Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  Lucy, smiling, listened to the nonsense they talked. In their company she lost all sense of reality; Mrs. Crowley was so fragile, and Dick had such a whimsical gaiety, that she could not treat them as real persons. She felt herself a grown-up being assisting at some childish game in which preposterous ideas were bandied to and fro like answers in the game of consequences.

  ‘I never saw people wander from the subject as you do,’ she protested. ‘I can’t imagine what connection there is between whether Mr. MacKenzie would arrange Julia’s footstool, and the profligacy of the female sex.’

  ‘Don’t be hard on us,’ said Mrs. Crowley. ‘I must work off my flippancy before he arrives, and then I shall be ready to talk imperially.’

  ‘When does Alec come?’ asked Dick.

  ‘Now, this very minute. I’ve sent a carriage to meet him at the station. You won’t let him depress me, will you?’

  ‘Why did you ask him if he affects you in that way?’ asked Lucy, laughing.

  ‘But I like him — at least I think I do — and in any case, I admire him, and I’m sure he’s good for me. And Mr. Lomas wanted me to ask him, and he plays bridge extraordinarily well. And I thought he would be interesting. The only thing I have against him is that he never laughs when I say a clever thing, and looks so uncomfortably at me when I say a foolish one.’

  ‘I’m glad I laugh when you say a clever thing,’ said Dick.

  ‘You don’t. But you roar so heartily at your own jokes that if I hurry up and slip one in before you’ve done, I can often persuade myself that you’re laughing at mine.’

  ‘And do you like Alec MacKenzie, Lucy?’ asked Dick.

  She paused for a moment before she answered, and hesitated.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think I rather dislike him. But I’m like Julia, I certainly admire him.’

  ‘I suppose he is rather alarming,’ said Dick. ‘He’s difficult to know, and he’s obviously impatient with other people’s affectations. There’s a certain grimness about him which disturbs you unless you know him intimately.’

  ‘He’s your greatest friend, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is.’

  Dick paused for a little while.

  ‘I’ve known him for twenty years now, and I look upon him as the greatest man I’ve ever set eyes on. I think it’s an inestimable privilege to have been his friend.’

  ‘I’ve not noticed that you treated him with especial awe,’ said Mrs. Crowley.

  ‘Heaven save us!’ cried Dick. ‘I can only hold my own by laughing at him persistently.’

  ‘He bears it with unexampled good-nature.’

  ‘Have I ever told you how I made his acquaintance? It was in about fifty fathoms of water, and at least a thousand miles from land.’

  ‘What an inconvenient place for an introduction!’

  ‘We were both very wet. I was a young fool in those days, and I was playing the giddy goat — I was just going up to Oxford, and my wise father had sent me to America on a visit to enlarge my mind — I fell over-board, and was proceeding to drown, when Alec jumped in after me and held me up by the hair of my head.’

  ‘He’d have some difficulty in doing that now, wouldn’t he?’ suggested Mrs. Crowley, with a glance at Dick’s thinning locks.

  ‘And the odd thing is that he was absurdly grateful to me for letting myself be saved. He seemed to think I had done him an intentional service, and fallen into the Atlantic for the sole purpose of letting him pull me out.’

  Dick had scarcely said these words when they heard the carriage drive up to the door of Court Leys.

  ‘There he is,’ cried Dick eagerly.

  Mrs. Crowley’s butler opened the door and announced the man they had been discussing. Alexander MacKenzie came in.

  He was just under six feet high, spare and well-made. He did not at the first glance give you the impression of particular strength, but his limbs were well-knit, there was no superfluous flesh about him, and you felt immediately that he had great powers of endurance. His hair was dark and cut very close. His short beard and his moustache were red. They concealed the squareness of his chin and the determination of his mouth. His eyes were not large, but they rested on the object that attracted his attention with a peculiar fixity. When he talked to you he did not glance this way or that, but looked straight at you with a deliberate steadiness that was a little disconcerting. He walked with an easy swing, like a man in the habit of covering a vast number of miles each day, and there was in his manner a self-assurance which suggested that he was used to command. His skin was tanned by exposure to tropical suns.

