Flower o' the Peach

He laughed, with one of those quick transitions of mood which characterize the negro temperament. It jarred a little on Margaret.

"He was the dearest old thing," he went on. "He 's one of the greatest living authorities on the Bantu tongues – those are the real old negro languages, I believe – and he was out here once in his wild youth. The Colonial Office appointed him to take charge of me and he used to come down to the schools where I was and give me a sovereign. He 'd have made a capital uncle. He had a face like a beefy rose, one of those big flabby ones that tumble to pieces when you pick them – all pink and round and clean, with kind, silly blue eyes behind gold spectacles. I had to get his consent before I could move, and I went to see him in a little room at the British and Foreign Bible Society's place in Queen Victoria Street, where they grow the rarer kinds of Bible under glass in holes in the wall; you know. He was correcting the proofs of a gospel in some Central African dialect and he had smudges of ink round his mouth. Sucking the wrong end of the pen, I suppose. He really was rather like a comic-paper professor, but as kind as could be. I sat down in the chair opposite to him, with the desk between us, and he heard what I 'd got to say, wiping his pen and sucking it while I told him. I fancy I began by being eloquent, but I soon stopped that. He 's good form to the finger-tips and he looked so pained. So I cut it short and told him what I wanted to do and why. And when I 'd finished, he gave me a solemn warning. I must do what seemed right to me, he said; he wouldn't take the responsibility of standing in my way; but there were grave dangers. He had known young men, promising young men, talented young men – all negroes, of course – who had returned to Africa after imbibing and accepting the principles of our civilization. They, it was true, were West Africans, but my danger was the same. They had left England in clothes, with a provision of soap in their trunks, and the result of their return to their own place was – they had lapsed! They had discontinued the clothes and forsworn the soap. 'One of them,' he said, 'presented a particularly sad example. He whom we had known and respected as David Livingstone Smith became the leader of a faction or party whose activities necessitated the despatch of a punitive expedition. Under a name which, being interpreted, signifies "The Scornful," he presided over the defeat and massacre of that armed force.' And he went on warning me against becoming an independent monarch and forcing an alliance on Great Britain by means of an ingenious war. He seemed relieved when I assured him that I had no ambition to sit in the seat of the Scornful."

He laughed again, looking up at Margaret with his white teeth flashing broadly.

"Yes," she said. "That was – funny."

Odd! It made her vaguely restive to hear the Kafir make play with the shortcomings of the white man. It touched a fund of compunction whose existence she had not suspected. Something racial in her composition, something partizan and unreasoning, lifted its obliterated head from the grave in which her training and the conscious leanings of her mind had buried it.

He had no thoughts of what it was that kept her from returning his smile. He imagined that his mission, his loneliness and his danger had touched her and made her grave.

"Well, you see how it all came about?" he went on. "It isn't really so extraordinary, is it? And I 'm not discouraged, Miss Harding. I shall find a way, sooner or later; they 're bound to get used to me in the end. In the meantime, Paul is teaching me Kafir, and there 's you. You make up to me for a lot."

"Do I?" Margaret roused herself and sat up, deliberately thrusting down out of her consciousness that instinctive element which bade her do injustice and withhold from the man before her his due of acknowledgment.

"Do I?" she said. "I 'd be glad if that were so."

He made to speak but stopped at her gesture.

"No," she said. "I would be glad. It 's a wonderfully great thing you 've started to do, and you 're lucky to have it. You feel that, don't you?"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "Oh, yes."

She eyed him with a moment's hesitation, for he had not agreed with any alacrity, and a martyr who regards his stake with aversion is always disappointing.

"Oh, you 're sure to succeed," she said. "People who undertake things like this don't fail. And if, as you say, I 'm any kind of help to you, I 'm glad. I 'm awfully glad of it. It makes coming out here worth while, and I shall always be proud that I was your friend."

"Will you? Does it strike you like that?"

"Yes," said Margaret.

She was above him on the bank and he sat on the ground with his head at the level of her knees. His worn and shabby clothes, the patience of his face, and even the hands that lay empty in his lap, joined with his lowly posture to give him an aspect of humility. He was like a man acclimatized to oppression and ill fortune, accepting in a mild acquiescence, without question and without hope, the wrongs of a tyrannous destiny.

