CHAPTER XIThe 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 interruptingme," 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. ButIsay"—the words rasped from Christian's lips—"Isay 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 andskoff—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, "nowwhat 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 totronk(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 XIIMargaret 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 theDopfontein 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'squaaicock. 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 aKafir—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 Kafirsare n'twhites. 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.""I should think not, indeed." Mrs. Jakes corroborated him with a shrug. She had found herself intrigued by the glazed-brick cities, and shook them from her as she remembered that she was not "friends" with their inventor.But Margaret was keen on her theory and would not abandon it for a fly-blown aphorism."You 'd never have been satisfied with that woman," she said. "Supposing she had n't married the Kafir? Supposing that being fond of him and believing in him, she had bowed down to your terrible decency and not married? You 'd still have been down on her for liking him, and she 'd have been persecuted if she spoke to him or let him be friendly with her. Is n't that so?"Mr. Samson pursed his lips and bristled his white mustache up under his nose."Yes," he said. "That is so. I won't pretend I 've got any use for women who go in for Kafirs.""Nobody has." Mrs. Jakes came in again at the tail of his reply with all the confidence of a faithful interpreter.Margaret, marking her righteous severity, had an impulse to stun them both with a full confession. She found in herself an increasing capacity for being irritated by Mrs. Jakes, and had a vision of her, flattened beyond recovery, by the revelation. She repressed the impulse because the vision went on to give her a glimpse of the tragedy that would close the matter.Ford had not yet spoken. He sat beside her, listening. Across the room, Dr. Jakes was listening also. She put the question to him."What do you think, Dr. Jakes?" she asked."Eh?" He started at the sound of his name and put up an uncertain hand to straighten his spectacles."About all this—about the general principle of it?" she particularized."Oh, well." He hesitated and cleared his throat. There was a fine clear-cut idea floating somewhere in his mind, but he could not bring it into focus with his thoughts."It's simply that—Kafirs are Kafirs," he said dully. Mrs. Jakes interposed a warm, "Certainly," and further disordered him. He gave her a long and gloomy look and tried to go on. "When they are—further advanced, that will be the time to—to think about inter-marriage, and all that. Now—well, you can see what they are."He wiped his forehead nervously with his handkerchief, and Ford entered the conversation."Jakes has got it," he said. "Intermarriage may come—perhaps; but at present every marriage of a white person with a Kafir means a loss. It's a sacrifice of a civilized unit. D' you see, Miss Harding? You 've got to reckon not only what that woman in Capetown does but what she doesn't do as well. She might have been the mother of men and women. Well, now she 'll bear children to be outcasts. She ought to have waited a couple of hundred years.""Perhaps she was in a hurry," answered Margaret. "But there 's the other question—what if she hadn't married?""Oh," said Ford. "In point of reason and all that, she 'd have been right enough. But people are n't reasonable. Look at Samson—and look at me.""You mean—you 've 'no use' for her?""It's prejudice," he answered. "It's anything you like. But the plain fact is, I 'd probably admire such a woman if I met her in a book; but as flesh and blood, I decline the introduction. Does that shock you?"Margaret smiled rather wryly. "Yes," she said. "It does, rather."He turned towards her, humorous and whimsical, but at that moment Dr. Jakes made a movement doorward and Mrs. Jakes began her usual brisk fire of small-talk to cover his retreat."I only wish there was some way we could get the papers regularly—such a lot of things seem to be happening just now," she prattled. "Some of the papers have cables from England and they are most interesting. ThatCape Timesyou lent me, Mr. Samson—it had the names of the people at the Drawing-Room. Do you know, I 've often been to see the carriages drive up, and it 's just like reading about old friends. There was one old lady, rather fat, with a mole on her chin, who always went, and once we saw her drinking out of a flask in the carriage. My cousin William—William Penfold—nicknamed her the Duchess de Grundy, and when