"Flower o' the peach,
Death for us all and his own life for each."
_Fra Lippo Lippi_.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1911
Copyright, 1911, by
THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, October, 1911_
TO
JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRAD
*FLOWER O' THE PEACH*
*CHAPTER I*
It was late in the afternoon when the sheep moved off, and the west was
full of the sunset. They flowed out from the cactus-ringed fold like a
broadening trickle of milk, with their mild idiot faces set southwards
towards the sparse pastures beyond the horizon, and the dust from their
feet hung over them in a haze of soft bronze. Half-way along the path
between the house and the dam, Paul turned to watch their departure,
dwelling with parted lips on the picture they made as they drifted forth
to join themselves with earth and sky in a single mellowness of hue.
The little farmhouse with its outbuildings, and the one other house that
reared its steep roof within eyeshot of the farm, were behind him as he
stood; nothing interrupted the suave level of the miles stretching
forth, like a sluggish sea, to the sky-line. In its sunset mood, its
barren brown, the universal tint into which its poor scrub faded and was
lost to the eye, was touched to warmth and softened; it was a wilderness
with a soul. The tall boy, who knew it in all its aspects for a
neighbor, stood gazing absorbed as the sheep came to a pause, with the
lean, smooth-coated dog at their heels, and waited for the shepherd who
was to drive them through the night. He was nearing seventeen years of
age, and the whole of those years had been spent on the Karoo, in the
native land of dreams. The glamour of it was on his face, where the
soft childish curves were not yet broken into angles, and in his gaze,
as his steady unconscious eyes pored on the distance, deep with
foreknowledge of the coming of the night.
"Baas!"
Paul closed his lips and turned absently. The old black shepherd was
eager to linger out a minute or two in talk before he went forth to his
night-long solitude. He stood, a bundle of shabby clothes, with his
strong old face seamed with gray lines and the corners of the eyes
bunched into puckers, waiting in the hope that the young baas might be
tempted into conversation. He carried a little armory of smooth,
wire-bound sticks, his equipment against all the perils of the unknown,
and smiled wistfully, ingratiatingly, up into Paul's face.
"Well?" said the boy.
It all depended on the beginning, for if he should merely nod and turn
away there would be nothing left but to follow the sheep out to the
silence. The old man eyed him warily.
"Has the baas heard," he asked, "that there is a mad Kafir in the veld?"
"No," said Paul. "A mad Kafir?"
The old man nodded half a dozen times. "There is such a one," he
affirmed. The thing was done; the boy would listen, and he let his
sticks fall at his feet that he might have two hands to talk with. They
were speaking "Kitchen Kafir," the _lingua franca_ of the Cape, and
since that is a sterile and colorless tongue--the embalmed corpse of the
sonorous native speech--the tale would need pantomime to do it justice.
"There is such a one," repeated the shepherd. "He goes about alone, in
the day and in the night, talking as he goes to companions who are not
there, and laughing sometimes as though they had answered him. And that
is very strange."
"Yes," said the boy slowly. His eyes traveled involuntarily to the veld
brooding under the sky. "Who has seen him?" he asked.
"I have," said the shepherd, putting a big black forefinger to his own
breast. "I have seen him." He held out his great hand before him, with
the fingers splayed, and counted on them. "Four nights ago I saw him
when the moon was rising."
"And he was mad?"
"Mad as a sheep."
Paul waited for the tale. The old man had touched his interest with the
skill of a clever servant practising upon a master. A hint of mystery,
of things living under the inscrutable mask of the veld, could not fail
to hold him. He watched the shepherd with a kind of grave intensity as
he gathered himself to tell the matter.
"The moon was rising," he said, "and it lay low above the earth, making
long shadows of the stones and little bushes. The sheep were here and
there, and in the middle of them was I, with a handful of fire and my
blanket. It was very still, baas, for the wind was gone down, and I
heard nothing at all but the ash sliding in the fire and the slow noise
of the sheep eating. There was not even a jackal to stand out of sight
and cry in the dark.
"Perhaps I was on the brink of sleep--perhaps I was only cloudy with
thoughts--I do not know. But very suddenly I heard singing.--a voice
coming nearer that sang a curious music."