  Mrs. Crowley and Dick chattered light-heartedly, but it was clear that he had no power of small-talk, and after the first greetings he fell into silence; he refused tea, but Mrs. Crowley poured out a cup and handed it to him.

  ‘You need not drink it, but I insist on your holding it in your hand. I hate people who habitually deny themselves things, and I can’t allow you to mortify the flesh in my house.’

  Alec smiled gravely.

  ‘Of course I will drink it if it pleases you,’ he answered. ‘I got in the habit in Africa of eating only two meals a day, and I can’t get out of it now. But I’m afraid it’s very inconvenient for my friends.’ He looked at Lomas, and though his mouth did not smile, a look came into his eyes, partly of tenderness, partly of amusement. ‘Dick, of course, eats far too much.’

  ‘Good heavens, I’m nearly the only person left in London who is completely normal. I eat my three square meals a day regularly, and I always have a comfortable tea into the bargain. I don’t suffer from any disease. I’m in the best of health. I have no fads. I neither nibble nuts like a squirrel, nor grapes like a bird — I care nothing for all this jargon about pepsins and proteids and all the rest of it. I’m not a vegetarian, but a carnivorous animal; I drink when I’m thirsty, and I decidedly prefer my beverages to be alcoholic.’

  ‘I was thinking at luncheon to-day,’ said Mrs. Crowley, ‘that the pleasure you took in roast-beef and ale showed a singularly gross and unemotional nature.’

  ‘I adore good food as I adore all the other pleasant things of life, and because I have that gift I am able to look upon the future with equanimity.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Alec.

  ‘Because a love for good food is the only thing that remains with man when he grows old. Love? What is love when you are five and fifty and can no longer hide the disgraceful baldness of your pate. Ambition? What is ambition when you have discovered that honours are to the pushing and glory to the vulgar. Finally we must all reach an age when every passion seems vain, every desire not worth the trouble of achieving it; but then there still remain to the man with a good appetite three pleasures each day, his breakfast, his luncheon, and his dinner.’

  Alec’s eyes rested on him quietly. He had never got out of the habit of looking upon Dick as a scatter-brained boy who talked nonsense for the fun of it; and his expression wore the amused disdain which one might have seen on a Saint Bernard when a toy-terrier was going through its tricks.

  ‘Please say something,’ cried Dick, half-irritably.

  ‘I suppose you say those things in order that I may contradict you. Why should I? They’re perfectly untrue, and I don’t agree with a single word you say. But if it amuses you to talk nonsense, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.’

  ‘My dear Alec, I wish you wouldn’t use the mailed fist in your conversation. It’s so very difficult to play a game with a spillikin on one side and a sledge-hammer on the other.’

  Lucy, sitting back in her chair, quietly, was observing the new arrival. Dick had asked her and Mrs. Crowley to meet him at luncheon immediately after his arrival from Mombassa. This was two months ago now, and since then she had seen much of him. But she felt that she knew him little more than on that first day, and still she could not make up her mind whether she liked him or not. She was glad that they were staying together at Court Leys; it would give her an opportunity of really beco
ming acquainted with him, and there was no doubt that he was worth the trouble. The fire lit up his face, casting grim shadows upon it, so that it looked more than ever masterful and determined. He was unconscious that her eyes rested upon him. He was always unconscious of the attention he aroused.

