For a week Matheson remained in Cape Town awaiting Holman's convenience.
He was in no hurry to leave. He felt neither interest nor curiosity in
his mission; the only emotion he experienced in regard to it was an
impatient desire to have it behind instead of hanging perpetually over
him, to fulfil his undertaking, and be done with the whole thing and
thus be free of further obligation. The necessity for doing something
altogether repugnant to him incensed him against the man who had imposed
the condition, and who was formerly his friend. He resented the thing
as though it had been a trick. In a way it had been a trick. He
apprehended that without following the purpose of the stratagem. He had
undertaken a questionable mission at the request of a man against whose
interest it was to be detected in connection with the matter. The whole
thing was ridiculous; but it was as imperative of discharge as any other
debt of honour incurred at the option of the individual. Having agreed
to the stake, it was impossible now to draw back.
During the week of compulsory inactivity in Cape Town he pursued with
considerable diligence the congenial pastime of cultivating the
acquaintance so recently begun, which on the night of that first walk
had leaped forward with astonishing rapidity, clearing the conventional
obstacles that intrude on new acquaintanceship, and arriving at
something more nearly resembling an intimate comradeship than anything
he had ever experienced in relation to feminine friendship. The novelty
of the thing, as much as the undeniable enjoyment he derived from the
girl's society, pleased him. The waiting about was not irksome when
Brenda Upton was there to fit into the blanks. But Brenda was not
always available.
During the next two days Mrs Graham remained indisposed; and her
companion was therefore free to spend most of the day, and all the
evening, in any way she inclined towards. Never before had Matheson
taken satisfaction in a woman's headaches; nor would he have believed it
possible that the sufferer's recovery on the third day could have caused
him such real disappointment. He would cheerfully have confined her to
her room for a week.
With Mrs Graham about again the meetings were uncertain and hurried,
and the after-dinner walks ceased altogether. Matheson rebelled against
this.
"You can get away if you want to," he asserted unreasonably. "She
couldn't refuse to let you off for an hour if you asked."
"Do you really believe that I don't want to?" she asked. "If you only
knew how much more they mean to me than they can to you--these walks!
... It's out of the question, anyhow."
That evening while she sat in the lounge, holding wool for her employer
and compelled to listen to the discordant noise made by a group of the
younger guests, gathered about the piano in the corner, Brenda's
thoughts wandered to the quiet beach. She pictured the warm satisfying
serenity of the night out there under the starlit sky with the moan of
the sea at one's feet. How good it was! ... how good! ... It was hot
in the house, despite the draughts created by open doors and windows;
there was difficulty in breathing. One wanted to be outside walls, away
from artificial lighting, out in the open in the quiet dusk, with no
light but the stars.
Mrs Graham finished winding her wool and, with the exhausted air of a
woman recently prostrated by some nervous disorder, proposed an
adjournment to her room for the inevitable hour's reading, which until
now the girl had accepted as a matter of course and not found so
unutterably wearisome.
With a limp disinclination that was an unspoken protest, she followed
Mrs Graham downstairs and into a room on the left of the entrance, a
pleasant room opening on to the stoep in front, and with access to a
small conservatory. Mrs Graham touched the electric switch, and
immediately the room was flooded with light.
"Shut die window," she directed, "or we shall be eaten alive by
mosquitoes."
"But,"--Brenda paused--"it's so hot."
"Well, you can leave the fanlight open. It is as hot outside as
indoors."
The reading proved a miserable business. The best of readers would fail
to interpret successfully the spirit of a work with a mind intent upon
matters wholly outside the subject of the book. Brenda attempted
conscientiously to capture her straying thoughts and tie them down to
the prosaic present, but they evaded her and flew off at a tangent in
pursuit of retrospective glamour. She reached out after them and
brought them back, only to lose them almost immediately as, eluding her
listless vigilance, they wandered anew in unbidden channels.
"I really think," Mrs Graham's voice broke in complainingly, "that you
must go back and read those last few pages again. You've missed the
sense somehow. There's a want of relevance... You mustn't skip."
Brenda turned back without comment and endeavoured to fix her attention
on the print, which conveyed no meaning whatever to her. The reading
that evening was admittedly a failure.
"Year in year out, until I'm old, it will be like this, I suppose," the
girl said wearily to herself later on her way upstairs. And then,
almost fiercely: "Why do we stand it? Why do we allow all the dull,
uninteresting things to be forced on us? I do this--for food and
shelter. And there isn't any escape--except through marriage. Ugh!"
Arrived in her bedroom, leaning from the window looking out upon the
stirless night, she admonished herself mutely.
"I don't think that moonlight walks and agreeable society are altogether
good for you, my dear. You grow discontented because every hour isn't a
perfect hour."
