Front matter (continued 4)

Christian watched him lift his glass and drink. He was perplexed; these folk seemed to have a language of their own and to be incomprehensible to ordinary folk.

"Worth it?" he repeated. "Fix what?" he demanded.

"Nod 's good 's wink," answered the other. "Don't want to shout it. Bend your long ear down to me—tell you."

They had a corner by the bar to themselves. Near the window the barman had a customer after his own heart and was repeating to him an oracular saying by his youngest daughter but two, glancing sideways while he spoke to see if Christian and the other were listening.

Christian bent, and the hot breath of the other, reeking of the day's drinking, beat on his neck and the side of his head. The hoarse whisper, with its infernal suggestion, seemed to come warm from a pit of vileness within the man's body.

"Is that plain 'nough?"

Christian stood upright again, trembling from head to foot with some cold emotion far transcending any rage he had ever felt. For some instant he could not lift his hand; he had seen the last foul depths of evil and was paralyzed. The other lifted his glass again. His movement released the Boer from the spell.

He took the man by the wrist that held the glass with so deadly a deliberation that the barman missed his hostile purpose and continued to talk, leaning with his fat, mottled arms folded on the bar.

"What you doin', y' fool?" The cry was from the florid youth.

"Ah!" Christian put out his strength with a maniac fury, and the youth's hand and the glass in it were dashed back into that person's face. No hand but his own struck him, and the countenance Christian saw as a blurred white disk broke under the blow and showed red cracks. He struck again and again; the barman shouted and men came running in from outside. Christian dropped the wrist he held and turned away. Those in the doorway gave him passage. On the floor in the corner the florid youth bled and vomited.

Christian knew him later as a bold and serene face in a plush photograph frame, signed across the lower right corner: "Yours blithely, Boy Bailey."

How he made inquiries for the girl's room and came at last to the door of it was never a clear memory to him. But he could always recall that small austere interior of whitewash and heat-warped furniture to which he entered at her call, to find her sitting on the narrow bed. He came to her bereft of the few faculties she had left him, grave, almost stern, gripping himself by force of instinct to save himself from the outburst of emotion to which the scene in the bar had made him prone. Everything tender and protective in his nature was awake and crying out; he saw her as the victim of a sacrilegious outrage, threatened by unnamable dangers.

She looked at him under the lids of her eyes, quickly alive to the change in him. It is necessary to record that she, too, had made inquiries since the morning, and learned of the farm that stood at his back to guarantee him solid.

"I wondered if you 'd come," she said. "That feller in Capetown has n't answered."

"I said I 'd come," he replied gravely.

"Yes, I know. All the same, I thought—you know, when a person 's in hard luck, nothing goes right, an' a girl, when she 's in a mess, is anybody's fool. Is n't that right?"

She knew her peril then; she lived open-eyed in face of it.

"You shall not be anybody's fool," he answered. "If anybody tries to be bad to you, I 'll kill him."

He was still standing just within the closed door, no nearer to her than the size of the little chamber compelled.

"Won't you sit down?" she invited.

"Eh?" His contemplation of her seemed to absorb him and make him absent-minded. "No," he replied, when she repeated her invitation.

"As you like," she conceded, wondering whether after all he was going to be amenable to the treatment she proposed for him. It crossed her mind that he was thinking of getting something for his money and her silly mouth tightened. If her sex was one of her assets, her virtue—the fanatic virtue which is a matter of prejudice rather than of principle,—was one of her liabilities. She had nothing to sell him.

"You know," she said, "the worst of it is, none of us have n't had any salary for weeks. That's what puts us in the cart. We 're all broke. If Padden had let us have a bit, we would n't be stranded like this. And the queer thing is, Gus Padden 's the last man you 'd have picked for a wrong 'un. Fat, you know, and beaming; a sort of fatherly way, he had. He used to remind me of Santa Claus. An' now he 's thrown us down this way, and how I 'm going to get up again I can't say." She gave him one of her shrewd upward glances; "tell me," she added.

"I can tell you," he replied.

"How, then?" she asked.

"Marry me," said Christian. "This acting—it's no good. There 's men that is bad all around you. One of them—I broke his face like a window-glass downstairs just now—he said you was—bad, like him. And it was time to see what he was worth. Unless you can you are ach—so—so little, so weak. Marry me, my kleintje and you shall be nobody's fool."

The girl on the bed stared at him dumbly: this was what she had never expected. Salvation had come to her with both hands full of gifts. She began to laugh foolishly.

"Marry me," repeated Christian. "Will you?"

She jumped up from her seat, still laughing and took two steps to him.

"Will I?" she cried. "Will a duck swim? Yes, I will; yes, yes, yes!"

Christian looked at her dazed; events were sweeping him off his feet. He took one of her hands and dropped it again and turned from her abruptly. With his arm before his face he leaned against the door and burst into weeping. The girl patted him on the back soothingly.

"Take it easy," she said kindly. "You'll be all right, never fear."

"That 's all the Port Elizabeth ones," said Paul. "How many do you make them?"

Christian du Preez looked up uncertainly. "Allemachtag," he said. "I forgot to count. I was thinking."

"Oh. About the tramp?"

"Yes. Paul, what did you bring him in for? Couldn't you see he was a skellum?"

Paul nodded. "Yes, I could see that. But—skellums are hungry and tired, too, sometimes."

His father smiled in a worried manner. He and Paul never talked intimately with each other, but an intimacy existed of feeling and thought. They took many of the same things for granted.

"Like us," he agreed. "Come on to supper, Paul."

CHAPTER X

It was nearing the lunch hour when Margaret walked down from the Sanatorium to the farm, leaving Ford and Mr. Samson to their unsociable preoccupations on the stoep, and found Paul among the kraals. He had some small matter of work in hand, involving a wagon-chain and a number of yokes; these were littered about his feet in a liberal disorder and he was standing among them contemplating them earnestly and seemingly lost in meditation. He turned slowly as Margaret called his name, and woke to the presence of his visitor with a lightening of his whole countenance.

"Were you dreaming about models?" inquired Margaret. "You were very deep in something."

Paul shook his head. "It was about wagons," he answered seriously. "I was just thinking how they are always going away from places and coming to more places. That's all."

"Wishing you had wheels instead of feet? I see," smiled the girl. "What a traveler you are, Paul."

He smiled back. In their casual meetings they had talked of this before and Paul had found it possible to tell her of his dreams and yearnings for what lay at the other end of the railway and beyond the sun mist that stood like a visible frontier about his world.

"I shall travel some day," he answered. "Kamis says that a man is different from a vegetable because he hasn't got roots. He says that the best way to see the world is to go on foot."

"I expect he 's right," said Margaret. "It's jolly for you, Paul, having him to talk to. Do you know where he is now?"

"Yes," answered the boy.

"Well, then, when can I see him? He told me you could always let him know."

"This afternoon?" suggested Paul. "If you could come down to the dam wall then, he can be there. There is a signal I make for him in my window and he always sees it."

"I 'll come then," promised Margaret. "Thank you, Paul. But that signal—that 's rather an idea. Did you think of it or did he?"

"He did," answered Paul. "He said it wouldn't trouble him to look every day at a house that held a friend. And he does, every day. There was only once he didn't come, and then he had twisted his ankle a long way off on the veld, walking among ant-bear holes in the dark."

"Which window is it?" asked Margaret.

Paul pointed. "That end one," he showed her.

Margaret looked, and a figure lounging against one of the doorposts of the house took her look for himself and bowed.

"That's nobody," said Paul quickly. "Don't look that way. It 's—it 's a tramp that came to me—and I gave him a shilling to keep still and be modeled—and he knows my mother—and he 's staying in the house. He 's beastly; don't look that way."

His solicitude and his jealousy made Margaret smile.

"I shouldn't see him if I did," she said. "Don't you worry, Paul. Then—this afternoon?"

"Under the dam," replied Paul. "Good-by. He's waiting for a chance to come and speak to you."

"Let him wait," replied Margaret, and turned homewards, scrupulously averting her face from the ingratiating figure of Boy Bailey.

That pensioner of fortune watched her pass along the trodden path to the Sanatorium till she was clear of the farm, and then put himself into easy movement to go across to Paul. The uncanny combination of Christian's clothes and his own personality drifted through the arrogant sunlight and over the sober earth, a monstrous affront to the temperate eye. He was like a dangerous clown or a comical Mephistopheles. Paul, pondering as he came, thought of a pig equipped with the venom of the puff-adder of the Karoo. As he drew near, the boy fell to work on the chain and yokes.

"Well, my dear boy." The man's shadow and his voice reached Paul together. He did not look up, but went on loosening the cross bar of a yoke from its link.

"There 's more in this place of yours than meets the eye at a first glance," said Boy Bailey. "You 're well off, my lad. Not only milk and honey for the trouble of lifting 'em to your mouth, but dalliance, silken dalliance in broad daylight. What would your dear mother say if she knew?"

"I don't know," said the boy. "Ask her?"

"And spoil sport? Laddie, you 'll know me better some day. Not for worlds would I give a chap's game away. It's not my style. Poor I may be, but not that. No. I admire your taste, my boy. You 've an eye in your head. But you forgot to introduce the lady to your mother's old friend. However, you 'll be seeing her again, no doubt, an' then—"

"I didn't forget," said Paul. Still he did not look up. The iron links shook in his hands, and he detached the stout crosspiece and laid it across his knees.

