Chapter Eleven.
When he went to his room that night Matheson was in too great a state of excitement to sleep. For some time he made no show of seeking the enveloping couch prepared for him by Honor’s capable hands, but remained at the open window looking out at the dark quiet beauty of the night, less in contemplation of the scene that stretched its uncertain outline to the far horizon than in a retrospective reverie, during which not only all that the Dutch girl had said, but all the concentrated bitterness of voice and expression, came back to him with the disconcerting effect of a blow which he could neither avoid nor return.
She had struck at him deliberately with intent to wound, and she had succeeded in that, and something more—she had succeeded in interesting him enormously.
In any circumstances he would have admired her; but it was something deeper than admiration she awoke in him, something more vital in quality, something which gripped and disquieted and provoked surprisingly, seeming part of the fierce passionate nature of the country, part of its unrestraint, its intensity, its rugged honesty. No woman had ever roused in him emotions so profound.
He was immeasurably perplexed and perturbed, and extraordinarily curious. One thing seemed fairly certain as an outcome of this visit to Benauwdheidfontein with its altogether unforeseen results; he would not leave this farm on the Karroo, to which he had journeyed against his inclination on an errand of doubtful honesty, unchanged by his experiences. He felt while he stood at the window and considered these things that his whole outlook on life was altering, and in the transition stage was altogether out of focus. Odd that in a few hours a man’s view of life should change.
He turned away from the window and undressed slowly and climbed into bed, where he lay fretting in uneasy wakefulness on his mountain of feathers.
Before the rising of the sun he was up and dressed and waiting on the stoep for Honor Krige. She came out and joined him with the first flushing of the sky, the sudden brightening and deepening of the colours in the east came swiftly and noiselessly, so that she was close beside him before the sound of the light footfall on the concrete floor apprised him of her approach. He brought his head round sharply and surveyed her with critical, curious eyes, eyes which held a flash of reawakened interest in them as they rested in a close scrutiny upon her face, shaded by a white sun-helmet. She wore a riding-skirt, and carried a whip in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other.
“I thought you would prefer to take this out here,” she said, and gave the cup into his hand.
“Thank you.” He greeted her formally when he had relieved her of the cup. “You are riding?” he said.
“Yes. We always ride on the veld.” She beat her skirt softly with the whip, and looked up at him with a faint smile. “You are early. I hope you slept well?”
“I scarcely slept at all,” he answered. “I was thinking... You set me thinking. I believe you intended that.”
Without denying this, she answered, looking away from him:
“At least I did not wish to spoil your rest.”
He stood sipping his coffee and regarding her the while. He decided that hers was the most beautiful face he had ever beheld; no pictured face that he could recall surpassed it, and among living faces it was more flawless than any he had seen.
“I’ll make up for that to-night,” he returned. “I don’t believe even an uneasy conscience could rob me of sleep two nights in succession.”
He finished the coffee, and carried the empty cup inside and put it down on the round oak table in the living-room. Honor made no effort to prevent him. She looked after him without moving, and remained silent until he returned and confronted her with an inquiring lift of the brows.
“Suppose I couldn’t ride?” he asked.
She evinced surprise. Not ride! Every man rode.
“You do,” she asserted.
“As luck has it... but there are plenty of quite respectable persons in England who don’t,” he informed her. “Getting on and off busses in motion is a more useful accomplishment with us. To each country its own customs! Do we start now?”
“Yes; we will walk across to the stables.” She flashed a smile at him. “I am afraid we will have to saddle our own horses; there won’t be any one about so early as this.”
The business of getting the horses out took time. The sun was above the horizon when Matheson led them into the open, followed by Honor, who had done her share of the work. He held his hand for her, and assisted her to the saddle. Then he mounted himself. Honor sat quietly, with her face turned, and watched the performance. She had not expected him to be clumsy; his size and weight notwithstanding, he conveyed the impression that whatever he did he would do well. At least, she reflected, when, having gained the saddle, he brought his horse abreast of hers, his seat was good.
“Which direction do we take?” he asked.
She lifted a hand and pointed with her whip to some flat-topped hills far away, but standing out in the clear dry atmosphere, sharply defined against the blue cloudless sky like hills seen through a powerful glass.
“We will ride to the south,” she said, “towards the tafel-kopjes yonder.”
He looked down into her eyes.
“And there we shall find the beauty and the charm you promised?”
Honor returned his gaze with grave composure.
“That depends on yourself,” she answered. “All this,” and she indicated the wide and arid landscape, which, with the night dews still lingering on its gaping surfaces and sapless vegetation, sparkled in the early sunshine with a glitter as of silver and gems, “appeals to people differently. Some see in it beauty, and others only barrenness—but always it is impressive. It hurts or it pleases, according to the mood.”
“But you believe I shall see its beauty,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” she answered; “I believe that—otherwise, I would not have suggested your coming.”
They rode in silence for a while. Momentarily the sun gained power; the freshness of the early day yielded to its burning ardour, was caught up and enveloped in its heated embrace; the dew on the scant vegetation sparkled a moment and the next was absorbed; and the hot yellow stones basking in its rays revealed unexpected streaks of colour and fanciful patterns and quaint veinings, as they caught the refracted rays, and transmitted them, and gave back some of their assimilated heat into the shimmering air.
The soil became more sandy the farther they rode, and more arid; wide bare patches of sand appeared, and again other patches sparsely covered with dry brown scrub. An occasional ostrich, suggestive of farms in the neighbourhood, wandered over the sunbaked ground, and pecked at the little stones. Here was Africa—the real Africa—untamed, barbaric, fiercely splendid, and cruel in its callous disregard of life.
