Van Bibber and Others - Richard Harding Davis
"Well, but, general," said Phillips, smiling, "that's dramatic enough
as it is, I think. Why--"
"Yes," interrupted the general, quickly and triumphantly. "But that is
not what you would have made him say, is it? That's my point."
"There was a man told me once," Lord Arbuthnot began, leisurely--"he
was a great chum of mine, and it illustrates what Sir Henry has said,
I think--he was engaged to a girl, and he had a misunderstanding or an
understanding with her that opened both their eyes, at a dance, and
the next afternoon he called, and they talked it over in the
drawing-room, with the tea-tray between them, and agreed to end it. On
the stage he would have risen and said, 'Well, the comedy is over, the
tragedy begins, or the curtain falls;' and she would have gone to the
piano and played Chopin sadly while he made his exit. Instead of
which he got up to go without saying anything, and as he rose he upset
a cup and saucer on the tea-table, and said, 'Oh, I beg your pardon;'
and she said, 'It isn't broken;' and he went out. You see," the young
man added, smiling, "there were two young people whose hearts were
breaking, and yet they talked of teacups, not because they did not
feel, but because custom is too strong on us and too much for us. We
do not say dramatic things or do theatrical ones. It does not make
interesting reading, but it is the truth."
"Exactly," cut in the Austrian Minister, eagerly. "And then there is
the prerogative of the author and of the playwright to drop a curtain
whenever he wants to, or to put a stop to everything by ending the
chapter. That isn't fair. That is an advantage over nature. When some
one accuses some one else of doing something dreadful at the play,
down comes the curtain quick and keeps things at fever point, or the
chapter ends with a lot of stars, and the next page begins with a
description of a sunset two weeks later. To be true, we ought to be
told what the man who is accused said in the reply, or what happened
during those two weeks before the sunset. The author really has no
right to choose only the critical moments, and to shut out the
commonplace, every-day life by a sort of literary closure. That is, if
he claims to tell the truth."
Phillips raised his eyebrows and looked carefully around the table.
"Does any one else feel called upon to testify?" he asked.
"It's awful, isn't it, Phillips," laughed Trevelyan, comfortably, "to
find that the photographer is the only artist, after all? I feel very
guilty."
"You ought to," pronounced the general, gayly. He was very well
satisfied with himself at having held his own against these clever
people. "And I am sure Mr. Gordon will agree with me, too," he went
on, confidently, with a bow towards the younger man. "He has seen more
of the world than any of us, and he will tell you, I am sure, that
what happens only suggests the story; it is not complete in itself.
That it always needs the author's touch, just as the rough diamond--"
"Oh, thanks, thanks, general," laughed Phillips. "My feelings are not
hurt as badly as that."
Gordon had been turning the stem of a wineglass slowly between his
thumb and his finger while the others were talking, and looking down
at it smiling. Now he raised his eyes as though he meant to speak, and
then dropped them again. "I am afraid, Sir Henry," he said, "that I
don't agree with you at all."
Those who had said nothing felt a certain satisfaction that they had
not committed themselves. The Austrian Minister tried to remember what
it was he had said, and whether it was too late to retreat, and the
general looked blankly at Gordon and said, "Indeed?"
"You shouldn't have called on that last witness, Sir Henry," said
Phillips, smiling. "Your case was very good as it was."
"I am quite sure," said Gordon, seriously, "that the story Phillips
will never write is a true story, but he will not write it because
people would say it is impossible, just as you have all seen sunsets
sometimes that you knew would be laughed at if any one tried to paint
them. We all know such a story, something in our own lives, or in the
lives of our friends. Not ghost stories, or stories of adventure, but
of ambitions that come to nothing, of people who were rewarded or
punished in this world instead of in the next, and love stories."
Phillips looked at the young man keenly and smiled. "Especially love
stories," he said.
Gordon looked back at him as if he did not understand.
"Tell it, Gordon," said Mr. Trevelyan.
"Yes," said Gordon, nodding his head in assent, "I was thinking of a
particular story. It is as complete, I think, and as dramatic as any
of those we read. It is about a man I met in Africa. It is not a long
story," he said, looking around the table tentatively, "but it ends
badly."
