Flower o' the Peach

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

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

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

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

She did not answer, but continued to stare.

"You hear?" he demanded.

She gulped. "Yes."

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

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

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

She fell on her knees beside him.

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

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

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

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

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

"No – not for an hour."

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

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

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

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

"England?" asked Mrs. du Preez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Money, have you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Two messages," said Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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