we asked a policeman about her, it turned out she really was a Duchess. Was n't that strange?"Mr. Samson heard this recital with unusual attention."A flask?" he asked. "Leather-covered thing, big as a quart bottle? Fat old girl with an iron-gray mustache?""Why," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 've seen her too."Mr. Samson glared around him. "Seen her," he exclaimed. "Why, ma 'am, once—she would walk with the guns, confound her—once I put a charge of shot into her. And why I didn't give her the other barrel while I was about it, I 've never been able to imagine. Seen her, indeed. I 've seen her bounce like a bally india-rubber ball with a gunful of lead to help her along. Used to write to me, she did, whenever a pellet came to the surface and dropped out. I should just think I had seen her.""Fancy," said Mrs. Jakes.Mr. Samson did not go off forthwith, as his wont was. He showed a certain dexterity in contriving to keep Margaret in the room with himself till the others had gone. Then he closed the door and stood against it, smiling paternally but still with gallantry."I wanted just a word with you, if you 'll allow me," he said, with a hand to the point of his trim mustache. He was a beautifully complete thing as he stood with his back to the door, groomed to a hair, civilized to the eyebrows. He presented a perfected type of the utterly conventionalized, kindly and uncharitable gentleman of England."Oh, Mr. Samson, this is so sudden," said Margaret."What's that? Oh, you be—ashamed of yourself," he answered. "Tryin' to fascinate an old buffer like me. But, I say, Miss Harding, I wish you 'd just let me say something I 've got on my mind—and forgive beforehand anything that sounds like preaching. We old crocks—we 've got nothing to do but worry the youngsters, and we have to be indulged—what?""Go ahead," agreed Margaret. "But if you preach at me, after shooting a duchess,—I'll scream for help. What is it?""It's a small matter," said Mr. Samson. "I want you just to let us go on likin' and admirin' you, without afterthought or anything to spoil the effect. You're new out here, and of course you don't know and could n't know; you 're too fresh and too full of sweetness and innocence; but—well, it kind of jars to hear you standin' up for a woman like that woman in Capetown. You mean a lot to us, Miss Harding. We have n't got much here, you know; we had to leave what we had and run out here for our lives—run like bally rabbits when a terrier comes along. It 'ud be a kindness if you wouldn't—you know."There was no mistaking the kindliness with which he smiled at her as he spoke. It was another warning, but conveyed differently from the others she had received. Mr. Samson managed to make his air of pleading for a matter of sentiment convincing."You—you 're awfully kind," she said."Not kind," he replied. "Oh no; it is n't that. It 's what I said. It 's us I 'm thinking of. You 've no idea of what you stand for. You 're home, and afternoons when one meets pretty girls who are all goin' to marry some bally cub, and restaurants full of nice women with jolly shoulders, and fields with tailor-made girls runnin' away from cows. You 're the whole show. But if you start educatin' us, though we 're an ignorant lot, we lose all that."He looked at her with a trace of anxiety."It 's cheek, I know, puttin' it to you like this," he added. "But I 'm relyin' on your being a sportsman, Miss Harding.""It is n't cheek," Margaret answered. "It's awfully good of you. I—I see what you mean, and I should be sorry if I—well, failed you."He stood aside from the door at once, throwing it open as he did so."Sportsman to the bone," he said. "Bless your heart, did n't I know it. Though I could n't have blamed you if you 'd kicked at all this pow-wow from a venerable ruin old enough to be your grandfather."Hand to mustache, crooked elbow cocked well up, brows down over bold eyes, the venerable ruin challenged the title he gave himself. Margaret found his simple and comely tricks of posture and expression touching; he played his little game of pose so harmlessly and faithfully. She stopped in front of him as she walked to the door."If you 'll shut your eyes and keep quite still, I 'll give you something," she offered."Ha!" snorted Mr. Samson zestfully.He closed his eyes and stood to attention, smiling. The lids of his eyes were flattened and seamed with blue veins, and they gave him, as he waited unmoving, some of the unreality and remoteness of a corpse. He looked like a man who had died suddenly while proposing a loyal toast or paying a compliment, who carries his genial purpose with him into the dark and leaves only the shell of it behind.Margaret put a light hand on his trim gray shoulder and rising on tiptoe touched him with her lips between the eyes. Then she turned