At his back towered the nearer lip of the crater. Its height seemed to disparage his emotion. How long would this mortal and his ephemeral trouble endure? The bitterness, which had succeeded his anger, passed and left him with a dazed sense of loss, in which consecutive thought was stilled. Pictures of the happiness, turned so suddenly to dust, rose in his mind:—
Norah's tawny hair, rebellious under her nurse's coif; Norah's slender hands opposite him at dinner tinged by the shaded candlelight; the way she used to throw herself into his arms when he came back on leave; a fluffy sort of dressing-gown she once had; and so on down the years of love and marriage till the moment when he heard that ragtime tune in the forest, whistled so gaily ... before she knew he was there.
That hurt worst of all. His mind ached into the vast query—Why? Why had he lost her? He had never understood how she came to love him, but what had he done to make that miracle cease? If she had only told him!
Her outburst on the farm, which sent him hurrying to the Congo, had come as a revelation. Manlike, he had assumed she liked the life she had chosen. And all the time...
He felt no anger against Norah. By some illogical working of his love she seemed to stand apart. Though his mind recorded her infidelity and reeled at it, his heart was filled with gracious recollections of her. What she was and had been, did not seem to be obliterated by what she did and what was done to her.
His hate focused blindingly on Dick Ward. Imagination of that coarseness defiling his wife's body drove the blood boiling to his brain, but he never thought of her as defiled. He was tormented by the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved, still loved, would always love.
But the swine who had killed her—lust for his blood mounted. To shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no great thing. If the war had not already shown him that, these years in the forest had dwarfed the importance of mankind. And his standards had been warped by these last weeks spent in the slaughter of monsters that take the three score years and ten of man's span to reach the stature that fits them for killing.
So for a while his mind played with the killing of Dick Ward ... until the memory that already the man's life was in his hands stayed him. In his pain he had lost sight of the crisis that before his appearance had faced Ward and Norah. He saw that he had only to stand aside and execution would be done. Or rather, since no harm must come to Norah, take her on alone with him, regaining his wife and obliterating her lover.
But all the time he saw the impossibility. He could not leave a man to die whom he had promised to help. Still less could he kill him. In a way Ward was his guest; he had come to Archie without food, or hope. His defencelessness protected him. And the duty that one white man in the wilds owes another, backed by the African tradition of help and hospitality, demanded his rescue.
Dick's helplessness, had he known it, was his strength.