidence against her husband.
So Africa was accessory after, as well as before, the fact. Archie may not have recognised her proffered help; at the same time he can have felt none of the anxiety and fear that so assist the workings of conscience. He blundered on through the trees, caring only to set space between himself and Norah, until chance brought him on the herd of eland.
His eye, which took in no detail of his course, was caught by the quick movement of a horned head plucking at a branch. The sight of the great antelope focused his vision on the rest of the herd, whose humped bodies were no more than shadows in the dappled gloom of the forest.
Dropping flat, he began to crawl into easy range. No fancy shots, with ammunition so scarce. As he got near, he saw that the animal he stalked was a cow. Cautiously he knelt up and searched among the trees for a bull. He thought involuntarily that, for the second time that day, he had spared the female of the species. He raised his rifle and aimed behind the shoulder of a magnificent bull who stood head up guarding his cows, his horns hidden in the flat branches. With faint surprise he found compunction in his heart. He was loath now to tighten the trigger finger. Half an hour before he had felt no such qualm.
It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull on a line between eye socket and ear hole.
If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were nothing—men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth. Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated, choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing posture.
Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.
The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. Soon the eland was hidden under a mound of foliage, black in the failing light. He kicked a little earth over a pool of blood that might attract a jackal or a hyæna. As he did so, another pool of blood with a woman's skirt trailing in it rose before his eyes, and he realised that what he did for an eland he must do for a man.
Ward must be buried. He could not be left to the ministrations of the forest. Archie's prodigious impersonality had departed and he was conscious of a violent distaste for the work before him. Either his fever or his imagination brought physical sickness, and he sat down on the ground till the nausea passed.
He started to drag himself home. His gun seemed an intolerable weight now that his mood had weakened. For a moment he saw the murder as a fault—not as a crime or an infraction of the law—for the power of the forest was too absolute to let this lawyer care much for legality—but as a failure in hospitality. Ward had come to him, he remembered, for help, had put himself in his power. And the use he had made of his power was to deal death where he promised escape.
Remorse passed as quickly as it had come when he thought of the kiss which had forfeited Ward his claim to help, safety, life. But the duty of burying Dick had never left his mind, where it bred a fresh idea of his victim.
He no longer saw him in the abstract as the enemy, the defiler of Norah's body, the pest which must be killed. He saw him as a dead man. A poor dead man. Un povero morte, shut out from the daylight, from sight and feel and smell, from love of women, from hope and achievement. All he had now was stillness and a silence.
Archie felt no horror at his crime. He stood back from civilisation, remote from society, away from the herd that had created morality to make possible life in a herd. But pity took hold of him, pity for his victim, who was also, he saw, the victim of exasperating circumstance, of passions and stupidities. And heavily—if justly—had he paid.
A growl of thunder diverted his attention. It did not sound very distant. He hoped the rains would not break yet, but he quickened his aching steps.
It was dark when he reached the ruins and found no trace of the body he had come to bury. Even in the obscurity he expected that he would have seen the white clothes. They would not be so white now, but something should be visible. Had Norah had it carried into camp? If she had, that showed beyond palliation that she was careless of her husband's fate.
Had he come to the right spot? Yes, this was where he had stood. Ward over there, with Norah. He had fallen forwards. His body should lie here. Archie fancied he could smell the pool of blood, and the light of a match justified his senses.
He lit another and saw that the grass was bent and broken. In Ward's death agony? Or had the body been dragged away? He followed the wake in the grass, striking matches as he went, till at a distance of some fifty yards he came on the stained, white bundle. He had not come in time. Hyaenas, a flicker of lightning revealed, had been before him. The poor corpse was already mutilated. His pity for the dead man gathered force. He had never admired Ward's good looks (secretly he may have been jealous of them), but he knew they were there, and against his will he had been conscious of the man's light-hearted charm. Now this helpless, shapeless thing worried by the beasts of night was all that remained.
It was the war again, he thought. Bodies of Germans hanging on the wire—sons, husbands, lovers of some one bereaved in Germany. Only here the consolation was lacking of sacrifice for a country. Ward had died in no nobler quarrel than the fight of two dogs over a bitch.
