He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on to get a buck with every round and not a day must be wasted. Ward, he said evenly, was in bed.
'You're an obstinate Scot, Archie,' she said with a little sigh. 'You must go your own way.'
'Afraid so,' he replied, with an effort at a smile. Then in a gentler tone than he had used since she'd met him in the hills, 'Thank you, it's nice of you to have bothered.'
Poor Archie, she thought, he was grateful for little enough.
He talked for a moment about the work. That day the felled and trimmed logs must be manhandled to the water's edge. There were too few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from hillside to lake all day.
Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.
But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. Then she dressed slowly. For a time she stood staring at the lake, which lay under the storm clouds grey as a salmon's scales. It was under a week, as calendars measure time, since she had first set eyes on the lake, welcoming it as the friend that pointed the way to Europe and happiness.
Well, she knew Tanganyika better now.
She turned her back on the lake and on the hopes it had once aroused. She would not see Europe, perhaps, until she was an old woman. The interview she was on her way to seek would, she supposed, make fast the bonds that stretched her on the altar of Africa.
She found Archie sitting on the wreck of a tree felled by the tireless destructiveness of white ants. She noticed how fever and pain had hollowed his face and bleached it under the sunburn, till it stared like a Cubist sculpture. The natives clustered in groups, chattering while Matao hacked a grip in the fifteen-foot log that lay at his feet, to attach the lushishi ropes.