“Oh, it’s Paramore!” I exclaimed. “Heaven, forgive you, Hoyting, you are always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at Paramore’s! By the way, I suppose you know that no one knows anything except that he’s dead.”
“Umph! Well, I do,” returned Hoyting. “That’s what I was set for—like the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in there with fever. I don’t go hunting for things like that, you understand. I’d as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier’s beaux yeux.”
“I didn’t know you knew whether eyes were fine or not.”
“I suppose I don’t. But I can guess. There are always other people to tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all for le bon Dieu and Pothier. She was a good sort—married out of a little provincial convent-school to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She loved him—for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have about war! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers. Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament.”
Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another hemisphere.
“So he was taken to the Pothiers’.”
“You’re leaving out a lot,” I interrupted. “Why ‘so,’ and why to the Pothiers? You said to the Mission.”
“Oh”—His brows knitted. He didn’t like filling up his own gaps. The things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic context! “The Mission was full of patients—an epidemic had been running through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament of baptism wasn’t some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it’s all magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn’t a convert—he was by way of being an agnostic, I imagine—and the Fathers weren’t, in a sense, responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that they’d never have sent him away if they hadn’t had a better place to send him to. The Mission was no place at the moment for a man with fever—sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who were hiding gri-gris under their armpits and looking more than askance at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior. They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her fine eyes, I believe—oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the world—and a bit of a Puritan to boot.
“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in any one of those taxis. And Paramore was a bit of a Puritan, for all his years of fake anthropology.”
His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me.