and went out, unhurrying, and Mr. Samson still stood to attention with closed eyes till the sound of her feet was clear of the stone-flagged hall and had passed out to the stoep.She did not go at once to the spot where a square stone pillar screened Ford's easel, as her custom was. She came to rest at the side of the steps and stood thoughtfully looking out to the veld, where the brown showed hints of gold as the sun went westward. It hung now, very great and blinding, above the brim of the earth, and bathed her with steep rays that riddled the recesses of the stoep with their radiant artillery. To one hand, a road came from the horizon and passed to the opposite horizon on the other hand, linking unseen and unheard-of stopping-places across the gulf of that emptiness."What has all this got to do with me?" was her thought, as her eyes traveled over the flat and unprofitable breast of land, whose featurelessness seemed to defy her even to fasten it in her memory. She recollected Ford's saying that she was a bird of passage, with all this but a stage in her flight from sickness to health. Her starting and halting points were far from Karoo; she touched it only as the dust that moves upon it when a chance wind raises fantastic spirals and drives them swaying and zigzagging till they break and are gone. Nothing that she did could be permanent here; her pains would be spent in vain. Even the martyrdom that had been held up to her for a warning—even that, if she accepted it, would be ineffectual, the "sacrifice of a civilized unit."Along the stoep, Ford's leg protruded from behind the pillar as he sat widely asprawl on his camp-stool; the heel of the white canvas shoe was on the flags and the toe cocked up energetically. He found things simple enough, reflected Margaret; as simple as Mrs. Jakes found them. Where knowledge and reason failed him, he availed himself frankly of prejudices and dealt honestly with his instincts. He permitted himself the indulgence of plain dislikings and was not concerned to justify or excuse them. It was possible to conceive him wrong, irrational, perverse, but never inconsistent or embarrassed. In the drawing-room he had spoken lightly, but Margaret knew the steadfastness of mind that was behind the trivial manner of speech. Well, he would have to be told, sooner or later, of the secret she shared with the veld. That confession was pressing itself upon her. With Mrs. Jakes and Boy Bailey already privy to it, it could not be withheld much longer. She stood, gazing at the outstretched leg, and tried to foresee his reception of the news."Well," said Ford, looking up absently when presently she walked down to him. "Did Samson crush you or did you crush him?""It was a draw," answered Margaret. "He 's a dear old thing, though. And what a guarantee of good faith to be able to cap a duchess story like that. Wasn't it good?""Rotten shooting, though," said Ford. "He wouldn't have admitted he 'd peppered a commoner.""You're jealous," retorted Margaret. "Mr. Samson 's quite all right, and I won't have him sneered at after he 's been paying me compliments.""Once I hit an Honorable with a tennis racket. It slipped out of my hand just as I was taking a fearful smack at a high one and hit him like a boomerang. So I 'm not as jealous as you might think.""One can't throw a tennis racket without hitting an Honorable nowadays. That 's nothing," said Margaret. "And you 're just an ordinary person, anyhow. Mr. Samson, now—he 's not only a gentleman, but he looks like it and sounds like it, and you could tell him with a telescope twenty miles off for the real thing.""Ye-es." Ford drew a leisurely thumb across the foreground of his picture and surveyed the result with his head on one side. "You know," he went on, kneading reflectively at the sticky masses of paint, "some of that 's true. He does sound exactly like it. If you wanted to know the broad general view of the class that he represents, and all the other classes that take a pattern from it, you 'd be fairly safe in asking Samson. Those dashing men of the world, you know—they 're all for the domestic virtues and loyalty and fair play. If you find fault with gambling and drinking and cursing, they say you 've got the Nonconformist Conscience. But when they stand for a principle, they 've got the consciences of Sunday School pupil-teachers. Samson's ideal of England is a nation of virtuous women and honest men, large families, Sunday observance, and no damned French kickshaws. For that, he 'd go to the stake smiling.""Well," said Margaret, "why not?""Oh, I 'm not saying anything against him," answered Ford. "I 'm telling you what he stands for and how far he counts when he turns on the oracle.""You mean that Kafir business, of course?""Yes," said Ford. "That 's what I mean.""I gathered," said