Dingley, l'illustre écrivain

JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD Dingley THE ILLUSTRIOUS WRITER CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE published twenty times a year PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

The Cahiers will publish by the same authors L’ANAON

JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD Dingley THE ILLUSTRIOUS WRITER EDITIONS DES CAHIERS PARIS 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

To the memory of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who died before the consummation of his injustice.

JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD Dingley THE ILLUSTRIOUS WRITER

Wherever English is spoken, no one is unaware of the name of the illustrious writer Dingley. Even children know him: many of them learn to read from his books. He was a man of incomparable gaiety, fancy, and freshness of imagination. He seemed to have been born at the dawn of the world, in a time when the senses of men rivaled those of beasts. Whether he described a virgin forest of India, a commercial office in the City of London, a sunrise over the tropical sea, or a Western European twilight soiled by factory smoke, his vision, always so unexpected, was that of a man opening fresh eyes upon all the spectacles of the world. His stories were painted with the exactness of a Japanese realist or the wild, delicious fantasy of a Persian poet. The characters in his tales nearly all inhabited a land where the powerful imagination of man had put forth marvelous flowers: the plains of the Ganges, witness to the most desperate effort of thinkers to discover a meaning in life. From the contrast between the petty preoccupations of Europeans who had emigrated there and an indigenous civilization saturated by the dreams of philosophers dead for thousands of years, Dingley had drawn the most striking effects. For he, in his artist’s brain born on that soil, united the practical, concrete spirit of men of the English race with the soul of a Hindu, unsatisfied with life and passionate for dreams: he had the ardor of a Norman pirate and the taste for interminable siestas in the shade, eyes closed, while in the field of inner vision there pass, like visions of another existence, the eventful lives of men who belonged to other ages. From one of these afternoon reveries had sprung that prodigious story of a young London clerk, quite ignorant of antiquity, who can reconstruct, with the exactness of a man who had suffered it, the entire life of a rower chained to the bench of a Phoenician galley, a thousand years before Christ. An evoker of the souls of men of old, Dingley also had the divination of the obscure soul of beasts. He knows all the animals of the forest; he analyzes the collective soul of the buffalo, the anarchist spirit of the monkeys, the meditative goodness of the elephant, the stupid brutality of the tiger, the supple and mottled intelligence of the panther. He knows the laws of the forest. He attends the councils of the wild beasts. He sees how a child raised in a family of wolves develops, and he will tell you how, having reached manhood, this son of a man and a woman leaves the free life of the woods to bury himself in a shop because he has fallen in love with a girl from the towns. And this whole world of the woods lives a life at once real and fantastical. This body of work was a marvelous game whose success exceeded the boundaries of the English language. Dingley knew glory: he was the most widely read man in the world. His photograph was everywhere: in reviews, magazines, newspapers. It was displayed in the shop windows of every bookseller in the new and old worlds. On the great ships that carried him, all year round, from one end of the world to the other, in the palace-hotels that were to him like a shepherd’s hut, the misses would point out to one another this small man with angular, lean features, a stiff moustache falling like a portcullis over his mouth, and restless, prying eyes never still behind the lenses of his steel spectacles.

When the Transvaal War was declared he was in London. He lived with his wife and child on the fifth floor of an immense hotel, from which he could see the life of the Thames. When the wind blew and the fog hid the rooftops, he could have believed himself in a lighthouse.

The war changed the aspect of the street: it became more hurried, more anxious, more nervous. Dingley carefully noted all the details of this transformation. At the same time he was in search of a theme for a novel in which he might paint this agitation of London during the war: chance, as almost always, was the initiator of the artist.

It was evening, in Warrington Square; a mob of hooligans surrounded a tall soldier dressed in red and bearing himself well. The sergeant was extolling the Queen’s service:

“Gentlemen,” he cried, “you were not born sons of peers! But the Government has its eye on you! It wants to use your talents! It invites you to eat chops every day. Here you are dying of hunger and thirst. At the Cape, good steaks, good whisky! And glory! On your return, in the homeland, a nice little position where all you’ll have to do is smoke your pipe and spit into the water!”

The bystanders dispersed when the sergeant had finished his speech. Around him there remained only Dingley and three poor famished wretches marked by misery and vice.

The sergeant took two of them familiarly by the arm. He said to the third:

“And you, are you coming?”

This one remained motionless, planted on the muddy asphalt like a tree in a public square, while the sergeant moved off with the other two. Dingley watched them turn the corner of a street: he rushed in pursuit and caught up with them at the door of a bar. He entered behind them, sat down at a neighboring table, and listened to them talk as they drank tea and gin from chipped cups, then straight gin. The sergeant recounted his campaigns, his adventures --- they were endless and all, to hear him tell it, more admirable than the last. He had fought the Afridis in India, the Mahdi in Egypt, the Burmese… The number of his conquests grew with the pile of saucers stacked up.

The door opened: a man came in; scarcely a man, a tall youth with an old-looking air: the third hero. His eyes passed, without fixing, over the recruiting sergeant and his companions, wandered slowly around the room, met those of Dingley. Their luster was cloudy like the orient of a pearl that the writer wore on his watch-chain and that had grown dull from rubbing against the table. His clothes, of careful cut, were dirty. His collar had the graduated yellow tones of an old pipe stem. Evidently it had been days since he had undressed. Dingley did not lose sight of any of his movements, noting in his memory the hesitant bearing of the wretch. At last he saw him brush against the sergeant like a girl enticing a man. The recruiter slipped his long arm around his waist:

“Gin?”

“Whatever you like,” the young man answered in a hoarse voice, “I’m thirsty.”

The sergeant understood he was dealing with a desperate man and that fine phrases were useless. He simply led him on to drink. The other two were already snoring, their foreheads on the table. He woke them to make them sign a paper he drew from the lining of his jacket. They had one last drink. The recruits and the sergeant left the bar silently. The soldier guided these patriots toward a nearby barracks.

Dingley returned to his lofty dwelling joyful with that particular joy that invaded him when fine themes for stories were taking shape in his brain. The Dawn of works! Nothing in the world, for him, was worth that moment of elation. At such moments he had a strange air: his eyes were wider, his features more elongated, a furrow deepened between his brows… When he entered, his wife recognized the quality of his joy. At once, without removing his coat, his body slightly leaning forward, his hands resting on the head of his cane, he told her what inspiration had come to him:

“Do you understand, Jeanne, a young man like the one I have just seen --- false eyes --- thin hair --- chlorotic --- the depths of misery. He enlists in the Queen’s service, not out of patriotism --- for a few guineas. By the virtue of war he will become a new man… If you had seen him with his long supple body, his beardless face, his limp gestures. He evoked the idea of a girl! Imagine this creature remaining some time longer in London, he falls into the basest depravity. But the war will take him, make of him a healthy and vigorous man.”

“And what do you call him?”

“Barr! Naturally. What would you have me call him? Barr! Barr!”

He repeated the monosyllable several times; it pleased him with its brief, hard sonority. One name, a single name suited each of his heroes: he prided himself on always finding it.

“Well! How do you find my tale?” he asked, uneasy at not feeling his wife vibrate to his narration. He was accustomed to testing on her, as on an admirably sensitive audience, the effect of his inventions.

“Do you understand!” he insisted nervously, “to show how war can make a hero of my scoundrel!”

“Do you really think so, my friend?” she replied, incredulous. “Can you ask men recruited in a state of drunkenness to become heroes? To enlist men for money and then claim to demand of them the sacrifice of their lives?”

“My dear,” Dingley resumed in a lofty tone, “the soldiers of Wellington were recruited in just the same way: they vanquished the most valiant troops in the world.”

Things regulated by age-old customs, at least in his country, seemed to the writer to partake of the necessity of nature.

“The cause for which Wellington’s soldiers fought…” replied Jeanne.

“Ah! There you go!” cried Dingley. “You understand nothing about this war! Always your concern with justice and injustice!” He shrugged his shoulders, set his cane on a table, unbuttoned his coat, and went to press his forehead against the window: the fog and smoke drowned everything. His nostalgic mind set sail toward the past: into the Thames came and went the Vikings on their dragon ships. The bellowing of the sirens evoked the sound of the horns of the sea kings. He said:

“The goods in the bellies of those ships going and coming through the fog are plunder, just like those once conquered by our Danish ancestors. Only the forms of plunder are different today from what they were ten centuries ago. Peaceful exchange is a madman’s dream.”

