_April 22, 1909._
I
Upon a day near the end of August, one long, brilliant South African
winter, when the old Vierkleur waved over the Transvaal, and what is now
the Orange River Colony was the Orange Free State, with the Dutch canton
still showing on the staff-head corner of its tribarred flag, two large,
heavily-laden waggons rolled over the grass-veld, only now thinking about
changing from yellow into green. Many years previously the wheels of the
old voortrekkers had passed that way, bringing from Cape Colony, with the
household gods, goods and chattels, language and customs of the Dutch, the
slips of the pomegranate and peach and orange trees, whose abundant
blossoming dressed the orchards of the farms tucked away here and there in
the lap of the veld, with bridal white and pink, and hung their girdling
pomegranate hedges with stars of ruby red. But days and days, and nights
and nights of billowing, spreading, lonely sky-arched veld intervened
between each homestead.
The flat-topped bills were draped and folded in the opal haze of distance;
the sky was perfect turquoise; the rounded kopjes shone like pink topaz,
unclothed as yet with the young pale green bush. To the south there was a
veld fire leaping and dancing, with swirling columns of white smoke edged
with flame. But it was many miles away, and the north-west wind blew
strongly, driving some puffs of gold cloud before it. Perhaps there would
be rain ere long. There had been rain already in the foremost waggon, not
from the clouds, but from human eyes.
The broad wheels crashed on, rolling over the yellow grass and the dry
bushes. Lizards and other creeping creatures scuttled across their wide
tracks. The patient oxen toiled under the yoke, their dappled nostrils
widespread, their great dewy eyes strained and dim with weariness. They
dumbly wondered why they must labour in the daytime when all night long
they had travelled without rest. The glorious sunrise had flamed in
crimson and gold behind the eastern ranges full five hours before. They
were weary to death, and no dorp or farm was yet in sight. The Cape boys
who tramped, each leading a fore-ox by the green reim bound about the
creature's wide horns, had no energy left even to swear at their beasts.
The Boer driver was wearied like the ox-team and the Cape boys. His
bestial face was drawn, and his eyes were red-rimmed for lack of sleep.
The long whip, with the fourteen-foot stock and the lash of twenty-three
feet, had not smacked for a long time; the sjambok had not been used upon
the long-suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his ill-fitting clothes of tan
cord, he sat on the waggon-box and slept, his head nodding, his elbows on
his knees. He was dreaming of the bad Cape brandy that had been in the
bottle, and would be, with luck, again, when the waggon reached a tavern
or a store.
A Kaffir drove the second waggon. It held stores and goods in bales, and
some trunks and other baggage belonging to the Englishman, for you would
have set down the tall, thin, high-featured, reddish-bearded,
soft-speaking man who owned the waggons as English, even though he had
called himself by a Dutch name. The child of three years was his. And his
had been the dead body of the woman lying on the waggon-bed, covered with
a new white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby lying on her breast.
For this the man who had loved and taken her, and made her his, had wept
such bitter, scalding tears. For this his dead love, with Love's blighted
bud of fruit upon her bosom, had given up her world, her friends, her
family--her husband, first and last of all. They had played the straight
game, and gone away openly together, to the immense scandal of Society
that is so willing to wink at things done cleverly under the rose. They
were to be married the instant the injured husband obtained his decree
absolute. The State sanctioned the re-marriage of the divorced if the
Churches did not. Their church should thenceforwards be the State. But
there was no _decree nisi_ even, the injured husband possessing a legal
heir by a previously-deceased wife. Besides, in a cold way it gave him
pleasure to think of that purpose foiled. He soon knew that his wife's
lover had sold his commission in the Army, and he learned, later, through
a communication forwarded through a London firm of solicitors, that
although he had chosen to ignore a certain appointment offered upon the
opposite side of the Channel, the other man would merely consider it
deferred until a suitable opportunity should occur. Meanwhile the writer
was travelling in South Africa, not alone.
