"A word fitly spoken is like apples of silver in baskets of gold."
A few days after our marriage Maurice went into town, and came back to
Water-lily Farm with a brief but interesting statement.
"We shall not be leaving Mashonaland. When I made you some such promise
I had not reckoned with my dear uncle Alexander. It appears that he
objects to my going away from Africa."
I regarded him steadfastly for a while, trying to read between the lines
of this announcement.
"What has made him change his mind about helping you into the Consular
service, Maurice?" I asked, not without a shade of irony I must
confess, for any one less adapted than Maurice to a profession in which
high principles, tact, and good manners are essential qualifications it
would have been hard to find, even in Africa, where budding diplomats do
not grow on every bush.
"He hasn't changed his mind. I have changed mine about asking him,
that's all. I know it would be no good, anyway."
He got into the verandah hammock, which was also his bed, propped
himself comfortably against a cushion, and lit a cigarette.
From my deck-chair I stared blankly at the surrounding horizon. To say
that I was _agacee_ is to say nothing. Even in the face of his recently
revealed duplicity I was unprepared for this cool jettisoning of the
most solemn part of our compact. It left me breathless. I said at
last:
"What is there to prevent you from leaving Africa without your uncle's
consent? You are not an infant--"
"No; I wish I were. Life would be considerably simpler. But the fact
is, my uncle is so kind as to pay me five hundred a year to stay out of
England, and the country he specifies as my residence, being a nice long
way off from him, is Africa. The moment I quit he'll stop payment, and
I shall have nothing to live on but my lordly salary of twenty quid a
month."
What sinister meaning lurked in so strange an arrangement I shrank from
asking, but I had an instinct to combat it--an instinct that was roused
in me twenty times a day as my husband's character unfolded itself, and
I saw upon what ignoble props and bolsters his life was arranged; how
slack were his moral muscles; how low his code of honour. Sometimes,
when I realised these things, and that my lot was irrevocably cast for
life companionship with a man who so deliberately outraged my ideals of
what a man should be, and what life should mean, I felt like a trapped
creature, and my instinct was to turn in bitter rage and rend the trap
with teeth and nails. But what good in that? And what good in all my
fine resolutions if they so quickly dissolved in the face of disaster?
I smothered down indignation and disdain, and used a gentleness with him
that, knowing my own proud ardent heart, surprised myself. With burning
cheeks I might presently have been heard pleading with him to throw off
the five-hundred-pound yoke, and strike out on his own account.
"Surely the freedom of your soul is worth more than five hundred a
year!" I cried. "You detest your uncle, why take his money under such
an ignominious condition? Fling his money into his teeth and take your
life into your own hands. Africa is not the only country on the map.
There are still Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Let us go to
Canada and start a farm, open a shop, run a hotel--anything, anywhere.
I will help you at whatever you put your hand to, Maurice, and I don't
care how poor we are. Only let us be honourable, and let us go away
from Africa."
And all the time my blood was leaping and my heart quivering at the
thought of staying on in this land, behind whose silent hills and dense
bush the fate of Anthony Kinsella still was hidden. To all my eloquence
he puffed at his cigarette and returned a cool stare.
"Jack up five hundred a year and go and look for a chance living in some
new country where I don't know the ropes? Not much, my dear girl! I
know my own limitations, thanks, and how likely I'd be to make my
fortune or even a bare living in Canada or anywhere else."
"What of the noble career you were to carve out for yourself," I flung
at him, hoping that scorn might achieve what pleading and reasoning
failed to do. But that stone broke no bones. He merely laughed and
flung one back at me with a man's sure aim.
"Why should I bother about a career, since I am never to have any
children to pass my glories on to?"
That sealed my lips from further retort. I sat still and stared
silently at the passionate blue of the skies, and the radiant sunlit
plain. What was the use of struggling against the witch who had me in
her toils and never meant to let me go?
"If she loves you, she will keep you, whether you will or no!" Anthony
had prophesied on just such a blue-and-gold day, when life went sweetly
with us. Well, if this was love, it was a strong, austere passion, hard
to distinguish from hate. Under its fierce cold caress I could truly
cry with the words of the Hindoo woman to her faithless lord:
"Hadst thou not called it Love--
I had called it a drawn sword!"
