Part 6

"Is it all like this?" she asked.

"Sometimes there is grass--a little--not much, and milk bushes and prickly pear," he told her. "But it is hard ground, all of it. It is very peaceful, though."

She nodded comprehendingly, and he found a stimulant in her quiet interest. He had not Paul's tense absorption in the harvest of the eye, but he would have been no Boer had the vacant miles not exercised a power over him.

"You 're never--discontented with it?" asked Margaret. "I mean, you find it enough for you, without wanting towns and all that?"

He shook his head, hesitating. "I do not know towns," he answered. "No, I don't want towns. But--every day the same sights, and the sun and the silence--"

"Yes?" she asked.

He was little used to confessing himself and his shyness was an obstacle to clear speech. Besides, the matter in his mind was not clear to himself; he was aware of it as a color to his thoughts rather than as a fact to be stated.

"It makes you guess at things," he said at last. "You guess, but you don't ever know."

"What things?" asked Margaret.

"A lot of things," he answered. "God, and the devil, and all that. It's always there, you see, and you must think."

A rattle in the passage and a start from Mrs. du Preez heralded tea, borne in upon a reverberating iron tray by a timid and clumsy Kafir maid, who set her burden insecurely upon the table and fled in panic. Christian du Preez ceased to speak as if upon a signal and Mrs. du Preez entered the arena hospitably.

"You 're sure you wouldn't rather have something else?" she asked Margaret, as she filled the cups. "There 's afternoons when a whisky-and-soda is more in my line than tea. Sure you won't? P'r'aps Mrs. Jakes will, then? We won't tell, will we, Paul? Well, 'ave it your own way, only don't blame me! Christian, reach this cup to Miss Harding."

The tall man did as he was bidden, ignoring Mrs. Jakes. In his world, women helped themselves. Paul carried her cup to Mrs. Jakes and sat down beside her in the place vacated by his mother. From there, he could see Margaret and look through the window as well.

"If you 'll have one, I 'll keep you company," suggested Mrs. du Preez privately to Mrs. Jakes.

"One what?" inquired Mrs. Jakes across her cup. The poor lady was feeling very grateful for the strong tea to console her nerves.

"One what!" Mrs. du Preez was scornful. "A drink, of course--a drink out of a glass!"

"No, thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes hastily. "I never touch stimulants."

"Oh, well!" Mrs. du Preez resigned herself to circumstances. "I suppose," she enquired, nodding towards Margaret, "_she_ don't either?"

"I believe not," replied Mrs. Jakes.

Mrs. du Preez considered the matter. "You 'd think they 'd grow out of it," she observed enigmatically. "She seems to be lively enough, too, in her way. First person I ever saw who could make Christian talk."

Christian was talking at last. Margaret had paused to watch a string of natives pass in single-file, after the unsociable Kafir fashion, before the window, going towards the huts, with the sun-gilt dust rising about them in a faint haze. They were going home after their day's work, and she wondered suddenly to what secret joy of freedom they re-entered when the hours of the white man's dominion were over and the coming of night made a black world for the habitation of black men.

"I suppose there is no knowing what they really feel and think?" she suggested.

That is the South African view, the white man's surrender to the impregnable reserve of the black races; native opinion is only to be gathered when the native breaks bounds. Christian du Preez nodded.

"No," he agreed. "I have always been among them, and I have fought them, too; but what they think they don't tell."

"You have fought them? How was that?"

"When I was young. On commando," he explained, with his eyes on her. It was luxury to see the animation of her pale, clear-cut face as she looked up and waited for him to go on.

"It was a real war," he answered her. "A real war. There was a chief--Kamis, they called him--down there in the south, and his men murdered an officer. So the government called out the burghers and sent Cape Mounted Rifles with us to go and punish him. I was twenty years old then, and I went too."

In the background Mrs. du Preez sniffed. "He 's telling her about that old Kafir war of his," she said. "He always tells that to young women. I know him!"

