Chapter VIII: Part 8

The hatred of Mrs. Jakes was a cue to consistency of action no less plain than her love. "I like people to know their own minds," was one of her self-revelations, and she believed that worthy people, decent people, good people were those who saw their way clear under all circumstances of friendship and hostility and were prepared to strike and maintain a due attitude upon any encounter. Her friends were those who indulged her the forms of courtesy and consideration; her enemies those who opposed her or were rude to her. To her friends she returned their indulgence in kind; her enemies she pursued at each meeting and behind their backs with an implacable tenacity of hate. One conceives that in the case of such lives as hers, only those survive whose feebleness is supplemented by claws. Take away their genuine capacity for making themselves disagreeable at will, and they would be trodden under and extinguished. Mrs. Jakes' girlhood was illuminated by the example of an aunt, who lived for fourteen years with only a thin wall between her and a person with whom she was not on speaking terms. The aunt had known her own mind with such a blinding clearness that she was able to sit with folded hands, listening through the wall to the sounds of a raving husband murdering her enemy, and no impulse to cry for help had arisen to dim the crystal of that knowledge. "She was a bad one at forgiving, was your Aunt Mercy," Mrs. Jakes had been told, always with a suggestion in the speaker's voice that there was something admirable in such inflexibility. Primitive passions, the lusts of skin-clad ancestors, fortified the anemia of the life from which she was sprung. Marriage by capture would have shocked her deeply, but she would not have been the worse squaw.

She dropped into a desultory conversation with Mr. Samson, with occasional side-references to Dr. Jakes, and managed at the same time to keep an eye on the other two. Margaret had walked across to Ford, and was sitting at his side on the window-ledge; he had a three-days-old copy of the _Dopfontein Courant_, in which the scanty news of the district was printed in English and Dutch and they were looking it over together. Ford held the paper and Margaret leaned against his arm to share it; the intimacy of their attitude was disagreeable to Mrs. Jakes. An alliance between the two of them would be altogether too strong for her, and besides, it was warfare as she understood it to destroy the foe's supports whenever possible.

"Nothing in the rag, I suppose, Ford?" asked Mr. Samson, in his high, intolerant voice.

"Not a thing," answered Ford, "unless you 're interested in the price of wools."

"Grease wool per pound," suggested Margaret. "Guess how much that is, Mr. Samson."

"It ought to be cheap," said Mr. Samson. "It sounds beastly."

"Well, then, how 's this?" Margaret craned across Ford's shoulder and read: "'Mr. Ben Bongers of Tomtown, the well-known billiard-marker, underwent last week the sad experience of being kicked at the hands of Mr. Jacobus Van Dam's _quaai_ cock. Legal proceedings are pending.' There now. But does anybody know what kicked him?"

"Cock ostrich," rumbled Dr. Jakes from the back of the room. "_Quaai_--that means bad-tempered."

"You see," said Ford, "ostriches are common hereabouts. They say cock and ostrich is understood. What would they call a barn-door cock, though?"

"A poultry," said Mr. Samson. "But we must watch for those legal proceedings; they ought to be good."

Mrs. Jakes had listened in silence, but now an idea occurred to her.

"There 's nothing about that woman in Capetown this week?" she asked, and smiled meaningly as she caught Margaret's eye.

"No," said Ford. "I was looking for that, but there 's nothing."

"What woman was that?" inquired Margaret.

"Oh, a rotten business. A woman married a Kafir parson--a white woman. There 's been a bit of a row about it."

"Oh," said Margaret, understanding Mrs. Jakes' smile. "I didn't see the paper last week."

She looked at Mrs. Jakes with interest. Evidently the little woman saw the matter of Kamis, and Margaret's familiar acquaintance with him, as a secret with which she could be cowed, a piece of dark knowledge that would be held against her as a weapon of final resort. The fact did more than all Kamis' warnings and Boy Bailey's threats to enlighten her as to the African view of a white woman who had relations, any relations but those of employer and servant, with a black man. Not only would a woman in such a case expose herself to the brutal scandal that flourishes in the atmosphere of bars where Boy Baileys frame the conventions that society endorses, but she would be damned in the eyes of all the Mrs. Jakes in the country. They would tar and feather her with their contumely and bury her beneath their disgust.

She returned Mrs. Jakes' smile till that lady looked away with a long-drawn sniff of defiance.

"But why a row?" asked Margaret. "If she was satisfied, what was there to make a row about?"

She really wanted to hear what two sane and average men would adduce in support of Mrs. Jakes' views.

Old Mr. Samson shook his head rebukingly.

"Men and women ain't on their own in this world," he said seriously. "They 've got to think of the rest of the crowd. We 're all in the same boat out here--white people holdin' up the credit of the race. Can't afford to have deserters goin' over to the other camp, don't y' know. Even supposin'--I say, _supposin'_--there was nothing else to prevent a white girl from taking on a nigger, it's lowerin' the flag--what?"