A little way off a native boy, whom I had noticed about the place the
last day or two, was sitting in the sunshine, with his back against a
hut. He wore a brick-red blanket sewn with large blue beads, swathed
round him rather gracefully, and a necklace of some wild beasts' teeth
about his neck. He was better looking than the average kaffir--nose
less flat, and lips less protruding; with a dreamy, moody air about him,
and in his big dark eyes. He had a tiny kaffir instrument in his hands,
upon which he was making a soft, sad, monotonous sound.
_Tom--brr--torn--brr--tom-tom-tom_--
Sometimes he would give a look, in which there seemed to be some
significant wistfulness, towards the verandah where we sat.
"Yes, I've got a nice little soft billet in the Mounted Police," pursued
Maurice serenely. "The powers that be thought it a pity for a happily
married man like me, with an adoring wife, to have to be so much away
from home as an N.C. must be, so they laid their heads together to see
what they could do for you and me. The result is the offer of a
sub-inspectorship in the Police, my service in the N.C. Department to
count towards seniority. They've given me the camp at Mgatweli."
Afterwards I learnt, as one learns everything in Rhodesia if one lives
long enough, that the whole affair had been arranged weeks before, upon
Maurice announcing the news of his approaching marriage. He had
accepted the appointment quite a month before he told me anything about
it.
But I soon learned that I must take falseness and double-dealing for
granted.
Judy, too, was proving faithless to her promise. She had written to say
that she had decided to take Dickie with her to Europe, where she was
going to spend her honeymoon.
I rose wearily to go inside and find out what arrangements were being
made for lunch, when I noticed that the boy with the music had left off
playing. He put his piano in his hair and came up to the verandah. His
eyes were fixed wistfully upon Maurice, who was apparently composing
himself to sleep. In the Mashona tongue he made a soft little request:
"_Neega meena e'tambo Inkos_."
My husband very quickly opened his eyes.
"Get out, you scoundrel, or I'll give you a kicking instead. And don't
let me see you hanging round here any longer." He added something.
Some added threat in the vernacular made the boy walk away. But he did
not leave the farm. I found out later that he was Makupi, the boy whose
charm Maurice would not give up, keeping it out of sheer deviltry and
malice, just because the boy wanted it so frightfully. When we left
Water-lily Farm Makupi left also, and a few days after our arrival at
our new home I saw his brick-red blanket again, and heard the thrumming
of the little melancholy piano. Often he would come to Maurice and
repeat his gentle request:
"_Neega meena e'tambo Inkos_" (give me my charm, master). And when
refused with menaces would walk uncomplainingly away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mgatweli was a little gathering of houses and huts, a church, and two
hotels--the habitations of three hundred souls. The town nestled in the
hollow of a plain, with low, wooded kopjes brooding round it.
Our home consisted of five huts: a dining-room lined with white limbo, a
drawing-room lined with red, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. They had been
lived in before, and left in a ragged and disreputable condition. There
was grass growing on my bedroom floor, and the ants had devoured most of
the drawing-room wall drapery. However, the place was undeniably
picturesque.
The huts were built in a wide ring round a compound full of bush and big
trees, and the whole camp was pitched half-way up the slope of the
biggest kop.
We were about a mile away from the town, and between us and it stretched
an emblazoned sea--an extravagant, brilliant _champs Elysee_ of terrible
colour.
In the first mushroom uprising of the town the little hospital had stood
where now our huts were built, and a young nurse, receiving a packet of
zinia seed from home, had, in the innocence of her heart, planted it at
the doors of the hospital, to cheer the patients, she said; but in time
it had frightened the patients.
Any one who knows anything about zinias need not be told that they want
nothing more than a shower and some sunny days to bloom gaily, and
thereafter fling their seed in turn to the four winds. That is what
Nurse Agnes's zinias had done, and now between the camp and the town
billowed an iridescent ocean of colour. And such colour! Atrocious
blues and reds and terra-cottas and pinks and magentas, all cheek by
jowl, and head to head. Perky little stiff-stalked wretches, blazing
wickedly in the sun. I detested them. The natural flowers of Africa
never clash with each other, or the skies, or the changing scarlets and
ambers of the veldt. But these malapert immigrants sinned against all
laws and canons of colour. They struck the eye a thousand blows a
minute. They disturbed the splendour of the skies. There was no peace
in the distant hills because of them.
Close beside us was the police camp: a bevy of huts built round a large
open space, with the stumps of chopped-down trees for occasional seats.
