"It is better to sleep on the stoep at night," Ghostie recommended.
"We all do."
Before the afternoon April had settled down among them as if she had lived there always. Sarle and his kisses seemed like a lost dream; the menace of Kenna was forgotten. For the first time in her existence she let herself drift with the tide, taking no thought for the morrow nor the ultimate port at which her boat would "swing to." It was lotus-eating in a sense, yet none of the dwellers at Ho-la-lé-la idled. It is true that Ghostie and belle Helène were crocks, but they worked at the business of repairing their bodies to tackle the battle of life once more. April soon discovered that they were only two of the many of Clive's comrades who came broken to the farm and went away healed. Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of her mothering.
She herself never stopped working, and her body was hard as iron from long discipline. She rose in the dawn to work on her lands, hoeing, digging her orchards, and tending her cattle in company with her coloured labourers. It was only at odd moments or during the heat of the day that she painted, and all the money she made with paint was swallowed up by the farm, which did not pay, but which was the very core of her heart.
Impossible for April to be in such company and not work too, even if her thoughts had not demanded occupation. So, first she mended the clothes of everybody, including Meekie's ragged piccanins; then she went to the Paarl, bought a pot of green paint, and spent days of sheer forgetfulness smartening up the rusty paraffin tins and barrels, and all the bleared and blistered shutters and doors and sills of the farm, that had not known paint for many years.
At mid-day they bathed in a tree-shaded pool that had formed in the bed of a stream running across the farm. They had no bathing frocks but their skins, and sometimes Clive, sitting stark on the bank, palette in hand, painted the others as they tumbled in the dark brown water, sporting and splashing like a lot of schoolboys. Afterwards they would mooch home through the shimmering noontide heat, deliciously tired, wrapped in reflection and their towels. Ghostie provided a perpetual jest by wearing a smart Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of visitors at Ho-la-lé-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of "Diana," they did so without comment, accepting her as one of themselves, and asking no questions about England, the voyage, or the Cape. The scandalous tragedy of the April Fool had never reached them, and if it had they would have taken little interest except to be sorry for the girl.
In the evenings when work was put away Clive played to them on the 'cello.
"I was determined to have music in my life," she told April. "And as you can't lug a piano and musician all over the shop with you, I saw no way of getting it but to darn well teach myself."
And very well she had done it, though why she had chosen a 'cello, which also needed some lugging, no one knew but herself. Sitting with it between her heavy boots and breeched legs, the eternal cigarette drooping from her mouth, she looked more than ever like Galahad, her blue austere gaze seeming to search beyond the noble mountain tops of her own pictures for some Holy Grail she would never find. No complicated music was hers, just grand, simple things like Handel's "Largo," Van Biene's "Broken Melody," "Ave Maria," or some of Squire's sweet airs.
Sometimes at night they went out and climbed upon a huge rock that stood in the apricot orchard. It was big enough to build a house on, and called by Clive her Counsel Rock, because there she took counsel with the stars when things went wrong with the farm. Lying flat on their backs they could feel the warmth of the day still in the stone as they gazed at the purple and silver panoply of heaven spread above them, and Clive would commune with blue-rayed Sirius and his dark companion; the Gemini, those radiant twins; Orion's belt in the centre sky preciously gemmed with celestial diamonds; Canopus, a calm, pale yellow star, the largest in our universe; Mars, gleaming red as a madman's eye; Venus springing from the horizon, the Pleiades slinking below it. The "galloping star" she claimed as her own on account of its presumed horsiness.
"It's a funny thing," she said. "My mother and father were gentle, bookish creatures with no understanding of animals. Even if a pony had to be bought for us children, every male thing of the family—uncles, nephews, tenth cousins—was summoned from every corner of England for his advice and experience. Yet these unsophisticated beings have a daughter like me—born into the world a full-blown horse-dealer! To say nothing of mules. You can believe me or believe me not," she added bragfully, "but there is no one in this land of swindles who knows more about mules than I do."