all that remained out of the ruin that had overtaken her, yet the most to which she could look forward, save for brief meetings at long intervals, was that I would be restored to her in my useless old age, when the glorious floodtide of her youth hud receded. You see I am sufficiently unbiased to be able to plead her case.”
The Major rose and, going over to the window, stood with his back toward Hindwood, gazing out into the night. Some minutes had elapsed, when he turned quietly.
“Where had I got to? Ah, yes! To where I had to send her to England! I accompanied her to Calcutta to see her safely on the liner. Shall I ever forget that journey? It had the gloom of a funeral and the frenzy of an elopement. Actually my rôle was that of a policeman deporting a miscreant who happened to be his wife. We tried to pack into moments the emotions of a lifetime. As background to our love-making was the poignant memory of the puzzled child, whom seven years earlier I had escorted on the same journey, en route for France, where she was to be made over into a sahib's lady. In her wondering attitude toward the fortunes that assailed her, she was little changed. She was still startlingly unsophisticated—a child-woman, dangerously credulous and deceivingly unversed in masculine wiles. I had taught her to be so dependent that I dared not imagine how she would do without me. She was so artless. She took such pleasure in admiration. Love was so necessary to her; it was the breath of her life. Its misuse had been the breath and the means of life of her Burmese mother before her.
“Her complete lack of comprehension that I in any way shared her sacrifice formed the most distressing part of my ordeal. She assumed that she was being exiled by ray choice. She persisted in talking as if she could stay, if I would only change my mind. Though she did not accuse me in words, she believed that I was ridding myself of her because she had disgraced me—that I was pushing her across the horizon, where she would be forgotten and out of sight. Up to the last moment she pleaded with and coaxed me, as though it were I who was refusing to repeal her sentence. The ship cast off, bearing her from me with her broken heart and her embittered memories of the newly-dug grave, while I turned back to ferret through the gutters of Asia, that I might earn the wherewithal to provide for her.
“At first she wrote many times a day; then every day; then regularly to catch each outgoing mail. In the whole of England she knew nobody. In her anger against British justice she wished to know nobody. She was inconsolable, bruised in spirit, and crushed in her pride. After the pomp and hubbub of the East, she found London drab and melancholy. From her lodgings in Kensington she poured out her soul on paper. Much of what she wrote consisted of memories, the tender trifles which a mother treasures about her child.
“Gradually, almost imperceptibly, there came a change. A querulous note crept in, a questioning of motives. Why had I sent her as far away as England? Why had I sent her away at all? If it were true that it was not I who had exiled her, why had I not accompanied her? Was it because I was tired and ashamed of her? It would have been kinder to have left her to dance in the temple. Then a new suspicion grew up, which betrayed an evil that I had never traced in her. With whom was I living? Some white woman? Was that why I had rid myself of her?
“What answers could I make? It was like arguing with a spiteful child. Our misunderstandings were as wide as the distance that separated us. She implored and finally demanded that I should join her. The more I stated obstacles, the more convinced she became that I was cruel, like all the sahibs who were torturing her—the proud sahibs who thought nothing of a murdered baby, when it was only the child of a half-caste woman.
“From then on her heart hardened, till at last I failed to recognize in her any resemblance to the gentle wife who had been so much my companion. She wrote vaguely about revenge, a revenge that should embrace the whole white race. Contempt should be repaid with despising, hatred with blows, blood with blood. Her beauty should be the weapon. She seemed to have gone mad. Suddenly her letters ceased. My remittances were returned; they had failed to reach her.
“For what follows I have but one explanation. By some species of unconscious hypnotism, so long as I had exerted physical influence over her, I had had the power to make the European in her predominate. As my influence weakened with time and distance, she relapsed into the woman she always would have been, if I had not found her: a smiling menace to the nobilities of both the races from which she was descended, a human jackal following the hunt. That sounds harsh? Then listen to the conclusion of my story.
“One day, six months after I had lost touch with her, I was glancing through an illustrated weekly when, on turning a page, I found her portrait gazing up at me. She was photographed in almost the attitude and attire in which I had first caught sight of her in the temple. The very setting was similar; behind her the huge god squatted, gloating and sinister—on her face was the unchanging houri's smile. On reading the text I discovered that she had leaped into instant fame as an exponent of Indian dancing. You will remember that in the last two years before the war the dance craze was at its height. She had been acclaimed a great artist; everything she said, did, and wore was fulsomely praised and described. There was no false reticence about either her or her admirers; she was frankly advertised as being possessed of the most beautiful body in Europe. She had given herself a French name and was announced as being of French ancestry. According to her printed biography, her father had been an orchid-hunter who had taken her with him on all his expeditions. On his last, in India, he had died; she had been kidnaped for her beauty and sold into the service of a Hindoo temple. From this bondage she had been rescued by an Englishman of title who had chivalrously restored her to her family in Marseilles. There was much more to the same effect—a jumble of perverted truth and romantic lies, precisely the kind of adventurous nonsense which appeals to the sensation-seeking public.
“From then on, via the press, I was always getting news of her. London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, each in turn went mad over her. She captivated a continent. Kings and emperors commanded her to appear before them. Her tours were royal triumphs. Little by little ugly rumors began to spread. There was a Parisian banker who, when he had lavished his all upon her, committed suicide, leaving his wife and children penniless. There was another scandal; it had to do with a Russian general who had betrayed his country. At his court-martial he poisoned himself when her name was introduced into the evidence. As though a conspiracy of silence had broken down, now that she began to be gossiped about, scandals gathered thick and fast. Each new one was more infamous than the last; out of each she emerged unpitying and smiling. It was only her victims who suffered. Her progress was marked by a trail of death and ruin. Nevertheless, infatuated by the exquisiteness of her body, men fluttered about her unceasingly, like moths, shriveling their souls in the flame of her fascination. When the peace of the world was violated by the Germans—”
Hindwood leaned forward, tapping the Major's knee. “I can spare you your eloquence. The rest of your story is common property. The woman you describe stole the Allies' anti-submarine defense plans from her lover. He was a British naval officer, temporarily in Paris. She was caught red-handed. There was a sentimental agitation in her favor—an attempt to argue that as a physical masterpiece of feminine perfection she ought to be exempted. It accomplished nothing. She was a German spy, who had sold men's lives for profit. She received and deserved no more mercy than a rag-picker. After having been encouraged in her sins because of her unrivaled loveliness, she was led out at dawn in the woods of Vincennes, where the body which had maddened thousands of eyes was riddled with bullets.”
The Major's lips were smiling crookedly. “How could she have been riddled with bullets,” he questioned, “when you crossed the Atlantic in her company?”
Hindwood shrugged his shoulders. “If you insist on propounding conundrums, it's up to you to supply the answers.”
“I can supply them. The person executed in the woods of Vincennes was not a woman.”
“That's a daring assertion. Who was it?”
“A distinguished French
