That afternoon when Norah had helped Archie down the hillside, where the work of transporting the logs was in process and where she had made her difficult offer of reconciliation, it had not been easy to persuade him to take his fever to bed.
She had at last overcome his conviction that the carriers could not be left alone by promising that she herself would watch the work. So she had spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon walking behind the gang in their slow passage between hillside and lake, until the full number of logs that Archie needed to build the rafts lay ranged on the shore.
Leaving the workers rolling lushishi ropes between the palm of their hands and the flat of their thighs, with orders to make a certain length before they knocked off for the night, she started in search of Dick to tell him she was going back to Archie. She dreaded the task before her. Her generosity shrank from the wreck she must work in Dick's dreams. That morning she had had to sacrifice her pride; now Dick's romance was the victim. Her days seemed a string of unendurable tasks.
Somehow she had mismanaged her offer to Archie. Instead of relieving him she had added to his distress. And the news she had for Dick, in its nature, carried nothing but pain. She scourged her imagination for some means to soften the blow.
As she meditated she caught sight of Dick's tall white-clad figure on one of the mounds that marked where the monastery had stood. She noticed that he had listened to Archie's monosyllabic advice, not to go far afield without his gun, as the rocks might harbour leopards. 'That's where those two rounds come in,' Archie had muttered.
She shouted to Dick, but the distance absorbed her voice. Forgetting fear of the ruins in dislike for her mission, she clambered up the shattered stairway.
Dick was plainly glad to see her. She had not been near him since dinner the night before, and she was struck by the change. He seemed to have filled out to the dimensions of his old care-free self. The storm of panic and jealousy had passed and left no mark, for Dick was one of those fortunate beings who can emerge on the far side of the Valley of the Shadow with an unimpaired flow of small talk.
I've just seen a water-spout,' he told her.
Norah examined him with wonder. His eyes were clear and happy, his manner without embarrassment, his bearing debonair—the Dick she had known and loved. He seemed unaffected by the heat, his hair well brushed and white clothes spotless and tidy. With his white topee on his head and the Mauser in his hand, he looked, she told him, like the frontispiece of a South Sea novel.
Where was the water-spout, she asked him. It was over on the far side, he said, a wisp of opaque mist joining the lake with a cloud. Snow-white at its foot; grey where it met the cloud.
'A pillar?' asked Norah, putting off the moment she dreaded.
'No, it sort of trailed. Wide at the base and the top; pinched in at the middle.'
She watched his hands as he tried to describe the vortex. He used them in conversation more than most Englishmen, perhaps because they were long and well shaped. She remembered how the touch of them had once thrilled her.
That magic had departed; exorcised by her better knowledge of him; or perhaps only overlaid. For the moment she was empty of all passion. Suspense, shame, pity had squeezed her dry like a sponge. When life flowed back into her veins, would the spell resume its dominion? Now she was nothing but a brain dispassionately scheming the redress of the wrong she had wrought, and grappling with the consequences. But one day, when the crisis was over, she knew her body would come to life. Would it then remember those well-shaped hands?
'Well,' she told herself unsympathetically, 'it would have to.' If Archie had not her heart, he had her word. And ignorant of the blow she must deal him, Dick talked gaily of a dozen different matters. He pointed to a stretch of opposite coast that was blotted from sight. The sky above the gap was a black fog that shredded into streamers of cloud. The hills on either side of the gap lay clear and clean in the sunlight.
'Rain,' said Dick, 'it'll be cooler here soon.' But since she had told Archie her decision, Norah's anxiety about the heat and its possible effects had been relieved.
'Dick,' she said, 'listen to me for a minute.' Pity poured into her. Contempt had given way to understanding. For all his thirty years he was only a boy. Good-looking, attractive, lovable. All his possibilities were in sight. He had no reserves to draw on and, if he had failed in the hour of test, the fire had been hot indeed.
'Dick, haven't you noticed,' she began, 'haven't you noticed that nothing good lasts? Sooner or later one goes back to school.'
'What is the matter?' he asked.
'Everything,' she said. 'But there's no need for you to mind. The world's full of pretty women—and ones that won't let you down.'
'Optimist!' he laughed, 'what are you talking about?'
