Flower o' the Peach

"Paul! That you? Where you bin all this time?"

"By the dam," he answered.

"I been callin' you this half hour," she said. "Mrs. Jakes is here – she wants you."

The light from within the house showed her as a thin woman, with the shape of youth yet upon her. But the years had taken tribute of her freshness, and her small, rather vacant face was worn and faded. She wore her hair coiled upon her head in a way to frame the thin oval of the face, and there remained to her yet the slight prettiness of sharp weak gestures and little conscious attitudes. In her voice there survived the clipped accent of London; Paul had come to know it as the thing that distinguished his mother from other women. Before her marriage she had been an actress of the obscure sort to be found in the lesser touring companies, and it was when the enterprise of which she was a member had broken down at the town of Fereira that she met and married the Boer, Christian du Preez, Paul's father. She preserved from the old days a stock of photographs inscribed in dashing hands – "yours to the dregs" – "your old pal" – "yours ever most sincerely" – and so on a few cuttings from newspapers – "Miss Vivie Sinclair as Gertie Gottem was most unique," said the Dopfontein Courant– a touch of raucousness in her voice, and a ceaseless weary longing for the easy sham life, the foolish cheerful companions, the stimulus of the daily publicity.

She drew the boy in, sliding her arm through his, to where Mrs. Jakes sat waiting.

"Here he is at last," she said, looking up at him prettily. She often said she was glad her boy was tall enough to go into a picture, but a mother must admire her son for one thing or another.

Mrs. Jakes acknowledged Paul's arrival with a lady-like little smile. "Better late than never," she pronounced.

She was the wife of the doctor at the Sanatorium, the old Dutch house that showed its steep roofs within a couple of miles of the farm, where came in twos and threes the consumptives from England, to mend their broken lungs in the clean air of the Karoo. They came not quite so frequently nowadays, for a few that returned healed, or believing themselves to be healed, had added to their travel-sketches of the wonderful old house and its surroundings an account of Dr. Jakes and his growing habit of withdrawing from his duties to devote himself to drink. Their tales commonly omitted to describe justly the anxious, lonely woman who labored at such times to supply his place, driving herself to contrive and arrange to keep the life of the house moving in its course, to maintain an assured countenance, and all the while to screen him from public shame and ruin. She was a wan little woman, clinging almost with desperation to those trivial mannerisms and fashions of speech which in certain worlds distinguished the lady from the mere person. She had lain of nights beside a drunken husband, she had fought with him when he would have gone out to make a show of his staggering gait and blurred speech – horrible silent battles in a candle-lit room, ending in a gasping fall and sickness – she had lied and cheated to hide the sorry truth, she had bared her soul in gratitude to her kind God that her child had died. These things as a matter of course, as women accept and belittle their martyrdom; but never in her life had she left the spoon standing in her tea-cup or mislaid her handkerchief. The true standards of her life were still inviolate.

She liked Paul because he was shy and gentle, but not well enough to talk to him without mentioning the weather first.

"The evenings are drawing out nicely," she remarked, leaning to one side in her chair to see through the door the darkness growing dense upon the veld. "It reminds me a little of a June evening in England – if only the rain holds off."

"Yes," said Paul. There would be rain in the ordinary course in three months or so, if all went well, but it was not worth while to go into the matter with Mrs. Jakes.

"We are to have another guest," the lady went on. The doctor's patients were always "guests" when she spoke of them. "A young lady this time. And that is what I came about, really."

"Mrs. Jakes wants you to go in to the station with the Cape-cart and fetch her out, Paul," explained his mother. "You 'll 'ave the first look at her. Mrs. Jakes takes her oath she is young."

Mrs. Jakes shuddered faintly, and looked at the floor.

"About twenty-six, I understand," she said. "About that." Her tone reproached Mrs. du Preez for a lapse of good manners. Mrs. Jakes did not understand the sprightliness of mild misstatement. She turned to Paul.

