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 scrap-heap 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 analyse 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 notepaper, 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 matter 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 civilisation 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 awe-
stricken admiration. And, above all, he sympathised, 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 aquaintances' 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 civilised 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 Limberg
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 civilisation, 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.
_________
-THE END-
[Hector Hugh Munro] Saki's short story: Cross Currents
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