“I love war as much as you do,” replied Jeanne, she too pressing her forehead to the glass, “but it saddens me to think that men from your country are going to die very far from here to conquer gold mines. If only the gold were for them! Oh, it is sad to think that young men are going to die for other men already rich, ugly, and old.”

Dingley began to smile:

“Now there is a woman’s idea! You would excuse this war if our capitalists were less rich, less ugly, and less old?”

Dingley’s wife had inherited from her French ancestors, who emigrated in the seventeenth century to Louisiana, a sure sense of character. Her very great admiration for her husband had not blinded her to the limits of his genius: he was born to enchant the imagination of men, not to moralize, even about war.

“Do not forget the trees or the beasts.”

“I forget nothing at all, my dear… No novelist has told us what Wellington’s soldiers were like. In the next century, people will look in my books to find out what the Queen’s soldiers were. Barr will be English patience, initiative, composure, humanity, good humor. He will make people understand the Roundheads, the grenadiers of Mont-Saint-Jean… Those who return from the Cape will find themselves in ---”

“Beware of becoming the apostle of a patriotism that is somewhat selfish and harsh.”

In a neighboring room a child was laughing with his nurse. The wife’s words and the child’s laughter mingled with the cries, rising from the street, of the Announcers of the Evening News.

The bell rang: the child ran to the door. He came back, carrying to Dingley in his arms a considerable newspaper, almost as tall, almost as broad, almost as heavy as his own frail person. Dingley took the newspaper and the child. He asked him:

“And you, son, what do you think of Master Kruger?”

Archie burst out laughing. Master Kruger had not yet entered the circle of his thoughts. The writer sat the child on a table, took the Times, cast a quick glance at the front page:

“Good heavens! What an honor!” he exclaimed. “They have signed my article with my name.”

And he pointed out to his wife on the still-damp sheet his name written in full.

“It’s true. I have never yet seen a signed leader in the Times. I congratulate you, my friend.”

“I hadn’t asked for it.”

“The newspaper is happy to announce to the world that you are a supporter of the war…” she said with a touch of bitterness.

“Of course!” Dingley answered proudly.

The disasters at the beginning of the war disconcerted the novelist’s imagination. Could he extol the intelligence of officers beaten by peasants? The heroism of soldiers who threw up their hands as soon as a mule had been killed in the column? Would Barr have courage only against the Afridis or the Mahdi’s negroes?

The writer roamed the wretched quarters of the City: he entered dives, listened to the poor talk about the war. He spent hours in the hall of the Stock Exchange; he mingled with the crowd stopped before the offices of the great newspapers, waiting, noses in the air, for the transparencies on which the latest war telegrams were projected in black.

He saw again a great many times the scene that had so interested him the first day he witnessed it: the same sergeant and the same hooligans. It seemed as if that sergeant had been struck off by Providence in thousands of copies. It was always the same man --- tall, lean, red, dressed in scarlet, with a little baton in his hand and a round cap on his head --- the same hooligans to whom misery and vice gave a family resemblance. And it was always the same bar with its chipped cups, the gin, and the paper the wretches always ended up signing.

In the room at the War Office where the names of the wounded and the dead were posted each day in several columns, Dingley lived through unforgettable minutes. A chapter of his novel was to bear that so tragically banal name: the waiting room. Truly the somber kingdom of Waiting, that ordinarily empty and bare room! Dingley could not recall having seen anywhere such expressions of despair; in the crowd that waited each day for the lists to appear, he recognized faces. Some particularly attracted his artist’s eye; he observed them furtively. A unique opportunity, he thought, to observe on human faces the effects of apprehension! The light struggled to penetrate the layer of ancient grime thickened on the windows; in that dirty light the most radiant complexions of young girls seemed livid. Before the names were posted, to beguile their anguish, the people gathered there whispered very softly, very softly, as if they were afraid of waking, in an adjoining room, some fearsome beast. The distinction between classes was abolished; Dingley saw gentlemen in the most gleaming top hats conversing with men in caps, women of the finest aristocracy in confidences with women dressed in rags. These moments of perfect equality lasted until the lists appeared. Then there was a rush; each straining to see! Those who had read no friendly name on the board slipped away furtively. Dingley saw them again the next day, in the same place, with the same look of anguish as the day before. After the great rush, when the crowd had drained away, a little old woman in a blue straw bonnet of the shape called a cabriolet would timidly approach the lists. Her arms and hands were wrapped several times in a fold of the greenish shawl that, enveloping her shoulders, fell in a point over her chest and back. Wisps of colorless hair hung over a collar of immaculate whiteness that gave the impression that the only clean thing the old woman wore was her chemise. The petticoat showing below her muddy dress was dirty. Her worn-down boots, with their burst elastic sides, revealed her thin ankles. She was always moving her lips. Was it the continual movement of her lips, or simply the abnormal development of her lower lip? Was it the roundness of her large round eyes rimmed with red? She had the stupid, timid, and kindly look of a mother rabbit. She could not read, and each day she asked a stranger to tell her whether the name “James Crook? Crook, is it not? Crook James?” was written on the list. Dingley often checked the list for her, and several times he anticipated her wish: “Crook, is it not? Crook James? No, he is not listed.” The old woman raised to him her large round eyes, dull and grateful, murmured a pale thank-you, and went away. One day Dingley read among the dead the name of Crook (James). He left it to another to break the news to the old woman. He slipped into a corner of the room to watch her. “James Crook? He is dead!” said the stranger to whom the old woman had asked: “James Crook? Crook? Crook James?” She let her arms fall in a gesture of infinite weariness. Her shawl unwound and Dingley saw her hands, poor hands, humble hands, but beautiful hands. He followed her for a time through the crowd of a suburb where she was lost…

Dingley came home sad. His wife asked him --- she asked him the same question every evening:

“Well? Crook?”

“Dead,” he replied with a painful smile.

“Poor Crook! He will not receive Archie’s treats!… Did you see his mother?”

Dingley answered “yes” with a nod. After a rather long silence his wife murmured:

“Terrible war! As many officers die as soldiers.”

“The officers, all struck in the head,” the novelist specified absently. “No matter! What a unique example of composure England gives the world!”

The news of the first successes unleashed a delirious joy in London, by which one could measure how great the apprehension had been, though concealed by pride. The chase given to General Cronje gripped public opinion: the Boers were fleeing with their wagons heaped with women and children. Minute by minute the telegraph reported to London the details of the pursuit. An employee of the Times telephoned Dingley all the dispatches. The writer communicated the news aloud to his wife over the telephone:

“The old fox cannot escape… He has gone to ground in the banks of the Modder… Two hundred guns are firing on him, with lyddite, night and day. The wagons are ablaze. Above the flames rise columns of red dust… That is all.”

Dingley went back to sit at his worktable. His wife moved about the room, stirred by this distant massacre.

For five days Dingley listened with passionate interest to the squawking Punch-and-Judy voice detailing the agony of Cronje and his army.

On the fifth day, during dinner, the telephone rang imperiously. Dingley had placed the receiver on his table, beside his plate. He listened:

“That’s it.”

“They have taken him?” asked Jeanne.

“No. He surrendered,” he replied with contempt.

An immense clamor from outside made a fly resting on the windowpane take flight into the room. Dingley and Jeanne leaned out the window. In the fog, upstream along the embankment, they saw the swirl of a crowd that was singing. When the throng had arrived before the hotel, it stopped for a few seconds, gave three tremendous hurrahs in Dingley’s honor, and moved on, lit by the blaze of illustrated newspapers bearing Kruger’s portrait that were burning at the tips of walking sticks.

“See, Jeanne,” said Dingley with a smile, “the belief in sorcery is not dead!”

“True,” replied Jeanne; “our contemporaries burn Kruger in effigy, just as in the Middle Ages one pierced with a needle the wax-fashioned heart of one’s enemy.”

From all these impressions the writer had composed the first part of his novel. The work had come off well; the gay stories of soldier-recruiting mingled with the sinister scenes at the War Office; the cries of the street with the silence of souls anxious for loved ones’ lives. In the following chapters he described Barr’s departure for Africa and his life on board. He had attended many embarkations of troops at Portsmouth. But he had never visited a transport in transit. He was reduced to imagining that part of his novel, and this displeased him: he was conscientious and liked documents taken from life.

