The Outspan: Tales of South Africa

This worried me exceedingly and I turned it over and over again to get at the truth, and eventually it came to this. I knew that they were right as to the cause of his disfigurement; it was impossible to look at him and not accept it. I had no high moral prejudices about this. I only pitied him the more. But I did not believe a word of the rest of the story. All presumption and a heap of circumstances were against me, but I am glad to say that, but for the first hesitation, I never, never doubted him.

It may have been a week or two after this that I met Mrs Chauncey in camp one afternoon. I had not seen her since the evening already referred to, and, as it was an off afternoon, I asked leave to join her in her walk home.

We wandered on slowly through the outskirts of the camp, along the most direct road to the Chaunceys’ house. Since I had heard and seen what I had that evening my interest in Mrs Mallandane had increased. I never passed the house without looking. I claim – even to myself – that it was real interest and not curiosity that prompted me. Once or twice I had seen the figure in simple black, but not sufficiently clearly to have known the face again. Her figure I don’t think I should have mistaken; it was rather striking. There was also a little girl who used to sit under a mimosa-tree studying her lessons or doing sums on a slate. She and I became friends. I was drawn to the youngster because, when passing one day, I took the unwarrantable liberty of looking over her shoulder to see what the sum was. After a decent pause, during which I might have taken the hint, she turned up at me a very serious little face lighted by large blue eyes, and lisped slowly:

“I don’t like people to thtand behind, becauth I fordet my thums.”

I laughingly patted the little head, and went on; but after this I always stopped to chaff my little friend about her “thums,” and I generally brought an offering of some sort – sweets, cake, or fruit.

Thinking of the house and its people as we walked along, I was not sorry when Mrs Chauncey asked if I would mind waiting for a minute or two while she went in to see her protégée about some work secured or promised.

I sat down in my little friend’s seat and waited. I had not long to wait. Presently I heard behind me the awkward tiptoeing of a child trying to walk very silently. Like Brer Rabbit, I lay low. Then came the climbing on to the seat, and finally a pair of childish hands were clapped over my eyes to an accompaniment of half-suppressed squeals of laughter, broken by panting efforts to maintain the blind-folding hug. I was busily keeping up the illusion by extravagantly bad guesses as to who it was, when I heard the rustle of a dress, and someone ran out, calling:

“Molly, Molly! how can you be so naughty, darling? Oh, do excuse her!”

I was released. My hat was in the dust and my hair rumpled. I saw Mrs Chauncey in the background in peals of laughter; Mrs Mallandane before me, looking most concerned, and holding the bewildered Molly by the hand; and Molly vindicating herself by saying with much dignity:

“Mother, it’s only the gentimell that dooth my thumth an’ kitheth me.”

As a defence this was, of course, adequate – not to say excellent; but it was rather embarrassing for me. It was so effective, however, that I was spared the necessity of saying anything myself Mrs Chauncey introduced me to her protégée as she would have done to any of her lady friends, and the protégée bowed, as it seemed to me, with a great deal more grace and quite as much easy composure as the best of them. That was my first thought. The next was to take myself indignantly to task for instituting a comparison.

As we resumed our walk I was wondering what could be the tie between this woman and Cassidy. There was no mistaking her class. She was a gentlewoman to her finger-tips. I was roused from my rather discourteous distraction by Mrs Chauncey saying:

“You are not so surprised now, perhaps, that I lost my temper with Mr Carter the other evening. I am sorry I spoke as I did, but I felt it deeply – indeed I did.”

“I can well understand it,” I answered. “How do you like her?” she asked abruptly. “What! after on interview of two minutes – and such an interview?”

Mrs Chauncey smiled, and said: “Well, I only wanted to know your impression. And, after all, you have had time to form one, for you have been thinking of her all the time since we left the house!”

“Perfectly true – I have. And to speak candidly, I think I have seldom – indeed, I think, never – seen a face that interested me more; partly, I suppose, because of what you told us. And I don’t think I have ever seen anyone look so infinitely sad. It is a pitiful, haunting face.”