A sergeant and ten troopers came and went on the zinia-lined road,
patrolling the neighbouring kraals and visiting the town. From our hut
doors we could see the men busy with their horses at morning and evening
"stables," and on Sunday nights they usually chanted Barrack-room
Ballads round their fires to hymn tunes played on a concertina. They
were an ill-kempt, casual, careless lot of men, but fine looking fellows
and all of them well-born ne'er-do-wells. The only one among them who
had no claim by birth to the title of gentleman was Locke, the smart and
spruce sergeant in charge of them under Maurice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Life with Maurice Stair was too lively and active a misery to be
truthfully described as dreary. It was more difficult than climbing the
_Dent blanche_ with bare and broken feet, or wandering waterless in the
burning desert; for there was no glorious peak in sight up the steep and
rugged path, nor any oases to rest by in the weary desert, nor any hope
of "Death, the tardy friend" overtaking one's faltering footsteps. I
was too young and strong to hope for death, even while I felt that youth
was being left far behind in the shadow of happier days, and age
crouched somewhere in the tangled thorny wild in front. And always,
always, the terrible regret for the passing of days that held nothing in
them! Empty days--empty nights! Life was not meant to be passed thus,
and life was passing!
"The wine of life was falling drop by drop;
The leaves of life were fading one by one!"
Maurice spent little of his time at the police camp. His duties as
commanding officer did not oppress him. He rarely went near his men.
The sergeant came to the house with all papers and reports, and Maurice
conducted the affairs of the Government in his bedroom, often from his
bed, for which he had a fondness.
As Public Prosecutor he was obliged to go over to the court-house every
morning at ten, but it was usually nearer eleven when he rode away,
looking like a modern Galahad on his white horse. There is no doubt he
was a very handsome fellow.
His duties at the court-house did not keep him long, there being little
more to do than to produce certain Mashonas who had been brought in by
the troopers for refusing to pay the hut-tax (ten shillings a year) and
thereafter to be sentenced to a month's labour at Government work.
Sometimes there was a cattle-stealer to face his crimes, or a breaker of
his brother's skull in some kraal revel. Whatsoever the cases they did
not detain Maurice long. He soon came riding gallantly back through the
zinias, to the hours of idleness that his soul loved. He would fling
off his uniform, get into a pair of shrunken flannel trousers, and in
his shirt sleeves and a pair of atrocious black leather slippers spend
the rest of the day _pottering_. He was the most successful potterer I
ever met. Sauntering from one hut to the other, he was never far from
his own. He may or may not have believed that I did not know the reason
for this; but I must have been deaf and blind and lacking in all my
seven senses not to know of the case after case of whiskey that was
carried to his hut and consumed there in solitude. Yet he still kept up
the pose of being a man who did not drink, and when I had the tantalus
filled with spirits and placed openly in the dining-room he looked at me
with surprise, and asked me whether I realised that whiskey was five
pounds a case!
He had the art of wasting time brought to a fine point. He could sit
for hours polishing some part of his saddlery (that it was his batman's
business to attend to), or spend the afternoon piercing fresh holes in a
strap he never intended to use, piercing them beautifully, with the care
of a diamond cutter at the most delicate work, polishing them afterwards
with sand-paper. He loved polishing as few housemaids do. The matter
of getting a rhino-hide _sjambok_ ebony black would happily occupy him
for many days, or cleaning a pipe that he never smoked--anything that
was futile and foolish and useless and that some one else could have
done better!
He also liked to make little pottering things with carpenters' tools.
After studying for the army he had, it appeared, taken a course at one
of the big technical training colleges in London, and had there chosen
to learn carpentering. No doubt I am snobbish, but I could never quite
understand what a gentleman wanted with a knowledge of carpentering.
Probably Maurice took it up to avoid being obliged to study something
that would make a demand on his brain. He was always very careful not
to overstrain his brain in any way. However, the result of this special
branch of instruction was that he could make nice little boxes that
would not quite close, and wooden pegs that wouldn't stay in the _dagga_
walls, and other things that no one had any earthly use for.
Once, it is true, he made a beautiful little tea-table, a thing we much
required, for furniture was still almost unobtainable in the wilds as we
were, and the drawing-room was but scantily furnished. But when the
table was finished he spoilt it by painting it a diabolical pink that
made it get up and smite in the eye everything in the room, including
the walls which were lined with scarlet twill. The thing was
impossible. The colour of a stuffed wolfs tongue! But do you think he
would change it? No. He would have it no other colour, and he forced
it through the drawing-room door, tearing the limbo and smashing up pots
of ferns, and planting it in the middle of the room, left it there
whether I liked it or not. I dispensed tea from it to my visitors and
let them gauge my taste by it if they liked. What did it matter?
