Public attention had been called at last to the greatness of his achievement, to the dangers he had run and the difficulties he had encountered; and before he sailed, he learned that the papers were ringing with his praise. A batch of cablegrams reached him, including one from Dick Lomas and one from Robert Boulger, congratulating him on his success. Two foreign potentates, through their consuls at Mombassa, bestowed decorations upon him; scientific bodies of all countries conferred on him the distinctions which were in their power to give; chambers of commerce passed resolutions expressing their appreciation of his services; publishers telegraphed offers for the book which they surmised he would write; newspaper correspondents came to him for a preliminary account of his travels. Alec smiled grimly when he read that an Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs had referred to him in a debate with honeyed words. No such enthusiasm had been aroused in England since Stanley returned from the journey which he afterwards described in Darkest Africa. When he left Mombassa the residents gave a dinner in his honour, and everyone who had the chance jumped up on his legs and made a speech. In short, after many years during which Alec’s endeavours had been coldly regarded, when the government had been inclined to look upon him as a busybody, the tide turned; and he was in process of being made a national hero.
Alec made up his mind to come home the whole way by sea, thinking that the rest of the voyage would give his constitution a chance to get the better of the ills which still troubled him; and at Gibraltar he received a letter from Dick. One had reached him at Suez; but that was mainly occupied with congratulations, and there was a tenderness due to the fear that Alec had hardly yet recovered from his dangerous illness, which made it, though touching to Alec, not so characteristic as the second.
My Dear Alec:
I am delighted that you will return in the nick of time for the London season. You will put the noses of the Christian Scientists out of joint, and the New Theologians will argue no more in the columns of the halfpenny papers. For you are going to be the lion of the season. Comb your mane and have it neatly curled and scented, for we do not like our lions unkempt; and learn how to flap your tail; be sure you cultivate a proper roar because we expect to shiver delightfully in our shoes at the sight of you, and young ladies are already practising how to swoon with awe in your presence. We have come to the conclusion that you are a hero, and I, your humble servant, shine already with reflected glory because for twenty years I have had the privilege of your acquaintance. Duchesses, my dear boy, duchesses with strawberry leaves around their snowy brows, (like the French grocer, I make a point of never believing a duchess is more than thirty,) ask me to tea so that they may hear me prattle of your childhood’s happy days, and I have promised to bring you to lunch with them, Tompkinson, whom you once kicked at Eton, has written an article in Blackwood on the beauty of your character; by which I take it that the hardness of your boot has been a lasting, memory to him. All your friends are proud of you, and we go about giving the uninitiated to understand that nothing of all this would have happened except for our encouragement. You will be surprised to learn how many people are anxious to reward you for your services to the empire by asking you to dinner. So far as I am concerned, I am smiling in my sleeve; for I alone know what an exceedingly disagreeable person you are. You are not a hero in the least, but a pig-headed beast who conquers kingdoms to annoy quiet, self-respecting persons like myself who make a point of minding their own business.
Yours ever affectionately,
Richard Lomas.
Alec smiled when he read the letter. It had struck him that there would be some attempt on his return to make a figure of him, and he much feared that his arrival in Southampton would be followed by an attack of interviewers. He was coming in a slow German ship, and at that moment a P. and O., homeward bound, put in at Gibraltar. By taking it he could reach England one day earlier and give everyone who came to meet him the slip. Leaving his heavy luggage, he got a steward to pack up the things he used on the journey, and in a couple of hours, after an excursion on shore to the offices of the company, found himself installed on the English boat.
But when the great ship entered the English Channel, Alec could scarcely bear his impatience. It would have astonished those who thought him unhuman if they had known the tumultuous emotions that rent his soul. His fellow-passengers never suspected that the bronzed, silent man who sought to make no acquaintance, was the explorer with whose name all Europe was ringing; and it never occurred to them that as he stood in the bow of the ship, straining his eyes for the first sight of England, his heart was so full that he would not have dared to speak. Each absence had intensified his love for that sea-girt land, and his eyes filled with tears of longing as he thought that soon now he would see it once more. He loved the murky waters of the English Channel because they bathed its shores, and he loved the strong west wind. The west wind seemed to him the English wind; it was the trusty wind of seafaring men, and he lifted his face to taste its salt buoyancy. He could not think of the white cliffs of England without a deep emotion; and when they passed the English ships, tramps outward bound or stout brigantines driving before the wind with their spreading sails, he saw the three-deckers of Trafalgar and the proud galleons of the Elizabethans. He felt a personal pride in those dead adventurers who were spiritual ancestors of his, and he was proud to be an Englishman because Frobisher and Effingham were English, and Drake and Raleigh and the glorious Nelson.
