Chapter Twenty Three.
Matheson dressed early for his meeting with Brenda, dressed with unusual care. A strange excitement held him. The renewal of this friendship meant more to him than its beginning had signified. He was proceeding towards his object with eyes open, proceeding deliberately with, he was aware, one ultimate end in view. His mind, despite its excitement, was quite steady of purpose. The complexities of life were resolving surely into a quite simple exposition of the human requirement. He had reached the stage when a man knows what it is he wants and is bent upon its attainment.
He met Brenda at the tramway. She wore a dark, rather shabby, coat and skirt, and she was manifestly shy. They climbed to the top of the tram, and for the first half-mile of the journey neither of them found much to say. The tram was fairly full, and the proximity of strangers made talking difficult for people who had nothing of a conventional nature to say to one another.
When they got down at the terminus he tucked her hand within his arm and started to walk quickly, drawing a long breath of relief when they left the tram lines and the remaining passengers behind and faced the sea.
“Time rolls back,” he said. “This is just like it was in the summer.”
“Yes,” she agreed; “only the satisfying warmth of summer has gone.”
There was something pathetic in her way of saying this; it was as though she lamented not only the summer’s geniality, but the satisfying warmth of their comradeship. He gripped her hand tightly, and looked down into the serious face.
“What have you been doing since I left you here—so jealously guarded? I thought I had lost you altogether. I wrote, but my letter came back to me.”
“Did you write?” Her eyes met his with a light of gladness in them. “I thought—that was only talk.”
“Did you?” His manner was faintly reproachful. “I had no idea you would leave Mrs Graham so soon, or I’d have written before.”
Brenda suddenly smiled.
“Neither had I,” she said. “It was not exactly voluntary.”
“You don’t mean,” he began quickly, and stopped, regarding her perplexedly. “I’ve wondered,” he added somewhat lamely after a pause, “since getting my letter back, whether you had any trouble that night? It wasn’t, I hope, in any way due to our intercourse that you lost your post?”
She laughed, and he thought her mirth the sweetest and most infectious he had ever heard. He laughed with her.
“Oh Lord!” he said. “Don’t tell me it was that.”
“Mrs Graham waited up for me,” she confessed, “and the others got back first and admitted I hadn’t gone with them. She was—oh! so angry... There was a man who boarded there who was sorry for me; and he secured me my present position at the café. It helped at the time, but of course it’s a step down.”
“It’s a drop, yes,” he admitted. “I’m awfully sorry. You must climb again. Life is always; climbing.”
“It is easier to drop a step than to climb one,” she returned.
“That isn’t your philosophy really,” he insisted. “I know you have encouraged me in believing that the greater the difficulty the more exhilarating and better worth the effort is its surmounting. It’s up to you to practise what you preach.”
“Ah!” she said, and her voice sounded a little weary. “I must have been a horrid little prig when I talked to you like that.”
“You were never priggish,” he asserted. “But you keep a man up to the mark.”
They walked on for a while in silence, and still in silence made their way down to the shore, scrambling with difficulty over the slippery rocks. When they came upon a stretch of sand he called a halt. They seated themselves close together on the sand, and he took his coat and put it about both their shoulders.
“The nights turn in chilly,” he said. “Do you remember how hot it was when we sat here before?”
“Yes,” she replied, and drew closer to him. “Everything seems changed,” she said,—“even you—you, perhaps, most of all.”
“I know I am changed,” he allowed. “I’ve been through a good deal since I saw you...”
He could not, he discovered, tell her then the nature of the thing which had changed him. He had meant to, but when he tried to express himself he could not find the words.
“I’ve been through a good deal,” he repeated. He played with the cold damp sand, and his manner became more aloof, less intimate and confidential. “Life changes most of us.”
“Because life hurts,” she said.
He looked at her closely, recalling the bright girlishness of her when last they had talked together.
“You are depressed,” he said. “I am inclined to believe that becoming a Puritan doesn’t agree with you.”
She laughed a little tonelessly, and expressed the wish that she had been born a man.
“A man in my position wouldn’t be serving in a café,” she explained. “If I had a profession I would work at it, and not grumble.”
And then he made a clumsy remark which immediately on its utterance he would have recalled, had that been possible.
“You will have a home of your own some day. That’s a woman’s rightful profession.”
He felt her withdraw from him, and in the dragging silence that followed he realised his mistake. How could he tell what jangling chord his clumsy touch had set vibrating? Misfortune had played so busy a part in her life that love had had little chance.
“Where are you staying?” he asked presently—“with whom?”
“My mother came back to Cape Town to be with me,” she said. “We board in a little house not far from the Gardens.”
“Do you think I might come to see you there?” he asked.
“Of course. Mother would like to meet you. She knows all about you.”
She hesitated, and then said with some embarrassment:
“Before you call I ought perhaps to tell you more about ourselves...”
“That isn’t necessary,” he answered quickly. “I know as much as suffices. Nothing could alter my regard for yourself anyway. I hope you believe that?”
“You are very generous,” she answered, in so low and grateful a voice that he felt he wanted to comfort her in some more practical way than by mere words. Instead he said quietly:
“I think you are a brave, dear little soul. Your friendship is an immense help to me. It’s the best thing that has happened to me. I’ve been back in Cape Town three months now, and I’ve come out here alone and thought about our jolly walks and missed you more than I can say. It was good to find you unexpectedly like that to-day.”
