Читать книгу Woodsmoke - Francis Brett Young - Страница 11

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A fortnight later, to the wonder and solicitude of his friends, Antrim had arranged to leave Mombasa in the company of the Rawleys. By this time the visitors must have become aware that the attitude of Mombasa toward them was not inviting, for though Rawley had not repeated his exhibition of the first night in the club, and though such a lapse from respectability had been known and even forgiven in the past, the fact that he was a stranger of unprepossessing appearance, with a commercial origin and no known virtues to mitigate his offence, made his crime not easily condoned.

That his wife had been with him when it happened, crowned his infamy. Add to this that the story of the injured ricksha boy had found its way into many kitchens, and from the kitchens, spiced and garnished, to the drawing-rooms. In any other community Rawley’s money might have excused him, but in this, where the only rich men were Goanese or Arab traders, the very fact of Rawley’s wealth made him suspect. Even his wife’s birth couldn’t help him; for a wife, as Mrs. Kilgour observed in the height of her indignation for the rape of Antrim, takes the station of her husband, and Rawley’s was that of a man with a number of queer stories behind him. What these stories were never emerged. That was one of the disadvantages of an island that had to wait on the caprices of Aden for its mails. They had to be taken for granted or imagined, and the English are an imaginative race.

No doubt the person who suffered most was Antrim. Morning and evening—for he was still living with the Kilgours—he had to stand the fire of Mrs. Kilgour’s reproaches. She stormed at him, gibed at him, reasoned with him, but none of these methods could alter his purpose or draw him into an explanation of his motives; the last for the very best of reasons—that he himself couldn’t explain them.

What annoyed her most was that she couldn’t get a rise out of him. All her assaults, persuasions, scorns or reproaches were met with the same good humour; and this was disappointing, for she dearly loved a scrap. When she told him that he was making himself ridiculous he took it like a lamb.

“You wouldn’t allow me to say things like this to you, Jimmy,” she said, “unless you were in love. You, after all these years, to go trotting after a petticoat!”

At this he laughed outright. “My dear burra memsahib,” he assured her, “that’s the widest shot of all. I’ve scarcely spoken ten words to the woman. I don’t even know her.”

“That makes no difference,” said Mrs. Kilgour darkly. “All I can say is that it’s mighty unpleasant for us who are fond of you to have your name associated with these Perfectly Poisonous People. I think you might drop it for our sake.”

But Antrim didn’t drop it. When he laughed at the idea of his being in love with Mrs. Rawley he was perfectly honest with himself. He wasn’t in love with her and didn’t intend to be. When he said that he had scarcely spoken to her he told the exact truth. At all his interviews with Rawley, including that extraordinary one on the morning after the Vandal had sailed when he went to their hotel and told him that he was ready to take charge of their party, she had been present; but Rawley had done all the talking; his wife sat there quietly disinterested, a presence rather than a person. It didn’t seem to matter to her whether they went to Nairobi or Timbuktu. For all that, it was obvious that Rawley deferred to her in everything. He was always prefacing his decisions with: “My wife says ...” or “My wife thinks ...” acting, in fact, as a kind of interpreter of her ideas.

Altogether the experience was a puzzle. Every word that Antrim spoke this woman heard, and yet, not once in all the long debates that they had held in the shabby lounge of the hotel, did she offer an opinion. If Antrim had given a truthful answer to a direct question he would have said that he didn’t really like her. Now, after ten days of her acquaintance, she seemed no nearer and certainly no more attractive than she had been at the Kilgours’ luncheon party. It bothered him a little to think that it was she who had actually forced his decision to stay in Africa, not by any active intervention, but just as an inactive body will precipitate crystallisation in a saturated solution. She had forced him to decide by a question, not by a suggestion. And he was glad to assure himself of this; to tell himself that he had not been influenced by her or any one else, that he had merely given expression to a resolve already formed in some secret chamber of his brain. If for one moment he had admitted her as an active influence he would have taken fright and backed out of the affair as well as decency allowed him; but, as the days went by, he found himself more and more deeply committed. He saw that now, even if he wanted to, he could not get out of it. And this, strangely enough, filled him with a sort of satisfaction. He was in it, up to the neck. How it would turn out was another matter.

By this time the whole arrangement of the safari rested on his shoulders. He and Rawley had sat for hours over the imperfect maps that were available, and the route of their tour had been thought out in detail. They were to start, on the first of the next month, from Voi; to cross the spurs of the Bura hills and the Serengeti plains, working toward Taveta and the foothills of Kilima N’jaro. From Moshi, just over the German border, they would turn eastward, doubling the flank of the great mountain, and trek on toward the southern end of the Victoria Nyanza through the German province of Mwanza.

All that part of their journey that lay west of Kilima N’jaro would carry them through country at that time very imperfectly known and thus satisfy the craving for the unexplored which Rawley had expressed and Antrim, in reality, felt as strongly.

The task once undertaken, Antrim set about it like a soldier planning a staff-ride. It was a job that suited him, for it involved the handling of men, the control of transport, the provision of supplies of ammunition and food. It kept him so busy that he escaped most of the attentions of Mrs. Kilgour, who still hoped to save him from his folly, and the curiosity of the island in general. By the end of ten days he had worked out the whole bandabast to his own satisfaction while Rawley was plodding steadily in the rear.

