Part 16

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. That _Cape Times_ you 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 XIII*

It was Kamis, the Kafir, ranging upon one of his solitary quests, who came upon them in the late afternoon, arriving unseen out of the heat-haze and appearing before them as incomprehensibly as though he had risen out of the ground.

Mrs. du Preez had groaned and sat down for the fourth or fifth time in three miles and Mr. Bailey's patience was running dry. For himself, the trudge through the oppression of the sun was not a new experience; he was inured to its discomforts and pains by many years of use while he had been a pilgrim from door to distant door of the charitable and credulous, and he had gathered a certain adeptness in the arts of the trek. He had set a good lively pace for this journey, partly because a single vigorous stage would see them at the railway line, but also because he sincerely believed in Christian du Preez's willingness to shoot him, and was concerned to be beyond the range of that vengeance. Therefore, at this halt, he turned and swore.

Mrs. du Preez fanned herself feebly with one hand while the other still held the little bundle that contained her money.

"I can't help it, Bailey," she said painfully. "I mus' have a rest. I 'm done."

"Done." He spat. "Bet I could make you walk if I started. Are you goin' to come on?"

She shook her head slowly, with closed eyes.

"I can't," she said. "I mus' jus'--have a sit down, Bailey."

Her elaborate hat nodded drunkenly on her head, and all the dust of the long road could not make her clothes at home in the center of the wide circle of dumb and forsaken land in which she sat, surrendered to her weariness, but never relaxing her hold on her money. Not once since their setting out had she loosed her grip on that, save when she changed the burden of it from one hand to the other. Her faith was in the worth and power of that double handful of sovereigns, and she would have felt poorer on a desert island by the loss of a single one of them.

"I 've been patient with you," Boy Bailey said, looking at her fixedly. "I 've been very patient with you. But it 's about time there was an end of this two-steps-and-a-squat business. There 's no knowing what minute that husband of yours might come ridin' up with his gun."

"I 'll be--all right--soon," she said. "Give me a half hour, Bailey."

"Take your own time," he replied. "Take all the time there is. Only--I 'm goin' on."

She opened her eyes at that and blinked at him in an effort to see him through the hot mist that stood before them.

"Goin'--to leave me?"

"Yes," he said. "What d' you think?"

Her look, her parted lips and all her accusing helplessness were before his eyes; he looked past them and shuffled. To the weak man, weakness is horrible.

"I warned you about comin'," he said, seeking the support of reasonable words as such men do. "You 've got yourself to blame, and I don't see why I should stop here to be shot by a man that grudged me a bite and a bed. It isn't as if I 'd asked you to come."

"I 'll be better soon," was all she could say, still holding him with that look of a wounded animal, the reproach that neither threatens nor defies and is beyond all answer.

"Better soon," he grumbled scornfully, and fidgeted. Her hand never left the little bundle. Would she struggle much, he was thinking. He could take it from her, of course, but he did n't want her to scream, even in that earless solitude. The thought of her screams made him uneasy. She might go on crying out even when he had torn the bundle from her and the cries would follow at his back as he carried it off, and he would know that she was still crying when he had passed out of hearing.

Still--a kick, perhaps. Boy Bailey looked at her bowed body and at the toe of his shoe. He began to breathe short and to tremble. It was necessary to wait a moment and let energy accumulate for the deed.

"Don't--go off," gasped Mrs. du Preez, with her face bent over her knees, and Bailey relaxed. The words had snapped the tension of his resolve, and it would have to be keyed up again.

"Give me that bundle," he said hoarsely. "Give it to me, or else--"

She sat up with an effort and he stopped in the middle of his threat. He was pale now and trembling strongly. She drew the bundle closer to her defensively.

"No," she answered. "I won't."

"Give it here," he croaked, from a dry throat. "Come on--God! I'll--"

The moment of resolution had come to him, and for the instant he was fit and strong enough to do murder. He plunged forward with his lower lip sucked in and his ragged teeth showing in a line above his chin, and all his loose and fearful face contorted into a maniac rage. The woman fell over sideways with a strident cry, her bundle hugged to her breast. Boy Bailey gasped and flung back his foot for the swinging kick that would save him from the noise of her complainings.

He kicked, blind to all but the woman on the ground, alone with her in a narrow theater of bestial purpose and sweating terrors. He neither heard nor saw the quick spring of the waiting Kafir, who charged him with a shoulder, football fashion, while the kick still traveled in the air and pitched him aside to fall brutally on his ear and elbow. He tumbled and slid upon the dust with the unresisting lifelessness of a sack of flour and lay, making noises in his throat and moving his head feebly, till the world grew visible again and he could see.

The Kafir stood above Mrs. du Preez, who lay where she had thrown herself, and stared up at him with eyes in which the understanding was stagnant.