Margaret slowly, "that you agreed with him about that."He was still at work with his colors and did not raise his head as he answered."Not a bit of it. I don't agree with him at all. He talks absolute drivel as soon as he begins to argue.""But," began Margaret."I say I don't agree with him," continued Ford; "but that 's not to say I don't feel just the same. As a matter of fact I do.""Oh, you 're too subtle," said Margaret impatiently."That 's not subtle," said Ford imperturbably. "You were sounding us all inside there and you got eloquence from old Samson and a shot in the dark from Jakes and thunder and lightning from Mrs. Jakes. Now, if you listen, you 'll get the real thing from me. As you said, I 'm just an ordinary person. Well, the ordinary person knows all right that a matter of tar-brush in the complexion doesn't make such a mighty difference in two human beings. He sees they 're both bustling along to be dead and done with it as soon as possible, and that they 'll turn into just the same kind of earth and take their chance of the same immortality or annihilation—as the case may be. He sees all right; he even sees a sort of romance and beauty in it, and makes it welcome when it doesn't suggest the real thing too clearly. But all that doesn't prevent him from barring niggers utterly in his own concerns. It doesn't stop his flesh from creeping when he reads of the woman in Capetown, and imagines her sitting on the Kafir's knee. And it does n't hinder him from looking the other way when he meets her in the street. It isn't reason, I know. It isn't sense. It is n't human charity. But it is a thing that's rooted in him like his natural cowardice and his bodily appetites. Is that at all clear?"Margaret did not answer at once. She seemed to be looking at the canvas."Yes," she said finally. "It 's clear enough. But tell me—is that you? I mean, were you describing your own feelings about it?""Yes," he said."You and I are going to quarrel before long," Margaret answered. "We 'll have to. You won't be able to help yourself.""Oh," said Ford. "Why 's that?""Because you 're such an ordinary person," retorted Margaret.He lifted his head at the tone of her voice, but further talk was arrested by the sight of a man on horseback coming across from the road towards them. Both recognized Christian du Preez. They saw him at the moment that he switched his cantering pony round towards the house, and came swiftly over the grass. He had his rifle slung upon his back by a sling across the chest, and he reined up short immediately below them, so that he remained with his face just above, the rail of the stoep."Daag," he said awkwardly."Afternoon," replied Ford. "Are you painted for war, or what, with that gun of yours?"The Boer, checking his fretting pony with heel and hand, gave him a bewildered look. The dust was thick in his beard, as from long traveling, and lay in damp streaks in each furrow of his thin face. The faint, acrid smell of sweating man and horse lingered about him. He moistened his lips before he could speak further."My wife is gone out," he said, speaking as though he restrained many eager words. "I must speak to her at once. She is not here—not?""I don't think so," said Ford.Margaret was more certain. "Mrs. du Preez has n't been here this afternoon," she assured the Boer. "There 's nothing wrong, I hope."Christian looked from one to the other as they answered with quick nervous eyes."No," he said. "But it is something—I must speak to her. She is not here, then?"They answered him again, wondering somewhat at his strangeness. He tried to smile at them but bit his lip instead."Well—" he hesitated."I will fetch Mrs. Jakes if you like," said Margaret. "But I 'm quite sure Mrs. du Preez hasn't been here.""No," he said forlornly. "Thank you. Good-by, Miss Harding."The pony leaped under the spur, and they saw him gallop back to the road and across it towards the farm."Queer," said Ford. "Did you notice how humble he was while his eyes looked like murder?"But Margaret had been struck by something else."I thought he looked like Mrs. Jakes," she said, "when I answer her back."
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 interruptingme," 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. ButIsay"—the words rasped from Christian's lips—"Isay 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 andskoff—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, "nowwhat 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 totronk(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 theDopfontein 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'squaaicock. 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 aKafir—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 Kafirsare n'twhites. 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."
