Blue Aloes Part 39

"It is better to sleep on the stoep at night," Ghostie recommended.

"We all do."

Before the afternoon April had settled down among them as if she had lived there always. Sarle and his kisses seemed like a lost dream; the menace of Kenna was forgotten. For the first time in her existence she let herself drift with the tide, taking no thought for the morrow nor the ultimate port at which her boat would "swing to." It was lotus-eating in a sense, yet none of the dwellers at Ho-la-le-la idled.

It is true that Ghostie and _belle_ Helene were crocks, but they worked at the business of repairing their bodies to tackle the battle of life once more. April soon discovered that they were only two of the many of Clive's comrades who came broken to the farm and went away healed.

Clive was a Theosophist: all men were her brothers, and all women her sisters; but those especially among art-workers who fell by the wayside might share her bread and blanket. They called her Old Mother Sphinx, because of her inscrutable eyes, and the tenderness of her mothering.

She herself never stopped working, and her body was hard as iron from long discipline. She rose in the dawn to work on her lands, hoeing, digging her orchards, and tending her cattle in company with her coloured labourers. It was only at odd moments or during the heat of the day that she painted, and all the money she made with paint was swallowed up by the farm, which did not pay, but which was the very core of her heart.

Impossible for April to be in such company and not work too, even if her thoughts had not demanded occupation. So, first she mended the clothes of everybody, including Meekie's ragged piccanins; then she went to the Paarl, bought a pot of green paint, and spent days of sheer forgetfulness smartening up the rusty paraffin tins and barrels, and all the bleared and blistered shutters and doors and sills of the farm, that had not known paint for many years.

At mid-day they bathed in a tree-shaded pool that had formed in the bed of a stream running across the farm. They had no bathing frocks but their skins, and sometimes Clive, sitting stark on the bank, palette in hand, painted the others as they tumbled in the dark brown water, sporting and splashing like a lot of schoolboys. Afterwards they would mooch home through the shimmering noontide heat, deliciously tired, wrapped in reflection and their towels. Ghostie provided a perpetual jest by wearing a smart Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of visitors at Ho-la-le-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of "Diana," they did so without comment, accepting her as one of themselves, and asking no questions about England, the voyage, or the Cape. The scandalous tragedy of the April Fool had never reached them, and if it had they would have taken little interest except to be sorry for the girl.

In the evenings when work was put away Clive played to them on the 'cello.

"I was determined to have music in my life," she told April. "And as you can't lug a piano and musician all over the shop with you, I saw no way of getting it but to darn well teach myself."

And very well she had done it, though why she had chosen a 'cello, which also needed some lugging, no one knew but herself. Sitting with it between her heavy boots and breeched legs, the eternal cigarette drooping from her mouth, she looked more than ever like Galahad, her blue austere gaze seeming to search beyond the n.o.ble mountain tops of her own pictures for some Holy Grail she would never find. No complicated music was hers, just grand, simple things like Handel's "Largo," Van Biene's "Broken Melody," "Ave Maria," or some of Squire's sweet airs.

Sometimes at night they went out and climbed upon a huge rock that stood in the apricot orchard. It was big enough to build a house on, and called by Clive her Counsel Rock, because there she took counsel with the stars when things went wrong with the farm. Lying flat on their backs they could feel the warmth of the day still in the stone as they gazed at the purple and silver panoply of heaven spread above them, and Clive would commune with blue-rayed Sirius and his dark companion; the Gemini, those radiant twins; Orion's belt in the centre sky preciously gemmed with celestial diamonds; Canopus, a calm, pale yellow star, the largest in our universe; Mars, gleaming red as a madman's eye; Venus springing from the horizon, the Pleiades slinking below it. The "galloping star" she claimed as her own on account of its presumed horsiness.

"It's a funny thing," she said. "My mother and father were gentle, bookish creatures with no understanding of animals. Even if a pony had to be bought for us children, every male thing of the family--uncles, nephews, tenth cousins--was summoned from every corner of England for his advice and experience. Yet these unsophisticated beings have a daughter like me--born into the world a full-blown horse-dealer! To say nothing of mules. You can believe me or believe me not," she added bragfully, "but there is _no one_ in this land of swindles who knows more about mules than I do."

They chose to believe her, especially after hearing her haggling and bartering with some of the itinerant dealers who visited the farm from time to time.

"I don't know vy ve can't do pizness today! I got no profit in anyting. I just been here for a friend"--thus the dealer.

"Ah! I know who your friend is," Clive would jeer from the stoep.

"You keep him under your own hat. But don't come here expecting to swop a beautiful mule that cost me 20 pounds for that skew-eyed crock that will go thin as a rake after three weeks on the sour veld, a 10 pound note thrown in, and taking me for a fool into the bargain. Your horse is worth 15 pounds, and not a bean more."

"I also must lif!"--the whine of the Jew.

"I don't see the necessity." Clive shamelessly plagiarized Wilde, Plato, or the holy prophets when it suited her.

"Vot, you know! You can't do pizness with a womans!" The dealer would weep tears of blood, but Clive made the bargain.

A week slid past, and April barely noticed its pa.s.sing. No word came from the outer world. It was not the custom to read newspapers at Ho-la-le-la, and all letters were stuffed unopened into a drawer, in case they might be bills. Close friends were wise enough to communicate by telegram, or, better still, dump themselves in person upon the doorstep. The only reason that April had been expected and fetched was that a "home letter" had heralded the likely advent of Lady Diana, and given the date and hotel at which she would be staying.

Home letters were never stuffed away unopened.

Late one afternoon, however, there was an unexpected announcement. The _boch-ma-keer-ie_ bird began to cry in the orchard, and Clive said it was a surer sign of visitors than any that came from the telegraph office.

