Читать книгу Flower o' the Peach - Gibbon Perceval - Страница 4

CHAPTER III

In the years of his innocence, when the art and practice of medicine were rich with enticements like a bride, Dr. Jakes had taken his dreams in hand to mold them to the shape of his desire. A vision had beckoned to him across the roofs and telegraph wires of South London, where he scuffled for a livelihood as the assistant of a general practitioner; and when he fixed his eyes upon it, it spread and took shape as a great quiet house, noble and gray, harboring within its sober walls the atmosphere of distinguished repose which goes with a practice of the very highest class. Nothing of all its sumptuous appointment was quite so clear to him as that flavor of footfalls muffled and voices subdued; to summon it was to establish a refuge in which he might have brief ease between a tooth-drawing and a confinement. Kindly people who excused a certain want of alacrity in the little doctor by the reflection that he was called out every night might have saved their charity; his droop, his vacancy were only a screen for the splendid hush and shadow of that great visionary mansion. It was peopled, too, with many dim folk, resident patients in attitudes of relaxation; and among them, delicate and urbane, went Dr. Jakes, the sweet and polished vehicle of healing for the pulmonary complaints of the well-bred. Nor was there lacking a lady, rather ghostlike and faint in conformity with the dreamer's ideal of the highest expression of a lady-like quality, but touched, none the less, with warm femininity, an angel and a houri in one, and answering, in the voice of refinement, to the title of Mrs. Jakes.

She had no Christian name then; she was a haunting mellowness, a presence delicate and uplifting. In the murk of the early morning, after a night spent behind drawn blinds in a narrow, tragic room, where another human being entered the world between his hands, he would go home along empty furtive streets, conscious of the comfort of her and glad as with wine, and in such hours he would make it clear to himself that she, at any rate, should never bear a child.

"No," he would say, half aloud and very seriously. "No; it's not in the part. No!"

That gracious and mild presence—he did not entirely lose it even when its place was assailed by the advent of the timid and amiable lady whom he married. She was a daughter of the landed interest; her father owned "weekly property" about Clapham Junction, two streets of forlorn little houses, which rang day and night with the passing of trains, and furnished to the population a constant supply of unwelcome babies. Dr. Jakes knew the value of property of that kind, and perhaps his knowledge did something to quicken his interest in a sallow, meager girl whom he encountered in the house of his employer. She brought him a thousand pounds in money, means ready to his hand to anchor the old vision to earth and run it on commercial lines; it puzzled him a little that the vision no longer responded to his summons so readily as of old. It had degenerated from an inspiration to a mere scheme, best expressed in the language of the prospectus; the fine zest of it was gone beyond recovery. There was no recapturing its gentle languors, the brooding silence of it; still less was it possible when, by the mere momentum of his plans, he had moved to South Africa and found him a house, to reproduce that reposefulness as the main character of the establishment. Such effects as he gained, during the brief strenuousness that he manifested on taking possession, were the merest caricatures of the splendid original, mocking his impotence. The thousand pounds, too, which at first had some of the fine, vague, inexhaustible quality of a dream, proved inelastic, and by the time the baby came, Dr. Jakes was already buying whisky by the case. The baby was a brief incident, a caller rather than a visitor, so ephemeral that it was scarcely a nuisance before it departed again in search of a peace less dependent on the arrangement of furniture than that which Dr. Jakes had sought to bring into being.

All life is a compromise; between the dream and the exigencies of Dr. Jakes' position the Sanatorium had emerged. The fine, simple, old house had an air of its own, which no base use could entirely destroy. Its flat front, pedestaled upon a wide, flagged stoep, faced to the southeast and made a stronghold of shade in the noonday vehemence of the sun. Its rooms were great and low, with wide solemn windows regarding the monotony of the level veld; they stood between straight corridors where one's footsteps rang as one walked. The art of its builders had so fashioned it that it stood on the naked ground like a thing native to it, not interrupting nor affronting that sweep of vacant miles, but enhancing it. The stolid Dutch builders knew how to make their profit out of wide horizons. They had conceived a frame for lives which should ripen in face of the Karoo, gleaming on its barrenness a measure of its tranquillity. They built a home; and of it Dr. Jakes had made a Home.

There remained yet, of all the decorous and ceremonial processes which were to maintain and give color to the life of the Sanatorium as he had conceived it of old, only one function. The two men patients who were left to him did as they pleased in most respects, but if they took tea in the afternoon they took it from Mrs. Jakes in the drawing-room after an established usage, with formal handing to and fro of plates and cups in the manner of civilized society. Jakes was seldom too unwell to be present at this function, and it was here, with his household at his back, that Margaret saw him first.

Weariness had come upon her with the rush of an overtaking pursuer as Mrs. Jakes brought her into the house and away from the spreading dawn, and that lady had cut short the forms of politeness to bid her go to bed. She woke to the warmth of afternoon and the glow of its sun slanting upon the floor of her room and was aware at once of a genial presence. At the window a tall, stout Kafir woman, her head bound in a red and yellow handkerchief in a fashion which reminded Margaret of pictures of pirates, was tweaking the tails of the spring-blinds and taking delight in watching them run up with a whir and click. She turned at the sound of Margaret's movement, and flashed a brilliant smile upon her.

"Missis sleeping too long," she observed. "Tea now."

The mere good humor of her was infectious and Margaret smiled in return.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"Me? Fat Mary," was the answer. She laughed easily, willing to make or be a joke according to Margaret's humor. "Fat Mary, because—" she sought for a word in the unfamiliar English and then gave it up. "Because," she repeated, and traced her ample circumference with a black finger. "You see?"

"I see," said Margaret, and prepared to get up.

Her long sleep had restored her and there was comfort, too, in waking to the willing humanity of Fat Mary's smiles, instead of to the starched cuffs and starched countenance of some formal trained and mechanical nurse. Fat Mary was not a deft maid; she was too easily amused at niceties of the toilet, and Margaret could not help feeling that she regarded the process of dressing as a performance which she could discuss later with her friends; but at least she was interested. She revolved helpfully about the girl, to the noise of bumped furniture and of large bare feet scraping on the mats, like a bulky planet about a wan and diminutive sun, and made mistakes and laughed and was buoyant and alight with smiles—all with a suggestion of gentle and reverent playfulness such as a more than usually grown person might use with a child.