Christian went on, lapsing as he continued from the careful English he had spoken hitherto to the cruder vernacular of the Cape. He told of the marching and the quick, shattering attack against Kafirs at bay in the low hills bordering the Karoo, of a fight at night in a rain-squall, when the "pot-leg," the Kafir bullets hammered out of cold iron, sang in the air like flutes and made a wound when they struck that a man could put his fist into. His eyes shone with the fires of warm remembrance as he told of that advance over grass-grown slopes slippery with wet, when the gay desperadoes of the Cape Mounted Rifles went up singing, "Jinny, my own true loved one, Wait till the clouds roll by," and on their flank the burghers found cover and lit the night with the flashes of their musketry. It was an epic woven into the fiber of the narrator's soul, a thing lived poignantly, each moment of it flavored on the palate and the taste remembered. He had been in the final breathless rush that broke the Kafirs and sent them scuttling like rock-rabbits--"dassies," he called them--through the rocks to the kopje-ringed hollow where they would be held till morning.

And then that morning!

"Man, it was cold," he said. "There was no fires. We were lying in the bushes with our rifles under our bellies till coffee-time, and that Lascelles, our general, walked up and down behind us all the night. He was a little old soldier-officer from Capetown; his face was red and his mustache was white. The rain was falling on my back all the time, but sometimes I slept a little. And when it was sun-up, I could see down the krantz to the veld below, and there was all the Kafirs together, all in a bunch, in the middle of it. They didn't look much; I was surprised to see so few. They were standing and lying on the wet grass, and they seemed tired. Some were sleeping, even, stretched out like dead men below us, but what made me sorry for them was, they were so few.

"I was sorry," he added, thoughtfully.

Margaret nodded.

"But it was a real war," he assured her quickly. "When the sun was well up, we moved, and presently all the burghers were lying close together with our rifles ready. It was Lascelles that ordered it. I didn't understand, then, for I knew a beaten Kafir when I saw one, and those below were beaten to the ground. By and by the Cape Mounted Rifles went past behind us, and dipped down into a hollow on our right; we had only to wait, and it was very cold. I was wondering when they would let us make coffee and talking to the next man about it, when from our right, so sudden that I jumped up at the sound of it, the Cape Mounted Rifles fired at the Kafirs down below. Man, that was awful! It was like a thunder on a clear day. All of us were surprised, and some called out and swore and said Lascelles was a fool. But it was queer, all the same, to see the Kafirs. Twenty of them was killed, and one of them had a bullet in his stomach and rolled about making screams like laughing. The rest--they didn't move; they didn't run; they didn't cry out. A few looked up at us; I tell you, it was near enough to see their white eyes; but the others just stopped as they were. They was like cattle, like sick cattle, patient and weak and finished; the Cape Mounted Rifles could have killed them all and they wouldn't have lifted their hands.

"Our commandant--Van Zyl, he was called, a very fat man--clicked with his tongue. 'Wasting them,' he said. 'Wasting them!'

"Then we went down the hill and came all round them, standing among the dead bodies, and Lascelles with his interpreter and his two young officers in tight belts went forward to look for Kamis, the chief. The interpreter--he was a yellow-faced Hollander--called out once, and in the middle of the Kafirs there stood up an old Kafir with a blanket on his shoulders and his wool all gray. He came walking through the others with a little black boy, three or four years old, holding by his hand and making big round eyes at us. It was the son that was left to him; the others, we found out, were all killed. He was an old man and walked bent and held the blanket round him with one hand. He looked to me like a good old woman who ought to have been sitting in a chair in a kitchen.

"'Are you Kamis?' they asked him.

"'I am Kamis,' he said, 'and this is my son who is also Kamis.'

"He showed them the little plump piccanin, who hung back and struggled. One of the young officers with tight belts put an eye-glass in his eye and laughed. Lascelles did not laugh. He was a little man, as neat as a lady, with ugly, narrow eyes.

"'Tell him he 's to be hanged,' he ordered.

"Old Kamis heard it without a sign, only nodding as the interpreter translated it to him.

"'And what will they do to my son?' he asked.

"Lascelles snuffled in his nose angrily. 'The Government will take care of his son,' he said, and turned away. But when he had gone a few steps he turned back again. 'Tell the old chap,' he ordered, 'and tell him plainly, that his son will be taken care of. He 'll be all right, he 'll be well looked after. Savvy?' he shouted to Kamis. 'Piccanin all right; plenty _skoff_, plenty _mahli_, plenty everything.'