He decided to leave with his wife and child for Southern Africa.

II.

His departure was a triumph: an immense crowd on the dock acclaimed the novelist, standing at the stern of the steamer between Jeanne and Archie, whom he held by the hand. When the ship bestirred itself, they acclaimed his name. He raised his traveling cap. He felt that this crowd was acclaiming in him the very conscience of the race. A profound feeling of pride swelled his heart. Shakespeare had never known, for a single second, this intoxication. Jeanne felt her husband’s hand tremble. She forgot the injustice of the war: Dingley was great! The massacres were over; Pretoria was taken; the blood would cease to flow. A feeling of universal optimism filled her soul. Archie, startled by the cries, raised his frank eyes to his father and asked “why are they shouting?” Dingley seized the child and raised him at arm’s length. Then it was delirium: hats and canes flew into the air. Dingley remained a long time leaning on the rail, watching this crowd drunk with his art, drunk with Him.

The days at sea had often been for Dingley days of fruitful work. He recalled having written many fine stories in a steamer cabin. The movement of the ship rocked by the sea carried along his imagination. The sense of solitude at sea, of the energetic life of the sailors, of the power of the engine that made the little wooden table where he wrote tremble, disposed him marvelously to reverie. Before, through his wife, he had experienced the evocative power of music, life on board had been the best stimulant of his genius. He had hoped, during this crossing, to recreate within himself the divine state of sustained inspiration.

Dingley set to work: his wife, in an adjoining cabin, played --- rather badly --- a succession of musical banalities: waltzes, music-hall songs, fragments of operas. Whether the music was good or bad mattered little to Dingley. It was enough for him to hear rhythms and noise. When he was still only a literary beginner, he had rented a room on one of the busiest streets in the City to hear the din of omnibuses rolling over the pavement. In the Tyrol he had installed himself in an inn near a sawmill whose droning mingled with the dripping of the water from a millwheel. In Cairo he had paid a Sudanese griot, brought as a captive by the victorious troops of the Mahdi, to recite interminable chants to him while accompanying himself on a sort of three-stringed lyre: he was writing then the celebrated story of that maharajah raised in an Oxford college who finally realizes that he can never be happy, for the happiness of Europeans is not for him and the happiness of Hindus is no longer for him. Dingley had seated the griot on a mat near his table, and for hours, while the negro, his head wrapped in a blood-stained turban, chanted tales of war or love, while in the street the lemonade sellers cried out, while the donkey drivers swore as they beat the spines of their beasts with cudgels, he had described the nostalgia of his Hindu in search of his soul… His wife, a mediocre musician, had replaced the omnibuses, the mill, the sawmill, the griot…

Dinner was the gayest hour of the day. Many of the people gathered around the long table, peeling a pear or scraping a cheese, had traveled the world, some in search of adventures, others by professional duty. There was Ted Cox, the most famous reporter in the United Kingdom, seated opposite Thibert, a French illustrator sent by L’Illustration to South Africa. Vagabondage across all lands, over all seas, had not weakened among the diners the differences of race. But a great courtesy concealed hatreds beneath a veneer of politeness. When Dingley entered the room, Cox was saying to Thibert, whom he had known in Egypt:

“The reporter’s trade has been ruined by scoundrels and fools!”

“What a pity,” replied Mrs. Dingley, looking in turn at the illustrator and the journalist; “you have achieved, gentlemen, the most modern type of heroism: devotion to the News and to the Image.”

“Oh! We,” replied Cox, who, when he wished to appear modest, pursed his lips like a man blowing on an egg, “we are only children. Thibert, who knew Jack Kurrachee, the half-caste correspondent of the Daily News, won’t contradict me. That man, Mrs. Dingley, was, as you say, a true hero of the News and the Image! The last photograph he took is the one in which you see a gunner mortally wounded at the moment he pulls the lanyard: the soldier’s fall fires the gun. You remember, Thibert?”

“Perfectly. When Kurrachee took that shot, he was sitting ten meters from the gunner on the wheel of an overturned ammunition wagon. The same shell that demolished the gunner sent poor Kurrachee to the next world.”

“So,” cried Dingley, bursting into laughter, “your half-caste was killed by the last shell he photographed?”

“Precisely.”

“Impossible to carry devotion to the Image any further!”

“You have never been wounded, Monsieur Thibert?” asked Mrs. Dingley.

“Good Lord, no.”

“Providence watches over you!”

“Providence? Perhaps. I don’t believe in it for others, but I believe in it for myself… Thus I am absolutely certain I shall die in France, in the Beauce, in my bed.”

“And I in England, in the county of Essex…” interrupted Ted Cox.

”… And look,” said at the other end of the table a young lieutenant, Sir George Harvey, wounded at Colenso and returning to take up service in Africa, “these Boers are so simple that they are incapable of using the sights on their Mausers!”

“I have heard it said,” replied Thibert, “that they advantageously replace the sights with the thumb of their left hand raised perpendicular to the barrel of the rifle?”

“That is true,” replied Harvey. “But, when all is said, they are brutes who do not even know the use of a toothbrush.”

Thibert was fond of this amiable young lieutenant.

What reasons he had to risk his life in South Africa! He was rich and could perfectly well have stayed at home, near a very rich old uncle whose sole heir he was. One day when the illustrator pressed him, Harvey had replied:

“I was born into a society that has instilled in me sentiments favorable to its preservation. This community, I sincerely believe, is as good as any other, and I defend it. That is all.”

Thibert had been tempted to ask him:

“And you are prepared to defend it against all justice and against all right?”

But he had refrained from speaking so, for fear of offending the lieutenant and also because he was, in advance, sure of his answer: The Boers, first, had violated justice. And besides, it was a Latin idea to introduce the notion of justice everywhere. In human affairs, it was never anything but a matter of force. Those who thought otherwise were hypocrites or fools.

“As long as we don’t arrive too late! When the ball is over!” said Ted Cox.

“Good heavens!” replied Thibert. “Fifty dozen Lumiere plates gone to waste.”

“And a missed opportunity,” added Cox, “to see something other than the slaughter of negroes, yellows, or bronzes: at last we shall see Whites against Whites!”

Dingley thought:

“What if Barr should arrive too late!”

His Barr story was not progressing.

He had reached the point in his novel where he was describing Barr’s life en route for Southern Africa. He did not know the feelings of soldiers at sea or the exact conditions of their life. A transport lay at anchor in the bay of the Azores. He visited it.

Dingley was received by the officers on board with that respectful and enthusiastic admiration that every Englishman had for him. They wanted to keep him in the salon reserved for senior officers. Dingley, having little interest in the punch and the imminent toasts, asked to visit the ship. The captain, a small man, clean, very clean, extremely clean, explained the distribution of the cargo. The stern was reserved for officers. The noncommissioned officers were quartered on the forecastle, the soldiers in the hold and between decks.

“Let us hurry, Captain. We shall soon have to return. Let me see the men, if you please.”

“Oh! Nothing very interesting, you know.”

As soon as they approached the between decks, an unbearable stench of dung, latrines, cooking, and brine assailed them; a multitude of soldiers swarmed about down there. Some lying down, others standing, a few singing, others smoking. Most of them mute and motionless. In a corner some were wrestling.

“Seven hundred,” said the captain.

“Seven hundred!” Dingley repeated with stupefaction.

In the cramped space where all these men were packed, three hundred would have been uncomfortable. They went down.

In the hold, forty mules were at the bottom. Their stalls were separated only by a wooden barrier from the straw mattresses where the men slept.

“These are the most unfortunate who live down here,” remarked Dingley.

“On the contrary,” replied the captain, “they all ask to come down here. It stinks of mule, but it keeps them warm. ‘Common folk are chilly.’”

Dingley made a face. Near the kitchens he caught a baker drawing water from the latrine tank to avoid going to the pump.

The captain shrugged. After all, it’s their affair, isn’t it?

Dingley returned to the officers’ salon, pained that this mass of soldiers was as slovenly as any other human crowd so uncomfortably treated. He believed the English to be of finer steel than the other peoples of the world.

The officers had lit a punch. When Dingley entered, they cried three times: “Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” While they were drinking, a sailor brought a telegram from South Africa with news of the war. It was bad. A certain De Wet had seized a convoy and its escort --- the convoy was empty, to be sure --- and two mounted batteries. A squadron of lancers was in pursuit.

