"Whatever Norah lacked, it was not looks," said Ross, leaving the rail to fling himself into a deck-chair that creaked under his weight.
'Beauty and gay clothes, a merry heart
And a good stomach to a feast are all,
All the poor crimes you can charge her with,'"
he murmured.
"Not that her heart stayed very merry: while, for the matter of that, even her beauty was a good deal altered the last time I met her and heard from her lips the story I am going to tell you.
By then life and Africa had handled her and treated her as an etcher his plate with steel and acid, adding something which was not there before, call it a soul or a complex according to your creed.
Well, if from heaven that day you could have seen her clearly as she sat beside Dick Ward on the deck of the Mimi you would have remarked, a bit of a thing, who rode some seven stone, neatly cut as a Chinese carving, legs and ankles to make you praise the name of short skirts, short dark hair that entangled the gleam of shaded lamplight on mahogany, cheekbones curving out from cheeks, whose blood (unless that carmine could be claimed for lip salve) had ebbed to her mouth, on which a smile mocked more often than it flattered.
This smile, her pretty slimness, her moods, mobile as quicksilver, might have left her what old men call 'a divine imp,' and you could have forgotten her in the next pretty girl you saw, but for some subtle, elusive quality—like a barely perceptible perfume—that, troubling and tantalising, forbade oblivion."
Ross seemed to meditate.
"I doubt," he said at last, "if it be profitable to anatomise magic; but if I must satisfy your inquiring turn of mind, I would hazard that it was the presence of two conflicting strains in Norah that fascinated the senses.
At some time you must have visited the Small Cat House at the Zoo? Those drowsy, furry, definite, little entities. A trifle sensual, a trifle cruel. Lazy, individualistic, practical, wicked, fascinating. Small, pointed faces, red tongues, sharp claws, sudden motions, quick wits.... Behind the prettiness and softness something lurks, something of the night, of the wilds.
Well, there was a quality in Norah that provoked one to the same admiration. When you listened to her deep, caressing voice—as deep a voice as I've heard in a woman, (some undergraduate once compared it to the dusk of a summer's day)—you were in the presence of something as strange and as primordial as the dances of the East.
Or when you glanced discreetly (should you be a foreigner, 'when you stared admiringly') at the elusive line of her face, which fined down to that evanescent oval, common enough in Italy, so light, so feminine, or should I say 'so female,' you were aware of something ... well, there isn't a fair word. To describe by opposites it certainly was not spiritual. But neither was it animal. Perhaps 'Southern' is as good an adjective as any. Not that she could really trace any meridional blood. If the Cleverlies went to the Continent for their mistresses, they stuck to the Shires for their wives. But unless you are satisfied by a wave of the hand towards the Small Cat House, 'Southern' is as good an adjective as I can find you.
Then, when you thought you had her classified, you met the second strain. Your ears lost her voice, your gaze left the line of cheek and chin and travelled to her narrow eyes, dark as night before sunrise, as a velvet curtain hiding a smouldering fire; at once you passed to the presence of a different animal.
The Small Cats don't bother their heads about romance, adventure, rebellion or any generous folly. I doubt if any occupant of the Zoo does; for that look you must search the human prisons.
But Norah's eyes made you remember forlorn hopes, lost causes, desperate adventures, despairing loyalties; all that uncomfortable side of life which the prudent man avoids. And when they gazed at you under their arched, delicate brows, you felt admiration or pity according to your lights, for a fellow mortal, spurred by impractical generosities, dazzled by romantic imaginings, ridden by rebellious longings, who'd funk no fence that Life might offer—Life isn't only fences," broke off Ross to mutter. "It's the plough that kills the likes of her."
"Dick Ward," he went on, "was gazing, no doubt, into those romantic orbs at the minute my story begins, and reading a flattering message in their courageous depths.
One could not look at Dick without pleasure. He presented a Lucifer-son-of-the-morning effect.
The 'Greek god' type, which fluttered our grandmothers, lacks sufficient kick for the Neo-georgian maid. His hair was perhaps a shade too long for male taste, though women seem in this to be more lenient. That people, on first acquaintance, were apt to take him for an American was possibly due to his faint Irish intonation, and he was so wonderfully sure, so well poised, and so preposterously good looking.
