Flower o' the Peach

"Mrs. Jakes." Margaret tried once more. "Please listen. If you 'll only let the doctor have this drink, he 'll be able to walk. If you don't, he 'll have to stay here. I am your friend; I got up when you came to me and I said I wouldn't leave you even when I hurt my chest. Doesn't that prove that I am? I wouldn't do you any harm or shame you before other people for anything. What will Dr. Jakes say if he finds out that you let me stay here pleading when I ought to be in bed? He 's a doctor himself and he 'll be awfully annoyed – after telling me I should get well, too. Aren't you going to give him a chance – and me?"

Mrs. Jakes merely glared stonily.

"Come," said Margaret. "Won't you?"

Kamis uttered a smothered exclamation. "I won't wait," he said. "I 'll count ten, slowly. Then Miss Harding must go in and I go away."

"Oh, don't begin that sort of thing," cried Margaret. "Mrs. Jakes is going to be sensible. Aren't you?"

There was no reply, only the stony and hostile stare of the little woman facing them and the gray image of disgrace.

"One," counted Kamis clearly. "Two. Three."

He counted with the stolid regularity of a clock; he made as though to overturn the glass and waste its contents in the dust as soon as he should have reached ten. "Ten," he uttered, but held it safely still. "Well?"

Mrs. Jakes did not move for some moments. Then she sighed and, still without speaking, moved away from the slumbering doctor. She walked a dozen paces from the road and stood with her back to them.

With quick skilful movements, Kamis lifted the unconscious man's head to the crook of his arm and the rim of the glass clicked on his teeth. Margaret walked after Mrs. Jakes.

"Come," she said gently. "I don't misunderstand. You trusted me or you would n't have waked me. Everything will be all right soon and then you 'll forgive me."

"I won't – never."

Mrs. Jakes would not face her. She stood looking into the blackness, tense with enmity.

"Well, I hope you will," said Margaret.

They heard grunts from the doctor and then quavering speech and one rich oath, and a noise of spitting. The Kafir approached them noiselessly from behind and paused at Margaret's side.

"That's done the trick," he said; "and he doesn't even know who gave him the draft. You 'll go in now?"

"Yes," said Margaret. "You have been good, though."

Mrs. Jakes had returned to her husband; they were for the moment alone.

"I didn't mean to force your hand," he whispered. "But I had to. A doctor has duties."

She gave him her hand. "There was something I wanted to tell you, but there 's no time to explain now. Did you know you were wanted by the police?"

"Bless you, yes." He smiled with a white flash of teeth. "Were you going to warn me? How kind! And now, in you go, and good night."

Dr. Jakes was sitting up, spitting with vigor and astonishment. He had taken a heroic dose of hair-raising restoratives on the head of a poisonous amount of whisky, and his palate was a moldering ruin. But the clearness of his faculties left nothing to be desired.

"Who 's that?" he demanded at sight of Margaret. "Miss Harding. How do you come to be out here at this time?"

"You should time your fits more decently, doctor," answered Margaret coolly.

Mrs. Jakes hastened to explain more acceptably. "I was frightened, Eustace. You looked so bad – and these fits are terrible. So I asked Miss Harding if she wouldn't come and help me."

"A patient," said the doctor. He turned over and rose stiffly to his feet, dust-stained all over. He stood before her awkwardly.

"I am unfortunate," he said. "You are in my care and this is what happens. It is my misfortune – and my fault. You 'll go back to bed now, Miss Harding, please."

"Sure there 's nothing more you want?" inquired Margaret.

"At once, please," he repeated. "In the morning – but go at once now."

On the stoep she paused to listen to them following after her and heard a portion of Mrs. Jakes' excuses to her husband.

"You looked so dreadful, Eustace, and I was frightened. And then, you 're so heavy, and I suppose I was tired, and to-night I couldn't quite manage by myself, dear."

Margaret passed in at the door in order to cough unheard, that nothing might be added to the tale of Mrs. Jakes' delinquencies.

CHAPTER IX

"And what have we here?" said the stranger loudly. "What have we here, now?"

