Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  One day Allerton appeared to be far better. For a week he had wandered much in his mind, and more than once Lucy had suspected that the end was near; but now he was singularly lucid. He wanted to get up, and Lucy felt it would be brutal to balk any wish he had. He asked if he might go out. The day was fine and warm. It was February, and there was a feeling in the air as if the spring were at hand. In sheltered places the snowdrops and the crocuses gave the garden the blitheness of an Italian picture; and you felt that on that multi-coloured floor might fitly trip the delicate angels of Messer Perugino. The rector had an old pony-chaise, in which he was used to visit his parishioners, and in this all three drove out.

  ‘Let us go down to the marshes,’ said Allerton.

  They drove slowly along the winding road till they came to the broad salt marshes. Beyond glittered the placid sea. There was no wind. Near them a cow looked up from her grazing and lazily whisked her tail. Lucy’s heart began to beat more quickly. She felt that her father, too, looked upon that scene as the most typical of his home. Other places had broad acres and fine trees, other places had forest land and purple heather, but there was something in those green flats that made them seem peculiarly their own. She took her father’s hand, and silently their eyes looked onwards. A more peaceful look came into Fred Allerton’s worn face, and the sigh that broke from him was not altogether of pain. Lucy prayed that it might still remain hidden from him that those fair, broad fields were his no longer.

  That night, she had an intuition that death was at hand. Fred Allerton was very silent. Since his release from prison he had spoken barely a dozen sentences a day, and nothing served to wake him from his lethargy. But there was a curious restlessness about him now, and he would not go to bed. He sat in an armchair, and begged them to draw it near the window. The sky was cloudless, and the moon shone brightly. Fred Allerton could see the great old elms that surrounded Hamlyn’s Purlieu; and his eyes were fixed steadily upon them. Lucy saw them, too, and she thought sadly of the garden which she had loved so well, and of the dear trees which old masters of the place had tended so lovingly. Her heart filled when she thought of the grey stone house and its happy, spacious rooms.

  Suddenly there was a sound, and she looked up quickly. Her father’s head had fallen back, and he was breathing with a strange noisiness. She called her friend.

  ‘I think the end has come at last,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like me to fetch the doctor?’

  ‘It will be useless.’

  The rector looked at the man’s wan face, lit dimly by the light of the shaded lamp, and falling on his knees, began to recite the prayers for the dying. A shiver passed through Lucy. In the farmyard a cock crew, and in the distance another cock answered cheerily. Lucy put her hand on the good rector’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s all over,’ she whispered.

  She bent down and kissed her father’s eyes.

  A week later Lucy took a walk by the seashore. They had buried Fred Allerton three days before among the ancestors whom he had dishonoured. It was a lonely funeral, for Lucy had asked Robert Boulger, her only friend then in England, not to come; and she was the solitary mourner. The coffin was lowered into the grave, and the rector read the sad, beautiful words of the burial service. She could not grieve. Her father was at peace. She could only hope that his errors and his crimes would be soon forgotten; and perhaps those who had known him would remember then that he had been a charming friend, and a clever, sympathetic companion. It was little enough in all conscience that Lucy asked.

  On the morrow she was leaving the roof of the hospitable parson. Surmising her wish to walk alone once more through the country which was so dear to her, he had not offered his company. Lucy’s heart was full of sadness, but there was a certain peace in it, too; the peace of her father’s death had entered into her, and she experienced a new feeling, the feeling of resignation.

  Now her mind was set upon the future, and she was filled with hope. She stood by the water’s edge, looking upon the sea as three years before, when she was staying at Court Leys, she had looked upon the sea that washed the shores of Kent. Many things had passed since then, and many griefs had fallen upon her; but for all that she was happier than then; since on that distant day — and it seemed ages ago — there had been scarcely a ray of brightness in her life, and now she had a great love which made every burden light.

  Low clouds hung upon the sky, and on the horizon the greyness of the heavens mingled with the greyness of the sea. She looked into the distance with longing eyes. Now all her life was set upon that far-off corner of unknown Africa, where Alec and George were doing great deeds. She wondered what was the meaning of the silence which had covered them so long.