Never to be alone again, she had promised him that not quite four years
ago. And to-day he sat on a box beside the waggon-bed where she lay dead
with her dead boy, and the only thing left to him that had the dear living
fragrance and sweet warmth of her slept smiling on his knees--their
daughter.
The long fine beard that he had grown swept the soft flushed cheek of the
little creature, and mingled with her yellow curls. Within the last few
hours--hours packed with the anguish of a lifetime for him--there were
sprinklings of white upon his high temples, where the hair had grown thin
under the pressure of the Hussar's furred busby, the khaki-covered helmet
of foreign service, or the forage-cap, before these had given place to the
Colonial smasher of felt, and the silky reddish-brown beard had in it
wide, ragged streaks of grey. He had worshipped the woman who had given up
all for him; they had lived only for, and in one another during four
wonderful years. Hardly a passing twinge of regret, never a scorpion-sting
of remorse, spoiled their union.
But they never stayed long in any town or even in any village. Some sound
or shape from the old unforgotten world beyond the barrier, some English
voice that had the indefinable tone and accent of high breeding, some
figure of Englishman or Englishwoman whose rough, careless clothing had
the unmistakable cut of Bond Street, some face recognised under the grey
felt or the white Panama, would spur them to the desire of leaving it
behind them. Then the valises would be repacked, the oxen would be hastily
inspanned, and their owners would start again upon that never-ending
journey in search of something that the woman was to be the first to find.
At last, when the sun was high and the worn-out beasts were almost
sinking, a group of low buildings came in sight a few miles away beyond a
kloof edged with a few poplar-like trees and the kameelthorn. A square,
one-storey house of corrugated iron, with a mud-walled hovel or two near
it, had a sprawling painted board across its front, signifying that the
place was the Free State Hotel. Behind it were an orchard and some fields
under rude cultivation, and a quarter of a mile to the north were the
native kraals.
At the sight the Boer shook himself fully awake, and sent the long lash
cracking over the thin, sweat-drenched backs of the ox-team. They laboured
with desperation at the yoke, and the waggon rumbled on.
The Englishman, hidden with his sorrow under the canvas waggon-tilt,
roused himself at the accelerated motion. He rose, and, holding the
sleeping child upon one arm, pushed back the front flap and looked out. He
spoke to the taciturn driver, who shook his head. How did he, Smoots
Beste, know whether a minister of the Church of England, or even a Dutch
predikant, was to be found at the place beyond? All he hoped for was that
he would be able to buy there tobacco and brandy cheap, and sleep drunken,
to wake and drink again.
The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof. Little birds of gay and
brilliant plumage, blue and crimson and emerald-green, rose in flocks from
the bush and grasses that clothed the sides of the coomb; the hollows were
full of the tree-fern; the grass had little white and purple flowers in
it. At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river after the
first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the barbel rose at flies.
There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn-out oxen could
do to stay the huge creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them
over the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied, churned-up
water that they were dying for, yet not allowed to taste, and toil with
them up the farther side.
The Englishman was not cruel. He was usually humane and merciful to man
and beast, but just now he was deaf and blind. Beside him there was her
corpse, beyond him was her grave, beyond that....
Both he and she, in that world that lay beyond the barrier had observed
the outward forms of Christianity. They had first met in the Park, one May
morning, after a church parade. They sat on a couple of green-painted
chairs while Society, conscious of the ever-present newspaper-reporter,
paraded past them in plumage as gorgeous as that of the gay-coloured birds
that flocked among the tree-fern or rose in frightened clouds as the
waggons crashed by. And they discussed--together with the chances of the
runners entered for the second Spring Meeting at Newmarket, and the merits
of the problem play, and the newest farcical comedy--the Immortality of
the Soul.
