Wanderfoot (The Dream Ship)
Val, lonely, impulsive, but lacking in judgment, fell in love with the
man she believed him to be, and without hesitation placed her fate in
his hands. There was no one to warn her (and if there had been it is
doubtful whether she would have believed that he was a thorough-paced
blackguard, whose family, sure by bitter experience that he would some
day openly disgrace an old and honoured name, and deciding that it were
better for him to do it in the Colonies than at their door, had financed
him to go abroad and stay there. Africa is full of such--"remittance
boys," ne'er-do-wells, men who have left their country for their
country's good. Most of them, when they arrive at least, have good
manners, often the stamp of a public school on them. Nearly all possess
the charm and guile that are special attributes of the professional
black sheep.
Valdana was a perfect example of this professional black sheep--whom
novelists and playwrights have encouraged into existence--the man who
talks rather sadly about his family never having seen any good in him,
but who, by "carving out a career" for himself means to show them some
day that he is "not such a waster after all!" Any woman of the world
would have seen through him in a very short time; but poor Val was no
woman of the world, only a gifted, romantic girl, with all the worldly
stupidity and shortsightedness of her kind. It should, perhaps, be
counted to Valdana's credit that he married her instead of playing some
trick upon the innocence of which her varied life had not yet robbed
her. But trickery would have meant plotting, and Horace Valdana was too
lazy to plot. Besides, he was well informed enough to know that Val had
value as a wife who could make money. So Val got a real marriage
certificate, and became a real wife, and in a very short time knew the
meaning of real misery. Until then the hard luck and misfortunes which
Fate had dealt her had at least been shared by loyal hearts and faced
with courage and gaiety; but now it was her lot to discover how bitter
sordid poverty can be when shared with a mean and vicious nature that
exacts all and gives less than nothing in the great give-and-take game
of marriage. Valdana darkened life for her and blotted out the stars.
He walked on her illusions and hopes, and threw down her idols. She
sometimes felt as if he had wiped his boots on her soul. Wretchedness
and a child were the outcome of the ill-starred marriage. Still soft
and pliable with youth, she might have forgiven the first for the sake
of the last, but her husband, utterly bored by her innocence and
uselessness, very soon decamped leaving her to shift for herself and the
child as best she might.
It was quite true as has been told that she was utterly useless in the
ordinary way. She had received absolutely no training in the practical
things of life, except of the most rough-and-ready kind. She could
light a camp-fire with any one, and shoot something to cook on it
afterwards, but she was far from knowing as much about domestic life as
even an ordinary Boer girl, and quite unfit to be a poor man's wife in
Africa or anywhere else. The one thing she could do well was to write up
big picturesque events for the newspapers; but such things have to be
sought first and written of afterwards, and now she had a baby to bind
her hands and stay her wandering feet.
There came another dreary era of struggle. Freed of the cankering taint
of Valdana's presence, the young mother plucked up enough courage and
money to get back to England, where she judged her best chance lay of
making a living. But the connections and introductions she had counted
on using there were in the end of very little use to her, for the reason
that she could not now continue her special line of work. There were
still things happening in out-of-the-way parts of the world, but Val
could not leave her young child to go and write about them, and after
one or two offers had been made to her and declined she got no others.
As for the conditions of English life and journalism she knew nothing of
them. Besides, a place in the London journalistic world has to be
worked and waited for on the spot; outsiders are not encouraged, and
have a bad time while trying to push in. When at last she realised that
all she could hope for was an ignominious place in the queue among the
hack writers, the girl proudly buried the name made memorable by
collaboration with Dick Rowan, and disguised under that of Valdana, took
what she could get to keep the wolf from the door. For herself,
travelling on a dark road where all the stars had gone out, she would
have cared little if at this time starvation and an end had come; but
the tiger maternity was awake in her and cried out for the preservation
of little Carmen.
From the first the child had doubled her anxieties by being delicate,
and in England its health did not improve. Many a time in the weary
London months the mother tripped up the journalist just as the path
looked a little clearer or was smoothening out to a surer footing. Many
a promising opportunity of regular work had to be passed by because of
some baby illness that needed all the careful nursing Val could give.
But youth and courage were still on her side; and in her heart the
secret conviction which thrills every mother--that her child is an
important link in the chain of generations, that a woman's career and
ambitions are as nothing compared to the keeping alight of the little
flame which may some day become a beacon to humanity. What mother's
heart has not trembled to this illusion? How many babies would ever
reach maturity if this secret religion did not hold sway in women's
hearts, urging them to sacrifice, pain, drudgery, and self-abnegation?