“I feel that also. I have never been able to forget her look since she came to me a month ago for work – needlework or any work. I will never believe that she could be an impostor. No, no! Truth is stamped in her face – truth and sorrow.”

I had always liked Mrs Chauncey. Just at that moment I was mentally patting her on the back and calling her “a little brick,” for it was clear that she too had heard something – heard it and passed it by. Good woman!

I was a bachelor, and not too old to feel; and, over and above my interest in Cassidy, this whole affair fascinated me considerably. From this time forward I never passed the house without greeting mother or child with sincere warmth, or missing them with an equally genuine sense of disappointment. I never met Mrs Chauncey without inquiring with interest the latest news of her friend and all details of her affairs.

There was never much to tell. Now it was some commission for a dress, now the mending of children’s clothes – another time the trimming of hats or working a tennis-net, that helped to make ends meet without hurt to her pride. These were petty details which might pass in woman’s chat, but should fail to interest a man, you would think. Nevertheless, they interested me. They did more. In the evenings, as I sat alone and smoked out in the starlight they helped me to conjure up pictures and to see her as she would at those very moments, perhaps, be employed.

I would have done anything to help her had I been able, but there was nothing I could do. I had even learned that I might not as much as evince sympathy or interest, except at the cost of insult to her. On one occasion when I happened to meet and walk with her in one of the main streets of the camp, I was frigidly cut by two ladies with whom I thought I was on quite friendly terms. This disturbed me considerably, not on my own account, but because of the insult and injustice to one who was powerless to resent it. It hurt me even more to realise that it would be wise to bow before this and prove greater friendship by showing less.

I was still smarting under this next morning when I was accosted by one of those puddle-headed, blundering idiots of whom there seem to be one or more in any community, no matter how small.

“I say, old chap,” he began, “look here, ye know! You’re not playin’ the game, ye know, old chap! The missis has been complainin’ to me about you. You know what I mean.”

I detest this “dontcherknow,” “g”-dropping kind of animal at any time – the thing that fondles you with “old chap” and “dear boy” and refers to its wife as “the missis.” But apart from this, I was to-day especially unprepared to submit to further outrage. I was still smarting, as I said before.

“My good man,” I said, “may I ask you to be more explicit?”

“Why, dash it all, old chap! you know what I mean – er. It’s no affair of mine, of course, if you only keep it quiet, don’t you know. But you don’t give one a chance, don’t you know; and, after all, you can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and all that sort of thing, don’t you know!”

I was trying to keep my temper, but with no very marked success, I fear; but I said as calmly as I could:

“That’s a very original remark, my friend, and no doubt equally intelligent, but I shall be pleased if you will be good enough to apply it so that I can understand it.”

“Look here, old chap. If you will go and walk in broad daylight with a woman like that, you know – well, you can’t expect – ”

“Stop now!” I said. I had hardly breath enough to speak, and there must have been something unpleasant in my face, for he stepped back a pace or two. “So far you are only a babbling fool. If you go on now you will be an infernal cad and must take the consequences. You understand what I mean. And further, as you have been good enough to hint that I should choose my line, I may tell you – to adopt your happy illustration – that I elect to ‘run with the hare.’ You see! Perhaps you understand what I mean!”

Now, before two minutes had passed, I did not need anyone to tell me that I had done the worst and most unwise thing possible under the circumstances. Of course I knew well enough that when a woman is concerned two things are very essential – that the man shall keep his temper, and that he shall be judicious, even circumspect, in defending. Having failed in the former, I necessarily failed in the latter, and I felt sick with impotent rage when I realised it.

I knew how the story would circulate, and I knew exactly how it would be touched up, amplified, and illustrated with graphic gesticulations when it reached the club and Exchange and passed through the hands of certain expert raconteurs; and to avoid the lamentable result of chaff and further provocation I got away for a couple of days to give myself – and the story – a chance.