"If you could manage it," she suggested. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble! The doctor, I 'm sorry to say, has a touch of the sun; he is subject, you know." Her hands clasped nervously in her lap, and her face seemed blind as she beat bravely on. "The climate really does n't suit him at all; he can't stand the heat. I 've begged and prayed him to give it up and go back to private practice at home. But he considers it his duty to keep on."

"The morning train?" asked Paul.

"It is early," lamented Mrs. Jakes. "But we should be so much obliged."

Paul nodded. "All right," he said. "I will bring her, Mrs. Jakes."

There are transactions consecrated to the humorous point of view, landmarks in the history of laughter. Mrs. du Preez honestly believed that a youth and a girl alone in the dawn were a spectacle essentially mirthful.

"Catch him missing the chance," she said, with her slightly jarring laugh. "None of your larks, now, Paul! Promise you 'll behave!"

"Yes, mother," Paul promised gravely, and her face went blank before the clear eyes he turned upon her. Mrs. Jakes in her chair rustled her stiff dress in a wriggle of approval.

"Miss Harding is the name," she told Paul. "You 'll manage to find her? I don't know at all what she 's like, but she comes of a very good family, I believe. You can't mistake her."

"Paul knows the look of the lungy ones by now," Mrs. du Preez assured her. "Don't you, Paul? It 's lungs, of course, Mrs. Jakes?"

"Chest trouble," corrected Mrs. Jakes, nervously. She preferred the less exact phrase, for there is indelicacy in localising diseases, and from the lungs to the bowels it is but a step. "Chest trouble, a slight attack. Fortunately, Miss Harding is taking it in time. The doctor lays stress on the necessity for taking it in time."

"Well," said Mrs. du Preez, "whatever it is, she 'll 'ave the fashions. Lungs or liver, they 've got to dress, and it 'll be something to see a frock again. She 's from London, you said?"

Mrs. Jakes rearranged her black skirts which had suffered by implication, and suppressed an impulse to reply that she had not said London.

"The address is Kensington," she answered. "Very good people live in Kensington."

"There 's shops there, at any rate," said Mrs. du Preez. "Lord, don't I remember 'em! I had lodgings at Hammersmith once myself, and an aunt in the High Street. There 's not much you can tell me about that part."

She nodded a challenge to Mrs. Jakes, who shrank from it.

"Then I can tell the doctor that you 'll meet Miss Harding?" Mrs. Jakes asked Paul. "He will be so obliged. You see, he 'd go himself, only – you quite see? Then I 'll expect Miss Harding for breakfast."

She rose and shook herself, the gentle expert shake that settles a woman's clothes into their place, and tendered him a vague, black-gloved hand. Gloves were among her defenses against the crudities of the Karoo. She was prim in the lamp-light, and extraordinarily detached from the little uncomfortable room, with its pale old photographs of forgotten actors staring down from wall and mantel.

"She may as well see you first," she said, and smiled at him as though there were an understanding between them.

CHAPTER II

At three o'clock in the morning it was still dark, though in the east, low down and gradual, there paled an apprehension of the dawn. From the driving-seat of the high two-wheeled cart, Paul looked forward over the heads of his horses to where the station lights were blurred like a luminous bead on the thread of railway that sliced without a curve from sky to sky. It was the humblest of halting places, with no town at its back to feed the big trains; it owed its existence frankly to a gaunt water-tank for the refreshment of engines. But for Paul it had the significance of a threshold. He could lose himself in the crowding impressions of a train's arrival, as it broadened and grew out of the distance and bore down between the narrow platforms, immense and portentous, and thudded to a standstill as though impatient of the trivial delay. The smell of it, the dull shine of glass and varnish, were linked in his mind with the names of strange, distant cities; it was freighted with the romance of far travel. There were glimpses of cushioned interiors, and tired faces that looked from the windows, giving a perfunctory glance to the Karoo which Paul knew as the world. And once he had watched four men, with a little folding table cramped between their knees, playing cards, low-voiced, alert, each dark predatory face marked with an impassivity that was like the sheath that hides a blade. He stared at them fascinated; not once did they raise their eyes to glance through the window, nor for an instant did one of them slacken his profound attention. Ahead, at the platform's end, the great engine whined like a child that gropes for the breast, till the feed-hose contented it and its gurgle-gurgle succeeded to the thin wail of the steam. The Kafir orange woman made melodious offers of naartjes and a hammer clinked critically along the wheels. It was the live season of the day, the poignant moment, its amends for the slow empty hours. But the men about the table had graver concerns. The feed-hose splashed back out of the way, the guard shouted, the brakes whanged loose. The long train jolted and slid, and still they had not looked up. Paul could not leave them; he even ran along the platform till their window distanced him, and then stopped, panting, to watch the tail of the train sink to the horizon. He had seen the Jew in earnest and it left him daunted.

