"Abercorn," said Ross, lighting his third consecutive cigar, "was laid out some quarter of a century ago by a far-sighted and optimistic official on the lines of Paris. There are boulevards and 'rond points'; avenues of thuja and eucalyptus; terraces and squares. And at the present moment there are five dwelling-houses, a block of government offices, a jail and post office, one European and three native stores.
The settlement is served by two railway systems, one distant four hundred miles to the north, the other six hundred to the south.
I suppose it is what you writers call 'an outpost of civilisation,' but civilised it seemed to me after six weeks of ulendo through the bush! and urban, to the point of decadence, it must have looked to Archie emerging from the virginal bosom of the 'fly' belt.
Red Dog, Manitoba; Bloggsville, Wisconsin; Smitsdorp, Transvaal; from what I hear these spots breathe a red-blooded life dear to cinematograph producers, without being remarkable either for comfort or refinement.
How different these tiny Boma towns of North-Eastern Rhodesia that have only existed a decade or two! You are at once struck by the absence of red dust, corrugated iron, spittoons. Books may be found in every house, water colours or etchings too; comfortable arm-chairs and cushions; nice china and plate; occasionally a piano. The standard of comfort is above the average of an English country rectory. And the issues that confront the population are often as vital.
A few days before I reached Abercorn, short of two loads, whose carriers had fallen sick on the way, one of these crises had begun to darken the horizon. I was privileged to hear at least one side of the question that was dividing the township, the side of which Mrs. Lavater was protagonist. Lavater was the D.C., and very kindly he had housed me until my loads caught up and I could go on to my fishing camp.
Mrs. Lavater is one of those big-boned, deep-bosomed, high-coloured women, who have done so much to make the Empire what it is. Were they endowed with any sense of humour, would that Empire be what it is? It is a doubtful question.
'What I told Mackenzie,' she was saying as she poured out the China tea for which she was rightly famous, 'was that the money was raised by the golf club and it ought to be spent on improving the golf course. I say we could start a new nine holes.'
King Arthur could not have mentioned the Quest of the Holy Grail in tones of greater reverence.
'It's all because,' she sank her voice, 'Mrs. Mackenzie won—or so she told me—a silver inkstand in the mixed doubles at Eastbourne in 1913. That's why he's fussing about a tennis court.'
I was lost in banal admiration of our race. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there shall golf, tennis and the seeds of England's greatness be found.
'They find a desert and leave it a links,' I murmured.
Mrs. Lavater said she was delighted that I agreed with her about the second nine.... She stared firmly out of the window. Had her pince-nez been endowed with supernatural vision; could they have pierced a range of tree-clad hills and embraced a couple of hundred miles of forest and lake; she might at that moment have seen Archie's carriers splashing knee deep in the tepid water, tugging at the lushishi cords, which dragged the second raft, grating down its path of rollers, reluctantly on to the lake.
The other raft already rode on the mirror-like surface. On its rough-hewn timbers a pile of bedding had been arranged for Norah. Her neat white clothes looked incongruous, for the uncouth craft and the theatrical blue of sky and water seemed to demand for passenger some shaggy Crusoe of pantomime.
Rifle in hand, Archie knelt on a round black rock that projected into the lake, his neck stretched and his eyes intent for any sign that the crocodiles had not been scared away by the noise.
The singing rose louder as the second craft slipped jerkily into the water, sending angry little waves to slap against the logs that supported Norah.
As the work of balancing the loads progressed, Archie from his rock called out the names. 'Mulenga, behind the Mama. Benesh, on the other raft, beside the kitchen box....'
As he was named, each native raised his ragged clothes as high as decency and Norah's presence would permit and climbed to his place, poising on his head his few possessions—a torn reed mat or a black clay cooking pot, an iron spear or axe, and strips of dried meat that tainted the air. With each fresh comer's weight, the raft dipped and danced....
By the following Saturday Mr. Mackenzie had completed a house-to-house canvas of the ten adult inhabitants of Abercorn. Hume the Postmaster, the doctor and the Assistant Native Commissioner had rallied to the Mackenzie standard. At four o'clock their leader, girt in a stiff collar, called officially to inform Mrs. Lavater that a tennis court was demanded by the majority of the town.
He dropped his bomb and retreated outwardly triumphant, but in his heart uneasy, for he knew how hardly women like Mrs. Lavater accept defeat. A sudden scurry of rain sent him for shelter into the post office, where he confided in Hume that he had not liked 'the calm way she took it.'
At lake level that scurry of rain was magnified into a vicious little squall that nearly ended Archie's and Norah's problems before their destined time.
The rafts were crawling over the glassy surface under the slow urge of unaccustomed arms. Their course pointed from headland to headland of a bay that bit deep into the thickly wooded slope.