"Too much clothes," was her final comment, when Margaret at last was ready and stood, slim and sober, under her inspection. "Like bundles," she added, thoughtfully. "But Missis is skinny."

"Where do we go now?" asked Margaret.

"Tea," replied Fat Mary, and led the way downstairs by a wide and noble staircase to the gray shadows of the stone hall. There was a simple splendor about the house which roused the connoisseur in Margaret, a grandeur which was all of proportion and mass, and the few articles of furniture which stood about were dim and shabby in contrast to it. She had only time to note so much when Fat Mary opened a door for her, and she was facing across a wide room to broad windows flooded with sunlight and aware of Mrs. Jakes rising from behind a little tea-table and coming forward to meet her. Two men, a young one and an old one, rose from their chairs near the window as she entered, and a third was standing on the hearth-rug, with his back to the empty hearth.

"Quite rested now?" Mrs. Jakes was asking. "You 've had a nice long sleep. Let me introduce the doctor. Eustace—this is Miss Harding."

Dr. Jakes advanced from the hearth-rug; Margaret thought he started forward rather abruptly as his name was spoken. He gave her a loose, hot hand.

"Charmed," he said in a voice that was not quite free from hoarseness. "We were just out of ladies, Miss Harding. This is a great pleasure; a great pleasure."

"Thank you," murmured Margaret vaguely.

He was a short plump man, with a big head and round spectacles that gave him the aspect of a large, deliberate bird. He was dressed for the afternoon in formal black, the uniform of his calling, though the window framed shimmering vistas of heat. He peered up at her with a sort of appeal on his plump, amiable face, as though he were conscious of that quality in him which made the girl shrink involuntarily while he held her hand, which no decent austerity of broadcloth could veil from her scrutiny. There was something about him at once sleepy and tormented, the state in which a man lies all day full-dressed upon a bed and goes habitually unbuttoned. It was the salient character in him, and he seemed to search her face in a faint hope that she would not recognize it. He dropped her hand with a momentary knitting of his brows like the ghost of despair, and talked on.

"It 's the air we depend on," he told her. "Wonderful air here, Miss Harding—the breath of healing, you know. It doesn't suit me, but then I 'm not here for my health."

He laughed uncertainly, and ceased abruptly when he saw that no one laughed with him. He was like a child in disgrace trying to win and conciliate a circle of remorseless elders.

Mrs. Jakes interrupted with a further introduction. While the doctor spoke, she had been standing by like an umpire. "Mr. Ford," she said now, and the younger of the two men by the window bowed to her without speaking across the tea-table. His back was to the window and he stood silhouetted against the golden haze which filled it, and Margaret saw only that he was tall and slender and moved with easy deliberation.

"Mr. Samson," said Mrs. Jakes next.

This was the elder man. He came forward to her, showing a thin, sophisticated old face with cloudy white eyebrows, and shook hands in a pronounced manner.

"Ah, you come like a gleam of sunshine," he announced, in a thin voice that was like a piece of bravado. "A gleam of sunshine, by gad! We 're not much to look at, Miss Harding; a set of crocks, you know—bellows to mend, and all that sort of thing, but, by gad, we 're English, and we 're glad to see a countrywoman."

He cocked his white head at her gallantly and straddled his legs in their neat gray trousers with a stiff swagger.

"My mother was Irish," observed Mrs. Jakes brightly. "But Miss Harding must have some tea."

Mr. Samson skipped before to draw out a chair for her, and Margaret was established at Mrs. Jakes' elbow. The doctor came across the room to hand her bread and butter; that done, he retired again to his place on the hearth-rug and to his cup, lodged upon the mantel-shelf. It seemed that this was his place, outside the circle by the window.

"Charming weather we 're having," announced Mrs. Jakes, conscientiously assailing an interval of silence. "If it only lasts!"

Mr. Samson, with his back to the wall and his teacup wavering in his thin hand, snorted.

"Weather!" he said. "Ya-as, we do get weather. 'Bout all we do get here,—eh, Jakes?"

Behind Margaret's back the doctor's teaspoon clinked in his saucer, and he said something indistinct, in which the words "wonderful air" alone reached her. She hitched her chair a pace sideways, so as to see him.

Mrs. Jakes was looking over her with the acute eyes of a shopper which took in and estimated each detail of her raiment.

"I suppose, now," she remarked thoughtfully, "in England, the spring fashions were just coming out."

"I don't know, really," Margaret answered. "When I left, the principal wear seemed to be umbrellas. It 's been an awful winter—rain every day."

"Aha!" Mr. Samson returned to the charge. "Rain, eh? Cab-wheels squirting mud at you all along the street, eh? Trees blubbering over the railings like bally babies, eh? Women bunchin' up their skirts and hoppin' over the puddles like dicky-birds, eh? I know, I know; don't I just know! How 'd you like a mouthful of that air, eh, Ford? Bad for the lungs—yes! But good, deuced good for the heart."

The young man in the window raised his head when he was addressed and nodded. From the hearth-rug Dr. Jakes murmured audibly: "Influenza."

"That of course," said Mrs. Jakes indulgently. "Were there many people in town, Miss Harding?"

"People!" Margaret was mystified for the moment. "Oh, yes, I think so."

She was puzzled by the general attitude of the others towards the little doctor; it was a matter into which she had yet to be initiated. It was as though there existed a tacit understanding to suffer his presence and keep an eye upon him. It conveyed to her a sense that these people knew things about him which would not bear telling, and held the key to his manner of one dully afflicted. When he moved or managed to make some small clatter in setting his cup on the mantel-shelf, Mrs. Jakes turned a swift eye upon him, inspected him suspiciously and turned away again. If he spoke, the person addressed seemed to turn his remark over and examine it for contraband meanings before making a perfunctory answer. He was like a prisoner handicapped by previous convictions or a dog conscious of a bad name. When he managed to catch the girl's eye, he gave her weak, hopeful, little smiles, and subsided quickly if any one else saw him, as though he had been caught doing some forbidden thing. The thing troubled her a little. Her malady had made a sharp interruption in her life and she had come to the Karoo in the sure hope that there she would be restored and given a warrant to return finally to her own world and deal with it unhampered. The doctors who had bidden her go had spoken confidently of an early cure; they were smooth men who made a good show of their expert knowledge. She had looked to find such a man at her journey's end, a doctor with the marks of a doctor, his social adroitness, his personal strength and style, his confidence and superiority to the weaknesses of diseased flesh. This little man, dazed and dumb, standing apart like a child who has been put in the corner, did not realize her expectations. If medical skill, the art and dexterity of a physician, dwelt in him, they had, she reflected, fallen among thieves.

