Archie's convalescence was rapid; within a week he was well enough to receive a visitor. During the days of his recovery I had come to know him better than ever before. The strangeness or remoteness I had sensed in him at Abercorn had gone. He was gentle and grateful for little things. I found him very human, and, since humanity is tragic, rather touching. He seemed to have won the sad tranquillity of old people on fine days. One could not grudge him a peace he had bought, he believed, at the price of his life or freedom.
He sat wrapped up, savouring the warmth of the sun, watching the natives at their trivial and absorbing occupations, inhaling as it were the beauty and activity of the world. And counting, I could not help imagining, the hours that remained for its enjoyment. Partly to escape such disquieting thoughts, partly to make Archie dependent on Norah and to draw him to her, I spent most of the day in my own camp.
His first visitor came to me, in my capacity of medical adviser, for permission to pay a call.
As I issued from the semi-darkness of my tent into the mellow sunlight of the late afternoon, I found him squatting in the shadow. The sunlight sliding through the trees that had been thinned by the needs of the villagers, fell on his wrinkled face and made him pucker his patient eyes. I recognised Ntula, the headman of the village against which we had camped.
Arranging the folds of the faded purple cloth that draped his emaciated limbs, he lay back on the ground and, with the courtesy of the old school, clapped his hands behind his head. Invoking peace on him and his village, I asked what he wished.
He had brought, he said, these unimportant presents—the little meal that famine among his people permitted, the handful of eggs that the hens would lay in the time of rain and a few chickens that had escaped the hawks.
He waved his hand towards the deeper shadow where I could imperfectly see the outline of the old lady with the puku skin wig, mounting guard over a flat basket of meal and a bundle of squawking fowls, tied together by the legs.
These, Ntula continued, he wished to take to the Bwana, whom the hand of Death had spared.
Pondering the cause of this deference, I led the old diplomat to Archie's camp, his obese consort following with a perfectly naked daughter of six, who carried a minute basket of eggs on her graceful head.
I found Archie in his usual place and ready to see the old man. He expected, he said, that some complaint against the conduct of his Wemba carriers prompted this visit of ceremony.
Ntula repeated his compliments, while his wife and daughter knelt behind the presents, clapping their hands. Archie expressed his thanks and sent Matao to find calico and salt for the return gifts.
Polite conversation proceeded, volubly on the headman's part, monosyllabically on Archie's.
At length when the course of the rains, the prospect of the crops and the abundance of game had been passed in review, there came a pause. Was there anything, asked Archie, that he could do for his visitor? The headman appeared pained at the idea. He had come, he repeated, to announce his satisfaction at the chief's recovery from grave sickness.... But since the chief suggested it, if it so happened that one day he saw Bwana La-va-ta...
'Is Bwana Lavater back at M'pala?'[1] asked Archie quickly.
Ntula replied that his eldest son had seen Bwana La-va-ta bicycling into Abercorn as it grew dark. Now should the chief happen to speak to...
'How long ago was that?' said Archie.
It was the evening of the day that the zebra had eaten the young mealies in his nephew Chisulo's garden ... well, that was five days ago.
'The evening I got better,' calculated Archie. 'Are you sure?' he asked, and the old man became courteously emphatic.
'Well,' said Archie, anxious for the visit to end, 'if I see Bwana Lavater...?'
We came circuitously to the point. It appeared that Ntula owed tax for himself and three wives, ten shillings a head, not only for the current year, but also for the last. And the Boma was putting men who did not pay their taxes in chains. If the chief would one day condescend to look at his gardens and his village, and see how poor the soil and how few the men, perhaps he could persuade Bwana Lavater....
Archie for all his stoicism winced. He leant forward and spoke to me in English. 'It wouldn't be much use my speaking to the Boma. May I tell the old man you'll try?'
I nodded and Ntula withdrew, with manifold expressions of pleasure at Archie's recovery and gratitude for his promise.
Archie sat down by the fire. Changalilo was on his knees blowing the embers into flame.
'If Lavater has been back in Abercorn for five days,' said Archie, 'something must have happened to my letter.'
I urged him to return to bed as night was at hand. He did not seem to hear me. Presently he announced that he would have a machila made the next day and be carried up to Abercorn in the afternoon.
'It's no use waiting,' he added.
The moment, I felt, was critical; once Archie made up his mind nothing would stop him. I turned my head and succeeded in catching Norah's eye. She was preparing invalid's food in the camp kitchen.
Since the day she had gone to Abercorn I had seen little of her. She was exhausted on her return, and I had had to content myself with her nod and some ambiguous words to the effect that all was well 'so far.' She made no further allusion to her scheme, and I felt she avoided me. This was natural, for my lack of enthusiasm made me a bad confidant in the matter of a forlorn hope. Desperation needs no cold water. For my part I was glad to escape the thankless role of critic.
