“I suppose this is the point in the narrative to say a rather difficult thing—though it ought to be clear that I’ve no cause or wish to paint myself anything but the mottled color most of us are. I spoke of what the tropics had done to her: fulfilled her in all kinds of ways. We had strange talks by the fire at night, moving on, after the necessary practical discussions, into regions of pure emotion. The emotion was all over the incidents we encountered; we marshalled our facts and made our decisions, and then leaned back and generalized with passion. Whatever Africa had done to her inwardly, it had at least taught her to talk. I had never had any particular sense of her being on guard—there was, from the very first, something strange and delicate in the flavor of our understanding—but now I had the sense of her being specifically and gloriously off her guard. We seemed to know each other awfully well.” Chalmers’s face, as he looked down at his pipe-bowl, was curiously boyish for an instant. He might have been speaking of a childhood playmate.
“Put it that I fell in love with her. I don’t choose to analyze my feeling more than that. There was everything in it to make me the prey of a passion for her—so long as we hadn’t begun, in Mozambique, by hating each other. She was straight, she was fine, she was thoroughly good; she was also, in her unfailing freshness and her astonishing health, infinitely desirable. By the law of every land she was my wife. There wasn’t a barrier between us except the frail one built of things that had never been said. Of course, I knew that, to her, the barrier doubtless looked insuperable. She considered herself the inalienable property of the man whose bones we were fantastically hunting for. Well: can’t you see that that very fact was peculiarly constructed to whet my hunger? It was maddening to know that shadows could effectually keep two strong, sinewy creatures apart. Our utter isolation in our adventure flung us upon each other.
“‘Doch es tritt ein styg’scher Schatten
Nächtlich zwischen mich und ihn.’
“One night she had a bad dream; she moaned and cried out in her sleep, and I had to stand outside her tent and listen, while she woke and wept and finally quieted down with little sobs like a child’s. I couldn’t even go in and lay my hand on her forehead to soothe her.”
He shook his head, and over his face crept the shadow of the burdened.
“Well, that was what I was in for, and I knew I was in for it as long as I should desire her. Finally, I only prayed that we might get safely back to Mozambique, where I could leave her forever. I knew that before my fever ebbed, it would rise in a horrid flood. I wanted her desperately; I should want her more desperately before I got through with it; and I had, for my honor’s sake, not to let her know. It’s odd how many situations there are in life that make it an insult to tell a woman you love her. But I think you’ll agree with me that this is rather an extraordinary case of it.
“All this time, I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what she felt: whether she knew, or what she would have thought of me if she had known. There’s something tremendous in the power of ideas. Think of how easy it would have been for me—I won’t say to take what I wanted, though against that background it wouldn’t have seemed such a preposterous thing to do—to insist on her talking it out with me, some night by the fire; how little she could have turned her back on me if I had wanted to ask her a question. But I was as tongue-tied as if we had been in a drawing-room, surrounded with all the paraphernalia of chaperonage. And yet sometimes it didn’t seem possible, with her face and her speech changing like that, week by week, that there shouldn’t be some change in it for me.
“I often wondered if she ever had moments, as I did, of thinking that that man had never lived. But I could only go on assuming that she gave him every thought she had. I never knew, by the way, what she felt—she never told me. I said, a little while back, that we never saw each other in the clear light of day—only in lightning-flashes. In spite of our semblance of intimacy, that was true. For when a man is obsessed with the notion of wanting to make very definite love to a woman, her impersonal conversation is a kind of haze at best. I know that we talked; but I know that, after the fiasco, when we ate our meals, when we rode side by side along those unspeakable trails, when we sat by the fire in the evening, I hardly knew or cared what we talked of. I kept a kind of office in my brain quite tidy for the transaction of business; the rest was just a sort of House of Usher where I wandered, wanting her. By the time we struck the first Rhodesian village, I didn’t even feel sure I could hold my tongue all the way south and east again. I only prayed to God to deliver me from being an utter and unspeakable brute. That was what my romance had led me to—that I was hanging on to common decency by the eyelids!
“You see, there was added to my most inconvenient and unfitting passion for the girl all the psychology of return from a lost battle-field—if you could in name so dignify that pitiful clearing which was our frustration. Everything was over, and why the devil shouldn’t something else begin? That was the refrain my blood kept pounding out. I dare say you don’t understand—you live among the civilized, and are used to reckoning with shadows. It’s different out there on the well-nigh uninhabited veldt. A platitude, I know. Funny how people despise platitudes, when they’re usually the truest things going! A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude at all. Humph!
“We struck into northeastern Rhodesia—days and days over the veldt; and after the rains it was blooming like the rose. Gladiolus everywhere—‘white man’s country, past disputing.’ No ‘baked karroo’ there. Pretty starkly uninhabited, though. Of course, we were hundreds of miles north of the mines and the other activities on the edge of the Transvaal. Mashonaland, it would really be more properly called; and it describes it better, sounds wilder—as it was. We were heading west across the tail of Nyassa, and then south—to the Zambesi or the railroad, it didn’t much matter which. That man was as lost to us, every corporal vestige of him, as if his ashes had been scattered like Wycliffe’s. But there on the rampart above Ravello both she and I had felt that the search was imperative: I no less than she. We were both pretty young.”