Читать книгу Between Sun and Sand: A Tale of an African Desert - W. C. Scully - Страница 11

The next day was a dream of delight. The evaporation from the sand counteracted the heat of the sun, and the pungent air was full of germinating energy. Cool, gentle breezes awoke now and then, wandered vaguely to and fro, and then laid themselves down to rest, rising anon to play in a circle of mimic whirlwinds. Old Schalk sat in the doorway of the mat-house with his feet in the sun and the large Bible open upon his knees. The combination of Old Schalk and an open Bible meant either that he was in extremely good humour and felt at peace with all mankind and in general harmony with his environment—or else the direct reverse. In the former case he would usually have the volume open at the Song of Solomon; in the latter, at the 109th Psalm. To-day he prayed, although he knew it not, for his heart was lifted up in involuntary thankfulness and appreciation of the feast which was so lavishly spread around him. His happiness was even beyond the terms of his favourite Psalms, which he knew off by heart—even the numbers of the great lyric poets of Israel seemed to fall short of the music which Nature was making upon his worn heart-strings.

Mrs Hattingh was sitting boiling soap inside the kitchen-scherm, her failing eyes rendered more than usually red and rheumy by the steam arising from the acrid lye. She, too, felt the benign influences with which the Desert was rich; the labour she was engaged in was not as irksome as usual. As she broke the bushes into the soap-pot she might have been a rapt sorceress brewing a love-philtre, or a priestess sacrificing at the shrine of the God of Cleanliness.

Maria and Petronella were sitting on the wagon-box crooning a weird song in a minor key. They felt sleepy and happy, for Mother Nature had a word for them too. It was a word very softly spoken, and in a language which they did not yet fully understand, but it made them dream vague, sweet dreams. Susannah heard the voice, and, low as it was spoken, it awoke her and she hearkened to it. She, too, failed to understand the words, but the cadences were sweet and seemed to be full of an infinite promise.

Nature, in her spring guise, has to do her work in the Desert, when she does it at all, in a hurry. There the seasons do not follow the regular course. At the end of her summer revel in other southern lands she sometimes suddenly bethinks her that away to the northward she has been for long neglectful of her duties, so she flies to the arid plains, where perhaps the very traces of her footprints have been long since forgotten. Then with a sudden dower of riches she tries to make amends for her forgetfulness; she tarries for a few sweet, pregnant hours, and the ardours and burgeonings of a season are consummated in one delicious day.

Susannah felt the rapid sap of sudden springtime rise in a sweet storm to her heart and to her brain. It seemed to her as though she had wings, and she longed to fly out over the infinite waste and beyond the blue, mysterious haze in which it merged with the horizon in a sapphire ring. The highest of the little group of kopjes stood just at the back of the camp, and her senses bounded at the thought of climbing quickly to the summit and thus getting so much nearer the sky. A tall koekerboom which stood on the very top quivered in the wind, and every cluster of leaves at the ends of its dichotomous branches seemed to beckon to her to come.

She climbed into the wagon, opened the camphor-wood box in which she kept her limited wardrobe, and selected her best dress. This was a cheap print, delicately flowered, and of soft hues. It thus afforded a pleasing contrast to the gaudy and crudely coloured habiliments of her cousins. After she had put it on one might have seen that the dress fitted her neat figure like a new glove. Her ample hair she rolled into a knot, but, after a moment’s consideration, she uncoiled it again and shook it back over her shoulders. Then she put on a “cappie” made of print of the same pattern as her frock. A cheap necklet of coral completed her toilet. She clasped this hurriedly about her throat as she sprang to the ground from the back of the wagon. She panted with desire to get away to the high peak where the solitary koekerboom, which had defied the sun for centuries, stood beckoning to her, and any delay was a pain. She sped away among the aromatic shrubs that clustered among the impassive granite rocks on the side of the kopje, and the brown stones she trod on seemed to be as buoyant as the air that filled her veins with ecstasy. In a few minutes she had gained the top of the kopje, when she sank down in pleasant exhaustion at the foot of the hoar-ancient koekerboom.

As she ascended the kopje the breeze freshened, and the stiff, awkward branches of the archaic tree seemed to be seized with excitement unfitting its age and experience; it beckoned violently, and until Max, who was standing at the door of the shop, saw not alone its signal, but the flutter of the delicately flowered print dress which at that moment was rippling against its gnarled knees.