But now the hour had struck for her intervention.
'Oughtn't you to be in bed?' she asked Archie as she joined us.
He shrugged his shoulders and told her that next day he was going to Abercorn.
Norah took a deep quick breath like a man about to dive.
'Archie,' she said, 'is it because of me?'
From his seat he looked up at her slim figure whose intensity seemed to quiver like a spear struck into the ground. He was, I saw, reluctant to speak.
Ntula's chickens came to his rescue with a sudden squawking and a beating of wings. Archie signed to Changalilo to untie their legs and to give the basket of meal to the carriers to divide among them.
Norah stood motionless, her short hair flambant in the slanting rays of the sun. She repeated the question that Archie had not answered. He looked round him as if seeking escape.
'Norah,' he said, 'what's the good of going into all this? It's done now.'
'Even so,' she said, her voice as calm as the evening light, 'even if it is, is it fair to either of us—to me,' she corrected, 'this silence?'
Archie reflected. You could always lever up Archie with the word 'unfair.'
I turned away with a feeling of intrusion. Yet Norah might need my support. I watched in the top branches of a tree a fishing eagle, sitting solid in the yellow sunlight. The big white bird with its square black head looked as if it had been chopped out of wood with rough, sure blows.
'No,' I heard Archie say almost casually, 'I do not want to go on living without you.'
'Then live with me,' cried Norah. The spear seemed to crumple, to collapse, and turn to a girl crouched on her knees at her husband's feet, fumbling for his hand.
The fishing eagle flapped slowly and as if contemptuously into the gathering darkness.
I could not hear all that Norah said. Naturally I did not try. I wanted to leave them, but the battle was joined, not won; at any moment I might be called on.
From the scattered words that reached my ear, I knew that she was telling him how the kiss in the ruins was given and in what spirit it was accepted. She told him how in the hills she had come to see he cared, and how the knowledge had brought her back to her place at his side. If she could not give him passion—passion was trodden out of her, she said—she could give him affection, if he could accept it....
It was dark now and some one in the village behind us began listlessly to tap a drum. It covered Norah's voice. While she fought for Archie's life, did she hear, I wondered, another drum and see a swinging light that had guided another man to her and on, so quickly, to his death?
At last Archie spoke, and I heard his male tones above the drum.
'You've taken away the bitterness,' he said, 'the bitterness of believing ... that about you. You must forgive me for doubting....'
'And you have to forgive so much,' I heard her break in.
They sat in silence; in the light of the fire I could see his fingers tangling her tawny hair. The drummer had begun to play in earnest and the syncopated, staccato throb seemed to force the wall of the forest to yield a little to its urgency before closing behind it, like a thick velvet curtain. Archie spoke at last and I saw Norah draw in her breath. His words came to me in fragments.
He was glad, so glad she had told him, but it could not alter ... letter to Lavater somewhere at the Boma ... found sooner or later ... intolerable to wait on its chance discovery ... must see Lavater himself to-morrow.
Norah's first weapon I saw had broken. I had never thought it a strong one. She could give Archie the comfort that she was not the trull he had judged her, she could not give him hope that she loved him. She could suppress a reason for not living, she could not make him want to live.
In the second round she held stronger cards. I saw her lips move, pleading with Archie's obstinacy. I could not hear the words. She was offering him a paper.
'But that's the letter I wrote to Lavater,' he cried. She nodded, her eyes dancing in the firelight.
'How on earth did you get it?'
The drum ceased abruptly. Silence swept up like a wave.
'Stole it,' said Norah, and told him how.
She had reached, she said, the Boma before sunset. Lavater, so Joseph told her, had been expected all the afternoon. If she cared to wait, he would be sure to look in at the office on his way home.
As she sat there, her mind worked ceaselessly on the cause she had come to fight, while her eyes darted nervously about the room. They were arrested by a familiar writing on the table in front of her. The blue envelope was addressed in Archie's hand.... It contained his confession.
Her brain leapt from perception to plan. Joseph she sent on an errand to the store. The moment he left the room, she seized a pen and scribbled a note of thanks for the milk and vegetables. This she slipped into the envelope that had contained the fatal letter. With the office gum she re-fastened the flap.
As she replaced it, Lavater's shadow crossed the window. She went to meet him with her heart beating noisily, she thought, against the stolen paper. She had come, she said, to ask leave to borrow some drugs from the Boma stores. And Lavater suspected nothing, but with expressions of concern found her the medicines.
