The commandant had extracted this journal from a pile of newspapers and magazines of half a dozen countries, all thumbed and ragged from perusals that had embraced the most trivial advertisements, and all still precious because by their aid one's spirit could fly home. This London journal contained at the bottom of a page, amid some gossip about music in America, the announcement that "the widow of Lawrence Teck, the explorer," had married the young composer, David Verne.
Raising his eyes at last toward the casement in the embrasure, Lawrence Teck saw, against a glaring turquoise sky, the fronds of a borassus palm, which seemed, like all the rest of nature, to be sleeping. He leaped to his feet, realizing that he was in Africa, still far from the coast, and that at this moment, in another hemisphere——
The walls, the sleeping borassus palm, the patch of sky, all became red.
He walked to and fro, saying to himself in what seemed a jocular tone:
"Didn't wait long. A composer. Think of that!"
He stood still, his bearded face upturned toward the casement. He let out a peal of laughter that froze the blood of the white-robed servants who had been dozing in the stone corridor. They crept beyond earshot of the stranger who, with his hips wrapped in bark cloth, had suddenly appeared on the rim of the safe world against a background of shields painted with the devices of the terrible Mambava.
But Lawrence Teck quickly recovered an external impassiveness. He sat down, and considered:
"How naïve I was. That's when the sentimentalism gushes out, at the end of long journeys, at the novelty of elegance and sophistication. One deifies them then: one gives them a place much larger than they ought to take up in life. How Muene-Motapa would laugh! He, virtually a Neolithic man, never sinks below manly thoughts: his ambitions are never enfeebled by the malady of sentimental love. So when he suffers it is like a man, not like a descendant of medieval mystics and cavalieri serventi."
His body relaxed, and he muttered:
"A bit of romance for her in imitation of some favorite play or book. An emotional hour with the man from Africa—and now a musical fellow."