During the war he served in the Air Force. When peace returned, a rich uncle's death saved him from the horrors of work. Wealth was added to charm, wit, good looks—unless vows matter, can you blame Norah so much?
'Marriage laws are drafted by the old,' he had just said, to calm some scruple, 'to be broken by the young.'
'Dick, don't be so Wilde!' she retorted. This isn't the setting. Look at the Lake....'
'I'd rather look at the woman!'
'Don't be an ass. The woman's there any day, Tanganyika——'
'I can't believe yet she will be. I'm afraid of waking up.'
'I feel I've dreamt away my life till now: I've only just woken up. Woken up from a bad dream about Africa.'
'Africa is nearly over. Two days up the Lake to the railway, then——'
'Do you so badly want the time to hurry?'
'Every second with you is worth a life, only——'
'Only you'd sooner catch the train.'
'Aren't you ever serious, Norah? You know I love you with——'
'I often wonder if you love me at all, Dick.'
'No one has ever loved a woman so.'
'Supposing, of course, there is such a thing as love.'
'Norah!'
'Love that survives appetite.'
'Darling!'.
'Well, you see, I loved before.'
'As much as ... now?'
'Differently, perhaps.'
'And my love is different. My love....'
But we'll leave Dick's amatory eloquence to the sufficient audience of Norah and the extinct volcanoes that ring the Lake. In their youth, they, too, had known outbursts of fire and passionate contortion: now cold and desolate, with puffs of cloud nestling like patches of snow in their hollow flanks, bluer than any precious stone, they stared down in unmoved silence.
All day the Mimi steamed slowly and fussily, the sun beating fiercely on her crowded deck through the thin awning. Norah lay full length on the camp bed her body servant had put up. The Mimi did not run to cabins—you shared her deck with her doubtfully Arab captain, who lounged in a three-legged wicker chair. Other competitors for the narrow space were the negro crew with their household gods, the couple of lean goats, and the dozen lousy fowls that formed the vessel's food supply.
A portion aft was reserved for native passengers, a class represented this trip by one incredibly lean Indian, with a wiry beard and a blue and white check turban. He sat on a hatch, naked to the waist, his thin legs crossed, motionless for hours. Each time that Norah glanced in his direction his brows seemed to bend in a scowl at the two Europeans.
So all that day they steamed over the Lake, whose sapphire waters were cool to the eye and tepid to the hand. Towards evening they anchored off a fishing village where the captain had told them an Arab was waiting with oxen to ship to a mission up the Lake. He had driven them from a village, a hundred miles to the south, where his father had settled in the days of the slave trade.
Norah was roused from drowsy contemplation of Dick's profile by a shout; she felt the engines go half speed and idly she watched a ragged silhouette sounding over the bows with a painted rod.
'Bili ... bili—two fathoms ... two fathoms.' Another shout, and the engines were silent. She rose and took Dick's arm as he leaned over the bulwarks gazing landwards.
'What is it?' she asked.
'I was planning.'
'About us?'
When we're home. What we'll do; where'll we go; what we'll see.'
'Never anything stranger than this,' she nodded towards the shore.
Sheer red cliffs loomed above them. Like futurist painting, violent colours lay in slabs. A streak of faint green sky topped the sandstone wall off which blazed the refulgence of the declining sun; a strip of beach slid a tongue of silver between that fiery barrier and the deepening blue of the Lake.
'Pity you can't paint, Dick. Call it "Drink of Water in Hell," or something bright.'
'The village spoils it. Victorian almost.'
The village, which contrasted the pacificism of man with the violence of nature, stretched its single row of oblong huts under the compact shade of gray-green mango-trees. Their shadow fell black on the ragged thatch which fined from the chocolate colour of the peak, discoloured by innumerable cooking fires, to silver at the eaves.
Groups of placid or indifferent men squatted on the verandahs without motion save for the occasional act of taking snuff. The only sound came from a woman who knelt and pounded millet. The smooth wooden block raised with her two hands beat rhythmically in the worn mortar.
