Chapter IV: Part 4

"But I saw a lot of Capetown," he said. "I walked that afternoon and evening full twenty miles--once all the way out to Sea Point and back again. And I was perhaps a little discouraged: there were so many difficulties I hadn't expected. I knew quite well before I left England that I should have difficulties with the whites, but I hadn't allowed for practically the same difficulties with the blacks. There was a place behind the railway station, a tumble-down house in which about a dozen Kafirs were living, and I tried that. They fetched a policeman who ordered me away, and I had to go. You see, they could n't make head or tail of me; I was much too unusual for them to keep company with. So about midnight I found myself walking down towards the jetty at the foot of Adderly Street. You don't know Capetown, I suppose? The jetty sticks out into the bay; it 's no great use except for a few boats to land and at night it serves the purpose of the Thames Embankment for men who have nowhere else to go. I was very tired by then. As I passed the Van Riebeck statue, a woman spoke to me."

He hesitated, examining Margaret's listening face, doubtfully.

"I understand," she said. "Go on. A white woman, was it?"

"Yes, a white woman," he replied with the first touch of bitterness she had seen in him. "A poor devil who had fallen so far that she had lost even the scruples of her trade. I heard her coughing in the shadow when she was some distance from me, and saw her come out into the lamplight still breathless, with the shadows making a ruin of her poor painted face. But she had herself in hand; she was game. At the moment I was near enough, she smiled--I suppose the last thing they forget is how to smile. 'Koos!' she called to me, softly. 'Koos!' 'Koos' is the Taal for cousin, you know; it 's a sort of familiar address. I couldn't pass her without a word, so I stopped. 'You ought to see to that cough,' I told her. She was horribly surprised, of course, and I rather think she started to bolt, but her cough stopped her. It was a bad case, that--a very bad case, and of course she wasn't sufficiently clad or nourished. I advised her to get home to bed, and she leaned against the wall wiping her eyes with the corner of her handkerchief wrapped round her finger so as not to smudge the paint, and stared at me with a sort of surrender. I got her to believe at last that I was what I said--a doctor--"

"_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."

"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."

*CHAPTER VIII*

"Don't you some times feel," asked Margaret, "as though dullness had gone as far as it possibly can go, and something surprising simply must happen soon?"

Ford glanced cautiously about him before he answered.

"Lots of things might happen any minute to some of us," he said. "You haven't been ill enough to know, but we are n't all keen for surprises."

It was evening, and the big lamp that hung from the ceiling in the middle of the drawing-room breathed a faint fragrance of paraffin upon the inhabitants of the Sanatorium assembled beneath it. From the piano which stood against the wall, Mrs. Jakes had removed its usual load of photographs and ornamental pottery, and now, with her back to her fellow creatures, was playing the intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana." Her small hands moving upon the keys showed the red knuckles and uneven nails which had come to her since first she learned that composition within earshot of the diapason of trains passing by Clapham Junction, mightily challenging her laborious tinkle-tinkle, and with as little avail as now the night of the Karoo challenged it. Like her gloves and her company manners, it stood between her shrinking spirit and those poignant realities which might otherwise have overthrown her. So when she came to the end of it she turned back the pages of the score which was propped before her, and without glancing at the notes, played it through again.

"For instance," whispered Ford, under cover of the music; "look at Jakes. He carries a catastrophe about with him, don't you think?"

The doctor was ranging uneasily to and fro on the hearth-rug, where the years of his exile were recorded in patches worn bare by his feet. There was already a change to be remarked in him since Margaret had first made his acquaintance; some of his softness and appealing guiltiness was gone and he was a little more desperate and unresponsive. She had mentioned this once to Ford, who had frowned and replied, "Yes, he 's showing the strain." She looked at him now covertly. He was walking to and fro before the empty fireplace with quick, unequal steps and the fingers of one hand fidgeted about his mouth. His eyes, flickering back and forth, showed an almost frantic impatience; poor Mrs. Jakes' melodious noises that smoothed balm upon her soul were evidently making havoc with his nerves. He seemed to have forgotten, in the stress of his misery, that others were present to see him and enter his disordered demeanor upon their lists of his shortcomings. As he faced towards her, Margaret saw the sideward sag of his mouth under his meager, fair mustache and the panic of his white eyeball upturned. His decent black clothes only accentuated the strangeness of him.

