The meeting with Holman and the latter's reference to the girl of the
beach brought Matheson's memory with a swing back to Brenda and his
promise to her. In all these weeks he had not thought of her twice, nor
looked at the address she had given him at his request. He took it out
when he got back to his rooms, and considered the wisdom of writing to
her in a calm, detached way, and with a view to possible developments.
Finally he decided that he would write, and did so, asking for news of
her. He despatched his letter, and waited in a state of curious
uncertainty for her reply. When the reply did not come this uncertainty
as to the real state of his wishes yielded to a very genuine
disappointment. It was no longer a matter of indifference to him; he
wanted to hear from her, wanted her friendship.
Some months later, after he was back in Cape Town, his own letter was
returned to him through the post office, with the unsatisfactory
information pencilled upon it. "Gone away, address not known." He had
waited too long; it was not possible now to get into touch with her.
He was sorry for this. He found himself wondering why she had left Mrs
Graham, where she had gone. He worried about her. It was not easy to
put his anxiety into words, but he had a feeling, strengthened possibly
by the fact that she had left no address behind, that the loss of her
former post was in the nature of a disaster. It couldn't, he reflected
uneasily, be consequent on that moonlight walk... She had so feared
being late, and he had displayed impatience at having to hasten.
Perhaps after all she had been late... It was beastly unjust that a
little thing like that should have such disproportionate results. He
wondered why women didn't combine and insist upon fairer conditions.
Even a companion should be privileged to count certain hours of the day
her own.
And then for a time he forgot Brenda again in the interests of his work,
and the distraction of new friendships made under the auspices of
Macfarlane, an engineering acquaintance resident in Cape Town. There
was a man from Port Elizabeth, named Aplin, whom he met first at the
docks and with whom he became rather intimate. Aplin was round visiting
his people; and there were two pretty cousins whom he took about who
evinced a quite flattering interest in Matheson, and invited him to
tennis and tea, and met him on occasions by agreement in town in the
middle of the morning for ices and coffee. They were merry,
high-spirited, Colonial girls, who brought just that bright touch of
femininity into his life which he needed at the moment, an easy
encouraging friendliness that was not intimate enough in character to
set throbbing the pain of the recent hurt, but was sufficiently
appreciative and competitive to be agreeable. These girls were not in
the least intellectual, but they had plenty of small talk and were
pleasant to look at. Matheson enjoyed going to the house. It was
somewhere, to go out of working hours, where he could feel sure of a
welcome and of being amused.
At no period of the acquaintance did he entertain any deeper sentiment
than that of friendship for either of them; but they both took a kind of
proprietary interest in him and let him see it. At the same time they
showed a similar interest in Aplin, and one or two men who frequented
their tennis court. They were quite frankly matrimonial in intention.
Their limited and rather commonplace lives shaped them for the one
inevitable destiny, failing which there was no resource, no visible
outlet.
"You go out there a good deal," Macfarlane warned him one Saturday,
meeting him on the tram for Rondebosch with a racquet under his arm.
"You'll be engaged before you know where you are." He laughed, a jolly
good-natured laugh. "They tried to catch me at one time. It's Rosie
you had better be careful of."
When Matheson reached the house and entered the garden he saw Rosie in
the path, stooping over a flower-border. He had met her like this
before and believed the encounter accidental, but Macfarlane's words,
coming back to him, illumined his understanding. Rosie turned with a
little start and straightened herself and came towards him. She looked
quite pretty and entirely unconscious, and she held some blue flower in
her hand the name of which he did not know.
"How nice!" she said. "I didn't guess it was you when I heard the gate.
I was picking flowers."
She held the sample one up to him as evidence of her occupation.
"You shall wear it in your buttonhole. It matches your eyes."
He stood while she pinned it in for him, and found some difficulty in
keeping the amusement out of the eyes which matched with her flower.
She stepped back to admire the effect of her handiwork and flashed a
coquettish glance at him, and then returned to admiring the effect.
"That's awfully kind of you," he said. "I feel tremendously smart."
"You look festive," she admitted. "Blue suits you. I'm glad I happened
to be in the garden when you arrived."
There was only one obvious reply to this obvious speech. Matheson made
it perfunctorily.
"It is I who have the greater reason to be glad," he said. "I don't
think any one has ever given me a flower before--certainly no one else
has been kind enough to pin one in my coat."