Max hurriedly locked the shop and sped up the side of the kopje towards the antiquated tree, which now seemed to have fallen asleep, so still it was. Schalk Hattingh’s was the only camp then at Namies, and as Nathan had given strict injunctions that the Hattinghs were to have no more credit, nothing was to be lost in respect of their custom. Max would, he told himself, be able to descry any approaching customers from the top of the kopje.

Susannah heard the nearing footstep. She had now taken off her cappie, and was lying back between two of the shapeless roots which were continuations of flanking buttresses thrown out by the tree towards the north-east, from whence the storms had been trying to uproot it—probably ever since the days when the galleys of Pharaoh passed down the Red Sea and returned to Egypt through the Pillars of Hercules. The girl arose into a sitting posture and turned towards the boy a face flushed with exercise and eyes liquid with delight. Max put out his hand in mute greeting, and she clasped it silently. Then he threw himself on the ground at her feet.

These two had for some time attracted each other. On Max’s side the attraction had lately begun to ripen into something very like love. But of this as yet he was unaware. To-day the universe seemed to breathe of music, the boughs of the old tree and the granite rocks were as the strings of a sounding harp, touched by the wind as a plectrum.

Spring, in a graciously capricious moment, resolved to crown her holiday with an idyll. Max arose and held out his hand to the girl. She took it, and he drew her gently to her feet. They wandered on together with scanty, broken speech and averted eyes, through lately arid nooks and hollows made sweet and full of the promise of verdure by yesterday’s rain. The faint-green spear-points of strange vegetation were already piercing the brown earth; quaint beetles crawled out from under the stones and beat their soft “tok-tok-tok” on the ground, signalling to prospective mates; lizards of a deeper and more vivid blue than anything else in Nature’s storehouse, sunned themselves on the rocks, panting with enjoyment.

They came to a flowering mass of gethyllis—that strange plant the curled leaves of which wind out their spirals in winter to catch the dewdrops and conduct them down their tube-like channels to the deep-underground bulb, which waits until the fiercest sun of summer shines before it sends up its lovely, tulip-like cup of snowy white or vivid crimson. The luscious scent filled the air and caused a faint, delicious intoxication. They bent over the blossoms and began gathering them. In doing this their hands met by accident and they started apart suddenly, thrilling with unknown confusion.

Their faltering speech died away altogether, and they more than ever avoided each other’s gaze. After retracing their steps for a short distance they again paused. The vague horizon seemed to become of absorbing interest. Each felt to blame for the abashment of the other, and both seemed to drink of a cup of humiliation. The old tree waved sympathetically over them its topmost branches, in which the wind seemed to waken a sigh.

Careless Nature, to bring them together, sacrificed a life. She sent a message down through a cleft in the rock against which Susannah was dejectedly leaning, and called from the depths where it had long been sleeping a poisonous red centipede. The creature crawled down over the girl’s shoulder and endeavoured to enter her sleeve at the wrist. Then Max saw it. He sprang forward in a spasm of terror, brushed the centipede aside with his hand; not, however, before it had given him a venomous nip. In an instant he had crushed the life out of the creature with his foot; then, with an exclamation of pain, he turned towards the girl. His hand was already beginning to swell. Susannah tore a piece off the curtain of her cappie and began to bind up the injury. As she did so she came so close that she leant slightly against Max. Then the opportunity triumphed over the pain—he passed his arm around her, drew her to him, and kissed her on the quivering lips.

The centipede and its sting were soon forgotten. Nature held them, embraced and embracing, for a blissful eternity; they saw the face of happiness smiling in the rosy gloom under Love’s wing.

The koekerboom became wrapped in a whirlwind of excitement, its gaunt boughs swayed until they clashed, and the sap rose in its slowly beating heart until the yellow buds which a few of its less mature twigs had put forth tentatively, as though half ashamed of such frivolity, burst open and sent forth a faint shower of pollen, which fell like a spangling of gold-dust upon Susannah’s hair.

As they paced away, hand in hand, a small army of fierce desert ants were dragging away the still writhing body of the centipede to their underground storehouse. Nature, so very lavish in large matters, is extremely economical in trifles.