"The Hollander told the old chief while Lascelles waited, and the men of the Cape Mounted Rifles who had the handcuffs for him stood on each side. Kamis heard it with his head on one side, as if he was a bit deaf. Then he nodded and put out his hands for the irons.

"Lascelles held out his hands to the baby Kafir.

"'Come with me, kid!' he said.

"The baby hung back. He was scared. Old Kamis said something to him and pushed him with his knee, and at last the child went and took Lascelles' hand.

"'That 's it,' said Lascelles, and lifted him up. As he carried him away, I heard him talking to the young officer with the eye-glass. 'That 's a damned silly grin you 've got, Whitburn,' he said, 'and you may as well know I 'm sick of it.'

"I think he was a bit ashamed of carrying the baby. He had n't any of his own. I saw his wife later, when we were disbanded--a skinny, yellow woman who played cards every evening.

"And then, at Fereira, they hanged old Kamis, while we all stood round with our rifles resting on the ground. There was a man to hang him who wore a mask, and I was sorry about the mask, because I thought I might meet him sometime and not know him and be friends with him. He had red hair though; his mask couldn't hide that, and there is something about red hair that turns me cold. There were about fifty of his tribe who were brought there to see the end of Kamis and take warning by him, and when he came out of the jail door, between two men, with his hands tied behind him, they all lifted a hand above their heads to salute him. The men on each side of him held him by the elbows and hurried him along. They took him so fast that he tripped his foot and nearly fell. 'Slower, you swine!' said Lascelles, who was there with a sword on. He walked across and spoke to Kamis. 'Piccanin all right!' he said, 'All-a right!' said Kamis, and then they led him up the steps. They were all about him there, the jail men and the man with the mask; for a minute I couldn't see him at all. Then they were away from him, and there was a bag on his head and the rope was round his neck. The man with the mask seemed to be waiting, and at last Lascelles lifted his hand in a tired way and there was a crash of falling planks and a cry from the Kafirs, and old Kamis, as straight and lean as a young man, was hanging under the platform just above the ground and swinging a little."

Christian du Preez frowned and looked at Margaret absently.

"And then I was sick," he said reflectively. "Quite sick!"

"I don't wonder," said Margaret. "But the baby! What happened to the Kafir baby?"

"I didn't see the baby any more," replied the Boer. "But I read in a newspaper that they sent it to England. Perhaps it died."

"But why send it to England?" asked Margaret. "What could it do there?"

Christian du Preez shrugged one shoulder. "The Government sent it," he replied, conclusively. No Boer attempts to explain a government; it is his eternal unaccountable. "You see it was the Chief, that baby was, so they wanted to send it a long way off, perhaps."

"And now, I suppose it 's a man," said Margaret; "a poor negro all alone in London, who has forgotten his own tongue. He wears shabby clothes and makes friends with servant girls, and never remembers how he held his father's hand while you burghers and the soldiers came down the hillside. Don't you think that's sad?"

"Yes," said the Boer thoughtfully, but without alacrity, for after all a Kafir is a Kafir and his place in the sympathies of his betters is a small one. "Kafirs look ugly in clothes," he added after a moment.

At the other side of the room, the others had ceased their talk to listen. Mrs. du Preez laughed a little harshly.

"They 're worse in boots," she volunteered. "Ever seen a nigger with boots on, Miss Harding? He walks as if his feet weighed a ton. Make a clatter like clog-dancin'. But round here, of course, there 's no boots for them to get."

"There 's one now," said Margaret. "Look--he 's passing the kraals. He 's got boots on."

They all looked with a quick curiosity that was a little strange to see; one would have thought a passing Kafir would scarcely have interested them by any eccentricity of attire. Even Mrs. Jakes rose from her place on the sofa and stood on tip-toe to see over Mrs. du Preez's shoulders. There is an instinct in the South African which makes him conscious, in his dim, short-sighted way, that over against him there looms the passive, irreconcilable power of the black races. He is like a man carrying a lantern, with the shifting circle of light about him, and at its frontier the darkness pregnant with presences.

