Front matter (continued 2)

Dr. Jakes warned him with an uplifted finger.

"Sit down," he said. "Keep quiet. I 'll see you in half an hour."

He looked round at Margaret and the rest of them thoughtfully and went back to his place by the mantel-piece, sighing. It was his signal to them that his brief display of efficiency was over, and as though to screen his retreat, Mrs. Jakes coughed and hoped loudly that the rain would hold off.

But Mr. Samson made his way to a chair and sat down in it heavily, grasping its arms with his hands, and Margaret noticed for the first time that he was an old man.

Apparently the thing that threatened Mr. Samson was not very serious, or else the doctor had found means to head it off in time, for though he went from the study to his bed, he was at breakfast next morning, with a fastidious appetite and thereafter the course of his life remained unaltered.

Breakfast at the Sanatorium was in theory a meal that might be taken at any hour from eight till half past eleven. In the days of his dream, Dr. Jakes had seen dimly silver dishes with spirit lamps under them and a house-party effect of folk dropping in as they came down and helping themselves. But Mrs. Jakes' thousand pounds had stopped short of the silver dishes and Mrs. Jakes herself could not be restrained from attending in person to see that the coffee was hot. Therefore, since it was not possible in any conscience to bind Mrs. Jakes to her post till noon, breakfast occurred between half-past eight and half-past nine.

The freshness, the exuberance, of the morning were not for her; already she wore the aspect of one who has done a stage of the day's journey and shed the bloom of her vigor upon it. The sunlight, waxing like a tide in flood, was powerless to lift her prim, black-dressed personality from the level of its cares and functions. She made to each as he entered the same mechanical little bow across the crockery, smiled the same formal smile from the lips outwards and uttered the same small comment on the blaze of day that filled the earth without the window. She had her life trimmed down to a routine for convenience of handling; she was one of those people—they are the salt of the earth!—whose passions are monosyllabic, whose woes are inarticulate. The three who sat daily at meat with her knew and told each other that her composure, her face keyed up like an instrument to its pitch of vacant propriety, were a mask. Sometimes, even, there had been sounds in the night to assure them of it; occasionally Jakes, on his way to bed in the small hours, would slip on the stairs and bump down a dozen or so of them, and lie where he fell till he was picked up and set on his way again; there would be the rasp of labored breath as he was supported along the corridor, and the mumble of his blurred speech hushed by prayerful whispers. A door slammed, a low cry bitten off short, and then silence in the big house, and in the morning Mrs. Jakes with her coffee pot and trivial tinkle of speech and treble armor of practised bearing against the pity of those who knew! The sheer truculence of it held them dumb; it was the courage of a swashbuckler, of a bravo, and it imposed on them the decorum of silence.

The doctor, she gave them to understand, suffered from the climate.

"He never was strong," she would say, with her eyes fixed on the person addressed as though she would challenge him to dispute or question it. "Never! It 's the sun, I think; he suffers from his head, you know. He used to take aspirin for it when we were first married, but it doesn't seem to do him any good now."

The three of them would nod sympathetically and look hastily elsewhere, as though ashamed to be the spectators of her humiliation.

Poor Mrs. Jakes! Seven thousand miles from the streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness and security of its little decent houses, she held yet with a frail hand to the skirts of its beatitude. In the drawer in her bedroom which also contained Jakes' dress suit, she kept in tissue paper and sincere regard a morocco-bound mausoleum of memory—an album. Only two or three times in Mr. Samson's experience—and he had been an inmate of the Sanatorium for four years—had she brought it forth. Once was on the night before young Shaw died, and when no soothing would hold him at peace in his bed, he had lain still to look through those yellowing portraits and hear Mrs. Jakes tell how this one was doing very well as a job-master and that one had turned Papist. But Margaret Harding had seen it. Mrs. Jakes had sat on her bed, quelling Fat Mary with her eye, and seen her unpack her clothes, the frocks new from dressmakers and tailors in London, the hats of only a month ago. Margaret had been aided in buying them by a philosophic aunt who had recently given up vegetarianism on the advice of her hairdresser. "My child, play light," had been the counsel of this relative. "Don't surprise the natives; they never like it. No frills; a vigorous vicarage style is what you want." And she had brought considerable powers of personality and vocabulary to bear on Margaret's choice, so that in the result there predominated a certain austerity of raiment which Margaret found unexciting. But Mrs. Jakes received them as canons of fashion, screwing up her mouth and nodding gravely as she mastered saliencies.

"I can't quite imagine them in these styles," she said; "the people in the Park, I mean. I suppose it's this golf that's done it."

In return for the exhibition, she had shown Margaret her album. It had many thick pages with beveled gilt edges, each framing from one to six portraits or groups, and she had led her hearer through the lot of them, from the first to the last. They sat side by side on the bed in Mrs. Jakes' room, and the album lay open on their laps, and Mrs. Jakes' finger traveled like a pointer among the pictures while she elucidated them in a voice of quiet pride. These pale and fading faces, fixed to the order of the photographer in more than human smiles, with sleek and decorative hair and a show of clothes so patently reserved for Sundays, were neither pale nor faded for her. She knew the life behind them, their passions and their strength, and spoke of them as she might have spoken had they been waiting in the next room.

"That 's my sister," she said, her finger pausing. "Two years older than me, but she never married. And what she used to suffer from indigestion, words can't tell. And here 's my Aunt Martha—yes, she died seven years ago. My mother's sister, you know. My mother was a Penfold—one of the Penfolds of Putney. You 've heard of them? Ah, and here 's Bill Penfold, my cousin Bill. Poor Bill, he didn't do well, ever. He had a fancy for me, once, or so they said, but my father never could bear him. No harm, you know, no real harm, but larky—sort of. This one? Oh, that 's nobody—a Mr. Wrench, who used to collect for my father; he had a hair-lip. I did n't like him."

The thick page turned, and showed on the other side a single cabinet portrait of a thin woman, with her head a little on one side.

"My mother," said Mrs. Jakes, and shifted the album that Margaret might see better.

"She was a Penfold of Putney," she said, gently. "I think she shows it, you know. A bit quiet and refined, especially about the eyes. Don't you think so?"

It was the picture of the wife of a robust and hardy man, Margaret thought, and as for the eyes and their slight droop, the touch of listlessness which bespeaks an acquired habit of patience and self-suppression, she had only to look up and they returned her look from the face of Mrs. Jakes.

"And this?" she asked.

Mrs. Jakes smiled quite brightly; the photograph was one of a baby.

"That 's little Eustace," she answered, with no trace of the softness of regret which had hushed her tone when she spoke of her mother. "My little baby; he 'd have been a big boy now. He was like his father—very like. Everybody noticed it. And that"—her finger passed on—"is George Penfold, Sergeant-Major in the Guards. His widow married again, a gunner in the Navy."

No sorrow for little Eustace. He, at any rate, would never see his dreams dislimn and fail him; no wife would watch the slow night through for his unsteady step nor read the dishonor written in his eyes. The first of the crosses in the barbed wire enclosure, Mrs. Jakes' empty and aching heart and her quick smile of triumph at his easy victory over all the snares of life—these and the faint, whitening photograph remained of little Eustace. Many a man leaves less when his time comes in South Africa.

"The weather is holding up nicely," she would say at breakfast. "Almost too fine, isn't it? But I suppose we oughtn't complain."

It was a meal over which one lingered, for with the end of it there closed the eventful period of the day. While it lasted, the Sanatorium was at its best; one saw one's fellows in faint hues of glamour after the night's separation and heard them speak with a sense of receiving news. But the hour exhausted them of interest and one left the table, when all pretexts for remaining there had been expended, to face the emptiness of a morning already stale. That, in truth, was the price one paid for healing, the wearing, smothering monotony of the idle days, when there was nothing to do and one saw oneself a part of the stagnation that ruled the place. Mrs. Jakes withdrew herself to become the motor of the domestic machinery, and till lunch time was not available for countenance and support. Ford occupied himself gravely with his little canvases, plastering upon them strange travesties of landscape, and was busy and intent and impatient of interruption for long periods at a time, while Mr. Samson, keeping a sufficient offing from all human contact, alternately strutted to and fro upon the stoep in a short quarter-deck promenade of ten steps and a right about turn, and lay in a deck chair with a writing case upon his knee and wrote fitfully and with deep thought long, important looking letters which never reached the post.

"You 're feeling the need of something to do," Ford told Margaret, when in desperation she came behind him and watched him modeling—as it seemed—in burnt sienna. "Why don't you knit—or something?"

"Knit?" said Margaret with huge scorn.

"You 'll come to it," he warned her. "There was a chap here before you came who taught himself the harp. A nuisance he was, too, but he said he 'd have been a gibbering idiot without it."

"That was n't saying much, perhaps," retorted Margaret.

"Oh, I don't know. He was a barrister of sorts, I believe. Not many barristers who can play the harp, you know."

"For goodness' sake, don't knead the stuff like that!" cried Margaret, watching his thumb at work. "You 're painting, not—not civil engineering! But what were you?"

"Eh?" He looked up at her.

"Before you had to come here, I mean? Oh, do talk for a minute," she begged.

"Sorry," he said. "I was in the army."

"And was it rather awful to have to give up and nurse yourself?"

