With Edged Tools Part 24

There are some friendships where the intercourse is only the seed which absence duly germinates. Jocelyn Gordon and Jack had parted as acquaintances; they met as friends. There is no explaining these things, for there is no gauging the depths of the human mind. There is no getting down to the little bond that lies at the bottom of the well--the bond of sympathy. There is no knowing what it is that prompts us to say, "This man, or this woman, of all the millions, shall be my friend."

"I am sorry," he said, "that he should have had a chance of causing you uneasiness again."

Jocelyn remembered that all her life. She remembers still--and Africa has slipped away from her existence for ever. It is one of the mental photographs of her memory, standing out clear and strong amidst a host of minor recollections.

CHAPTER XVIII. A REQUEST

It surely was my profit had I known It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

"Why did he come back?"

Jocelyn had risen as if to intimate that, if he cared to do so, they would sit in the verandah.

"Why did Mr. Durnovo come back?" she repeated; for Jack did not seem to have heard the question. He was drawing forward a cane chair with the leisurely debonnair grace that was his, and, before replying, he considered for a moment.

"To get quinine," he answered.

Without looking at her, he seemed to divine that he had made a mistake.

He seemed to know that she had flushed suddenly to the roots of her hair, with a distressed look in her eyes. The reason was too trivial.

She could only draw one conclusion.

"No," he continued; "to tell you the truth, I think his nerve gave way a little. His health is undermined by this climate. He has been too long in Africa. We have had a bad time at Msala. We have had small-pox in the camp. Oscard and I have been doing doughty deeds. I feel convinced that, if we applied to some Society, we should get something or other--a testimonial or a monument--also Joseph."

"I like Joseph," she said in a low tone.

"So do I. If circ.u.mstances had been different--if Joseph had not been my domestic servant--I should have liked him for a friend."

He was looking straight in front of him with a singular fixity. It is possible that he was conscious of the sidelong scrutiny which he was undergoing.

"And you--you have been all right?" she said lightly.

"Oh, yes," with a laugh. "I have not brought the infection down to Loango; you need not be afraid of that."

For a moment she looked as if she were going to explain that she was not "afraid of that." Then she changed her mind and let it pa.s.s, as he seemed to believe.

"Joseph constructed a disinfecting room with a wood-smoke fire, or something of that description, and he has been disinfecting everything, down to Oscard's pipes."

She gave a little laugh, which stopped suddenly.

"Was it very bad?" she asked.

"Oh, no. We took it in time, you see. We had eleven deaths. And now we are all right. We are only waiting for Durnovo to join, and then we shall make a start. Of course, somebody else could have come down for the quinine."

"Yes."

He glanced at her beneath his lashes before going on,

"But, as Durnovo's nerves were a little shaken, it--was just as well, don't you know, to get him out of it all."

"I suppose he got himself out of it all?" she said quietly.

"Well--to a certain extent. With our approval, you understand."

Men have an esprit de s.e.xe as well as women. They like to hustle the cowards through with the crowd, un.o.bserved.

"It is a strange thing," said Jocelyn, with a woman's scorn of the man who fears those things of which she herself has no sort of dread, "a very strange thing, that Mr. Durnovo said nothing about it down here. It is not known in Loango that you had small-pox in the camp."

"Well, you see, when he left we were not quite sure about it."

"I imagine Mr. Durnovo knows all about small-pox. We all do on this coast. He could hardly help recognising it in its earliest stage."

She turned on him with a smile which he remembered afterwards. At the moment he felt rather abashed, as if he had been caught in a very maze of untruths. He did not meet her eyes. It was a matter of pride with him that he was equal to any social emergency that might arise. He had always deemed himself capable of withholding from the whole questioning world anything that he might wish to withhold. But afterwards--later in his life--he remembered that look in Jocelyn Gordon's face.

"Altogether," she said, with a peculiar little contented laugh, "I think you cannot keep it up any longer. He ran away from you and left you to fight against it alone. All the same, it was--nice--of you to try and screen him. Very nice, but I do not think that I could have done it myself. I suppose it was--n.o.ble--and women cannot be n.o.ble."

"No, it was only expedient. The best way to take the world is to wring it dry--not to try and convert it and make it better, but to turn its vices to account. That method has the double advantage of serving one's purpose at the time, and standing as a warning later. The best way to cure vice is to turn it ruthlessly to one's own account. That is what we are doing with Durnovo. His little idiosyncrasies will turn in witness against him later on."

She shook her head in disbelief.

"Your practice and your theory do not agree," she said.

There was a little pause; then she turned to him gravely.

"Have you been vaccinated?" she asked.

"In the days of my baptism, wherein I was made--"

"No doubt," she interrupted impatiently, "but since? Have you had it done lately?"

"Just before I came away from England. My tailor urged it so strongly.

He said that he had made outfits for many gents going to Africa, and they had all made their wills and been vaccinated. For reasons which are too painful to dwell upon in these pages I could not make a will, so I was enthusiastically vaccinated."

"And have you all the medicines you will require? Did you really want that quinine?"

There was a practical, common-sense anxiety in the way she asked these questions which made him answer gravely.

"All, thanks. We did not really want the quinine, but we can do with it.

Oscard is our doctor; he is really very good. He looks it all up in a book, puts all the negative symptoms on one side, and the positive on the other--adds them all up, then deducts the smaller from the larger, and treats what is left of the patient accordingly."

She laughed, more with the view of pleasing him than from a real sense of the ludicrous.

"I do not believe," she said, "that you know the risks you are running into. Even in the short time that Maurice and I have been here we have learnt to treat the climate of Western Africa with a proper respect. We have known so many people who have--succ.u.mbed."

"Yes, but I do not mean to do that. In a way, Durnovo's--what shall we call it?--lack of nerve is a great safeguard. He will not run into any danger."