Chapter Ten.
Charity Calls.
“To know anything about one’s self one must know all about others.”
The big main doors of the post-office were thrown open at an early hour of morning but the inmates of laager did not rise with the lark. They trickled forth at intervals, according to their use in life and the duties to be performed by them. When I came out on the verandah facing the barricades I found it strewn with the sleeping forms of men.
I stood for a moment looking at the landscape glowing and scintillating under the sparkling morning sunlight. Across the veldt a small body of horsemen came cantering towards the town; the men who had been out all night on picket duty.
I had slipped away from Mrs Marriott, for having long ago heard how sensitive she was about her tiny, barely-furnished hut, I did not want to cause her the embarrassment of offering to share it with me. I was looking at the mounting of one of the big guns and pondering the question of which hotel I should try, when Mrs Valetta swept past, her face coldly averted, and just the faintest suspicion of an intention to hold her skirt away from me. I flushed, then smiled disdainfully at the uplifted nose of Anna Cleeve who followed in her wake. Neither of them spoke a word. I had a childish inclination to whistle a time just to show them I didn’t care a button, but I conquered it, and started instead to pick my way through the wet grassy paths towards the Imperial Hotel—I had suddenly remembered that Hendricks had said the Imperial was kept by a woman.
Half-way across the township I was caught up by the doctor, and when I told him where I was bound for he very agreeably offered to escort me. But he peered at me curiously as if to know the reason of this odd departure. Arrived at the long, galvanised-iron building which glared and blinked in the morning sun, he left me in the verandah with the assurance that he would send Mrs Baynes out to me. A few minutes later I made the discovery that Mrs Baynes was the dropsical duchess with whom I had shared a staring acquaintance the night before. She immediately resumed her observations, but she was professionally civil and obsequious until she found that I wished to engage a room; her manner then underwent a series of rapid changes—from curiosity to amazement, to hauteur, to familiarity. She began to “my dear” me! I swallowed my indignation as best I might and assumed not to notice her impertinence, for I was beginning to fear that she would not take me in and there would be nothing for me but Swears’s.
“Aoah!” she said at last. (She had a peculiarly irritating way of pronouncing “oh!”) “Aoah! I thought you were staying with Mrs Valetta and all that swagger lot.”
She examined me intently from my hat to my shoes as though she had not done the same thing thoroughly the night before.
“Have you no rooms to let?” I repeated politely.