CHAPTER XXVIII

_(Extract from the diary of Sir Eustace Pedler)_

As I remarked once before, I am essentially a man of peace. I yearn

for a quiet life—and that’s just the one thing I don’t seem able

to have. I am always in the middle of storms and alarms. The relief

of getting away from Pagett with his incessant nosing out of

intrigues was enormous, and Miss Pettigrew is certainly a useful

creature. Although there is nothing of the houri about her, one or

two of her accomplishments are invaluable. It is true that I had

a touch of liver at Bulawayo and behaved like a bear in consequence,

but I had had a disturbed night in the train. At 3 a.m. an

exquisitely dressed young man looking like a musical-comedy hero

of the Wild West entered my compartment and asked where I was

going. Disregarding my first murmur of “Tea—and for God’s sake

don’t put sugar in it,” he repeated his question, laying stress on

the fact that he was not a waiter but an Immigration officer. I

finally succeeded in satisfying him that I was suffering from no

infectious disease, that I was visiting Rhodesia from the purest

of motives, and further gratified him with my full Christian names

and my place of birth. I then endeavoured to snatch a little sleep,

but some officious ass aroused me at 5.30 with a cup of liquid

sugar which he called tea. I don’t think I threw it at him, but I

know that that was what I wanted to do. He brought me unsugared

tea, stone cold, at 6, and I then fell asleep utterly exhausted,

to awaken just outside Bulawayo and be landed with a beastly wooden

giraffe, all legs and neck!

But for these small contretemps, all had been going smoothly. And

then fresh calamity befell.

It was the night of our arrival at the Falls. I was dictating to

Miss Pettigrew in my sitting-room, when suddenly Mrs. Blair burst

in without a word of excuse and wearing most compromising attire.

“Where’s Anne?” she cried.

A nice question to ask. As though I were responsible for the girl.

What did she expect Miss Pettigrew to think? That I was in the

habit of producing Anne Beddingfeld from my pocket at midnight or

thereabouts? Very compromising for a man in my position.

“I presume,” I said coldly, “that she is in her bed.”

I cleared my throat and glanced at Miss Pettigrew, to show that I

was ready to resume dictating. I hoped Mrs. Blair would take the

hint. She did nothing of the kind. Instead she sank into a chair

and waved a slippered foot in an agitated manner.

“She’s not in her room. I’ve been there. I had a dream—a terrible

dream—that she was in some awful danger, and I got up and went to

her room, just to reassure myself, you know. She wasn’t there and

her bed hadn’t been slept in.”

She looked at me appealingly.

“What shall I do, Sir Eustace?”

Repressing the desire to reply, “Go to bed, and don’t worry over

nothing. An able-bodied young woman like Anne Beddingfeld is

perfectly well able to take care of herself,” I frowned judicially.

“What does Race say about it?”

Why should Race have it all his own way? Let him have some of the

disadvantages as well as the advantages of female society.

“I can’t find him anywhere.”

She was evidently making a night of it. I sighed and sat down in

a chair.

“I don’t quite see the reason for your agitation,” I said patiently.

“My dream——”

“That curry we had for dinner!”

“Oh, Sir Eustace!”

The woman was quite indignant. And yet everybody knows that

nightmares are a direct result of injudicious eating.

“After all,” I continued persuasively, “why shouldn’t Anne

Beddingfeld and Race go out for a little stroll without having the

whole hotel aroused about it?”

“You think they’ve just gone out for a stroll together? But it’s

after midnight!”

“One does these foolish things when one is young,” I murmured,

“though Race is certainly old enough to know better.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I dare say they’ve run away to make a match of it,” I continued

soothingly, though fully aware that I was making an idiotic

suggestion. For, after all, at a place like this, where is there

to run away to?

I don’t know how much longer I should have gone on making feeble

remarks, but at that moment Race himself walked in upon us. At any

rate, I had been partly right—_he_ had been out for a stroll, but

he hadn’t taken Anne with him. However, I had been quite wrong in

my way of dealing with the situation. I was soon shown that. Race

had the whole hotel turned upside-down in three minutes. I’ve never

seen a man more upset.

The thing is very extraordinary. Where did the girl go? She walked

out of the hotel, fully dressed, about ten minutes past eleven,

and she was never seen again. The idea of suicide seems impossible.

She was one of those energetic young women who are in love with

life, and have not the faintest intention of quitting it. There

was no train either way until midday on the morrow, so she can’t

have left the place. Then where the devil is she?

Race is almost beside himself, poor fellow. He has left no stone

unturned. All the D.C.’s, or whatever they call themselves, for

hundreds of miles round have been pressed into the service. The

native trackers have run about on all fours. Everything that can

be done is being done—but no sign of Anne Beddingfeld. The accepted

theory is that she walked in her sleep. There are signs on the path

near the bridge which seem to show that the girl walked deliberately

off the edge. If so, of course, she must have been dashed to pieces

on the rocks below. Unfortunately, most of the footprints were

obliterated by a party of tourists who chose to walk that way early

on the Monday morning.

I don’t know that it’s a very satisfactory theory. In my young

days, I always was told that sleep-walkers couldn’t hurt

themselves—that their own sixth sense took care of them. I don’t

think the theory satisfies Mrs. Blair either.

I can’t make that woman out. Her whole attitude towards Race has

changed. She watches him now like a cat a mouse, and she makes

obvious efforts to bring herself to be civil to him. And they used

to be such friends. Altogether she is unlike herself, nervous,

hysterical, starting and jumping at the least sound. I am beginning

to think that it is high time I went to Jo’burg.

A rumour came along yesterday of a mysterious island somewhere up

the river, with a man and a girl on it. Race got very excited. It

turned out to be all a mare’s-nest, however. The man had been there

for years, and is well known to the manager of the hotel. He totes

parties up and down the river in the season and points out

crocodiles and a stray hippopotamus or so to them. I believe that

he keeps a tame one which is trained to bite pieces out of the boat

on occasions. Then he fends it off with a boat-hook, and the party

feel they have really got to the back of beyond at last. How long

the girl has been there is not definitely known, but it seems

pretty clear that she can’t be Anne, and there is a certain delicacy

in interfering in other people’s affairs. If I were this young

fellow, I should certainly kick Race off the island if he came

asking questions about my love affairs.

_Later._

It is definitely settled that I go to Jo’burg to-morrow. Race urges

me to do so. Things are getting unpleasant there, by all I hear,

but I might as well go before they get worse. I dare say I shall

be shot by a striker, anyway. Mrs. Blair was to have accompanied

me, but at the last minute she changed her mind and decided to stay

on at the Falls. It seems as though she couldn’t bear to take her

eyes off Race. She came to me to-night and said, with some

hesitation, that she had a favour to ask. Would I take charge of

her souvenirs for her?

“Not the animals?” I asked, in lively alarm. I always felt that I

should get stuck with those beastly animals sooner or later.

In the end we effected a compromise. I took charge of two small

wooden boxes for her which contained fragile articles. The animals

are to be packed by the local store in vast crates and sent to Cape

Town by rail, where Pagett will see to their being stored.

The people who are packing them say that they are of a particularly

awkward shape (!), and that special cases will have to be made. I

pointed out to Mrs. Blair that by the time she has got them home

those animals will have cost her easily a pound apiece!

Pagett is straining at the leash to rejoin me in Jo’burg. I shall

make an excuse of Mrs. Blair’s cases to keep him in Cape Town. I

have written him that he must receive the cases and see to their

safe disposal, as they contain rare curios of immense value.

So all is settled, and I and Miss Pettigrew go off into the blue

together. And any one who has seen Miss Pettigrew will admit that

it is perfectly respectable.