For the first time it occurred to him that his victim was a human being. He had seen and killed him as an abstraction—the betrayer of Norah; he had seen him and pitied him as a corpse: now he knew that he had been a human being with human faults and qualities, human interests, human relationships; somewhere he had a family, friends, a home.
And to-night he must bury him far from all that. He faced the problem of the burial. The work must be done with his own hands and the carriers must know nothing. He could give out that Ward had been taken by a crocodile on the shore of the lake. The noise of shooting would be explained by eland meat he would send them to fetch next day. The first round fired would have missed. He passed to other considerations.
The digging must be done with a broad bladed native hoe that was tied on to one of his loads for general camp use. There was no spade. The ground was iron-hard and the tool inefficient. It would take his fever-weighted arms several hours to dig even a shallow grave. Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.
It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his body yet unburied. Yet, rather than cross to his camp and meet his wife, he would have preferred to stay in the company of the part-eaten corpse of the man he had shot down.
The pain he had felt, when he first learnt in that sunlit clearing that Norah was untrue, had been diffuse. Grief attacked his heart from many sides and numbed it. Despair mingled with puzzlement; self-reproach merged into anger. Norah he had been slow to blame, making his own shortcomings scapegoat and Ward's seduction. That she was guiltless, that her chastity was intact he could not pretend; but he found excuses and put his love at the five-barred gate of prejudice. Love saved him the shock of his wife's sinfulness that most men would have suffered, accepting the boom in virginity engineered by a Church that is celibate at heart and the great ring of women with plain daughters to marry.
But if Archie had tried to ignore his wife's infidelity and in his heart had longed to forgive it, disillusionment now seared him with hotter irons. His body and brain seemed to ache with the question—why in the morning say she was ready to come back to him and had left Dick Ward for ever, to be caught ere evening in his passionate embrace?
There were only two answers:—
It might be that, faithless herself, she had not believed his promise to bring her and her lover safe back to Abercorn. To make sure their escape she had coldly tortured him with lying offers, had tricked him with a flattering tale. Could it be true that the girl he had worshipped as all that was loyal, all that was high-hearted, had fallen to this treachery, grovelled in such cowardice and cruelty?
But if that was not the truth, then his clean, lovely Norah was a harlot so wanton, so rotten, she could not keep for an hour out of a man's arms, could not for a few days stay faithful. The day she was left on the farm welcoming a lover; renouncing him as soon as her husband found her; slinking back the same night.
He must accept, it seemed, one of these unendurable explanations. Where both so base, did it matter which was true? He had married and adored either a wanton or a traitress. Was further scrutiny necessary? Was not the only manly course amputation, to cut the woman out of his life?
When first he had learnt that she had left him, he had grieved for Norah as one untimely dead, lost to him but still dear. Now he must think of her not only as lost, but dishonoured. That he still loved her, degraded him to her level. She had eaten her way into his life like rust, had twined her fingers through his heart-strings. Before it was too late, he must tear himself free of her magic.
He faced the issue squarely. Suppose he surrendered to the love, which still impregnated his tormented being, and took Norah back, what peace would there be for either? Could he ever for a moment forget her character as this blinding moment had revealed it? Could he ever trust her word? When she spoke to him he would divine a hidden sense; when she kissed him he would see a lure. He would have sold his manhood for deception and a mockery.
No, once he had rescued her from the danger of the moment, he must break through the net that entangled him. The world would be bare enough without Norah, without the farm, without mankind's major compensations for living—love and work.
Even suicide was inadmissible. If he killed himself here, what would happen to Norah?
Some heavy drops of rain recalled him to the work that faced him. He must fetch the hoe. If he met Norah, he need not speak to her. Sometime he must tell her what he had decided, that could wait. There was now a man to be buried, a raft to be built, a journey to be begun. Plenty for one man to do, with fever. Then he'd have to go to the first Boma and give them a story of Ward's death. Unless, of course, Norah betrayed him. That, and anything, was now possible.
He found it difficult to raise himself from the heap of masonry on which he was sitting. His limbs seemed to have stiffened and he shook with ague. Laboriously he dragged brushwood and creepers near the corpse and put a match to the heap.
Then without looking round, he walked heavily to the camp. The unsteady illumination of lightning showed him his path.”