  ‘Oh, if I could only see,’ she murmured.

  She sent her spirit upon that vast journey, trying to pierce the realms of space, but her spirit came back baffled. She could not know what they were at.

  If Lucy’s love had been able to bridge the abyss that parted them, if in some miraculous way she had been able to see what actions they did at that time, she would have witnessed a greater tragedy than any which she had yet seen.

  X

  The night was stormy and dark. The rain was falling, and the ground in Alec’s camp was heavy with mud. The faithful Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, chattered with cold around their fires; and the sentries shivered at their posts. It was a night that took the spirit out of a man and made all that he longed for seem vain and trifling. In Alec’s tent the water was streaming. Great rats ran about boldly. The stout canvas bellied before each gust of wind, and the cordage creaked, so that one might have thought the whole thing would be blown clean away. The tent was unusually crowded, though there was in it nothing but Alec’s bed, covered with a mosquito-curtain, a folding table, with a couple of garden chairs, and the cases which contained his more precious belongings. A small tarpaulin on the floor squelched as one walked on it.

  On one of the chairs a man sat, asleep, with his face resting on his arms. His gun was on the table in front of him. It was Walker, a young man who had been freshly sent out to take charge of the North East Africa Company’s most northerly station, and had joined Alec’s expedition a year before, taking the place of an older man who had gone home on leave. He was a funny, fat person with a round face and a comic manner, the most unexpected sort of fellow to find in the wildest of African districts; and he was eminently unsuited for the life he led. He had come into a little money on attaining his majority, and this he had set himself resolutely to squander in every unprofitable way that occurred to him. When his last penny was spent he had been offered a post by a friend of his family’s, who happened to be a director of the company, and had accepted it as his only refuge from starvation. Adversity had not been able to affect his happy nature. He was always cheerful no matter what difficulties he was in, and neither regretted the follies of his past nor repined over the hardships which had followed them. Alec had taken a great liking to him. A silent man himself, he found a certain relaxation in people like Dick Lomas and Walker who talked incessantly; and the young man’s simplicity, his constant surprise at the difference between Africa and Mayfair, never ceased to divert him.

  Presently Adamson came into the tent. He was the Scotch doctor who had already been Alec’s companion on two of his expeditions; and there was a firm friendship between them. He was an Edinburgh man, with a slow drawl and a pawky humour, a great big fellow, far and away the largest of any of the whites; and his movements were no less deliberate than his conversation.

  ‘Hulloa, there,’ he called out, as he came in.

  Walker started to his feet as if he were shot and instinctively seized his gun.

  ‘All right!’ laughed the doctor, putting up his hand. ‘Don’t shoot. It’s only me.’

  Walker put down the gun and looked at the doctor with a blank face.

  ‘Nerves are a bit groggy, aren’t they?’

  The fat, cheerful man recovere
d his wits and gave a short laugh.

  ‘Why the dickens did you wake me up? I was dreaming — dreaming of a high-heeled boot and a neat ankle and the swirl of a white lace petticoat.’

  ‘Were you indeed?’ said the doctor, with a slow smile. ‘Then it’s as well I woke ye up in the middle of it before ye made a fool of yourself. I thought I’d better have a look at your arm.’

  ‘It’s one of the most æsthetic sights I know.’

  ‘Your arm?’ asked the doctor, drily.

  ‘No,’ answered Walker. ‘A pretty woman crossing Piccadilly at Swan & Edgar’s. You are a savage, my good doctor, and a barbarian; you don’t know the care and forethought, the hours of anxious meditation, it has needed to hold up that well-made skirt with the elegant grace that enchants you.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re a very immoral man, Walker,’ answered Adamson with his long drawl, smiling.

  ‘Under the present circumstances I have to content myself with condemning the behaviour of the pampered and idle. Just now a camp-bed in a stuffy tent, with mosquitoes buzzing all around me, has allurements greater than those of youth and beauty. And I would not sacrifice my dinner to philander with Helen of Troy herself.’