  Lucy hoped that she would induce him to talk of the work he had done, and the work upon which he was engaged. With her mind fixed always on great endeavours, his career interested her enormously; and it gained something mysterious as well because there were gaps in her knowledge of him which no one seemed able to fill. He knew few people in London, but was known in one way or another of many; and all who had come in contact with him were unanimous in their opinion. He was supposed to know Africa as no other man knew it. During fifteen years he had been through every part of it, and had traversed districts which the white man had left untouched. But he had never written of his experiences, partly from indifference to chronicle the results of his undertakings, partly from a natural secrecy which made him hate to recount his deeds to all and sundry. It seemed that reserve was a deep-rooted instinct with him, and he was inclined to keep to himself all that he discovered. But if on this account he was unknown to the great public, his work was appreciated very highly by specialists. He had read papers before the Geographical Society, (though it had been necessary to exercise much pressure to induce him to do so), which had excited profound interest; and occasionally letters appeared from him in Nature, or in one of the ethnographical publications, stating briefly some discovery he had made, or some observation which he thought necessary to record. He had been asked now and again to make reports to the Foreign Office upon matters pertaining to the countries he knew; and Lucy had heard his perspicacity praised in no measured terms by those in power.

  She put together such facts as she knew of his career.

  Alec MacKenzie was a man of considerable means. He belonged to an old Scotch family, and had a fine place in the Highlands, but his income depended chiefly upon a colliery in Lancashire. His parents died during his childhood, and his wealth was much increased by a long minority. Having inherited from an uncle a ranch in the West, his desire to see this occasioned his first voyage from England in the interval between leaving Eton and going up to Oxford; and it was then he made acquaintance with Richard Lomas, who had remained his most intimate friend. The unlikeness of the two men caused perhaps the strength of the tie between them, the strenuous vehemence of the one finding a relief in the gaiety of the other. Soon after leaving Oxford, MacKenzie made a brief expedition into Algeria to shoot, and the mystery of the great continent seized him. As sometimes a man comes upon a new place which seems extraordinarily familiar, so that he is almost convinced that in a past state he has known it intimately, Alec suddenly found himself at home in the immense distances of Africa. He felt a singular exhilaration when the desert was spread out before his eyes, and capacities which he had not suspected in himself awoke in him. He had never thought himself an ambitious man, but ambition seized him. He had never imagined himself subject to poetic emotion, but all at once a feeling of the poetry of an adventurous life welled up within him. And though he had looked upon romance with the scorn of his Scottish common sense, an irresistible desire of the romantic surged upon him, like the waves of some unknown, mystical sea.

  When he returned to England a peculiar restlessness took hold of him. He was indifferent to the magnificence of the bag, which was the pride of his companions. He felt himself cribbed and confined. He could not breathe the air of cities.

  He began to read the marvellous records of African exploration, and his blood tingled at the magic of those pages. Mungo Park, a Scot like himself, had started the roll. His aim had been to find the source and trace the seaward course of the Niger. He took his life in his hands, facing boldly the perils of climate, savage pagans, and jealous Mohammedans, and discovered the upper portions of that great river. On a second expedition he undertook to follow it to the sea. Of his party some died of disease, and some were slain by the natives. Not one returned; and the only trace of Mungo Park was a book, known to have been in his possession, found by British explorers in the hut of a native chief.

  Then Alec MacKenzie read of the efforts to reach Timbuktu, which was the great object of ambition to the explorers of the nineteenth century. It exercised the same fascination over their minds as did El Dorado, with its golden city of Monoa, to the adventurers in the days of Queen Elizabeth. It was thought to be the capital of a powerful and wealthy state; and those ardent minds promised themselves all kinds of wonders when they should at last come upon it. But it was not the desire for gold that urged them on, rather an irresistible curiosity, and a pride in their own courage. One after another desperate attempts were made, and it was reached at last by another Scot, Alexander Gordon Laing. And his success was a symbol of all earthly endeavours, for the golden city of his dreams was no more than a poverty-stricken village.

