“He shook his head a little, and the netting moved on his face. It was horrid.
“‘He told them I couldn’t have done the stuff I’d brought back.’
“‘Did he know?’
“‘He didn’t know anything about folk-lore, but he did know where I’d been.’
“He spoke so impersonally that it led me on to ask questions. After all, I had told Madame Pothier I would stay with him through the morning, and I had to make the time go somehow for both of us. It was remittent fever without the chills, and there were fairish mornings at first. The afternoons and nights, when the malady rose like a wave and broke horribly after midnight—oh, those were bad. Madame Pothier and the regimental doctor took care of those. It looked fairly hopeful when he arrived, but finally all the worst symptoms came out, and before the end it was very bad. It was one of those cases that might, at the last, be yellow fever and just technically isn’t. Poor Paramore! Did I say that his face looked as old as all time under that shock of sun-bleached hair? It did.
“That questioning was the first of it. It fixed the name of Whitaker in my mind. I thought I’d find out something about him. You never can tell what will comfort a man in that state. But the Pothiers had never heard of him, or the Fathers at the Mission. I only mention those first remarks of Paramore’s to show you how I came into it. I had never heard of Paramore himself until that time in Dakar. I never read newspapers. All those good people said Paramore was a ‘grand savant,’ but they seemed a little vague, themselves. The only person who wasn’t vague was a lean, old, parchment-colored Father who was waiting for the next boat to take him home. He had been twenty years in the interior, and he was worn out—all except his voice, which was startlingly deep. He said no one could afford to study fetich but a priest. Père Bernard had no respect for anthropologists—thought they took a collector’s interest in preserving various primeval forms of sin, I suppose. I didn’t care for his mediæval manners, and I went back to Paramore with more sympathy. What a world! I always wondered if Paramore had some time, somewhere at the back of beyond, got him on the raw. Well, we shall never know. And yet I dare say the reverend old gentleman is here in Paris at this very moment. What a world! Nothing in it, according to Père Bernard, that isn’t magic—either white or black.
“I can’t tell you by what steps Paramore led me to his tragedy. I don’t remember those days separately at all. They went in jagged ups and downs—times when he talked, times when he was dumb, times when he might be said to rave. Then, too, he brought things out in no order at all. It was as if he lay in a world beyond perspective and expected you to sit outside of Space and Time, too, and see it all whole, as he did. That was rather unpleasant—he had so the manner of being dead and seeing his life from so far off that one thing in it was as near and as real as another. There was absolutely no selection. It was only by recurrence of certain things that you got any stress. And out of it all I managed to get the three main facts: the Royal Anthropological Institute, Whitaker, and the soul of Paramore. Madame Pothier was a close fourth, but she was only an accessory after the fact. That I swear. You believe it?”
I jerked my head up. “Good Heavens, Hoyting, how do I know? You haven’t told me anything yet.”
He rubbed his hands over his brows and frowned with closed eyes. “No; I beg your pardon. But, as I say, I see the whole thing. It’s hard to tell. It never was told to me. And I didn’t want you to think it was one of those silly tales of a man’s turning hero because he’s in love with a woman. If Paramore had asked me to tell Madame Pothier the story I’m telling you, I’d have turned on my heel and left him, if he’d been at the death gasp. I swear I would.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette—the world’s supply must be inexhaustible!—and seemed to brace his huge body for concentrated effort.