Several weeks passed after this incident, during which I saw but little of Mrs Mallandane, and heard not much more. Occasionally I heard of Cassidy from men coming up the line. In spite of his grumbling and seeming discontent with the nature of the country in his section nobody believed that Cassidy’s Cutting was such a very unprofitable job as he gave out. Cassidy was too old a hand to be drawn into any admission which could be used against him for the purpose of cutting down prices in future contracts. Those best able to judge put him down to make close on 10,000 pounds out of that job. His section lay some sixty miles from Barberton, and, as far as I knew, he had been into camp only twice during the five months that had passed since I had first met him. One occasion was the night on which I had seen him; the other when he called at the office to see me. I was out of camp that day and missed him. I do not know how often he may have been in besides those two occasions.

Mrs Chauncey and I were real friends. Jack was one of my oldest chums, and when he married I found – what does not necessarily follow – that his wife was just one to strengthen the friendship and not weaken it. With regard to her, I felt that if an occasion should arise requiring that I should make a confidante of any woman Mrs Chauncey would be the one. I don’t know that I ever realised this sufficiently forcibly to express it even to myself until after a remark which she made to me about this time.

She had been telling me some little thing about Mrs Mallandane, and I may have shown by my attention – perhaps even by questions – more interest than she expected or thought called for. There was quite a long silence, during which I felt that she was thinking of something concerning me. When she turned towards me her expression was one of almost tender consideration, and in the gentlest possible voice she said:

“It is good to be kind and generous, and to help those who need it; but when a man means to help a woman it should be clear to him from day to day, from hour to hour, not only how far he means to go, but also what she will understand.”

The words went home to me, and I suppose I showed it, for she added a little nervously:

“You must not mind that from me. ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend.’”

“Taken as meant, Mrs Chauncey; and – thank you!” I meant it.

I made a careful and impartial examination of conscience that night when I had the silence and darkness to favour me; and although I honestly acquitted myself, there was just the faintest suggestion of the finding of the Irish jury: “We find the prisoner not guilty; but he’s not to do it again.” I told myself again that Mrs Chauncey was a “little brick” for her timely and well-judged warning; for I thought it was quite possible that I might have drifted on and “gone soft” before knowing it. I am satisfied that there was no cause for alarm, as the resolution to “ease up” cost me neither effort nor pang.

I abided fairly by the spirit of my unspoken pact. I changed my daily route to one that did not lead past Mrs Mallandane’s house. I ceased to talk of her; I even tried not to think of her. But just there I failed – for the effort to forget makes occasion to remember.

It was the tail end of summer. The heat was terrible, and in all the outlying parts – even in the lower portions of the camp – malarial fever was prevalent. The accounts from the line were particularly bad, nearly all the engineers, contractors, and sub-contractors being more or less laid up by attacks of the summer fiend. One of the engineers suffering from a mild attack was brought in, and, being at the hotel when he arrived, I heard accounts of what was going on. He told me that Cassidy had had attack after attack, but that he would neither lie up there nor come into hospital. It was work, work, work, with him, all day and night, except when he was looking after others – and, in truth, his camp was a kind of improvised hospital Cassidy, he said, with his superb strength and physique would not give in. He would not believe that fever could beat a man who was game, and he fought it.

There was no suitable conveyance to be got before night, so I arranged to start after dark, for I was determined to do something to repay the kindness I had had at Cassidy’s hands. I took a serious view of his case, for I knew how these things usually ended, and he was not going to die without an effort on my part to save him.

I walked home that night worrying considerably about poor Cassidy and wishing to Heaven that the trap was ready to start at once. I had reached the crossing-stones in the little stream, where my old and new paths forked out. It was dusk, and I was not thinking of whom I might meet, so I started at the sight of Mrs Mallandane a few paces off coming towards me, evidently to meet me.

“Oh, I have waited for hours to meet you!” she began without any ceremony, and talking nervously and fast. “I thought you had gone already, and yet I feared to annoy you by going to your office. Look here – look! Tell me, is this true? Oh, you can’t see – I forgot; it’s too dark. Here in the paper they say you are going down the line to-night to bring in someone who is ill, very ill with fever. Tell me, is it true?”

