The Claw Part 34

"What has made him change his mind about helping you into the Consular service, Maurice?" I asked, not without a shade of irony I must confess, for any one less adapted than Maurice to a profession in which high principles, tact, and good manners are essential qualifications it would have been hard to find, even in Africa, where budding diplomats do not grow on every bush.

"He hasn't changed his mind. I have changed mine about asking him, that's all. I know it would be no good, anyway."

He got into the verandah hammock, which was also his bed, propped himself comfortably against a cus.h.i.+on, and lit a cigarette.

From my deck-chair I stared blankly at the surrounding horizon. To say that I was _agacee_ is to say nothing. Even in the face of his recently revealed duplicity I was unprepared for this cool jettisoning of the most solemn part of our compact. It left me breathless. I said at last:

"What is there to prevent you from leaving Africa without your uncle's consent? You are not an infant--"

"No; I wish I were. Life would be considerably simpler. But the fact is, my uncle is so kind as to pay me five hundred a year to stay out of England, and the country he specifies as my residence, being a nice long way off from him, is Africa. The moment I quit he'll stop payment, and I shall have nothing to live on but my lordly salary of twenty quid a month."

What sinister meaning lurked in so strange an arrangement I shrank from asking, but I had an instinct to combat it--an instinct that was roused in me twenty times a day as my husband's character unfolded itself, and I saw upon what ign.o.ble props and bolsters his life was arranged; how slack were his moral muscles; how low his code of honour. Sometimes, when I realised these things, and that my lot was irrevocably cast for life companions.h.i.+p with a man who so deliberately outraged my ideals of what a man should be, and what life should mean, I felt like a trapped creature, and my instinct was to turn in bitter rage and rend the trap with teeth and nails. But what good in that? And what good in all my fine resolutions if they so quickly dissolved in the face of disaster?

I smothered down indignation and disdain, and used a gentleness with him that, knowing my own proud ardent heart, surprised myself. With burning cheeks I might presently have been heard pleading with him to throw off the five-hundred-pound yoke, and strike out on his own account.

"Surely the freedom of your soul is worth more than five hundred a year!" I cried. "You detest your uncle, why take his money under such an ignominious condition? Fling his money into his teeth and take your life into your own hands. Africa is not the only country on the map.

There are still Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Let us go to Canada and start a farm, open a shop, run a hotel--anything, anywhere.

I will help you at whatever you put your hand to, Maurice, and I don't care how poor we are. Only let us be honourable, and let us go away from Africa."

And all the time my blood was leaping and my heart quivering at the thought of staying on in this land, behind whose silent hills and dense bush the fate of Anthony Kinsella still was hidden. To all my eloquence he puffed at his cigarette and returned a cool stare.

"Jack up five hundred a year and go and look for a chance living in some new country where I don't know the ropes? Not much, my dear girl! I know my own limitations, thanks, and how likely I'd be to make my fortune or even a bare living in Canada or anywhere else."

"What of the n.o.ble career you were to carve out for yourself," I flung at him, hoping that scorn might achieve what pleading and reasoning failed to do. But that stone broke no bones. He merely laughed and flung one back at me with a man's sure aim.

"Why should I bother about a career, since I am never to have any children to pa.s.s my glories on to?"

That sealed my lips from further retort. I sat still and stared silently at the pa.s.sionate blue of the skies, and the radiant sunlit plain. What was the use of struggling against the witch who had me in her toils and never meant to let me go?

"If she loves you, she will keep you, whether you will or no!" Anthony had prophesied on just such a blue-and-gold day, when life went sweetly with us. Well, if this was love, it was a strong, austere pa.s.sion, hard to distinguish from hate. Under its fierce cold caress I could truly cry with the words of the Hindoo woman to her faithless lord:

"Hadst thou not called it Love-- I had called it a drawn sword!"

A little way off a native boy, whom I had noticed about the place the last day or two, was sitting in the suns.h.i.+ne, with his back against a hut. He wore a brick-red blanket sewn with large blue beads, swathed round him rather gracefully, and a necklace of some wild beasts' teeth about his neck. He was better looking than the average kaffir--nose less flat, and lips less protruding; with a dreamy, moody air about him, and in his big dark eyes. He had a tiny kaffir instrument in his hands, upon which he was making a soft, sad, monotonous sound.

_Tom--brr--torn--brr--tom-tom-tom_--

Sometimes he would give a look, in which there seemed to be some significant wistfulness, towards the verandah where we sat.

