The Claw Part 35

His favourite seat was a packing case under a big thorn tree--not too far from his bedroom door; and there day after day he murdered time.

If he had possessed the easy-going, warm-hearted, beauty-loving Bohemian temperament that usually accompanies a lazy nature, much could have been forgiven him. A gipsy's heart and a poet's dreams would have gone very far towards compensating to me, at least, for idleness and incompetence.

But Maurice had no more poetry in him than a packing-case. And if his soul had ever given birth to dreams he had long since drowned them in whiskey. So far from being easy-going he was extremely cantankerous to every one under him. The servants detested him, and his men only tolerated him because he left them to their own devices. As for loving beauty; he never raised his eyes to the hills except to curse them for cutting him off from civilisation. He infinitely preferred to see his own cigarette smoke than to watch the pansy-coloured shadows flocking across the plains at eventide. A sunset left him cold; he never saw a dawn.

If any one thinks I sat down meekly to this life, and to this man they gravely err. I am not of the meek of the earth. Irish-Americans rarely are. Moreover, a meek woman in the household of Maurice Stair would have been extremely out of place. He would have calmly proceeded to wipe his boots on her.

I was consumed with shame for this man. I looked upon him as a cheat; and I knew the humiliation and shame of a woman whose husband was defrauding his employers. I had been long enough in the country to know how hard the _real_ men, who had ideals, worked for the country and for themselves. I knew that there were a hundred things Maurice could have done to improve his men, the camp, and the general state of affairs.

But he preferred to let Sergeant Locke earn his salary for him, while he sat under a thorn tree and polished a strap; and I, his wife, shared the salary!

At first, having learnt something of his arrogant, stubborn nature, I tried to beguile him from his ways with soft and even flattering words.

I painted to him, with a daring impressionist hand, the future that ought to be his, clothing it in mists of scarlet and gold.

"Grind away at your profession," I invoked him, "and show them you're too good for this little hole. Have your men in such a state of efficiency that the fame of them will reach Buluwayo. Improve the camp.

Get after the kaffirs and make them work at this place so hard that the next time the C.O. is here he will cast an envious eye on it for one of his pets, and you'll be moved on somewhere else. Having shown your stamina they won't dare to push you in the background again. They'll _have_ to give you something better."

I descended deep into flattery, and though to my own ears it sounded uncommonly like irony, he took it well. But afterwards he smiled at me, the patient smile of the great.

"What's the good, my dear girl? You don't know this country. You can work the flesh off your bones and n.o.body will thank you for it. You will never get ahead of the Company's pets."

The old cry of the idle and incompetent, whether in art, trade, or the professions--the uselessness of striving against injustice and favouritism!

"I consider that they have distinctly petted you, Maurice. Show them that they did well, and you'll get more petting."

"I suppose you would like me to be like Popper in Salisbury--always after the men to see if they've got their putties on straight, and whether they're taking Epsom salts and saying their prayers regularly."

"Oh, Maurice, you know very well that is not what I mean."

"I don't think you know what you mean. You are talking through your hat, my dear girl, of things you know absolutely nothing about."

"Perhaps so," I admitted with a humility that was far from being natural to me. "But I am only making suggestions. I can't bear to see you wasting your life. There are such a lot of things you could do in this country, and make a big future out of. If you could get inside the inscrutable native mind, for instance, you who know so much about the natives already. Why not become an authority on them, a master of the native tongue as no other man in this country is? Dear Maurice, I want to see you start carving that career you told me about."

(I never let him off that!) But he was entirely undisturbed.

"You talk like a book, my dear girl," he affably responded. "But I'd rather carve a stick. Less trouble. Go and get into the native mind yourself if you think it such a mighty interesting place. And further, I wish you'd remember that I warned you on our wedding day that I would not have you interfering with my affairs. I knew well enough you'd start this blither about ambition. I must ask you once and for all to mind your own business."

"It _is_ my business," I said. "How dared you ask me to take a name you did not mean to do something with?"

This was no gentle answer to turn away wrath, as I very well knew. But there were moments, and this was one of them, when my spirit rebelled against the embargo of submission I had laid upon it. I saw at last that guileful persuasion was useless. I might as well have tried to beguile a _wildebeeste_ from the veldt, or a crocodile from the _green_ slime of the Pungwe River, as this man from the paths of sloth. But there was still the goad left.

