His head dropped on his breast for a moment. He looked as if he felt his burden. I suppose the tortoise sometimes wonders why....
“Then, one afternoon, we dropped into the heart of a storm—tropical thunder, tropical lightning, skies blacker than you’ve ever seen, a wind that churned the heavens into a pot of inky broth. I had been wondering, for days, what we should do when we struck something besides the eternal huddled villages of the natives, with their tobacco-plots and mealie-fields, their stupid curiosities, their impudent demands for gifts—something more like a house, people you could count people, with a touch of white in their complexions. Strange coincidence, that it was by the real lightning-flash that, for the only time in my life, I saw her clear; strange, too, that the revelation should have come on the heels of our first approach to anything like civilization. It was only the plantation of a man who had made his little pile by trading in Kimberley, and had trekked up to the edge of the wilderness to live there in peace with his aged wife, and his cattle, and the things that without too much trouble he could coax out of the good-humored soil. His establishment was the first earnest of European activities seething somewhat to the southward; the first reminder of Europe that we had had since leaving the last Portuguese outpost on the way to the Nyassa. The trip had not been hard, as such trips go: we had run into no wars; no famine or drought or disease had visited us. We had been in luck; for I was a shocking amateur, and anything like a real expedition I could not have managed, of course. Yet, even so, I had been straining my eyes for the sight of a white man; for some form of life that more nearly suited my definition of ‘colonial.’
“And so we stumbled into his compound at eight in the evening, after endless floundering about in the storm. We had had to dismount from our donkeys and lead the frightened beasts by the bridle. Eventually we could discard them for horses or oxcarts, but for a little while still we might need them, and we clung to them, though the temptation was to let them go—with a kick.”
Chalmers hesitated. “Why do I find it so confoundedly hard to come at? I’m not writing a diary of accidents and self-congratulations like the explorer fellows. The only point in the whole thing is just what I can’t manage to bring out!” He mused for a moment. “The whole place white with hail after the storm ... thick on the thatch of the big, rambling house ... the verandah eaves dripping ... then the rain stopping, and a miraculous silence after the tumult ... no light anywhere except long, low, continual flashes on the horizon at the edge of the veldt—and then she came out, dressed in something of the poor old vrouw’s that hung about her lovely, slim figure like a carnival joke. I was wondering thickly where I should spend the night. I had introduced her as my wife, of course ... and they had muttered something about the other room’s being in use. The good old souls had gone off to bed with the ceasing of the storm, after our little caravan was housed down in the farm niggers’ quarters. But naturally I couldn’t have explained to them, anyhow.... The lightning was about as regular as a guttering candle set in a draught—but about a thousand candle-power when it did come. And, by one apocalyptic flash, I saw her face. She didn’t say anything; she merely laid her hand on my shoulder. And I, who had been bursting with the wish to talk, to tell her, to lay my head on her knees and weep, out of pure self-pity and desire—all those cub-like emotions—didn’t say anything either. I only saw—in that one flash—the working of her lips, the prophetic brilliancy of her eyes. We turned and went into the house without a word. She wanted me, too; that was what it came to. Other things being equal, the utter isolation of a man and a woman must do one of two things—must put a burning fire or the polar ice between them. I knew what it had done to me; I hadn’t been able to guess what it had done to her. I had rather been betting on the polar ice.”
Chalmers ruffled both hands through his hair and leaned back from the table. His mouth took on a legal twist. “It’s the only thing I blame myself for—bar all the egotism that youth has to slough, and that I think I sloughed forever before I reached the damned coast. I ought to have known that half her impulse was the mere clinging of the frightened child, and the other half the strangeness of our journey, which made us both feel that all laws had ceased to work and that all signs had failed. I ought to have reflected, to have put her off, to have made sure, before I ever took her into my arms. And yet I’m glad I didn’t—though I’m ashamed of being glad. Even then, you know, I didn’t envisage the rest of life. I still thought, as for months I had thought, that there could be no conventional future for that adventure. When my curious wanderjahr was over, I expected to die. And I wanted to have some other face than the barren visage of Romance—the painted hussy!—press itself to mine before I went out. I got it; and I’m not yet over being glad, though it has made a coil that grows tighter rather than looser with the years.”
I made no answer. There was nothing to say. He had not got to the end, and until the end what was there for me to do but light another weary cigarette, and summon all the sympathy I could to my non-committal eyes? On the face of it, it was merely an extraordinary situation in which, if a man were once caught, he could do little—a new and singular kind of hard-luck story. But, as he told it, with those tones, those inflections, those stresses, he certainly did not seem to be painting himself en beau. I looked at the patient figure opposite me—Chalmers always seemed pre-eminently patient—and, for very perplexity, held my tongue.
“The next morning, I got breakfast early and went to see about my men and beasts. I was a little afraid of finding the men drunk, but they weren’t—only full-fed and lazy and half mutinous. The guide who had led us to the historic spot had vanished—deserted in the night, with half his pay owing him. No one in that black crew could explain. We had had desertions before, and I should have considered us well enough off simply with one coast nigger the less, if he hadn’t been my interpreter as well. There were very few things I could say to the others without him, and, though we were out of the woods, we were by no means done with our retinue. I strode back to the house in a fine rage. I think I minded the inconvenience most, since it would be the inconvenience that would most affect her. Frankly, you see, I couldn’t suppose she felt, any longer, a special concern with that particular black sample of human disloyalty.
“When I entered the house, I saw her at once. Her back was turned to me, and she was talking with a man I had not hitherto seen—evidently some inmate of the house whom we had not encountered the previous evening. The other room had been in use, I reflected, in a flash. He was stretched on a ramshackle sofa with some sort of animal skin thrown over him. He—but I won’t describe him. I know every feature of his face, though I saw him, all told, not more than five minutes, and have never seen him since. I have a notion”—Chalmers’s voice grew very precise, and his mouth looked more legal than ever—“that, when he wasn’t pulled down with a long illness and protracted suffering, he would be very good-looking. As it was, he was unhealthy white, like the wrong kind of ghost. One arm was quite limp.
“At the instant I didn’t place him—naturally! But as soon as she turned her face to me, I did. Only one thing could have induced that look of horror—horror in every strained feature, like the mask of some one who has seen the Medusa. I started to her, but stopped almost before I started; for I saw immediately that I was the Gorgon. It was for me that her face had changed. God knows what, two minutes before, her face had been saying to that half-lifeless form. It was about me that she felt like that. Since, with all the years to work it out in, I’ve seen why; but just at the moment I was overwhelmed. She sat down in a chair and covered her face with her hands. I heard the man babbling tragic and insignificant details. I can’t say I listened, but before I could pull myself together and leave, I caught mention of fever, accident, loss of memory, broken limbs, miraculous co-operation of fate for good and evil alike—the whole mad history, I suppose, from his side, of the past year. I have sometimes wished I had caught it more clearly, but just then I could take in nothing except the insulting fact that this was the man whose grave we had not found. That was what her face had told me in that horrid instant. I never saw her face again. It was still bowed on her hands when I went out of the door.
“I don’t know how I got off—I don’t remember. I suppose I had the maniac’s speed. If I hadn’t been beside myself, I think I could recall more of what I did. The patriarchal creature under whose roof it had all happened helped me. I think I gave him a good many directions about the negroes and the kit. Or I may have paid them off, myself. I honestly don’t know. I know that I left nearly all of my money with him, and started off on horseback alone. I had a dull sense that I was causing her some practical difficulties, but I also had a very vivid sense that she would kill herself if she had to encounter me again. She had looked at me as if I were a monster from the mud. And the night before, on the verandah, in the lightning....”