  ‘You remind me considerably of the fox who said the grapes were sour.’

  Walker flung a tin plate at a rat that sat up on its hind legs and looked at him impudently.

  ‘Nonsense. Give me a comfortable bed to sleep in, plenty to eat, tobacco to smoke; and Amaryllis may go hang.’

  Dr. Adamson smiled quietly. He found a certain grim humour in the contrast between the difficulties of their situation and Walker’s flippant talk.

  ‘Well, let us look at this wound of yours,’ he said, getting back to his business. ‘Has it been throbbing?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not worth bothering about. It’ll be as right as rain to-morrow.’

  ‘I’d better dress it all the same.’

  Walker took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve. The doctor removed the bandages and looked at the broad flesh wound. He put a fresh dressing on it.

  ‘It looks as healthy as one can expect,’ he murmured. ‘It’s odd what good recoveries men make here when you’d think that everything was against them.’

  ‘You must be pretty well done up, aren’t you?’ asked Walker, as he watched the doctor neatly cut the lint.

  ‘Just about dropping. But I’ve a devil of a lot more work to do before I turn in.’

  ‘The thing that amuses me is to think that I came to Africa thinking I was going to have a rattling good time, plenty of shooting and practically nothing to do.’

  ‘You couldn’t exactly describe it as a picnic, could you?’ answered the doctor. ‘But I don’t suppose any of us knew it would be such a tough job as it’s turned out.’

  Walker put his disengaged hand on the doctor’s arm.

  ‘My friend, if ever I return to my native land I will never be such a crass and blithering idiot as to give way again to a spirit of adventure. I shall look out for something safe and quiet, and end my days as a wine-merchant’s tout or an insurance agent.’

  ‘Ah, that’s what we all say when we’re out here. But when we’re once home again, the recollection of the forest and the plains and the roasting sun and the mosquitoes themselves, come haunting us, and before we know what’s up we’ve booked our passage back to this God-forsaken continent.’

  The doctor’s words were followed by a silence, which was broken by Walker inconsequently.

  ‘Do you ever think of rumpsteaks?’ he asked.

  The doctor stared at him blankly, and Walker went on, smiling.

  ‘Sometimes, when we’re marching under a sun that just about takes the roof of your head off, and we’ve had the scantiest and most uncomfortable breakfast possible, I have a vision.’

  ‘I would be able to bandage you better if you only gesticulated with one arm,’ said Adamson.

  ‘I see the dining-room of my club, and myself seated at a little table by the window looking out on Piccadilly. And there’s a spotless table-cloth, and all the accessories are spick and span. An obsequious menial brings me a rumpsteak, grilled to perfection, and so tender that it melts in the mouth. And he puts by my side a plate of crisp fried potatoes. Can’t you smell them? And then a liveried flunky brings me a pewter tankard, and into it he pours a bottle, a large bottle, mind you, of foaming ale.’

  ‘You’ve certainly added considerably to our cheerfulness, my friend,’ said Adamson.

  Walker gaily shrugged his fat shoulders.

  ‘I’ve often been driven to appease the pangs of raging hunger with a careless epigram, and by the laborious composition of a limerick I have sought to deceive a most unholy thirst.’

  He liked that sentence and made up his mind to remember it for future use. The doctor paused for a moment, and then he looked gravely at Walker.

  ‘Last night I thought that you’d made your last joke, old man; and that I had given my last dose of quinine.’

  ‘We were in rather a tight corner, weren’t we?’

  ‘This is the third expedition I’ve been with MacKenzie, and I assure you I’ve never been so certain that all was over with us.’

  Walker permitted himself a philosophical reflection.

  ‘Funny thing death is, you know! When you think of it beforehand, it makes you squirm in your shoes, but when you’ve just got it face to face it seems so obvious that you forget to be afraid.’

