‘Have you been married long ?’
‘Two years. I brought her out after my last leave. In a post like this it’s necessary to have a companion. You married ?’
‘Yes - that is to say I have been married.’
‘Of course I know you are thinking that she 1s very young for me. But I look ahead. If you believe in marriage you have to look to the future. I’ve still got twenty years of — let’s call it active life ahead of me, and what would a woman of thirty be like in twenty years? A man keeps better in the tropics. Don’t you agree >’
‘I’ve never thought about it. And I don’t yet know the tropics.’
‘There are enough problems without sex I can assure you. St Paul wrote, didn’t he, that 1t was better to marry than burn. Marie will stay young long enough to save me from the furnace.’ He added quickly, ‘Of course I’m only joking. We have to joke, don’t we, about serious things. At the bottom of my heart I believe very profoundly in love.” He made the claim as some men might claim to believe in fairies.
&
"You can take my torch.” The morning would be better, the man repeated, and Querry saw that he was scared. ‘If I go with you, will you come ?’ ‘ The man shook his head, so Querry went alone.
He could not blame these people for their fears: a man had to believe in nothing if he was not to be afraid of the big bush at night. There was little in the forest to ln appeal to the romantic. It was completely empty. It had never been humanised, like the woods of Europe, with t witches and charcoal-burners and cottages of marzipan; no one had ever walked under these trees lamenting lost love, nor had anyone listened to the silence and communed like a lake-poet with his heart. For there was no silence; if a man here wished to be heard at night he had to raise his voice to counter the continuous chatter of the insects as in some monstrous factory where thousands of sewing-machines were being driven against time by myriads of needy seamstresses. Only for an hour or so, in the midday heat, silence fell, the siesta of the insect.
But if, like these Africans, one believed in some kind of divine being, wasn’t it just as possible for a god to exist in this empty region as in the empty spaces of the sky where men had once located him ? These woody spaces would remain unexplored, it seemed likely now, for longer than the planets. The craters of the moon were already better known than the forest at the door that one could enter any day on foot. The sharp sour smell of chlorophyl from rotting vegetation and swampwater fell like a dentist’s mask over Querry’s face.
&
By the time the Ryckers came to go — they had to wait a long time for Mme. Cassin — Rycker had drunk to the margin of what was dangerous; he had passed from excessive amiability to dissatisfaction, the kind of cosmic dissatisfaction which, after probing faults in others’ characters, went on to the examination of his own. Marie Rycker knew that if he could be induced at this stage to take a sleeping-pill all might yet be well; he would probably reach unconsciousness before he reached religion which, like the open doorway in a red-lamp district, led inevitably to sex.
&
‘Father Thomas, when you have been in Africa a little longer, you will learn not to ask an African a question which may be answered by yes. It is their form of courtesy to agree. It means nothing at all.’
‘I think after two years I can tell when an African is lying.’
‘Those are not lies. Father Thomas
&
Even in those early days he had known how to alter the direction of a woman’s need to love. Woman ? She was not even as old as the architectural student whose name he couldn’t now remember ~ an ugly name like Hoghe. Unlike Marie Morel the former student was probably still alive, building in some suburb his bourgeois villas — machines for living in. Querry addressed him from the bed. ‘I am sorry. I really believed that I meant you no harm. I really thought in those days that I acted from love.’ There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.
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