Wanderfoot Part 2

from whom Westenra had sprung. Tradition dies hard when it is rooted in such firm ground. Small wonder that dismay blotted out delight when he recognised at last the romantic face of the woman he had waited for, only to find it allied to the strange, rootless, roving, almost vagrant personality of Valentine Valdana.

Even if every one on the ship except himself had not appeared to know that she was Mrs. Valdana _the_ journalist, he could not long have remained in ignorance of her name for "Val Valdana" in writing so illegible as to invoke curiosity was written on everything she possessed, and she left her possessions everywhere. She was the most careless woman in the world. She lost and mislaid books, cushions, papers, and rugs; her shoes were frequently undone, and her hair almost always on the point of coming down. Yet she never looked untidy because her feet were pretty and her hair was of the feathery kind; and in the matter of her lost possessions she preserved entire calmness, for some one was always obliging enough to find them for her and bring them back.

Once she left on deck a book full of audacious sketches and notes about the pa.s.sengers, and the wind ruffling the leaves of it dispersed sc.r.a.ps of paper in every direction. One of these displayed a pair of love-birds sitting beak to beak on a branch, but the birds possessed the life-like features of two cranky old maid pa.s.sengers who were continually squabbling in public; beneath was the scribbled legend: "_If we comfort not each other, Who shall comfort us in the dark days to come?_" ... Another ent.i.tled "_La planche_" was the portrait of an enormously fat lady pa.s.senger grown extraordinarily slim and pretty. A little pink hard-sh.e.l.led woman with a habit of making up to people only to say something extremely unpleasant to them was cartooned as a crab reaching out and nipping everything within reach. A moony-looking individual with a wry neck, peering eyes, and a loud brown check suit had lent his individuality to the sketch of a tortoise pottering curiously about the deck. A newly-married couple who were always sipping egg-nog together had been pilloried as the Siamese twins joined by a large egg.

Yet when the cartoonist came on deck the victims of her pencil were all ready to smile at her, and return her property without resentment. It was so patent somehow that malice was the one thing absent from the mental make-up of Mrs. Valdana.

Another day soon after their first meeting, Westenra found her in her deck chair with one slim foot twisted round to inspect what is sometimes known as a "potato" in the heel of her stocking.

"Isn't it amazing how holes in one's stockings arrive?" she remarked to him pleasantly. "I would n't mind only I 've got such tender heels."

Impossible for a thoughtful man who has known poverty and carried memories of his mother's fingers worn with darning to imagine such a woman as a wife and mother. Plainly the shrine Westenra had built for the woman of his dreams could never be occupied by this one. No shrine could keep for long so restless a heart, nor fireside and cradle detain such wandering feet! As the days went by the likeness in fact that he had seen in her to his vision became blurred and faded. It was not difficult at last to persuade himself that his recognition of her had been a fantasy of his brain. Once the thought dismissed of any mystical bond between them, he could not help liking the incompetent, careless creature and finding pleasure in her society. She was a good companion: not gay herself so much as the cause of gaiety in others. She rarely said witty things, but it was surprising how witty others became in her company. Her art was of the kind that seems to underlie rather than break through the surface of conversation, leaving the best points for others to make. But sometimes when things were at their dullest she would suddenly send up a little sparkling rocket that lit the mental horizon and thrilled the surroundings with colour.

Westenra, whose native wit and eloquence needed little sharpening, was at his best with her, and he became his pleasant and extremely engaging self while enjoying to the full that charm in her that from the first he had not denied. Her ardent feeling for the ideal and the original was a spur to his intellect, and not only re-awoke his natural gaiety, but set stirring all his altruistic dreams. For there was greatness smouldering in Westenra, that needed only the right woman's hand to fan it into flame.

No one observing Mrs. Valdana listening, almost thirsting for all he had to say, would have guessed that as far as actual experience of life went, hers had been far wider and greater than his, for the usual results of experience--callous indifference or a calm philosophic outlook--were amazingly absent from her. She was vividly interested in life, and the more she saw of it, the less _blasee_ she became; and because ideas interested her even more than experience she was deeply interested in Westenra.

If the latter had ever lived in England he would infallibly have recognised the name of Valentine Valdana as being that of one of the foremost women journalists in the world. Even had he been in the habit of reading those American Sunday journals whose overseas cables in a surprisingly small s.p.a.ce manage to mention the doings of everyone of importance, he would have realised that so far from being the "small-headed, yellow journalist" he supposed, she occupied a unique and enviable position in the newspaper world. But he had never concerned himself with the doings of European journalists. America is a big country, with big enough personalities and interests of its own to absorb such attention as a man wrapped up in his work and the great scientific facts of life has to give to public affairs. Thus it came to pa.s.s that he did not know there was one thing Mrs. Valdana, with her odd eccentric gowns and ornaments, a hole in the heel of her stocking, and her black hair endlessly coming down, was not careless about, and that one thing was her work--and that because of her work she was famous.