"Eh?" Boy Bailey's face darkened a little, and his wary eyes narrowed. He looked down on the boy's bent back unpleasantly.

"You didn't?" he said. "I see. Well, well. A chap that 's poor must put up with these slights." His slightly hoarse voice became bland again. "But have it your own way; Heaven knows, I don't mind. She 's a saucy little piece, all the same, an' p'r'aps you 're right not to risk her with me. If I got her by herself, there 's no saying—"

He stopped; the boy had looked up and was rising. His face stirred memories in Boy Bailey; it roused images that were fogged by years, but terrible yet. In the instant's grace that was accorded him, he felt his wrist gripped once more and saw the livid clenched face, tense with the spirit of murder, that burned above his ere his own hand and the glass it held were dashed athwart his eyes. The boy was rising and he held the cross-bar of the yoke like a weapon.

Boy Bailey made to speak but failed. With a sort of squeak he turned and set off running towards the house, pounding in panic over the ground with his grotesque clothes flapping about him like abortive wings. Paul, on his feet amid the tangled chains, watched him with the heavy cross-bar in his hand.

If he had any clear feeling at all, it was disappointment at the waste of a rare energy. He could have killed the man in the heat of it, and now it was wasted. Boy Bailey was whole, his pulpy face not beaten in, his bones functioning adequately as he ran instead of creaking in fractures to each squirm of his broken body. It was an occasion squandered, lost, thrown away. It had the unsatisfying quality of mere prevention when it might have been a complete cure.

Margaret returned to the Sanatorium in time to meet Mrs. Jakes in the hall as she led the way to lunch and to receive the unsmiling movement of recognition which had been her lot ever since the night of Dr. Jakes' adventure. Contrary to Margaret's expectation, Mrs. Jakes had not come round; no treatment availed to convince her that she had not been made a victim of black treachery and the doctor wantonly exposed and humiliated. When she was cornered and had to listen to explanations, she heard them with her eyes on the ground and her face composed to an irreconcilable woodenness. When Margaret had done—she tried the line of humorous breeziness, and it was a mistake—Mrs. Jakes sniffed.

"If you please," she said frigidly, "we won't talk about it. The subject is very painful. No doubt all you say is very true, but I have my feelings."

"So have I," said Margaret. "And mine are being hurt."

"I am extremely sorry," replied the little wan woman, with stiff dignity. "If you wish it, I will ask the doctor to recommend you a Sanatorium elsewhere, where you may be more comfortable."

"You know that is n't what I want," protested Margaret. "This is all very silly. I only want you to understand that I have n't done you any harm and that I did the best I could and let's stop acting as if one of us had copied the other's last hat."

"No doubt I am slow of understanding, Miss Harding," retorted Mrs. Jakes formidably. "However—if you have quite finished, I 'm in rather a hurry and I won't detain you."

And she made her escape in good order, marching unhurried down the matted corridor and showing to Margaret a retreating view of a rigid black alpaca back.

Dr. Jakes was equally effective in his treatment of the incident. He went to work upon her lungs quite frankly, sending her to bed for a couple of days and gathering all his powers to undo the harm of which he had been the cause. On the third day, there was a further interview in the study, a businesslike affair, conducted without unnecessary conversation, with monosyllabic question and reply framed on the most formal models. At the close of it, he leaned back in his chair and faced her across the corner of his desk. He was irresistibly plump and crumpled in that attitude, with his sad, uncertain eyes expressing an infinite apprehension and all the resignation of a man who has lost faith in mercy.

"That is all, then, Miss Harding. Unless—?"

The last word was breathed hoarsely. Margaret waited. He gazed at her owlishly, one nervous hand fumbling on the blotting-pad before him.

"There is nothing else you want to say to me?" he asked.

"I can't think of anything," said Margaret.

He continued to look at her, torpidly, helplessly. It was impossible to divine what fervencies of inarticulate emotion burned and quickened behind his mask of immobile flesh. The rumpled hair, short and blond, lay in disorder upon his forehead and his lips were parted impotently. He had to blink and swallow before he could speak again, visibly recalling his wits.

"If you don't tell me, I can't answer," he said, and sighed heavily. He raised himself in his big chair irritably.

"Nothing more, then?" he asked. "Well—take care of yourself, Miss Harding. That 's all you have to do. Whatever happens, your business is to take care of yourself; it's what you came here for."

"I will," answered Margaret. She wished she could find a plane on which it would be possible to talk to him frankly, without evasions and free from the assumptions which his wife wove about him. But the resignation of his eyes, the readiness they expressed to accept blows and penalties, left her powerless. The gulf that separated them could not be bridged.

"Then—" he rose, and in another pair of moments Margaret was outside the study door in the hall, where Mrs. Jakes, affecting to be concerned in the arrangement of the furniture, examined her in sidelong glances, to know whether she had used the weapon which the doctor's adventure had put into her hand. Apparently there was no convincing her that the girl's intentions were not hostile.

It did not simplify life for Margaret, this enmity of Mrs. Jakes. Lunch and breakfast under her pale, implacable eye, that glided upon everything but skipped Margaret with a noticeable avoidance, had become ordeals to be approached with trepidation. Talk, when there was anything to talk about, died still-born in that atmosphere of lofty displeasure. It was done with a certain deftness; Mrs. Jakes was incapable of anything crude or downright; and when it was necessary, in order that the state of affairs should not be conspicuous, she could smile towards the wall at the girl's back and spare her an empty word or so, in a way that was sometimes as galling as much more dexterous snubs that Margaret had seen administered. One can "field" a snub that conveys its purpose in its phrasing and return it with effect to the wicket; but there is nothing to be done with the bare word that just stops a gap from becoming noticeable.

Ford was waiting outside the front door when Margaret came out after exercising the virtue of forbearance throughout a meal for which she had had no appetite.

"What 's the row with Mrs. Jakes?" he asked, without wasting words on preamble.

"Oh, nothing," answered Margaret crossly. "You 'd better ask her if you want to know. I 'm not going to tell you anything."

"Well, don't, then. But you couldn't arrange a truce for meal-times, could you? It turns things sour—the way you two avoid looking at each other."

"I don't care," said Margaret. "It 's not my fault. I 've been as loyal as anybody—more loyal, I think, and certainly more helpful. I 've done simply everything she asked of me, and now she 's like this."

Ford gave her a whimsical look of question.

"Sure you haven't at some time done more than she asked you?" he inquired.

"Why?" Margaret was surprised. She laughed unwillingly. "Is it shrewdness or have you heard something?"

"I haven't heard a word," he assured her. "But is that it?"

"It 's just your natural cleverness, then? Wonderful," said Margaret. "You ought to go on the stage, really. Yes, that 's what it is—I suppose. And now d'you think she 'll see the reasonable view of it? Not she! I 'm a villain in skirts and if I won't stand it, she 'll ask the doctor to recommend a Sanatorium where I can be more comfortable. And just at this moment, I don't think I can stand much more of it."

"Eh?" Ford scowled disapprovingly. "That 's a rotten thing to say. You don't feel inclined to tell me about it?"

"I can't; I mustn't. That 's the worst of it," answered Margaret. "I can't tell you anything."

"At any rate," said Ford, "don't take it into your head to go away. This won't do you any harm in the end. You weren't thinking of it seriously, were you?"

"Wasn't I? I was, though. I hate all this."

Ford took a couple of steps toward the door and a couple back.

"It won't weigh with you," he said, "but I 'd be sorry if you went. I would, personally—awfully sorry. But if you must go, you must. It 's a thing you can judge for yourself. Still, I 'd be sorry."

Margaret shrugged impatiently.

"Oh, I 'd be sorry, too. It 's been jolly, in a way, with you here, and all that. I 'd miss you, if you want to know. But—"

She stopped. Ford was looking at her very gravely.

"Don't go," he said, and put his thin, sun-browned hand upon her shoulder. "It 'll make things simpler for me if you say you won't. Things will arrange themselves, but even if they don't—don't go away."

"Simpler? How do you mean?"

"Just that," he answered. "If you stay, here we are—friends. We help each other out and talk and see each other and have time before us and there 's no need to say anything. And it's because a lunger like me must n't say anything till he sees whether he 's going to get well or—or stay here forever, that it 'll be simpler if you don't go. Do you see?"

His hand upon her shoulder was pleasant to feel; she liked the freedom he took—and gave—in resting it there; and his young, serious face, touched to delicacy by the disease that governed him, was patient and wise.

"It 's not because of that that you mustn't say anything," she answered. "I did n't know—you 've given me no warning. What can I say?"

"Say you won't go," he begged. "Say you won't act on any decision you 've made at present. And then we can go on—me lecturing you, and you flouting me, till—till I can say things—till I 'm free to say what I like to anybody."

She smiled rather nervously. "If I agree now," she answered, "it will look as if—" she paused; the thing was difficult to put in its nicety. But he was quick in the uptake.

"It won't," he said. "I 'm not such a bounder as that."

"But I 'd rather be here than take my chance among other people," she went on. "I suppose I can stand Mrs. Jakes if I give my mind to it, particularly if you 'll see me through."

"I 'll do what I can," he promised. "You 'll do it, then? You'll stay?"

"I suppose so," said Margaret. His hand for a moment was heavier on her shoulder; she felt as though she had been slapped on the back, with the unceremoniousness of a good friend; and then he loosed her.