Paul, sitting cross-legged in his old place under the wall of the dam, with a piece of clay between his fingers, looked round with a start. The stranger had come up behind him, treading unheard in his burst and broken shoes upon the soft dust, and now stood leaning upon a stick and smiling down upon him with a kind of desperate jauntiness. His attitude and manner, with their parody of urbane ease, had for the moment power to hide the miserable shabbiness of his clothes, which were not so much broken and worn as decayed; it was decay rather than hardship which marked the whole figure of the man. Only the face, clean-shaven save for a new crop of bristles, had some quality of mobility and temper, and the eyes with which he looked at Paul were wary and hard.

"Oh, nothing," said Paul, uneasily, covering his clay with one hand. "Who are you?"

The stranger eyed him for some moments longer with the shrewdness of one accustomed to read his fortune in other men's faces, and while he did so the smile remained fixed on his own as though he had forgotten to take it off.

"Who am I!" he exclaimed. "My boy, it 'd take a long time to tell you. But there 's one thing that perhaps you can see for yourself – I 'm a gentleman."

Paul considered this information deliberately.

"Are you?" he said.

"I 'm dusty," admitted the other; "dusty both inside and out. And I 'm travelin' on foot – without luggage. So much I admit; I 've met with misfortunes. But there 's one thing the devil himself can't take away from me, and that 's the grand old name of gentleman. An' now, my lad, to business; you live at that farm there?"

"Yes," replied Paul. This tramp had points at which he differed from other tramps, and Paul stared at him thoughtfully.

"So far, so good," said the stranger. "Question number two: does it run to a meal for a gentleman on his travels, an' a bed of sorts? Answer me that. I don't mean a meal with a shilling to pay at the end of it, because – to give it you straight – I 'm out of shillings for the present. Now, speak up."

"If you go up there, they 'll give you something to eat, and you can sleep somewhere," said Paul, a little puzzled by the unusual rhetoric.

The stranger nodded approvingly. "It's all right, then?" he said. "Good – go up one. But say! Ain't you going there yourself pretty soon?"

"Presently," said Paul.

"Then, if it 's all the same to you," said the stranger, "I 'll wait and go up with you. Nothing like being introduced by a member," he added, as he lowered himself stiffly to a seat among the rank grass under the wall. "Gives a feller standing, don't it?"

He took off his limp hat and let himself fall back against the slope of the wall, grunting with appreciation of the relief after a day's tramp in the sun. His rather full body and thin legs, ending in a pair of ruinous shoes that let his toes be seen, lay along the grass like an obscene corpse, and above them his feeble, sophisticated face leered at Paul as though to invite him to become its confidant.

"You go on with what you 're doing," urged the stranger. "Don't let me hinder you. Makin' marbles, were you – or what?"

"No," said Paul. He hesitated, for an idea had come to him while he watched the stranger. "But – but if you 'll do something for me, I 'll give you a shilling."

"Eh?" The other rolled a dull eye on him. "It isn't murder, is it? I should want one-and-six for that. I never take less."

Paul flushed. "I don't know what you mean," he said. "I only want you to keep still like that while I – while I make a model of you. You said you had n't got any shillings just now."

"Did I say that?" inquired the stranger. "Well, well! However, chuck us over your shilling and I 'll see what I can do for you."

He made a show of biting the coin and subjecting it to other tests of its goodness while the boy looked on anxiously. Paul was relieved when at last he pocketed it and lay back again.

"I 'll get rid of it somehow," he said. "It's very well made. And now, am I to look pleasant, or what?"

"Don't look at all," directed Paul. "Just be like – like you are. You can go to sleep if you like."

"I never sleep on an empty stomach," replied the stranger, arranging himself in an attitude of comfort.

"Is this all right for you? Fire away, then, Mike Angelo. Can I talk while you 're at it?"

"If you want to," answered Paul. The clay which he had been shaping was another head, and now he kneaded it out of shape between his hands and rounded it rudely for a sketch of the face before him. The Kafir, Kamis, had bidden him refrain from his attempts to do mass and detail at once, to form the features and the expression together; but Paul knew he had little time before him and meant to make the most of it. The tramp had his hands joined behind his head and his eyes half-closed; he offered to the boy the spectacle of a man beaten to the very ground and content to take his ease there.

"D'you do much of this kind of thing?" asked the tramp, when some silent minutes had passed.

"Yes," said Paul, "a lot."

"Nothing like it, is there?" asked the other. He spoke lazily, absorbed in his comfort. "We 've all got our game, every bally one of us. Mine was actin'."