"Well!" He glanced at her consideringly, as though to measure her intelligence. "It was rough," he admitted. "You see, the army 's not like barristering, for instance. It 's not a thing you can drop for a bit and then take up again; once you 're out, you 're out for good." He paused. "And I meant it," he added.

"Meant it?"

"Yes, there 's a chance nowadays for a chap with a turn for soldiering. There 's a lot to know, you see, and, well—I was by way of knowing it. That 's all."

He turned to his canvas again, but did not fall to work. Margaret saw his back, thin under his silk coat but flat and trim as a drilled man's should be.

"So for you, it meant the end of everything?" she suggested.

"Looks like it, doesn't it!" he answered. "Still—we 'll see. They trained me and there 's just a chance, in the event of a row, that they might have a use for me. They 'd be short of officers who knew the game. You see—"

He hitched sideways on his camp-stool so that he might make himself clear to her.

"You see, the business of charging at the head of your men is a thing of the past, pretty nearly. All that gallery play is done away with. But take a hundred Tommies and walk 'em about for half a year, dry-nurse 'em, keep them fed and healthy and moderately happy and as clean as you can, be something between an uncle and a schoolmaster to them, and have 'em ready at the end of it to march forty miles in a day and then fight—that's an art in itself! In fact, it's a trade, and it can't be learned in a week."

"I 'm perfectly sure it can't," agreed Margaret.

"Well, that was my trade," said Ford. "That's where I 'll come in when the band begins to play. See?"

He nodded at her expressively but with finality. If was plain that he considered the subject drained dry, and only waited for her to go to return to the mysteries of art.

"Oh, well," sighed Margaret, and left him to it.

Lunch lacked the character of breakfast. For one thing, it was impossible for three feeble people, debarred from exercise, to arrive at a state of appetite during a morning of semi-torpor, with a prospect before them of an afternoon of the same quality. For another, tempers had endured the heat and burden of four hours of enforced idleness and emerged from the test frayed at the edges.

This meant more labor for poor Mrs. Jakes, who could by no means allow the meal to be eaten in a bitter silence, and was driven by a stern sense of duty to keep up a dropping fire of small talk. Their sour faces, the grimness with which they passed the salt, filled her with nervous tremors, and she talked as a born hostess might talk to cover the confusion induced by an earthquake under the table, trembling but fluent to the last. There were times when her small, hesitating voice wrought Margaret up to the very point of flat interventions. At one such moment, it was Ford who saved the situation.

"Miss Harding," he said, in a matter-of-fact way. "You are a pig!"

Mrs. Jakes gasped and bounded in her chair, and old Mr. Samson choked.

"And you," replied Margaret with intensity, "are just a plain beast!"

"That 's the idea," said Ford. "You feel better now?"

"Ever so much better, thank you," answered Margaret. "It was just what I wanted."

Mrs. Jakes was staring at them as though convinced that sudden mania had attacked them both at the same moment.

"It 's all right," Ford assured her. "It's a dodge for blowing off temper. If you 'd just call Mr. Samson something really rude, he 'd be ever so grateful. Call him a Socialist, Mrs. Jakes."

"Oh, I couldn't," said Mrs. Jakes, while Mr. Samson, mastering his emotions, glared and reddened. "You did alarm me," she said. "I thought for a moment—well, I don't know what I did think."

She was distinctly not at her ease for the remainder of the meal, and even at tea that afternoon, she kept an eye on the pair of them. To her mind, they were playing with edged tools.

It was at tea, as a rule, that Dr. Jakes was first visible, very tremulous and thirsty, but always submissive and content to be overlooked and forgotten. At dinner, later on, he would be better and able to talk with a jerky continuity to Margaret who sat at his right hand. He bore himself always with an air of effort, like one who is not at home and whose acquaintance with his fellows is slight, and drank at table nothing but water. His eyes kept the Kafir servants under observation as they waited, and the black boys were full of alacrity in the consciousness that he was watching. "It 's strange," Mrs. Jakes used to say; "Eustace is so quiet, and yet the natives obey him wonderfully." Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he would flicker to and fro restlessly, growing each moment more irritable and incapable of hearing a sentence to the end. Half-way through the evening, he would seize an occasion to escape to his own quarters, and thereafter would be invisible till next day. Every one knew whither he went and for what purpose; eyes met in significant glances as the door closed softly behind him and Mrs. Jakes raised her voice in rapid speech to hide the sound of his tiptoe crossing of the hall; his secret was anybody's and even the Kafirs shared it, and yet the man had the force of mystery. He slid to and fro in the interstices of their lives and came to the surface only to serve and heal them. That done, he dropped back again to the solace that was his behind his locked door, while about him the house slept. He knew himself and yet could look his patients and his wife in the face. Mingled with their contempt and disgust, there was an acknowledgment of the quality of him, of a kind of wry and shabby greatness.

And thus the day came to its end. One by one, Margaret, Ford and Mr. Samson drew off and made their way to the dignified invitation of the big staircase and their rooms. Mrs. Jakes was always at hand to bid them good night, for her day was yet a long way from its finish.

"Tired, my dear?" she would ask Margaret. "It 's been a tiring day; I feel it myself. Good night to you."

In her room, Margaret would find Fat Mary waiting for her, sleepy in her vast, ridiculous way, but still prodigal of smiles, and ready to put her to bed with two left hands equipped with ten thumbs. She had a yawn which would have reminded Jonah of old times, but nothing could damp her helpful ardor, not even being discovered stretched fast asleep on Margaret's bed and being waked with the bath sponge. She made it clear that she would stop at few things to be of service.

"Missis not sleepy? Ah!" She stood in thought for five seconds. "Me nurse Missis, all same baby? Plenty strong—me!"

She dandled an imaginary child in her great arms, smiling cheerfully but quite in earnest. "Plenty strong," she assured the young lady from Kensington. "No? No? All a-right!"

Darkness at last, and the window wide to the small, whispering winds which people the veld at night! A sky of blue-black powdered with misty white stars, and from the distance, squeaks, small cries, the wary voice of the wilderness! Sometimes a jackal would range within earshot and lift up his voice under the stars to cry like a child, in the very accent of heartbroken, helpless woe. The nightly traffic of the veld was in full swing ere her eyes closed and its subdued clamor followed her into her dreams.

Silence in the big house and along the matted corridors—and one voice, speaking guardedly, in the hall. It never happened to Margaret to hear it and go to the stair-head and look down. Thence she might have seen what would have made her less happy—Mrs. Jakes on her knees at the locked door of the study, with her candle set on the floor beside her, casting a monstrous shadow-caricature of her upon the gray stone wall. In her sober black dress she knelt on the mat and her small, kitchen-reddened hands tapped gently, carefully on the panels. She spoke through the keyhole and her fruitless whisperings rustled in light echoes about the high ceiling.

"Eustace, it's me. Eustace! I 'm so tired, Eustace. Please open the door. Please, Eustace! It 's only me, dear."

CHAPTER V

"Hardly smart," pronounced Mrs. du Preez, speaking low into Mrs. Jakes' ear. "Smart 's not the word I 'd use for her myself. Distangay, now, or chic, if you understand what that means!"

"Oh, quite!" replied Mrs. Jakes coldly.

They were seated side by side upon the sofa in the little parlor of the farm; its dimensions made it impossible for Mrs. Jakes to treat her hostess as distantly as she could have wished. There was nothing for it but to leave her ear and her unresponsive profile, composed to a steadfast woodenness, to the mercy of those critical and authoritative whispers until deliverance should offer itself. She settled her small black-gowned figure and coughed behind three gloved fingers.

Near the window looking forth across the kraals, Margaret Harding, the subject of Mrs. du Preez's comments, had the gaunt Boer for a companion. This was her visit of ceremony, her "return call"; two or three earlier visits, mere incidents of morning walks, when she had stopped to talk to Paul and been surprised and captured by Paul's mother, were understood not to count, and the Recording Angel would omit them from his notes. Mrs. du Preez had taken the initiative in due order by appearing at the Sanatorium one afternoon at tea-time; she had asked Dr. Jakes if he had "a mouth on him" and Margaret if there were many people in town. The next step in the transaction was for Margaret to put on a real frock and a real hat, and take herself and her card-case through the white, scornful sunshine to the farm; and behold! by virtue of this solemnity, two women marooned at the heart of an ocean of sun-swamped desert had license to distinguish one another from common objects of the country side.

Even Mrs. Jakes, whose attitude towards Mrs. du Preez was one of disapproval tempered by dread, could see no alternative to this course. She shook her head at Margaret's amusement.

"This is not London, of course," she said reasonably. "I know that. But, my dear, we 're Christian people—even here."

At Margaret's side, the tall Boer, Christian du Preez, leaned against the wall and regarded her with shy, intent eyes that were oddly like Paul's. There was lacking in him that aloof and almost reverent quality of the boy which made him seem as though he regarded all things with an equal wonder and an equal kinship; he was altogether harder and more immediately forceful, a figure at home in his narrow world; but the relationship between him and his son was obvious. Margaret had only to glance across the room to where Paul sat by the door, following the trickle of conversation around the room from face to face with his eyes, to see the resemblance. What was common to them both was a certain shadowy reserve, a character of relationship to the dumbness and significance of the Karoo, and something else which had the gloom of melancholy and the power of pride. In each of them the Boer, the world's disinherited son, was salient.

