The Last Ditch

by Will Levington Comfort

"It's not a matter of place," she had repeated. "I don't hasten matters by rounding the world every year or two. I know he might just as well cross my own threshold in Ireland or come to one of the late tiger-hunter's households in England. Not a matter of place, but the right time. I think when we are both ready he will come surely—it must be he who is not ready.... See how the years go. I am older than you, Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I don't want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child—one child from him. I learned something of what it means—oh, just the beginning of that mighty mystery. I would kill him—if he did not prove the real lover. No more tiger-hunters for me. All boyish things would have to be put away by the man I took for my own. He would have to know what it means to be a father. There's something heroic about that that the world doesn't dream of yet. My lover would have to understand that. At least, he would have to know when I told him. God, how few are the lovers in the world."

Romney pondered this again and again in his berth, sentence by sentence. Once she had laughed and said:

"The man I mean—why, his romance is greater to him than his life work."

And again, she had bent forward whispering, her hand upon his knee: "Sometimes I feel as if I were strong enough to be the mother of the new race."

All this on a little river steamer, deep in China, the rice-lands giving away to the hills as they neared Hankow. Moira Kelvin had but one theme—the lover she would some time know. A frail superb woman burning with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff in her to endure fire that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions. He quite believed that she was capable of killing the man who failed her. He sensed something of her deadly horror in the mistake she had once made. She was different now from the girl-wife of that patient English sportsman.

"There are analogies in nature about this killing of the male," she had said. "Look at the fate of the bee whom the queen crowns king in their flight."

The hours had passed magically. It was he who had risen first. He was afraid of the woman, afraid as he had never been before, of some intrinsic lacking of his own. He felt at times that his own presence had nothing to do with her ideal—that she was merely telling her story as she might have done to some woman companion. Then there were other moments of personal relation—as if she felt from the first the power she possessed for him; that she was interested in making it greater; that she loved the use of her power in his arousing; even that he might be or become something of this solar being she dreamed of.... Always with her was the feeling that she was not interpreting herself exactly, some histrionic weakness—that she was carried away in the ardour of her impulses; that she acted perfectly the moment, but was not exactly that. Romney hated the logic of the male mind that persistently brought him this observation.

They were together the next afternoon at Longstruth's Pyramids by the river, a little table in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of the Empire. Two white butterflies were whirling together persistently near. Moira Kelvin's eyes followed them dreamily. Romney said:

"They make me think of the States—little common kid-day butterflies. I don't know as I ever saw them before in China."

"They are around the world," she answered. "They are always where I am because I see them. Always two—like bluebirds, and always silent like bluebirds. I see them and all well-paired things.... Once in Ireland in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that dress—ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty windless evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over the grove of copper beeches.... I am hungry and thirsty to-day, Sir Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes Nature maddens me....