The officers had never yet heard this name De Wet. They questioned one another: De Wet? De Wet? What is this De Wet?

The first minutes of surprise past, the captain of the Vultur declared:

“This is a matter of guerrilla warfare, gentlemen! To the Queen’s health!”

Dingley left the Vultur amid acclamations: the soldiers had learned the name of their unknown visitor. They jostled toward the rail to see him. They sang in chorus a marching song composed by Dingley. Men would go to their deaths with one of his songs on their lips! The success of none of his books had inspired in the novelist so deep a surge of pride. Inwardly, his lips pressed together, he took up the refrain. The song fell upon the sea like the wings of a gigantic bird. It poured from the chests of those young men so full, so vigorous, that it seemed the improvisation of soldiers and sailors… Dingley recalled the moment when he had conceived the idea for that song, the place where he had written it, the trouble it had cost him…

He returned to his own ship. Wisps of straw and hay had caught in his hair, his boots were muddy with dung and the liquid filth from the bottoms of mess-tins. When he entered the bathroom, Archie was stark naked, in a tub, in the middle. His skin, latticed with a network of moist welts, gleamed under the electric light. Dingley lifted him in his arms, proud that this vigorous child was his son.

“Will you stop playing and hurry up,” said Jeanne gaily, poking the tip of her nose and her bare arm through the half-open door. She was dressing. Dingley surprised her in her room in a short petticoat.

“You smell of donkey, my friend.”

“Imagine seven hundred men in a foul clog, pell-mell with the mules, stupefied by life on board. When I left the ship, they woke up to sing the hymn I composed. Didn’t you hear anything?”

Jeanne replied:

“No, we heard nothing.” Dingley was vexed that this rumor of glory had not carried beyond two hundred yards.

Dingley was in the habit of depicting his compatriots as physically clean; he could not represent them crammed into the narrow space of a hold and between decks, dirty, badly fed, depressed, and more like those sheep from the Plata loaded at Buenos Aires than conquerors: of all animals, the unclean man has the most repulsive odor. Dingley racked his brain to find narratives, to invent dialogues in which his hero would show himself superior to his circumstances; he found nothing.

To break the spell of those blank pages on which he could not write a line, the novelist tried to write a story of pure fantasy, in his old manner. He came out of his cabin: on deck Archie was playing with his nursemaid, a young Hindu woman Dingley had encountered, some ten years earlier, in an opium den run by a Chinaman: she was the one who prepared the regulars’ pipes. She knew all the stories of the gods and the heroes, all the legends of India. He had engaged her in his service. Many of his most celebrated tales were merely a transcription of the stories told by this thin little girl with fixed eyes. She had become attached to Dingley, to his wife, to Archie. The novelist always spoke to her with as much ceremony as if he were addressing a princess. She was to him a Hindu Scheherazade, a living legend… In her simple mind, filled with nursery tales, submissive to fate, Dingley cherished the spirit most like his own he had ever met.

To clothe her, no fabric was fine enough, rare enough. Dingley sought for her the most delicate, the most unexpected textiles, created by the fancy of Japanese, Hindu, or Lyonnais weavers. To dress the storyteller required large rectangular pieces that she wound as she pleased about her long, supple waist. Thus her attire never had the unbearable, mechanical stiffness of a dress. Always clothed in those light silks and draped in the Hindu fashion, following an immutable tradition, yet she was never the same, for never did the same fold crease upon her body. Her black hair knotted in a chignon at her nape gleamed beneath a close-meshed net of gold from which hung, against her temples, two broad plates of wrought silver. She shod her feet in narrow wooden sandals that she held negligently with the tips of her toes engaged in a leather ring. On her left arm she wore three ivory bracelets.

Dingley approached the Hindu woman and asked her:

“Do you know the story of the ditch of Amritsar?”

“Yes, master. It was I who told it to you long ago. It was before Archie’s birth.”

“Yes, I remember now… in Calcutta, at the opium den…”

“Yes, that was there,” she interrupted quickly, “but let us not speak of that.”

She did not like to recall the sordid inn where she presided over the dreams of a few brutes.

“Bah!” replied Dingley, “that time is far away!”

The Hindu woman began:

“You remember Chamba, near Amritsar?” Dingley at once saw again the plain blazing under the sun, at the foot of the high Himalayas.

“Well, there was once such a famine in that country that nearly all the women and children perished. Then the construction of the canal that you have seen was resolved upon, to bring the water from the mountains into the country of Chamba.”

“That canal,” asked Dingley, “shaded by those great trees?”

“Precisely. In two years the ditch was finished. But the water of the lakes that was to fill it, enchanted by the Dragons, refused to flow into it. The drought had been great. A terrible famine was in the offing. The priests prayed so hard to the Spirits that they sent a young dwarf to make known on what conditions they would allow the waters to flow into the canal of Chamba: they demanded that the beautiful Harribakti, the king’s daughter, should follow the bank of the ditch, quite naked, to the lakes, where she would give herself to their prince. The Brahmins long hesitated to carry out their message to King Jehangir.”

Dingley’s wife had come closer: she stopped. And she listened, leaning against a bench, holding Archie lightly by the hand at her fingertips. The vanished sun still lit the sea. Dingley, his chin propped on his clenched fists, elbows on his knees, raised his eyes to the Hindu woman, who sat with her torso erect, her hands flat on her thighs, in the attitude of an Egyptian goddess. She said:

“Three days and three nights the Brahmins hesitated. They might never have had the courage to appear before King Jehangir, had the crowd gathered before the temple not compelled them with its clamor. They came out behind the high priest and went toward the palace, their heads bowed, like men being led to their death. King Jehangir received them in the inner court of his palace, in the silent court where all the fountains had fallen still.

“The chief of the Brahmins began a speech that went on and on.

“‘To the point!’ cried the king.

“‘Well, Sire, the Dragons demand that your daughter, the beautiful, the noble Harribakti, should walk up the canal to the lakes.’

“Jehangir frowned.

”’… quite naked…’

“The king rose violently from his throne.

”’… before the eyes of all the people.’

“‘Never!’ cried the king.

“‘That is not all,’ continued the Brahmin.

“‘What else do they demand of Her?’ Jehangir asked anxiously.

“‘Her life. They want her, at the end of her journey, to plunge to the bottom of the lake where the prince of the Waters awaits her.’

“In the days that followed, the king desperately scanned the sky to the west, to see if some cloud might be coming. But the sky remained an impassive blue and the famine ravaged the city. The people compelled Jehangir as they had compelled the Brahmins. He had to explain to his daughter what the Dragons wanted of her. The beautiful Harribakti was with her women in the palace courtyard where the last fountain still murmured. The princess turned redder than the silk thrown over her shoulders when she heard she must walk quite naked before the eyes of the multitude: she turned whiter than the marble of her throne when she learned she must join, at the bottom of the lake, the Spirit of the waters. After a long silence, she replied:

“‘I will go.’”

“Stop your legend here,” Dingley interrupted. “You will tell me the rest later, later.” The rest of the day and all through the night, he wrote the story of King Jehangir and the beautiful Harribakti. The next day he read the tale to his wife and to Thibert.

“It is a delightful tale,” said the illustrator when Dingley had finished reading it. “Give it to me, please. I would gladly illustrate it…”

He held out his hand to receive the sheets covered with Dingley’s fine handwriting. But Dingley tossed them disdainfully overboard. The pages flew away.

“Oh!” said Thibert, astonished by the gesture, “that is fine joy you are casting to the wind!”

Jeanne watched with regret the leaves flying off in an irregular and uncertain flight.

The ship was going so fast that she did not see a single one settle on the sea.

“Bah! It is vain to take interest in those old stories,” said Dingley with a smile, “when there are in our world far more tragically interesting stories.”

The time for writing stories fit to amuse children had passed; one must write for men! Dingley was eager to arrive at the Cape, to visit the battlefields, the ambulances, the hospitals, the camps, to gather all the documents necessary for the composition of a gripping and true picture of this war.

The steamer stopped for a few hours at Saint Helena. Dingley and his wife were permitted to visit the Boer prisoners. They were indeed as all the illustrated newspapers in the world had depicted them: badly clothed, long-bearded, wild-looking, but not very fierce. General Cronje lived apart, in a small white house with green shutters: when Dingley pushed open the wicket gate of his garden, he was smoking on his doorstep. The novelist greeted him and introduced himself. At that moment the door of the house opened and on the threshold appeared a tall woman, already old, with a hard, dry face. She said in English, with an indescribable accent of contempt:

“Come, Pierre! You must go inside! One does not speak with these people!”

