Robert Gore Browne

“ A few seconds had passed since Norah had stepped into the sun. In that space she had ranged the gamut of emotion. The first sight of Archie had dazzled her brain, as the sun her eyes. For a moment the earth had reeled in a vertigo. And its reeling hurled her into a lake of shame that stung like the fumes of ammonia: shame at the ludicrous, the indecent figure she cut. Anger succeeded. Anger with Archie, whose pursuit had put her in this intolerable position. How like a man, she thought, to come to recapture the woman he had not troubled to keep! ”

“ Taking a man and leaving him in a few weeks. Like any harlot: less constant than the animals, whose fidelity endures the breeding season.
In fact, Archie had no clear thoughts. He felt that waves were buffeting him: his bones ached with fever: his brain was numb. Like Norah, he had turned his back to the future, and this fresh shuffling of the bits of coloured glass that make the kaleidoscope of life, as yet meant nothing to him. He could not focus his thinking. Presently one thought emerged. Not a very lofty one. 'You've got her back from Ward,' crooned his instinct of possession. ”

“ He was tormented by the picture of Norah in Ward's arms, but she was still Archie's Norah, not Dick's Norah, unchanged ... only lost; stolen away like any Eurydice. He thought of her as of a dead woman he had loved, still loved, would always love.
But the swine who had killed her—lust for his blood mounted. To shoot him in a duel, taking inexorable aim after standing his fire.... To feel the fat throat between his thumbs and to watch life fading from protruding eyes and purpling face.... Human life was no great thing. ”

“ Fortunately the moon would shortly be up. He decided to fetch the hoe at once, and to light a small fire of brushwood to keep away hyænas and their kind. Then he remembered that in camp he would find Norah. The thought swept away his unnatural calm.
It was not that he still feared the temptation to outrage Norah by word or action, even to kill her. That moment of bleak rage had faded and would never return. Nor did he feel horror of the prospect of facing the woman whose lover's blood was wet on his hands, his body yet unburied. ”

“ Presently she turned her head aside and I guessed she was crying.
'Wasn't it that kiss that killed his heart?' she asked at last.
Snatches of raving rang in my ears as I shrugged my shoulders.
She seemed to gather herself together. 'I'll bring it back to life,' she said.
Then, as if she read scepticism in my silence, 'I'm not pretending to you—I've told you too much—that I love Archie as once I did. Nor will I pretend with Archie. He'd see through me, suffering sharpens the eyes. ”

“ Dick commented on their luck.
'Anyhow, down here, it's too hot to care,' said Norah. She felt already the atmosphere of lake level—a matter not only of heightened temperature and humidity but of changed values. 'High thermometer and low morals,' was the way she put it. She felt her remaining scruples dissolve in that mild air. Ideas of duty and discipline were left on the austere highlands, where scattered men scratch a precarious existence out of a thin soil. At lake level, life was no longer an epic of struggle with victory or defeat as stakes, but a drowsy eclogue ended by easy oblivion. ”

“ To such purpose, that, as soon as Archie's bones and Norah's duties allowed, they were married.
Every marriage is said to be pre-ordained by the female, and baited for the male with the illusion of choice. Whether this is always true, I have no doubt that here Norah took the lead. Of course Archie would have sold his soul for her, but where would he find the decision to tell her so? She must have helped him out, her love translating his silences into mute eloquence, his caution into noble modesty, his reticence into silent strength. ”

“ There were too few natives for the size of the trees. They would be hauling from hillside to lake all day.
Left alone, she reproached herself for not acting up to the night's resolve. But she could not take the plunge, lying in bed with Archie stiff and awkward in the doorway, held from his work by courtesy alone. She would do better in the forest, she assured herself.
But it is not the easiest thing in the world for a proud woman to offer herself to a man who may no longer want her, and she lingered on in bed as long as her self-respect would let her. ”

“ And while he explained and excused his folly, Norah wondered what would have happened half an hour before, had Dick's rifle been loaded. A sudden doubt of his resolution assailed her. With a loaded gun in his hand, would he have dominated the mutiny? In his rage he might have fired, but in cold blood she doubted if, even to secure their escape, he could have screwed himself to the killing point.
Surprisingly she was sorry. Not, I think, from any hate of the Indian, pre-eminently unlovable as he was, but from a feeling that if logic barred all other paths a man should kill. ”

“ He felt, however, more anxiety than Norah, who had flung her cap with a brave gesture, and it was with relief that he hailed the lake.
'The road lies open,' he cried to Norah. 'The highway to civilisation.'
'It's more like the gateway of Heaven,' she said, blinded by the beauty before her.
'It will be,' he answered.
As side by side they descended the path which turned from rock to sand, the view flattened and the horizon sank. The closely grouped thatch of a native village showed through the trees. Of white men and their works no sign. ”

“ This lack of enthusiasm emphasised the romantic nature of the union, and the happiness of the young couple was only interrupted by the end of Archie's sick leave, and his return to Flanders.
From then life began to thrust them apart, as surely as a tree-root forces asunder two stones in a wall. Not that these two stones can ever have been very truly laid. Archie's reserved devotion can never have satisfied Norah's capacity for passion. She asked for the wine of life and got its breakfast food. But while that Carpathian picture was not effaced, she would see no flaws in her hero. ”

