Margaret smiled at his back as he went, and its extravagant slouch of
indifference and ease. She knew he would not look round; once his mood
was defined, it was reliable entirely; but she felt she would have
forgiven him if he had. The last word in such a matter as this is
always capable of expansion, and probably some such notion was in the
mind of the oracle who first pronounced that to women the last word is
dear.
He was still at his easel when she set forth to keep her appointment
under the dam wall, working on his helpless canvas with an intensity
that spared not a look as she went by on the parched grass below the
stoep. It was a low easel, and he sat on a stool and spread his legs to
each side of it, like a fighter crouched over an adversary, and his
thumb was busy smudging among masses of pigment. Margaret could see the
canvas as a faintly shining insurrection of colors which suggested that
he had broken an egg upon it. A score of times in the past weeks those
cryptic messes had irritated her or showed themselves as a weakness in
their author. The domineering thumb and the shock tactics of the palette
knife had supplied her with themes for ridicule, and the fact that the
creature could not paint and yet would paint and refused all instruction
had put the seal of bitterness on many a day of weary irritation. But
suddenly his incompetence and his industry, and even the unlovely fruit
of their union--the canvases that he signed large with his name and hung
unframed upon the walls of his room--were endearing; they were laughable
only as a little child is laughable, things to smile at and to prize.
Her smiling and thoughtful mood went with her across the grass and dust
and around the curved shoulder of the dam wall, where Kamis, obedient to
Paul's signal, sat in the shade and awaited her. At her coming he
sprang up eagerly with his face alight. His tweed clothes were, if
anything, shabbier than before, but it seemed that no usage could subdue
them to congruity with the broad black face and its liberal smile.
"This is great luck," he said. "I half expected you 'd find it too hot
for you. Are you all right again after that night?"
Margaret seated herself on the slope of the wall and rested with one
elbow on the freshness of its water-fed grass.
"Quite all right," she assured him. "Dr. Jakes has done everything that
needed to be done. But I didn't thank you half enough for what you
did."
He smiled and murmured deprecatingly and found himself a place to sit on
at the foot of the wall, with legs crossed and his back to the sun.
Leaning forward a little in this posture, with his drooping hat-brim
shadowing him, it was almost possible for Margaret to avoid seeing the
blunt negro features for which she had come to feel something akin to
dread; they affected her in the same way that darkness with people
moving in it will affect some children.
"I saw Paul's signal," said Kamis. "We have an understanding, you know.
He hangs a handkerchief in his window when he wants me and when you want
me he hangs two. It shows as far as one can see the window; all the
others are just black squares, and his has a white dash in it. That 's
rather how I see Paul, you know. Other people are just blanks, but he
means something--to me, at any rate. By the way, before I forget--did
you want me for anything in particular?"
Margaret shook her head. "I wanted to talk," she said; "and to make
that police matter clear to you."
"Oh, that." He looked up. "Thank you."
"Do you know of a Mr. Van Zyl, a police-officer?" she asked him. "He
thinks you are guilty of sedition among the natives. I suppose it 's
nonsense, but he means to arrest you, and I thought you 'd better know."
"It 's awfully good of you to bother about it," he answered. "I 'll
take care he doesn't lay hands on me. But it is nonsense, certainly, and
anybody but he would know it. He 's been scouring the kraals in the
south for me and giving the natives a tremendous idea of my importance.
They were nervous enough of me before, but now--"
He shrugged his shoulders disgustedly, but still smiled.
"That is what he said--they 're uneasy," agreed Margaret. "But why are
they? You see, I know scarcely more of you than Mr. Van Zyl. What is
it that troubles them about you?"
"Oh," the Kafir deliberated. "It's simple enough, really. You see," he
explained, "the fact is, I 'm out of order. I don't belong in the
scheme of things as the natives and Mr. Van Zyl know it. These Kafirs
are the most confirmed conservatives in the world, and when they see a
man like themselves who can't exist without clothes and a roof to sleep
under, who can't walk without boots or talk their language and is
unaccountable generally, they smell witchcraft at once. Besides, it has
got about that I 'm Kamis, and they know very well that Kamis was hanged
about twenty years ago and his son taken away and eaten by the soldiers.
