Vanessa Pennington had a husband who was poor, with few
extenuating circumstances, and an admirer who, though
comfortably rich, was cumbered with a sense of honour. His
wealth made him welcome in Vanessa's eyes, but his code of
what was right impelled him to go away and forget her, or at
the most to think of her in the intervals of doing a great
many other things. And although Alaric Clyde loved Vanessa,
and thought he should always go on loving her, he gradually
and unconsciously allowed himself to be wooed and won by a
more alluring mistress; he fancied that his continued
shunning of the haunts of men was a self-imposed exile, but
his heart was caught in the spell of the Wilderness, and the
Wilderness was kind and beautiful to him. When one is young
and strong and unfettered the wild earth can be very kind
and very beautiful. Witness the legion of men who were once
young and unfettered and now eat out their souls in
dustbins, because, having erstwhile known and loved the
Wilderness, they broke from her thrall and turned aside into
beaten paths.
In the high waste places of the world Clyde roamed and
hunted and dreamed, death-dealing and gracious as some god
of Hellas, moving with his horses and servants and
four-footed camp followers from one dwelling ground to
another, a welcome guest among wild primitive village folk
and nomads, a friend and slayer of the fleet, shy beasts
around him. By the shores of misty upland lakes he shot the
wild fowl that had winged their way to him across half the
old world; beyond Bokhara he watched the wild Aryan horsemen
at their gambols; watched, too, in some dim-lit tea-house
one of those beautiful uncouth dances that one can never
wholly forget; or, making a wide cast down to the valley of
the Tigris, swam and rolled in its snow-cooled racing
waters. Vanessa, meanwhile, in a Bayswater back street, was
making out the weekly laundry list, attending bargain sales,
and, in her more adventurous moments, trying new ways of
cooking whiting. Occasionally she went to bridge parties,
where, if the play was not illuminating, at least one
learned a great deal about the private life of some of the
Royal and Imperial Houses. Vanessa, in a way, was glad that
Clyde had done the proper thing. She had a strong natural
bias towards respectability, though she would have preferred
to have been respectable in smarter surroundings, where her
example would have done more good. To be beyond reproach
was one thing, but it would have been nicer to have been
nearer to the Park.
And then of a sudden her regard for respectability and
Clyde's sense of what was right were thrown on the scrapheap
of unnecessary things. They had been useful and highly
important in their time, but the death of Vanessa's husband
made them of no immediate moment.
The news of the altered condition of things followed Clyde
with leisurely persistence from one place of call to
another, and at last ran him to a standstill somewhere in
the Orenburg Steppe. He would have found it exceedingly
difficult to analyze his feelings on receipt of the tidings.
The Fates had unexpectedly (and perhaps just a little
officiously) removed an obstacle from his path. He supposed
he was overjoyed, but he missed the feeling of elation which
he had experienced some four months ago when he had bagged a
snow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day's fruitless
stalking. Of course he would go back and ask Vanessa to
marry him, but he was determined on enforcing a condition:
on no account would he desert his newer love. Vanessa would
have to agree to come out into the Wilderness with him.
The lady hailed the return of her lover with even more
relief than had been occasioned by his departure. The death
of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which
were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded
even from her note-paper, where it had long been retained as
a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given
to us to conceal our whereabouts. Certainly she was more
independent now than heretofore, but independence, which
means so much to many women, was of little account to
Vanessa, who came under the heading of the mere female. She
made little ado about accepting Clyde's condition, and
announced herself ready to follow him to the end of the
world; as the world was round she nourished a complacent
idea that in the ordinary course of things one would find
oneself in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park Corner sooner or
later no matter how far afield one wandered.
East of Budapest her complacency began to filter away, and
when she saw her husband treating the Black Sea with a
familiarity which she had never been able to assume towards
the English Channel, misgivings began to crowd in upon her.
Adventures which would have presented an amusing and
enticing aspect to a better-bred woman aroused in Vanessa
only the twin sensations of fright and discomfort. Flies
bit her, and she was persuaded that it was only sheer
boredom that prevented camels from doing the same. Clyde
did his best, and a very good best it was, to infuse
something of the banquet into their prolonged desert
picnics, but even snow-cooled Heidsieck lost its flavour
when you were convinced that the dusky cupbearer who served
it with such reverent elegance was only waiting a convenient
opportunity to cut your throat. it was useless for Clyde to
give Yussuf a character for devotion such as is rarely found
in any Western servant. Vanessa was well enough educated to
know that all dusky-skinned people take human life as
unconcernedly as Bayswater folk take singing lessons.
And with a growing irritation and querulousness on her
part came a further disenchantment, born of the inability of
husband and wife. to find a common ground of interest. The
habits and migrations of the sand grouse, the folklore and
customs of Tartars and Turkomans, the points of a Cossack
pony---these were matters which evoked only a bored
indifference in Vanessa. On the other hand, Clyde was not
thrilled on being informed that the Queen of Spain detested
mauve, or that a certain Royal duchess, for whose tastes he
was never likely to be called on to cater, nursed a violent
but perfectly respectable passion for beef olives.
Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband
who added a roving disposition to a settled income was a
mixed blessing. It was one thing to go to the end of the
world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home
there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its
virtue when one practised it in a tent.
Bored and disillusioned with the drift of her new life,
Vanessa was undisguisedly glad when distraction offered
itself in the person of Mr. Dobrinton, a chance acquaintance
whom they had first run against in the primitive hostelry of
a benighted Caucasian town. Dobrinton was elaborately
British, in deference perhaps to the memory of his mother,
who was said to have derived part of her origin from an
English governess who had come to Lemberg a long way back in
the last century. If you had called him Dobrinski when off
his guard he would probably have responded readily enough;
holding, no doubt, that the end crowns all, he had taken a
slight liberty with the family patronymic. To look at, Mr.