"Good of you," he answered shortly.

Both were weighted by the handicap of their race; they had been, as it were, trapped into a certain depth of emotion and self-revelation, and both found a difficulty in stepping down again to the safe levels of commonplace intercourse. Ford shoved both hands into his pockets and half-turned from her.

"Well—doing anything this afternoon?" he inquired in his tersest manner.

"Yes," said Margaret, whom the position could amuse.

"What?"

"Oh—going yachting," she retorted.

He sniffed and nodded. "I 'm going to paint," he announced. "So long."

Margaret smiled at his back as he went, and its extravagant slouch of indifference and ease. She knew he would not look round; once his mood was defined, it was reliable entirely; but she felt she would have forgiven him if he had. The last word in such a matter as this is always capable of expansion, and probably some such notion was in the mind of the oracle who first pronounced that to women the last word is dear.

He was still at his easel when she set forth to keep her appointment under the dam wall, working on his helpless canvas with an intensity that spared not a look as she went by on the parched grass below the stoep. It was a low easel, and he sat on a stool and spread his legs to each side of it, like a fighter crouched over an adversary, and his thumb was busy smudging among masses of pigment. Margaret could see the canvas as a faintly shining insurrection of colors which suggested that he had broken an egg upon it. A score of times in the past weeks those cryptic messes had irritated her or showed themselves as a weakness in their author. The domineering thumb and the shock tactics of the palette knife had supplied her with themes for ridicule, and the fact that the creature could not paint and yet would paint and refused all instruction had put the seal of bitterness on many a day of weary irritation. But suddenly his incompetence and his industry, and even the unlovely fruit of their union—the canvases that he signed large with his name and hung unframed upon the walls of his room—were endearing; they were laughable only as a little child is laughable, things to smile at and to prize.

Her smiling and thoughtful mood went with her across the grass and dust and around the curved shoulder of the dam wall, where Kamis, obedient to Paul's signal, sat in the shade and awaited her. At her coming he sprang up eagerly with his face alight. His tweed clothes were, if anything, shabbier than before, but it seemed that no usage could subdue them to congruity with the broad black face and its liberal smile.

"This is great luck," he said. "I half expected you 'd find it too hot for you. Are you all right again after that night?"

Margaret seated herself on the slope of the wall and rested with one elbow on the freshness of its water-fed grass.

"Quite all right," she assured him. "Dr. Jakes has done everything that needed to be done. But I didn't thank you half enough for what you did."

He smiled and murmured deprecatingly and found himself a place to sit on at the foot of the wall, with legs crossed and his back to the sun. Leaning forward a little in this posture, with his drooping hat-brim shadowing him, it was almost possible for Margaret to avoid seeing the blunt negro features for which she had come to feel something akin to dread; they affected her in the same way that darkness with people moving in it will affect some children.

"I saw Paul's signal," said Kamis. "We have an understanding, you know. He hangs a handkerchief in his window when he wants me and when you want me he hangs two. It shows as far as one can see the window; all the others are just black squares, and his has a white dash in it. That 's rather how I see Paul, you know. Other people are just blanks, but he means something—to me, at any rate. By the way, before I forget—did you want me for anything in particular?"

Margaret shook her head. "I wanted to talk," she said; "and to make that police matter clear to you."

"Oh, that." He looked up. "Thank you."

"Do you know of a Mr. Van Zyl, a police-officer?" she asked him. "He thinks you are guilty of sedition among the natives. I suppose it 's nonsense, but he means to arrest you, and I thought you 'd better know."

"It 's awfully good of you to bother about it," he answered. "I 'll take care he doesn't lay hands on me. But it is nonsense, certainly, and anybody but he would know it. He 's been scouring the kraals in the south for me and giving the natives a tremendous idea of my importance. They were nervous enough of me before, but now—"

He shrugged his shoulders disgustedly, but still smiled.

"That is what he said—they 're uneasy," agreed Margaret. "But why are they? You see, I know scarcely more of you than Mr. Van Zyl. What is it that troubles them about you?"

"Oh," the Kafir deliberated. "It's simple enough, really. You see," he explained, "the fact is, I 'm out of order. I don't belong in the scheme of things as the natives and Mr. Van Zyl know it. These Kafirs are the most confirmed conservatives in the world, and when they see a man like themselves who can't exist without clothes and a roof to sleep under, who can't walk without boots or talk their language and is unaccountable generally, they smell witchcraft at once. Besides, it has got about that I 'm Kamis, and they know very well that Kamis was hanged about twenty years ago and his son taken away and eaten by the soldiers. So it's pretty plain to them that something is wrong somewhere. Do you see?"

"Still"—Margaret was thoughtful—"Mr. Van Zyl is n't an ignorant savage."

"No," agreed Kamis. "He isn't that. For dealing with Kafirs, he 's probably the best man you could find; the natives trust him and depend on him and when they 're in trouble they go to him and he gives them the help they want. When they misbehave, he 's on hand to deal with them in the fashion they understand and probably prefer. And the reason is, Miss Harding—the reason is, he 's got a Kafir mind. He was born among them and nursed by them; he speaks as a Kafir, understands as a Kafir and thinks as a Kafir, and he 'll never become a European and put away Kafir things. They 've made him, and at the best he 's an ambassador for the Kafirs among the whites. That 's how they master their masters. Oh, they 've got power, the Kafirs have, and a better power than their hocus-pocus of witchcraft."

The afternoon was stored with the day's accumulated heat and the cool of the grass beneath and the freshness of the water, out of sight beyond the wall but diffusing itself like an odor in the air, combined to contrast the spot in which they talked with the dazed sun-beaten land about them and gave to both a sense of privacy and isolation. The Kafir's words stirred a fresh curiosity in Margaret.

"He thinks you are making the natives dangerous," she said. "I don't believe that, of course, but what are you doing?"

"What am I doing?"

The black face was lifted to hers steadily and regarded her for a space of moments without replying. Nothing mild or subtle could find expression in its rude shaping of feature; the taciturnity of the Karoo itself governed it.

"What am I doing?" repeated Kamis. He dropped his eyes and his hands plucked at the grass absently. "Well, I 'm looking for a life for myself."

Margaret waited for him to continue but he was silent, plucking the grass shoots and shredding them in his fingers.

"A life," she prompted. "Yes; tell me."

Kamis finished with the grass in his hand and threw it with an abrupt gesture from him.

"I 'll tell you if you like," he said, as though suppressing a feeling of reluctance. "It isn't anything wonderful; still—. You know already how I began; Paul told me how you learnt that; and you can see where I 've got to with my education and my degree and my profession and all that. I 'm back where I came from, and besides what I 've learned, I 've got a burden of civilized habits and weaknesses that keep me tied by the leg. I need friendship and company and equality with people about me, just as you do, and I 'm apt to find myself rather forlorn and lost without them. In England, I had those things—I had some of them, at any rate; but what was there for a black doctor to do, do you think, among all those people who look on even a white foreigner as rather a curiosity?"

"Wasn't there anything?" Margaret was watching the nervous play of his gesticulating hands, so oddly emphasizing his pleasant English voice.

"Nothing worth while. That 's another of my troubles, you see. They taught me and trimmed me till I could n't be content with occasional niggers at the docks suffering from belaying-pin on the brain. It was n't odd jobs I wanted, handed over to me to keep me happy; I wanted work. We niggers, we 're a strong lot and we can stand a deal of wear and tear, but we don't improve by standing idle. I wanted to come out of that glass case they kept me in, with tutors and an allowance from the Government and an official guardian and all that sort of thing, and make myself useful."

He paused. "You understand that, don't you?" he asked.

"Of course I do," replied Margaret. "If I could only come out too! But I 've got all those weaknesses of yours and this as well." Her hand rested on her chest and he nodded.

"You 're different," he said. "You must n't be worn and torn."

"Well, so you came out here?"

"It 's my country," he answered, and waved a hand at its barrenness. "It was my father's, a good deal of it, in another sense too. When I saw that living in England wasn't going to lead to anything, I thought of this. Somebody ought to doctor the poor beggars who live here and give them a lead towards a more comfortable existence, and I hoped I was the man to do it. I must have relations among them, too; that 's queer, is n't it? Aunts—my father had lots of wives—and lashings of cousins. I thought the steamer was bringing me out to them and I had a great idea of a welcome and all that; but I 'm no nearer it now than I was when I started. If ever I seem too grateful to you for your acquaintance, Miss Harding—if I seem too humble to be pleasant when I thank you for letting me talk to you—just remember I know that over there my poor black aunts are slaving like cattle and my uncles are driving them, and when I come they dodge among the huts and maneuver to get behind me with a club."

"No," answered Margaret slowly. "I 'll remind you instead of all you 're doing while I do nothing."

He shook his head. "I know what you do to me," he said. "And I can't let you pity me. It was n't for want of warnings I came out here. I even had a letter from the Colonial Secretary. And I must tell you about the remonstrances of my guardian."

He laughed, with one of those quick transitions of mood which characterize the negro temperament. It jarred a little on Margaret.