So it's pretty plain to them that something is wrong somewhere. Do you
see?"
"Still"--Margaret was thoughtful--"Mr. Van Zyl is n't an ignorant
savage."
"No," agreed Kamis. "He isn't that. For dealing with Kafirs, he 's
probably the best man you could find; the natives trust him and depend
on him and when they 're in trouble they go to him and he gives them the
help they want. When they misbehave, he 's on hand to deal with them in
the fashion they understand and probably prefer. And the reason is,
Miss Harding--the reason is, he 's got a Kafir mind. He was born among
them and nursed by them; he speaks as a Kafir, understands as a Kafir
and thinks as a Kafir, and he 'll never become a European and put away
Kafir things. They 've made him, and at the best he 's an ambassador for
the Kafirs among the whites. That 's how they master their masters.
Oh, they 've got power, the Kafirs have, and a better power than their
hocus-pocus of witchcraft."
The afternoon was stored with the day's accumulated heat and the cool of
the grass beneath and the freshness of the water, out of sight beyond
the wall but diffusing itself like an odor in the air, combined to
contrast the spot in which they talked with the dazed sun-beaten land
about them and gave to both a sense of privacy and isolation. The
Kafir's words stirred a fresh curiosity in Margaret.
"He thinks you are making the natives dangerous," she said. "I don't
believe that, of course, but what are you doing?"
"What am I doing?"
The black face was lifted to hers steadily and regarded her for a space
of moments without replying. Nothing mild or subtle could find
expression in its rude shaping of feature; the taciturnity of the Karoo
itself governed it.
"What am I doing?" repeated Kamis. He dropped his eyes and his hands
plucked at the grass absently. "Well, I 'm looking for a life for
myself."
Margaret waited for him to continue but he was silent, plucking the
grass shoots and shredding them in his fingers.
"A life," she prompted. "Yes; tell me."
Kamis finished with the grass in his hand and threw it with an abrupt
gesture from him.
"I 'll tell you if you like," he said, as though suppressing a feeling
of reluctance. "It isn't anything wonderful; still--. You know already
how I began; Paul told me how you learnt that; and you can see where I
've got to with my education and my degree and my profession and all
that. I 'm back where I came from, and besides what I 've learned, I
've got a burden of civilized habits and weaknesses that keep me tied by
the leg. I need friendship and company and equality with people about
me, just as you do, and I 'm apt to find myself rather forlorn and lost
without them. In England, I had those things--I had some of them, at
any rate; but what was there for a black doctor to do, do you think,
among all those people who look on even a white foreigner as rather a
curiosity?"
"Wasn't there anything?" Margaret was watching the nervous play of his
gesticulating hands, so oddly emphasizing his pleasant English voice.
"Nothing worth while. That 's another of my troubles, you see. They
taught me and trimmed me till I could n't be content with occasional
niggers at the docks suffering from belaying-pin on the brain. It was
n't odd jobs I wanted, handed over to me to keep me happy; I wanted
work. We niggers, we 're a strong lot and we can stand a deal of wear
and tear, but we don't improve by standing idle. I wanted to come out
of that glass case they kept me in, with tutors and an allowance from
the Government and an official guardian and all that sort of thing, and
make myself useful."
He paused. "You understand that, don't you?" he asked.
"Of course I do," replied Margaret. "If I could only come out too! But
I 've got all those weaknesses of yours and this as well." Her hand
rested on her chest and he nodded.
"You 're different," he said. "You must n't be worn and torn."
"Well, so you came out here?"
"It 's my country," he answered, and waved a hand at its barrenness.
"It was my father's, a good deal of it, in another sense too. When I
saw that living in England wasn't going to lead to anything, I thought
of this. Somebody ought to doctor the poor beggars who live here and
give them a lead towards a more comfortable existence, and I hoped I was
the man to do it. I must have relations among them, too; that 's queer,
is n't it? Aunts--my father had lots of wives--and lashings of cousins.