Archie, since a hippo, inquisitive or frightened, had risen under the baggage raft and tipped its crew into the crocodile-infested water, had left Matao in the bows to keep a look-out ahead and had posted himself in the stern of his craft, his rifle across his knees, his eyes plumbing the bottomless blue of the lake. Some instinct, or perhaps the continuous drone of Matao's voice, made him turn, to catch his lookout man absorbed in conversation with the bow paddler.
He snatched the steersman's paddle and the water churned as he headed the clumsy craft landwards. For where the headland should have shown clear in their path stood a blank wall of mist. Alive at last to their danger, the unskilled paddlers strained their strength to drive the heavy rafts to shore, but, in spite of their efforts, the squall gained on them. The sky darkened and they heard the oncoming howl of the wind.
Their breath hissed between their teeth, their muscles stood in knots on their arms and naked backs, as Archie, paddling with long, quick strokes, urged them on. Waves splashed over the raft, drenching Norah to the skin, and stinging her delicate body with their impact. The last slapped up full in her face, setting her spluttering with its brackish taste and clinging with her slim fingers to the knotted logs. Two of the loads broke loose and swept past her lakewards.
Archie dropped his paddle and, tearing up the bark rope that lashed the raft, looped the free end round her waist. Then the rain broke on them, driving in horizontal sheets. Norah shut her eyes to save her sight. She opened them to see Archie leap from the raft. Her heart stood still, till she saw him standing chest-high in the surf and heard him bellow to her to put her arms round his neck....
The day following that scurry of rain, Mrs. Lavater launched her counter attack, which proved to be nothing more sinister than the convention of the members of the Golf Club (a body differing from the population of Abercorn by the exclusion of children under twelve—see Rule Four) to discuss the motion 'that this meeting approves the enlargement of the links.'
The Mackenzie faction, secure in their canvassed majority of five against four (for the D.C. stood firm in his neutrality), arrived to find the meeting enlarged by the presence of the eldest Lavater girl, Dorothea, aged twelve and a half. Too late they realised that Dorothea, whom lack of clubs had kept away from the links, had by the workings of Anno Domini equalised the vote.
With superb self-control and diplomacy worthy of Whitehall, Mackenzie rose to propose that, in view of the deadlock, the meeting be postponed to that day fortnight.
Mrs. Lavater, prompted by a suspicion that Angus Mackenzie was due to celebrate a thirteenth! birthday at the beginning of next month, opposed the amendment on the indisputable grounds that, before the fortnight was up, the N.C. would have gone on leave and the doctor would have accompanied him as far as his tropical disease research station in the Luangwa Valley.
But, suggested Mr. Mackenzie, since the doctor and the N.C. held opposite opinions on the vexed question, would they not, so to speak, pair with each other?
'So important a matter,' retorted Mrs. Lavater with crushing effect, 'must be settled by the whole community.'
On the morning of this eventful day, Matao, terrified into vigilance by Archie's threat of degradation and a beating, signalled with a yell of delight the thin blue smoke of a village hidden behind a cluster of islets....
About the hour that Mrs. Lavater said 'check' to Mr. Mackenzie's queen, Archie and his followers pushed on, leaving the village rich in silver, but emptied of fruit, fish and canoes. Its young men had agreed to take them to the south end of the lake, and as they paddled they sang to keep their hearts up for the long adventure.
The old men and the women remaining in the village could hear the singing, after the shadow flung by the chain of islands had swallowed each canoe that vanished like a water rat, slanting into the darkness of a hollow bank. So calm was the silver water that for a moment the wake of each boat showed separately, when the hull that had cut it had gone.
In the biggest of the canoes, paddled by a picked crew in charge of the headman's eldest son, sat Norah and Archie.
'We're all right now,' said Archie.
This was as long a sentence as he had uttered since the night Dick died; and not the violence of sun and rain beating on her defenceless body, not the uncertainty and monotony of the food supply, not the known and unknown dangers of their position had distressed Norah as much as Archie's impenetrable reserve. He did not sulk or ignore her. He was, she told me, as invariably courteous and considerate as he would have been to a fellow passenger in a railway carriage. And he had saved her life on the day of the squall.
But of what he felt or planned, of regret, fear or hope, he gave no sign.
At first she had sought to bridge the gulf that had opened between them. She tried to hint that she did not hold him answerable for Dick's death: and once she slipped her hand over his. But his quick disengagement from the contact of word or body would have discouraged one less proud than Norah.
'It was as if he was buried along with Dick,' she said, 'and a foot of earth between us.'
