“At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea. It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially.
“Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East Africa. He had gone into the interior—more or less—on a job for the Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman—or Lourenço Marques, either. I know. Damn their yellow, half-breed souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I imagine, had not been very far off.
“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was, up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying, exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country. Can’t you imagine those letters—in quaint, bad English, on thin paper, worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and cried over? I never saw them, but I can.
“Well—I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly, and considered herself virtually dead—entirely negligible at least, as pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively overweening about some special thing. The damned worms won’t turn—any more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her.
“She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already stricken, got away—probably considering that there was a lively curse on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal, and by the time they turned in a report—to use formal language in a case where it is a sore misfit—there was nothing to be done. I didn’t get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all, where it belongs.”
Chalmers stopped—he had been talking steadily—and lighted a cigarette. I took the opportunity to sip a little whiskey. Through his introduction, I had been staring at him fixedly. My own cigarette had burned to ashes in my fingers; when I felt the spark touch them, I dropped the thing, still without looking at it, into the tray. He hunched his shoulders in the speckled brown coat and bent forward, his arms folded on the table. The little movement of his head from side to side was very like a tortoise.
“Well, you see ... of course she couldn’t go alone, and of course there was no one to see her through a thing like that. I am sure she hadn’t money enough to pay any one for going with her. If she had tried to go, she wouldn’t have succeeded in doing much except get into the newspapers. She had sense enough to realize it, or the C.’s had sense enough to make her. But if she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t do anything else. She simply sat and brooded, looking seaward. She apparently intended, at least, not to let go of her idea. She may have had some notion of mesmerizing the universe with her obsession—just by sitting tight and never, for a moment, thinking of anything else. There she sat, anyhow, and Madame C. sent out her doves in vain. They all came back from the parapet, drenched with Mediterranean spray. So it went on. The girl might have been watching for some fabulous creature to rise up from the waves and take her to her goal. She would cheerfully have embarked for East Africa on a dolphin, I think. At all events, she wouldn’t leave her parapet, she wouldn’t leave the villa, she wouldn’t descend to the conventional plane. I don’t mean that she didn’t talk like a sane woman; I mean only that she sat at the heart of her obsession, and that when you came within a few feet of her you knocked up against it, almost tangibly. A queer thing to meet, day after day.... It ended by my being distinctly impressed.
“Very like the girl in the play! Just the same blonde vagueness, just the same effect of being cast inevitably for an unimportant, a merely supplementary part. But one is never fooled twice by that sort of thing. I tell you Maude Lansing will find herself some day doing chambermaid to that girl’s heroine! If I was impressed, it was by the cul-de-sac she had got herself into. She couldn’t go forward, and she wouldn’t go back. She sat there, waiting for the world to change. In the end—after Madame C. had wrung her hands for your benefit a few hundred times—you began to damn the world for not changing. It seemed to be up to the perverse elements to stop the regular business of the cosmos and waft her to her goal.
“I could hardly have talked to her about anything but her plight. It was a week or two before I talked to her at all; but, in the end, I found that if I wanted to continue to come to the villa, I should have to brave that presence on the parapet—domesticate myself in that pervasive and most logical gloom. So I did. She was a positive creature; there wasn’t the faintest hint of apology or deprecation in her manner. She would see you on business, and only on business—the business being her tragedy. Don’t misunderstand—” (Chalmers frowned a little as he looked at me.) “She was neither lachrymose nor hard; she was just infinitely and quite decently preoccupied with her one desire and her helplessness to achieve it. She didn’t magnify herself. It isn’t magnifying yourself to want a proper funeral for the person you love, is it? She was even grateful for sympathy, though she didn’t want a stream of words poured out over her. She—she was an awfully good sort.”
Chalmers dug his cigarette-end almost viciously into the tray, and watched the smoke go out. We both watched the smoke go out....