"I shall be proud," she repeated. "Always." She held forth her hand to him in token of that friendship, leaning down that he might take.

He did not do so at once. His eyes flashed to her with a startled glance, and he seemed at a loss. He lifted himself to his knees and put his own hand, large and fine for all the warm black of the back of it, the hand of a physician, refined to nice uses, under hers without clasping it. His movement had some of the timidity and slavishness of a dog unused to caresses; a dumb-brute gratitude was in his regard. He bent his black head humbly and printed a kiss upon her slender fingers.

It was a thing that exhausted the situation; Margaret, a little breathless and more than a little moved, met his gaze as he rose with a smile that was not clear of embarrassment. Neither knew what to say next; the kiss upon her hand had transformed their privacy into secrecy.

"My love is like a black, black rose."

It sounded above them, from the top of the dam wall, an outrageous bellow of melody that thrust itself obscenely between them and split them asunder with the riving force of a thunderbolt. Intolerably startled by the suddenness of it, Margaret nearly fell down the slope, and saving herself with her hands turned her face, whitened by the shock, towards the source of the noise. Another face met hers, parting the long grasses on the crown of the wall.

Her amazed and ambushed faculties saw it as a face only. It was attached to no visible body, solitarily self-sufficient in an unworthy miracle. It did not occur to her that the owner of it must be lying on his belly at the water's edge, and for the moment she was not equal to deducing that he must have heard, and possibly even seen, all that had passed. She saw merely a face projected over her, that grinned with a fixity that was not without an imbecile suggestion. It was old with a moldy and decayed quality, bunched into pouches between deep wrinkles, and yet weak and appealing. A wicked captive ape might show that mixture of gleeful sin and slavishness.

"Don't think I 'm not shocked, because I am," it uttered distinctly. "Kissing! I saw you. An' if anybody had told me that a lady of your looks would take on a Kafir, I wouldn't ha' believed it."

The face heaved and rose and lifted to corroborate it the cast-off clothes of Christian du Preez, enveloping the person of Boy Bailey. He shuffled to a sitting position on the edge of the wall, and it was a climax to his appearance that his big and knobly feet were bare and wet. He had been taking his ease with his feet in the water while they talked below, a hidden audience to their confidences. He shook his head at them.

"Dam walls have got dam ears," he observed. "You naughty things, you."

Margaret turned helplessly to Kamis for light.

"What is it?" she asked.

He had jumped to his feet and away from her at the first sound, and now turned a slow eye upon her. The negro countenance is the home of crude emotions; the untempered extremes have been its sculptors through the ages. Its mirth is a guffaw, its sorrow is a howl, its wrath is the naked spirit of murder. He looked at her now with a face alight and transfigured with slaughterous intention.

"Go away," he said, in a whisper. "Go away now. He must have heard. I 'll deal with him."

"Don't," said Margaret. She rose and put a hand on his arm. "Will you speak to him, or shall I?"

"Not you," he answered quickly. "But – " he was breathless and his face shone as with a light sweat. "He 'll tell," he urged, still whispering. "You don't know – it would be frightful. Go quickly away and leave me with him."

"They 're at it still," sounded the voice above them. "Damme, they can't stop."

Kamis was desperate and urgent. He cast a wild eye towards the man on the top of the wall, and went on with agitated earnestness.

"I tell you, you don't know. It 's enough that you were here with a Kafir and he kissed your hand." He slapped his forehead in an agony. "Oh, I ought to be hanged for that. They 'll never believe – nobody will. In this country that sort of thing has only one meaning – a frightful one. I can't bear it. If you don't go" – he gulped and spoke aloud – "I 'll go up and kill him before your eyes."

"Now, now!" The voice remonstrated in startled tones.

Margaret still had her hand on his arm, and could feel that he was trembling. She had recovered from the shock of the surprise and was anxious to purge the situation of the melodramatic character which it seemed to have assumed. Kamis' whispered fears failed to convince her.

"You 'll do nothing of the kind," she said. "I don't care what people think. Speak to the man or I will."

Kamis lifted his head obediently.

"Come down," he said. "Come down and say what you want."

Mr. Bailey recovered his smile as he shook his head.

"I can say it here," he replied. "Don't you worry, Snowball; it won't strain my voice."

