Cynthia Stockley

“ For the world is always wide.
Poor Kenna! She had been false: that was why he had sought the wide world of the veld and renounced women. Sarle, certain of the innate truth and loyalty of the girl opposite him as of her pearl-like outer beauty, could pity his friend's fate from the bottom of his soul. But being a man, he did not linger too long with pity; hope is always a pleasanter companion, and hope was burning in him like a blue flame: the hope that within an hour or two he would hold this radiant girl in his arms and touch her lips. ”

“ One long look at the dead face, then Chrissie ran down the steps and sprang across the veld. Men’s forms were moving hither and thither, carrying the dead and wounded away from the raging flames. Groans resounded everywhere, and there were bitter cries for water. To one such cry, in a voice she knew, Chrissie flew like an arrow from a bow.
She found him lying where the explosion had thrown him, far down the river bank, shattered, broken, dying; and when she had given him water, she kissed his lips, and baring her breast let his head lie there, sobbing out his life’s blood against her heart. ”

“ Something fluttered like a frightened bird behind that door of her mind (or heart, or soul) which she had so carefully closed. It might have been the little drab-faced conscience. However, a fascinating champagne cocktail drugged it into silence, and they enjoyed a merry lunch together.
The afternoon was spent about as busily as the lilies of the field spend their afternoons. She rested a good deal, shook out her best gown for the evening, tried a new way of doing her hair, and brooded over the diamond in an effort to recapture the first fine early magic of possession. ”

“ Evelyn Carson's son was born in the dawn of a late October day: heralded in by Big Ben striking the hour of five. Poppy gave one long, ravished glance at the little dimpled morsel, with its sleek, black head and features like crumpled rose-leaves, then lay back content and at peace with all the world.
"How sweet it is to be a woman!" she thought, forgetting all past pain and despair, all anguish to come. "My heart can never be a stone again, nor my soul a shrivelled leaf." ”

“ Africa had shown them to me happening in all their naked terror and beauty. In Europe I had known pictures, and sculpture, add music, in all their finished and accepted beauty. But here I had found the very elements of Art—deeds to inspire sculpture, and all the tragedy that a violin in the hands of a master tries to tell.
Riding home between the two men, along the dusty road, silver fretted now under the glancing stars and a moon that hung in the heavens like a great luminous pearl, I realised how changed I was, and how changed was life for me. ”

“ She wore the news in her parted lips, her tinted cheeks, and the little rumple of her hair. He walked as one whom the gods had chosen to honour, pride-of-life written across his face, yet in his eyes a humility curious in Maryon Hammond. He had met his Waterloo.
Some of the women gave little sighs, not in envy so much as in a kind of sadness that certain beautiful things only come once in each woman’s life, however much she may try and repeat or give base imitations of them; and most men felt a sort of warmth in their veins as they looked at those two radiant beings. ”

“ She rejoiced in her beauty, because it was a precious gift to him.
"You don't know what you mean to me, Diana—a star dropped out of heaven; the pure air of the veld I love; white lilies growing on a mountain top. Thank God you are all these things without any darkness in you anywhere. It is the crown of a man's life to love a woman like you."
"Let me go, Kerry," she said. "It is late. I must go."
He did not notice that her voice was broken with tears, for the wind swept her words up to the trees and the boiling wrack of clouds beyond. ”

“ The sun still glared, but the place was full of dim coolness, for its roof was massed with clematis and Virginia creeper, and heavy curtains of creeper hung from roof to rail; but long openings had been cut in the greenery to afford a view of the town and sea. Over the tops of the trees, far away below, beyond many white houses and gardens and a shining beach, was the Indian Ocean. It lay very still and splendid: a vast sheet of Sèvres enamel with a trivial frill of white at its edges, like the lace froth at the bottom of a woman's ball-gown. ”

“ On the sun-baked, wind-swept farm, bare of trees except for a line of blue gums before the house, a few clusters of pomegranate, and an old kameeldorn down by the goat kraal—the big blonde old Boer had been bred and reared, and in turn had bred and reared his family. After his brooding inarticulate fashion, he loved its bareness and bleakness, the wide loneliness of it, and above all the deep silences that from day to day were unbroken save by the purling of the river, the voices of his “boys” busy at their tasks, or the lowing of homing cattle. ”