Certainly she was not the person to tell him, being as reticent about the astonishing things she had done as she was childishly frank about her picturesque tastes and fancies. She would show her ivory bracelets cut green from the tusks of an elephant in Central Africa, or howl in the moonlight like a jackal, or dance like a Somali warrior (as she did at the concert got up for the sailors' benefit), or describe the orchids that hang like glowing lamps from the trees in the deep steaming forests of the Congo; but she would say nothing of her articles on sleeping sickness and Congo atrocities, or how she had nearly lost a foot on a terrible march in Somaliland, but turned out an amazing Odyssey on the manners and customs of a little known people. She always forgot to mention that it was she who had shot the elephant from whose tusks the bracelets came, and that her knowledge of jackal music was acquired in a lion-infested part of Bechua.n.a.land, where she had got lost from her party and spent a sinister night up a tree.

Next to Africa she loved India best in the world, and could discourse alluringly on the subject of _phul-karries_, and silk embroideries from Delhi, of sunsets seen across the plains when the buffaloes and the goats are being herded home in a mist of golden dust; of paddy-birds standing in shallow grey pools, and the grace of the swathed women coming from the wells. Chanting through her nose a thin monotonous wail, while with three fingers and her thumb she made a measured thrumming tattoo on the table, she could conjure up the very heart-throb of the Indian Bazaar until the never-ending rhythmic torment of the East dragged at the heart of those who listened. She could tell too every kind of amusing story and scandal about Anglo-Indian society; but she would never mention that she had been sent out in '97 to get for her paper the truth about the Tochi rising--and had got it; that she was at Simla when the English were waiting breathlessly for news from their men at the front, knowing that any serious reverse in the Tirah might possibly mean an attempt at a general rising and ma.s.sacre in the plains and hill stations of the Punjab, and that she was one of those women who had gone out as usual to b.a.l.l.s, and laughed and jested with sickening fear in their hearts, under the keen eyes of the native servants--and afterwards had sat in her room hour after hour sorting and cla.s.sifying her facts, embodying them in the strong vivid articles that a few weeks later made England "sit up" for awhile and realise that all was not peace and fair contentment in the Indian Empire.

There were lots of other interesting things Mrs. Valdana never told.

She had been in Russia on a mission for Mr. Stead, and in Turkey to probe out the affair of a secret concession for turquoise searching granted by the Sultan to an English Member of Parliament. She had interviewed De Witte, the Red Sultan, and Paul Kruger, and stayed at Groot Schuur as Cecil Rhodes's guest. But all these things were part of her work, and of her work (except to other journalists) she never spoke.

It spoke for itself.

Though she had done special work for many of the big London papers she was a free lance and under bonds to no journal. No inducement that could be held out to her was strong enough to lure her from her ways, which were the ways of a literary vagabond who came and went at no man's bidding, but achieved her best work by wandering only where she listed, and writing only what her heart urged. This might have been fatal to financial success, but that it was allied to an instinct that amounted to genius for the big vivid things that take hold of the public imagination. Every good journalist has a nose for news; Valentine Valdana had the added gift of an "eye for colour"; she saw it across continents, recognised it overseas, followed it as her star; and what she wrote concerning it editors were pleased to scramble for. If one disapproved of her "stuff" another was only too glad to embrace it. She revised and blue-pencilled for no man. Her creed was Byron's when he wrote to Murray: "Cut me up in the _Quarterly_, rend me in the Reviews, do unto me as did the Levite unto his concubine, but do not ask me to revise, for I cannot and I will not." She would not either, and she did not have to. Enough that her stuff was signed with her well-known nom-de-plume "Wanderfoot" for it to sell like hot cakes. In fact, in her own line Valentine Valdana was famous; and Garrett Westenra did not know it.

Nor would he have been greatly impressed if he had known. He was entirely opposed to that kind of fame for a woman.

All Irishmen, whatever their rank or situation, are at bottom profound lovers of nature, virtue, and simplicity; and from this great quality of the heart springs the singular charm that makes them the most attractive people in the world; but it has a defect in its almost peasant standardising of women. Lack of money in Ireland has created in the Irish an eternal oversense of the value of riches; but though there has never been any lack of women in Ireland they are not undervalued on this account (in fact, as has been shown, they are given shrines to occupy).

Still there is a secret and peculiar hatred in the Irishman's nature for any change in the status of women, moral or intellectual, since the time of Mother Eve or the beloved Madonna. The wife-and-mother is the ideal, and very rightly so, but she is a meek and submissive and gentle wife-and-mother, and she sits eternally by the fireside with a child on her knee. Yes, though in his heart he will crown her with a golden crown and burn incense before her, that is where an Irishman always sees the ideal woman--by the fireside, with a child on her knee. No true Irishman will ever be a suffragist.

Considering these things it was surely unwise of Garrett Westenra, very much an Irishman, to linger day after day by the deck chair of a vagabond woman, who, from all accounts and appearances, had never possessed a fireside of her own, nor was ever likely to appreciate one.

