The Man Who Went Back

by G. B. Lancaster

THE MAN WHO
WENT BACK

By G. B. LANCASTER

VERY softly, almost without sound, the pole lifted from the smooth water and slid back again. Very softly, but with a strange, protesting murmur, the little boat pushed forward through the tangled growth of lotus-flowers, blue and fresh and deliriously sweet as those Cleopatra may have pulled when she came down the Nile. The Masai at the pole stood on the thwart, naked and grandly shaped as a bronze image, while the broadening day struck points of light from the coils of wire wound about his ankles and wrists.

The dawn had made the world blue with the half-ghostly glimmer of opalescence. Blue was the stretch of the dreaming lake, blue the rock and the low scrub that edged it, and blue, translucently blue, the hills that marched back, tier on tier, to guard Lake Victoria Nyanza from the cunning of the white man who was to strip the mystery from this land which is older and more strange than time.

To Penderel, R.E., sitting in the stern of the boat, with his brows drawn together over the calculations in the note-book on his knee, this hushed, unhandled solitude of British East Africa was no more than so much land and water through which his railway might drive its tunnels and lay its sleepers and tie-plates and raise its bridges. For three days he had been on safari down the lake, seeking a rift in that eternal toffee-coloured rock which might lead out to the swampy plateau beyond, and so offer a means of draining it without great expense or waste of time. Penderel's knowledge of topography told him that the soakage from the plateau was more likely to occur among these tumbled hills dropping to the lake; and hour by hour he had patiently thrust his way through papyrus thicket and lotus tangle, and, wet to thigh or to shoulder, had followed up each little indentation to the invariable cul-de-sac just round the corner.

Until that plateau could be drained, the railway survey was held up indefinitely, and Penderel, having drawn blank seventeen times already, snapped his book shut and ran his keen eyes along the bank.

"Drive in where that little creek runs down, Mbomba," he commanded, in the mixed dialect which three years of inland East Africa had taught him; and the big man obeyed, thrusting through the reeds with a force that sent the muscles rippling along his shining limbs.

The sound of the human voice broke the intense calm that brooded over the place, and, sudden as a ribbon unrolled, a flock of flamingos rose from behind the reeds and flew across the lake in a flutter of rose and black and white. A dull splash followed, and Penderel, springing up, saw the broad back and nose of a hippopotamus floating like so much blubber where the lake broke in silver ripples around it. He reached for his rifle, but stopped before his fingers touched it. There was no sport in shooting a hippo—that last word in stupid inertia—and big game to him meant something more than so many tons of bone and cartilage and flesh. As a matter of fact, Penderel was stalking Nature just now. He had witnessed her death-throes before—in the spoiled forest and the driven road, in the tapped swamp and the conquered river and the blasted hill. He would witness them again, when he had bled that swamp dry on the plateau. And then, with the survey safely through his division, he would take his long-deferred holiday and find, in a grey house on the storm-beaten salt shores of England, the little girl who watched so eagerly for those terse letters, written under all conditions and in all places, which had filtered to her through long years of absence.

The boat nosed with a jar to the shelving beach, and Penderel stepped out.

"Wait for me here," he said, and went up over the fine sand, where his shooting-boots made no sound. The sun was high now, flinging his shadow sharply before him in sturdy strength, and, far above, the hollow sky was swept clear of the mystery of the night. Penderel followed up the creek, with its tinkling of tiny falls, and a glow came into his eyes as he splashed and stumbled on the sharp rocks. Leeches clung to him, and infinitesimal flies swarmed about him. Colour was reduced to its basic browns and greens and harsh greys. The sun grew levelly hot, and still the way wound upward; and still Penderel followed, one white man alone in a neolithic world which held the customs and the animal life that had been before men learned to measure time.

The creek widened and shallowed, and about his feet came the murmur of long grass blowing over, brown and silver, in the wind, and all the little gold balls of the scrub mimosa loosed a haunting sense of sweetness on the air. Penderel breasted the last steep rise down which the creek splintered itself in a scatter of spray, and came out on the rim of the plateau, taking the breath from the dark distant hills upon his forehead. All about him lay the purples and the misty greys and soft greens of this barrier which was holding up the survey at the foot of those far hills, and here stood Penderel, with a little thrill running on his eager limbs and the key to that door in his hand.

