The Crater
Date: 2022-03-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Triangles (Interpersonal relations) -- Fiction; British -- Africa -- Fiction; Storytelling -- Fiction; Tanganyika; Lake -- Fiction

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Title: The Crater

Author: Robert Gore Browne

Release date: March 23, 2022 [eBook #67694]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: George H. Doran Company, 1926

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67694

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRATER ***

THE CRATER

BY

ROBERT GORE-BROWNE

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1926,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

NOTE: No white character in this novel is drawn from life.—R. G.-B.

THE CRATER

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THE CRATER

PROLOGUE

"Her story," said Ross, aiming his cigar-end at a phosphorescent patch of ocean, "was discreditable enough to be true." He drew an immense red handkerchief from the pocket of his pyjamas, and wiped his extensive forehead, muttering, "As far as a woman ever tells the truth about herself."

I sat on in silence waiting for the epigrams to end and the narrative to begin.

It was a stifling night off the East Coast of Africa. A wind that blew from the Equator and followed a crowded ship made sleep impossible. Nightly it drove Ross and myself on deck to spend the intolerable hours in talk.

I did not know much about Ross; no one on board did. A big man with a walrus moustache and a bald head, he had joined the vessel at an unusual East Coast port with few possessions—a rifle or two, and a green kit bag. His preposterous opinions were enunciated with the precise utterance of a spinster, and punctuated by pulls at a virulent black cigar. He knew men and cities; he knew Africa at its heart, where are neither men nor cities.

Our mutual acquaintanceship exhausted, we had drifted to anecdotes of the improbabilities that happen daily in that improbable continent.

"You can never tell what the most normal folk will do," he had said. "One of the most charming girls I know—in three weeks she and her husband had reduced the Decalogue to ribbons...." He broke off, and I had difficulty in inducing him to begin again.

"The girl," he said at last, between puffs of his cigar, "came to me for advice. This implied no particular compliment to my wisdom, since I was the only disinterested white man for a hundred miles. I told her that only fools gave advice, and only wise men took it.

'God knows I'm not wise,' she said, 'but I'd do anything to...'

'My dear, I'll do my best,' I said when I saw that she did not mean to finish her sentence, 'but even for that I must hear a bit more.' She looked at me a little startled, then threw up her chin and plunged into her story. And, as I said, by most standards, it did her little enough credit. Unless courage covers as much as charity. Courage is even needed for a proud woman to tell a man whom she'd met half a dozen times the full story of her ... 'indiscretions' shall we call them?" He paused and seemed to ponder the qualities and failings of his heroine. "Still, most of the other animals have courage," he added. "And no doubt if she was to stay sane, she had to get things clear in her own head. Anyhow, she spared me no detail or digression in the telling of her deplorable history."

Ross got up and walked heavily to the rail where he stood staring down at the sea, which parted before our bows with the sound and motion of split silk. His voice came to me a little muted by the night.

"I didn't know the Sinclairs well," he continued, "but by using my eyes at our occasional meetings, I had a pretty correct idea how matters stood. And Archie told me as much as he told any one. More, while I was nursing him through three days of delirium."

I ventured to suggest that it would be more interesting for me if he began the story at the beginning instead of the end. He shook his head: "The writer of the Book of Genesis was the last story teller who could begin at the beginning. So much has gone before.

If you want the beginning, you'll have to listen, for instance, to the history of the house of Cleverly, from its first earl, the bandit, to its last earl, the bankrupt, while I trace you Norah's inheritance of the maxim of that race of rakes ... and occasional heroes—'Risk before Repute.'

And don't forget we'd have to blend in a survey of Archie's hard-headed lowland forbears, measure the immeasurable pride of his Highland mother, estimate the weight of the legal tradition he inherited from sire and grandsire, which sees both sides of everything, and commits itself to nothing, superimpose Archie's own Oxford training which forbade him ever to back his fancy—all that made him that loyal, hardworking, and in every way estimable stone of stumbling and rock of offence to poor Norah.

And then the scene is set in Africa. By now the power of Africa has passed into platitude, but like most platitude, there's something in it.

Every one knows that good fellow, Brown, who gets through a case of whisky a week on his one-man station; and that decent chap, Smith, who is living with a brace of black women somewhere at the back of beyond; while White's temper has become so ungovernable that no wonder his wife ran away from the farm; and, of course, no one believes that Black's shooting accident was accidental.

Many explanations are given. Medicine, physiology, geography, psychology, all make their guess. Superstition too, for if you are living far away in the great silence of Africa, the silence that is woven out of a million minute or distant sounds, it is not difficult to ascribe power over protesting man to insentient things (if insentient they be); to see the innumerable trees, the unexplored swamps, the fantastic rocks as gods or devils, older and crueller than Jah or Moloch, inexorably shaping the lives of the foredoomed mortals who have invaded their sanctuaries."

"Plainer men," went on Ross after a pause, "see there no strange gods, see rather the dangerous absence of that unromantic Deity, Public Opinion. In civilised life man's every action is preordained by the opinion of his fellows.

Your young revolutionary may deny this, claiming that he, at any rate, is a free agent. But is not he too bound on the wheel of revolutionary opinion? Does not the Bolshevik follow the tradition of his class—to spit at a bourgeois or whatever it may be—as slavishly as a Die-hard peer?

In the solitudes, the force is unborn and the individual is left, now hell is discredited, a law to himself.

So if you ask me to foretell the change that Africa would work in any given individual, I say, 'Take his ruling weakness, his Lowest Common Failing: cube it. The result will be the man when Africa has done with him.'"

Ross re-lit his atrocious cigar.

"By now," he said, "you must regret that you asked for the beginning of my story.

Are you not convinced that it is better to let me start in the middle of the story and incidentally in the middle of a lake in the middle of Africa?"

"Suppose yourself dead," he continued, taking my silence for assent, "and seeking variety from twanging harps round a glassy sea or banging tambourines in a medium's cabinet, you look down from the upper air, one day in October, 1921. Suppose your eye falls on Tanganyika—that sapphire coloured cleft which runs eight hundred miles long by fifty wide through the endless forests of Central Africa, with the old German Colony to the right, Belgian Congo to the left, North Eastern Rhodesia at the near end.

Not much humanity for you to patronise: every thirty miles or so along the edge of the water a cluster of thatched huts providing a measure of shelter for a handful of savages who live on fish and mangoes, careless of the future, indifferent to the past. Every 300 miles or so, at a Catholic Mission, a couple of white-robed Fathers issue rosaries to their less enlightened neighbours, who until the missionaries came had to rely on amulets made of python hearts. Between these centres of human endeavour, an uncharted belt of forest fringes the lake, and climbs the sides of the great cold crater, until these slope so steep that not even a creeper can catch hold. For the last thousand feet the rock is bare.

Forest rings the crater, stretching further than even you from your advantageous position can see. Nor can you see through the peacock-blue water to the bottom of the lake. They say it hasn't one.

On this particular day of your ethereal view, there is even a bit of human interest in that splendid but desolate vista. At the southern end of the lake a herald of European culture, a broad-beamed steam tug, lies black and ugly on the fantastically blue water. In the bows you may see two figures; from your remote standpoint, insignificant enough. You can discern the features no more than you can read the passions of the tiny puppets holding each other close, as if for defence against the indifferent majesty of nature.

From your elevation you can see a third figure. It is thrusting its way through the forest that borders the lake at the head of a train of diminutive black carriers. Ignorant of each other, the two groups of marionettes are drawn by wires of Fate, invisible even to you, into a contact all but fatal to both."

PART I

"If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard ... thou shalt enjoy her."—W. SHAKESPEARE.

CHAPTER I

"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."

CHAPTER II

Telling the story a fortnight later, Norah said that this evening offered her the last peace and contentment she was to know. I fancy one must have youth as well as a good digestion on one's side to feel peaceful and content a few weeks after deserting a devoted husband. But scruples, if women ever have them, lapse in love, and more fully I imagine when the game is played with so splendid a partner in so romantic a scene.

All her life, Norah had taken to romance, as other folk take to drink, or politics. The cure, you shall see, was drastic.

As a child, she had run wild. Her mother had died at her birth, and her father was interminably engaged in a series of unsuccessful operations on the markets, the turf, or the tables. A succession of governesses threw in their hands after a brief attempt, unbacked by any parental authority, to control her. From them, however, she learned to read and write, and from the coachman, to swear. Otherwise, she had little regular education.

She made up for it in the great dilapidated library where she browsed, uncontrolled, among the great debris of the past. Poetry, drama, novels, history, it did not matter, so long as it had a story and a swing. Not a very high criterion, perhaps, but it led her to Shakespeare, and the Arabian Nights, Marlowe and Webster, Froissart and Hakluyt, Chaucer, Drayton, Otway, Defoe, Byron. There seemed to be a wonderful world waiting for her, wonderful lands to visit, wonderful deeds to dare, wonderful men to meet.

The outbreak of war swung her from this world of books into life and a phase of life then strange enough to any of us.

She was seventeen when she started work as a V.A.D. and eighteen when she received her eventual discharge with the infraction of every rule to her discredit. In her first round with discipline that unimaginative force had won. She spent a night of tears and abasement, feeling that to have her way, she had failed her country and her class.

But the votaries of Romance are not easily, if indeed they are ever, discouraged. The next morning she joined a volunteer Red Cross column, which a wealthy humanitarian was raising for service with the Russian Armies.

In those days we still believed, if not in the great steam roller, at least in the great soul of Russia. Our stale, materialistic civilisation was to be quickened with an air blowing cold from the steppes. The way had been shown us, our enthusiasts instanced, by the Muscovite abnegation of vodka; forgetting that a Russian is only worth listening to when he is drunk. Regeneration was dawning, convincingly enough, in the east; they little knew how red that dawn.

Norah eagerly seized the chance of reinstating herself in her own esteem. And no doubt the glamour of the country of the Tsars called her. During her months with the V.A.D. her stout heart, quick wits, and clever fingers had picked up something of war-time nursing. It is not difficult to believe that her beauty, if not her skill, was welcome to the overworked, ill-equipped French and Russian doctors, who laboured day and night behind the Russian front at the first dressing station where worked the column."

Ross hesitated.

"She told me," he said, "a good many interesting things about this experience of hers—of operations by candle-light on the kitchen tables of abandoned farms, of a long-haired pope attached to the column whom horror drove mad one night in a shattered tavern; but the story will be long enough without any picturesque extras, and we'll go straight on to the day that the Sisters, for a joke, I suppose, crossed Norah's thread with Archie's.

Archie Sinclair was not, of course, in the least like Dick Ward.

In his adventures, the male unconsciously pursues one chosen type, finding in his mates, if only for a moment, an approximation to his dreams. Just as, in a palpable desert, it is the mirage of water that men follow, ignoring other less desired deception.

Deception it is. Alone the hermits of the Thebaid attained to the achievement of temptation without realisation. Less fortunate men find in possession the denial of the dream.

Women never follow this ideal of monotony. Their husbands, their lovers, are the glasses through which they survey the world. Sometimes one wants spectacles, sometimes lorgnettes, sometimes field-glasses.

Dick was successful, splendid, heroically moulded. He took the eye and filled the stage. Archie was small and unremarkable. He hated emotion, gestures in any degree. Expression made him uncomfortable; and any display of generous sentiment, noble aspiration or lofty ideal he met with embarrassed silence. But he lacked the self-confidence that would have qualified him for the slightly unfashionable ranks of Strong Silent Men. Meeting him casually, he struck you as irresolute. 'Cautious' was really a truer diagnosis.

Like Dick, he was a Celt. But while Dick was the type that fills parliaments and places where they talk, Archie was the dark, inconspicuous sort that is only dragged from its holes in the hills into public by outside force.

His father and grandfather had practised at the Scottish Bar; he was himself destined for the same career, but circumstances, in the obscure shape of a handful of Serbian assassins, landed him in a gun-pit in a picturesque valley at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.

As an earnest young Liberal at the Union Debating Society, Oxford, Archie had repeatedly proved the impossibility of war under modern conditions. In August, 1914, however, when Europe had failed to realise this impossibility, Archie, after two days of more than usual reticence, announced that he was off next day to Glasgow. Pressed to give his motives, he muttered that he supposed it was up to one to join. As he didn't think he'd make much of an officer, he'd enlisted.

Before very long Gunner Sinclair was drafted out to Flanders to replace casualties. He spent an evil winter in the mud of the Salient where endurance found more scope than dash. When Spring came to the desolate scene, he was sent home to receive a commission and to train with a Kitchener division.

At that time things were going badly in Russia. Sukomlinov, the war minister, was suspected not merely of the incompetence that is demanded of a war minister, or of the corruption which is expected of any Russian official, but of an active intelligence with the enemy, not tolerable in the early stages of a war.

It was found impossible to supply rifles and small arms ammunition, let alone artillery and shells, to the hitherto victorious army of the Grand Duke in the Carpathians; and it became necessary for the infantry—rude, unpolished fellows for the most part—to troop over the top without rifles or artillery support, against a well-equipped and entrenched enemy.

To limit the retreat which unexpectedly became necessary, the Russian Government applied to England for guns and munitions.

The War Office and the politicians, realising the seriousness of the position, and standing on the well-proved maxim that, 'if a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing half,' fitted out several batteries of more or less obsolete twelve pounders—old Horse Artillery ware—and embarked them to the aid of their allies. Second Lieutenant Sinclair was a section commander in one of these units.

Archie, never communicative, told me little of his share in that disastrous campaign—disastrous, but not inglorious, if death and sacrifice can dignify. But for my story's sake, from the bald and insufficient facts he let fall, I must try to outline the last evening's fighting, that contrived the confluence of his and Norah's lives.

The scene, he said, was a gun-pit at the side of a muddy road, which led through a ransacked Galician village. Its wretched hovels had been gutted by the retiring troops, and from a window of the only two-storied house, the black-robed body of a Jew swung by the neck. A playful habit of the retreating Muscovite, designed to discourage espionage. By now the shadow of the mountain, under whose flank the village lay, mercifully obscured his features.

On the road that passed the gun-pit, bodies of men and horses lay like burst sacks to show where a direct hit had exploded the ammunition limber of Archie's second gun as the team was hooking in.

His section had been left to cover the brigade's withdrawal to a fresh position down the valley. When their unmolested retreat had been secured, his first gun, successfully extricated, had followed on down the hill.

The Austrian fire was ill-aimed, and spasmodic. The crash and dust of falling masonry at the far end of the straggling village, or spouts of black earth from the fields beyond, showed where the shells were falling. But the God of Battles decided that the moment selected by Archie to limber up his second gun should be chosen by the number 4 of an Austrian 120 mm. somewhere up the valley to insert a defective round. The shell dropped a quarter of a mile short of its fellows to score the direct hit on the limber.

When the smoke of the explosion had cleared, only Archie, his sergeant, one driver and one horse of the team were able to pick themselves up from the ground.

Archie's brain worked quicker than its wont. There were not many alternatives.

'Driver Evans,' he said, 'are you all right to ride?'

'Yessir!'

'Have a look at Dossie, and see if she will carry you.'

With his hand pressed to his side, where a piece of flying metal had caught him, he examined the damage done to the gun. The sergeant was at work with Archie's revolver among the wounded horses.

The driver reported that, bar a bit of skin gone, the off-leader would do.

'Good,' said Archie. 'Then mount and follow the battery hell for blast. If they have gone to their new positions, find them. Tell the major what has happened. Say the gun is worth saving, if he can get a team up in the night. There are no Austrians in sight; if they are not here before dark, they will probably wait till dawn. Tell him none of us can walk except Sergeant Yates and myself. Understand?'

Evans saluted, and swung round on his heel. Archie and the sergeant busied themselves with first-aid dressings and fetching water for the wounded. Whenever the stoicism of his kind let a sufferer ask what was happening:—

'Driver Evans is finding the Major,' said Archie. 'When it's dark, he'll send up to pull the gun and us out.'

It was not, he knew, as simple as that. The battery had a long start, and would by now be concealed in a new position. In a strange country and with a foreign tongue, the driver would be very lucky if he found it. But there seemed no better plan.

To look for civilian transport in the scarred desert that the retreating army left in its wake was to waste time. Time that was all too short, even if the Austrian advance guard, accustomed to the almost defenceless condition of the Russian rear at that date, and misled by the English expenditure of ammunition, advanced with unjustified caution.

The hours passed. Archie watched the shadow of the western hills, as it spread across the valley, and still no attack came.

I tactlessly asked him what he felt like as he waited.

He stared at me.

'Felt like?' he repeated. 'I didn't register feelings. I was talking to the men.'

'What did you talk about?'

'I forget. Football, I think. And boxing. One of the men had been Army Welter Champion in India. Poor devil. I don't suppose he boxed again.'

All the same, I can't help thinking that in such a situation the alternatives of sudden death, prison or salvation must have danced their round in the brain of even the least imaginative of men.

At last darkness fell, and the enemy's fire ceased. Archie stood up and strained his ears for any sound that might betray an advance, but all he heard was the painful breathing of his wounded men, or a groan from the layer, who was hit in the stomach, and unlikely to live the night.

'Sergeant,' whispered Archie, 'time you were off.'

'Beg pardon, sir?'

'One of us is enough to stay with these chaps till help comes.'

'You don't mean me to go, sir?'

'Yes, sergeant! Get back to the battery. Besides, you can hurry them up.'

Reluctantly, Sergeant Yates disappeared and Archie was left in the dark with his disabled gun and his dead and dying men. His side hurt him, and his heart ached for his companions. He calculated and re-calculated how soon help could come, till, as the long hours passed, doubt became certainty that his message had miscarried.

He could hardly guess that his destiny had been crossed by the fortunes of Private Pyotr Pavlovitch of the Seventh Siberian Rifles. Pyotr had been holding remarkable hands at 'vint' that morning in the trenches before he and his battalion had been withdrawn under the cover of the British guns. He had won a shirt from Ivan Ilyitch, and ten (pre-revolution) roubles from Dmitri Kalkanov. Can it be wondered that having traversed the cheaper stages of loquacity and truculence, he now lay in deep slumber across the road?

Observe, moreover, the careful dispositions of Providence. Had he held a trump less, and won a kopeck fewer, he would have fallen a moment sooner into the ditch at the side of the road. In that case his prostrate body would not have brought, poor, tired, off-leader Dossie down in a heap, nor sent Driver Evans with a broken leg and concussion to Norah's first dressing station. Neither would the board have been set for the game which was to be played five years later on Lake Tanganyika.

Norah's hand was on her compatriot's head when his eyes opened, and her ear close to his lips that demanded feebly to continue his search for the battery. She shook her head and pointed to his leg. Driver Evans persisted and explained his persistence.

She invoked the aid of the chief doctor of the column, a celebrated French surgeon.

'I will do all I can for your compatriots, Lady Norah,' he said, 'but I'm afraid it isn't much.'

Norah's foot tapped the floor while he scribbled a note and gave it to his orderly.

'Nobody here would know where the battery is; Peter will carry this note to the brigadier. However...' he shrugged his shoulders and turned to the case he was dressing.

Norah heard him murmur to his assistant: 'A cette heure-ci le Russe sera certainement couché avec une poule quelconque. Pas moyen de l'y déranger pour une telle bagatelle que les vies de ses soldats.'

Norah bit her lip and went back to Driver Evans. How masculine it all was! Discipline and routine and inefficiency. While the surgeon shrugged his shoulders and the General slept with his woman, her men were dying.

She made up her mind, and, bending over Evans, plied him with as many questions as he could answer. Then, with her comic little air of decision, she crammed a round grey astrachan hat on her head, swung a black Caucasian cloak of pony skin on to her shoulders and made for the stables.

The sleepy transport sergeant was dragged out of his bed and set to start the Ford box-car, which carried the personal baggage of the column. Grumbling, but obedient to her English air of certainty, he swung the engine into life."

"I've spent too long on this episode introducing to your notice Norah Cleverly, and Archie Sinclair," said Ross with a yawn, "to allow me to describe to you her ride. On horseback, it would have claimed a poet's pen. As the mount was a Ford car, I can only say the road was abominable, scored into deep ruts, strewn with boulders, and, without lights, invisible. How the car kept together and the girl's strength held out and how they escaped total wreck, I can't imagine. A stoutish bit of work. Eventually—about the time that Archie's layer died in his arms—the Ford came to a full stop in the sand with its wheels spinning round tyre-deep.

Norah jumped out and pushed. The car did not stir. She looked for stones to put under the wheels to give them grip. She saw nothing but sand and immovable boulders. She sat on the step, the tears hot in her eyes. Not from fear at her position in the route of the victorious Austrian army, but from anger at her failure, and from pity for the men she had failed to rescue.

After a time she heard a voice raised in song. Russians, she knew, sing about the Volga, Teutons about the 'Heimat.' When, therefore, she heard the words:—

'And when I die, don't bury me at all,
Just pickle my bones in al-co-hol...'

she recognised a compatriot.

'God bless my soul,' said Sergeant Yates, a minute later.

* * * * * * *

'Listen,' said Archie to the survivors of his party, a little before dawn, 'isn't that a Ford?'

'Then they 'ave them in 'ell too,' groaned a cockney driver, who was sure he would die of his wounds before the morning. The rattle ceased behind the shattered cottages. A pause interminable to Archie ensued. He stood fingering his revolver. Had the Austrians got round behind them? Were they preparing the rush which would end all? Two figures visible against the crumbling white walls detached themselves from the dark. He wondered whether to challenge them or trust to the cover of darkness. They loomed closer, picking their way slowly over the battle-torn ground. Archie waited till they were at arm's length, before he pressed the button of his torch.

The white circle of light framed a young girl's face: yellow mud was smeared on her cheek, and she shook a tumble of curls out of her eyes."

CHAPTER III

At first she can hardly have seemed credible to Archie, momentarily expecting the end. In the middle of death and destruction, suddenly this vivid beauty. And not an academic, ideal beauty demanding worship of brain or senses, but a practical travel-stained young woman holding rescue in her hands. His feelings can't have been very clear. When hope of life suddenly dawns, men don't bother much with the outlying emotions. Moreover, Archie was busy getting his wounded men, as gently as the ground would allow, into the box-car. But he must have been conscious of a great wonder, wonder at this eleventh hour salvation, wonder at her beauty and courage.

It was not till afterwards, in his bunk at the dressing station, when his broken ribs had been strapped, that he settled into the steady devotion which was to be his guide and his torment in days to come. From the start he was a humble lover, asking little, diffident of his fortune. Whether the fortune was good or ill, no outsider can say: but on that night of battle, at first sight, Archie was loved by Norah. It was the old story of Ares and Aphrodite entangled in the net, but a net spread by artificers, more cunning even than Hephæstus—Romance and Pity.

Archie, seeing the fight out, and standing by his men wounded and dead, his clothes torn by the explosion, his face discoloured with dust, smoke and blood, his eyes ravaged with sleeplessness and pain, seemed to Norah a figure heroically proportioned in its tenacity, devotion and isolation. And while her spirit paid tribute to the hero, her heart ached to mother the poor, tired boy.

Archie's broken rib and some hitch in clearing the wounded from the dressing station to the base, gave scope to this aspiration and the sick-bed completed what the battlefield had begun. To such purpose, that, as soon as Archie's bones and Norah's duties allowed, they were married.

Every marriage is said to be pre-ordained by the female, and baited for the male with the illusion of choice. Whether this is always true, I have no doubt that here Norah took the lead. Of course Archie would have sold his soul for her, but where would he find the decision to tell her so? She must have helped him out, her love translating his silences into mute eloquence, his caution into noble modesty, his reticence into silent strength. She was young enough to demand perfection in the object of her affections, and deep enough in love to find it. Obstacles and conventions only acted as spurs to her hot blood. Her natural bent was to put all her money on one horse and that for a win, never a place. In this the war lent her reason, urging her to pluck the day ere night fell, to take and give what life offered before death laid his claim. It needs, I think, an old head and a cold heart to condemn these war marriages.

Archie, whose Scottish nature appreciated the unfavourable side of everything, no doubt saw each of the hundred reasons against the marriage. He may have realised their difference of temper, foreseen the parental disapproval of the solid Scots lawyer and the impecunious English peer, calculated money difficulties, guessed that Norah was in love with an aspect of him, which peace time—should he survive the war—would never call into being.

But can any man, even a Scot, let this weigh when he is fast in love with an incredible apparition, who has saved his life and lets him see that his love is not unacceptable? To my mind, Archie deserves neither blame nor pity—beauty and guts mayn't be a pass into the Kingdom of Heaven, but they carry a girl a long way towards Holy Matrimony.

Judge it as you may, the marriage took place not many weeks after their meeting in that Carpathian valley, as soon in fact as Norah had got home and Archie had been released from his London hospital.

In spite of the quietness of the wedding, our modern Argus got hold of the story and billed them as 'Red Cross Romance: Peer's Daughter Rescues Artillery Lieutenant.'

The Peer let it be felt that he regretted the rescue; while the father of the lieutenant indicated that if he went his own way, he must pay it.

This lack of enthusiasm emphasised the romantic nature of the union, and the happiness of the young couple was only interrupted by the end of Archie's sick leave, and his return to Flanders.

From then life began to thrust them apart, as surely as a tree-root forces asunder two stones in a wall. Not that these two stones can ever have been very truly laid. Archie's reserved devotion can never have satisfied Norah's capacity for passion. She asked for the wine of life and got its breakfast food. But while that Carpathian picture was not effaced, she would see no flaws in her hero. Nor, during his long absences at the front, and his short visits on leave, did she perceive the difference between the man and the picture. She longed passionately for his return and loved him dearly when he came. But apart from his brief periods of leave, the first hours of which were always wasted in a sort of strangerhood, they had no life in common to buttress up Romance and to let picture tone into fact.

Norah did not lack humour, and had war allowed, daily companionship would have built up affection for the man to supplement and in time supplant adoration of the hero. The daily letters which passed between the flat in Baker Street and the dug-out in Flanders—Archie's rather formal chronicles and Norah's passionate little notes—could not take the place of the personal intercourse which war denied them.

I know it is the thought of meeting the object of their passion daily at breakfast that heads off many a Benedict and Beatrice. But it is only by submitting to the humanising influence of small daily contacts that love will provide a working basis for marriage. Without this humanising, love does not develop but starves."

"I didn't know you were married, Ross," I interrupted.

"I'm not," he replied, and went on with his story.

"Norah's environment did not help her to keep in touch with her husband. In his absence she was absorbed into the circle of her family, by none of whom was Archie known or appreciated. A different atmosphere was created in which Archie drew no breath. New points of view and standards of life presented themselves to her young eyes. This was her first taste of London, and a strange world lay at her feet. No wonder her head was a little dizzied. She drove an ambulance by day, and by night she danced. Her beauty, vivacity and birth made her acceptable to that set which won the war by going to charity matinées. She did not like it, but found its glitter stimulating. At the houses of her relations she met celebrated, handsome, and amusing men. And, in truth, though the comparison never presented itself, they were a good deal better company than poor, silent Archie.

After three years of this the war ended, and Archie came home. He was far too devoted to Norah to ask her to alter her way of life, and while his gratuity lasted, he took her to dinners, theatres, races, dances, night clubs; all that hostesses, restaurateurs and impresarios pass off on us for 'pleasure.'

I don't suppose Archie showed at his best in these surroundings. He had scant small talk, and probably an indifferent tailor.

During these weeks, disillusionment first reared its head. For both their sakes I hope the process was gradual, but I think passion would desert Norah's quick heart as capriciously as it visited it.

Archie must have looked forward to the time when his gratuity would be exhausted and the two-pences for the merry-go-round would no longer be forthcoming. Then they would have to retire to Edinburgh and live on their small income, while Archie made his way at the Scottish Bar, like his fathers before him. Unfortunately, his nature was to keep his views to himself. He did not disclose them until one evening at supper at Giro's. The disclosure was disastrous.

They had dined, a trifle noisily, at the mansion of a South African Jew, whose acquaintance Norah had made during the war when only aliens could procure luxuries. I had known their host before he became respectable—too well, indeed, to be dropped—and had also been invited.

The war had left me lame, and Norah, in whom modish hardness hid a compassionate heart, insisted on picking me up in her taxi. She was looking, I thought, very adorable. Her frock was made of some sort of shot silk, very bright. It fitted her straight little figure closely down to her waist, spreading out below in scalloped flounces. The suggestion was a fin-de-siècle shepherdess, strayed from Arcady to Park Lane.

Over her shoulders hung a cloak lined with green brocade. Its upright collar of monkey fur framed with spikes the piquancy of her face. Her high cheekbones were rouged, her wide mouth drooped a little at the corners.

Archie made a good background. He was slight and dark. Typically, he wore a dinner jacket instead of the tail-coat that the rest of the party would sport. His hair was close-cropped and grew high on his forehead. His face was clean shaven and rather weather-beaten, with a well formed nose and an obstinate chin. His supra-orbital sinus, as the anatomists call the bar of the eyebrows, was pronounced and his grey eyes seemed sunken beneath it. He looked uncommonly wiry, giving an impression of 'no waste'—no spare flesh, no spare words, no spare emotions. Condemning emotion he substituted Reason, thereby coming more of a mucker than the ordinary irrational man. His anxiety to be reasonable gave him an irresolute air. He was still balancing questions which years before ordinary men had settled by instinct, prejudice or indifference.

After dinner we went to the last act of the last revue, though why the discomfort of a box should be sought for conversation that could perfectly well be held at home, I never know. When the theatre was over, and the party had broken up, I heard Norah tell Archie she was too tired to go home and wanted supper.

Apparently the supper was not a success. Archie ordered champagne. Norah tasted it, and made a face.

'My dear,' she said, 'the stuff's undrinkable. Do order something a little less like what they give you in church!'

Archie, in whose opinion wine began and ended with port, said nothing, and beckoned the wine waiter.

Unfortunately, he betrayed his thoughts by a slight shrug. Norah, who was tired and nervy, saw it.

'All right, I won't have it then. I suppose you think we can't afford it.' Archie shook his head. Much of his conversation was by sign. When you asked him a question, he paused before answering. A stranger would think he had not heard, and would repeat his question; but Archie was only thinking over his reply—a habit which may make valuable contribution to thought, but does not help small talk. Sometimes it would be your penultimate remark which he answered, having duly considered the question during the intermediate talk. No, Archie was not a conversationalist. But now Norah felt the need of opening her heart.

