第6章

"They're a picturesque couple," explained Cuthbert."Ducret was originally a wrestler.Used to challenge all comers from the front of a booth.He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small way, in ivory.Now he's the biggest merchant, physically and every other way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad.He has a house at Brazzaville built of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-plant.His wife was a supper-girl at Maxim's.He brought her down here and married her.Every rainy season they go back to Paris and run race-horses, and they say the best table in every all-night restaurant is reserved for him.In Paris they call her the Ivory Queen.She's killed seventeen elephants with her own rifle."In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women.They were pallid, washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age.For him women of any other type had ceased to exist.

He had come to think of every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun, with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed.He thought of them as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and army helmets.

When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger.She appeared to have stepped to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue de la Paix.She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great loveliness, and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, a la Merode, across a broad, fair forehead.She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as delicate as a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a curtain, hung more lace.

When she was pleased, she lifted her head and the curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes.Around the white, bare throat was a string of pearls.They had cost the lives of many elephants.

Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was--a Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne.He knew that on any night at Madrid or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same charming type.They might lack that something this girl from Maxim's possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the depths of darkness.But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as she.

But to Everett she was no messenger from another world.She was unique.To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was her entire sex personified.She was the one woman for whom he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the one thing to be desired.Opposite, across the table, her husband, the ex-wrestler, chasseur d'Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an ox.Men felt as well as saw his bigness.Captain Hardy deferred to him on matters of trade.

The purser deferred to him on questions of administration.He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in big figures.

He was fifty years ahead of his time.He beheld the Congo open to the world; in the forests where he had hunted elephants he foresaw great "factories," mining camps, railroads, feeding gold and copper ore to the trunk line, from the Cape to Cairo.His ideas were the ideas of an empire-builder.But, while the others listened, fascinated, hypnotized, Everett saw only the woman, her eyes fixed on her husband, her fingers turning and twisting her diamond rings.

Every now and again she raised her eyes to Everett almost reproachfully, as though to say, "Why do you not listen to him? It is much better for you than to look at me."When they had gone, all through the sultry night, until the sun drove him to his cabin, like a caged animal Everett paced and repaced the deck.The woman possessed his mind and he could not drive her out.He did not wish to drive her out.What the consequences might be he did not care.So long as he might see her again, he jeered at the consequences.Of one thing he was positive.He could not now leave the Congo.He would follow her to Brazzaville.If he were discreet, Ducret might invite him to make himself their guest.Once established in her home, she MUSTlisten to him.No man ever before had felt for any woman the need he felt for her.It was too big for him to conquer.It would be too big for her to resist.

In the morning a note from Ducret invited Everett and Cuthbert to join him in an all-day excursion to the water-fall beyond Matadi.

Everett answered the note in person.The thought of seeing the woman calmed and steadied him like a dose of morphine.So much more violent than the fever in his veins was the fever in his brain that, when again he was with her, he laughed happily, and was grandly at peace.So different was he from the man they had met the night before, that the Frenchman and his wife glanced at each other in surprise and approval.They found him witty, eager, a most charming companion; and when he announced his intention of visiting Brazzaville, they insisted he should make their home his own.