I'm trying to tell you.... It's all finished now, Dick. Oh, do understand! we're through.'
Norah had counted on a painful reception of her words—prayers, protests, despair. It had not occurred to her that she might be met with blank incredulity.
'My dearest child,' he said, 'you're mad.'
She wanted to tell him that outside the natives she was the only sane person in the bay, but he would not listen.
'You're nervy,' he said. 'I don't wonder. I was nervy myself yesterday. I imagined all sorts of rubbish about Sinclair.'
'I'm going back to Archie,' she managed to put in.
'Yesterday I thought he'd got something up his sleeve,' Dick went on without seeming to hear her, 'but I know I was wrong. I think he's behaved jolly well. He doesn't mean to interfere with us in any way. Of course it's rough on him, but that is life.'
Dick's mercurial temper had asserted itself. Starvation, death, violence seemed very far away. His sky was clear.
'Oh, do listen!' cried Norah.
She was getting hysterical, he thought. No wonder, either. But he must not give way to her fancies. He kept up a steady flow of reassurance. When at last the stream ran dry—
'Dick, listen,' she spoke very slowly, dividing the syllables. 'I've—told—Archie—I'll—go—back—to him.'
When the words had left her lips their brutality appalled her. She had hurt Dick as she had hurt Archie. If only he had not forced her to speak out.
Her calm impressed his optimism. He dropped his rifle, which clanged against the hidden masonry.
'Good God!' he said, 'do you mean it?'
She nodded her head wearily.
'You've told Sinclair you'd chuck me? Damn it, Norah...' and his disappointment found vent in anger and in abuse of Archie.
Norah saw she must stop him. Their short romance had been disastrous: it need not be made ugly.
'Don't,' she cried, 'don't spoil it now. Leave it so that one day we can look back without distaste. Part has been good. Don't throw that away.' He opened his mouth to answer.
'Murder's better done in silence,' she said, and walked a few steps away.
Dick's affection for Norah was real and shamed him into the silence she begged. After a moment—'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I was a brute. But it's such a shock.' Then coaxing her: 'Norah, say you don't mean it, say it's all a nightmare.'
She sat down on a pile of rubble overgrown with creepers. He knelt beside her and slipped his arm round her body.
'Norah, it can't be over yet. We'd only just started.' His face came close to hers. 'It was going to be so heavenly.'
She made to rise but Dick held her fast and crushed his lips on to hers.
What were Dick Ward's motives in kissing the mouth that had just renounced him? He may have trusted to the caress, with the memories it would revive, to soothe what he deemed disordered nerves. He may have hoped to burn away her scruples in a kiss. Or, more simply, the nearness of her body, so soon to be lost to him, may have set his veins a-throb and deprived him of reason. He never had the opportunity to explain.
In the hours that followed Norah was to curse the kiss so negligently accepted—suffered, rather, in weariness and compassion. She felt a great pity for Dick. With his gallant exterior and weakness beneath, he was so ill-equipped for the hand-to-hand fight that is Life. So easily hurt. She wanted in his dark hour to let him down as lightly as she could. If every word of hers, every action, was to breed suffering for the two men who loved her, it seemed ungenerous to forbid anything that might ease the pain. If kissing her was any help....
After all it seemed prudish to balk at a kiss from one who had so recently possessed her. And since it stirred in her no breath of passion, whom could it hurt? So if kissing made parting easier...? And she was weary, mind and body; the interviews with Archie and Dick had taken all her strength; for the moment she was as passive as the dead. What did a kiss more or less matter?
The next moment, she was kneeling by a corpse.
Death, when it comes suddenly, is so incredible, that for some time she worked to bring back consciousness.
At last she desisted and her senses and intelligence confirmed the fact of death; still she took in nothing. Mechanically she closed his eyes and mechanically stayed on her knees, trying to pray for a spirit released on Eternity all unready. But she would have been less astonished, when she opened her eyes at last, to see him standing there gay and immaculate with a smile on his face and a word of love on his tongue, than to find him lying stiff and contorted in the disorder of violent death. Was it believable that the mouth, which a matter of seconds before had so feverishly sought hers, was set in that grimace as long as any flesh was on it? That the body, whose warmth she felt against her heart, was growing colder, never to be warm again ... unless putrefaction engenders heat?