'I wish you'd drink a bit more fizz, Archie. It might binge you up a bit. You sat all through dinner looking as bored as sin, and you didn't smile once at the play or even at Tony Moorhouse.'

That gilded youth, after a conscientious patronage of the magnate's cellar, had subjected the revue artistes to a flow of not very witty interruption. The party had shrieked with laughter, and Archie had flattered himself that he, too, had gone through the motions of being amused.

'I'm sorry,' he protested, 'I was thinking——'

'My poor boy, you don't go to the play to think. What on earth were you thinking about?'

Now, one of Archie's habits which more than any other unfitted him for polite society was his tendency to tell the truth. So now he blurted out, 'I was thinking you'd miss all this in Edinburgh.'

Norah's delicate eyebrows rose, and her lips tightened.

'What's that about Edinburgh, Archie?'

'Well, some day we must settle down to work.'

'But, my poor friend, why Edinburgh? what's wrong with East Ham?'

'You know. Family connection, and all that. Solicitors. I wouldn't have a chance at the London Bar; now, at Edinburgh, in five years——'

'Yes, darling, go on——'

'In five or six years I ought to be clearing at least five hundred a year.'

'Say it again slowly, Archie.... You don't seriously mean to shut me up for five or six years in Edinburgh to earn five hundred a year! Why, I'd sooner be bricked into a convent wall!'

'Edinburgh's not a bad place; we'd know lots of people there.'

'The same applies to hell, dear.' And so the argument went on, Archie more and more obstinate, and Norah more outrageous. Archie was determined that his only safe prospect was the Bar and the Scottish Bar at that. The Bar might be slow, but, for him, it was sure, and success was only a question of time. Norah urged him to chance his arm at something quicker, more lucrative, and in London. She quoted the successful among her friends whom post-war poverty had driven to work.

'Look at Bobby Anstruther. His garage is making three thousand a year, hiring out defunct Daimlers. You have to book one days ahead.'

'He'll be bust in a year when every one's spent their money.'

Well, look at young Peter Carey, making thousands on the Stock Exchange. And what about that Rhodesian man we met at dinner to-night? He said there were pots of money to be made in mealies in Africa. He said any fool could grow them.'

'Not in London?'

'No, darling. But if I can't be in London, I'd rather be in Jericho or Tierra del Fuego than in a blasted provincial town. Listen, Archie,' and she went on to repeat what the South African had told her, how the Chartered Company were giving tracts of 3000 acres in Northern Rhodesia to approved ex-officers, free for the asking, provided they occupied and worked them.

Archie shook his head. 'I might be able to make farming pay,' he said, 'I was brought up on a farm. But it's a hard life, and, in spite of your friend, it's slow money. You'd like it worse than Edinburgh and the Bar.'

'If you mention Edinburgh or the Bar again, I'll tell the head waiter that I don't know who you are, and you've accosted me.'

Then with one of her sudden changes of moods:

'Archie, I'm sorry. I'm being a beast to you to-night. I don't mean to be, dear, but I'm tired, and Edinburgh ... say you forgive me, darling, and I won't say another word about it.'

But Norah had got her toes in and her husband's opposition to the African plan only made her dig them in deeper. Though Archie was as obstinate as they make them, his will was weakened by his anxiety to please his wife. Like most men, he was attracted by the idea of an outdoor life; but that northern pre-vision of the disadvantages of any agreeable course, held him back, and by birth and breeding he was mistrustful of anything new and unproven. Moreover, he did not believe that Norah would like the life.

She herself had no doubts. Her restless, adventurous hands grasped at anything fresh and strange. Of all the siren lands that had lured her girlhood, Africa's voice had rung the clearest. Women and the lower animals do not reason. Pictures present themselves before their minds, and they choose as the pictures entice or repel.

So as she re-read the travels of the great adventurers, she saw a sunlit vision of palms and orchids, savages as noble as princes, and as faithful as dogs, wild beasts to be hunted at pleasure, lands of mystery to be explored at will, fortunes to be won in the intervals as a diver gathers pearls. And at the end a triumphant return to the luxury of home with spoils that would lay London at her feet.

Her final storming of Archie's opposition was characteristic. She had driven him to his last line of defence—a plea of insufficient capital. Had Archie ever understood women, he would have known the danger of setting up one concrete objection. She put on her furs and an hour later returned with a handful of banknotes.

'Where did this come from?' he asked.

'My pearls,' was the reply.

"That is the way they always defeat us," said Ross.

CHAPTER IV

One day, towards the end of the dry season in Central Africa more than two years later, Norah was sitting on an empty packing-case under the shade of an acacia, watching the tiling of her house.

Archie had been two years building it. He was so thorough that he sometimes maddened her. Moreover, every brick and tile had to be moulded and burnt on the farm; anthill clay for mortar dug and carried; shells for lime pointing dredged from the river and burnt in kilns; timber felled, dragged and hand sawn; doors and windows made in the shop; bolts and iron work wrought in the forge; and natives taught to do all this.

At last the white walls were up, the verandah pillars stood square and solid, and the skeleton of the king post roof reared its symmetry across the cloudless blue sky. A string of naked black urchins herded by an objurgatory black capitao formed a chattering procession carrying tiles, two in each hand and one on each head, to the tile hangers, who crouched like black apes on the rafters.

Norah felt no elation at the thought of good work nearly done, and stared blankly across a prospect of profitless and laborious years. True, she would be heartily glad to be quit of her temporary habitation of the last thirty months. From where she sat, she could see the cluster of wattle-and-daub rondavels, where they lived while the permanent house was building. It was across a little river that ran swift as a mill race, bordered by marshy banks hidden in papyrus rushes with heads like mops. Waterfowl, black, white, and grey, rose into the air from time to time with harsh, melancholy cries. On either bank of the river lay the flats, where grew the dry season grass for Archie's cattle. The edge of the bush, as straight as if drawn with a ruler, fringed the flats. Desolation gained her when she thought how many square miles of trees lay between her and her nearest white neighbour. Beyond the tops of the trees she could see the rounded slopes of the hills, blue in the distance, as bright as a child's painting.

On the flats, which stayed green when the scanty grass of the bush had turned orange, she could see Archie's beloved herds and, going his rounds, looking out for sick and ailing beasts, Archie himself. To-day the disreputable grey double terai had for company a dirty white topee. A wandering 'stiff' had descended on the farm some evenings before with a ulendo[1] of two carriers. They had few visitors, a dozen or two in the year, traders, missionaries, Boma[2] officials, and occasionally a 'stiff,' some unfortunate with insufficient kit and carriers, his presence in the country imperfectly explained by an ostensible search for work where none was to be found. Such were usually chary of giving their names or their business. This one, a wizened little fellow with a half-hearted beard and a game leg, answered, when he remembered, to the name of Jones, and purported to have come from the Congo, over whose frontier he admitted to have been escorted by Belgian askari. He had a repertory of elephant stories and tales of tusks of incredible size, but became elusive if pressed as to locality. He was now, no doubt, giving Archie a wealth of inexpert advice on the treatment of cattle, and Norah smiled as she imagined the impenetrable silence with which it would be received.

[1] "Ulendo"—journey or the necessary components of a journey.

[2] "Boma"—lit. enclosure, hence the Government posts.

Archie had proved to have a knack with cattle. Brought up on the farm his mother had inherited, he had learnt a good deal of veterinary work in the gunners. The herd of native cattle he had collected was as good as any in the country, and for grass his farm was unrivalled. But lack of markets and the distance from rail-head, which made freight prohibitive and the amenities of civilisation rare, held him up. The only market which was not at the moment barred by the embargoes of God or man—tsetse fly belts or prohibited areas—was the Katanga, the district of the Congo copper mines, whose vast compounds of native workers consumed unlimited meat. The depreciated Belgian exchange, however, made it unprofitable for Archie to sell there. So, while his herds increased and multiplied, his bank balance, under the constant drain of working expenses, ebbed.

The cattle were already streaming to their kraals on the high ground. Amid the shouting of the herd-boys, they snatched at a last bite of grass as they shouldered their way and a little mist of dust rose from their hoofs. Norah got up with a sigh as the sun sank behind the darkened hills. Cattle attract lions and leopards, and it was not safe for man or domestic beast to be abroad after dark.

She reached the ferry and stepped into the dug-out canoe, manned by an elderly native with a withered leg, whom Archie employed from charity. He pointed the nose of the canoe up-stream and pushed off. Carried by the current, the boat swung round and bumped into the rough steps on the farther bank. She sprang out bidding good-night to the old man, who knelt down and clapped his hands in salutation.

Archie had not reached the rondavels before her; he would be seeing the cattle safely kraaled for the night. Her 'boy,' Changalilo, brought quinine and silently prepared a hip-bath for her.

Silence, discretion, and resource, were Changalilo's rare qualifications. His tribe, the Awemba, a dignified, well-mannered, and once warlike race, are as a rule too irresponsible to make good servants. Norah explained the exception that was Changalilo by attributing to him Arab blood. His lips and jaw showed no trace of negroid thickness, and it was likely enough that in passage some Arab slave trader had sired one of his parents.

His slimness and his white kanju made him look taller than he really was, and his grave restrained manner lent him an aloofness which was probably absent from his simple heart. Now he lingered in the room soundlessly creating an impression, as native courtesy directs, that there was something more to be said.

'What is it, Changalilo?' asked Norah.

'Io, mwkai—nothing, mistress,' came the disclaimer imposed by good form on any speaker with news to impart.

Further interrogation elicited the fact that the sukambali, a lad of fourteen who hewed wood, drew water, and washed plates, stated that his father was ill, and that he wanted to go to his village.

'Is it true?' asked Norah.

Changalilo's silence indicated scepticism.

'In any case, he cannot start to-night,' she decided.

This was just her luck, with a guest in the house. She supposed she would have to let the little beast go, and of course another sukambali would appear in a day or two, but work in the kitchen would be completely disorganised. Unless she cooked with her own hands, food would be uneatable. How she hated housewifery. She had to do it, though. Archie took over the whole work of the farm, and the house fell to her share.

Her days seemed a round of ignoble detail—thwarting the table-boy's appetite for sugar, driving the sukambali to wash the saucepans before they were used, giving out paraffin, and watching that it was not stolen from the lamps. That's what pioneering meant. Well, she must stick it now. She promised Changalilo she would interview the sukambali on the morrow, and dismissed him. There was a sound of inharmonious humming outside, and Archie entered. He was in good spirits, his day's work done, and his visitor bestowed for the moment in the guest house. Norah, forcing a smile, inquired dutifully after the farm.

'Wasted most of the day listening to Jones' rubbish,' was the reply. 'He knows more about elephant than cattle. I hope so, anyhow. Telling me how to control the sex of calves. Pure superstition, of course. His theory is that...' But Norah was not listening. Her gaze wandered from a patch in the bulging wall, where the stakes showed through the dull red mud, to the sagging thatch of the ceilingless roof, whence insects were liable to drop. Her mind contrasted this unromantic squalor with the spacious poverty of her own home, and with the splendour of her London days, exaggerated, no doubt, across the two-year gap of barren makeshift. Bravely, she forced the picture out of her mind and bent her attention to Archie's monosyllabic conversation.

'I think,' he was saying, 'I ought to see to getting another pure bred bull to build up the herd a bit.'

At the familiar words 'build up the herd' Norah's restraint snapped. When you consider that she had loyally suppressed her feelings for over two years, perhaps her outburst may be forgiven her.

'What's the good of building up the precious herd, when you can't sell the brutes? Do you think I've come to live like a Hottentot in this desert to watch you acting midwife to a lot of humpbacked African cows for their sakes? I never see you all day, except at meals when you're eating, and in the evenings, when you're sleeping. I believe you think more of your heifers than you do of your wife.'

Slowly Archie answered.

'It's the only safe line, Norah. If we build up...' he checked himself in time. 'We've got the best herd in the country and it's getting better all the time. When times are normal, we'll sell well. It'll be easier for you in the new house, and it's only a question of time....'

'So's life, Archie, only a question of time. Three score years and ten of it, isn't it? And I've had twenty-four already. How long do you want us to go on?'

But you can supply without my help the stock complaints of an over-wrought woman.

The storm ended unusually for Norah in tears. Silently, Archie tried to soothe her. He was thinking harder than he had for many a day. Constant manual work leaves little room for thought. Typically, he gave no utterance to his meditation. He liked to work things out in his mind, bring his matured plan to a successful issue, and then, and not till then, announce his conclusion. That was his habit, and he pursued it now. Had he told Norah his thoughts, well, it would have spoiled my story and saved a life.

As it was, Norah retired to bed with her nerves in shreds, and Archie dined alone with his nomadic guest, whom a string of 'sundowners' seemed to stimulate. His shrill voice was audible through the mud walls till a late hour. Archie talked more than his wont, and seemed to be asking questions. Only once were any words distinguishable.

'It's a bargain,' said Mr. Jones of the Congo.

Next morning at dawn she was awakened by an unusual bustle. She supposed that their visitor had decided to decamp and that Archie was hospitably supplying him with the many necessaries he lacked, before speeding him on his way. She did not feel her presence was necessary at that ceremony, nor did she as yet want to meet Archie. She was sorry for last night's outburst because it must have hurt him. The look in his eyes had nearly checked her words. But if he cared for her, as his eyes seemed to say, as he once had cared for her, why did his words, his actions never show it now? He never asked her advice, sought her help. She had become part of his daily life, part of the farm, like Simoni, the ploughman. Well, one must expect six years of marriage to kill love, though it seemed a little hard that youth too should be wasted. But it wasn't fair to say things that hurt Archie. She must make it up to him for last night. But not now: she lacked courage to pretend at this time in the morning. And if Archie said the wrong thing she would give herself away, and hurt him afresh. So when he knocked at her door, she lay very still, and shammed sleep. He knocked twice, and hung about for some minutes, apparently undecided whether to make another onslaught. Then his steps receded, and the bustle died away.

When at length she came out to breakfast, wearing a flame coloured jumper that was a favourite of Archie's, she found neither of the men. Changalilo, standing at attention behind her chair, presented the following literary effort:—

'Dearest, have started for Elizabethville on cattle business. Will write from there. Jones is here.—ARCHIE.'"

CHAPTER V

Naturally, Norah was furious. Any one would be furious who was denied the doing of a gracious deed already rehearsed in mind.

She had come to breakfast with a generous act of submission, and an affectionate reconciliation prepared. The sort of thing that closes the story on the screen, but, alas! ends little in real life. And now Archie had gone without a word on 'cattle business,' to buy, that meant, the pure bred bull that had made the mischief—neglecting as if it had never been made, her protest. He hadn't even noticed that she was miserable; or if he had noticed, he hadn't cared. Last night's scene was now transfigured into a declaration of wrongs, a declaration brutally ignored. But wait till Archie came back with his bull, she'd make him take her into account; she wouldn't stay a day longer on the farm; if need be, alone she'd go back to a decent life in a decent country.

In this mood she finished her breakfast and walked out into the chequered sunlight of the forest behind the rondavels. Changalilo, obeying Archie's standing order, slipped after her with her rifle on his shoulder. They passed the sawpit and galvanised into momentary activity the sawyers, who were celebrating Archie's absence with a morning of idleness over a fire of sticks.

She climbed a rocky hill, whose eminence gave her a view above the all-surrounding trees, which, from the level, limited sight to a matter of yards. Looking over the carpet of tree tops, whose leaves at that season had taken the transparent colour of azalea flowers, she watched the shadows of the clouds marbling the distant hillside, reflecting that her life was as useless as yonder succession of light and shade. Presently Changalilo, in whose eyes a hill top was useful to locate game or landmarks, and who cared little for scenery or meditation, announced the approach of a 'ulendo wa musungu' (a travelling white man and his carriers).

Norah's slower eyes searched the forest in vain. But soon on a path that wound between the trees appeared a native with a hip-bath on his head. More natives, carrying on head or shoulder bundles of tents and bedding, boxes of food and kitchen utensils, straggled into sight at irregular intervals. As they approached, appearing and disappearing among the trees, Norah wondered who the traveller could be. It was rare to have two visitors in so short a space, but as there was no other white settlement for several days' journey, the traveller would certainly make a halt at the farm.

It was not Henderson, the Native Commissioner, for she would have seen him before his bath, walking ahead of his carriers on the look-out for game. The bath and the camp gear were too new for old Palmer, the trader, making his round of inspection of native storemen. If it were Father Dupont, of the French Fathers, she would not have expected a bath at all.

The deductive methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes failing her, she decided to see for herself. Scrambling downhill, through the litter of grey sandstone, split apart by trunks of trees, and crowned with euphorbias, she reached the path before the wayfarer had come in sight, and since conventions, even of the English, are sometimes superseded in lonely places, she advanced some way along it to meet him.

Where the path swerved to avoid a big mupundu tree, she found him. A tall young man, leaning on a stick, whipped off his sun helmet and grasped her hand.

She noticed that his hair curled and caught the sun. She noticed that his clothes, the ordinary clothes of a ulendo—khaki shirt and shorts, puttees and heavy boots—were newer than that part of the country generally saw. He bore himself with an air, and two tall natives at his back, shouldering guns, added a pleasantly piratical touch.

'My name's Ward,' he said. 'You must be Lady Norah Sinclair, whom I've heard so much about.'

'I don't know who from!' she laughed.

'Every one, since I landed at Cape Town,' he asserted, looking at her fixedly.

'They haven't forgotten how to tell pleasant lies in England,' she smiled back. 'I'll bet you never heard of our existence, till you stopped with the White Fathers on the Chambezi, three days' journey back.'

'I assure you,' he began, then broke off. 'Anyhow, you've forgotten my existence.'

She stared at him. A light dawned.

'You looked different in pyjamas,' she said, and the flood of reminiscence burst. He had crashed at Brooklands in 1914, and lain for a fortnight in her ward. She remembered, amused, how his eyes had followed her about the room, and his boyish efforts to make conversation. She had liked him and was sorry when he was moved to another hospital.

'This is the most marvellous thing that ever happened,' he exclaimed. 'How can we celebrate it in the forest?'

'Only lunch, I'm afraid,' she said. 'It's ready on the farm. My husband's away on ulendo'—at the memory her temper flamed—'but we'll manage alone.'

'Thanks awfully,' he said, and limped alongside of her. I don't know whether his wound had stiffened during the halt, but he leaned more heavily on his stick.

'You're lame,' she remarked.

Ward explained that he had been bitten on the foot by some anonymous insect, and the day's march had rubbed the wound into a sore.

'It's an awful nuisance on ulendo,' he added, and then—Dick was never the lad to lose anything for want of trying—'I'd been meaning, as I came along, to ask your husband to put me up for a couple of days, till I was right.'

Norah considered Dick for a moment, as women can, without looking at him. She had liked him well in hospital days and had been flattered by his obvious adoration. Then the changes and chances of life had wiped his picture clean from her mind till now his presence brought up details buried seven years deep—his bed in the corner of the ward, a passing irritation at a pretty girl's visit, the chrysanthemums she left.

She made up her mind.

'Mrs. Grundy hasn't got farther north than the railway will take her,' she said. 'You'll find a rest camp all ready by the new house across the river. You'll come over to meals, of course,' she added as his face fell. She felt a momentary awkwardness and changed the conversation to shooting, of which she said she did not get as much as she liked, since Archie could not often spare the time, and did not like her going far afield alone.

'You must let me take you out,' Ward interrupted.

'But what about your foot?' said Norah innocently.

She explained that she always wanted to invite her relations from England for shooting trips, but her husband could not leave his work to meet them at rail-head, and take them about the country.

'A farmer's wife sees a different side of Central Africa to the traveller who makes a short shooting trip to a good game area and goes back to London to write a book about it.'

'Is that one for me?' asked Ward penitently.

'No, one for myself,' she sighed, 'before I came out I believed it all.'

So Norah chattered on. She did not get much chattering on the farm. Her rare visitors, if women, talked about recipes and jam making. The men talked of game or natives. If Dick was a ghost from the past, ghosts can be very entertaining. And he was handsomer than ever.

Dick thought the same of Norah. Norah, in the formality of V.A.D. uniform, was only less fascinating than Norah in the boyishness of her farm wear—silk shirt open at the neck, breeches and canvas leggings. In Dick's opinion most women he had seen in breeches looked either bulbous or cinematographical; Norah was a twentieth century hamadryad—cool and restrained, save for her narrow eyes and her short dark hair that bubbled out from under her wide grey hat. The sun had burnt her neck to the colour of coffee and cream, but her arms still hinted at the whiteness of her body.

Dick could not keep his eyes off her.

'Lunch will be foul,' she was saying. 'My suk has gone to bury his father.'

'Why don't you take over mine?' Dick pressed her.

'D'you mean it? Suk-snatching isn't beyond me.'

'Of course I mean it! And, look here, do give your household a chance of getting straight and dine with me to-night.'

'Love to!' said Norah.

For the next three days Dick laid close siege to Norah's heart. Such siege of a woman alone on a lonely farm may not have been scrupulous. But when did Venus teach scruples? Her reputation was ill enough in the old Island years, and her latter day registration, under the Anglo-Saxon name of Natural Selection, has changed nothing.

The dinner was Dick's first move, and an intelligent one. The hours that succeeded it before Norah's eyes closed in forgetfulness testified its success. After the roseate glow of the Pommery, with which Dick's admirable table boy had plied her, had worn off, her mind still lingered among golden moments.

'I won't insult you with an iceless cocktail?' he had said.

'My last drink,' she retorted, 'was the mead the White Fathers brew at the Chambezi!'

'That curious compound of honey and fermented mealies?'

'The local gourmets walk a hundred miles to drink it.'

Dinner started, for the dweller in cities banally enough, with hors-d'œuvres. To Norah's reluctant rusticity, the tinned caviare shone with an unforgotten aura of shaded restaurant lamps, the bottled anchovies swam in a remembered sea of laughter and wit, the dried olives echoed with the lost lilt of ragtime orchestras.

There was no bathos in the courses that followed.

'Who cooks for you?' she asked. 'The angel Gabriel?'

'Is it hard to get cooks up here?' he replied innocently.

'Yesterday I found Alabedi rolling a rissole into shape on his naked chest,' she said. 'The one before used to wash his feet in the big saucepan.'

'The chef at the Ritz may have the same weaknesses,' put in Dick sympathetically.

'Yes, but he can at least cook. My criminals haven't an idea above "shtoo!"'

After dinner they sat in a shelter, fragrant with the fresh leaves and blossoms of the boughs that formed it.

'What about a tune?' asked Dick, as his personal boy, resplendent in white kanju and scarlet sash, presented a book of gramophone records.

'You choose,' she said, 'it's so long, since...'

Dick judged the jewelled eroticism of Puccini opportune; but when it was over...

'In my young days,' she commented, 'there wasn't any opera. It was thought rather German. Do put on a fox-trot.'

'I don't know that one,' she said at the end. 'Of course,' she added.

Dick searched, and found a one-step that dated back to the war.

She sighed. 'There's nothing that reminds like a tune. I take it the Recording Angel keeps a list of all one's most pricelessly associated tunes, and has them played to one in hell.'

'I'm sorry. I didn't think——' he lied.

'What is there on the back? Yes, let's have that. How sick one was of it!'

When the commonplace little tune was played, 'I can't bear any more,' she said. 'Give me a cigarette. If it's a "flag" I'll burst into tears.'

It wasn't, and they talked—or he told her—of dances, theatres, the marriages and divorces of their mutual friends and enemies.

'How soon do you go back?' she asked.

'That depends on——'

She did not give him time to say on whom it depended.

'And where do you go on to from here?'

He was vague. He was short of provisions. ['I'm sure I've eaten three years of pâté de foies gras to-night,' she interrupted.] He had to hang about for fresh supplies to catch him.

He brought the conversation round, by way of shops, to her frock, which he admired discreetly. He compared it favourably with the clothes they were now wearing in London.

'Two and a half years old,' she said. 'If I had the choice between an hour's talk with Paul Poiret or St. Paul, I wouldn't bother to learn Hebrew.'

'Where are your nearest shops?'

'There's a store three days' walk away, where you can buy white calico, or blue calico with white spots, and mouth organs or looking-glasses.'

'I think you're marvellous,' he said. 'Not many women...'

She did not answer, but Dick, watching closely, saw her breast rise in an involuntary sigh.

She sighed again as she lay sleepless, reckoning relentlessly what her bond to Archie would cost her. That loyalty was costing her youth, beauty, health; it exacted all, and gave nothing. She pictured herself in five years' time. Still young, as lives go, but her looks perished, her skin dried with the glare and sagging with the heat, her mind ruralised, her interests dwindled.

If she had still loved Archie, she would have thrown all this at his feet, as carelessly as she had risked her life for him. But her passion had vanished, had followed her illusion, in an almost unnoticed, almost painless decease, killed by some inward unsoundness, some hidden cancer or malnutrition. And to-day Archie had proved his entire dissociation from her.

The same morning, as if sent by the Devil, had appeared an Adonis, whose words, whose eyes proclaimed an interest, a devotion that was ready to flame into...

But her word bound her to Archie, and by her word she abode. With more reason than many of her generation, Norah had no clear religious or moral principles. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father knew his way about Ruff's Guide better than the Bible. But loyalty was a class virtue that she had not escaped, and for the first of many sleepless nights during the two unhappy years, she began to probe its foundations. No doubt the shade of Dick, cool, handsome, debonair, encouraged her.

To what Moloch had Archie offered her loyalty?

To this fetish of a farm which swallowed all his money, thoughts, energy. On the same altar were laid her heritage by sex and class of careless, elegant living; her place in the life of the day; all that her youth demanded.

And now Archie had proved that he despised her sacrifice. He did not even refuse her claims so long choked back, combat her protest voiced at last. It was sufficient to ignore them."

"I can't help feeling," said Ross, "that Archie's idiotic taciturnity almost earned him Norah's defection.

Had he been able to overcome his distaste for expression—emotion he called it; had he tried to conquer his passion for finishing a job before he mentioned it; had he, in short, told Norah that he was going to Elizabethville to sell his herd in order to satisfy her wishes and take her back to England, Dick Ward would never have secured foothold in her heart.

Instead, Archie held his tongue and left the field to the Devil and to Dick."

CHAPTER VI

These made the most of their chance.

In the red, leather-bound volume of aphorisms which accompanied Dick in his wanderings, he found a remark of Balzac's which seemed to him full of promise:—

'Dans le monde de la realité,' that thinker had apparently concluded, 'comme dans le monde des fées, la femme appartient toujours à celui qui sait arriver à elle et la délivrer de la situation où elle languit.'

Here was the situation, here the woman languished, here was Dick ready for the part of Fairy Prince.

He reflected with satisfaction that while the heroine of fairy stories may very suitably be shepherdess, goose girl, beggar maid, the hero is inevitably a prince—never a cattle breeder. Did this not hint the triumph of Court over Farm, Athens over Bœotia, Capital over Colony?

If Dick was no prince, he was young, amusing, good-looking, rich enough to wander in comfort about Africa and bold enough to call such wandering 'exploration' (at any rate to the journalists at Southampton). The omens were favourable.

Dinner the first evening had been planned to suggest a tacit comparison between Norah's present lot and the world of civilised luxury whose gate his kiss would open.

He had shown Africa in damaging contrast with Europe. Now he applied himself to set the lover in high relief against the husband.

Too clever for tangible disparagement that would challenge Norah's loyalty, Dick applied himself silently to supply all that Archie in two years had left undone. Dick's 'boy' hung the pictures that had stood, faces wallwards, for eighteen months; Dick stretched an insect-proof ceiling of calico that he took from his stores of presents for headmen; Dick's carriers dug and levelled the flower garden that Archie had always promised 'next season.'

His long limbs and cool, unhurried gestures, his well-cut white flannels, and the faint swagger with which he wore them, had the unquestioned advantage of Archie's unremarkable presence.

In long tête-à-têtes he exerted all his charm of manner and person.

An afternoon when Nature seemed to work for him was the shooting expedition that he had promised. In deference to the foot, which furnished the excuse of his stay, it was decided to paddle down river to the flats where puku grazed and where at nightfall duck flighted.

Papyrus met over their heads in a tunnel of green silence, that the plash of a paddle hardly broke.

'If this would never end,' sighed Dick.

Norah shrugged her shoulders.

'"Momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,

she quoted, as the stream bore them out into the daylight.

A bird like a black ibis, rigid and heraldic on the bank that here was firm and covered with short turf, kept jealous watch on the surface of the water. Their silent passage barely disturbed his fishing. Half-way between the river and the straight edge of the bush a pair of Karongo crane, true season after season to each other and their haunts, promenaded the flats. Their long necks swayed to their leisurely, fastidious stride.

The old boatman with the withered leg, who stood in the stern, bent forward and whispered excitedly.

'He can see a herd of puku,' said Norah.

Crouching low in the boat beneath the level of the bank, they drifted till a bend of the river brought them into long range. Peeping cautiously from behind a tuft of amatete reeds, Norah watched the little red-brown cluster of buck.

Five lengths ahead of his ewes the ram was grazing. Ever and again up jerked his head and he stood, broad-chested and solid, his mild eyes distended, his wet nostrils snuffing, alert for sign, scent, or sound. Then his head would sink and, reassured, he took up his grazing, moving onward as he fed.

Dick cocked his rifle and pushed it into Norah's hand.

'Now's your chance,' he whispered.

Norah shook her head.

'Too far for me,' she breathed. 'I don't want to wound.'

Helped by Dick, whose fingers lingered on her arm, she clambered up the bank, and began to creep on her knees, circling that the breeze might not carry her scent to the herd. But for all her care, the ram was uneasy. At shorter intervals his head jerked up, causing Norah each time to flatten herself to the ground.

Whether at last they caught her scent or whether general principles of caution prevailed, at some invisible sign from their leader the herd started into a skeltering gallop. The ground drummed under their hoofs until they came to a strip where reeds concealed a little marsh. There the red bodies emerged and disappeared with the bounding motion of rocking-horses. On the farther side they paused, long necks stretched, wide eyes astare. Then they fell quietly to grazing.

'I'm three parts glad I didn't get a shot,' said Norah, as she rejoined the canoe.

Dick commended her gentleness.

'Puku are such gallant little chaps,' she said, 'and they take such a lot of killing. Archie wounded one that dropped after she had run a mile. When they cut her up, they found the bullet in her heart."

This gave Dick a chance to talk about the state in which at an autopsy his heart would be found.