Mrs. du Preez had secured his presence to grace the occasion after some resistance on his part, for he entered the parlor seldom and was not at his ease there. Its atmosphere of indoor formality daunted and oppressed him, and he felt coarse and earth-stained under the eyes of the serene young men who watched him from their plush and fret-work frames. He had nothing to set against their sleek beauty and their calm sophistication but his fathom and odd inches of lean, slow-moving strength, his eyes of patient expectancy and the wild beard that redeemed his countenance from mildness. He had come under protest and for the sake of peace, and sat scowling in a chair, raw with shyness and irritation, in the dreadful interval between the completion of Mrs. du Preez's preparations and the arrival of the guests, while in face of him "yours blithely, Boy Bailey," set him a hopeless example of iron-clad complacency.

Then came Margaret and Mrs. Jakes, and at the first sign of them he was screened as in a cloud by the welcome of Mrs. du Preez. Their step upon the threshold was her cue for a cordiality of greeting that filled the room and overflowed into the passage in a rapid crescendo of compliment, inquiries as to health, laughter and mere bustle; it was like the entrance of two star performers supported by a full chorus and corps de ballet.

"So here you are, the two of you," was her style. "On time to a tick, too! Come right in, Miss Harding, and look out for that step—it 's a terror. A death-trap, I call it! And you, Mrs. Jakes. I won't say I 'm glad to see you, 'cause you 'll believe that without me telling you. You found it pretty hot walking, I know; we 're all pretty warm members in this community, aren't we? Sit down, sit down; no extra charge for sitting down, y'know. And now, how are you? Sitting up and taking nourishment, eh? That's the style!"

Margaret was aware, across her shoulder, of a gloomy male presence inhabiting the background.

"Let me introduce my husband," said Mrs. du Preez, following her glance. "Christian, this is Miss Harding. And now, Mrs. Jakes, let you an' me have a sit-down over here. You first—age before innocence, y'know. And how 's the poor old doctor?"

"Thank you," said Mrs. Jakes firmly, "he is quite well."

She smiled graciously at Paul, who was watching her, and took her seat, resigned to martyrdom.

Christian du Preez gave the girl a slack hand and murmured incoherently some salutation, while his gaze took in avidly each feature of her and summed up her effect of easy modernity. He recognized in her a certain feminine quality for which he had no name. Once before he had glimpsed it as in a revelation, when, as a youth newly returned from service on commando against rebellious Kafirs, he had spent an evening in a small town and there seen a performance by a traveling theatrical company. It was a crude and ill-devised show, full of improbable murders that affronted the common-sense of a man fresh from various killings; but in an interval between slaughters, there was a scene that brought upon the stage a slim girl who walked erect and smiled and shrugged easily at the audience. Her part was brief; she was not visible for more than a few minutes, and assuredly her shaft, so soon sped, struck no one else. It needed a Boer, with his feet in the mud and his head among the stars, to clothe her with dignity as with a robe and add to her valuation of herself the riches of his woman-haunted imagination. She passed from sight again, and for the time he scarcely regretted her, for she left glamour behind her and a vision of womanhood equipped, debonnaire, heart-breaking in its fragility and its daring.

The outcome of that revelation was marriage within the week; but it never revisited the bored and weary woman whom Christian du Preez had brought home to his farm and its solitudes. It was as though he had tried to pick an image from still water; the fruit of that endeavor was memory and an empty hand. Even as he greeted Margaret he turned slowly and looked from her to his wife in unconscious comparison, and turned as unconsciously back again. Only Mrs. du Preez knew the meaning of that glance; she answered it with an obstinate compression of the mouth and went on talking to Mrs. Jakes about the hang of Margaret's skirt.

"It 's all right for her," she was saying. "These leggy ones can wear anything. But think how you 'd look in it, for instance. Why you 'd make a horse laugh!"

"Indeed!" said Mrs. Jakes, unhappy but bristling. She never grew reconciled to Mrs. du Preez's habit of using her as a horrible example.

"You would that," Mrs. du Preez assured her. "You see, my dear, yours is an elderly style."

At the window, Margaret was doing what she could to thaw the tall Boer into talk, and meeting with some success. He liked, while possibly he did not quite understand, her relish for the view from the window, with the rude circles of the kraals near at hand, the scattered huts of the farm Kafirs beyond them, and the all-subduing brown of the Karoo slipping forth to the edge of the sky. He had once heard a young man from the Sanatorium agree with Mrs. du Preez that the Karoo resembled a brick-field established in a cemetery. Margaret did better than that.

"I suppose you 've traveled all over it?" she asked him.

"When I was a young man, I rode transport," he answered. "Then I traveled; now I sit still in the middle of it and try to grow wool."

"Is it all like this?" she asked.

"Sometimes there is grass—a little—not much, and milk bushes and prickly pear," he told her. "But it is hard ground, all of it. It is very peaceful, though."

She nodded comprehendingly, and he found a stimulant in her quiet interest. He had not Paul's tense absorption in the harvest of the eye, but he would have been no Boer had the vacant miles not exercised a power over him.

"You 're never—discontented with it?" asked Margaret. "I mean, you find it enough for you, without wanting towns and all that?"

He shook his head, hesitating. "I do not know towns," he answered. "No, I don't want towns. But—every day the same sights, and the sun and the silence—"

"Yes?" she asked.

He was little used to confessing himself and his shyness was an obstacle to clear speech. Besides, the matter in his mind was not clear to himself; he was aware of it as a color to his thoughts rather than as a fact to be stated.

"It makes you guess at things," he said at last. "You guess, but you don't ever know."

"What things?" asked Margaret.

"A lot of things," he answered. "God, and the devil, and all that. It's always there, you see, and you must think."

A rattle in the passage and a start from Mrs. du Preez heralded tea, borne in upon a reverberating iron tray by a timid and clumsy Kafir maid, who set her burden insecurely upon the table and fled in panic. Christian du Preez ceased to speak as if upon a signal and Mrs. du Preez entered the arena hospitably.

"You 're sure you wouldn't rather have something else?" she asked Margaret, as she filled the cups. "There 's afternoons when a whisky-and-soda is more in my line than tea. Sure you won't? P'r'aps Mrs. Jakes will, then? We won't tell, will we, Paul? Well, 'ave it your own way, only don't blame me! Christian, reach this cup to Miss Harding."

The tall man did as he was bidden, ignoring Mrs. Jakes. In his world, women helped themselves. Paul carried her cup to Mrs. Jakes and sat down beside her in the place vacated by his mother. From there, he could see Margaret and look through the window as well.

"If you 'll have one, I 'll keep you company," suggested Mrs. du Preez privately to Mrs. Jakes.

"One what?" inquired Mrs. Jakes across her cup. The poor lady was feeling very grateful for the strong tea to console her nerves.

"One what!" Mrs. du Preez was scornful. "A drink, of course—a drink out of a glass!"

"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes hastily. "I never touch stimulants."

"Oh, well!" Mrs. du Preez resigned herself to circumstances. "I suppose," she enquired, nodding towards Margaret, "she don't either?"

"I believe not," replied Mrs. Jakes.

Mrs. du Preez considered the matter. "You 'd think they 'd grow out of it," she observed enigmatically. "She seems to be lively enough, too, in her way. First person I ever saw who could make Christian talk."

Christian was talking at last. Margaret had paused to watch a string of natives pass in single-file, after the unsociable Kafir fashion, before the window, going towards the huts, with the sun-gilt dust rising about them in a faint haze. They were going home after their day's work, and she wondered suddenly to what secret joy of freedom they re-entered when the hours of the white man's dominion were over and the coming of night made a black world for the habitation of black men.

"I suppose there is no knowing what they really feel and think?" she suggested.

That is the South African view, the white man's surrender to the impregnable reserve of the black races; native opinion is only to be gathered when the native breaks bounds. Christian du Preez nodded.

"No," he agreed. "I have always been among them, and I have fought them, too; but what they think they don't tell."

"You have fought them? How was that?"

"When I was young. On commando," he explained, with his eyes on her. It was luxury to see the animation of her pale, clear-cut face as she looked up and waited for him to go on.

"It was a real war," he answered her. "A real war. There was a chief—Kamis, they called him—down there in the south, and his men murdered an officer. So the government called out the burghers and sent Cape Mounted Rifles with us to go and punish him. I was twenty years old then, and I went too."

In the background Mrs. du Preez sniffed. "He 's telling her about that old Kafir war of his," she said. "He always tells that to young women. I know him!"

Christian went on, lapsing as he continued from the careful English he had spoken hitherto to the cruder vernacular of the Cape. He told of the marching and the quick, shattering attack against Kafirs at bay in the low hills bordering the Karoo, of a fight at night in a rain-squall, when the "pot-leg," the Kafir bullets hammered out of cold iron, sang in the air like flutes and made a wound when they struck that a man could put his fist into. His eyes shone with the fires of warm remembrance as he told of that advance over grass-grown slopes slippery with wet, when the gay desperadoes of the Cape Mounted Rifles went up singing, "Jinny, my own true loved one, Wait till the clouds roll by," and on their flank the burghers found cover and lit the night with the flashes of their musketry. It was an epic woven into the fiber of the narrator's soul, a thing lived poignantly, each moment of it flavored on the palate and the taste remembered. He had been in the final breathless rush that broke the Kafirs and sent them scuttling like rock-rabbits—"dassies," he called them—through the rocks to the kopje-ringed hollow where they would be held till morning.

