Archie, when we reached his camp, was lying on his back with open eyes that saw nothing visible to us. The bedclothes were in a heap on the ground and he resisted Norah when she replaced them. Except that his head rolled heavily from side to side, I had no difficulty in taking his temperature. It was 104°.
Norah said that at about midnight she had heard him muttering. He did not know her, though she sat by his side for the rest of the night, keeping the clothes on his tossing limbs. Sometimes she had had to hold him down, for he shouted that he must see Lavater at once and struggled to rise.
I asked if the D.C. had had the fatal letter. Public morality might demand that Archie should be nursed to life to be turned over to the hangman. But putting friendship before morals, it seemed to me that he might be allowed to die, if not quietly, at least in his bed.
Norah's hands were clenched and white, while Matao was spinning his rigmarole.
'Then Bwana Lavater is not back?' she asked at the end, 'what did you do with the letter?'
Joseph, the D.C.'s clerk, had promised he would give it to the D.C. as soon as he came back. Joseph was an Angoni, said Matao, and all Angoni are liars; but he had not left the office until he had seen the letter laid on Bwana La-va-ta's big table.
So the confession lay unread: there was hope, then, and Archie's life was still worth saving. I felt that I could not leave Norah, whose nerves had been strained to the fainting point, unaided to nurse him, and I sent my fundi back with orders to strike camp and bring on carriers and loads.
I looked round for a bit of level ground for my camp. Archie, with an eye to the comfort of his much-enduring carriers, had pitched his tent on the outskirts of the first village he had come to on his way up from the lake. The ground was a net-work of little obstructed paths, trodden between the raised beds which make an African village garden resemble a pauper cemetery of circular graves. The green of ground nuts, cassava, gourds and beans, straggled sparsely over the mounds. High, splintery, black stumps showed where the trees had been lopped, two or three feet from the ground, and burnt to enrich the soil with their potash. Only the biggest trunks, that had been too much trouble to cut, remained.
Meaning to ask in the village for a guide to show me a more shady and level spot, I penetrated the squalid cluster of dilapidated mud huts. The villagers, I found, were absent at work, no doubt in distant gardens. One old woman, the headman's eldest wife I guessed her to be, sat under the untidy overhang of her thatched roof. Her stomach was enormous; on her head she wore a tan-coloured wig made of puku skin. She bent forward and clapped her hands in salutation, but she was too shy to answer my question.
Beyond the village I found the twenty-foot road that the last D.C. had cut through the forest to connect Abercorn with the lake. Its earth surface was deeply scored by ruts which the occasional ox-wagons that carried freight to the Mimi had cut. Rain had poured down the channels, scouring them till the white roots showed. A path, trodden hard by bare feet, straggled from side to side of the road, and down its centre a bicycle had marked its track on the wet earth.
As I chose my site, what a chance, I reflected, for any one with a taste for allegory! Side by side, the pathetic makeshift of the savage and the masterful puerility of the European, on a background of bottomless lake, immemorial hill, interminable forest. Which in the history of the globe would prevail?
The first hour of my vigil by Archie's bed passed in silence. The African day is so much quieter than the night. Some insect humming, a bird calling.... From time to time I moistened Archie's dry lips or arranged his disordered bed.
I had gone outside for a drink of tea when his voice recalled me. It was not me he called, but a bombardier who had been killed at his side six years before in Flanders. I sat by him while he revisited all his life's hours of stress. Now shells were dropping on his O.P. at Armentières; now the hump-backed African oxen jibbed in the plough or the brick-makers let the kiln fires go out; in the Carpathian darkness with his dying men he waited for the Austrians; or his hoe struck rock before Dick's grave was deep enough.
And through it all ran his love for Norah, like the theme of a fugue or the thread on which a rosary of pain was strung.
As the day wore on, his earlier memories were blocked by the horror of the last fortnight. I felt no shame at eavesdropping on his soul. To save him, I must gauge the malady of mind, as well as body.