"I should think not, indeed." Mrs. Jakes corroborated him with a shrug. She had found herself intrigued by the glazed-brick cities, and shook them from her as she remembered that she was not "friends" with their inventor.
But Margaret was keen on her theory and would not abandon it for a fly-blown aphorism.
"You 'd never have been satisfied with that woman," she said. "Supposing she had n't married the Kafir? Supposing that being fond of him and believing in him, she had bowed down to your terrible decency and not married? You 'd still have been down on her for liking him, and she 'd have been persecuted if she spoke to him or let him be friendly with her. Is n't that so?"
Mr. Samson pursed his lips and bristled his white mustache up under his nose.
"Yes," he said. "That is so. I won't pretend I 've got any use for women who go in for Kafirs."
"Nobody has." Mrs. Jakes came in again at the tail of his reply with all the confidence of a faithful interpreter.
Margaret, marking her righteous severity, had an impulse to stun them both with a full confession. She found in herself an increasing capacity for being irritated by Mrs. Jakes, and had a vision of her, flattened beyond recovery, by the revelation. She repressed the impulse because the vision went on to give her a glimpse of the tragedy that would close the matter.
Ford had not yet spoken. He sat beside her, listening. Across the room, Dr. Jakes was listening also. She put the question to him.
"What do you think, Dr. Jakes?" she asked.
"Eh?" He started at the sound of his name and put up an uncertain hand to straighten his spectacles.
"About all this—about the general principle of it?" she particularized.
"Oh, well." He hesitated and cleared his throat. There was a fine clear-cut idea floating somewhere in his mind, but he could not bring it into focus with his thoughts.
"It's simply that—Kafirs are Kafirs," he said dully. Mrs. Jakes interposed a warm, "Certainly," and further disordered him. He gave her a long and gloomy look and tried to go on. "When they are—further advanced, that will be the time to—to think about inter-marriage, and all that. Now—well, you can see what they are."
He wiped his forehead nervously with his handkerchief, and Ford entered the conversation.
"Jakes has got it," he said. "Intermarriage may come—perhaps; but at present every marriage of a white person with a Kafir means a loss. It's a sacrifice of a civilized unit. D' you see, Miss Harding? You 've got to reckon not only what that woman in Capetown does but what she doesn't do as well. She might have been the mother of men and women. Well, now she 'll bear children to be outcasts. She ought to have waited a couple of hundred years."
"Perhaps she was in a hurry," answered Margaret. "But there 's the other question—what if she hadn't married?"
"Oh," said Ford. "In point of reason and all that, she 'd have been right enough. But people are n't reasonable. Look at Samson—and look at me."
"You mean—you 've 'no use' for her?"
"It's prejudice," he answered. "It's anything you like. But the plain fact is, I 'd probably admire such a woman if I met her in a book; but as flesh and blood, I decline the introduction. Does that shock you?"
Margaret smiled rather wryly. "Yes," she said. "It does, rather."
He turned towards her, humorous and whimsical, but at that moment Dr. Jakes made a movement doorward and Mrs. Jakes began her usual brisk fire of small-talk to cover his retreat.
"I only wish there was some way we could get the papers regularly—such a lot of things seem to be happening just now," she prattled. "Some of the papers have cables from England and they are most interesting. ThatCape Timesyou lent me, Mr. Samson—it had the names of the people at the Drawing-Room. Do you know, I 've often been to see the carriages drive up, and it 's just like reading about old friends. There was one old lady, rather fat, with a mole on her chin, who always went, and once we saw her drinking out of a flask in the carriage. My cousin William—William Penfold—nicknamed her the Duchess de Grundy, and when we asked a policeman about her, it turned out she really was a Duchess. Was n't that strange?"
Mr. Samson heard this recital with unusual attention.
"A flask?" he asked. "Leather-covered thing, big as a quart bottle? Fat old girl with an iron-gray mustache?"