“ Don't you think that sometimes, in some chance combination of words, Norah hears Dick Ward speak...? Suppose she comes across his friends, his relations.... Sometimes, on nights when she cannot sleep, will not the burden of the guilt she shouldered seem too heavy...?
Archie too. Don't you think he ever sees a face, a face that is partly eaten away by a hyæna, a face on which he is raking the wet earth? When Norah whistles—it is a habit of hers—doesn't he see her saunter into that sunlit clearing and watch the light die in her eyes as she recognises him? ”

“ Moreover, Dick loved her. Must he pay the price as well? Must she go on racking the men who loved her and inflict on Dick the anguish Archie seemed to suffer?
When she was sinking into a morass of conflicting emotion, pride came to her help. Whatever else she felt for Dick, she knew that she despised him. Contempt makes an ill bedfellow. A woman can love a weak man whom she pities; she is too practical to trust her life to a man she despises.
Almost against her will, Norah's mood hardened. The tent stifled her. She must make this cruel decision in the open air. ”

“ Well, dark was falling and he must get that eland or they'd be short of food. He fired, and the beast fell kicking. The rest of the herd threw up their heads in terror, standing wide-eyed and ignorant which way to bolt. Then with a brief scurry of hoofs they were gone.
The silence was only broken by the difficult breathing of the dying buck. The sun, invisible in the deepening clouds, warned Archie that, before he could reach camp, dark would have fallen. As the meat must lie out all night, to protect it from vultures and other scavengers, he began to break off branches and tear up bracken. ”

“ A path, trodden hard by bare feet, straggled from side to side of the road, and down its centre a bicycle had marked its track on the wet earth.
As I chose my site, what a chance, I reflected, for any one with a taste for allegory! Side by side, the pathetic makeshift of the savage and the masterful puerility of the European, on a background of bottomless lake, immemorial hill, interminable forest. Which in the history of the globe would prevail?
The first hour of my vigil by Archie's bed passed in silence. The African day is so much quieter than the night. ”

“ After all it seemed prudish to balk at a kiss from one who had so recently possessed her. And since it stirred in her no breath of passion, whom could it hurt? So if kissing made parting easier...? And she was weary, mind and body; the interviews with Archie and Dick had taken all her strength; for the moment she was as passive as the dead. What did a kiss more or less matter?
The next moment, she was kneeling by a corpse.
Death, when it comes suddenly, is so incredible, that for some time she worked to bring back consciousness. ”

“ Occasionally life, or the workings of his own heart, drive a man or a bull or a ram away from the herd. Once isolated he acts with more enterprise and vigour than any of the feline family, however used to solitude.
Sighted again, the herd reclaims him.
So Archie came back that night from Abercorn a changed man. The hard outline which had seemed to bound his thinking, like the lead round a figure in stained glass, had melted. He was weaker, more human: something of his old indecision had returned. Uneasily he paced the camp.
In silence Norah wondered. ”

“ It was still in her grasp when she reached the camp, where Changalilo took it from her to clean. She felt that henceforward life would consist of minute, valueless acts like handing a rifle to a native, changing a skirt, sitting down on a chair. Nothing would ever matter again. 'All things are full of labour: man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.'
The workers were in sight, still rolling ropes of lushishi: even in this backwater, life did not pause in the presence of death. ”

“ They had paddled the greater part of the quarter mile that separated the steamer from the shore, when Obadiah the ox, as Dick had christened him, suddenly varied the puffing and snorting with which he met each wavelet, by a plunge that threw his quarters out of the water, and a bellow in which Norah, accustomed to cattle, could read an agony of fear and pain. He lashed out, plunging and rearing. His forelegs churned the water to bubbles that were dark with sand scooped from the bottom. His maddened struggles rocked the heavily laden boat. ”

“ It was easier, it seemed, to kill a man than a beast; much easier than an elephant, that you had to hit in the thin wall of the skull on a line between eye socket and ear hole.
If you didn't mind killing elephants, who did you no harm, men were nothing—men who pressed their hot lips against your wife's mouth. Had he experienced the slightest emotion when he had levelled the sights on Ward, a hesitation of pity such as he now felt for this fine bull? ... 'Head shot or heart shot?' he had coolly debated, choosing the latter as surer with a heavy gun and from a standing posture. ”

“ In his heart, he could almost have cursed the elopement, which threatened to prove fatal to both of them. Yet, as he looked at Norah, the robuster part of him declared her worth it. In the sea of blood spilt for women, no fairer face can have been mirrored.
She stood bare-headed, her short hair stirring, her chin up and her eyes bright with courage. He noticed where the lake sun had caught the skin on her arms. It was borne on him that his attitude lacked worth. An aristocrat-on-the-scaffold gesture was indicated. ”

“ Her precarious approach disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets, who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost hurt the eye.
Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.
But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour she had caught nothing. ”

“ She did not seem to penetrate the brilliant skin and glorious plumage. What lay behind? ... But surely Dick loved her, and why haggle over the endurance or value of that love? Why chill the warmth of the present by brooding over a future as fathomless as the lake, whose bottom had never been plumbed?
She left the chattering group of carriers to rejoice at the sight of their journey's end and sat down under the mulombwa tree to wait for Dick, who had found the path too steep and rough for his bicycle. ”