Needless to say, Pat Temple was neither a blood-stained general nor a mining adventurer. He made his income honestly enough out of a cold-storage plant, and though indirectly he dealt with corpses, they were legitimate corpses of beef and mutton. This was hard on Loraine Loree (as her mother had romantically named her after Kingsley’s poem), with her secret thirst for glamour and glory and strange jewels. But husbands often know nothing of their wives’ secret thirsts. Pat Temple knew that he had found the girl he wanted growing like a flower in a Channel Island garden—a “Jersey lily,” with French blood in her veins—and that was enough for him. He meant to get her the best the world can give before he had finished, but he never mentioned his intentions. At the moment, he was up North trying to persuade Rhodesians to install cold-storage plants in all their big towns. That was why Loree was alone in the luxurious Kimberley hotel. He had told her it was better for her to keep cool and comfortable there than be bucketing about all over Rhodesia.
So there she sat in her black gown, reflecting and drawing the string of little pearls softly back and forth across her fresh lips. The difference between real pearls and false is that you can play with the real ones in this manner or twist them perpetually between your fingers; artificial ones should be more discreetly used and are best worn unassumingly under chiffon or only allowed to peep with modesty from the V of your gown.
Loree had always adored jewels, but never owned any until she married. This string of three hundred and sixty-five little pearls, one for each day in the year, was more precious to her than bread. Which was only right, for its purchase had made a considerable dent in Pat’s capital (though he had never mentioned that, either). She also had two rather fine single pearls in her ears, and some pearl rings. For a dealer in carcasses, Pat Temple’s taste in jewellery was curiously eclectic. She had never possessed a diamond. Nor had she particularly wished to do so, though, like most women, she sometimes lingered to gaze at a display of them in a shop window, wondering if they would become her. But it was only since she came to Kimberley that the romance of them had taken hold of her imagination. It was seeing “the biggest hole in the world” that started it. She had gone by herself, and gazed, long into the vast excavation delved by the hands of men in the search for those strange little cadres of imprisoned light, each with a mysterious past behind it and an almost eternal future before it. She wondered what became of diamonds. They seem indestructible, yet where were all the millions of them that had been taken from this one great hole alone—that, down there, out of the light, were still being dug and groped and sweated for?
And it was all for women! That gave her a thrill she had never felt before. Men slaved and wore out their lives and were killed down there, so that women might wear diamonds. Those little sparkling stones were tokens of love between men and women—imperishable counters of passion!
It began to stir her uneasily from that moment to think she had never possessed a diamond. Why had Pat only given her tristful white pearls? Perhaps she was missing something. Perhaps the great things of life were passing her by.
Her eyes wandered round the dining-room. There were not many women, but every one of them had a glimmer of light somewhere—in her ears, at the bosom, or on her fingers. One woman, who, like Loree, was dining alone, wore a single stone slung round her neck on an almost invisible chain, and at every movement it sent long pin-rays of light darting across the room to where Loree sat. Every time a ray reached her, it seemed to give her a prick, increasing her uneasy sense that she was missing something in life. There seemed a magical power in the thing. She determined that after dinner she would, speak to the wearer and examine the jewel more closely.
The lady was a Mrs Cork, a dark woman who did her hair in a classical knot at the back of her head and looked as if she had a past. She was a widow from Johannesburg, not beautiful, but the kind of woman who would be looked at in a room before all the pretty women. Her brilliant, weary eyes wore an expression of having seen everything in the world worth seeing, and finding that nothing was worth having. Loree admired and intensely envied her air of “having lived,” and the cynical flavour of her speech. They had already exchanged smiles and fragments of conversation when meeting in the lounge and drawing-room, and Mrs Cork had told her that she was in Kimberley to consult a noted pedicurist about some trouble with her left foot.
Another person who interested Mrs Temple now entered the dining-room and sat down at a table a few yards away, with his chair so placed that there was nothing between him and an uninterrupted view of Loree except the little delicately shaded electric lamp. Very unobtrusively, he moved the light slightly aside. Immediately Loree experienced the same odd pricking in her blood as the rays of the diamond seemed to cause her. Only, she no longer felt that she was missing something, or that life was passing her by on the other side.
For three days he had deliberately courted her with a pair of fine, golden-brown eyes that contained melancholy, power, a whimsical reflective expression, and a whole world of admiration for Loree Temple. He was a dark, gracefully-built man with thick dark hair brushed back smoothly on his well-shaped head. Everything about him was right, from his hair to his shoes. He was the kind of man who could not make any mistake about dress, and gave distinction to anything he wore. His name was Quelch, and Loree was aware that he was a power in the hotel and in Kimberley.
The first day at lunch, when the heat was sizzling outside among the fernlike leaves of the pepper-trees and coming through the windows in almost visible waves—Mrs Temple’s red head had drooped rather like a poppy overtired by the sun, and she had fanned herself a little wearily with the menu-card. A low-spoken word at Quelch’s table and a shade of the outside verandah was moved by swift hands so that it darkened the window behind her without shutting off the air. A moment later, a huge block of ice standing in a deep tray of greenery miraculously appeared on the window-sill, and a fan daintily composed of lace and ivory lay at her elbow. In the evening, she found that beside her table a wooden tree had sprung up through the floor and blossomed into an electric fan whose zephyrs were for her exclusive refreshment. There were lovely flowers everywhere, but a silver bowl of deep-red roses distinguished her table from the others. There are some things you know for certain without knowing them for sure, as the saying is. Without any evidence, Loree was aware of Quelch’s responsibility for these delicate miracles. He was a power. He spoke, and things happened.