Sacrifice | Page 9

what?"
"Behind the formal words? Who knows? For whatever they desired
most. Probably for something that nobody would suspect."
"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.
In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible. Their minds,
restricted to puerilities, had never grown up. Their bodies were so lax
that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted them.
Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo clocks and
music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away in caskets,
then bedizening themselves all over again. Their servants, who had

known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave markets,
told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a thousand
devils of ingenuity and wit. And those scented ladies with feeble flesh,
hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening for a while in
vague regret, all at once became bored. Whereupon they fell to playing
parchesi and eating sweetmeats.
In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a similarity
to her own life. Or, at least, she felt that her life, if he knew it in detail,
would seem to him almost as trivial.
"Poor souls," she said. "But one surely finds others out there," she
persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it
intently. "White women, for example, the women of the empire
builders? At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be
almost inevitable. Each finds in the other an overwhelming
congeniality? The loneliness round about exerts a tremendous
persuasion?"
"Oh, yes," he assented, with a smile. "Especially if the lady smokes a
pipe."
He told her of an Englishwoman whom he had met in the Masai veldt,
hunting for maneless lions--an amazon in breeches and boots, at the
head of her own safari. Week after week she had led her dark-skinned
retainers through the wilds, cheerily doctoring them in their sicknesses,
herself never ailing or weary. At the charge of a lion she had withheld
her fire till the last possible moment. By night, the safari encamped, she
had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one knee cocked over the
other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the gossip of ragged
wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and the smell of
burning fat.
"I find such women incomprehensible," Lilla declared, with a profound
animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves
were so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging
lions, who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the
blood that she had shed.

Lawrence Teck, after a moment's struggle with himself, blurted out:
"I assure you that when we fellows dream of women it's of a different
sort."
"Oh, of course. Of the one that you've left behind, I suppose."
Sometimes, he assented presently; in which case the one at home would
be immensely enriched by that wide separation. But it often happened
that such an exile, when no specially congenial woman had given him
her heart, constructed from his imagination an ideal, a vision capable of
brightening the wilderness with the most exquisite charms. Or else he
might find an unattainable ideal ready-made. Thus it was that uncouth
sailors, on long voyages, treasured the photographs of unknown
actresses in fancy costume, as a religious devotee might treasure an
ikon. Or thus a soldier in some Congo fort, while gradually succumbing
to the malefic spell of the encircling forests, yearned toward the portrait
of a princess that he had clipped from an old illustrated
magazine--toward a divinity whom he could never know, but whom he
adored because her nature and life were so different from his.
"How romantic men are!" she exclaimed, turning away her head.
He seemed abashed; but he returned:
"And are women never tempted to renounce that famous practicality of
theirs?"
She walked on along the terrace. The moonlight intensified her ethereal
aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the contrast
between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength.
At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according
with the faltering of her heart beats. But it was in an almost indifferent
tone that she inquired:
"You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?"

"Yes, everything's settled."
She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal
from that scene of its peculiar charm.
"Why are you returning?"
He hesitated. Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far north
of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the stone
city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were
supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the
fabled Land of Ophir. Who knew what ancient idols, what Himyarite
inscriptions,