After listening for a few moments we moved quietly away and continued our course along the street. Soon we turned again to the right, and afterwards to the left. Eventually we found that we had lost ourselves. We wandered about helplessly for some time, getting into blind alleys and streets that led nowhere, and thus having to retrace our steps over and over again. Quarter by quarter the hour was chimed from the belfry tower of the far-away Dutch church, and when ten o’clock struck, and we were still lost, the situation looked serious for us who required to catch the train in half-an-hour.
Just after this, however, we found ourselves in the street where we had listened to the wailing, and soon the rumbling of an approaching cab was heard. After being hailed, the driver, an Irishman of even more than average volubility, swore with fervour that his cab had never, since it was turned out with its first coat of varnish from the very best workshop in the whole of South Africa, had a “dirty Malay” sitting across its axle (it was from Malays that the infection was mostly dreaded); that the vehicle was known throughout the length and breadth of Cape Town as “the white man’s cab”; that if we weren’t too proud to take a look at the panel, we would find the cab’s name, “The Blanche,” in “purty gould letthers.” Of course “ivry wan” who was educated knew that to mean just “white,” and nothing else in the English language.
So we bade Brand farewell and were driven, smoking germicidically, to the railway-station, which we reached just in time to catch the train.
Two
Brand strolled slowly down the street and again stopped before the house of sorrow, where the wailing had now ceased. Yielding to a reprehensible impulse of morbid curiosity he approached the shuttered window, where light still faintly gleamed, and endeavoured to find an aperture through which he could see into the house. By looking upwards between the diagonally-fixed slats he could see the ceiling, but the lower areas of the chamber were quite out of the range of his vision. Listening carefully, he seemed to hear a smothered sob and then a sigh. One of those unaccountable impulses that grip men by the throat sometimes, and make them do to their own undoing things which under ordinary circumstances they would never dream of attempting, then overcame him, and he felt that, come what may, he must see the inside of that room. He caught hold of the shutter and gently tried to open it, but the outside leaf was firmly bolted to the window-sill, and could not be moved. However, in passing his hand over the slats he found that one was slightly loose and yielded to pressure. He pressed this slat and it slid upwards and inwards, leaving a space of about an inch and a half in width through which he could look.
The room was one of medium size, with a fireplace at one end. A lamp hung from the ceiling and distributed a dim light. The papered walls were of a deep crimson hue, and the floor was covered with Indian mats. A very large cushioned divan draped with dark green silk stood before a curtained recess in the opposite wall, and a large open volume lay upon a Koran stand of black wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A number of feminine garments, principally of silk, lay about the room in disorder.
Sitting on the divan and facing the window was a young girl, apparently a Malay; and although her face was partly covered by her hands, Brand could see that she was very lovely. Judging by her figure she looked to be about seventeen years of age. She was bent forward with her elbows resting on her knees, and her long black hair hung down in a rolled sheaf over one side of her bosom. Her neck, arms, and legs below the knees were bare, and of the most delicate symmetry. Her only clothing appeared to be a short petticoat and bodice, both of red silk delicately embroidered with white, and a pair of richly-worked sandals. Her skin was even lighter than that delicate, slightly dusky tint usually only found in pure-bred Malay girls and young boys.
Brand withdrew from the window with a flush of shame at his dishonourable conduct, and stood in the middle of the street. The huge bulk of Table Mountain loomed sheer before him, transfigured by the white splendour of the moonlight,—a faint film of mist hanging motionless over its highest western buttress. A gentle breeze was now streaming from the south-east. This, flowing over the city, bore to his ear a low and confused murmur of belated life. From the graveyard high on the hill-side above him still pierced the shrill cadences of the mourners. Then an indescribable feeling of oppression came over him, a sort of hopeless sense of the mystery overshadowing Man and his destinies—Death, the falling of the awful veil that men, since the beginning of Time, had been trying to pierce with their agonised prayers. The God who dwelt behind it and made no sign—what did it matter what He were called—Jehovah or Allah—whether the favoured interpreter of His laws to men were called Christ or Mahomet, or whether the broken heart sobbed out its yearning appeal from the church pew, or from the carpet on the pavement of a mosque?
Did men tell truth when they declared that they could realise His existence with absolute certainty? Where in this world of shows and shadows might a humble seeker happily find—not Him—that were too much to hope for—but some sacred, authentic shred from the hem of His divine robe? Just then from the tower of the adjacent mosque pealed out the clear voice of a priest calling the faithful to prayer. Brand smiled wearily—prayer, in the sense of communion with the object prayed to, was as unintelligible to him as colour to one born blind.