"He looks dreadful," she said; "dreadful. Oughtn't you to go to him--or something?"

"No use." Ford shook his head. "_I_ know. But I wish he 'd go to his study, all the same. If he stays here he may break down."

"Why doesn't he go?" asked Margaret.

"He can't make up his mind. He 's at that stage when to decide to do anything is an effort. And yet the chap 's suffering for the only thing that will give his nerves relief. Can't help pitying him, in spite of everything, when you see him like that."

"Pitying him--yes," agreed Margaret. Mrs. Jakes with her foot on the soft pedal, was beginning the intermezzo again for the fifth time and slurring it dreamily to accord with her brief mood of contentment and peace.

"You know," Margaret went on, "it 's awfully queer, really, that I should be in the same room with a man in that condition. Three months ago, I couldn't have borne it. Except sometimes on the streets, I don't think I 'd ever seen a drunken man. I must have changed since then in some way."

"Learned something, perhaps," suggested Ford. "But you were saying you found things dull. Well, it just struck me that you 'd only got to lift up your eyes to see the makings of a drama, and while you 're looking on, your lungs are getting better. Aren't you a bit hard to satisfy?"

"Am I? I wonder." They were seated at opposite ends of a couch which faced them to the room, and the books which they had abandoned--loose-backed, much-handled novels from the doctor's inelastic stock of literature--lay face down between them. Margaret looked across them at Ford with a smile; he had always a reasonable answer to her complainings.

"You don't take enough stock in human nature," he said seriously. "Too fastidious--that's what you are, and it makes you miss a lot."

"Perhaps you 're right," she answered. "I 've been thinking something of the kind myself. A letter I had--from a girl at home--put it in my mind. She writes me six sheets all about the most trivial and futile things you can imagine, but she speaks of them with bated breath, as it were. If only she were here instead of me, she 'd be simply thrilled. I wish you knew her."

"I wish I did," he said. "I 've always had an idea that the good Samaritan was a prying, inquisitive kind of chap, and that 's really what made him cross the road to the other fellow. He wanted to know what was up, in the first place, and the rest followed."

"Whereas--" prompted Margaret. "Go on. What 's the moral?"

Ford laughed. "The moral is that there 's plenty to see if you only look for it," he answered.

"I 've seen one thing, at any rate, without looking for it, since I 've been here," retorted Margaret. "Something you don't know anything about, Mr. Ford."

"What was that?" he demanded. "Nothing about Jakes, was it?"

"No; nothing about him."

She hesitated. She had it in her mind to speak to him about the Kafir, Kamis, and share with him that mystery in return for the explanations which he could doubtless give of its less comprehensible features. But at that moment Mrs. Jakes ceased playing and began to put the score away.

"I 'll tell you another time," she promised, and picked up her book again.

The cessation of the music seemed to release Dr. Jakes from the spell which had been holding him. He stopped walking to and fro and strove to master himself for the necessary moment before his departure. He turned a writhen, twitching face on his wife.

"You played it again and again," he said, with a sort of dull resentment.

Mrs. Jakes looked up at him swiftly, with fear in her eyes.

"Don't you like it, Eustace?" she asked.

He only stared without answering, and she went on speaking hurriedly to cover him.

