“‘Why don’t you go alone?’
“He looked at me then; he had only spoken to me before. Dominated by that look, I began to piece together my own scraps of traveller’s knowledge. Then I kicked myself. I didn’t need all the unphraseable explanations that gathered silently in his eyes. I knew, of course, what he just refrained from replying. It was the last leash on him—the thinnest thread of control. If that snapped, if I jerked it, we should be saying, all three of us together, monstrous things. I held hard on the leash.
“‘He can’t go alone.’ Her voice was just a whisper. She was shocked to the core of her, and I saw that, to that extent at least, they had had it out. I was sorry for her then—sorry without regard to my fast-ebbing admiration. She had been flung on the horns of a dilemma, and they were goring her cruelly. They couldn’t, poor devils, get peace with honor.”
Hoyting ordered more vermouth, and lighted the next of the undiminishing procession of cigarettes. He wandered away from the actual story for a little, and I let him, knowing that in the end he would get his fox and goose and bag of corn all safe across, like the man in the riddle.
“Dorrien wasn’t the sort of man you’d expect to find in scientific research. He was too human, too impressionable. A scientist oughtn’t to notice Javanese singing girls. They ought to be to him as the female of the flounder. I don’t mean for a minute that Dorrien was a cad, that he was anything but—complete. He was a scientist of sorts, at least by predilection; but he was also healthy and immensely masculine. He couldn’t personify Science and then treat her as if she were really a woman. He knew the difference. I’ve seen men who didn’t. They are the lucky ones. Dorrien was unlucky: he had no end of conflicting desires. He wanted abnormal conditions plus a normal life; and he wanted a little fame thrown in. I dare say he also wanted Mrs. Dorrien and the little girl whose teeth had to be straightened. Just at that moment, he thought he wanted more than all the rest a chance to do his appointed work. But he was honest, damn him! honest. He knew that Science could never, for him, be a mistress, and he wasn’t a man to exist on merely Platonic relations. I’ve always admired him for not blinking facts when he must have been sorely tempted to. But what they must have gone through, of bitter exposition, those two, in the days of my absence! I didn’t see any way out of it. He wanted incompatible goods. And so, by heavens! did she.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his chest and closed his eyes wearily for a moment.
“If she had been a different sort, even, they might have pulled through. But look at it. She was ambitious and sentimental. She wanted his success. She’d have been willing enough to send him out alone if he had lied to her about possibilities. He had had the honesty to realize them, and the utter brutality to tell her—that was perfectly clear from the state of both of them. Probably he didn’t think he had a right to withhold the information from her; or he might have thought it would be a clinching argument for her going with him. If you ask me, I think she was very near hating him for having enlightened her as to the dangers. Women of her kind don’t like such assumptions. And it didn’t give her a beau rôle. There wasn’t anything, and wouldn’t be, God knows, for her to be jealous of. But there was everything prospectively, if he went, to pity him for. A wife couldn’t fling him into that; not when he wouldn’t even pose, not when he didn’t scruple to say what she was flinging him into. However much she may have wanted to say ‘Go,’ she couldn’t. If he had only pretended to be other than he was, she could have made it out to herself that both of them were martyrs, he to his work, she to—oh, well, to the little girl. She was the kind of woman who could condone an infidelity, I imagine, in a cold, superior way; but her principles would hardly permit her to face it beforehand. And that wasn’t all—that wasn’t all. Of course she had asked him first of all—she would have—about the danger of infection; and it was evident from every suffering line in both their faces that he hadn’t hesitated to dot his i’s. She knew what was dangerous and what was not, and she knew that if Dorrien went alone he was lost. I pitied her. She had hunted, during two days, for a beau rôle, and she couldn’t find one. Her only hope was to get him home and trust that he would get over it, like some kind of fit. And he wouldn’t; that was clear. The only suggestion I could think of was that they should divorce, and that he should proceed to find another woman who adored him, and take her out there. That isn’t the kind of suggestion you make to people; it doesn’t sound sympathetic. It isn’t practical, either; it leaves too much to be done too quickly. Moreover, it had almost certainly never occurred to either of them that they didn’t love each other as much as any other two people did.
“And they expected me to say something! They had spent forty-eight hours trying, quite in vain, to find a way out, and then had the appalling cheek and the pathetic confidence to bring it to me!
“‘I can’t argue this matter,’ I said finally. ‘You must see that.’
“They didn’t see it. It was a perfectly impersonal clutch they were strangling me with. They hadn’t any notion of their own dismaying breach of reticence. We were all in Soerabaya—which was hell—together; and conventions didn’t exist. Also, I couldn’t any more get out of it than if we had been more literally in Hell and they ineluctable and imperishable shades. I had to go on.