And then that morning!

"Man, it was cold," he said. "There was no fires. We were lying in the bushes with our rifles under our bellies till coffee-time, and that Lascelles, our general, walked up and down behind us all the night. He was a little old soldier-officer from Capetown; his face was red and his mustache was white. The rain was falling on my back all the time, but sometimes I slept a little. And when it was sun-up, I could see down the krantz to the veld below, and there was all the Kafirs together, all in a bunch, in the middle of it. They didn't look much; I was surprised to see so few. They were standing and lying on the wet grass, and they seemed tired. Some were sleeping, even, stretched out like dead men below us, but what made me sorry for them was, they were so few.

"I was sorry," he added, thoughtfully.

Margaret nodded.

"But it was a real war," he assured her quickly. "When the sun was well up, we moved, and presently all the burghers were lying close together with our rifles ready. It was Lascelles that ordered it. I didn't understand, then, for I knew a beaten Kafir when I saw one, and those below were beaten to the ground. By and by the Cape Mounted Rifles went past behind us, and dipped down into a hollow on our right; we had only to wait, and it was very cold. I was wondering when they would let us make coffee and talking to the next man about it, when from our right, so sudden that I jumped up at the sound of it, the Cape Mounted Rifles fired at the Kafirs down below. Man, that was awful! It was like a thunder on a clear day. All of us were surprised, and some called out and swore and said Lascelles was a fool. But it was queer, all the same, to see the Kafirs. Twenty of them was killed, and one of them had a bullet in his stomach and rolled about making screams like laughing. The rest—they didn't move; they didn't run; they didn't cry out. A few looked up at us; I tell you, it was near enough to see their white eyes; but the others just stopped as they were. They was like cattle, like sick cattle, patient and weak and finished; the Cape Mounted Rifles could have killed them all and they wouldn't have lifted their hands.

"Our commandant—Van Zyl, he was called, a very fat man—clicked with his tongue. 'Wasting them,' he said. 'Wasting them!'

"Then we went down the hill and came all round them, standing among the dead bodies, and Lascelles with his interpreter and his two young officers in tight belts went forward to look for Kamis, the chief. The interpreter—he was a yellow-faced Hollander—called out once, and in the middle of the Kafirs there stood up an old Kafir with a blanket on his shoulders and his wool all gray. He came walking through the others with a little black boy, three or four years old, holding by his hand and making big round eyes at us. It was the son that was left to him; the others, we found out, were all killed. He was an old man and walked bent and held the blanket round him with one hand. He looked to me like a good old woman who ought to have been sitting in a chair in a kitchen.

"'Are you Kamis?' they asked him.

"'I am Kamis,' he said, 'and this is my son who is also Kamis.'

"He showed them the little plump piccanin, who hung back and struggled. One of the young officers with tight belts put an eye-glass in his eye and laughed. Lascelles did not laugh. He was a little man, as neat as a lady, with ugly, narrow eyes.

"'Tell him he 's to be hanged,' he ordered.

"Old Kamis heard it without a sign, only nodding as the interpreter translated it to him.

"'And what will they do to my son?' he asked.

"Lascelles snuffled in his nose angrily. 'The Government will take care of his son,' he said, and turned away. But when he had gone a few steps he turned back again. 'Tell the old chap,' he ordered, 'and tell him plainly, that his son will be taken care of. He 'll be all right, he 'll be well looked after. Savvy?' he shouted to Kamis. 'Piccanin all right; plenty skoff, plenty mahli, plenty everything.'

"The Hollander told the old chief while Lascelles waited, and the men of the Cape Mounted Rifles who had the handcuffs for him stood on each side. Kamis heard it with his head on one side, as if he was a bit deaf. Then he nodded and put out his hands for the irons.

"Lascelles held out his hands to the baby Kafir.

"'Come with me, kid!' he said.

"The baby hung back. He was scared. Old Kamis said something to him and pushed him with his knee, and at last the child went and took Lascelles' hand.

"'That 's it,' said Lascelles, and lifted him up. As he carried him away, I heard him talking to the young officer with the eye-glass. 'That 's a damned silly grin you 've got, Whitburn,' he said, 'and you may as well know I 'm sick of it.'

"I think he was a bit ashamed of carrying the baby. He had n't any of his own. I saw his wife later, when we were disbanded—a skinny, yellow woman who played cards every evening.

"And then, at Fereira, they hanged old Kamis, while we all stood round with our rifles resting on the ground. There was a man to hang him who wore a mask, and I was sorry about the mask, because I thought I might meet him sometime and not know him and be friends with him. He had red hair though; his mask couldn't hide that, and there is something about red hair that turns me cold. There were about fifty of his tribe who were brought there to see the end of Kamis and take warning by him, and when he came out of the jail door, between two men, with his hands tied behind him, they all lifted a hand above their heads to salute him. The men on each side of him held him by the elbows and hurried him along. They took him so fast that he tripped his foot and nearly fell. 'Slower, you swine!' said Lascelles, who was there with a sword on. He walked across and spoke to Kamis. 'Piccanin all right!' he said, 'All-a right!' said Kamis, and then they led him up the steps. They were all about him there, the jail men and the man with the mask; for a minute I couldn't see him at all. Then they were away from him, and there was a bag on his head and the rope was round his neck. The man with the mask seemed to be waiting, and at last Lascelles lifted his hand in a tired way and there was a crash of falling planks and a cry from the Kafirs, and old Kamis, as straight and lean as a young man, was hanging under the platform just above the ground and swinging a little."

Christian du Preez frowned and looked at Margaret absently.

"And then I was sick," he said reflectively. "Quite sick!"

"I don't wonder," said Margaret. "But the baby! What happened to the Kafir baby?"

"I didn't see the baby any more," replied the Boer. "But I read in a newspaper that they sent it to England. Perhaps it died."

"But why send it to England?" asked Margaret. "What could it do there?"

Christian du Preez shrugged one shoulder. "The Government sent it," he replied, conclusively. No Boer attempts to explain a government; it is his eternal unaccountable. "You see it was the Chief, that baby was, so they wanted to send it a long way off, perhaps."

"And now, I suppose it 's a man," said Margaret; "a poor negro all alone in London, who has forgotten his own tongue. He wears shabby clothes and makes friends with servant girls, and never remembers how he held his father's hand while you burghers and the soldiers came down the hillside. Don't you think that's sad?"

"Yes," said the Boer thoughtfully, but without alacrity, for after all a Kafir is a Kafir and his place in the sympathies of his betters is a small one. "Kafirs look ugly in clothes," he added after a moment.

At the other side of the room, the others had ceased their talk to listen. Mrs. du Preez laughed a little harshly.

"They 're worse in boots," she volunteered. "Ever seen a nigger with boots on, Miss Harding? He walks as if his feet weighed a ton. Make a clatter like clog-dancin'. But round here, of course, there 's no boots for them to get."

"There 's one now," said Margaret. "Look—he 's passing the kraals. He 's got boots on."

They all looked with a quick curiosity that was a little strange to see; one would have thought a passing Kafir would scarcely have interested them by any eccentricity of attire. Even Mrs. Jakes rose from her place on the sofa and stood on tip-toe to see over Mrs. du Preez's shoulders. There is an instinct in the South African which makes him conscious, in his dim, short-sighted way, that over against him there looms the passive, irreconcilable power of the black races. He is like a man carrying a lantern, with the shifting circle of light about him, and at its frontier the darkness pregnant with presences.

The Boer, learned in Kafir varieties, stared under puckered brows at the single figure passing below the kraals. He marked not so much any unusual feature in it as the absence of things that were usual.

"Paul," he said, "go an' see what he 's after."

Paul was already at the door, going out silently. He paused to nod.

"I 'm going now," he said.

"Strange Kafirs want lookin' after," explained Mrs. du Preez to Margaret as the boy passed the window outside. "You never know what they 're up to. Hang out your wash when they 're around and you 're short of linen before you know where you are, and there 's a nigger on the trek somewhere in a frilled petticoat or a table-cloth. They don't care what it is; anything 'll do for them. Why, last year one of 'em sneaked a skirt off Mrs. Jakes here. Didn't he, now?"

"It was a very good skirt," said Mrs. Jakes, flushing. "A very good one—not even turned."

"Well, he was in luck, then," said Mrs. du Preez. "And what he looks like in it—well, I give it up! Miss Harding, you ain't going yet, surely?"

"I 'm afraid I must," put in Mrs. Jakes, seizing her opportunity. "I have to see about dinner."

They shook hands all round. "You must all come up to tea with me some afternoon soon," suggested Margaret. "You will come, won't you?"

"Will a duck swim?" inquired Mrs. du Preez, genially. "You just try us, Miss Harding. And oh! if you want to say good-by to Paul, I know where he 's gone. He 'll be down under the dam, makin' mud pies."

"Not really?"

"You just step down and see; it won't take you a moment. He makes things, y'know; he made a sort of statue of me once. 'If that 's like me,' I told him, 'it 's lucky I 'm off the stage.' And what d 'you think he had the cheek to answer me? 'Mother,' he says, 'when you forget what you look like, you look like this.'"

"I think I will just say good-by to Paul," said Margaret, glancing at Mrs. Jakes.

