The Last Ditch

by Will Levington Comfort

"A thousand times I have re-pictured that night coming into the court," he told her. "Who would have thought of such a meeting in the Gobi? I once heard that it wasn't a matter of place, but of time—"

The thought of Moira Kelvin had hardly recurred with her in the room, and there was something strange about this, considering the proneness of the human mind to make contrasts. Moira Kelvin had been his master—perhaps that was the secret of her falling away so cleanly from his heart. His first thought that her capacity of appeal was so largely histrionic, scarcely recurred in the later days of their fortnight, and left only a memory. There had been an early sense of her ruthlessness, but that had not lived out their period. He held her to splendour. Finding her with Nifton Bend fastened it forever in his mind. Her quest was the certain spirit of a man—and yet he remembered the passion of her. He felt that great natures are built upon such passions, and considered it nothing at all to his credit that he had held her passion sacred since she had nothing else for him.

She had shown him in a thousand ways that there is a new order of conduct in the love-relations of the world—that man in general is very much in need of learning to wait, to hold and to serve. He held Moira Kelvin as a great friend now—one to reverence and to rely upon among the rarest passages of his life. All that she had said had proven true. He had brought Anna Erivan a different treasure because of that meeting. It had proved an initiation, and the one dark moment of Nadiram was his taking Anna Erivan in his arms at the wrong moment. He would pay for that in good measure....

She had been silent, and spoke now as if the words escaped: "Do you think that because you were so ready—because you had been waiting and had pictured the one woman—that I more or less fell into it?"

He leaned forward longingly. Her shyness in asking such a question quickened her attraction.

"That first night—that night of fighting—I thought there must be something insane about me—to let you take hold so utterly. Why, it was as if everything else were done—a new era entered on. The whole world would say I'm yellow to stick here—instead of pushing on for that which I was sent. I sat in the court during those nights apart from you—or thinking I was apart on that conventional thing—and felt Bamban, Nadiram, the Big Three and all of New China pouring scorn upon me. Yet what hurt me more was being apart from you. You see, that seemed a difference we couldn't overcome."

She seemed to be looking into his heart and finding something there which had little to do with his words. She felt the silence again, and it was plain to him when she spoke that she had taken up some secondary matter less hard to broach.

"I have sometimes felt that you were not sure of the work you were on—as if you doubted, perhaps, since you were out here, the wisdom or the goodness of those who sent you."

Romney was startled at the foreignness of the observation at this moment. Nothing seemed normal that had not to do with their story. He found himself telling her hastily of the suspicion he had encountered in regard to New China's idea of waging war—if she were called to war; and also of the incident of the Japanese spy.

"That was hard to take," he added. "I thought I was pretty well orientalised, but the old western training cropped up. I tried to make myself believe that I wasn't responsible for his capture, but I didn't make a very good job of that. I had run him down. Perhaps they would have got him, but the fact is, they got him where they did because of my efforts. It broke me for a moment—the little man being put out that way at my feet—"