“But that is only as the goat to the leopard. The trap must be dug—or the scent of the bait will be blown.”
“Ehh!” gasped Bakuma, in desperation, “by my twin soul which dwells beneath the banana plant, will I do it!”
Chapter 7
Gerald Birnier had flattered himself that he was a philosopher with a sense of humour, fairly well developed by ten years’ wandering about Central Africa, but deep emotions submerge such cherished qualities.
The presence of the photograph was explicable by several surmises: zu Pfeiffer might have met Lucille at Washington, Paris, or Berlin: she might have given him the photograph or he might have bought it, or even stolen it. But—the signature “à toi, Lucille”! There lay the sting which maddened Birnier and strangled reason, the fact at which his mind yawed futilely.
So great had been the shock that the arrest had seemed but a secondary matter in accord with the insanity of zu Pfeiffer’s statement that he was engaged to Lucille. The affair had been so sudden that for some time he could progress no farther in an attempt to think than a gasp, pawing mentally at an intangible substance which eluded him like a child’s small hand trying to grasp a toy balloon. Sense of reality appeared to have been dissolved. He had followed the sergeant across the square meekly without realising what was happening, and when he had been placed in a whitewashed room at the back of the native guard house which served as a jail, he sat down upon a chair, too bewildered to comprehend where he was. That “à [pg 87] toi, Lucille” rang like the clanging in a belfry, drowning the sound of other thoughts.
By the light of a hurricane lamp he regarded the soldiers bringing in an old camp bed with indifference. When they had gone he began to pace up and down the small room frantically trying to gain control. To the first prompting of a logical reason for the whole affair he did not dare to listen. The disrupting cause was the complete inability to explain the familiar signature. To his Anglo-Saxonised mind, bred in the strict code of the south, tutoyer was only permissible to dogs, inferiors, most intimate relations and lovers. He was far too unbalanced to see the humour as he solemnly announced that certainly zu Pfeiffer was not a dog, nor in the social code an inferior; he was not a relation; therefore.… His mind baulked and raced into incoherence.
A point of view which added false premises, as well as his attitude to those two little words, was the consciousness that many would consider that he had not treated his wife as a husband should do. This possibility had never occurred to him before, so that it came with disproportionate emphasis.