Stephen French Whitman

“ A small, wiry, middle-aged man, with an honest, lantern-jawed face, entered the living room bearing a breakfast tray. After one glance, keeping his eyes cast down, he bowed respectfully.
He was Parr, Lawrence Teck's valet in America and right-hand man in Africa.
With her head bent forward, she stared at some petals that had fallen from the gourd. Her neck rose from the white burnoose in a curve of the palest amber; her delicate lips were parted; her loosened tresses were filled with the feeble sunshine. She seemed to symbolize quiet. But when the telephone bell rang she started violently. ”

“ In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.
She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's deepest desires. She stood still. The world—this new world drenched in an unprecedented quality of moonlight—gradually became distinct. She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of verification. ”

“ Then, by aid of the sunset, the warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ playing the Nunc Dimittis.
Sometimes he would say:
"When I am gone you will be as fair as ever. That is good. The ancients who entered their temples to worship the goddess must have redoubled their love with the thought that the beauty of her marble person would survive them." ”

“ Hamoud opened the front door, and told her:
"They are waiting for you."
"They? Who is here?"
"Mr. Brantome."
She stood for a moment staring balefully at the stone knight above the fireplace of the hall, who still raised his sightless face, and brandished his blunt sword, with that stupid appearance of defying everything. Then she tossed aside her cloak and hat, and went straight into the living room, peeling off her gloves, saying in a gracious voice:
"Hello! How nice! But how foolish to wait for me. You must both be starved." ”

“ A clock in the valley struck eleven, its last vibrations mingling with a laugh that rose, through the moonbeams, from a marble kiosk enveloped in flowers. And as the breeze, heavy with the fragrance of many blossoms, caressed her face, Lilla felt that the gardens must be full of hidden persons each of whom had at last found the amorous complement.
At the end of the esplanade, in the light of the French windows, Cornelius Rysbroek's face appeared, then drifted away.
"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck. "Just now he wanted me to take him along to Africa. ”

“ The others, in the white-walled room now mellow from lamplight, were clustered round the piano, and one of them was singing a song by Tosti. Without drawing away her hand, Lilla returned:
"Happiness. Yes, tell me what it consists in."
"In the glory of life and love. In the splendors of this world and our acceptance of them—we who are this world's strange, sensitive culmination. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so fine, so complex. To be natural in the heart of nature." ”

“ Every morning there appeared on the terrace of a neighboring villa a young Frenchwoman in a white straw hat and a white dress, carrying an ebony cane, and followed by a brown spaniel. In the evening the stranger might be seen pacing behind the marble urns in a gown of gold and silver lace, or perhaps in a black dress spotted with large medallions of pearl and turquoise. A tall man walked by her side; and when their silhouettes stood out against the luminous sea there came to Lilla, with the interminable odor of roses, a soft laugh of happiness. ”

“ By night, the safari encamped, she had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one knee cocked over the other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the gossip of ragged wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and the smell of burning fat.
"I find such women incomprehensible," Lilla declared, with a profound animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves were so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging lions, who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the blood that she had shed. ”

“ Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of other voices broke like a wave.
"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but, kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net, to take her hand and press it to his brow.
"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to you." ”

“ In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a similarity to her own life. Or, at least, she felt that her life, if he knew it in detail, would seem to him almost as trivial.
"Poor souls," she said. "But one surely finds others out there," she persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it intently. "White women, for example, the women of the empire builders? At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be almost inevitable. Each finds in the other an overwhelming congeniality? The loneliness round about exerts a tremendous persuasion?" ”

“ But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafés where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she admired. Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of geniuses aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken possession of them. She envied the women whose lives were united to theirs in an atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who basked in that radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.
Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell. ”

“ But Cornelius Rysbroek was traveling far away.
As for Lawrence, he was slipping farther and farther into the past. There were times when without the aid of his picture Lilla could no longer visualize his face. Their moment of love became blurred in her memory. At times, remorsefully, as if struggling against a lethargy mysteriously imposed upon her natural instincts, she strove to revive her grief in its full strength; and then, for an instant, her recollections became as poignant as though he had been with her only yesterday. ”

“ And Lilla did not know how to summon back into being the man that he had been; for all her inspiration was dragged down by guilt. She remembered the dusty rooms where even her last tribute of flowers had now turned to dust. She recalled the victorious seductiveness of genius, of egotism, the lure of a world in which a myriad women had seemed to be dancing away from her toward happiness; and then, her moment of complex treason at the horse show. ”

“ Consent, Bangana! Consent, Mfondolo, who might be my brother lion, pouncing upon army after army, as the lion pounces upon the antelope. I have shown you the Zimbabwe, the stone cities of the ancients. With slaves we will dig the gold out of the quartz reefs, buy guns from the Arabs, and drive these little yellow-skinned white men back into the sea. We two will rule over the land of my ancestors, the kingdom of the first Muene-Motapa. Through your mouth we will treat with the English, the Arabs, and all the world as equals. I will not kill you, because you will be my mind. ”

“ Is there nothing else, nothing better?"
Lilla began again to shrink from life, to mistrust it.
She suffered from trivial, groundless fears, which she magnified, then abruptly forgot. Growing thinner, she found herself enervated as in the days of her mourning for Lawrence Teck, and all the while something at once indefinite and priceless seemed to be lost to her. In the midst of her sadness she would have fleeting perceptions of blue water, felucca sails, a town on the edge of a lake—maybe Lausanne—a room where she sat obediently asleep in a deep leather chair. ”

“ Lawrence Teck returned:
"Say this to Muene-Motapa. The medicine that might cure me is far beyond the sea. I thought I might do without it; but see what the lack of it has brought me to. A little chill, a headache—the strong man rejoicing in the world shakes his shoulders and they are gone. But death in one of its multitude of forms stands at the door of the heart that has ceased to take pleasure in life." ”

“ There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their appearance and actions, to be human—beings that danced in regiments with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums, that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest stronghold ”

“ She had an idea that the silently brooding forest was smiling in the darkness.
Yes, she felt, alone; since even the God of Hamoud could not be aware of this world, in which everything desired by the senses, or apprehensible by them, was going to destruction—so futile a tragedy, so contemptible a fleeting dream, a nothingness of which the miserable woman seemed to see herself, at last, as the most insignificant part. ”

“ All knew by this time that they were not headed for Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Avoiding that last outpost of civilization, they were approaching the country of the Mambava, which lay behind the steamy sunshine, below the blue and lavender battlements of granite, in the uplands covered with forests.
The askaris alone, the lean, khaki-clad Somalia, remained indifferent to this atmosphere of disquiet that was more debilitating to the porters than the fever-laden mists. For these fierce, restless men from the northern deserts were of a breed that found its true contentment in danger and violence. ”

“ She lay on her bed, under the muslin mosquito net through which strained the pearly gleam of a lantern. Once more it was all an illusion which must be allowed to endure till reality could be gained. For Lilla, the only reality was comprised at this moment into one more meeting with him, in the sight of his living face, in the sound of his voice pronouncing words of forgiveness, of love, perhaps even of remorse. ”