"THE ONLY ENGLISH GIRL."
May Wenlock was in a temper.
She had got up in one, and throughout the morning her mother and brother
had had the full benefit of it. Why she was in it she could not have
told, at least with any degree of definitiveness. She was sick of home,
she declared; sick of the farm, sick of the very sight of everything to
do with it; sick of the eternal veldt. The mountains in the background
were depressing, the wide-spreading Karroo plains more depressing still,
although, since the rain, they had taken on a beautiful carpeting of
flower-spangled green. She wanted to go away--to Port Elizabeth, or
Johannesburg; in both of which towns she had relatives; anywhere, it
didn't matter--anywhere for a change. Life was too deadly monotonous
for anything.
Well, life on a farm in the far Karroo is not precisely a state of
existence bristling with excitement, especially for the ornamental sex,
debarred both by conventionality and inclination from the pleasures of
the chase. But May was not really so hardly used as she chose to
imagine. She was frequently away from home visiting, but of late,
during almost the last year, she had not cared to go--had even refused
invitations--wherein her brother saw another exemplification of feminine
unreasonableness and caprice. Her mother, a woman and more worldly
wise, was not so sure on that head.
"What's the row, anyhow?" said Frank, bluntly. "What do you want to
scoot away for, and leave mother and me to entertain each other? Girls
are always so beastly selfish."
"Girls selfish? Men, you mean," she flashed back. "Men are the most
selfish creatures in existence. I hate them--hate them all."
"Why, only the other day you were saying that you had come round to the
idea that it was much jollier in the country, and that you hated towns,"
went on Frank. "You've said it over and over again, and now--"
"Oh, go away, Frank, can't you, and leave her alone," said his mother.
"Why do you take such a delight in teasing her when you see she's out of
sorts?"
"Out of sorts, eh? That's what women always say when they're in a
beastly bad temper. Oh, well, thank goodness I've no time for that sort
of thing." And cramming his pipe he went out.
Frank was right, if somewhat inconsiderate. May was in a bad temper--a
very bad temper indeed. Hardly had he gone than she flung on her white
_kapje_, the same we first saw her in, and which became her so well, and
went out too, but not after him. She went round among her fowl-houses,
then strolled along the quince hedges to see if any of the hens had been
laying out and in irregular places for the benefit of the egg-loving
_muishond_, or similar vermin, but her mind some how was not in it. She
gazed out over the surrounding veldt. A little cloud of dust away in
the distance caused her to start and her eyes to dilate. But it passed
away and was gone. It heralded the approach of nobody. The distant
flying cackle of a cock koorhaan alarmed had the same effect, but no
sign of life, far or near, save the slow movement of black ostriches
grazing, and the occasional triple boom as they lifted up their voices.
The sun, flaming down in the cloudless forenoon, caused the great
expanse of plains to shimmer and glow with mirage-like effect, giving to
each distant table-topped mountain an appearance of being suspended in
mid-air.
Her eyes filled as she stood thus gazing, and two shining tears rolled
down.
"Oh, I must get away from here," she said to herself. "All this is
weighing upon my nerves. I hate men--selfish, cruel, heartless
wretches!"
She caught her voice, and was conscious that the pulsations of her heart
had undergone an acceleration. Away in the distance a large dust-cloud
was advancing, and with it the white tilt of a Cape cart.
"Only some tiresome Dutch people," she said to herself, with a weary
sigh. "I hope to goodness they won't come here, that's all."
But her wish was doomed to non-fulfilment, for very soon the cart was
seen to turn off the road that should have taken it by and to strike the
branch track leading direct to the house. A flutter of feminine
garments within it betokened the nature of the visit.
"May, where are you? May?" shouted Frank, in stentorian tones. "Oh,
there you are. Here's a whole crowd coming down into the drift. Looks
like the De la Reys. They'll be here in a minute."
"I wish they'd be somewhere else in a minute, then," muttered May to
herself with a frown that quite transformed the pretty, winning face
within the ample white _kapje_.
Frank's surmise proved correct. The occupants of the cart were the
three De la Rey girls and their brother Jan. As they drove up Mrs
Wenlock came out in a flutter of excitement and welcome.