"Curious!" The boy was hanging on the words. "Curious!" he repeated.
"It was a song," explained the old Kafir, "but the words of it were
meaningless, just noises such as a baby makes--a babble. I listened,
for I was not afraid. And soon I could hear footfalls among the stones
and the singer came between me and the young moon, very great and black
against the sky. It was only when he stood by my fire that I saw he was
not a white man, but a Kafir. He was young, a strong young man, wearing
clothes and boots." He paused. "Boots," he said again and thrust out
his own bare foot, scarred and worn with much traveling. "Boots!"
In a town, it is conceivable that a Kafir may wear boots for purposes of
splendor; but not on the Karoo. Paul saw the old man's point; here was
an attribute of the unnatural.
"Yes," he said; "go on."
"I was sitting, with my pipe. He stood by the fire and looked down at
me, and I could see by the shine of his teeth that he was smiling. But
when he spoke, it was like his song--just noises, no speech at all. It
was then that I began to doubt him. But I gave him greeting, and moved
that he might sit down and smoke with me. He listened and shook his
head gently, and spoke again with his slow soft voice in his language of
the mad."
"What did it sound like?" demanded Paul.
"Baas, it sounded like English," replied the shepherd. "Yes, there are
many Kafirs who speak English; the dorps are noisy with them; but there
are none who do not speak Kafir. And this man had come through the
night, singing in his strange tongue, going straight forward like one
that has a purpose. I and my fire stayed him only for a minute; he was
not one of us; he stood, with his head on one side, smiling down, while
I began to feel fear and ill-ease. I had it in my mind that this was a
ghost, but of a sudden he stooped to where my bread lay--I had newly
eaten my supper, and the things still lay about--and took a piece as
large as this fist. He seemed to ask for it, but I could not understand
him. Then he laughed and tossed something into my lap, and turned again
to the night and the long shadows and the things that belong there. His
feet moved among the stones and he was gone; and later I heard him
singing again in the distance, till his voice dwindled and was lost."
"He threw you something," said the boy. "What was it?"
The old shepherd nodded. "I will show the baas," he said, and made
search among precarious pockets. "This is it; I have not spent it."
It was a shilling, looking no larger than sixpence on the flat of his
great horny palm. Paul looked at it and turned it over, sensible that
something was lacking in it, since it differed in no respect from any
other shilling. The magic of madness and the stolid massiveness of Queen
Victoria's effigy were not easy to reconcile.
"It looks like a good one," he commented.
"It is good," said the shepherd. "But--" he paused ere he put it in its
true light--"the bread was not more than a pennyworth."
A hundred yards away the waiting sheep discharged a small volley of
bleats. Paul raised his head.
"Yes," he said, "the veld is full of wonderful things. But I would like
to hear that language of the mad."
He nodded in token of dismissal and walked slowly on towards the dam,
where the scarlet of the sky had changed the water to blood. The old
shepherd picked up his sticks and went heavily after the sheep, a
grotesque and laborious figure in that wonder of evening light. The
smooth dog slunk towards him, snuffling in welcome; the Kafir dog is not
a demonstrative animal, and his snuffle meant much. The shepherd hit
him with the longest of the wire-bound sticks.
"Hup!" he grunted. "Get on!"
At the top of the dam wall, the sloping bank of earth and stones that
held the water, Paul paused to watch them pass into the shifting
distance, ere he went to his concerns at the foot of it. He could not
have put a name to the quality in them which stirred him and held him
gazing, for beauty is older than speech; but words were not needful to
flavor the far prospect of even land, with the sheep moving across it,
the squat, swart shape of the shepherd pacing at their heels, and the
strange, soft light making the whole unreal and mysterious.
Below the dam wall, the moisture oozing through had made a space of rank
grass and trailing weed-vines, and the ground underfoot was cool and
damp through the longest day of sun. Here one might sit in the odor of
water and watch the wind lift tall spirals of dust and chase them over
the monotonous miles where the very bushes rustled like dead boughs at
their passage. It had the quality of a heritage, a place where one may
be aloof and yet keep an eye on the world, and since there were no
others who needed elbow-room for their dreams, Paul had it to himself.