There was a silence much more appreciated than a polite murmur of
invitation would have been, and the simply smart people settled
themselves rigidly to catch every word for future use. They realized
that this would be a story which had not as yet appeared in the
newspapers, and which would not make a part of Gordon's book. Mrs.
Trevelyan smiled encouragingly upon her former protege; she was sure
he was going to do himself credit; but the American girl chose this
chance, when all the other eyes were turned expectantly towards the
explorer, to look at her lover.
"We were on our return march from Lake Tchad to the Mobangi," said
Gordon. "We had been travelling over a month, sometimes by water and
sometimes through the forest, and we did not expect to see any other
white men besides those of our own party for several months to come.
In the middle of a jungle late one afternoon I found this man lying at
the foot of a tree. He had been cut and beaten and left for dead. It
was as much of a surprise to me, you understand, as it would be to you
if you were driving through Trafalgar Square in a hansom, and an
African lion should spring up on your horses' haunches. We believed we
were the only white men that had ever succeeded in getting that far
south. Crampel had tried it, and no one knows yet whether he is dead
or alive; Doctor Schlemen had been eaten by cannibals, and Major
Bethume had turned back two hundred miles farther north; and we could
no more account for this man's presence than if he had been dropped
from the clouds. Lieutenant Royce, my surgeon, went to work at him,
and we halted where we were for the night. In about an hour the man
moved and opened his eyes. He looked up at us and said, 'Thank
God!'--because we were white, I suppose--and went off into
unconsciousness again. When he came to the next time, he asked Royce,
in a whisper, how long he had to live. He wasn't the sort of a man you
had to lie to about a thing like that, and Royce told him he did not
think he could live for more than an hour or two. The man moved his
head to show that he understood, and raised his hand to his throat and
began pulling at his shirt, but the effort sent him off into a
fainting-fit again. I opened his collar for him as gently as I could,
and found that his fingers had clinched around a silver necklace that
he wore about his neck, and from which there hung a gold locket shaped
like a heart."
Gordon raised his eyes slowly from the observation of his finger-tips
as they rested on the edge of the table before him to those of the
American girl who sat opposite. She had heard his story so far without
any show of attention, and had been watching, rather with a touch of
fondness in her eyes, the clever, earnest face of Arbuthnot, who was
following Gordon's story with polite interest. But now, at Gordon's
last words, she turned her eyes to him with a look of awful
indignation, which was followed, when she met his calmly polite look
of inquiry, by one of fear and almost of entreaty.
"When the man came to," continued Gordon, in the same conventional
monotone, "he begged me to take the chain and locket to a girl whom
he said I would find either in London or in New York. He gave me the
address of her banker. He said: 'Take it off my neck before you bury
me; tell her I wore it ever since she gave it to me. That it has been
a charm and loadstone to me. That when the locket rose and fell
against my breast, it was as if her heart were pressing against mine
and answering the beating and throbbing of the blood in my veins.'"
Gordon paused, and returned to the thoughtful scrutiny of his
finger-tips.
"The man did not die," he said, raising his head. "Royce brought him
back into such form again that in about a week we were able to take
him along with us on a litter. But he was very weak, and would lie for
hours sleeping when we rested, or mumbling and raving in a fever. We
learned from him at odd times that he had been trying to reach Lake
Tchad, to do what we had done, without any means of doing it. He had
had not more than a couple of dozen porters and a corporal's guard of
Senegalese soldiers. He was the only white man in the party, and his
men had turned on him, and left him as we found him, carrying off with
them his stock of provisions and arms. He had undertaken the
expedition on a promise from the French government to make him
governor of the territory he opened up if he succeeded, but he had had
no official help. If he failed, he got nothing; if he succeeded, he
did so at his own expense and by his own endeavors. It was only a
wonder he had been able to get as far as he did. He did not seem to
feel the failure of his expedition. All that was lost in the happiness
of getting back alive to this woman with whom he was in love. He had
been three days alone before we found him, and in those three days,
while he waited for death, he had thought of nothing but that he would
never see her again. He had resigned himself to this, had given up all
hope, and our coming seemed like a miracle to him. I have read about
men in love, I have seen it on the stage, I have seen it in real life,
but I never saw a man so grateful to God and so happy and so insane
over a woman as this man was. He raved about her when he was feverish,
and he talked and talked to me about her when he was in his senses.