I thought the steamer was bringing me out to them and I had a great idea
of a welcome and all that; but I 'm no nearer it now than I was when I
started. If ever I seem too grateful to you for your acquaintance, Miss
Harding--if I seem too humble to be pleasant when I thank you for
letting me talk to you--just remember I know that over there my poor
black aunts are slaving like cattle and my uncles are driving them, and
when I come they dodge among the huts and maneuver to get behind me with
a club."
"No," answered Margaret slowly. "I 'll remind you instead of all you
're doing while I do nothing."
He shook his head. "I know what you do to me," he said. "And I can't
let you pity me. It was n't for want of warnings I came out here. I
even had a letter from the Colonial Secretary. And I must tell you
about the remonstrances of my guardian."
He laughed, with one of those quick transitions of mood which
characterize the negro temperament. It jarred a little on Margaret.
"He was the dearest old thing," he went on. "He 's one of the greatest
living authorities on the Bantu tongues--those are the real old negro
languages, I believe--and he was out here once in his wild youth. The
Colonial Office appointed him to take charge of me and he used to come
down to the schools where I was and give me a sovereign. He 'd have
made a capital uncle. He had a face like a beefy rose, one of those big
flabby ones that tumble to pieces when you pick them--all pink and round
and clean, with kind, silly blue eyes behind gold spectacles. I had to
get his consent before I could move, and I went to see him in a little
room at the British and Foreign Bible Society's place in Queen Victoria
Street, where they grow the rarer kinds of Bible under glass in holes in
the wall; you know. He was correcting the proofs of a gospel in some
Central African dialect and he had smudges of ink round his mouth.
Sucking the wrong end of the pen, I suppose. He really was rather like
a comic-paper professor, but as kind as could be. I sat down in the
chair opposite to him, with the desk between us, and he heard what I 'd
got to say, wiping his pen and sucking it while I told him. I fancy I
began by being eloquent, but I soon stopped that. He 's good form to
the finger-tips and he looked so pained. So I cut it short and told him
what I wanted to do and why. And when I 'd finished, he gave me a
solemn warning. I must do what seemed right to me, he said; he wouldn't
take the responsibility of standing in my way; but there were grave
dangers. He had known young men, promising young men, talented young
men--all negroes, of course--who had returned to Africa after imbibing
and accepting the principles of our civilization. They, it was true,
were West Africans, but my danger was the same. They had left England
in clothes, with a provision of soap in their trunks, and the result of
their return to their own place was--they had lapsed! They had
discontinued the clothes and forsworn the soap. 'One of them,' he said,
'presented a particularly sad example. He whom we had known and
respected as David Livingstone Smith became the leader of a faction or
party whose activities necessitated the despatch of a punitive
expedition. Under a name which, being interpreted, signifies "The
Scornful," he presided over the defeat and massacre of that armed
force.' And he went on warning me against becoming an independent
monarch and forcing an alliance on Great Britain by means of an
ingenious war. He seemed relieved when I assured him that I had no
ambition to sit in the seat of the Scornful."
He laughed again, looking up at Margaret with his white teeth flashing
broadly.
"Yes," she said. "That was--funny."
Odd! It made her vaguely restive to hear the Kafir make play with the
shortcomings of the white man. It touched a fund of compunction whose
existence she had not suspected. Something racial in her composition,
something partizan and unreasoning, lifted its obliterated head from the
grave in which her training and the conscious leanings of her mind had
buried it.
He had no thoughts of what it was that kept her from returning his
smile. He imagined that his mission, his loneliness and his danger had
touched her and made her grave.
"Well, you see how it all came about?" he went on. "It isn't really so
extraordinary, is it? And I 'm not discouraged, Miss Harding. I shall
find a way, sooner or later; they 're bound to get used to me in the
end. In the meantime, Paul is teaching me Kafir, and there 's you. You
make up to me for a lot."
"Do I?" Margaret roused herself and sat up, deliberately thrusting down
out of her consciousness that instinctive element which bade her do
injustice and withhold from the man before her his due of
acknowledgment.