Norah laughed. 'You'll have forgotten I exist by the time you've been a week in London,' she prophesied.

Dick said this was hardly fair. It was seven years since he'd seen her last, and all the time...

'Anyhow it took you a good few minutes to recognise me in the bush,' she reminded him.

'But you'd grown more lovely yet,' he protested. 'And in breeches....'

The river had widened out into a sort of lake. Reeds grew up through the water and blue lotuses starred its surface. A couple of small red-headed moorhens bobbed up from under the broad leaves as if they were made of cork.

This is a good place to wait for the duck to come over,' said Norah, and Dick fixed his twelve bore.

The sunlight had turned from white through gold to ochre. A few frogs had tentatively begun to croak. Too near the equator for twilight, it was Africa's heure du berger.

Dick began to talk. From what Norah told me, his themes seem to have dated from the early earnest years of the century. He pleaded the right of the Natural Mate over the Legal Spouse; he urged the barrenness of constancy Where Love is Not; he suggested that the world might be Well Lost for Love. And so on. For my part I never could see why 'All for Love' is a respectable sentiment and a subject for epics and tragedies, while other equally whole-hearted passions and sacrifices, say, 'All for Money' or 'for Food' are discredited. However, that's an opinion that neither Norah nor Dick shared.

Norah, of course, wasn't convinced by Dick's eloquence—no woman ever listened to what her lover said. But passion is as infectious as small-pox, and, if it lasts no longer, leaves no lighter scars. So, reluctantly on that perfect evening, her conscience gave ground and Dick's words began to reach her heart and his nearness her senses.

'Don't miss the best part of life,' he adjured her.

'Life looks its best from behind.'

'It isn't for any one as young and lovely to say that. Be brave, take a chance....'

This was perilous advice for the gambler's daughter.

'Supposing I wanted to take a chance ... with you, don't you see I've promised...'

'Are you willing to waste your whole life for two words mumbled in Hanover Square?'

'Don't be melodramatic, Dick!'

'It isn't melodrama, it's tragedy! Norah, come away with me, Norah....'

Just then the duck came over, and winging swiftly against the sunset, interrupted Dick's eloquence.

On the third evening Dick, progressing from words to action, forced her to decision. The sun had set and Norah was still sitting out of doors protected from wild beasts by a lamp on the table and by a gun at her feet. The lowing of the cattle had abated and the thud of their feet as they shouldered into the kraals had ceased. The air was heavy with spring and with the fleshy scent of the wild magnolias that overhung the river.

She knew it was time to go indoors, but any effort seemed intolerable. The harsh chorus of frogs in the marshes alone broke the silence. She sat on. A moth, as big as a swallow, brushed against her cheek, causing her to look up. A yellow light across the river caught her eye. 'Dick's camp fire,' she thought, and let her imagination play. But as she gazed she knew she was mistaken, for the light was dodging and swaying nearer. It was a hurricane lamp crossing the river. It could only be carried by Dick, and he was coming over to her.

She did not feel glad or sorry, but waited in inert prostration before an oncoming fate. The night denied motion, and she was held in a snare waiting the coming of the fowler. Her heart began to beat faster. A drum started to throb in a distant village and her blood seemed to pulse in time. Dick's lamp was an intolerable way off, so were the tropical stars, so was reality. Her world was that insistent drum and her galloping pulses.

At last she heard Dick's footsteps on the leaves. Without a word he lowered himself into the chair beside her and for a long time sat in silence, his face in the shadow.

'What holds you here?' he asked at last.

'Say "who" rather?' her deep voice replied, resenting the effort of speech.

'The flowers blossom and die in your forests,' he went on, 'and no man sees them.'

'Poetry!' she laughed. 'This is prose and daily bread.'

He groped after her mood.

'You could have poetry and cake.'

She threw up her head laughing and he saw where the sunburn stopped on her neck.

'Wedding cake?' she asked mischievously.

'If I'm not an angel, I'm not an absolute rotter,' he said quickly.

'It wouldn't have mattered in any case,' she murmured, 'if...'

'If what?'

She did not answer. In the distance the drum pounded on, inciting to the dance some isolated community of black men, sentient only of the whips of hunger and desire. She wondered if white civilisation at heart obeyed any different goad.

'That's all the music you'll hear,' Dick nodded his head in the direction of the sound.

'Life can be lived without stimulants,' she said.

'D'you call it life?'

He tried to take her hand. She moved it.

'Norah, you're driving me mad. Do you want to?'

'You know I don't,' she whispered.

'Don't you see? ... In a few days, my foot'll be well, I must go. Must I go alone, without hope, knowing I'll never see you again? I really think I'll kill myself.'

What about Archie?'

'Would he kill himself?' asked Dick quietly. 'Would he ... notice even?'

She did not answer.

'Be fair to him; but be fair to yourself; be generous to me.'

She was silent, listening to the message of the drums.

He interpreted her silence to his wishes, and slid his hand up her arm. She did not resist; it seemed so much simpler to accept the philosophy of the drum and surrender to the primeval forces. Dick's lips were on hers, but his kisses reminded her of her husband's early love-making. Without much conviction, she pushed them away and stood upright, her breasts heaving. Dick seized her small hands as they pushed at his chest, pulling her against him. His arm went round her body and lifted her to him till her toes barely touched the ground. He smothered her white, upturned face with kisses. She could hardly breathe. For a moment she was tense and tingling; her senses shot up like firelight, then narrowed to a pin point. Heaviness descended on her and remorse. Her own voice rang in her ears—'What about Archie?'

She struggled and he released her.

'Go now, Dick,' she said, her deep voice husky, and picking up the lamp she left him.

He waited silent in his chair for hours it seemed; then, as she made no sign, he rose, swinging his hurricane lamp. She watched the light stagger away across the river with a feeling of utter desolation.

Next morning she sat down at her writing-table. Outside the window squatted Jacketi waiting impassively for her letter.

Jacketi was a bad lot, he liked beer and women better and spared truth further than most natives, but he had perfect manners and wonderful legs. Sixty miles in thirty hours he would do, and overtake in a day and a night the three days' stages of a white man. For this Norah had summoned him to carry a letter to Archie.

Africa was silent in the daylight and traditions of loyalty and chastity asserted themselves. She resented the struggle and thought cynically how much simpler it would have been, if Dick had imposed his will on her: like Montaigne's lady, who, after a troop of cavalry had been billeted in her house, wrote in her diary, This night, praise the Virgin, I am satisfied without sin.'

She had decided to call to Archie to come and, if his presence did not stem the flood which threatened to sweep her away, at least she would talk things out aboveboard and honestly with him. Painfully she drafted a letter: not an easy one to write. She tore up her first attempt and scrawled, 'Dear Archie, If you love me, come straight back.—NORAH.' She sealed it and handed it through the window to the waiting Jacketi. Then she wrote a note to Dick, telling him to keep his side of the river till she sent for him. Norah never did things by halves.

A few days later Jacketi was standing again on the verandah, tired but smiling.

'Well, Jacketi, did you find the Bwana?'

'Yes, indeed, mistress.'

'Did he give you a letter?'

'No, indeed, mistress....'

'What did the Bwana say?'

Jacketi imitated Archie's manner and voice.

'"All right, Jacketi."'

'Was that all?'

Jacketi nodded his head composedly. She flung him a shilling. 'You can go now,' and re-entered the darkened room.

Had Archie ignored this appeal too and pushed forward on his 'cattle business'? If so ... But since he was as saving with letters as with words, he might even now be on his way back to her. She must have patience and wait. He should reach the farm not later than Wednesday."

Ross flung out his arm with a deprecatory gesture. At least that is how I interpreted the path of his glowing cigar-end.

"Some of the blame," he said, "should you be old-fashioned enough to think in terms of blame and praise, must be reserved for Africa.

To understand the problem of Norah's ... fall, bid for self-expression, or whatever your brand of morality calls it, apply my formula for gauging what Africa will make of a man:—'Lowest Common Failing cubed' if you remember. Our first task is the ever congenial one of spotting the L.C.F., the ruling weakness. Poor Norah, the field is big enough. So big, selection is difficult; for, outside courage and honesty, she had few noteworthy virtues.

Pride, hot temper—neither was missing, but neither ruled her. Irreverence—a full share, but nothing notable for the century. A free tongue, a gambler's heart—I feel we are 'warmer.' Rebelliousness, generosity—which of these two failings to choose?

From her cradle she had been a rebel. I have mentioned a few instances—her expulsion from the Red Cross, her defiance of the rules of war when she rescued Archie, and of the rules of common sense when she married him, her preference of Africa to Edinburgh, and so on. To Norah a custom established, a practice accepted, dared her to its disregard or breach. The temptation to break with her sex's tradition of, at any rate overt, chastity must have been overwhelming, while to the itch to break through rules, she could only oppose fidelity to her promise.

Generosity, my second choice, had ever made it hard for her to say 'no' or to withhold what lay in her power to give. As a child she had lavished her pennies on the utterly undeserving poor. As a girl, disregarding the cost, she had always been at the call of any friend, or stranger for that matter, in a difficulty. And now she could by an act, not in itself uncomfortable, grant Dick a boon he craved, whose refusal he hinted would make him desperate ... while Archie, it seemed ... did not care.

So, if you wish, you may charge her ultimate surrender to her double weakness exploited by Africa; if you prefer, to her single strength betrayed by Archie's silence, that loyalty to her bond long and savagely honoured.

As an English writer you may be trusted not to impute her fall to mere weakness of the flesh. You would never admit that a woman of your nation and class would take a lover from so disinterested a motive. Adultery on grounds of spite, altruism, jealousy, poverty, revenge, avarice, or even absence of mind is admissible. From passion, unthinkable.

Well, the decisive Wednesday came without sign or rumour of Archie.

On Saturday night Dick's lantern a second time came swinging across the river."

CHAPTER VII

That Tanganyika was destined to be alike villain and setting of the drama which followed, first sight of the lake gave Norah no warning.

The lovers had waited on the farm for Dick's supplies to come till Norah would stay no longer. Leaving a letter for Archie, and replenishing Dick's stores from the reserves on the farm, that the Congo expedition had already diminished, they started on the three weeks' ulendo through the bush, Dick on a bicycle, Norah in her machila.1[1]

[1] A hammock slung on one pole or two and carried between two or four natives, relieved at intervals.

Lying uncomfortably on her back, she saw little of the country she was carried through. Her landscape was limited by ranks of trees on either side. Overhead she could stare at the African sky already banked with rain-clouds. Or she could lie on her side and watch the sandy path for hurrying streams of pre-occupied ants or for occasional spoor, the only manifestation of the shy life of the forest. Sometimes her eye would be caught by a bundle of scarlet flowered mistletoe, the alpine outline of a great ant heap, a tree curiously deformed, or the melancholy traces of an almost obliterated garden; till oppressed by the nearness and insignificance of these sights, she would shut her eyes and imagine the evening with Dick, when the camp fire would gild from below the interlacing boughs.

But now the ulendo was nearly done. For an hour the road had sloped precipitously from plateau level lakewards 3000 feet below. The tip and tilt of the machila was vertiginous. Broad leafed, dark trees obscured the sky: rampant undergrowth and luxurious herbage hid the ground. A native laboured up towards them; he was old and one-eyed. Her carriers called to him for news of the steamer, but he only stared. They were strangers in a strange land. The air felt warmer and clammier. Languid flies settled heavily on Norah's face and hands. She expected momentarily to see the lake below her feet, but the dark trees shut her in.

The machila-bearers stopped singing the mournful 'Mai illova,' 'Deep in the Ground,' that was their favourite carrying song, and started a brisk marching tune into which the name 'Tanganyika' came again and again. The swing of the hammock was barely tolerable. She caught the word 'malala' in the song—the sleeping sickness, for whose sake men shun the lake. They met a second native blind in one eye—was all this mutilation man's work or the lake's? A single mulombwa tree with bare boughs and canary yellow flowers stood out by the roadside, thirty feet high and as straight as a spear.

Suddenly the steeply tilted machila stopped with a jerk and shot her on to her feet.

Had that travel-stained hammock been Elijah's fiery chariot it could not have translated her more suddenly into a new universe. From the close forest that had so long confined her body and her mind, she was caught up into a blue firmament, a world of misty blue glass over which distant shadows played. As she gazed the blue mirror resolved into sky, mountains, water. Under heaven, the hills; under the hills, the lake with its horizon flung far above her head, above the tree tops.

This vision of a new world seemed to hint at the new life she was entering. A life of beauty and—inevitably—romance, free from the sordidness of daily struggle, cleared of the orts of a disastrous past. The child understood life as little as she understood the lake. Her inherited instinct was to play for the highest stakes and risk all, without weighing the cost, on a single throw. But this sudden revelation of beauty almost frightened her into taking thought. That such loveliness existed seemed a spur to its pursuit. Was she treading a path that led to it? Almost against her will she strained her eyes into the future.

Since the night that Dick's lantern had crossed the flats for the second time, she had kept her mind strapped to the present moment, fiercely contented in her passion for Dick, refusing regret, denying foresight.

Archie, whose memory her mind, like a tongue with a sensitive tooth, shunned but could not avoid, had failed her; Dick had come to the rescue. Dick was her slave; Archie was the slave of the farm. She loved Dick ... she was almost sure. She was surer she did not love Archie.

What would come of it all? The preliminaries she faced with contempt. Scandalous tongues, slights to be met, the ostrich-like antics of the Law, details in the Press (for she realised she would be good copy and might even run to posters). She would pass through this indifferently for what lay beyond.... If anything lay beyond. Romance had fooled her before. Was Life Repetition and Cycle? 'The thing that has been, is that which shall be: and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.'

She knew Dick's mind no better than the day he had come to the farm, than the day he had entered her ward seven years ago. She did not seem to penetrate the brilliant skin and glorious plumage. What lay behind? ... But surely Dick loved her, and why haggle over the endurance or value of that love? Why chill the warmth of the present by brooding over a future as fathomless as the lake, whose bottom had never been plumbed?

She left the chattering group of carriers to rejoice at the sight of their journey's end and sat down under the mulombwa tree to wait for Dick, who had found the path too steep and rough for his bicycle.

What Dick was feeling I can only guess. I had met him at the beginning of his shooting trip, or 'voyage of exploration,' as he preferred to see it, dining with the District Commissioner at rail-head. But that was before he fell into the meshes of Norah's beauty.

She, of course, told me what he said, and did, and looked like, but a woman's evidence for or against her lover isn't worth much.

Love-making is largely bluff. To get yourself taken, you must appear, if not a fine fellow, at least an interesting one. (It's true she'll probably love you for some absurdity you've forgotten to cover up, but that's not your fault.) Then, especially if love's illicit, men and women begin with different rules. As different as big game and bird shooting.

Your big game shot and your woman do the trick by stalking. They locate the victim, crawl up, taking cover behind each blade of grass, aim long and carefully with one eye shut. Your bird shot fires with both eyes open, by instinct rather than aim, before or behind him at birds which beaters, or circumstances, drive. Then he waits for the next covey. Some men even like pigeon shooting.

Dick, I suspect, started with the ideas of the bird shot. Since he left the railway, he had hardly seen a white woman, and he still carried the newcomer's prejudice against black. He would be in a susceptible mood, when he came on Norah that morning in the forest. If Joseph had been a month or two alone in the bush, and if Potiphar's wife had been in the same street with Norah, Holy Writ would have been altered. And, as the Americans say, Dick's second name wasn't Joseph. Nor for that matter was Norah's surname Potiphar. But circumstances, the uncongenial life, the errant husband's absence were all beating for Dick. His wits, quick where women were concerned, divined this and whispered that this loveliness was not unapproachable. And in the matter of rushing in, Dick was never on the side of the angels.

It was this idea that so swelled Dick's foot that he could not move it from the farm. Constant intercourse with Norah was not calculated to heal wound in foot or heart and hourly he fell deeper under her spell: under the spell, too, of his own manly eloquence. His visit the evening before Norah summoned Archie and called in vain, was undertaken, I should say, by an impetuous lover, who hoped that his mistress's interest was not severely platonic. His repulse added body to his passion since it is the nature of men only to prize the possession that is refused them.

Norah's absence, during her days of waiting for Archie, was of the nature that makes the heart grow fonder. He saw her continually across the river; in imagination he felt her lips on his, her body in his arms.

Tantalised by memory and proximity, goaded by the lust of the unobtainable, his passion had mastered all inhibitory instinct. The flood of his imagination rose and swept majestically over the weir of the Divorce Courts and breasted even the subsequent dam of Holy Matrimony. When I met him at rail-head, I got the impression that Dick was not the sort who would find it unpleasant, for example, to be cited as co-respondent with the daughter of a peer. So when in the end Norah consented to go away with him, the granting of the boon he craved could have caused him comparatively few qualms. He felt, however, more anxiety than Norah, who had flung her cap with a brave gesture, and it was with relief that he hailed the lake.

'The road lies open,' he cried to Norah. 'The highway to civilisation.'

'It's more like the gateway of Heaven,' she said, blinded by the beauty before her.

'It will be,' he answered.

As side by side they descended the path which turned from rock to sand, the view flattened and the horizon sank. The closely grouped thatch of a native village showed through the trees. Of white men and their works no sign. Throughout their flight, by avoiding the occasional Bomas and rarer farms, they had escaped the awkwardness of European encounter. Dick commented on their luck.

'Anyhow, down here, it's too hot to care,' said Norah. She felt already the atmosphere of lake level—a matter not only of heightened temperature and humidity but of changed values. 'High thermometer and low morals,' was the way she put it. She felt her remaining scruples dissolve in that mild air. Ideas of duty and discipline were left on the austere highlands, where scattered men scratch a precarious existence out of a thin soil. At lake level, life was no longer an epic of struggle with victory or defeat as stakes, but a drowsy eclogue ended by easy oblivion. The few thousand feet from the plateau to the lake seemed to bridge all degrees from Dumfries to Naples, from Calvin to Priapus.

The palm trees threw black shadows on the silver roofs. On the soundless air came the laughter of copper-coloured babies playing in and out of the lapping water. Crocodiles and water snakes people Tanganyika, but in their play the children were as unconscious of danger as Norah and Dick of the fate that bore down on them from the lake."

CHAPTER VIII

A couple of afternoons later, Norah's fingers playing in his hair roused Dick, somnolent from the heat.

'What's wrong with the engines?' she asked. Dick, who knew nothing of machinery, went through the motions of intelligent auscultation.

'They are banging and clattering worse than yesterday,' she persisted, with her head on one side; 'hurry, miss a beat, hurry. And I'm sure we're going slower.'

'The Mimi was never an ocean greyhound,' said Dick.

Now Norah mentioned it, the engines did sound odd. Why didn't he know more about the damn things? It was monstrous running a British boat with black officers and crew. Anything might happen. It would be deuced awkward if they broke down; it might make them ridiculous. But the odd noises he thought he noticed might be imaginary.

'She'll get us there before she sinks,' he said.

Norah pulled his hair a trifle harder. 'Nothing like an optimist,' she remarked.

'It wouldn't be the first time.'

'What do you mean? Has she sunk before?'

'Been sunk. Before the war she was a deep-sea boat, carrying Hun officials and mails between Dar-es-Salaam and Tanga. One day in 1915 she ran into a British light cruiser. The next two years she spent at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.'

'Are you inventing this?' said Norah, taking a firmer grip on a handful of hair.

'Not a word; you can see the shell-marks amidships.'

'I love you when you talk nautical, Dick!'

Dick dragged her to him and kissed her mocking lips.

'Don't, Dick, you'll distract the man at the wheel. Go on telling me! How do you know all this?'

'One of the Boma men told me. Well, eventually our people raised her, buried the bones of her captain and crew, and railed her in sections to the lake. And here she's the only boat we've got.'

'No wonder her engines knock a bit.'

'They're good enough engines, I'm told, though they run red hot. But they're too big for her hull. There's a sweepstake among the half-dozen people who use the lake whether she goes up in flames or the engines drop through her bottom first.'

'Go on, Dick, don't mind me.'

'Yes, I thought you'd like to know,' Dick put his arm round her shoulders. 'Early this morning when you were sleeping like a lamb, I was lying awake watching the metal work going a nice cherry red, and selecting that flat bit of iron to beat off the crew from your place in the dinghy when the ship burst into flames.'

Norah laughed. 'You think of everything,' she said. 'Why don't they put on a new boat?'

'Money.' Dick got up and took a turn aft, where he could hear the engines more clearly. He stood with his head cocked, listening. At last he shrugged his shoulders and came back to Norah.

'The territory's about bankrupt, and all the cash there is goes in building a new governor's palace to impress the noble savage.'

He sat down on his bed and fidgeted with the sheet.

'I believe you're right,' he said, 'the engines are about worn out. They say that at the end of every trip Alibaba reports to the Railway Workshops at Kigoma, something like this:—(he imitated the genial obsequiousness and urbane gesticulation of the Arab skipper)—'Yes, sir, thank you, sir, good run, sir. Boilers finish, sir. Want new one. No, sir? Very good, sir, start Wednesday, sir.'

Norah's deep laugh rang out. Dick's Irish blood made him a good mimic. Moreover, life since she left the farm was one long first day of the holidays, and anything was good for a laugh.

'I adore Alibaba,' she said, 'but I daren't think what his toilet will be, when he feels he knows us a little better.'

There was some ground for this apprehension. They had boarded the vessel, scrambling up a rope from her dinghy on to her dirty iron deck, to be welcomed by a corpulent, bowing figure clad in a khaki jacket buttoned up to the chin, new red fez, vast trousers once white, and patent leather boots. His pock-marked face had shone as he 'escorted them to their quarters,' a ceremony which consisted of kicking the deck clear of cooking utensils, baskets of meal, firewood, chickens and goats, and helping Changalilo erect the beds. But once under way, Alibaba's habit was to replace the new fez with a dirty skull cap of broderie anglaise, unbutton his jacket from top to bottom, unlace his boots largely and unhitch his trousers till they bellied menacingly.

In this negligé he moved slowly between a moribund Madeira chair, the wheel and the engine-room. Unlike any other skipper who ever sailed the lake, he ran night as well as day, feeling his way by some extra sense for squalls, islands, and rocks.

All the work on board was accomplished by him. If from some sense of fitness, he issued orders which awakened no answering chord in the crew, it was with unruffled amiability that he executed them himself.

Well might the Mimi be called the Democrat's Utopia. Instance the business of dropping anchor. As the Mimi came inshore, Alibaba would blow his syren rapturously and rattle through a string of polyglot orders while the crew listened with a gratified smile, in complete immobility. Without the slightest sign of mortification, Alibaba would waddle forward and, with a push of his patent leather boot, propel the tiny anchor into the lake. A sublime gesture worth pages of philosophic writing or communist propaganda.

'Is his name really Alibaba?' asked Norah, laying her hand over Dick's well-kept fingers.

'I think it's because of the crew,' Dick explained. 'Alibaba and the forty thieves.'

'Is he an Arab or what?' Mildly interested, she liked hearing Dick's voice.

'"Or what" about describes him,' he replied. 'I should say every race on the East Coast took a hand. Let's see. His grandfather would be a Eurasian stationmaster....'

'And his grandmother a Zanzibari dancing girl.'

'While his mother was kept by a Greek barman.'

'But was unfaithful to him with the Goanese cook.'

They laughed together delightedly. The engines seemed to run smoother, and Dick's mind was easier. If Dick was happy, Norah was happy too. Was she not on her honeymoon, the sweeter if stolen? And after the shuttered years on the farm, how savoury this foretaste of the busy world of men!

Like a demon in a pantomime, the pitch black head of a fireman popped up through an iron hatch, hung over the side gleaming with sweat and drank greedily the brackish water of the lake, flicking it dexterously with straight fingers into a cavernous mouth. Then he began to pass armfuls of short logs from the firewood stacked on the deck to an invisible comrade by the boilers.

A shutter or door was opened in the bowels of the ship and a noise of hammering issued. Hammering and oaths in an unknown tongue. A blast of scorching, oil-saturated air reached Dick. It was as concrete as a hot hand laid on his face.

'By Jove, the heat must be terrific down there.' he said, 'it's sufficiently torrid on deck.'

It had been cool enough that morning when they left the fishing village where the oxen had been embarked. Dawn had streaked the motionless water with fragile pink and silver. The boat rode so low in the water that Norah's head on her pillow had been almost level with the lake. Never before had she felt so near nature, absorbed into beauty, trespassing on mystery.

Her thoughts had jerked back to Archie. Poor lad, how this beauty would have bored him and how he would have glowered at Dick's rhapsodies....

Poor Archie, you couldn't help liking him, even if you didn't love him. And she must have done that once, unimaginable as it now was."

"Dead Love," mused Ross, "seems to leave slighter memory even than its mortal begetters. If Archie had died, she would still have remembered every detail of his body and habits. But the love he had once inspired—that had passed like a last year's sunrise, leaving at the most a certain sadness for a glory ephemeral.

She stared over the side. The steamer was following a deep-water channel, indiscernible to other eyes than Alibaba's, winding her way very close to shore through a screen of densely wooded islets, black against the pale sky of dawn, the debris of the crater wall. Here and there, among many islands that were merely cliffs crowned with tightly packed trees, glimpses of enticing coves and silvery beaches called to the lovers to linger.

But, like the comrades of Odysseus, Alibaba stopped his ears and signed to the tall negro at the helm whose high cheekbones and white beretta-like cap lent him a certain episcopal dignity, as he spun the wheel and steered the vessel out into the lake.

What was the use, thought Norah, of letting her mind dwell on Archie now she had left him for good. If she had endured something of the agony of a Samson pulling down the pillars of the loyalty that supported her world, she did not mean to look over her shoulder at the ruins.

Norah's thought did not run on subtle lines. Life for her fell into watertight compartments. She had loved Archie with a whole-hearted romantic passion. That was over, many months dead and shut away in its own little coffin. The succeeding phase of wifely duty, half kindly, half grudging, was over too and disposed in its less honoured grave. Now she stood, as she thought, on the threshold of a new world, a reborn Norah with no past to catch her feet."

"When she propounded that illusion," said Ross, "I really couldn't help laughing. As if we, prisoners lying in the dark, blindfolded with every shade of prejudice, handcuffed with immemorial habits, fettered by years of education, accidental or deliberate, chained to almost automatic reactions, could ever start afresh. We who don't get a fresh start in the womb, where too we're the slaves of a past that drags us along from amœba to ape.

And that is inside ourselves: the outside world does not stand aside, hat in hand, to let us start afresh.

Still Norah was perhaps freer than some of us. She felt no moral qualms. The seventh—is it?—commandment to her had always seemed an over-rated affair, a question to be solved more by fastidiousness than morality. She had always assumed the right to please herself. And now she was well pleased. Dick was the ideal lover—happy, charming, attentive. She had found the mate Nature had created for her—lion-hearted and debonair, the match for any emergency life might produce, ready for any risk, game for battle with the gods, who, when at last she had yielded to his entreaties, had shouted with Troilus that he would 'throw his glove to Death himself.'

Yes, she had chosen well this time. All idols hadn't feet of clay, some surely were pure gold. The old and disillusioned could not be right. She turned from that distasteful theory to the beauty of the lake.

As the islands and the shore receded, the formation of the 800-mile-long crater revealed itself.

Outside towered a circle of hyacinthine blue from whose summit perhaps at a time before there were men to suffer, the great cone had been hurled, leaving a lip here straight as a sword, here jagged as a jaw of shattered teeth. Inwards from the torn sides of the stupendous bowl radiated, like fingers from a monstrous hand, hills, in these days thick with trees, dimpled with valleys.

These spurs or buttresses gave on to the lake sometimes in a cliff or tumble of boulders, sometimes in a sloping facet like the hip of a slate roof. Down the valleys between them swift streams hurried or, failing to find a bed, fell in cascades down thousands of feet. In spite of the beauty Norah shivered.

'Don't you feel like a mouse in a bucket?' she said.

As the sun rose higher and hotter, the irregularity of the engines became more marked—in Alibaba's words, 'worse as before, sir.' Dick's features had drawn into a frown which even Norah could not lighten and irritably he paced the narrow deck.

Noon was announced by an access of activity among the deck hands, who bestirred themselves to eat their thick pink porridge of cooked millet, dipping fingers into the common bowl. They were a chattering, good-humoured crowd, clad in the remains of blue serge with white beretta-shaped caps on their shiny black heads.

Changalilo became visible threading his way through them with a plate of soup in each hand. With lunch he brought a tale of violence and interference on the part of the lean Indian passenger. A rambling story, like all native plaints, it was, starting from the moment of reaching the Mimi and leading from borrowed pans and stolen cutlery to high words that ended in a blow.

Dick's nerves had been set on edge by the heat and by anxiety over the engines. He would not listen to advice to follow Gallio. He had always hated, he said, the Indians in Africa, low-caste pedlars battening on the ignorant native, and he wasn't going to stand for any interference with his servants. He strode angrily down the hot iron deck, his white coat flapping. The deck hands followed in a curious mob.

Norah heard his voice raised in the stern, angry and a little shrill.

'I found the brute squatting half naked on his hatch,' he reported later, 'eating rice and spilling it into his beard. I asked him if he understood English, and he bowed in a condescending sort of way. That made me lose my temper a bit and I told him if he didn't leave our boys alone, I'd pitch him into the lake. The swine didn't stir a muscle except to smile. A nasty quiet sort of smile. It made me wild to see him sitting there, cross-legged and grinning, as if he'd bought the ship, and I told him to get up when a white man spoke to him. Again he didn't move, but went on picking some grains of rice out of his beard. He even had the cheek to close his eyes as if he were tired.

'That was a trifle too much, and I took him by the scruff, lifting him none too gently on to his feet. I was going to give him a good cuffing, but he slid out of my hand like a snake, and disappeared behind the galley. By his face as he went, I shouldn't say he was exactly brimming over with brotherly love.... I'd have followed him, but it wouldn't have looked dignified.'

'I'm jolly glad you didn't,' said Norah. 'He might have stuck a knife into you. Do be careful, Dick.'

'I'd like to see him try,' said Dick, 'but pluck's not his strong suit ... the odd thing was the way the crew seemed to side with him. Usually the nigger hates the Hindoo, but these blighters looked upset when I went for the swine.'

Dick was a bit upset himself. No one cares to feel he has played a poorish part. It needed all Norah's admiration to restore his equanimity, and the physical contact of her cool white hand.