The porters could not understand him, and he found me sympathetic, I
suppose, or else he did not care, and only wanted to speak of her to
some one, and so he told me the story over and over again as I walked
beside the litter, or as we sat by the fire at night. She must have
been a very remarkable girl. He had met her first the year before, on
one of the Italian steamers that ply from New York to Gibraltar. She
was travelling with her father, who was an invalid going to Tangier
for his health; from Tangier they were to go on up to Nice and Cannes,
and in the spring to Paris and on to London for this season just over.
The man was going from Gibraltar to Zanzibar, and then on into the
Congo. They had met the first night out; they had separated thirteen
days later at Gibraltar, and in that time the girl had fallen in love
with him, and had promised to marry him if he would let her, for he
was very proud. He had to be. He had absolutely nothing to offer her.
She is very well known at home. I mean her family is: they have lived
in New York from its first days, and they are very rich. The girl had
lived a life as different from his as the life of a girl in society
must be from that of a vagabond. He had been an engineer, a newspaper
correspondent, an officer in a Chinese army, and had built bridges in
South America, and led their little revolutions there, and had seen
service on the desert in the French army of Algiers. He had no home or
nationality even, for he had left America when he was sixteen; he had
no family, had saved no money, and was trusting everything to the
success of this expedition into Africa to make him known and to give
him position. It was the story of Othello and Desdemona over again.
His blackness lay from her point of view, or rather would have lain
from the point of view of her friends, in the fact that he was as
helplessly ineligible a young man as a cowboy. And he really had lived
a life of which he had no great reason to be proud. He had existed
entirely for excitement, as other men live to drink until they kill
themselves by it; nothing he had done had counted for much except his
bridges. They are still standing. But the things he had written are
lost in the columns of the daily papers. The soldiers he had fought
with knew him only as a man who cared more for the fighting than for
what the fighting was about, and he had been as ready to write on one
side as to fight on the other. He was a rolling stone, and had been a
rolling stone from the time he was sixteen and had run away to sea, up
to the day he had met this girl, when he was just thirty. Yet you can
see how such a man would attract a young, impressionable girl, who had
met only those men whose actions are bounded by the courts of law or
Wall Street, or the younger set who drive coaches and who live the
life of the clubs. She had gone through life as some people go through
picture-galleries, with their catalogues marked at the best pictures.
She knew nothing of the little fellows whose work was skied, who were
trying to be known, who were not of her world, but who toiled and
prayed and hoped to be famous. This man came into her life suddenly
with his stories of adventure and strange people and strange places,
of things done for the love of doing them and not for the reward or
reputation, and he bewildered her at first, I suppose, and then
fascinated, and then won her. You can imagine how it was, these two
walking the deck together during the day, or sitting side by side when
the night came on, the ocean stretched before them. The daring of his
present undertaking, the absurd glamour that is thrown over those who
have gone into that strange country from which some travellers
return, and the picturesqueness of his past life. It is no wonder the
girl made too much of him. I do not think he knew what was coming. He
did not pose before her. I am quite sure, from what I knew of him,
that he did not. Indeed, I believed him when he said that he had
fought against the more than interest she had begun to show for him.
He was the sort of man women care for, but they had not been of this
woman's class or calibre. It came to him like a sign from the heavens.
It was as if a goddess had stooped to him. He told her when they
separated that if he succeeded--if he opened this unknown country, if
he was rewarded as they had promised to reward him--he might dare to
come to her; and she called him her knight-errant, and gave him her
chain and locket to wear, and told him, whether he failed or succeeded
it meant nothing to her, and that her life was his while it lasted,
and her soul as well.
"I think," Gordon said, stopping abruptly, with an air of careful
consideration, "that those were her words as he repeated them to me."
He raised his eyes thoughtfully towards the face of the girl opposite,
and then glanced past her, as if he were trying to recall the words
the man had used. The fine, beautiful face of the woman was white and
drawn around the lips, and she gave a quick, appealing glance at her
hostess, as if she would beg to be allowed to go. But Mrs. Trevelyan
and her guests were watching Gordon or toying with the things in front
of them. The dinner had been served, and not even the soft movements
of the servants interrupted the young man's story.
