"Oh—going yachting," she retorted.
He sniffed and nodded. "I 'm going to paint," he announced. "So long."
Margaret smiled at his back as he went, and its extravagant slouch of indifference and ease. She knew he would not look round; once his mood was defined, it was reliable entirely; but she felt she would have forgiven him if he had. The last word in such a matter as this is always capable of expansion, and probably some such notion was in the mind of the oracle who first pronounced that to women the last word is dear.
He was still at his easel when she set forth to keep her appointment under the dam wall, working on his helpless canvas with an intensity that spared not a look as she went by on the parched grass below the stoep. It was a low easel, and he sat on a stool and spread his legs to each side of it, like a fighter crouched over an adversary, and his thumb was busy smudging among masses of pigment. Margaret could see the canvas as a faintly shining insurrection of colors which suggested that he had broken an egg upon it. A score of times in the past weeks those cryptic messes had irritated her or showed themselves as a weakness in their author. The domineering thumb and the shock tactics of the palette knife had supplied her with themes for ridicule, and the fact that the creature could not paint and yet would paint and refused all instruction had put the seal of bitterness on many a day of weary irritation. But suddenly his incompetence and his industry, and even the unlovely fruit of their union—the canvases that he signed large with his name and hung unframed upon the walls of his room—were endearing; they were laughable only as a little child is laughable, things to smile at and to prize.
Her smiling and thoughtful mood went with her across the grass and dust and around the curved shoulder of the dam wall, where Kamis, obedient to Paul's signal, sat in the shade and awaited her. At her coming he sprang up eagerly with his face alight. His tweed clothes were, if anything, shabbier than before, but it seemed that no usage could subdue them to congruity with the broad black face and its liberal smile.
"This is great luck," he said. "I half expected you 'd find it too hot for you. Are you all right again after that night?"
Margaret seated herself on the slope of the wall and rested with one elbow on the freshness of its water-fed grass.
"Quite all right," she assured him. "Dr. Jakes has done everything that needed to be done. But I didn't thank you half enough for what you did."
He smiled and murmured deprecatingly and found himself a place to sit on at the foot of the wall, with legs crossed and his back to the sun. Leaning forward a little in this posture, with his drooping hat-brim shadowing him, it was almost possible for Margaret to avoid seeing the blunt negro features for which she had come to feel something akin to dread; they affected her in the same way that darkness with people moving in it will affect some children.
"I saw Paul's signal," said Kamis. "We have an understanding, you know. He hangs a handkerchief in his window when he wants me and when you want me he hangs two. It shows as far as one can see the window; all the others are just black squares, and his has a white dash in it. That 's rather how I see Paul, you know. Other people are just blanks, but he means something—to me, at any rate. By the way, before I forget—did you want me for anything in particular?"