"You have only three patients here now?" she asked Mrs. Jakes.

"At present," answered Mrs. Jakes. "It's a convenient number. The doctor, you see, can give them so much more attention than if there were a houseful. Yes, it's really better for everybody."

As she finished, Margaret looked up and caught the eye of the young man, Ford, fixed upon her, as though he watched to see how she would take it. He was a tall youth with a dark impassive face and level brows, and his malady announced itself in a certain delicacy of coloring and general texture and in attitudes which slacked naturally to invalid languors. While the others talked, he sat on the ledge of the window, looking out to the veld prostrate under the thresh of the sun. In any talkative assembly, the silent man is at an advantage, and this tall youth seemed to sit without the little circle of desultory tongues and dwarf it by his mere aloofness. His glance now seemed to convey a hint to her to accept, to pass over, things that needed explanation and to promise revelations at a more fitting time.

"You see," Mrs. Jakes continued, when Margaret had murmured noises of acquiescence; "you see, each patient requires his individual attention. And—" she sank her voice to a confidential undertone—"he 's not strong."

She nodded past Margaret's shoulder at Jakes, who was drinking from his cup with precautions against noise. He caught her look over the rim of it and choked. Ford smiled faintly and turned to the window again.

"The Karoo does n't suit him a bit," Mrs. Jakes went on. "Too bracing, you know. He 's often quite ill. But he won't leave."

"Why?" asked Margaret. The doctor was busy with his handkerchief, removing the traces of the accident from his waistcoat.

Mrs. Jakes looked serious. "Duty," she replied, and pursed her pale lips. "He considers it his duty to remain here. It 's his life-work, you know."

Ford's eye caught Margaret's again, warning and inviting. "It 's—it's very unselfish of him," she said.

"Yes!" said Mrs. Jakes. "It is." And she nodded at Margaret as much as to ask, "And now, what have you got to say?"

The doctor managed the tea stains to his satisfaction and came across the room, replacing the cup and saucer on the table with a hand that was not quite steady. In the broad light of the window, he had a strained look; one familiar with such matters would have known that the man was raw and tense with the after effects of heavy drinking. He looked down at Margaret with an uncertain smile.

"I must have a little talk with Miss Harding," he said. "We must find out how matters stand. Will you bring her to my study presently, my dear?"

"In a quarter of an hour?" suggested Mrs. Jakes. He nodded. Ford did not turn from his idle gazing through the window and old Samson did not cease from looking at him with an arrogant fixity that seemed on the point of breaking into spoken denunciations. He looked from one to the other with a hardy little smile, then sighed and went out.

His going was the signal for the breaking up of the gathering. Old Samson coughed and walked off and Ford disappeared with him.

"And what would you care to do now?" asked Mrs. Jakes of Margaret. "I have some very good views of Windsor, if you like. You know Windsor?"

Margaret shook her head. Windsor had no attractions for her. What interested her much more was the fact that this small, bleak woman was on the defensive, patently standing guard over privacies of her life, and acutely ready to repel boarders who might endeavor to force an intimacy upon her. It was plain in the rigor of her countenance, set into a mask, and in each tone of her voice. Margaret had yet to undergo her interview with Dr. Jakes in his study, and till that was over, and she definitely enlisted for or against him, Mrs. Jakes would preserve an armed neutrality.

"I think," said Margaret, "I 'd like to go out to the veranda."

"We call it the stoep," corrected Mrs. Jakes. "A Dutch word, I believe. By all means; you 'll probably find Mr. Ford there and I will call you when the doctor is ready."

The stone hall held its cathedral shadows inviolate, and from it Margaret went forth to a westering sun that filled the earth with light, and painted the shadow of the house in startling black upon the ground. She stood between the square pillars with their dead and ruined vines and looked forth at a land upon which the light stood stagnant. It was as though the Karoo challenged her conception of it. She had seen it last vague with the illusions of the dawn, hemmed in by mists and shadows that seemed to veil the distances and what they held. Now these were stripped from it to reveal only a vast nakedness, of red and red-brown and gray, all ardent in the afternoon sun. The shadows had promised a mystery, the light discovered a void. It ran from before her yet in a single sweep to a horizon upon which the blue of remote hills was a faint blur, and in all the far prospect of it there was not one roof, no single interruption to its still level. Margaret, quickly sensitive to the quality of her environment, gazed at it almost with a sense of awe, baffled by the fact that no words at her command were pliant enough to fit it. It was not "wild" nor "desolate" nor even "beautiful"; none of the words allotted to landscapes, with which folk are used to label the land they live upon, could be stretched to the compass of this great staring vacancy. It was outside of language; it struck a note not included in the gamut of speech. "Inhuman" came nearest to it, for the salient quality of it was something that bore no relation to the lives—and deaths—of men.

A sound of coughing recalled her from her contemplation of it, and she walked along the stoep towards it. Behind a pillar near the corner of the house, Ford sat on a camp-stool, with a little easel before him, and smudged with his thumb at the paint on a small canvas.

He looked up at her with no token of welcome, but rather as though he withdrew himself unwillingly from his picture.

"Well?" he said, motioning with his head at the wide prospect before them. "What d'you think of it?"

"Oh, a lot," replied Margaret, refusing to commit herself with adjectives. "Can I see?"

He sat back to give her room to look. She had in her time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which help Kensington to its character and was prepared to appreciate expertly. It was a sketch in oils, done mostly with the thumb and palette-knife, a croûte of the most obvious—paint piled in ridges as though the artist would have built his subject in relief upon the canvas, perspective improvised by the light of nature, crudities, brutalities of color, obtruded in the effort for breadth. They were all there. She stared into this mist of blemishes in an effort to see what the painter saw and could not set down, and had to give it up.

In the art school it had been the custom to tell one's fellows the curt, unwelcome truth.

"You can't paint," said Margaret.

"Oh, I know that," answered Ford. "You weren't looking for that, were you?"