"Do I?" she said. "I 'd be glad if that were so."
He made to speak but stopped at her gesture.
"No," she said. "I _would_ be glad. It 's a wonderfully great thing
you 've started to do, and you 're lucky to have it. You feel that,
don't you?"
"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Oh, yes."
She eyed him with a moment's hesitation, for he had not agreed with any
alacrity, and a martyr who regards his stake with aversion is always
disappointing.
"Oh, you 're sure to succeed," she said. "People who undertake things
like this don't fail. And if, as you say, I 'm any kind of help to you,
I 'm glad. I 'm awfully glad of it. It makes coming out here worth
while, and I shall always be proud that I was your friend."
"Will you? Does it strike you like that?"
"Yes," said Margaret.
She was above him on the bank and he sat on the ground with his head at
the level of her knees. His worn and shabby clothes, the patience of
his face, and even the hands that lay empty in his lap, joined with his
lowly posture to give him an aspect of humility. He was like a man
acclimatized to oppression and ill fortune, accepting in a mild
acquiescence, without question and without hope, the wrongs of a
tyrannous destiny.
"I shall be proud," she repeated. "Always." She held forth her hand to
him in token of that friendship, leaning down that he might take.
He did not do so at once. His eyes flashed to her with a startled
glance, and he seemed at a loss. He lifted himself to his knees and put
his own hand, large and fine for all the warm black of the back of it,
the hand of a physician, refined to nice uses, under hers without
clasping it. His movement had some of the timidity and slavishness of a
dog unused to caresses; a dumb-brute gratitude was in his regard. He
bent his black head humbly and printed a kiss upon her slender fingers.
It was a thing that exhausted the situation; Margaret, a little
breathless and more than a little moved, met his gaze as he rose with a
smile that was not clear of embarrassment. Neither knew what to say
next; the kiss upon her hand had transformed their privacy into secrecy.
"My love is like a black, black rose."
It sounded above them, from the top of the dam wall, an outrageous
bellow of melody that thrust itself obscenely between them and split
them asunder with the riving force of a thunderbolt. Intolerably
startled by the suddenness of it, Margaret nearly fell down the slope,
and saving herself with her hands turned her face, whitened by the
shock, towards the source of the noise. Another face met hers, parting
the long grasses on the crown of the wall.
Her amazed and ambushed faculties saw it as a face only. It was
attached to no visible body, solitarily self-sufficient in an unworthy
miracle. It did not occur to her that the owner of it must be lying on
his belly at the water's edge, and for the moment she was not equal to
deducing that he must have heard, and possibly even seen, all that had
passed. She saw merely a face projected over her, that grinned with a
fixity that was not without an imbecile suggestion. It was old with a
moldy and decayed quality, bunched into pouches between deep wrinkles,
and yet weak and appealing. A wicked captive ape might show that
mixture of gleeful sin and slavishness.
"Don't think I 'm not shocked, because I am," it uttered distinctly.
"Kissing! _I_ saw you. An' if anybody had told me that a lady of your
looks would take on a Kafir, I wouldn't ha' believed it."
The face heaved and rose and lifted to corroborate it the cast-off
clothes of Christian du Preez, enveloping the person of Boy Bailey. He
shuffled to a sitting position on the edge of the wall, and it was a
climax to his appearance that his big and knobly feet were bare and wet.
He had been taking his ease with his feet in the water while they talked
below, a hidden audience to their confidences. He shook his head at
them.
"Dam walls have got dam ears," he observed. "You naughty things, you."
Margaret turned helplessly to Kamis for light.
"What is it?" she asked.
He had jumped to his feet and away from her at the first sound, and now
turned a slow eye upon her. The negro countenance is the home of crude
emotions; the untempered extremes have been its sculptors through the
ages. Its mirth is a guffaw, its sorrow is a howl, its wrath is the
naked spirit of murder. He looked at her now with a face alight and
transfigured with slaughterous intention.
"Go away," he said, in a whisper. "Go away now. He must have heard. I
'll deal with him."