So, during days and nights of delirium, I pieced together some sequence of what Archie had suffered on the shores of Tanganyika. It was screamed at me in oaths and prayers; whispered in obscene words; veiled in symbolism of delirium. With foul names he assailed the woman of his life; with writhing fingers he tore at Dick's throat; hyænas with blind eyes swarmed on to the rafts; the lake changed from azure to blood; Dick grinned on the ground by the filled-in grave and Norah screamed under the wet earth....
From the insane medley, one clear fact emerged. Archie was racked, less by his guilt than his love. The shadow, not of his crime, but of something that Norah had done, pursued him inexorably. One phrase again and again seemed to burst, rather from his chest, than from his cracking lips.
'Norah, why did you? ... Norah, why did you?'
When night fell, his cries sank to a murmur that, by the time Norah came to relieve me, had yielded to sleep.
'Is he going to live?' were her first words.
'Does he want to?' I countered, 'do you want him to?'
Her grave eyes considered me.
'Is that how I appear to you?' she said at last.
'I'm neutral by creed,' I answered, 'but you don't understand me. Do you want him to live ... for what awaits him?'
'It mustn't,' she stammered a little in her eagerness, 'we must save him.'
'From himself then,' I added, without her confidence. Then as she did not reply, 'It isn't the police we've got to fear, it's his own despair.'
'Because he feels he's a murderer?'
'Partly.'
'And——?'
'Because his heart's dead.'
She lifted her head to say that she must undo what she had done. I wondered how far that can ever be effected. Some gesture must have revealed my doubt.
'You think I can't,' she said, 'and you don't know how much there is to undo. I haven't told you....'
Thus began the re-telling of her tragic story, partly I fancy, to ease the load that lay so heavy on her heart, partly to track down some clue that might yet save Archie.
On ran her narrative, when neither Archie's needs nor our own desire for sleep took precedence, during the seventy-two hours of his illness. It was not now the naked bones of the tragedy that she showed me. In her search for any word and moment in the tragedy that might throw light on the dark places of Archie's heart, she laid bare before my eyes, that were at least pitiful, all she had seen, imagined, suffered.
By the second midnight, when Archie was quiet and we sat together by the fire, the story had wound its indirect way as far as her promise to renounce Dick and return to her husband.
'And then he found Dick kissing me!' she cried in a strained voice. 'No wonder if...' she lapsed into silence, staring into the fire with eyes that watching had sunk deep. Presently she turned her head aside and I guessed she was crying.
'Wasn't it that kiss that killed his heart?' she asked at last.
Snatches of raving rang in my ears as I shrugged my shoulders.
She seemed to gather herself together. 'I'll bring it back to life,' she said.
Then, as if she read scepticism in my silence, 'I'm not pretending to you—I've told you too much—that I love Archie as once I did. Nor will I pretend with Archie. He'd see through me, suffering sharpens the eyes. But...' she stood up and, for the first time since she had sought me, I had a girl before me, 'I can and will prove I'm not what I've let him think.'
'What Archie pursues,' I said rather pompously, 'and in himself achieves is loyalty, cleanness....'
'While I'm unloyal, dirtied,' she broke in. 'Yes, I am. But I'll show him my ideals are his.'
Her voice broke a little and flattened. 'Yes, you're right, what is the good of ideals one throws on the scrap heap? But I'll serve him, cherish him.... Though I can't love him with passion, if only he can love me again, I'll serve him honestly for better or for worse, till death....'
I suppose my instinctive mistrust of promises led me to point out that that parting was not likely to be remote unless—
'Unless?' she asked and repeated, 'I'll save him. I will save him.'
'You've got to save him from two dangers.'
'For heaven's sake don't speak in riddles,' she said, her nerves on edge.
'From himself and from the herd.'
'You think that even if he...' she hesitated, 'even if I can make him believe I'm worth his love, he'll still give himself up?'
I nodded, 'And his confession is on the D.C.'s desk.'
She seemed to brush this aside. 'Why can't he see it as I do?' she cried. 'A nightmare to be forgotten, if we can. Not to sacrifice to. He was mad at the time, mad with jealousy and fever. Why should his life be thrown after Dick's?'
It takes a woman to reach these heights of common sense. Conscience is the curse of Adam; while Eve's punishment, if I remember right, was nothing less practical than the pangs of child-birth and a dread of snakes.