"He was the dearest old thing," he went on. "He 's one of the greatest living authorities on the Bantu tongues—those are the real old negro languages, I believe—and he was out here once in his wild youth. The Colonial Office appointed him to take charge of me and he used to come down to the schools where I was and give me a sovereign. He 'd have made a capital uncle. He had a face like a beefy rose, one of those big flabby ones that tumble to pieces when you pick them—all pink and round and clean, with kind, silly blue eyes behind gold spectacles. I had to get his consent before I could move, and I went to see him in a little room at the British and Foreign Bible Society's place in Queen Victoria Street, where they grow the rarer kinds of Bible under glass in holes in the wall; you know. He was correcting the proofs of a gospel in some Central African dialect and he had smudges of ink round his mouth. Sucking the wrong end of the pen, I suppose. He really was rather like a comic-paper professor, but as kind as could be. I sat down in the chair opposite to him, with the desk between us, and he heard what I 'd got to say, wiping his pen and sucking it while I told him. I fancy I began by being eloquent, but I soon stopped that. He 's good form to the finger-tips and he looked so pained. So I cut it short and told him what I wanted to do and why. And when I 'd finished, he gave me a solemn warning. I must do what seemed right to me, he said; he wouldn't take the responsibility of standing in my way; but there were grave dangers. He had known young men, promising young men, talented young men—all negroes, of course—who had returned to Africa after imbibing and accepting the principles of our civilization. They, it was true, were West Africans, but my danger was the same. They had left England in clothes, with a provision of soap in their trunks, and the result of their return to their own place was—they had lapsed! They had discontinued the clothes and forsworn the soap. 'One of them,' he said, 'presented a particularly sad example. He whom we had known and respected as David Livingstone Smith became the leader of a faction or party whose activities necessitated the despatch of a punitive expedition. Under a name which, being interpreted, signifies "The Scornful," he presided over the defeat and massacre of that armed force.' And he went on warning me against becoming an independent monarch and forcing an alliance on Great Britain by means of an ingenious war. He seemed relieved when I assured him that I had no ambition to sit in the seat of the Scornful."

He laughed again, looking up at Margaret with his white teeth flashing broadly.

"Yes," she said. "That was—funny."

Odd! It made her vaguely restive to hear the Kafir make play with the shortcomings of the white man. It touched a fund of compunction whose existence she had not suspected. Something racial in her composition, something partizan and unreasoning, lifted its obliterated head from the grave in which her training and the conscious leanings of her mind had buried it.

He had no thoughts of what it was that kept her from returning his smile. He imagined that his mission, his loneliness and his danger had touched her and made her grave.

"Well, you see how it all came about?" he went on. "It isn't really so extraordinary, is it? And I 'm not discouraged, Miss Harding. I shall find a way, sooner or later; they 're bound to get used to me in the end. In the meantime, Paul is teaching me Kafir, and there 's you. You make up to me for a lot."

"Do I?" Margaret roused herself and sat up, deliberately thrusting down out of her consciousness that instinctive element which bade her do injustice and withhold from the man before her his due of acknowledgment.

"Do I?" she said. "I 'd be glad if that were so."

He made to speak but stopped at her gesture.

"No," she said. "I would be glad. It 's a wonderfully great thing you 've started to do, and you 're lucky to have it. You feel that, don't you?"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Oh, yes."

She eyed him with a moment's hesitation, for he had not agreed with any alacrity, and a martyr who regards his stake with aversion is always disappointing.

"Oh, you 're sure to succeed," she said. "People who undertake things like this don't fail. And if, as you say, I 'm any kind of help to you, I 'm glad. I 'm awfully glad of it. It makes coming out here worth while, and I shall always be proud that I was your friend."

"Will you? Does it strike you like that?"

"Yes," said Margaret.

She was above him on the bank and he sat on the ground with his head at the level of her knees. His worn and shabby clothes, the patience of his face, and even the hands that lay empty in his lap, joined with his lowly posture to give him an aspect of humility. He was like a man acclimatized to oppression and ill fortune, accepting in a mild acquiescence, without question and without hope, the wrongs of a tyrannous destiny.

"I shall be proud," she repeated. "Always." She held forth her hand to him in token of that friendship, leaning down that he might take.

He did not do so at once. His eyes flashed to her with a startled glance, and he seemed at a loss. He lifted himself to his knees and put his own hand, large and fine for all the warm black of the back of it, the hand of a physician, refined to nice uses, under hers without clasping it. His movement had some of the timidity and slavishness of a dog unused to caresses; a dumb-brute gratitude was in his regard. He bent his black head humbly and printed a kiss upon her slender fingers.

It was a thing that exhausted the situation; Margaret, a little breathless and more than a little moved, met his gaze as he rose with a smile that was not clear of embarrassment. Neither knew what to say next; the kiss upon her hand had transformed their privacy into secrecy.

"My love is like a black, black rose."

It sounded above them, from the top of the dam wall, an outrageous bellow of melody that thrust itself obscenely between them and split them asunder with the riving force of a thunderbolt. Intolerably startled by the suddenness of it, Margaret nearly fell down the slope, and saving herself with her hands turned her face, whitened by the shock, towards the source of the noise. Another face met hers, parting the long grasses on the crown of the wall.

Her amazed and ambushed faculties saw it as a face only. It was attached to no visible body, solitarily self-sufficient in an unworthy miracle. It did not occur to her that the owner of it must be lying on his belly at the water's edge, and for the moment she was not equal to deducing that he must have heard, and possibly even seen, all that had passed. She saw merely a face projected over her, that grinned with a fixity that was not without an imbecile suggestion. It was old with a moldy and decayed quality, bunched into pouches between deep wrinkles, and yet weak and appealing. A wicked captive ape might show that mixture of gleeful sin and slavishness.

"Don't think I 'm not shocked, because I am," it uttered distinctly. "Kissing! I saw you. An' if anybody had told me that a lady of your looks would take on a Kafir, I wouldn't ha' believed it."

The face heaved and rose and lifted to corroborate it the cast-off clothes of Christian du Preez, enveloping the person of Boy Bailey. He shuffled to a sitting position on the edge of the wall, and it was a climax to his appearance that his big and knobly feet were bare and wet. He had been taking his ease with his feet in the water while they talked below, a hidden audience to their confidences. He shook his head at them.

"Dam walls have got dam ears," he observed. "You naughty things, you."

Margaret turned helplessly to Kamis for light.

"What is it?" she asked.

He had jumped to his feet and away from her at the first sound, and now turned a slow eye upon her. The negro countenance is the home of crude emotions; the untempered extremes have been its sculptors through the ages. Its mirth is a guffaw, its sorrow is a howl, its wrath is the naked spirit of murder. He looked at her now with a face alight and transfigured with slaughterous intention.

"Go away," he said, in a whisper. "Go away now. He must have heard. I 'll deal with him."

"Don't," said Margaret. She rose and put a hand on his arm. "Will you speak to him, or shall I?"

"Not you," he answered quickly. "But—" he was breathless and his face shone as with a light sweat. "He 'll tell," he urged, still whispering. "You don't know—it would be frightful. Go quickly away and leave me with him."

"They 're at it still," sounded the voice above them. "Damme, they can't stop."

Kamis was desperate and urgent. He cast a wild eye towards the man on the top of the wall, and went on with agitated earnestness.

"I tell you, you don't know. It 's enough that you were here with a Kafir and he kissed your hand." He slapped his forehead in an agony. "Oh, I ought to be hanged for that. They 'll never believe—nobody will. In this country that sort of thing has only one meaning—a frightful one. I can't bear it. If you don't go"—he gulped and spoke aloud—"I 'll go up and kill him before your eyes."

"Now, now!" The voice remonstrated in startled tones.

Margaret still had her hand on his arm, and could feel that he was trembling. She had recovered from the shock of the surprise and was anxious to purge the situation of the melodramatic character which it seemed to have assumed. Kamis' whispered fears failed to convince her.

"You 'll do nothing of the kind," she said. "I don't care what people think. Speak to the man or I will."

Kamis lifted his head obediently.

"Come down," he said. "Come down and say what you want."

Mr. Bailey recovered his smile as he shook his head.

"I can say it here," he replied. "Don't you worry, Snowball; it won't strain my voice."

Kamis gulped. "What do you want?" he repeated.

"Ah! What?" inquired Boy Bailey rhetorically. "I come here of an afternoon to collect my thoughts an' sweeten the dam by soaking my Trilbies in it an' what happens? I 'm half-deafened by the noise of kissing. I look round, an' what do I see? I ask you—what?"

He brought an explanatory forefinger into play, thick and cylindrical like a damaged candle.

"First, thinks I, here 's a story that's good for drinks in any bar between Dopfontein and Fereira—with perhaps a tar-and-feathering for the young lady thrown in." He nodded meaningly at Margaret. "And it wouldn't be the first time that's happened either."

"Ye-es," said Kamis, who seemed to speak with difficulty. "But you won't get away alive to tell that story."

"Hear me out." Boy Bailey shook his finger. "That 's what I thought first. My second thought was: what 's the sense of making trouble when perhaps there 's a bit to be got by holdin' my tongue? How does that strike you?"

Margaret had been leaning on her stick while he spoke, prodding the earth and looking down. Now she raised her eyes.

"The first thought was the best," she said. "You won't get anything here."

"Eh?" Mr. Bailey was astonished. "You don't understand, Miss," he said. "Ask Snowball, there—he 'll tell you. In this country we don't stand women monkeying with niggers. Hell—no. It 's worth, well—"

"Not a penny," said Margaret. "I don't care in the least whom you tell. But—not one penny."