Kamis gulped. "What do you want?" he repeated.

"Ah! What?" inquired Boy Bailey rhetorically. "I come here of an afternoon to collect my thoughts an' sweeten the dam by soaking my Trilbies in it an' what happens? I 'm half-deafened by the noise of kissing. I look round, an' what do I see? I ask you – what?"

He brought an explanatory forefinger into play, thick and cylindrical like a damaged candle.

"First, thinks I, here 's a story that's good for drinks in any bar between Dopfontein and Fereira – with perhaps a tar-and-feathering for the young lady thrown in." He nodded meaningly at Margaret. "And it wouldn't be the first time that's happened either."

"Ye-es," said Kamis, who seemed to speak with difficulty. "But you won't get away alive to tell that story."

"Hear me out." Boy Bailey shook his finger. "That 's what I thought first. My second thought was: what 's the sense of making trouble when perhaps there 's a bit to be got by holdin' my tongue? How does that strike you?"

Margaret had been leaning on her stick while he spoke, prodding the earth and looking down. Now she raised her eyes.

"The first thought was the best," she said. "You won't get anything here."

"Eh?" Mr. Bailey was astonished. "You don't understand, Miss," he said. "Ask Snowball, there – he 'll tell you. In this country we don't stand women monkeying with niggers. Hell – no. It 's worth, well – "

"Not a penny," said Margaret. "I don't care in the least whom you tell. But – not one penny."

Kamis was listening in silence. Margaret smiled at him and he shook his head. On the top of the wall Mr. Bailey leaned forward persuasively. He had something the air, in so far as his limitations permitted, of benevolence wrestling with obstinacy, the air which in auctioneers is an asset.

"You don't mean that, I know," he said indulgently. "I can see you 're going to be sensible. You would n't let a trifle of ready money stand between you an' keepin' your good name – a nice, ladylike girl like you. Why, for less than what you 've done, women have been stoned in the streets before now. Come now; I 'm not going to be hard on you. Make an offer."

He sat above them against the sky, beaming painfully, always with a wary apprehension at the back of his regard.

"You won't go away?" demanded Kamis suddenly. "You won't? You know I can't do it if you 're here. Then I 'm going to pay."

"You shan't," retorted Margaret. "I won't have it, I tell you. I don't care what he does."

"I 'm going to pay," repeated Kamis. "It 's that or – you won't go away?"

"No," said the girl angrily.

"Then I 'm going to pay." He turned from her. "I 'll give you twenty pounds," he called to Bailey.

"Double it," replied Boy Bailey promptly; "add ten; take away the number you thought of; and the answer is fifty pounds, cash down, and dirt cheap at that. Put that in my hand and I 'll clear out of here within the hour and you 'll never hear of me again."

Kamis nodded slowly. "If I do hear of you again," he said, "I 'll come to you. Paul will bring you the money to-morrow morning, and then you 'll go."

"Right-O." Mr. Bailey rose awkwardly to his feet and made search for his boots. With them in his hands, he looked down on the pair again.

"It's your risk," he warned them. "If that cash don't come to hand, you look out; there 'll be a slump in Kafirs."

He went off along the wall, disappearing in sections as he descended its shoulder. His gray head in its abominable hat was the last to disappear; it sailed loftily, as became the heir to fifty pounds.

Margaret frowned and then laughed.

"What an absurd business," she cried. "Supposing he had told and there had been a row – it would have been better than this everlasting stagnation. It would have been more like life."

The Kafir sighed. "Not life," he answered gently. "Not your life. It meant a death in life – like mine."

His embarrassed and mournful look passed beyond her to the Karoo, spreading its desolation to the skies as a blind man might lift his eyes in prayer.

CHAPTER XI

The deplorable hat which shielded Mr. Bailey from the eye of Heaven traveled at a thoughtful pace along the path to the farmhouse, cocked at a confident angle upon a head in which faith in the world was re-established. Boy Bailey had no doubt that the money would be forthcoming. What he had heard of the conversation between Margaret and Kamis had assured him of the Kafir's resources and he felt himself already as solvent as if the minted money were heavy in his pockets. A pleasant sense of security possessed his versatile spirit, the sense that to-morrow may be counted upon. For such as Mr. Bailey, every day has its price.

