Time and space in which to think, lying there behind the bolted door, battered mud walls about her, bulging thatch overhead full of fat black spiders that sat immovable as Fate in their lairs. And her thoughts were of the long, long kind, though there was little of youth in them. She was so silent that the flies pretended to believe her dead and descended upon her in black battalions. The struggle to keep them off made the whole business just a little more sordid, and roused in her a kind of sullen fury against Africa and all that in it was.
“I must get out of it,” she muttered to herself. “It is driving me mad. I must have been mad to let that man kiss me—a common oaf who talks Dutch in that horrible throaty way—a sort of Boer—how dared he!”
She tried to remember his face as it had revolted her the night before, suffused with blood and swollen, but she could only remember the keen, quiet eyes full of light and distance, and how they had darkened when he looked at her, and how they had measured up Roper, and how her heart had leaped in her breast at the sound of the first blow.
“I am mad,” she reiterated wearily, and covered her eyes. “This miserable country has driven me mad!”
At sundown the next day, the woman brought a parcel and the news that a cart had come and would be ready to start again at dawn. The parcel contained a man’s mackintosh, a dark blue coat and skirt of simple not to say skimpy design, a white blouse, and sailor hat. She shook out the Philistine garments carefully as if she thought a scorpion—or a note—might be hidden among them. But no sign of either.
“Tant mieux!” she said at last, and discarded the rush hat and tattered shirt almost violently as if with them she hoped to throw off the last trace of her veld madness.
Wrapped in the mackintosh she slipped out to the waiting cart in the dimness of the dawn, and started on the last lap of the journey that was originally to have taken her ten days, but had already extended to six weeks! Only when the lights of Buluwayo gleamed before her at last could she really believe the end had come.
Within a week, civilisation had its grip on her once more, and she was her cynical self with the nut of bitter dust back in her breast.
The opening up of the country had brought a fashionable English crowd to Buluwayo, among them many people that she knew and had special feuds with. One of the latter was Lady Angela Vinning, a woman with a good figure, beautiful, pleading green eyes, and thumbs down on every other woman except those who for the moment happened to fit into her schemes. She and Vivienne were staying at the same hotel, and exchanged polite greetings and glances of disdain every morning. Vivienne despised her for what she was: false, unscrupulous, and mean-souled. She detested Vivienne for being fifteen years younger than herself, and that is the most poignant of all the feminine hatreds.