Kitabı oku: «Flower o' the Peach», sayfa 7

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."

"They looked meek enough as they passed," remarked Ford. "There didn't seem to be a kick left among them."

Van Zyl nodded over the brim of his tea-cup. "There isn't," he said shortly. "They 've had the kick taken out of 'em."

He drank imperturbably, and Margaret had a momentary blurred vision of defeated, captured Kafirs in the process of having the kick extracted from them and the serene, fair-haired sub-inspector superintending its removal with unruffled, professional calm.

"Been here long, Miss Harding?"

Van Zyl addressed her suddenly across the room.

"Not quite long enough to understand," she replied. "Did you say those poor creatures were fighting – among themselves?"

"Yes."

"But why?" she persisted. "What did they fight for?"

He shrugged his neat shoulders. "Why does a Kafir do anything?" he enquired. "They told a cock-and-bull story that seems to be getting fashionable among them of late, about a son of one of their old chiefs appearing among them dressed like a white man. He went from kraal to kraal, talking English and giving money, and at one kraal the headman, an old chap who used to be a native constable of ours, actually seems to have laid his stick across some wandering nigger who couldn't explain what he wanted. The next kraal heard of this, and decided at once that a chief had been insulted, and the next thing was a fight and the old headman with an assegai through him. But if you want my opinion, Miss Harding – it does n't make such a good story, but I 've had to do with niggers all my life – "

"Yes?" said Margaret. "Tell me."

"Well," said Van Zyl, "my opinion is that if the old headman had n't been the owner of twelve head of cattle, all ready to be stolen, he might have gone on whacking stray Kafirs all his life without hurting anybody's feelings."

"Except theirs," suggested Mr. Samson. "Hah, ha! Except the chaps that he whacked – what?"

"Quite so!" Sub-Inspector Van Zyl smiled politely. "He was a vigorous old gentleman, and rather given to laying about him with anything that came handy. Probably picked up the habit in the police; the Kafir constables are always pretty rough with people of their own color. Anyhow, he 's done for; they drove a stabbing assegai clean through him and pinned him to a post of his own hut. I think I 've got the nigger that did it."

Mrs. Jakes at the tea-table shook her skirts applaudingly. At any rate, the rustle of them as she shook came in like applause at the tail of the sub-inspector's narrative.

"He ought to be hanged," she said.

"He will be," said the sub-inspector. "But we 're not at the bottom of it yet. There is a fellow, so far as I can find out, coming and going on the Karoo, dressed in clothes and talking a sort of English. He 's the man I want."

"What for?" demanded Margaret, and knew that she had spoken too sharply. Van Zyl seemed to remark it, too, for his eye dwelt on her inquiringly for a couple of seconds before he replied.

"It'll probably be sedition," he replied. "The whole lot of 'em are uneasy down in the south there and we 're strengthening our posts. No!" he said, to Mrs. Jakes' exclamation; "there 's no danger. Not the slightest danger. But if we could just lay hands on that wandering nigger who talks English – "

He left the sentence unfinished, and his nod signified that dire experiences awaited the elusive Kafir when he should come into the strong hands of authority. The Cape Mounted Police, he replied, would cure him of his eccentricities.

He passed on to talk with Ford and Mrs. Jakes about common acquaintances, officers in the police and the Rifles and people who lived in Dopfontein, sixty miles away, and belonged to a tennis club. Then the sound of the softly-closing door advertised them of the tiptoe departure of Dr. Jakes, and soon afterwards Van Zyl rose and announced that he must leave to overtake his party.

"If you can come to Dopfontein, Miss Harding," he said, as he took his leave, "hope you 'll let me know. Decent little place; we 'll try to amuse you."

The orderly, refreshed but dusty still, came quickly to attention as the sub-inspector appeared in the doorway, and his pert cockney face took on the blankness proper to discipline. At a window above, Fat Mary shed admiring glances upon him, and a certain rigor of demeanor might have been taken to indicate that the warrior was not unconscious of them. He looked back over his shoulder as he cantered off in the wake of the sub-inspector.

"What 's the trouble?" asked Ford, discreetly, as the sun-warmed dust fluffed up and enveloped the riders in a soft cloud of bronze.

Margaret turned impatiently from looking after them.

"I hate cruelty," she said, irritably.

Ford looked at her shrewdly. "Of course you do," he said. "But Van Zyl's not cruel. What he said is true; he 's been among Kafirs all his life."

"And learned nothing," retorted Margaret. "It 's beastly; it's just beastly. He can't even think they ever mean well; they only fight to steal, according to him. And then he 'takes the kick out of them!' Some day he 'll work himself up to crucify one of them."

"Hold on," said Ford. "You mustn't get excited; you know, Jakes doesn't allow it. And you 're really not quite just to Van Zyl."

"Isn't he proud of it?" asked Margaret scornfully.

"I wonder," said Ford. "But it 's just as likely he 's proud of policing a smallpox district single-handed and playing priest and nurse when he was only paid to be jailer and executioner. He got his promotion for that."

"Mr. Van Zyl did that?" asked Margaret incredulously. "Did he arrange to have the deaths over in time for tea?"

Ford laughed shortly. "You must ask him," he replied. "He 'll probably say he did. He 's very fond of tea. But at any rate, he sees as much downright hard fighting in a year as a man in the army might see in a lifetime and – " he looked at Margaret out of the corners of his eyes – "the Kafirs swear by him."

"The Kafirs do?" asked Margaret incredulously.

"They swear by him," Ford assured her. "You try Fat Mary some time; she 'll tell you."

"Oh, well," said Margaret; "I don't know. Things are beastly, anyhow, and I don't know which is worse – cruelty to Kafirs or the Kafirs' apparent enjoyment of it. That man has made me miserable."

Ford frowned. "Don't be miserable," he said, awkwardly. "I hate to think you 're unhappy. You know," he went on, more fluently as an argument opened out ahead of him, "you 've no business really to concern yourself with such things. You don't belong among them. You 're a bird of passage, just perching for a moment on your way through, and you mustn't eat the local worms. It 's poaching."

"There 's nothing else to eat," replied Margaret lugubriously.

"You should have brought your knitting," said Ford. "You really should! Capital thing for staying the pangs of hunger, knitting!"

"Thank you," said Margaret. "You 're very good. But I prefer worms. Not so cloying, you know!"

She did not, however, act upon Ford's suggestion to ask Fat Mary about the sub-inspector. Even as rats are said to afford the means of travel to the bacillus of bubonic plague, it is probable that the worms of a country furnish vehicles for native prejudices and habits of mind. At any rate, when Margaret surveyed Fat Mary, ballooning about the room and creased with gaiety, there came to her that sense of the impropriety of discussing a white man with her handmaid which is at the root of South African etiquette.

"Them flowers gone," announced Fat Mary tranquilly, when Margaret was in bed and she was preparing to depart.

"Gone! Where?" asked Margaret.

"I throw 'um away," was the contented answer. "Stink – pah! So I throw 'um. Goo' night, missis."