It was science and the determination of man against Nature, as always, and, also as always, it was man who had won out. Penderel flung himself down in the coarse cool grass and beat the earth softly with his palm. He had warred with this veiled Africa so long and so consistently that she had become a vital and a gallant enemy to him, and he rejoiced in each overthrow with a prick of compunction.

"We'll have the whole of you in time," he said. "We'll bleed you and bridge you and build over you, and we'll make you the finest country on God's good earth. And then some of us will want you back as you were, my dear, when we first came to you."

His fingers, feeling among the grass-stems and the low mimosa, chanced on something hard as stone—something that glittered as he pulled it up and held it to the light. It was an arrow-head, made of obsidian roughly chopped out, and Penderel wrinkled his strong brows as he looked on it. Such things found in England inferred deposit before the Quarternary period, but in Africa men were in that period still. This arrow-head was old—older than the computation of man—and it might have lain here a week or a thousand years.

He sought in the grass again, finding three more heads and a blue bead. And then he sat up with an exclamation of satisfaction which brought a faint chuckling echo from the hot brown rocks about him. These beads were rare, extremely rare, and old with an origin that ran back into the mists of legend and antiquity. Once, before time was, before history told, the swarthy Nubians, pushing down from Egypt through the primeval forests, had bartered gaudy silks and cottons and these little glass beads to the countries of the Upper Nile. That way had been closed down and forgotten long ago, but the little blue beads remained, with all their mystery of an utterly vanished past.

Penderel turned the bead in his fingers curiously. It was very crudely made, being no more than a thread of soft opaque glass twirled into the form of a ring and then set on its edge to harden. The colour was strong turquoise, and the rims were harsh still, as though it had never been worn.

"I will take it home to Molly," said Penderel. "It's the finest I've seen anywhere. I'll take it home to her."

About him the grass-stalks stirred with a faint sigh, and Penderel, his imagination moved for the moment by this link leading back across the ages, laughed a little shamefacedly.

"You poor old Africa!" he said. "We're taking everything from you. This swamp will be another of your ramparts gone, and, in return for what I'm going to do to you, you offer me this blue bead. It is very pretty of you, my dear, and you mustn't mind if I give it to another lady now. You have had it probably two thousand years and more."

He stood up, looking round on the wide stillness of rocks and earth, which seemed to breathe in the wind like a living thing. The air was full of vague odours, impalpable dust of pollen, murmur of unseen insects. Restless cloud-shadows moved over the face of the swamp, black on the pale mauves and cinnamons and mole-greys. Not a bird hung in the high, empty sky, not a leaf trembled on the bleached mimosa and fern. And yet the man felt the quiet, restrained tenacity of life about him as he never remembered feeling it before. But the swamp was doomed. That lush sedge and those vivid mosses would very shortly have the life drained out of them, and the place where they had been would be saddled and barred with steel and timber and deep-driven piles.

Over the plateau the shadows flitted, as though seeking some lost thing, and Penderel, resenting with a curious anger the sense of individuality which it seemed to force on him, slipped the bead and the arrow-heads into his pocket and turned down the creek-bed again.

The descent was more difficult than the climb had been, but peace reigned in his heart. He had found the way, and the work of destruction and consequent construction could go on. Weariness did not matter; bruised limbs, where he slipped on the greasy rock, did not matter; torn hands, where the sharp mimosa thorns stabbed him, mattered no more than the hunger which he allayed by continual smoking. He had grown used to hardship and loneliness and body-ache; he had grown used to disappointment and waiting. But his reward had come now. The work could go on, and in years to come, when this little one-line railway had broadened into a network, his name would be remembered as that of the man who had made the first survey. To-morrow he would go down the lake again and back to headquarters for his staff. But it was characteristic of Penderel that he would allow no outside element in crises that might go against him. He could not have endured another white man groaning over the discouragements of these last few days; he did not want a white man to rejoice with him now.