"Tomorrow is Sunday. We'll have visitors, sure as a gun," she prophesied.

April quailed. She could not bear the peaceful drifting to end, and wished for no reminder of that outer world where Bellew, the mail-boat for England, and the dreary task of breaking an old man's heart awaited her. Sometimes in spite of herself she was obliged to consider these things, and the considering threw shadows under her eyes and hollowed her cheeks. Sarle, too, though he was a dream by day, became very real at night when she should have been dreaming. She knew now that she could never escape from the memory of him, and the thought that he was suffering from her silence and defection tortured her. What must he think of her, slinking guiltily away without a word of explanation or farewell? Doubtless Kenna would set him right! "Faithful are the wounds of a friend," she thought bitterly. Better far and braver to have done the explaining and setting right herself, if only she could have found some way of releasing herself from the compact of silence made with Diana and Bellew.

Sunday, morning dawned very perfectly. They were all sleeping on the stoep, their beds in line against the wall, Clive upon the oak chest, which her austere self-discipline commanded. At three o'clock, though a few stars lingered, the sky was already tinting itself with the lovely l.u.s.tre of a pink pearl. No sound broke the stillness but the breathing of the sleepers and the soft perpetual dropping of acorns from the branches overhead.

The peace and beauty of it smote April to the heart. She pressed her fingers over her eyes and tears oozed through them, trickling down her face. When at last she looked again the stars were gone and the sky was blue as a thrush's egg, with a fluff of rose-red clouds knitted together overhead and a few crimson rags scudding across the Qua-Quas.

A dove suddenly cried, "Choo-coo, choo-coo," and others took up the refrain, until in the hills and woods hundreds of doves were greeting the morning with their soft, thrilling cries. Fowls straying from a barn near by started scratching in the sand. The first streak of sunshine shot across the hills and struck a bush of pomegranates blossoming scarlet by the gate.

Presently the farm workers began to come from their huts and file past the stoep towards the outhouses. Julie, the Cape foreman, with a right leg longer than the left, was the first to stagger by.

"Moorer, Missis!" he said, with a pull of his cap and a swift respectful glance at the stoep. Clive, awake by now on her oak chest, responded absently without raising her head from the pillow.

"Moorer, Julie!"

Next, Isaac, whose legs were so formed that when he stood still they described a circle, and when he moved the circle became a triangle.

"Moorer, Missis!" said he.

"Moorer, Isaac!"

Jim, the cowherd, had a hare-lip and no roof to his mouth, and was so modest that he turned his head away when he lisped his salutation to the stoep.

"Moor-ler, Mithis!"

"Moorer, Jim!"

After a few moment's silence a voice from one of the beds was heard.

"Is the file-past of the Decrepits over? May one now sleep for a while?"

"This place ought to be called _des Invalides_," grumbled another.

Clive laughed her large, blithe laugh.

"At any rate, there's nothing wrong with me," she proclaimed, and sprang with one leap into her top-boots. Pa.s.sing April's bed she touched the girl's eyelids tenderly, and her finger-tips came away wet.

"Nor with our little April, I hope--except a pa.s.sing shower! You had better come up the lands with me this morning, and plant trees."

That was Clive's cure for all ills of the body and soul: to plant trees that would grow up and benefit Africa long after the planters were dead and forgotten. No one ever left Ho-la-le-la without having had a dose of this medicine, and many an incipient forest lay along the valleys and down the sides of the Qua-Quas. So behold April an hour or two later, faring forth with a pick and a basket full of saplings, followed by Clive leading the Kerry cow, who was sick and needed exercise.

They lunched in the open, resting from their labours and savouring the sweetness of food earned by physical labour. Care was stuffed out of sight, dreams and ghosts faded in the clear sun-beaten air, and again April realized what life could mean in this wonderful land, given the right companionship, and a clean heart. But Clive, with arms clasped about her knees, sat munching apricots and staring with a strange sadness at her forests of baby trees. There was an unfulfilled look on her face, spite of living her own life, and following her star.

Neither Africa nor life had given her all she needed.

Later they wended their way back full of the happy weariness engendered by honest toil. But nearing home Clive lifted her nose, and sniffing the breeze like a wild a.s.s of the desert sensing unfamiliar things scowled bitterly.

"Petrol!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "One of those stinking motor-cars! Why can't people use horses, like gentlemen? What's the matter with a nice mule, even?"

As they slouched warily round the house and came in view of the stoep she emitted a staccato whistle of dismay. Tethered out upon the vagabondish gra.s.s was--not one motor-car, but three! An opulent thing of blinking bra.s.s and crimson leather arrogated to itself the exclusive shade of the largest tree; a long grey torpedo affair of two seats occupied the pasturage of the Kerry cow; and blistering in the sunshine, with several fowls perched upon it, was an ancient Ford wearing the roystering air of a scallywag come home for good.

"That old _boch-ma-keer-ie_ bird knew something!" muttered the painter.

"I don't like the look of this!"

They paused to take counsel of each other, then presently advanced, Clive approaching her own front door with the stealthy glide of a pickpocket, April tip-toeing behind her. The idea was to get indoors without being seen, listen in the hall to discover whether the visitors were agreeable ones, and if not, to take refuge in the kitchen until they had departed. Unfortunately one of them came out of the front door to shake his pipe on the stoep as Clive and April reached the steps.

"Why, it's old Kerry Sarle!" cried Clive heartily, and stealth fell from her. She beamed with happiness, and shook his hand unceasingly, pouring forth questions like water.

"When did you get back? Why didn't you come before? What did you bring a crowd for? Who have you got with you?"