Athalie

It appeared that there was nothing he could do for his young wife before he wandered on in the jolly autumn sunshine.

So the next morning he cleared out. Which proceeding languidly interested Innisbrae that evening in the billiard-room.

That winter Clive got hurt while pig-sticking in Morocco, being but an indifferent spear. During convalescence he read "Under Two Flags," and approved the idea; but when he learned that the Spahi cavalry was not recruiting Americans, and when, a month later, he discovered how much romance did not exist in either the First or Second Foreign Legions, he no longer desired dangers incognito under the tri-colour or under the standard bearing the open hand.

Some casual wanderer through the purlieus of science whom he met in Brindisi, induced him to go to Sumatra where orchids and ornithoptera are the game. But he acquired only a perfectly new species of fever, which took six months to get over.

He convalesced at leisure all the way from Australia to Cape Town; and would have been all right; but somebody shot at somebody else one evening, and got Clive. So it was several months more before he arrived in India, and the next year before he had enough of China.

But Clive had seen many things in those two years and had learned fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and satiated humanity shuffles home to bed.

He saw a massacre – or the remains of it – where fifteen thousand yellow men and one white priest lay dead. He saw Republican China, 40,000 strong, move out after the banditti, shouldering its modern rifles, while its regimental music played "Rosie O'Grady" in quick march time. He saw the railway between Hankow and Pekin swarming with White Wolf's bloody pack, limping westward from the Honan-Anhui border with dripping fangs. He peered into the stinking wells of Honan where women were cutting their own throats. He witnessed the levity of Lhasa priests and saw their grimy out-thrust hands clutching for tips beside their prayer-wheels.

In India he gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him to the soul.

Back into Europe he drifted; and instantly and everywhere appeared the awful Yankee – shooting wells in Hungary, shooting craps in Monaco, digging antiques in Greece, digging tunnels in Servia, – everywhere the Yankee, drilling, bridging, constructing, exploring, pushing, arguing, quarrelling, insisting, telegraphing, gambling, touring, over-running older and better civilisations than his own crude Empire where he has nothing to learn from anybody but the Almighty – and then only when he condescends to ask for advice on Sunday.

And Clive, nevertheless, longed with a longing that made him sick, for "God's country" where all that is worst and best on earth still boils in the vast and seething cauldron of a continent in the making. There bubbles the elemental broth, dregs, scum, skimmings, residue, by-products, tailings, smoking corruption above the slowly forming and incorruptible matrix in its depths where lies imbedded, and ever growing, the Immam, the Hope of the World – gem indestructible, pearl beyond price. Difficilia quae pulchra.

And once, Clive had almost set out for home; and then, grimly, turned away toward the southern continent of the hemisphere.

In Lima he heard of an expedition fitting out to search for the lost Americans, Cromer and Page, and for the Hungarian Seljan. And that same evening he met Captain Dane.

They looked at each other very carefully, and then shook hands. Clive said: "If you want a handy man in camp, I'd like to go."

"Come on," said Dane, briefly.

Later, looking over together some maps in Dane's rooms, the big blond soldier of fortune glanced up at the younger man, and saw a lean, bronzed visage clamped mute by a lean bronzed jaw; but he also saw two dark eyes fixed on him in the fierce silence of unuttered inquiry. After a moment Dane said very quietly:

"Yes, she was well, and I think happy, when I left New York… How long is it since you have heard from her?"

"Three years."

"Three years," mused Dane, gazing into space out of his slitted eyes of arctic blue; "yes, that's some little time. Bailey… She is well – I think I said that… And very prosperous, and greatly admired … and happy – I believe."

The other waited.

Dane picked up a linen map, looked at it, fiddled with the corner. Then, carelessly: "She is not married," he said… "Here's the Huallaga River as I located it four years ago. Seljan and O'Higgins were making for it, I believe… That red crayon circle over there marks the habitat of the Uta fly. It's worse than the Tsetse. If anybody is hunting death —esta aquí!.. Here is the Putumayo district. Hell lies up here, just above it… Here's Iquitos, and here lies Para, three thousand miles away… Were you going to say something?"