And if women have no consciences, I reflected, neither do they admit any debt to society. They are free lances, privateers: if they and their men are safe, society can fend for itself. But I did not speak my thoughts, as Norah sat down again and in the low, even voice of one who thinks aloud, resumed her story.
Again she described the last meeting she was to have with Dick on earth, again his arms clutched her immobile body, as Archie and his rifle emerged from the shadow of the ruined tower. So vivid were her words, I felt I was an eyewitness: I saw Dick start up; the barrel of the .420 wavered from Norah's breast to his; he fumbled with his gun....
The dusky voice had stopped in the middle of a word. I looked round to see what had interrupted her.
The natives detailed to tend the fire slept soundlessly at our feet, nothing stirred in the circle of the fire, there was even a lull in the noises of the night. Norah was staring straight in front of her and I understood that it was something her mind had seen that had arrested her.
'I'll do it,' she murmured, 'I can do it. I'm strong enough.'
And strong she looked. Despair had dropped from her like a garment, her face shone with courage. So must Kate Douglas have looked, who thrust her arm through the empty staples to bar the door, behind which whispered the murderers of her king.
So, her dark eyes moist but triumphant, must Norah Cleverly have looked the night in the Carpathians she saved the life she was so nearly to spoil.
In turns we watched, made plans and slept, until, about three next afternoon, Archie's temperature subsided and he fell into a quiet sleep.
Norah stood looking at the thin face. Then she drew me out of the tent. Did I think it safe for her to leave him for the afternoon, she asked? I must have looked astonished, for she laughed and said she was going into Abercorn.
It would be dark, I objected, by the time she got there.
'The darker the better,' she replied, still laughing.
I wondered if relief had made her hysterical; a queer exhilarated light shone in her dark eyes; there was something at once fey and fanatical about her. The pythoness at the oracle, the martyr at the stake must have had, I imagined, such eyes. Under the power of the inspiration, whatever it was, her beauty had bloomed again, like Africa when the rains have come.
But even so it seemed no reason to be caught by the fall of night on a motiveless walk to Abercorn. I said so.
She promised to take Changalilo, a gun and a hurricane lamp.
I said bluntly I could not see why she wanted to go. She became serious.
'I'm going to see Mr. Lavater,' she said.
I raised my eyebrows.
'What's the good?' I asked, 'what are you going to say?'
'I don't know yet. It depends on him.'
'But you must have some plan!'
'Do they listen to confessions made in delirium?'
'Will Lavater believe it was?'
'Why not?'
I pointed out that he would come to see Archie as soon as he was convalescent ... and hear a repetition of the same confession. We both knew Archie's obstinacy.
If he does, if I can't make Archie change,' she looked up quickly, 'I'll swear on the Bible it was I that killed Dick.'
Woman, the greatest egoist of created beings ... and the most selfless! I looked at Norah with admiration. When she gave, she gave herself. But I admired her courage more than her sense.
'And Archie will swear on another Bible, that he did it,' I objected.
'He may; they can't hang us both,' she said with triumphant logic.
What evidence was there, she insisted, to support either story? Why should they believe Archie before her?
I held my tongue. Unless the prosecuting counsel was a fool, I was sure that he would turn her story inside out. The elopement would be dragged to light and every presumption of motive would point to Archie's guilt. True that was not evidence, but what seemed to me to stamp with futility any struggle or shift of Norah's, was Archie's own soul as his ravings had revealed it. He saw himself a murderer, his wife a treacherous wanton. If Norah's subterfuge saved his life from the hands of the Law, could she secure it from his own?
I hesitated. In spite of post-war philosophy, courage seems to me admirable and rare enough. But to win, she must face issues.
I hinted my doubts.
'I know,' she said, 'I know all that.'
When I came back from escorting her as far as the road, Archie was awake.
He smiled weakly and tried to greet me, but his voice was inaudible. He was glad to obey me and lie quiet, though his eyes wandered in search of Norah.
'She's sleeping,' I lied, wishing to keep Abercorn and what it held out of his thoughts.