WILLIAM VAN HERT

They, that is, the Pyms, stayed in Johannesburg before they started on their travels. Mr. Pym had built for himself a charming house in the Sachsenwald neighbourhood, architectured, of course, by Mr. Herbert Baker, and having a lovely view to far blue hills.

Few people who have never seen Johannesburg have the smallest conception of the charm of its best suburbs, with their wonderful far vistas to a dream country of blue mountains on the horizon. To most it suggests little beyond dump-heaps of white powdered quartz, tall machinery, tall chimneys, with a town of tramways and offices and wealthy people all struggling together for more wealth.

Yet in a few minutes one may leave all this behind, and drive along tree-lined roads and avenues to where, probably amidst swaying firs, a “stately home” of South Africa is picturesquely standing.

Mr. Pym’s house was not of the largest, for he had never been ostentatious of his wealth, and much of it was represented by large tracts of land, where he generously experimented for the benefit of the country. As with several rich South Africans, he had his stud farm and his agricultural farm; and both were kept up to a very high standard, without any particular consideration for profit and loss. But his house in the Sachsenwald neighbourhood had more of charm and comfort in it than display. The rooms were very high and airy and well ventilated, with artistic colour effects which the girls had achieved, and something of an Italian air about it.

Along one side, widening into an embrasure at the middle, where doors from the drawing-room and dining-room stood open to it, ran a broad tessellated terrace; and from the terrace one looked out over a lovely garden, gorgeous with the flaming flowers of South Africa, yet softened by velvety turf such as is seldom seen “over there,” and can only be attained by much consistent care and attention.

It was here the girls loved best to sit: Diana because the prospect was fresh and breezy and wide, and, true to her namesake, she loved the smell of the firs and the earth; Meryl because of those far blue hills which made so fitting a background to the dreamland thoughts that filled her mind; and, moreover, Aunt Emily did not particularly love light and air, so she usually remained in her own sanctum, and Diana was able to enjoy, not one cigarette, but two or three, after each meal without the tiresome accompaniment of a disapproving eye.

They reached Johannesburg in the latter half of July, and those people who had not already fled from the high winds and driving dust were hurriedly preparing to do so. In consequence, few friends were there to welcome them on their return, and their plans proceeded apace. Diana had a smart khaki knickerbocker suit made, and a wonderful broad-brimmed hat with a long feather to go with it. When they laughingly told her she was not journeying to an uncivilised country, and could not possibly wear such a garb in modern Rhodesia, she merely asserted she was going into the wilderness to please them, and in return they must put up with her in any sort of garb she chose. In the end Meryl was persuaded to have a knickerbocker garb also, though she insisted that she would never wear it. Aunt Emily bought yards and yards of green and blue muslin, in which she proposed to tie up her head. “You must have a particularly ugly helmet, and a pair of smoked spectacles, and a butterfly-net as well,” said Diana, “and then you will look as if you belonged to the British Association.”

Her uncle, sitting back silently in his big arm-chair, with the quiet twinkle in his keen eyes, remarked, “And you will look like the principal boy at a pantomime.”

“How heavenly!...” said outspoken Diana, and Aunt Emily raised her hands in horror.

It was on one of the last evenings before their final departure that William van Hert came from a quiet sea-side place above Durban to see them. He was taking a long rest there, after a strenuous parliamentary campaign, and only discovered through a belated newspaper that they had returned from England, and were contemplating a journey north. He immediately took a day’s road journey to the nearest railway and departed for Johannesburg.

Diana saw him arrive, and executed a remarkable spring into the air, finished off with a little kick. “Oh, golly!...” she breathed. “Here’s Dutch Willy come flying to the arms of his ladylove!”

Meryl looked up with swift, questioning eyes.

“Impossible!... He is down at M’genda.”

“A little bird whispered, ’She, the fair one of many millions, has returned,’ and straightway the thousand white arms of M’genda failed to hold him.”

“Don’t be spiteful, Di. Mr. van Hert cares nothing for anyone’s millions. You know it well.”

“I do; and for that reason he should be kept in a glass case. Still, he cares for a fair Englishwoman who has been well, kind to him.”

