The Last Ditch

by Will Levington Comfort

She was gone. Still she had not shut his door.

It was all a kind of blur to Romney until he lay down. Then the picture straightened and steadied. Could it be that he, Romney, had hypnotised himself—so that the first possible woman had fallen straight into his heart? He had reached the period of life when a man begins consciously to look for his woman. Does not such a search make the man blind? One cannot see clearly so long as he doesn't want anything. Was he so shallow and common as to be caught in a whirlwind of the artificial? It was not that he lowered Anna Erivan in this thought, but could she be the one woman in the world for him?

Then he thought of her from the first moment to the last, reviewed her every gesture and movement of face and hand. It was not what she said, though there was much in that for him, but her comprehension was so instantaneous. She had fancy. She loved the half-lights; she had passion; the whole strength of her had to do with that. Was her strength the strength of repression? She had beauty, but was it the kind of beauty that goes with terrible self-love? ... She seemed tender and brave and imaginative.

Romney sat up on the cot with a suddenness that made the whole fabric creak. And what of his task? The possibility of his penetrating to the heart of the great Gobi mystery seemed far and intolerable compared to the next morning, when she would come into the outer room.... Would she be there first and he emerge to join her, or would he be waiting?

He laughed. Even this simple question had absorbed him utterly, banishing the mystery of the desert. There could not be two missions. As for her beauty, it seemed as if he had created it in his own highest moments, touch by touch.... Might she not journey on with him, thrilled, too, by the strange thing he had set out to accomplish? This was madness. Even the physical dangers forbade that.... The task, whatever it was, looked little and fanatical beside her. The Big Three and Fai Ming seemed altered, their zeal misguided; his own former seriousness in relation to man's accomplishment, seemed absurdly young.... This is what a woman had done for him in one evening.

There could not be two missions. He must stay or go on.... Perhaps after reading the Nadiram documents he could tell her something of what he was out after, but it would change nothing. There could not be two tasks. He must cleave to the one and forsake the other....

Romney was sweating. It would not have been so hard, had she not made the whole business appear insignificant. Must he be a ghost-chaser, leaving this superb creature here? ... Wickedness in her? He could not find it anywhere. She might become a saint or a wanton, but there would be greatness in her giving in either case. In that she was like Moira Kelvin. Splendours flashed for his eyes about her repressions, and yet what had her repressions to do with him? She had merely talked with him, and she was dying to talk. She would have talked with any one who would listen and furnish understanding. After all, Romney relied upon the one fact that such meetings as he had known in the twilight in the court of the Consulate, did not in the nature of things rouse one heart alone. There was no magic in life, if meetings such as that did not contain magic. Still he had not won Moira Kelvin.... It may have been only a waver, a gleam to her, so far, yet he felt that if he remained, Anna Erivan would know something of this that had come to him in an instant.... There was a kind of bruise in his heart that all his old life had been lessened. Suppose she was destined to be only a passing face to him. Would the old zeal for the world come back? Did he want back anything that had been spoiled? A woman great enough to diminish everything else, even for a night, was great enough for any man. But the things he had set himself to do.... Romney's lip tightened with self-scorn. He could come to no decision. The episode was making him yellow already. He had hitherto prided himself upon his faculties for decision. He arose and paced the room in bare feet. The night cold came in....

He thought of journeying with her in the evenings together on the dromedary—she sitting forward, sun and moon and sand, the deep drinking at evening, the fire on the desert, the tents—the tent.

He had stopped in the centre of the room and now paced on again. He was not quite the same after that last. He wished for the day. He tried the cot again, but could not stay; paced the room, longing for the day. At last he thought of papers given him to be opened at this stage of the journey.

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