"Why," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 've seen her too."
Mr. Samson glared around him. "Seen her," he exclaimed. "Why, ma 'am, once—she would walk with the guns, confound her—once I put a charge of shot into her. And why I didn't give her the other barrel while I was about it, I 've never been able to imagine. Seen her, indeed. I 've seen her bounce like a bally india-rubber ball with a gunful of lead to help her along. Used to write to me, she did, whenever a pellet came to the surface and dropped out. I should just think I had seen her."
"Fancy," said Mrs. Jakes.
Mr. Samson did not go off forthwith, as his wont was. He showed a certain dexterity in contriving to keep Margaret in the room with himself till the others had gone. Then he closed the door and stood against it, smiling paternally but still with gallantry.
"I wanted just a word with you, if you 'll allow me," he said, with a hand to the point of his trim mustache. He was a beautifully complete thing as he stood with his back to the door, groomed to a hair, civilized to the eyebrows. He presented a perfected type of the utterly conventionalized, kindly and uncharitable gentleman of England.
"Oh, Mr. Samson, this is so sudden," said Margaret.
"What's that? Oh, you be—ashamed of yourself," he answered. "Tryin' to fascinate an old buffer like me. But, I say, Miss Harding, I wish you 'd just let me say something I 've got on my mind—and forgive beforehand anything that sounds like preaching. We old crocks—we 've got nothing to do but worry the youngsters, and we have to be indulged—what?"
"Go ahead," agreed Margaret. "But if you preach at me, after shooting a duchess,—I'll scream for help. What is it?"
"It's a small matter," said Mr. Samson. "I want you just to let us go on likin' and admirin' you, without afterthought or anything to spoil the effect. You're new out here, and of course you don't know and could n't know; you 're too fresh and too full of sweetness and innocence; but—well, it kind of jars to hear you standin' up for a woman like that woman in Capetown. You mean a lot to us, Miss Harding. We have n't got much here, you know; we had to leave what we had and run out here for our lives—run like bally rabbits when a terrier comes along. It 'ud be a kindness if you wouldn't—you know."
There was no mistaking the kindliness with which he smiled at her as he spoke. It was another warning, but conveyed differently from the others she had received. Mr. Samson managed to make his air of pleading for a matter of sentiment convincing.
"You—you 're awfully kind," she said.
"Not kind," he replied. "Oh no; it is n't that. It 's what I said. It 's us I 'm thinking of. You 've no idea of what you stand for. You 're home, and afternoons when one meets pretty girls who are all goin' to marry some bally cub, and restaurants full of nice women with jolly shoulders, and fields with tailor-made girls runnin' away from cows. You 're the whole show. But if you start educatin' us, though we 're an ignorant lot, we lose all that."
He looked at her with a trace of anxiety.
"It 's cheek, I know, puttin' it to you like this," he added. "But I 'm relyin' on your being a sportsman, Miss Harding."
"It is n't cheek," Margaret answered. "It's awfully good of you. I—I see what you mean, and I should be sorry if I—well, failed you."
He stood aside from the door at once, throwing it open as he did so.
"Sportsman to the bone," he said. "Bless your heart, did n't I know it. Though I could n't have blamed you if you 'd kicked at all this pow-wow from a venerable ruin old enough to be your grandfather."
Hand to mustache, crooked elbow cocked well up, brows down over bold eyes, the venerable ruin challenged the title he gave himself. Margaret found his simple and comely tricks of posture and expression touching; he played his little game of pose so harmlessly and faithfully. She stopped in front of him as she walked to the door.
"If you 'll shut your eyes and keep quite still, I 'll give you something," she offered.
"Ha!" snorted Mr. Samson zestfully.
He closed his eyes and stood to attention, smiling. The lids of his eyes were flattened and seamed with blue veins, and they gave him, as he waited unmoving, some of the unreality and remoteness of a corpse. He looked like a man who had died suddenly while proposing a loyal toast or paying a compliment, who carries his genial purpose with him into the dark and leaves only the shell of it behind.