Kamis was listening in silence. Margaret smiled at him and he shook his head. On the top of the wall Mr. Bailey leaned forward persuasively. He had something the air, in so far as his limitations permitted, of benevolence wrestling with obstinacy, the air which in auctioneers is an asset.

"You don't mean that, I know," he said indulgently. "I can see you 're going to be sensible. You would n't let a trifle of ready money stand between you an' keepin' your good name—a nice, ladylike girl like you. Why, for less than what you 've done, women have been stoned in the streets before now. Come now; I 'm not going to be hard on you. Make an offer."

He sat above them against the sky, beaming painfully, always with a wary apprehension at the back of his regard.

"You won't go away?" demanded Kamis suddenly. "You won't? You know I can't do it if you 're here. Then I 'm going to pay."

"You shan't," retorted Margaret. "I won't have it, I tell you. I don't care what he does."

"I 'm going to pay," repeated Kamis. "It 's that or—you won't go away?"

"No," said the girl angrily.

"Then I 'm going to pay." He turned from her. "I 'll give you twenty pounds," he called to Bailey.

"Double it," replied Boy Bailey promptly; "add ten; take away the number you thought of; and the answer is fifty pounds, cash down, and dirt cheap at that. Put that in my hand and I 'll clear out of here within the hour and you 'll never hear of me again."

Kamis nodded slowly. "If I do hear of you again," he said, "I 'll come to you. Paul will bring you the money to-morrow morning, and then you 'll go."

"Right-O." Mr. Bailey rose awkwardly to his feet and made search for his boots. With them in his hands, he looked down on the pair again.

"It's your risk," he warned them. "If that cash don't come to hand, you look out; there 'll be a slump in Kafirs."

He went off along the wall, disappearing in sections as he descended its shoulder. His gray head in its abominable hat was the last to disappear; it sailed loftily, as became the heir to fifty pounds.

Margaret frowned and then laughed.

"What an absurd business," she cried. "Supposing he had told and there had been a row—it would have been better than this everlasting stagnation. It would have been more like life."

The Kafir sighed. "Not life," he answered gently. "Not your life. It meant a death in life—like mine."

His embarrassed and mournful look passed beyond her to the Karoo, spreading its desolation to the skies as a blind man might lift his eyes in prayer.

CHAPTER XI

The deplorable hat which shielded Mr. Bailey from the eye of Heaven traveled at a thoughtful pace along the path to the farmhouse, cocked at a confident angle upon a head in which faith in the world was re-established. Boy Bailey had no doubt that the money would be forthcoming. What he had heard of the conversation between Margaret and Kamis had assured him of the Kafir's resources and he felt himself already as solvent as if the minted money were heavy in his pockets. A pleasant sense of security possessed his versatile spirit, the sense that to-morrow may be counted upon. For such as Mr. Bailey, every day has its price.

He gazed before him as he walked, at the house, with its kraals clustered before it and its humble appanage of out-buildings, with a gentle indulgence for all its primitive and domestic quality. Meals and a bed were what they stood for, merely the raw framework of intelligent life, needing to be supplemented and filled in with more stimulating accessories. They satisfied only the immediate needs of a man adrift and hungry; they offered nothing to compensate a lively mind for its exile from the fervor of the world. Fifty pounds, the fine round sum, not alone made him independent of its table and its roof, but opened afresh the way to streets and lamplight, to the native heath of the wandering Bailey, who knew his fellow men from above and below—Kafirs, for instance, he saw from an altitude—but had few such opportunities as this of meeting them on a level of economic equality. There came to him, as he dwelt in thought upon his good fortune, a clamorous appetite for what fifty pounds would buy. Capetown was within his reach, and he recalled small hotels on steep streets, whose back windows looked forth on flat roofs of Malay houses, where smells of cooking and people loaded the sophisticated air and there was generally a woman weeping and always a man drunk. A little bedroom with an untidy bed and beer bottles cooling in the wash-hand basin by day; saloons where the afternoon sun came slanting upon furtive men initiating the day's activities over glasses; the electric-lit night of Adderley Street under the big plate-glass windows, where business was finished for the shops and offices and newly begun for the traders in weakness and innocence—he knew himself in such surroundings as these. He could slip into them as noiselessly as a snake into a pool, with no disturbance to those inscrutable devotees of daylight and industry who carry on their plain affairs and downright transactions without suspecting the existence of the world beneath them, where Boy Bailey and his fellows stir and dodge and hide and have no illusions, save that hunger is ever fed or thirst quenched.

He paused at the open door of the farmhouse, recalled to the present by the sound of voices from the kitchen at the end of the passage, where Christian du Preez and his wife were engaged in bitter talk. Boy Bailey stepped delicately over the doorstep on to the mat within and stood there to listen, if there should be anything worth listening to. A smile played over his large complacent features, and he waited with his head cocked to one side. Something in which the word "tramp" occurred as he came through the door flattered him with the knowledge that the dispute was about himself.

Mrs. du Preez spoke, and her shrill tones were plainly audible.

"I don't make no fuss when your dirty old Doppers outspan here an' come sneakin' in for coffee, an' some of them would make a dog sick. Bailey 's got his troubles, but he don't do like Oom Piet Coetzee did when—"

An infuriate rumble from Christian broke in upon her. Boy Bailey smiled and shook his head.

"Now, now," he murmured. "Language, please."

"He 's worse than a Kafir in the house," Christian went on. "Woman, it makes me sick when he looks at you, like an old silly devil."

"So long as he don't look like an old silly Dutchman, I don't mind," retorted his wife. "I 'm fairly sick of it all—you an' your Doppers and all. And just because you can't tell when a gentleman 's having his bit of fun, you come and howl at me."

"Howl." The word seemed to sting. "Howl. Yes, instead of howling I should take my gun and let him have one minute to run before I shoot at him. You like that better, eh? You like that better?"

"Christian." There was alarm in Mrs. du Preez's voice. Behind the shut door of the kitchen, Bailey could picture Christian reaching down the big Martini that hung overhead with oiled rags wrapped about its breech.

"Time for me to cut in at this," reflected Mr. Bailey. "I never was much of a runner."

He walked along the passage with loud steps, acting a man returned from a constitutional, restored by the air and at peace with the whole human race.

Mrs. du Preez and Christian were facing one another over the length of the table; they turned impatient and angry faces towards the door as he opened it and thrust his personality into the scene. He fronted them with his terrible smile and his manner of jaunty amity.

"Hot, ain't it?" he inquired. "I 've been down by the dam and the water 's nearly on the boil."

Neither answered; each seemed watchful of the other's first step. Christian gave him only a dark wrathful look and Mrs. du Preez colored and looked away. Boy Bailey, retaining his smile under difficulties, tossed his hat to a chair and entered.

"Not interrupting anything, am I?" he inquired.

"You 're not interrupting me," replied Mrs. du Preez. "I 've said all I 'd got to say."

"But I haven't said all I 've got to say," retorted Christian from his end of the table. "We was talking about you."

"About me?" said Bailey, with mild surprise. "Oh."

"Yes." The Boer, leaning forward with his hands gripping the thick end of the table, had a dangerous look which warned Bailey that impudence now might have disastrous consequences.

"Yes—about you. My wife says you are a gentleman and got gentleman's manners and you are her old friend. She says you don't mean harm and you don't look bad and dirty. She says I don't know how gentlemen speak and look and I am wrong to say you are a beast with the mark of the beast."

Bailey shifted uncomfortably under his gaze of fury held precariously in leash, and edged a little towards Mrs. du Preez. He was afraid the big, bearded man might spring forward and help out his words with his fist.

"Very kind of Mrs. du Preez," he murmured warily.

"She says all that. But I say"—the words rasped from Christian's lips—"I say you are a man rotten like an old egg and the breath in your mouth is a stink of wickedness. And I tell her that sometimes I get up from my food and go out because if I don't I shall stamp you to death. Gott verdam! Your dirty eyes and your old yellow teeth grinning—I stand them no longer. You have had rest and skoff—now you go."

Bailey's face showed some discomposure. His disadvantage lay in the danger that the Boer was plainly willing to be violent. He had returned to the house with the intention of announcing that on the morrow he would take his departure, but it was not the prospect of spending a night in the open that disconcerted him. It was simply that he disliked to be treated thus loftily by a man he despised. He stole a glance at Mrs. du Preez.

She was staring at her husband with shrewdness and doubt expressed in her face, as though she were checking her valuation of him by the fierce figure at the other end of the table, with big, leathery hands clutched on the edge of the board and thin, sun-tanned face intent and wrathful above the uneven beard. She was revisiting with an unsympathetic eye each feature of that irreconcilable factor in her life, her husband.

"D'you hear me?" thundered the Boer. "You go."

He pointed with sudden forefinger to the door, and his gesture was unspeakably daunting and wounding.

"Ye-es," hesitated Boy Bailey, and sighed. The pointing finger compelled him like a hand on his collar, and he moved with shuffling and unwilling feet to the chair where his hat lay. He fumbled with it as he picked it up and it fell to the floor. The finger did not for a moment pretermit its menacing command. He sighed again and drew the door open.

"Bailey." Mrs. du Preez spoke sharply, with a trembling catch in her voice. "Bailey, you stop here."

"Eh?" He turned in the doorway with alacrity. Another moment and it might have been too late.

