Cross Currents

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

Vanessa Pennington had a husband who was poor, with few extenuatingcircumstances, and an admirer who, though comfortably rich, wascumbered with a sense of honour. His wealth made him welcome inVanessa's eyes, but his code of what was right impelled him to goaway and forget her, or at the most to think of her in the intervalsof doing a great many other things. And although Alaric Clyde lovedVanessa, and thought he should always go on loving her, he graduallyand unconsciously allowed himself to be wooed and won by a morealluring mistress; he fancied that his continued shunning of thehaunts of men was a self-imposed exile, but his heart was caught inthe spell of the Wilderness, and the Wilderness was kind andbeautiful to him. When one is young and strong and unfettered thewild earth can be very kind and very beautiful. Witness the legionof men who were once young and unfettered and now eat out theirsouls in dustbins, because, having erstwhile known and loved theWilderness, they broke from her thrall and turned aside into beatenpaths.In the high waste places of the world Clyde roamed and hunted anddreamed, death-dealing and gracious as some god of Hellas, movingwith his horses and servants and four-footed camp followers from onedwelling ground to another, a welcome guest among wild primitivevillage folk and nomads, a friend and slayer of the fleet, shybeasts around him. By the shores of misty upland lakes he shot thewild fowl that had winged their way to him across half the oldworld; beyond Bokhara he watched the wild Aryan horsemen at theirgambols; watched, too, in some dim-lit tea-house one of thosebeautiful uncouth dances that one can never wholly forget; or,making a wide cast down to the valley of the Tigris, swam and rolledin its snow-cooled racing waters. Vanessa, meanwhile, in aBayswater 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 bridgeparties, where, if the play was not illuminating, at least onelearned a great deal about the private life of some of the Royal andImperial Houses. Vanessa, in a way, was glad that Clyde had donethe proper thing. She had a strong natural bias towardsrespectability, though she would have preferred to have beenrespectable in smarter surroundings, where her example would havedone more good. To be beyond reproach was one thing, but it wouldhave been nicer to have been nearer to the Park.And then of a sudden her regard for respectability and Clyde's senseof what was right were thrown on the scrap-heap of unnecessarythings. 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 withleisurely persistence from one place of call to another, and at lastran him to a standstill somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe. He wouldhave found it exceedingly difficult to analyse his feelings onreceipt of the tidings. The Fates had unexpectedly (and perhapsjust a little officiously) removed an obstacle from his path. Hesupposed he was overjoyed, but he missed the feeling of elationwhich he had experienced some four months ago when he had bagged asnow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day's fruitless stalking. Ofcourse he would go back and ask Vanessa to marry him, but he wasdetermined on enforcing a condition; on no account would he deserthis newer love. Vanessa would have to agree to come out into theWilderness with him.The lady hailed the return of her lover with even more relief thanhad been occasioned by his departure. The death of John Penningtonhad left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened thanever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it hadlong been retained as a courtesy title on the principle thataddresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts. Certainly shewas more independent now than heretofore, but independence, whichmeans so much to many women, was of little account to Vanessa, whocame under the heading of the mere female. She made little adoabout accepting Clyde's condition, and announced herself ready tofollow him to the end of the world; as the world was round shenourished a complacent idea that in the ordinary course of thingsone would find oneself in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park Cornersooner or later no matter how far afield one wandered.East of Budapest her complacency began to filter away, and when shesaw her husband treating the Black Sea with a familiarity which shehad never been able to assume towards the English Channel,misgivings began to crowd in upon her. Adventures which would havepresented an amusing and enticing aspect to a better-bred womanaroused in Vanessa only the twin sensations of fright anddiscomfort. Flies bit her, and she was persuaded that it was onlysheer boredom that prevented camels from doing the same. Clyde didhis best, and a very good best it was, to infuse something of thebanquet into their prolonged desert picnics, but even snow-cooledHeidsieck lost its flavour when you were convinced that the duskycupbearer who served it with such reverent elegance was only waitinga convenient opportunity to cut your throat. It was useless forClyde to give Yussuf a character for devotion such as is rarelyfound in any Western servant. Vanessa was well enough educated toknow that all dusky-skinned people take human life as unconcernedlyas Bayswater folk take singing lessons.And with a growing irritation and querulousness on her part came afurther disenchantment, born of the inability of husband and wife tofind a common ground of interest. The habits and migrations of thesand grouse, the folklore and customs of Tartars and Turkomans, thepoints of a Cossack pony--these were matter which evoked only abored indifference in Vanessa. On the other hand, Clyde was notthrilled on being informed that the Queen of Spain detested mauve,or that a certain Royal duchess, for whose tastes he was neverlikely to be called on to cater, nursed a violent but perfectlyrespectable passion for beef olives.Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband who added aroving disposition to a settled income was a mixed blessing. It wasone thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thingto make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to losesome of its virtue when one practised it in a tent.Bored and disillusioned with the drift of her new life, Vanessa wasundisguisedly glad when distraction offered itself in the person ofMr. Dobrinton, a chance acquaintance whom they had first run againstin the primitive hostelry of a benighted Caucasian town. Dobrintonwas elaborately British, in deference perhaps to the memory of hismother, who was said to have derived part of her origin from anEnglish governess who had come to Lemberg a long way back in thelast century. If you had called him Dobrinski when off his guard hewould probably have responded readily enough; holding, no doubt,that the end crowns all, he had taken a slight liberty with thefamily patronymic. To look at, Mr. Dobrinton was not a veryattractive specimen of masculine humanity, but in Vanessa's eyes hewas a link with that civilisation which Clyde seemed so ready toignore and forgo. He could sing "Yip-I-Addy" and spoke of severalduchesses as if he knew them--in his more inspired moments almost asif they knew him. He even pointed out blemishes in the cuisine orcellar departments of some of the more august London restaurants, aspecies of Higher Criticism which was listened to by Vanessa in awe-stricken admiration. And, above all, he sympathised, at firstdiscreetly, afterwards with more latitude, with her fretfuldiscontent at Clyde's nomadic instincts. Business connected withoil-wells had brought Dobrinton to the neighbourhood of Baku; thepleasure of appealing to an appreciative female audience induced himto deflect his return journey so as to coincide a good deal with hisnew aquaintances' line of march. And while Clyde trafficked withPersian horse-dealers or hunted the wild grey pigs in their lairsand added to his notes on Central Asian game-fowl, Dobrinton and thelady discussed the ethics of desert respectability from points ofview that showed a daily tendency to converge. And one eveningClyde dined alone, reading between the courses a long letter fromVanessa, justifying her action in flitting to more civilised landswith a more congenial companion.It was distinctly evil luck for Vanessa, who really was thoroughlyrespectable at heart, that she and her lover should run into thehands of Kurdish brigands on the first day of their flight. To bemewed up in a squalid Kurdish village in close companionship with aman who was only your husband by adoption, and to have the attentionof all Europe drawn to your plight, was about the least respectablething that could happen. And there were internationalcomplications, which made things worse. "English lady and herhusband, of foreign nationality, held by Kurdish brigands who demandransom" had been the report of the nearest Consul. AlthoughDobrinton was British at heart, the other portions of him belongedto the Habsburgs, and though the Habsburgs took no great pride orpleasure in this particular unit of their wide and variedpossessions, and would gladly have exchanged him for someinteresting bird or mammal for the Schoenbrunn Park, the code ofinternational dignity demanded that they should display a decentsolicitude for his restoration. And while the Foreign Offices ofthe two countries were taking the usual steps to secure the releaseof their respective subjects a further horrible complication ensued.Clyde, following on the track of the fugitives, not with any specialdesire to overtake them, but with a dim feeling that it was expectedof 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 afrivolous young gentleman in Downing Street remarked, "Any husbandof Mrs. Dobrinton's we shall be glad to extricate, but let us knowhow many there are of them." For a woman who valued respectabilityVanessa really had no luck.Meanwhile the situation of the captives was not free fromembarrassment. When Clyde explained to the Kurdish headmen thenature of his relationship with the runaway couple they were gravelysympathetic, but vetoed any idea of summary vengeance, since theHabsburgs would be sure to insist on the delivery of Dobrintonalive, and in a reasonably undamaged condition. They did not objectto Clyde administering a beating to his rival for half an hour everyMonday and Thursday, but Dobrinton turned such a sickly green whenhe heard of this arrangement that the chief was obliged to withdrawthe concession.And so, in the cramped quarters of a mountain hut, the ill-assortedtrio watched the insufferable hours crawl slowly by. Dobrinton wastoo frightened to be conversational, Vanessa was too mortified toopen her lips, and Clyde was moodily silent. The little Limbergnegociant plucked up heart once to give a quavering rendering of"Yip-I-Addy," but when he reached the statement "home was never likethis" Vanessa tearfully begged him to stop. And silence fasteneditself with growing insistence on the three captives who were sotragically herded together; thrice a day they drew near to oneanother to swallow the meal that had been prepared for them, likedesert beasts meeting in mute suspended hostility at the drinkingpool, and then drew back to resume the vigil of waiting.Clyde was less carefully watched than the others. "Jealousy willkeep him to the woman's side," thought his Kurdish captors. Theydid not know that his wilder, truer love was calling to him with ahundred voices from beyond the village bounds. And one evening,finding that he was not getting the attention to which he wasentitled, Clyde slipped away down the mountain side and resumed hisstudy of Central Asian game-fowl. The remaining captives wereguarded henceforth with greater rigour, but Dobrinton at any ratescarcely regretted Clyde's departure.The long arm, or perhaps one might better say the long purse, ofdiplomacy at last effected the release of the prisoners, but theHabsburgs were never to enjoy the guerdon of their outlay. On thequay of the little Black Sea port, where the rescued pair came oncemore into contact with civilisation, Dobrinton was bitten by a dogwhich was assumed to be mad, though it may only have beenindiscriminating. The victim did not wait for symptoms of rabies todeclare themselves, but died forthwith of fright, and Vanessa madethe homeward journey alone, conscious somehow of a sense of slightlyrestored respectability. Clyde, in the intervals of correcting theproofs of his book on the game-fowl of Central Asia, found time topress a divorce suit through the Courts, and as soon as possiblehied him away to the congenial solitudes of the Gobi Desert tocollect material for a work on the fauna of that region. Vanessa,by virtue perhaps of her earlier intimacy with the cooking rites ofthe whiting, obtained a place on the kitchen staff of a West Endclub. It was not brilliant, but at least it was within two minutesof the Park.

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