"A woman like that deserves to be horsewhipped," cried Mrs. Jakes, with sudden vigor. "To go and marry a _Kafir_--the vile creature."

"This is very interesting," said Margaret. "Do you mean the Kafir is vile, Mrs. Jakes, or the woman?"

"I mean both," retorted Mrs. Jakes. "In this country we know what such creatures are. A respectable woman does n't let a Kafir come near her if she can help it. She never speaks to them except to give them their orders. And as to--to marrying them, or being friendly with them--why, she 'd sooner die."

Margaret had started a subject which no South African can exhaust. They discuss it with heat, with philosophic impartiality, with ethnological and eugenic inexactitudes, and sometimes with bloodshed; but they never wear it out.

"You see, Miss Harding, there are other reasons against it," Mr. Samson struck in again. "There 's the general feelin' on the subject and you can't ignore that. One woman mustn't do what a million other women feel to be vile. It 's makin' an attack on decency--that 's what it comes to. A woman might feel a call in the spirit to marry a monkey. It might suit her all right--might be the best thing she could do, so far as a woman of that sort was concerned; but it would n't be playin' the game. It wouldn't be cricket."

He shook his spirited white head with a frown.

"I see," said Margaret. "But there 's one other point. I only want to know, you know."

"Naturally," agreed Mr. Samson. "What's the point?"

"Well, there are about ten times as many black people as white in this country. What about their sense of decency? Doesn't that suffer a little by this--this trades-union of the whites? That woman in Capetown has all the whites against her and all the blacks for her--I suppose. There 's a majority in her favor, at any rate."

"Hold on," cried Mr. Samson. "You can't count the Kafirs like that, you know. They 're not in it. We 're talking about white people. The whole point is that Kafirs _are n't_ whites. A white woman belongs to her own people and must stand by their way of lookin' at things. If we take Kafir opinion, we 'll be chuckin' clothes next and goin' in for polygamy."

"Would we?" said Margaret. "I wonder. D'you think it will come to that when the Kafirs are all as civilized as we are and the color line is gone?"

"The color line will never go," replied Mr. Samson, solemnly. "You might as well talk of breakin' down the line between men and beasts."

"Well, evolution did break it down," said Margaret. "Think, Mr. Samson. There will come a day when we shall travel on flying machines, and all have lungs like drums. We shall live in cities of glazed brick beside running streams of disinfectant. There will be no poverty and no crime and no dirt, and only one language. Where will the Kafirs be then? Still in huts on the Karoo being kept in their place?"

"I 'm not a prophet," said Mr. Samson. "I don't know where they 'll be. It won't bother me when that time comes. I 'll be learning the harp."

"There 'll be a statue in one of those glazed-brick cities to the woman in Capetown," Margaret went on.

"It 'll be inscribed in letters of gold--'To ---- (whatever her name was): She felt the future in her bones.'"

Mr. Samson blew noisily. "Evolution 's not in my line," he said. "It 's all very well to drag in Darwin and all that but black and white don't mix and you can't get away from that."

"I should think not, indeed." Mrs. Jakes corroborated him with a shrug. She had found herself intrigued by the glazed-brick cities, and shook them from her as she remembered that she was not "friends" with their inventor.

But Margaret was keen on her theory and would not abandon it for a fly-blown aphorism.

"You 'd never have been satisfied with that woman," she said. "Supposing she had n't married the Kafir? Supposing that being fond of him and believing in him, she had bowed down to your terrible decency and not married? You 'd still have been down on her for liking him, and she 'd have been persecuted if she spoke to him or let him be friendly with her. Is n't that so?"

Mr. Samson pursed his lips and bristled his white mustache up under his nose.

"Yes," he said. "That is so. I won't pretend I 've got any use for women who go in for Kafirs."

"Nobody has." Mrs. Jakes came in again at the tail of his reply with all the confidence of a faithful interpreter.

Margaret, marking her righteous severity, had an impulse to stun them both with a full confession. She found in herself an increasing capacity for being irritated by Mrs. Jakes, and had a vision of her, flattened beyond recovery, by the revelation. She repressed the impulse because the vision went on to give her a glimpse of the tragedy that would close the matter.

Ford had not yet spoken. He sat beside her, listening. Across the room, Dr. Jakes was listening also. She put the question to him.

"What do you think, Dr. Jakes?" she asked.

"Eh?" He started at the sound of his name and put up an uncertain hand to straighten his spectacles.

"About all this--about the general principle of it?" she particularized.

"Oh, well." He hesitated and cleared his throat. There was a fine clear-cut idea floating somewhere in his mind, but he could not bring it into focus with his thoughts.