If Norah's hand was cool, it was the only thing on board the boat in that condition. For, as the day wore on, the heat of the failing engines, added to the blaze of the sun, was intolerable. The sickly smell of hot oil filled the nostrils; the dazzle off the water scorched the eyeballs. Mirage with a magician's wand lifted island and headland off the horizon as the lake took a colour of deepest emerald, its surface networked irregularly with violet shadows.

About three in the afternoon, the engines gave a final jerk and fetched up soundless. The Chief—and only—Engineer emerged for emphatic converse with Alibaba.

He was an obese Indian with a naturally depressed air and an easy flow of perspiration. His hair and drooping moustaches were grey. I fancy a day or two in the engine-room of the Mimi would send Phœbus Apollo a bit grey.

Skipper and engineer disappeared, but the sounds of hammering between decks indicated their continued existence. After half an hour they emerged, dirtier than ever and swimming in sweat. Dick, now thoroughly uneasy, thought the time for direct action had arrived, and joined the party. Norah, watching from the bows, guessed from the bowing, shrugging, and upturned palms that the situation was not satisfactory. She was right.

'I can't understand engine-room shop in a mixture of Swahili and Hindustani,' confided Dick, 'but I gather from Alibaba it's case of "that engine no good, sir," and "big rod he very sick, sir, he wantee for die."'

'I suppose we'll have to make for the nearest White Fathers,' said Norah, 'though I do feel an adulterous couple a bit "de trop" at a mission.'

'Alibaba says there isn't a mission anywhere for 100 miles either way up or down this side of the lake.'

'Can't we do that slowly?'

'He says not.'

'What about crossing over to the other side?'

'That's forty miles or so from here, and the engines are good for another ten at the most. No, what they want is to put into a little bay just out of sight round that headland, where there's good anchorage for the night.'

'I suppose there'll be a village where we can get food,' said Norah.

'In any case,' added Dick, 'there's really no choice. We can do ten miles at the most. I'd better tell them to get on with it.'

Much firewood was shot into the furnace and much steam hissed out into the air, before the engines clanked regretfully into life. Alibaba took his place at the wheel, and, dragging like a wounded buck that has outdistanced the hunter, the Mimi drew inshore. Across her bows loomed a rocky promontory that dropped in sheer cliff to the water. Alibaba swung her wide to miss the piled boulders, which had crumbled from its face to form a breakwater to the bay and a council chamber for the grave, black, diving birds who, bolt upright, stretched their necks in the sun.

The view that was revealed as the steamer heeled slowly round the bar and the divers with raucous cries flapped heavily into the air, presented an appearance of habitation that momentarily relieved the wayfarers.

At the feet of the densely wooded hills that sloped from the sheer cliffs of the encircling mountains, a square red brick tower proclaimed the constructive instinct of white men. Its style revealed the faith of the Catholic Fathers, who, since the days of the slave trade, have proselytised the lake shores.

Help seemed at hand, though the travellers' relief was marred by the falsehood of their position. Then, as the steamer drew painfully abreast of the tower, they recognised the handicraft of a Presence alike indifferent to hopes of human aid and feelings of delicacy. The assurance of Alibaba that 'missionary he finish die long time' was not required to identify the technique of death and desolation.

The windows of the tower gaped blankly, the round Spanish tiles were broken or missing, trees and creepers had obliterated all trace of the dwelling of kindly men. Not even the squalor of a native village struggled with the silent supremacy of nature. The ruined church tower stood alone to establish a passing triumph of faith. Other buildings that may have once existed had failed to resist the pressure of the forest. Even in the bright sunshine, Norah felt the wing of tragedy over the deserted station, and she wished Alibaba endowed with enough imagination to have avoided this haunted valley for their night's sojourn.

But that astute seafarer had not, as it proved, underrated the endurance of his engines. Already panting had degenerated into hiccoughing. Slower and slower the Mimi trailed her wounded way towards the land, heading for the northern arm of the bay, where a swift little river pouring yellow into the lake promised anchorage inshore.

When she was within a hundred yards of its mouth, the end came. The engines raced ear-shatteringly. A grinding noise succeeded, and a cloud of steam masking the hurrying black forms of the firemen. Then a dead silence and the Mimi rolled lifelessly lakewards, carried out by the yellow current."

CHAPTER IX

The hour that followed the rattle of the anchor chain stamped on Norah's brain the impression of a flood of talk, whose waves broke over her head.

Her eyes were on Dick, white clad, tall and elegant, in the centre of a sooty group, whose rags dripped with sweat and whose hands waved in wild gesticulation. Her ears were assailed by the clamour raised by captain and engineer, stokers and crew, gabbling in a dozen tongues explanations of what had happened, conjectures of what might have happened, prophecies of what would happen, while into the babble cut Dick's sharp queries and criticism. Advice, questions, protests, orders, oaths, exhortation rolled in a stream as muddy as the water of the yellow river. Only the sinister figure of the lean Indian passenger kept aloof and silent, contemptuous of past and future alike.

At length the obese engineer detached himself from the agitated mob and vanished below. Reappearing unexpectedly through a hatch, he held out to Dick an armful of warm, distorted metal with the air of an afflicted father submitting to a doctor the corpse of his first-born.

The interruption had the effect of dispersing the conference. Still plying him with questions, Dick led Alibaba aft. Norah, who had little confidence in male brains unassisted, joined them.

As she listened, certain facts emerged. If not dangerous, the situation was at least unpleasant. There seemed no doubt that the Mimi was immobile. Alibaba supported the engineer in insisting that the engines (connecting rod, was it?) were damaged beyond his power of repair.

'I said it was monstrous,' remarked Dick. 'Only niggers to run the ship.' He turned to the Arab. 'Why can't you patch them up?' he asked.

Alibaba spread his hands and gabbled apologetically. Norah gathered from the polyglot flow that welding or brazing was necessary, and the bellows of the boat's portable forge were under repair at Kigoma. In any case the job was too big for the Mimi's resources.

'Well, what do you mean to do about it?' asked Dick sourly.

Alibaba was silent. He foresaw that the solution he eventually proposed would be ill-received. They must stay where they were till the ship could be towed into Kigoma, 300 miles away.

The fellow's a fool,' said Dick. 'He doesn't know his job! Why not rig a sail, man?'

Without replying Alibaba licked his finger and held it above his head. Mildly he remarked that the dead calm would hold till the rains broke. It might be weeks.

With much head-shaking he rejected a suggestion of Norah's, opining that an attempt to tow the steamer behind her dinghy would end after an hour in mutiny. 'Black fellow he say "too much work no good"' was his comment.

A second fact had to be faced. Not only was the vessel stranded, but no rescue could be expected from Kigoma or elsewhere for many days. The Mimi was not due at Kigoma for forty hours, and a further delay of two or three days would not be sufficiently unusual to excite attention. When she was a week overdue, alarm would be felt. But even so, there was no British boat on the lake to send. Kigoma would have to get in touch with Albertville across the water and ask the loan of one of the three Belgian steamers. If the Belgians were willing and a boat was available, she would have to cross the lake and make slow progress close inshore, visiting each bay and natural harbour, until she caught sight of the derelict.

Alibaba's estimate that relief could not be expected for at least twelve days did not strike Norah as pessimistic.

'This'll learn me,' said Dick, 'to trespass into the Stone Age!' He stared disconsolately across the blue water. A thought struck him: 'What about a dhow? Surely there are Arab dhows on the lake?'

Again Alibaba shook his head with the deprecatory tolerance of an Anglican divine. Before the English took the land from the Gerimani[1] there had been much trade, and fleets of dhows. But now ... in any case the calm before the rains would keep dhows beached in their harbours. And why should a dhow visit this deserted bay?

[1] Germans.

Norah, who did not share Dick's depression and at first looked on the breakdown as an exciting adventure, cast her eyes to the land, from which, it seemed, must come their help. Would it not be easy to despatch one of the crew to the nearest village bidding them send a runner to the first white settlement with news of the plight of the Mimi and her passengers?

There were no villages, said Alibaba reluctantly, no natives, no settlements. Sleeping sickness had wiped the coast clear of life. In the old days smoke from the fires of fishing villages had shown blue on the shore, but at present... He waved his hand in the direction of the ruined tower, and Norah felt she understood something of that tragedy.

Silence fell on the little group. It testified to the rugged nature of the country that no one suggested a march inland or along the shore. As if painted on the back-cloth of a stage, before their faces rose the encircling wall of the dead volcano. Sheer cliffs that any advance inland must scale. The broken formation, which Norah had noticed from the lake, of spurs and buttresses, that radiated inwards from the crater sides, interset with mountain torrents and precipitous valleys, made progress parallel to the lake almost impossible. Should the castaways be bold enough to attempt either of these desperate marches, braving the risk of sleeping sickness, where could they find carriers for their loads—tents, cooking pots, ammunition, and food?

'The mouse has indeed fallen into the bucket,' thought Norah, as she walked forward with Dick. Alibaba, crestfallen at the failure of his charge, offering no cure but patience, retired in silence to the engine-room.

Dick dropped heavily on to his bed.

'Well,' he said at last, 'it looks like staying here a fortnight till we're rescued by a crowd of grinning Bulamatadi.'[2]

[2] Belgians.

'A fortnight will soon be over,' said Norah cheerfully. But she felt a shadow had fallen between her and the sun. In a fortnight she had hoped to be on the high seas, steaming towards Europe. It did not seem so easy to escape from Africa.

Dick did not answer, misfortune had pricked his buoyancy.

'It's lucky we have got the oxen on board,' she went on. 'We've only two days' food in the boxes, and I don't want you to go shooting with S.S.[3] about...'

[3] Sleeping sickness.

She caught her breath in the middle of the sentence.

'Dick,' she cried. 'What idiots we are!' He did not look up. 'Dick, how far is it across the lake to the other side?'

'Forty or fifty miles,' he replied gloomily. 'We can't move a foot.'

'No, but the dinghy can!'

'What d'you mean?'

'With four oars we'd do it between dawn and dark! Or nearly.'

'What's the good?'

'You're not your brightest, dear... At the worst we'd be on the route of the Belgian boats. At the best we'd strike a Belgian Boma or mission.'

Dick's gloom was dispelled, and he hurried aft to requisition the skipper's knowledge of the lake. In answer to his shouts Alibaba emerged from the secret places of the ship. His smiling face signalled to Norah that her plan was passed. Even the lean Indian was interested. She wondered if he had at first been drugged with hemp and the effects had now worn off.... What an interminable amount of talk between Dick and the skipper! How men did talk!

'We start at dawn!' Dick greeted her at last. 'It'll be a long day, let's go and stretch our legs ashore.'

'Don't be maddening, Dick! Start at the beginning!'

The reaction from anxiety had been too much for Dick's self-control. He was bubbling over with excitement.

'Sorry, darling.' He kissed her on the cheek. 'Well, Alibaba says there's a Belgian poste, which is Bulamatadi for Boma, opposite here and about twenty miles north. The lake is under forty miles across here, so we'll be over to-morrow night and drinking beer with the Chef du Poste the next day. A happy issue to all our afflictions, what?' Dick's spirits easily went up or down, and he rattled on. 'Alibaba is picking four of the best oars among the thieves, and there'll be just room for Changalilo and the baggage. We'd better take a goat, too. He'll do as a mascot, if we don't have to eat him.'

'What about the others?' asked Norah, who had not Dick's happy absorption in self.

'What about them?' he stared at her for a moment, 'why they'll be all right. They'll stay here till we get word through to Kigoma.'

Leg-stretching ashore ended in sleeping there. Norah was reluctant to leave the ship, but Dick's enthusiasm swept her objections aside.

'It's safe enough if we're careful,' he said. 'The "palp"[4] never goes far from water and shade.' He pointed to a strip of bare rocky ground that lay at the back of the amphitheatre of the bay. Above it rose a sheer red cliff. For a quarter of a mile there was neither water nor tree. 'At night,' he continued, 'out there there's no fear of fly. Here there's the certainty of a stench of oil and crew. Not to mention the roll. Besides, I want to repack my kit.'

[4] Glossina palpalis—the sleeping sickness fly.

Changalilo quickly loaded the baggage into the dinghy, leaving, at Dick's instructions, the heavy ammunition chest on board to cross intact next day. The loaded magazine of Dick's Mauser was enough for emergencies on shore.

There was some difficulty in finding oarsmen. The crew had settled down to a gamble on the forecastle, slapping on the deck the dice made of cowrie shells filed smooth on one side, and betting which way they would turn.

When at last the boat was ready to start, Norah remembered the oxen. Even if their fate was slaughter, till the day arrived their life would be more endurable on shore, where the hands could build a lion-proof kraal.

'Can we manage them?' said Dick. He was unwilling to incur the extra work till the skipper's opposition to Norah's plan—from laziness, he thought—converted him, and, on the principle of 'worst first,' the ox, who had nearly pitched Dick into the hold the evening before, was lowered into the water.

They had paddled the greater part of the quarter mile that separated the steamer from the shore, when Obadiah the ox, as Dick had christened him, suddenly varied the puffing and snorting with which he met each wavelet, by a plunge that threw his quarters out of the water, and a bellow in which Norah, accustomed to cattle, could read an agony of fear and pain. He lashed out, plunging and rearing. His forelegs churned the water to bubbles that were dark with sand scooped from the bottom. His maddened struggles rocked the heavily laden boat.

'Look out, Changalilo; he'll have us over!' shouted Norah.

The frenzied beast, released by Changalilo, slipped rapidly astern, as if drawn by a current. As he passed her, Norah was moved by the agonised appeal in his mild eyes. A stain more sinister than sand now darkened the water. She looked at the deck hands and saw that they were resting on their oars, pointing with widely grinning mouths at the contortions of the ox. Bellow on bellow filled the air.

'What on earth is it, Changalilo?' she asked. Then as his lips framed the world 'ngwene,' she understood. 'A crocodile's got him?'

'Yes,' shouted Dick, 'look!' and she saw a black tail flick out of the water.

'Poor brute,' she sighed, and turned her eyes away.

The struggle receded from the amused view of the oarsmen, as the crocodile relentlessly drew his victim towards the southern arm of the bay. There was no hurry; he had a good hold on a hind leg and in twenty minutes or so the ox would be drowned and wedged on a certain muddy bank, where the swollen corpse could rot the time required to make it palatable.

In the distance the agony continued, now a fore-leg showing above the surface, now the wide horns, now the white belly.

'Do make them row in, Dick,' said Norah. 'It's horrible!'

Reluctantly they paddled the dinghy inshore. As the bows grated on the shingle an apparent log lying near the edge of the yellow river rose to its feet and disappeared into the safety of the stream.

The momentary glimpse of the rough scales dried khaki-grey in the sun, the pale wicked eye, the high hind legs, which sloped the obscene body at a slinking angle down to the crooked forelegs, recalled the monstrous saurians of the prehistoric past.

'And, by Jove, there's another!' whispered Dick, nodding his head at a couple of black knobs on the surface of the water, that represented the snout and eyebrow of a submerged monster. He reached for his gun and fired. A long, pale belly cartwheeled into the air with slashing tail and legs, to sink without a sound and be devoured, perhaps still living, by its mate.

Camp was pitched in silence on the site already chosen by Dick, and the deck hands were sent off grumbling to collect firewood. Norah was oppressed by the desolation of the bay, once the scene of hopeful and devoted enterprise, now delivered over to reptiles. A curse seemed to rest there, and she wondered whether by passing a night on these shores she submitted to its power.

Here the pale Galilean had not conquered. The gods of Africa had shown they still could wield their old weapons of remorseless disease, sudden death, and instantaneous decay, installing at the end a garrison of reptiles, cruel and hideous like themselves, the survivors of more ancient and horrific epochs."

"I don't mean," said Ross, "that Norah, who was a healthy-minded little thing, really believed such stuff. She was upset by the pitiful fate of the ox under her impotent eyes, and felt a distinct, if unreasonable, dislike for the place.

She was tempted to ask Dick to take her back to the steamer. But as the wish crossed her mind, she heard the report of his gun up the beach. He was amusing himself, bless his heart. She knew men did not welcome feminine intuitions that make them alter their plans, and thrust the impulse aside as cowardly.

But when she recollected that rapturous first sight of Tanganyika, and the hopes it had raised of quick release from the forest's encirclement and of an easy passage along azure waters to the civilisation her heart desired, disillusionment was keen. Would she ever be free, or had Africa put out a tentacle that had retaken her to its dark bosom? Would Africa master her as it had mastered this ruined mission?"

* * * * * * *

Ross rose and stretched his arms above his head. He lit a match to see his watch.

"The work of white men's hands," he remarked, "does not seem to prosper on the shores of the lake. Ujiji, for instance, is smaller to-day than it was in Livingstone's time; Niamkolo is a mound of bricks hidden in the grass; Kigoma, since we took it, grows smaller every year....

The history of the ruined tower that filled Norah with such foreboding, I never heard. Whatever the doom, it fell before my day. Still, it is not hard to imagine the birth and death of the station. Think of the arrival of the French Fathers....

With heavy rosaries hanging below their untrimmed beards, wide hats on their heads, clad in white robes of coarse cloth, they had sailed from some elder station on the lake into the unknown.

Think of the start of their voyage in a home-made boat of clumsy lines, whose unpainted white wood planks showed the roughly-nailed joints. Overhead on a light framework was stretched an awning to shield them from the sun of indefinite days.

The Father who built the boat came with them to the edge of the water, a carpenter's apron over his white robe, and stood shading his eyes beside the little red fire on which he had warmed the pitch to give the seams a final caulking. The other Fathers stood in a group under the mango trees at the top of the shallow brick steps that led to the lake, silently speculating on the fate of their brothers whom they might, or might not, see again.

For many days the adventurers were rowed by native Christians to the singing of Catholic hymns learnt in place of the melancholy water songs of their ancestors. At last the canoe stopped at a fishing village that once populated the bay.

Long beards and robes won for the Fathers the respect due to wizards. Moreover, there would be hope of their help against the Arab slavers, who at that time led a train of bones and blood across Africa, whose dhows were familiar in passage up-lake to Ujiji, whence they drove their wares overland to Bagamayo for shipment to the markets of Zanzibar. Had starvation and hardship unduly reduced their cargo, the loss was soon made good from the lake villages.

In return for protection from this menace, the villagers would be willing to build a church. They were simple folk and glad to help those who seemed kind and good men.

So, as the seasons succeeded each other, a group of buildings sprang up on the lake shore. The layout would be like that of the other lake missions. A monastery would spread its length ..."

"Ross," I interrupted, "have you ever read a book called Sandford and Merton?"

"No," said Ross. "Is it interesting?"

"Interesting?" I replied. "Hardly interesting...."

"The monastery," continued Ross placidly, "would spread its single—or double-storied—length parallel to the lie of the lake. The roof would be low-pitched with a wide overhang supported on brick pillars, to form a dark spacious verandah from whose centre a double flight of steps descended to the courtyard. At right angles on one wing lay stores and outbuildings; and on the other stood the church with narrow unglazed windows, round brick columns, scanty fittings, and the ornaments of Latin Catholicism, when humble so devotional, so secular when rich.

Gardens were dug, fruit trees planted, crops cultivated. All the time proceeded the less material work of tending the sick, teaching and preaching. Permanganate of potassium and epsom salts, sermons and hymns, reading, writing and the other queer things they teach the heathen—Christian philosophy and the geography of the Holy Land.

By how much the black man profited, I shouldn't care to say, but I don't doubt that the community grew and multiplied. The birth-rate increased; famines were averted; refugee relatives from raided villages came in, and the blessings of the first chapter of Genesis seemed to rest on the devoted labours of the Fathers, until ...

The first 'fly' may have been brought by one of the refugees or carried by game or spread naturally up the lakeshore. At the beginning the presence of the destroyer would not be suspected. The increased death-rate would be attributed to an unhealthy summer; the wasting of the sufferers to fever; their fits to epilepsy; their madness to insanity.

But as the buryings increased, the fear of an epidemic must have gripped the hearts of the Fathers. Their slight medical knowledge was as unavailing as their prayers. Bells will have sounded, masses been said, and litanies sung for defence from the arrow that flieth in darkness and the pestilence that destroyeth at noonday. But the mortality did not stay.

Finding the new God did not help them, some of the people will have relapsed into heathendom. At first frightened, they would settle into a mute endurance, nearer apathy than stoicism. The more energetic would flee from the doomed villages ... and spread the sickness with them. The rest awaited the end with fatalism.

One by one the Fathers buried their people, mourning the loss now of some favourite convert, now of some skilful workman.

Whether the sickness ultimately struck all the white men, or whether, since they could not help, they took the resolution of abandoning the stricken settlement and their lives' work, one does not know. Alibaba's words, a later discovery of Norah's, and the French Fathers' tradition of self-sacrifice, suggest that death found them at their work. The end was the same in either case: Africa took back its own, and the insatiable forest swallowed up villages, buildings, and every sign of life, as relentlessly as it had always engulfed every trace of human endeavour."

I interrupted the silence that followed Ross' last words with a hint that the fate of the abandoned mission hardly touched on the story of Norah and Dick.

"So you think," said Ross, "that no emanation from the tragedies of the past lingers over their scene. I cannot bring myself to believe that the strip of land from Dixmude to the Vosges will ever quite lose the breath of four years' agony and heroism; though I know there is a view that those years may now be forgotten. However, I am telling this story and you must allow me to suggest that the wind of that elder tragedy still ruffled the beauty of the bay, blowing cold on Norah's heart. But since, however, you prefer strictly material facts, I will skip her presentiments, simply mentioning that they were interrupted by the reappearance of the two deck hands, who had collected, they considered, sufficient wood.

As Norah watched the dinghy, rowed towards the steamer's masthead light, recede from the now darkened shore, a great sense of loneliness filled her—that microscopic feeling engendered, for instance, by an imprudent glance at the stars.

It was succeeded by more practical apprehension.

'I wonder if we should have kept them,' she thought. 'What would happen to us if the boat...'"

CHAPTER X

Norah woke before it was light. She made no attempt to recapture a sleep that dreams had disturbed—dreams in which the ox was drowned again, in which a crocodile pursued her leaden steps while the Indian's crooked knife held Dick from her rescue. As soon as her watch showed half-past four, she summoned Changalilo from the fire which he had tended through the night, waking at intervals as a native will. Yesterday it had been decided to strike camp before dawn, giving him time to cook breakfast and carry their loads down to the shore ready to start at the first gleam of light.

Breakfast finished, Dick led the way to the beach. When they were twenty yards away, they heard a quick scrunch on the shingle and a quiet plop in the water.

'Ngwene,' said Changalilo casually, and kept back from the lake's edge, where the crocodile they had disturbed still might lurk.

They waited, Norah's hand in Dick's. The water was warmer than the air, and a mist hung on its surface. Above the mist the mountains across the lake were already outlined against a faint sky.

Voices on the Mimi, carried by the water, were audible.

'Damn Alibaba!' said Dick. 'Why can't he send the boat?'

Norah felt her last night's uneasiness return. 'But it's early yet,' she said.

The talking on board continued. Alibaba's voice was recognisable, raised in command or protest.

'He's having a job getting the boat's crew out,' said Dick, in answer to an unspoken anxiety.

Dawn came suddenly, and the water showed a delicate misty blue, as if it were seen through silvered crystal. Dick raised his voice in a hail. The sounds on the steamer ceased. She was visible now, squat and black on the water, but the distance was too great to distinguish figures in the group that darkened the deck.

Dick hailed again.

A silence seemed to brood on the face of the waters till the banal reassurance 'All right' floated to them on the motionless air.

'That wasn't Alibaba?' asked Norah.

Dick shrugged his shoulders in nervous irritation. He was angry with Alibaba, angry with himself.

Soon, however, the sight of black figures climbing over the stern dispelled his apprehension. 'That's better,' he sighed, 'but why five of them? We don't want more than four oars.'

As the boat approached, Norah noticed that for the long row its crew had discarded the unfamiliar European oar, reverting to the pointed paddle of their fathers. This looked like business. She took a last glance at the shore, where she had sensed such sinister influence, and smiled at her unfulfilled forebodings.

What the devil's that blasted Hindoo doing in the boat?' cried Dick suddenly.

Norah looked and saw the Indian's sardonic features momentarily revealed over the rising and falling shoulder of the bow-paddler, an ape-like negro, whose hunting knife, stuck in his belt, lent a piratical air to a personality no doubt genial enough.

'I'll jolly soon have him out of that,' muttered Dick.

As if his intentions had been divined, the uplifted paddles were checked and the silver water dripped from their narrow blades. The boat swung broadside on, a stone's-throw from land, rocking gently. Norah was near enough to see the perturbed, uneasy features of the crew that contrasted with the ironic composure of the Indian. He rose slowly to his feet from his seat in the stern. His thin lips twisted into a smile. His beaklike nose and the naked, withered skin of his neck reminded Norah of a vulture that had settled on a buck she had shot on the farm.

He stood for a moment in silence, smiling at the Europeans.

'Yesterday,' he began nasally, 'the Sahib struck this slave for remaining seated in the Sahib's presence. The slave now stands.'

'Cut that out,' shouted Dick, 'and paddle the boat inland at once.'

The habit of obeying white men stimulated the gorilla-like stoker to dip his paddle in the water, but the Indian stopped him with a gesture.

'Surely, Sahib, when my words are ended, we will paddle to land.'

His hand, waved gently towards the Belgian coast, explained his meaning.

'Yesterday the Sahib forbade his slave to interfere in his affairs. He will now lay the lake between himself and those affairs.'

He threw back his head and laughed noiselessly. Dick went red with rage.

'The damned nigger...' he cried.

Under her breath Norah whispered to him to take his gun.

'It's him or us,' she said.

'Do you mean?...' began Dick, then broke off. 'Hell!' he shouted. Why did I waste those cartridges yesterday?'

'Why——' began Norah.

'I emptied my magazine on a croc last night,' he confessed. 'I thought I had another handful in my shooting jacket.'

'Then bluff him with the empty gun. If you can frighten the Indian, the natives will turn.'

But if Dick was a bluffer, his was not the brand that pulls off forlorn hopes. His belief in the avarice of the Indians who colonise Africa suggested an easier plan. Holding out his purse, he shouted promises of lavish reward, if the Indian would take them off.

The offer made to the crew might have had effect. Their simple minds were free from hostility or mistrust. But in the dominant heart of the Hindoo, vengeance, and doubt that promises would be honoured, displaced cupidity.

He gave the order to paddle.

Too late Dick ran to the loads and snatched his gun. The dinghy had drawn out into the lake. 'Stop,' shouted Dick, 'or I'll fire.' His words recalled to Norah's brain the games of her childhood, and in spite of her anxiety she had to smother a smile.

The Indian stopped laughing and crouched in the bottom of the boat, urging speed on the paddlers. He put his faith in the increasing range and the mist which still covered the water. For some seconds after every one had recognised the pretence Dick stood, gun at shoulder, theatrical, ridiculous. Then with an oath he dropped the Mauser.

Already remote, the Indian's laugh rang out above the là! ... là! ... là! ... of the paddlers, half chant, half grunt of exertion.

Then distance enveloped the sounds.

The position was desperate. Without ammunition or stores of food, life was impossible on shore. Between shore and steamer the water teemed with crocodiles. They had no boat or the materials to build one. No help could be expected from the land, no rescue for many days from the lake. When at last the relief party came, it was doubtful if there would even be bones for them to find....

But Norah's courage, which had shrunk before the intangible menace of the bay, rose to meet the concrete disaster that appeared to have overwhelmed Dick. With Changalilo's help she unpacked the food boxes and measured the margin between them and starvation.

Even the scant array of tins that Changalilo produced proved to be misleading. It included such innutritious aids as baking and curry powder, anchovies and Worcester sauce—the armoury of Colonials against the monotony of ulendo meals. The solid residue was meagre, for they had brought on board only enough food for the normal trip of three days, counting for emergency on the ship's supplies and on purchases from fishing villages. What was now left would last them two bare days. And Alibaba had said that rescue could not come for twelve.

Norah looked towards Dick, who had subsided on the pile of baggage, his head in his hands. She decided to tell Changalilo first. He accepted the position with the indifference of one accustomed to famine, and with the native's inherited communism added his rations—a cloth full of millet meal—to the common store.

'What are you doing?' asked Dick in a dull voice.

She turned to him a little brusquely. After all, if Dick hadn't quarreled with the Indian, if he hadn't insisted on sleeping ashore, if he hadn't wasted his ammunition, they wouldn't be in this mess. He ought to pull himself together and help; there must be some way that a man could find to retrieve the disaster.

She was conscious that she was unfair and feminine, but with all their independence the present generation of young women admire a muddler as little as did their grandmothers.

'Come on, Dick,' she said briskly, let's think this out.'

'I've done nothing else, since that swine rowed off,' said Dick.

She made him listen to the result of her commissariat calculations.

'That's worse than I thought,' he said; 'our number's up.'

'Of course it isn't. Don't be such a pessimist.'

Dick drummed on the boxes. 'Unless you can do a fortnight without food,' he said.

She restrained her impatience.

'Are you sure you haven't any cartridges anywhere?'

'Quite—I looked through my kit last night. I could have sworn...'

And while he explained and excused his folly, Norah wondered what would have happened half an hour before, had Dick's rifle been loaded. A sudden doubt of his resolution assailed her. With a loaded gun in his hand, would he have dominated the mutiny? In his rage he might have fired, but in cold blood she doubted if, even to secure their escape, he could have screwed himself to the killing point.

Surprisingly she was sorry. Not, I think, from any hate of the Indian, pre-eminently unlovable as he was, but from a feeling that if logic barred all other paths a man should kill. And as a woman and an aristocrat, if a life lay between her and safety, she instinctively demanded a man's love to ... eliminate the obstacle.

In the comparative comfort and security of a deck chair on an ocean liner, such sentiments seem blameworthy even in a woman. In her father's stately home in the Shires or her father-in-law's respectable legal circle in Scotland, I have no doubt that Norah, whom I have presented to you as no paragon, would have shrunk from so drastic a solution. But I suppose standards suffer when you are in danger of life in Central Africa.

In justice I record that she did not pursue the thought; she turned to wondering what Archie would have done. Probably nothing, she decided. By the time he had weighed the advantages and disadvantages of drastic action, opportunity would have flown. But when at last he moved, she admitted that Archie generally went to the heart of the matter.