"You can imagine a man," Gordon went on, more lightly, "finding a
hansom cab slow when he is riding from the station to see the woman he
loves; but imagine this man urging himself and the rest of us to hurry
when we were in the heart of Africa, with six months' travel in front
of us before we could reach the first limits of civilization. That is
what this man did. When he was still on his litter he used to toss and
turn, and abuse the bearers and porters and myself because we moved so
slowly. When we stopped for the night he would chafe and fret at the
delay; and when the morning came he was the first to wake, if he slept
at all, and eager to push on. When at last he was able to walk, he
worked himself into a fever again, and it was only when Royce warned
him that he would kill himself if he kept on that he submitted to be
carried, and forced himself to be patient. And all the time the poor
devil kept saying how unworthy he was of her, how miserably he had
wasted his years, how unfitted he was for the great happiness which
had come into his life. I suppose every man says that when he is in
love; very properly, too; but the worst of it was, in this man's case,
that it was so very true. He was unworthy of her in everything but his
love for her. It used to frighten me to see how much he cared. Well,
we got out of it at last, and reached Alexandria, and saw white faces
once more, and heard women's voices, and the strain and fear of
failure were over, and we could breathe again. I was quite ready
enough to push on to London, but we had to wait a week for the
steamer, and during that time that man made my life miserable. He had
done so well, and would have done so much more if he had had my
equipment, that I tried to see that he received all the credit due
him. But he would have none of the public receptions, and the audience
with the khedive, or any of the fuss they made over us. He only wanted
to get back to her. He spent the days on the quay watching them load
the steamer, and counting the hours until she was to sail; and even at
night he would leave the first bed he had slept in for six months, and
would come into my room and ask me if I would not sit up and talk with
him until daylight. You see, after he had given up all thought of her,
and believed himself about to die without seeing her again, it made
her all the dearer, I suppose, and made him all the more fearful of
losing her again.
"He became very quiet as soon as we were really under way, and Royce
and I hardly knew him for the same man. He would sit in silence in his
steamer-chair for hours, looking out at the sea and smiling to
himself, and sometimes, for he was still very weak and feverish, the
tears would come to his eyes and run down his cheeks. 'This is the
way we would sit,' he said to me one night, 'with the dark purple sky
and the strange Southern stars over our heads, and the rail of the
boat rising and sinking below the line of the horizon. And I can hear
her voice, and I try to imagine she is still sitting there, as she did
the last night out, when I held her hands between mine.'" Gordon
paused a moment, and then went on more slowly: "I do not know whether
it was that the excitement of the journey overland had kept him up or
not, but as we went on he became much weaker and slept more, until
Royce became anxious and alarmed about him. But he did not know it
himself; he had grown so sure of his recovery then that he did not
understand what the weakness meant. He fell off into long spells of
sleep or unconsciousness, and woke only to be fed, and would then fall
back to sleep again. And in one of these spells of unconsciousness he
died. He died within two days of land. He had no home and no country
and no family, as I told you, and we buried him at sea. He left
nothing behind him, for the very clothes he wore were those we had
given him--nothing but the locket and the chain which he had told me
to take from his neck when he died."
Gordon's voice had grown very cold and hard. He stopped and ran his
fingers down into his pocket and pulled out a little leather bag. The
people at the table watched him in silence as he opened it and took
out a dull silver chain with a gold heart hanging from it.
"This is it," he said, gently. He leaned across the table, with his
eyes fixed on those of the American girl, and dropped the chain in
front of her. "Would you like to see it?" he said.
The rest moved curiously forward to look at the little heap of gold
and silver as it lay on the white cloth. But the girl, with her eyes
half closed and her lips pressed together, pushed it on with her hand
to the man who sat next her, and bowed her head slightly, as though it
was an effort for her to move at all. The wife of the Austrian
Minister gave a little sigh of relief.
"I should say your story did end badly, Mr. Gordon," she said. "It is
terribly sad, and so unnecessarily so."