When all his possessions had been picked over and polished and he could
for the moment find nothing sufficiently futile to do, he would get a
pack of cards and play patience, or amuse himself with a chess-board.
He never touched a book or a pen, or took the slightest interest in the
profession into which he had been pitch-forked over the heads of better
_warn_, by a Government whose kindly idea at that time was to do well by
the men who had first come into the country. He appeared to have no use
whatever for his head: but his long, womanish, restless hands were
everlastingly occupied.
His favourite seat was a packing case under a big thorn tree--not too
far from his bedroom door; and there day after day he murdered time.
If he had possessed the easy-going, warm-hearted, beauty-loving Bohemian
temperament that usually accompanies a lazy nature, much could have been
forgiven him. A gipsy's heart and a poet's dreams would have gone very
far towards compensating to me, at least, for idleness and incompetence.
But Maurice had no more poetry in him than a packing-case. And if his
soul had ever given birth to dreams he had long since drowned them in
whiskey. So far from being easy-going he was extremely cantankerous to
every one under him. The servants detested him, and his men only
tolerated him because he left them to their own devices. As for loving
beauty; he never raised his eyes to the hills except to curse them for
cutting him off from civilisation. He infinitely preferred to see his
own cigarette smoke than to watch the pansy-coloured shadows flocking
across the plains at eventide. A sunset left him cold; he never saw a
dawn.
If any one thinks I sat down meekly to this life, and to this man they
gravely err. I am not of the meek of the earth. Irish-Americans rarely
are. Moreover, a meek woman in the household of Maurice Stair would
have been extremely out of place. He would have calmly proceeded to
wipe his boots on her.
I was consumed with shame for this man. I looked upon him as a cheat;
and I knew the humiliation and shame of a woman whose husband was
defrauding his employers. I had been long enough in the country to know
how hard the _real_ men, who had ideals, worked for the country and for
themselves. I knew that there were a hundred things Maurice could have
done to improve his men, the camp, and the general state of affairs.
But he preferred to let Sergeant Locke earn his salary for him, while he
sat under a thorn tree and polished a strap; and I, his wife, shared the
salary!
At first, having learnt something of his arrogant, stubborn nature, I
tried to beguile him from his ways with soft and even flattering words.
I painted to him, with a daring impressionist hand, the future that
ought to be his, clothing it in mists of scarlet and gold.
"Grind away at your profession," I invoked him, "and show them you're
too good for this little hole. Have your men in such a state of
efficiency that the fame of them will reach Buluwayo. Improve the camp.
Get after the kaffirs and make them work at this place so hard that the
next time the C.O. is here he will cast an envious eye on it for one of
his pets, and you'll be moved on somewhere else. Having shown your
stamina they won't dare to push you in the background again. They'll
_have_ to give you something better."
I descended deep into flattery, and though to my own ears it sounded
uncommonly like irony, he took it well. But afterwards he smiled at me,
the patient smile of the great.
"What's the good, my dear girl? You don't know this country. You can
work the flesh off your bones and nobody will thank you for it. You
will never get ahead of the Company's pets."
The old cry of the idle and incompetent, whether in art, trade, or the
professions--the uselessness of striving against injustice and
favouritism!
"I consider that they have distinctly petted you, Maurice. Show them
that they did well, and you'll get more petting."
"I suppose you would like me to be like Popper in Salisbury--always
after the men to see if they've got their putties on straight, and
whether they're taking Epsom salts and saying their prayers regularly."
"Oh, Maurice, you know very well that is not what I mean."
"I don't think you know what you mean. You are talking through your
hat, my dear girl, of things you know absolutely nothing about."
"Perhaps so," I admitted with a humility that was far from being natural
to me. "But I am only making suggestions. I can't bear to see you
wasting your life. There are such a lot of things you could do in this
country, and make a big future out of. If you could get inside the
inscrutable native mind, for instance, you who know so much about the
natives already. Why not become an authority on them, a master of the
native tongue as no other man in this country is? Dear Maurice, I want
to see you start carving that career you told me about."
(I never let him off that!) But he was entirely undisturbed.