"For what, then?" asked Margaret.

He hitched himself up to the canvas again, and began to smudge with his thumb at a mess of yellow ocre.

"There 's something in it that I can see," he said. "I 've been watching this—this desert for more than a year, you know, and I try to get in what I see in it. You can't see anything?"

"No," said Margaret. "But I did try." She watched his unskilful handling of the ocre. "I could show you a thing or two," she suggested.

She had all a woman's love for technique, and might have been satisfied with more skill and less purpose. But Ford shook his head.

"No, thank you," he said. "It's not worth while. I 'm only painting for myself. I know what I mean by these messes I make; if I could paint more, I mightn't be so pleased with it."

"As you like, of course," said Margaret, a little disappointed.

He worked in silence for about a minute.

"You didn't like the looks of Dr. Jakes?" he suggested suddenly. "I saw you wondering at him in there."

"Well," Margaret hesitated. "He seemed rather out of it," she answered. "Is there anything—wrong—with him?"

Ford was making an irreparable mess of his picture and did not look up.

"Wrong?" he repeated. "Well, depends what you call wrong. He drinks."

"Drinks!" Margaret did not like the matter-of-fact way in which he said it. "Do you mean—"

"He 's a drunkard—he goes to bed drunk. His nerves were like banjo strings this afternoon; he couldn't keep his hands still. You noticed it? That was last night's drinking; he didn't get to bed till daylight. I heard him struggling up the stairs, with Mrs. Jakes whispering to him not to make a noise and helping him. That was just before you came."

"Poor thing!"

"Yes—poor thing!" Ford looked up at the girl sharply. "You 've got it, Miss Harding. It 's Mrs. Jakes that suffers. Jakes has got his liquor, and that makes up to him for a lot. You and I, we 've got—whatever we have got, little or much. Old Samson 's got his memories and his pose; he gets along all right with them. But she 's got nothing at all—only the feeling that she 's managed to screen him and prop him and fooled people into thinking she 's the wife of a decent man. That 's all."

"But," said Margaret, "is he safe?"

"Safe? Oh, I forgot that he was to see you in his study. He won't reel about and fall down, if that 's what you mean. That part of it is all done in private; Mrs. Jakes gets the benefit of that. And as to his patients, he really does know a little about lungs when he 's sober, and there 's always the air. Oh, he 's safe enough."

"It's dreadful," said Margaret. She was at a loss; the men she knew did not get drunk. When they went to the bad, they chose different roads; this one seemed ankle-deep with defilement. She recalled Mrs. Jakes when she had come forth from the silent house to meet her in the chill dawn, and a vision flashed upon her of the vigil that must have been hers through the slow night, listening to the chink of bottle on glass and waiting, waiting in misery and fear to do that final office of helping the drunken man to his bed. Her primness, her wan gentility, her little affectations of fashion, seemed monstrously heroic in the light of that vision—she had carried them with her to the pit of her humiliation and brought them forth again unsullied, the spotless armor of a woman of no account.

"You understand now?" asked Ford, watching her.

"Yes," answered Margaret, slowly. "But it frightens me. I wish I hadn't got to see him in his study. What will he do?"

"Hush!" said Ford. "Here comes Mrs. Jakes. Don't let her hear you. He won't do anything."

He fell to his work again, and Margaret turned to receive the doctor's wife.

"The doctor will see you now, Miss Harding," said Mrs. Jakes. "Will you come with me?"

She eyed the pair of them with a suspicion she could not altogether hide, and Ford was careful to hold an impassive face.

"I am quite ready," returned Margaret, nerving herself for what had assumed the proportions of an ordeal, and went with her obediently.

Jakes' study was a small, rather dark room opening off the hall, in which the apparatus of his profession was set forth to make as much show as possible. His desk, his carpet, his leather chairs and bookcases did their best to counterfeit a due studiousness in his behalf, and a high shelf of blue and green bottles, with a microscope among them, counteracted their effect by suggesting to the irreverent that here science was "skied" while practice was hung on the line. This first interview was a convention in the case of every new patient. Dr. Jakes always saw them alone as a matter of professional honor. Mrs. Jakes would make a preliminary inspection of him to assure herself and him that he was fit for it; old Mr. Samson, passing by the half-open door once, had seen her bending over him, smelling his breath critically; and then she would trust him to his patient's good will and to the arbitrary Providence which ruled her world.

"Miss Harding, Eustace," she announced at the door of the study and motioned the girl to enter.

The little doctor rose with bustling haste, and looked at her with melancholy eyes. There was a smell of eau de Cologne in the room, which seemed natural at the time to its rather comfortable shabbiness.

"Sit down, sit down, Miss Harding," he said, and made a business of thrusting forward one of the leather chairs to the side of his desk. Seated, she faced him across a corner of it. In the interval that had elapsed since she had seen him at tea, he seemed to have recovered himself somewhat. Some of the strain was gone from him, and he was grave with a less effect of effort and discomfort.

He put his open hand upon a paper that lay before him.

"It was Dr. Mackintosh who ordered you south?" he asked. "A clever man, Miss Harding. I have his letter here about your case. Now, I want you to answer a question or two before we listen to that lung of yours."

"Certainly," said Margaret.

She was conscious of some surprise that he should move so directly to the matter in hand. It relieved her of vague fears with which Ford's warning had filled her, and as he went on to question her searchingly, her nervousness departed. The little man who fell so far short of her ideal of a doctor knew his business; even a patient like herself, with all a patient's prejudice and ignorance, could tell by the line his questions took that he had her case by heart. He was clearly on familiar ground, a fact which had power to reassure her, and she told herself that, after all, his resigned, plump face was not entirely repulsive.

"A queer little man," she said to herself. "Queer enough to be a genius, perhaps."

"And, now, please, we 'll just hear how things really are. No, I don't think you need undo anything. Yes, like that."

As he explored her chest and side with the stethoscope, his head was just under her face, the back of it rumpled like the head of some huge and clumsy baby. It was fluffy and innocent and comical, and Margaret smiled above him. Every one has his best aspect, or photographers would crowd the workhouses and the manufacturers of pink lampshades would starve. Dr. Jakes should have made more of the back of his head and less of his poor, uncertain face.

But he was done with the stethoscope at last, and as he raised his head his face came close to hers and the taint of his breath reached her nostrils. Suddenly she understood the eau de Cologne.