Brenda glanced at him swiftly.
“You came into the café last week,” she said, “and stood close to me. I could have touched you.”
“Really?” he exclaimed in amaze. “Why in the name of mystery didn’t you speak to me?”
“I wasn’t sure you would be pleased. I thought—perhaps you didn’t wish to see me.”
“Oh Lord!” he cried, and laughed. “You—Puritan, you! As though I could be anything but pleased to see you anywhere. I don’t know how I came not to see you... But I’m eyes right generally with all those girls around. If you hadn’t returned my change—”
“Your tip,” she corrected.
“My tip, then.” He laughed again light-heartedly.—“I doubt I’d have noticed you at all. What made you do it?”
“I don’t know. It was quite a handsome tip for a café. But I could not take it—from you.”
She did not add that besides her reluctance to take his tip, she had desired to make him recognise her—had wanted to prove to her own satisfaction whether his former omission was intentional or merely the accident he now assured her it had been. She had believed it to be accidental, but at the back of her mind there had lingered a doubt; and the doubt hurt.
“I don’t want you to take tips from any one,” he said. “Promise me... I don’t like the thought of your being offered tips. I don’t like to think of your serving people. It’s ridiculous, perhaps, but I would rather you were still in attendance on that immoral old woman. She was an immoral old woman. I’d like to tell her how her conduct strikes an outsider.”
“I prefer the café,” Brenda said. “At least, there’s a mental freedom. Often I am tired, and frequently I am annoyed; but there’s a sort of liberty... After all, liberty is the best thing in life. And it’s good to get home at night-time,” she added on a softened note.
Home consisted of one room, but in that room her mother waited for her, and that meant everything.
“On the whole,” he said lightly, “you’re a lucky person. I get off at night, but I can’t get home. There’s the ocean between me and all the home I ever knew.”
He described his home to her briefly, and his parentless childhood.
“One day I hope to make a home of my own,” he finished reflectively, and after a brief pause proceeded to unburden himself of his ambitions to her in much the same words as he had confided them to Macfarlane. Then, drawing on his imagination, he enlarged and elaborated his schemes, almost forgetting his audience in the pleasure of thinking out and developing his views of life, evolved in the first instance from Nel’s opinions.
She listened in an attentive silence, which she did not break when he ceased talking. For the life of her she could find nothing to say. It sounded so coldblooded this deliberate purpose of marriage for certain ends, with a definite idea of colonisation, and no thought, it seemed to her, of love or the needs of the girl he would single out for his purpose. She felt the keen breath of disappointment chilling her liking for him.
“You don’t say anything,” he observed, slightly aggrieved. “I don’t believe you are the least interested. You don’t enter into the spirit of Empire building.”
She was looking away, seaward, and the moonlight, falling upon her face, lent it a strange pallor, and revealed the soft roundness of its outline and the shadowed mystery of her eyes. Quietly, and very deliberately she turned her face towards him, and he noticed when she moved the quick, nervous beat of a tiny pulse in the bare white throat, and the faint, half-wistful smile that curved the parted lips.
“Oh, Empire building!” she said indifferently. “What of the human need? ... Isn’t that more important? You are overlooking that, and yet it’s the most important thing of all. I don’t think so much of the Empire. Of course I’m patriotic; but the human need comes first.”
He did not answer immediately. He looked into her eyes, puzzled and disquieted, and reflected a while. The patriotism that Honor had stirred into active being was questioned and opposed by this other girl’s quiet insistence on the claim of the individual. Was he in danger of developing into a bloodless idealist, with a limited understanding of the requirement both of the individual and of the State?
So many emotions had held him of late for a space, so many thoughts had filtered through his brain and left their conflicting impressions there, that a certain confusion held possession of his mind. All the old warm impulses were subdued and dulled, and he had nothing in the place of them that was as good as the emotions he repressed. He realised that now. Something—something enveloping, stultifying and bewildering the understanding—dropped away from his soul, as a leaf drops from the tree which no longer nourishes it. He saw clearly how surely, through disappointment, he was drifting towards a hard callousness that would end inevitably in all the kindly human sensibilities becoming submerged therein and ultimately lost. He did not want that to happen. And yet he felt that he had no power to stay this drifting. The warm, generous youth of him was running back, as the sap runs back in the bark; and he was no more able to prevent this than the tree to stay the processes of nature. He had believed that he had discovered the purpose of life: now he was beginning to realise that he had discovered nothing, only lost something of worth, which he might never recover.
“It’s odd,” he remarked, “how you set me thinking. I never met any one who challenged thought as you do. I believed I was on the right tack, and you immediately point out that I’ve got my values wrong. It’s like having one’s sums crossed out on the slate when one fancied the answers were correct. There’s a baffling sort of feeling about it. And you’re right, that’s the worst of it.”
“It’s only your values that are wrong,” she said quietly. “If you readjust those, then the idea is fine enough.”
In confiding his plans to her he had intended to prepare her for the proposal of marriage he had in contemplation, and to accustom her to the idea of marriage with a man who could never be a lover. He did not know whether she divined his purpose, but he apprehended very clearly that she would not be satisfied with that.