A Handful of Dust

“You just wait a few weeks,” he had said. “Brenda will come back. She’ll soon get sick of Beaver.”

“But I don’t want her back.”

“I know just how you feel, but it doesn’t do to be medieval about it. If Brenda hadn’t been upset at John’s death this need never have come to a crisis. Why last year Marjorie was going everywhere with that ass Robin Beaseley. She was mad about him at the time, but I pretended not to notice and it all blew over. If I were you I should refuse to recognize that anything has happened.”

Marjorie had said, “Of course Brenda doesn’t love Beaver. How could she?… And if she thinks she does at the moment, I think it’s your duty to prevent her making a fool of herself. You must refuse to be divorced—anyway until she has found someone more reasonable.”

Tony had been living with Jock for the last three weeks. Mrs. Rattery had gone to California and he was grateful for company. They dined together most evenings. They had given up going to Brat’s; so had Beaver; they were afraid of meeting each other. Instead Tony and Jock went to Brown’s, where Beaver was not a member. Beaver was continually with Brenda nowadays, at one of half a dozen houses.

Mrs. Beaver did not like the turn things had taken; her workmen had been sent back from Hetton with their job unfinished.

“She sounded very well. I didn’t see her.”

“But you said you were going to see her.”

“Yes, I thought I was, but I turned out to be wrong. I talked to her several times on the telephone.”

“But you can telephone her from here, can’t you, daddy? Why did you go all the way to London to telephone her?… Why, daddy?”

“It would take too long to explain.”

“Well tell me some of it… Why, daddy?”

“Look here, I’m tired. If you don’t stop asking questions I shan’t let you ever come and meet the train again.”

charming and experienced woman like Brenda Last is just the person to help him. He’s got a very affectionate nature, but he’s so sensitive that he hardly ever lets it appear… to tell you the truth I felt something of the kind was in the air last week, so I made an excuse to go away for a few days.

himself in deep water and attempted to swim, found himself among boulders again and attempted to grapple with them. Then he reached the falls.

They were unspectacular as falls go in that country—a drop of ten feet or less—but they were enough for Dr. Messinger. At their foot the foam subsided into a great pool, almost still, and strewn with blossom from the forest trees that encircled it. Dr. Messinger’s hat floated very slowly towards the Amazon and the water closed over his bald head.

He had picked up bêtes rouges in the bush and they were crawling and burrowing under his skin; the bitter oil which Dr. Messinger had given him as protection, had set up a rash of its own wherever he had applied it. Every evening after washing he had burned off a few ticks with a cigarette end but they had left irritable little scars behind them; so had the djiggas which one of the black boys had dug out from under his toe

bought Miss de Vitré a woolen rabbit at the barber’s shop.

“How I wish I was a man,” said Thérèse de Vitré.

Tony told her about the expedition; of the Peruvian emigrants in the middle ages and their long caravan working through the mountains and forests, llamas packed with works of intricate craftsmanship; of the continual rumors percolating to the coast and luring adventurers up into the forests; of the route they would take up the rivers, then cutting through the bush along Indian trails and across untraveled country; of the stream they might strike higher up and how, Dr. Messinger said, they would make woodskin canoes and take to the water again; how finally they would arrive under the walls of the city like the Vikings at Byzantium. “But of course,” he added, “there may be nothing in it. It ought to be an interesting journey in any case.”

She was eighteen years old;