The noise of its bolts being shot home was the last sound the Kafir heard from the house. The wind that comes before the dawn touched him and he shivered. He turned up the collar of his coat and set off walking as briskly as his fatigue would allow.
CHAPTER XIV
The drawing-room of the Sanatorium was available until tea-time for the practice of correspondence. It offered for this purpose a small table with the complexion of mahogany and a leather top, upon which reposed an inkstand containing three pots, marked respectively in plain letters, "black," "red," and "copying," and a number of ancient pens. When a new arrival had overcome his wonder and consternation at the various features of the establishment, he usually signalized his acceptance of what lay before him by writing to Capetown for a fountain-pen. As old inhabitants of the Cape reveal themselves to the expert eye by carrying their tobacco loose in a side pocket of their coats, so the patient who had conceded Dr. Jakes' claims to indulgence was to be distinguished by the possession of a pen that made him independent of the establishment's supply and frequently by stains of ink upon his waistcoat in the region of the left-hand upper pocket, where custom has decided a man shall carry his fountain-pen.
Margaret had brought her unanswered letters to this privacy and her fountain-pen was busy in the undisturbed interval following the celebration of lunch. Hers was the common task of the exile in South Africa, to improvize laboriously letters to people at home who had plenty to see and do and no need of the post to inject spice into their varied lives. There was nothing to write about, nothing to relate; the heat of the sun, the emptiness of the veld, the grin of Fat Mary—each of her letters played over these worn themes. Yet unless they were written and sent, the indifferent folk to whom they were addressed would not write to her, and the weekly mail, with its excitements and its reminders, would fail her. No dweller in lands where the double knock of the postman comes many times in the day can know the thrill of the weekly mail, discharged from the steamship in Capetown and heralded in its progress up the line by telegrams that announce to the little dorps along the railway the hour of its coming. They have not waited with a patient, preoccupied throng in the lobby of the post-office where the numbered boxes are, and heard beyond the wooden partition the slam of the bags and the shuffle of the sorters, talking at their work about things remote from the mail. The Kafir mail-runners, with their skinny naked legs and their handfuls of smooth sticks know how those letters are awaited in the hamlets and farms far remote from the line, by sun-dried, tobacco-flavored men who are up before the dawn to receive them, by others whose letters are addressed to names they are not called by, and by Mrs. Jakes, full-dressed and already a little tired two hours before breakfast. All those letters are paid for by screeds that suck dry the brains of their writers, desperately searching over the chewed ends of penholders for suggestions on barren ground.
There was one letter which Margaret had set herself to compose that had a different purpose. There were not lacking signs that her position in Dr. Jakes' household would sooner or later become impossible, and it was desirable to clear the road for a retreat when no other road would be open to her. It was not only that Mrs. Jakes burned to be rid of her and had taken of late to dim hints of her desire in this respect, for Margaret was prepared, if she were forced to it, to find Mrs. Jakes' enmity amusing and treat it in that light. Such a course, she judged would paralyze Mrs. Jakes; in the face of laughter, the little woman was impotent. But there was also the prospect, daily growing nearer and more threatening, of an exposure which would show her ruthlessly forth as the friend and confidante of the Kafir, Kamis, the woman for whom Ford and Mr. Samson, had, in their own phrase, "no use." The hour when that exposure should be made loomed darkly ahead; nothing could avert its sinister advance upon her, nor lighten it of its quality of doom. She no longer invited her secret to make itself known. By degrees the warnings of Kamis, the threats of Boy Bailey, the malice of Mrs. Jakes, had struck their roots in her consciousness, and she was becoming acclimatized to the South-African spirit which threatens with vague penalties, not the less real for being vague, such transgressors as she of its one iron rule of life and conduct. When it should come upon her, she decided, she would summon her strength to accept it, and confront it serenely, in the manner of good breeding. But when that was done, she would have to go.
She was writing therefore to the legal uncle of Lincoln's Inn Fields, who controlled her affairs and manifested himself with sprightly letters and punctual cheques. He was an opinionative uncle, like most men who jest along the established lines of humor, but amenable to a reasonable submissiveness on the part of his ward and niece. He liked to be inflexible—good-naturedly inflexible, like an Olympian who condescends to earth, but he could be counted upon to repay an opportunity for a display of his inflexibility by liberal indulgence upon other points. Therefore Margaret, after consideration, commenced the serious part of her epistle to the heathen with a suggestion in regard to investments which she knew would rouse him. Then, in a following paragraph:
I am better than I was when I came out, but not better than I was a month ago, and I don't think I am improving as rapidly as Dr. David hoped. It may be that I am a little too far to the East of the Karoo. Was it you or somebody else who advised me to keep to the West?
"That 'll help to fetch him," murmured Margaret, as she wrote the last words.
Perhaps, later on, if Dr. Jakes thinks well of it, I might move to a place I hear of over in the West. I 'm letting you know now in plenty of time; but I don't want you to think there is anything seriously wrong. Please don't be at all anxious.
"Now something fluffy," pondered Margaret. "If I get it right, he 'll order me to go."