A group of naked babies splashed among wavelets too tiny to disturb even their slight equilibrium.
And Norah's heart warmed to the quiet humanity of the scene. A thought struck her: 'What about those babies and crocs?' she asked.
'Oh!' said Dick. 'There aren't crocs everywhere. It's uninhabited bays they like.'
The advent of the steamer created no stir. At last a family, more enterprising or more avaricious than the rest, was moved to abandon the quietude of their verandah for the yellow sunlight of the beach, where their naked forms were silhouetted, straining at the launch of one of the dozen grey dugouts that pointed in every direction on the sand. The example set, the Mimi was soon ringed by slim canoes laden with long bunches of bananas, purplish green mangoes, and fish of the lake.
'Better buy some, Dick, we haven't too much food with us,' counselled Norah. 'And we mayn't have another chance before Kigoma.'
'What about half a dozen of those?' he pointed to an odd looking yellow barbel with grotesque whiskers. It was as big as a child of ten.
Norah shuddered.
'What's that?' she asked in Swahili, pointing to another fish. 'Is it good eating?'
'Coupi, memsahib,' said the villager, holding up a sort of carp that looked as if it had been inexpertly dyed a poisonous saffron.
'See the blue marking on its belly!' said Dick. 'What a colour!'
'Lapis-lazuli, isn't it?'"
* * * * * * *
For some time Ross had seemed to try my credulity high.
"Do you mean to tell me," I cried, "that Lady Norah repeated to you the words of the most trivial conversations, minute details that caught her eye, vague impressions that darted across her brain?"
"Of course not," said Ross calmly, "but she told me enough to let me fill them in with certainty. You surely don't demand the 'or words to that effect' of the metropolitan police at each moment.
* * * * * * *
"The cattle dealer," he continued placidly, "who, for many days had been awaiting the boat's arrival, had driven two oxen knee-deep into the water. A couple of deck-hands tumbled, laughing and talking, into the ship's dinghy and paddled towards them.
Norah, whose attention was as easily caught by life's activities as any errand boy's, left the bargaining crowd to watch the boat's return.
Horns, muzzles, humps alone visible out of the water, the beasts swam tied to either rowlock. Supporting the head of one, its owner hung over the gunwale. The other less favoured ox submerged each time the slight swell struck him and, as he rose again above the surface, snorted stentorianly.
A cable, paid out from the ship, at a second attempt was noosed over one pair of wide horns. The firemen bent to the capstan, answering the long-drawn chant of their capitao 'oo-ère' with a staccato 'wére.' Slowly the derrick lifted the heavy beast by his horns into the air where he hung grotesquely, pawing and patient. A signal was given and the beam swung inboard, the ox slipping a little as his hoofs met the unfamiliar plates of the deck.
The second beast was more truculent. No sooner had he touched deck and felt his horns free of the noose than, lunging forward, he tossed one of the ship's goats into the hold. The crew laughed delightedly. The ox stood, his feelings outraged, scraping the deck with his hoof and swaying his lowered head.
'Look out, Dick,' cried Norah, wise in the ways of cattle. 'He's coming for you.'
But Dick would not have been quick enough to escape the fate of the goat, had not Norah presented a stick to the oncoming muzzle. Faced with the alternative of bumping his nose, or abandoning his objective, scared and nervy, rather than ugly-tempered, he shambled off, lowing, to the after end of the ship.
'Brute,' said Dick, but Norah followed and had her late opponent slobbering his wet muzzle into her sleeve.
His owner, the Arab, in a hurry to start his hundred-mile walk home, had rowed back to shore to collect his herd boys, who lay on the beach, at the edge of the lapping water. His white-robed figure was visible for a moment on the path leading into the hills behind the village, before it disappeared among the trees. The voices of his ragged followers were audible a little longer, then silence fell as the village settled for the night. Blue smoke rose through every roof and hovered in a mist over the village; the smell of wood fires and cooking was added to the faintly saline breath of the Lake. Presently the moon came up and touched with silver the crest of every ripple. Across the glittering pathway slid the silhouette of a canoe and, lying in her bows, an adolescent began to twang a native guitar.”