Cupid in Africa Part 36

"By Jove, Cupid, you look ten years older than when I saw you last," said Murray, laying his hand on Bertram's shoulder and studying his face. "I should hardly have known you. . . ."

"Quite a little man now," remarked Macteith, and proceeded to enquire as to where was the nearest and best Home-from-Home in Mombasa, where one could have A-Drink-and-a-Little-Music-what-what?

"I am staying at the Mombasa Hotel," said Bertram coldly, to which Macteith replied that he hoped it appreciated its privilege.

Bertram felt that he hated Macteith, but also had a curious sense that that young gentleman had either lost in stature or that he, Bertram, had gained. . . . Anyhow he had seen War, and, so far, Macteith had not. He had no sort of fear of anything Macteith could say or do-and he'd welcome any opportunity of demonstrating the fact. . . . Dirty little worm!

Chatting gaily with Murray, he took them to the Mombasa Club and there found a note from Mrs. Stayne-Brooker asking him to come to tea on the morrow.

"I won't attempt to offer condolence nor express my absolute sympathy, Mrs. Stayne-Brooker," said Bertram as he took her hand and led her to her favourite settee.

"Don't," said she.

"My heart aches for you, though," he added.

"It need not," replied Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, and, as Bertram looked his wonder at her enigmatic reply and manner, she continued:

"I will not pretend to _you_. I will be honest. Your heart need not ache for me at all-because mine sings with relief and grat.i.tude and joy.

Bertram's jaw fell in amazement. He felt inexpressibly shocked.

Or was it that grief had unhinged the poor lady's mind?

"I am going to say to you what I have never said to a living soul, and will never say again. . . . I have never even said it to myself. . . .

_I hated him most utterly and most bitterly_. . . ."

Bertram was more shocked than he had ever been in his life. . . This was terrible! . . . He wanted to say, "Oh, hus.h.!.+" and get up and go away.

"I could not _tell_ you how I hated him," continued Mrs. Stayne-Brooker, "for he spoilt my whole life. . . . I am not going into details nor am I going to say one word against him beyond that. I repeat that he _made_ me loathe him-from my very wedding-day . . . and I leave you to judge. .

Bertram judged.

He was very young-much younger than his years-and he judged as the young do, ignorantly, harshly, cruelly. . . .

What manner of woman, after all, was this, who spoke of her dead husband?

Of her own husband-scarcely cold in his grave. Of her _husband_ of all people in the world! . . . He could have wept with the shame and misery of it, the disillusionment, the shattering blow which she herself had dealt at the image and idol that he had set up in his heart and gratefully wors.h.i.+pped.

He looked up miserably as he heard the sound of a sob in the heavy silence of the room. She was weeping bitterly, shaken from head to foot with the violence of her-her-what could it be? not grief for her husband of course. Did she weep for the life that he had "spoilt" as she expressed it? Was it because of her wasted opportunities for happiness, the years that the locust had eaten, the never-to-return days of her youth, when joy and gaiety should have been hers?

What could he say to her?-save a ba.n.a.l "Don't cry"? There was nothing to say. He did not know when he had felt so miserable and uncomfortable. . . .

"It is over," she said suddenly, and dried her tears; but whether she alluded to the unhappiness of her life with her husband, or to her brief tempest of tears, he did not know.

What could he say to her? . . . It was horrible to see a woman cry. And she had been _so_ good to him. She had revived his interest in life when through the miasma of fever he had seen it as a thing horrible and menacing, a thing to flee from. How could he comfort her? She had made no secret of the fact that she liked him exceedingly, and that to talk to him of the things that matter in Life, Art, Literature, Music, History, was a pleasure akin to that of a desert traveller who comes upon an inexhaustible well of pure water. Perhaps she liked him so well that he could offer, acceptably, that Silent Sympathy that is said to be so much finer and more efficacious than words. . . . Could he? . . Could he? . . .

Conquering his sense of repulsion at her att.i.tude toward her newly dead husband, and remembering all he owed to her sweet kindness, he crossed to her settee, knelt on one knee beside her, took her hand, and put it to his lips without a word. She would understand-and he would go.

With a little sobbing cry, Mrs. Stayne-Brooker s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand from him, and, throwing her arms about his neck, pressed her lips to his-her face was transfigured as with a great light-the light of the knowledge that the poets had told the great and wondrous truth when they sang of Love as the Greatest Thing-and sung but half the truth. All that she longed for, dreamed of, yearned over-and disbelieved-was true and had come to pa.s.s. . . .

She looked no older than her own daughter-and forgot that she was a woman of thirty-seven years, and that the man who knelt in homage (the moment that she was free to receive his homage!) _might_ be but little over thirty.

She did not understand-but perhaps, in that moment, received full compensation for her years of misery, and her marred, thwarted, wasted womanhood.

Oh, thank G.o.d; thank G.o.d, that he loved her . . . she could not have borne it if . . .

Glad that he had succeeded in comforting her, slightly puzzled and vaguely stirred, he arose and went out, still without a word.

Returning to his hotel, he found a telegram ordering him to proceed "forthwith" to a place called Soko Na.s.sai _via_ Voi and Taveta, and as "forthwith" means the next train, and the next train to Voi on the Uganda Railway went in two hours, he yelled for Ali, collected his kit, paid his Club bill and got him to the railway station without having time or opportunity to make any visits of farewell. That he had to go without seeing Miss Eva again troubled him sorely, much more so than he would have thought possible.