"It's simply that--Kafirs are Kafirs," he said dully. Mrs. Jakes interposed a warm, "Certainly," and further disordered him. He gave her a long and gloomy look and tried to go on. "When they are--further advanced, that will be the time to--to think about inter-marriage, and all that. Now--well, you can see what they are."

He wiped his forehead nervously with his handkerchief, and Ford entered the conversation.

"Jakes has got it," he said. "Intermarriage may come--perhaps; but at present every marriage of a white person with a Kafir means a loss. It's a sacrifice of a civilized unit. D' you see, Miss Harding? You 've got to reckon not only what that woman in Capetown does but what she doesn't do as well. She might have been the mother of men and women. Well, now she 'll bear children to be outcasts. She ought to have waited a couple of hundred years."

"Perhaps she was in a hurry," answered Margaret. "But there 's the other question--what if she hadn't married?"

"Oh," said Ford. "In point of reason and all that, she 'd have been right enough. But people are n't reasonable. Look at Samson--and look at me."

"You mean--you 've 'no use' for her?"

"It's prejudice," he answered. "It's anything you like. But the plain fact is, I 'd probably admire such a woman if I met her in a book; but as flesh and blood, I decline the introduction. Does that shock you?"

Margaret smiled rather wryly. "Yes," she said. "It does, rather."

He turned towards her, humorous and whimsical, but at that moment Dr. Jakes made a movement doorward and Mrs. Jakes began her usual brisk fire of small-talk to cover his retreat.

"I only wish there was some way we could get the papers regularly--such a lot of things seem to be happening just now," she prattled. "Some of the papers have cables from England and they are most interesting. That _Cape Times_ you lent me, Mr. Samson--it had the names of the people at the Drawing-Room. Do you know, I 've often been to see the carriages drive up, and it 's just like reading about old friends. There was one old lady, rather fat, with a mole on her chin, who always went, and once we saw her drinking out of a flask in the carriage. My cousin William--William Penfold--nicknamed her the Duchess de Grundy, and when we asked a policeman about her, it turned out she really was a Duchess. Was n't that strange?"

Mr. Samson heard this recital with unusual attention.

"A flask?" he asked. "Leather-covered thing, big as a quart bottle? Fat old girl with an iron-gray mustache?"

"Why," cried Mrs. Jakes. "You 've seen her too."

Mr. Samson glared around him. "Seen her," he exclaimed. "Why, ma 'am, once--she would walk with the guns, confound her--once I put a charge of shot into her. And why I didn't give her the other barrel while I was about it, I 've never been able to imagine. Seen her, indeed. I 've seen her bounce like a bally india-rubber ball with a gunful of lead to help her along. Used to write to me, she did, whenever a pellet came to the surface and dropped out. I should just think I had seen her."

"Fancy," said Mrs. Jakes.

Mr. Samson did not go off forthwith, as his wont was. He showed a certain dexterity in contriving to keep Margaret in the room with himself till the others had gone. Then he closed the door and stood against it, smiling paternally but still with gallantry.

"I wanted just a word with you, if you 'll allow me," he said, with a hand to the point of his trim mustache. He was a beautifully complete thing as he stood with his back to the door, groomed to a hair, civilized to the eyebrows. He presented a perfected type of the utterly conventionalized, kindly and uncharitable gentleman of England.

"Oh, Mr. Samson, this is so sudden," said Margaret.

"What's that? Oh, you be--ashamed of yourself," he answered. "Tryin' to fascinate an old buffer like me. But, I say, Miss Harding, I wish you 'd just let me say something I 've got on my mind--and forgive beforehand anything that sounds like preaching. We old crocks--we 've got nothing to do but worry the youngsters, and we have to be indulged--what?"

"Go ahead," agreed Margaret. "But if you preach at me, after shooting a duchess,--I'll scream for help. What is it?"

"It's a small matter," said Mr. Samson. "I want you just to let us go on likin' and admirin' you, without afterthought or anything to spoil the effect. You're new out here, and of course you don't know and could n't know; you 're too fresh and too full of sweetness and innocence; but--well, it kind of jars to hear you standin' up for a woman like that woman in Capetown. You mean a lot to us, Miss Harding. We have n't got much here, you know; we had to leave what we had and run out here for our lives--run like bally rabbits when a terrier comes along. It 'ud be a kindness if you wouldn't--you know."

There was no mistaking the kindliness with which he smiled at her as he spoke. It was another warning, but conveyed differently from the others she had received. Mr. Samson managed to make his air of pleading for a matter of sentiment convincing.

"You--you 're awfully kind," she said.

"Not kind," he replied. "Oh no; it is n't that. It 's what I said. It 's us I 'm thinking of. You 've no idea of what you stand for. You 're home, and afternoons when one meets pretty girls who are all goin' to marry some bally cub, and restaurants full of nice women with jolly shoulders, and fields with tailor-made girls runnin' away from cows. You 're the whole show. But if you start educatin' us, though we 're an ignorant lot, we lose all that."

