Below the dam wall, the moisture oozing through had made a space of rank grass and trailing weed-vines, and the ground underfoot was cool and damp through the longest day of sun. Here one might sit in the odor of water and watch the wind lift tall spirals of dust and chase them over the monotonous miles where the very bushes rustled like dead boughs at their passage. It had the quality of a heritage, a place where one may be aloof and yet keep an eye on the world, and since there were no others who needed elbow-room for their dreams, Paul had it to himself. Here and there about the sloping bank, as on the walls of a gallery, his handiwork cracked and crumbled in the sun – little masks and figures of red clay which he fashioned to hold some shape that had caught his eye and stayed in it. He had an instinct for the momentary attitude, the quick, unconscious pose which is life, the bunched compact shape of a sheep grazing, the poise of a Kafir girl with a load on her head, a figure revealed in wind-blown clothes and lost in a flash. The sweet, pliant clay was his confidant; it was not the fault of the clay that he could tell it so much less than he knew.
He groped, kneeling, below a vine, and brought out the thing he had hidden there the evening before when the light failed him. A flattened stone at the foot of the wall was his table; he set the clay down tenderly and squatted beside it, with his back to the veld and all the world. It was to be the head of a negro, the negro as Paul knew him, and already the clay had shape. The shallow round of the skull was achieved; he had been feeling, darkly, gropingly, for the brutal angle of the brows that should brood like a cloud over the whole countenance. It had evaded him and baffled him; he knew how it should be, but when the time had come for him to leave it for the night, the brows still cocked themselves in a suggestion of imbecility which was heart-breaking. He turned it round, frowning a little as his habit was when he centered his faculties upon a matter; the chaos of the featureless face below the smooth head fronted him.
"Allemachtag!" he cried aloud, as he set eyes on it.
There was no possibility that he could be mistaken; he remembered, in their smallest exasperating detail, those brows as he had left them, taunting him as bad work will. Even now, he had but to close his eyes and he could see them, absurd and clamorous for correction. But – he stared dumbly at the clay as he realized it – since then another creator had played with it, or else the thing, left to itself, had frowned. The rampart of the brows had deepened above the empty face; Paul knew in it the darkness for which he had sought, the age-old patience quenching the spark of the soul. It was as different from what he had left as living flesh is from red clay, an inconsequent miracle.
"Somebody," said Paul, pondering over it – "somebody knows!"
The thing troubled him a little while, but he passed his hand over the clay, to make yet more sure of it, and the cool invitation of its softness was medicine for his wonder. He smudged the clay to a ridge in the place where the nose should be, and then, forgetting forthwith that he was the victim of a practical joke, as it seemed, played upon him by the powers of the air, he fell to work.
The colors in the west were burning low when he raised his head, disturbed by a far sound that forced itself on his ear. It was like a pulse in the air, a dull rhythmical throb faintly resonant like the beating of some great heart. He came to consciousness of it slowly, withdrawing himself unwillingly from the work under his hands, and noting with surprise that the evening light was all but gone. But the face of the negro was a step nearer completion, and even the outline of the gross mouth was there to aid the clay to return his look. The far sound insisted; he lifted his head with mild impatience to listen to it, sighed, and tucked the unfinished head away in its hidingplace. Perhaps another night would draw out the mouth to its destined shape of empty, pitiful mirth.
The beat of the gourd-drum that hung at the farmhouse door still called, and he hastened his steps along the homeward path. It was the common manner of summons on the farm. For the European ear, the gourd sawed across, with a skin stretched over it, is empty of music, but it has the quality of sowing its flat voice over many miles, threading through the voices of nature as a snake goes through grass. Simple variants in the rhythm of the strokes adapt it to messages, and now it was calling Paul. "Paul, Paul, P-P-Paul!" it thrilled, and its summons was as plain as words. To silence it, he put fingers to his mouth and answered with a shrill, rending whistle. The gourd was silent.
His mother was in the doorway as he came through the kraals; she heard his steps and called to him.
"Paul! That you? Where you bin all this time?"
"By the dam," he answered.
"I been callin' you this half hour," she said. "Mrs. Jakes is here – she wants you."
The light from within the house showed her as a thin woman, with the shape of youth yet upon her. But the years had taken tribute of her freshness, and her small, rather vacant face was worn and faded. She wore her hair coiled upon her head in a way to frame the thin oval of the face, and there remained to her yet the slight prettiness of sharp weak gestures and little conscious attitudes. In her voice there survived the clipped accent of London; Paul had come to know it as the thing that distinguished his mother from other women. Before her marriage she had been an actress of the obscure sort to be found in the lesser touring companies, and it was when the enterprise of which she was a member had broken down at the town of Fereira that she met and married the Boer, Christian du Preez, Paul's father. She preserved from the old days a stock of photographs inscribed in dashing hands – "yours to the dregs" – "your old pal" – "yours ever most sincerely" – and so on a few cuttings from newspapers – "Miss Vivie Sinclair as Gertie Gottem was most unique," said the Dopfontein Courant– a touch of raucousness in her voice, and a ceaseless weary longing for the easy sham life, the foolish cheerful companions, the stimulus of the daily publicity.
She drew the boy in, sliding her arm through his, to where Mrs. Jakes sat waiting.
"Here he is at last," she said, looking up at him prettily. She often said she was glad her boy was tall enough to go into a picture, but a mother must admire her son for one thing or another.
Mrs. Jakes acknowledged Paul's arrival with a lady-like little smile. "Better late than never," she pronounced.
She was the wife of the doctor at the Sanatorium, the old Dutch house that showed its steep roofs within a couple of miles of the farm, where came in twos and threes the consumptives from England, to mend their broken lungs in the clean air of the Karoo. They came not quite so frequently nowadays, for a few that returned healed, or believing themselves to be healed, had added to their travel-sketches of the wonderful old house and its surroundings an account of Dr. Jakes and his growing habit of withdrawing from his duties to devote himself to drink. Their tales commonly omitted to describe justly the anxious, lonely woman who labored at such times to supply his place, driving herself to contrive and arrange to keep the life of the house moving in its course, to maintain an assured countenance, and all the while to screen him from public shame and ruin. She was a wan little woman, clinging almost with desperation to those trivial mannerisms and fashions of speech which in certain worlds distinguished the lady from the mere person. She had lain of nights beside a drunken husband, she had fought with him when he would have gone out to make a show of his staggering gait and blurred speech – horrible silent battles in a candle-lit room, ending in a gasping fall and sickness – she had lied and cheated to hide the sorry truth, she had bared her soul in gratitude to her kind God that her child had died. These things as a matter of course, as women accept and belittle their martyrdom; but never in her life had she left the spoon standing in her tea-cup or mislaid her handkerchief. The true standards of her life were still inviolate.
She liked Paul because he was shy and gentle, but not well enough to talk to him without mentioning the weather first.
"The evenings are drawing out nicely," she remarked, leaning to one side in her chair to see through the door the darkness growing dense upon the veld. "It reminds