Margaret put a light hand on his trim gray shoulder and rising on tiptoe touched him with her lips between the eyes. Then she turned and went out, unhurrying, and Mr. Samson still stood to attention with closed eyes till the sound of her feet was clear of the stone-flagged hall and had passed out to the stoep.
She did not go at once to the spot where a square stone pillar screened Ford's easel, as her custom was. She came to rest at the side of the steps and stood thoughtfully looking out to the veld, where the brown showed hints of gold as the sun went westward. It hung now, very great and blinding, above the brim of the earth, and bathed her with steep rays that riddled the recesses of the stoep with their radiant artillery. To one hand, a road came from the horizon and passed to the opposite horizon on the other hand, linking unseen and unheard-of stopping-places across the gulf of that emptiness.
"What has all this got to do with me?" was her thought, as her eyes traveled over the flat and unprofitable breast of land, whose featurelessness seemed to defy her even to fasten it in her memory. She recollected Ford's saying that she was a bird of passage, with all this but a stage in her flight from sickness to health. Her starting and halting points were far from Karoo; she touched it only as the dust that moves upon it when a chance wind raises fantastic spirals and drives them swaying and zigzagging till they break and are gone. Nothing that she did could be permanent here; her pains would be spent in vain. Even the martyrdom that had been held up to her for a warning—even that, if she accepted it, would be ineffectual, the "sacrifice of a civilized unit."
Along the stoep, Ford's leg protruded from behind the pillar as he sat widely asprawl on his camp-stool; the heel of the white canvas shoe was on the flags and the toe cocked up energetically. He found things simple enough, reflected Margaret; as simple as Mrs. Jakes found them. Where knowledge and reason failed him, he availed himself frankly of prejudices and dealt honestly with his instincts. He permitted himself the indulgence of plain dislikings and was not concerned to justify or excuse them. It was possible to conceive him wrong, irrational, perverse, but never inconsistent or embarrassed. In the drawing-room he had spoken lightly, but Margaret knew the steadfastness of mind that was behind the trivial manner of speech. Well, he would have to be told, sooner or later, of the secret she shared with the veld. That confession was pressing itself upon her. With Mrs. Jakes and Boy Bailey already privy to it, it could not be withheld much longer. She stood, gazing at the outstretched leg, and tried to foresee his reception of the news.
"Well," said Ford, looking up absently when presently she walked down to him. "Did Samson crush you or did you crush him?"
"It was a draw," answered Margaret. "He 's a dear old thing, though. And what a guarantee of good faith to be able to cap a duchess story like that. Wasn't it good?"
"Rotten shooting, though," said Ford. "He wouldn't have admitted he 'd peppered a commoner."
"You're jealous," retorted Margaret. "Mr. Samson 's quite all right, and I won't have him sneered at after he 's been paying me compliments."
"Once I hit an Honorable with a tennis racket. It slipped out of my hand just as I was taking a fearful smack at a high one and hit him like a boomerang. So I 'm not as jealous as you might think."
"One can't throw a tennis racket without hitting an Honorable nowadays. That 's nothing," said Margaret. "And you 're just an ordinary person, anyhow. Mr. Samson, now—he 's not only a gentleman, but he looks like it and sounds like it, and you could tell him with a telescope twenty miles off for the real thing."
"Ye-es." Ford drew a leisurely thumb across the foreground of his picture and surveyed the result with his head on one side. "You know," he went on, kneading reflectively at the sticky masses of paint, "some of that 's true. He does sound exactly like it. If you wanted to know the broad general view of the class that he represents, and all the other classes that take a pattern from it, you 'd be fairly safe in asking Samson. Those dashing men of the world, you know—they 're all for the domestic virtues and loyalty and fair play. If you find fault with gambling and drinking and cursing, they say you 've got the Nonconformist Conscience. But when they stand for a principle, they 've got the consciences of Sunday School pupil-teachers. Samson's ideal of England is a nation of virtuous women and honest men, large families, Sunday observance, and no damned French kickshaws. For that, he 'd go to the stake smiling."