"Go on," cried the Boer. "Out you go, or I 'll—"

"Stop where you are, Bailey," cried Mrs. du Preez.

She came across the room with a run and put herself in front of Bailey, facing her husband.

"Now," she said, "now what d'you think you'll do?"

The Boer heaved himself upright, and they fronted one another stripped of all considerations save to be victor in the struggle for the fate of Boy Bailey. It was the iron-hard cockney against the Boer.

"I told him to go," said Christian. "If he doesn't go—I'll shoot."

He cast an eye up to the gun in its place upon the wall.

"You will, will you?" The bitter voice was mocking. "Now, Christian, you just listen to me."

"He 'll go," said the Boer.

"Oh, he 'll go," answered Mrs. du Preez. "He 'll go all right, if you say so. But mark my words. You go turning my friends out of the house like this, and so help me, I 'll go too. Get that straight in your head, old chap—it's right. Bailey 's not fretting to stay with you, you know. You 're not such good company that you need worry about it. It 's me he came to see, not you. And you pitch him out; that 's all. Bailey goes to-night, does he? Then I go in the morning."

She nodded at him, the serious, graphic nod that promises more earnestly than a shaken fist.

"What!" The Boer was taken by surprise. "If he goes—"

"I 'll go—yes."

She was entirely in earnest; her serious purpose was plain to him in every word she spoke. She threatened that which no Boer could live down, the flight of a wife. He stared at her almost aghast. In the slow processes of his amazed mind, he realized that this, too, had had to come—the threat if not the deed; it was the due and logical climax of such a marriage as his. Her thin face, still pretty after its fashion, and her slight figure that years had not dignified with matronly curves, were stiffened to her monstrous purpose. Whether she went or not, the intention dwelt in her. It was another vileness in Boy Bailey that he should have given it the means of existence.

Both of them, his wife and Mr. Bailey, screened by her body, thought that he was vanquished. He stood so long without answering that they expected no answer. Bailey was framing a scene for the morrow in which he should renounce the reluctant hospitality of the Boer: "I can starve, but I can't stand meanness." He had got as far as this when the Boer recovered himself.

With an inarticulate cry he was suddenly in motion, irresistibly swift and forceful. A sweep of his arm cleared Mrs. du Preez from his path and sent her reeling aside, leaving Boy Bailey exposed. Christian seemed to halt at the threshold of the room and thrust a long arm out, of which the forked hand took Boy Bailey by the thick throat and dragged him in. He held the shifty, ruined face, now contorted and writhen from his grip like the face of a hanged man, at the level of his waist and beat upon it with the back of his unclenched right hand again and again. Boy Bailey's legs trailed upon the floor lifelessly; only at each dull blow, thudding like a mallet on his blind face, his weak arms fluttered convulsively. Mrs. du Preez, who had fallen against the table, leaned forward with hands clasped against her breast and watched with a fascinated and terror-stricken stare.

Boy Bailey uttered a windy moan and Christian dropped him with a gesture of letting fall something that defiled his hand. The beaten creature fell like a wet towel and was motionless and limp about his feet. Across his body, Christian looked at his wife. He seemed to her to tower above that meek and impotent carcass, to impend hatefully and dreadfully.

"Throw water on him," he said. "In an hour, I will come back and if I see him then, I will shoot."

She did not answer, but continued to stare.

"You hear?" he demanded.

She gulped. "Yes."

"Good," he said. He stepped over the body of Boy Bailey and mounted on a chair, where he reached down the rifle. He gave his wife another look; she had not moved. He shrugged and went out with the gun under his arm.

It was not till the noise of his steps ceased at the house-door that Mrs. du Preez moved from her attitude of defeat and fear. She came forward on tiptoe, edged past Boy Bailey's feet and crouched to peer round the doorpost. She had to assure herself that Christian was gone. She went furtively along the passage and peeped out over the kraals to be finally certain of it and saw him, still with the gun, walking down to the further fold where Paul was knee-deep in sheep. She came back to the room and closed the door carefully, going about it with knitted brows and a face steeped in preoccupation. Not till then did she turn to attend to Boy Bailey.

"Oh, God," she cried in a startled whisper as she bent above him, for his eyes were open in his bloody face and the battered features were feeling their way to the smile.

She fell on her knees beside him.

"Bailey," she said breathlessly. "I thought you—I thought he 'd killed you."

Boy Bailey rose on one elbow and felt at his face.

"Him!" he exclaimed, with all the scorn that could be conveyed in a whisper. "Him! He couldn't kill me in a year. Why, he never even shut his fist."

He wiped the blood from his fingers by rubbing them on the smooth earth of the floor and sat up.

"Why," he said, "take his gun away and I wouldn't say but what I 'd hammer him myself. Him kill me—why, down in Capetown once I had a feller go for me with a bottle an' leave me for dead, an' I was havin' a drink ten minutes after he 'd gone. He isn't coming back yet, is he?"

"No—not for an hour."

She had hardly heard him, so desperately was she concentrated on the one idea that occupied her mind.

"Well, I won't wait for him," said Mr. Bailey. "I 'll get some of this muck off my face an'—an' have a drink, if you 'll be so kind, and then I 'll fade. But if ever I see him again—"

"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez, "where 'll you go?"

"Where? Well, to-night I reckon to sleep in plain air, as the French say—or is it the Germans?—somewhere about here till I can get word with a certain nigger who owes me money. And then, off to the station on my tootsies and take train back to the land of ticky (threepenny) beer and Y.M.C.A.'s."

"England?" asked Mrs. du Preez.

"England be—" Boy Bailey hesitated—"mucked," he substituted. "Capetown, me dear; the metropolis of our foster motherland. It 's Capetown for me, where the Christian Kafirs come from."

"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez. "Bailey, take me."

"What?" demanded Boy Bailey. "Take you where?"

"Take me with you." She was still kneeling beside him and she put a hand on his arm urgently, looking into his blood-stained and smashed face. "I won't stay with him now. I said I wouldn't and I won't. I 'd die first. And you and me was always good pals, Bailey. Only for that breakdown at Fereira, we 'd have—we might have hitched up together. You were always hinting—you know you were, Bailey. Don't you know?"

"Hinting?" He was surprised at last, but still wary. "But I wasn't hinting at—supporting you?"

"I didn't say you were," she answered eagerly. "Bailey, I 'm not a fool; I 've got temperament too. You said yourself I had, only the other day. And—and I can't stop with him now."

Mr. Bailey looked at his fingers thoughtfully and felt his face again.

"Fact is," he said deliberately, "you 're off your balance. You 'll live to thank me for not taking advantage of it. You 'll say, 'Bailey had me and let me go, as a gentleman would. He remembered I was a mother. Bless him.' That 's what you 'll say when you 're an old woman with your grandchildren at your knee. And anyhow, what d'you think you 'd do in Capetown? You ain't far off forty, are you?"

She shook him by the arm she held to fix his attention.

"Bailey," she said. "That don't matter for a time. I 've got a bit of money, you know. I 'm not leaving that behind."

"Money, have you?"

The wonderful thing in women such as Mrs. du Preez is that they see so clearly and yet act so blindly. They know they are sacrificed for men's gain and do not conceal their knowledge. They count upon baseness, cruelty and falsity as characteristics of men in general and play upon these qualities for their purposes. But furnish them with a reason for depending upon a man, and they will trust him, uphold him, obey him, lean upon him and compensate the flimsiest rascal for the world's contempt and hardness by yielding him a willing victim.

They looked at each other. Bailey still sitting on the floor, she on her knees, and each read in the other's eyes an appraisement and a stratagem. The coffee-pot that stood all day beside the fire to be ready for Boer visitors, sibilated mildly at their backs.

"It would n't last for ever, the bit you 've got," said Bailey. "There 's that to think of."

"It 's a good bit," she replied.

"Is it—is it as much as fifty pounds?" he asked.

"It 's more," she answered. "Never you mind how much it is, Bailey. It's a good bit and it 's mine, not his."

He thought upon it with his under-lip caught up between his teeth, almost visibly reviewing the possibilities of profit in the company of a woman who had money about her. Mrs. du Preez continued to urge him in hard whispers.

"I 'd never manage it by myself, Bailey, or I wouldn't be begging you like this. I 've tried to bring myself to it again and again, but I was n't game enough. And it isn't as if I was goin' to be a burden to you. It won't be long before I 'll get a job—you 'll see. A barmaid, p'r'aps, or I might even get in again with a show. I haven't lost my figure, anyhow. And as for staying here now, with him, after this—Bailey, I 'll take poison if you leave me."

Boy Bailey frowned and looked up at the clock which swung a pendulum to and fro against the wall, as though to invite human affairs to conduct themselves in measure.

"Well, we haven't got too much time to talk about it," he said. "He said an hour. Now supposin' I take you, you know it's a case of footin' it down the line to the next siding? It wouldn't suit me to be nabbed with you on my hands. He 'd shoot as soon as think about it, and then where would I be?"

"I can walk," Mrs. du Preez assured him eagerly. "You 'll take me with you, then, Bailey?"

Boy Bailey sighed. "Oh, I'll take you," he said. "I 'll take you, since your mind 's made up. My good nature has been the ruin of me—that and my temperament. But don't forget later on that I warned you."

Mrs. du Preez jumped up. "I won't forget," she promised. "This is my funeral. Get up from there, Bailey, and we 'll have a drink on it."