Now that it seemed sure that they would reach! their journey's end, dread of the inquiries that must there be met, quickened; each sun that rose through the morning's pale haze of silver and misty blue, to climb across the scorching firmament of gold and azure and decline into the tender green and saffron of a momentary twilight, brought her nearer to officials, cross-examination and all the paraphernalia of justice that women hate and distrust. Each repetition of the crew's monotonous refrain, each stroke of the paddles carried her nearer to ... what?
The day the little fleet of canoes, sprinkled on the face of the great mountain-bound lake like specks of dust slowly rotating in a basin of water, reached the southern shores of the lake, I was again in Abercorn. By now I had settled into my fishing camp. My loads had arrived and Lavater had left Abercorn on a two days' ulendo into the bush to inspect the scene of an alleged infanticide.
But mail day and Mrs. Lavater's invitation to lunch brought me into town. After an excellent meal Mrs. Lavater's admirable black butler was handing us coffee on the verandah. The second nine holes were temporarily eclipsed by Mrs. Mackenzie's extravagance.
'Crêpe de chine and real Mechlin, my dear,' announced my hostess.
I was not her dear. That enviable position was held by the doctor's wife, a tall girl with red hair. Before her marriage, so Mrs. Lavater had informed me, she was a professional pianist. Whether in cinemas or the Queen's Hall, I had no means of telling. On the same authority she was to have a baby in March.
She now expressed no wonder at the richness of Mrs. Mackenzie's underlinen and indicated that, from the prices charged at her husband's store, it might well be sewn with diamonds....
'Who can that be on the road?' interrupted Mrs. Lavater.
We turned and stared down the road which, leading to the lake, runs straight for a mile or more outside the township. As the white man in ragged khaki, with a gun bearer at his heels, came near, to my surprise I recognised Archie.
'Do you know Captain Sinclair well?' I was asked when the first flood of conjecture had abated.
'I doubt if any one does,' was my reply, which, in my own mind, included his wife.
'Of course he's very nice,' said the red-haired girl, staring up the road, 'but don't you find him just a little bit dull? Now she's such a lively little thing.'
Mrs. Lavater contributed the inevitable platitude about opposites.
'His marriage must have been the adventure of his life,' persisted the other. 'You can't imagine anything much happening to Mr. Sinclair.'
The unromantic object of our interest was now nearly within hail. I noticed that he walked like a tired or an old man.
A gang of native prisoners were sweeping the footpath at the cross roads. The black policeman who guarded them stood to attention and saluted. Archie seemed to hesitate before he returned the salute. He paused for a moment, as if uncertain whether to come up to the verandah. At last he turned and made for the business part of the township.
'Where's he off to?' asked Mrs. Lavater, disappointed, I thought, that another should have first pull at the news. 'He'll be here in a minute,' she consoled herself.
But minutes passed and Archie did not come. For some imprecise reason faintly uneasy, I made an excuse to follow him. Passing the little group of red brick houses with their shady balconies and luxuriant pergolas, their tidy English beds of roses and carnations, I came to the trading store. Mackenzie was stock-taking.
'And three dozen is six hundred,' he said as I entered.
'Pleased to see you, Mr. Ross ... would you believe it, the ladies call these cups too dear at eleven pence! I give you my word they cost me ninepence and a fraction landed here, and that's without breakages or overhead charges.'
I sympathised and, as soon as I could, I asked if Sinclair had been there.
'It's not ten minutes since he got up from that chair,' I was told. 'He looked as if he needed a chair too.'
Mackenzie did not think it was fever. If it was, he'd never seen a go like it. Archie looked 'all endwise,' he said, and added that he hadn't seemed to know whether he was coming or going. He had stared at Mackenzie quite queerly when he told him about the golf-course scandal. But he was plainly glad to see the case of ammunition that was waiting for him in the meal store. He brought two rounds out of his pocket which he said were his last. Then he had gone to the shelves and ordered tinned fruit and vegetables by the dozen.
I interrupted to ask for news of Norah.
'I inquired after his lady,' said Mackenzie, 'but the Captain never seemed to hear me.' With national readiness to anticipate the worst, he added that he would be sorry if everything was not well there.
'If you're wanting to see him yourself,' he ended, 'you've only got to step round to the post office. He said he must send a wire to Kigoma about the Mimi—you'll find him with Hume.'
But I did not. He had gone, said Hume, in the direction of the D.C.'s office. Hume too remarked how ill he looked. Fever, he diagnosed, and a bad go at that, although Sinclair had insisted that nothing was wrong.
Besides his mail—several weeks' accumulation of letters and newspapers—there had been a cable for him.
