It was this idea that so swelled Dick's foot that he could not move it from the farm. Constant intercourse with Norah was not calculated to heal wound in foot or heart and hourly he fell deeper under her spell: under the spell, too, of his own manly eloquence. His visit the evening before Norah summoned Archie and called in vain, was undertaken, I should say, by an impetuous lover, who hoped that his mistress's interest was not severely platonic. His repulse added body to his passion since it is the nature of men only to prize the possession that is refused them.
Norah's absence, during her days of waiting for Archie, was of the nature that makes the heart grow fonder. He saw her continually across the river; in imagination he felt her lips on his, her body in his arms.
Tantalised by memory and proximity, goaded by the lust of the unobtainable, his passion had mastered all inhibitory instinct. The flood of his imagination rose and swept majestically over the weir of the Divorce Courts and breasted even the subsequent dam of Holy Matrimony. When I met him at rail-head, I got the impression that Dick was not the sort who would find it unpleasant, for example, to be cited as co-respondent with the daughter of a peer. So when in the end Norah consented to go away with him, the granting of the boon he craved could have caused him comparatively few qualms. He felt, however, more anxiety than Norah, who had flung her cap with a brave gesture, and it was with relief that he hailed the lake.
'The road lies open,' he cried to Norah. 'The highway to civilisation.'
'It's more like the gateway of Heaven,' she said, blinded by the beauty before her.
'It will be,' he answered.
As side by side they descended the path which turned from rock to sand, the view flattened and the horizon sank. The closely grouped thatch of a native village showed through the trees. Of white men and their works no sign. Throughout their flight, by avoiding the occasional Bomas and rarer farms, they had escaped the awkwardness of European encounter. Dick commented on their luck.
'Anyhow, down here, it's too hot to care,' said Norah. She felt already the atmosphere of lake level—a matter not only of heightened temperature and humidity but of changed values. 'High thermometer and low morals,' was the way she put it. She felt her remaining scruples dissolve in that mild air. Ideas of duty and discipline were left on the austere highlands, where scattered men scratch a precarious existence out of a thin soil. At lake level, life was no longer an epic of struggle with victory or defeat as stakes, but a drowsy eclogue ended by easy oblivion. The few thousand feet from the plateau to the lake seemed to bridge all degrees from Dumfries to Naples, from Calvin to Priapus.
The palm trees threw black shadows on the silver roofs. On the soundless air came the laughter of copper-coloured babies playing in and out of the lapping water. Crocodiles and water snakes people Tanganyika, but in their play the children were as unconscious of danger as Norah and Dick of the fate that bore down on them from the lake."