Dobrinton was not a very attractive specimen of masculine
humanity, but in Vanessa's eyes he was a link with that
civilization which Clyde seemed so ready to ignore and
forgo. He could sing “Yip-I-Addy” and spoke of several
duchesses as if he knew them---in his more inspired moments
almost as if they knew him. He even pointed out blemishes
in the cuisine or cellar departments of some of the more
august London restaurants, a species of Higher Criticism
which was listened to by Vanessa in awestricken admiration.
And, above all, he sympathized, at first discreetly,
afterwards with more latitude, with her fretful discontent
at Clyde's nomadic instincts. Business connected with
oil-wells had brought Dobrinton to the neighbourhood of
Baku; the pleasure of appealing to an appreciative female
audience induced him to deflect his return journey so as to
coincide a good deal with his new acquaintances' line of
march. And while Clyde trafficked with Persian
horse-dealers or hunted the wild grey pigs in their lairs
and added to his notes on Central Asian game-fowl, Dobrinton
and the lady discussed the ethics of desert respectability
from points of view that showed a daily tendency to
converge. And one evening Clyde dined alone, reading
between the courses a long letter from Vanessa, justifying
her action in flitting to more civilized lands with a more
congenial companion.
It was distinctly evil luck for Vanessa, who really was
thoroughly respectable at heart, that she and her lover
should run into the hands of Kurdish brigands on the first
day of their flight. To be mewed up in a squalid Kurdish
village in close companionship with a man who was only your
husband by adoption, and to have the attention of all Europe
drawn to your plight, was about the least respectable thing
that could happen. And there were international
complications, which made things worse. “English lady and
her husband, of foreign nationality, held by Kurdish
brigands who demand ransom” had been the report of the
nearest Consul. Although Dobrinton was British at heart,
the other portions of him belonged to the Habsburgs, and
though the Habsburgs took no great pride or pleasure in this
particular unit of their wide and varied possessions, and
would gladly have exchanged him for some interesting bird or
mammal for the Schoenbrunn Park, the code of international
dignity demanded that they should display a decent
solicitude for his restoration. And while the Foreign
Offices of the two countries were taking the usual steps to
secure the release of their respective subjects a further
horrible complication ensued. Clyde, following on the track
of the fugitives, not with any special desire to overtake
them, but with a dim feeling that it was expected of him,
fell into the hands of the same community of brigands.
Diplomacy, while anxious to do its best for a lady in
misfortune, showed signs of becoming restive at this
expansion of its task; as a frivolous young gentleman in
Downing Street remarked, “Any husband of Mrs. Dobrinton's
we shall be glad to extricate, but let us know how many
there are of them.” For a woman who valued respectability
Vanessa really had no luck.
Meanwhile the situation of the captives was not free from
embarrassment. When Clyde explained to the Kurdish headmen
the nature of his relationship with the runaway couple they
were gravely sympathetic, but vetoed any idea of summary
vengeance, since the Habsburgs would be sure to insist on
the delivery of Dobrinton alive, and in a reasonably
undamaged condition. They did not object to Clyde
administering a beating to his rival for half an hour every
Monday and Thursday, but Dobrinton turned such a sickly
green when he heard of this arrangement that the chief was
obliged to withdraw the concession.
And so, in the cramped quarters of a mountain hut, the
ill-assorted trio watched the insufferable hours crawl
slowly by. Dobrinton was too frightened to be
conversational, Vanessa was too mortified to open her lips,
and Clyde was moodily silent. The little Lemberg
negociant plucked up heart once to give a quavering
rendering of “Yip-I-Addy,” but when he reached the
statement “home was never like this” Vanessa tearfully
begged him to stop. And silence fastened itself with
growing insistence on the three captives who were so
tragically herded together; thrice a day they drew near to
one another to swallow the meal that had been prepared for
them, like desert beasts meeting in mute suspended hostility
at the drinking-pool, and then drew back to resume the vigil
of waiting.
Clyde was less carefully watched than the others.
“Jealousy will keep him to the woman's side,” thought his
Kurdish captors. They did not know that his wilder, truer
love was calling to him with a hundred voices from beyond
the village bounds. And one evening, finding that he was
not getting the attention to which he was entitled, Clyde
slipped away down the mountain side and resumed his study of
Central Asian game-fowl. The remaining captives were
guarded henceforth with greater rigour, but Dobrinton at any
rate scarcely regretted Clyde's departure.
The long arm, or perhaps one might better say the long
purse, of diplomacy at last effected the release of the
prisoners, but the Habsburgs were never to enjoy the guerdon
of their outlay. On the quay of the little Black Sea Port,
where the rescued pair came once more into contact with
civilization, Dobrinton was bitten by a dog which was
assumed to be mad, though it may only have been
indiscriminating. The victim did not wait for symptoms of
rabies to declare themselves, but died forthwith of fright,
and Vanessa made the homeward journey alone, conscious
somehow of a sense of slightly restored respectability.
Clyde, in the intervals of correcting the proofs of his book
on the game-fowl of Central Asia, found time to press a
divorce suit through the Courts, and as soon as possible
hied him away to the congenial solitudes of the Gobi Desert
to collect material for a work on the fauna of that region.
Vanessa, by virtue perhaps of her earlier intimacy with the
cooking rites of the whiting, obtained a place on the
kitchen staff of a West End Club. It was not brilliant, but
at least it was within two minutes of the Park.