Here and there about the sloping bank, as on the walls of a gallery, his
handiwork cracked and crumbled in the sun--little masks and figures of
red clay which he fashioned to hold some shape that had caught his eye
and stayed in it. He had an instinct for the momentary attitude, the
quick, unconscious pose which is life, the bunched compact shape of a
sheep grazing, the poise of a Kafir girl with a load on her head, a
figure revealed in wind-blown clothes and lost in a flash. The sweet,
pliant clay was his confidant; it was not the fault of the clay that he
could tell it so much less than he knew.
He groped, kneeling, below a vine, and brought out the thing he had
hidden there the evening before when the light failed him. A flattened
stone at the foot of the wall was his table; he set the clay down
tenderly and squatted beside it, with his back to the veld and all the
world. It was to be the head of a negro, the negro as Paul knew him,
and already the clay had shape. The shallow round of the skull was
achieved; he had been feeling, darkly, gropingly, for the brutal angle
of the brows that should brood like a cloud over the whole countenance.
It had evaded him and baffled him; he knew how it should be, but when
the time had come for him to leave it for the night, the brows still
cocked themselves in a suggestion of imbecility which was
heart-breaking. He turned it round, frowning a little as his habit was
when he centered his faculties upon a matter; the chaos of the
featureless face below the smooth head fronted him.
"_Allemachtag!_" he cried aloud, as he set eyes on it.
There was no possibility that he could be mistaken; he remembered, in
their smallest exasperating detail, those brows as he had left them,
taunting him as bad work will. Even now, he had but to close his eyes
and he could see them, absurd and clamorous for correction. But--he
stared dumbly at the clay as he realized it--since then another creator
had played with it, or else the thing, left to itself, had frowned. The
rampart of the brows had deepened above the empty face; Paul knew in it
the darkness for which he had sought, the age-old patience quenching the
spark of the soul. It was as different from what he had left as living
flesh is from red clay, an inconsequent miracle.
"Somebody," said Paul, pondering over it--"somebody _knows_!"
The thing troubled him a little while, but he passed his hand over the
clay, to make yet more sure of it, and the cool invitation of its
softness was medicine for his wonder. He smudged the clay to a ridge in
the place where the nose should be, and then, forgetting forthwith that
he was the victim of a practical joke, as it seemed, played upon him by
the powers of the air, he fell to work.
The colors in the west were burning low when he raised his head,
disturbed by a far sound that forced itself on his ear. It was like a
pulse in the air, a dull rhythmical throb faintly resonant like the
beating of some great heart. He came to consciousness of it slowly,
withdrawing himself unwillingly from the work under his hands, and
noting with surprise that the evening light was all but gone. But the
face of the negro was a step nearer completion, and even the outline of
the gross mouth was there to aid the clay to return his look. The far
sound insisted; he lifted his head with mild impatience to listen to it,
sighed, and tucked the unfinished head away in its hidingplace. Perhaps
another night would draw out the mouth to its destined shape of empty,
pitiful mirth.
The beat of the gourd-drum that hung at the farmhouse door still called,
and he hastened his steps along the homeward path. It was the common
manner of summons on the farm. For the European ear, the gourd sawed
across, with a skin stretched over it, is empty of music, but it has the
quality of sowing its flat voice over many miles, threading through the
voices of nature as a snake goes through grass. Simple variants in the
rhythm of the strokes adapt it to messages, and now it was calling Paul.
"Paul, Paul, P-P-Paul!" it thrilled, and its summons was as plain as
words. To silence it, he put fingers to his mouth and answered with a
shrill, rending whistle. The gourd was silent.
His mother was in the doorway as he came through the kraals; she heard
his steps and called to him.
"Paul! That you? Where you bin all this time?"
"By the dam," he answered.
"I been callin' you this half hour," she said. "Mrs. Jakes is here--she
wants you."