The end of her recital was drowned in a fresh burst of drumming, but I was glad to see that civilisation had not recaptured Archie completely. Admiration for Norah's resource shone on his thin face. Admiration and gratitude. Then the sadness which had lifted returned.
'Norah,' he said, 'what a brick you are! I think it's the most sporting effort I've ever heard of. No one but you.... But you see, don't you? I can't profit by what you've done.' He turned the paper in his hands. 'I've got to go through with it now.' Norah, worsted in the second encounter, rose to her feet and faced him. Her lips framed the word "Why?"
'Because I'm a murderer,' he said, looking over her head, blindly, into the darkness.
As she did not speak, he went on carefully, dispassionately.
At first, he said, he had justified himself. In the forest, he had seemed to stand outside the Law... But Abercorn with its trim roads, its comfortable houses, its kind, commonplace inhabitants had drawn him back into its fold. Obscurely he felt that by accepting the standards of Jehovah and of the forest, he was deserting from the forces that for twenty or thirty centuries had fought for order, to make things shipshape, sane, reasonable.
White men went native sometimes, abjured their heritage, married black wives, lived in mud huts, ate native food. Well, if he set up in his heart the values he had found in the forest, he'd be a renegade like them.
Norah, who had bitten on her lip till it nearly bled, broke in with a cry of indignation.
What had this, she asked, to do with Dick's death? Why should Archie sacrifice his own life for vague ideas about Abercorn and society! What had society ever done for him? Let society look after itself!
'I'm not being clear,' said Archie; 'what I mean is that until I saw Abercorn standing like an advance guard in the fight for...' He felt his words were high-flown and he said, 'all that' with a dismissing wave of the hand. 'I did not feel I had done wrong. Abercorn showed me that I had. Now I must pay for what I did.'
'But Archie, Archie! What's the good? Dick's dead and nothing you can do will bring him to life.'
He was silent.
'All you'll do will be to agonise your father, your relations and friends. And me. You'll pay, you say. But what about us?'
His lips moved but I heard no word.
'If it did any good,' she went on, 'we'd—I'd be glad, proud to suffer for you. But all for nothing! For an idea!'
Archie shrugged his shoulders. 'Don't some people say ideas are everything?' he asked me.
They had begun to dance in the village. Hand-clapping strengthened the beat of the drum and the shrill monotonous voices of women singing, as they jogged to the rhythm.
'You were provoked, you were ill with fever,' Norah began.
'I haven't told you all,' Archie interrupted. 'Have you thought what life now holds for me?'
Without expiation he could never again have peace of mind. He must be ready at any moment to lie to his friends. At any moment a sincere word might be his ruin. Never would he feel clean. And as, to one of his nature, long duplicity was intolerable, he would have to live alone to escape. Alone, what memories would haunt him! What escape would there be from the vision of the defenceless man he had murdered.
The dance had come to an end and the singing ceased. I looked at Norah feeling she was beaten and was surprised to see her poise herself as if to deliver a blow.
'Defenceless, Archie? Murdered? It was fair fight.'
'Fair fight?' he echoed.
'Dick would have killed you if you hadn't killed him!'
I shared Archie's astonishment.
'I didn't give him much chance then,' he said grimly.
'But Dick fired first, he fired at you first!' cried Norah.
Archie passed his hand over his eyes.
'It's all blurred like a bad dream,' he said, 'but I fired before his rifle was up.'
Norah's reply was unexpected. 'Changalilo,' she called.
Changalilo emerged from the kitchen.
'Changalilo, there are some cartridges missing.' The native was silent.
'How many cartridges were there for Bwana Dick's gun?'
'Two, Mama.'
'There's only one now.'
With deference Changalilo reminded her that one had been fired the night the Bwana had shot the eland, the night that Bwana Dick-i...
'Are you sure one was fired then?' said Archie slowly and as if he dreaded the answer.
Changalilo was emphatic, and added that he had cleaned the fouled gun, when the Mama had brought it back to camp.
Norah dismissed the native. 'Do you believe me now?' she asked. Archie sank back into his chair with his head between his hands.
'I saw Dick,' she said, putting every ounce of her will into her speech, 'pick up his rifle and fire at you from his hip. He missed you and you killed him before he could fire the second shot. Is that murder?'
There was a long pause. The drumming and singing burst out again. Men's voices singing, I judged, a song of war. They had thrown dried grass on to their fire, lighting the underside of the trees into pale silver. The shadows of the invisible dancers leapt and flapped like fantastic birds.
I caught a glimpse of Norah's triumphant eyes before the grass was burnt and the light fell. Lying at Archie's feet, I saw a paper torn in four."