He gazed before him as he walked, at the house, with its kraals clustered before it and its humble appanage of out-buildings, with a gentle indulgence for all its primitive and domestic quality. Meals and a bed were what they stood for, merely the raw framework of intelligent life, needing to be supplemented and filled in with more stimulating accessories. They satisfied only the immediate needs of a man adrift and hungry; they offered nothing to compensate a lively mind for its exile from the fervor of the world. Fifty pounds, the fine round sum, not alone made him independent of its table and its roof, but opened afresh the way to streets and lamplight, to the native heath of the wandering Bailey, who knew his fellow men from above and below – Kafirs, for instance, he saw from an altitude – but had few such opportunities as this of meeting them on a level of economic equality. There came to him, as he dwelt in thought upon his good fortune, a clamorous appetite for what fifty pounds would buy. Capetown was within his reach, and he recalled small hotels on steep streets, whose back windows looked forth on flat roofs of Malay houses, where smells of cooking and people loaded the sophisticated air and there was generally a woman weeping and always a man drunk. A little bedroom with an untidy bed and beer bottles cooling in the wash-hand basin by day; saloons where the afternoon sun came slanting upon furtive men initiating the day's activities over glasses; the electric-lit night of Adderley Street under the big plate-glass windows, where business was finished for the shops and offices and newly begun for the traders in weakness and innocence – he knew himself in such surroundings as these. He could slip into them as noiselessly as a snake into a pool, with no disturbance to those inscrutable devotees of daylight and industry who carry on their plain affairs and downright transactions without suspecting the existence of the world beneath them, where Boy Bailey and his fellows stir and dodge and hide and have no illusions, save that hunger is ever fed or thirst quenched.

He paused at the open door of the farmhouse, recalled to the present by the sound of voices from the kitchen at the end of the passage, where Christian du Preez and his wife were engaged in bitter talk. Boy Bailey stepped delicately over the doorstep on to the mat within and stood there to listen, if there should be anything worth listening to. A smile played over his large complacent features, and he waited with his head cocked to one side. Something in which the word "tramp" occurred as he came through the door flattered him with the knowledge that the dispute was about himself.

Mrs. du Preez spoke, and her shrill tones were plainly audible.

"I don't make no fuss when your dirty old Doppers outspan here an' come sneakin' in for coffee, an' some of them would make a dog sick. Bailey 's got his troubles, but he don't do like Oom Piet Coetzee did when – "

An infuriate rumble from Christian broke in upon her. Boy Bailey smiled and shook his head.

"Now, now," he murmured. "Language, please."

"He 's worse than a Kafir in the house," Christian went on. "Woman, it makes me sick when he looks at you, like an old silly devil."

"So long as he don't look like an old silly Dutchman, I don't mind," retorted his wife. "I 'm fairly sick of it all – you an' your Doppers and all. And just because you can't tell when a gentleman 's having his bit of fun, you come and howl at me."

"Howl." The word seemed to sting. "Howl. Yes, instead of howling I should take my gun and let him have one minute to run before I shoot at him. You like that better, eh? You like that better?"

"Christian." There was alarm in Mrs. du Preez's voice. Behind the shut door of the kitchen, Bailey could picture Christian reaching down the big Martini that hung overhead with oiled rags wrapped about its breech.

"Time for me to cut in at this," reflected Mr. Bailey. "I never was much of a runner."

He walked along the passage with loud steps, acting a man returned from a constitutional, restored by the air and at peace with the whole human race.

Mrs. du Preez and Christian were facing one another over the length of the table; they turned impatient and angry faces towards the door as he opened it and thrust his personality into the scene. He fronted them with his terrible smile and his manner of jaunty amity.

"Hot, ain't it?" he inquired. "I 've been down by the dam and the water 's nearly on the boil."

Neither answered; each seemed watchful of the other's first step. Christian gave him only a dark wrathful look and Mrs. du Preez colored and looked away. Boy Bailey, retaining his smile under difficulties, tossed his hat to a chair and entered.

"Not interrupting anything, am I?" he inquired.

"You 're not interrupting me," replied Mrs. du Preez. "I 've said all I 'd got to say."

"But I haven't said all I 've got to say," retorted Christian from his end of the table. "We was talking about you."