  One by one Alec studied the careers of these great men; and he saw that the best of them had not gone with half an army at their backs, but almost alone, sometimes with not a single companion, and had depended for their success not upon the strength of their arms, but upon the strength of their character. Major Durham, an old Peninsular officer, was the first European to cross the Sahara. Captain Clapperton, with his servant, Richard Lander, was the first who traversed Africa from the Mediterranean to the Guinea Coast. And he died at his journey’s end. And there was something fine in the devotion of Richard Lander, the faithful servant, who went on with his master’s work and cleared up at last the great mystery of the Niger. And he, too, had no sooner done his work than he died, near the mouth of the river he had so long travelled on, of wounds inflicted by the natives. There was not one of those early voyagers who escaped with his life. It was the work of desperate men that they undertook, but there was no recklessness in them. They counted the cost and took the risk; the fascination of the unknown was too great for them, and they reckoned death as nothing if they could accomplish that on which they had set out.

  Two men above all attracted Alec Mackenzie’s interest. One was Richard Burton, that mighty, enigmatic man, more admirable for what he was than for what he did; and the other was Livingstone, the greatest of African explorers. There was something very touching in the character of that gentle Scot. MacKenzie’s enthusiasm was seldom very strong, but here was a man whom he would willingly have known; and he was strangely affected by the thought of his lonely death, and his grave in the midst of the Dark Continent he loved so well. On that, too, might have been written the epitaph which is on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren.

  Finally he studied the works of Henry M. Stanley. Here the man excited neither admiration nor affection, but a cold respect. No one could help recognising the greatness of his powers. He was a man of Napoleonic instinct, who suited his means to his end, and ruthlessly fought his way until he had achieved it. His books were full of interest, and they were practical. From them much could be learned, and Alec studied them with a thoroughness which was in his nature.

  When he arose from this long perusal, his mind was made up. He had found his vocation.

  He did not disclose his plans to any of his friends till they were mature, and meanwhile set about seeing the people who could give him information. At last he sailed for Zanzibar, and started on a journey which was to try his powers. In a month he fell ill, and it was thought at the mission to which his bearers brought him that he could not live. For ten weeks he was at death’s door, but he would not give in to the enemy. He insisted in the end on being taken back to the coast, and here, as if by a personal effort of will, he recovered. The season had passed for his expedition, and he was obliged to return to England. Most men would have been utterly discouraged, but Alec was only strengthened in his determination. He personified in a way that deadly climate and would not allow himself to be beaten by it. His short experience had shown him what he needed, and as soon as he was back in England he proceeded to acquire
a smattering of medical knowledge, and some acquaintance with the sciences which were wanted by a traveller. He had immense powers of concentration, and in a year of tremendous labour acquired a working knowledge of botany and geology, and the elements of surveying; he learnt how to treat the maladies which were likely to attack people in tropical districts, and enough surgery to set a broken limb or to conduct a simple operation. He felt himself ready now for a considerable undertaking; but this time he meant to start from Mombassa.

  So far Lucy was able to go, partly from her own imaginings, and partly from what Dick had told her. He had given her the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, and here she found Alec MacKenzie’s account of his wanderings during the five years that followed. The countries which he explored then, became afterwards British East Africa.

  But the bell rang for dinner, and so interrupted her meditations.

  III

  They played bridge immediately afterwards. Mrs. Crowley looked upon conversation as a fine art, which could not be pursued while the body was engaged in the process of digestion; and she was of opinion that a game of cards agreeably diverted the mind and prepared the intellect for the quips and cranks which might follow when the claims of the body were satisfied. Lucy drew Alec MacKenzie as her partner, and so was able to watch his play when her cards were on the table. He did not play lightly as did Dick, who kept up a running commentary the whole time, but threw his whole soul into the game and never for a moment relaxed his attention. He took no notice of Dick’s facetious observations. Presently Lucy grew more interested in his playing than in the game; she was struck, not only by his great gift of concentration, but by his boldness. He had a curious faculty for knowing almost from the beginning of a hand where each card lay. She saw, also, that he was plainly most absorbed when he was playing both hands himself; he was a man who liked to take everything on his own shoulders, and the division of responsibility irritated him.