“He must have been a bit of a coward. If he wanted so desperately to collect those filthy facts, why didn’t he collect them?”
“Bad luck—nothing else. He went as far as he could. But he was no seasoned traveller, you know. He just came to grief, as any man might, there in the wilderness. The stars in their courses—and so forth. He didn’t get so far west as he had meant to. Men went back on him, maps turned out incorrect, supplies failed awkwardly, everything happened that can happen. Then his interpreter died—his one absolutely trustworthy man—and the whole game was up. He lost his head; he believed his eyes; he believed lying natives. They made game of him, I dare say, in some grim, neolithic way. They said anything and everything about marriage customs—quite different things from group to group. He had bad luck with his own men—half a dozen of them died of dysentery or something—and he had to recruit on the spot. Why on earth should they tell him the truth? It was more fun not to. And, of course, now and then he pushed into some corner where the only use they had for him was to eat him. From those places he had to withdraw speedily. It’s not an anthropologist’s business to get killed unless he can be sure of getting his note-books home. He’s more like a spy, apparently, than a soldier.
“After eight or ten beastly months, despair was reeking round him like a mist. I think he said that, himself. His mind tried to peer out through it. He got nothing but a jumble of reports from those aborigines. Time after time they’d promise to let him in on some rite, and then their faces would be shamelessly blank when he kept his appointment. They said nothing that wasn’t carefully contradicted. Certain things he did get hold of, of course. Paramore swore to me that a good bit of his book was true as truth—but not enough to prove anything, to found theories on. About three of the note-books were genuine, but they made nothing coherent, he said. He put everything down, always intending to check and sift later.”
I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going to be in your hands, and the more information you have the better. I’m not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful. I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having luck against him.”
“No,” I protested stiffly; “for lying.”
“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole business easier.”
“Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment, go further than that.
Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had been pleading with him not to stop.
“One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have been a little off his head, you know.... He wouldn’t confess his failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books; he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in some—a very few—of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And then I would contradict a few things.’
“Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful book. There were things that occurred to me—I put them in. Any one who knows any folk-lore can make up customs with his eyes shut. After a little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did. But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later—much later—at Whitaker’s place.’