But if Clive had anything to say he seemed to find no words to say it. And he only folded his arms on the table's edge and looked down at the stained and crumpled map.

"It will take us about a year," remarked Dane.

Clive nodded, but his eye involuntarily sought the irregular red circle where trouble of all sorts might be conveniently ended by a perfectly respectable Act of God.

Actus Dei nemini facit injuriam.

CHAPTER XIX

THERE was a slight fragrance of tobacco in the room mingling with the fresh, spring-like scent of lilacs – great pale clusters of them decorated mantel and table, and the desk where Athalie sat writing to Captain Dane in the semi-dusk of a May evening.

Here and there dim figures loomed in the big square room; the graceful shape of a young girl at the piano detached itself from the gloom; a man or two dawdled by the window, vaguely silhouetted against the lilac-tinted sky.

Athalie wrote on: "I had not supposed you had landed until Cecil Reeve told me this evening. If you are not too tired to come, please do so. Do you realise that you have been away over a year? Do you realise that I am now twenty-four years old, and that I am growing older every minute? You had better hasten, then, because very soon I shall be too old to believe your magic fairy tales of field and flood and all your wonder lore of travel in those distant golden lands I dream of.

"Who was your white companion? Cecil tells me that you said you had one. Bring him with you this evening; you'll need corroboration, I fear. And mostly I desire to know if you are well, and next I wish to hear whether you did really find the lost city of Yhdunez."

A maid came to take the note to Dane's hotel, the Great Eastern, and Cecil Reeve looked up and laid aside his cigarette.

"Come on, Athalie," he said, "tell Peg to turn on one of those Peruvian dances."

Peggy Brooks at the piano struck a soft sensuous chord or two, but Francis Hargrave would not have it, and he pulled out the proper phonographic record and cranked the machine while Cecil rolled up the Beluch rugs.

The somewhat muffled air that exuded from the machine was the lovely Miraflores, gay, lively, languorous, sad by turns – and much danced at the moment in New York.

A new spring moon looked into the room from the west where like elegant and graceful phantoms the dancers moved, swayed, glided, swung back again with sinuous grace into the suavely delicate courtship of the dance.

The slender feet and swaying figure of Athalie seemed presently to bewitch the other couple, for they drew aside and stood together watching that exquisite incarnation of youth itself, gliding, bending, floating in the lilac-scented, lilac-tinted dusk under the young moon.

The machine ran down in the course of time, and Hargrave went over to re-wind it, but Peggy Brooks waved him aside and seated herself at the piano, saying she had enough of Hargrave.

She was still playing the quaint, sweet dance called "The Orchid," and Hargrave was leaning on the piano beside her watching Cecil and Athalie drifting through the dusk to the music's rhythm, when the door opened and somebody came in.

Athalie, in Cecil's arms, turned her head, looking back over her shoulder. Dane loomed tall in the twilight.

"Oh!" she exclaimed; "I am so glad!" – slipping out of Cecil's arms and wheeling on Dane, both hands outstretched.

The others came up, also, with quick, gay greetings, and after a moment or two of general and animated chatter Athalie drew Dane into a corner and made room for him beside her on the sofa. Peggy had turned on the music machine again and, snubbing Hargrave, was already beginning the Miraflores with Cecil Reeve.

Athalie said: "Are you well? That's the first question."

He said he was well.

"And did you find your lost city?"

He said, quietly: "We found Yhdunez."

"We?"

"I and my white companion."

"Why didn't you bring him with you this evening?" she asked. "Did you tell him I invited him?"

"Yes."

"Oh… Couldn't he come?"

And, as he made no answer: "Couldn't he?" she repeated. "Who is he, anyway – "