Matheson’s gaze travelled over the scene, travelled to the distant hills, and rested there. A dark shadow like a black stain lay upon the hillside, the curious effect of some unseen cloud. In his imagination it seemed a significant, even a sinister, shadow. He watched it for a time, but it moved so slowly that it did not appear to move at all, but to be in reality a black stain on the face of the land. He removed his gaze, and when later he looked again the shadow had passed.
“This is the real thing,” he said—“the key to Africa. The Karroo is the small sister of the Sahara.”
Suddenly, moved by some unaccountable emotion, he turned towards her swiftly.
“How can you endure living here?” he asked. “The loneliness... Heavens! the loneliness... It suggests a world in the making. The beauty! ... Yes, I acknowledge the beauty, the terrible beauty of it. But—how often do you see a human face besides your own?”
She broke into a quiet laugh.
“Not often. But then, we are busy; we don’t trouble about such things. The blood of the old Voortrekkers runs in our veins. At least there is freedom here.”
“Gods! I should say so,” he responded, and fell to contemplating once more the sameness of those leagues upon leagues of interminable, sun-scorched veld, with its dried-up water-courses, its gaping fissures, and scrubby blackened bush, among which at long intervals pushed the smooth green fingers of the milkbush, and the stunted, gnarled trunks of the butterbloem, yellow as though smeared with sulphur, with bell-shaped flowers blooming on long blood-red stems. Boulders of iron-stone broke the sameness, and an occasional hill, rounded or peaked, not rising gradually but seeming to have been dumped down there, or happened otherwise by accident.
Honor’s eyes rested dreamily upon the scene.
“You should see it after the rains fall,” she said. “It is wonderful then.”
“It is wonderful now,” he returned. “I have never beheld anything so extraordinarily moving and impressive.”
“But you don’t like it,” she said quickly.
“Oh, like! ... the term scarcely applies. I couldn’t live here... I’d be afraid to live here—not physically, of course. I mean it’s so immense, so unpeopled. The Karroo is jealous of life; it crushes it. I’d go down under the spell of it. I can imagine a man falling into the habit of talking aloud to himself here—for company.”
“One need not live alone,” she said.
“You love the solitudes,” he said, looking at her wonderingly.
“Yes; I suppose I do. I love the veld... It is my blood—that intense love of the land.”
Her eyes, looking out from the shade of her helmet, dwelt with intense appreciation upon the shimmering landscape. All the wonder and the beauty and the richness of the plain, which appeared now but a blackened waste, was known to her. To the unobservant gaze the scene might wear the semblance of an arid desert; but to one familiar with it through the different seasons the drought-stricken sterility which held the veld in a relentless, strangling grip was but the period of waiting when the land rested in expectation of the coming gift of life. With the rains the richness concealed in her dry bosom would spring forth and blossom prodigally, and the desert would be a garden, teeming with life.
“Love of the land!” she repeated softly. And added, after a moment: “Have you ever breathed air so good as this?—so light and clear and dry? There’s health in every breath of it. One could see to the ends of the earth through air so pure and clear. There is health here, and freedom.”
“It is a savage land,” he said suddenly—“but it grips. It is the savagery which gets hold of one. I feel I want to tame it.”
She laughed, and pointed upward where a vulture with great wings outspread flew heavily in the blue, sensing its prey.
“Could you tame the aasvogel,” she asked, “till it ceases to be a carrion bird and eats from your hand? Could you teach the jackal to respect the lamb?—or the snake to forget its venom? I would hate to see this land subdued.”
He smiled at her enthusiasm. There was something in herself which, if not exactly savage, was at least untamed, he reflected. Without thinking she had quickened her horse’s pace. Matheson rode faster to keep up with her.
“I have disappointed you,” he said.
“Oh, no!” she contradicted quickly. “It wasn’t to be expected that you would feel as we do about the veld... But you see deeper than many Englishmen. You will love the land yet.”
He made no answer to this. Had he put his thoughts into words, they would have claimed to love the land already. It was amazing how surely and firmly it had got a hold on his imagination. It was not only with his arrival at the farm, he told himself, that he had felt this extraordinary influence; but since he had come to Benfontein he had acquired a new sympathy with, and a deeper understanding of, the country. Honor Krige was teaching him that, and other things.
He had set forth that morning to behold the beauty and the charm of the veld; and, insensibly, while he gazed upon this sun-scorched sameness, the mystery and the beauty of it were revealed to him. The translucent air, quivering in the sunlight like some glad and living thing, was wondrously soft and stimulating; eye and brain cleared with its magic healing; the mind became surprisingly alert and receptive of new impressions. The sandy soil lost its aridity, and disclosed numberless unsuspected shining beauties; it glittered as with many gems, and revealed in places unexpected shades and colours, and curious, infinitesimal insect-life creeping and pushing upon its white surface. The dry sluits and water-courses, proclaiming moisture where it would appear that moisture was unknown; the cairns of yellow stones, piled high in rude and strange formation; the yellow and red of the butterbloem, crude intense colours in an intense atmosphere under the hard blue of the sky; the occasional oddly-shaped kopjes; the distant oasis of some lonely farm; each struck a separate note of beauty in this strange, uncivilised scene—a beauty that was fearful and fiercely assertive, that crushed the senses, that again attracted and held surely by the unfailing magnetism of elemental and sincere things. And over all the parched nakedness of the land the sun flung its golden radiance, a yellow flame that quivered through the hot air and pierced into the earth.
Matheson knew while his eyes lingered upon it all that he would in very truth love the land.
And then he turned his head suddenly and met Honor’s eyes. She was smiling softly, but she did not speak.