"Come on after me, then," answered the doctor's wife. "I really must fly."

"Pigs might fly," suggested Mrs. du Preez, enigmatically.

The Boer did not go to the door with them; he waited where he stood while Mrs. du Preez, her voice waxing through the leave-takings to a shrill climax of farewell, accompanied them to her borders. When she returned to the little room, he was still standing in his place, returning "Boy Bailey's" glazed stare with gloomy intensity.

His wife looked curiously at him as she moved to the table and began to put the scattered tea-cups together on the tray.

"She 's a nice girl, Christian," she said, as she gathered them up.

He did not answer, though he heard. She went on with her work till the tray was ready to be carried forth, glancing at his brooding face under her eyebrows.

"Christian," she said suddenly. "I remember when you told me about the war and the Kafir baby."

He gave her an absent look. "You said, 'Hang the Kafir baby!'" he answered.

He turned from her, with a last resentful glare at the plump perfection of Boy Bailey, and slouched heavily from the room. Mrs. du Preez, with a pursed mouth, watched him go in silence.

Mrs. Jakes was resolute in her homeward intentions; she had a presentiment of trouble in the kitchen which turned out to be well grounded. So Margaret went alone along the narrow rut of a path which ran down towards the shining water of the dam, which the slanting sun transmuted to a bath of gold. She was glad of the open air again, after Mrs. du Preez's carefully guarded breathing-mixture with its faint odor of furniture polish and horsehair. Paul, by the way, knew that elusive fragrance as the breath of polite life; it belonged to the parlor, where his father might not smoke, and to nowhere else, and its usual effect was to rarefy human intercourse to the point of inanity. In the parlor, one spoke in low tones and dared not clear one's throat and felt like an abortion and a monstrosity. Years afterwards, when the doors of the world had been forced and it had turned out to be a smallish place, only passably upholstered, it needed but a sniff of that odor to make his hands suddenly vast and unwieldy and reduce him to silence and discomfort.

The path skirted the dam, at the edge of which grew rank grass, and dipped to turn the corner of the sloping wall of earth and stones at its deeper end. As she went, she stooped to pick up a fragment of sun-dried clay that caught her eye; it had been part of a face, and on it the mouth still curved. It was rudely done, but it was there, and it had, even the broken fragment that lacked the interpretation of its context, some touch of free vigor that arrested her in the act of letting it drop. She went on carrying it in her hand, and at the corner of the wall stopped again at the sound of voices. Some one was talking only twenty paces away, hidden from her by the bulk of the wall.

"You must shape it in the lump," she heard. "You must go for the mass. That's everything—the mass! Do you see what I mean?"

She knew the tones, the clear modulations of the pundit-speech which belonged to her class, but there was another quality in the voice that was only vaguely familiar to her, which she could not identify. It brought to her mind, by some unconscious association, the lumbering gaiety of Fat Mary.

"Ye-es," very slowly. That was Paul's voice answering. "Yes. Like you see it in the distance."

"That 's it," the baffling voice spoke again. "That 's it exactly. And work the clay like this, without breaking it, smoothly."

She still held the broken fragment in her hand as she stepped round the corner of the wall to look. Paul, sitting cross-legged on the ground, had his back to her, and facing him, with a lump of red clay between his hands, which moved upon it deliberately, molding it with care, sat a Kafir. He was intent upon his work, and the brim of his hat, overhanging his eyes, prevented him from seeing her arrival. She stood for a moment watching; the two of them made a still group to which all the western sky and the wide land were a background. And then the clay fragment dropped from her hand, hit on a stone underfoot and cracked into pieces that dissolved the dumb curve of the mouth in ruin.

At the little noise it made, Paul turned sharply and the Kafir raised his head and looked at her. There was an instant of puzzled staring and then the Kafir lifted his hat to her.

"I 'll be going," he said, and began to rise to his feet.

"Don't," said Paul. "Don't go." He was looking at the girl expectantly, waiting for her to justify herself. Now was the time to confirm his faith in her. "Don't go," he repeated. "It's Miss Harding that I told you about." He hesitated a moment, and now his eyes appealed to her. "She 's from London," he said; "she 'll understand."

The Kafir waited, standing up, a slender, upright young man in worn discolored clothes. To Margaret then, as to Paul in his first encounter with him at the station, there was a shock in the pitiful, gross negro face that went with the pleasant, cultivated voice. It added something slavish to his travel-stained appearance that touched the girl's quick pity.

She stepped forward impulsively.

"Please don't go," she begged, "I should be so sorry. And Paul will introduce us."

He smiled. "It shall be as you like, of course," he answered. "Will you sit down? The grass is always dry here."

He made an oddly conventional gesture, as though the slope of the dam wall were a chair and he were going to place it for her.

"Oh, thanks," said Margaret, and sat down.

CHAPTER VI

The Kafir seated himself again in his old place and let his hand fall upon the mass of clay which he had been fashioning for Paul's instruction. He was the least perturbed of the three of them. He sank his finger-tops in the soft plasticity of the stuff, and smiled across it at the others, at the boy, embarrassed and not sure of Margaret yet, and at her, still mastered by her curiosity. It was almost as if he were used to being regarded with astonishment, and his self-possession had a touch of that deliberate lime-lit quality which distinguishes the private lives of preachers and actors and hunchbacks.

For the rest, he seemed to be about Margaret's age, clean run and of the middle stature. Watching him, Margaret was at a loss to discover what it was about him that seemed so oddly commonplace and familiar till she noted his clothes. They were "tweeds." Though he had apparently slept on the bare ground in them and made them a buffer between his skin and many emergencies of travel, they were still tweeds, such as any sprightly youth of Bayswater might affect for a week-end in the country.

It needed only a complexion and an attitude to render him inconspicuous on a golf-course, but in that place, under the majestic sun, with the heat-dazzle of the Karoo at his back, his very clothes made him the more incomprehensible.

Margaret realized that he was waiting for her to speak.

"You model, then?" she asked, striving to speak in an altogether matter-of-fact tone, as though to come across gifted, English-speaking negroes, giving art lessons in odd corners, were nothing unusual.

"Just a little," he answered. "Enough to help Paul to make a beginning. Eh, Paul?"

Paul nodded, turning to Margaret. "He knows lots," he said. "He 's been in London, too. It was there he learned to—to model."

Paul had a way of uttering the word "London" which conveyed to Margaret's ready sympathies some little part of what it meant to him, the bright unattainable home of wonderful activities, the land of heart's desire.

"In London?" She turned to the Kafir, "London seems a long way from here, doesn't it?"

"Yes; a long way." He was not smiling now. "It is seven months since I left London," he said; "and already it seems dim and unreal. It's as if I 'd dreamed about it and only remembered parts of my dream."

Paul was listening with that profound attention he seemed to give to all things.

"I don't feel it 's as far as all that," said Margaret. "But then, I was there two months ago. Probably that makes a difference."

She was only now beginning to realize the strangeness of the encounter, and as she talked her faculties, taken by ambush and startled from their functions, regained their alertness. She watched him composedly as he replied.

"Yes," he said. "And there are other differences, too. Since I left London I have not slept under a roof."

While he spoke he did not cease to finger the clay; as he turned it here and there, Margaret was able to see it was the head of a negro that he was shaping and the work was already well forward. It was, indeed, the same head whose unexpected scowl had astonished Paul; and as he moved it about, the still gloomy face of clay seemed to glance backward and forward as though it heard him and doubted.

"But why not?" demanded Margaret.

He seemed to hesitate before answering, and meanwhile his hands were busy and deft.

"Why not?" she repeated. "Seven months! I don't understand. Why have n't you slept under a roof all that time?"

"Well!" He smiled as he spoke at last. "You see—I don't speak Kafir. That's where the trouble is. When first I came up here, I went across to the southern districts, where Kafirs are pretty numerous. My idea was to live among them, in order to—well, to carry out an idea of mine."

He paused. "They didn't know what to make of you?" suggested Margaret.

"No—unless it was a corpse," he answered. "I don't really blame them; they must have been horribly suspicious of me. At the first kraal I came to—the first village, that is—I tried to make myself known to a splendid old chap, sitting over a little fire, who seemed to be in charge. That was awfully queer. Every man, woman and child in the place stood round and stared and made noises of distrust—that's what they sounded like; and the old chap just squatted in the middle and blinked up at me without a word. I 'd heard that most of the Kafirs about here could understand a little English, so I just talked away and tried to look innocent and useful and I hoped I was making the right impression. The chap listened profoundly till I had quite done, looking as though he were taking in every word of it. Then he lifted both arms, with exactly the movement of a cock when it 's going to crow, and two young fellows behind him leaned down and took hold of them and helped him very slowly to his feet. I made sure I 'd done the trick and that he was getting up to shake hands or something. But instead of that he groped about with his right hand in a blind, helpless kind of way, till one of his private secretaries put a knobherry, a bludgeon with a knob on the end, into it. And then, the poor old thing who had to be helped to his feet took one quick step in my direction and landed me a bang on the head with the club. I just remember that all the others burst into screams of laughter; I must have heard them as I went down."

"What a horrible thing!" exclaimed Margaret.

He smiled again, his teeth flashing brilliantly in his black face.

