is totally unendurable, where am I to blame? I can’t scowl at them, and nothing short of that will restrain them. Now, the reason why I rather like this man is that he has so far shown no signs of mental aberration.”
She meant it all. For one so plenteously, so dangerously, dowered as far as the other sex was concerned, Nidia Commerell was strangely unromantic. In her allusion to the rapidity with which the average male succumbed to her charms there was no exaggeration. She seemed to possess the art of conquest sudden and complete, yet, in reality, art it was not, for she had not a shadow of the flirt in her composition. The very artlessness of her frank unstudied demeanour constituted, in fact, her most formidable armament. But she refused to see why she should avoid the other sex simply because a large percentage of its members were weak enough to fall in love with her upon no sort of warranty or provocation. There was no affectation, either, in her declaration that the unanimity wherewith they did so candidly bored her.
“Just as I begin to like a man,” she would plaintively declare, “and find him of some use, he gets serious, gloomy, and spoils everything.” And for all her airiness on the subject, she was not entirely without a qualm lest John Ames should follow suit, and him she had more than begun to like very much indeed. The roar of a truly demoniacal gong cut short further discussion of the subject, by warning them that it was time to go down and join the object of it at table. Him they found in an amused state.
“Rather fun,” he said. “Some fellow has been going for that most cherished and firmly rooted institution, the great Cape fish-horn, in a letter to the evening Argus. He doesn’t see how a civilised community at the end of the nineteenth century can tolerate their day and night alike being made hideous by an unending procession of dirty Malays blaring weirdly, wildly, deafeningly through a ‘yard of tin;’ and, for the matter of that, no more do I. Look, here it is” – handing the paper across to Mrs Bateman.
The latter, like most high-featured people, was of censorious habit. “Yes; it’s amusing,” she said. “But there are some people who are never happy unless they are finding fault. I suppose even these poor Malays must earn their living.”
“No fear of their not doing that,” rejoined Ames. “Why, they are the most well-to-do crowd on this peninsula. I take it the writer’s point is they could earn it without making life intolerable to the world at large.”
At which remark, ever so faint a droop of the mouth-corners changed the visage of a silent, middle-aged individual seated at an adjacent table; but his back was towards them, and they couldn’t see it. “Oh, nonsense,” retorted Mrs Bateman, breezily. “People who can’t stand a little noise ought to go and live by themselves on a desert island.”
Here the droop on the lips of the silent one became a very pronounced sneer. “A fool of a woman, answering according to her folly,” he thought.
“Let me see it,” cried Nidia. “Yes; it is a good joke, and perfectly true, too. I know I’ve wished that same hideous noise anywhere times out of number. I quite agree – it is amazing how they tolerate it. I wonder who the writer is. Positively I’d like to send him an anonymous letter of cordial thanks.”
This time the silent one laughed to himself, heartily and undisguisedly.
“Write it to the Argus instead and agree with him; that’ll do just as well,” said John Ames. “The fact of the matter is that the Malay vote is a power just here, and it would be about as easy to uproot Table Mountain itself as the diabolical snoek trumpet under discussion.”
“No, I don’t agree with you in the least, Susie,” declared Nidia. “I think unnecessary racket ought to be put down with a stern hand. Don’t you remember all that abominable cannon nuisance when we were in the Bernese Oberland? You didn’t like that any more than I did. Just fancy, Mr Ames. Some of the most picturesque turnings of the road, almost wherever we went, were tenanted by a miscreant volunteering to let off a horrid cannon for half a franc – to raise an echo.”
“I should have felt like offering him a whole one not to raise it,” was the reply. “But the noble Switzer was shrewd enough to appraise his clients at their correct value. The English are never quite happy unless they are making a noise, unless it is when they are listening to one.”
“Yes; aren’t they?” cried Nidia. “You see it in their fondness for banging doors and talking at the top of their voices on every landing at all hours of the day and night, and throwing their boots about and pounding up and down for hours over somebody else’s head, in a house full of other people.”
The silent one hearkened approvingly. “That’s no fool of a girl,” he was saying to himself.
“I know,” replied John Ames. “And, talking about that stumping overhead trick, if you were wantonly to knock a cripple off his crutch you would be voted the greatest brute on earth. Yet that same cripple will go into the room above yours, and, as you say, pound up and down for hours, or perhaps let fall that same crutch with a mighty bang upon the floor, totally callous to the possibility of there being some unfortunate wight underneath with shattered nerves, and generally seedy, and who would give his soul for a square night’s rest. No; if you expect from other people any of the consideration they expect from you, you are simply laughed at for a fool, and a selfish one at that.”
“Oh, well, in life we have to give and take, I suppose,” remarked the censorious one, with striking originality.
John Ames smiled. He had an idea as to the sort of giving and taking this masterful person would be likely to practise, save in one quarter, that is; for he had not spent the time he had in the society of the two without detecting that she had at any rate one soft place, and that was Nidia Commerell. So he agreed easily, and the talk drifted on to other matters.
It was pleasant out in the moonlight. The elder of the two ladies had pronounced herself tired when Nidia, whose freshness nothing seemed to impair, suggested strolling. John Ames was rather inclined to be silent as they wandered on, the light of the southern moon flooding down through the overshadowing firs, the balmy stillness of the night broken by distant snatches of shrill laughter and the chatter of voices from squalid coloured loafers on the main road. He was realising with a sort of pang at the heart how all this time would soon be behind him, as in a flash, only as an episode to look back to. The girl, noting his silence, was wondering whether it was a prelude to what she had airily termed “hoisting the signals,” and, thus conjecturing, was surprised at herself and her lack of the usual eagerness to avoid them.
“You are feeling much better than when you came down, are you not, Mr Ames?” she said softly.
“Ever so much. I shall go back quite set up.”
Her practised ear detected the slightest suspicion of melancholy in the tone, while admiring the strength which controlled it.
“What a strange life you must have to lead up there!” she went on; for he had told her a good deal about himself during the time of their acquaintanceship.
“Oh yes. It gets monotonous at times. But then, I take it, everything does.”
“But it is such a useful life. And you have helped to open up the country, too.”
“Not I. That is left to other people.”
“But you were with the first expedition, and so of course you helped. I don’t wonder you pioneers are proud of the part you took in extending the Empire. Isn’t that the correct newspaper phrase? At any rate, it sounds something big.”
John Ames smiled queerly. He was not especially proud of the extension of the Empire; he had seen a few things incidental to that process which had killed within