“It is quite true. I leave to-night after nine,” I answered – I hope without betraying surprise; but I could not help noticing that she did not mention Cassidy’s name, and that she was painfully excited. I drew no conclusions – I had no time for thought; but these things left a weight on my heart for all that, and it was not lightened as she went on.

“I have come to ask you something. You will please bring him to my house. I must nurse him! He must come to me!” This was not a favour sought, it was rather a direction given, and there was only the slightest note of interrogation in her voice. I could only repeat in surprise: “To your house, Mrs Mallandane?”

“Yes – yes! You will do that for me, please?”

“I am sorry, but I do not think that would be right. His place is clearly in the hospital, and I have no right to take him elsewhere.”

“You refuse? Oh, you cannot refuse me!”

“Mrs Mallandane, you put it very harshly. You must see that I cannot do otherwise. I know of nothing to justify me in not sending him to hospital. It will be better for him, and far better for you.”

She drew a sharp breath and faced me drawn up to her full height, looking me straight in the eyes.

“I half expected this,” she said. “I only asked you because I feared to worry him. Your refusal is nothing. He will come to me all the same. You will not refuse to take a letter to him, will you, if I detain you a few minutes longer?”

We were quite close to her little cottage, and as we walked towards it I tried to soften my refusal as best I could. She, however, did not seem to hear me.

She left me seated in the little parlour. There was no light in the room, but she carried in a lamp from an adjoining one; and I have never been so struck by a face as I was by hers when the glow of the lamp lighted it up. The charm of her beauty was not one whit abated – for beautiful she was; and yet there was only one thing to be read in her face, and that was resolution. It lay in her lips, the curve of the nostrils, a peculiar look in the eye, and a certain poise of the head. In very truth, she looked superb.

I sat waiting while the minutes passed, and not a sound broke the perfect silence in the house. Everything was so still that it seemed as if there could be no one within miles of me.

There was a book on the table before me, and I took it up unthinkingly. It opened where a cabinet-sized photograph had been left in it – as a marker I suppose. The photograph showed the head and shoulders of a man, and the face shown in full was one of the gayest and most resolute that I ever remember to have seen. There was something very attractive about it, and there was, as I thought, a faint suggestion of somebody I had known or seen. It was a good face, splendidly strong and honest, and, from a man’s point of view, a right handsome face too.

To look at a photograph uninvited may be an impertinence; to read the inscription on the back certainly is. And yet these are things which one is apt to do unthinkingly and even instinctively. I turned the photograph round and read:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” and under that a date. I put it back in the book, feeling that I had been prying into the secrets of a woman’s grief.

Presently I heard a chair pushed back in the next room and Mrs Mallandane’s step approaching. She handed me a closed note.

“You will give that to him, please,” she said politely, but very firmly. “He will come here if he receives it; but it is possible that he may still be delirious, and if so, I only ask you again if you will be good enough to bring him to me.”

With the knowledge which after-events have given me it is difficult to say whether I was concerned only for Cassidy’s health and Mrs Mallandane’s good name, or whether I was not pricked to anxiety by some other feeling. My heart did sink at her suggestion, I don’t know whether through selfishness or something better. I felt that I was beginning to yield before her evident purpose, but my answer was evasive. I said I did not see how I could promise anything.

She waved that impatiently aside. I recall the motion of her hand, as though she could literally brush such things away. She came a step nearer to me, the light shone full in her face, on the waves of her hair, on her slightly-parted lips, and glinted and flashed back from her eyes. For half a minute she stood so looking at me, and I was conscious of the grip of her hand on the back of a chair, and of the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed.

“You know him! You have seen him?” she queried in a low, deliberate voice.

“Yes,” I answered.

“You know he is disfigured?”

I could barely answer again, “Yes.”

“When I tell you, then, that I am the cause of that, will you deny me the privilege of any reparation I can make?”

The words met me like a blow in the face. I was crushed! God knows what I would have done but that I saw the flame of colour that leapt into her face, and the trembling and quivering of her lips. I gasped out:

“No, no! I will do it.”