Cronje removed his pipe from his mouth, raised his hand to his hat, and went back inside the house.

Dingley said, under his breath, with anger:

“Boer hospitality? Charming!”

Madame Cronje, through the open door, heard him. She reappeared on the threshold and said to him gravely:

“It is as good as yours!”

That very evening Dingley was telling Thibert about his visit to the prisoners’ camp.

“Exactly the same race,” the illustrator remarked, “as the beggars of Holland or the French Huguenots.”

That evening a gentle light lay on the sea, the sky, in the air of the night. All the elements seemed favorable to man. Dingley came to lean his elbows on the back of the rocking chair where his wife was reclining. He watched the gleam of moonlight on some indistinct object at the foot of the mast, to which he was trying to give a name. For he took no interest in things until he could name them. His wife was thinking of nothing, wrapped in the caress of that night, so sweet it made one forget the hour. The ship advanced, without rolling, without pitching, almost without sound: the stars paled unto death…

Still astonished by the first humiliation anyone had dared to inflict upon the English name in his presence, Dingley set foot on African soil.

As soon as he had installed his wife and Archie in a villa by the sea, he set off with Thibert and Ted Cox to see the war.

On the way, Cox, for lack of real news, invented symbolic ones.

His is the story of such delicious British humor: the story of the Boers’ artillery practice on a herd of oxen penned in an enclosure. Not only was none of the beasts wounded, but after the firing it was discovered that the herd had grown by one head. Under fire, a cow had calved.

At last they saw the real war, accompanying the columns. Thibert had the luck to find himself, many times, at close range from the impact points of the shells. Hence those photographs, published in L’Illustration, as dramatic as they were scientifically interesting: shells falling amid a formation in open order --- shells bursting on a munitions wagon --- a riderless horse eviscerated by shrapnel. Never before had one seen men and beasts immobilized by terror or scattered to the four winds so strikingly reproduced.

Thibert was distressed to photograph only the English. The Boers did not let themselves be approached. And he regretted not yet having witnessed one of those routs so rich for lovers of those tragic, unexpected, unimaginable movements to which a panicked humanity gives itself over.

Cox, for his part, employed all the ingenuity of his mind to disguise setbacks with clever phrases. When a regiment was repulsed, it retired to an impregnable position; when a column retreated, it executed a rearward concentration movement.

Dingley watched.

III.

Archie was happy in the large villa: he had been bored in London and on the steamer. He loved space. The villa’s park, with its great trees, its thickets, its flowers --- less brilliant than those he had seen in India --- was a Paradise. There was above all a species of dwarf oaks whose branches twisted into the shape of hunting horns a few feet from the ground. The child slipped his supple body through the rings of the branches.

His mother lived in anxiety: she knew Dingley’s professional integrity. He never hesitated to risk his life for the sake of an authentic document. He had visited towns decimated by cholera or plague merely to see the look of the streets. A letter in which Dingley described a rather hot engagement heightened all her terrors:

… A dispatch rider, he wrote, came to warn us that the Queen’s hussars were engaged with the enemy. Thibert and Cox leap onto their horses: I do the same. Grenades burst fifty paces away. Our horses bolt! In a few minutes they carry us up to the level of the highlanders, who were advancing with their rifles in hand, in a line with intervals, toward a kopje where the enemy had fortified himself.

We dismount, all three of us. Ahead of the first line there seemed not to be a living soul. Yet we all knew that the enemy, sheltered behind the rocks, was watching us come, waiting to fire when we were at four hundred yards. The rising sun cut a blue rectangle in the cloudy sky on the rim of the horizon. Our shadows were exactly perpendicular to our bodies. We quickened our pace, eager to be delivered from the anguish that precedes the first volley. Thibert ran hither and thither, his camera in hand. The terrifying silence made the seconds seem like centuries. Near me, a Gordon shouted at the Boers in a furious voice: “Take aim! Shoot, damn you!” I snapped my pipe stem between my teeth. At four hundred yards an irregular and sustained fusillade began. The Gordons, with hurrahs, stormed the hill. Halfway up they halted behind tumbled rocks to catch their breath and wait for the Irish coming up behind. Very near me, Thibert took advantage of the respite to take a panoramic view of the battle: tiny figures scattered over the hills and the plain; here and there, clouds of dust…

When the Irish had caught up, the assault was launched again. I reached the crest with the first Gordons.

There was no one left. The Boers had vanished. Only a sort of giant stood there, beside a demolished machine gun, his face slashed diagonally by a wide wound, and without weapons. A soldier ran him through with a bayonet thrust. Thibert had time to photograph him still standing. The Boers had fallen back to hills facing those they had just abandoned. The second assault was like the first. At the halt before the final rush, I looked around for Thibert. A lieutenant pointed to the middle of a field, at a human form curled up on itself, like a sleeping dog:

“That’s your friend the photographer,” he told me. “I was beside him when he fell.”

At these words Cox, kneeling before me, stands up, and I see him run down the hill at full speed. The Boers open a terrible fusillade on him. He bends over Thibert, opens his jacket, runs his hand over the Frenchman’s chest. By some miracle no bullet touches him. He runs back to us, still running, a package under his arm. I shout to him:

“Is he dead?”

And the devil of a man answers me:

“I have no idea. But I have his negatives. Here they are.”

The fifes and bagpipes begin to play the air: Scotland, green Scotland, we remember thee.

The next day I found Cox stretched out on a pallet in the yard of a farm, slightly wounded and still cheerful. I asked him if he had any news of Thibert.

“Thibert! I should think so. They brought him back here last night, half dead. This morning he must have been woken by the noise of the ammunition wagons rolling past the farm. The poor devil was delirious: he got up to go and see. They found him against the door, his camera on his knees, squatting like an old woman selling apples at the market. They pushed him: he fell on his face.”

“Dead?”

“You can see for yourself: he is over there in the barn.”

Our friend was lying on the packed earth: his fine goat-like face all smeared with mud, his eyes wide open… This death greatly moved me; but in war as in war! Who knows who will be alive tomorrow?

Dingley’s wife felt that she was weeping: she had loved the illustrator’s boyish gaiety. She sighed:

“Poor Thibert, he will not be buried in the Beauce!”

Lord Kitchener had conceived the plan of burning the farms of the Veldt and gathering into vast camps the children and wives of the Boer combatants. He hoped by this means to subdue the enemy.

Among the children, epidemics of smallpox, cholera, and dysentery broke out at once. From the camps the epidemics spread to the whole colony. Jeanne trembled for Archie. She would have liked to flee, to forget in some gentle European landscape the horrors bloodying this land. She wrote letters to Dingley pressing him to return.

But he, impassioned by his new life, his pockets stuffed with notes, his memory full of attitudes, words, stories, spectacles of war, gave no thought to returning. He sent to the coast delightfully cheerful letters:

… Barr is doing well. He vies in daring and cunning with the Boers. He dynamites the farms: it is a necessary measure. He is fatherly to the children and women… War simplifies men and purifies them… He is clean. I admire the care with which he washes himself in puddles of rainwater. When he returns to London, his comrades will no longer recognize him. His once so worthless life is illuminated: he no longer feels either hatred or covetousness. War, by suppressing his needs, has restored him to the integrity of his nature. He has become joyful again. London’s dampness no longer rots him. In the ranks, he has gained awareness of the solidarity that should bind men together: each day he becomes more of a man. Decidedly the Providence of London’s hooligans appears to me in the guise and appearance of a recruiting sergeant… You are worried about Archie. The epidemics decimating our camps will not reach the coast. I grieve, as you do, over the mortality among the children here. But what can be done? If the commander-in-chief had left them and their mothers in the farms, they would have died of starvation there. Let the responsibility for the blood shed fall upon those who persist in continuing the war with a ferocious and stupid obstinacy… Tell Archie that I will bring him back a great Boer whip nine feet long and some burst shrapnel cases.

When Dingley’s wife received this letter, Archie was already very ill; he no longer went down to the garden; the doctor feared dysentery. Alone in this villa, in the middle of this immense park, on the edge of a sea that was always stormy in this season, she was seized by a wild anguish. The Hindu woman could not reassure her: the soul of that girl was so childlike! At least she amused Archie by telling him stories day and night, during his sleepless hours.