"Don't," said Margaret. She rose and put a hand on his arm. "Will you
speak to him, or shall I?"
"Not you," he answered quickly. "But--" he was breathless and his face
shone as with a light sweat. "He 'll _tell_," he urged, still
whispering. "You don't know--it would be frightful. Go quickly away
and leave me with him."
"They 're at it still," sounded the voice above them. "Damme, they can't
stop."
Kamis was desperate and urgent. He cast a wild eye towards the man on
the top of the wall, and went on with agitated earnestness.
"I tell you, you don't know. It 's enough that you were here with a
Kafir and he kissed your hand." He slapped his forehead in an agony.
"Oh, I ought to be hanged for that. They 'll never believe--nobody
will. In this country that sort of thing has only one meaning--a
frightful one. I can't bear it. If you don't go"--he gulped and spoke
aloud--"I 'll go up and kill him before your eyes."
"Now, now!" The voice remonstrated in startled tones.
Margaret still had her hand on his arm, and could feel that he was
trembling. She had recovered from the shock of the surprise and was
anxious to purge the situation of the melodramatic character which it
seemed to have assumed. Kamis' whispered fears failed to convince her.
"You 'll do nothing of the kind," she said. "I don't care what people
think. Speak to the man or I will."
Kamis lifted his head obediently.
"Come down," he said. "Come down and say what you want."
Mr. Bailey recovered his smile as he shook his head.
"I can say it here," he replied. "Don't you worry, Snowball; it won't
strain my voice."
Kamis gulped. "What do you want?" he repeated.
"Ah! What?" inquired Boy Bailey rhetorically. "I come here of an
afternoon to collect my thoughts an' sweeten the dam by soaking my
Trilbies in it an' what happens? I 'm half-deafened by the noise of
kissing. I look round, an' what do I see? I ask you--what?"
He brought an explanatory forefinger into play, thick and cylindrical
like a damaged candle.
"First, thinks I, here 's a story that's good for drinks in any bar
between Dopfontein and Fereira--with perhaps a tar-and-feathering for
the young lady thrown in." He nodded meaningly at Margaret. "And it
wouldn't be the first time that's happened either."
"Ye-es," said Kamis, who seemed to speak with difficulty. "But you
won't get away alive to tell that story."
"Hear me out." Boy Bailey shook his finger. "That 's what I thought
_first_. My second thought was: what 's the sense of making trouble
when perhaps there 's a bit to be got by holdin' my tongue? How does
that strike you?"
Margaret had been leaning on her stick while he spoke, prodding the
earth and looking down. Now she raised her eyes.
"The first thought was the best," she said. "You won't get anything
here."
"Eh?" Mr. Bailey was astonished. "You don't understand, Miss," he
said. "Ask Snowball, there--he 'll tell you. In this country we don't
stand women monkeying with niggers. Hell--no. It 's worth, well--"
"Not a penny," said Margaret. "I don't care in the least whom you tell.
But--not one penny."
Kamis was listening in silence. Margaret smiled at him and he shook his
head. On the top of the wall Mr. Bailey leaned forward persuasively.
He had something the air, in so far as his limitations permitted, of
benevolence wrestling with obstinacy, the air which in auctioneers is an
asset.
"You don't mean that, I know," he said indulgently. "I can see you 're
going to be sensible. You would n't let a trifle of ready money stand
between you an' keepin' your good name--a nice, ladylike girl like you.
Why, for less than what you 've done, women have been stoned in the
streets before now. Come now; I 'm not going to be hard on you. Make
an offer."
He sat above them against the sky, beaming painfully, always with a wary
apprehension at the back of his regard.
"You won't go away?" demanded Kamis suddenly. "You won't? You know I
can't do it if you 're here. Then I 'm going to pay."
"You shan't," retorted Margaret. "I won't have it, I tell you. I don't
care what he does."
"I 'm going to pay," repeated Kamis. "It 's that or--you won't go
away?"
"No," said the girl angrily.
"Then I 'm going to pay." He turned from her. "I 'll give you twenty
pounds," he called to Bailey.