"Well," said Margaret, "why not?"
"Oh, I 'm not saying anything against him," answered Ford. "I 'm telling you what he stands for and how far he counts when he turns on the oracle."
"You mean that Kafir business, of course?"
"Yes," said Ford. "That 's what I mean."
"I gathered," said Margaret slowly, "that you agreed with him about that."
He was still at work with his colors and did not raise his head as he answered.
"Not a bit of it. I don't agree with him at all. He talks absolute drivel as soon as he begins to argue."
"But," began Margaret.
"I say I don't agree with him," continued Ford; "but that 's not to say I don't feel just the same. As a matter of fact I do."
"Oh, you 're too subtle," said Margaret impatiently.
"That 's not subtle," said Ford imperturbably. "You were sounding us all inside there and you got eloquence from old Samson and a shot in the dark from Jakes and thunder and lightning from Mrs. Jakes. Now, if you listen, you 'll get the real thing from me. As you said, I 'm just an ordinary person. Well, the ordinary person knows all right that a matter of tar-brush in the complexion doesn't make such a mighty difference in two human beings. He sees they 're both bustling along to be dead and done with it as soon as possible, and that they 'll turn into just the same kind of earth and take their chance of the same immortality or annihilation—as the case may be. He sees all right; he even sees a sort of romance and beauty in it, and makes it welcome when it doesn't suggest the real thing too clearly. But all that doesn't prevent him from barring niggers utterly in his own concerns. It doesn't stop his flesh from creeping when he reads of the woman in Capetown, and imagines her sitting on the Kafir's knee. And it does n't hinder him from looking the other way when he meets her in the street. It isn't reason, I know. It isn't sense. It is n't human charity. But it is a thing that's rooted in him like his natural cowardice and his bodily appetites. Is that at all clear?"
Margaret did not answer at once. She seemed to be looking at the canvas.
"Yes," she said finally. "It 's clear enough. But tell me—is that you? I mean, were you describing your own feelings about it?"
"Yes," he said.
"You and I are going to quarrel before long," Margaret answered. "We 'll have to. You won't be able to help yourself."
"Oh," said Ford. "Why 's that?"
"Because you 're such an ordinary person," retorted Margaret.
He lifted his head at the tone of her voice, but further talk was arrested by the sight of a man on horseback coming across from the road towards them. Both recognized Christian du Preez. They saw him at the moment that he switched his cantering pony round towards the house, and came swiftly over the grass. He had his rifle slung upon his back by a sling across the chest, and he reined up short immediately below them, so that he remained with his face just above, the rail of the stoep.
"Daag," he said awkwardly.
"Afternoon," replied Ford. "Are you painted for war, or what, with that gun of yours?"
The Boer, checking his fretting pony with heel and hand, gave him a bewildered look. The dust was thick in his beard, as from long traveling, and lay in damp streaks in each furrow of his thin face. The faint, acrid smell of sweating man and horse lingered about him. He moistened his lips before he could speak further.
"My wife is gone out," he said, speaking as though he restrained many eager words. "I must speak to her at once. She is not here—not?"
"I don't think so," said Ford.
Margaret was more certain. "Mrs. du Preez has n't been here this afternoon," she assured the Boer. "There 's nothing wrong, I hope."
Christian looked from one to the other as they answered with quick nervous eyes.
"No," he said. "But it is something—I must speak to her. She is not here, then?"
They answered him again, wondering somewhat at his strangeness. He tried to smile at them but bit his lip instead.
"Well—" he hesitated.
"I will fetch Mrs. Jakes if you like," said Margaret. "But I 'm quite sure Mrs. du Preez hasn't been here."
"No," he said forlornly. "Thank you. Good-by, Miss Harding."
The pony leaped under the spur, and they saw him gallop back to the road and across it towards the farm.
"Queer," said Ford. "Did you notice how humble he was while his eyes looked like murder?"
But Margaret had been struck by something else.
"I thought he looked like Mrs. Jakes," she said, "when I answer her back."