Wild Honey: Stories of South Africa

by Cynthia Stockley

Ah! what a two years! Instead of enjoying the brilliant peace of the land about her, she was thinking of them now, turning her eyes inward to memories that were poisoning her life. Two years of outward kow-towing to those who had once kow-towed to her, of being cut and ignored by people who when she was heiress to great estates and an ancient name would have petted and fawned upon her, had not the natural haughtiness of her nature rebuffed them. They remembered those rebuffs when the tide of her family’s prosperity turned, and the great law case that had dragged on wearily for many months came to an end with the verdict that disinherited her father and gave to an Australian cad all that Vivienne had been taught from her birth to consider irrefragably hers. Well had her haughtiness been remembered against her in that hour! It seemed as though all fashionable society had been poised expectant, stones and javelins in hand, waiting for the fall of the house of Giffard-Carlton. Sir Gerald, her gentle, chivalrous father, had not long survived the loss of his title and position, but Vivienne and her mother of the same spirit, proud and defiant in adversity, bore the brunt of society’s malignant glee with unbowed heads, contemptuously refusing the charity of the usurper, and the humiliating favours of so-called friends. They were obliged to step down from their high places, but they did it with dignity, and might with dignity have retired into obscurity and been forgotten by society, like many another before them, but for the fact that of all her gifts the only one Vivienne could turn to account was the gift of description and charming phrase which soon gave her a place and a living in the world of journalism. And in that connection she came into constant touch with the world of society. For she had been obliged of course to begin at the very beginning, penny-a-lining reports of balls and receptions, descriptions of weddings and the gowns of débutantes. It was at such work that so much that was wounding and embittering had come her way. Many a cruel insult had she been obliged to swallow for her guinea a column. Many an old score cherished by les nouveaux riches against the house of Giffard-Carlton had been paid into the account of the lady journalist! And the result of it all was a nature incalculably embittered and corroded. Though she was only twenty-two, Vivienne did not feel like a girl any longer, but she still looked like a girl, and a very charming one at that. The fact was one she meant to use as a weapon in her reprisals against a world that had mishandled her. Her gift of writing was a weapon that enabled her to beat a living for herself and her mother out of life, but her beauty was a far more potent one, and she meant to use it to the hilt as a means of getting back her own from society. This work she had come out to Africa to do for the Daily Flag—a series of articles descriptive of the life, inhabitants, and prospects of Cecil Rhodes’s country—would, she hoped, prove to be a means to a very special end. If her articles made a big hit she would not have to go back to describing ball gowns. But she did not mean to return to journalism at all if she could help it. There were plenty of millionaires in Africa—and she had plenty to give in exchange for the millions of one of them—youth, beauty, birth, breeding, an intimate knowledge of the social world! There was only one thing he must not ask of her, and that was a heart. She might be tempted to reveal to him what she carried instead—a husk with a little brown dust in it, like a rotten nut! To cry to him as Baudelaire cried in his bitterness:

“My heart?—the beasts have eaten it!”

She had little fear of being unable to gain her end. Many men had proposed to her since she became simple Miss Carlton, but none of them had been able to offer enough in exchange for the rotten nut. The man destined to receive that precious gift must be very rich indeed, must have enough to buy back what the world had robbed her of—place, and power to put her foot on the necks of those who had humiliated her. There were many such in Africa. Even during her short stay in Cape Town, she had met one who showed himself as heartily disposed as he was well-equipped to shoulder his side of the bargain. Only for a foolish and incomprehensible shrinking on her part at the last moment, she would now have been engaged to marry Wolfe Montague, one of Johannesberg’s great financial kings.

However! She was to see him again in a month or two in Rhodesia and doubtless by that time she would be rid of all foolish prejudices. This charming coach journey was one of the things that would help her to come to a propitious decision! At the thought, she gave a little cynical laugh that made her companions stare, wondering what she found in the scenery to amuse her.

Indeed, nothing less amusing than this journey could be imagined. Day after day of weary crawling across a landscape that changed unceasingly in outline, though never in detail. Always the undulating grassy slopes dotted with bush, the eternal kopje ahead, and the eternal kopje left behind. There was something terrible about the brooding loneliness, the eloquent stillness, the great unending sameness of it all.

They had been travelling for four nights and days and must continue for a good many more yet before the end was reached—sometimes putting up for a night at a rough wayside hotel, more often just outspanning beside a mule stable during the darkest hours and sleeping as best they could in the cramped cart, with rugs and mail-bags as a common couch. Vivienne had never imagined such physical discomfort possible, and though her body was too strong to suffer by it, her mind was sick, and her whole being revolted at the sordidness of it all. Sleeping side by side with strange men, and a common woman, wedged against them, listening to their snores! Wakening in the morning to the intimacy of their unkempt faces! Eating and drinking in their company, listening to their eternal talk!

Thank Heaven! to-night at least was to be spent at a hotel. Even the others who were seasoned coach-travellers congratulated themselves on that fact, not so much because there would be beds to sleep in, as because an obvious storm was brewing. The sunlight had gone suddenly, and black clouds, lined with pallid green, were grouping in the west, taking the form of a great monster with brooding wings. Now and then a quiver of lightning passed across the sky, and a large drop of rain splashed down into the coach.

On rounding a kopje, they came suddenly upon Palapye, the native village where the night was to be spent. It was the kraal of Khama, king of the Bechuana tribe—hundreds of straw thatched huts sprawling up a hill and across the plain!

Vivienne, since she left Pretoria, had seen many such “hotels” as the one by which the coach now drew up: a square wattle-and-daub affair with a number of smaller huts scattered around it. Painfully she clambered down, and with the others followed the worn woman who kept the place to one of these small huts which were the guest rooms. For once there were enough to go round, and no one was obliged to share. That was something to be thankful for in an odious world!

After she had washed some of the dust from her face and hands and removed a great deal more from her dark curly hair, which she wore boy-fashion—short, and parted on one side—Vivienne went and sat by her hut door to get a little air. The storm had not yet broken, and with the thermometer at anything over a hundred, the heat was almost unbearable. Immediately, she became aware of another woman, sitting in the doorway of a hut opposite—a stone-still woman, whose face, shadowed by a dark print sunbonnet was pallid as a bone, with sunken eyes staring absorbedly before her into nothingness. In the listless hands hanging over her knees, she held a child’s little torn shabby straw hat.