The sun was near its setting when he came to the beach at last, exhausted and dripping with creek-water and heat, but triumphant. His carriers had arrived, after threading their way along the shore with the cat-like dexterity of the native, and Mbomba, quiescent before all the vagaries of the "Boss," had ordered camp to be pitched and mosquito-smudges of green branches to be made. The potent acridity of the smoke blew on the air, together with the smell of zebra flesh from the little red fires before the carriers' tents. Penderel's own tent stood, a ghostly glimmer, against the rocks near the creek; but the remainder of the camp was across the curve of the beach, and to Penderel, coming out of the shadows and the thick fern and mimosa fringing the creek among the tall rocks, the rosy lake rippling into the blue haze of dusk, and the scarlet flares, and the white motes of the tents, and the moving bodies of the naked men, glowing to fiery bronze as they took the light, was such a barbaric picture as he had learned to love.

He ate his meal with relish; and then, over his pipe, he sat and looked on the grotesque forms hunched round the fires, which sent black shadows fluttering in a heathen dance across the sand. Great bats sheered about them, and all the noises of the jungle began to wake. Night had come, soft-fallen and purple-clear and pricked through with golden, steady stars. The natives in their rags were cave-men, neolithic men, and Penderel, with centuries of civilisation and more than centuries of knowledge dividing him from them, looked on them as the white man has learned to look on an ignorant race which will presently dissolve and blow away on the wind of time. Passing shadows they were, these naked Masai and Kikuyu, quarrelling over their half-raw lumps of zebra flesh, but the white man was strong—strong and assured, the conqueror of the earth. Such things as the swamp on the plateau, the hippopotamus floating unthinkingly in the lake, the naked native with his arrow and bow, must go down before the tread of the white man. It was their destiny, and Penderel, grateful for the act of grace which had made him of the ruling race, felt in his pocket for the arrow-heads and the blue bead which would score again the difference between these people and himself.

The bead had slipped through a hole in the torn pocket, and he had to cut the coat-lining to get it out. Then, in fear lest he might lose it altogether, he pushed it over the top joint of his little finger. The scratch of the rough edges sent a little shiver of pain running up his arm, and he swore at it in sudden irritation. On the sound of the oath followed the horrible hysterical laugh of a hyena back in the tumbled rocks, and Penderel saw the figures round the fire draw together. For the moment an indescribable, fierce loathing for them and for the animal possessed him, for well he knew the unholy fellowship which bound the two. The Masai never bury their dead. They lay them in open spaces for the seeking hyenas, and so the most cowardly of brutes becomes the sepulchre for one of the bravest of the races of men. No Masai slays a hyena; but to Penderel it was ever the foulest beast that moved, and he took his rifle now and disappeared among the rock-shadows with the thirst for killing on him.

The shadows were unbelievably real, with darting necks and glinting eyes among the tumbled scoria, and the night seemed bound into a waiting, watching silence. Penderel had the fancy that this silence was a coiled spring which a touch could galvanise into whirring, irresistible power. Almost it unnerved him; and then came the familiar laugh again, with the grotesque whoop at the end of it, and, with fingers twitching on the rifle, he stumbled on.

Under his feet the mimosa yielded up its fragrant life and the pink, hollow-stalked grasses bowed down. Wandering scents made rich the air, and the languid wash of the lake on the shore rose fitfully. The moon, an old and weary moon, sent shadows slanting down from the peaks, and presently Penderel's feet brought him out to a little open space of long grass where some bones gleamed white. Like ghosts, two hyenas slunk about the pile, snarling. They had come too late to the feast of another, and hate and revenge showed on their grinning faces in the moonlight.

Penderel lifted his rifle, and one beast, thrusting up its head to laugh, looked him straight between the eyes. For a moment only it looked, and then, with none of the fear which the hyena usually holds for men, it came near, slowly dragging its body along the ground. And Penderel dropped on his hands and knees to meet it.

He was not conscious that he was on all-fours, snarling also with bared teeth. He knew only that the air was full of nameless things—of unsuspected evil and coward terror and foul knowledge. Formless faces fluttered about him, things of the dead past that were trying to interpret themselves to him. The rank smell of the animal was more vile in his nostrils than he ever had known it before. It seemed to pierce into the brain, bringing a sense of degrading fear and bestiality to curdle the blood. All the horror of the jungle life, of the animal who lives to kill and to be killed, descended on him, making him one with these pariahs, one with these slinking, deformed children of this land that was still veiled Africa.