The Boer, learned in Kafir varieties, stared under puckered brows at the single figure passing below the kraals. He marked not so much any unusual feature in it as the absence of things that were usual.

"Paul," he said, "go an' see what he 's after."

Paul was already at the door, going out silently. He paused to nod.

"I 'm going now," he said.

"Strange Kafirs want lookin' after," explained Mrs. du Preez to Margaret as the boy passed the window outside. "You never know what they 're up to. Hang out your wash when they 're around and you 're short of linen before you know where you are, and there 's a nigger on the trek somewhere in a frilled petticoat or a table-cloth. They don't care what it is; anything 'll do for them. Why, last year one of 'em sneaked a skirt off Mrs. Jakes here. Didn't he, now?"

"It was a very good skirt," said Mrs. Jakes, flushing. "A very good one--not even turned."

"Well, he was in luck, then," said Mrs. du Preez. "And what he looks like in it--well, I give it up! Miss Harding, you ain't going yet, surely?"

"I 'm afraid _I_ must," put in Mrs. Jakes, seizing her opportunity. "I have to see about dinner."

They shook hands all round. "You must all come up to tea with me some afternoon soon," suggested Margaret. "You will come, won't you?"

"Will a duck swim?" inquired Mrs. du Preez, genially. "You just try us, Miss Harding. And oh! if you want to say good-by to Paul, I know where he 's gone. He 'll be down under the dam, makin' mud pies."

"Not really?"

"You just step down and see; it won't take you a moment. He makes things, y'know; he made a sort of statue of me once. 'If that 's like me,' I told him, 'it 's lucky I 'm off the stage.' And what d 'you think he had the cheek to answer me? 'Mother,' he says, 'when you forget what you look like, you look like this.'"

"I think I will just say good-by to Paul," said Margaret, glancing at Mrs. Jakes.

"Come on after me, then," answered the doctor's wife. "I really must fly."

"Pigs might fly," suggested Mrs. du Preez, enigmatically.

The Boer did not go to the door with them; he waited where he stood while Mrs. du Preez, her voice waxing through the leave-takings to a shrill climax of farewell, accompanied them to her borders. When she returned to the little room, he was still standing in his place, returning "Boy Bailey's" glazed stare with gloomy intensity.

His wife looked curiously at him as she moved to the table and began to put the scattered tea-cups together on the tray.

"She 's a nice girl, Christian," she said, as she gathered them up.

He did not answer, though he heard. She went on with her work till the tray was ready to be carried forth, glancing at his brooding face under her eyebrows.

"Christian," she said suddenly. "I remember when you told me about the war and the Kafir baby."

He gave her an absent look. "You said, 'Hang the Kafir baby!'" he answered.

He turned from her, with a last resentful glare at the plump perfection of Boy Bailey, and slouched heavily from the room. Mrs. du Preez, with a pursed mouth, watched him go in silence.

Mrs. Jakes was resolute in her homeward intentions; she had a presentiment of trouble in the kitchen which turned out to be well grounded. So Margaret went alone along the narrow rut of a path which ran down towards the shining water of the dam, which the slanting sun transmuted to a bath of gold. She was glad of the open air again, after Mrs. du Preez's carefully guarded breathing-mixture with its faint odor of furniture polish and horsehair. Paul, by the way, knew that elusive fragrance as the breath of polite life; it belonged to the parlor, where his father might not smoke, and to nowhere else, and its usual effect was to rarefy human intercourse to the point of inanity. In the parlor, one spoke in low tones and dared not clear one's throat and felt like an abortion and a monstrosity. Years afterwards, when the doors of the world had been forced and it had turned out to be a smallish place, only passably upholstered, it needed but a sniff of that odor to make his hands suddenly vast and unwieldy and reduce him to silence and discomfort.

The path skirted the dam, at the edge of which grew rank grass, and dipped to turn the corner of the sloping wall of earth and stones at its deeper end. As she went, she stooped to pick up a fragment of sun-dried clay that caught her eye; it had been part of a face, and on it the mouth still curved. It was rudely done, but it was there, and it had, even the broken fragment that lacked the interpretation of its context, some touch of free vigor that arrested her in the act of letting it drop. She went on carrying it in her hand, and at the corner of the wall stopped again at the sound of voices. Some one was talking only twenty paces away, hidden from her by the bulk of the wall.