To occupy her hands she lifted his rifle, playing with it aimlessly. What deadly toys men had! She turned the weapon in her hands, half opened the breech.
It was still in her grasp when she reached the camp, where Changalilo took it from her to clean. She felt that henceforward life would consist of minute, valueless acts like handing a rifle to a native, changing a skirt, sitting down on a chair. Nothing would ever matter again. 'All things are full of labour: man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.'
The workers were in sight, still rolling ropes of lushishi: even in this backwater, life did not pause in the presence of death. She felt she must get close to living beings, but when she had joined them, she found in their proximity no relief. They were too calm and unconcerned, too alien to her. She dismissed them for the day and turned back to camp.
Her eye fell on Archie's shelter and travelled to the rain clouds.... With his fever ... his fever was bad. Perhaps if he had been normal he would not have ... how was the quinine going? She fetched the bottle and tipped out the tablets, counting them slowly. She lost count and started again. The bottle would not last many more days. She must warn Archie. She took up the flowers she had picked that morning while she watched the log-hauling—purple orchids from a patch of swampy ground by the yellow river. Their clear, bright colour caught hold of her emptied mind. It seemed to matter more than anything else that was left in the world. She pinned a bunch against her white jumper. As she did so, she noticed they made her hand smell of musk, and ever afterwards the odour of musk made her think of blood.
Unpinning them, she discovered that she hated their sophisticated little faces. She threw the bunch away and tried to wash the musk from her hands. But the scent lingered faintly.
All the while, she was detached from her actions, as if her intelligence had been carried high up into the air whence, at an immense distance, it watched her body mooning about with flowers, loving them and quarrelling with them like an idiot child in a limpid poem by Wordsworth.
But inactivity increased her anguish. She had the sensation of abominable things lurking behind her, ready to spring if she began to think. She picked up the needlework she had been busy with on the Mimi, and tried to stitch. Her fingers trembled too much and she sat staring blankly at the sewing until she dropped it with a despairing gesture. It was a sock of Dick's that she had started to darn.
The trivial shock seemed at last to clear her brain and it bore on her that Dick was dead and killed by Archie. That the calamity she had foreseen had happened. She tried to believe that from the first she had seen no human power could ride the storm of the two men's passions. But in truth she had never doubted that her wit would find a way. She had divined the danger, faced it and, she believed, by the sacrifice of her every sensibility, had mastered it. Then one act of pointless surrender had brought her contriving to bloody ruin! The idea that Archie might see her loveless embrace and by it be goaded to strike had never crossed her brain. Had her mind not been dulled by the three days' ceaseless stress, it would have refused Dick the fatal consolation of that barren kiss.
By her blind sympathy, by the abandonment of a moment, she had killed him. To the two men she loved she had brought ruin and death. Her own act had made her the wife of a murderer and the mistress of his victim. Œdipus, slaying his father and marrying his mother, Rigoletto stabbing his daughter for the seducer he had abetted, were no more blood-guilty than she.
She tried to forget what was irreparable. What did the future hold?
One glimpse was enough. A black frame, in the middle of which a body, with a cloth over its face, hung, twitching a little. She put her hands over her eyes, but imagination had no mercy.
She waited now in the airless court, waited to hear Archie sentenced to spend his youth in a prison or pay life for life. She saw the indifferent, dispassionate features of the barristers; the old, grave face of the judge; the inhuman pomp of Justice, only less terrible than the degraded ceremonial of the scaffold.
And his father would be there. She would have to tell him.... How could she save Archie? If payment was claimed, it was she who must pay. She would force him to be prudent, to cover up the traces of blood, to plan an escape.
At any moment, one of the carriers, released from work, wandering afield looking for wild honey, might stumble on the corpse. She braced herself for action and told Changalilo to collect the natives. Anxiously she counted them; they were all there. How could she keep them from the place of death?
'Tell them,' she bade the servant, 'to-night it will rain. They must thatch their shelters, now, without waiting.'
She showed him where they were to pull the grass for thatching. She stood over them to see they did not wander. Changalilo asked if he should prepare Archie's bath. Where could Archie be all this time? By now it was nearly dark. Changalilo said he had heard shots, the last one just audible. The Bwana, he suggested, had wounded and followed game.