She wore a brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa in delicate shades
of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with sweeping white plumes. Her
hair was the colour of autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the
sunshine, and she had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like
shells, and a delicate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cosmetics. She
thought it wicked to doubt that one waked up again after dying,
Somewhere--a vague Somewhere, with all the nice people of one's set about
one. He said that Agnosticism and all that kind of thing was bad form. Men
who had religion made the best soldiers. Like the Presbyterian Highlanders
of the Black Watch and the "Royal Irish" Catholics--but, of course, she
knew that. And she said yes, she knew; meeting his admiring eyes with her
own, that were so grey and sweet and friendly, the little gloved hand that
held the ivory and gold-bound Church Service lying in her lap. He longed
to take that little white, delicate hand. Later on he took it, and a
little later the heart that throbbed in its pulses, and the frail,
beautiful body out of which the something that had been she had gone with
a brief gasping struggle and a long shuddering sigh....
He kept the beloved husk and shell of her steady on the waggon-bed with
one arm thrown over it, and held the awakened, fretting child against his
breast with the other, as the sinking oxen floundered up the farther side
of the kloof. Amidst the shouting and cursing of the native voor-loopers
and the Boer and Kaffir drivers, the rain of blows on tortured, struggling
bodies, and the creaking of the teak-built waggon-frames, he only heard
her weakly asking to be buried properly in some churchyard, or cemetery,
with a clergyman to read the Service for the Dead.
Before his field-glass showed him the sprawling hotel-sign he had hoped
that the buildings in sight might prove to mask the outskirts of a native
village with an English missionary station, or a Dutch settlement
important enough to own a corrugated iron Dopper church and an
oak-scrub-hedged or boulder-dyked graveyard, in charge of a pastor whose
loathing of the Briton should yield to the mollifying of poured-out gold.
But Fate had brought him to this lonely veld tavern. He watched it growing
into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew nearer. To this horrible place,
miscalled the Free State Hotel--a mere jumble of corrugated-iron
buildings, wattle and mud-walled stables for horses, and a barbed-wire
waggon-enclosure--he had brought his beloved at the end of their last
journey together. He shuddered at the thought.
The waggons were halted and outspanned before the tavern. The drivers went
in to get drink, and Bough, the man who sold it, leaving the women to
serve them, came forth. He ordinarily gave himself out as an Afrikander.
You see in him a whiskered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man of
twenty-six, but looking older, whose regard was either insolent or
cringing, according to circumstances, and whose smile was an evil leer.
The owner of the waggons stood waiting near the closed-up foremost one,
the yellow-haired child on his arm. He looked keenly at the landlord,
Bough, and the man's hand went involuntarily up in the salute, to its
owner's secret rage. Did he want every English officer to recognise him as
an old deserter from the Cape Mounted Police? Not he--and yet the cursed
habit stuck. But he looked the stranger squarely in the face with that
frank look that masked such depth of guile, and greeted him with the
simple manner that concealed so much, and the English officer lifted his
left hand, as though it raised a sword, and began to talk. Presently
Bough called someone, and a smart, slatternly young woman came out and
carried the child, who leaned away from her rouged face, resisting, into
the house.
The English traveller would take no refreshment. He needed nothing but to
know of a graveyard and men to dig a grave, and a minister or priest to
read the Burial Service. He would pay all that was asked. He learned that
the nearest village-town might be reached in three days' trek across the
veld, and that the landlord did not know whether it had a pastor or not.
Three days' trek! He waved the twinkling-eyed, curious landlord back, and
went up into the foremost waggon, drawing the canvas close. He faced the
truth in there, and realized with a throe of mortal anguish that the
burial must be soon--very soon. To prison what remained of her in a
hastily knocked-together coffin, and drag it over the veld, looking for
some plot of consecrated earth to put it in, was desecration, horror. He
would bury her, and fetch the minister or clergyman or priest to read
prayers. Later, if it cost him all he had, the spot should be consecrated
for Christian burial. He came forth from the waggon and held parley with
the landlord of the tavern. There was a wire-fenced patch of sandy red
earth a hundred yards from the house, a patch wherein the white woman who
was mistress at the tavern had tried to grow a few common English
flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered packet left by a drummer who had
passed that way. She had grown tired of the trouble of watering and
tending them, so that some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had
flown over the fence and scratched the rest up.