He looked at her with a trace of anxiety.

"It 's cheek, I know, puttin' it to you like this," he added. "But I 'm relyin' on your being a sportsman, Miss Harding."

"It is n't cheek," Margaret answered. "It's awfully good of you. I--I see what you mean, and I should be sorry if I--well, failed you."

He stood aside from the door at once, throwing it open as he did so.

"Sportsman to the bone," he said. "Bless your heart, did n't I know it. Though I could n't have blamed you if you 'd kicked at all this pow-wow from a venerable ruin old enough to be your grandfather."

Hand to mustache, crooked elbow cocked well up, brows down over bold eyes, the venerable ruin challenged the title he gave himself. Margaret found his simple and comely tricks of posture and expression touching; he played his little game of pose so harmlessly and faithfully. She stopped in front of him as she walked to the door.

"If you 'll shut your eyes and keep quite still, I 'll give you something," she offered.

"Ha!" snorted Mr. Samson zestfully.

He closed his eyes and stood to attention, smiling. The lids of his eyes were flattened and seamed with blue veins, and they gave him, as he waited unmoving, some of the unreality and remoteness of a corpse. He looked like a man who had died suddenly while proposing a loyal toast or paying a compliment, who carries his genial purpose with him into the dark and leaves only the shell of it behind.

Margaret put a light hand on his trim gray shoulder and rising on tiptoe touched him with her lips between the eyes. Then she turned and went out, unhurrying, and Mr. Samson still stood to attention with closed eyes till the sound of her feet was clear of the stone-flagged hall and had passed out to the stoep.

She did not go at once to the spot where a square stone pillar screened Ford's easel, as her custom was. She came to rest at the side of the steps and stood thoughtfully looking out to the veld, where the brown showed hints of gold as the sun went westward. It hung now, very great and blinding, above the brim of the earth, and bathed her with steep rays that riddled the recesses of the stoep with their radiant artillery. To one hand, a road came from the horizon and passed to the opposite horizon on the other hand, linking unseen and unheard-of stopping-places across the gulf of that emptiness.

"What has all this got to do with me?" was her thought, as her eyes traveled over the flat and unprofitable breast of land, whose featurelessness seemed to defy her even to fasten it in her memory. She recollected Ford's saying that she was a bird of passage, with all this but a stage in her flight from sickness to health. Her starting and halting points were far from Karoo; she touched it only as the dust that moves upon it when a chance wind raises fantastic spirals and drives them swaying and zigzagging till they break and are gone. Nothing that she did could be permanent here; her pains would be spent in vain. Even the martyrdom that had been held up to her for a warning--even that, if she accepted it, would be ineffectual, the "sacrifice of a civilized unit."

Along the stoep, Ford's leg protruded from behind the pillar as he sat widely asprawl on his camp-stool; the heel of the white canvas shoe was on the flags and the toe cocked up energetically. He found things simple enough, reflected Margaret; as simple as Mrs. Jakes found them. Where knowledge and reason failed him, he availed himself frankly of prejudices and dealt honestly with his instincts. He permitted himself the indulgence of plain dislikings and was not concerned to justify or excuse them. It was possible to conceive him wrong, irrational, perverse, but never inconsistent or embarrassed. In the drawing-room he had spoken lightly, but Margaret knew the steadfastness of mind that was behind the trivial manner of speech. Well, he would have to be told, sooner or later, of the secret she shared with the veld. That confession was pressing itself upon her. With Mrs. Jakes and Boy Bailey already privy to it, it could not be withheld much longer. She stood, gazing at the outstretched leg, and tried to foresee his reception of the news.

"Well," said Ford, looking up absently when presently she walked down to him. "Did Samson crush you or did you crush him?"

"It was a draw," answered Margaret. "He 's a dear old thing, though. And what a guarantee of good faith to be able to cap a duchess story like that. Wasn't it good?"

"Rotten shooting, though," said Ford. "He wouldn't have admitted he 'd peppered a commoner."

"You're jealous," retorted Margaret. "Mr. Samson 's quite all right, and I won't have him sneered at after he 's been paying me compliments."

"Once I hit an Honorable with a tennis racket. It slipped out of my hand just as I was taking a fearful smack at a high one and hit him like a boomerang. So I 'm not as jealous as you might think."

"One can't throw a tennis racket without hitting an Honorable nowadays. That 's nothing," said Margaret. "And you 're just an ordinary person, anyhow. Mr. Samson, now--he 's not only a gentleman, but he looks like it and sounds like it, and you could tell him with a telescope twenty miles off for the real thing."