And then, crouching there, he knew that Africa was no more veiled for him. The film was being withdrawn, slowly, relentlessly, surely. He was on the edge of knowledge, of comprehension, and all about him was some unknown land, some forbidden land which had been free to the beasts before the advent of man. Those eyes of the hyena were older than man's eyes. They knew, and to Penderel, shuddering down in the coarse grass, came some realisation of what they knew.

Now the land had taken on a different aspect. Threat and horror lurked behind every tree, in every running shadow, in every stir of a branch. Oppression was abroad, the hand of Nature against the animal, of animal against its kind, and of blind treachery and a weak ferocity against them all. Life was in its throes of beginning, with no God, no soul to it. Life was clay only—animated clay—so near to the earth that it heard the voices of the earth and breathed the breath of it.

Nearer crept the beast, until its blotched skin showed bristly in the moonlight, and Penderel, with the sweat breaking on him, backed away from it. Then, like a shot bolt, a zebra sprang across the clearing, with panting, sleek sides and its pink tongue lolling. Hard on its quarters flashed a great yellow lioness, and the hyenas seemed to wither up in the shadows as if they were not. But the man, to whom had now come the very incarnation of fear, leapt up and ran headlong through the scrub and the tumbled rock as though hell itself was behind him.

All about him the night was alive with little voices calling in the sliding earth and brushing leaves—wordless voices, yet virile with interpretation.

"We are Fear!" they chattered. "We are Fear! We are Death! We are Fear!" It was earth crying to earth, with no soul, no spirit to inform it, and, as earth, the fleeing man heard and was afraid. This was the morning of Life, this huge shapeless blackness that stooped over his brain, that would devour him—Heavens, that would devour him! He ran, with set eyes and chilled limbs in the heat of the night—ran from terror, and felt it leaping after him with noiseless, untiring feet. This was the morning of Life, before man came and received a soul, before a God came and bestowed immortality. This was the morning of Life, while the world was yet unfinished, and its Maker experimented still in His workshop.

A bat swooped past Penderel, wailing. It had a voice like a woman—a lost woman. But it had never had a soul. A smell of big hairy spiders rose from a crevice in a rock, and Penderel's flight quickened. They were spinning their webs of death. On through the night he ran, with no conscious thought in him now. The swelling, breathing life about him seemed to choke him, to press down on him. And he felt shades of meaning from it all. This was Life, the amorphous blindly-feeling beginning of things—piteous, greatly struggling, knitted into a fellowship of beast and bird and quick earth such as man never knew, never could know. But Penderel knew.

On he ran, and upward, while the moon made its curve across the sky and the stars marched past. The little hills grew less, and grassy spaces came among their tops. Spores of animals showed here and there on the beaten earth. Out of the thicket of papyrus, hiding a little stream to the left, lurched something that looked like the grey earth itself, shapeless and with a suggestion of stones and dried clay. A sense at the back of Penderel's brain told him that, in the world he had known, this was called a rhinoceros. Now he knew that it was Antiquity itself. It was one of Nature's earliest thoughts——crude, elemental, terrific. It was the tentative product of a waking mind; it was the relic of an immature and shapeless world, when strange conceptions moved over the face of the earth which had spewed them up. It was that world, old and grey and fossilised, hidden here in the heart of this secret Africa as the link between living clay and dead earth.

Old it looked as it slouched across the open under the waning moon. The gigantic and undecided thought which gave it birth seemed to draw about it, and Penderel, shrunk down on his knees, shuddered under the immensity of that conception. Here, more than the other, was the morning of Life. Here was Nature direct, Nature fashioning her exuberant fancies into plastic clay. Here was nothing but clay made flesh—mere flesh—with not enough brain for fear. It would have bodily sense only, this great brute that hurled itself forward as though just burst out of the earth-womb that shaped it. Penderel lost fear as he looked on it. The myriad trembling voices of the night sank back into dumbness, and it seemed to him that he walked the earth indifferent and unmolested, not thinking nor acting life, but merely smelling it. With the thought came a potent odour, a curious acrid odour, unfamiliar to Penderel. The great beast raised its short neck, and a gleam came into its little eyes. Penderel knew why. He, too, hated with a sudden mad hate that odour blowing down the wind, and he rose to his feet with the whole of him rushing out in a desire to make an end of it.