"Acting?" Paul paused in his busy fingering to look up. "Were you an actor?"

The actors he knew looked out of frames in his mother's little parlor, intense, well-fed, with an inhuman brilliance of attire.

"Even me," replied the tramp equably. He did not move from his posture nor uncover his drowsy eyes; the swollen lids, in which the veins stood out in purple, did not move, but his voice took a rounder and more conscious tone as he went on: "And there was a time, my boy, when actin' meant me and I meant actin'. In '87, I was playing in 'The Demon Doctor,' and drawing my seven quid a week – you believe me. Talk of art – why! I 've had letters from Irving that 'd make you open your eyes."

"I 've heard about Irving," said Paul, glancing back and fore from his clay to the curiously pouched mouth of his recumbent model.

"Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly. "But it was a great game, a great game. Sometimes, even now, I sort of miss it. And the funny thing is – it is n't the grub and the girls and the cash in my breeches pocket that I miss so much. It 's the bally work. It 's the work, my boy." He seemed to wonder torpidly at himself, and for some seconds he continued to repeat, as though in amazement: "It 's the work." He went on: "Seems as if once an actor, always an actor, don't it? A feller 's got talent in him and he 's got to empty it out, or ache. Some sing, some write, some paint; you prod clay about; but I 'm an actor. Time was, I could act a gas meter, if it was the part, and that 's my trouble to this day."

He ceased; he had delivered himself without once looking up or reflecting the matter of his speech by a change of expression. For all the part his body or his features had in his words, it might have been a dead man speaking. Paul worked on steadily, giving small thought to anything but the shape that came into being under his hands. His standard of experience was slight; he knew too little of men and their vicissitudes to picture to himself the processes by which the face he strove to reproduce sketchily could have been shaped to its cast of sorrowful pretense; he only felt, cloudily and without knowledge, that it signaled a strange and unlovely fate.

His knack served him well on that evening, and besides, there was not an elusive remembrance of form to be courted, but the living original before him. The tramp seemed to sleep; and swiftly, with merciless assurance, the salient thing about him came into existence between Paul's hands. Long before the light failed or the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door commenced its rhythmic call, the thing was done – a mere sketch, with the thumb-prints not even smoothed away, but stamped none the less with the pitiless print of life.

"Done it?" inquired the tramp, rousing as Paul uncrossed his legs and prepared to put the clay away. "Let 's have a look?"

"It wants to be made smooth," explained Paul, as he passed it to him. "And it's soft, of course, so don't squeeze it."

"I won't squeeze it," the tramp assured him and took it. He gazed at it doubtfully, letting it lie on his knee. "Oho!" he said.

"It's only a quick thing," said Paul. "There was n't time to do it properly."

"Wasn't there?" said the tramp, without looking up. "It 's like me, is it? Damn you, why don't you say it and have done with it?"

"Why," cried Paul bewildered, and coloring furiously. "What's the matter? It is like you. I modeled it from you just now as you were lying there."

"An' paid me a shilling for it." The tramp thrust an impetuous hand into his pocket; possibly he was inspired to draw forth the coin and fling it in Paul's face. If so, he decided against it; he looked at the coin wryly and returned it to its place.

"Well," he said finally; "you 've got me nicely. The cue is to shy you and your bally model into the dam together – an' what about my supper? Eh? Yes, you 've got me sweetly. Here, take the thing, or I might make up my mind to go hungry for the pleasure of squashing it flat on your ugly mug."

"You don't like it?" asked Paul, as he received the clay again from the tramp's hands. He did not understand; for all he knew, there were men who surprised their mothers by being born with that strange stamp upon them.

The tramp gave him a slow wrathful look. "The joke 's on me," he answered. "I know. I look a drunk who 's been out all night; I 'm not denying it. I 've got a face that 'll get me blackballed for admission to hell. I know all that and you 've made a picture of it. But don't rub it in."

Paul looked at the clay again, and although the man's offense was dawning on his understanding, he smiled at the sight of a strong thing strongly done.

"I didn't mean any joke," he protested.

"Let 's call it a joke," said the tramp. "Once when I was nearly dying of thirst up beyond Kimberly, a feller that I asked for water gave me a cup of paraffin. That was another joke. Tramps are fair game for you jokers, aren't they? Well, if that meal you spoke about wasn't a joke, too, let 's be getting up to the house."