The light from within the house showed her as a thin woman, with the
shape of youth yet upon her. But the years had taken tribute of her
freshness, and her small, rather vacant face was worn and faded. She
wore her hair coiled upon her head in a way to frame the thin oval of
the face, and there remained to her yet the slight prettiness of sharp
weak gestures and little conscious attitudes. In her voice there
survived the clipped accent of London; Paul had come to know it as the
thing that distinguished his mother from other women. Before her
marriage she had been an actress of the obscure sort to be found in the
lesser touring companies, and it was when the enterprise of which she
was a member had broken down at the town of Fereira that she met and
married the Boer, Christian du Preez, Paul's father. She preserved from
the old days a stock of photographs inscribed in dashing hands--"yours
to the dregs"--"your old pal"--"yours ever most sincerely"--and so on a
few cuttings from newspapers--"Miss Vivie Sinclair as Gertie Gottem was
most unique," said the _Dopfontein Courant_--a touch of raucousness in
her voice, and a ceaseless weary longing for the easy sham life, the
foolish cheerful companions, the stimulus of the daily publicity.
She drew the boy in, sliding her arm through his, to where Mrs. Jakes
sat waiting.
"Here he is at last," she said, looking up at him prettily. She often
said she was glad her boy was tall enough to go into a picture, but a
mother must admire her son for one thing or another.
Mrs. Jakes acknowledged Paul's arrival with a lady-like little smile.
"Better late than never," she pronounced.
She was the wife of the doctor at the Sanatorium, the old Dutch house
that showed its steep roofs within a couple of miles of the farm, where
came in twos and threes the consumptives from England, to mend their
broken lungs in the clean air of the Karoo. They came not quite so
frequently nowadays, for a few that returned healed, or believing
themselves to be healed, had added to their travel-sketches of the
wonderful old house and its surroundings an account of Dr. Jakes and his
growing habit of withdrawing from his duties to devote himself to drink.
Their tales commonly omitted to describe justly the anxious, lonely
woman who labored at such times to supply his place, driving herself to
contrive and arrange to keep the life of the house moving in its course,
to maintain an assured countenance, and all the while to screen him from
public shame and ruin. She was a wan little woman, clinging almost with
desperation to those trivial mannerisms and fashions of speech which in
certain worlds distinguished the lady from the mere person. She had lain
of nights beside a drunken husband, she had fought with him when he
would have gone out to make a show of his staggering gait and blurred
speech--horrible silent battles in a candle-lit room, ending in a
gasping fall and sickness--she had lied and cheated to hide the sorry
truth, she had bared her soul in gratitude to her kind God that her
child had died. These things as a matter of course, as women accept and
belittle their martyrdom; but never in her life had she left the spoon
standing in her tea-cup or mislaid her handkerchief. The true standards
of her life were still inviolate.
She liked Paul because he was shy and gentle, but not well enough to
talk to him without mentioning the weather first.
"The evenings are drawing out nicely," she remarked, leaning to one side
in her chair to see through the door the darkness growing dense upon the
veld. "It reminds me a little of a June evening in England--if only the
rain holds off."
"Yes," said Paul. There would be rain in the ordinary course in three
months or so, if all went well, but it was not worth while to go into
the matter with Mrs. Jakes.
"We are to have another guest," the lady went on. The doctor's patients
were always "guests" when she spoke of them. "A young lady this time.
And that is what I came about, really."
"Mrs. Jakes wants you to go in to the station with the Cape-cart and
fetch her out, Paul," explained his mother. "You 'll 'ave the first
look at her. Mrs. Jakes takes her oath she is young."
Mrs. Jakes shuddered faintly, and looked at the floor.
"About twenty-six, I understand," she said. "About that." Her tone
reproached Mrs. du Preez for a lapse of good manners. Mrs. Jakes did
not understand the sprightliness of mild misstatement. She turned to
Paul.
"If you could manage it," she suggested. "If it wouldn't be too much
trouble! The doctor, I 'm sorry to say, has a touch of the sun; he is
subject, you know." Her hands clasped nervously in her lap, and her
face seemed blind as she beat bravely on. "The climate really does n't
suit him at all; he can't stand the heat. I 've begged and prayed him to
give it up and go back to private practice at home. But he considers it
his duty to keep on."
"The morning train?" asked Paul.
"It is early," lamented Mrs. Jakes. "But we should be so much obliged."