And after all the struggle was in vain. The baby died, and Val, more
lonely and alone than ever before, wished that she too might die, for it
seemed that life was never to hold anything for her but work. And oh!
the weariness of work that has not love for its compelling force! Oh!
the longitude and lassitude of life without loved ones in it!
Fortunately, something occurred at this time which not only took her
away from the scene of her loss, but occupied her every thought for a
considerable period. The Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shook England to
the heart with various emotions, and called for a great deal of
information that could only be acquired at the scene of operations. The
Editor of the Imperialistic Daily, which had employed Dick Rowan, found
himself keenly regretting the "Gadfly" and his deep knowledge of the
internal workings of the Transvaal Government, then remembered
"Wanderfoot" and her application of a year or so back. A search was
instituted, and within a week Val was sailing for Africa full of
instructions that gave her little time in which to remember the
emptiness of her heart and the dull ache of loss, or anything but the
affair she was sent upon--to get speech of both President Kruger and the
members of the Reform Committee who lay in Pretoria Gaol.
The series of brilliant articles sent by her from Johannesburg dealing
with the reign of terror at that time exercised by Transvaal Boers over
the betrayed and despairing English population; the history, written in
terse, mordant, heart-wringing phrases of that famous trial, when four
of the Reform Committee were sentenced to death, and the rest to "two
years' rotting" in a foul prison; these constituted the first steps in
the ladder by which Valentine mounted alone and unaided, rung by rung,
to journalistic fame. After that no more need to seek work; it sought
her. There were commissions to India, Turkey, Russia, and Mexico, and
with each new adventure were fresh laurels, for her work improved as the
work of a writer can only improve when she gives it her heart and soul
and serves no other god.
Thus, after struggling and climbing practically from the age of fourteen
up the craggy hillside of Fame, she had in her twenty-sixth year reached
a point nearer the top than do most women. True, it was not universal
fame, but the fact remains, that to any one who read with understanding
the British newspapers, her name stood for work both brilliant and
sound, a fine temperament and a great future.
When success first began to come her way, Valdana cropped up again,
smiling and ready to step back into her life. But sorrow had taught Val
a few things and opened her eyes to the real worthlessness of her
husband's character. She recognised coldly and clearly at last just
what he was--a lazy, unscrupulous scoundrel. Even more unforgivable was
the fact that he had not cared a rap whether his child lived or died of
starvation: that she could never forget. Therefore, though she gave him
money, even unto the half of her income, she refused to return to him or
allow him to come back into her life. He became so troublesome,
however, that she was on the point of seeking legal protection from him,
when the Boer war broke out, and in the urgent interests of her
newspaper she was obliged to put private affairs aside, and start
immediately for Africa. After a year there of unceasing work and
travel, she succumbed to a bad illness, resulting from overtaxed energy,
and it was while she lay ill in Cape Town that Valdana made a fresh move
in the game.
It must be mentioned that before his people, realising his lack of all
moral sense, and fearful of future dishonour, had decided to despatch
him to Africa, he was intended for the army, and had been educated and
trained to that end. His parents' decision was a bitter blow to him,
for the picturesque side of army life appealed to him greatly, and he
chose to believe and to frequently air the modest opinion that in him a
very gallant soldier had been lost to England. Now, when in England's
dark hour she called for men to volunteer their services in Africa, came
his chance, and with a promptness he only exhibited in his own
interests, he applied for a commission in one of the corps raised in
London. His application was at first refused, because there were plenty
of good men of tried experience to fill such posts; but a clever use of
his wife's name and work got him into the limelight. He did not even
disdain to make use of her illness, and the fact that she had been
brought almost to death's door in the service of the public. So finally
he got his commission and sailed for the front in a glow of publicity.
Then, for a blackleg and a ne'er-do-well whom no one wanted, he did an
extraordinary and unheard of thing--he died! And not content to merely
die, he did the thing well; nobly and heroically he did it, in company
with a dozen or so men of his troop. They were isolated in a farmhouse,
surrounded by a large number of Boers, and refusing to surrender were
cut up to a last man, and the house set afire over their wounded bodies.
Some grudging curmudgeon had invented a tale to the effect that one of
the band had slunk out, and, deserting his wounded comrades, escaped.
But no one had ever been able to prove the lie, and even the Boers
themselves gave evidence of the splendid courage of the little band, and
especially of their leader, the last to die with a laugh upon his lips.
All England rang with Horace Valdana's name. Val, already bright in the
public eye, had the added lustre of her gallant husband's glory shed
upon her. Shoals of sympathetic letters and telegrams reached her in
Cape Town, and, on the occasion of her return to England, having been
rigidly forbidden by the doctors to continue her war correspondence, she
was met by crowds and cheered to the echo. But both sympathy and cheers
were wasted upon her. She received them coldly and silently, without