Evening was falling: Dingley, in the middle of a circle of officers to whom a soldier was recounting an engagement he had just witnessed, was approached by Ted Cox:

“A telegram for you, Dingley,” said the journalist, holding out a slip of paper that an express messenger had brought him.

The telegram unfolded between his fingers, Dingley continued to listen to the soldier’s account, attentive to his every word, his every gesture. When his eyes fixed on the telegram, he turned very pale.

“Gentlemen,” he said, bowing to the company, “excuse me. I must leave.”

The officers bowed and shook his hand without a word.

The journalist followed him:

“Bad news?” he asked.

“Archie, very ill. I must go back. Provided I don’t arrive too late,” Dingley replied in an unsteady voice.

The reporter opened his arms, without showing further emotion. He had seen so many children die in recent months that death, even of a friend’s son, hardly touched him.

“You will take my horse,” said the journalist obligingly. “It is fresher than yours. It’s a runaway Boer horse that a rider just sold me.”

“Thank you, I accept.”

The two men went to the pickets where the horses were tethered. Cox recognized his, a chestnut horse blinded in one eye by a bullet and without a tail.

“Not exactly pretty,” he said, smiling, “but good.”

Dingley mounted.

“Will you be able to find your way?” asked the reporter. “In your place, I would ask the colonel for a guide.”

“No need. The dead horses mark the route.”

Dingley set off at full speed on his little horse, across the Veldt, in the direction of Bloemfontein. The night was fairly light. Around the rider, as far as the eye could see, a vast plain, without a tree, without a house. Before him, to the right, to the left, dark masses --- the bodies of horses. Some were still alive. When Dingley’s horse brushed against them, they would raise their heads and snort, or else, struggling to their feet, they would bolt away, straight ahead, tails erect like whip handles, manes streaming in the wind; the stars went out one after another. The night became utterly black. The track Dingley was following was no longer marked by the funereal beasts. A heavy silence crushed the Veldt. Dingley could see nothing, hear nothing. His horse stopped short and refused to go on. He dismounted. The freshly turned soil gave way under his feet. His boot uncovered the face of a man sunk in the mud. A recent fight had taken place there: the dead had been hastily buried in that field. He had stumbled upon a charnel pit. He walked on, dragging his horse by the bridle. He had the impression of wading in a bloody mash, of crushing heads, arms, chests. His feet stuck in the damp earth as if the dead were pulling him by his boots. In a flash, he remembered all the houses he had lived in and where he might have been safe that night: transatlantic cabins, Indian bungalows, his London flat, the villa where Jeanne and the sick child were. Slowly, the vague fear that had invaded him gave way to astonishment at being --- he, the most widely read man in the world --- at this hour, alone in a charnel pit in the middle of the Veldt, hauling his horse by the bridle. What was Archie doing just now? What if he were dying? He was not much moved by death in general. He himself did not fear it for himself. But the death of his son appeared to him of a different nature from all others --- iniquitous --- monstrous and, at bottom, impossible. He remounted, dug his spurs into the flanks of his beast, and set off at a gallop, straight ahead, by guesswork, toward Bloemfontein.

His horse brought him near a dynamited farmhouse of which only the walls remained:

“Is that you, Piet Retief?” asked a voice.

Dingley had stumbled upon a Boer encampment. He wanted to flee. But his horse reared under the spur and stayed put. The man who had hailed him seized the beast by the bit. He did not recognize his comrade. He whistled. Boers emerged from the ruins and surrounded Dingley. He saw himself taken, held prisoner for weeks. What would become, all that time, of his wife and son? Unnerved by this night ride and by the thought that he was not, that he would likely not for a long time yet be at his son’s side, that Archie could die without his even being told, he replied with impolite brusqueness to a young Boer who asked him, in the most elegant English, who he was and how he came to be passing so late through these parts.

“A reporter who has lost his way!”

“You will allow us to search your pockets,” the Boer replied: “it is the custom of war.”

Dingley handed him his notebook, his notes, and Jeanne’s telegram.

The post commander quickly scanned the papers by the light of a candle stub that a man held lit at the level of his eyes. When he had finished his inspection, he removed his hat and bowed deeply to Dingley.

“Delighted, sir, to make your acquaintance. I did not expect, tonight, to receive the foremost novelist of England.” Saying these words, he returned all his papers to the writer. The other farmers, seeing that the capture held no interest, had already slipped away without asking leave of their commander, who led Dingley to a corner of the ruined house where a remnant of roof hung. A few blades of damp straw could not conceal the beaten earth. The Boer invited Dingley to lie down there.

“Am I taking your bed?”

“You are my guest. Sorry not to have a better one to offer you. If you had come yesterday, the house was still quite comfortable. But it was blown up this morning after a small fight.”

“Which took place not far from here?”

“Five or six miles. You must have passed through it.”

“Were many killed? I crossed a veritable charnel pit.”

“N…o: A small engagement, a dozen dead at most.” Dingley was surprised. Under the spell of terror and the night, he had thought he was wading in a slurry of flesh and blood when he was walking through soggy ground.

The man on guard paced back and forth, his rifle slung over his shoulder, cupping in his closed hand the bowl of his pipe.

Stretched out on the straw, Dingley did not sleep. His thoughts were far from the Veldt; he saw a villa at the end of a drive, in that villa a room, and in that room a child. If the Boers took a fancy to keep him… After all, he was a valuable hostage. And surely they must hate him with a fierce hatred. His gaze turned furtively to the young commander who, leaning against the wall, was smoking a short English pipe.

… That man knows me… he knows who I am… with what ardor I pushed for this war… He will never let me go… This thought that he could not leave, that he might never in his life see his son alive again, kept him so anxious that, overcoming his pride, he resolved to learn what the Boer commander meant to do with him. But he did not know how to begin the conversation.

“Will you allow me, sir,” he said at last, addressing his companion, “to ask your country of origin? The excellence of your English…”

“I was born near Abrahamskraal, not far from here. My name is Villiers, and I am a former student of Oxford… In my turn, will you allow me to ask whether you are in a hurry to return to the Coast? The telegram which I had the indiscretion to glance at…”

“Yes,” replied Dingley with an anguish he could not conceal, “a sick child.”

“You may leave at dawn,” the commander interrupted; “I place at your disposal a horse and a guide. The quickest way to reach Bloemfontein is to get to Klipsdrift station. It will take you three hours. Ah! But do try to arrive before nine o’clock. You will take the first train. For perhaps,” he added with a smile, “you would wait too long for the next one. You can sleep. They will wake you in time.”

Dingley could not believe his ears. And at the bottom of his heart his vanity was wounded. What! So little value was placed on his capture! He slept two hours, the sleep of an exhausted beast. In the morning the sentinel woke him. He rose. A child stood before him holding two saddled horses by the bridle. Dingley would have liked, before leaving, to thank the commander who had been so generous. He asked to see him.

“No use,” the child replied, “he is asleep.”

The sun was rising over the Veldt. It was still attached to the maternal earth by a broad cord of golden light.

Dingley’s guide was a boy of about fifteen, riding bareback on his horse, legs dangling. He seemed to be one with his horse, which he urged only with his voice. His supple body followed every movement of the animal. He was of a sovereign elegance.

Dingley, thinking of Archie, reflected that he would be happy if one day the boy acquired such mastery as a rider. While galloping, he addressed his guide several times. But the latter pretended not to hear him. Suddenly he stopped his horse with a jerk of the reins:

“We have arrived, sir. You cannot go wrong. You have only to head for that tree.” And the child pointed toward a slender tree on the horizon that resembled a poplar.

Dingley thanked his guide: he was about to gallop off again. But the child seized his horse by the bridle:

“Excuse me, sir; you are riding one of our horses.”

Dingley stared at him in astonishment: he was riding the horse Ted Cox had lent him. And it was indeed a Boer horse.

“You will be at the station in an hour, if you walk at a good pace,” the child said with a mischievous smile.

“After all, he is right,” thought Dingley, “this beast is not mine.”

IV.

He dismounted, greatly vexed.

The child bowed, whistled for Dingley’s horse, and trotted off briskly with both beasts.

Dingley felt old, wretched, ridiculous; he hurried across the Veldt. When he arrived at Klipsdrift, the train was in the station; no passenger cars were coupled to the engine; nothing but wagons filled with wounded being evacuated to Bloemfontein. The Boers, hidden along the track, had fired on the train. The locomotive’s smokestack was riddled with bullet holes.

