Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
and the Irishman, fallen on evil days through Court intrigues and an
affliction of the eyes, was obliged to flee from Zanzibar and make for
the only country where he and his child could keep warm and live
cheaply--Italy. There, the girl, Iolita, learned to perfect a gift of
dancing she had always delighted in, and when later her father became
totally blind and penniless, it was she who bravely maintained the
affair of living for both of them by dancing at the theatres and the
opera until she danced her way into fame.
Child of a passionate love-marriage it was only natural that Iolita too
should follow her heart. In London, at the very zenith of her success
and just when Fate was unrolling before her a vista of luxurious years,
she proved the heritage of her blood by eloping to Africa with the
youngest son of an English peer, a being as romantic and irresponsible
as herself.
Gay Haviland had tried his hand at most things, from Shakespearean
acting in London to horse-breaking in Mexico, before he found his true
_metier_ as a transport-rider on the South African veldt. The home to
which he took his eager-hearted bride was an ox-waggon drawn by a span
of twenty magnificent red bullocks, which earned their living and his by
carrying loads of wool and grain from the Free State and the Transvaal
to the Cape. It was on a St. Valentine's Day from the tent of that
waggon as it lay under the shadow of the Catberg Range, that little Val
first saw the light, and the same tent was the only home she knew,
except for occasional sojourns in Dutch towns, for the first nine years
of her life. From a child's point of view it was an ideal existence,
full of beauty and variety as far at least as scenery was concerned,
adventures with big game, long days of camping on the banks of wild
rivers or in the shade of purple mountains, and an absolute absence of
the tasks and training common to children brought up in the ordinary
way. It is true that at camping times the dancer amused herself by
teaching little Val to read and write in Italian, while the
transport-rider successfully imparted to the child, together with his
poetical if vagabond views of life, a very real love and knowledge of
Literature. For if ever scholar turned gipsy it was Gay Haviland, and
though the book he loved best was Nature, and his library the Open Road,
his waggon-boxes were always well stocked with works of classical and
modern writers.
Val imbibed his tastes and vagabond creeds as a flower imbibes dew, but
for the rest she was as free and idle as a little wild buck prancing
across the veldt in the wake of its mother, and as unthinkingly happy.
With Haviland's tragic death from snake-bite, however, the veldt life
came to a sudden end and passed for ever into the realms of memory,
seeming to Val in the hard years that followed to have been a wonderful
dream, yet remaining always the most poignant and cherished part of her
existence.
Poverty showed its jagged teeth to the beautiful dancer, frightening her
back to Europe, where she essayed to gain her living once more with
flying seductive feet. But her dancing was not what it had been. Ten
years of idle and ideal love on the veldt had spoiled her art, or
perhaps the wife and mother had absorbed it. At any rate she was unable
to step back into the vacancy created when as Iolita Fitzpatrick she had
left the stage for love of Gay Haviland. Other stars had arisen, and
the public had forgotten her. Engagements were difficult to find, and
when found were at best of the second-rate order. Neither help nor
sympathy was forthcoming from the proud English family who, having
always detested poor Gay Haviland's _mesalliance_, absolutely repudiated
any connection with the dancer or her child.
Years of arduous struggle followed during which the two trailed from one
great continental city to another, often miserably poor and in desperate
straits, sometimes perilously near starvation, but thanks to the
generous Freemasonry of Art, and grace to their own happy charm in good
and evil times, never quite without friends, or some last resource. It
may truly be said that Val's education was received in the school of
Life, for she never attended any other; but the love of books inculcated
by her father stayed with her, and because book lovers will always,
whatever their straits, get books, Val was able to educate herself as
many another has done, and done well, by reading. Then, too, with the
open mind of the untaught she received and retained all the beauty and
colour and picturesque event of their wandering Bohemian life, finding
even in their grimmest adventure food for thought and amusement.
When she was fourteen, and Iolita still astonishingly beautiful in spite
of poverty and defeat, an engagement took them to the Argentine
Republic, but ending up disastrously left them stranded and almost
penniless at Buenos Aires. Things were at their darkest when good luck
dawned once more in the shape of Dick Rowan, an old friend of
Haviland's, and who together with the latter had adored the dancer in
the days when she was a star. Rowan was a brilliant but eccentric man of
letters, afflicted by the wanderlust. His adventurous temperament,
irked by life in cities, had driven him forth as a journalist to far
lands, where he had become as famous for his war and political
correspondence as for his dissipated ways and generous heart. He was an
expert on the political situation of various Colonies and smaller
Powers, and whenever little wars were on the carpet there also was
Rowan. In times when wars were not, he occupied himself with the
internal wranglings of Colonial governments. Wherever he could force
his way in he made himself felt. It was not for nothing he was known as
"Gadfly" Rowan. At the period of his re-meeting with Iolita he was
interesting himself in the Transvaal with the affairs of Paul Kruger and
the Uitlander, up to his eyes in political intrigue, and editing a
Johannesburg journal with Imperialistic leanings. His presence in the
Argentine on some business of his own was the veriest accident, but a
happy one for Iolita, for, faithful to his early passion, he was
overjoyed to find her again, and asked nothing better than to take her
burdens upon his shoulders and be a father to Gay Haviland's daughter.