"Oh, Alexander the Great! Do you remember what he said to the soldier he found sleeping at his post? 'Either honour your name, sir, or change it!'"

"Oh! Bah! What do women know of honour. Let me alone, for G.o.d's sake."

But I would not let him alone. Even when his retorts were coa.r.s.e and insulting, I persisted. It burned me like an acid to bear the name of this neglecter of his duties: this skulker behind a bush while other men did his work. I made clear to him that any woman with a backbone detests the type of man who potters about the house driving in nails instead of getting out after the big things of life. I gave him no rest under his thorn tree.

I jeered at his wooden boxes, and made mock of the slovenly troopers who pa.s.sed upon the road below our camp. I jibed at his beloved shrunken white flannels, and let him know I found him no object of beauty in the black bath-slippers. I scarified him, and inflicted many a scar on my own pride in the process; and apparently he remained invulnerable. But sometimes I saw a little colour creep into his sallow cheek, and knew that an arrow had gone home. Until at last one day he turned on me raging:

"Good G.o.d! a man had better have married a flaming sword than you! I might as well try to sleep with vitriol trickling over me!"

At that I rejoiced: if an emotion of mingled despair and savage triumph could be described as joy. And thereafter I gave him no quarter. More than ever I bit into him like a steel blade and flickered round him like a flame.

That was the beginning of a new era. And if sometimes the last state of these persons seemed worse than the first--I flamed and flickered on.

One thing was certain; anything was better than stagnation in a swamp; so I made the swamp as untenantable as if it were infested with asps.

However, departure from the swamp meant departure also from tranquillity. With the mists of idleness and the green slime of sloth, peace also disappeared. It is true that Sergeant Locke came no more to the house with the reports; no longer paid the men and harangued them vainly for their sins; nor rode any more to the court-house to play deputy P.P. while his superior officer lay in bed; nor performed any more of the duties of that same superior officer. That was so much to the good. But for amendment Maurice took toll of me at home, retaliating with the malice of a small-minded woman, interfering in the affairs of the house, grumbling at the food, abusing the cook, and insulting me. Nothing pleased him. Though he was much more at the camp and court than he had ever been he also seemed to have more time to be at home, to fall upon the cook and kick the house boys, with the result that no sooner had I trained one servant to do his duties unsuperintended, than he ran away, and I had to begin the thankless task over again.

My husband was a bad person to keep house for at any time. One of those men who tells every one he doesn't care what he eats so long as it is food; and then raises the roof if he has cold mutton daintily served with a salad for lunch, after having had it for dinner the night before.

"d.a.m.n it! is this goat going to last for ever?" he would cry outraged.

"It must have been a blazing horse. Did you buy the whole four quarters in the name of G.o.d?"

My mornings were taken up with trying to manufacture new dishes, and teaching Mango, the cook, to manage the spa.r.s.e material at his disposal, so that the result might spell variety in the _menu_.

I discovered that turning out charming suppers in a Paris studio was a very different matter to keeping house in a land where goat and "bully"

were the foundations of life; fresh fruit and fish unheard-of things; and vegetables luxuries that had to be fetched on horseback from a coolie river-garden several miles away, and pleaded and bartered for at that.

Chickens, of which it took about half-a-dozen to make a meal, had also to be fetched from kaffir kraals, and eggs had to be ridden after (and sometimes run away from afterwards).

I found, as many a weary woman has found before me, that housekeeping is the most thankless, heart-breaking, soul-racking business in the world to those who have not been trained to it from their youth upwards. But I had to stick to my job. Maurice having been driven forth from his swamp into the wilds had come back with at least two of the qualities of the king of beasts: an enormous appet.i.te, and a tendency to roar the house down. My plain duty was to appease him, and pray for further lion-like attributes to develop.