Of one thing she was certain. His Scottish stubbornness would not allow him to beg from a man who had insulted him and whom he had struck. Nor would he offer money. She tried to put out of her mind that picture of her lover, pale in the dawn, unconscious of the water lapping over his feet, holding out his purse to his enemy.

In this, you may remark, she was unjust. At one moment she blamed Dick for not securing her safety by a cold-blooded murder, at the next she tried not to despise him for attempting to save her by the much less reprehensible methods of bribery and a trifling surrender of pride.

She was recalled from her reflections. Dick had ended his explanation and had asked her a question.

'There must be a way out,' she said at random.

'Yes,' he laughed nervously. 'We could swim to the Mimi ... at least we could swim the first ten yards.... Norah,' he said suddenly, 'I believe that would be the best thing to do.'

The part of Norah's brain that was not under Dick's spell wondered cynically what he would say if she agreed. Then she felt ashamed of her sneer. Was not the greater part of his distress on her behalf?

'We can't make a boat without tools,' he began again, and rekindled her irritation. All this talk of what they couldn't do was utterly vain. Her woman's brain had jumped to the only course that lay open, moving along no path of reason, accepting the only practicable picture that offered.

'Dick,' she said, 'we must strike inland.'

'And hardly any of these African woods float,' went on Dick, monotonously pursuing his line of thought. There's no second boat on board.' ... Then the hope that he had been repressing burst to the surface. 'Norah,' he said, 'do you think there's a chance of those paddlers bringing back the dinghy from the other side?'

'No, dear, I don't,' she said gently. Then, as if she were dealing with an invalid, 'You see, they know they've behaved badly, and natives in the wrong get frightened like naughty children. They'd be afraid of being punished, if they came back.... No, as soon as the Indian lets them go, they'll disappear to their villages.'

The last pitiful hope that had lingered, disappeared. In his heart, he could almost have cursed the elopement, which threatened to prove fatal to both of them. Yet, as he looked at Norah, the robuster part of him declared her worth it. In the sea of blood spilt for women, no fairer face can have been mirrored.

She stood bare-headed, her short hair stirring, her chin up and her eyes bright with courage. He noticed where the lake sun had caught the skin on her arms. It was borne on him that his attitude lacked worth. An aristocrat-on-the-scaffold gesture was indicated. Or perhaps something more tender. 'Darling,' he whispered, with his faint Irish intonation, 'I'd die happy in your arms.'

As he laid his cheek against hers, he sensed a slight rigidity. Had he struck the wrong note? Norah was sometimes disconcertingly practical.

'"There is a time for marrying, and a time for giving in marriage,"' she quoted under her breath. 'Now, be sensible, Dick,' she went on aloud, 'and listen to me. There's no need to talk about dying, but it's no good looking to the lake for help. Our best chance is to strike inland and hope to hit a village or a native path leading to one.'

Dick felt his flourish had miscarried; but in spite of himself, his sinews were braced by Norah's example.

She developed her plan. Not wasting any of the forty-eight hours that were assured to them, they must struggle up the mountain side, the three of them, with the food on their backs. When night overtook them, they would lie between two blazing fires to protect them against beasts. Then push on in the dawn, till they had left the sleeping sickness belt and reached inhabited country once again. If their luck held, they should strike a village or a village path before their food was gone.

'How are you going to get over that?' Dick waved his arm toward the crater wall.

There must be a pass somewhere.'

'We may take days to find it.'

'We must leave something to chance.'

But Dick was no gambler, and the idea of laying out all their food on the possibility that they would find a path frightened him. He thought of the stories of travellers lost in the bush, walking in despairing circles. Where they were, they at least had water.

'It would be better if I went to find the way alone, without a load on my back, and came back for you.'

'If you didn't find it, you'd have to come back just the same. We'd be no further on, with a day wasted.'

'A dhow might have come in or a canoe from a village along the coast.'

Norah said nothing. Though she did not put into words the criticism of her lover, she knew the futility of arguing with a man who prefers a sixty-six to one miracle to a short price chance.

After a brief silence Dick expounded his scheme. There was a hope that the valley of the yellow river led to a pass. He would follow the stream to its source, from every vantage point searching with field-glasses for sign of human life—boat on the lake, path, garden or village in the forest.

Norah gave in. Human eyes she knew could penetrate short distance into the forest, and she had small faith in the plan. But Dick had taken the initiative, and she was not sure enough of her own scheme to force its risk on him. In any case no time must be wasted in argument.

'All right, dear; I'll come the first bit of the climb with you.' Her new-born insight into his nature advised her to keep him under way. Followed by Changalilo, they ascended the course of the yellow stream.

Fantastically tangled roots, growing apparently in air, and a lattice work of creepers formed a wall that forbade progress along the bank, but, at that season of the year, it was possible to walk along a strip of shingle that bordered the bed of the stream. Up this they toiled until their advance was barred by a little waterfall, which boiled through a gap in rocks worn smooth and red, and fell in spray on the rounded boulders below.

Dick decided to deviate into the forest. From where they stood it was possible to divine the course of the river through the trees, until it disappeared circling round the base of a column or chimney of natural rock, whose throat torn raggedly open showed where a small volcano or blowhole had once belched its stream of lava. Dick intended to slant through the forest and rejoin the river by the chimney.

'I'll go back here,' said Norah. 'Changalilo, stay with Bwana Dick to show him the way back to-night.'

'The Bwana said I was never to leave the Ba-Mama[1] alone in the forest,' protested Changalilo.

[1] Ba-Mama—lit. "Grandmothers" (plur.). The respectful term for all influential ladies—white women or native princesses.

'What Bwana?' asked Dick.

'Bwana A-ri-shy,'[2] replied Changalilo firmly.

[2] The Awemba cannot pronounce consecutive consonants without inserting a vowel. Changalilo meant Archie.

As Norah retraced her steps, she repeated Changalilo's words. He still regarded her as Archie's possession. In her scorn for the condemnation of others, it had never entered her head to consider the opinion of the natives on her flight with Dick. She knew that while the Chiwemba tongue contains no word for a virgin—an ideal that is unfamiliar to this direct people—they looked with an unsympathetic eye on adultery. The code of the good old days, before the white men came, allotted death, she believed, to the guilty pair. Fantastically enough, the existence of this point of view in a backward and little known people carried weight with her.

She dismissed it from her mind and faced the danger that confronted her. The practical side of her nature was uppermost. She saw that two factors—Time and Food—dominated the situation and threatened to sign the death warrant. She could not shorten the days that must precede a rescue, she could increase the food supply. Fish there must be in the lake, fruit there might be in the ruins. As she had no fishing tackle, she decided first to explore the mission.

As she approached the ruined tower, the superstitious dread which the place inspired in her was reinforced by a more concrete fear of snakes. She was a better zoologist than Omar, and knew that 'the keeping of courts where Jamshyd gloried' was more probably entrusted to puff adders and cobras than to lions and leopards.

But fruit trees would have been planted near monastery walls, and to the need for food terrors, supernatural and material, must yield.

As she picked her way through the long grass which surrounded the tower, her foot touched masonry. Treading cautiously, she identified the remnants of a flight of broad steps that once, she supposed, led to the lake. Now their easy gradient was distorted and reft. At one point they ceased completely, at others they slanted drunkenly. The grass that covered them, knee high, made the ascent dangerous.

She stood at the foot of the tower. To her right creeper-grown mounds showed where the chancel lay. She penetrated a clump of trees, dark like citrus, but she found them an outpost of the forest and no domesticated variety. Now she could see a gaping, jagged rift, following the bonding of the brickwork that explained the quick destruction of the station. An earthquake had associated itself with the more patient forces of the forest in the work of obliteration. She wondered that the tower still stood.

Beyond the grass-covered mounds, into which the monastery walls had decayed, she found a grove of mangoes ... the late sort whose fruit, it seemed odd to reflect, might not be ripe till she was dead. In what once had been the courtyard some oranges had reverted to stock. Even so they were fruitless, their season past. Her biggest haul was a handful of small, hard peaches from what had been an orchard. It was doubtful if the trees had ever flourished in the great heat of lake level.

There were no other European trees except the cypresses that edged the terrace on which the monastery had stood, their dark spires pointing men to heaven. But Norah was reminded of Archie's farm and the avenue of young cypresses that led to the new house. She remembered searching the forestry catalogue with Archie, and the Latin name of the Italian cypress—cypressus funebris—crossed her mind with significance now sinister.

Another clump of cypresses led her from the main ruins to an enclosure whose containing wall the destroying forces had spared. As she clambered through a gap she saw the reason of their tolerance. It was the mission cemetery, and here the pride of man was already humbled.

A crudely-hewn stone proclaimed that Alibaba's words had been literal, and that at least one of the White Fathers had died at his post. She wondered how long the news had taken to reach the French village he had left so long ago, and whether there had been any relatives to remember an old man who had endured exile, danger, and death for his faith.

Round him, in their almost obliterated graves, lay his adopted people.

The Christian practices are only able to reduce, by a few years and by the faint memory which mound and stone briefly preserve, the eternity of oblivion that waits. Norah wondered if the old native form of burial—an unmarked hole in the uncharted bush—was not at once less pretentious and, when you bargain with infinity, as effective.

With her miserable handful of peaches, she left the desolation of the mission for the solitude of the shore.

She must face the problem of catching fish without tackle or net. Changalilo's spear, she thought, might have served, had it not formed the sole defence of the party in the hills. Her mind flew to Dick where he felt his way through the forest. Why had she let him go without her? Suppose, without a gun, he ran into lion or buffalo!

She pulled off the cording of the loads and set to work. After more than two hours' labour, a net of sorts was finished. Clasping it, she scrambled on to the breakwater of rocks that the Mimi had turned as she entered the bay.

From talk on the farm, she knew that tiger fish lie under white cliffs. These rocks were white—great round boulders worn smooth like marble in the years that had elapsed since they crumbled from the cliffs above and piled haphazard one on another. She had noticed divers and egrets sitting motionless on the edge. Where were fishing birds there must be fish. As she clambered along the slippery surface she surprised an otter, sitting in the sun with head alert and paws spread like a Landseer lion. Her precarious approach disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets, who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost hurt the eye.

Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.

But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour she had caught nothing. Neither tiger fish with rat-trap teeth that cut through wire casts, nor iron-grey ngombe, whose narrow head and jaws fight the fisherman like a true salmon of the lake, nor yellow, blue-blotched coupi, nor pande, the gigantic perch of Tanganyika, rewarded the efforts of her aching arms.

The sun scorched pitilessly off the rocks, and, as pitilessly, thought seared her brain. When Dick came back that night without accomplishment, they would have one day left to eat. It seemed incredible that in time of peace and in the twentieth century, enjoying full health and strength, with money in her pocket, without an enemy in the world, death should lurk so near. But her appetite—for she had given Dick the lion's share of the day's rations—confirmed her reasoning.

The sun was low above the mountains when she desisted from her unavailing task and returned to camp. She noticed with relief that the store of wood was not spent and she set to work to kindle a blaze.

How much longer would Dick be? Surely he would be back before dark! What news would he bring? Her eyes searched the hillside in vain. She took her field-glasses to the shore and looking back she tried to penetrate the maze of trees. As she raked the hillside, hope leapt within her. High up, near the torn throat of the little volcano, in the fading light, she saw a native.

Dick must have found a village and help was coming.

Then her heart turned to lead. It was Changalilo ... alone. Her worst fears had come true: something had happened to Dick. The criticism that had been forming in her mind since the fiasco of the dinghy fell to dust. Dick was dead or disabled. Her gallant, lovely Dick.

She would have stumbled into the hills, but fear that she would miss Changalilo in the dark restrained her. She waited.

* * * * * * *

An hour she waited, till Changalilo appeared noiselessly in the firelight. He saluted in silence.

'What has happened?' she forced herself to ask.

He did not speak. Her eyes, which had been trying to read his expressionless features, fell till they rested on his hand decorously holding a letter. She snatched it.

'Darling,' it read, 'we're saved. Just seen a camp fire in the bush. Chang says it's a white man. Will spend night with him and join you to-morrow. All my love.—DICK.'"

* * * * * * *

Ross broke off. He remarked that the air was a little cooler and that he thought he could snatch a little sleep in the interval between stifling night and sweltering day.

We went below. As we reached the companionway:—

"To-morrow," he said. "I'll tell you how optimistic was that letter. No will-o'-the-wisp ever led wayfarer farther from safety than that camp fire led Dick."

PART II

"The blooms of the almond tree grow in a night and vanish in a morn: the flies hœmerœ take life with the sun and die with the dew: fancy that slippeth in with a gaze goeth out with a wink: and too timely loves have ever the shortest length.

"I write this as thy grief and my folly."

R. GREENE.

CHAPTER I

It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on his bald head.

His burly, masculine figure seemed incongruous among the welter of empty deck-chairs and the futile debris of a voyage—women's wraps, rope quoits, cushions and picture papers. Side by side we leant over the rail, and for a while our tongues were busy with the idiocies that pass for events on a liner—the ship's run, the latest quarrel, and so forth. A pause gave me the opportunity to remind him that he was in the middle of a story.

"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked, surprised. I said that I was interested to know what happened, resisting the temptation to add that I could spare some of the moralising with which he garnished his facts.

"About the hour," he began again, "that Norah received the note, Dick was finishing a second helping of roan antelope by the side of the fire he had described.

'So I followed for hours,' he was saying, 'till the path stopped dead at a drinking pool. Not a trace beyond.'

'Game track,' suggested the stranger on the other side of the fire.

'That's what my "boy" said when we struck it. I didn't believe a path so well-used and hard-beaten could be anything but human-made.'

'There's not a human for miles,' said the other. 'Except ourselves,' he added, glancing round the enclosure, where the firelight picked on a cheekbone or a line of teeth, an eye-ball or the protuberance of a hip to suggest rather than reveal the presence of a dozen natives.

'There must be rhino by the score,' persisted Dick, 'to flatten out a path like that.'

'Zebra do a lot. The hoofs of a herd of zebra working regularly between two drinking places.'

'Anyhow, neither was much help to me. So I decided to push back to ... to my base and try again to-morrow. Just before dark I saw your fire.'

'Lucky we lit it early. They're frightened of lions. Always are in uninhabited country.' He jerked his head in the direction of the palisade which surrounded the camp. The farthest glint of the red fire revealed a sort of ragged fence of saplings, eight or ten feet high, sharpened and staked into the ground with leafy boughs laced in between.

'You alone?' asked the stranger.

'I had only one "boy" with me, and I sent him back to camp,' prevaricated Dick.

In telling his story he had avoided mention of Norah. This was only prudent in a country, the affairs of whose tiny white population are common property; but the result had made his tale a little like the Book of Genesis without Eve, and he realised that to maintain this discretion would be increasingly difficult. For the moment, however, he temporised.

His first emotion on catching sight of that point of light through the trees had been unqualified delight. His spirits, which his intimate friends called 'mercurial,' had shot from the depths of despair, where a day of futile wandering had lodged them, to an almost arrogant elation. He only waited to scribble a line to Norah before he plunged across country in the direction of the light.

But that beacon, as if it possessed the qualities of the hope it inspired, proved illusive. Soon night overtook him struggling through thickets and stumbling over outcrops. Perhaps those physical obstacles imposed a pause for thought, for before he reached the camp, he had begun to wonder with what cloak to cover his rather ambiguous position. For the moment he could only decide on a policy of caution. The line he took must vary with the number, condition, and temper of his rescuers. It was possible that he only had to deal with natives.

Except that this guess was wrong, scrutiny of the figure, that sat opposite with eyes shaded from the fire heat, revealed little. The mystery may have been partly due to a lack of interest in third parties habitual to Dick. But in truth there did not seem to be anything very remarkable about the owner of the fire. He was youngish, shortish, darkish. Not a missionary, one would say, or an official or a trader, even had that desolate region offered souls for saving, bodies for the governing, or wants for the supplying.

That he was no plutocrat progressing triumphantly across the continent on a well-boomed shooting trip, the absence of blameless hecatombs of slaughtered buck and poisoned carnivora proclaimed. The modesty of his appointments—Dick was reposing his aching limbs on a packing-case and his host was as ill-provided—and the shabbiness of his torn shorts and frayed shirt underlined the point. Taken all round, an unnoteworthy man whom you would never pick out of a crowd. But as there was no crowd for a thousand miles to pick him from, the appearance of the Apollo Belvedere could not have been more welcome, or indeed more surprising.

Several leading questions designed to dispel the mystery were allowed to fall to the ground unanswered.

It is not impossible that, irritated by these feelers, the stranger was moved to repay in like coin. At any rate he followed up his disconcerting, 'You alone?' with a no less awkward, 'I don't know your name?'

'Brown,' said Dick Ward, after a moment's pause.

'Ah!' said the unknown, eyeing him, to Dick's mind, a trifle aggressively. 'Mine's Smith,' he added after a pause.

Suspicion of mockery crossed Dick's mind, causing him to glance quickly at his host. He appeared immersed in thought. At length he produced the result of his deliberations.

'Better start at dawn,' he said.

'Start?' echoed Dick. 'Where for?'

'Abercorn,' was the monosyllabic reply.

The announcement was not to Dick's taste. In the first place he did not like his plans made for him. Moreover, in his sanguine heart he had reckoned on a loan of at least enough provisions to carry Norah and himself to the nearest white settlement.

But now the man Smith was proposing—almost dictating—a double back into Rhodesia and an amalgamation of forces that would discover Norah's presence. And, as there were people at Abercorn who knew both her and Archie, he would have to tell the truth.

A shade stiffly then (it would never occur to Dick that Smith was in a position to offer whatever arrangement suited him) he replied that he didn't think he could manage to make for Abercorn, adducing as an excuse the state of his feet, which had suffered from the stony and precipitous route he had that day followed.

Smith heard him out without any expression on his face that would reveal his opinion. 'Matao,' he said to his capitao, 'the fire.' He seemed to collapse into his thoughts.

A native, naked save for his blanket, extracted his sprawling limbs from the fire-lit group that talked in sibilant whispers only broken by suppressed laughter at some scandalous tale. From the firewood pile he pulled the pale trunk of a tree long dead, eaten to a skeleton by white ants, and pitched it on to the fire. The impact released a shower of sparks and a flicker of flames that lit the underside of the overhanging boughs, showing their leaves livid against the richness of the sky, like the pattern on a brocade.

That's right, Matao,' said Smith, and relapsed into silence. Then, with the tone of one who had been reasoning all the time—'You see,' he said to Dick, 'you see, I haven't anything I can leave you. I haven't any tins myself or meal for my carriers. So I can't give you any.'

Dick, to whom salvation had seemed assured, felt as if he had been pushed off a cliff. 'We're living on what I shoot,' went on Smith after a pause; 'unfortunately I'm short of ammunition. Bloody short. What guns have you got?'

'Seven point nine Mauser and a heavy Westley Richards,' replied Dick dully.

'So, even if I could spare you any, it wouldn't fit.' Smith seemed to muse. 'I've got a 7.9 at home,' he continued. 'I might have a round or two in my bag. But not enough to be any use.'

A native rose from the fire and disappeared in the direction of the tent, returning at once with the stranger's heavy rifle. Some word understood in the conversation had recalled an unfulfilled task. He took his place by the fire and, producing a bundle of bits of rag, Rangoon oil and a pull-through, sat cross-legged cleaning the gun.

'That's Johnny, my fundi,'[1] said Smith. 'Saved my life the other day. Didn't you, Johnny?'

The native, who did not understand a word, laughed and his teeth flashed white in the darkness.

[1] "Fundi"—native hunter.

'So,' went on Smith, whose conversation seemed to follow his thoughts rather than his words, 'we'll have to stick together and do long days to Abercorn and live on what I shoot. I've got ammunition waiting at Abercorn,' he added.

Dick saw that Norah's presence could no longer be concealed. He had no other excuse for rejecting the stranger's scheme. He wished he had been more open from the beginning. Confession was difficult now. In any case a complete explanation to this not very sympathetic stranger was unthinkable. He took the plunge.

'You see, there's my wife,' was his phrase.

The stranger looked at him as if he were going to speak. But when ultimately he did, it was only to say, 'You didn't tell me Mrs. Brown was with you.'

Dick saw that silence was his best defence, and held his tongue while Smith submerged into one of his periods of thought. Dick waited anxiously on the words of this rather mysterious being who held Norah's life and his in his hands. Eventually the arbiter of destinies spoke; more exactly, he whistled.

'We're in a bit of a hole,' he said.

That first person plural relaxed Dick's tautened muscles.

'We'd never get a lady as far as Abercorn,' Smith continued. Dick agreed with a whole heart. 'I've only got enough carriers for my loads. None for her kit, let alone a machila.... If I increased their loads, we'd never make the distance.'

'How far is it?' asked Dick.

'God knows. I'm a stranger in this country, so are my natives. From what you tell me of your trip up the lake we must be over two hundred miles from the south end. Abercorn's twenty miles on.... That's by water—dodging mountains and ravines makes it longer. For instance, there's a road on the other side between M'pala and Badouinville. It's three hours by water and two days on foot.'

'Then why Abercorn?' asked Dick, attaining his objective.

Smith explained that while he didn't know his way to any Boma or settlement on this side of the water, Abercorn would be found by following the lake. And touch need never be lost with drinking water.

'But it's out of the question now,' he declared. 'I was counting on doing it in a fortnight. With the dozen odd rounds I've got, luck and good shooting, we should have been all right for food. But Mrs. Brown could never do twenty-five-mile days.'

Dick agreed.

'I suppose you think,' began Smith, and stopped. 'I'd better tell you,' he began again, 'what I'm doing here without ammunition or food. Else Mrs. Brown may wonder....'

Dick murmured a deprecatory phrase, which fortunately for his curiosity was ignored.

The account which the stranger proceeded to give of himself was not very detailed. He had, Dick gathered, been after elephant somewhere in the Congo. Wonderful game country, not far from the lake. So many elephant that he had used up most of his big bore ammunition. He had plenty of .303 stuff, but his .303 rifle had been twisted into scrap metal by the wounded bull Johnny had saved him from. (Hundred-pound tusks he had.) Then he got into trouble with the Bulamatadi. ('Poaching,' thought Dick.) So that there was question of confiscating his ivory. He'd got too much to risk losing, and he'd induced a fishing village to paddle him and his ulendo across to the British side.

'A bit risky, wasn't it, in a canoe at this time of year?' suggested Dick. 'What if a squall got up?'

'Risky?' repeated Smith. 'Yes, I suppose so. I had to pay the paddlers pretty high. Or rather their headman. I couldn't get enough canoes, either. That's why I left most of my stuff behind.'

He had crossed at night and landed a day's stage north of the present camp. Dick mentally supplied the missing detail of a reverent burial of the ivory on the beach. Now he was on his way to Abercorn.

'But of course I'll stay and see you and your wife through,' he added.

Dick was suitably grateful, but Smith was apparently already thinking of something else.

'We'll have to see what can be done,' he went on. 'Maybe my chaps could build a raft and we could edge our way along the coast till we reach a fishing village.... I'd better move camp alongside of you first thing to-morrow and get to work,' he reflected. A sudden thought seemed to strike him, 'I suppose Mrs. Brown has got a gun.'

Dick explained that the gun was ammunitionless.

'But,' protested Smith, 'you can't leave her alone there without a gun!'

'You're safe from crocs, on land, aren't you?'

'Yes, I think so, but...'

'She's got lots of firewood.' Dick was not as easy as he pretended, but he resented his host's interference, 'and there's not a hope of finding our way down in the dark. It's nearly vertical in parts, and I'm not sure of the way. Even in the daylight we'll have to wait for my "boy" to guide us.'

'Well, she's your wife, not mine,' said Smith, prompted possibly by some attendant angel with a taste for Greek irony.

As if to dismiss the matter, he reached out and offered Dick a cigarette. The metal of the case caught Dick's eye as he accepted, for elephant hunters do not, as a rule, sport gold, and curiosity impelled him to decipher the words engraved inside. The fire had sunk to a glow, but the sardonic-minded angel, anxious to see the fun, whispered to the stranger to kick the smouldering logs, and a tongue of flame licked high enough for Dick to read the words 'Archie from Norah' followed by a date that his retina had not recorded, ere the light had sunk.

There shot through Dick's being a fear as luminous as that arrow of fire and as quickly sped. Of course, even in the small white circle of Central Africa there must be lots of men named 'Archie,' who were given things by women called 'Norah.' Why should not Smith's Christian name be Archie? 'Archie Smith,' a perfectly convincing combination.

He could not help recalling with faint uneasiness that suspicion of mockery when the stranger declared his name. Had he been given a Roland for his Oliver, a Smith for his Brown?

But, even if his name were not Smith, why should it be Sinclair? Archie Sinclair, who was hundreds of miles away 'on cattle business,' presumably at Elizabethville.

With a start he realised that his host had asked him a question. Intent on the problem of the man's identity, he chanced assent, and was relieved when the answer proved adequate.

Of course the fellow might have found or even stolen the case. It certainly was not natural for a hunter to possess such an article ... if he were an elephant hunter. He was up to the knees in a morass of uncertainties; there seemed no bottom to the mystery; but until he was on firm ground, exhausted as he was, he knew he would not sleep. How could he get at the truth? One couldn't very well say to a man, 'I say, Smith, is your name Sinclair? Because, if so, I'm sleeping with your wife.' Nor could he interrogate natives in their master's presence.

Whatever happened, he must escape from this morose tête-à-tête, whose suppressions were driving him to idiocy. Conversation, he felt, would choke him; without it solution was no nearer. He rose to his feet with a gesture of weariness that was not assumed.

'You must take my bed,' said the putative Smith, moved again by the Spirit with a taste for double entendre.

He escorted Dick to the tent and left him there while he went to give orders for his own bed of leaves. Once alone, no pedantic delicacy restrained Dick. With the flair of a private detective, he found a handkerchief. Granted a good wife, this might solve the question. But the emblem 'A.S.' that rewarded his search and testified to a modicum of wifely devotion, only reduced the field to Archies, Sinclair or Smith.

It was not until he thought of looking under the bed that the myth of the latter's existence was exploded. There lay an old uniform case which its owner had preserved from army days. Painted on it, he read, '2nd Lieut. Archibald Sinclair, R.F.A.'"

CHAPTER II

After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings on that remarkable evening.

It appears that even the culminating evidence of the uniform case did not satisfy him, so reluctant is homo sapiens to admit unwelcome truth. He wanted to know more. How could Archie be here? There was not time for him to have gone back to the farm, to have found Norah's letter, and followed. To catch them, a pursuer would have had to overtake before the Mimi was boarded—the only boat that called at the Rhodesian end of the lake.

But what about that wandering 'stiff' who, he remembered Norah saying, had started for the Congo with her husband. Might not this be he? Suppose he had stolen Sinclair's kit at Elizabethville and was making for an East Coast port?

Dick's reluctance to look truth in the eye was removed by Archie's return to the tent, where a couch of leaves had been heaped. One of the grunts, with which he settled himself, matured into more or less coherent speech, 'By the way, sorry ... my name's not Smith ... Sinclair.... Thought I ought to tell you.... Good-night.'

Even a purist when hit on the head with a hammer ceases to argue whether coal or sledge. Dick was reduced to accepting facts at face value.

A stronger man might have seized the moment to face it out, while Archie's words held the door open to confession. A line too direct for Dick. He did nothing—not from fear, as he explained no doubt truthfully to Norah, but from a sense of the supreme awkwardness of the position. That was how he put it: you would probably say 'seeing what a poor fish he'd look.'

It is possible, even easy, to seduce a man's wife with a certain air. The gesture has been made picturesque, amusing, sublime, according to the clothes, characters, circumstances of the puppets. Don Juan, Casanova, young Lochinvar were masters of the different genres.

But collect your troop on a desert island of limited acreage, give Menelaus the sole power of rescue, and the laughter veers round against Paris. Worse still, Helen might lead it. And when you throw in one loaded rifle and give it to Menelaus, the romantic farce may degenerate into tragedy.

Dick, whatever he told Norah, cannot have been long realising that his position was not only false but dangerous, and his life at the mercy of the man he had wronged. He may not have expected actual violence, for Norah's allusions to her husband at that date of her disillusionment would have outlined a deliberate, cautious, rather pale-blooded being in whom civilisation had destroyed all sudden impulse. One who had reduced 'soundness' to a vice and was lamentably sure 'to do the sensible thing'; who, meditating both sides of every question and avoiding the ill-considered move, had almost lost power of action. One of those irritating people who are too busy giving the devil his due to reach for the holy water.

Since Dick, like the rest of us, preferred to use labels and pigeon-holes instead of observation and thought, he did not stop to compare this pallid creation with the lean, taciturn individual who slept a few feet from him.

But although the eminently 'sound' man of Dick's and Norah's fancy does not go about shooting people even on considerable provocation, he is not, Dick argued, of the type that steps far out of the way to save the lives of enemies.

There are men who would never tolerate the unsavoury and dangerous business of murder, but who would make slight effort to prevent the death of an enemy out of sight and earshot—witness the mediæval popularity of the oubliette. So Dick did not find unconvincing the figure of an outraged husband who pursued his way to Abercorn and left the identified Mr. and Mrs. Brown to shift for themselves.

Fear of some such fate is the only excuse I can find for the scheme which he afterwards confessed to Norah. It was, he said, the only way out of the impasse. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there was anything unsporting in his plan, any gleam of the phosphorescent aura of treachery. If pressed, he might have produced the old excuse about Love and War; a sophism, which, pushed to logical extremes, justifies, I suppose, arsenic in the Burgundy and babies on the bayonet.

An acute moral sense was never Dick's weakness; still, one would have expected common sense to save him from the stupidity of confiding in Norah his happy thought of stealing her husband's gun and leaving him and his natives to ... fend for themselves. He must have been very sure of the spell his adoration cast.

No doubt Africa was probing him too deep. In the last twenty-four hours she had unmasked batteries too heavy for her victim. Blow on blow had been hammered at his weakest points. She had opened with her favourite gambit of starvation and had daunted his courage with its shadow. She had lowered his vitality by an interminable day of incessant toil and disappointed hope. She tormented him with the sudden display of a salvation that faded into a trap from which there was no honourable issue.

Her machinery was ponderous enough to shatter the morale of a finer man than Dick. It was like shooting rabbits with a field-gun. Dick was that not uncommon flower of our civilisation—a thoroughly charming fellow. Just the man for a dance at your house, a rubber at your club, a week-end at your partridges. Good-looking, well-dressed, well-mannered, it was impossible not to like him at sight.