His words evoked a fresh horror. That distant gun! For a terrible moment she saw a second figure in the lonely hills, lying in its blood.
She shut the image out. Archie, of all men, however little he wished to live, would not leave her on this haunted shore to face starvation alone. She wondered if he had collapsed from fever alone in the bush. Only fear of what the natives might find on their way stopped her from leading a search party.
It seemed that hours passed before the sound of slow footsteps in the dead leaves fell on her ear and Archie's bowed figure crossed the circle of the firelight. Even in the reddish glow his face was pale and he walked as if each motion called for a separate effort of will.
She moved to meet him, to take his hand, but he kept his eyes turned to the ground and carried his gun to the shelter. She heard the bed creak under his weight. She had no inkling of the baseness he had read into her acts, and only her respect for his obvious wish to be left alone stopped her following him. Could he not see the urgent need to give the natives some reason for Dick's ... absence? To forestall curiosity? Talk spread through the villages and from the villages might reach a Boma. Inquiry would follow, the carriers would be sent for and the story pieced together. She forced herself to keep quiet, crediting Archie with agony of conscience that he did not, in fact, feel.
When she could endure inactivity no longer, she crossed to the shelter and looked in. Archie was sitting on his bed, his chin dug into his chest and his rifle across his knees.
'Archie,' she said softly.
He took no notice.
She repeated his name.
'For Christ's sake, Norah!' he said.
'No, listen to me,' she began again, 'don't think about ... what's happened.'
'Not think about what's happened?' he echoed as if he could not believe he heard her words right.
'Think what you'll tell the natives,' she said. But he only stared as if he had never seen her before.
At last he spoke. 'Norah!' he began, then checked himself, and as if, she thought, he was fleeing from her presence, shouldered his way out of the shelter.
She stood where she was, unconscious of the repugnance she had inspired. Had horror swept him beyond clear thought and speech? Or did he think his company intolerable while his hands were wet with her lover's blood? Where was he going? Out into the forest, driven by his thoughts? Or maddened by remorse to betray himself?
He was calling Matao to him and speaking loud and in Chi-wemba, so that the attentive group of carriers, sprawling by the fire, chewing dried strips of yesterday's meat, could hear. She gathered the sense of his words.
He had killed, he said, an eland in the hills. The announcement was received with murmurs of contentment and the firelight caught the gleams of teeth revealed by wide, smiling lips.
It was a big bull, he went on, and there would be much meat for every one. The prone figures twisted over on to their knees and clapped their hands softly in token of gratitude.
After he had taken them, he continued, to the meat at dawn, work would start on the rafts, ready to leave the bay in the afternoon.
He began to speak lower, but his voice did not falter. Bwana Dick, he said, was missing. He feared something had befallen him. His words were received, it seemed to Norah, in complete apathy. The goings on of the strange white man were no concern of the people.
The Bwana, said Archie, had started towards the northern arm of the bay, looking for fish. He had not returned. Archie paused, but the natives listened in a detached silence.
Shortly before dark, he continued, he had heard a sound like a cry. It came from the beach. He looked at the natives, but no one made a sound. He bade Matao inquire if any of them had heard it. Matao saluted and whispering started. Archie waited awhile before he finished his tale.
He had gone, he said at last, in the direction of the cry, and had found Dick's footprints in the sand ... and the spoor of a crocodile. He stopped speaking.
The natives were in eager discussion. They were interested, thought Norah, in this version of Dick's death, not as a tragedy but as a sort of sporting event between a man and a crocodile. Then her heart stood still. Their unfailing interest in game of all sorts would draw them next morning, however indifferent to Dick's fate, to the beach to see the spoor and trace the struggle. And they would find smooth shingle: not a mark to confirm the story. Why, oh! why had Archie not consulted her? She could have devised a story less vulnerable than that.
The whispering ceased as a native rose, helping himself up by his spear struck into the ground. With quick gesture he told his story, starting, as natives do, with happenings of days before. How Bwana A-ri-shy had brought them in canoes across the lake; how Bwana Dick-i had come by night; of the migration to the bay and the trees they had felled.