And then his pride in the great empire which had sprung from that small island, a greater Rome in a greater world, dissolved into love as his wandering thoughts took him to green meadows and rippling streams. Now at last he need no longer keep so tight a rein upon his fancy, but could allow it to wander at will; and he thought of the green hedgerows and the pompous elm trees; he thought of the lovely wayside cottages with their simple flowers and of the winding roads that were so good to walk on. He was breathing the English air now, and his spirit was uplifted. He loved the grey soft mists of low-lying country, and he loved the smell of the heather as he stalked across the moorland. There was no river he knew that equalled the kindly Thames, with the fair trees of its banks and its quiet backwaters, where white swans gently moved amid the waterlilies. His thoughts went to Oxford, with its spires, bathed in a violet haze, and in imagination he sat in the old garden of his college, so carefully tended, so great with memories of the past. And he thought of London. There was a subtle beauty in its hurrying crowds, and there was beauty in the thronged traffic of its river: the streets had that indefinable hue which is the colour of London, and the sky had the gold and the purple of an Italian brocade. Now in Piccadilly Circus, around the fountain sat the women who sold flowers; and the gaiety of their baskets, rich with roses and daffodils and tulips, yellow and red, mingled with the sombre tones of the houses, the dingy gaudiness of ‘buses and the sunny greyness of the sky.
At last his thoughts went back to the outward voyage. George Allerton was with him then, and now he was alone. He had received no letter from Lucy since he wrote to tell her that George was dead. He understood her silence. But when he thought of George, his heart was bitter against fate because that young life had been so pitifully wasted. He remembered so well the eagerness with which he had sought to bind George to him, his desire to gain the boy’s affection; and he remembered the dismay with which he learned that he was worthless. The frank smile, the open countenance, the engaging eyes, meant nothing; the boy was truthless, crooked of nature, weak. Alec remembered how, refusing to acknowledge the faults that were so plain, he blamed the difficulty of his own nature; and, when it was impossible to overlook them, his earnest efforts to get the better of them. But the effect of Africa was too strong. Alec had seen many men lose their heads under the influence of that climate. The feeling of an authority that seemed so little limited, over a race that was manifestly inferior, the subtle magic of the hot sunshine, the vastness, the remoteness from civilisation, were very apt to throw a man off his balance. The Fre
nch had coined a name for the distemper and called it folie d’Afrique. Men seemed to go mad from a sense of power, to lose all the restraints which had kept them in the way of righteousness. It needed a strong head or a strong morality to avoid the danger, and George had neither. He succumbed. He lost all sense of shame, and there was no power to hold him. And it was more hopeless because nothing could keep him from drinking. When Macinnery had been dismissed for breaking Alec’s most stringent law, things, notwithstanding George’s promise of amendment, had only gone from bad to worse. Alec remembered how he had come back to the camp in which he had left George, to find the men mutinous, most of them on the point of deserting, and George drunk. He had flown then into such a rage that he could not control himself. He was ashamed to think of it. He had seized George by the shoulders and shaken him, shaken him as though he were a rat; and it was with difficulty that he prevented himself from thrashing him with his own hands.
And at last had come the final madness and the brutal murder. Alec set his mind to consider once more those hazardous days during which by George’s folly they had been on the brink of destruction. George had met his death on that desperate march to the ford, and lacking courage, had died miserably. Alec threw back his head with a curious movement.
‘I was right in all I did,’ he muttered.
George deserved to die, and he was unworthy to be lamented. And yet, at that moment, when he was approaching the shores which George, too, perhaps, had loved, Alec’s heart was softened. He sighed deeply. It was fate. If George had inherited the wealth which he might have counted on, if his father had escaped that cruel end, he might have gone through life happily enough. He would have done no differently from his fellows. With the safeguards about him of a civilised state, his irresolution would have prevented him from going astray; and he would have been a decent country gentleman — selfish, weak, and insignificant perhaps, but not remarkably worse than his fellows — and when he died he might have been mourned by a loving wife and fond children.
Now he lay on the borders of an African swamp, unsepulchred, unwept; and Alec had to face Lucy, with the story in his heart that he had sworn on his honour not to tell.
XIII
Alec’s first visit was to Lucy. No one knew that he had arrived, and after changing his clothes at the rooms in Pall Mall that he had taken for the summer, he walked to Charles Street. His heart leaped as he strolled up the hill of St. James Street, bright by a fortunate chance with the sunshine of a summer day; and he rejoiced in the gaiety of the well-dressed youths who sauntered down, bound for one or other of the clubs, taking off their hats with a rapid smile of recognition to charming women who sat in victorias or in electric cars. There was an air of opulence in the broad street, of a civilisation refined without brutality, which was very grateful to his eyes accustomed for so long to the wilderness of Africa.
The gods were favourable to his wishes that day, for Lucy was at home; she sat in the drawing-room, by the window, reading a novel. At her side were masses of flowers, and his first glimpse of her was against a great bowl of roses. The servant announced his name, and she sprang up with a cry. She flushed with excitement, and then the blood fled from her cheeks, and she became extraordinarily pale. Alec noticed that she was whiter and thinner than when last he had seen her; but she was more beautiful.
‘I didn’t expect you so soon,’ she faltered.