"You talk like a book, my dear girl," he affably responded. "But I'd
rather carve a stick. Less trouble. Go and get into the native mind
yourself if you think it such a mighty interesting place. And further,
I wish you'd remember that I warned you on our wedding day that I would
not have you interfering with my affairs. I knew well enough you'd
start this blither about ambition. I must ask you once and for all to
mind your own business."
"It _is_ my business," I said. "How dared you ask me to take a name you
did not mean to do something with?"
This was no gentle answer to turn away wrath, as I very well knew. But
there were moments, and this was one of them, when my spirit rebelled
against the embargo of submission I had laid upon it. I saw at last
that guileful persuasion was useless. I might as well have tried to
beguile a _wildebeeste_ from the veldt, or a crocodile from the _green_
slime of the Pungwe River, as this man from the paths of sloth. But
there was still the goad left.
"Oh, Alexander the Great! Do you remember what he said to the soldier
he found sleeping at his post? `Either honour your name, sir, or change
it!'"
"Oh! Bah! What do women know of honour. Let me alone, for God's
sake."
But I would not let him alone. Even when his retorts were coarse and
insulting, I persisted. It burned me like an acid to bear the name of
this neglecter of his duties: this skulker behind a bush while other men
did his work. I made clear to him that any woman with a backbone
detests the type of man who potters about the house driving in nails
instead of getting out after the big things of life. I gave him no rest
under his thorn tree.
I jeered at his wooden boxes, and made mock of the slovenly troopers who
passed upon the road below our camp. I jibed at his beloved shrunken
white flannels, and let him know I found him no object of beauty in the
black bath-slippers. I scarified him, and inflicted many a scar on my
own pride in the process; and apparently he remained invulnerable. But
sometimes I saw a little colour creep into his sallow cheek, and knew
that an arrow had gone home. Until at last one day he turned on me
raging:
"Good God! a man had better have married a flaming sword than you! I
might as well try to sleep with vitriol trickling over me!"
At that I rejoiced: if an emotion of mingled despair and savage triumph
could be described as joy. And thereafter I gave him no quarter. More
than ever I bit into him like a steel blade and flickered round him like
a flame.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
That was the beginning of a new era. And if sometimes the last state of
these persons seemed worse than the first--I flamed and flickered on.
One thing was certain; anything was better than stagnation in a swamp;
so I made the swamp as untenantable as if it were infested with asps.
However, departure from the swamp meant departure also from
tranquillity. With the mists of idleness and the green slime of sloth,
peace also disappeared. It is true that Sergeant Locke came no more to
the house with the reports; no longer paid the men and harangued them
vainly for their sins; nor rode any more to the court-house to play
deputy P.P. while his superior officer lay in bed; nor performed any
more of the duties of that same superior officer. That was so much to
the good. But for amendment Maurice took toll of me at home,
retaliating with the malice of a small-minded woman, interfering in the
affairs of the house, grumbling at the food, abusing the cook, and
insulting me. Nothing pleased him. Though he was much more at the camp
and court than he had ever been he also seemed to have more time to be
at home, to fall upon the cook and kick the house boys, with the result
that no sooner had I trained one servant to do his duties
unsuperintended, than he ran away, and I had to begin the thankless task
over again.
My husband was a bad person to keep house for at any time. One of those
men who tells every one he doesn't care what he eats so long as it is
food; and then raises the roof if he has cold mutton daintily served
with a salad for lunch, after having had it for dinner the night before.
"Damn it! is this goat going to last for ever?" he would cry outraged.
"It must have been a blazing horse. Did you buy the whole four quarters
in the name of God?"
My mornings were taken up with trying to manufacture new dishes, and
teaching Mango, the cook, to manage the sparse material at his disposal,
so that the result might spell variety in the _menu_.
I discovered that turning out charming suppers in a Paris studio was a
very different matter to keeping house in a land where goat and "bully"
were the foundations of life; fresh fruit and fish unheard-of things;
and vegetables luxuries that had to be fetched on horseback from a
coolie river-garden several miles away, and pleaded and bartered for at
that.
Chickens, of which it took about half-a-dozen to make a meal, had also
to be fetched from kaffir kraals, and eggs had to be ridden after (and
sometimes run away from afterwards).
