The workers were in sight, still rolling ropes of lushishi: even in this backwater, life did not pause in the presence of death. She felt she must get close to living beings, but when she had joined them, she found in their proximity no relief. They were too calm and unconcerned, too alien to her. She dismissed them for the day and turned back to camp.
Her eye fell on Archie's shelter and travelled to the rain clouds.... With his fever ... his fever was bad. Perhaps if he had been normal he would not have ... how was the quinine going? She fetched the bottle and tipped out the tablets, counting them slowly. She lost count and started again. The bottle would not last many more days. She must warn Archie. She took up the flowers she had picked that morning while she watched the log-hauling—purple orchids from a patch of swampy ground by the yellow river. Their clear, bright colour caught hold of her emptied mind. It seemed to matter more than anything else that was left in the world. She pinned a bunch against her white jumper. As she did so, she noticed they made her hand smell of musk, and ever afterwards the odour of musk made her think of blood.
Unpinning them, she discovered that she hated their sophisticated little faces. She threw the bunch away and tried to wash the musk from her hands. But the scent lingered faintly.
All the while, she was detached from her actions, as if her intelligence had been carried high up into the air whence, at an immense distance, it watched her body mooning about with flowers, loving them and quarrelling with them like an idiot child in a limpid poem by Wordsworth.
But inactivity increased her anguish. She had the sensation of abominable things lurking behind her, ready to spring if she began to think. She picked up the needlework she had been busy with on the Mimi, and tried to stitch. Her fingers trembled too much and she sat staring blankly at the sewing until she dropped it with a despairing gesture. It was a sock of Dick's that she had started to darn.
The trivial shock seemed at last to clear her brain and it bore on her that Dick was dead and killed by Archie. That the calamity she had foreseen had happened. She tried to believe that from the first she had seen no human power could ride the storm of the two men's passions. But in truth she had never doubted that her wit would find a way. She had divined the danger, faced it and, she believed, by the sacrifice of her every sensibility, had mastered it. Then one act of pointless surrender had brought her contriving to bloody ruin! The idea that Archie might see her loveless embrace and by it be goaded to strike had never crossed her brain. Had her mind not been dulled by the three days' ceaseless stress, it would have refused Dick the fatal consolation of that barren kiss.
By her blind sympathy, by the abandonment of a moment, she had killed him. To the two men she loved she had brought ruin and death. Her own act had made her the wife of a murderer and the mistress of his victim. Œdipus, slaying his father and marrying his mother, Rigoletto stabbing his daughter for the seducer he had abetted, were no more blood-guilty than she.
She tried to forget what was irreparable. What did the future hold?
One glimpse was enough. A black frame, in the middle of which a body, with a cloth over its face, hung, twitching a little. She put her hands over her eyes, but imagination had no mercy.
She waited now in the airless court, waited to hear Archie sentenced to spend his youth in a prison or pay life for life. She saw the indifferent, dispassionate features of the barristers; the old, grave face of the judge; the inhuman pomp of Justice, only less terrible than the degraded ceremonial of the scaffold.