'You'd have thought it was bad news,' said Hume, 'the way he read it. As a matter of fact—I oughtn't to tell you, only I know it won't go any further—it was an Elizabethville cable confirming the purchase of Captain Sinclair's whole herd, at a big price too.'
But Archie had stared at the message, said Hume, as if it did not make sense. Then he'd laughed 'an odd kind of laugh' and torn the form to little bits. The pieces lay there still.
As I followed Archie to the Boma, I could not help wondering what had happened to this self-possessed Scot. I could hardly guess that in full Byronic blast that morning he had breasted the hill to Abercorn with the pride of Manfred or Cain in his heart. And now the well-kept roads, the grip of Mackenzie's industrious hand, the news of the great golf scandal—all this shouted at him that, in the well-padded hold of civilisation, Cain becomes Crippen.
I knocked at the door of the D.C.'s office. Joseph, the native clerk, immaculate in white duck and a black tarboosh, admitted me. The office was as spotless as its sole occupant—bundles of documents tied with tape, trays full of letters, rows of files, all the paraphernalia of administration.
The Bwana, said Joseph, had gone away after hearing that Bwana La-va-ta was on ulendo and that Bwana Jo-ne-si (Jones was the name of the Native Commissioner) had gone to England.
As I left the block of offices, I saw Foster, the A.N.C., with a crowd of black men on his verandah. His position in a deck chair, flanked by blue and red clad messengers and surrounded by an irregular circle of silent natives, indicated that a lawsuit was in progress. He appeared to ask a question and a native in the front of the circle, without moving his body or head, loosed a spate of words.
I listened, waiting my chance to ask Foster which road Archie had taken. A cause célèbre seemed to be in process. Tungati, an obese elder of Malekani's village, had followed King David's example in taking a third wife to comfort his age. The experiment had been a success, until a stranger from Kachilikila's ... A pause in the evidence enabled me to ask my question.
'Left a minute ago,' replied Foster, 'went towards Lavater's house by the back way. He stood and watched these blighters for ten minutes. Looked as sick as mud. You'd think it was his wife instead of Tungati's,' added the irreverent youth.
When I had closed my fruitless circle, Archie was already installed on the verandah of the D.C.'s house and Mrs. Lavater was making tea. As I walked up, I saw his illness had not been exaggerated. But while I shook hands, I wondered if health alone explained the sunken cheeks, the skin grey in spite of the sun, the dead eyes. He seemed stricken yet defiant: burnt out, but the ashes were hot.
Mrs. Lavater was pressing him to stay to dinner; but Norah, he said, was alone in camp ten miles out of the township ... yes, they had come off the lake that morning ... no, they hadn't come on the Mimi ... no, canoes ... yes, it had been hot ... yes, the rains hadn't helped....
I took no part in the cross-examination. If Archie was more than usually taciturn, there was something, no doubt, which he did not want to discuss. The same reasoning urged the ladies to fresh efforts. But their bag was meagre. Like the poet, they failed to elicit whence he had come, or whither going. At last a reply that roused Mrs. Lavater's hospitable instincts checked the hunt. Leaving us together, she went to see that milk and butter from the Boma herd, vegetables from her garden and eggs from her yard were sent off at once to Norah. The doctor's wife went with her.
To break the silence that followed their withdrawal, 'Lavater's expected back to-morrow,' I remarked.
My very ordinary words seemed to send a wave of emotion across Archie's face. Relief at first he seemed to feel, satisfaction almost. Then the slight smile faded, and a barely perceptible frown of anxiety or defiance settled on his features.
'So soon,' he said quietly.
His mood puzzled me. I had always liked Archie. There was something extremely lovable in his almost truculent sincerity. He was so straight; you knew where you were with him. But to-day a shadow stood between us. I didn't know in the least where I was.
He plainly did not want to talk and I suggested that he must be anxious to open the mail he held under his arm.
He glanced at the handwriting on the envelopes and pushed them into his pocket. Then he ripped off the wrapper of a newspaper. Indifferently he turned the leaves, till he seemed to come to something that interested him. In the silence that followed, I tried to analyse the strangeness of Archie's manner.
That faintly defiant jerk of his head. What did it defy? That vaguely puzzled look, as if he tried to grasp at a word whose syllables danced in the recesses of his brain, or struggled to locate some indistinct smell. What was eluding him?
My thoughts were interrupted by the swish of the newspaper falling from his fingers. My eye caught the headlines of the open page as it fluttered to the ground. They dealt with the bellicose caperings of Monsieur Poincaré and with the latest murder trial that was quickening the pulses of the great British public. I glanced up at Archie's grey face. It was no longer puzzled. He had found the word he sought.
And when he had gone, 'Don't you agree now,' said the red-haired girl, 'that Captain Sinclair is a tiny bit dull?'”