blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But
where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by
talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the
world better to talk English? You're so one idea'd, you Dutch folk, at
least some of you," pointedly. "The language and the Bible and your
early-morning coffee!"
They could not help laughing at her, but van Hert indignantly
repudiated her charge.
"O well!..." she continued, airily. "You know perfectly well you do
make a fetish of the Language Question; and that your back-veldt
followers believe the Bible was written in Dutch for the Dutch race
alone; and that you start having coffee at daybreak, with relays up to
breakfast-time. And you don't expect your natives or your women to
possess such a thing as an individual will. That is a luxury for the
strong sex only!... It all means just one thing. Out in the back veldt
you are years and years and years, positive, æons, behind the times;
and you'd sooner represent a big dam to the progress of the world than
yield one little silly, rotten cotton prejudice to help it forward. So
there!..." And having delivered herself of this piece of oration Diana
got up, pushed her chair back with a jerk, and finished, "I'm going
out on the terrace. When I think of your back-veldters, and your
back-veldt policy of suppressing all individualism and all advance, I
need the company of a few worlds and solar systems to regain my
equilibrium. No, don't expostulate," as he rose in his eagerness to
confront her. "I seldom argue. It is not worth while. I merely
'express an opinion,' having the good fortune to belong to a race in
which women are permitted such an indulgence," and she threw a
laughing glance back at him from the window before she stepped out.
Meryl watched her with a swift look of deep affection in her eyes, and
then glanced at her father. Henry Pym's face was expressionless, but
his eyes seemed to reply to her unspoken question, and tell her that
he, too, recognised a little more thoroughly that under the surface
flippancy and light raillery there was depth. In the meantime, feeling
she had not been quite fair to her opponent, to go off without
allowing him to defend himself, he purposely discussed the language
question a little more openly than was at all his wont with such
prickly subjects, speaking a few quiet truths in a way that even a
firebrand like van Hert could not possibly resent. When they joined
Diana she was sitting on a table, swinging her feet, and singing a new
music-hall ditty.
"Touching that slander of yours," van Hert began, good-humouredly, for
few could ever be seriously annoyed with Diana, "I should like to say
..."
"No, I forbid it," she interrupted. "Arguments bore me. Have you heard
that little song before that I was singing? It's a ripping little
ditty. Chain Aunt Emily to the drawing-room sofa and I'll sing it all
through to you; but if she were to hear it she might faint, and that
is so tiresome."
He laughed, and sat on the table beside her, and the rabid sectarian
politician, so given to raising storms and creating scenes in that
most remarkable of parliaments, the South African Union Assembly,
forgot his pet injustices and prejudices, and was quickly the
versatile, virile, engaging social man. Meryl sat a little apart, with
some dainty crochet-work in her delicate fingers, and though the
visitor chatted with Diana, his eyes were almost always upon her.
They had purposely put out the electric light after their coffee was
served, preferring only the lights in the rooms behind them and the
splendour of the night before. And in the dimness Meryl's fair skin
gleamed unusually white beside her dusky hair, and the velvety,
blue-grey eyes, when she looked up, had caught the dreaming darkness
of the heavens. Only now and then she glanced round. Mostly she sat
with her eyes on the shadowy darkness and her work in her lap. And the
Dutchman, gazing, felt with a sort of fierce reluctance that there
were no women in the world for calmness and strength quite like the
Englishwomen, nor more delicately, entrancingly fair.
Then, suddenly, Meryl heard her name and looked up.
"Why in the world do you want to go to Rhodesia?" he had said; and
Diana answered, "I don't know that we do want to go; but Meryl has
suddenly developed into a violent Imperialist, and we go at her
desire."
"What to do?" and he asked the question a little sharply of the dark
eyes now turned to theirs. Quite suddenly and unaccountably he
resented their going; resented, at any rate, that she, Meryl, should
go. There had been so much "Rhodesia" of late. Everyone seemed bitten
with a kind of silly craze for the place. Now it was gold; now it was
land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and "twenty
pieces of silver"; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of
wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef.