They made their last arrangements over the glasses. Christian's absence was to be counted upon for the greater part of the next day; their road would be clear.

The first word above a whisper which had been spoken since Christian left them was by Mrs. du Preez. She sat down her glass at the last with a jolt.

"But, Bailey," she cried, on a note of hysterical gaiety, "Bailey—we got to be careful, I know, and all that—but what a lark it 'll be."

He stared at her, not quick enough to keep up with her mounting mood. She was flushed and feverish with excitement and the reaction of strong feeling and her eyes danced like a child's on the brink of mischief.

"The woman 's a fool," thought Boy Bailey.

His own attitude towards the affair, as he reviewed it that night in the forage-shed, where he reposed full dressed in the scent of dry grasses and stared reflectively through a gap in the roof at the immortal patience of the stars, was strictly businesslike. Not even a desire to be revenged upon Christian du Preez, who had called him names and beaten him, impaired the consistency of that attitude. Boy Bailey allowed for a certain proportion of thrashings in his experiences; they ranked in the balance-sheet of his transactions as a sort of office expenses. They had to be kept down to the lowest figure compatible with convenience and good business, but they were not to be weighed against a lucky deal. The one thing that engaged his fancy was the fact that the woman, though close on forty, would come with money about her—more than fifty pounds. It would make up his equipment to a handsome, an imposing, figure. Never before had he possessed a round hundred pounds in one sum. The mere possibilities that it opened out were exciting; it seemed as large and as inexhaustible as any other large sum. He did not dwell on the fact that it belonged to Mrs. du Preez and not to him; he did not even give his mind to a scheme for securing it. All that was detail, a thing to be settled at any advantageous moment. A dodge, a minute of drowsiness on her part—or perhaps, at most, a blow on the breasts—would secure the conveyance of the money to him. In the visions of Capetown that hovered on the outskirts of his thought, a ghostly seraglio attending his nod, there moved many figures, but Mrs. du Preez was not among them. His imagination made a circuit about her and her fate, or at most it glanced with brevity and distaste on the spectacle of a penniless woman weeping on a bench at a wayside station, seeing the tail-lights of a vanishing train blurred through tears.

"I knew I 'd strike it lucky one of these days," was Mr. Bailey's reflection, as he composed himself to slumber. "With two or three more like her—I 'll be a millionaire yet."

The stars watched his upturned face as he slept with a still scrutiny that must have detected aught in its unconscious frankness that could redeem it or suggest that once it had possessed the image of God. He slept as peacefully, as devotedly, as a baby, confiding his defenselessness to the night with no tremors or uncertainty. He left unguarded the revelations of his loose and feeble face that the mild stars searched, always with their stare of stagnant surprise.

In the farmhouse, there was yet a light in the windows when dawn paled the eastward heaven. Christian du Preez slept in his bed unquietly, with clenched hands outstretched over the empty place beside him, and in another room Paul had transferred himself from waking dreams to a dream-world. Tiptoeing here and there in the house, Mrs. du Preez had gathered together the meager handful of gear that was to go with her; she had shaken out a skirt that she treasured and made ready a hat that smelt of camphor. Her money, in sovereigns, made a hard and heavy knob in a knotted napkin. All was gathered and ready for the journey and yet the light shone in the window of the parlor where she sat through the hours. Her hands were in her lap and there were no tears in her eyes—it was beyond tears. She was taking leave of her furniture.

She saw her husband at breakfast, facing him across the table with a preoccupied expression that he took for sullenness. She did not see the grimness of his countenance nor mark his eye upon her; she was thinking in soreness of heart of six rosewood chairs, upholstered in velvet, a rosewood table, a sofa, and the rest of it—the profit of her marriage, her sheet-anchor and her prop. She felt as though she had given her life for them.

Christian rode away with his back to the sun, with no word spoken between them, and as his pony broke into a lope—the Boer half-trot, half-canter,—he caught and subdued an impulse to look back at the house. Even if he had looked, he would hardly have seen the cautious reconnoiter of Boy Bailey's head around the corner of it, as that camp-follower of fortune made sure of his departure. Thrashings Mr. Bailey could make light of, but the Boer's threat of shooting had stuck in his mind. He rested on his hands and knees and stuck his chin close to the ground in prudent care as he peered about the corner of the house to see the owner of the rifle make a safe offing.

Even when the Boer had dwindled from sight, swallowed up by the invisible inequalities of the ground that seemed as flat as a table, he avoided to show himself in the open. He lurked under the walls of kraals, frightening farm Kafirs who came upon him suddenly and finally made a sudden appearance before Paul at the back of the house.

"I won't waste words on you," he said to the boy. "I 've got something better to do, thank God. But I 'm told you have a message for me."

"Two messages," said Paul.

"One 'll do," replied Boy Bailey. "I don't want to hear you talking. I 've been insulted here and I 'm not done with you yet. Mind that. So hand over what you 've got for me and be done with it—d'you hear?"

"Here it is." Paul put his hand into the loose bosom of his shirt and drew out a small paper packet. He held it out to Boy Bailey.

"That!" Boy Bailey trembled as he seized it, with a frightful sense of disappointment. He had seen the money as gold, a brimming double handful of minted gold, with gold's comforting substance and weight. The packet he took into his hand was no fatter than a fat letter and held no coin.

He rent the covering apart and stared doubtfully at the little wad of notes it contained, sober-colored paper money of the Bank of Africa. It had never occurred to him that the Kafir, Kamis, would have his riches in so uninspiring a shape. Two notes of twenty pounds each and one of ten and all three of them creased and dirty. No chink, no weight to drag at his pocket and keep him in mind of it, none of the pomp and panoply of riches.

"Why—why," he stammered. "I told him—cash down. Damn the dirty Kafir swindler, what does he call this?"

"Blackmail, I think he said," replied Paul. "That was the other message. If you don't do what you said you 'd do, you 'll go to tronk (jail) for it, and I am to be a witness. That 's if he does n't kill you himself—like I told him he 'd better do."

Boy Bailey arrived by degrees at sufficient composure to pocket the notes, thrusting them deep for greater security and patting them through the cloth.

"Oh, you told him that, did you?" he said. "And you call yourself a white man, do you? Murder, is it? You look out, young feller. You don't know the risks you 're running. I 'm not a man that forgets."

But Paul was not daunted. He watched the battered face that threatened him with an expression which the other did not understand. There was a curious warm interest in it that might have flattered a man less bare of illusions as to his appearance.

"I suppose you 've never seen a black eye before, you gaping moon-calf," he cried irritably. "What are you staring like that for?"

Paul smiled. "I would give you a shilling again to let me make a model of you," he answered. "I 'd give you two shillings."

Boy Bailey swore viciously and swung on his heel. He was stung at last and he had no answer. He made haste to get around the corner and away from eyes that would keep the memory of him as he appeared to Paul.

It was more than an hour later that Mrs. du Preez discovered him, squatting under the spikes of a dusty aloe, humped like a brooding vulture and grieving over that last affront. He lifted mournful eyes to her as she stood before him.

"Bailey," she said breathlessly. "I hunted everywhere for you. I thought you 'd gone without me."

She was ready for the long flight on foot. All that she had in the way of best clothes was on her body, everything she could not bring herself to leave. The seemliness of Sunday was embodied in her cloth coat and skirt, her cream silk bosom and its brooches, the architectural elaborateness of her hat. She stood in the merciless sun in all her finery, with sweat on her forehead and a small bundle in each hand.

"You 're coming, then?" he asked stupidly.

She stamped her foot impatiently. "Of course I 'm coming," she said. "Don't go into all that again, Bailey. D' you think I 'd stop with him now, after—after everything?"

She was holding desperately to her resolution, eager to be off before the six rosewood chairs, the table and the sofa should overcome her and make good their claim to her.

"What 's those?" Bailey nodded at the bundles torpidly.

"Oh," she was burning to be moving, to be committed, to see her boats flaming and smoking behind her. "This is grub, Bailey. We 'll want grub, won't we? And this is my things."

"The—er—money, I suppose, an' all that?"

"Yes, yes. Oh, do come on, Bailey. The money 's all here. Everything 's here. You carry the grub an' let 's be going."

"The grub, eh?" Mr. Bailey rose grunting to his feet. "You 'd rather—well, all right."

None viewed that elopement to mark how Mrs. du Preez slipped her free hand under Bailey's arm and went forth at his side in the bravery she had donned as though to bring grace to the occasion. Paul was down at the dam with sheep, and before he returned the brown distances of the Karoo had enveloped them and its levels had risen behind them to blot out the dishonored roof of the house.

At the hour of the midday meal, Paul ate alone, contentedly and unperturbed by his mother's absence. For all he knew she had one of her weeping fits upstairs in her bedroom, and he was careful to make no noise.

CHAPTER XII

Margaret entered the drawing-room rather late for tea and Mrs. Jakes accordingly acknowledged her arrival with an extra stoniness of regard. In his place by the window, Ford turned from his abstracted contemplation of the hot monotony without and sent her a discreet and private smile across the tea-table. Mrs. Jakes, noting it and the girl's response, tightened her mouth unpleasantly as the suspicion recurred to her that there was "something between" Mr. Ford and Miss Harding. More than once of late she had noticed that their intercourse had warmed to the stage when the common forms of expression need to be helped out by a code of sympathetic looks and gestures. She addressed the girl in her thinnest tones of extreme formality.