Alas! the forest cares nothing for looks, clothes, or manners.

The mild fires of public-school and life about town had not tempered his metal hard enough. He had had an easy war, largely spent at Bolo House. In his spells at the front, he had the support of discipline, example, comradeship; responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. Now he had to fight a duel with Africa for an opponent.... And hate, that the war taught us so quickly kills all sense of sportsmanship, blindfolded him.

As he thought of his dependence on the man he had wronged, his heart contracted. He was so ignominiously at the mercy of one on whom he had hitherto bestowed a smile of pity.

And why? Not because his enemy was braver, or cleverer, or a better man in any way, but just because he had a loaded rifle. From whatever angle he regarded this intolerable triangle, the gun dominated. Looked at as a means of securing food, in Archie's prejudiced hands, it dictated terms. As a weapon of offence, it imposed no less. So long as Archie held this card, Dick and Norah were impotent, immobilised, compelled ignobly to confess their liaison and accept starvation or such humiliating terms as their master saw fit to stipulate.

Archie was the common enemy whose advantage must be torn from him without consideration of his ultimate fate.

The tent in which Dick and his intended victim were sleeping was small, some eight feet by six, a one man load. He could not help contrasting his own luxurious installation with double fly, bathroom and verandah. Here was barely room for the two men to sleep. On the ground between them lay the gun, but close to Archie's hand. The firelight showing through the canvas gave a dull gleam off the barrels. It was not a magazine rifle, and the two rounds in the chambers would not go far. Archie's ammunition bag, which lay behind his head, must be secured.

His deep breathing proclaimed sleep. God send the natives by the fire slept as sound.

Moving an inch at a time to minimise the creaking of the camp bed, Dick reached out and out till his muscles were ready to snap. At last he secured the strap and lifted the bag gently to him. The rifle fell an easier prey.

With heart throbbing in the silence he lay still, waiting for the flames to die down and mask his sortie. It seemed hours before the firelight faded. He must act before a native woke to heap on fresh fuel. With infinite pains not to break the silence, he rose from his bed. His heart stood still at a leopard's bark. There was no break in Archie's breathing. Picking his way through the stray leaves that strewed the ground, he tiptoed to the door.

He must have made a sound in unlacing the flap.

'What is it?' came Archie's quiet voice.

'I heard something.'

'Lion?'

'Leopard, I thought.'

Archie was beside him.

'Thank you,' he said, and took the gun. Dick had already laid the cartridge bag on the ground.

Together they interrogated the sleepers by the fire. Archie—'damnably thorough,' thought Dick—searched for spoor with a hurricane lamp.

'I must have imagined it,' said Dick, when they had regained the tent.

'Looks like it,' replied Archie dryly. Then 'Wake me next time you want my gun,' he said.

But whatever suspicion he may have framed about his guest, it did not keep him awake, and soon his regular breathing formed an accompaniment to Dick's night thoughts. Not that they were very coherent. The grotesque failure of his plot, whose attempt, you must admit, had taken some resolution, left him physically exhausted and emptied. He lay crushed almost beyond feeling, while the hours that were left him to find a solution passed.

Consciousness of this flight of time forced him to bend his will to fresh scheming. But his anxious thought produced nothing more heroic than the decision to ask Norah what to do. After all it was she who had deserted Archie, and she ought to have her say in the handling of him. As soon as it was light he would slip down and lay the matter before her. 'Shift the responsibility on to her,' would have been honester phrasing, for Dick was by now a beaten man.

But even this wouldn't work. The curse of abortion seemed to descend on every plan he devised. If he left at dawn, Archie, his suspicions over the name question reinforced by the gun episode, would be only too glad to start on his way without wasting more time over an unsatisfactory individual who fortunately had disappeared.

And with Archie, intolerable thought, would vanish hope of life. Everything seemed to swing round in a vicious circle to focus the spotlight on the whip in Archie's hand.

Was there no other course than a full confession at the eleventh hour? To wake the man up and say, 'I've seduced your wife, I've told you a pack of lies. I've tried to steal your gun and leave you to starve. Now will you get me out of this hole, please?'

It wasn't thinkable. At the same time, it was inevitable. What else.... What else...."

* * * * * * *

"I have always," said Ross, "felt a profound admiration for the last Earl of Derwentwater who, when his army was surrounded at Preston in the '15, went to bed.

Dick in a similarly untenable position fell asleep."

CHAPTER III

The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of the guide who was to lead the way down the hills. Until he came there seemed no object in waking Brown or whatever his real name was.

By nature incurious, Archie could not help suspecting that there was something wrong about the man. It was not natural to find so feckless a being alone in the wilds. He seemed, moreover, to have something to conceal. Archie liked them with less looks and more honesty. What the devil had he been doing in the middle of the night with his gun? A queer bird.

But the man was in a hole—a baddish hole—and out here it was up to one white man to help another. He began to make plans. Most of them were blocked by the man's wife. You couldn't ask a woman to do too much. What sort of a wife would the chap have? Something fair and fluffy and adoring, he decided. He wasn't too sure they were married. That would explain some of the mystery ... not that it was any of his business.

As he came to this fallacious conclusion, the thin sweetness of whistling trickled through the quiet of the forest like tinsel against night.

'Another white man,' thought Archie. 'The place is like Piccadilly.' Then he reflected that Mrs. Brown must be coming up the hill to join her husband and wondered with a twist of his lip whether she would have the presence of mind to answer to that name.

The whistling started again, closer. Why did that syncopated phrase bring the colour of emeralds before his eyes? Were the words about emeralds? More like Kentucky, Tennessee, and the rest of the rural spots that American song writers ache to revisit.

Then he remembered: it was an emerald green shawl crossed tightly over a woman's flexible shoulders. The fringe hung to the ankle whose silk-clad movement caught and lost the light as her foot tapped to the rhythm. Her back was framed in the lighted blank of a long window that gave on to the London street where he stood smoking. Dawn was near, and a grey light invaded the ball-room, revealing the pallor of the electricity, the withering of the flowers, the weariness of the women.

She had half turned to her companion, and Archie, invisible in the square, had rested his gaze on the silhouetted curve of her cheek. She moved again, and it gripped his heart to see how tired her eyes were. What a little thing she looked with her figure held firmly by that emerald shawl!

Funny how the whistled tune recalled that picture of Norah and all that sort of life.... Ah, well! in a few months now, when the cattle deal was through and the ivory sold, he'd have made her happy by taking her back. The price of ivory must be somewhere about twelve shillings now, but...

At that moment Norah stepped into the sunlit clearing. Coming from under the close shadow of the forest, she was dazzled, the oblique rays of the sun shining in her face. Archie rose to meet her, amazed. How had she found him? What had brought her? What was her need of him?

Never free with words, wonder held him silent, conscious only of gladness that she was there. But gladness left him when recognition dawned in the shocked eyes she shaded from the sun. Not for him, they revealed, had she come.

Her arm raised against the sun went out, pushing something away, and her face as she looked down was bloodless. So she stood for a second, then up went her chin with the old defiant gesture.

'Why did you follow me?' she said, her deep voice damped down till he could hardly hear.

'Follow you?' he repeated.

'Didn't you understand what I wrote?' she asked.

The pause which followed was long, even for Archie's conversational methods. Speech was forced on her again.

'The letter I left you at the farm.'

'The farm? I've been in the Congo.'

'You don't know...?'

'Know what, Norah?' his voice, usually expressionless, seemed to plead; 'tell me, what has happened.'

'In a minute, Archie. Give me that packing-case to sit on, will you. I've been on short rations lately.'

She noticed that, bringing the box, he fumbled like a blind man.

He pressed her to have breakfast before she talked.

'No,' she said, 'I must get this over first,' and regretted the ungracious words when she saw him flinch. If you mind that...' she began. 'Archie, you mustn't mind anything about me. I can't bear you to mind.'

His reply fell so low that she had to strain her ears to catch it. The words confirmed her flash of understanding.

'You,' he murmured reluctantly, 'are the only thing I mind about. As long as nothing's happened to you.'

A few seconds had passed since Norah had stepped into the sun. In that space she had ranged the gamut of emotion. The first sight of Archie had dazzled her brain, as the sun her eyes. For a moment the earth had reeled in a vertigo. And its reeling hurled her into a lake of shame that stung like the fumes of ammonia: shame at the ludicrous, the indecent figure she cut. Anger succeeded. Anger with Archie, whose pursuit had put her in this intolerable position. How like a man, she thought, to come to recapture the woman he had not troubled to keep! How blundering! How undignified!

Archie's first words dispelled her resentment. And his patent sincerity was troubling. Was there some mistake? ... And somehow she saw Archie for the first time for months—or was it years?—saw something she had missed.... Archie's rigid face, his voice so resolutely kept from trembling told her there was another unconsidered facet in her romance. With all her high thinking, her regard for loyalty, bond, rights, she had missed the one factor that denied her freedom—that Archie might still care.

He cared. Must have cared all the time. The distress he failed to conceal did not spring from the outraged vanity of a husband wounded in his pride of possession. The hurt was deeper, deep in his undemonstrative heart.

She was naturally sensitive to others' suffering, and it seemed to her that not only Archie, not only herself, but the whole forest vibrated with pain. She had created it: nothing she could do would dull it.

She found herself resenting the pity that tore her heart—that desolating, impotent, futile pity! What was the good of pity, affection even, for Archie, when it was passion she felt for Dick. All that remorse could do was to blunt, to sully that passion. It was too late to think of Archie's feelings now. She could only go forward.

'Archie!' she said. He was standing with his back turned to her, his hands deep in his pockets, clenched, they must have been, and tightly, for the veins on his arms to stand up like that. 'Archie, stay there, don't turn round till I've told you.'

He made neither sign nor sound.

'Archie, I think I'm going to hurt you. I've only just seen...' Words, words which altered nothing, spared nothing. She spoke quickly, raising her voice. 'That letter, the letter that's waiting at the farm, said I was ... was leaving you.'

'Leaving me,' he repeated her statement, his voice toneless like a sleep-walker's.

Suddenly he whipped round, for the instant mastered by his emotion. He caught her shoulder and held her at arm's length. That night she found the bruise, but at the time she felt the pain no more than he knew he inflicted it.

'Why, Norah, why? I thought we were going to be so happy. I never knew. Never guessed. Tell me, why?'

She felt explanation impossible. Her hands came out to touch him, but fell helpless to her sides.

'But I never meant to hurt you so, my dear,' she said.

He let go of her shoulder, slowly, regretfully, as though he touched her body for the last time.

'There's nothing,' he said. 'Nothing I can do?'

She shook her head. His hopes must be killed.

'There's another man,' she said.

'That——'

'Dick Ward,' she interrupted him.

'That fellow who came to my fire last night?'

She nodded.

'Why in hell did I let them light the fire,' he said. 'He'd have starved then.'

He walked abruptly to the tent and kicked at the flap.

'Come out of that!'

'What's the matter?' Dick's voice did not sound as unconcerned as he would have wished.

'You come out!'

'No need to speak like that,' and Dick emerged. He thought it wise to ignore Archie. 'Hallo, Norah,' he said. 'Why didn't you wait at the camp?'

The assumption of ownership was ill-timed. Archie's sunburnt face went brick red, and he came very close to Dick.

'If you don't clear out, I'll break you up.'

Dick Ward towered above his adversary, but there his advantage ended. He carried too much flesh, and his splendid torso looked best under a tennis shirt. But Archie's muscles had been worked into steel by twenty-five-mile days after elephant, and made him as awkward an opponent as a six-inch shell.

'My dear Sinclair,' said Dick, 'we must talk this over like men of the world.' The tone of patronage alone would have been enough. Archie's feet shifted and his right knee turned and bent for the upper-cut that in another second would have smashed upwards under Dick's jaw, when Norah's low voice broke in:—

'Archie! Dick! Don't; you're making things worse!'

Her instinct was to save her lover. He was in danger, he was her lover. The pity she had lately felt for Archie was in a way disloyalty to Dick.

The men stood tense. Archie did not relax his wound-up muscles.

'Archie!' she cried, whipping her nerves that anger might overlay compassion, 'Archie, come here. For the love of God, behave like a civilised being!'

'I told him to go,' said Archie sullenly. But he lowered his eyes from his enemy's and his fist slowly loosened.

'How can he go?'

'Why not?'

'Where can he go to? Do you mean him to starve?'

Archie shrugged his shoulders. What happened to Dick was indifferent to him, provided he went. Norah blew on the embers of her passion to kindle a blaze that should scorch pity from her heart.

'Very well. We'll go,' she said.

Archie did not answer and silence closed in on them, a sinister silence like the patch of calm in the centre of a typhoon. They waited. Dick paced about the camp. He did not try to hide the commotion of his nerves. To Norah sitting still on her box, time seemed to be measured into lengths. Something must come now ... or now ... or now.

And as she waited, she watched over the trees a falcon with the blue-grey plumage of a dove hang under the hard blue heaven motionless, save for its questing head. Then it swooped. Would Archie's completed thought deal death like that?

But when he spoke it was in a lower tone.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'I don't know what to do. Norah'—he turned to her with appeal in his eyes—'I must be quiet, don't you see, and think. I must get things clear.'

This was an Archie whom Norah knew better than the hard, decided, almost fierce animal that had just threatened Dick. He wanted to think things out.

'I must be alone,' he went on; then flamed out again. 'For God's sake send him away for half an hour.'

'Dick,' said Norah steadily, 'you'd better go down to the camp.' His eyes signalled to her to come too. Archie divined the intention.

'Norah,' he began, 'don't, just for now, don't...' then bitterness broke over him. 'Oh, well, it doesn't matter by now, does it?'

She resigned herself to the rack and promised to stay with him while Dick went down to the lake. But Archie spared her. He was going, he said, to walk in the hills, and called Matao to give her breakfast.

'I ought to have seen that Ward had breakfast,' he said. Then as he paced away into the forest she thought she could detect the words, 'they serve breakfast in the condemned cell....'

In moments of danger Norah's romanticism had a way of lapsing, leaving her as practical as a Swiss hotel-keeper. She ate a good meal of cold roan. She knew she would need all her strength to keep Archie and Dick apart. Moreover, if this was to be her last breakfast, it should be a good one.

She did not suppose that even this new, incalculable Archie contemplated leaving her to starve; she was less sure about his plans for Dick. And of course she would stay with Dick.

'Her honour rooted in dishonour stood.
And faith unfaithful kept her falsely true.'

A tag that Miss Briggs had taught her in the schoolroom as an example of some eccentricity of grammar or other. It was sometimes true of life.

She must be prepared for anything. Archie might not act in hot blood: he might think things out, but she was not reassured. The Archie she knew had a habit of logical thought. And if this unfamiliar man of action came to the conclusion that it was not his business to succour the enemy within his gates, he would translate his ideas into deeds.

As she meditated the change she saw in Archie, a sound caught her ear, and looking up she saw Dick signalling to her from the edge of the clearing. With a shrug she walked across to him. She noticed that his hair was still untidy and his clothes crumpled from the night spent without his gear.

'This isn't fair!' she said, when she reached him.

'Is he here?' he asked anxiously.

'Archie's in the hills, but I promised ... why couldn't you wait?'

He stepped into the open. 'I couldn't, Norah, not alone; down on that shore.'

'I did last night.' She did not tell him she had not dared sleep or that she had taken to the hills as soon as she could see the white mist that rose from the warm water of the lake.

'I didn't have much of a night either,' said Dick, and related how Archie's identity had been disclosed.

He told his story in jerks, with quick glances over his shoulder and exaggerated gestures. Norah guessed that his nerves were breaking under the strain. His poise, his assurance was shattered. His debonair bearing had shrunk to the rags of a swagger that he pulled round him when fear allowed.

'What's he going to do, Norah? For Christ's sake, what is he going to do?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know,' she said.

He jumped at a sudden snap of a branch. A carrier had stepped on a dry twig.

'What was he saying to you? I couldn't hear.'

'That he must be alone and think.'

Dick's voice went shrill. 'You say he's sitting there, thinking in cold blood whether he'll let us starve?'

She shrugged her shoulders. She believed Archie was doing more than that. He was trying to save something out of a wrecked universe. If she had not exaggerated the look in his eyes, he might even be struggling for sanity.

Dick might be right that their fate swam in the crucible, but she was so desolately unhappy it hardly seemed to matter. Dick's misery took a less stoical form.

'It's awful,' he was saying, 'hanging about to hear what he settles. We might be criminals in the dock. It's worse, for there the judge is not your enemy.'

Norah made no comment. What was the good of all this talk? ... and, well, she preferred Archie's way of taking a knock. Couldn't Dick spare her this pitiful sight into his soul? Was she cursed to torture her husband and debase her lover?

'You don't seem to see, Norah,' he went on after a glance over his shoulder, 'if he turns us off, we've got food left for one day, for one day, till to-morrow. Then three, four, or five days more we'll suffer the tortures of starvation. About Sunday we'll die.' His voice was out of his control. 'Die, do you understand?' He paused, and his fingers twisted restlessly. 'By Tuesday, in a week's time, Norah, by Tuesday we'll be rotten. Don't you understand?'

'Always the little ray of sunshine,' said Norah.

His hands went up to his head. 'Oh! you must think me a beast to say these things to you, but don't you see, you must go to your husband and get him to ... to stay. He'll listen to you, if you beg him. He can't have the heart. Ask for time anyhow. Plead with him. If you must, promise him...'

'To go back?' Her voice was hard.

Dick averted his eyes. 'Afterwards, things will be different. Anything may happen ... provided we are alive.'

'Dick,' said Norah passionately, 'I may be a rotter and a whore: d'you want to make me a coward too?'

'But don't you see...'

'For Heaven's sake shut up; you're making me hate you!'

When Archie left his camp, he had wandered aimlessly in the forest until he noticed a boulder, and sat down. Below him lay the lake as blue as the Virgin's robe. He could see the mountains of the farther shore, their tops ruled straight by cloud. They reminded him of Table Mountain and his landing with Norah at Cape Town when hope was high.

At his back towered the nearer lip of the crater. Its height seemed to disparage his emotion. How long would this mortal and his ephemeral trouble endure? The bitterness, which had succeeded his anger, passed and left him with a dazed sense of loss, in which consecutive thought was stilled. Pictures of the happiness, turned so suddenly to dust, rose in his mind:—

Norah's tawny hair, rebellious under her nurse's coif; Norah's slender hands opposite him at dinner tinged by the shaded candlelight; the way she used to throw herself into his arms when he came back on leave; a fluffy sort of dressing-gown she once had; and so on down the years of love and marriage till the moment when he heard that ragtime tune in the forest, whistled so gaily ... before she knew he was there.

That hurt worst of all. His mind ached into the vast query—Why? Why had he lost her? He had never understood how she came to love him, but what had he done to make that miracle cease? If she had only told him!

Her outburst on the farm, which sent him hurrying to the Congo, had come as a revelation. Manlike, he had assumed she liked the life she had chosen. And all the time...

He felt no anger against Norah. By some illogical working of his love she seemed to stand apart. Though his mind recorded her infidelity and reeled at it, his heart was filled with gracious recollections of her. What she was and had been, did not seem to be obliterated by what she did and what was done to her.

His hate focused blindingly on Dick Ward. Imagination of that coarseness defiling his wife's body drove the blood boiling to his brain, but he never thought of her as defiled. He was tormented by the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved, still loved, would always love.

But the swine who had killed her—lust for his blood mounted. To shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no great thing. If the war had not already shown him that, these years in the forest had dwarfed the importance of mankind. And his standards had been warped by these last weeks spent in the slaughter of monsters that take the three score years and ten of man's span to reach the stature that fits them for killing.

So for a while his mind played with the killing of Dick Ward ... until the memory that already the man's life was in his hands stayed him. In his pain he had lost sight of the crisis that before his appearance had faced Ward and Norah. He saw that he had only to stand aside and execution would be done. Or rather, since no harm must come to Norah, take her on alone with him, regaining his wife and obliterating her lover.

But all the time he saw the impossibility. He could not leave a man to die whom he had promised to help. Still less could he kill him. In a way Ward was his guest; he had come to Archie without food, or hope. His defencelessness protected him. And the duty that one white man in the wilds owes another, backed by the African tradition of help and hospitality, demanded his rescue.

Dick's helplessness, had he known it, was his strength.

So what Archie would have called 'being decent' prevailed, and, painfully, he began to plan the immediate future. He welcomed, indeed, anything that held his mind away from thought of his loss, the three lives.

The outcome of that salvation—what would afterwards become of Norah, Ward, and himself—he did not attempt to guess.

At last his ideas were in order. In spite of the heat he shivered as he got up to return to camp."

CHAPTER IV

The first face he saw was Dick's. In spite of the heat through canvas, Norah had retired into the tent. Archie wondered if it was to show she had not sent for Ward. 'Damn the fellow,' he muttered, 'can't he see he's asking for trouble.'

That wouldn't do, he reflected; in a minute he'd be at the man's throat. Must be normal; what was it Norah had said—'Be civilised'?

His attempt at normality and civility would have made an angel laugh.

'Rain's coming,' he growled.

'Yes,' replied Dick, and wondered whether this was the small talk of the tribunal before the black cap is assumed, 'that's why it's so appallingly hot, I suppose.'

Archie stared at him inimically. Dick's face was wet with sweat and his silk shirt stuck to his body. 'Heat or funk?' thought Archie uncharitably. But the limpness of the leaves and the attentions of the flies told him how hot it really was. And yet he was shivering. Fever coming, he concluded. Damned nuisance just now.

'Yes,' he said aloud, 'the rains.'

He could stand the fellow's physical presence no longer, and turned to the tent.

'Norah,' he said, 'we must make our plans.... I say, you oughtn't to be in this furnace.'

'I promised you...' she replied slowly.

He stared at her. Then some promises were binding! That wouldn't do either. If he was to go through this show decently he must rule out bitterness as well as anger.

They walked into the shade. Dick followed. His restless eyes, his fingers twining and loosing revealed his anxiety. Archie felt the pervading suspense and saw that for all his distaste for explanation he must declare himself. At last he broke the silence which seemed so intolerable to Dick's tormented nerves. His words were commonplace enough.

'This is a rotten position,' he said, and added, 'for all of us,' then paused for thought. 'If we were anywhere else,' he went on, 'I'd go away. A long way away, and let time'—he felt for a word—'mend things.' Another silence. 'Unless I called you out and shot you'—his rapid whisper was more startling than a shout. 'But, as it is, I can't clear out, or you'd both starve.'

Dick wiped his forehead.

'So we've got to stick together,' ended Archie, 'till we're out of this hole.'

Norah felt no relief. Between them in their several ways, these men made life more dreadful than death.

Archie began again. He was speaking now to Dick, though his eyes looked beyond him. 'I make one condition,' he said. 'I must have sole charge. You must do what I say. Otherwise I can't promise to pull it off.' He might have added that if Dick was to oppose him at every turn he couldn't promise restraint. 'Do you agree?' he asked curtly.

In his relief Dick would have agreed to change his creed.

I'm sure you're right,' he said, 'unity of command.' The reprieve had gone to his head like wine, and he talked light-headedly. 'By Jove, the heat! I felt suffocated.' But no whisper of a breeze had come to dissipate the heaviness that lay on the land. 'What's your scheme to get away?' he asked.

Archie forced himself to answer.

'Move down to lake level first.'

'Why not go on up here?'

'Blast the man,' thought Archie. Then aloud, 'How many days will it take us with Norah,' he hesitated before mentioning her Christian name to this fellow, 'to find a village?'

Dick spread out his hands.

'Well, I don't know either. We might be out of ammunition first. And what about water? And where are we going to get carriers for your loads from?'

Dick agreed brightly that by sticking to the lake their water supply was assured. It did not strike him that in his relief his words were not very profound. The business of striking camp proceeded.

'You'll have my tent, Norah,' said Archie, and gave Matao directions to have a shelter built for him.

Dick's exhilaration vanished. He opened his mouth to speak, but a menace in Archie's eye dissuaded him. He kicked at a partly consumed log and hummed gloomily. Archie's withdrawal to pack his kit at last gave him the opportunity to murmur something to Norah about 'rubbing things in.'

'Do you expect me to sleep with you under my husband's eyes?' she asked. 'Aren't you a trifle exigeant? Besides,' she added bitterly, 'you told me just now to make up to him.'

His retort was prevented by footsteps behind him. He turned and saw that he was being offered a couple of cartridges.

'Two rounds of 7.9 stuff I brought by accident.' Archie explained. 'Found them in my kit. They'll fit your Mauser.'

When the loads were ready, the string of carriers, with Changalilo at their head, straggled down the hill. The three Europeans, after a visible hesitation, followed. If their mutual company was unendurable, to descend singly at intervals would be grotesque. So these two men and their woman, the prey of all the forces that civilisation works to repress, hatred, love, fear, shame, pity, danger, were constrained by their sense of—was it humour or reticence?—to observe the usages of daily intercourse.

They passed the foot of the blow-hole chimney where Norah had sighted Changalilo the night before, and the view that was revealed gave them a momentary relief from the pain of thought.

All the week the clouds that herald the rains had packed closer and closer on the horizon, till now they lay like a litter of discoloured wool.

Across the lake the mountain tops which had been hidden in haze, stood out in the sun-bathed clarity of a primitive painting. Their crags and ravines, diminutive in the distance, looked as if human fingers had pinched and dinted them into the powder-green relief of a plaster map. Black against this green lay the foothills in the shadow of the cloud bank. The foreground was blocked by the near headland, heavily green with the green of English elms in August. Every tree that grew there was distinct, and the grass at their feet. At the water's edge gleamed pillars of white rock.

'I wish the rains would come,' said Norah at the end of a silence. 'I feel as if I were breathing hot fluff.'

But with the weight on her heart she would hardly have noticed the stifling heat, had she not dreaded the working of that suffocation on the men's nerves. As she glanced away from Archie's pale face she tried to forget the tales of violence, murder, suicide committed often on almost frivolous grounds in the exasperation of the heat that heralds the rains.

Here at lake level, close to the equator, the dagger of jealousy and despair hilt-deep in his brain, might not Archie find suicide or murder the only solution?

It was agony to be so impotent to avert the doom that hung over the two men she had loved and crucified. She felt, or imagined, their hot, angry eyes on her, and dared not look up lest she loosed the lightning. She alone could lay the passions she had so heedlessly aroused; and any word, any gesture almost, might precipitate the latent madness.

She was aware that the strain of the intolerable position could not endure; unless she lessened it something would snap. And the life of one or both of the men would pay. When death from starvation had threatened, she had pictured herself in a short dark corridor of days. In front stretched an iron-grey screen like a fireproof curtain. Behind it lay ... what? Now danger of death had lifted, and still the screen was there. Her mind was pinned to the emergency of the moment, but even had that urgent menace receded, she would not have dared to lift the curtain. What lay in store for her, she made no attempt to divine. Life with Dick, life with Archie, life alone? The future was too dreadful to contemplate, the ruin she had wrought too radical. And if—what she dreaded—took place, she would be making plans for men who would be dead at their fruition.

For the moment she anchored her conduct to the only course that she felt could not do harm. By a manner resolutely matter of fact, she might create a conventional atmosphere, might maintain the dangerous equilibrium of the moment until the impulse to violence died.

Archie, it seemed, when the vulture that tore at his entrails would let him, had resolved on the same conduct.

'What about resting here a bit?' he asked.

'I don't believe it's much good. It's as hot sitting as walking. What wouldn't I give for a breeze!'

'It may be days before it breaks,' said Archie. 'But if you're not tired the sooner we get down and start work the better.'

'What are you meaning to do?' asked Dick aggressively.

By now he had lost his fear of Archie. Enmity and suspicion had taken its place. He paid with hatred for the panic that had gripped his heart, for the doubts kindled in Norah's mind, for the glamour stripped from him. Where once he had felt contemptuous pity, an uncertain jealousy flickered. He hated Archie because he held the whiphand; he hated and despised him for not using it. He despised him that he might not despise himself. And he was uneasy. Why had the man promised to save him? Why, above all things, had he given him that ammunition? Was there a trap?

He wished he had not agreed to Sinclair's leadership. That condition, now he examined it, left the way open to every treachery. Was there a plot to separate him from Norah and let him starve?...

With all her drastic methods, Africa seems to have brought little out in Dick but a certain animal cunning. It was in a spirit of suspicious enmity that he asked the question which opened the discussion.

'What am I meaning to do?' repeated Archie. He refrained from adding, 'What in hell's that to you?'

'Yes,' said Dick.

'Build a raft, if you want to know.'

'A raft?'

'Look here——' said Archie, but Norah intervened in time.

'To get over to the Mimi, Archie?'

'To get along the coast.' Archie struggled with his instinct to produce a completed job, discussing it neither before nor after. But his reasonable nature told him that, where he gambled with the lives of others, they had a right to see his play.

By now they had reached the camp by the ruins. Under a stream of exhortation from Matao some of the carriers had started to pitch Norah's tent; others were cutting boughs for the shelter.

Norah led the way into the shade. The men followed.

'As far as I can see,' Archie began, 'there are three ways out that aren't too risky.'

He stopped and looked up at the sky, which was now heavy with cloud. The heat, however, was fiercer, as though a lid had been shut down on them.

'The weather matters too,' he explained.

'You were saying you had three plans,' said Dick.

Archie continued to address Norah. He told her that his first idea had been to stay where they were and wait for rescue, relying on the game they could shoot with the remaining ammunition, helped out perhaps by fish from the lake. The objection to this simple plan was that the game would move away and ammunition might be exhausted before help came.

'Alibaba said twelve days,' put in Norah.

'Doubt it,' muttered Archie. 'One of the Bulamatadi boats is in dry dock. Or so they told me at Songwe. They mightn't be in a hurry to send. Anyhow, it's a risk.'

There was a distant rumble of thunder.

'That may go on for weeks before anything happens,' said Archie.

'Or,' he went on, 'we could ferry over to the Mimi. What you said. I don't believe we'd be any better off. Any meat they could spare wouldn't go far among all of us. They'll have wasted half. More likely we'll have to feed them. And Ward's ammunition—that'll have gone by now. No native can resist cartridges.'

Norah remembered what had looked like the ammunition chest at the bottom of the disappearing dinghy. Its value would explain the Hindoo's incorruptibility. She expressed her conviction, and, at the mention of the Indian, Dick broke into curses.

