Chapter Twenty Nine.
Pamela awoke with the sun flashing in her eyes as the heavy lids lifted reluctantly to the flush of the new day. She sat up and looked from the window which had remained open and unshuttered through the night. Dare had left her shortly before two o’clock, and she had slept soundly until roused by the sun, which newly risen shone golden in a cloudless sky. Already its fiery heat penetrated into the carriage, and struck fiercely on her hands and face, and upon the cushions of the seat which felt warm under her touch.
She wondered whether Dare had slept, whether he slept still? Involuntarily her thoughts turned back to the overnight vigil. She reviewed with a regretful sense as of something past, gone irrevocably, the quiet hours of intimate companionship, silent hours for the greater part,—silent with that eloquence of wordlessness more assertive than speech. A raised voice would have sounded intrusive, breaking the stillness of the darkened carriage where they had sat close together, gazing out upon the dusk, and whispering at intervals the thoughts which sprang straight from the heart to the lips. That night with its beauty; its stirrings of complex emotions, seeking and evading articulate expression; its untellable happiness, made up mainly of physical nearness and assimilated thoughts and feelings, had rolled back into the past,—was curtained off for ever behind the obnubilating folds of yesterday’s mantle. Only memory remained; the vivid hours had faded away in the dawn. Would any night ever mean so much to them again?
Pamela rose and made her toilet with the primitive arrangements provided in the carriage. She felt crumpled and unrefreshed, the effects of sleeping fully dressed. There was grit and sand in her hair. She brushed and rearranged it by the aid of the tiny suspended mirror. Then she dusted the compartment as well as she was able with a handkerchief; the fine red sand of the Karroo penetrated everywhere, and lay thick upon the baggage and the cushions of the seats.
She heard Dare moving in the next compartment; and felt glad that he too was up early. When he joined her they would have an early breakfast of fruit and biscuits.
She was ready for him when he tapped on the door. He slid the door back in response to her permission to enter, and came in quietly and kissed her.
“Sleep well?” he asked.
She nodded brightly.
“Like a top,” she answered.
“You did it in a hurry then,” he remarked. “It’s only six now.”
“Only six!” she repeated. “And feel how hot it is. What will it be like at noon?”
“If you travel through the Karroo in February,” he said, “you must expect to find it sultry. You will have to keep the shutters closed on the sunny side.”
“But that shuts out the view,” she objected. “I’m just loving this. I never imagined anything so desolate and grand and inspiring.”
“It’s desolate enough,” he admitted, glancing through the window out on the wide scene.
They were in the heart of the Karroo now. The arid sandy soil was sparsely covered with scrub and stunted mimosa bushes, and at intervals low hills sprang unexpectedly to the view, giving the effect of dark excrescences on the flat face of the land. Nothing green was visible; everywhere the eye rested on parched, powdered soil and dry scrub, beneath a brazen sky of hard, relentless blue.
They opened their baskets and broke their fast. Pamela was frankly hungry; the clear light air of the Karroo stimulates the appetite; and this early morning breakfast, with the warm sunlight streaming in through the windows, with the light warm breeze on her face, stirring the hair at her temples, was a new experience. She felt as she had felt on the previous night, alive in every nerve and centre of her being,—alert with the instinct of sheer gladness and joy in life; keenly appreciative of each fresh sensation, each fresh aspect in the constantly changing landscape as it unfolded itself to the view.
The stark barrenness of these vast tracks of no man’s land appealed to her senses acutely, stirred the imagination; contrasting sombrely with the greater fertility which occasionally started up amid the desolation, emphasising the sterility of the great plain which nursed these oases in its bare bosom, and supplied them from sources denied itself. Here, where the land was richer, where the rivers, dry at this season, had their beds between wooded banks, were to be seen small isolated groups of native huts, reed thatched, and patched with sacking and pieces of tin; and little naked piccaninnies ran forward to meet the train, and danced and shrieked excitedly, holding out little dark supplicating hands in greedy anticipation. Pamela snatched a handful of fruit and threw it to them, and leaning from the window, watched the eager race of these children of the sun who scampered to get the prize.