"All right," said Paul. He hesitated a minute, for he hated to part with the thing he had made. "Oh, it can go," he exclaimed, and threw the clay up over the wall. It fell into the dam above their heads with a splash.

"I didn't mean any joke, truly," he assured the tramp.

"Don't rub it in," begged the other. "We don't want to make a song about it. And anyhow, I want to try to forget it. So come on – do."

They came together through the kraals and across the deserted yard to the house-door, the tramp looking about him at the apparatus of well-fed and well-roofed life with an expression of genial approval. Paul would have taken him round to the back-door, but he halted.

"Not bad," he commented. "Not bad at all, considering. An' this is the way in, I suppose."

"We 'd better go round," suggested Paul, but the tramp turned on the doorstep and waved a nonchalant hand.

"Oh, this 'll do," he said, and there was nothing for Paul to do but to follow him into the little passage.

The door of the parlor stood open, and within was Mrs. du Preez, flicking a duster at the furniture in a desultory fashion. The tramp paused and looked at her appraisingly.

"The lady of the house, no doubt," he surmised, with his terrible showy smile, before she could speak. "It 's the boy, madam; he wouldn't take no for an answer. I had to come home to supper with him."

His greedy quick eyes were busy about the little room; they seemed to read a price-ticket on each item of its poor pretentious furniture and assess the littleness of those signed and framed photographs which inhabited it like a company of ghosts.

"Why," he cried suddenly, and turned from his inspection of these last to stare again at Mrs. du Preez.

His plausible fluency had availed for the moment to hide the quality of his clothes and person, but now Mrs. du Preez had had time to perceive the defects of both.

"What d'you mean?" she demanded. "How d 'you get in here? Who are you?"

The tramp was still staring at her. "It 's on the tip of my tongue," he said. "Give me a moment. Why" – with a joyous vociferation – "who 'd ha' thought it? It 's little Sinclair, as I 'm a sinnair – little Vivie Sinclair of the old brigade, stap my vitals if it ain't."

"What?"

The man filled the narrow door, and Paul had to stoop under his elbow to see his mother. She was leaning with both hands on the table, searching his face with eyes grown lively and apprehensive in a moment. The old name of her stage days had power to make this change in her.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"Think," begged the tramp. "Try! No use? Well – " he swept her a spacious bow, battered hat to heart, foot thrown back – "look on this picture" – he tapped his bosom – "and on that." His big creased forefinger flung out towards the photograph which had the place of honor on the crowded mantel-shelf and dragged her gaze with it.

"It 's not – " Mrs. du Preez glanced rapidly back and forth between the living original and the glazed, immaculate counterfeit – "it isn't – it can't be —Bailey?"

"It is; it can," replied the tramp categorically, and Boy Bailey, in the too, too solid flesh advanced into the room.

Mrs. du Preez had a moment of motionless amaze, and then with a flushed face came in a rush around the table to meet him. They clasped hands and both laughed.

"Why," cried Mrs. du Preez; "if this don't – but Bailey! Where ever do you come from, an' like this? Glad to see you? Yes, I am glad; you 're the first of the old crowd that I 've seen since I – I married."

"Married, eh?" The tramp tempered an over-gallant and enterprising attitude. "Then I mustn't – eh?"

His face was bent towards hers and he still held her hands.

"No; you mustn't," spoke Paul unexpectedly, from the doorway, where he was an absorbed witness of the scene.

They both turned sharply; they had forgotten the boy.

"Don't be silly, Paul," said his mother, rather sharply. "Mr. Bailey was only joking." But she freed her hands none the less, while Mr. Bailey bent his wary gaze upon the boy.

The interruption served to bring the conversation down to a less emotional plane, and Paul sat down on a chair just within the door to watch the unawaited results of promising a meal to a chance tramp. The effect on his mother was not the least remarkable consequence. The veld threw up a lamentable man at your feet; in charity and some bewilderment you took him home to feed him, and thereupon your mother, your weary, petulant, uncertain mother, took him to her arms and became, by that unsavory contact, pink and vivacious.

"There 's more of you," said Mrs. du Preez, making a fresh examination of her visitor. "You 're fatter than what you were, Bailey, in those old days."