'The third way,' Archie began again, 'has got the points of the other two. If we made a couple of rafts, we can tap the Mimi for anything in her that's any use, and we can coast along the shore with game and fish always handy. Sooner or later we must come to a fishing village.

'Danger,' he added, 'is squalls and crocs.'

Dick considered the scheme. If there was a trap, it was well hidden.

'It seems all right,' he admitted.

'That's most gratifying,' replied Archie, and Norah reflected that the squalls which would follow the coming of rain might be less dangerous than the heat which came before it.

'We're wasting time,' said Archie, and calling Matao he gave him his orders in Chi-wemba.

The hardwoods, he explained when he had finished, Kayimbi, Mulombwa, Mubanga and the rest, would not float. But there was a little light timber from which the natives cut their canoes.

'It's scattered about the hills,' he said. 'I'll have to blaze it before we start felling'—but his eyes showed his hesitation to leave his wife with her lover. She wondered what to do. If she offered to come, Dick might be stung to dangerous speech.

'I'll go and lie down,' she said. 'I've got a headache.'

An hour later, the apparently deserted hills echoed with the resonant chopping of axes. A dozen wooden bells seemed scattered in the forest as the tall trunks sounded with a rhythmic clop! clop! under the soft native iron. A rending, splitting noise, and the first tree, with the swish of a gigantic broom, tore through the boughs, prostrating its neighbours. The wooden bells clanked on as its limbs were hacked from it.

Soon Norah found the heat of the tent unbearable. She wandered to the shore, where she hoped a breeze might be perceptible. But the water was as smooth as a mirror. She faced inland. A tree top taller than the rest caught her eye. It stirred. The wind must be rising, although her wet face felt no breath. The tree trembled now. Its boughs waved, although wind seemed no more than a memory of the dead. The tree swayed. A modulated sway that lengthened with each period, until with a splintering crash it submerged beneath the ripple of the surrounding leaves. It was man's work she saw, not the wind's.

A native issued from the dark line of the forest. The light caught the tawny bundle he carried. Approaching the lake, he tossed a small log into the water that the splash might scare any crocodile which lurked there; then he bent and pushed the tangles of lushishi, broad strips of flexible bark, into the silvery margin. He hooked his axe over his naked shoulder and went off in search of more. To-morrow, Norah knew, the sodden lushishi would be twisted into rough ropes to lash the raft.

She pictured the adventure of the raft and shrank from the heavy hours that awaited the three of them cramped side by side on that narrow platform.

Archie had said 'two rafts,' but one would carry the loads and the carriers who were not needed to paddle their masters. It was a pity a sense of the ridiculous did not allow one raft to each European. Jealousy, shame, hatred demand more footage than a raft can give. All the world may be too little.

But she was glad Archie had not decided to wait in the bay. Her instinct that tragedy pervaded the deserted settlement had had foundation. It now urged escape before tragedy deepened.

She heard a European tread on the shingle and turned to find Archie.

That's started,' he said. 'I'll ask Ward to keep an eye on them while I try to get a buck.' Determined to pursue any indifferent topic, she asked what sort of game he expected to find.

'Might be anything. But I must keep on till I find something big and fairly eatable. Dwyka or klipspringer are too small to be worth a cartridge, while zebra or waterbuck ... I tried eating zebra the other day!"

She sympathised. There was a pause; both felt awkward.

'I've told off a man,' pursued Archie resolutely, 'to make snares and things. Though I don't believe they ever catch much in them. Those drop traps are the best. A beam poised over a gap in a bit of fence. We might get some small stuff that way—a katiri or even a bush pig. Doubt it, though.'

'Fish?' said Norah, remembering her efforts of the day before.

'Yes, that's what I wanted to ask you. I've told Matao to find some one with ideas; when he comes will you keep an eye on him?'

'They're all Awemba, I suppose?' She knew that that once warlike people had no water-lore.

'Yes, and Matao was shocked when I told him to find one with an Awisa[1] mother.'

[1] The Awisa, with a certain knowledge of the simpler arts of peace, were conquered and swamped by the purely predatory Awemba.

After a moment of hesitation Archie left her. She saw him speak to Dick, then with his gun under his arm he disappeared into the trees.

As she watched him go, she could not restrain a feeling of admiration. In days past she had jibbed at his thoroughness. She saw its value now. The practical man might not cut a romantic figure; but for coping with romantic situations, he could give a stone to any Lohengrin or Lancelot. His cautious, deliberate nature, how it used to irritate her! How irresolute she had often thought him! But now she sighed for a little less resolution in his handling of Dick. Only the deliberate humour she had once despised could avert tragedy. But how formidable the forces against its return!"

CHAPTER V

Two or three big drops of rain fell. Norah made her way slowly back to camp. Near the ruins she was stopped by Dick, already tired of watching the woodcutters. She noticed that access to his shaving tackle had restored his freshness.

'Norah,' he said, with his hint of a brogue, 'why have you been keeping away from me all day, the day I needed you most?'

Norah, never less inclined for sentiment, found two answers ready to her lips; the first, that any attention to him might set Archie at his throat, too melodramatic; the second, that in his present mood he was best left alone, too brutal. So she remained silent.

'What was Sinclair saying to you on the beach?' he asked.

'Nothing much. Being decent.'

Dick's face darkened.

'You mean I'm not?'

'Well, the way you come to me the moment his back's turned, makes me look pretty cheap,' she said dispassionately.

'How can I talk to you before him? Be fair, Norah.'

'Is there anything to talk about?' she asked. 'Isn't all as bad as we can make it without more talk?'

'All right,' said Dick, 'I'll go back to the wood-cutting. If you'd rather talk to Sinclair...'

'Oh! Dick,' she cried. 'Don't let's quarrel. It's horrible enough, without that!'

'Our love's horrible?'

'I didn't mean that. The world's horrible; life's ugly, cruel. I thought I was finding something beautiful, and all I've done is to hurt, betray, spoil....'

Dick's jealousy boiled over.

'What makes you suddenly so careful of Sinclair's feelings?' he asked. 'He had his chance of you. He wasn't man enough to keep you.'

Norah was silent. Why couldn't Dick shut up?

'But he's trying to get you back. I know it.'

'You think he'd take me back?' she asked the question half bitterly, half soberly, and for a moment she fingered the sheet, draping a future that lay as imperturbable as a corpse.

'Do you want him to?' said Dick violently. 'I'd rather see you dead first.'

'It isn't on the cards,' she stated quietly. She had no clear idea of her own hopes, let alone Archie's intentions. She said as much to Dick. He caught up her words.

'Yes, what's he up to, Norah?' Dick's voice was eager. 'What's his game? Hasn't he given any idea?'

'Has he any "game"?' she asked wearily. 'Unless fighting with beasts in your heart is a game.'

'Why did he give me those cartridges?' persisted Dick. 'He wasn't keen on me touching his ammunition last night!' he added with a laugh, and made Norah the confidante of his nocturnal adventure.

As a word, or a tune, or a scent may fire a train of latent memory and illumine or connect experiences till then dark and unrelated, so Dick's story threw across his actions a beam as unsparing as the blue glare of some great arc light in a main street that midnight, rain, and frost had emptied.

Memories crossed her mind like pictures on a screen. Again Dick humbled himself on the shore of the lake, and again she heard the paddles splash as the Hindoo disappeared across the water. She saw Dick's helpless stare as he sat limply on the pile of baggage contemplating the disaster he had provoked and was impotent to stem. She felt him tugging at her sleeves in naked terror of Archie's decision in the hills. His breath was warm on her face, urging her to beg the man they had wronged for a few days' life. She blushed with shame at his advice to offer to go back, a promise, said he, that need not be kept.

A dozen times he was convicted of meanness, ingratitude, treachery. She saw for a bungler and a coward the man she had left all to follow. The man she had loved—that she still loved for all she knew. Feeling was dried out of her by pain and anxiety, but her brain told her that, if ever the crisis passed, she would find the image of Dick still near her heart.

And Archie, while she could see each of his virtues—pluck, loyalty, gentleness—written in letters of fire, she knew that never again could he quicken her pulses.

Hot scorn of herself and her lover filled her veins, but she did not voice it. All her wit was devoted to the task of keeping the men from each other's throats. She scrutinised every word before she spoke it, that nothing she said might send the precarious triangle, at whose apex she stood, heeling to disaster.

So while her realisation of Dick's unworth penetrated her brain as lead is melted and poured into a mould, she was guiding the conversation to soothe his ruffled vanity: and not until she felt her end attained did she leave him on the excuse that she must see about the fishing.

On her way to the beach she was met by a note from Archie asking her to send six men to carry in a hartebeeste he had shot. With a sigh of relief she dismissed one anxiety. There was food now for all for a day or two.

It was dusk before the procession returned in pairs, the dismembered limbs of the buck swinging from freshly-cut poles that rested on their bowed shoulders. Anxious to regain the firelight before dark, their knees were bent and their hips swung in a gliding trot. One arm supported the pole, the other held a spear or axe. Behind them walked Archie with his gun over his shoulder. He gave orders for the meat to be spread on the ground beside the fire and bade the tense, black circle stand farther back.

'In this heat the stuff will be rotten by to-morrow night,' he remarked. 'They won't mind, though.'

He told Changalilo to take the saddle for the European table, and watched while Matao with an axe divided the rest between the natives. They knelt and clapped their hands in salutation before they withdrew, clasping each man his sanguinary portion. Soon a ring of bright little fires half-burnt, half-smoked the spitted meat, and the night was full of soft voices and high-pitched laughter.

Archie subsided into a deck-chair and sat silent, his head in his hands. Nervous of his thoughts, Norah inquired about the kill.

He had had to cover a lot of ground, he answered, uttering his words carefully. No, there wasn't a herd; a solitary ram, turned out probably for his bad temper; grazing behind an anthill. He was hoping she would not hear his teeth clattering against each other. Pains that started from the base of his skull and shot across his head assured him that an attack of malaria threatened.

With an effort he answered Norah, who, anxious to cover Dick's silence, had asked another question.

'One round,' he said, 'heart shot.'

When at last dinner came he could not eat it. As soon as the others had done, he withdrew to his shelter. Though she guessed he was ill, Norah did not dare to follow, and after enduring Dick's sullen monologue retired early to the tent Archie had allotted her. Body triumphed over mind, and she slept as soon as she had stretched herself on her bed.

In the early hours of the morning she woke. She was conscious at once, before thought returned, of the oppression of impending disaster that had been her waking burden. Then she remembered.

Refreshed by sleep, her brain took up its round, searching for the path that led to safety. She saw at last why that search had been futile. Till now she had not dared face the future, to imagine what lay behind the curtain. A flash of insight revealed that she must pledge her future if she was to cope with the present.... For a time she fought off the question that clawed at her brain. At last she confronted it—'Must I give up Dick?' she asked herself.

With reluctant clearness she saw that, if she gave up her lover and told her husband, she would sterilise the soil so fertile with violence. But could she pay the price of sacrifice and humiliation? Could she let Dick go? Though all passion was buried under ashes, Dick was still a part of her subconscious life. She could not at once uproot the vivid memories of their few weeks together. Her emotions were in a state of suspended animation, shut off, not dead. What needs might not arise in that future she shrank from visualising!

Moreover, Dick loved her. Must he pay the price as well? Must she go on racking the men who loved her and inflict on Dick the anguish Archie seemed to suffer?

When she was sinking into a morass of conflicting emotion, pride came to her help. Whatever else she felt for Dick, she knew that she despised him. Contempt makes an ill bedfellow. A woman can love a weak man whom she pities; she is too practical to trust her life to a man she despises.

Almost against her will, Norah's mood hardened. The tent stifled her. She must make this cruel decision in the open air. Slipping into a cloak, she stepped into the moonlight.

The natives, less black than their shadows, slept in contorted postures about the ground. Here was an arm flung out, as if a declamatory gesture had beep stilled in sleep; there was a knee drawn up as if pain had found cessation in death. The ruined tower threw its shadow across the sleepers, a shadow which seemed to Norah the visible presentation of the doom she had divined.

In the distance a hyæna howled like a ship's syren and reminded her that it was not safe to move beyond the arc of light flung by the fire. As she took the chair Dick had left, she was startled by a voice she did not recognise. She could distinguish no words. Quietly she picked her way between the sleeping bodies to the shelter where Archie lay. The moonlight fell in flecks between the leaves, and she could see Archie sprawling on his back, nearly naked, his lips muttering in fever. As she picked up the clothes her arm brushed against him. He caught at it with hot, dry hands. A string of curses poured from his unconscious lips as he gripped her wrist with his two hands, digging his thumbs into her flesh. The pressure was so painful she felt she must wake him, but with a final twist under which her skin tore, he let go.

'You won't touch her again,' he muttered. 'Damn you, not ever again!'

She pulled the clothes on to the bed and tucked them in, then fetched another blanket from her tent and spread it over him, that he might sweat out the fever. He had enough to endure without that.

She bathed her arm and sat down, her hesitation gone. The manner of Archie's dreaming proved that her fears were not imaginary. It lay with her that dreams did not pass into deeds.

Nor could she leave Archie to fight his fever alone; but until she had made clear her position between the two men, it was not possible for her to take up her duty by her husband's sick-bed. As another man's acting mistress she had no right there. The sight of her might even make him worse.

She would not feel clean till she had humbled herself before Archie, told him she renounced Dick, and offered to fulfil the contract she had vowed and broken. Archie might well refuse the spoiled remnants of her loyalty, but she would at least have done the little she could to repair the irreparable wrong. And Dick ... she did not dare to think of Dick. Before she spoke to Archie she must tell Dick. He had a right to hear from her lips. She had to tell him that their love must end ... was ended. She would have to launch upon a hopeless explanation of motives she barely understood and reasons which he would refuse. Every shred of reticence would be torn to tatters. Agonised but inflexible, she would have to listen to his reproaches, arguments, prayers.

Could she trust her will under that fire? Would she not be wiser to tell Archie before she told Dick? Once she had offered to her husband the remainder of her burnt-out life, honour would keep her weak flesh from yielding to her lover's entreaties.

Nor was that all. Dick jilted, his love and vanity ableed, would be in the mood to provoke Archie, not yet aware of his wife's renunciation, to fatal action; and the tragedy she had given her love to avert would be consummated in a death grapple between the two men she had loved and left.

Before she fell asleep again, her mind was made up that first Archie must hear she had given up Dick for ever. Then Dick must be told."

CHAPTER VI

As soon as it was light, Norah was awakened by Archie's voice outside her tent. He was speaking in Chiwemba, and she could hear Matao's monosyllabic replies.

Her call brought Archie to the doorway. She resisted an impulse to tell him to come in; he seemed so infinitely remote.

'You ought to be in bed,' she told him.

He assured her that he was better.

'What is it? Fever?'

'Yes. But it's down this morning.'

If he had not been standing with his back to the light, she could have seen from the colour of his eyes that it was not very far 'down.'

'You ought to have a day in bed and give yourself a chance,' she urged him.

'Can't. Every moment brings the rains nearer. No joke to be caught on a raft by a squall.'

She asked if the natives could not be left to work alone, or, she hesitated a moment, under Dick's charge.

He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on to get a buck with every round and not a day must be wasted. Ward, he said evenly, was in bed.

'You're an obstinate Scot, Archie,' she said with a little sigh. 'You must go your own way.'

'Afraid so,' he replied, with an effort at a smile. Then in a gentler tone than he had used since she'd met him in the hills, 'Thank you, it's nice of you to have bothered.'

Poor Archie, she thought, he was grateful for little enough.

He talked for a moment about the work. That day the felled and trimmed logs must be manhandled to the water's edge. There were too few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from hillside to lake all day.

Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.

But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. Then she dressed slowly. For a time she stood staring at the lake, which lay under the storm clouds grey as a salmon's scales. It was under a week, as calendars measure time, since she had first set eyes on the lake, welcoming it as the friend that pointed the way to Europe and happiness.

Well, she knew Tanganyika better now.

She turned her back on the lake and on the hopes it had once aroused. She would not see Europe, perhaps, until she was an old woman. The interview she was on her way to seek would, she supposed, make fast the bonds that stretched her on the altar of Africa.

She found Archie sitting on the wreck of a tree felled by the tireless destructiveness of white ants. She noticed how fever and pain had hollowed his face and bleached it under the sunburn, till it stared like a Cubist sculpture. The natives clustered in groups, chattering while Matao hacked a grip in the fifteen-foot log that lay at his feet, to attach the lushishi ropes.

'That will do,' said Archie, 'get on with it.'

The ropes were fastened and the gang split into two rows. Matao raised his voice in falsetto song and the deeper voices of the workers joined the chanty. At the first beat of each bar they hauled on the ropes, shuffling their feet in a bear-like measure to the unstressed beats, so that the log progressed by jerks.

'No good showing them how to pull like men instead of the Russian ballet,' said Archie. 'The Wemba have hauled trees that way since they came out of the West and they're going on.'

'To the same tune too,' added Norah.

'Probably/. Then, after a pause, 'Anything up?'

She reassured him.

'Then I think I'll keep with them and see they don't slack.'

With an effort of will she stopped him. 'Please, Archie.... Can't we talk? There's something I've got to say.'

He looked distressed. 'Need we?' he muttered. 'Isn't it better left alone?' Without awaiting her answer, he moved in the direction of the singing.

She stood firm. 'No, Archie, I must. You can go back to the work in a minute.'

He shouted for Matao. The singing ceased, while he ran to receive his orders. His return was signalled by a fresh outburst of the tune. Norah wished for a moment she had let Archie go. The start was intolerable. To gain time she asked how he had got his fever. He told her it was fording a river one day after elephant. She expressed her surprise. This was the first she had heard of elephant hunting.

He told her the size of his bag and the weight of the ivory. 'Not that it matters now,' he added, in spite of himself.

'D'you know, Archie,' she said, 'you never told me a word?'

He stared at her in silence. 'Nor I did,' he answered at last. 'But that was half the reason I went to the Congo.'

'And the other, the pure-bred bull,' she said sadly.

'Bull?' he was obviously puzzled, 'what bull?'

A measure of their old familiarity returned to her. 'Archie,' she said, 'you're maddening. Do you realise I haven't a notion what you've been doing from the day you left the farm till ... till we met here?'

So Archie struggled with his taciturnity and, helped out by Norah's questions, produced a more or less coherent story.

Until Norah's outburst on that momentous evening at the farm, no intuition had warned him she hated the life they were living. Intuition, introspection, and so forth don't get the same scope with a pioneer working eleven hours a day on a ranch, as they do with a serious young man fulfilling himself in Chelsea. Archie's only excuse took the form of a tribute to Norah.

'You stuck it like a brick,' he said. 'You never gave a sign.'

'I'd have been pretty mean if I had,' she put in. 'I made you come out here.'

So when at last her restraint had snapped, he treated the revelation with even more than his normal solemnity. After his habit he looked at the issue from both sides. For his part, the life and the country were ideal. And he was, he believed, on the slow gradient that leads his kind of man to success. But then Norah, she told him, hated the farm, the forest, everything. And the issue she did not believe worth waiting for.

Archie thought too clearly to assume the right of any one, even an Englishman, to impose his wishes on a fellow man; so it did not occur to him that he might keep Norah in surroundings she disliked. At the same time his deep-seated, if unvocal, love for Norah turned down the solution that she should go back to England, while he stayed and worked the farm. The nearest he could now bring himself towards some expression of this was to murmur, 'I didn't think then I could do without you'—words which added remorse to the pity in Norah's breast.

His logical brain accepted the only choice that remained—to take Norah back to England and find work there.

Once he had decided, it was not his way to brood on the cost of abandoning the farm that had absorbed two years and over of his life. He chose without murmuring the lesser of the evils that confronted him. Many days would have followed of slow consideration of plans to realise his assets, had not the pace been forced by no less humble an instrument of Providence than 'Mr. Jones of the Congo.'

'That night at dinner,' explained Archie, 'I said I was thinking of selling the herd. Jones' eyes lit up and he told me he had a pal on the Katanga who'd buy them.'

Archie had not been greatly impressed until he learnt that Jones' friend was head compound manager of a group of mines. The contract for the miners' meat was in his hands.

'If you let me handle the deal,' Jones had said, 'I'll get you a better price for "live weight" than you'll get anywhere else for "dead."'

'Bribery all round,' said Archie to himself, 'but that's not my concern.'

'You've been good to me,' added the "stiff," 'I'll only take five per cent. on the transaction.'

This Archie, with his Scotch blood, thought excessive; Jones himself must have had some qualms, since he was willing to throw in a bit of information that might, he said, make Archie's fortune.

I've been offered that sort of tip before,' said Archie, 'and I wanted to know a bit more.'

Well, it wasn't an undiscovered gold field or pipe of diamonds, but the whereabouts of what Jones described as 'the elephants' home town.'

The year before he had stumbled on a little-known valley on the Congo side of Lake Tanganyika where elephant, he declared, were as thick as rabbits and as big as dinosaurs. Tusks up to 150 lbs.

'Not unnaturally I asked him why he didn't take a knock at them himself,' said Archie. 'But he had a yarn ready that he had lost his nerve for elephant.'

Well, to cut a long story short, Archie did not believe a word until Jones drew him a sort of map of the locality, marking the position of several villages. The name of one of the villages was familiar. Searching his brain, Archie remembered that he had that day written on a Congo native for mason's work, who gave that village as his home.

'More to score off Jones than because I believed there was anything in it, I sent for Wadia,' he told Norah. 'To my surprise he confirmed his story. Elephant, he said, were as plentiful there as the puku on our flats: their footprints were as long across as his arm.'

In the light of this support Archie's reply that he would think it over was characteristic. It did not, however, suit Jones. The D.C. at—he mentioned the name—had given him a hint not to stay too long in the country, and he must push on the next day. If Archie liked to come to Elizabethville and give him five per cent. on the sales he secured, well and good; if not, they'd leave it at that. Archie, without answering, worked out the suggested commission on the back of an envelope. He found that he stood to gain more than he gave. Making the further stipulation that the compound manager paid hard cash, he professed willingness to start the following morning.

'Right, it's a bargain,' said Jones.

Nora told Archie how she had overheard these words. 'If only I'd heard it all!' she said. 'Why on earth didn't you tell me, Archie?'

'Well, it seemed pretty wild. The whole thing might be a try on. And I didn't want to talk about it till I'd got the money and we could start home.'

But if, he said, she hadn't been asleep when he came to say good-bye he'd have told her. In fact that's what he came to say.

Norah felt that the petty deception had been the fatal moment of her life.

He did not say much about his journey north. Quite early he had decided there was no object in accompanying Jones to Elizabethville and had made straight for the Valley of Ivory, as he named it. Sceptical to the last, Archie had to admit that the place came within measurable distance of Jones' enthusiasm. Of his adventures there he gave no account.

'You feel a bit of a swine the first elephant you shoot,' he mentioned. It's so big, so contemptuously trustful. You seem to have taken an unfair advantage of a large-minded opponent. And you've destroyed something older and longer in the making than yourself. Like burning an old master.'

The first hitch had come after he had shot his first two bulls. That was the number allowed him on his thousand franc license. He applied at the 'Poste' for the second license he had been promised, to be met with a bland refusal. No second licenses were being issued. He had considered his position. If he gave up the hunt, he would go back to Norah with a hundred or a hundred and fifty more sovereigns in his pocket. Even with a first-rate sale of his stock that wouldn't be much use.

The alternative was to stay and poach.

'Everybody does it up there,' was the excuse he gave Norah.

But Archie never had cared for the example of other people; the force which urged this law-abiding Scot to break the law was his love for Norah. Where she was concerned, he stuck at nothing. He had not hesitated to abandon his farm and two years' work to satisfy what most men would call a fancy. A Bulamatadi law did not stand much chance. The pity is that he was so careful to conceal from Norah this one recklessness and its source.

Not that it was necessary to surcharge her cup. He had said enough to show that while she flirted with Dick his only thought had been her service.

But her last defence remained to be stormed.

'If only you had come when I sent,' was her cry.

Archie stared.

'The letter Jacketi brought,' she repeated.

'I never saw Jacketi,' he said slowly.

She told him of the despairing letter she had sent, of Jacketi's return without an answer, and of the days she had waited.

He dropped his hands hopelessly.

'Jacketi never came near me. He must have turned into some village for a beer-drink.'

'Damn him, damn him!' cried Norah, and then in a dead voice, 'No, it's I who am damned.'

The work gang returned trailing the lushishi ropes. Husband and wife stood silent while the capitao prepared another log for hauling.

When the workers had danced themselves out of sight, Archie saw that Norah was crying. His awkwardness returned. 'Don't cry,' he said, 'it's done now; we can't help it.' He searched his mind for comforting phrases.

'I wouldn't have gone,' she said like a child, 'if I'd known.'

What could he say? Why had she insisted on this useless laceration?

'I thought you didn't care,' she repeated again and again.

He felt that this was unendurable. All his energy was needed for action. Emotion might complete the harm that fever had begun. Norah too must spare herself. He took a tug at the strait waistcoat of stoicism he had condemned himself to wear, remarking dispassionately that he must go back to the work. Many more logs should have been transported by now.

But Norah's weakness had been momentary, and her courage reasserted itself. 'Wait!' she said, 'I haven't told you what I came to say.'

How could she allude to what had happened without hurting him? How could she tell him it was over without promising more than she could perform? The phrases formed in her mind. She rejected each in turn.

'I'm giving Dick up!' That sounded as if she grudged a sacrifice.

'Take me back!' held out hopes she could not justify.

'I've left Dick'—she might be a kept woman.

'Archie,' she said slowly, 'I wanted to tell you that I'm leaving Dick, whatever happens. If you want me still, I'll come back to the farm.'

Archie did not speak. Not even his expression altered. The pain he had suffered had dulled his senses. His silence, his undecipherable features spared Norah nothing of humiliation. What was he thinking of her? Like a child she wondered if any one was marking up her humiliation against the harm she had done. Her words rang in her ear. She could not force herself to add a syllable to them, though she saw how inadequate they were. How Archie must despise her! Unfaithful even in adultery. Taking a man and leaving him in a few weeks. Like any harlot: less constant than the animals, whose fidelity endures the breeding season.

In fact, Archie had no clear thoughts. He felt that waves were buffeting him: his bones ached with fever: his brain was numb. Like Norah, he had turned his back to the future, and this fresh shuffling of the bits of coloured glass that make the kaleidoscope of life, as yet meant nothing to him. He could not focus his thinking. Presently one thought emerged. Not a very lofty one. 'You've got her back from Ward,' crooned his instinct of possession.

Then an idea flickered through his brain, stabbing like a white-hot wire.

'Does this mean she still loves me?'

His body seemed to come to life and to flow with young, clean blood. He must sound the amazing possibility at once and risk the pain that denial would bring.

'Why are you ... what makes you give up Ward?' he stammered.

Norah felt explanation beyond her powers. Surely it was not demanded of her to tell how she had come to despise and distrust her lover; and how she had been driven to parry the danger she sensed.

'I can't go on,' she answered simply.

But Archie's stoicism had deserted him, and he found the suspense more atrocious than yesterday's certitude.

'It wasn't because you thought you might...' His voice trailed away.

She understood what he wanted to ask, and sorrowfully shook her head. She dared not start into a labyrinth of deception through which her feet would have to drag every day of her life.

Archie's eyes, which had been alive with incredulous hope, died. He sat down heavily on the stump, no longer sustained by any aspiration, hope as dead and dry as bones in the sand.

'I had to tell you,' Norah murmured.

He nodded.

'Don't let's talk of it any more,' he said; 'we needn't settle anything yet.'

For once he felt he must talk; the sound of his voice was preferable to the bottomless vacancy of his heart.

'We've got to get out of here first. Then I dare say you'll like to be taken back to England. Then we can see.'

In his disappointment he clutched at her offer of reconciliation. It was something to know that she was not a total loss to him. He had, it seemed, only to say the word and she would come back into his life. If he did not set his demands on happiness too high something might be saved out of the wreck.

Norah had been watching his face. Her heart had ached for him as she saw the re-birth of hope and its deception. She had been tempted to foster it; but why treat him like a child when his manliness made him so admirable? She had lost confidence in herself and felt she blundered in a dark room, bruising and crushing against her will.

She was distressed to see how ill and worn he looked now that hope had left him. Finding no word that could help, she urged him to come to his breakfast. To her surprise he consented. Together they started downhill. Archie stumbled. In his disappointment, the fever was mastering him. He stumbled again. Norah took his arm and led him to camp. With Changalilo's help she put him to bed. He seemed affected by her care for him. It gave him the momentary illusion that nothing had happened and that their life together had not been interrupted except perhaps by a night's dreaming. Hugging the illusion, he fell asleep.

Towards evening the slanting rays of the sun entered his shelter and woke him.

Two facts permeated his waking consciousness—a body sore in every bone and a mind that grappled with the possibilities of Norah's offer to come back to him—'if he wanted her.' How he wanted her! Was there anything else he wanted?

But ever his reason forbade him to listen to his affections. Whenever he smothered his common sense, retribution followed. Of course it had been mad to think he could make a husband for Norah, and it was mad to think he could hold her now.... But as yet nothing need be determined. His first job was to get them out of this ... but there was something that had to be done at once. What was it? ... Damn this fever.... Oh, yes! Johnny, the fundi, had reported a herd of eland in the hills behind the ruins. With the rains coming, they would not stay there. He must get one that evening and have the meat dried into strips, as a stand-by on the rafts.

Painfully he lifted himself out of bed and, his head swimming with weakness, got into his clothes. How heavy his .420 weighed! Pity the handy little .303 had been smashed up by that wounded bull! A near shave it had been!

He looked about for a native to carry his gun, but the camp was empty. Resting the heavy rifle on his shrinking shoulder, he walked shakily into the hills.

He looked up at the sun and saw that in under two hours it would be dark. There was not much time. As he walked he searched the ground for spoor. Padded footprints on a stretch of sand showed where one of the smaller cats had stepped in the night. A genet probably; too small for a serval. Norah had had a tame genet on the farm. 'Fred' it had been called. He remembered the little blind thing he had bought for a shilling from a native who would have eaten it. It used to sleep all day in Norah's pocket; she had nursed it through infancy, waking in the night to feed it on warm milk and water, but it had died while still a kitten, bitten by a native dog.