“They are just sweet,” she said, laughing.
“At a distance, yes,” agreed Dare. “They are characteristic of the country anyway—healthy, untrammelled, uncivilised.”
He got up and leaned from the window beside her. They had left the fertility behind. The ground became more stony, more strikingly naked. The railway wound in and out among the hills,—brown hills, covered with scrub, and strewn with huge boulders. There was no sight of a tree or of any living thing. The wind blew fitfully and more strongly; hot breaths of it were wafted in their faces, carrying with it a fine red grit which made the eyes sore.
Dare watched the eager, intent face with a slightly amused smile. Pamela’s keen enjoyment of everything reduced the discomfort of the long tiring journey to a minimum. She was making of it a picnic, and he was glad to fall in with her mood.
“We will take advantage of the next stop,” he said, “and make our way to the breakfast-car. I need something more substantial than fruit to face the day upon.”
He was wise in insisting upon a substantial breakfast; the heat, later in the day, deprived them both of appetite. Pamela refused to go to lunch, and Dare, equally disinclined for food, remained with her in the compartment, sitting opposite her on the shady side of the stifling carriage, keenly observant of her as she sat, limp and pale with the heat, but still interested; noting everything with languid, amazed blue eyes while the train rushed onward across the burning plain, through miles of uncultivated land, vast tracks of sun-drenched, treeless desert, where in patches of startling green, showing vividly amid the blackened scrub, its pale fingers pointing skyward, the milkbush flourished, hardy plant of the dry Karroo, which like the cactus draws its sustenance from the dews. Bleached bones of cattle strewed the ground in places, and about the farms, springing up occasionally out of the barrenness, the lean stock moved listlessly, feeding on the insufficient vegetation.
Farther on, in the dry bed of a river, a few hollow-flanked oxen lay, too weak to rise, their big soft eyes dim with suffering; and on the banks starved sheep were dying on the blackened veld, victims of the merciless drought that had swept the land bare as though devastated by fire. The aasvogels, perched on the telegraph poles along the railway, waited sombrely; grim birds of prey, with their bare ugly necks and gloomy eyes, ready to swoop when the last faint flicker of life died out.
Little whirlpools of dust rose on the flats, small, detached, yellow clouds, disturbed by some local puff of wind; and across the hard blue of the sky a few fleecy clouds floated lazily, throwing moving shadows of dense black upon the kopjes that appeared at frequent and unexpected intervals parallel with the line. Lonely graves of British soldiers, reminiscent of the ugly past, lay thickly at the foot of these deadly hills.
“This,” Pamela said, bringing her face round and looking with troubled eyes at Dare, “makes my heart ache. This is truly the Desolate Way. But it’s impressive,—it’s amazing. I feel all stirred.”
“Yes,” he said; “one can’t help feeling that. It’s the actuality of life struggling with death, an everlasting grapple with indeterminate result. One sees here the forces of nature incessantly warring, the elements of productiveness and destruction constantly opposed. One day these elements will be brought into subjection. The railway is the first step in linking up these waste places with our tentative civilisation. This country is in the lap of the future.”
“I would sooner see it as it is,” she said.
“So would I,” he agreed. “Civilisation could never excite one’s imagination as this untamed land does. It’s a fine country,—worth the sacrifice of a good deal.”
“But not worth that,” she said, and pointed to the cairns of stones with the little wooden crosses standing above them. There were so many of these relics along the route.
“That’s the part that shows,” he returned. “It has cost more than that.”
She was silent for a while, gazing from the window as she leaned back in her seat Dare had bought some pineapples at De Aar that the natives were selling on the platform, and he cut one of the fruit in half, and gave it to her with a spoon, that being, he assured her, the only way in which a pineapple should be eaten.
“If I had come alone,” Pamela said, “I should have fared badly.”
“You couldn’t have made this journey alone,” he said decidedly. “It’s unthinkable.”
