A witty but unhappy writer whose life proved the truth of his epigram wrote that "good resolutions are cheques which we draw on a bank where we have no account." But at twenty-six Valentine Valdana could still, with serene confidence in her power to honour them, draw cheques upon this bank of the soul: so perhaps after all life had not done so ill by her as might have been supposed.
Her life-story was a curiously unusual one. The touch of Orientalism in her eyes and hair was a legacy from her grandmother, a beautiful Egyptian girl born in a harem and stolen therefrom by an adventurer who was deep in the counsels and intrigues of its lord and owner, her father. The two fled from Egypt to Zanzibar, where, under the protection of the Sultan, they married and lived, the Irishman making himself as useful and necessary to the negro Sultan as he had to the Egyptian chief. The beautiful little harem-born wife from association with her husband and the few Europeans in the place learned to speak English, and her only child, a girl who resembled one of the wonderful tropical flowers she lived among, was brought up in European fashion by an Irish nurse sent for from Ireland. In time the Egyptian mother died, and the Irishman, fallen on evil days through Court intrigues and an affliction of the eyes, was obliged to flee from Zanzibar and make for the only country where he and his child could keep warm and live cheaply--Italy. There, the girl, Iolita, learned to perfect a gift of dancing she had always delighted in, and when later her father became totally blind and penniless, it was she who bravely maintained the affair of living for both of them by dancing at the theatres and the opera until she danced her way into fame.
Child of a passionate love-marriage it was only natural that Iolita too should follow her heart. In London, at the very zenith of her success and just when Fate was unrolling before her a vista of luxurious years, she proved the heritage of her blood by eloping to Africa with the youngest son of an English peer, a being as romantic and irresponsible as herself.
Gay Haviland had tried his hand at most things, from Shakespearean acting in London to horse-breaking in Mexico, before he found his true métier as a transport-rider on the South African veldt. The home to which he took his eager-hearted bride was an ox-waggon drawn by a span of twenty magnificent red bullocks, which earned their living and his by carrying loads of wool and grain from the Free State and the Transvaal to the Cape. It was on a St. Valentine's Day from the tent of that waggon as it lay under the shadow of the Catberg Range, that little Val first saw the light, and the same tent was the only home she knew, except for occasional sojourns in Dutch towns, for the first nine years of her life. From a child's point of view it was an ideal existence, full of beauty and variety as far at least as scenery was concerned, adventures with big game, long days of camping on the banks of wild rivers or in the shade of purple mountains, and an absolute absence of the tasks and training common to children brought up in the ordinary way. It is true that at camping times the dancer amused herself by teaching little Val to read and write in Italian, while the transport-rider successfully imparted to the child, together with his poetical if vagabond views of life, a very real love and knowledge of Literature. For if ever scholar turned gipsy it was Gay Haviland, and though the book he loved best was Nature, and his library the Open Road, his waggon-boxes were always well stocked with works of classical and modern writers.
Val imbibed his tastes and vagabond creeds as a flower imbibes dew, but for the rest she was as free and idle as a little wild buck prancing across the veldt in the wake of its mother, and as unthinkingly happy.
With Haviland's tragic death from snake-bite, however, the veldt life came to a sudden end and passed for ever into the realms of memory, seeming to Val in the hard years that followed to have been a wonderful dream, yet remaining always the most poignant and cherished part of her existence.
Poverty showed its jagged teeth to the beautiful dancer, frightening her back to Europe, where she essayed to gain her living once more with flying seductive feet. But her dancing was not what it had been. Ten years of idle and ideal love on the veldt had spoiled her art, or perhaps the wife and mother had absorbed it. At any rate she was unable to step back into the vacancy created when as Iolita Fitzpatrick she had left the stage for love of Gay Haviland. Other stars had arisen, and the public had forgotten her. Engagements were difficult to find, and when found were at best of the second-rate order. Neither help nor sympathy was forthcoming from the proud English family who, having always detested poor Gay Haviland's mésalliance, absolutely repudiated any connection with the dancer or her child.