"Well," he said, sitting down again; "now we know where we are."

He had seen her little start of disgust and annoyance at the smell of him, and kept his eyes on the paper before him, playing with a corner of it between his fingers as he spoke.

"Will I get well?" asked Margaret, directly.

"Yes," he answered, without hesitating.

"I 'm glad," she said. "I 'm awfully glad. Thank you."

"I 'll see about your treatment," he said, without raising his eyes. "But I needn't keep you now. Only—"

"Yes?"

"You mustn't be afraid," he continued. "Not of anything. Do you understand? You mustn't be afraid."

Margaret wished he would look up. "I 'm not afraid," she answered. "Really I 'm not."

Dr. Jakes sighed and rose slowly. The trouble had descended on him again, and he looked sorry and dull.

"That 's right," he said without heartiness, and moved to open the door for her. His appealing eyes dwelt on her for a moment. "This isn't England," he added, with a heavy deliberation. "We 're none of us here because we like it. But—but don't be afraid, Miss Harding."

"I 'm sure there 's nothing to be afraid of," answered Margaret, moved—he was so mournful in his shame. He bowed to her, a slow peck of his big head, and she went.

In the hall, Mrs. Jakes met her and challenged her.

"Well," she said; "and what does the doctor say about you?"

Margaret smiled at her. "He says I shall get well, and I believe he knows," she answered.

It was as though some stiffening in Mrs. Jakes had suddenly resigned its functions. She softened before the girl's eyes.

"Of course he knows," she said contentedly. "Of course he knows. My dear, he really does know."

"I 'm sure he does," agreed Margaret.

Mrs. Jakes put a hand on her arm. "I feel certain we 're going to be friends," she said. "You 're so pretty and—and distinguished. And—and what a pretty frock you 've got!"

She hesitated an instant, and was very timid and humble.

"I should love to see you unpack," she said earnestly.

CHAPTER IV

The strength of a community, of almost any community, is its momentum; it is easier to go on than to pull up, even though its progress be erratic and the tear exceed the wear. Dr. Jakes' Sanatorium was a house divided against itself and poised for a downfall; but the course of its daily life had yet current enough to pick up a newcomer and float him from his independent foothold. The long languors of its days, its deep whispering nights, were opiates for the critical and exacting, so that before they had made it clear to themselves that this was no place for them, they were absorbed, merged in, the eventless quiet of the house and its people. For some—for most of them, indeed—there came at last a poignant day when Paul and his tall horses halted at the door to carry them to the station, and it was strange with what a reluctance they rode finally across the horizon that rose up to shut the big gray house from view, and how they hesitated and frowned and talked curtly when the station opened out before them and offered them the freedom of the world. And for the others, those who traveled the longer journey and alone, there stood upon the veld, a mile from the house, an enclosure of barbed wire—barbed against—what? For them came stout packing cases, which made the Kafirs sweat by their weight, and being opened, yielded some small cross of marble, black-lettered with name and dates and sorrowful texts; the lizards sunned themselves all day upon these monuments, for none disturbed them.

At the Sanatorium, day began in the cool of morning with a padding of bare feet in the long corridors and the fresh wakeful smell of coffee. Africa begins its day with coffee; it is the stirrup-cup of the country. Margaret opened her eyes to the brightness of morning and the brisk presence of Fat Mary, radiant across her adventurously held tray of coffee cups and reflecting the joy of the new light in her exulting smile. She had caught from Mrs. Jakes the first rule of polite conversation, though none of the subsequent ones, and she always began with a tribute of words to the weather.

"Sun burning plenty; how 's Missis?" was her usual opening gambit.

The wide-open windows flushed the room with air, sweet from the night's refreshment; and Margaret came to value that hour between the administration of coffee and the time for rising; it was the bonne bouche of the day. From her pillows she could lie and see the far mists making a last stand against the shock of the sun, breaking and diffusing before his attack and yielding up wider views of the rusty plain at each minute, till at last the dim blue of infinitely remote hills thickened the horizon. At the farm, a mile away, figures moved about and among the kraals, wonderfully and delicately clear in that diamond air which stirred her blood like wine. She could even make out Paul; the distance robbed him of nothing of his deliberate, dreamy character as he went to and fro with his air of one concerned with greater things than the mere immediacies of every day. There was always a suggestion about him of one who stoops from cloudy altitudes of preoccupation to the little concerns of men, and towards Margaret he wore the manner of having a secret to divulge which was difficult to name. She met him sometimes on the veld paths between the two houses, and each time he seemed to draw near the critical moment of confession and fall back from it baffled. And though Margaret in her time had heard many confidences from many men and had made much progress in the subtle arts of the confidante, this was a case beyond her powers. The deftly sympathetic corkscrew failed to unbottle whatever moved in his mind; he evidently meant to bide his time. Meanwhile, seen from afar, he was a feature of the before-breakfast hour, part of the upholstery of the morning.

It was when she heard Mr. Samson pass her door on his way to the bath that she knew the house was definitely awake. He wore Turkish slippers that announced him as he went with the slap-slap of their heels upon the floor. Once, putting her head forth from the door incautiously to scout for Fat Mary she had beheld him, with his bath-robe girt about him by its tasseled cord and bath towels round his neck, going faithfully to the ritual initiation of his daily round, a figure consistent with the most correct gentlemanly tradition. The loose robe and the towels gave him girth and substance, and on the wary, intolerant old face, with its gay white mustache, was fixed a look of serious purpose. Mr. Samson never trifled with his toilet, by gad—what? Later, on his return, she would hear his debonair knock on Ford's door. "Out with you!" he would pipe—he never varied it. "Out with you! Bright and early, my boy—bright and early—what?" An answer growled from within contented him, and he would turn in at his room, there to build up the completed personality which he offered daily to the world. It took time, too, and a meek Kafir valet, for a man is not made and perfected in a minute or two, and the result never failed to justify the labor. When next he appeared it would be as a member of the upper classes, armored and equipped, treading the stoep in a five-minutes' constitutional in a manner that at once dignified and lightened it. When one looked at him, one thought instinctively of exclusive clubs, of fine afternoons in Piccadilly, of the landed interest and the Church of England. One judged that his tailor loved him. He had a cock of the head, with a Homburg hat upon it, and a way of swelling his neck over the edge of his conservative collar, that were the very ensign of gallantry and spirit. It was only when he coughed that the power abandoned him, and it was shocking and pitiful to see the fine flower of gentility rattled like a dice-box in the throes of his malady and dropped at last against a wall, wheezing and gasping for breath in the image of a weak and stricken old man.