Archie listened imperturbably to the rambling statement. At last the man came to the point. He had been sent by Matao to soak some lushishi in the margin of the lake. While he did so he heard a shout.
'Who shouted?' asked Archie quickly.
'It was like Bwana Dick-i's voice, but frightened.'
'At what hour?'
The native indicated the height of the sun in the heavens.
'From what direction?'
He pointed towards the northern arm of the bay, away from the ruins.
What had he thought?
He had thought nothing.
Norah breathed more freely. The black man's child-like anxiety to stand in the limelight had brought confirmation to Archie's story.
He dismissed the two natives and retired to his shelter. Norah watched the group by the fire resume their business of meat and sleep. Presently she saw Archie with an unlit hurricane lamp in his hand walk out of the circle of light in the direction of the latrine. She saw him stoop and pick something off the ground. A hoe, she knew, always lay about there. Then he disappeared in the direction of the ruins.
She guessed where he was going and on how ghastly an errand. Why wouldn't he confide in her? She would never have agreed to that crocodile story, whose falsehood to-morrow would prove. How could she undo the mistake he had made? How could the natives be kept from the shore on some pretext not too transparent?
The storm was getting closer. Crashes of thunder were more frequent and louder. The flicker of lightning was incessant. It revealed, concealed, revealed the walls of the crater that had trapped them. Those old hills, had they ever seen pain like this before? Pain, the only rival in man's experience of their immortality. Peoples emerge and disappear, gods are honoured and forgotten, pain alone endures.
A wind began to blow, cold wet gusts that drove the heavy stale air before them. The night grew darker. A distant hissing sound came nearer and clearer, like the approach of a railway train. The boughs of the forest lashed and waved. The noise resolved into the slash of rain on leaves. A moment of lightning disclosed the oncoming of an opaque wall of water. The deluge burst on the camp.
Norah faced the rain, bending her body to withstand its violence. Her eyes were blinded but her brain seemed to be cleared. Great relief filled her heart, tempered by a foreboding that such luck could not endure; for the traces of the imaginary struggle would be washed from the shore before morning.
Near the crumbling shell of the church tower, which seemed in the tremulous illumination of the storm to bob and stagger at each recurring crash of thunder, naked to the waist, smeared with mud, dripping with rain and sweat, Archie dug.
His lantern was perched on the heap of liquefying earth he had thrown up behind him. Each gust reeled the flame over to the brink of extinction and whistled sibilantly through the air holes.
He worked slowly, but without pausing even to throw off the water which ran over his eyebrows and into his eyes, or to free his shorts which flapped clammily against his legs. As he dug, the rain ran into the grave, so that his boots squelched in the mud and once he slipped, falling with his face in the loose earth he had thrown out. Each hoeful had to be tossed up on to the heap, the hoe held by the heel and handle. His lumbar muscles rose under the strain, catching the dull gleam of the lamp.
When he had dug for a couple of hours, the moon appeared and the clouds thinned to wisps of black vapour that scudded across her face. The roar of the rain in the forest was lowered, till the drip of each separate leaf seemed audible over an undertone of the surge of the waves on the lake. The smell of the earth, wet after seven months' drought, rose and the perfume of fresh green.
Archie clambered out of the hole and measured it depth with the handle of his hoe. Apparently satisfied, he walked over to where Ward's body lay and tried to lift it. But Dick had been a big man and Archie was a small one, exhausted with fever and back-breaking labour. With a shrug of the shoulders he abandoned the effort and taking hold of the corpse by the collar he dragged it over the uneven ground to the grave.
He laid it supine and endeavoured to straighten the twisted limbs. Already the body was stiff and resisted him. So he pushed it into the resting-place he had prepared. But in its bent-up attitude the knees stuck out of the shallow grave and Archie had to roll it over on to its side.
Without waiting he started to pull earth into the grave, using his hoe sideways as a scraper. As the soil tumbled in, he reflected, with wonder and no bitterness, that the face his wife had so lately kissed was now pressed into the cold, wet earth....
Then he heaped broken bricks from the debris of the church on the place, lest a hyæna should undo his work....”
[1] The Awisa, with a certain knowledge of the simpler arts of peace, were conquered and swamped by the purely predatory Awemba.