"How good of you to come over!" she said. "I am so glad to see you. We
don't get many visitors just now. Why, Aletta, I should hardly have
known you. My, but you must have been away quite a long time. I
suppose you have been having grand times down at the Cape. And how tall
you have grown! Well, I always say it does a girl good to send her
about among folks and to see a little of the world. Let's see, I don't
think you and my May have ever met. She was not with us when we first
came up."
May, who had already been exchanging greetings with the other girls, now
turned to this one.
"No, we haven't," she said. "How do you do, Miss De la Rey?" And as
the two clasped hands each was mentally reading the other.
"What a figure!" thought May to herself. "How easily and with what
unconscious grace she moves! I wish I had it instead of being fat and
dumpy"--which she wasn't--"and beautifully dressed, yet quite plainly.
Well, she isn't pretty, that's one thing. Oh no, she isn't in the least
pretty."
"So this is `the only English girl,'" Aletta was thinking. "She is
pretty. Yes, mother was right, she is very, very pretty. Those blue
eyes--like Table Bay when the sun shines on it at noon--I wish I had
them. And the gold of her hair, and her beautiful colouring. I do
believe old Tant' Plessis must be right. Frank, too, has improved since
I saw him. He has grown quite good-looking."
The said Frank, having shouted ineffectually for one of the boys,
presumably away on some other business, was helping Jan to outspan.
"Well, Jan," said Mrs Wenlock as they all went inside, "you have been a
long time bringing your sister over to see us."
"Andrina and I have only just got back ourselves, Mrs Wenlock," struck
in Condaas. "Aletta has had a lot to do at home. And we have had old
Tant' Plessis there and ever so many people."
"Ever so many people. Yes, I think you have had some people you would
have been better without, if report speaks true," replied Mrs Wenlock,
shaking a finger at the speaker with a good-humoured laugh. "There are
those who come a long way to breed sedition and discontent and
differences among folks who are quite happy and contented. We quite
thought you had deserted us nowadays because we were English."
Mrs Wenlock, you see, was one of those good souls who pride themselves
on speaking their minds--in this case an utterly tactless operation. A
momentary frost lay upon the whole party. But the situation was
relieved by the readiness of Aletta.
"Why, Mrs Wenlock, you are forgetting that there is some English blood
in us," she said.
"To be sure I was, child. And your father, although there is no English
in him, he is a man for whom I have the greatest regard. He is the last
man to listen to agitators and sedition-mongers--of that I am quite
sure. How is he, by the way, and your mother?" They reassured her as
to the perfect state of health and well-being enjoyed by both parents,
which had the effect of leading the conversation away from a very
delicate subject. May, the while, had been out of the room to see about
getting tea ready, and now returned in time to hear the following:--
"Why don't you bring your gun over, Frank?" Jan was saying. "Man,
there is a fine lot of guinea-fowl down along the river--if Colvin has
left any, that is. _Maagtig_, but he is fond of shooting birds. One
_klompje_ down on the _draai_ by the white rock had nearly sixty birds
in it, and now there are nine. Colvin has shot all the rest.
Guinea-fowl are not easy to get at, you know. There are other
_klompjes_, but he will do the same with them, so you had better be
quick or there will be none left."
"He must have been shooting a lot at your place, Jan."
"He has. Rather. He comes over nearly every other day to have a shoot.
Why, we shall soon have hardly anything left if he goes on at that
rate. But the season will soon be over now. Not that we care much
about season or no season if we want a buck to eat."
"Tut-tut, Jan! What's that you're saying? And your father
Field-cornet, too!" struck in Mrs Wenlock.
May, who was presiding at the tea-tray, hearing this apparently harmless
dialogue, felt it to be just about all she could do to restrain the ugly
frown which threatened to cloud her face. "He comes over nearly every
other day," Jan had said, yet he had not been near them for about three
weeks, or close upon it--not, indeed, since that evening he and Frank
had returned from Schalkburg together. He had never been away from them
so long as that since he had been settled on his own farm, nor anything
like it. What _did_ it mean? What was the attraction? The sport?