The wind was rising steadily, a hot wind, that stirred the sticky red sand and carried it in clouds towards them till it covered everything. Whirlpools of red dust, rising skyward like tongues of furiously swirling flame, travelled with extraordinary velocity along the ground. There were farms here too, and cultivated patches of grain, and more lean sheep; and at infrequent intervals, marking a spot of beauty in this sterile waste, grew low, spiky, darkly green bushes starred with white blossom resembling cherry blossom, and straggling clumps of the prickly pear.
“And people live on these lonely farms,” Pamela said. “I wonder what their lives are like? Think of it, day after day—only this.”
“Fairly dull,” Dare commented. “But it’s extraordinary how little they regard it. I’ve stayed on some of these Karroo farms. It isn’t half bad.”
“As an experience, perhaps not... But to live there!”
“There are conditions,” he returned, “in which such isolation might be agreeable.”
“They would be quite extraordinary conditions,” she rejoined. “Most of those people are probably ordinary folk with ordinary feelings. I can’t imagine it myself. It appears to me depressingly monotonous. How tired they must grow of one another.”
He looked amused.
“It is possible to attain to that state of boredom even in big centres,” he argued.
“Well, yes, of course. But there are distractions. One isn’t so entirely dependent on one another.”
“That’s the strongest argument in favour of these cut off places,” he returned. “Such absolute dependence must develop qualities of kindliness and toleration which would encourage the companionable spirit. I don’t think it would irk me under the right conditions. The heart of the Karroo would be heaven with the right person to share one’s life.”
“I suppose any exile might be acceptable in that case,” Pamela said, gravely returning his look. “But I don’t fancy it happens often in life that the right people come together.”
“That is sometimes their own fault,” he answered quietly. He leaned suddenly towards her, and took and held her hand. “We are in a fair way to commit that blunder, Pamela. We are stumbling forward, following blindly the leading of a blind fate, and cutting the ground behind us, closing every retreat. I’m gripped with a conviction at times that we are acting foolishly,—that afterwards we shall regret.”
“Regret!” she echoed a little bitterly. “Life is one long regret.”
“It is in our own hands,” he said. “The choice is always ours.”
“No,” she said, “no!”
She drew her hand gently from his and turned her face aside quickly, afraid to meet the love in his eyes, afraid of the earnest persuasion of his manner as he presented their case anew for her consideration. It was hard to withstand him. But free choice, she realised, was the one thing which was not permitted them; for her it was not a question of choice at all; it was a matter of controlled and unquestionable necessity. If she turned back now it would be to own herself beaten at every point along the road of life. That would insure regret also—more than regret. A shameful consciousness of failure would stultify any satisfaction that love would bring them; and in watching her children grow up about her she would be reminded continually of how completely she had failed in her duty to them. They would be to her always a lasting reproach.
“You are bent on making a hard business of life,” he said.
His voice held a dissatisfied ring; his eyes, as they rested on her half-averted face, wore a look of baffled perplexity. It had not been his intention to make this further appeal; he was vexed with himself for troubling her; but at the moment he could not have kept the words back.
“Whatever course I took the path would be difficult,” she answered, “because I took the wrong step years ago. One can’t go back, you see, and start again. One has to make the best of one’s mistakes. That’s why we are parting now, dear,—you and I. There isn’t any choice in it at all.”
He moved to her side of the compartment and sat down close to her.
“I’ve got to submit to your ruling,” he said; “I know that... And I’m doing it, doing it with an ill grace, perhaps; but you can’t expect too much. There’s just one little ray of comfort left me, Pamela... Shall I tell you what that is?”
She slipped a hand into his.
“Tell me,” she said softly.
“It’s that I have a presentiment at the back of my mind that one day in the future—how far off or how near, I cannot say—we shall come together—be together always. I don’t feel that we are parting. We aren’t parting—not finally. This is an ugly phase in our intercourse—a rude breaking away of vital things that entails a certain loss—temporary loss. Afterwards we shall meet again, farther along the journey. Then we’ll finish the journey together.”
She made no answer. She turned to him in silence, and drew his face to hers and kissed him with grave tenderness upon the mouth. After that they did not talk again for some considerable time.