Yet linger he did, and day by day her charm wrought upon him and wound itself round him and penetrated him until it seemed to become part of him. By no effort of hers was the thing done. She grew strangely silent as the voyage drew towards an end, sitting in her chair with still eyes and hands, like a woman in a dream drifting down a dream river. Once more she began to resemble the woman Westenra knew so well--the mystery woman with whom he had walked for many years in his secret garden. And when he came on deck and did not find her in her place, the deck and the ship and the world seemed to become suddenly empty--with an appalling emptiness.

But always when alone in his cabin he made the same observation to himself.

"This thing has got to stop. It is rank foolishness. What do I know of her? G.o.d knows what her life has been. She is not the woman I have dreamed of. She is not within a hundred miles of the kind of woman I could spend my life with.... A reckless, careless vagabond!

Good-hearted, yes, full of fine impulses ... full of charm! But when the glamour has gone ... what then?"

He had that gift and curse of his race of seeing too far--the worthlessness of the prize at the end of the race, the rotten core inside the rosy apple. Perhaps why Irishmen achieve so little, is that nothing which can be got seems to them worth while getting!

So he said to himself firmly:

"This thing has got to stop."

He said it and meant it right up to the last night of the voyage--a night when they stayed late in their deck chairs under a glorious moon that transformed the sea into a golden harvest of promise. Many other couples sat along the deck laughing and jesting, announcing their intention to stay up until the Statue of Liberty hove in sight, but well aware that the purser would be prowling along the deck at about half-past ten with hinting scowls for all loiterers. Long before the purser came, however, the keen air had driven most people below, and there was no one left except Westenra and Mrs. Valdana, and a far couple in the shadow of the bridge.

A silence had fallen upon Westenra and his companion, one of those silences that have lips to speak and hands to caress. A little wind blew past them carrying a s.n.a.t.c.h of her hair across his lips. He had never before felt a woman's hair on his lips! Her pale hand nervous and lonely lay outside the rug in which she was wrapped.

"That hand looks cold lying there," he said, and taking it drew it under a fold of his own rug, and held it fast. It lay in his without response like a little stone hand, but through his palm he could feel her pulse beating wild and uncertain, and that stirred him strangely, yet awoke the doctor in him too. He remembered the brandy-and-soda she had drunk the first evening, and every evening since. He remembered too his own cynical thought, and repeated it now, though his voice held little cynicism.

"I 'll give you two years longer to live if you keep on at this rate."

"What rate?" she asked in surprise.

"Drinking, smoking, taking drugs. What drug is it you take?"

"You seem to know all my vices," she said laughing a little tremulously.

She was leaning back in her chair looking very pale. "I have to take veronal sometimes to make me sleep."

"You would sleep naturally if you gave up smoking and drinking, and lived a quiet natural life."

"But then I could n't write."

"Well, you must give up writing."

"But then I could n't live," she said laughing. "You don't seem to know that I write for my living--it is my work."

"Your work is a curse to you if it makes you do these things."

"It is all I have," was her strange answer.

He turned in his chair and looked at her. In her face was none of the bitter humiliation of the woman whose weaknesses are suddenly exposed and condemned. She was smiling a little, a smile with a twist to it, like the smile of a child who is determined not to weep. And her smoke-coloured eyes, bright and sad with tears, and exile, and lost joys, and all the sorrow of the Irishry, were the eyes of the woman who had been given him in a dream. While he looked at her she closed them and sat very still. At last he knew that there was no question of fleeing from Fate. He leaned forward and laid his lips on her sad smiling mouth, and found there the answer to many a question.

Yet when he spoke it was to ask another.

"Now will you leave writing?"

"Yes, Garrett," she said simply. "I will leave everything for you; I think it was written so in the beginning of things."

CHAPTER III

FATE'S WINDING PATHS

"Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the weary end."

With Westenra's kiss still warm on her lips Valentine Valdana knelt in her cabin, elbows plunged in the low plush-covered lounge, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her upturned face resting in the palms of her hands as still and rapt as the face of a visionnaire, and indeed it was in visionary scenes that her mind wandered: scenes of the past peopled with the absent and the dead. Sometimes her lips moved and she spoke a name--her mother's, her father's, a child's, an old woman's, that of a man who lay by her mother's side in the Durban cemetery--one whom the world had known as a brilliant but drunken journalist, but whom she remembered only as a great heart and loved friend. For she had a great capacity for loving, this woman; she did not know how to merely like people; when she cared at all she loved and gave her best. She loved all the people with whom she was dreaming now, and she loved them still with a love that reached over seas and past the grave; in her radiant new-found happiness her thoughts flew to them wishing that they too might be glad with her.

"Dear d.i.c.k ... I am so happy," she said, visualising the drunken journalist, not as others had seen him, a short red-faced man with bright, haggard eyes and a sardonic mouth, but as the big-hearted man of letters who had generously taught a young uneducated girl all he knew of his craft.