"Ye-es." Ford drew a leisurely thumb across the foreground of his picture and surveyed the result with his head on one side. "You know," he went on, kneading reflectively at the sticky masses of paint, "some of that 's true. He does sound exactly like it. If you wanted to know the broad general view of the class that he represents, and all the other classes that take a pattern from it, you 'd be fairly safe in asking Samson. Those dashing men of the world, you know--they 're all for the domestic virtues and loyalty and fair play. If you find fault with gambling and drinking and cursing, they say you 've got the Nonconformist Conscience. But when they stand for a principle, they 've got the consciences of Sunday School pupil-teachers. Samson's ideal of England is a nation of virtuous women and honest men, large families, Sunday observance, and no damned French kickshaws. For that, he 'd go to the stake smiling."

"Well," said Margaret, "why not?"

"Oh, I 'm not saying anything against him," answered Ford. "I 'm telling you what he stands for and how far he counts when he turns on the oracle."

"You mean that Kafir business, of course?"

"Yes," said Ford. "That 's what I mean."

"I gathered," said Margaret slowly, "that you agreed with him about that."

He was still at work with his colors and did not raise his head as he answered.

"Not a bit of it. I don't agree with him at all. He talks absolute drivel as soon as he begins to argue."

"But," began Margaret.

"I say I don't agree with him," continued Ford; "but that 's not to say I don't feel just the same. As a matter of fact I do."

"Oh, you 're too subtle," said Margaret impatiently.

"That 's not subtle," said Ford imperturbably. "You were sounding us all inside there and you got eloquence from old Samson and a shot in the dark from Jakes and thunder and lightning from Mrs. Jakes. Now, if you listen, you 'll get the real thing from me. As you said, I 'm just an ordinary person. Well, the ordinary person knows all right that a matter of tar-brush in the complexion doesn't make such a mighty difference in two human beings. He sees they 're both bustling along to be dead and done with it as soon as possible, and that they 'll turn into just the same kind of earth and take their chance of the same immortality or annihilation--as the case may be. He sees all right; he even sees a sort of romance and beauty in it, and makes it welcome when it doesn't suggest the real thing too clearly. But all that doesn't prevent him from barring niggers utterly in his own concerns. It doesn't stop his flesh from creeping when he reads of the woman in Capetown, and imagines her sitting on the Kafir's knee. And it does n't hinder him from looking the other way when he meets her in the street. It isn't reason, I know. It isn't sense. It is n't human charity. But it is a thing that's rooted in him like his natural cowardice and his bodily appetites. Is that at all clear?"

Margaret did not answer at once. She seemed to be looking at the canvas.

"Yes," she said finally. "It 's clear enough. But tell me--is that you? I mean, were you describing your own feelings about it?"

"Yes," he said.

"You and I are going to quarrel before long," Margaret answered. "We 'll have to. You won't be able to help yourself."

"Oh," said Ford. "Why 's that?"

"Because you 're such an ordinary person," retorted Margaret.

He lifted his head at the tone of her voice, but further talk was arrested by the sight of a man on horseback coming across from the road towards them. Both recognized Christian du Preez. They saw him at the moment that he switched his cantering pony round towards the house, and came swiftly over the grass. He had his rifle slung upon his back by a sling across the chest, and he reined up short immediately below them, so that he remained with his face just above, the rail of the stoep.

"_Daag,_" he said awkwardly.

"Afternoon," replied Ford. "Are you painted for war, or what, with that gun of yours?"

The Boer, checking his fretting pony with heel and hand, gave him a bewildered look. The dust was thick in his beard, as from long traveling, and lay in damp streaks in each furrow of his thin face. The faint, acrid smell of sweating man and horse lingered about him. He moistened his lips before he could speak further.

"My wife is gone out," he said, speaking as though he restrained many eager words. "I must speak to her at once. She is not here--not?"

"I don't think so," said Ford.

Margaret was more certain. "Mrs. du Preez has n't been here this afternoon," she assured the Boer. "There 's nothing wrong, I hope."

Christian looked from one to the other as they answered with quick nervous eyes.

"No," he said. "But it is something--I must speak to her. She is not here, then?"

They answered him again, wondering somewhat at his strangeness. He tried to smile at them but bit his lip instead.

"Well--" he hesitated.

"I will fetch Mrs. Jakes if you like," said Margaret. "But I 'm quite sure Mrs. du Preez hasn't been here."

"No," he said forlornly. "Thank you. Good-by, Miss Harding."

The pony leaped under the spur, and they saw him gallop back to the road and across it towards the farm.

"Queer," said Ford. "Did you notice how humble he was while his eyes looked like murder?"

But Margaret had been struck by something else.

"I thought he looked like Mrs. Jakes," she said, "when I answer her back."

*CHAPTER XIII*

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

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

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

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

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

She shook her head slowly, with closed eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Goin'--to leave me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't be frightened," he said. "I know who you are. I 'll take you safely where you want to go."