That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price, paid down in good
English sovereigns--the coinage that is welcome in every corner of the
earth, save among the scattered islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, where
gin, tobacco, and coffee are more willingly taken in exchange for goods or
souls.
The Englishman was business-like. He fetched pen and ink and paper out of
that jealously closed-up waggon, drew up the deed of sale, and had it
witnessed by the Boer driver and the white woman at the hotel.
He had made up his mind. He would bury her, since it must be, and then
fetch the clergyman. Knowing him on the road, or returning to the
fulfilment of his promise, she would not mind lying there unblessed and
waiting for six lonely days and nights. He whispered in her deaf ears how
it was going to be, and that she could not doubt him. He swore--not
dreaming how soon he should keep one vow--to visit the grave often, often,
with his child and hers, and to lie there beside her when kind Death
should call him too.
Then he left her for a moment, and sent for the Kaffir driver and the Boer
to come, and, with him, dig her grave....
But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paradise, lying grunting on a bench in
the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to the kraals with the Cape boys. The
English officer looked at the rowdy landlord and the loafing men about the
tavern, and made up his mind. No hands other than his own should prepare a
last bed for her, his dearest.
So, all through the remainder of the long day, streaming and drenched with
perspiration, which the cold wind dried upon him, he wrought at a grave
for her with spade and pick.
It should be deep, because of the wild-cat and the hungry Kaffir dogs. It
should be wide, to leave room for him. The ground was hard, with boulders
of ironstone embedded in it. What did that matter? All the day through,
and all through the night of wind-driven mists and faint moonlight, he
wrought like a giant possessed, whilst his child, lulled with the
condensed milk and water, in which biscuits had been sopped, lay sleeping
in the tavern upon a little iron bed.
He had had the waggon brought close up to the wired enclosure. All the
time he worked he kept a watch upon it. Did claws scrape the wide wheels
or scurrying feet patter across the shadows, he left off work until the
voracious creatures of the night were driven away.
The pale dawn came, and the east showed a lake of yellow.... When the
great South African sun rose and flooded the veld with miraculous liquid
ambers and flaming, melted rubies, the deep, wide grave at last was done.
He climbed out of it by the waggon ladder, struggling under the weight of
the last great basketful of stones and sandy earth. He dumped that down
by the graveside, and went to the waggon and removed all stains of toil,
and then set about making the last toilette of the beautiful woman who had
so loved that everything that touched her should be pure, and dainty, and
sweet.
He had dressed her silken, plentiful, squirrel-brown hair many times, for
the sheer love of its loveliness. With what care he now combed and brushed
and arranged the perfumed locks! He laid reverent kisses on the sealed
eyelids that his own hands had closed for ever; he whispered words of
passionate love, vows of undying gratitude and remembrance, in the
shell-like ears. He bathed with fresh water and reclad in fragrant linen
the exquisite body, upon which faint discolouring patches already heralded
the inevitable end. When he had done, he swathed her in a sheet, and
fetched a bolt of new white canvas from the store-waggon, and lined the
grave with that.
And then he placed a narrow mattress in it, and freshly covered pillows,
and brought her from the waggon, and to the grave, and carried her down
the light wooden ladder, and laid her in her last earthly home, with a
kiss from the lips that had never been her husband's. It was so cruel to
think of that. It was so hard to cover up the cold, sweet face again, but
he did it, and lapped the sheet over her and brought the canvas down.
Remained now to fill in her grave and fetch the man whose mouth should
speak over it the words that are of God.
But first--fill in the grave.