"It was awkward at the time," he admitted. "I came to later on the veld where they dragged me, with a lump on my head the size of my fist. And sore—by Jove! I was sore. Still, it's just possible I might have gone back for another try, if the first thing I saw hadn't been a tall black gentleman sitting at the entrance to the kraal with an assegai—a spear, that is—ready for me. I concluded it was n't good enough!"

"No!" Margaret agreed with him. "I should think not. But why should they receive you like that?"

"Perhaps," he suggested, "they learned it from the white men!"

("He means to look ironical," Margaret thought. "It isn't a leer; it 's irony handicapped by a negro face. Poor thing!")

"Then you had a bad time somewhere else?" she asked aloud. "Would you mind telling how? If you would, please don't tell me. But I 'd like to hear."

"Then you shall. Of course you shall." The look that tried to be ironical vanished. "If you could only know how grateful I am for—for this—for just your politeness. For you being what you are—"

"Please," interrupted Margaret. "Please don't. I want to hear. Just tell me."

There was something pathetic in his prompt obedience. He shifted ground at once like a child that is snubbed.

"It was in Capetown," he said; "when I landed from the boat. There was trouble on the boat, too; it was full of South Africans, and I had to have my meals alone and only use the deck at certain hours. I could n't even put my name down for a sovereign in the subscription they raised for the ship's band; the others wouldn't have it. I only got rid of that sovereign on the last evening, when the leader of the band came to me as I walked up and down on the boat deck. He passed me once or twice before he stopped to speak to me—making sure that nobody was looking. 'Hurry up!' he said, in a whisper. 'Where 's the quid you was going to subscribe?' 'Say Sir!' I said—for the fun of the thing. He couldn't manage it for fully a minute; his share of it wasn't more than half-a-crown. I went on walking and left him where I stood, but as I came back again he was ready for me. 'No offense, sir,' he said, quite clearly. I gave him the money and passed on. But he was still there when I turned again, and ever so anxious to put himself right with his conscience. 'D'you know what I 'd do with you niggers if I had my way?' he began, still in a large hoarse whisper, like air escaping from a pipe. 'I 'd 'ave you back into slavery, I would. I 'd sell the lot of you.' I laughed. 'You couldn't buy many of us with that sovereign!' I told him. Really, I rather liked that man."

"There are men like that," said Margaret thoughtfully. "And women, too."

"Yes, aren't there?" he agreed quickly. "But I 'd rather—it 's a pity you should know it. However, you wanted to hear about Capetown."

The afternoon was waning; the Kafir, with his hat at the back of his head and the rim of its brim framing his patient face, was set against a skyful of melting color. Even in face of those two attentive hearers, he sat as though in an immense and significant isolation, imposing himself upon them by virtue of his strong aloofness. Margaret was conscious of a great gulf set between them, an unbridgable hiatus of spirit and purpose. The man saw the life of the world not from above or below but as through a barred window, from a room in which he was prisoned and solitary.

He was entirely matter-of-fact as he told of his troubles and difficulties when he landed in Capetown; he spoke of them as things accepted, calling for no comment. On the steamer from England he had been told of the then recent experiences of a concert party of American negroes who visited Africa and had been obliged to sleep in the streets, but the tale had the sound of a smoking-room ingenuity and had not daunted him. But it was true for all that and he ran full-tilt into the application of it, when nightfall of the day of his arrival found him still seeking vainly for a lodging. He had money in plenty, but neither money nor fair words availed to bribe an innkeeper into granting him a bed.

"But I saw a lot of Capetown," he said. "I walked that afternoon and evening full twenty miles—once all the way out to Sea Point and back again. And I was perhaps a little discouraged: there were so many difficulties I hadn't expected. I knew quite well before I left England that I should have difficulties with the whites, but I hadn't allowed for practically the same difficulties with the blacks. There was a place behind the railway station, a tumble-down house in which about a dozen Kafirs were living, and I tried that. They fetched a policeman who ordered me away, and I had to go. You see, they could n't make head or tail of me; I was much too unusual for them to keep company with. So about midnight I found myself walking down towards the jetty at the foot of Adderly Street. You don't know Capetown, I suppose? The jetty sticks out into the bay; it 's no great use except for a few boats to land and at night it serves the purpose of the Thames Embankment for men who have nowhere else to go. I was very tired by then. As I passed the Van Riebeck statue, a woman spoke to me."

He hesitated, examining Margaret's listening face, doubtfully.

"I understand," she said. "Go on. A white woman, was it?"

"Yes, a white woman," he replied with the first touch of bitterness she had seen in him. "A poor devil who had fallen so far that she had lost even the scruples of her trade. I heard her coughing in the shadow when she was some distance from me, and saw her come out into the lamplight still breathless, with the shadows making a ruin of her poor painted face. But she had herself in hand; she was game. At the moment I was near enough, she smiled—I suppose the last thing they forget is how to smile. 'Koos!' she called to me, softly. 'Koos!' 'Koos' is the Taal for cousin, you know; it 's a sort of familiar address. I couldn't pass her without a word, so I stopped. 'You ought to see to that cough,' I told her. She was horribly surprised, of course, and I rather think she started to bolt, but her cough stopped her. It was a bad case, that—a very bad case, and of course she wasn't sufficiently clad or nourished. I advised her to get home to bed, and she leaned against the wall wiping her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief wrapped round her finger so as not to smudge the paint, and stared at me with a sort of surrender. I got her to believe at last that I was what I said—a doctor—"

"Are you a doctor?" interrupted Margaret.

"Yes," he answered. "I hold the London M.B.; oh, I knew what I was talking about. When she understood it, she changed at once. She was pretty near the end of her tether, and now she had a chance, her first chance, to claim some one's pity. The lives they lead, those poor smirched things! She had a landlady; can you imagine that landlady? And unless she brought money with her, she could not even go back to her lodgings. She told me all about it, coughing in between, under the windows of a huge shopful of delicate women's wear, with a big arc-light spluttering above the empty street and Van Riebeck looking over our heads to Table Mountain. Wasn't it strange—us two homeless people, cast out by our own folk and rejected by the other color?"

"Yes," answered the girl; "very strange and sad."

"It was like a dream," said the Kafir. "It was weird. But I like the idea that she accosted a possible customer and found a deliverer. I gave her the money she needed, of course, and listened to her lungs and wrote her a prescription on the back of a card she produced. No real use, you know—just something to go on with. She was past any real help. No use going into details, but it was a bad case!"

He shook his head thoughtfully, in a mood of gloom.

"And then?" asked Margaret.

"Oh, then she went away," he said, "and I watched her go. She crossed the road, holding up her skirt clear of the mud; she was a neat, appealing little figure in spite of everything. She passed with her head drooped to the corner opposite and there she turned and waved her hand to me, I waved back and she went into the shadows. She 's in the Valley of the Shadows now, though; she hadn't far to go.

"But you can't conceive how still and wonderful it was on the jetty, with the water all round and the moon making a broad track of beams across it, and over the bay the bulk of inland hills massive and inscrutable. It was like looking at Africa from a great distance; and yet, you know, I was born here!"

His hands had fallen idle on the clay, but as he ceased to speak he began to work again, with eyes cast down to his task. The light was already failing, and as the three of them waited in the silence that followed on his words, there reached them the dull pulse of the gourd-drum at the farm, stealing upon their consciousness gradually. Paul frowned as he recognized it, coming out of the trance of his faculties unwillingly. He had sat motionless with parted lips through the Kafir's story, so still in his absorption that the others had forgotten his presence.

"That 's for me," he said, slowly, but took his time about getting up. He was looking at the Kafir with the solemn, sincere eyes of a child.

"I would like," he said, "to make a clay of that woman."

"Eh!" The Kafir suppressed his smile. "Time enough, Paul. Plenty of time and plenty of clay for you to do that—and plenty of women, too."

Paul was on his feet by now, looking down at the other two.

"But," he hesitated, "I must make it," he said. "I must."

The Kafir nodded. "All right," he said. "You make it, Paul, and show it to me. As you see her, you know; that 's how you must do it."

"Yes," said Paul seriously. "Brave and smiling and dying. I know!"

The gourd-drum throbbed insistently. He moved towards it reluctantly. "Good night," he said.

"Goodnight, Paul!"

A moment later he was vague in the growing dusk, and they heard his long whistle of answer to the drum.

Margaret, with her chin propped on her hand, sat on the slope of the wall. The Kafir began to put away the clay on which he had been working. Paul's store was an abandoned ant-bear's hole across which there trailed the broad dry leaves of a tenacious gourd. He put the unfinished head carefully in this receptacle, and then drew from it another object, which he held out to the girl.

"A bit of Paul's work," he explained.

She took it in her hand, but for the time being her interest in the immaturities of art gave place to the strange realities in whose presence she felt herself to be. She glanced at it perfunctorily, a little sketch of a woman carrying a basket, well observed and sympathetic.

"Yes," she answered. "He has a real gift. But just now I can't think about that. I 'm thinking about you."

"I 've saddened you," he said. "I didn't want to do that. I should have held my tongue. But if you could know what it means to talk to you at all, you 'd forgive me. I 'm not regretting, you know; I 'm going through it of my own free will; but it 's a lonely business. I 'm always glad of a tramp making his way along the railway line, and Paul was a godsend. But you! Oh, you 'll never understand how splendid it is to tell you anything and have you listen to it."

He spoke almost humbly, but with a warmth of sincerity that moved her.