"I'm glad I'm the first," she said, and flashed another look at him, and
walked on by his side. "I am not considered generous with my favours,"
she added mendaciously... "but the colour of the flower suggested you.
I like blue eyes."
Matheson laughed at that.
"I prefer brown eyes," he said, and was amused at the smiling
satisfaction of the brunette face close to his shoulder.
"Well, of course," she returned, "one usually admires opposite
colouring. That's only natural."
Her speech somehow set him thinking of the fairest face he had ever
seen. The picture of that fair face framed in the sunlit hair, with the
dark woodwork of the old room for a background, was so vividly before
him that it was not surprising his attention wandered from the empty
little person at his side, whose flow of frivolous chatter went on
uninterruptedly, and covered while it did not disguise the fact that he
had grown suddenly dull. Then May appeared unexpectedly from behind
some flowering shrubs, and took charge of him and conducted him to the
tennis court, where Aplin and another man were playing singles, while
Mrs Aplin sat in a rustic summer-house overlooking the court, a
self-effacing chaperon, beaming complacently upon the young people, with
an indulgent eye lit with maternal pride for her girls. There were no
other girls present. As Rosie explained, if they invited too many
people they never got any play themselves.
It was all very jolly and homelike, Matheson considered. He played with
both girls in turn. May lit a cigarette for him between the sets, and
Mrs Aplin fussed over him during tea, and was confidential with him
later in regard to her daughters' tastes and accomplishments and general
amiability.
"They are such favourites with _every one_," she confided with emphatic
earnestness. "A friend whose girls are not popular asked me recently
the secret of my training... what plans I adopted in bringing my girls
up that made them so generally liked? I told her that I had brought
them up to play games." She regarded Matheson quite seriously, with a
gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. "They play games... every game...
_well_. What more is required of a girl? All this nonsense about
higher education... It's so unnecessary. And study is bad for the
eyes; it makes girls frown; and a girl with a frown doesn't look so much
studious as bad tempered. Let them play games and look nice; that's all
that is requisite."
"It's the sort of idea I started out with," Matheson returned, beating
his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay
rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. "I don't know about
looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a
game. But it isn't. And playing games doesn't provide one with a
banking account."
"Of course it's different for men. I don't advocate games for _every
one_," she assured him gravely. "But girls don't need to think about
banking accounts."
"Some of them must," he said.
She looked at him in surprise.
"I wasn't speaking of _that_ sort of girl; I meant my own girls," she
answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before
Matheson's amazed vision.
"I think responsibility _unsexes_ a woman," she added; and her
bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the
coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker's claim to
respectability.
That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the
house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of
everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his
appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his
roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family.
Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house.
Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent,
heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed
to eclipse.
"It was seeing the old man among them scared me off," Macfarlane
informed him. "Any man who marries one of them can look forward to
becoming like that. He's a cipher in the house. They do well to keep
him in the background as a rule. But there's lots of money. If a man
isn't particular in other respects... there you are."
Money undoubtedly swelled the train of the Aplin girls' admirers; but it
was not a sufficiently powerful magnet to attract Matheson. As he
explained one day in a burst of confidence to Macfarlane, he could not
dispense altogether with brains in a life-partner.
"They are pretty," he allowed,--"and jolly nice to talk with for an
afternoon, but they have no more intelligence than kittens. Imagine how
fed up a man would get! And looks don't last. Though, apart from that,
I'd grow weary to death of the inanity long before the looks were faded.
I want more than either of them could give from my wife."
"Well, I don't know," Macfarlane returned lazily, "that I'm so keen on
matrimony. A man has a lot better time while he's single."
"That's all very well," Matheson argued; "but the world can't be run on
those lines. I mean to marry. I want to have a wife and children and
some stake in the country."
"You're going ahead a bit," Macfarlane laughed. "What's changed you?
You weren't keen on responsibilities at one time... You are changed,
Matheson. You've changed a lot during the last few months... A girl--
eh?"
"A girl--yes."
Matheson was silent for a moment or so; and the other man, observing him
closely, drew his own conclusions from his gloomy face.