“This is definitely the first and the last train that will pass today,” announced the engineer. Dingley squeezed himself into the tender, the only space free of wounded and that did not reek of iodoform. The ballast of the recently repaired track was not reliable: the train advanced only with extreme slowness. At intervals, ruined farms, dismantled carts, posts of soldiers in rags…

On the platform, the first familiar face Dingley saw was that of Harvey, the young lieutenant wounded at Colenso whom he had met on the steamer. Harvey came forward, hand outstretched:

“Back already?”

“Archie is ill… I am returning…”

“Poor child! And what does he have?”

“Dysentery, I fear. Is there still a departure for the Cape today?”

“I don’t know. All the trains are requisitioned for supplies and troops… If you want to leave, you’ll need an authorization from the town commandant. I’ll go with you.”

At headquarters, Dingley sent his card in to an orderly officer: he was immediately shown in to the major. Sir John Carey’s face was the color of the lees of an old Bordeaux: he stuttered and was garrulous.

“One minute. I have only one minute to give you,” he said, inviting Dingley to sit down. “We are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed.”

He raised his thick, short arms, sleeved in a red tunic, as if trying to stay afloat above a flood… On his table lay a collection of pipes amid champagne bottles and dirty glasses.

The novelist told him why he had come.

“Nothing simpler. You will leave tonight with the convoy… Ah! But ---” saying these words, Sir John Carey burst out laughing --- “I don’t think they’ll b-b-blow you up. The track is fairly well p-p-protected now. But with these confounded Boers, can one ever be sure?”

The floor was burning under Dingley’s feet. Everything Sir John said irritated his impatience.

At last he received his pass and immediately took his leave.

The major caught up with him in the corridor:

“You’ll d-d-dine at the mess with us tonight? The train doesn’t leave until eleven. You have time… Is that settled?”

Dingley wanted to refuse. As if he had the heart to dine in company! But the loquacious officer had already turned around. He swung back and called out again: “Is that settled?”

“Devil take him!” muttered Dingley.

“It will help you pass the time,” said Harvey. “What would you do, alone all evening?”

He accompanied the writer to his hotel door. Dingley ordered his trunks. He placed in a leather satchel that he always carried with him the written pages of his novel, his notes, his photographs; he paid his tradesmen, made a few indifferent calls. When he had finished everything, he found he still had two hours before dinner: he wandered through the streets of Bloemfontein. On his first trip to the Cape he had visited the town. It was then a town of farmers, with streets as wide as a cart track, lined with small one-story brick houses. He had arrived on a market day. He remembered the long wagons with their canvas covers, lined up on the main square like the tents of a camp…

He wandered through the streets, filled with a new sentiment: boredom.

He could not manage to take an interest in the movement of life. Behind his spectacles, his hunter’s eyes stalked nothing. Between him and the things and beings going and coming around him, there interposed a sick child’s room… He left Bloemfontein: soldiers were busy stretching wire netting to make the sentinels’ work more effective.

Every ten yards a bell tinkled at any attempt to climb over. Dingley showed his pass. He walked about in the torn-up, barren plain like a parade ground. The solitude sharpened the dull ache of his heart…

Was Archie worse? Why had his wife not sent him another telegram? What if he arrived too late? What if… These war trains did not move… The bridges were not solid… The Boers might succeed in cutting the track. He felt he would never reach the coast. He turned back toward the town. Without his knowing it, the gestures of men, their voices, the din of streets teeming with soldiers provided a diversion from his worry. He crossed the line of sentinels again.

Dinner time was approaching. At the door of the mess, he met a military doctor he had known in India: Mr. Colgrave. This old man had seen a great number of men die and always had some telling story to recount. He walked bent over, leaning on a white cane with an ivory knob. At the War Office he was held to be an excellent practitioner. But the young army doctors mocked his outdated science.

“Delighted to see you, my good friend,” he said, extending to Dingley his fingers twisted by gout. “Sir John Carey tells me you are returning to the Coast?”

“I leave tonight. My son is ill.”

Mr. Colgrave made a face:

“Bad business for children to be ill just now, in this country! Imagine, they are dying like flies.”

Dingley knew the latest statistics: the child mortality was terrifying. But as long as Archie had been well, he had not worried.

The major had stuttered to every officer he had seen that Dingley was dining that evening at the mess. So the room was full when the novelist entered. Everyone expected to hear him tell stories and impressions of war. But Dingley was in no mood to tell stories. The sadness of his face discouraged the questioners. Word spread quickly around the table that his son was ill. He listened, his mind elsewhere, to what was being said near him. Mr. Colgrave’s grimace had terrified him. The old doctor was at the other end of the table: he would have liked to rise, go to him, talk to him. About what exactly he did not know, but to speak to him about illnesses, about children, about those he was treating at the hospital. A sudden pity moved him to tenderness for the small victims of the war.

“The war is over,” the major declared.

This was not the opinion of Mr. Colgrave, who saw the wounded pouring in.

At other times, the conversation of these officers gathered around the table would have interested Dingley. If he listened now to their talk, it was in spite of himself, from the acquired habit of recording what he heard. But what did the war, De Wet, Kitchener, Botha, and all the words and all the gestures and all the faces of these men busy eating and drinking matter to him? He was realizing that firsthand information did not have the absolute value he had until now attributed to it. He had lost that passionate interest he had taken in seeing, in hearing. The picturesque quality of things and beings no longer interested him. He sensed that there were profound realities he had never suspected; he glimpsed the world of sorrow… These officers who were there, some of whom were his friends, seemed to him of a ridiculous puerility. Most, when all was said, were those professionals dulled by routine that exist in every army in the world… For the first time in his life, Dingley was judging impartially men of his own country. He had always been content to look at them, to describe the sound of their voices, their bearing, their gestures, their mannerisms. He had never asked himself what their worth was as men. He had no leisure to reflect on this new state of his sensibility, which could have so great an influence on his talent: the hour had come to leave.

At that moment the stammering major rose, and raising his champagne flute to the level of his head --- through the full glass Dingley saw his drunkard’s nose enormously magnified by refraction:

“Gentlemen, to the health of the illustrious writer who… who… who had the courage to leave his family on the Coast to follow the operations of the war.”

“The imbecile!” murmured Harvey. “One cannot be more tactless!”

Dingley answered almost under his breath:

“Sir, to the health of the Queen and her valiant army!”

Harvey climbed up beside Dingley in the cab that waited at the door. They covered without a word the distance separating them from the station. The lieutenant sensed that all the festive noise had irritated Dingley and that he wanted silence.

“You will wire me, won’t you?” said Harvey as he stepped down from the cab.

“To Bloemfontein?”

“No. To Pretoria. I have just received orders to rejoin French. I prefer that to staying here in the muck.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” Dingley replied distractedly.

The major had reserved for Dingley a corner of a cattle wagon in which ammunition destined for the posts along the line was heaped. A rattan chaise longue, a provision basket bursting at the seams with the neck of a bottle sticking out, and a jug furnished this sort of cabin.

The train whistled.

“You will wire me, won’t you?” Harvey repeated.

Dingley, leaning against the door of the wagon, waved farewell to the young man standing on the platform, in leggings, wearing a faded blue jacket, and topped with a khaki felt hat. This was the last image the writer would keep of his friend. Harvey was killed the following week in an engagement between French’s forces and Botha’s troops.

The train advanced only with maddening slowness. A fine, relentless rain added its sadness to the monotony of the landscape. From head to tail of the train, from the fireman to the soldiers employed in bedding down the livestock on board, the same anxiety: an enemy surprise. Dingley would have counted himself lucky, only a few days earlier, to witness an attack on a convoy. Today he was the most anxious of the travelers: what if the Boers were to derail the train! Every unexpected jolt, every stop alarmed him. If he was lying on his chaise, he would get up, slide the wagon door open on its hinges; he would lean out: always the plain drowned in rain. The engine would stop: soldiers in rags would approach. Crates and packages were thrown to them from a wagon. They helped to unload oxen, horses… Why had the train stopped here rather than there? Impossible to guess. No trace of village or house. Or else they approached a bridge. The locomotive would whistle and slow down. The temporary bridges thrown up in haste to replace the ones the retreating Boers had blown up were so flimsy that a train barreling along at thirty miles an hour would have crushed them.