"There is nothing worth seeing in Rhodesia, except the Victoria
Falls," he asserted; "and you can run up there and see all you want to
and get back in a week!" And still he looked enquiringly at Meryl.
"We want to see the people," she said, half turning. "The pioneers,
who went first to investigate, the settlers who followed, the women
who went forward with their husbands into the wilderness."
He got off the table and came and leaned against a verandah-post
beside her with folded arms, looking down. "But that is what you won't
see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with
horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and
flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless
land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They
want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won't
accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked
Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there at present.
You will only get typhoid and malaria, and be excruciatingly
uncomfortable."
"It sounds a pretty rotten sort of place! What do you and your
colleagues want it for so badly, anyway?..." asked Diana, throwing her
head back and narrowing her eyes as she looked at him with a shrewd
questioning air.
He coloured slightly under the sunburn on his cheeks. "We want a
United South Africa. Why should one country stand aloof!"
"Meinheer van Hert," said she, coming down from her table and taking a
step forward to confront him, "for any man with your political views
to talk about including Rhodesia in the Union solely for the sake of a
United South Africa and for her own good, is the veriest cant. There's
gold up there, and perhaps tin; and there's land for farming, and land
for ranching, and hunting grounds, and a big river. In your United
South Africa you want your people to be 'top dog' always, and as long
as Rhodesia stands out there's a menace in the north. That's one
reason why you want her! Rumour tells us there's a fine race of men up
there, who don't mean to have any tongue but Cecil Rhodes's tongue
taught in Cecil Rhodes's country, so it certainly is no place for you!
You've got to learn more thoroughly what an Englishman means by
'cricket' before your overtures will be considered; and we're all
hoping you'll learn it quickly, because we want to be friends, good
friends, just as soon as ever we can."
He bit his lip and looked angry, but she was already laughing the
moment's tension aside. "You didn't know I was a politician, did
you?... As a matter of fact, I'm not!... I'm sick of the whole bag of
tricks, and the Empire that fills Meryl with heaves and swells isn't
half so much to me as winning a tennis tournament or a golf
championship. But when you Hollanders are bursting with pride of place
and achievement, and offering energy and brains to help Britishers
along, I just feel as if you'd got to be told a few home-truths for
your good. Now I'm going to liven the meeting with a little operatic
music," and she tripped indoors to the piano. Van Hert shrugged his
shoulders expressively, and then stood silently beside Meryl for some
moments looking into the night. And as he stood he became conscious of
a vague sort of dissatisfaction with himself. It was a sensation he
knew only at rare moments, and those moments were chiefly at the Pyms'
house. He admired the two cousins more than any women he knew; he
admired Henry Pym; he loved the homyness of their household; and he
had to remember that they were English. There must, of course, be many
others like them. Were there many like them among his own countrymen?
When Diana told him his people had yet to learn more thoroughly what
was meant by "cricket" she had hit him hard. He would never have
admitted it for one moment, but, nevertheless, when he was at the
Pyms' house he _wondered_.... Densely, stubbornly patriotic to his own
people and his own tongue he might be, but he had travelled enough to
recognise certain traits in the English "old public-school boy" which
it was good for a country there should be in her young men, and which
were not noticeably present in his countrymen of the back veldt.
Then his eyes rested on Meryl, and all his pulses throbbed with her
nearness. He had known for many months now that he loved her, yet he
had never actually told his love. At first there had been a
disinclination to marry an Englishwoman because of the unbending,
resolute policy he had identified himself with in the Union
Parliament. No one spoke of anti-British and anti-Dutch nowadays. It
was impolitic. But whereas certain men genuinely tried to ease the
forced situation and meet with fairness and justice upon common
ground, others still kept the flag of discord in their hands, though
they hid it under the table, so to speak, and only produced it when,
as they chose to assert, some pet foible of their countrymen was
overruled or some indignity threatened.
And of this section in Parliament van Hert was the leader. If he then
married an Englishwoman, not even South African born, would he not be
held up to ridicule by his colleagues? And then he would see Meryl
again, and all his feelings would merge into one great longing for
her; not for her money--she had been right when she said such a charge
was unjust, indeed, he almost wished she had been poor--but her quiet
dignity and calm strength and the exquisite fairness that held all his
senses.