"That's past and done with though. She hasn't any part in this. I want
to marry... It has nothing to do with being in love. I've been
thinking about things... getting hold of a sort of idea of what my
special job in life is. I am going to colonise--in earnest. I'm going
to own land in the country, and raise a family on it if it's possible,
and try for a seat in the Legislative Assembly and have a voice in
matters." He looked up, met Macfarlane's astonished, questioning eye,
and smiled drily. "You think I'm talking over my hat," he said.
"I think you are taking on something of a job," was all Macfarlane
vouchsafed.
They were seated after dinner in a quiet corner of Macfarlane's stoep
which fronted his small bachelor bungalow. It was a Sunday afternoon,
warm and still, and until their present conversation roused them from
their lethargy they had both seemed more inclined to drowse than talk.
Matheson, who was smoking, threw away his cigarette in order to give his
whole attention to his subject.
"I was on a Dutch farm before I came down," he said, "staying among
Dutch people--some of the disaffected Dutch--"
"There are a good many of that breed," Macfarlane interposed.
"They've got a case," Matheson said.
"Oh! they've got a case," Macfarlane allowed--"but it's against their
own interests to insist upon it. The men with brains recognise that.
It's among the more ignorant Boers that the disaffection spreads. I
don't fancy it is worth worrying over."
"Possibly not. But it's always desirable to stop the spread of
contagious disease."
"What remedy have you to propose?" Macfarlane inquired.
"Tact. I'm of the opinion that it is because most of us refuse to
recognise their case that the ill feeling spreads. I've talked with
them... It's a real sense of injustice at the back of their minds that
rankles. They aren't all of them actuated by blind hatred."
Macfarlane looked doubtful.
"Well, there may have been injustice," he allowed. "But the position
out here was impossible, as any one who wasn't a sentimentalist would
acknowledge. After all, it's a British Colony, and there wasn't room
for a rival power. We paid hard cash for the privilege of settling, and
our right received international recognition. We've done more for the
development of South Africa than the Boers ever could. If they owned
the country some greater power would step in and take it from them.
They aren't, you see, a nation."
"They are a nation in the making," Matheson rejoined, thinking of Nel's
words. "They are going to be a power in the country."
"Why not? There's room for all of us under the one flag."
Matheson was silent for a while, thinking. Presently he said:
"There's ill work--underhand work going on. I've come in touch with it.
There's a German I know, who passes for an Englishman, who is
deliberately fostering the spirit of rebellion among the Boers."
"I dare say. The Germans played dirty tricks with the Boers during the
late war. But if it came to a head," Macfarlane answered comfortably,
"it would be only a half-hearted rebellion. That spirit isn't general."
"No. But it has crossed my mind to wonder whether there is something
behind this--something we aren't expecting. Europe seems settled and
peaceably inclined, but... Suppose there should be something brewing?"
Macfarlane sat up and looked at him queerly.
"It's odd you should say that," he remarked. "It was only last week
Aplin was commenting on the German exodus from Port Elizabeth. For the
past two years they have been leaving for Europe, all the influential
Germans. They have any amount of German firms there, and the beggars
are all clearing out." He laughed suddenly. "Oh, rats!" he cried.
"You are making me fanciful. I should advise you to quit staying on
Dutch farms. You stick to engineering, my boy, and give over
philosophising on love and war."
"I'm going to talk with Aplin about this," Matheson said. "I'd like to
hear what he has to say."
"Oh! he'll play up to you all right. There's a German round his way who
puts his back up with his incessant peace talk. He has ideas for a
federation of nations to enforce peace on the world. That idea,
according to Aplin, is aggressive; no principle can be peaceful that
needs to be enforced."
"One can argue down anything with that kind of sophistry," Matheson
contended. "But there is something in the idea."
"Yes--if the beggar's sincere. But something of that nature appeared in
a magazine a little while back. For myself, I'd like to know where it
originated. I'm not much of a believer in any German made article. The
German may talk brotherly love; but he never has loved his neighbour,
and he never will. Look at their Colonies. None but Germans can live
under their flag. And then look at Cape Town--bar America, it is the
most cosmopolitan city in the world. So much for that!" he said, and
lighted himself another cigarette. "I discredit equally their peace
palaver and your predicted rebellion. If rebellion does come, we've got
a man at the head of affairs--and he's a Dutchman, mind you--who will be
equal to dealing with it."
"He knows how to deal with strikers anyhow," Matheson said, and laughed.