Boy Bailey nodded carelessly. "Yes, my figure 's gone too," he agreed; "gone with all the rest. Friends, position, reputation – all but my spirits and my talents. I know. Ah, but those were good times, weren't they?"

"Too good to last," sighed Mrs. du Preez.

"They didn't last for me," said Boy Bailey. "When we broke down at Fereira – lemme see! That must be nearly twenty years ago, ain't it? – I took my leave of Fortune. Never another glance did I get from her; not one bally squint. I did advance agent for a fortune-teller for a bit; I even came down to clerking in a store. I 've been most things a man can be in this country, except rich. And why is it? What 's stood in my way all along? What 's been my handicap that holds me back and nobbles me every time I face the starter?"

"Ah!" exclaimed Mrs. du Preez sympathetically.

"I don't need to tell you," continued Boy Bailey, "you not being one of the herd, that it 's temperament that has me all the time. I don't boast of it, but you know how it is. You remember me when I had scope; you 've seen me at the game; you can judge for yourself. A man with temperament in this country has got as much chance as a snowflake in hell. Perhaps, though, you 've found that out for yourself before now."

"Don't I know it," retorted Mrs. du Preez. "Bailey, if you 'll believe me, I have n't heard that word 'temperament,' since I saw you last. Talk of scope – why you can go to the winder there and see with your eyes all the scope I 've had since I married. It 's been tough, Bailey; it 's been downright tough."

"Still – " began Mr. Bailey, but paused. "We must have another talk," he substituted. "There 's a lot to hear and to tell. Do you think you could manage to put me up for a day or two? I suppose your husband wouldn't mind?"

"Why should he?" demanded Mrs. du Preez. "You 're the first in all these years. Still, it wouldn't be a bad idea if you was to have a change of clothes before he sees you, Bailey. It isn't me that minds, you know; so far as that goes, you 'd be welcome in anything; but – "

Boy Bailey waved her excuses away. "I understand," he said. "I understand. It's these prejudices – have your own way."

The resources of Christian du Preez's wardrobe were narrow, and Christian's wife was further hampered in the selection of clothes for her guest by a doubt whether, if she selected too generously, Christian might not insist on the guest stripping as soon as he set eyes on him. Her discretion revealed itself, when Mr. Bailey was dressed, in a certain sketchiness of his total effect, an indeterminate quality that was not lessened by the fact that all of the garments were too narrow and too long; and though no alteration of his original appearance could fail to improve it, there was no hiding his general character of slow decay.

"It 's hardly a disguise," commented Boy Bailey, as he surveyed himself when the change was made. "Disguise is n't the word that covers it, and I 'm hanged if I know what word does. But these pants are chronic."

"You can roll 'em up another couple of inches," suggested Mrs. du Preez.

"It isn't that," complained Mr. Bailey. "If they want to cover my feet, they can. But I 'd need a waist like a wasp before the three top buttons would see reason. Damme, I feel as if I was going to break in halves. What 's that dear boy of yours grinning at?"

"I wasn't grinning," protested Paul. "I was only going to say that father 's coming in now."

The tramp and his mother exchanged a glance of which the meaning was hidden from him, the look of allies preparing for a crucial moment. Already they were leagued to defeat the husband.

Christian du Preez came with heavy footsteps along the passage from the outer door, saw that there was a stranger in the parlor and paused.

"Christian," said Mrs. du Preez, with a false sprightliness. "Come in; here 's a – an old friend of mine come to see us."

"An old friend?"

The Boer stared at the stranger standing with straddled legs before the fireplace, and recognized him forthwith. Without speaking, he made a quick comparison of the bold photograph, whose fleshy perfection had so often invited him to take stock of his own imperfections, and then met the living Boy Bailey's rigid smile with a smile of his own that had the effect of tempering the other's humor.

"I see," said the Boer. "What's the name?" He came forward and read from the photograph where the bold showy signature sprawled across a corner. "'Yours blithely, Boy Bailey,'" he read. "And you are Boy Bailey?"

"You 've got it," replied the photograph's original. "Older, my dear sir, and it may be meatier; but the same man in the main, and happy to make the acquaintance of an old friend's husband."

His impudence cost him an effort in face of the Boer's stare of contemptuous amusement, a stare which comprehended, item by item, each article of his grotesque attire and came to rest, without diminishing its intensity, upon the specious, unstable countenance.