And as he stood beside her now he hated more and more, without knowing
why, that she should go to Rhodesia. Whatever he had said to the
contrary, he knew that there was a romance about that far land that
might fascinate her. He knew that up there there were some of the
cream of England's men. "The second son's country," he had heard it
called, and that meant very often the well-born, high-bred gentleman
who was not afraid to work, who had never been pampered, and was full
of the best sportsman's spirit. The man of all others to attract such
a woman as Meryl Pym. The mere thought of it seemed to fill him with a
growing alarm, and presently, almost before he knew it, he found
himself pouring into her ears the story of his love.
Meryl was startled and taken aback. She had known perhaps that he had
a special liking for her; seen it often in his eyes when he gazed at
her. But that he should speak now was a little sudden, and she wished
Diana had not left them alone. She tried to meet his eyes, but
something a little too ardent in them abashed her, and she looked out
into the darkness, nervously twisting and untwisting the thread of her
work.
He saw that she was taken aback, and tried somewhat to curb the eager
intensity that he felt was unnerving her.
"You are going away up there, and I shall be very anxious about you,"
he pleaded. "If you would only give me your promise before you go, and
let me have the right to follow at once if you are ill or anything, it
would make it so much easier."
She stood up, agitated, still gazing wistfully into the night.
"It is very sudden.... I did not know.... I hardly thought.... Have
you ... have you ... remembered everything?..."
"That you are English and I am Dutch?... What of it, Meryl?... I may
call you Meryl, mayn't I?... Are we not both South Africans?..."
He tried to take her hand and draw her to him, but she shrank away and
he did not urge it.
"Have you remembered it long enough?... Thought it out thoroughly?...
It all seems somehow so sudden."
"I have known long that I loved you. Does anything else really matter
if you can love me in return?"
"Ah!..." she breathed and stopped short.
She had liked him long. She had always liked him. Away from his
politics he was liked by most people. Huguenot blood was in his veins,
and it showed itself in a French charm of manner that came to him
naturally when he could get away from that bigoted, narrow obstinacy
that marred him. She felt he was a man who might be led to many
things, though driven to none. Because he attracted her she felt she
half loved the Huguenot side of him already. If only the other side
did not so insistently repel! Could it perhaps be overruled? Could she
love him truly enough to hold his love for ever, and through it lead
him to heights he might never even sight without her? Yet her eyes
were wistful, gazing out there at the dreaming stars, and her face
gleamed whiter and whiter.
This was not the love that whispered to her when she looked to the far
blue hills. This was not the consummation the high stars in far
infinities told her vaguely might some day bless her life.
And then he pleaded again in low-voiced eagerness, and in distress she
turned to him. "I'm so sorry. I can't bear to think of perhaps making
you unhappy. But ... but ... I'm afraid I don't love you in the way
you want. I hadn't thought about it."
"I have been too sudden." He drew himself up, and his eyes followed
hers out to the darkness. And a touch of latent nobility seemed to
come out in him; a quiet dignity like her own that appealed to her
strongly. "I won't take your answer to-night. I shall come to you
again when you come back. Perhaps then ... when you have thought
about it ..." He broke off abruptly. "May I write to you?... Will you
sometimes write to me?... Perhaps I could follow ..."
They heard steps and voices coming towards them from the drawing-room
where Diana had wearied of her operas, and in sudden haste he caught
her hand and raised it to his lips.
"I think I have to thank you for a good deal," he told her a trifle
huskily. "Men of all nations are better for being admitted to the
friendship of women like you. If there were anything I could do to
serve you?..." and he waited for her to speak.
"Serve South Africa," she breathed tensely. "I could ask no more of
any man."
His hand tightened upon hers.
"Serve her with me. Together we could do so much."
He saw her waver.
"Let me tell you when I come back. Yes ... together we might do so
much...."
"When you come back ..." he said, and pressed her hand in
understanding.
Then Diana stepped out of the brightness of the drawing-room.