"They wouldn't even look," he was saying, as he went back to his cart. "They wouldn't even look." It served as a revelation to one who looked so much and so fervently.

The other train, which came and went before the daylight, had its equal quality of a swift, brief visitor, and the further mystery of windows lighted dimly through drawn curtains, whereon surprising shadow heads would dawn and vanish in abrupt motion. It was strange to stand beside one and hear from within the crying of an infant and the soothing of a mother, both invisible, arriving from the void on one hand and bound for the void on the other, with the Karoo not even an incident in their passage. Paul wondered whether one day that infant might not pass through again, with trousers and a mustache and a cigar, and another trouble to perturb him and cards and partners to do the soothing.

He arrived well in advance of the time of the train, and tied his docile horses to the hitching rail beside the road. Within the station there was the usual expectant group under the dim lamps, the two or three men who attended to the tank, a Cape Mounted Policeman, spurred and trim, and a few others, besides the half-dozen or so mute and timid Kafirs who lounged at the end of the platform. The white men talked together and shivered at the cold of the night; only the Cape Policeman, secure in his uniform great-coat, stood with legs astraddle and his whip held behind his back, a model of correct military demeanor in the small hours. Paul noted the aggressive beauty of his attitude and his fine young virility, and stared somewhat till the armed man noticed it.

"Well, young feller," he drawled. "You haven't fallen in love with me, have you?"

"No," answered Paul, astonished.

Two or three of the bystanders laughed, and made him uncomfortable. He did not fully understand why he had been spoken to, and stared at his questioner a little helplessly. The policeman smacked his boot with his whip.

"Nor yet me with you," he said. "So if you want to stare, go and stare at something else. See?"

Paul backed away, angry and shy, and moved down the platform to be out of the sound of their voices. The things that people laughed at were seldom clear to him; it seemed that he had been left out of some understanding to take certain things as funny and laugh at them. His mother's mirth, breaking startlingly out of unexpected incidents, out of words spoken without afterthought, out of little accidents and breakages, always puzzled him. It was as little to be understood as her tears, when she would sit silent through a long afternoon of stagnant heat, and burst suddenly into weeping when some one spoke to her.

He came to a standstill at the point where the station roof ended and left the platform bare to the calm skies. The metals gleamed before his feet, ranging out to the veld whence the train would come. He listened for the sound of it, the low drum-note so like the call of the gourd-drum at the farmhouse door, which would herald it even before its funnel dragged its glare into view. There was nothing to be heard, and he turned to the Kafirs behind him, and spoke to one who squatted against the wall apart from the rest.

"Is the train late?" he asked, in the "Kitchen Kafir" of his everyday commerce with natives.

The black man raised his head at the question, but did not answer. Paul repeated it a little louder.

The native held his head as if he listened closely or were deaf. Then he smiled, his white teeth gleaming in the black circle of his shadowed face.

"I 'm sorry," he answered, distinctly; "I can't understand what you say. You 'll have to speak English."

It was the voice of a negro, always vaguely musical, and running to soft full tones, but there was a note in it which made it remarkable and unfamiliar, some turn which suggested (to Paul, at any rate) that this was a man with properties even stranger than his speaking English. He thrilled with a sense of adventure, for this, of course, was the mad creature of the shepherd's tale, who sang to himself of nights when the moon rose on the veld. If a dog had answered him in set phrases, it would not have been more amazing than to hear that precise, aptly modulated voice reply in easy English from the mouth of a Kafir.

"I – I 've heard of you," he said, stammering.