At last they neared De Aar. From there the track would be safer. They would go faster… He hoped to find there a telegram from Jeanne: he was disappointed. No telegram awaited him. His anxiety grew.

One night --- he was dozing, lying on the chaise longue --- he was woken by curses and shouts and the tramping of a body of men along the train.

“What do you expect us to do with him?” said voices.

“Whatever you like. --- There’s no more room. --- The men are suffocating. --- There’d be no end of it if we had to pick up every wounded man.”

“So then…”

“So then! Must he die like a dog beside the track?” cried furious men. “We cannot carry him: he cannot stay in the saddle.”

Dingley put his head out of the door. Before him a vast, deserted expanse: a platoon of soldiers was dividing up the cartridges that were being tossed to them from a wagon in packets. A wounded man, his shirt open on his chest, lay before them on the bare earth.

Dingley got down from his wagon.

“Look, sir,” said one of the horsemen, “isn’t it a disgrace to abandon a man in this state?”

He explained that he was camped with his comrades twenty miles away, that they had come to the track on a work detail, and that on the way they had taken a volley from Boers in ambush. No one had been hit except a horse and the poor wretch lying there. The wounded man was looking with all his eyes, listening with all his ears. His gaze was terrified. Dingley asked him:

“Where are you wounded?”

He opened his mouth. No sound could come out.

“Sir,” replied a horseman, “he understands everything said to him, but he cannot speak. The bullet, which barely grazed his back, has taken away his speech. He can say nothing, nor make any movement. It is strange, see sir, a wound that is nothing at all.”

He gently raised the wounded man, and through the opening of the torn shirt Dingley saw in the middle of his back a small bloody groove, very shallow, and a few centimeters wide.

“Move on!” cried the engineer, “sort it out as you will. We must arrive on time.”

And turning his back, he headed for his engine.

Dingley asked the guard:

“Do you see any objection to his being laid on my chaise longue?”

“That’s your business, sir, you are master in your own quarters.”

Dingley had the wounded man laid on his chaise longue, and the man sent him a look such as the artist had never seen anything more moving spring from a human eye: a look charged with all the gratitude that neither the wounded man’s gestures nor his voice could convey.

The train whistled. For a time the comrades galloped on their little Hungarian horses alongside the wagon; when they saw themselves overtaken by the train, they cried:

“Goodbye, Humphry, goodbye!”

Dingley followed them for a minute with his eyes. They were lost in the night.

By the light of the dusty lamp that illuminated his wagon, Dingley examined the soldier. He was not one of those many hooligans whose enlistment he had followed, but he was one of their brothers. The war had not been kind to this one. It would have been better for him to have stayed in a London suburb and died of poverty there.

He poured a few drops of champagne between his teeth.

He must have been a good comrade, since his mates had so valiantly defended him against the engineer…

Dingley was seized again, for a moment, by his desire to make uneducated people talk, to collect their raw impressions, stripped of literature; he would have liked to question him, to ask him who he was, what he had seen, what he missed…

But this man was as mute as if he were dead. Lying rigid on the chaise longue, his eyes fixed on the black planks of the ceiling, he was terrifying to behold. From time to time, a jolt of the train wrung a muffled groan from him; the features of his face would convulse, and then he would resume his cadaverous rigidity.

Dingley thought that this man would willingly have given, had he possessed them, all the treasures of this earth, this earth itself, merely to be able to move the tip of his tongue.

He resembled Barr; he had the build, the eyes, the wan face of his hero. Thinking of his novel, the writer made a melancholy comparison:

“Barr too, paralyzed.”

He would have done better to stay in London, to know the war only through the news given by the newspapers. There were, decidedly, things capable of disturbing the vision of the best-tempered artist. Thus, he had often seen people die without feeling the slightest dread. But he had not yet seen a wounded man like this strange bedfellow --- a living corpse. And Archie would be all right.

He fell again to thinking of his son: “That one could not die.” It seemed to him that his son was more proof against death than any being in the world. But the fatigue of the journey, the weariness of having witnessed for so many days scenes of carnage, the certainty that Boer children were dying in droves, the presence of this wretched man beside him, all conspired to plunge him into a gloomy sadness.

Arriving at De Aar, he handed Humphry over to the duty doctor at the station. He gently pressed the wounded man’s hand and said without conviction: “Goodbye, my friend, good---” He could not bring himself to finish the word: the soldier’s gaze spared him the banality of that wish. Of the doctor who was showing him to the door of the waiting room that served as an infirmary, Dingley asked:

“He is going to die, is he not?”

The doctor replied:

“Alas! No. It is quite possible that he will live!”

V.

The following day he arrived at the Cape. A light carriage driven by a black coachman and hitched to wheezy horses --- all vigorous animals had been requisitioned --- carried him, without haste, to the villa where his wife lived. The house, modeled on a Chinese pagoda, raised its roofs, upturned at the corners, between two rows of cypresses against the black sky: it seemed deserted.

Dingley bounded up the front steps. His wife had heard the carriage crunch over the sand of the drive. She asked, leaning over the banister of the dark stairway:

“Who is there?”

He answered:

“It is I!”

Already he was beside her, on a wide landing where three doors opened: two were dark; the third was lit by candles burning at the back of a room.

“You have arrived too late!”

“Dead?” cried Dingley in a hoarse voice.

She fell into his arms: tightly embraced, they wept.

The Hindu woman emerged from the candlelit room at the back of which gleamed Archie’s pale head between the burning candles. She took Dingley’s hand and kissed it. She asked gently:

“Madame, the key to the linen cupboard, please.”

Dingley wished to remain a few weeks in this chance dwelling to which he would no doubt never return. He felt a bitter joy in living within these walls, among these trees, in treading the lawns where his son had played.

The pages of his novel lay somewhere on a table in his room. A gale that tore the tiles from the roof and wrenched open all the windows facing the sea scattered the pages. Some flew over the trees of the park. He did not give the order to gather them up. His imagination no longer took an interest in these war stories. He dreamed of setting off again for India, the land of dreams, beyond life, beyond space, beyond time. In the meanwhile, he spent his days listening to the Hindu woman. His wife, for her part, never listened to the servant, powerless and disdainful of lulling her grief with the chloroform of a tale.

On an unbearable night of southern storm, she came down from her room in a white dressing gown, barefoot. The stairway was deserted, the front door ajar. On the steps she heard a chanting voice: the voice of the Hindu woman, continuing the story she had begun on the ship at the start of their voyage, the story of the beautiful Harribakti. Her voice was monotonous and gentle, like the flowing of a spring. She said:

… The princess came forth from the palace, quite naked. Her long black hair fell over her face, over her nape, like the fine branches of the willow. Now, as she advanced along the canal, on both banks there sprang up slender bamboos, more closely woven than the warp of a cashmere shawl. No one saw the naked Virgin. But the Goddess or the God…

Jeanne descended the steps. Dingley, crouching on the stairs, his head in his hands, did not see her. The Hindu woman watched her pass without interrupting her legend.

Jeanne did not hear the end of the tale: she wandered in the park for half an hour. When she returned, Dingley and the Hindu woman were motionless and silent --- more motionless, more silent, more somber than stone Spirits at the entrance to a temple. Jeanne laid her hand on Dingley’s shoulder, and he raised his head to her. The artist’s eyes shone, and the blazing stars of the South were reflected, minuscule, innumerable, in the depths of his pupils. He said:

“Now, if you wish, we shall leave.”

“Ah!” she replied, “if only we had never come here! If you had not wanted to see again the Thames, the Docks, the Stock Exchange, the streets of the City, this land, this war!”

“Things had to be so, mistress,” said the Hindu woman in an undertone. Dingley replied:

“No doubt, things had to be so.”

His wife did not answer. She climbed the steps of the porch, passed through the shadow of the doorway, entered the house. Dingley watched her white form fade into the empty corridor, then vanish. Then, with the gesture of a child surrendering himself to his nurse, the illustrious writer let his head fall upon the knees of the Hindu woman, murmuring in the dialect of Calcutta:

“Stories, come, tell me stories.”

Finished writing in Paris in March 1902 Jerome and Jean Tharaud

Finished printing three thousand copies on Tuesday, April 15, 1902 at the Imprimerie de Suresnes (C. PAYEN, administrator) 9, rue du Pont