  Indeed it was only by a miracle that any of them was alive, and they had all a curious, light-headed feeling from the narrowness of the escape. They had been fighting, with their backs to the wall, and each one had shown what he was made of. A few hours before things had been so serious that now, in the first moment of relief, they sought refuge instinctively in banter. But Dr. Adamson was a solid man, and he wanted to talk the matter out.

  ‘If the Arabs hadn’t hesitated to attack us just those ten minutes, we would have been simply wiped out.’

  ‘MacKenzie was all there, wasn’t he?’

  Walker had the shyness of his nationality in the exhibition of enthusiasm, and he could only express his admiration for the commander of the party in terms of slang.

  ‘He was, my son,’ answered Adamson, drily. ‘My own impression is, he thought we were done for.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, you see, I know him pretty well. When things are going smoothly and everything’s flourishing, he’s apt to be a bit irritable. He keeps rather to himself, and he doesn’t say much unless you do something he don’t approve of.’

  ‘And then, by Jove, he comes down on you like a thousand of bricks,’ Walker agreed heartily. He remembered observations which Alec on more than one occasion had made to recall him to a sense of his great insignificance. ‘It’s not for nothing the natives call him Thunder and Lightning.’

  ‘But when things look black, his spirits go up like one o’clock,’ proceeded the doctor. ‘And the worse they are the more cheerful he is.’

  ‘I know. When you’re starving with hunger, dead tired and soaked to the skin, and wish you could just lie down and die, MacKenzie simply bubbles over with good humour. It’s a hateful characteristic. When I’m in a bad temper, I much prefer everyone else to be in a bad temper, too.’

  ‘These last three days he’s been positively hilarious. Yesterday he was cracking jokes with the natives.’

  ‘Scotch jokes,’ said Walker. ‘I daresay they sound funny in an African dialect.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him more cheerful,’ continued the other, sturdily ignoring the gibe. ‘By the Lord Harry, said I to myself, the chief thinks we’re in a devil of a bad way.’

  Walker stood up and stretched himself lazily.

  ‘Thank heavens, it’s all over now. We’ve none of us had any sleep for three days, and when I once get off I don’t mean to wake up for a week.’

  ‘I must go and see the rest of my patients. Perkins has got a bad dose of fever this time. He was quite
delirious a little while ago.’

  ‘By Jove, I’d almost forgotten.’

  People changed in Africa. Walker was inclined to be surprised that he was fairly happy, inclined to make a little jest when it occurred to him; and it had nearly slipped his memory that one of the whites had been killed the day before, while another was lying unconscious with a bullet in his skull. A score of natives were dead, and the rest of them had escaped by the skin of their teeth.

  ‘Poor Richardson,’ he said.

  ‘We couldn’t spare him,’ answered the doctor slowly. ‘The fates never choose the right man.’

  Walker looked at the brawny doctor, and his placid face was clouded. He knew to what the Scot referred and shrugged his shoulders. But the doctor went on.

  ‘If we had to lose someone it would have been a damned sight better if that young cub Allerton had got the bullet which killed poor Richardson.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been much loss, would he?’ said Walker, after a silence.

  ‘MacKenzie has been very patient with him. If I’d been in his shoes I’d have sent him back to the coast when he sacked Macinnery.’

  Walker did not answer, and the doctor proceeded to moralise.

  ‘It seems to me that some men have natures so crooked that with every chance in the world to go straight, they can’t manage it. The only thing is to let them go to the devil as best they may.’

  At that moment Alec MacKenzie came in. He was dripping with rain and threw off his macintosh. His face lit up when he saw Walker and the doctor. Adamson was an old and trusted friend, and he knew that on him he could rely always.

  ‘I’ve been going the round of the outlying sentries,’ he said.

  It was unlike him to volunteer even so trivial a piece of information, and Adamson looked up at him.

  ‘All serene?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Alec’s eyes rested on the doctor as though he were considering something strange about him. The doctor knew him well enough to suspect that something very grave had happened, but also he knew him too well to hazard an inquiry. Presently Alec spoke again.