"I thought perhaps you were n't coming in," she said. "I 'm afraid the tea 's not very hot now."

"I 'll ring," said Mr. Samson, diligently handing a chair.

"Please don't," said Margaret, taking it. "I don't mind at all. Don't bother, anybody."

"I forget if you take sugar, Miss Harding," said Mrs. Jakes, pouring negligently from the pot. Ford grinned and turned quickly to the window again.

"No sugar, thanks," answered Margaret agreeably; "and no milk and no tea."

"No tea?" Mrs. Jakes raised her eyebrows in severe surprise and looked up. The movement sufficed to divert the stream from the tea-pot so that it flowed abundantly on the hand which held the cup and splashed thence into the sugar basin. She sat the pot down sharply and reached for her handkerchief with a smothered ejaculation of annoyance.

"Oh, I 'm sorry," said Margaret. "But how lucky you didn't keep it hot for me. You might have been scalded, might n't you?"

"Thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes, with all the dignity she could summon while she mopped at her sleeve. "Thank you; I am not hurt."

That was the second time Margaret had turned her own guns, her own little improvised pop-guns of ineffectual enmity, back upon her; and she did not quite understand how it was done. The first time had been when she had pretended not to hear a remark Margaret had addressed to her. The girl had crossed the room and joined Dr. Jakes in his hearth-rug exile, and Mr. Samson had stared while Ford laughed silently but visibly. Mrs. Jakes had not understood the implication of it; she was only aware, reddening and resentful, that Margaret had scored in some subtle fashion.

The hatred of Mrs. Jakes was a cue to consistency of action no less plain than her love. "I like people to know their own minds," was one of her self-revelations, and she believed that worthy people, decent people, good people were those who saw their way clear under all circumstances of friendship and hostility and were prepared to strike and maintain a due attitude upon any encounter. Her friends were those who indulged her the forms of courtesy and consideration; her enemies those who opposed her or were rude to her. To her friends she returned their indulgence in kind; her enemies she pursued at each meeting and behind their backs with an implacable tenacity of hate. One conceives that in the case of such lives as hers, only those survive whose feebleness is supplemented by claws. Take away their genuine capacity for making themselves disagreeable at will, and they would be trodden under and extinguished. Mrs. Jakes' girlhood was illuminated by the example of an aunt, who lived for fourteen years with only a thin wall between her and a person with whom she was not on speaking terms. The aunt had known her own mind with such a blinding clearness that she was able to sit with folded hands, listening through the wall to the sounds of a raving husband murdering her enemy, and no impulse to cry for help had arisen to dim the crystal of that knowledge. "She was a bad one at forgiving, was your Aunt Mercy," Mrs. Jakes had been told, always with a suggestion in the speaker's voice that there was something admirable in such inflexibility. Primitive passions, the lusts of skin-clad ancestors, fortified the anemia of the life from which she was sprung. Marriage by capture would have shocked her deeply, but she would not have been the worse squaw.

She dropped into a desultory conversation with Mr. Samson, with occasional side-references to Dr. Jakes, and managed at the same time to keep an eye on the other two. Margaret had walked across to Ford, and was sitting at his side on the window-ledge; he had a three-days-old copy of the Dopfontein Courant, in which the scanty news of the district was printed in English and Dutch and they were looking it over together. Ford held the paper and Margaret leaned against his arm to share it; the intimacy of their attitude was disagreeable to Mrs. Jakes. An alliance between the two of them would be altogether too strong for her, and besides, it was warfare as she understood it to destroy the foe's supports whenever possible.

"Nothing in the rag, I suppose, Ford?" asked Mr. Samson, in his high, intolerant voice.

"Not a thing," answered Ford, "unless you 're interested in the price of wools."

"Grease wool per pound," suggested Margaret. "Guess how much that is, Mr. Samson."

"It ought to be cheap," said Mr. Samson. "It sounds beastly."

"Well, then, how 's this?" Margaret craned across Ford's shoulder and read: "'Mr. Ben Bongers of Tomtown, the well-known billiard-marker, underwent last week the sad experience of being kicked at the hands of Mr. Jacobus Van Dam's quaai cock. Legal proceedings are pending.' There now. But does anybody know what kicked him?"

"Cock ostrich," rumbled Dr. Jakes from the back of the room. "Quaai—that means bad-tempered."

"You see," said Ford, "ostriches are common hereabouts. They say cock and ostrich is understood. What would they call a barn-door cock, though?"

"A poultry," said Mr. Samson. "But we must watch for those legal proceedings; they ought to be good."

Mrs. Jakes had listened in silence, but now an idea occurred to her.

"There 's nothing about that woman in Capetown this week?" she asked, and smiled meaningly as she caught Margaret's eye.

"No," said Ford. "I was looking for that, but there 's nothing."

"What woman was that?" inquired Margaret.

"Oh, a rotten business. A woman married a Kafir parson—a white woman. There 's been a bit of a row about it."

"Oh," said Margaret, understanding Mrs. Jakes' smile. "I didn't see the paper last week."

She looked at Mrs. Jakes with interest. Evidently the little woman saw the matter of Kamis, and Margaret's familiar acquaintance with him, as a secret with which she could be cowed, a piece of dark knowledge that would be held against her as a weapon of final resort. The fact did more than all Kamis' warnings and Boy Bailey's threats to enlighten her as to the African view of a white woman who had relations, any relations but those of employer and servant, with a black man. Not only would a woman in such a case expose herself to the brutal scandal that flourishes in the atmosphere of bars where Boy Baileys frame the conventions that society endorses, but she would be damned in the eyes of all the Mrs. Jakes in the country. They would tar and feather her with their contumely and bury her beneath their disgust.

She returned Mrs. Jakes' smile till that lady looked away with a long-drawn sniff of defiance.

"But why a row?" asked Margaret. "If she was satisfied, what was there to make a row about?"

She really wanted to hear what two sane and average men would adduce in support of Mrs. Jakes' views.

Old Mr. Samson shook his head rebukingly.

"Men and women ain't on their own in this world," he said seriously. "They 've got to think of the rest of the crowd. We 're all in the same boat out here—white people holdin' up the credit of the race. Can't afford to have deserters goin' over to the other camp, don't y' know. Even supposin'—I say, supposin'—there was nothing else to prevent a white girl from taking on a nigger, it's lowerin' the flag—what?"

"A woman like that deserves to be horsewhipped," cried Mrs. Jakes, with sudden vigor. "To go and marry a Kafir—the vile creature."

"This is very interesting," said Margaret. "Do you mean the Kafir is vile, Mrs. Jakes, or the woman?"

"I mean both," retorted Mrs. Jakes. "In this country we know what such creatures are. A respectable woman does n't let a Kafir come near her if she can help it. She never speaks to them except to give them their orders. And as to—to marrying them, or being friendly with them—why, she 'd sooner die."

Margaret had started a subject which no South African can exhaust. They discuss it with heat, with philosophic impartiality, with ethnological and eugenic inexactitudes, and sometimes with bloodshed; but they never wear it out.

"You see, Miss Harding, there are other reasons against it," Mr. Samson struck in again. "There 's the general feelin' on the subject and you can't ignore that. One woman mustn't do what a million other women feel to be vile. It 's makin' an attack on decency—that 's what it comes to. A woman might feel a call in the spirit to marry a monkey. It might suit her all right—might be the best thing she could do, so far as a woman of that sort was concerned; but it would n't be playin' the game. It wouldn't be cricket."

He shook his spirited white head with a frown.

"I see," said Margaret. "But there 's one other point. I only want to know, you know."

"Naturally," agreed Mr. Samson. "What's the point?"

"Well, there are about ten times as many black people as white in this country. What about their sense of decency? Doesn't that suffer a little by this—this trades-union of the whites? That woman in Capetown has all the whites against her and all the blacks for her—I suppose. There 's a majority in her favor, at any rate."

"Hold on," cried Mr. Samson. "You can't count the Kafirs like that, you know. They 're not in it. We 're talking about white people. The whole point is that Kafirs are n't whites. A white woman belongs to her own people and must stand by their way of lookin' at things. If we take Kafir opinion, we 'll be chuckin' clothes next and goin' in for polygamy."

"Would we?" said Margaret. "I wonder. D'you think it will come to that when the Kafirs are all as civilized as we are and the color line is gone?"

"The color line will never go," replied Mr. Samson, solemnly. "You might as well talk of breakin' down the line between men and beasts."

"Well, evolution did break it down," said Margaret. "Think, Mr. Samson. There will come a day when we shall travel on flying machines, and all have lungs like drums. We shall live in cities of glazed brick beside running streams of disinfectant. There will be no poverty and no crime and no dirt, and only one language. Where will the Kafirs be then? Still in huts on the Karoo being kept in their place?"

"I 'm not a prophet," said Mr. Samson. "I don't know where they 'll be. It won't bother me when that time comes. I 'll be learning the harp."

"There 'll be a statue in one of those glazed-brick cities to the woman in Capetown," Margaret went on.

"It 'll be inscribed in letters of gold—'To —— (whatever her name was): She felt the future in her bones.'"

Mr. Samson blew noisily. "Evolution 's not in my line," he said. "It 's all very well to drag in Darwin and all that but black and white don't mix and you can't get away from that."