Matheson dressed early for his meeting with Brenda, dressed with unusual
care. A strange excitement held him. The renewal of this friendship
meant more to him than its beginning had signified. He was proceeding
towards his object with eyes open, proceeding deliberately with, he was
aware, one ultimate end in view. His mind, despite its excitement, was
quite steady of purpose. The complexities of life were resolving surely
into a quite simple exposition of the human requirement. He had reached
the stage when a man knows what it is he wants and is bent upon its
attainment.
He met Brenda at the tramway. She wore a dark, rather shabby, coat and
skirt, and she was manifestly shy. They climbed to the top of the tram,
and for the first half-mile of the journey neither of them found much to
say. The tram was fairly full, and the proximity of strangers made
talking difficult for people who had nothing of a conventional nature to
say to one another.
When they got down at the terminus he tucked her hand within his arm and
started to walk quickly, drawing a long breath of relief when they left
the tram lines and the remaining passengers behind and faced the sea.
"Time rolls back," he said. "This is just like it was in the summer."
"Yes," she agreed; "only the satisfying warmth of summer has gone."
There was something pathetic in her way of saying this; it was as though
she lamented not only the summer's geniality, but the satisfying warmth
of their comradeship. He gripped her hand tightly, and looked down into
the serious face.
"What have you been doing since I left you here--so jealously guarded?
I thought I had lost you altogether. I wrote, but my letter came back
to me."
"Did you write?" Her eyes met his with a light of gladness in them. "I
thought--that was only talk."
"Did you?" His manner was faintly reproachful. "I had no idea you
would leave Mrs Graham so soon, or I'd have written before."
Brenda suddenly smiled.
"Neither had I," she said. "It was not exactly voluntary."
"You don't mean," he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her
perplexedly. "I've wondered," he added somewhat lamely after a pause,
"since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night?
It wasn't, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your
post?"
She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious
he had ever heard. He laughed with her.
"Oh Lord!" he said. "Don't tell me it was that."
"Mrs Graham waited up for me," she confessed, "and the others got back
first and admitted I hadn't gone with them. She was--oh! so angry...
There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured
me my present position at the cafe. It helped at the time, but of
course it's a step down."
"It's a drop, yes," he admitted. "I'm awfully sorry. You must climb
again. Life is always; climbing."
"It is easier to drop a step than to climb one," she returned.
"That isn't your philosophy really," he insisted. "I know you have
encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more
exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It's up to
you to practise what you preach."
"Ah!" she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. "I must have been
a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that."
"You were never priggish," he asserted. "But you keep a man up to the
mark."
They walked on for a while in silence, and still in silence made their
way down to the shore, scrambling with difficulty over the slippery
rocks. When they came upon a stretch of sand he called a halt. They
seated themselves close together on the sand, and he took his coat and
put it about both their shoulders.
"The nights turn in chilly," he said. "Do you remember how hot it was
when we sat here before?"
"Yes," she replied, and drew closer to him. "Everything seems changed,"
she said,--"even you--you, perhaps, most of all."
"I know I am changed," he allowed. "I've been through a good deal since
I saw you..."
He could not, he discovered, tell her then the nature of the thing which
had changed him. He had meant to, but when he tried to express himself
he could not find the words.
"I've been through a good deal," he repeated. He played with the cold
damp sand, and his manner became more aloof, less intimate and
confidential. "Life changes most of us."
"Because life hurts," she said.
He looked at her closely, recalling the bright girlishness of her when
last they had talked together.
"You are depressed," he said. "I am inclined to believe that becoming a
Puritan doesn't agree with you."
She laughed a little tonelessly, and expressed the wish that she had
been born a man.
"A man in my position wouldn't be serving in a cafe," she explained.
"If I had a profession I would work at it, and not grumble."
And then he made a clumsy remark which immediately on its utterance he
would have recalled, had that been possible.
"You will have a home of your own some day. That's a woman's rightful
profession."