In a small way we were obliged to entertain. Maurice's official position demanded as much, though it was an obligation he was very willing to shirk, preferring a quiet, swamp-like evening in his hut to the trouble of dressing for dinner and being polite to people for a few hours. But my plans for his redemption did not include any evenings off, and I asked the necessary people to dine whether he liked it or not. He had many ways of revenging himself on me for this. Sometimes he would absent himself at the last moment, leaving me to make what excuse I was able to the guests for the non-appearance of the host whom they had probably seen lounging in his hut door smoking, as they came up the road. At other times after I had made elaborate excuses he would appear in his white flannel trousers and shirt sleeves, and without any apology take his seat at the head of the table where his guests sat arrayed in the immaculate evening dress that people buried in the wilds love to a.s.sume, cherishing the custom of dressing for dinner as a symbol that they are not yet of the beasts of the field, though obliged to congregate with them. What these people thought of a host in dirty flannels facing a hostess decked in a Paris gown, _decolletee et tres chic_ (for if I could not alter my gowns with the skill of a _couturiere_ they at least still bore the _cachet_ of Paris) I cannot say. But Rhodesians are a gay-hearted people and would always prefer to believe that you mean to amuse rather than insult them, and so, as a flowing brook pa.s.ses over a jagged rock, the incident would be pa.s.sed over and covered up with ripples.

As for me, I learned in time to manage my cheeks as well as my gowns, so that they no longer burned at such _contretemps_.

My method was not to apologise in words for my husband's behaviour, but by delicate implication to let it be understood that I considered such vagaries perfectly permissible in a genius--or a fool. They may have been in doubt (as I meant them to be) as to which of the two I considered him. But Maurice _knew_; and his was the cheek to burn.

When he insulted his guests over cards later in the evening I pursued the same tactics. I do not profess that I at any time played the _role_ of a gentle and propitiating houri. As I have before remarked, such a person would have been thrown away on Maurice, and very bad for him. A man with a dog whip would have been much more to the point.

The art of winning or losing with equanimity at cards was not one which his ancestors had bequeathed to him. If he lost sixpence he also lost his temper. If he won he became jaunty and facetious and tried to make others lose their tempers by jeers at their poor play. When things went very wrong with his game he thought nothing of taking advantage of being in his own house to jibe a man about his income or his debts or any private matter he might happen to have cognisance of.

Once after squabbling outrageously with a man over his losses early in the evening, and winning from him later, he at the end of the game ostentatiously tore up the man's I.O.U. saying calmly:

"That's all right old man! I know you can't afford to lose it."

The man turned a bright green, and everybody in the room commenced to talk vivaciously about the weather. But Maurice smiled the triumphant smile of the man who has scored.

It was upon such occasions that I positively detested him. When I saw a man who for the sake of decency had been calm under affliction all the evening, smiling the set smile of a gargoyle, when only the presence of women prevented him from getting up and hitting Maurice in the eye (as I certainly should have done in his place); when I saw such a man swallow some flagrant final insult with an effort that made him turn pale, I too turned pale, and tasted aloes. When in my bedroom at the end of the evening, while they were putting on their wraps, I found myself mechanically muttering inventions to women as pale as myself about my husband's touch of fever--stroke of sun--overwork--strain, anything that was not too utterly futile a reason for outrageous behaviour; the taste of life was bitter in my mouth, and I knew shame that burned to the bone.

Those were the nights when I could have torn out my tongue for making vows before G.o.d to Maurice Stair; when my soul was blotted with hatred; when I drove the knives of scorn and contempt into myself for desecrating my life, and my father's name by such an alliance.

On such nights I dared not open my lips to Maurice. I feared myself too much. Locked in my hut I would spend hours watching with dry eyes the spectacle of pride writhing in the dust. Or kneeling before the tortured body of Christ crucified, but not daring to lift my face to him, nor to the lovely face of that stately Madonna Bouguereau painted with hands upraised and great eyes full of sorrow for the fate of women; no prayer would come to my bitten lips, nor tears to my scorched eyes; but the cry of the desolate and the despairing was in my heart.

"_Oh, Mother of Consolation!... Help of the Afflicted... ora pro n.o.bis_!"

Often when dawn, that scarlet witch, with golden fingers came tapping on the canvas windows I would still be kneeling there, stiff-limbed, my shoulders chilled to stone above my gown. And after a little while I would open my door and go out into the sweet wild morning. Strange that sometimes it almost seemed as if the pagan witch had more healing in her golden hands than the Mother of Sorrows herself; for standing there gazing at her rising from the mists of the hills like a G.o.ddess from the incense on her altars, I would feel at last the frozen tears thawing in my heart and surging to my weary-lidded eyes.