Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
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 Dick ... 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.
In memory she sat again in the stuffy Johannesburg newspaper office with
the maps on the wall, tables hidden under a jumble of papers, chairs
covered with tobacco ash, books, whiskey bottles, and heard the voice of
Dick Rowan pounding "style" into her while the mine batteries drummed
outside, and the windows reddened and rattled under the assault of a
blinding Rand dust storm. Her thoughts passed to another man who had
worked with them, and who lay now in the little cemetery behind the
Primrose Deep; to another sniped in the streets of Mafeking who had
written to her by the last post that came from the beleaguered town; to
another dead in the shadow of the Himalayas of whom she could not think
without remembering the paddy-birds in the rice fields near Benares;
another sleeping on the shores of Lake Chad.
For like all women thrown early on the world to make a living she had
found her best friends among men, and the very adventurousness of her
own life had brought her into contact with adventurous men of the kind
whose lives are full and vivid and of sudden ending. Of the men who
"did things, and died in far places" she had known a-many, and been
proud of their friendship, and with all the ardour of an ardent nature
she had loved them every one in her boyish, good-comrade way. And they
had all passed on or passed away! But she wanted them to be with her in
this hour. She called on every one she had loved, or been loved by, to
rejoice with her now. She even laid in thought a flower of amnesty upon
the memory of Horace Valdana, but with him she did not linger, for in
the memory of her husband was neither beauty nor joy, and in that hour
she wished only to remember things that gave no hurt.
For she too believed that the fate which through the open and winding
passages of life had been seeking after her had found her at last; that
of all the men she had been loved by, and she had been greatly loved,
here at last was the one whom her heart and mind had awaited--a real man
with something of the lion in the hold of his head and in the quality of
his sure glance and careless smile, who "did before the sun and moon
whatsoever his heart appointed," and was no man's man but his own. She
saw that Westenra was big in mind and spirit, self-trusting,
self-reliant; and every woman's heart responds to those iron strings.
Every woman hopes to find in the man she loves something big and vast
and eternal in which she can become absorbed, and lose herself. For
every woman has the secret fear that by herself she is nothing, can be
nothing, and has no eternal life except in and through love.
She had loved Westenra from the first with all the wise and foolish
reasons a woman will find for putting her hands under the feet of the
beloved, for his boyish laugh, and the way his hair grew, his witty
tongue, the simplicity of his heart, and the subtlety of his mind; for
his big head and broad shoulders, for the grace and strength of him, for
his curious personal shyness and his wide, impersonal outlook; for the
twist his race had given to his speech, and for his handsome face which
was not handsome at all, but the face of a thinker who has been up
against the hardest problem in the world--ignorance.
These were the things she knew that she loved him for, but she was aware
without going too deeply into the matter that the other and more
important ones that she had long sought were there too. Dimly she knew
that the maternal woman in her, the subconscious mother who seeks for
greatness in the father of her children, was satisfied with Westenra and
that promise of eternity in his eyes. And because of this she was
willing to renounce all that her life had been and might be, to change
all in herself that he did not like, to become of him and for him. She
had always known that a time like this would come, when she would throw
all she had worked for and earned to the winds, for the sake of a man
who wanted her not because she was a famous journalist, but because she
was a woman and the woman for him. But the condition was that he must be
the man for her too. She had waited long for that condition to be
fulfilled, passing over many a fine heart because her own refused or was
unable to give the countersign to his challenge.
And at last the hour had come, as it always does come to those who know
how to wait. From the moment she first spoke to Westenra and looked him
in the eyes she had felt that mystic stirring of flesh and spirit that
comes only once and is so unmistakable. She had realised then that to
have this man always in her life would be to touch the highest peaks of
the far blue mountains of romance. And the moment she realised it she
felt hopeless. For never in her life had she got anything that she
ardently desired. Happiness had evaded her and joy had passed her by.
To know now at last that Westenra loved her, that the greatest desire in
her life was to be fulfilled, seemed too wonderful to be true. The
gratitude that filled her was curious in so clever a woman, and one who
had had many men at her feet; but a childlike humility concerning
herself was one of her sweetest qualities.
In the presence of those she loved she never remembered that she was
famous, gifted, travelled, and honoured, and withal young and
attractive. It always amazed her that any one should find her clever and
charming. And that Westenra, who did not even know or care what she had
done as a journalist, should find her desirable just because she was
Valentine Valdana and a woman was the most amazing and beautiful thing
in the world. It opened life out upon a boundless horizon, and flooded
the future with a love great enough to cast out all devils of the past.
She knelt long by her bed, half-praying, half-pondering on sad things
gone by and glad things to come. Out of it all came a resolve that the
next day she would tell Westenra the whole story of her life of strange
adventure and misery.
There were many things that to speak of would cause her wretchedness,
but it was not the shameful wretchedness of those who, resisting no
temptation, have taken all they wished from life, leaving nothing for
the future but regrets. Her sorrows were sweet and untainted. There
were many things of which perhaps people of hedged-in lives might think
she should be ashamed, but which seemed to her to be natural and simple
and nothing. She had gone up and down the world and seen so much in the
way of suffering, known so many complications of love and life, that
nothing astonished or even shocked her any more. She had been through
the mill and "seen life," as the phrase goes; and whether or not that is
a good thing for a woman, and whether or not the spiritual vision gets a
little dimmed in the process, and the senses a little dulled, is a
matter of opinion. The fact remains that at the age of twenty-six
Valentine Valdana still retained such freshness of heart that she could
kneel for an hour or two at her bedside in a state of contemplative
prayer, unembittered by the past and full of hope for the future.
A witty but unhappy writer whose life proved the truth of his epigram
wrote that "good resolutions are cheques which we draw on a bank where
we have no account." But at twenty-six Valentine Valdana could still,
with serene confidence in her power to honour them, draw cheques upon
this bank of the soul: so perhaps after all life had not done so ill by
her as might have been supposed.
Her life-story was a curiously unusual one. The touch of Orientalism in
her eyes and hair was a legacy from her grandmother, a beautiful
Egyptian girl born in a harem and stolen therefrom by an adventurer who
was deep in the counsels and intrigues of its lord and owner, her
father. The two fled from Egypt to Zanzibar, where, under the
protection of the Sultan, they married and lived, the Irishman making
himself as useful and necessary to the negro Sultan as he had to the
Egyptian chief. The beautiful little harem-born wife from association
with her husband and the few Europeans in the place learned to speak
English, and her only child, a girl who resembled one of the wonderful
tropical flowers she lived among, was brought up in European fashion by
an Irish nurse sent for from Ireland. In time the Egyptian mother died,