"Against the ropes," he would stammer shakily as he gathered himself together again, sniffling into his beautiful handkerchief. "Got me against the ropes, it did. Damn it—what?"

He suffered somewhat in his aggressive effect from the lack of victims. He had exhausted his black valet's capacity for being blasted by a glance, and had fallen back on Dr. Jakes. The wretched little doctor had to bear the brunt of his high severity when he came among his patients racked and quivering from his restless bed, and his bleared and tragic eyes appealed in vain for mercy from that high priest of correct demeanor. Mr. Samson looked at him as a justice of the peace, detained upon the bench when he should be at lunch and conscious that his services to the State are gratuitous, might look upon a malefactor who has gone to the length of being without visible means of subsistence. The doctor might wriggle and smile painfully and seek the obscurity of corners, but it could not serve him; there was no getting out of range of that righteous and manly battery while he stayed in the same room with it. Once, however, he spiked its guns. The glare across the tea-table, the unspoken sheer weight of rebuke and condemnation, seemed to suddenly break up the poisoned fog that clouded his faculties, and he lifted his face, shining a little as with sweat, in a quick look at Mr. Samson. Margaret, who saw it, recognized it; just so he had looked in his study when he questioned her on her case and bent his mind to the consideration of it. It was direct, expert, impersonal, the dehumanized scrutiny of the man whose trade is with flesh and blood. Something had stirred the physician in the marrow of the man, and from a judge and an executioner of justice, a drawing-room hangman, Mr. Samson had become a case. At the beginning of it, Mrs. Jakes, unfailingly watchful, had opened her mouth to speak and save the situation, but she too saw in time and closed her mouth again. Mr. Samson glowered and the hectic in his thin cheeks burned brighter.

"You 've seen me before, Jakes!" he said, crisply.

The little doctor nodded almost easily. "Your hand, please," he said. "Thanks."

His forefinger found the pulse and dwelt on it; he waited with lips pursed, frowning.

"As I thought," he said, dropping the stringy white hand again. "Yes! I 'll see you in the study, Mr. Samson, please—in half an hour."

Mr. Samson gulped but stood up manfully. He was at his best, standing, by reason of a certain legginess which had been taken into account in the design of his clothes, but now those clothes seemed big for him.

"What is it?" he demanded, throwing his courage into his voice.

Dr. Jakes warned him with an uplifted finger.

"Sit down," he said. "Keep quiet. I 'll see you in half an hour."

He looked round at Margaret and the rest of them thoughtfully and went back to his place by the mantel-piece, sighing. It was his signal to them that his brief display of efficiency was over, and as though to screen his retreat, Mrs. Jakes coughed and hoped loudly that the rain would hold off.

But Mr. Samson made his way to a chair and sat down in it heavily, grasping its arms with his hands, and Margaret noticed for the first time that he was an old man.

Apparently the thing that threatened Mr. Samson was not very serious, or else the doctor had found means to head it off in time, for though he went from the study to his bed, he was at breakfast next morning, with a fastidious appetite and thereafter the course of his life remained unaltered.

Breakfast at the Sanatorium was in theory a meal that might be taken at any hour from eight till half past eleven. In the days of his dream, Dr. Jakes had seen dimly silver dishes with spirit lamps under them and a house-party effect of folk dropping in as they came down and helping themselves. But Mrs. Jakes' thousand pounds had stopped short of the silver dishes and Mrs. Jakes herself could not be restrained from attending in person to see that the coffee was hot. Therefore, since it was not possible in any conscience to bind Mrs. Jakes to her post till noon, breakfast occurred between half-past eight and half-past nine.

The freshness, the exuberance, of the morning were not for her; already she wore the aspect of one who has done a stage of the day's journey and shed the bloom of her vigor upon it. The sunlight, waxing like a tide in flood, was powerless to lift her prim, black-dressed personality from the level of its cares and functions. She made to each as he entered the same mechanical little bow across the crockery, smiled the same formal smile from the lips outwards and uttered the same small comment on the blaze of day that filled the earth without the window. She had her life trimmed down to a routine for convenience of handling; she was one of those people—they are the salt of the earth!—whose passions are monosyllabic, whose woes are inarticulate. The three who sat daily at meat with her knew and told each other that her composure, her face keyed up like an instrument to its pitch of vacant propriety, were a mask. Sometimes, even, there had been sounds in the night to assure them of it; occasionally Jakes, on his way to bed in the small hours, would slip on the stairs and bump down a dozen or so of them, and lie where he fell till he was picked up and set on his way again; there would be the rasp of labored breath as he was supported along the corridor, and the mumble of his blurred speech hushed by prayerful whispers. A door slammed, a low cry bitten off short, and then silence in the big house, and in the morning Mrs. Jakes with her coffee pot and trivial tinkle of speech and treble armor of practised bearing against the pity of those who knew! The sheer truculence of it held them dumb; it was the courage of a swashbuckler, of a bravo, and it imposed on them the decorum of silence.

The doctor, she gave them to understand, suffered from the climate.

"He never was strong," she would say, with her eyes fixed on the person addressed as though she would challenge him to dispute or question it. "Never! It 's the sun, I think; he suffers from his head, you know. He used to take aspirin for it when we were first married, but it doesn't seem to do him any good now."

The three of them would nod sympathetically and look hastily elsewhere, as though ashamed to be the spectators of her humiliation.