"How can you two stay sleepily there, looking at the stars like two
cats, when I am trying to lure you indoors with the latest comic-opera
music! Meinheer van Hert, Mister Pym says, will you drink with
him?..."
VI
THE JOURNEY
As he had three ladies with him Mr. Pym decided to take a private
saloon-car, but no saloon in the world could prevent them being nearly
smothered with the dust through Bechuanaland and Matabeleland in
August, and while Aunt Emily rent the air with her complainings and
sufferings, Diana chose to pass disparaging remarks upon the
long-suffering British Empire, which she considered responsible for
her journey north. Meryl said nothing, but there was often a wistful
expression in her eyes as they sighted a lonely farmstead, or stood in
a little wayside station with perhaps one corrugated-iron building,
where some white-faced woman looked listlessly at the train. When she
tried to voice her sympathy with their loneliness, however, Diana
snapped her up a little impatiently.
"My dear Meryl, you will look at things always in the sentimental
light. A woman with a husband and child in this freshness and sunshine
is at least better off than if she were in a city slum, and her man
probably out of work, and her child dying for want of fresh air."
"But that is not the only alternative!... And in any case to suffer in
company is almost always easier than to suffer alone."
"But they don't suffer, or, at any rate, they needn't necessarily.
That is where you are so short-sighted. The average woman wants a
husband and a child, and I don't see that it matters much whether she
has them in the wilderness or in a city; the main thing is to have
them."
"Well, for my part," put in Aunt Emily in an aggrieved voice, "if I
could only have a man in a cloud of dust I'd sooner never see the
species again," which tickled Diana hugely and caused her to horrify
her aunt by adding, "But what an advantage for him never to be able to
see what you were doing! One could have such high jinks!..." Then,
changing her voice subtly, she enquired, "Is it too much for you,
aunty?... I mean the dust and the journey? because there must be such
very much worse things ahead, and ..."
"That will do, my dear. I can bear it," and her expression of mournful
resignation tickled Diana more than ever. On the day before they
reached Bulawayo, however, when hour after hour brought very little
but scrub and sand, she and her aunt were very nervy and irritable,
and only Meryl, with her dreams and ideals, continued quietly
interested. When they reached Bulawayo matters did not improve much,
because a sand-storm was blowing and it was almost impossible to go
out. Mr. Pym packed them off to the Victoria Falls as soon as
possible, and remained behind himself to complete the arrangements for
his trip. On the further railway journey the dust was worse than ever,
and utterly out of heart with everything Rhodesian, Aunt Emily retired
to a suite of rooms at the hotel on their arrival and said she should
stay there until the cool of the evening.
So Diana and Meryl stood on Danger Point alone, when they took their
first long look at the amazing cataract of waters. Neither spoke for
many seconds, and then Diana breathed, "I'm glad Aunt Emily didn't
come. She would have called it 'lovely' or 'sweet.'"
Meryl laid a sympathetic hand on her arm and murmured, "And you?..."
"One couldn't call it anything. It just _is_." And Meryl with her
understanding heart pressed her arm in silence.
They walked together through the rain forest, getting drenched with
spray and hardly noticing it, until they came to the opening near the
Devil's Cataract at the south end, and sat down to gaze at the
splendour and wonder outspread.
Then Diana spoke a little in something of an undertone, half to Meryl,
half to the air:
"A god did it. I don't know which--Jupiter or Pan, or Apollo or
Hercules--and when they grew tired of the earth and went off to other
planets, they just left it behind as a child might a castle he has
built in the sand; and by and by some crabs crawled along and found
the castle, and sat down and looked at it because it seemed to them
so wonderful; and by and by some humans found the gods' waterfall,
crawled up to it, and sat down and wondered. That's all there is to
do. O, Meryl, I wish I were a goddess and not a worm. The waters are
mocking us. Don't you hear them?... I just feel as if there were
something about it all I can't bear."
Meryl smiled a little tender smile. To her Diana in all her moods was
adorable. In her shy, fierce, tense ones, as now, she was best of all.
