I shrugged my shoulders.
Hoyting lighted another cigarette, folded his arms on the table, and looked at me. “I knew everything there was to know about Paramore before he died,” he affirmed. “I didn’t in the least want to know any of it, but it was inevitable. He had no control over his mental muscles—complete paralysis of the reticent nerve, you might say. I know, I tell you. If you don’t choose to believe it—you’ll have doubted my word, that’s all. I have all the evidence there is; and why should I lie about it?”
“Oh, I believe it—but it’s extraordinary.”
“Should I be here if it weren’t extraordinary? It’s preposterous. But there it is.”
“And the rest, you said, was drama?”
Hoyting looked out. “Let’s go to a café,” he said; “I want a rest.”
I assented. There is something in the transitoriness of a café crowd that quiets Hoyting. No one can be expected to stay overnight in a café. He likes the restlessness, the ridiculous suggestion that every one else may be as foot-loose as he. Besides, Hoyting is always restive under the strain of a story; he chafes at the bounds and limits of any rounded episode. He needs to draw breath and come back to it, as it were, from very far. So we ordered things; sitting on the very edge of the boulevard, we sipped and watched for an hour. In the end I saw signs of his return to the matter in hand.
“Beauty—” he began suddenly, pushing his glass aside, “it’s something I never see. But now and then a man or a woman delights me curiously. Madame Pothier was like that. She showed you what civilization of the older sort can do when it likes. And Paramore saw it, too. He was clean gone on her. He would have told her everything if he had had any right to. I said it wasn’t a silly tale of woman’s ennobling influence, didn’t I? No more it was. Yet he saw her as soon as he reached Africa, and I am sure he carried her image into the interior with him—as he once did Joan Whitaker’s, only with an immense difference, after all. This time he brought back truth instead of lies. So at least it couldn’t have been a bad image to live with.
“I got all this that I’ve been telling you, in bits and snatches, while I sat with him. The fever didn’t seem so bad at first—the doctor thought we could pull him through. You absolutely never know. I never thought he would pull through. Those very first questions of his, when he sat peering out at me through the mosquito-netting of his bed, didn’t seem to come from a man who had life before him. And when I had got those early details out of him, I somehow felt sure he’d go. I’m no pessimist; but I didn’t see life giving him a second chance. It was too much to hope that life would let him make good after all. And yet—he so nearly did. Damn fever!...
“Madame Pothier did everything she could. She was a good sort. I’ve always wondered, as much as it is permitted to wonder, whether she felt anything for Paramore. If she did, I am sure that she never knew it. There are women like that, you know. I don’t mean the women who gaze out of cold, sexless depths at the fires burning above, and wonder pruriently why the fires burn. She wasn’t that kind. I mean the women who, when they become wives, remain women only for their husbands. I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to her that any man save Marcel Pothier could look upon her with romantic interest. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, but I know that it exists. A woman like that simply assumes that she is no longer a wandering lure constantly crossing the path of the male. She thinks all men’s eyes are veiled because hers are. A very pretty, pathetic ostrich trick. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but astonishingly often it does. With Paramore it did. All I mean is that she hadn’t dreamed Paramore worshipped her. She remembered him as a friend they had made two years before, and of course he was to come to them out of that pitiful Mission Hospital. No one in Dakar knew anything about Paramore’s fiasco. He wasn’t precisely famous, you see. Dakar was perfectly provincial. And Paramore was hoping, I dare say, that he could stave off the tale of his lie until he could lay before her the news of his atonement as well. The hardest thing he had to bear, probably, was dying and leaving his story to the telling of chance tongues, not knowing in what form it would eventually come to her. That, I am convinced, is why he told me so much—let his parched lips articulate those memories for me. But not once did he break down and ask me to tell her. Oh, I’ve good reason for respecting Paramore—a second-rate respect it must always be, I dare say, granted that extraordinary crumpling-up in Australia. But he never crumpled up again.