"Yes, I've got a nice little soft billet in the Mounted Police," pursued Maurice serenely. "The powers that be thought it a pity for a happily married man like me, with an adoring wife, to have to be so much away from home as an N.C. must be, so they laid their heads together to see what they could do for you and me. The result is the offer of a sub-inspectors.h.i.+p in the Police, my service in the N.C. Department to count towards seniority. They've given me the camp at Mgatweli."

Afterwards I learnt, as one learns everything in Rhodesia if one lives long enough, that the whole affair had been arranged weeks before, upon Maurice announcing the news of his approaching marriage. He had accepted the appointment quite a month before he told me anything about it.

But I soon learned that I must take falseness and double-dealing for granted.

Judy, too, was proving faithless to her promise. She had written to say that she had decided to take d.i.c.kie with her to Europe, where she was going to spend her honeymoon.

I rose wearily to go inside and find out what arrangements were being made for lunch, when I noticed that the boy with the music had left off playing. He put his piano in his hair and came up to the verandah. His eyes were fixed wistfully upon Maurice, who was apparently composing himself to sleep. In the Mashona tongue he made a soft little request:

"_Neega meena e'tambo Inkos_."

My husband very quickly opened his eyes.

"Get out, you scoundrel, or I'll give you a kicking instead. And don't let me see you hanging round here any longer." He added something.

Some added threat in the vernacular made the boy walk away. But he did not leave the farm. I found out later that he was Makupi, the boy whose charm Maurice would not give up, keeping it out of sheer deviltry and malice, just because the boy wanted it so frightfully. When we left Water-lily Farm Makupi left also, and a few days after our arrival at our new home I saw his brick-red blanket again, and heard the thrumming of the little melancholy piano. Often he would come to Maurice and repeat his gentle request:

"_Neega meena e'tambo Inkos_" (give me my charm, master). And when refused with menaces would walk uncomplainingly away.

Mgatweli was a little gathering of houses and huts, a church, and two hotels--the habitations of three hundred souls. The town nestled in the hollow of a plain, with low, wooded kopjes brooding round it.

Our home consisted of five huts: a dining-room lined with white limbo, a drawing-room lined with red, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. They had been lived in before, and left in a ragged and disreputable condition. There was gra.s.s growing on my bedroom floor, and the ants had devoured most of the drawing-room wall drapery. However, the place was undeniably picturesque.

The huts were built in a wide ring round a compound full of bush and big trees, and the whole camp was pitched half-way up the slope of the biggest kop.

We were about a mile away from the town, and between us and it stretched an emblazoned sea--an extravagant, brilliant _champs Elysee_ of terrible colour.

In the first mushroom uprising of the town the little hospital had stood where now our huts were built, and a young nurse, receiving a packet of zinia seed from home, had, in the innocence of her heart, planted it at the doors of the hospital, to cheer the patients, she said; but in time it had frightened the patients.

Any one who knows anything about zinias need not be told that they want nothing more than a shower and some sunny days to bloom gaily, and thereafter fling their seed in turn to the four winds. That is what Nurse Agnes's zinias had done, and now between the camp and the town billowed an iridescent ocean of colour. And such colour! Atrocious blues and reds and terra-cottas and pinks and magentas, all cheek by jowl, and head to head. Perky little stiff-stalked wretches, blazing wickedly in the sun. I detested them. The natural flowers of Africa never clash with each other, or the skies, or the changing scarlets and ambers of the veldt. But these malapert immigrants sinned against all laws and canons of colour. They struck the eye a thousand blows a minute. They disturbed the splendour of the skies. There was no peace in the distant hills because of them.

Close beside us was the police camp: a bevy of huts built round a large open s.p.a.ce, with the stumps of chopped-down trees for occasional seats.

A sergeant and ten troopers came and went on the zinia-lined road, patrolling the neighbouring kraals and visiting the town. From our hut doors we could see the men busy with their horses at morning and evening "stables," and on Sunday nights they usually chanted Barrack-room Ballads round their fires to hymn tunes played on a concertina. They were an ill-kempt, casual, careless lot of men, but fine looking fellows and all of them well-born ne'er-do-wells. The only one among them who had no claim by birth to the t.i.tle of gentleman was Locke, the smart and spruce sergeant in charge of them under Maurice.

