Flower o' the Peach

"Are you a doctor?" interrupted Margaret.

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

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

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

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

"And then?" asked Margaret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Goodnight, Paul!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes?" asked Margaret.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know your name," he answered.

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

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

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

She put out her hand to him.

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It leaves me cold," returned Margaret agreeably.

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

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

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

"Good!" said Mr. Samson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Boots!" she repeated darkly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ford was staring with narrowed eyes through the sunshine.

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

"Prisoners? Oh, do let me look!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Any resistance?" enquired Ford.

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