And then unaccountably tears came to her eyes. Falling back into her chair, she hid her face. Her heart began to beat painfully.
‘You must forgive me,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I can’t help being very silly.’
For days Lucy had lived in an agony of terror, fearing this meeting, and now it had come upon her unexpectedly. More than four years had passed since last they had seen one another, and they had been years of anxiety and distress. She was certain that she had changed, and looking with pitiful dread in the glass, she told herself that she was pale and dull. She was nearly thirty. There were lines about her eyes, and her mouth had a bitter droop. She had no mercy on herself. She would not minimise the ravages of time, and with a brutal frankness insisted on seeing herself as she might be in ten years, when an increasing leanness, emphasising the lines and increasing the prominence of her features, made her still more haggard. She was seized with utter dismay. He might have ceased to love her. His life had been so full, occupied with strenuous adventures, while hers had been used up in waiting, only in waiting. It was natural enough that the strength of her passion should only have increased, but it was natural too that his should have vanished before a more urgent preoccupation. And what had she to offer him now? She turned away from the glass because her tears blurred the image it presented; and if she looked forward to the first meeting with vehement eagerness, it was also with sickening dread.
And now she was so troubled that she could not adopt the attitude of civil friendliness which she had intended in order to show him that she made no claim upon him. She wanted to seem quite collected so that her behaviour should not lead him to think her heart at all affected, but she could only watch his eyes hungrily. She braced herself to restrain a wail of sorrow if she saw his disillusionment. He talked in order to give time for her to master her agitation.
‘I was afraid there would be interviewers and boring people generally to meet me if I came by the boat by which I was expected, so I got into another, and I’ve arrived a day before my time.’
She was calmer now, and though she did not speak, she looked at him with strained attention, hanging on his words.
He was very bronzed, thin after his recent illness, but he looked well and strong. His manner had the noble self-confidence which had delighted her of old, and he spoke with the quiet deliberation she loved. Now and then a faint inflection betrayed his Scottish birth.
‘I felt that I owed my first visit to you. Can you ever forgive me that I have not brought George home to you?’
Lucy gave a sudden gasp. And with bitter self-reproach she realised that in the cruel joy of seeing Alec once more she had forgotten her brother. She was ashamed. It was but eighteen months since he had died, but twelve since the cruel news had reached her, and now, at this moment of all others, she was so absorbed in her love that no other feeling could enter her heart.
She looked down at her dress. Its half-mourning still betokened that she had lost one who was very dear to her, but the black and white was a mockery. She remembered in a flash the stunning grief which Alec’s letter had brought her. It seemed at first that there must be a mistake and that her tears were but part of a hateful dream. It was too monstrously unjust that the fates should have hit upon George. She had already suffered too much. And George was so young. It was very hard that a mere boy should be robbed of the precious jewel which is life. And when she realised that it was really true, her grief knew no bounds. All that she had hoped was come to nought, and now she could only despair. She bitterly regretted that she had ever allowed the boy to go on that fatal expedition, and she blamed herself because it was she who had arranged it. He must have died accusing her of his death. Her father was dead, and George was dead, and she was alone. Now she had only Alec; and then, like some poor stricken beast, her heart went out to him, crying for love, crying for protection. All her strength, the strength on which she had prided herself, was gone; and she felt utterly weak and utterly helpless. And her heart yearned for Alec, and the love which had hitherto been like a strong enduring light, now was a consuming fire.
But Alec’s words brought the recollection of George back to her reproachful heart, and she saw the boy as she was always pleased to remember him, in his flannels, the open shirt displaying his fine white neck, with the Panama hat that suited him so well; and she saw again his pleasant blue eyes and his engaging smile. He was a picture of honest English manhood. There was a sob in her throat, and her voice trembled when she spoke.
‘I told you that if he died a brave man’s death I could ask no more.’
She spoke
in so low a tone that Alec could scarcely hear, but his pulse throbbed with pride at her courage. She went on, almost in a whisper.
‘I suppose it was predestined that our family should come to an end in this way. I’m thankful that George so died that his ancestors need have felt no shame for him.’
‘You are very brave.’
She shook her head slowly.
‘No, it’s not courage; it’s despair. Sometimes, when I think what his father was, I’m thankful that George is dead. For at least his end was heroic. He died in a noble cause, in the performance of his duty. Life would have been too hard for him to allow me to regret his end.’
Alec watched her. He foresaw the words that she would say, and he waited for them.
‘I want to thank you for all you did for him,’ she said, steadying her voice.
‘You need not do that,’ he answered, gravely.
She was silent for a moment. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him steadily. Her voice now had regained its usual calmness.
‘I want you to tell me that he did all I could have wished him to do.’
To Alec it seemed that she must notice the delay of his answer. He had not expected that the question would be put to him so abruptly. He had no moral scruples about telling a deliberate lie, but it affected him with a physical distaste. It sickened him like nauseous water.
Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated) Page 124