In fact he thought of her all night as he lay on the long bed-seat of his carriage in a fog of fine red dust, instead of sleeping or thinking of what lay before him at Taveta, whence, if all or any of the Club gossip were true, he would be embarking upon a very hard campaign, and one of "open" fighting, too. This would be infinitely more interesting than the sit-in-the-mud trench warfare, but it was not of this that he found himself thinking so much as of the length and silkiness of Miss Eva's eyelashes, the tendrils of hair at her neck, the perfection of her lips, and similar important matters. He was exceedingly glad that he was going to be attached to a Kashmiri regiment, because it was composed of Dogras and Gurkhas, and he liked Gurkhas exceedingly, but he was ten thousand times more glad that there was a Miss Eva Stayne-Brooker in the world, that she was in Mombasa, that he could think of her there, and, best of all, that he could return and see her there when the war was o'er-and he sang aloud:

"When the war is o'er, We'll part no more."

No-d.a.m.n it all-one couldn't sing "at Ehren on the Rhine," after the German had shown his country to be the home of the most ruffianly, degraded, treacherous and despicable brute the world has yet produced; and, turning over with an impatient jerk, he tipped a little mound of drifted red dust and sand into his mouth and his song turned to dust and ashes and angry spluttering. _Absit omen_.

At Taveta, a name on a map and a locality beneath wooded hills, Bertram found a detachment of his regiment, and was accepted by his brother-officers as a useful-looking and very welcome addition to their small Mess. He was delighted to renew acquaintance with Augustus and with the Gurkha Subedar-whom he had last seen at M'paga. Here he also found the 29th Punjabis, the 130th Baluchis, and the 2nd Rhodesians. In the intervals of thinking of Miss Eva, he thought what splendid troops they looked, and what a grand and fortunate man he was to be one of their glorious Brigade.

When he smelt the horrible fever smell of the pestilential Lumi swamp, he hoped Miss Eva would not get fever in Mombasa.

When he feasted his delighted eyes on Kilimanjaro, on the rose-flushed snows and glaciers of Kibo and Mawenzi, their amazing beauty was as the beauty of her face, and he walked uplifted and entranced.

When the daily growing Brigade was complete, and marched west through alternating dense bush and open prairie of moving gra.s.s, across dry sandy nullahs or roughly bridged torrents, he marched with light heart and untiring body, neither knowing nor caring whether the march were long or short.

When Gussie Augustus Gus said it was dam' hot and very thoughtless conduct of Jan s.m.u.ts to make innocent and harmless folk walk on their feet at midday, Bertram perceived that it _was_ hot, though he hadn't noticed it. His spirit had been in Mombasa, and his body had been unable to draw its attention to such minor and sordid details as dust, heat, thirst, weariness and weakness.

The ice-cold waters of the Himo River, which flows from the Kilimanjaro snows to the Pangani, reminded him of the coolness of her firm young hands.

As the Brigade camped on the ridge of a green and flower-decked hill looking across the Pangani Valley, to the Pare Hills, a scene of fertile beauty, English in its wooded rolling richness, he thought of her with him in England; and as the rancid smell of a frying _ghee_, mingled with the acrid smell of wood smoke, was wafted from where Gurkha, Punjabi, Pathan and Baluchi cooked their _chapattis_ of _atta_, he thought of her in India with him. . . .

Day after day the Brigade marched on, and whether it marched between impenetrable walls of living green that formed a tunnel in which the red dust floated always, thick, blinding and choking, or whether it marched across great deserts of dried black peat over which the black dust hung always, thicker, more blinding and more choking-it was the same to Second-Lieutenant Bertram Greene, as he marched beside the st.u.r.dy little warriors of his regiment. His spirit marched through the realms of Love's wonderland rather than through deserts and jungles, and the things of the spirit are more real, and greater than those of the flesh.

For preference he marched alone, alone with his men that is, and not with a brother officer, that he might be spared the necessity of conversation and the annoyance of distraction of his thoughts. For miles he would trudge beside the Subedar in companionly silence. He grew very fond of the staunch little man to whom duty was a G.o.d. . . .

When the Brigade reached Soko Na.s.sai it joined the Division which (co-operating with Van Deventer's South African Division, then threatening Tabora and the Central Railway from Kondoa Irangi) in three months conquered German East Africa-an almost adequate force having been dispatched at last. It consisted of the 2nd Kashmir Rifles, 28th Punjabis, 130th Baluchis, the 2nd Rhodesians, a squadron of the 17th Cavalry, the 5th and 6th Batteries of the S.A. Field Artillery, a section of the 27th Mountain Battery, and a company of the 61st Pioneers, forming the First East African Brigade. There were also the 25th Royal Fusiliers, the M.I. and machine-guns of the Loyal North Lancas.h.i.+re Regiment, the East African Mounted Rifles, a Howitzer Battery of Cornwall Territorials, "Z" Signalling Company, a "wireless" section, and a fleet of armoured cars. In reserve were the 5th and 6th South Africans.

Few divisions have ever done more than this one did-under the greatest hards.h.i.+ps in one of the worst districts in the world.

Its immediate task was to clear the Germans from their strong positions in the Pare and Usambara Mountains, and to seize the railway to Tanga on the coast, a task of all but superhuman difficulty, as it could only be accomplished by the help of a strong force making a flanking march through unexplored roadless virgin jungle, down the Pangani valley, the very home of fever, where everything would depend upon efficient transport-and any transport appeared impossible. How could motor transport go through densest trackless bush, or horse and bullock transport where horse-sickness and tsetse fly forbade?

The First Brigade made the Pangani march and turning movement, performing the impossible, and with it went Second-Lieutenant Bertram Greene, head in air and soul among the stars, his heart full of a mortal tenderness and caught up in a great divine uplifting,