"It always seems to me such a sweet piece," she said. "So haunting. Don't you think so, Miss Harding? I 've always liked it. I remember there was a tea-room in Oxford Street where they used to have a band in the afternoons--just fiddles and a piano--and they used to play it there. Many 's the time I 've dropped in for a cup of tea when I was shopping--not for the tea but just to sit and listen. Their tea wasn't good, for the matter of that, but lots of people went, all the same. Tyler's, was the name, I remember now. Do you know Tyler's, Miss Harding?"

She was making it easy for the doctor to get away, after his custom, but either the enterprise of making a move was too difficult for him or else an unusual perversity possessed him. At any rate, he did not go. He stood listening with an owlish intentness to her nervous babble.

"I know Tyler's very well," answered Margaret, coming to her aid. "Jolly useful place it is, too. But I don't remember the band."

"_I_ used to go to the Queen's Hall," put in Dr. Jakes hoarsely. "Monday afternoons, when I could get away. And afterwards, have dinner in Soho."

From the window, where Mr. Samson lay in an armchair in apparent torpor, came a wheeze, and the single word, "Simpson's."

Margaret laughed. "How sumptuous," she said. "Now, Mr. Ford, you tell us where you used to go."

"Club," answered Ford, promptly. "I had to have something for my subscription, you know, so I went there and read the papers."

Mrs. Jakes was watching her husband anxiously, while Ford and Margaret took up the burden of inconsequent talk and made a screen of trivialities for her. But to-night Dr. Jakes needed expression as much as whisky; there was the hopeless, ineffectual anger of a baited animal in his stare as he faced them.

"Why aren't any of you looking at me?" he said suddenly.

None answered; only Mr. Samson sat up on his creaking armchair of basketwork with an amazed, "Eh? What 's that?" Margaret stared helplessly and Mrs. Jakes, white-faced and tense, murmured imploringly, "Eustace."

"Dodging with your eyes and babbling about tea-shops," said the doctor hotly. "You think, because a man 's a bit--"

"Eustace," cried Mrs. Jakes, clasping her hands. "Eustace _dear_."

It was wonderful to notice how her habit of tone held good in that peril which whitened her face and made her tremble from head to foot as she stood. From her voice alone, one would have implied no more than some playful extravagance on the doctor's part; she still hoped that it could be carried off on the plane of small affairs.

"You would go out without a proper hat on, Jakes," said Ford suddenly. "Feel stuffy in the head, don't you?"

"What do you mean--stuffy?" demanded Jakes.

But already the vigor that had spurred him to a demonstration was exhausted and the need for alcohol, the burning physical famine for nerve-reinforcement, had him in its grip.

"Stuffy?" repeated Ford, watching him closely. "Oh, you know what I mean. I 've seen chaps like it heaps of times after a day in the sun; they get the queerest fancies. You really ought to get a proper hat, though."

Mrs. Jakes took him by the arm persuasively. "Don't you think you 'd better lie down for a bit, Eustace--in the study?"

"In the study?" He blinked twice or thrice painfully, and made an endeavor to smile. "Yes, perhaps. This--er--stuffy feeling, you know--yes."

His wife's arm steered him to the door, and once out of the room he dropped it and fairly bolted across the echoing hall to his refuge. In the drawing-room they heard his eager feet and the slam of the door that shut him in to his miserable deliverance from pain, and the double snap of the key that locked out the world and its censorious eyes.

"You--you just managed it," said Margaret to Ford. The queer inconsequent business had left her rather breathless. "But wasn't it horrible?"

"Some day we shan't be able to talk him down, and then it 'll be worse," answered Ford soberly. "That 'll be the end for Mrs. Jakes' home. But you played up all right, you know. You did the decent thing, and in just the right way. And I was glad, because, you know, I 've never been quite sure how you 'd shape."

"You thought I 'd scream for help, I suppose," suggested Margaret.

"No," he replied slowly. "But I often wondered whether, when the time came, you 'd go to your room or stay and lend a hand. Not that you wouldn't be quite right to stand out, for it 's a foul business, all this, and there 's nothing pretty in it. Still, taking sides is a sign of life in one's body--and I 'm glad."