He spoke in tones as matter-of-fact as he could make them, for his professional eye told him that the woman was at the limit of her endurance and could support no further surprises. But he took in the pretentious style of her dress with the dust upon it and the fact that she was in company with the tramp upon a path that led to the railway and wondered darkly. It was almost inconceivable, in spite of the situation in which he found her, that she could be running away from her husband in favor of the creature who now lay in the road, moving his limbs tentatively and watching with furtive eyes to see if it was safe to sit up.

Mrs. du Preez moistened her lips. "I got nowhere to go, now," she said.

"Then you 'd better go home," said Kamis. "Rest a little first--there 's plenty of time, and it 'll be cooler presently. Then I 'll take you back."

He turned to look over his shabby tweed shoulder at Boy Bailey and addressed him curtly.

"You can go now," he said.

Boy Bailey sat up awkwardly, with an expression of pain, as though it hurt him to move. He had not yet mastered the change in the state of affairs and attempted to temporize till matters should define themselves.

"I 've got to see first if I can stand," he said. "It's all very well, but you can't slam a man down on his funny-bone and then order him to do the goose-step."

"Hurry," said the Kafir.

Mr. Bailey passed an exploring hand about his shoulder. "Ouch!" He winced. "Broken bone," he explained. "You say you 're a doctor--see for yourself. And anyhow, I want a word in private with the lady."

Kamis took two deliberate steps in his direction and--

"Hey!" yelled Boy Bailey, and scrambled to his feet. "What d'you kick me like that for, you black swine?"

He backed before the Kafir, with spread hands in agitated protestation.

"Kickin' a man when he 's down," he cried. "Is that a game to play? All right, all right; I 'm goin', aren't I? You keep where you are and let me turn round. No, you stop first. I 'm not goin' to be kicked again like that if I can help it."

Kamis came to a halt.

"Next time I see you, I 'll murder you," he promised. "Murder you." He paused at Mr. Bailey's endeavor to save his dignity with a sneer. "Don't you believe that?" he asked. "Say--don't you believe I 'll do it?"

Mr. Bailey's sneer failed as he looked into the black face that confronted him. By degrees the sheer sinister power that inhabited it, lighting it up and making it imminently terrible with its patent willingness to kill, burned its way to his slow intelligence. His pendulous underlip quivered.

"Don't you?" repeated the Kafir, with a motion of his shoulders like a shrug. "Don't you believe I 'll slaughter you like a pig next time I see you? Answer--don't you believe it?"

"Ye-es," stammered Boy Bailey.

The Kafir's deliberate nod was indescribably menacing.

"That's right," he said. "It's very true indeed. And you remember what I paid you fifty pounds for, too. A word about that, Bailey, and I 'll have you. Now go."

A hundred paces off, Boy Bailey halted, to get breath and ideas, and stood looking back.

He waited, watching the Kafir bring Mrs. du Preez to a condition in which she could stand again and bear the view of the backward road coiling forth to the featureless skyline, and thence to further and still featureless skylines, traversing intolerably far vistas that gave no sign of a destination. With his returning wits, he found himself wondering what arguments the man had to induce her to brave her husband.

As it happened, there was need of none. The woman was broken and beyond thought. She was reduced to instincts. The homing sense that sets a wounded rock-rabbit of the kranzes crawling in agony to die in its burrow moved in her dimly; she could not even summon force to wonder at the apparition of the English-speaking, helpful Kafir. Under the practised deftness of his suggestion and persuasion she rose and put her limp arm in his, and they moved away together, following their long shadows that went before them, gliding upon the dust.

"There they go," said Mr. Bailey bitterly. "There they go. And what about _me_?"

He saw that the Kafir propped the exhausted woman with his arm and helped her. He was protecting and assured, a strength and a shield. Almost unconsciously Boy Bailey followed after them. He could not have given a reason for doing so; he only knew that he was very unwilling to be left alone with his bruises and his sense of failure and defeat. In less than a quarter of an hour, the veld that had been comfortingly empty had become lonely. He went on tiptoe, with long ungainly strides and much precaution to be unheard.

He followed perhaps for half a mile and then the Kafir looked back and saw him. Mr. Bailey stopped within speaking distance.

"I was coming to apologize," he called. "That 's all. I lost my temper and I want to apologize."

The Kafir let Mrs. du Preez sit down and came walking back slowly. When half the distance to Mr. Bailey was covered he broke suddenly into a run. For some seconds Mr. Bailey abode, his mind racing, and then he too turned and ran as he had never run before. With fists clenched and head back, he faced the west and fled in leaps, and as he went he emitted small squeals and fragments of speech.

"My mistake," he would utter, through failing breath. "As long as I live, I 'll never--I swear it--I swear it. O-o-oh. You 're very--hard--on me."