Iolita, on her part, had always felt a great affection for the
journalist. It seemed a pleasant end of weariness to consign her fate
into his eager if improvident hands. So they were married, and the
family of three sailed for Africa, where for the next two years they
spent a busy, happy, and erratic existence together, surrounded by
journalists, politicians, and all the quick wits of the Rand. From the
first Val showed a keen liking which Rowan was swift to foster for
newspaper writing. He took her as his secretary, and taught her on
broad lines all that is most useful for a journalist to know. None knew
better than Dick Rowan how to direct a natural talent for journalism,
and in Val he recognised splendid material, a born vocabulary, a keen
sense of observation, love of phrase, and a knowledge of books and
places. Above all, she was full of ardour for the work. Nothing lacked
but training to apply her genius, and this Rowan, erratic and
irresponsible in all things but his profession, was the best person in
the world to give her.
From being his amanuensis she soon became his assistant. A great
devotion sprang up between the stepfather and daughter. Later, when
Iolita, visiting Durban, died and was buried in that beautiful seaside
town, the two drew closer in their loneliness and sorrow. Val was
eighteen then, and Rowan ageing rapidly, for he always lived every
moment of his life, and always he "poured spirits down to keep his
spirits up." Because of this his energy and brain were both beginning
to fail; and here the value of the hand and head he had trained was
proved. Work was offered to him that he would never have been able to
accept but for Val. It was she who urged him on, worked with him and
for him, repaying her own and her mother's debt by unwearying devotion.
A commission to proceed to Somaliland, a splendid opportunity for glory,
came from a great London Daily, but Rowan's initiative would never have
been equal to it without Val. She not only made him go, but went with
him, and when he fell ill there, and the newspaper correspondence
devolved upon her, as well as the nursing of her stepfather, so well did
she accomplish both, that Rowan got well and she reaped recognition.
For Rowan, rigid as all good writers about the identity of work,
insisted on the authorship of the letters being known. Shyly she
appended "Wanderfoot," the nom-de-plume she had chosen, to her first
unaided work. It looked like a special effort on the part of the god of
irony that before the end of the expedition she nearly lost her feet
through inflammation caused by overwalking.
After Somaliland, commissions came to her singly, but from a sense of
loyalty she would do nothing except in connection with Rowan; so they
worked and travelled together going to different parts of Africa from
the Cape to Egypt, until one day landing in Durban to make a flying
visit to the Transvaal, Rowan paid with dramatic suddenness the penalty
for burning up his brain and liver for years with whiskey and the best
wines.
Val found herself alone in the world, though not helpless, for her own
and Rowan's efforts had given her a weapon with which to fight for and
hold her place among the journalists of the day. But she was only
twenty, and as hopelessly impractical as the conditions of her life and
Rowan's happy-go-lucky methods could make her. He was one of those who
knew no use for money except to make it fly faster than it came, living
gaily ahead of his income to the tune of the old saw:
"Happy-go-lucky,
Penny loaf for twopence,
Got no shoes go without."
Val's journalistic intelligence had been developed at the expense of her
practicability for everyday purposes. She could already make money, but
she had no sense of the value of it. A number of things she had
gathered hi the course of her vivid life could not be tabulated, for
they were intangible, nor valued, for they were priceless; but of common
or garden prudence and horse-sense she possessed no single jot or iota.
What she did possess and wear for all the world to recognise was a
disquietingly attractive appearance, and the fascination that hangs
about the personality of one who is able to _do_ something, and that
something well. To this was now added the wistful charm that sorrow
stamps upon her elect. All those whom Val had loved had left her one by
one. She began to believe herself doomed to loneliness--that she had
but to love to suffer the bitterness of loss. The cerebral hemorrhage
with which Rowan had been smitten had left him a few merciful clear
hours before death, and during that time he had impressed upon her the
wisdom of going straight to England and making the most of his literary
connections there. But, in spite of this injunction, she had lingered
on from day to day in the expensive Durban hotel where he died. She
could not drag herself away from the two graves that lay in the heart of
the town, sheltered by palms and feathery trees, with the naked feet of
Zulus pattering past up and down the Berea hill, and ricksha bells
echoing between the marble crosses and headstones of the dead. She
shrank and faltered from turning her face towards a new life empty of
love.
That was a propitious moment for Horace Valdana to step upon the scene.
Handsome, with the marks of race on him, and no outward sign of his dark
heart, he was of the exact type to attract a romantic girl's interest.