“ I missed Makupi’s red blanket against the blaze of the zinias, where he was wont to sit, expelling the melancholy of his soul with the throb of his weird tom-tom, and hiding in his heart through all these months a secret that changed the face of life for three people!
Down in the camp a trooper, sitting outside his hut, was at the same business as myself—darning his foot-wear—and save for his idle song there was no other sound to break the hot, tranquil silence of the afternoon. ”

“ Her gown of cloth of gold shone like a blaze of daffodils. Diamonds shone all over her too; in the buckles of her shoes, on her large able hands, on her plump but not shapeless arms. Youth had gone, and fat had come, but beauty had not entirely deserted her. She had one of those corsetted figures that make men wonder at the endurance of women, but her sufferings did not dim the brilliance of her smile nor the resonance of her hearty laughter which occasionally rang through the room. ”

“ But if she had the lip-service, Christine was very well aware to whom was accorded, that night, the service of the eyes.
Every man there had become aware of the youth and beauty which, till that day, she had worn as if veiled, and they were paying the tribute that men will proffer until the end of time to those two gifts of the gods. She knew it without vanity, but also without embarrassment, for she had tasted triumph before in a world more difficult to please than this, surrounded by opponents worthier of her steel than Isabel van Cannan. ”

“ Evening is a pleasant time in Natal, and the Portals' moonlit gardens and lawns and long verandahs lent themselves agreeably to strolling people, tired of the clang and glare of the day. With someone always at the piano to sprinkle the still air with melody, it was pleasant to saunter, the dew in your hair and all the sounds of the night-things about you, while you talked with someone whose interest interested you, or gossiped of life as it could, or would, or might be, or of "Home," meaning England, which through the glamour of an African night seems the moon of all men's Desire. ”

“ She lifted her lips to him, to take or leave, and knew that if he left them they would go lonely all life long, which was no more than she deserved who had played fast and loose with love. But he did not leave them. Once more she tasted the strange fragrant flavour of wild honey, and knew at last that this fantastic land of strange flowers and heavy scents, of silence and song, cruelty and beauty, was for her, as he was for her. Africa was wild honey. The love of Kerry de Windt was wild honey, and she could never content herself with any other. ”

“ It seemed to me then that I was very friendless and alone in that wide sun-scorched land of pale grasses and turquoise skies—far from my dead mother and my brother and the friends of my life. Fate had dumped me on the African veldt and suffering had overtaken me. All the things I had known and loved—pictures, books, marbles, dim churches, and magnificent music—seemed useless to help or comfort me. These things do not matter to Africa; and when one is dumped on a burning African plain they do not seem to matter to life. ”

“ Before she reached the station her veil and hair were in streamers, and her scalp was almost torn from her head, but the serpent jaune which had gnawed her vitals all night had ceased from troubling, and joy of living glowed in her once more. She could not help it; there was something in the air and the wind and the blaze of Africa that made for life, and thrust out despair. It swept away misery as the south-easter had swept the skies, leaving them blue and clear as a flawless turquoise. ”

“ When, after the fifth waltz, Diane Heywood came into the ballroom from the dim verandah where she had been sitting-out a dance with Maryon Hammond, her eyes were like two violets that had been plucked at dawn with the mists of the night still on them. She had the lovely dewy look of a girl who has been kissed in the darkness by the man she loves; a girl whose heart has waked up and found itself beating in a woman’s breast. ”

“ 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 God to Maurice Stair; when my soul was blotted with hatred ”

“ The whole family used to creep into the room and stand round the cot, while Poppy sat there with Ina's hand in hers, whispering songs between the bars of the cot, while her head felt as though there were long sharp needles running through it, and her throat and body were full of horrible pains. Sometimes the room seemed all cloudy and she only faintly saw dead faces through the dimness; Ina and she whispering together seemed to be the only alive people in the world. ”

“ As they came out from the miles of bush which surround Wankelo into the hill-and-valley lands of Selukine, the moon burst in pearly splendour from her fleecy wrappings of cloud and showed long lines of silver-tipped hills and violet valleys, and, here and there, great open stretches of undulating space with a clear view across leagues and leagues to the very edge, it seemed, of the world. As one such great stretch of country rolled into view from a rise in the road, Druro spoke for the first time, in a low voice, vaguely and half to himself.
"There is the land I love—my country!" ”

“ Between two upright boulders almost on the river bank there was a little cleft of shadow lined with moss and small, harsh-leaved fern, and there I flung myself down and unburdened my heart of its weight of tears. I wept until I had no more tears, until it seemed that last night’s moonlit madness must be washed away, all Anthony Kinsella’s scorching kisses from my lips, all his treachery from my memory. Only the young know the exquisite tragedy and solace of tears: of broken sobs that come shuddering up from the soul to the lips; that are of the body and yet most terribly of the spirit ”