It was Antrim’s way to carry plans and figures in his head. Rawley, on the other hand, had a passion for note-taking: the legacy, perhaps, of his business apprenticeship. He could not see things unless they were recorded in black and white, and the table of his room at the hotel was piled with the diary notebooks that his firm supplied to the users of their dip. He must have carried nearly a dozen of them about with him: private diaries, records of cash expenditure balanced to the last penny, lists of equipment and porters’ wages, records of photographic exposures; lists of photographic tackle, a book mysteriously labelled “Geology,” and a sort of general log in which the contents of all the others were to be summarised. At first Antrim had often wondered what the man would do with himself out in the wild at times when a normal traveller would be kept busy with sport; but when he saw this library of Rawley’s Chemical Notebooks he wondered no longer.

In all these preparations one of his chief despairs was Rawley’s inability to read a map: a deficiency common in women but rare among men. Rawley would wrestle with them for hours, turning them this way and that in futile attempts at finding his orientation that drove Antrim to distraction. And here, curiously enough, Mrs. Rawley was completely at home. Her mind was as quick as Antrim’s own; her sense of position and direction so faultless as to astonish him. Yet, when he came to think of it, he saw that this quality was in keeping with his first estimate of her as a creature boyish rather than feminine. The quick, practical nature of her mind encouraged him, in sudden glimpses, amid Rawley’s methodical blunderings.

She rarely spoke; but when she did speak, he felt that she understood things that with Rawley he must explain at length. Her mind gave him the same impression of clean efficiency as her body. Compared with her husband she was a creature of another world. And that world, Antrim quickly realised, was his own. Not that she ever admitted, or even indirectly implied it. When Antrim and her husband sat steaming hour after hour in the hotel lounge over the plans and the Chemical Notebooks; when Antrim’s sense of decency was being outraged, and she knew it; when Rawley was obviously, for the moment, odd man out, she never gave him one word or look that might have been interpreted as the foundation of a natural alliance. He liked her for this; for he had no great opinion of loyalty in women. She was a sportsman and was sticking to the rules of the game in a manner of which an inferior spirit would not have been capable. It cheered him to realise that there was to be one efficient, reliable person with the instincts of his own kind in this mad adventure.

One day Rawley asked him to choose her a rifle.

“You know my own views on the subject,” he said, “but if it gives her pleasure to shoot there’s no reason why she shouldn’t, and I shall not prevent her. You will have to do a certain amount of shooting for the pot. As a matter of fact I believe that at home she was considered quite a good shot.” It was curious to see how pride in his wife’s accomplishment was mingled with his distaste for its character. Antrim was delighted.

“She’d better come along with me to the African Trading Company’s,” he said, “and we’ll fix it up.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Rawley quickly. “We can rely entirely on your judgment.”

Antrim turned to her for confirmation. All the time she had been sitting near them without speaking a word. Nor did she speak to him now. He couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t natural, nor even, exactly, polite. Probably she had taken a dislike to him. If that were so it was a misfortune for both of them, seeing that for the next three months they must rub shoulders pretty closely. But, if she didn’t like him, why had she asked him to go with them? The answer to this question was that she hadn’t; and yet he couldn’t accept it, for the fact remained that she had been responsible, in a manner however indirect, for his resolution to stay.

Perhaps she was merely afraid of her husband; but this Antrim refused to believe. He had seen enough of her that afternoon in the stranded ricksha to be certain that she wasn’t lacking in courage. He gave it up. Next day he bought her a rifle, a .257 Mannlicher, and a little sixteen-bore shot gun by Purdey, a gem of a weapon that was going cheap, second-hand. These he duly delivered at the hotel, and heard no more about them. She didn’t even say “Thank you.”

This incident, and a dozen others of the same kind, put him out of heart. He liked people to be simple and direct, without reservations, and in this particular Rawley, with whom he knew he had far less in common, was more satisfactory than his wife. Rawley, at least, appreciated his labours. Even if he had been a paid servant instead of a friend who, on the slenderest acquaintance, was doing all the donkey-work for nothing, he would have been entitled to a little recognition.

Indeed, there were times when the cumulative effect of Mrs. Kilgour’s protests began to weigh with him. He felt that the whole expedition was a piece of madness and God knew how he had let himself in for it. By this time Mrs. Kilgour was beginning to leave him alone, having given him up as a bad job. This unsympathetic silence troubled him more than her reproaches. It invited confession. It made him want to go to her frankly and say: “Look here. I’ve made an ass of myself. Get me out of it!”

But she couldn’t get him out of it, and he knew it. To begin with, his pride wouldn’t allow the whole island to say: “I told you so!” any more than his sense of honour could permit him to leave the Rawleys stranded after making himself necessary to their plans. Rawley, in his blundering way, was obviously grateful. If only this woman would acknowledge his existence ...

He told himself that this was a small matter and that it was a sign of pettiness to be disturbed by it; and in any case he was now so deeply committed that there was nothing for him but to go through to the end. Perhaps it was the amused curiosity that the island showed in his affairs that had made him touchy. Well, the sooner he was out of it the better!

Everything connected with the safari had now been arranged but the engagement of the headman, the gun-bearers and the cook. In another week they would be setting out for Voi. Once away from these artificial conditions of life and from the prejudices of a limited society, matters would solve themselves. All through he had been anxious to find an excuse for Mrs. Rawley’s attitude, and, as he thrashed it out for the hundredth time, a new explanation occurred to him. It was not a very good one, but it put him in a better humour with himself. It presumed that she was aware that she had been responsible for his change of plans; that she appreciated all that he had done for them, but feared, naturally enough, that he might be disappointed in the result; that she was anxious, in other words, but too diffident, to tell him of her anxiety, and shy to feel that through her he had been committed to such a doubtful adventure. With this explanation he was determined to be satisfied, and, by its aid, persuaded himself that he was. “Some day,” he told himself, “she will let me know exactly what she felt, and then we shall both laugh at ourselves.”