The cold sweat drenched him at the thought of heaping back those tons of
earth and stone above her, crushing with a frightful weight of inert
matter the bodily beauty that he adored. He felt as though her soul
hovered about him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his
garments with imploring, impalpable hands.
The thing must be done, though, before the sordid life stirred again under
the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar faces, with their greedy, prying
eyes, should be there to snigger and spy.
He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and carried it down and
laid it on her by handfuls. What were his livid, parched lips muttering?
Over and over, only this:
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ..."
Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the sandy gravel. That was
a terrible pang. It wrenched the first groan from him, but he worked on.
More and more of the sandy gravel, but for precaution the stones must lie
above. Should the voracious creatures of the night come, they must find
the treasure in impregnable security. That thought helped him to lay in
the first, and the second, and then greater and greater stones. He was
spent and breathless, but still he laboured. He tottered, and at times the
tavern and the veld, and the waggons on it, and the flat-topped distant
mountains that merged in the horizon, swung round him in a wild, mad
dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was in his mouth, and he gasped
and panted, but he never rested until the grave was filled in.
Then he built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a
rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite
methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the
curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down
stiffly, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign
upon his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that nearly
extinguished voice of hers, to pray for her.
"Dicky!..."
Ah! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered by stiffening
lips upon the bed of death!
"Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't they? Pray for mine
by-and-by. It will comfort me to know you are praying, darling, even if
God is too angry with us to hear!"
He held her to his bursting heart, groaning.
"If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was mine--all mine. He
must know!"
Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur:
"Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all in black, but there was
white linen about her face and neck, and it was dabbled dreadfully with
blood." The weak, slight body shuddered in his embrace. "She said our
wickedness had brought her death, but that she would plead for us in
Heaven."
"She is not dead, my beloved; I heard of her before we left Cape Colony.
She has taken the veil. She is well, and will be happy in her religion, as
those good women always are."
"I was not one of those good women, Richard----"
He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently:
"You might have been happy--with her--if I had never come between you!"
He found some words to tell her that these things were meant to be. From
the beginning ...
"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and
leave you, Richard?"
He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying
whisper fluttered at his lips:
"You cannot! Think!--the child!"
He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang,
remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss
it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes
rolled up, and she died.
He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she
could not have borne to have him leave her.
The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him
praying--a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.
But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at
openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up
waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester
repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.
"_Our Father Who art in Heaven...._"
He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the
burning blue vault of ether Who heard ... and yet, for her sake,
supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even
now....
_"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come...."_
And if it came, should those have any part in it who had lived together
unwed in open sin?
_"Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven...."_
The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will that left him
desolate and laid her away, a still fair, fast-corrupting thing, under the
red earth and the great ironstone boulders!
_"Give us this day our daily bread...."_
Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the daily bread of
life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many base, sordid, loveless
marriages had not that illicit bond of theirs put to shame! And yet as a
boy he had learned the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit
adultery." Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet
sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life hereafter, and
could it--could it be that her soul was even now writhing in fires
unquenchable, whither he, who would have gladly died in torment to save
her from outrage or death, had thrust her?
_"Forgive us our trespasses...."_
O Man of Sorrows, pitying Son of Mary, before Whom the Scribes and
Pharisees brought the woman taken in adultery, forgive her, pardon her! If
a soul must writhe in those eternal fires they preach of, in justice let
it be mine! Thou Who didst pity that woman of old time, standing white and
shameful in the midst of the evil, jeering crowd, with the wicked fingers
pointing at her, say to this other woman, lifting up Thyself before her
terrified, desperate soul, confronted with the awful mystery that lies
behind the Veil....
_"Neither do I condemn thee...."_
And do with me what Thou wilt!
The ragged, wild-eyed man who had been kneeling rigid and immovable before
the wooden symbol reared upon the new-raised cairn of boulders swayed a
little. His head fell forward heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in
spite of his desperate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening collapse
of will and brain and body that was mastering him. He fell sideways, and
lay in a heap upon the ground.