Years of arduous struggle followed during which the two trailed from one great continental city to another, often miserably poor and in desperate straits, sometimes perilously near starvation, but thanks to the generous Freemasonry of Art, and grace to their own happy charm in good and evil times, never quite without friends, or some last resource. It may truly be said that Val's education was received in the school of Life, for she never attended any other; but the love of books inculcated by her father stayed with her, and because book lovers will always, whatever their straits, get books, Val was able to educate herself as many another has done, and done well, by reading. Then, too, with the open mind of the untaught she received and retained all the beauty and colour and picturesque event of their wandering Bohemian life, finding even in their grimmest adventure food for thought and amusement.
When she was fourteen, and Iolita still astonishingly beautiful in spite of poverty and defeat, an engagement took them to the Argentine Republic, but ending up disastrously left them stranded and almost penniless at Buenos Aires. Things were at their darkest when good luck dawned once more in the shape of Dick Rowan, an old friend of Haviland's, and who together with the latter had adored the dancer in the days when she was a star. Rowan was a brilliant but eccentric man of letters, afflicted by the wanderlust. His adventurous temperament, irked by life in cities, had driven him forth as a journalist to far lands, where he had become as famous for his war and political correspondence as for his dissipated ways and generous heart. He was an expert on the political situation of various Colonies and smaller Powers, and whenever little wars were on the carpet there also was Rowan. In times when wars were not, he occupied himself with the internal wranglings of Colonial governments. Wherever he could force his way in he made himself felt. It was not for nothing he was known as "Gadfly" Rowan. At the period of his re-meeting with Iolita he was interesting himself in the Transvaal with the affairs of Paul Kruger and the Uitlander, up to his eyes in political intrigue, and editing a Johannesburg journal with Imperialistic leanings. His presence in the Argentine on some business of his own was the veriest accident, but a happy one for Iolita, for, faithful to his early passion, he was overjoyed to find her again, and asked nothing better than to take her burdens upon his shoulders and be a father to Gay Haviland's daughter. Iolita, on her part, had always felt a great affection for the journalist. It seemed a pleasant end of weariness to consign her fate into his eager if improvident hands. So they were married, and the family of three sailed for Africa, where for the next two years they spent a busy, happy, and erratic existence together, surrounded by journalists, politicians, and all the quick wits of the Rand. From the first Val showed a keen liking which Rowan was swift to foster for newspaper writing. He took her as his secretary, and taught her on broad lines all that is most useful for a journalist to know. None knew better than Dick Rowan how to direct a natural talent for journalism, and in Val he recognised splendid material, a born vocabulary, a keen sense of observation, love of phrase, and a knowledge of books and places. Above all, she was full of ardour for the work. Nothing lacked but training to apply her genius, and this Rowan, erratic and irresponsible in all things but his profession, was the best person in the world to give her.
From being his amanuensis she soon became his assistant. A great devotion sprang up between the stepfather and daughter. Later, when Iolita, visiting Durban, died and was buried in that beautiful seaside town, the two drew closer in their loneliness and sorrow. Val was eighteen then, and Rowan ageing rapidly, for he always lived every moment of his life, and always he "poured spirits down to keep his spirits up." Because of this his energy and brain were both beginning to fail; and here the value of the hand and head he had trained was proved. Work was offered to him that he would never have been able to accept but for Val. It was she who urged him on, worked with him and for him, repaying her own and her mother's debt by unwearying devotion. A commission to proceed to Somaliland, a splendid opportunity for glory, came from a great London Daily, but Rowan's initiative would never have been equal to it without Val. She not only made him go, but went with him, and when he fell ill there, and the newspaper correspondence devolved upon her, as well as the nursing of her stepfather, so well did she accomplish both, that Rowan got well and she reaped recognition. For Rowan, rigid as all good writers about the identity of work, insisted on the authorship of the letters being known. Shyly she appended "Wanderfoot," the nom-de-plume she had chosen, to her first unaided work. It looked like a special effort on the part of the god of irony that before the end of the expedition she nearly lost her feet through inflammation caused by overwalking.