“I don't see much opening,” she answered. “If you ask my advice, I should say there is only one thing to be done in Rhodesia just now—turn farmer.”
“It IS done,” I answered, with my usual impetuosity. “Since YOU say the word, I am a farmer already. I feel an interest in oats that is simply absorbing. What steps ought I to take first in my present condition?”
She looked at me, all brown with the dust of my long ride. “I would suggest,” she said slowly, “a good wash, and some dinner.”
“Hilda,” I cried, surveying my boots, or what was visible of them, “that is REALLY clever of you. A wash and some dinner! So practical, so timely! The very thing! I will see to it.”
Before night fell, I had arranged everything. I was to buy the next farm from the owner of the one where Hilda lodged; I was also to learn the rudiments of South African agriculture from him for a valuable consideration; and I was to lodge in his house while my own was building. He gave me his views on the cultivation of oats. He gave them at some length—more length than perspicuity. I knew nothing about oats, save that they were employed in the manufacture of porridge—which I detest; but I was to be near Hilda once more, and I was prepared to undertake the superintendence of the oat from its birth to its reaping if only I might be allowed to live so close to Hilda.
The farmer and his wife were Boers, but they spoke English. Mr. Jan Willem Klaas himself was a fine specimen of the breed—tall, erect, broad-shouldered, and genial. Mrs. Klaas, his wife, was mainly suggestive, in mind and person, of suet-pudding. There was one prattling little girl of three years old, by name Sannie, a most engaging child; and also a chubby baby.
“You are betrothed, of course?” Mrs. Klaas said to Hilda before me, with the curious tactlessness of her race, when we made our first arrangement.
Hilda's face flushed. “No; we are nothing to one another,” she answered—which was only true formally. “Dr. Cumberledge had a post at the same hospital in London where I was a nurse; and he thought he would like to try Rhodesia. That is all.”
Mrs. Klaas gazed from one to other of us suspiciously. “You English are strange!” she answered, with a complacent little shrug. “But there—from Europe! Your ways, we know, are different.”
Hilda did not attempt to explain. It would have been impossible to make the good soul understand. Her horizon was so simple. She was a harmless housewife, given mostly to dyspepsia and the care of her little ones. Hilda had won her heart by unfeigned admiration for the chubby baby. To a mother, that covers a multitude of eccentricities, such as one expects to find in incomprehensible English. Mrs. Klaas put up with me because she liked Hilda.