Poor Mrs. Jakes! Seven thousand miles from the streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness and security of its little decent houses, she held yet with a frail hand to the skirts of its beatitude. In the drawer in her bedroom which also contained Jakes' dress suit, she kept in tissue paper and sincere regard a morocco-bound mausoleum of memory—an album. Only two or three times in Mr. Samson's experience—and he had been an inmate of the Sanatorium for four years—had she brought it forth. Once was on the night before young Shaw died, and when no soothing would hold him at peace in his bed, he had lain still to look through those yellowing portraits and hear Mrs. Jakes tell how this one was doing very well as a job-master and that one had turned Papist. But Margaret Harding had seen it. Mrs. Jakes had sat on her bed, quelling Fat Mary with her eye, and seen her unpack her clothes, the frocks new from dressmakers and tailors in London, the hats of only a month ago. Margaret had been aided in buying them by a philosophic aunt who had recently given up vegetarianism on the advice of her hairdresser. "My child, play light," had been the counsel of this relative. "Don't surprise the natives; they never like it. No frills; a vigorous vicarage style is what you want." And she had brought considerable powers of personality and vocabulary to bear on Margaret's choice, so that in the result there predominated a certain austerity of raiment which Margaret found unexciting. But Mrs. Jakes received them as canons of fashion, screwing up her mouth and nodding gravely as she mastered saliencies.

"I can't quite imagine them in these styles," she said; "the people in the Park, I mean. I suppose it's this golf that's done it."

In return for the exhibition, she had shown Margaret her album. It had many thick pages with beveled gilt edges, each framing from one to six portraits or groups, and she had led her hearer through the lot of them, from the first to the last. They sat side by side on the bed in Mrs. Jakes' room, and the album lay open on their laps, and Mrs. Jakes' finger traveled like a pointer among the pictures while she elucidated them in a voice of quiet pride. These pale and fading faces, fixed to the order of the photographer in more than human smiles, with sleek and decorative hair and a show of clothes so patently reserved for Sundays, were neither pale nor faded for her. She knew the life behind them, their passions and their strength, and spoke of them as she might have spoken had they been waiting in the next room.

"That 's my sister," she said, her finger pausing. "Two years older than me, but she never married. And what she used to suffer from indigestion, words can't tell. And here 's my Aunt Martha—yes, she died seven years ago. My mother's sister, you know. My mother was a Penfold—one of the Penfolds of Putney. You 've heard of them? Ah, and here 's Bill Penfold, my cousin Bill. Poor Bill, he didn't do well, ever. He had a fancy for me, once, or so they said, but my father never could bear him. No harm, you know, no real harm, but larky—sort of. This one? Oh, that 's nobody—a Mr. Wrench, who used to collect for my father; he had a hair-lip. I did n't like him."

The thick page turned, and showed on the other side a single cabinet portrait of a thin woman, with her head a little on one side.

"My mother," said Mrs. Jakes, and shifted the album that Margaret might see better.

"She was a Penfold of Putney," she said, gently. "I think she shows it, you know. A bit quiet and refined, especially about the eyes. Don't you think so?"

It was the picture of the wife of a robust and hardy man, Margaret thought, and as for the eyes and their slight droop, the touch of listlessness which bespeaks an acquired habit of patience and self-suppression, she had only to look up and they returned her look from the face of Mrs. Jakes.

"And this?" she asked.

Mrs. Jakes smiled quite brightly; the photograph was one of a baby.

"That 's little Eustace," she answered, with no trace of the softness of regret which had hushed her tone when she spoke of her mother. "My little baby; he 'd have been a big boy now. He was like his father—very like. Everybody noticed it. And that"—her finger passed on—"is George Penfold, Sergeant-Major in the Guards. His widow married again, a gunner in the Navy."

No sorrow for little Eustace. He, at any rate, would never see his dreams dislimn and fail him; no wife would watch the slow night through for his unsteady step nor read the dishonor written in his eyes. The first of the crosses in the barbed wire enclosure, Mrs. Jakes' empty and aching heart and her quick smile of triumph at his easy victory over all the snares of life—these and the faint, whitening photograph remained of little Eustace. Many a man leaves less when his time comes in South Africa.

"The weather is holding up nicely," she would say at breakfast. "Almost too fine, isn't it? But I suppose we oughtn't complain."

It was a meal over which one lingered, for with the end of it there closed the eventful period of the day. While it lasted, the Sanatorium was at its best; one saw one's fellows in faint hues of glamour after the night's separation and heard them speak with a sense of receiving news. But the hour exhausted them of interest and one left the table, when all pretexts for remaining there had been expended, to face the emptiness of a morning already stale. That, in truth, was the price one paid for healing, the wearing, smothering monotony of the idle days, when there was nothing to do and one saw oneself a part of the stagnation that ruled the place. Mrs. Jakes withdrew herself to become the motor of the domestic machinery, and till lunch time was not available for countenance and support. Ford occupied himself gravely with his little canvases, plastering upon them strange travesties of landscape, and was busy and intent and impatient of interruption for long periods at a time, while Mr. Samson, keeping a sufficient offing from all human contact, alternately strutted to and fro upon the stoep in a short quarter-deck promenade of ten steps and a right about turn, and lay in a deck chair with a writing case upon his knee and wrote fitfully and with deep thought long, important looking letters which never reached the post.

"You 're feeling the need of something to do," Ford told Margaret, when in desperation she came behind him and watched him modeling—as it seemed—in burnt sienna. "Why don't you knit—or something?"

"Knit?" said Margaret with huge scorn.

"You 'll come to it," he warned her. "There was a chap here before you came who taught himself the harp. A nuisance he was, too, but he said he 'd have been a gibbering idiot without it."

"That was n't saying much, perhaps," retorted Margaret.

"Oh, I don't know. He was a barrister of sorts, I believe. Not many barristers who can play the harp, you know."

"For goodness' sake, don't knead the stuff like that!" cried Margaret, watching his thumb at work. "You 're painting, not—not civil engineering! But what were you?"

"Eh?" He looked up at her.

"Before you had to come here, I mean? Oh, do talk for a minute," she begged.

"Sorry," he said. "I was in the army."

"And was it rather awful to have to give up and nurse yourself?"

"Well!" He glanced at her consideringly, as though to measure her intelligence. "It was rough," he admitted. "You see, the army 's not like barristering, for instance. It 's not a thing you can drop for a bit and then take up again; once you 're out, you 're out for good." He paused. "And I meant it," he added.

"Meant it?"

"Yes, there 's a chance nowadays for a chap with a turn for soldiering. There 's a lot to know, you see, and, well—I was by way of knowing it. That 's all."

He turned to his canvas again, but did not fall to work. Margaret saw his back, thin under his silk coat but flat and trim as a drilled man's should be.

"So for you, it meant the end of everything?" she suggested.