"That's all right, then," said Margaret. "And it 's enough about me for the present, too. You said that some day it won't be possible any more to talk him down. Did you mean--some day _soon_?"

"Goodness knows," said Ford. He leaned back and turned his head to look over the back of the couch at Mr. Samson. "Samson," he called.

"Yes; what?"

"That was bad, eh! What's the meaning of it?"

Mr. Samson blew out his breath windily and uncrossed his thin legs. "Don't care to go into it before Miss Harding," he said pointedly.

"Oh, bother," exclaimed Margaret. "Don't you think I want to know too?"

"Well, then," said Mr. Samson, with careful deliberation, "since you ask me, I 'd say it was a touch of the horrors casting its shadow before. He doesn't exactly see things, y' know, but that 's what 's coming. Next thing he knows, he 'll see snakes or cuttle-fish or rats all round the room and he 'll--he 'll gibber. Sorry, Miss Harding, but you wanted to know."

"But--but--" Margaret stared aghast at the feeble, urbane old man asprawl in the wicker chair, who spoke with genial authority on these matters of shadowy horror. "But how can you possibly know all this?"

Mr. Samson smiled. He considered it fitting and rather endearing that a young woman should be ignorant of such things and easily shocked when they were revealed.

"Seen it all before, my dear young lady," he assured her. "It 's natural you should be surprised, but it's not so uncommon as you think. Why, I remember, once, in '87, a feller gettin' out of a cab because he said there was a bally great python there--a feller I knew; a member of Parliament."

Margaret looked at Ford, who nodded.

"He knows all right," he said, quietly. "But I don't think you need be nervous. When it comes to that, we 'll have to do something."

"I 'm not nervous--not in that way, at least," said Margaret. "Only--must it come to that? Isn't there anything that can be done?"

"If we got a doctor here, the chances are he 'd report the matter to the authorities," said Ford. "This place is licensed or certified or something, and that would be the end of it. And then, even if there wasn't that, it isn't easy to put the matter to Mrs. Jakes."

"I--I suppose not," agreed Margaret thoughtfully. "Still, if you decided it was necessary--you and Mr. Samson--I 'd be willing to help as far as I could. I wouldn't like to see Mrs. Jakes suffer for lack of anything I could do."

"That's good of you," answered Ford. "I mean--good of you, really. We won't leave you out of it when the time comes, because we shall need you."

"Always knew Miss Harding was a sportsman," came unexpectedly from Mr. Samson in the rear. And then the handle of the door, which was loose and arbitrary in its workings, rattled warningly and Mrs. Jakes re-appeared.

She made a compunctious mouth, and expressed with headshakes a sense that all was not well, though perfectly natural and proper, with the doctor. Her eyes seemed rather to dwell on Margaret as she gave her bulletin.

"Mr. Ford was perfectly right about the hat," she said. "Perfectly right. He ought to have one of those white ones with a pugaree. He never was really strong, you know, and the sun goes to his head at once. But what can I do? He simply won't listen to me when I tell him we ought to go Home. The number of times I 've said to him, 'Eustace, give it up; it 's killing you, Eustace,'--you wouldn't believe. But he 's lying down now, and I think he 'll be better presently."

Mr. Samson spoke again from the background. He didn't believe in hitting a man when he was down, Mr. Samson didn't.

"Better have that pith helmet of mine," he suggested. "That 's the thing for him, Mrs. Jakes. No sense in losin' time while you 're writin' to hatters--what?"

"You 're very good, Mr. Samson," answered Mrs. Jakes, gratefully, pausing by the piano. "I 'll mention it to the doctor in the morning; I 'm sure he 'll be most obliged. He 's--he 's greatly troubled, in case any of you should feel--well--annoyed, you know, at anything he said."

"Poor Dr. Jakes," said Margaret. "Of course not," chorused the others. "Don't know what he means," added Mr. Samson.