Well, the sport wasn't bad at Spring Holt. No--a darker thought gripped
her mind and heart, making her miserable. The time corresponded, within
a day or two, to that of Aletta's return. Well, what then? Surely she
was tormenting herself unnecessarily. Surely she could hold her own
against a Dutch girl--an ugly Dutch girl--she added spitefully to
herself. But just then, as she was discharging her duties of deputy
hostess mechanically while thus thinking, the voice of the "ugly Dutch
girl" broke in upon her broodings, with a remark addressed to herself.
"You have been in the Transvaal lately, I hear, Miss Wenlock?"
"Not quite lately; not for a year. I have some relations in
Johannesburg, and was stopping with them."
"Ah! I have some there too. I may be going up there soon, but have
never been. It is a very wonderful place, is it not?"
"Oh, yes. Miles ahead of any other in South Africa. It hasn't got the
Sleepy Hollow sort of look all these other musty old places have.
English capital and energy have put it in the forefront."
This was no sort of remark to make under the circumstances, and herein
was another instance of May's lack of breeding which would now and again
crop up. It may have been that she was stung by a new discovery which
had been brought home to her with the first utterance. This "ugly Dutch
girl" had a beautiful voice, soft, well modulated, thoroughly refined.
It was a time when people were wont to rave at and wrangle with each
other over the rights and wrongs of the political situation then nearly
at its most acute stage, on far less challenge than May's tone and words
implied. This Dutch girl, however, did nothing of the kind. She went
on talking pleasantly as though no such remark had been made--asking
questions about the place under discussion, and seeming to take a vivid
interest in the answers. Poor May felt very small, very inferior. She
was honest enough to own to herself that she had transgressed against
the laws of good breeding, and to admire the other's self-possession and
ready tact, though, as constituting another attraction, she loved not
the possessor of these qualities any the more.
Then Frank and Jan went out to smoke a pipe or two together, and talk
shop, and about sport, and the latest rumours from the Transvaal--though
this guardedly. The girls, left behind, were chatting, and looking at
things, notably some English fashion papers which May had got out. Then
they, too, took a stroll out to look at May's fowl-houses, and finally
all met at dinner.
There was no lack of conversation. Aletta was telling them about her
experiences at the capital--where none of her hearers, save Frank, had
ever been--moved thereto by many questions from Mrs Wenlock, and all
the good times she had been having--balls, and bicycle picnics, and
Government House receptions, and dances on board one or other of the
warships at Simonstown. May, listening with vivid interest, almost
forgot her ill-humour, only failing where she was reminded of it by
envy. That was the sort of life her own soul hankered after, instead of
being stuck away on a dismal up-country farm. That was life--this
stagnation. Yet could she at that moment have been offered her choice,
whether she would be there or here, she would have elected to remain
where she was.
"I thought Cape Town a beastly place," declared Frank. "Nothing on
earth to do there, and they wanted me to wear a bell-topper hat on
Sunday."
Aletta broke into one of her whole-hearted laughs.
"That's the best definition I've ever heard," she said. "No, really, I
shall have to tell it to some of them next time I am down there again--
if ever I am."
"It's true, all the same," persisted Frank, looking remarkably pleased
with himself and the consciousness of having said a good thing. But his
mother told him he was talking nonsense, and proceeded with her
cross-examination of Aletta. Had she seen the Governor, and was he like
his portraits? and so on.
Oh, yes, she had seen him pretty often. Spoken to him? He had once or
twice, in a kindly conventional way, spoken to her, but she was certain
he would not know her from Eve if he were to see her again. There were
so many people he had to talk to in the same way at officially social
functions. But the point in this qualification was lost upon her
questioner, whose honest middle-class soul swelled with a congenial
respect for one who had actually talked with the Governor.
"Hallo! by George, there's someone coming!" exclaimed Frank, as the
raucous coughs of the one decrepit cur whose acquaintance we have
already made, together with a sound of hoofs, gave notice of the fact.
"Wonder who it is?"
May looked up quickly, a whole world of eager expectancy, of forestalled
disappointment in her glance. And as she did so she met the eyes of
Aletta.