"More tea. It is lovely to be home again and have you waiting on me."
"Ah! I expect you liked it best abroad in that London, now Poppy?"
"Never. I thought I should, but I had forgotten that my roots were planted out here. As soon as I got out of sight of Africa they began to pull and hurt ... you've no idea of the feeling, Kykie ... it is terrible ... and it always came upon me worst in cities. I used to be sick with longing for a glimpse of the big open spaces with nothing in view but land and sky ... for the smell of the veldt, you know, when it is baking hot and the rain comes fizzling down on it; and the early morning wind, when it has blown across a thousand miles of sun-burnt grass and little stalky, stripy, veldt-flowers and stubby bushes, and smells of the big black patches on the hill-sides where the fires have been, and of the dorn bloems on the banks of the rivers ... and the oozy, muddy, reeking, rushing rivers! Oh Kykie, when I thought of Africa, in some prim blue-and-gold continental hotel, I felt like a caged tiger-cat, raging at the bars of the cage!... In Paris and London I couldn't bear to go to the big open parks for fear the sickness would come upon me.... It was like being a wild ass of the desert, knee-haltered in a walled-in garden."
Kykie might have been an amazingly-arrayed copper idol representing Africa, so benign and gratified was her smile.
"Tell me some more, Poppy. Where else did you think of Africa?"
"Well, Palermo nearly drove me wild. It has the same hot moist air as Natal, and the flowers have the same subtle scents. The big spotted mosquitoes bit like terriers and followed us as high as we could go; but I couldn't even hate them, Kykie, they were so like the wretches we have out here—there's been one biting my instep all the afternoon." She pulled up her foot, and began to rub the spot gently through her stocking.
"I think Norway was the worst of all. The men there have beards and the same calm eyes as the Boers, and the people are all simple and kind, just as they were on the farms in the Transvaal ... and sometimes on the top of a steep still hill I could close my eyes and pretend that I was on a wild mountain krantz and the hush of the waterfalls all round one was the hush of the tall veldt grasses waving in the wind.... But when I looked, and saw only the still green waters of the fjords and afar off a glacier thrust out between two hills like the claw of some great white monster ... oh Kykie, I could have torn the heart out of my breast and thrown it into the waters below."
"Heavenly me! And were there coloured people there too?"
"Not in Norway; but America is full of them, and I hate them for cheats and frauds ... for I was always listening and waiting to hear some Kaffir or Dutch word from their lips ... and they never spoke anything but mincing, drawling American, through their noses, like this, Kykie:
"'Oh say, would you tell me what time this kyar is due to start?'