The Kafir had ceased to run when Mr. Bailey turned to flee. He stood and watched him go, unpursued and terrified, with the dust spirting under his feet like the smoke of a powder-train. Then he went back and aided Mrs. du Preez to rise and together they set out again.

The last of Boy Bailey was a black blot against the sky; he was too far off for Kamis to see whether he still ran or stood. It merely testified that a degenerate human frame will stand blows and much emotion and effort under a hot sun and yet hold safe for further evil the life within it. Man of all animals is the most tenacious of his existence; he lives not for food but for appetite. What was assured was that the far blot that represented Boy Bailey was still avid and still unsatisfied. He had not even gratified his last desire to apologize.

The sun dawdled over the final splendid ceremony of his setting, drawing out the pomp of departure while night waited in the east for his going with pale premature stars. The small wind that clears the earth of the sun's leavings of heat sighed about them, and produced from each side of their path a faint rustle as though it stirred trees at a little distance. Above them the sky began to light up with a luminous powder of stars, that strained into radiant clearness before the west was empty of its last pink stain. They went slowly, Mrs. du Preez leaning heavily on Kamis' arm, and still faithfully carrying her bundle. She had not spoken since they started. She went with her eyes on the ground, and unequal steps, till the evening breeze touched her and she lifted her face to its gentle refreshment.

She had to sit down every little while, but she was stronger after the setting of the sun, and it was not till the night had surrounded them that she spoke.

"When I saw you first," she said suddenly, "the sun was in my eyes. And I thought you was--_black_?"

"Yes?" said Kamis. "That wasn't the sun," he said slowly. "I am black."

"But--" she hesitated. "I don't mean just black," she said vaguely. "I meant--a black man, a nigger."

She was peering up at him anxiously, while her weight rested in his arm.

"Well, wouldn't you have let a nigger help you?" asked Kamis quietly. "Isn't it a nigger's business, when he sees a white woman in trouble, to do what he can for her? One of your farm niggers, now--wouldn't you have called to him if he 'd been there?"

"Yes," fretfully. "But I thought _you_ was a nigger."

"I 'm a doctor," said Kamis. "I was at schools and colleges in England. The English Government gives me hundreds of pounds a year. You 're quite safe with me."

"It was the sun in my eyes," she murmured uncertainly. "I said it was the sun."

"No, it wasn't the sun," he said. "You saw quite well. I am a nigger."

"How can a doctor be a nigger?" she asked. "Niggers--why, I know all about niggers. You can't fool me."

"I won't try," answered Kamis. "But--one thing; you 've got to get home, haven't you? And you can't do it alone. You wouldn't refuse to let a nigger help you to walk, would you?"

"No," she said wonderingly. "I _got_ to get home. I got to."

"All right," said Kamis. "Then look here. Take a good look and satisfy yourself. There 's no sun now to get in your eyes."

He had halted and drawn his arm from hers. A match crackled and its flame showed him to her, illuminating his negro features, and her drawn face, frowning in an effort to comprehend. He held it till it burned to his fingers and then dropped it, and the darkness fell between them again like a curtain.

"Now do you see?" he asked. "A Kafir like any other, flat nose, big lips, woolly hair, everything--just plain Kafir; but a doctor none the less. The Kafir will help you to walk and the doctor will see to you if you find by and by that you can't walk any further. Will that satisfy you?"

She did not answer immediately; she stood as though she were still trying to scan the face which the match flame had revealed. She was searching for a formula, he told himself with a momentary bitterness, which would save her white-skinned dignity and yet permit her to avail herself of his services.

Then her moving hand touched him on the arm, gently and unexpectedly, and she answered.

"You poor devil," she said. "You poor devil."

Kamis stood quite still, her timid touch upon him, the ready pity of her voice in his ears. Mingled with his surprise he felt a sense of abasement in the presence of this other outcast, so much weaker than he, and he could have begged for her pardon for the wrong which his thoughts had done her.

"Thank you," he said abruptly. "Thank you, Mrs. du Preez. It's--it's kind of you. You shall be very safe with me."

It was a strange companionship in which they went forward through the night, he matching his slow steps to her weariness, with her thin arm, bony and rigid through the cloth sleeve, weighing within his. She was too far spent for talk; they moved in a silence of effort and desperate persistence, with only her harsh and painful breathing sounding in reply to the noises which the darkness evoked upon the veld. Every little while she had to sit down on the ground, and at each such occasion she would make her small excuse.

"I 'll have to take a spell, now," she would say apologetically. "You see, I was walking since before noon."

Then her arm would slide from his and she would sink to earth at his feet, panting painfully, with her head bowed on her bosom and her big hat roofing her over. Thus she would remain motionless for a space till her breath came more easily, and then the hat would tilt up again.