"You must shape it in the lump," she heard. "You must go for the mass. That's everything--the mass! Do you see what I mean?"

She knew the tones, the clear modulations of the pundit-speech which belonged to her class, but there was another quality in the voice that was only vaguely familiar to her, which she could not identify. It brought to her mind, by some unconscious association, the lumbering gaiety of Fat Mary.

"Ye-es," very slowly. That was Paul's voice answering. "Yes. Like you see it in the distance."

"That 's it," the baffling voice spoke again. "That 's it exactly. And work the clay like this, without breaking it, smoothly."

She still held the broken fragment in her hand as she stepped round the corner of the wall to look. Paul, sitting cross-legged on the ground, had his back to her, and facing him, with a lump of red clay between his hands, which moved upon it deliberately, molding it with care, sat a Kafir. He was intent upon his work, and the brim of his hat, overhanging his eyes, prevented him from seeing her arrival. She stood for a moment watching; the two of them made a still group to which all the western sky and the wide land were a background. And then the clay fragment dropped from her hand, hit on a stone underfoot and cracked into pieces that dissolved the dumb curve of the mouth in ruin.

At the little noise it made, Paul turned sharply and the Kafir raised his head and looked at her. There was an instant of puzzled staring and then the Kafir lifted his hat to her.

"I 'll be going," he said, and began to rise to his feet.

"Don't," said Paul. "Don't go." He was looking at the girl expectantly, waiting for her to justify herself. Now was the time to confirm his faith in her. "Don't go," he repeated. "It's Miss Harding that I told you about." He hesitated a moment, and now his eyes appealed to her. "She 's from London," he said; "she 'll understand."

The Kafir waited, standing up, a slender, upright young man in worn discolored clothes. To Margaret then, as to Paul in his first encounter with him at the station, there was a shock in the pitiful, gross negro face that went with the pleasant, cultivated voice. It added something slavish to his travel-stained appearance that touched the girl's quick pity.

She stepped forward impulsively.

"Please don't go," she begged, "I should be so sorry. And Paul will introduce us."

He smiled. "It shall be as you like, of course," he answered. "Will you sit down? The grass is always dry here."

He made an oddly conventional gesture, as though the slope of the dam wall were a chair and he were going to place it for her.

"Oh, thanks," said Margaret, and sat down.

*CHAPTER VI*

The Kafir seated himself again in his old place and let his hand fall upon the mass of clay which he had been fashioning for Paul's instruction. He was the least perturbed of the three of them. He sank his finger-tops in the soft plasticity of the stuff, and smiled across it at the others, at the boy, embarrassed and not sure of Margaret yet, and at her, still mastered by her curiosity. It was almost as if he were used to being regarded with astonishment, and his self-possession had a touch of that deliberate lime-lit quality which distinguishes the private lives of preachers and actors and hunchbacks.

For the rest, he seemed to be about Margaret's age, clean run and of the middle stature. Watching him, Margaret was at a loss to discover what it was about him that seemed so oddly commonplace and familiar till she noted his clothes. They were "tweeds." Though he had apparently slept on the bare ground in them and made them a buffer between his skin and many emergencies of travel, they were still tweeds, such as any sprightly youth of Bayswater might affect for a week-end in the country.

It needed only a complexion and an attitude to render him inconspicuous on a golf-course, but in that place, under the majestic sun, with the heat-dazzle of the Karoo at his back, his very clothes made him the more incomprehensible.

Margaret realized that he was waiting for her to speak.

"You model, then?" she asked, striving to speak in an altogether matter-of-fact tone, as though to come across gifted, English-speaking negroes, giving art lessons in odd corners, were nothing unusual.

"Just a little," he answered. "Enough to help Paul to make a beginning. Eh, Paul?"

Paul nodded, turning to Margaret. "He knows lots," he said. "_He 's_ been in London, too. It was there he learned to--to model."

Paul had a way of uttering the word "London" which conveyed to Margaret's ready sympathies some little part of what it meant to him, the bright unattainable home of wonderful activities, the land of heart's desire.