"I don't know," said Lady Arbuthnot, thoughtfully--"I don't know; it
seems to me it was better. As Mr. Gordon says, the man was hardly
worthy of her. A man should have something more to offer a woman than
love; it is a woman's prerogative to be loved. Any number of men may
love her; it is nothing to their credit: they cannot help themselves."
"Well," said General Kent, "if all true stories turn out as badly as
that one does, I will take back what I said against those the
story-writers tell. I prefer the ones Anstey and Jerome make up. I
call it a most unpleasant story."
"But it isn't finished yet," said Gordon, as he leaned over and
picked up the chain and locket. "There is still a little more."
"Oh, I beg your pardon!" said the wife of the Austrian Minister,
eagerly. "But then," she added, "you can't make it any better. You
cannot bring the man back to life."
"No," said Gordon, "but I can make it a little worse."
"Ah, I see," said Phillips, with a story-teller's intuition--"the
girl."
"The first day I reached London I went to her banker's and got her
address," continued Gordon. "And I wrote, saying I wanted to see her,
but before I could get an answer I met her the next afternoon at a
garden-party. At least I did not meet her; she was pointed out to me.
I saw a very beautiful girl surrounded by a lot of men, and asked who
she was, and found out it was the woman I had written to, the owner of
the chain and locket; and I was also told that her engagement had just
been announced to a young Englishman of family and position, who had
known her only a few months, and with whom she was very much in love.
So you see," he went on, smiling, "that it was better that he died,
believing in her and in her love for him. Mr. Phillips, now, would
have let him live to return and find her married; but Nature is kinder
than writers of fiction, and quite as dramatic."
Phillips did not reply to this, and the general only shook his head
doubtfully and said nothing. So Mrs. Trevelyan looked at Lady
Arbuthnot, and the ladies rose and left the room. When the men had
left them, a young girl went to the piano, and the other women seated
themselves to listen; but Miss Egerton, saying that it was warm,
stepped out through one of the high windows on to the little balcony
that overhung the garden. It was dark out there and cool, and the
rumbling of the encircling city sounded as distant and as far off as
the reflection seemed that its million lights threw up to the sky
above. The girl leaned her face and bare shoulder against the rough
stone wall of the house, and pressed her hands together, with her
fingers locking and unlocking and her rings cutting through her
gloves. She was trembling slightly, and the blood in her veins was hot
and tingling. She heard the voices of the men as they entered the
drawing-room, the momentary cessation of the music at the piano, and
its renewal, and then a figure blocked the light from the window, and
Gordon stepped out of it and stood in front of her with the chain and
locket in his hand. He held it towards her, and they faced each other
for a moment in silence.
"Will you take it now?" he said.
The girl raised her head, and drew herself up until she stood straight
and tall before him. "Have you not punished me enough?" she asked, in
a whisper. "Are you not satisfied? Was it brave? Was it manly? Is that
what you have learned among your savages--to torture a woman?" She
stopped with a quick sob of pain, and pressed her hands against her
breast.
Gordon observed her, curiously, with cold consideration. "What of the
sufferings of the man to whom you gave this?" he asked. "Why not
consider him? What was your bad quarter of an hour at the table, with
your friends around you, to the year he suffered danger and physical
pain for you--for you, remember?"
The girl hid her face for a moment in her hands, and when she lowered
them again her cheeks were wet and her voice was changed and softer.
"They told me he was dead," she said. "Then it was denied, and then
the French papers told of it again, and with horrible detail, and how
it happened."
Gordon took a step nearer her. "And does your love come and go with
the editions of the daily papers?" he asked, fiercely. "If they say
to-morrow morning that Arbuthnot is false to his principles or his
party, that he is a bribe-taker, a man who sells his vote, will you
believe them and stop loving him?" He gave a sharp exclamation of
disdain. "Or will you wait," he went on, bitterly, "until the Liberal
organs have had time to deny it? Is that the love, the life, and the
soul you promised the man who--"
There was a soft step on the floor of the drawing-room, and the tall
figure of young Arbuthnot appeared in the opening of the window as he
looked doubtfully out into the darkness. Gordon took a step back into
the light of the window, where he could be seen, and leaned easily
against the railing of the balcony. His eyes were turned towards the
street, and he noticed over the wall the top of a passing omnibus and
the glow of the men's pipes who sat on it.