‘Oh! George, are you a snob?’
‘As a matter of fact, I am, rather. My best dream was one where King George borrowed half a crown from me to see him over the week-end. But I was thinking of my uncle – the one from whom I am estranged. He’s a frightful snob. When he knows I’m going to marry you, and that we’ll have a title in the family, he’ll make me a partner at once!’
‘Oh! George, is he very rich?’
‘Elizabeth, are you mercenary?’
‘Very. I adore spending money. But I was thinking of Father. Five daughters, full of beauty and blue blood. He’s just yearning for a rich son-in-law.’
‘H’m,’ said George. ‘It will be one of those marriages made in Heaven and approved on earth. Shall we live at Rowland’s Castle? They’d be sure to make me Lord Mayor with you for a wife. Oh! Elizabeth, darling, it’s probably contravening the company’s by-laws, but I simply must kiss you!’
‘While the Light Lasts’ was first published in Novel Magazine, April 1924.
The Ford car bumped from rut to rut, and the hot African sun poured down unmercifully. On either side of the so-called road stretched an unbroken line of trees and scrub, rising and falling in gently undulating lines as far as the eye could reach, the colouring a soft, deep yellow-green, the whole effect languorous and strangely quiet. Few birds stirred the slumbering silence. Once a snake wriggled across the road in front of the car, escaping the driver’s efforts at destruction with sinuous ease. Once a native stepped out from the bush, dignified and upright, behind him a woman with an infant bound closely to her broad back and a complete household equipment, including a frying pan, balanced magnificently on her head.
All these things George Crozier had not failed to point out to his wife, who had answered him with a monosyllabic lack of attention which irritated him.
‘Thinking of that fellow,’ he deduced wrathfully. It was thus that he was wont to allude in his own mind to Deirdre Crozier’s first husband, killed in the first year of the War. Killed, too, in the campaign against German West Africa. Natural she should, perhaps – he stole a glance at her, her fairness, the pink and white smoothness of her cheek; the rounded lines of her figure – rather more rounded perhaps than they had been in those far-off days when she had passively permitted him to become engaged to her, and then, in that first emotional scare of war, had abruptly cast him aside and made a war wedding of it with that lean, sunburnt boy lover of hers, Tim Nugent.
Well, well, the fellow was dead – gallantly dead – and he, George Crozier, had married the girl he had always meant to marry. She was fond of him, too; how could she help it when he was ready to gratify her every wish and had the money to do it, too! He reflected with some complacency on his last gift to her, at Kimberley, where, owing to his friendship with some of the directors of De Beers, he had been able to purchase a diamond which, in the ordinary way, would not have been in the market, a stone not remarkable as to size, but of a very exquisite and rare shade, a peculiar deep amber, almost old gold, a diamond such as you might not find in a hundred years. And the look in her eyes when he gave it to her! Women were all the same about diamonds.
The necessity of holding on with both hands to prevent himself being jerked out brought George Crozier back to the realities. He cried out for perhaps the fourteenth time, with the pardonable irritation of a man who owns two Rolls-Royce cars and who has exercised his stud on the highways of civilization: ‘Good Lord, what a car! What a road!’ He went on angrily: ‘Where the devil is this tobacco estate, anyway? It’s over an hour since we left Bulawayo.’
‘Lost in Rhodesia,’ said Deirdre lightly between two involuntary leaps into the air.
But the coffee-coloured driver, appealed to, responded with the cheering news that their destination was just round the next bend of the road.
The manager of the estate, Mr Walters, was waiting on the stoep to receive them with the touch of deference due to George Crozier’s prominence in Union Tobacco. He introduced his daughter-in-law, who shepherded Deirdre through the cool, dark inner hall to a bedroom beyond, where she could remove the veil with which she was always careful to shield her complexion when motoring. As she unfastened the pins in her usual leisurely, graceful fashion, Deirdre’s eyes swept round the whitewashed ugliness of the bare room. No luxuries here, and Deirdre, who loved comfort as a cat loves cream, shivered a little. On the wall a text confronted her. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ it demanded of all and sundry, and Deirdre, pleasantly conscious that the question had nothing to do with her, turned to accompany her shy and rather silent guide. She noted, but not in the least maliciously, the spreading hips and the unbecoming cheap cotton gown. And with a glow of quiet appreciation her eyes dropped to the exquisite, costly simplicity of her own French white linen. Beautiful clothes, especially when worn by herself, roused in her the joy of the artist.
The two men were waiting for her.
‘It won’t bore you to come round, too, Mrs Crozier?’
‘Not at all. I’ve never been over a tobacco factory.’
They stepped out into the still Rhodesian afternoon.
‘These are the seedlings here; we plant them out as required. You see –’
The manager’s voice droned on, interpolated by her husband’s sharp staccato questions – output, stamp duty, problems of coloured labour. She ceased to listen.
This was Rhodesia, this was the land Tim had loved, where he and she were to have gone together after the War was over. If he had not been killed! As always, the bitterness of revolt surged up in her at that thought. Two short months – that was all they had had. Two months of happiness – if that mingled rapture and pain were happiness. Was love ever happiness? Did not a thousand tortures beset the lover’s heart? She had lived intensely in that short space, but had she ever known the peace, the leisure, the quiet contentment of her present life? And for the first time she admitted, somewhat unwillingly, that perhaps all had been for the best.
‘I wouldn’t have liked living out here. I mightn’t have been able to make Tim happy. I might have disappointed him. George loves me, and I’m very fond of him, and he’s very, very good to me. Why, look at that diamond he bought me only the other day.’ And, thinking of it, her eyelids dropped a little in pure pleasure.
‘This is where we thread the leaves.’ Walters led the way into a low, long shed. On the floor were vast heaps of green leaves, and white-clad black ‘boys’ squatted round them, picking and rejecting with deft fingers, sorting them into sizes, and stringing them by means of primitive needles on a long line of string. They worked with a cheerful leisureliness, jesting amongst themselves, and showing their white teeth as they laughed.
‘Now, out here –’
They passed through the shed into the daylight again, where the lines of leaves hung drying in the sun. Deirdre sniffed delicately at the faint, almost imperceptible fragrance that filled the air.
Walters led the way into other sheds where the tobacco, kissed by the sun into faint yellow discoloration, underwent its further treatment. Dark here, with the brown swinging masses above, ready to fall to powder at a rough touch. The fragrance was stronger, almost overpowering it seemed to Deirdre, and suddenly a sort of terror came upon her, a fear of she knew not what, that drove her from that menacing, scented obscurity out into the sunlight. Crozier noted her pallor.
‘What’s the matter, my dear, don’t you feel well? The sun, perhaps. Better not come with us round the plantations? Eh?’
Walters was solicitous. Mrs Crozier had better go back to the house and rest. He called to a man a little distance away.
‘Mr Arden – Mrs Crozier. Mrs Crozier’s feeling a little done up with the heat, Arden. Just take her back to