She seemed so upset, so unsteady, that I made a half-step towards her, but she motioned me back, saying:

“Go now – go! Please go, and leave me.” A hundred thoughts were surging and churning in my head as I drove down the long, long valley of the Lampogwana River that night. I felt as miserable as man need feel. Everything seemed wrong – most of it horribly so – but turn as I might from one phase to another, the one thing always recurred, pervading, dominating everything: “I am the cause of that.” The words rang in my ears again and again, and the horrible significance shamed me afresh each time, always to be answered by something which said, “No, I will believe! I will trust!”

Poor Cassidy was very, very bad when I reached him, and his lucid intervals were far between. His appearance was terrible, the ghastly pallor adding, as I had thought nothing could add, to the face from which one eye, the nose, half the upper lip, and portion of one cheek, were gone. It was terrible – truly terrible!

There is no need to dwell on it all. I got him in and he lived for five days. Fever didn’t kill him; it couldn’t have; he was too strong and too stout-hearted. It was haemorrhage resulting from some old injury received in an accident years before. The doctor told me that when the artery had gone Cassidy knew he would be dead in a few minutes. He begged the doctor to leave him, and turning to Mrs Mallandane, asked her to cover his face with a handkerchief, and to hold his hand. He said to her, “God bless you, Molly! Good-bye!” and died like the man he was.

Mrs Chauncey was the real friend in that time of need. It was she who had supplied everything that an invalid could want; it was she who stayed all that long night through with Mrs Mallandane, who went with her to the funeral and stood by her, and stayed with her when all was over.

The day after the funeral I sat in my office dazed and stupefied with worrying and puzzling over many things in connection with these people whose affairs and whose lives seemed to have become suddenly entangled with mine. Not the least of my worries was the document before me, which was Cassidy’s will: “I give everything absolutely to Mary Mallandane,” and nominating me as his executor.

I dreaded the first interview – so much so, in fact, that I got Mrs Chauncey to go with me. The tall black figure and the excessive pallor of her face smote very hard on my heart, but I was relieved by the presence of little Molly, who stuck to me from the time I entered the room until Mrs Mallandane sent her away. I had already stated my object in calling when she sent Molly out, and I was about to resume, when she asked me abruptly:

“Do you know anything of his past life?”

“Nothing whatever,” I said. “Nor of mine?”

“No, Mrs Mallandane.”

She laid a hand on one of Mrs Chauncey’s, who was sitting near, and said gravely:

“You, who have been my friend, know nothing either. It is right that you should – that you both should.”

We were sitting at a table in the parlour; the writing materials were lying on it ready for my use. The two ladies sat close together opposite me.

I cannot give Mrs Mallandane’s own words, nor can I convey her manner when telling us the story of her life. Sometimes she would talk in a subdued monotone, telling, with an absence of feeling that was infinitely pathetic, of their troubles. Sometimes she would be roused to a pitch of feeling that left her voice but a husky whisper. Once – just once – I fancied there was the faintest trace of contempt in her tone when referring to – well, not to Cassidy. If it was so, it was at any rate instantly lost in a flow of pity.

This is substantially what she told us. Mallandane and Cassidy had owned claims in the Kimberley or one of the neighbouring mines, and were in fact partners doing business together. They were both young Irishmen, and had come out on the same boat some years before – which were considered sufficient reasons for their entering into partnership. Cassidy was the one with the brains, money, and work; and, from what I gathered, there seems to have been no reason, except Cassidy’s good-nature, for the alliance with Mallandane at all. However, they prospered, and Mallandane went home for a trip, and married and brought his wife back to Kimberley.

For a couple of years all went well – in fact, until the firm began to lose money. Reverses only stimulated Cassidy to harder work and more cheery, indomitable effort. You couldn’t beat him. But it was different with Mallandane. All his wife said was that he lost heart; used to go away day after day and night after night to where he could forget his worries – drinking and gambling. When Cassidy first recognised that his partner was falling, he gave up his own house, suggesting that it would be doing him (Cassidy) a good turn if they would let him board with them. He gave himself up to a splendid effort to save his partner from ruin.