Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)

by Cynthia Stockley

"Dear Dick ... I am so happy," she said, visualising the drunken journalist, not as others had seen him, a short red-faced man with bright, haggard eyes and a sardonic mouth, but as the big-hearted man of letters who had generously taught a young uneducated girl all he knew of his craft.

In memory she sat again in the stuffy Johannesburg newspaper office with the maps on the wall, tables hidden under a jumble of papers, chairs covered with tobacco ash, books, whiskey bottles, and heard the voice of Dick Rowan pounding "style" into her while the mine batteries drummed outside, and the windows reddened and rattled under the assault of a blinding Rand dust storm. Her thoughts passed to another man who had worked with them, and who lay now in the little cemetery behind the Primrose Deep; to another sniped in the streets of Mafeking who had written to her by the last post that came from the beleaguered town; to another dead in the shadow of the Himalayas of whom she could not think without remembering the paddy-birds in the rice fields near Benares; another sleeping on the shores of Lake Chad.

For like all women thrown early on the world to make a living she had found her best friends among men, and the very adventurousness of her own life had brought her into contact with adventurous men of the kind whose lives are full and vivid and of sudden ending. Of the men who "did things, and died in far places" she had known a-many, and been proud of their friendship, and with all the ardour of an ardent nature she had loved them every one in her boyish, good-comrade way. And they had all passed on or passed away! But she wanted them to be with her in this hour. She called on every one she had loved, or been loved by, to rejoice with her now. She even laid in thought a flower of amnesty upon the memory of Horace Valdana, but with him she did not linger, for in the memory of her husband was neither beauty nor joy, and in that hour she wished only to remember things that gave no hurt.

For she too believed that the fate which through the open and winding passages of life had been seeking after her had found her at last; that of all the men she had been loved by, and she had been greatly loved, here at last was the one whom her heart and mind had awaited--a real man with something of the lion in the hold of his head and in the quality of his sure glance and careless smile, who "did before the sun and moon whatsoever his heart appointed," and was no man's man but his own. She saw that Westenra was big in mind and spirit, self-trusting, self-reliant; and every woman's heart responds to those iron strings. Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.

She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind; for his big head and broad shoulders, for the grace and strength of him, for his curious personal shyness and his wide, impersonal outlook; for the twist his race had given to his speech, and for his handsome face which was not handsome at all, but the face of a thinker who has been up against the hardest problem in the world--ignorance.

These were the things she knew that she loved him for, but she was aware without going too deeply into the matter that the other and more important ones that she had long sought were there too. Dimly she knew that the maternal woman in her, the subconscious mother who seeks for greatness in the father of her children, was satisfied with Westenra and that promise of eternity in his eyes. And because of this she was willing to renounce all that her life had been and might be, to change all in herself that he did not like, to become of him and for him. She had always known that a time like this would come, when she would throw all she had worked for and earned to the winds, for the sake of a man who wanted her not because she was a famous journalist, but because she was a woman and the woman for him. But the condition was that he must be the man for her too. She had waited long for that condition to be fulfilled, passing over many a fine heart because her own refused or was unable to give the countersign to his challenge.

And at last the hour had come, as it always does come to those who know how to wait. From the moment she first spoke to Westenra and looked him in the eyes she had felt that mystic stirring of flesh and spirit that comes only once and is so unmistakable. She had realised then that to have this man always in her life would be to touch the highest peaks of the far blue mountains of romance. And the moment she realised it she felt hopeless. For never in her life had she got anything that she ardently desired. Happiness had evaded her and joy had passed her by. To know now at last that Westenra loved her, that the greatest desire in her life was to be fulfilled, seemed too wonderful to be true. The gratitude that filled her was curious in so clever a woman, and one who had had many men at her feet; but a childlike humility concerning herself was one of her sweetest qualities.

In the presence of those she loved she never remembered that she was famous, gifted, travelled, and honoured, and withal young and attractive. It always amazed her that any one should find her clever and charming. And that Westenra, who did not even know or care what she had done as a journalist, should find her desirable just because she was Valentine Valdana and a woman was the most amazing and beautiful thing in the world. It opened life out upon a boundless horizon, and flooded the future with a love great enough to cast out all devils of the past.

She knelt long by her bed, half-praying, half-pondering on sad things gone by and glad things to come. Out of it all came a resolve that the next day she would tell Westenra the whole story of her life of strange adventure and misery.

There were many things that to speak of would cause her wretchedness, but it was not the shameful wretchedness of those who, resisting no temptation, have taken all they wished from life, leaving nothing for the future but regrets. Her sorrows were sweet and untainted. There were many things of which perhaps people of hedged-in lives might think she should be ashamed, but which seemed to her to be natural and simple and nothing. She had gone up and down the world and seen so much in the way of suffering, known so many complications of love and life, that nothing astonished or even shocked her any more. She had been through the mill and "seen life," as the phrase goes; and whether or not that is a good thing for a woman, and whether or not the spiritual vision gets a little dimmed in the process, and the senses a little dulled, is a matter of opinion. The fact remains that at the age of twenty-six Valentine Valdana still retained such freshness of heart that she could kneel for an hour or two at her bedside in a state of contemplative prayer, unembittered by the past and full of hope for the future.