"Double it," replied Boy Bailey promptly; "add ten; take away the number
you thought of; and the answer is fifty pounds, cash down, and dirt
cheap at that. Put that in my hand and I 'll clear out of here within
the hour and you 'll never hear of me again."
Kamis nodded slowly. "If I do hear of you again," he said, "I 'll come
to you. Paul will bring you the money to-morrow morning, and then you
'll go."
"Right-O." Mr. Bailey rose awkwardly to his feet and made search for
his boots. With them in his hands, he looked down on the pair again.
"It's your risk," he warned them. "If that cash don't come to hand, you
look out; there 'll be a slump in Kafirs."
He went off along the wall, disappearing in sections as he descended its
shoulder. His gray head in its abominable hat was the last to
disappear; it sailed loftily, as became the heir to fifty pounds.
Margaret frowned and then laughed.
"What an absurd business," she cried. "Supposing he had told and there
had been a row--it would have been better than this everlasting
stagnation. It would have been more like life."
The Kafir sighed. "Not life," he answered gently. "Not your life. It
meant a death in life--like mine."
His embarrassed and mournful look passed beyond her to the Karoo,
spreading its desolation to the skies as a blind man might lift his eyes
in prayer.
*CHAPTER XI*
The deplorable hat which shielded Mr. Bailey from the eye of Heaven
traveled at a thoughtful pace along the path to the farmhouse, cocked at
a confident angle upon a head in which faith in the world was
re-established. Boy Bailey had no doubt that the money would be
forthcoming. What he had heard of the conversation between Margaret and
Kamis had assured him of the Kafir's resources and he felt himself
already as solvent as if the minted money were heavy in his pockets. A
pleasant sense of security possessed his versatile spirit, the sense
that to-morrow may be counted upon. For such as Mr. Bailey, every day
has its price.
He gazed before him as he walked, at the house, with its kraals
clustered before it and its humble appanage of out-buildings, with a
gentle indulgence for all its primitive and domestic quality. Meals and
a bed were what they stood for, merely the raw framework of intelligent
life, needing to be supplemented and filled in with more stimulating
accessories. They satisfied only the immediate needs of a man adrift
and hungry; they offered nothing to compensate a lively mind for its
exile from the fervor of the world. Fifty pounds, the fine round sum,
not alone made him independent of its table and its roof, but opened
afresh the way to streets and lamplight, to the native heath of the
wandering Bailey, who knew his fellow men from above and below--Kafirs,
for instance, he saw from an altitude--but had few such opportunities as
this of meeting them on a level of economic equality. There came to
him, as he dwelt in thought upon his good fortune, a clamorous appetite
for what fifty pounds would buy. Capetown was within his reach, and he
recalled small hotels on steep streets, whose back windows looked forth
on flat roofs of Malay houses, where smells of cooking and people loaded
the sophisticated air and there was generally a woman weeping and always
a man drunk. A little bedroom with an untidy bed and beer bottles
cooling in the wash-hand basin by day; saloons where the afternoon sun
came slanting upon furtive men initiating the day's activities over
glasses; the electric-lit night of Adderley Street under the big
plate-glass windows, where business was finished for the shops and
offices and newly begun for the traders in weakness and innocence--he
knew himself in such surroundings as these. He could slip into them as
noiselessly as a snake into a pool, with no disturbance to those
inscrutable devotees of daylight and industry who carry on their plain
affairs and downright transactions without suspecting the existence of
the world beneath them, where Boy Bailey and his fellows stir and dodge
and hide and have no illusions, save that hunger is ever fed or thirst
quenched.
He paused at the open door of the farmhouse, recalled to the present by
the sound of voices from the kitchen at the end of the passage, where
Christian du Preez and his wife were engaged in bitter talk. Boy Bailey
stepped delicately over the doorstep on to the mat within and stood
there to listen, if there should be anything worth listening to. A
smile played over his large complacent features, and he waited with his
head cocked to one side. Something in which the word "tramp" occurred
as he came through the door flattered him with the knowledge that the
dispute was about himself.
Mrs. du Preez spoke, and her shrill tones were plainly audible.
"I don't make no fuss when your dirty old Doppers outspan here an' come
sneakin' in for coffee, an' some of them would make a dog sick. Bailey
's got his troubles, but he don't do like Oom Piet Coetzee did when--"
An infuriate rumble from Christian broke in upon her. Boy Bailey smiled
and shook his head.
"Now, now," he murmured. "Language, please."
"He 's worse than a Kafir in the house," Christian went on. "Woman, it
makes me sick when he looks at you, like an old silly devil."
"So long as he don't look like an old silly Dutchman, I don't mind,"
retorted his wife. "I 'm fairly sick of it all--you an' your Doppers
and all. And just because you can't tell when a gentleman 's having his
bit of fun, you come and howl at me."
"Howl." The word seemed to sting. "Howl. Yes, instead of howling I
should take my gun and let him have one minute to run before I shoot at
him. You like that better, eh? You like that better?"
"Christian." There was alarm in Mrs. du Preez's voice. Behind the shut
door of the kitchen, Bailey could picture Christian reaching down the
big Martini that hung overhead with oiled rags wrapped about its breech.
"Time for me to cut in at this," reflected Mr. Bailey. "I never was much
of a runner."
He walked along the passage with loud steps, acting a man returned from
a constitutional, restored by the air and at peace with the whole human
race.
Mrs. du Preez and Christian were facing one another over the length of
the table; they turned impatient and angry faces towards the door as he
opened it and thrust his personality into the scene. He fronted them
with his terrible smile and his manner of jaunty amity.
"Hot, ain't it?" he inquired. "I 've been down by the dam and the water
's nearly on the boil."
Neither answered; each seemed watchful of the other's first step.
Christian gave him only a dark wrathful look and Mrs. du Preez colored
and looked away. Boy Bailey, retaining his smile under difficulties,
tossed his hat to a chair and entered.
"Not interrupting anything, am I?" he inquired.
"You 're not interrupting _me_," replied Mrs. du Preez. "I 've said all
I 'd got to say."
"But I haven't said all I 've got to say," retorted Christian from his
end of the table. "We was talking about you."
"About me?" said Bailey, with mild surprise. "Oh."
"Yes." The Boer, leaning forward with his hands gripping the thick end
of the table, had a dangerous look which warned Bailey that impudence
now might have disastrous consequences.
"Yes--about you. My wife says you are a gentleman and got gentleman's
manners and you are her old friend. She says you don't mean harm and
you don't look bad and dirty. She says I don't know how gentlemen speak
and look and I am wrong to say you are a beast with the mark of the
beast."
Bailey shifted uncomfortably under his gaze of fury held precariously in
leash, and edged a little towards Mrs. du Preez. He was afraid the big,
bearded man might spring forward and help out his words with his fist.
"Very kind of Mrs. du Preez," he murmured warily.
"She says all that. But _I_ say"--the words rasped from Christian's
lips--"_I_ say you are a man rotten like an old egg and the breath in
your mouth is a stink of wickedness. And I tell her that sometimes I
get up from my food and go out because if I don't I shall stamp you to
death. _Gott verdam_! Your dirty eyes and your old yellow teeth
grinning--I stand them no longer. You have had rest and _skoff_--now
you go."
Bailey's face showed some discomposure. His disadvantage lay in the
danger that the Boer was plainly willing to be violent. He had returned
to the house with the intention of announcing that on the morrow he
would take his departure, but it was not the prospect of spending a
night in the open that disconcerted him. It was simply that he disliked
to be treated thus loftily by a man he despised. He stole a glance at
Mrs. du Preez.
She was staring at her husband with shrewdness and doubt expressed in
her face, as though she were checking her valuation of him by the fierce
figure at the other end of the table, with big, leathery hands clutched
on the edge of the board and thin, sun-tanned face intent and wrathful
above the uneven beard. She was revisiting with an unsympathetic eye
each feature of that irreconcilable factor in her life, her husband.
"D'you hear me?" thundered the Boer. "You go."
He pointed with sudden forefinger to the door, and his gesture was
unspeakably daunting and wounding.
"Ye-es," hesitated Boy Bailey, and sighed. The pointing finger
compelled him like a hand on his collar, and he moved with shuffling and
unwilling feet to the chair where his hat lay. He fumbled with it as he
picked it up and it fell to the floor. The finger did not for a moment
pretermit its menacing command. He sighed again and drew the door open.
"Bailey." Mrs. du Preez spoke sharply, with a trembling catch in her
voice. "Bailey, you stop here."
"Eh?" He turned in the doorway with alacrity. Another moment and it
might have been too late.
"Go on," cried the Boer. "Out you go, or I 'll--"
"Stop where you are, Bailey," cried Mrs. du Preez.
She came across the room with a run and put herself in front of Bailey,
facing her husband.
"Now," she said, "_now_ what d'you think you'll do?"
The Boer heaved himself upright, and they fronted one another stripped
of all considerations save to be victor in the struggle for the fate of
Boy Bailey. It was the iron-hard cockney against the Boer.
"I told him to go," said Christian. "If he doesn't go--I'll shoot."
He cast an eye up to the gun in its place upon the wall.
"You will, will you?" The bitter voice was mocking. "Now, Christian, you
just listen to me."
"He 'll go," said the Boer.
"Oh, he 'll go," answered Mrs. du Preez. "He 'll go all right, if you
say so. But mark my words. You go turning my friends out of the house
like this, and so help me, I 'll go too. Get that straight in your
head, old chap--it's right. Bailey 's not fretting to stay with you,
you know. You 're not such good company that you need worry about it.
It 's me he came to see, not you. And you pitch him out; that 's all.
Bailey goes to-night, does he? Then I go in the morning."
She nodded at him, the serious, graphic nod that promises more earnestly
than a shaken fist.
"What!" The Boer was taken by surprise. "If he goes--"
"I 'll go--yes."
She was entirely in earnest; her serious purpose was plain to him in
every word she spoke. She threatened that which no Boer could live
down, the flight of a wife. He stared at her almost aghast. In the
slow processes of his amazed mind, he realized that this, too, had had
to come--the threat if not the deed; it was the due and logical climax
of such a marriage as his. Her thin face, still pretty after its
fashion, and her slight figure that years had not dignified with
matronly curves, were stiffened to her monstrous purpose. Whether she
went or not, the intention dwelt in her. It was another vileness in Boy
Bailey that he should have given it the means of existence.
Both of them, his wife and Mr. Bailey, screened by her body, thought
that he was vanquished. He stood so long without answering that they
expected no answer. Bailey was framing a scene for the morrow in which
he should renounce the reluctant hospitality of the Boer: "I can starve,
but I can't stand meanness." He had got as far as this when the Boer
recovered himself.
With an inarticulate cry he was suddenly in motion, irresistibly swift
and forceful. A sweep of his arm cleared Mrs. du Preez from his path
and sent her reeling aside, leaving Boy Bailey exposed. Christian
seemed to halt at the threshold of the room and thrust a long arm out,
of which the forked hand took Boy Bailey by the thick throat and dragged
him in. He held the shifty, ruined face, now contorted and writhen from
his grip like the face of a hanged man, at the level of his waist and
beat upon it with the back of his unclenched right hand again and again.
Boy Bailey's legs trailed upon the floor lifelessly; only at each dull
blow, thudding like a mallet on his blind face, his weak arms fluttered
convulsively. Mrs. du Preez, who had fallen against the table, leaned
forward with hands clasped against her breast and watched with a
fascinated and terror-stricken stare.
Boy Bailey uttered a windy moan and Christian dropped him with a gesture
of letting fall something that defiled his hand. The beaten creature
fell like a wet towel and was motionless and limp about his feet. Across
his body, Christian looked at his wife. He seemed to her to tower above
that meek and impotent carcass, to impend hatefully and dreadfully.
"Throw water on him," he said. "In an hour, I will come back and if I
see him then, I will shoot."
She did not answer, but continued to stare.
"You hear?" he demanded.