The odour came nearer, and then a man walked out into the moonlight beside Penderel—a naked Masai, with a mud- coloured cloth swinging from his shoulder. With a roar the huge animal lowered its head and charged blindly—charged, not at the man, but at the smell of him, a moving mountain of living clay, controlled by the senses only.

Penderel heard the beast snort at his shoulder as he swung round, and he tore uphill with the terror of death on him again. So, in the neolithic ages, had his own ancestors run from the brutes who were greater than they. So he and the Masai ran now, separated soon by the tangling scrub, but driven by the same sense of helpless fear. Scent of the mimosa blew again in Penderel's face. Murmur of hollow grass-stalks singing in the wind came to his throbbing ears. And then the wide, warm sweep of the swamp opened its arms to him, and he heard small voices calling him from reed and ruddy moss-cup and pollened flower. He saw the life of it rising up at him—beauty shaping into form and face. He felt the pulsing of its heart under his straining feet, and he flung himself forward to it with a loud cry of rejoicing.

This at last was Africa—this overwhelming sense of succour and beauty. Far-off horror and blind hate might rage at him, but in these circling arms he was safe, he was free—free of the understanding of the immortal, of the goddess, of the Earth herself. This was beauty, this was knowledge, this was love. Penderel flung himself full-length, reaching his arms about the grasses and the tufty mosses. Bubbling water, brown as peat, rose along his body-line with the soft coolness of a caress. He stooped his head, kissing the yielding rosy moss as a man may kiss the one woman whom he loves. Now, thank God, now he understood! Mortality was no more. This was the real woman, this was the immortal, this the secret Africa who had waited so long for his coming, and who met him now with murmuring lips and soft breast against his own. Dull living clay was not yet; horror was not yet; the struggle of life towards separate immortality was not yet. Throes and stress were unknown. Here was peace only—infinite life—and a strange hush of wonder, wherein he heard a million little roots pushing out their fibres through the welcoming earth, and heard the stars wheel by, singing, and heard the winds gathering beyond the edge of space.

Here was the real morning of Life, where it lay, a direct thought of God, glorious, glowing, the mother of all things to be, the benignant lover of all that was. Penderel caressed with his fingers the yielding earth which was so slowly taking him.

"And I would have killed you!" he said, in awe. "Oh, you beautiful thing! I would have killed you!"

There was no effort in him now, no thought, nothing but a sense of quiescence, of obedience to a direct guidance. Tired of his individual life, he had come back to the essence of it; and the glory, the rejoicing of the first morning of Life, when the worlds came "singing from God's hand," was upon him. All across the plateau little voices were calling him. A leaning face with hair of the mist and eyes deep as the night was warm against his own. This was the morning of Life.

A sudden sharp pain stabbed up his little finger to the heart. He dragged his hand from the soft wetness of the soil and held it up. Blood ran down it, and the blue ring was gone, and in that moment he knew that he was alone and sinking in the swamp. The smell of decay was about him, the black of the night, the terror of death—such a death as this. Blind with the sweat that ran down him, he struggled, burst free, hurled himself forward, and fell to his knees again. The sucking of a thousand little lips sounded under him, and with the agony of desperation he wrenched himself from them, and gained the feel of hard rock and dry soil to his hands, to his feet. He stood up, looking back on the swamp lurking black in its shadows. Dawn was near, shivering whitely across the sky, and the dim line of the hills swelled into shape. Penderel, R.E., drew a long breath and rubbed his eyes.

"What a ghastly dream!" he said. "And what brought me sleep-walking up here, I wonder? Well, I'll be the last man to be bogged in this, anyhow, for I'll have the place drained before the year's out."

The breath of a sigh quivered over the plateau. A thousand little lips called. But Penderel, striking his nailed boots on the hard rock, did not hear. He turned and went down through the broken hills again, with the deafness and the blindness of his civilisation on him. For between the earth and the earth which walks on it connection has been severed too long.