"You 'll have to tell me more," she said. "You 'll be coming here again?"

"Indeed I will," he replied quickly. "I 'll be here often, if only in the hope that you 'll come down to the dam sometimes. But—there 's one thing."

"Yes?" asked Margaret.

"You know, it won't do for you to be seen with me," he said gently. "It won't do at all."

Margaret laughed. "I think I can bear up against the ill-report of the neighborhood," she said. "My kingdom is not of this particular world. We won't bother about that, please."

The Kafir shook his head. "There 's no help for it," he answered. "I must bother about it. It bothers me so much that unless you will let me know best in this (for I really do know) I 'll never come this way again. Do you think I could bear it, if people talked about you for suffering the company of a nigger? You don't know this country. It 's a dangerous place for people who go against its prejudices. So if I am to see you, for God's sake be careful. I 'll look forward to it like—like a sick man looking forward to health; but not if you are to pay for it. Not at that price."

"Oh, well!" Margaret found the topic unpleasant. "I don't see any risk. But you 're rather putting me into the position of the bandmaster on the ship, are n't you? I 'm to have the sovereign; that is, I 'm to hear what I want to hear; but only when nobody 's looking. However, it shall be as you say."

"Thank you." He managed to sound genuinely grateful. "You 're awfully kind to me. You shall hear everything you want to hear. Paul can always lay hands on me for you."

Margaret rose to her feet. The evening struck chill upon her and she coughed. In the growing dark, the Kafir knit his brows at the sound of it.

"I must be going now," she said. "Paul didn't introduce me after all, did he? But I don't think it's necessary."

She stood a little above him on the slope of the wall, a tall, slight figure seen against its dark bulk.

"I know your name," he answered.

"And I know yours," she put in quickly. "Tell me if I 'm not right. You 're Kamis. I 've heard about you this afternoon."

He stared at her for a space of seconds. "Yes," he said slowly. "I 'm Kamis. But—who told you?"

She laughed quietly. "You see," she said, "I 've got something to tell, too. Oh, I know lots about you; you 'll have to come and hear that, at any rate."

She put out her hand to him.

"Good night, Mr. Kamis," she said.

The Kafir bared his head before he took her hand. He seemed to have some difficulty in speaking.

"Good night," he said. "Good night! I'll never forget your goodness."

He let her go and she turned back to the path that should take her past the farmhouse and the kraals to the Sanatorium and dinner. At the turn of the wall, its lights met her with their dazed, unwinking stare, shining from the dining-room which had no part in the spacious night of the Karoo and those whose place is in the darkness. She had gone a hundred yards before she looked back.

Behind her the western sky treasured still the last luminous dregs of day, that leaked from it like water one holds in cupped hands. In the middle of it, high upon the dam wall, a single human figure, swart and motionless, stood to watch her out of sight.

CHAPTER VII

"Looks pooty bad for the huntin'," remarked Mr. Samson suddenly, glancing up from the crinkly sheets of the letter he was reading. "Here 's a feller writin' to me that the ground 's like iron already. You hunt, Miss Harding?"

"Oh, dear, yes," replied Margaret cheerfully. "Lions and elephants and—er—eagles. Such sport, you know!"

"Hah!" Mr. Samson shook his head at her indulgently. "Your grandmother wouldn't have said that, young lady. But you youngsters, you don't know what 's good for you—by gad! Eagles, eh?"

Once in a week, breakfast at the Sanatorium gained a vivid and even a breathless quality from the fact that one found the weekly letters piled between one's knife and fork, as though Mrs. Jakes knew—no doubt she did—that her guests would make the chief part of their meal on the contents of the envelopes. The Kafir runner who brought them from the station arrived in the early dawn and nobody saw him but Mrs. Jakes; she was the human link between the abstractions of the post-office and those who had the right to open the letters and be changed for the day by their contents. It was not invariably that the mail included letters for her, and these too would be put in order on the breakfast table, under the tap of the urn, and not opened till the others were down. Then Mrs. Jakes also, like a well-connected Jack Horner, could pull from the eloquence of her correspondents an occasional plum of information to pass round the table.

"Only think!" she would offer. "The Duchess of York has got another baby. Let me see now! How many does that make?"

It was always Mr. Samson who was down first on mail-mornings, and his was always the largest budget. His seat was at the end of the table nearest the window, and he would read sitting a little sideways in his chair, with the letter held well up to the light and his right eyebrow clenched on a monocle. Fat letters of many sheets, long letters on thin foreign paper, newspapers, circulars—they made up enough to keep him reading the whole morning, and thoughtful most of the afternoon. From this feast he would scatter crumbs of fashionable or sporting intelligence, and always he would have something to say about the state of the weather in England when the post left, three weeks before.

"Just think!" he continued. "Frost already—and fogs! Frost, Miss Harding; instead of this sultry old dust-heap. How does that strike you? Eh?"

"It leaves me cold," returned Margaret agreeably.

"Cold!" he retorted, snorting. "Well, I 'd give something to shiver again, something handsome. What 's that you 're saying, Ford?"

Ford had passed a post-card to Mrs. Jakes to read and now received it back from her.

"It 's Van Zyl," he replied. "He writes that he 'll be coming past this afternoon, about tea time, and he 'll look in. I was telling Mrs. Jakes."

"Good!" said Mr. Samson.

"It's a man I know," Ford explained to Margaret. "He looks me up occasionally. He 's in the Cape Mounted Police and a Dutchman. You 'll be in for tea?"

"When somebody 's coming? Of course I will," said Margaret. "A policeman, is he?"

"Yes," answered Ford. "He 's a sub-inspector, an officer; but he was a trooper three years ago, and he 's quite a chap to know. You see what you think of him."

"I 'll look at him carefully," said Margaret. "But tell me some more, please! Is he a mute, inglorious Sherlock Holmes, or what?"

Ford laughed. "No," he said. "No, it 's not that sort of thing, at all. It 's just that he 's a noticeable person, don't you know? He 's the kind of chap who 's simply born to put into a uniform and astride of a horse; you 'll see what I mean when he comes."

Mrs. Jakes leaned to the right to catch Margaret's eye round the urn.

"My dear," she said seriously. "Mr. Van Zyl is the image of a perfect gentleman."

"All right!" said Margaret. "Between you, you 've filled me with the darkest forebodings. But so long as it's a biped, and without feathers, I 'll do my best."

Her own letters were three in number. One was from an uncle who was also her solicitor and trustee, the source of checks and worldly counsel. His letter opened playfully; the legal uncle, writing in the inner chamber of his offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields, hoped that she did not find the local fashions in dress irksome, and made reference to three mosquitos and a smile. The break of a paragraph brought him to business matters and the epistle concluded with an allusion to the effect of a Liberal Government on markets. It was, thought Margaret, a compact revelation of the whole mind of the legal uncle, and wondered why she should get vaguely impatient with his implied suggestion that she was in an uncivilized country. The next was from the strong-minded aunt who had imposed austerity upon her choice of clothes for her travels—a Chinese cracker of a letter, detonating along three sheets in crisp misstatements that had the outward form of epigrams. The aunt related, tersely, her endeavor to cultivate a physique with Indian clubs and the consequent accident to her maid. "But arms like pipe-stems can be trusted to break like pipe-stems," she concluded hardily. "I 've given her cash and a character, and the new one is fat. No pipe-stems about her, though she bruises with the least touch!"

These two she read at the breakfast table, drinking from her coffee-cup between the bottom of one sheet and the top of the next, savoring them for a vintage gone flat and perished. It came to her that their writers lived as in dim glass cases, seeing the world beyond their own small scope as a distance of shadows, indeterminate and void, while trivialities and toys that were close to them bulked like impending doom. She laid down the legal uncle in the middle of a sentence to hear of Van Zyl and did not look back to pick up the context when she resumed her reading. The legal uncle, in her theory, had no context; he ranked as a printer's error. It was the third letter which she carried forth when she left the table, to read again on the stoep.

The jargon of the art schools saves its practitioners much trouble in accounting for those matters and things which come under their observation, since a phrase is frequently indistinguishable from a fact and very filling at the price. But Margaret was not ready with a name for that quality in the third letter which caused her to read it through again and linger out its substance. It was from a girl who had been her school-fellow and later her friend, and later still a gracious and rarely-seen acquaintance, smiling a welcome at chance meetings and ever remoter and more abstracted from those affairs which occupied Margaret's days. The name of a Kensington square stood at the head of her letter as her address; Margaret knew it familiarly, from the grime on the iron railings which held its melancholy garden a prisoner, to the deep areas of its houses that gave one in passing glimpses of spacious kitchens under the roots of the dwellings. Three floors up from the pavement, Amy Hollyer, in her brown-papered room, with the Rossetti prints on the wall and the Heleu etching above the mantel, had set her mild and earnest mind on paper for Margaret's reading, news, comment, small jest and smaller dogma, a gentle trickle of gossip about things and people who were already vague in the past. It was little, it was trivial, but through it there ran, like the red thread in a ripping-cord, a vein of zest, of sheer gusto in the movement and thrill of things. It suggested an ant lost in a two-inch high forest of lawn-grass, but it rendered, too, some of the ant's passionate sense of adventure.

"She 's alive," thought Margaret, laying the letter at last in her lap. "Dear old Amy, what a wonderful world she lives in! But then, she 'd furnish any world with complications."

