Yet when the cartoonist came on deck the victims of her pencil were all ready to smile at her, and return her property without resentment. It was so patent somehow that malice was the one thing absent from the mental make-up of Mrs. Valdana.
Another day soon after their first meeting, Westenra found her in her deck chair with one slim foot twisted round to inspect what is sometimes known as a "potato" in the heel of her stocking.
"Isn't it amazing how holes in one's stockings arrive?" she remarked to him pleasantly. "I would n't mind only I 've got such tender heels."
Impossible for a thoughtful man who has known poverty and carried memories of his mother's fingers worn with darning to imagine such a woman as a wife and mother. Plainly the shrine Westenra had built for the woman of his dreams could never be occupied by this one. No shrine could keep for long so restless a heart, nor fireside and cradle detain such wandering feet! As the days went by the likeness in fact that he had seen in her to his vision became blurred and faded. It was not difficult at last to persuade himself that his recognition of her had been a fantasy of his brain. Once the thought dismissed of any mystical bond between them, he could not help liking the incompetent, careless creature and finding pleasure in her society. She was a good companion: not gay herself so much as the cause of gaiety in others. She rarely said witty things, but it was surprising how witty others became in her company. Her art was of the kind that seems to underlie rather than break through the surface of conversation, leaving the best points for others to make. But sometimes when things were at their dullest she would suddenly send up a little sparkling rocket that lit the mental horizon and thrilled the surroundings with colour.
Westenra, whose native wit and eloquence needed little sharpening, was at his best with her, and he became his pleasant and extremely engaging self while enjoying to the full that charm in her that from the first he had not denied. Her ardent feeling for the ideal and the original was a spur to his intellect, and not only re-awoke his natural gaiety, but set stirring all his altruistic dreams. For there was greatness smouldering in Westenra, that needed only the right woman's hand to fan it into flame.
No one observing Mrs. Valdana listening, almost thirsting for all he had to say, would have guessed that as far as actual experience of life went, hers had been far wider and greater than his, for the usual results of experience--callous indifference or a calm philosophic outlook--were amazingly absent from her. She was vividly interested in life, and the more she saw of it, the less blasée she became; and because ideas interested her even more than experience she was deeply interested in Westenra.
If the latter had ever lived in England he would infallibly have recognised the name of Valentine Valdana as being that of one of the foremost women journalists in the world. Even had he been in the habit of reading those American Sunday journals whose overseas cables in a surprisingly small space manage to mention the doings of everyone of importance, he would have realised that so far from being the "small-headed, yellow journalist" he supposed, she occupied a unique and enviable position in the newspaper world. But he had never concerned himself with the doings of European journalists. America is a big country, with big enough personalities and interests of its own to absorb such attention as a man wrapped up in his work and the great scientific facts of life has to give to public affairs. Thus it came to pass that he did not know there was one thing Mrs. Valdana, with her odd eccentric gowns and ornaments, a hole in the heel of her stocking, and her black hair endlessly coming down, was not careless about, and that one thing was her work--and that because of her work she was famous.
Certainly she was not the person to tell him, being as reticent about the astonishing things she had done as she was childishly frank about her picturesque tastes and fancies. She would show her ivory bracelets cut green from the tusks of an elephant in Central Africa, or howl in the moonlight like a jackal, or dance like a Somali warrior (as she did at the concert got up for the sailors' benefit), or describe the orchids that hang like glowing lamps from the trees in the deep steaming forests of the Congo; but she would say nothing of her articles on sleeping sickness and Congo atrocities, or how she had nearly lost a foot on a terrible march in Somaliland, but turned out an amazing Odyssey on the manners and customs of a little known people. She always forgot to mention that it was she who had shot the elephant from whose tusks the bracelets came, and that her knowledge of jackal music was acquired in a lion-infested part of Bechuanaland, where she had got lost from her party and spent a sinister night up a tree.
Next to Africa she loved India best in the world, and could discourse alluringly on the subject of phul-karries, and silk embroideries from Delhi, of sunsets seen across the plains when the buffaloes and the goats are being herded home in a mist of golden dust; of paddy-birds standing in shallow grey pools, and the grace of the swathed women coming from the wells. Chanting through her nose a thin monotonous wail, while with three fingers and her thumb she made a measured thrumming tattoo on the table, she could conjure up the very heart-throb of the Indian Bazaar until the never-ending rhythmic torment of the East dragged at the heart of those who listened. She could tell too every kind of amusing story and scandal about Anglo-Indian society; but she would never mention that she had been sent out in '97 to get for her paper the truth about the Tochi rising--and had got it; that she was at Simla when the English were waiting breathlessly for news from their men at the front, knowing that any serious reverse in the Tirah might possibly mean an attempt at a general rising and massacre in the plains and hill stations of the Punjab, and that she was one of those women who had gone out as usual to balls, and laughed and jested with sickening fear in their hearts, under the keen eyes of the native servants--and afterwards had sat in her room hour after hour sorting and classifying her facts, embodying them in the strong vivid articles that a few weeks later made England "sit up" for awhile and realise that all was not peace and fair contentment in the Indian Empire.
There were lots of other interesting things Mrs. Valdana never told. She had been in Russia on a mission for Mr. Stead, and in Turkey to probe out the affair of a secret concession for turquoise searching granted by the Sultan to an English Member of Parliament. She had interviewed De Witte, the Red Sultan, and Paul Kruger, and stayed at Groot Schuur as Cecil Rhodes's guest. But all these things were part of her work, and of her work (except to other journalists) she never spoke. It spoke for itself.