I found, as many a weary woman has found before me, that housekeeping is
the most thankless, heart-breaking, soul-racking business in the world
to those who have not been trained to it from their youth upwards. But
I had to stick to my job. Maurice having been driven forth from his
swamp into the wilds had come back with at least two of the qualities of
the king of beasts: an enormous appetite, and a tendency to roar the
house down. My plain duty was to appease him, and pray for further
lion-like attributes to develop.
In a small way we were obliged to entertain. Maurice's official
position demanded as much, though it was an obligation he was very
willing to shirk, preferring a quiet, swamp-like evening in his hut to
the trouble of dressing for dinner and being polite to people for a few
hours. But my plans for his redemption did not include any evenings
off, and I asked the necessary people to dine whether he liked it or
not. He had many ways of revenging himself on me for this. Sometimes
he would absent himself at the last moment, leaving me to make what
excuse I was able to the guests for the non-appearance of the host whom
they had probably seen lounging in his hut door smoking, as they came up
the road. At other times after I had made elaborate excuses he would
appear in his white flannel trousers and shirt sleeves, and without any
apology take his seat at the head of the table where his guests sat
arrayed in the immaculate evening dress that people buried in the wilds
love to assume, cherishing the custom of dressing for dinner as a symbol
that they are not yet of the beasts of the field, though obliged to
congregate with them. What these people thought of a host in dirty
flannels facing a hostess decked in a Paris gown, _decolletee et tres
chic_ (for if I could not alter my gowns with the skill of a
_couturiere_ they at least still bore the _cachet_ of Paris) I cannot
say. But Rhodesians are a gay-hearted people and would always prefer to
believe that you mean to amuse rather than insult them, and so, as a
flowing brook passes over a jagged rock, the incident would be passed
over and covered up with ripples.
As for me, I learned in time to manage my cheeks as well as my gowns, so
that they no longer burned at such _contretemps_.
My method was not to apologise in words for my husband's behaviour, but
by delicate implication to let it be understood that I considered such
vagaries perfectly permissible in a genius--or a fool. They may have
been in doubt (as I meant them to be) as to which of the two I
considered him. But Maurice _knew_; and his was the cheek to burn.
When he insulted his guests over cards later in the evening I pursued
the same tactics. I do not profess that I at any time played the _role_
of a gentle and propitiating houri. As I have before remarked, such a
person would have been thrown away on Maurice, and very bad for him. A
man with a dog whip would have been much more to the point.
The art of winning or losing with equanimity at cards was not one which
his ancestors had bequeathed to him. If he lost sixpence he also lost
his temper. If he won he became jaunty and facetious and tried to make
others lose their tempers by jeers at their poor play. When things went
very wrong with his game he thought nothing of taking advantage of being
in his own house to jibe a man about his income or his debts or any
private matter he might happen to have cognisance of.
Once after squabbling outrageously with a man over his losses early in
the evening, and winning from him later, he at the end of the game
ostentatiously tore up the man's I.O.U. saying calmly:
"That's all right old man! I know you can't afford to lose it."
The man turned a bright green, and everybody in the room commenced to
talk vivaciously about the weather. But Maurice smiled the triumphant
smile of the man who has scored.
It was upon such occasions that I positively detested him. When I saw a
man who for the sake of decency had been calm under affliction all the
evening, smiling the set smile of a gargoyle, when only the presence of
women prevented him from getting up and hitting Maurice in the eye (as I
certainly should have done in his place); when I saw such a man swallow
some flagrant final insult with an effort that made him turn pale, I too
turned pale, and tasted aloes. When in my bedroom at the end of the
evening, while they were putting on their wraps, I found myself
mechanically muttering inventions to women as pale as myself about my
husband's touch of fever--stroke of sun--overwork--strain, anything that
was not too utterly futile a reason for outrageous behaviour; the taste
of life was bitter in my mouth, and I knew shame that burned to the
bone.
Those were the nights when I could have torn out my tongue for making
vows before God to Maurice Stair; when my soul was blotted with hatred;
when I drove the knives of scorn and contempt into myself for
desecrating my life, and my father's name by such an alliance.
On such nights I dared not open my lips to Maurice. I feared myself too
much. Locked in my hut I would spend hours watching with dry eyes the
spectacle of pride writhing in the dust. Or kneeling before the
tortured body of Christ crucified, but not daring to lift my face to
him, nor to the lovely face of that stately Madonna Bouguereau painted
with hands upraised and great eyes full of sorrow for the fate of women;
no prayer would come to my bitten lips, nor tears to my scorched eyes;
but the cry of the desolate and the despairing was in my heart.
"_Oh, Mother of Consolation!... Help of the Afflicted... ora pro
nobis_!"
Often when dawn, that scarlet witch, with golden fingers came tapping on
the canvas windows I would still be kneeling there, stiff-limbed, my
shoulders chilled to stone above my gown. And after a little while I
would open my door and go out into the sweet wild morning. Strange that
sometimes it almost seemed as if the pagan witch had more healing in her
golden hands than the Mother of Sorrows herself; for standing there
gazing at her rising from the mists of the hills like a goddess from the
incense on her altars, I would feel at last the frozen tears thawing in
my heart and surging to my weary-lidded eyes.
There were other hours when battles of a different kind were to be
faced, not with myself but Maurice. Thrusting himself violently into my
hut he would revoke all promises and trample compacts under foot, making
demands of me that seemed to fill and darken the room with shame:
transforming me into a pillar of ice that could utter no word but one--a
word that fell like a little cold icicle into space, re-forming again
upon my benumbed lips to fall and fall again. "No--no--no--no--no--no."
There was such a night that ended at dawn with an unspeakable struggle--
scorching kisses on my bare shoulders, and a blow across his lips that
left blood upon my clenched fist.
Ah! those were dark days! Desperate, soul-deforming nights!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There was another night when after bitter taunts had been hurled like
poisoned arrows round the room, he tore the bed-clothes and pillows from
my bed and the gowns and hangings from the walls and flung them in heaps
and tatters into the rain-sodden yard. When the boys came in the
morning to their work they picked everything up, cleaned and dried them
as best they could, and with calm, inscrutable faces replaced them in my
room.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
After such incidents came intervals of days and weeks in which we never
opened lips to each other. I moved about his house like a ghost,
passing from hut to hut, arranging his meals, ordering his household,
but speaking him no word, or if I did getting none in return. When we
rode together, because it had become a set habit to mount our horses at
a certain hour every afternoon, we never addressed each other except in
the presence of other people who might chance to join us in our ride.
One day when we sat at table and I crossed myself for grace, as I had
always been accustomed to do, he found a new jibe to throw at me.
"It makes me sick to see you sitting there tapping at yourself like an
Irish peasant!"
Swiftly I found words to requite him for this new outrage. Until then
he had at least left my faith untainted by his touch.
"Oh, Maurice!" I said. "If you were only an Irish peasant I would wash
your feet and dry them with my hair."
I spoke very softly, but my words brought two little streaks of red into
his cheeks, as though I had flicked them there with a whip. God forgive
me, I had developed a cruel tongue; I was no Angel in the house: only a
sorely driven woman. And it was true that I would have poured out gifts
at his feet if he had only been an Irish peasant with any of the
nobility of some of the natures that come to birth in that sad land of
beauty. If only he had possessed some of the lovely Irish traits that
draw love as the sun draws the dew--generosity, a few ideals, a sweet
thing or two about his heart, a little room in it for dreams and beauty!
If even his sins had been _big_ sins I should have felt some hope. Had
everything he did been of the same calibre as his coming to table in his
dirty flannels, offensive and discourteous as that action was, I could
have forgiven much. There is hope for the boldly offensive man who does
not care a button whose feelings he hurts, or who sees his sins. Such
men usually have the force of character to do big, bold, fine things
also to offset their offences, and such men never fail to bring women to
their banner; for women, above all things, love in a man the quality of
_bigness_.
But a man who lies and is a coward! who drinks whiskey in his room, and
afterwards eats cloves! who pats animals in public, and viciously kicks
them in private! whose wretched puling sins are afraid to stand on their
own legs and assert themselves as sins--hiding behind doors, skulking in
the darkness!
Oh! there were days when, as we rode together over the short golden
grass, I wished my horse would throw me and break my neck--and did not
pray at night for forgiveness for that sinful wish. In the terrible
season of drought that had fallen, the source of prayer was beginning to
dry up and fail.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a letter from Judy, which came from Australia this passage occurred:
"I hear that the _petit sobriquet_ Rhodesians have for you since you
went to Mgatweli is `Ghostie' Stair. They tell me you are as gay and
witty as ever, and seem to be extremely happy in your marriage, but have
become as white and spectral as a ghost. Doesn't the place agree with
you? Dickie is flourishing, and I have got a splendid German governess
for him. John is a perfect Pet."