"No," said Paul, flushing. The Kafir bit off a smile and stood submissive, with an eye on the boy's troubled face.
"You don't want to let them get fresh with you," said the policeman. "I 've been keepin' my eye on him and he talks too much. Have you finished with him now?"
His silver-headed whip came out from behind his back ready to dismiss the negro in the accepted manner. Paul trembled and took a step which brought him near enough to seize the whip if it should flick back for the cut.
"Let him alone," he said wrathfully. "Mind your own business."
"Eh?" the policeman was astonished.
"You let him alone," repeated Paul, bracing himself nervously for combat, and ready to cry because he could not keep from trembling. He had never come to blows in his life, but he meant to now. The policeman stared at him, and laughed harshly.
"He 's a friend of yours, I suppose," he suggested, striving for a monstrous affront.
"Yes," retorted Paul hotly, "he is."
For a moment it looked as though the policeman, outraged in the deepest recesses of his nature, would burst a blood vessel or cry for help. A man whose prayer that he may be damned is granted on the nail could scarcely have looked less shocked. He recovered himself with a gulp.
"Oh, he is, is he? A friend of yours? A nigger!" Then, with a swelling of rage he dodged Paul's grasping hand and swung the whip. "I 'll teach him to – "
He came to a stop, open-mouthed. The Kafir was gone. He had slipped away unheard while they quarreled, and the effect of it was like a conjuring trick. Even Paul gaped at the place where he had been and now was not.
"Blimy!" said the policeman, reduced to an expression of his civilian days, and vented a short bark of laughter. "And so, young feller, he 's a friend o' yours, is he? Now, lemme give you just a word of advice."
His young, sun-roughened face was almost paternal for a moment, and Paul shook with a yearning to murder him, to do anything that would wipe the self-satisfaction from it. He sought furiously for a form of anathema that would shatter the man.
"Go to hell," he cried.
"Oh, well," said the policeman, tolerantly, and then the train's magnificent uproar of arrival gave Paul an opportunity to be rid of him.
In the complication of events Paul had all but forgotten his duty of discovering the young lady with "chest trouble," and now he wondered rather dolefully how to set about it. He stood back to watch the carriage windows flow past. Would it be at all possible just to stand where he was and shout "Miss Harding" till she answered? To do that needed some one more like the policeman and less like Paul; the mere thought of it was embarrassing. The alternative was, to wait until such passengers as alighted – they would not be many – had taken themselves away, and then to go up to the one that remained and say, "Is your name Miss Harding, if you please?" But supposing she answered, "Mind your own business!"
The train settled and stood, and Paul became aware that from the carriage nearest him a woman was looking forth, with her face in the full light of a lamp. The inveterate picture-seeker in him suddenly found her engrossing, as she leaned a little forward, lifting her face to the soft meager light, and framed in the varnished wood of the window. It was a pale face, with that delicacy and luster of pallor which make rose tints seem over-robust. It was grave and composed; there was something there which the boy, in his innocence, found at once inscrutable and pitiful, like the bravery of a little child. Distinctly, this was a day of surprises; it came to him that he had not known that the world had women like this. His eyes, always the stronghold of dreams, devoured her, unconscious that she was returning his gaze. Perhaps to her, he also was a source of surprise, with his face rapt and vague, his slender boyishness, his general quality of standing always a little aloof from his surroundings. On the Karoo, people said of him that he was "old-fashioned"; one word is as good as another when folk understand each other. The point was that it was necessary to find some term to set Paul apart from themselves.
He saw the girl was making preparations to leave the carriage, and was suddenly inspired. He found the handle of the door and jerked it open, and there she was above him, and looking down. She wore some kind of scent, very faint and elusive; he was conscious of her as a near and gentle and fragrant personality.
"I hope," he said, letting the words come, "I hope you are Miss Harding?"
The girl smiled. It had been prettily spoken, with the accent of sincerity.
"Yes," she answered. "You have come to meet me?"
The thing about her to which Paul could put no name was that she was finished, a complete and perfect product of a special life, which, whatever its defects and shortcomings, is yet able to put a polish of considerable wearing qualities on its practitioners. She knew her effect; her education had revealed it to her early; she was aware of the pale, intent figure she cut, and her appearance of enlightened virginity. The reverence in the boy's eyes touched her and warmed her at once; it was a charming welcome at the end of that night's journey. Paul's guilelessness had served the specious ends of tact, for to corroborate a woman's opinion of herself is the sublime compliment.
He received the lesser luggage which she handed down to him and then she came down herself, and one train, at least, had shed its marvel upon the Karoo. She was not less wonderful and foreign on the platform than she had been at the window; the Cape Policeman, coming past again, lost his military-man air of a connoisseur in women and stiffened to a strutting perfection of demeanor at sight of her. South Africa is still so short of women that it makes the most of those it can get, both as goddesses and as beasts of burden. Paul was free of the evil civilized habit of thinking while he could feel, and the girl had to despatch the single lanky porter for her baggage herself and attend to having it stacked at the back of the cart. Then she was beside him, with the poignant air from the open south fresh on their faces, and the empty veld before them. The slow dawn was suddenly magical and the stillness was the hush that attends miracles.
He had to give his mind to steering the big cart through the gateway to the road, and it was here that he saw, against the white fence, a waiting figure that looked up and was silent. He bent forward and waved his hand, but the Kafir did not respond. The girl at his side broke silence in her low rich voice.
"That was a native, was n't it?" she asked.
Paul looked at her. "It was a – a friend of mine," he answered seriously. "A Kafir, you know."
The light in the eastern sky had grown and its lower edge, against the rim of the earth, was tinged with a rose-and-bronze presentiment of the sunrise. The Karoo lay under a twilight, with the night stripping from its face like a veil drawn westwards and away. In that half-light, its spacious level, its stillness, its quality of a desert, were enhanced; its few and little inequalities were smoothed out and merged in one empty flatness, and the sky stood over in a single arch, sprinkled with stars that were already burning pale. In all the vast expanse before them, there rose no roof, no tree, no token of human habitation; the eye that wandered forward, returned, like the dove to the Ark, for lack of a resting-place. It was a world at gaze, brooding grimly. The little morning wind, which would die when the sun rose clear of the horizon and leave the veld to its day-long torpor of heat, leaned upon their faces; the girl raised her brows against it and breathed deeply of its buoyancy.
"Oh," she said; "this is what I came for."
"The air?" Paul glanced sideways at her clear profile set against the shadowy morning. "They say it is good for – for – "
He hesitated; Mrs. Jakes had managed to make the word difficult. But Miss Harding took it in her stride.
"For the lungs?" she suggested without compunction. "Yes, I 'm sure it is. And you live here all the time, do you?"
"I was born here," Paul answered.
"How you must love it," she said, and met his eyes with a look in which there was a certain curiosity. "All this, I mean," she explained. Then: "But do you?"
"Yes," he answered. "It 's – it's fine to look at – if you like looking at