A faint smile curved her lips. She leaned farther out into the fragrant
darkness, and rested her elbows on the sill and her chin in her hands,
and gazed away towards the sea, and sighed.
"Life isn't made up of perfect hours," she reflected. "They are so
few--so very few--that's what makes them so good. He's discontented
too... Every one's discontented. We want things--oh! all sorts of
fine, impossible things--we keep on wanting them. And life goes on in
the same solid, stolid way: we live; we grumble; we die. _Sic
transit_..."
"No," she contradicted presently, "that isn't all. There _is_ a glory
concealed somewhere--the rainbow in the bubble, if we look long enough."
And after that she ceased to speculate on the problem of life, and fell
into a retrospective reverie and forgot the time.
Perhaps it is because women as a sex acquiesce too readily in the
conditions of life, whatever they may be, instead of making a determined
stand against what is unfavourable, that unfavourable conditions are
imposed upon them. Men do not submit, and results justify their
resistance--organised resistance is the charter of freedom. It is
taught that there is beauty in submission--well, there isn't.
Submission is lacking in dignity, and beauty is always dignified. There
is beauty in restraint, in control, in unselfishness; but none of these
qualities necessarily include submission--rule it out, therefore; its
day is done.
It was Matheson who gave Brenda Upton her first lesson in resistance.
He was very authoritative and firm and convincing; also--he was going
away. That was the strongest argument in favour of his demand. It was
a demand; there was nothing in the nature of a request about it. He
required her on the day before he left Cape Town to obtain, not an hour
off, but the entire evening. He wanted her companionship, wanted to sit
and talk uninterruptedly, as they had done on those other nights, and
not to be worried with considerations of time. He met her on the beach
during the hottest hour of the day, when Mrs Graham was enjoying her
siesta, and stated his desire. Brenda looked amazed.
"She'll not hear of it," she said.
"Of course not, if you make up your mind in advance that you won't ask
her," he returned.
A flicker of a smile showed in the dark eyes.
"If you only realised how difficult it is! She'll want it explained--
why I want to go, and all that."
"But that's cheek," he said, surprised. "Don't you see it's cheek. You
ought not to submit to that sort of thing. It isn't any business of
hers."
She laughed.
"It isn't... But it's always understood in the case of a girl--it's one
of the indignities we put up with."
"Then don't put up with them. Don't you see that in putting up with
them you are responsible for their existence. It's up to you to make a
stand for the good of the next generation."
"That's not as simple as it sounds when one has to exist," she said.
"No."
He was silent for a moment, then he returned to the attack.
"Well, you are coming with me to-night. Tell her what you like--only
come."
Events combined that evening to facilitate matters for Brenda. Several
of the younger people staying in the house arranged a walk to Camps Bay
for that evening: the plan was under discussion during dinner, so
audible a discussion that Mrs Graham could not avoid hearing it at her
table in the corner. Brenda also listened with attention; and the
manner in which she intended to put her request framed itself in her
thoughts. After dinner she approached Mrs Graham with her sentences
well considered.
"There is a walk on to-night," she observed, with the faintest trace of
nervousness apparent in her manner, and a consciousness of wilfully
deceiving. "It is such a perfect evening... I wonder if you would let
me have to-night off?"
"To-night?" Mrs Graham's tone was expostulatory. "What am I to do for
the reading?"
"I'm sorry." The girl's face looked mutinous; there was an obstinate
ring in her voice. She was not going to give in. Matheson had made
that point clear. She had to make a stand. "I will read longer
to-morrow if I may have to-night... only to-night I won't be
inconsiderate afterwards."
She felt that it was weak to promise that Why, after all, should she not
have a night free occasionally?
"But they will be away hours," Mrs Graham objected. "I shall be in bed
before you get back. There will be no one to massage my shoulder."
It trembled on Brenda's lips to promise to massage it in the morning;
but deciding that this was weak also she remained obstinately silent.
Something in the girl's manner, perhaps the unrelenting quiet of her
air; convinced Mrs Graham that opposition would avail nothing. In the
teeth of determined resistance she gave way.
"Well, of course, if you really wish to go..." she conceded with
sufficient ungraciousness. "But it is very inconvenient. I should have
thought that you had had plenty of free time lately."
She felt distinctly aggrieved. And she held a prejudice against these
expeditions when her young companion formed one of the number. There
was something not altogether seemly in the idea.
"I hope you won't be very late," she said.
Brenda followed the party from the house, and contrived to separate from
it outside the gate. She took an unnecessary turn round a block of
buildings, and came out again upon the main road and made her way on to
the beach. Matheson came forward eagerly and caught her hands.
"Didn't I say you'd manage it?--clever person! Now, which is it to
be?--into town, or a last pilgrimage to the spot we visited that first
evening? It depends on whether your mood demands amusement or
solitude."
Her answer pleased him.
"My mood demands neither... I want companionship, and the old spot."