Norah had always a liking for the little wild things of the forest; some feeling of kinship, maybe....

His eye rested on the delicate footprints of a dwyka. The antelope's bound had impressed its hard, slender toes into the baked earth. The tracks were a day old ... was it thinkable that Norah and he would be able to take up their life together from the point where she had dropped it? Would memory let them? Was this ... adventure of Norah's a mere episode that they could both forget or did it mean more?...

He'd thought there were leopards about and those scratches on the bark of that muputa tree showed where a leopard had sharpened his claws. Leopardess, more likely, to judge by the height.... It was too rocky ahead, he would have to work round behind the mission. There wasn't a breath of wind, so it didn't matter which way he came at the game....

Here were the ruins, the sweep of the hill had brought him out too low. Funny how Norah hated the place—fancy, of course. Was that her voice he heard? But quinine makes your ears sing and then you imagine voices. Still those deep tones of Norah's.... He'd just look round the tower to see if any chance had brought her there. She'd be angry with him for leaving bed....

He rounded the ruined tower and stood as if paralysed by what he saw. His right knee bent to advance began to tremble violently with slow, separated jerks. He tried to raise his voice, but his lips had gone dry. They felt swollen. He had not had this feeling since the nightmares of his childhood when he had seemed to cower in a small dark room, gasping for air, while a shapeless, colourless, nameless body like a distorted featherbed or an obscene grand piano was swelling, swelling and crushing him out of existence. The oncoming of absolute and inevitable disaster.

So he stood, while not twenty yards from his eyes, Norah's body lay fast held in Ward's arms. His kisses rained on her white face. Her tired eyes were shut—he imagined the little blue veins in their lids—and she seemed to swoon with pleasure.

In spite of the resolution he had taken in the hills, at moments Archie's rage against Dick had rowelled him. Imagination had goaded him with intolerable pictures of his wife's intimacy with her lover, kissing, for instance, body to body, Dick's rather full lips crushed into her carmine mouth. The vision always lashed him to a mute fury in which he could feel his rival's throat bulge under his fingers. Fever had given body to these visions and had reduced his self-control. But except perhaps in dreams, such as Norah had witnessed, the crisis was momentary and quickly overcome.

When, therefore, a few yards off, he saw his wife's pale face forced back by the weight of her lover's kiss, her little body crushed by the violence of his arms, the familiar process was started. Rage blazed up to be as instantly curbed by will. Fiercely he commanded his passion, until realisation dawned. This was no unhealthy, torturing fancy, but an enactment in flesh and blood. And if the picture before him was real, so was that throat real. At any rate the weight of the gun on his shoulder was real. But where did imagination start and reality end? Had he imagined Norah promising him that morning to give up Ward and, if he said the word, come back to him? No, that was real. Then this picture that seemed to sear his eyes must be the work of fever in his brain. Norah did not lie. And she had promised ... he then must be mad. Fever was not enough to cast shadows so solid as those before his eyes.... Fact or fancy, he'd stop it, by God!

He humped up his shoulder, and the barrel of the rifle fell into his left palm. The familiar feel of the metal cleared his mind. Those were real people over there, Dick Ward and Norah Sinclair; real, mortal, vulnerable people. And Norah had lied to him that morning; had come to him with her flesh a-tingle perhaps from Ward's kisses, and had lied to make Ward safe. Well, she shouldn't get away with the lie. Hot fury blazed in Archie's breast, and power of motion returned.

He must have shouted, though he did not hear his voice; a startled face turned towards him, and slowly, oh! slowly, Norah's eyes opened.

He saw his enemy drop Norah, start to his feet, snatch at a gun that lay on the ground. With his right thumb Archie pushed over his safety catch, and for an instant the barrel rested on Norah. She had been fooling him all the time, perhaps all these years she had fooled him.... Then the sights swung round and aligned on Dick. Some one should pay him for this.

Before Ward could raise his rifle from hip to shoulder, a shot rang through the ruins. His knees sagged, bent; then he toppled over with his face rubbing the ground. His shoulders twitched and his hands opened and clenched. A jerk, and he had twisted on to his back. Thus he lay staring at the sky, and the tissue of enterprise and weakness, frailty and charm that had been Dick Ward ceased to exist."

CHAPTER VII

When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeling beside the body, fumbling with its collar. He remarked her skirt was in a pool of dark blood. She would not, he reflected, be able to wear that dress again.

He started to go to her, stopped, and stood in thought. If he went to her he would hear her reproaches, see her grief, perhaps be maddened to ... harm her. He knew he would be sorry later if he did. Nothing in the world would make him sorry about Ward.

Without any conscious act of will he walked away into the forest. As he walked he held at arm's length the knowledge of Norah's treachery. That had better not be faced till his head was calm again. Thinking about Ward did not matter.

His anger had vanished, but nothing like remorse took its place. His mind handled the crime dispassionately, mathematically. Before his ... action he had, he now saw, been trying to solve an insoluble problem. The world had been veiled in a thick fog of good and bad intentions, mixed motives, false standards. Now he saw everything as clear-cut and minute as if he looked through the wrong end of a telescope. Ward's death had amazingly simplified life. In retrospect he could see the death of one of them as the only conceivable solution; there had not been room in the world for the two men and their passions.

The only emotion he was conscious of was an almost impersonal satisfaction. Once he had shot a lioness that had terrorised a village; his sensations had been similar—at a certain risk to himself the world was quit of a pest. He was satisfied, moreover, at a clean job carried out efficiently with his own hands...."

Ross paused. "It's easy," he said, "to go wrong over Archie's feelings. He was always so careful to suppress them. But that's the best I can piece together from what he let fall, consciously and in his delirium. The result is not what your psychologist, certainly not what your moralist, would like.

If you are inclined to side with these wise men from the West, you must remember that on the subject of Norah this hard-headed farmer was not quite normal. His love was that dominant weakness through which, according to my theory, Africa masters a man. So the kiss that betrayed his love shocked him not only into murder, not only into callousness, but into a different epoch of morality. The atrocity of his discovery seems to have atrophied the segments of brain that are latest developed in man—the convolutions that give refuge to mercy, compassion, gentleness.

'The vigorous young world was ignorant
Of these restrictions; 'tis decrepit now,
Not more devout, but more decayed and cold.'

And Africa stood eager to welcome him to an older world where force, not cunning, ruled; muscle, not money, dominated; where Jehovah was God, where an eye for an eye was sound morality; where you killed your enemy, dashed his children against the stones, and added his wives to your harem. It was Jehovah's gospel, not Christ's, not Mammon's, that the forest whispered in Archie's ear.

Another avenue to remorse did Africa close, that fear of discovery and of punishment that leads men to contrition. Murder is so safe in Central Africa. Let me advise you to take your enemies on a shooting trip there. There in the solitude, far from coroners' inquests, are a hundred agents of sudden and silent death—snake-bite, blackwater, a crocodile, sunstroke, a lion ... and a sun that makes immediate burial unavoidable.

Any of these or a dozen other fates could be adduced to explain Dick's disappearance; the natives would ask no questions and carry no tales; and a wife cannot, in English law, give evidence against her husband.

So Africa was accessory after, as well as before, the fact. Archie may not have recognised her proffered help; at the same time he can have felt none of the anxiety and fear that so assist the workings of conscience. He blundered on through the trees, caring only to set space between himself and Norah, until chance brought him on the herd of eland.

His eye, which took in no detail of his course, was caught by the quick movement of a horned head plucking at a branch. The sight of the great antelope focused his vision on the rest of the herd, whose humped bodies were no more than shadows in the dappled gloom of the forest.

Dropping flat, he began to crawl into easy range. No fancy shots, with ammunition so scarce. As he got near, he saw that the animal he stalked was a cow. Cautiously he knelt up and searched among the trees for a bull. He thought involuntarily that, for the second time that day, he had spared the female of the species. He raised his rifle and aimed behind the shoulder of a magnificent bull who stood head up guarding his cows, his horns hidden in the flat branches. With faint surprise he found compunction in his heart. He was loath now to tighten the trigger finger. Half an hour before he had felt no such qualm.

It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull on a line between eye socket and ear hole.

If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were nothing—men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth. Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated, choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing posture.

Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.

The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. Soon the eland was hidden under a mound of foliage, black in the failing light. He kicked a little earth over a pool of blood that might attract a jackal or a hyæna. As he did so, another pool of blood with a woman's skirt trailing in it rose before his eyes, and he realised that what he did for an eland he must do for a man.

Ward must be buried. He could not be left to the ministrations of the forest. Archie's prodigious impersonality had departed and he was conscious of a violent distaste for the work before him. Either his fever or his imagination brought physical sickness, and he sat down on the ground till the nausea passed.

He started to drag himself home. His gun seemed an intolerable weight now that his mood had weakened. For a moment he saw the murder as a fault—not as a crime or an infraction of the law—for the power of the forest was too absolute to let this lawyer care much for legality—but as a failure in hospitality. Ward had come to him, he remembered, for help, had put himself in his power. And the use he had made of his power was to deal death where he promised escape.

Remorse passed as quickly as it had come when he thought of the kiss which had forfeited Ward his claim to help, safety, life. But the duty of burying Dick had never left his mind, where it bred a fresh idea of his victim.

He no longer saw him in the abstract as the enemy, the defiler of Norah's body, the pest which must be killed. He saw him as a dead man. A poor dead man. Un povero morte, shut out from the daylight, from sight and feel and smell, from love of women, from hope and achievement. All he had now was stillness and a silence.

Archie felt no horror at his crime. He stood back from civilisation, remote from society, away from the herd that had created morality to make possible life in a herd. But pity took hold of him, pity for his victim, who was also, he saw, the victim of exasperating circumstance, of passions and stupidities. And heavily—if justly—had he paid.

A growl of thunder diverted his attention. It did not sound very distant. He hoped the rains would not break yet, but he quickened his aching steps.

It was dark when he reached the ruins and found no trace of the body he had come to bury. Even in the obscurity he expected that he would have seen the white clothes. They would not be so white now, but something should be visible. Had Norah had it carried into camp? If she had, that showed beyond palliation that she was careless of her husband's fate.

Had he come to the right spot? Yes, this was where he had stood. Ward over there, with Norah. He had fallen forwards. His body should lie here. Archie fancied he could smell the pool of blood, and the light of a match justified his senses.

He lit another and saw that the grass was bent and broken. In Ward's death agony? Or had the body been dragged away? He followed the wake in the grass, striking matches as he went, till at a distance of some fifty yards he came on the stained, white bundle. He had not come in time. Hyaenas, a flicker of lightning revealed, had been before him. The poor corpse was already mutilated. His pity for the dead man gathered force. He had never admired Ward's good looks (secretly he may have been jealous of them), but he knew they were there, and against his will he had been conscious of the man's light-hearted charm. Now this helpless, shapeless thing worried by the beasts of night was all that remained.

It was the war again, he thought. Bodies of Germans hanging on the wire—sons, husbands, lovers of some one bereaved in Germany. Only here the consolation was lacking of sacrifice for a country. Ward had died in no nobler quarrel than the fight of two dogs over a bitch.

For the first time it occurred to him that his victim was a human being. He had seen and killed him as an abstraction—the betrayer of Norah; he had seen him and pitied him as a corpse: now he knew that he had been a human being with human faults and qualities, human interests, human relationships; somewhere he had a family, friends, a home.

And to-night he must bury him far from all that. He faced the problem of the burial. The work must be done with his own hands and the carriers must know nothing. He could give out that Ward had been taken by a crocodile on the shore of the lake. The noise of shooting would be explained by eland meat he would send them to fetch next day. The first round fired would have missed. He passed to other considerations.

The digging must be done with a broad bladed native hoe that was tied on to one of his loads for general camp use. There was no spade. The ground was iron-hard and the tool inefficient. It would take his fever-weighted arms several hours to dig even a shallow grave. Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.

It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his body yet unburied. Yet, rather than cross to his camp and meet his wife, he would have preferred to stay in the company of the part-eaten corpse of the man he had shot down.

The pain he had felt, when he first learnt in that sunlit clearing that Norah was untrue, had been diffuse. Grief attacked his heart from many sides and numbed it. Despair mingled with puzzlement; self-reproach merged into anger. Norah he had been slow to blame, making his own shortcomings scapegoat and Ward's seduction. That she was guiltless, that her chastity was intact he could not pretend; but he found excuses and put his love at the five-barred gate of prejudice. Love saved him the shock of his wife's sinfulness that most men would have suffered, accepting the boom in virginity engineered by a Church that is celibate at heart and the great ring of women with plain daughters to marry.

But if Archie had tried to ignore his wife's infidelity and in his heart had longed to forgive it, disillusionment now seared him with hotter irons. His body and brain seemed to ache with the question—why in the morning say she was ready to come back to him and had left Dick Ward for ever, to be caught ere evening in his passionate embrace?

There were only two answers:—

It might be that, faithless herself, she had not believed his promise to bring her and her lover safe back to Abercorn. To make sure their escape she had coldly tortured him with lying offers, had tricked him with a flattering tale. Could it be true that the girl he had worshipped as all that was loyal, all that was high-hearted, had fallen to this treachery, grovelled in such cowardice and cruelty?

But if that was not the truth, then his clean, lovely Norah was a harlot so wanton, so rotten, she could not keep for an hour out of a man's arms, could not for a few days stay faithful. The day she was left on the farm welcoming a lover; renouncing him as soon as her husband found her; slinking back the same night.

He must accept, it seemed, one of these unendurable explanations. Where both so base, did it matter which was true? He had married and adored either a wanton or a traitress. Was further scrutiny necessary? Was not the only manly course amputation, to cut the woman out of his life?

When first he had learnt that she had left him, he had grieved for Norah as one untimely dead, lost to him but still dear. Now he must think of her not only as lost, but dishonoured. That he still loved her, degraded him to her level. She had eaten her way into his life like rust, had twined her fingers through his heart-strings. Before it was too late, he must tear himself free of her magic.

He faced the issue squarely. Suppose he surrendered to the love, which still impregnated his tormented being, and took Norah back, what peace would there be for either? Could he ever for a moment forget her character as this blinding moment had revealed it? Could he ever trust her word? When she spoke to him he would divine a hidden sense; when she kissed him he would see a lure. He would have sold his manhood for deception and a mockery.

No, once he had rescued her from the danger of the moment, he must break through the net that entangled him. The world would be bare enough without Norah, without the farm, without mankind's major compensations for living—love and work.

Even suicide was inadmissible. If he killed himself here, what would happen to Norah?

Some heavy drops of rain recalled him to the work that faced him. He must fetch the hoe. If he met Norah, he need not speak to her. Sometime he must tell her what he had decided, that could wait. There was now a man to be buried, a raft to be built, a journey to be begun. Plenty for one man to do, with fever. Then he'd have to go to the first Boma and give them a story of Ward's death. Unless, of course, Norah betrayed him. That, and anything, was now possible.

He found it difficult to raise himself from the heap of masonry on which he was sitting. His limbs seemed to have stiffened and he shook with ague. Laboriously he dragged brushwood and creepers near the corpse and put a match to the heap.

Then without looking round, he walked heavily to the camp. The unsteady illumination of lightning showed him his path."

CHAPTER VIII

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...."

PART III

"...break through laws divine and human,
And think them cobwebs spread for little man."
J. DRYDEN.

CHAPTER I

"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?'"

CHAPTER II

Within forty-eight hours, some of the questions I had asked myself on Mrs. Lavater's verandah were answered.

I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice. Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind, I would have recognised Norah's deep tones. I rose from my work, feeling after some passable excuse for having failed to visit their camp half a dozen miles away. My true reason had been an instinctive shrinking from other people's troubles.

But my first sight of Norah told me that forms might be forgotten. Her eyes, that the lamp of romance had once lit, now were dark with pain. Was it possible, you wondered, that they had ever laughed? Had even cried? Without suffering the decay of age, she had lost her youth. The wing of death, you guessed, was between her and the sun. Infinitely remote from her seemed the life that the rains set pulsing through each leaf, each blade of grass. She noticed nothing of the beauty that surrounded her, the shouts of green that the trees set up, the blue eye of the lake looking along the glade my carriers had cut. Her eyes were turned inwards on some private hell whose key lay in her bosom.

Her first words were banal enough. Some apology for intrusion that I waved away. My reply, inevitably trivial, sounded flippant in the face of her manifest grief and I subsided into an awkward silence.

Archie was ill, went on the low voice, and their quinine was finished: she had wondered...

By the time I returned with the bottle, I fancy she had decided to consult me.

The words came jostling each other—Archie was delirious; the doctor was away from Abercorn; the Kasama man would take a week to get here; and anyhow ... She did not complete the sentence. He had never been so bad as this; but the strain of the last week—was it blackwater, did I think? And ... and they had come from the sleeping sickness belt, could it be...?

She refused food, and when I had given my medicine chest to my fundi to carry, we set out along a native path in the direction she had come. Her obvious gratitude to me for coming was surprising. So pretty a woman is rarely grateful. Men are too ready to help without.

To cut short her thanks, I inquired about Archie's symptoms and was able to assure her that the fever was not blackwater. And certainly not a forerunner of sleeping sickness. I was prepared to notice that my words brought little relief. A husband delirious in the bush might send a woman wild with anxiety, might drive her to the brink of panic, it would not explain the hopelessness in Norah's eyes and mouth.

I felt a wave of pity. She was too slim a little thing for this burden, whatever it was. In violence to my principles I asked if I could help.

'I don't think anything can help now,' she whispered, and so low that I had to read her lips. 'Archie has killed ... some one.'"

"I was not particularly shocked," said Ross. "All this feeling against straightforward assassination is quite modern.

You must discriminate, of course, between honest killing and surreptitious murder. There has always been a prejudice against that. The Borgias, for instance, have found critics in every century, and until recent, sentimental years we burnt wives who poisoned their husbands. But an honourable assassination, under guises which varied from the ceremonial of mediæval tournament to the violence of renaissance vendetta, and on to the more polished formulæ of the duel, has lasted almost to our day.

With the duel passed the power to punish certain private injuries for which the law furnishes no redress. And in fault of any regular outlet, the man with strong feelings and a literal mind has to fall back on murder."

Ross spoke with vehemence. Did his earnestness, I wondered, throw any light on his own mysterious past? As if he read some shadow of the suspicion on my face, he came back abruptly to the Sinclairs.

"That was how I came to hear Norah's story," he said. "Not in the detail I have given you, nor in the order. But by the time we were half-way to Archie's camp she had given me a clear enough outline.

I suggested that she had exaggerated the danger. We would have to nurse Archie ourselves and keep outsiders away till he was clear of delirium. And the natives, even if they suspected anything, would keep quiet. They do not like Bomas, I said and enlarged on the discretion of Africa.

She signed to me to stop.

'It's past that now,' she said. 'I haven't told you the end.'

Archie's visit to Abercorn had been paid with the object of reporting Dick's death to the Boma. So much information he had given Norah before he started up the hill, repeating the story he had told the natives on the night of the crime.

Her heart had ached to help him. If only he would let her be of some use, go with him and perjure herself for his sake. Fiercely she longed to save him, to avert the ultimate consequences of the havoc she had loosed. But with conventional words of leave-taking, Archie, followed by his gun-bearer, went up the road.

She took what comfort she could, remembering the efficiency he had shown throughout. If, thought she, her husband could cope with Lake Tanganyika, she need not doubt his dealings with the Boma. In which conclusion, she allowed him a woman's strength. When, at the beginning of this story, I tried to show you Norah, I spoke of the small cat house. Now cats, and women, do not herd. The hand they play is a lone one whether in Malay or Mayfair, and the war they wage with law, rules of conduct, codes of honour, is age old.

But men, and the animals that chew the cud, have the herd instinct. They see the value of solidarity and are glad to submit their wills to the herd. Until suffragettes were vouchsafed us, no Englishman had ever guessed that it was unnecessary to obey the law. Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to solitude.

Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.

So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human: something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the camp.

In silence Norah wondered. The senior officials, he had said, were away from the Boma and he had returned, his story untold. But relief or suspense, she knew, could not explain this change. Under her eyelashes all evening she watched him and sought in vain for some word that might allay his trouble. Throughout the night she heard the camp bed creak under his restless body.

Was it then that he was first aware of his fellowship with the men whose names shame alone preserves when quicklime has consumed their bodies? Did Dick's eyes again look pitifully into the muzzle of his .420? Did he strive once more to straighten the stiffened limbs and push the contorted body sideways into the wet grave? There can, I suppose, be little sleep on the first night you see yourself a murderer.

In the morning a glance told Norah that the fever, which had fantastically vanished after the rains had drenched him to the skin, was back. He sat huddled over the camp fire, only moving to call for logs. She urged him to return to bed, but he shook his head. He refused luncheon, and sat with pen and paper before him. Then he began to write. His hand shook with fever, but he wrote fairly quickly. He covered three sheets and addressed an envelope for each.

Still crouching over the fire, 'Norah,' he said, 'I think I ought to give it you to read.'

His tone told her she must brace herself for a shock.

'They won't bother you, I hope,' he went on, 'I've tried to make it all right for you.' He kept his eyes turned away from her, but his voice was more kind. His hand, which trembled a little, played with the letters on the table.

'This,' he continued, 'is to the solicitors. About the farm, the sale of the stock and so on. This,' he touched the second letter, 'is my will. Of course everything goes to you.'

He paused and, drawing the last document from its envelope, he handed it to Norah.

She forced herself to read, though her mind was too busy with his words to take in the symbols before her eyes. Suddenly, as if a blade of ice had been driven between her shoulders, she understood.

The letter was addressed to the District Commissioner, Abercorn, and began and ended officially enough, 'Sir, I have the honour to report ... I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant, A. L. Sinclair.'

Between the formulæ, ran a story designed to shield her and convict himself. He wrote that Ward, at his request, had been escorting Norah to Kigoma. They were all to meet there. The Mimi broke down, but chance united them in the bay of the deserted mission. On the evening of the 25th he had gone out shooting with Ward. Their tempers had suffered from the heat. He had complained of Ward's over-liberal expenditure of ammunition, which was then short. A quarrel had ensued and he had shot Ward through the heart. With legal forethought he gave the exact position of the grave that the body might be identified and death established.

She read the bald story word by word to its end.

'For God's sake, Archie,' she asked him, although she knew his answer only too well, 'what are you going to do with this?'

He said that Matao must take it to Abercorn. His fever would not let him walk so far. He muttered something about feeling clean again.

'Don't, Archie, don't! Give it back to me!' Her voice made the natives break off their occupations and stare at the eccentricities of the white man. He looked in her face as if her eyes could show him her soul. Then he turned away shaking his head.

'But you've got fever,' she urged, 'you don't know what you're doing. Write what you were going to say yesterday.'

For answer he called Matao.

'One can pay too much, just to live,' he murmured.

'At least wait. Think it over in cold blood. Wait a day, one day.'

Lavater, he replied, came back that afternoon. The death would have to be reported at once, one version or the other. He now knew which version it must be.

A fog seemed to spring up from below, over her eyes. She would have thrown herself at his feet if Matao had not stood gravely waiting.

'For my sake then, Archie!'

'How should I know,' he said looking away from her. 'How should I know that this time too...?'

He felt the harshness of his words and let them die away.

'Matao,' he said quickly, his voice rough in his throat. 'Take this to Bwana Lavater at his office. The sun will have set before you arrive. Sleep at M'pala and return in the morning.'

Norah saw Matao salute and swing round. She did not see him disappear into the trees, for she had fainted."

CHAPTER III

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.

CHAPTER IV

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.

[1] M'pala is the native name for Abercorn.

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."

EPILOGUE

Ross smoked a time in silence. At length he spoke. "Archie did not give in at once," he said. "His Scottish instincts put up a rearguard action. But Norah's account of Dick's death had won the day.

He protested indeed, but without his old conviction, that he must stand his trial and be formally exonerated. I dropped heavily on the suggestion. What was he thinking of? I asked. What was the use of dragging Norah through the mud of the courts, of giving to the press the story of her elopement? Was it fair to sacrifice her name on the altar of his exoneration?

Archie collapsed; it was never hard to put him in the wrong. Soon I left for bed. Husband and wife sat on by the fire. Bad perhaps for his fever but to the good of his happiness.

It was long before I slept. The duel I had witnessed was fought again in my head. At last I fell asleep, still wondering if Norah had told an inspired lie; if she had been rash enough to teach Changalilo the tale he had repeated; or if Dick had really fired before he died.

It was Changalilo who enlightened me.

Next day Norah went up to the Boma to report Ward's disappearance. She would not, I suppose, trust Archie in Abercorn. She gave me instructions to see to his soup in the middle of the morning. About eleven I went to the kitchen to find out if it was ready. I found Changalilo and the sukambali squatting on the ground, stirring a saucepan, with their backs towards me. I was wearing tennis shoes and my approach was unheard.

'Did the Mama think I had stolen the cartridge?' Changalilo was saying; 'I do not know.'

He went back to relate the original discovery of the two rounds that fitted Dick's 7.9 Mauser, and how they had lain in its magazine till the day of the eland.

'I was making the chief's dinner,' said Changalilo, 'on the fire. I heard from the hills not far off, first the boom'—he imitated the sound—'of Bwana Ar-i-shy's gun for elephant. Then not a moment later the crack'—again an imitation—'of the little gun.'

Soon after the Mama brought him the little gun with only one cartridge in the magazine and he had cleaned the barrel. Now she had forgotten that she had fired at the eland and missed. So he was blamed.

'Yes, indeed,' said the sukambali, 'the chief forgets and the slave is beaten.'

'First the boom of the elephant gun; then the crack of Dick's gun.' I could guess what had happened.

Archie had shot Dick through the heart. As he fell, his contracting fingers closed on the trigger of his 7.9 and the bullet went into the air, into the ground. Archie, deafened by the explosion from his heavy weapon and dizzy with fever, had not heard that posthumous, as one might call it, shot. When Norah had first told me her story, she related how she had picked up Dick's rifle and automatically had opened the breech. Some fresh point had crossed her brain, and she had not told me she had noticed the empty cartridge case. Memory of that detail had burst on her when she retold the story, and saw how it could be manipulated by a wife who was brave enough to shoulder the weight of her husband's crime."

Ross stopped speaking.

After a long silence broken only by the throbbing of the engines, "Is that the end?" I asked.

"The worst of you writers," said Ross, "is that you expect a story to have a beginning and an end. Life isn't so tidy. Death itself doesn't end the story, except possibly for the dead man....

Who is the platitude-monger who talks about the ever-widening circle of ripples started by any stone you care to fling into the duck-pond of life? Well, the wash started by that ill-timed kiss of Dick's came near, as I have shown you, to swamping the Sinclairs' boat. It may still swamp it."

"I saw them off," he continued, "on their slow ulendo to the coast, within a week of that momentous conversation, myself taking in hand the sale of the cattle, the disposal of the farm, the disinterment of the ivory.

But now that they are back in England, do you fancy they have forgotten? Forgetting is not as easy as you happy-ending merchants make out. And the Sinclairs have plenty to forget....

Don't you think that sometimes, in some chance combination of words, Norah hears Dick Ward speak...? Suppose she comes across his friends, his relations.... Sometimes, on nights when she cannot sleep, will not the burden of the guilt she shouldered seem too heavy...?

Archie too. Don't you think he ever sees a face, a face that is partly eaten away by a hyæna, a face on which he is raking the wet earth? When Norah whistles—it is a habit of hers—doesn't he see her saunter into that sunlit clearing and watch the light die in her eyes as she recognises him?"

Ross began ponderously to pace the deck, his bulk visible against the eastern sky. I fell into step beside him.

"The Come-back of the Erring Wife isn't as simple as it looks at the end of Reel Five," he said. "Those silver-haired husbands with wistful faces, whose lines are caressed by the glow of the dying fire, as they lay a hand of forgiveness on the girl wife's golden head, they aren't found in every home.

Still Norah stood a fair chance with Archie. He always thought for himself and never accepted as gold the counters that pass for ideas. He would grant, I fancy, that courage may be as valuable a feature in a wife as chastity."

"Who was it said that purity is the bull point of the plain woman?" Ross asked me.

I did not reply. It sounded to me much like Ross.

"Well, there's something in it," he resumed. "Why do men love the memories of the fair and frail and forget good wives and mothers? Why will Queen Cleopatra's fame increase when Queen Victoria is forgotten?" He paused and seemed to expect an answer. I said something about Shakespeare.

"Rubbish," he replied, "how many people have read that play? But you're taking me off my point. Men marry widows and, as far as Dick was concerned, Norah might nearly rank as a widow. They say that patriotism died with the war and virginity with the higher education of women. Well, if it did, Archie would be one of those who would make the best of a bad job. I don't mean that he'd sit by, while his wife climbed in and out of other men's beds like the heroines of Mr. Arlen's novels. On the contrary, you've seen he had a pretty short way with the other man. But he never subscribed to the view of the Church of Paul that sex was the only thing that mattered. And in his darkest hour, he had never been able to conquer his love for Norah."

I suggested that her indifference would in the end effect that conquest.

"Indifference?" said Ross quickly. "To run off with a man, when you think your husband ignores you, is not indifference. Any more than it is indifference to load his crime on your guilty shoulders."

"In any case," I protested, "she told you she didn't love him."

"For the time, the tragedy she had brought about had trodden out of her that blend of illusion and realism we call 'love,' leaving her potent for no impulse more romantic than devotion. When she reached home and the horror had receded, her quick-blooded nature would need to twine round some man's heart. She would think more than twice before she looked beyond her husband a second time. And now she knows his strength no less than his weakness. Not a bad basis for love."

The flippancy which Ross affected was momentarily laid aside. "I believe," he said slowly, "I pray, that by now Norah and Archie Sinclair's hearts are so locked together by sympathy, understanding and affection that they can face together the black hours they cannot hope to escape."

"In any case," I said, "he cannot judge her."

"Because he'd killed Dick?"

I nodded.

"So you agree with Archie, that was wrong?"

"Don't you?" I asked.

I shivered in the chill that comes before the dawn. Land was visible on the port and I guessed we were rounding Gardafui. Before us lay Europe, behind us Africa.

Life was stirring on the liner. Clattering his pail, a sailor started to swab the deck.

Congo River—Marcham—Capri.
1924-25.

THE END

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Table of Contents

- THE CRATER

- PROLOGUE

- PART I

- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X

- PART II

- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII

- PART III

- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- EPILOGUE

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE