"Good," he said. He stepped over the body of Boy Bailey and mounted on
a chair, where he reached down the rifle. He gave his wife another
look; she had not moved. He shrugged and went out with the gun under
his arm.
It was not till the noise of his steps ceased at the house-door that
Mrs. du Preez moved from her attitude of defeat and fear. She came
forward on tiptoe, edged past Boy Bailey's feet and crouched to peer
round the doorpost. She had to assure herself that Christian was gone.
She went furtively along the passage and peeped out over the kraals to
be finally certain of it and saw him, still with the gun, walking down
to the further fold where Paul was knee-deep in sheep. She came back to
the room and closed the door carefully, going about it with knitted
brows and a face steeped in preoccupation. Not till then did she turn
to attend to Boy Bailey.
"Oh, God," she cried in a startled whisper as she bent above him, for
his eyes were open in his bloody face and the battered features were
feeling their way to the smile.
She fell on her knees beside him.
"Bailey," she said breathlessly. "I thought you--I thought he 'd killed
you."
Boy Bailey rose on one elbow and felt at his face.
"Him!" he exclaimed, with all the scorn that could be conveyed in a
whisper. "Him! He couldn't kill me in a year. Why, he never even shut
his fist."
He wiped the blood from his fingers by rubbing them on the smooth earth
of the floor and sat up.
"Why," he said, "take his gun away and I wouldn't say but what I 'd
hammer him myself. Him kill me--why, down in Capetown once I had a
feller go for me with a bottle an' leave me for dead, an' I was havin' a
drink ten minutes after he 'd gone. He isn't coming back yet, is he?"
"No--not for an hour."
She had hardly heard him, so desperately was she concentrated on the one
idea that occupied her mind.
"Well, I won't wait for him," said Mr. Bailey. "I 'll get some of this
muck off my face an'--an' have a drink, if you 'll be so kind, and then
I 'll fade. But if ever I see him again--"
"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez, "where 'll you go?"
"Where? Well, to-night I reckon to sleep in plain air, as the French
say--or is it the Germans?--somewhere about here till I can get word
with a certain nigger who owes me money. And then, off to the station
on my tootsies and take train back to the land of ticky (threepenny)
beer and Y.M.C.A.'s."
"England?" asked Mrs. du Preez.
"England be--" Boy Bailey hesitated--"mucked," he substituted.
"Capetown, me dear; the metropolis of our foster motherland. It 's
Capetown for me, where the Christian Kafirs come from."
"Bailey," said Mrs. du Preez. "Bailey, take me."
"What?" demanded Boy Bailey. "Take you where?"
"Take me with you." She was still kneeling beside him and she put a
hand on his arm urgently, looking into his blood-stained and smashed
face. "I won't stay with him now. I said I wouldn't and I won't. I 'd
die first. And you and me was always good pals, Bailey. Only for that
breakdown at Fereira, we 'd have--we might have hitched up together.
You were always hinting--you know you were, Bailey. Don't you know?"
"Hinting?" He was surprised at last, but still wary. "But I wasn't
hinting at--supporting you?"
"I didn't say you were," she answered eagerly. "Bailey, I 'm not a fool;
I 've got temperament too. You said yourself I had, only the other day.
And--and I can't stop with him now."
Mr. Bailey looked at his fingers thoughtfully and felt his face again.
"Fact is," he said deliberately, "you 're off your balance. You 'll
live to thank me for not taking advantage of it. You 'll say, 'Bailey
had me and let me go, as a gentleman would. He remembered I was a
mother. Bless him.' That 's what you 'll say when you 're an old woman
with your grandchildren at your knee. And anyhow, what d'you think you
'd do in Capetown? You ain't far off forty, are you?"
She shook him by the arm she held to fix his attention.
"Bailey," she said. "That don't matter for a time. I 've got a bit of
money, you know. I 'm not leaving that behind."
"Money, have you?"
The wonderful thing in women such as Mrs. du Preez is that they see so
clearly and yet act so blindly. They know they are sacrificed for men's
gain and do not conceal their knowledge. They count upon baseness,
cruelty and falsity as characteristics of men in general and play upon
these qualities for their purposes. But furnish them with a reason for
depending upon a man, and they will trust him, uphold him, obey him,
lean upon him and compensate the flimsiest rascal for the world's
contempt and hardness by yielding him a willing victim.
They looked at each other. Bailey still sitting on the floor, she on
her knees, and each read in the other's eyes an appraisement and a
stratagem. The coffee-pot that stood all day beside the fire to be
ready for Boer visitors, sibilated mildly at their backs.
"It would n't last for ever, the bit you 've got," said Bailey. "There
's that to think of."
"It 's a good bit," she replied.
"Is it--is it as much as fifty pounds?" he asked.
"It 's more," she answered. "Never you mind how much it is, Bailey.
It's a good bit and it 's mine, not his."
He thought upon it with his under-lip caught up between his teeth,
almost visibly reviewing the possibilities of profit in the company of a
woman who had money about her. Mrs. du Preez continued to urge him in
hard whispers.
"I 'd never manage it by myself, Bailey, or I wouldn't be begging you
like this. I 've tried to bring myself to it again and again, but I was
n't game enough. And it isn't as if I was goin' to be a burden to you.
It won't be long before I 'll get a job--you 'll see. A barmaid,
p'r'aps, or I might even get in again with a show. I haven't lost my
figure, anyhow. And as for staying here now, with him, after
this--Bailey, I 'll take poison if you leave me."
Boy Bailey frowned and looked up at the clock which swung a pendulum to
and fro against the wall, as though to invite human affairs to conduct
themselves in measure.
"Well, we haven't got too much time to talk about it," he said. "He
said an hour. Now supposin' I take you, you know it's a case of footin'
it down the line to the next siding? It wouldn't suit me to be nabbed
with you on my hands. He 'd shoot as soon as think about it, and then
where would I be?"
"I can walk," Mrs. du Preez assured him eagerly. "You 'll take me with
you, then, Bailey?"
Boy Bailey sighed. "Oh, I'll take you," he said. "I 'll take you, since
your mind 's made up. My good nature has been the ruin of me--that and
my temperament. But don't forget later on that I warned you."
Mrs. du Preez jumped up. "I won't forget," she promised. "This is my
funeral. Get up from there, Bailey, and we 'll have a drink on it."
They made their last arrangements over the glasses. Christian's absence
was to be counted upon for the greater part of the next day; their road
would be clear.
The first word above a whisper which had been spoken since Christian
left them was by Mrs. du Preez. She sat down her glass at the last with
a jolt.
"But, Bailey," she cried, on a note of hysterical gaiety, "Bailey--we
got to be careful, I know, and all that--but what a lark it 'll be."
He stared at her, not quick enough to keep up with her mounting mood.
She was flushed and feverish with excitement and the reaction of strong
feeling and her eyes danced like a child's on the brink of mischief.
"The woman 's a fool," thought Boy Bailey.
His own attitude towards the affair, as he reviewed it that night in the
forage-shed, where he reposed full dressed in the scent of dry grasses
and stared reflectively through a gap in the roof at the immortal
patience of the stars, was strictly businesslike. Not even a desire to
be revenged upon Christian du Preez, who had called him names and beaten
him, impaired the consistency of that attitude. Boy Bailey allowed for
a certain proportion of thrashings in his experiences; they ranked in
the balance-sheet of his transactions as a sort of office expenses.
They had to be kept down to the lowest figure compatible with
convenience and good business, but they were not to be weighed against a
lucky deal. The one thing that engaged his fancy was the fact that the
woman, though close on forty, would come with money about her--more than
fifty pounds. It would make up his equipment to a handsome, an imposing,
figure. Never before had he possessed a round hundred pounds in one
sum. The mere possibilities that it opened out were exciting; it seemed
as large and as inexhaustible as any other large sum. He did not dwell
on the fact that it belonged to Mrs. du Preez and not to him; he did not
even give his mind to a scheme for securing it. All that was detail, a
thing to be settled at any advantageous moment. A dodge, a minute of
drowsiness on her part--or perhaps, at most, a blow on the
breasts--would secure the conveyance of the money to him. In the
visions of Capetown that hovered on the outskirts of his thought, a
ghostly seraglio attending his nod, there moved many figures, but Mrs.
du Preez was not among them. His imagination made a circuit about her
and her fate, or at most it glanced with brevity and distaste on the
spectacle of a penniless woman weeping on a bench at a wayside station,
seeing the tail-lights of a vanishing train blurred through tears.
"I knew I 'd strike it lucky one of these days," was Mr. Bailey's
reflection, as he composed himself to slumber. "With two or three more
like her--I 'll be a millionaire yet."
The stars watched his upturned face as he slept with a still scrutiny
that must have detected aught in its unconscious frankness that could
redeem it or suggest that once it had possessed the image of God. He
slept as peacefully, as devotedly, as a baby, confiding his
defenselessness to the night with no tremors or uncertainty. He left
unguarded the revelations of his loose and feeble face that the mild
stars searched, always with their stare of stagnant surprise.
In the farmhouse, there was yet a light in the windows when dawn paled
the eastward heaven. Christian du Preez slept in his bed unquietly,
with clenched hands outstretched over the empty place beside him, and in
another room Paul had transferred himself from waking dreams to a
dream-world. Tiptoeing here and there in the house, Mrs. du Preez had
gathered together the meager handful of gear that was to go with her;
she had shaken out a skirt that she treasured and made ready a hat that
smelt of camphor. Her money, in sovereigns, made a hard and heavy knob
in a knotted napkin. All was gathered and ready for the journey and yet
the light shone in the window of the parlor where she sat through the
hours. Her hands were in her lap and there were no tears in her
eyes--it was beyond tears. She was taking leave of her furniture.
She saw her husband at breakfast, facing him across the table with a
preoccupied expression that he took for sullenness. She did not see the
grimness of his countenance nor mark his eye upon her; she was thinking
in soreness of heart of six rosewood chairs, upholstered in velvet, a
rosewood table, a sofa, and the rest of it--the profit of her marriage,
her sheet-anchor and her prop. She felt as though she had given her
life for them.
Christian rode away with his back to the sun, with no word spoken
between them, and as his pony broke into a lope--the Boer half-trot,
half-canter,--he caught and subdued an impulse to look back at the
house. Even if he had looked, he would hardly have seen the cautious
reconnoiter of Boy Bailey's head around the corner of it, as that
camp-follower of fortune made sure of his departure. Thrashings Mr.
Bailey could make light of, but the Boer's threat of shooting had stuck
in his mind. He rested on his hands and knees and stuck his chin close
to the ground in prudent care as he peered about the corner of the house
to see the owner of the rifle make a safe offing.
Even when the Boer had dwindled from sight, swallowed up by the
invisible inequalities of the ground that seemed as flat as a table, he
avoided to show himself in the open. He lurked under the walls of
kraals, frightening farm Kafirs who came upon him suddenly and finally
made a sudden appearance before Paul at the back of the house.
"I won't waste words on you," he said to the boy. "I 've got something
better to do, thank God. But I 'm told you have a message for me."
"Two messages," said Paul.
"One 'll do," replied Boy Bailey. "I don't want to hear you talking. I
've been insulted here and I 'm not done with you yet. Mind that. So
hand over what you 've got for me and be done with it--d'you hear?"
"Here it is." Paul put his hand into the loose bosom of his shirt and
drew out a small paper packet. He held it out to Boy Bailey.
"That!" Boy Bailey trembled as he seized it, with a frightful sense of
disappointment. He had seen the money as gold, a brimming double
handful of minted gold, with gold's comforting substance and weight. The
packet he took into his hand was no fatter than a fat letter and held no
coin.
He rent the covering apart and stared doubtfully at the little wad of
notes it contained, sober-colored paper money of the Bank of Africa. It
had never occurred to him that the Kafir, Kamis, would have his riches
in so uninspiring a shape. Two notes of twenty pounds each and one of
ten and all three of them creased and dirty. No chink, no weight to drag
at his pocket and keep him in mind of it, none of the pomp and panoply
of riches.
"Why--why," he stammered. "I told him--cash down. Damn the dirty Kafir
swindler, what does he call this?"
"Blackmail, I think he said," replied Paul. "That was the other
message. If you don't do what you said you 'd do, you 'll go to _tronk_
(jail) for it, and I am to be a witness. That 's if he does n't kill
you himself--like I told him he 'd better do."
Boy Bailey arrived by degrees at sufficient composure to pocket the
notes, thrusting them deep for greater security and patting them through
the cloth.
"Oh, you told him that, did you?" he said. "And you call yourself a
white man, do you? Murder, is it? You look out, young feller. You
don't know the risks you 're running. I 'm not a man that forgets."
But Paul was not daunted. He watched the battered face that threatened
him with an expression which the other did not understand. There was a
curious warm interest in it that might have flattered a man less bare of
illusions as to his appearance.
"I suppose you 've never seen a black eye before, you gaping moon-calf,"
he cried irritably. "What are you staring like that for?"
Paul smiled. "I would give you a shilling again to let me make a model
of you," he answered. "I 'd give you two shillings."
Boy Bailey swore viciously and swung on his heel. He was stung at last
and he had no answer. He made haste to get around the corner and away
from eyes that would keep the memory of him as he appeared to Paul.
It was more than an hour later that Mrs. du Preez discovered him,
squatting under the spikes of a dusty aloe, humped like a brooding
vulture and grieving over that last affront. He lifted mournful eyes to
her as she stood before him.
"Bailey," she said breathlessly. "I hunted everywhere for you. I
thought you 'd gone without me."
She was ready for the long flight on foot. All that she had in the way
of best clothes was on her body, everything she could not bring herself
to leave. The seemliness of Sunday was embodied in her cloth coat and
skirt, her cream silk bosom and its brooches, the architectural
elaborateness of her hat. She stood in the merciless sun in all her
finery, with sweat on her forehead and a small bundle in each hand.
"You 're coming, then?" he asked stupidly.
She stamped her foot impatiently. "Of course I 'm coming," she said.
"Don't go into all that again, Bailey. D' you think I 'd stop with him
now, after--after everything?"
She was holding desperately to her resolution, eager to be off before
the six rosewood chairs, the table and the sofa should overcome her and
make good their claim to her.
"What 's those?" Bailey nodded at the bundles torpidly.
"Oh," she was burning to be moving, to be committed, to see her boats
flaming and smoking behind her. "This is grub, Bailey. We 'll want
grub, won't we? And this is my things."
"The--er--money, I suppose, an' all that?"
"Yes, yes. Oh, do come on, Bailey. The money 's all here. Everything
's here. You carry the grub an' let 's be going."
"The grub, eh?" Mr. Bailey rose grunting to his feet. "You 'd
rather--well, all right."
None viewed that elopement to mark how Mrs. du Preez slipped her free
hand under Bailey's arm and went forth at his side in the bravery she
had donned as though to bring grace to the occasion. Paul was down at
the dam with sheep, and before he returned the brown distances of the
Karoo had enveloped them and its levels had risen behind them to blot
out the dishonored roof of the house.
At the hour of the midday meal, Paul ate alone, contentedly and
unperturbed by his mother's absence. For all he knew she had one of her
weeping fits upstairs in her bedroom, and he was careful to make no
noise.
*CHAPTER XII*
Margaret entered the drawing-room rather late for tea and Mrs. Jakes
accordingly acknowledged her arrival with an extra stoniness of regard.
In his place by the window, Ford turned from his abstracted
contemplation of the hot monotony without and sent her a discreet and
private smile across the tea-table. Mrs. Jakes, noting it and the
girl's response, tightened her mouth unpleasantly as the suspicion
recurred to her that there was "something between" Mr. Ford and Miss
Harding. More than once of late she had noticed that their intercourse
had warmed to the stage when the common forms of expression need to be
helped out by a code of sympathetic looks and gestures. She addressed
the girl in her thinnest tones of extreme formality.
"I thought perhaps you were n't coming in," she said. "I 'm afraid the
tea 's not very hot now."
"I 'll ring," said Mr. Samson, diligently handing a chair.
"Please don't," said Margaret, taking it. "I don't mind at all. Don't
bother, anybody."
"I forget if you take sugar, Miss Harding," said Mrs. Jakes, pouring
negligently from the pot. Ford grinned and turned quickly to the window
again.
"No sugar, thanks," answered Margaret agreeably; "and no milk and no
tea."
"No tea?" Mrs. Jakes raised her eyebrows in severe surprise and looked
up. The movement sufficed to divert the stream from the tea-pot so that
it flowed abundantly on the hand which held the cup and splashed thence
into the sugar basin. She sat the pot down sharply and reached for her
handkerchief with a smothered ejaculation of annoyance.
"Oh, I 'm sorry," said Margaret. "But how lucky you didn't keep it hot
for me. You might have been scalded, might n't you?"
"Thank you," replied Mrs. Jakes, with all the dignity she could summon
while she mopped at her sleeve. "Thank you; I am not hurt."
That was the second time Margaret had turned her own guns, her own
little improvised pop-guns of ineffectual enmity, back upon her; and she
did not quite understand how it was done. The first time had been when
she had pretended not to hear a remark Margaret had addressed to her.
The girl had crossed the room and joined Dr. Jakes in his hearth-rug
exile, and Mr. Samson had stared while Ford laughed silently but
visibly. Mrs. Jakes had not understood the implication of it; she was
only aware, reddening and resentful, that Margaret had scored in some
subtle fashion.
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?"