“ A man had come into the camp. Swift-footed and noiseless as a ghost, neither the dog nor the sleeping umfans had heard his coming. It was almost as if he had sprung from a neighbouring bush and Vivienne, startled as Roper by the sudden apparition, rose to her feet. But apart from his quietness, and the gleam of his light clothes, there was nothing supernatural about the tall lithe shirt-sleeved figure which with rifle on shoulder and revolver on hip, came into the firelight. ”

“ If your grandmother has worn a shawl over her head and walked barefoot on the bitter coast of Clare with a smile on her lips and a melody in her heart, she had something better to bequeath to you than money or possessions: her song and her smile will come down through the years and make magic in your eyes; her spirit will trample your troubles underfoot. ”

“ She was to meet him tonight! That thought had power enough to drive out the little snakes of despair and desolation that had been eating her heart all day. Let the morrows, with their pain of parting, take care of themselves! Today, it was good to be alive! That was her philosophy as she went, light-foot, through the blue-ground heaps.
There was no one about in the big outer enclosure. The monotonous chanting of Kafir songs came over the iron walls of the compound, the murmuring of many voices, clank of pot and pan, smell of fires, and the soft, regular beat of some drumlike native instrument. ”

“ But she had opened eyes in my soul that had been blind before, and had shown me lives seared with pain and sin and scorched with the fires of passion that were yet beautiful; of men who could fight down the beasts of temptation and conquer the devils of vice; of men who could forget self-interest to hold out a helping hand to the weak and the stumbling; of men who could die in lone, silent places so that others might live in safety and security; of women who could offer their all for the public good, and lose it with a smile on their lips. ”

“ Always the undulating grassy slopes dotted with bush, the eternal kopje ahead, and the eternal kopje left behind. There was something terrible about the brooding loneliness, the eloquent stillness, the great unending sameness of it all.
They had been travelling for four nights and days and must continue for a good many more yet before the end was reached—sometimes putting up for a night at a rough wayside hotel, more often just outspanning beside a mule stable during the darkest hours and sleeping as best they could in the cramped cart, with rugs and mail-bags as a common couch. ”

“ But only the lesser part of Poppy Destin was there. The spirit of her wandered in a moonlit Natal garden, listening to a voice with a rustle in it, and from thence ... far, far!
Afterwards, she reconstructed all the chapters of her life since the magic night that began so wonderfully and ended in despair with the uttering of another woman's name. Of that woman—Loraine, she thought little now, having fought down and killed the bitter hatred of her, as once she had wished to kill the woman. There was no room in her awakened heart for hatred—only Love could be there. ”

“ For two days Rosanne lay there, silent and strange. The third day her sickness took an acute form. She tossed and moaned and called out in her pain, her face twisted with torture. Her mind appeared to remain clear.
"Mother, I believe I am dying," she said, after one such spell, during the afternoon. "I feel as if something is tearing itself loose from my very being. Does it hurt like this when the soul is trying to escape from the body?"
"I have sent for the doctor again, darling."
"It is nothing he can cure. It is here, and here that I suffer." She touched her head and her heart. ”

“ Then suddenly the heat was over, the flare died out of the picture, the far-off kops turned a faint pink colour, and the grimness of the bush was blurred in a drapery of purple chiffon. At once night unsheathed her velvet wings, and darkness fell in dim purple veils embroidered with silver stars. Some subtle scent as of flowering trees growing by a river blew through the tent of the cart. The world seemed filled with gracious dimness and made up of illimitable lovely space. An indescribable feeling of happy freedom filled my heart. ”

“ I am a child of passionate Africa, Clem ... the blood in my veins runs as hot and red as the colour of a poppy.... It is an awful thing to look into the eyes of a man you do not love and see passion staring there—and feel it urging in your own veins, too. It is an awful thing to know what it is that he is silently demanding, and what that basely answers in your own nature.... ”

“ There was a great stillness between them. Truly as the wise people of old held, to give a man the use of your name is to give him power over you! He felt that he had power over her and perhaps that was why her hand lying on the bridge rail trembled, though her voice was quite level.
“Why do you call me by that name, Mr Bettington?”
“Because I love you, woman with the amber eyes, and the amber hair, and the clear amber heart,” he said gently and strongly, and took her hands in his. “And I think that you love me.” ”