Life with Maurice Stair was too lively and active a misery to be truthfully described as dreary. It was more difficult than climbing the _Dent blanche_ with bare and broken feet, or wandering waterless in the burning desert; for there was no glorious peak in sight up the steep and rugged path, nor any oases to rest by in the weary desert, nor any hope of "Death, the tardy friend" overtaking one's faltering footsteps. I was too young and strong to hope for death, even while I felt that youth was being left far behind in the shadow of happier days, and age crouched somewhere in the tangled th.o.r.n.y wild in front. And always, always, the terrible regret for the pa.s.sing of days that held nothing in them! Empty days--empty nights! Life was not meant to be pa.s.sed thus, and life was pa.s.sing!

"The wine of life was falling drop by drop; The leaves of life were fading one by one!"

Maurice spent little of his time at the police camp. His duties as commanding officer did not oppress him. He rarely went near his men.

The sergeant came to the house with all papers and reports, and Maurice conducted the affairs of the Government in his bedroom, often from his bed, for which he had a fondness.

As Public Prosecutor he was obliged to go over to the court-house every morning at ten, but it was usually nearer eleven when he rode away, looking like a modern Galahad on his white horse. There is no doubt he was a very handsome fellow.

His duties at the court-house did not keep him long, there being little more to do than to produce certain Mashonas who had been brought in by the troopers for refusing to pay the hut-tax (ten s.h.i.+llings a year) and thereafter to be sentenced to a month's labour at Government work.

Sometimes there was a cattle-stealer to face his crimes, or a breaker of his brother's skull in some kraal revel. Whatsoever the cases they did not detain Maurice long. He soon came riding gallantly back through the zinias, to the hours of idleness that his soul loved. He would fling off his uniform, get into a pair of shrunken flannel trousers, and in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves and a pair of atrocious black leather slippers spend the rest of the day _pottering_. He was the most successful potterer I ever met. Sauntering from one hut to the other, he was never far from his own. He may or may not have believed that I did not know the reason for this; but I must have been deaf and blind and lacking in all my seven senses not to know of the case after case of whiskey that was carried to his hut and consumed there in solitude. Yet he still kept up the pose of being a man who did not drink, and when I had the tantalus filled with spirits and placed openly in the dining-room he looked at me with surprise, and asked me whether I realised that whiskey was five pounds a case!

He had the art of wasting time brought to a fine point. He could sit for hours polis.h.i.+ng some part of his saddlery (that it was his batman's business to attend to), or spend the afternoon piercing fresh holes in a strap he never intended to use, piercing them beautifully, with the care of a diamond cutter at the most delicate work, polis.h.i.+ng them afterwards with sand-paper. He loved polis.h.i.+ng as few housemaids do. The matter of getting a rhino-hide _sjambok_ ebony black would happily occupy him for many days, or cleaning a pipe that he never smoked--anything that was futile and foolish and useless and that some one else could have done better!

He also liked to make little pottering things with carpenters' tools.

After studying for the army he had, it appeared, taken a course at one of the big technical training colleges in London, and had there chosen to learn carpentering. No doubt I am sn.o.bbish, but I could never quite understand what a gentleman wanted with a knowledge of carpentering.

Probably Maurice took it up to avoid being obliged to study something that would make a demand on his brain. He was always very careful not to overstrain his brain in any way. However, the result of this special branch of instruction was that he could make nice little boxes that would not quite close, and wooden pegs that wouldn't stay in the _dagga_ walls, and other things that no one had any earthly use for.

Once, it is true, he made a beautiful little tea-table, a thing we much required, for furniture was still almost un.o.btainable in the wilds as we were, and the drawing-room was but scantily furnished. But when the table was finished he spoilt it by painting it a diabolical pink that made it get up and smite in the eye everything in the room, including the walls which were lined with scarlet twill. The thing was impossible. The colour of a stuffed wolfs tongue! But do you think he would change it? No. He would have it no other colour, and he forced it through the drawing-room door, tearing the limbo and smas.h.i.+ng up pots of ferns, and planting it in the middle of the room, left it there whether I liked it or not. I dispensed tea from it to my visitors and let them gauge my taste by it if they liked. What did it matter?

When all his possessions had been picked over and polished and he could for the moment find nothing sufficiently futile to do, he would get a pack of cards and play patience, or amuse himself with a chess-board.

He never touched a book or a pen, or took the slightest interest in the profession into which he had been pitch-forked over the heads of better _warn_, by a Government whose kindly idea at that time was to do well by the men who had first come into the country. He appeared to have no use whatever for his head: but his long, womanish, restless hands were everlastingly occupied.