Twenty feet way, Ford had his little easel between his outstretched legs and was frowning absorbedly from it to the Karoo and back again. Twenty feet away on her other side, Mr. Samson was crackling a three-weeks-old copy of The Morning Post into readable dimensions. Before her, across the railing of the stoep, the Karoo lifted its blind face to the gathering might of the sun.

"Even this," continued Margaret. "She 'd find this inexhaustible. She was born with an appetite for life. I seem to have lost mine."

From the great front door emerged to the daylight the solid rotundity of Fat Mary, billowing forth on flat bare feet and carrying in her hand a bunch of the long crimson plumes of the aloe, that spiky free-lance of the veld which flaunts its red cockade above the abomination of desolation. Fat Mary spied Margaret and came padding towards her, her smile lighting up her vast black face with the effect of "some great illumination surprising a festal night."

"For Missis," she remarked, offering the crimson bunch.

Margaret sat up in her chair with an exclamation. "Flowers!" she said. "Are they flowers? They 're more like great thick feathers. Where did you get them, Mary?"

Fat Mary giggled awkwardly. "A Kafir bring 'um," she explained. "He say—for Missis Harding, an' give me a ticky (a threepenny piece). Fool—that Kafir!"

Margaret stared, holding the fat, fleshy crimson things in her hands.

"Oh!" she said, understanding. "Where is he, Mary? The Kafir, I mean?"

Fat Mary shook her head placidly. "Gone," she said; and waved a great hand to the utter distance of the heat haze. "That Kafir gone, Missis. He come before breakfus'; Missis in bed. Say for Missis Harding an' give me ticky. Fool! Talk English—an' boots!"

She shrugged mightily to express the distrust and contempt she could not put into words.

"Boots!" she repeated darkly.

"Well," said Margaret, "they 're very pretty, anyhow."

Fat Mary wrinkled her nose. "Stink," she observed. "Missis smell 'em. Stink like a hell! Missis throw 'um away."

Margaret looked at the stout woman and smiled. Fat Mary's hostility to the Kafir and the aloe plumes and the ticky was plainly the fruit of jealousy.

"I won't throw them away yet," she said. "I want to look at them first. But did you know the Kafir, Mary?"

"Me!" Fat Mary drew herself up. "No, Missis—not know that skellum. Never see him before. What for that Kafir come here, an' bring stink-flowers to my Missis? An' boots? Fool, that Kafir! Fool!"

"All right, Mary," said Margaret, conciliatingly. "Very likely he won't come again. So never mind this time."

Fat Mary smiled ruefully. Most of her emotions found expressions in smiles.

"That Kafir come again," she said thoughtfully, "I punch 'im!"

And comforted by this resolve, she retired along the stone stoep and betook herself once more to her functions indoors.

At his post further along the stoep, Ford was looking up with a smile, for the sounds of Fat Mary's grievance had reached him. Margaret did not notice his attention; she was turning over the great bouquet of cold flaunting flowers which had come to her out of the wilderness, as though to remind her that at the heart of it there was a voice crying.

Ford's friend was punctual to his promise to arrive for tea. Upon the stroke of half-past four he reined in his big horse at the foot of the steps and swung stiffly from the saddle. He came, indeed, with circumstances of pomp, armed men riding before him and captives padding in the dust between them. Old Mr. Samson sighted him while he was yet afar off and cried the news and the others came to look.

"Who 's he got with him?" demanded Mr. Samson, fumbling his papers into the pockets of his writing case. "Looks like a bally army. Can you see what it is, Ford?"

Ford was staring with narrowed eyes through the sunshine.

"Yes," he said slowly. "He 's got prisoners. But what 's he bringing them here for?"

"Prisoners? Oh, do let me look!"

Margaret came to his side and followed his pointing finger with her eyes. A blot of haze was moving very slowly towards them over the surface of the ground, and through it as she watched there broke here and there the shapes of men and horses traveling in that cloud of dust.

"Why, they 're miles away," she exclaimed. "They'll be hours yet."

"Say half-an-hour," suggested Ford, his face still puckered with the effort to see. "They 're moving briskly, you know. He 's shoving them along."

"But why prisoners?" enquired Margaret. "What prisoners could he get on the Karoo? There 's nobody to arrest."

"Van Zyl seems to have found somebody, anyhow," answered Ford. "I had a glimpse of people on foot. But I can't imagine why he brings 'em here."

"Ask him," suggested Mr. Samson. "What 's your hurry? Wait till he comes and then ask him."

First Mrs. Jakes and then the doctor joined the spectators on the stoep as the party drew out of the distance and defined itself as a string of Kafirs on foot, herded upon their way by five Cape Mounted Police with a tall young officer riding in the rear. It was a monstrous phenomenon to emerge thus from the vagueness and mystery of the haze, and Margaret uttered a sharp exclamation of distress as it came close and showed itself in all its miserable detail. There were perhaps twenty Kafirs, men and women both, dusty, lean creatures with the eyes, at once timorous and untameable, of wild animals. They shuffled along dejectedly, their feet lifting the dust in spurts and wreaths, their backs bent to the labor of the journey. Three or four of the men were handcuffed together, and these made the van of the unhappy body, but save for these fetters, there was nothing to distinguish one from another. Their separate individualities seemed merged in a single slavishness, and as they turned their heads to look at the white people elevated on the stoep, they showed only a row of white hopeless eyes. Beside them as they plodded, the tall beautiful horses had a look of nonchalance and superiority, and the mounted men, bored and thirsty, looked over their heads as perfunctorily as drovers keeping watch on docile cattle.

"How horrible!" said Margaret, in a low voice, for the officer, followed by an orderly, was at the foot of the steps.

The prisoners and their guards did not halt; they continued their way past the house and on towards the opposite horizon. Their backs, as they departed, showed gray with clinging dust.

Sub-Inspector Van Zyl, booted and spurred, trim in his dust-smirched blue uniform, with his holster at his hip and the sling across his tight chest, lifted his hand in the abrupt motions of a salute as he received Mrs. Jakes' greeting.

"Kind of you," he said, with a sort of curt cordiality and the least touch in life of the thick Dutch accent. "Most kind! Tea 's the very thing I 'd like. Thank you."

At sight of Margaret, grave and young, as different from Mrs. Jakes as if she had been of another sex, a slight spark lit in his eye for a moment and there was an even stronger abruptness of formality in his salute. His curiously direct gaze rested upon her several times during the administration of tea in the drawing-room, where he sat upright in his chair, with knees apart, as though he were still astride of a horse. He was a man made as by design for the wearing of official cloth. His blunt, neatly-modeled Dutch face, blond as straw where it was not tanned to the hue of the earth of the Karoo, had the stolid, responsible cast that is the ensign of military authority. His uniform stood on him like a skin; and his mere unconsciousness of the spurs on his boots and the revolver on his hip strengthened his effect of a man habituated to the panoply and accoutrement of war. Even his manners, precise and ordered like a military exercise, never slackened into humanity; the Dutch Sub-Inspector of Cape Mounted Police might have been a Prussian Lieutenant with the eyes of the world on him.

"Timed myself to get here for tea," he explained to Ford. "Just managed it, though. Hot work traveling, to-day."

Hotter, thought Margaret, for those of his traveling companions who had no horses under them, and who would not arrive anywhere in time for tea.

"You seem to have made a bag," replied Ford. "What 's been the trouble?"

"Fighting and looting," answered Sub-Inspector Van Zyl carelessly. "A row between two kraals, you know, and a man killed."

"Any resistance?" enquired Ford.

"A bit," said Van Zyl. "My sergeant got his head split open with an axe. Those niggers in the south are an ugly lot and they 'll always fight. You see, it 's only about twenty years ago they were at war with us; it 'll need another twenty to knock the fighting tradition out of 'em."

"They looked meek enough as they passed," remarked Ford. "There didn't seem to be a kick left among them."

Van Zyl nodded over the brim of his tea-cup. "There isn't," he said shortly. "They 've had the kick taken out of 'em."

He drank imperturbably, and Margaret had a momentary blurred vision of defeated, captured Kafirs in the process of having the kick extracted from them and the serene, fair-haired sub-inspector superintending its removal with unruffled, professional calm.

"Been here long, Miss Harding?"

Van Zyl addressed her suddenly across the room.

"Not quite long enough to understand," she replied. "Did you say those poor creatures were fighting—among themselves?"

"Yes."

"But why?" she persisted. "What did they fight for?"

He shrugged his neat shoulders. "Why does a Kafir do anything?" he enquired. "They told a cock-and-bull story that seems to be getting fashionable among them of late, about a son of one of their old chiefs appearing among them dressed like a white man. He went from kraal to kraal, talking English and giving money, and at one kraal the headman, an old chap who used to be a native constable of ours, actually seems to have laid his stick across some wandering nigger who couldn't explain what he wanted. The next kraal heard of this, and decided at once that a chief had been insulted, and the next thing was a fight and the old headman with an assegai through him. But if you want my opinion, Miss Harding—it does n't make such a good story, but I 've had to do with niggers all my life—"

"Yes?" said Margaret. "Tell me."

"Well," said Van Zyl, "my opinion is that if the old headman had n't been the owner of twelve head of cattle, all ready to be stolen, he might have gone on whacking stray Kafirs all his life without hurting anybody's feelings."