"I could move on a bit, now, if you 'd give me a hand up."

Her courage was a thing he wondered at. Again and again, as the hours spun themselves out, she rose to her feet, groped for his sustaining arm, with her face a pallid disk against the shadow of her hat, and faced the cruel miles. Her feet, in her smart town boots, tormented her without ceasing; her strength was drained from her like blood from an opened vein; and the slowness of their progress protracted the dreary horror of the road that remained to be covered. At times she seemed to talk to herself in whispers between sobbing breaths, and his ear caught hints of words shaped laboriously, but nothing that had meaning. But she uttered no complaint.

At one point where she rested rather longer than usual, he tried to find out what she expected at the journey's end.

"Have you thought what you 'll say," he asked, "when you get home?"

She raised her head slowly.

"I don't know," she answered. "I--I got to take my gruel, I suppose. Whatever it is, I got to take it. It 's up to me."

It was the sum of her wisdom; those free-lances of their sex add it early into the conclusion that saves them the futile effort of evading payment for the fruit they snatch when the world is not looking. After the fun, the adventure, the thrill, comes the gruel, and they have to take it. It is up to them. By the short cut of experience, they reach thus the end and destination of a severe morality.

"He can't shut you out, at any rate," said Kamis, half-aloud.

"Can't he?" she said. "Can't he, though! Can't stand there feelin' noble and righteous and point to the veld and shut the door with a big slam? You don't know him."

She rose again presently, clicking her tongue between her teeth at the anguish of her swollen and abraded feet.

"The Boers got sense," she said. "A person 's a fool to go on foot."

It was the only reference she made to her pain and weariness.

It was long past midnight when they came at last past the sheds behind the farmhouse and saw that there was yet a light in the kitchen. The window shone broad and yellow in the vague bulk of the house, and as they lifted their faces towards it, a shadow moved across it, grotesque and abrupt after the manner of shadows, which seem to have learned from men how to mock their makers.

"That 's Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, whispering harshly.

"Are you afraid?" asked Kamis. "Will you sit here while I go and speak to him first?"

"No," she replied. "No use. This is where I get what's comin' to me. I wish I wasn't so done up, though. If he knew, I believe p'r'aps he 'd let me off till the morning. But he doesn't know, and it wouldn't be him if he did."

"Better let me speak to him first," urged Kamis. "I could tell him--"

"No," she said again. "No use dodging it. We 'll go to the back door; I 'd rather have him shut that on me than the front."

Near the door she drew her arm away from the Kafir's and left him standing to one side, while she approached and knocked upon it with the back of her hand. She meant to eat the dreaded gruel alone.

Silence succeeded upon her knocking, and then deliberate footsteps within that came towards the door. A pair of bolts were thrust back, crashing in their sockets. Mrs. du Preez gathered her sparse energies and stood upright as the door opened and the figure of her husband appeared, tall and black against the light inside which leaked past him and spilt itself about her feet. For some moments they stood facing each other, and neither spoke.

There was drama in the atmosphere. The Kafir standing without its scope, watched absorbedly.

"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, at length; "it's me."

"Yes." The Boer's deep voice was grave. "Where have you been?"

She lifted her shoulders in a faint hopeless shrug.

"I ran away," she said. "Like I said I would. But I wasn't up to it."

"You ran away," he repeated slowly. "With that Bailey?"

"Yes, Christian. But--"

Christian caught sight of the dark figure of the Kafir and started sharply.

"Is that him there?" he cried. "Is that Bailey?"

"No, no," she answered eagerly. "That 's--that 's a Kafir, Christian; he helped me to get back. He came up when I was too tired to go any further, and Bailey was starting to kick me to get my money away from me--I 've got it here, Christian, all safe--an' he knocked Bailey over and chased him off. If it hadn't ha' been for him--"

"What?" Christian interrupted strongly. "What did you say? Bailey was going to--kick you? You was too tired to walk and he was going to kick you?"

"Yes, Christian. And if it hadn't ha' been for this Kafir, he would ha' done. I was sitting down, you see, and he got mad with me and wanted me to hand him over the money. So when I screamed--what did you say, Christian?"

"I swore," answered the Boer.

"Oh," exclaimed Mrs. du Preez, as though she apologized for interrupting. "And then the Kafir came up. If it was n't for him, Christian, I 'd--I 'd ha' had to die out of doors. I could never have managed to get back by myself."

The effort merely to stand upright taxed her sorely, but she went on doggedly to praise the Kafir and to try in her confused and inadequate tongue to convey to the Boer that this Kafir was not as other Kafirs. Her small voice, toneless and desperate, beat on pertinaciously.

"He 's a doctor, Christian," she concluded. "He 's been educated an' all that, an' he speaks English like a gentleman. And he 's been a white man to me."