He felt her withdraw from him, and in the dragging silence that followed
he realised his mistake. How could he tell what jangling chord his
clumsy touch had set vibrating? Misfortune had played so busy a part in
her life that love had had little chance.
"Where are you staying?" he asked presently--"with whom?"
"My mother came back to Cape Town to be with me," she said. "We board
in a little house not far from the Gardens."
"Do you think I might come to see you there?" he asked.
"Of course. Mother would like to meet you. She knows all about you."
She hesitated, and then said with some embarrassment:
"Before you call I ought perhaps to tell you more about ourselves..."
"That isn't necessary," he answered quickly. "I know as much as
suffices. Nothing could alter my regard for yourself anyway. I hope
you believe that?"
"You are very generous," she answered, in so low and grateful a voice
that he felt he wanted to comfort her in some more practical way than by
mere words. Instead he said quietly:
"I think you are a brave, dear little soul. Your friendship is an
immense help to me. It's the best thing that has happened to me. I've
been back in Cape Town three months now, and I've come out here alone
and thought about our jolly walks and missed you more than I can say.
It was good to find you unexpectedly like that to-day."
Brenda glanced at him swiftly.
"You came into the cafe last week," she said, "and stood close to me. I
could have touched you."
"Really?" he exclaimed in amaze. "Why in the name of mystery didn't you
speak to me?"
"I wasn't sure you would be pleased. I thought--perhaps you didn't wish
to see me."
"Oh Lord!" he cried, and laughed. "You--Puritan, you! As though I
could be anything but pleased to see you anywhere. I don't know how I
came not to see you... But I'm eyes right generally with all those
girls around. If you hadn't returned my change--"
"Your tip," she corrected.
"My tip, then." He laughed again light-heartedly.--"I doubt I'd have
noticed you at all. What made you do it?"
"I don't know. It was quite a handsome tip for a cafe. But I could not
take it--from you."
She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had
desired to make him recognise her--had wanted to prove to her own
satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the
accident he now assured her it had been. She had believed it to be
accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and
the doubt hurt.
"I don't want you to take tips from any one," he said. "Promise me...
I don't like the thought of your being offered tips. I don't like to
think of your serving people. It's ridiculous, perhaps, but I would
rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was
an immoral old woman. I'd like to tell her how her conduct strikes an
outsider."
"I prefer the cafe," Brenda said. "At least, there's a mental freedom.
Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there's a sort of
liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it's good
to get home at night-time," she added on a softened note.
Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her,
and that meant everything.
"On the whole," he said lightly, "you're a lucky person. I get off at
night, but I can't get home. There's the ocean between me and all the
home I ever knew."
He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.
"One day I hope to make a home of my own," he finished reflectively, and
after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to
her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then,
drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes,
almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and
developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel's
opinions.
She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he
ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It
sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain
ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to
her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his
purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking
for him.
"You don't say anything," he observed, slightly aggrieved. "I don't
believe you are the least interested. You don't enter into the spirit
of Empire building."
She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face,
lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline
and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately
she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the
quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the
faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.
"Oh, Empire building!" she said indifferently. "What of the human need?
... Isn't that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it's
the most important thing of all. I don't think so much of the Empire.
Of course I'm patriotic; but the human need comes first."
He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and
disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had
stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other
girl's quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in
danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited
understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the
State?
So many emotions had held him of late for a space, so many thoughts had
filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there,
that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm
impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of
them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that
now. Something--something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the
understanding--dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree
which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through
disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would
end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged
therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet
he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous
youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he
was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of
nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now
he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost
something of worth, which he might never recover.
"It's odd," he remarked, "how you set me thinking. I never met any one
who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack,
and you immediately point out that I've got my values wrong. It's like
having one's sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers
were correct. There's a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you're
right, that's the worst of it."
"It's only your values that are wrong," she said quietly. "If you
readjust those, then the idea is fine enough."
In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the
proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the
idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know
whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that
she would not be satisfied with that.