"About me?" said Bailey, with mild surprise. "Oh."

"Yes." The Boer, leaning forward with his hands gripping the thick end of the table, had a dangerous look which warned Bailey that impudence now might have disastrous consequences.

"Yes – about you. My wife says you are a gentleman and got gentleman's manners and you are her old friend. She says you don't mean harm and you don't look bad and dirty. She says I don't know how gentlemen speak and look and I am wrong to say you are a beast with the mark of the beast."

Bailey shifted uncomfortably under his gaze of fury held precariously in leash, and edged a little towards Mrs. du Preez. He was afraid the big, bearded man might spring forward and help out his words with his fist.

"Very kind of Mrs. du Preez," he murmured warily.

"She says all that. But I say" – the words rasped from Christian's lips – "I say you are a man rotten like an old egg and the breath in your mouth is a stink of wickedness. And I tell her that sometimes I get up from my food and go out because if I don't I shall stamp you to death. Gott verdam! Your dirty eyes and your old yellow teeth grinning – I stand them no longer. You have had rest and skoff– now you go."

Bailey's face showed some discomposure. His disadvantage lay in the danger that the Boer was plainly willing to be violent. He had returned to the house with the intention of announcing that on the morrow he would take his departure, but it was not the prospect of spending a night in the open that disconcerted him. It was simply that he disliked to be treated thus loftily by a man he despised. He stole a glance at Mrs. du Preez.

She was staring at her husband with shrewdness and doubt expressed in her face, as though she were checking her valuation of him by the fierce figure at the other end of the table, with big, leathery hands clutched on the edge of the board and thin, sun-tanned face intent and wrathful above the uneven beard. She was revisiting with an unsympathetic eye each feature of that irreconcilable factor in her life, her husband.

"D'you hear me?" thundered the Boer. "You go."

He pointed with sudden forefinger to the door, and his gesture was unspeakably daunting and wounding.

"Ye-es," hesitated Boy Bailey, and sighed. The pointing finger compelled him like a hand on his collar, and he moved with shuffling and unwilling feet to the chair where his hat lay. He fumbled with it as he picked it up and it fell to the floor. The finger did not for a moment pretermit its menacing command. He sighed again and drew the door open.

"Bailey." Mrs. du Preez spoke sharply, with a trembling catch in her voice. "Bailey, you stop here."

"Eh?" He turned in the doorway with alacrity. Another moment and it might have been too late.

"Go on," cried the Boer. "Out you go, or I 'll – "

"Stop where you are, Bailey," cried Mrs. du Preez.

She came across the room with a run and put herself in front of Bailey, facing her husband.

"Now," she said, "now what d'you think you'll do?"

The Boer heaved himself upright, and they fronted one another stripped of all considerations save to be victor in the struggle for the fate of Boy Bailey. It was the iron-hard cockney against the Boer.

"I told him to go," said Christian. "If he doesn't go – I'll shoot."

He cast an eye up to the gun in its place upon the wall.

"You will, will you?" The bitter voice was mocking. "Now, Christian, you just listen to me."

"He 'll go," said the Boer.

"Oh, he 'll go," answered Mrs. du Preez. "He 'll go all right, if you say so. But mark my words. You go turning my friends out of the house like this, and so help me, I 'll go too. Get that straight in your head, old chap – it's right. Bailey 's not fretting to stay with you, you know. You 're not such good company that you need worry about it. It 's me he came to see, not you. And you pitch him out; that 's all. Bailey goes to-night, does he? Then I go in the morning."

She nodded at him, the serious, graphic nod that promises more earnestly than a shaken fist.

"What!" The Boer was taken by surprise. "If he goes – "

"I 'll go – yes."

She was entirely in earnest; her serious purpose was plain to him in every word she spoke. She threatened that which no Boer could live down, the flight of a wife. He stared at her almost aghast. In the slow processes of his amazed mind, he realized that this, too, had had to come – the threat if not the deed; it was the due and logical climax of such a marriage as his. Her thin face, still pretty after its fashion, and her slight figure that years had not dignified with matronly curves, were stiffened to her monstrous purpose. Whether she went or not, the intention dwelt in her. It was another vileness in Boy Bailey that he should have given it the means of existence.