"What does it say to you, Meryl?..." the girl went on. "Do you feel as
if you hated it and worshipped it both together? Hated its remote
magnificence and devilish cruelty, and worshipped it because you
couldn't help yourself, either from fear or wonder? I don't know
which, only I feel ... I feel ... as if I ought to throw over
something I loved as a sacrifice of propitiation. And it goes on just
the same--think of it--year after year, century after century, just
calmly spilling magnificence on the desert air! I believe I'm
frightened, Meryl. Tell me what it all says to you."
Meryl looked dreamily along the glistening mighty cascades, and then
spoke softly:
"I feel I'm in the presence of one of the world's biggest things, and
it is inspiring. You know that sentence of James Lane Allen's, 'When
one has heard the big things calling, how they call and call, day and
night, day and night!...' Here they call louder, that is my chief
feeling. I look at this great natural wonder, and whatever there is in
me most akin to it swells upward. I feel I must do great things or die
... be great or not at all. And while I feel like this there is a
sense of kinship, as if some spirit of the waters understands."
"Perhaps that is why I am afraid," breathed Diana. "I don't care about
greatness. I don't want to be great. It all seems so unreal. I like
the sunshine, and flowers, and trees, and birds, and four-footed
things. I don't want to be bothered with my fellow-creatures; they are
a nuisance. If they are in difficulties, and can't find a way out for
themselves, they might just as well go under."
"You heartless little heathen!" affectionately.
The girl brightened suddenly. "Why! it understands, Meryl!... The
Spirit of the Waters heard me, and now it is laughing. It is great
enough to understand and appreciate the feelings of both of us. Don't
you hear the note of revelling now?... Why!... it's all revelling. The
waters are shrieking with joy. They've come tearing down the Zambesi
valley for the rapture of plunging over the precipice, and now they
are just beside themselves with the excitement and delight of it.
O!... they heard me say I don't care about my fellow-creatures, that
they are just a nuisance, and they're shouting to me, 'Neither do we
... neither do we!... Silly, wide-eyed, open-mouthed humans come and
stare at us, and try to describe us, saying we are lovely and
wonderful and pretty and such-like, and we just roar at them and their
puniness and take our glorious plunge.' That is what the waters are
saying to me now, Meryl. I feel as if I simply must plunge with them.
Take me away. I can't bear any more to-day." And they went silently
back through the lovely plantations to the hotel.
But in the evening, in the moonlight, her mood changed again.
"I feel a little like you to-night, Meryl. The big things do matter,
of course. If I'm such a silly little goat I can't do anything big
myself, I guess I'll help you whenever it's possible. And, of course,
even humans matter a little, though I do like dogs and horses so much
better; but there's something so calm and big and strong about the
waters to-night, they are telling me all the time that the big things
matter. O, Meryl, it's so lovely--so lovely--it hurts dreadfully...."
And after a pause: "If it hadn't been for you I should never have
taken the trouble to come and see it. I won't grouse at the dust any
more."
And later: "I'm glad there's no sign of a human habitation at hand,
and that the wilderness is all round. They had to be splendidly
isolated--magnificently alone--the god who did it understood that. One
can think of the wide reaches of Africa afterwards, and the gem, like
a priceless jewel, set in them. Deep silence, wide horizons, untrodden
country on every hand, and this in the midst like a treasure tenderly
enfolded."
After three days they returned to Bulawayo, and found their pilot
impatient to be off. He unfolded his plans, and the two girls listened
eagerly when he said:
"I am told there is every indication of gold in the Victoria district,
and my engineer is anxious I should journey down there and see one or
two properties. The railway does not extend beyond Selukwe, so if we
go we must take a travelling ambulance and tents and sleep out in them
for three or four weeks. I think there is a pretty good hotel in
Edwardstown, where you could remain if you like while I travel round,
and then we might all journey to Salisbury up the old pioneer route."
The girls were delighted, but Aunt Emily's mournful resignation had
reached its limit. She informed them, in a voice which implied, no
matter how they pleaded with her, she should remain firm, that nothing
would induce her to accompany them upon such a journey.
Her brother said quietly, "Just as you like, Emily. I think I can take
care of the girls. Will you stay in Bulawayo, or go back to
Johannesburg?"