"Looks like it, doesn't it!" he answered. "Still—we 'll see. They trained me and there 's just a chance, in the event of a row, that they might have a use for me. They 'd be short of officers who knew the game. You see—"

He hitched sideways on his camp-stool so that he might make himself clear to her.

"You see, the business of charging at the head of your men is a thing of the past, pretty nearly. All that gallery play is done away with. But take a hundred Tommies and walk 'em about for half a year, dry-nurse 'em, keep them fed and healthy and moderately happy and as clean as you can, be something between an uncle and a schoolmaster to them, and have 'em ready at the end of it to march forty miles in a day and then fight—that's an art in itself! In fact, it's a trade, and it can't be learned in a week."

"I 'm perfectly sure it can't," agreed Margaret.

"Well, that was my trade," said Ford. "That's where I 'll come in when the band begins to play. See?"

He nodded at her expressively but with finality. If was plain that he considered the subject drained dry, and only waited for her to go to return to the mysteries of art.

"Oh, well," sighed Margaret, and left him to it.

Lunch lacked the character of breakfast. For one thing, it was impossible for three feeble people, debarred from exercise, to arrive at a state of appetite during a morning of semi-torpor, with a prospect before them of an afternoon of the same quality. For another, tempers had endured the heat and burden of four hours of enforced idleness and emerged from the test frayed at the edges.

This meant more labor for poor Mrs. Jakes, who could by no means allow the meal to be eaten in a bitter silence, and was driven by a stern sense of duty to keep up a dropping fire of small talk. Their sour faces, the grimness with which they passed the salt, filled her with nervous tremors, and she talked as a born hostess might talk to cover the confusion induced by an earthquake under the table, trembling but fluent to the last. There were times when her small, hesitating voice wrought Margaret up to the very point of flat interventions. At one such moment, it was Ford who saved the situation.

"Miss Harding," he said, in a matter-of-fact way. "You are a pig!"

Mrs. Jakes gasped and bounded in her chair, and old Mr. Samson choked.

"And you," replied Margaret with intensity, "are just a plain beast!"

"That 's the idea," said Ford. "You feel better now?"

"Ever so much better, thank you," answered Margaret. "It was just what I wanted."

Mrs. Jakes was staring at them as though convinced that sudden mania had attacked them both at the same moment.

"It 's all right," Ford assured her. "It's a dodge for blowing off temper. If you 'd just call Mr. Samson something really rude, he 'd be ever so grateful. Call him a Socialist, Mrs. Jakes."

"Oh, I couldn't," said Mrs. Jakes, while Mr. Samson, mastering his emotions, glared and reddened. "You did alarm me," she said. "I thought for a moment—well, I don't know what I did think."

She was distinctly not at her ease for the remainder of the meal, and even at tea that afternoon, she kept an eye on the pair of them. To her mind, they were playing with edged tools.

It was at tea, as a rule, that Dr. Jakes was first visible, very tremulous and thirsty, but always submissive and content to be overlooked and forgotten. At dinner, later on, he would be better and able to talk with a jerky continuity to Margaret who sat at his right hand. He bore himself always with an air of effort, like one who is not at home and whose acquaintance with his fellows is slight, and drank at table nothing but water. His eyes kept the Kafir servants under observation as they waited, and the black boys were full of alacrity in the consciousness that he was watching. "It 's strange," Mrs. Jakes used to say; "Eustace is so quiet, and yet the natives obey him wonderfully." Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he would flicker to and fro restlessly, growing each moment more irritable and incapable of hearing a sentence to the end. Half-way through the evening, he would seize an occasion to escape to his own quarters, and thereafter would be invisible till next day. Every one knew whither he went and for what purpose; eyes met in significant glances as the door closed softly behind him and Mrs. Jakes raised her voice in rapid speech to hide the sound of his tiptoe crossing of the hall; his secret was anybody's and even the Kafirs shared it, and yet the man had the force of mystery. He slid to and fro in the interstices of their lives and came to the surface only to serve and heal them. That done, he dropped back again to the solace that was his behind his locked door, while about him the house slept. He knew himself and yet could look his patients and his wife in the face. Mingled with their contempt and disgust, there was an acknowledgment of the quality of him, of a kind of wry and shabby greatness.

And thus the day came to its end. One by one, Margaret, Ford and Mr. Samson drew off and made their way to the dignified invitation of the big staircase and their rooms. Mrs. Jakes was always at hand to bid them good night, for her day was yet a long way from its finish.

"Tired, my dear?" she would ask Margaret. "It 's been a tiring day; I feel it myself. Good night to you."

In her room, Margaret would find Fat Mary waiting for her, sleepy in her vast, ridiculous way, but still prodigal of smiles, and ready to put her to bed with two left hands equipped with ten thumbs. She had a yawn which would have reminded Jonah of old times, but nothing could damp her helpful ardor, not even being discovered stretched fast asleep on Margaret's bed and being waked with the bath sponge. She made it clear that she would stop at few things to be of service.

"Missis not sleepy? Ah!" She stood in thought for five seconds. "Me nurse Missis, all same baby? Plenty strong—me!"

She dandled an imaginary child in her great arms, smiling cheerfully but quite in earnest. "Plenty strong," she assured the young lady from Kensington. "No? No? All a-right!"

Darkness at last, and the window wide to the small, whispering winds which people the veld at night! A sky of blue-black powdered with misty white stars, and from the distance, squeaks, small cries, the wary voice of the wilderness! Sometimes a jackal would range within earshot and lift up his voice under the stars to cry like a child, in the very accent of heartbroken, helpless woe. The nightly traffic of the veld was in full swing ere her eyes closed and its subdued clamor followed her into her dreams.

Silence in the big house and along the matted corridors—and one voice, speaking guardedly, in the hall. It never happened to Margaret to hear it and go to the stair-head and look down. Thence she might have seen what would have made her less happy—Mrs. Jakes on her knees at the locked door of the study, with her candle set on the floor beside her, casting a monstrous shadow-caricature of her upon the gray stone wall. In her sober black dress she knelt on the mat and her small, kitchen-reddened hands tapped gently, carefully on the panels. She spoke through the keyhole and her fruitless whisperings rustled in light echoes about the high ceiling.

"Eustace, it's me. Eustace! I 'm so tired, Eustace. Please open the door. Please, Eustace! It 's only me, dear."