“He is interesting. Was there any special kindness in letting him know that I had the perspicacity to see it?” And they went downstairs together to receive him.

William van Hert was at that time one of the most disliked, one of the most attractive, and one of the most disturbing men in South Africa. Gifted with brains and polish, he was yet, at present, marred by bigotry, narrowness of vision, and an unreasonable antipathy to the advance of English ways and customs. Furthermore, having obtained for himself a considerable following, he was, unfortunately, powerful. When genuine efforts were being made to bury the hatchet over the racial question, this man had more than once dug it up again; but it was not entirely clear at present whether he was actuated by motives of misguided patriotism, or whether, like far greater men, he only wanted to make himself thoroughly heard in the world first, and when that object was satisfactorily attained, he would modify his tendency to rabid policies and prove himself a reliable statesman. In the meantime he was dangerous.

In England there were many who quite seriously believed the racial feud was over. There were others who knew that it was still exceedingly bitter. There were others again who said very little, and perhaps professed to know very little, but in the quietness of their own thoughts pondered deeply and patriotically how a real and sincere union, and not a merely public newspaper one, was to be wrought between two fine races, so that in true harmony they might bring a country of great promise to its day of fulfilment. The men who saw any solution in making both languages compulsory were not men of true insight; neither were those who retrenched Englishmen in one direction, and created new posts for Dutchmen in others. One could but suppose these men were content to be patriots, not in a big sense to the whole country, but in a limited one to their own countrymen. To be patriots of South Africa herself, in her widest sense, seemed too much to ask of them. Yet, because of the fine qualities many of these men possessed, one could but hope that ere long what was good for South Africa would be good for each individual, whether in private life he called himself English or Dutch.

That William van Hert was ever a welcome guest in the Pyms’ household showed that he had many excellent qualities besides his undisputed personal attractiveness to counterbalance his obstinate bigotry. Otherwise Mr. Pym would not have shown him the friendliness he did; for in his quiet way Henry Pym possessed greatness, and everyone throughout the land knew that he was of those resolute, reliable few who would let all their wealth go before they would pander to any government or any party to save it. Meryl talked to him because she perceived there was a rough sincerity in the man underneath his bigotry, and hoped because he was powerful he would presently expand.

Diana alone crossed swords with him, and though perhaps he did not know it, it was no small thing that she thought it worth while.

He stayed to dine with them in a simple, homely manner, and his conversation at the table was sparkling and vivacious. He told them some excellent stories, concluding with one in very broad Dutch that they had great difficulty in following. And then Diana opened fire.

“Such a monstrous, face-distorting language,” she remarked coolly. “I wonder you don’t forbid its use instead of urging it.”

The gleam came quickly to her uncle’s eye, though he appeared to take no heed. It was left to Meryl to frown cautiously, and shake a wise head.

“Don’t frown at me, Meryl,” said the incorrigible. “It’s a hideous tongue, and he knows it, and what’s the good of pretending anything else? I don’t hold with pretence in anything.”

“It is the tongue of my country,” van Hert told her, more amused than annoyed. “Every true patriot loves his mother tongue.”

“O, nonsense!” with a charming insolence. “Meryl and I both have Norse blood in us. If you go far enough back we probably are Norse. But where would be the sense in our professing to love our country by talking her tongue, when it served every reasonable purpose in the world better to talk English? You’re so one idea’d, you Dutch folk, at least some of you,” pointedly. “The language and the Bible and your early-morning coffee!”

They could not help laughing at her, but van Hert indignantly repudiated her charge.

“O well!...” she continued, airily. “You know perfectly well you do make a fetish of the Language Question; and that your back-veldt followers believe the Bible was written in Dutch for the Dutch race alone; and that you start having coffee at daybreak, with relays up to breakfast-time. And you don’t expect your natives or your women to possess such a thing as an individual will. That is a luxury for the strong sex only!... It all means just one thing. Out in the back veldt you are years and years and years, positive, aeons, behind the times; and you’d sooner represent a big dam to the progress of the world than yield one little silly, rotten cotton prejudice to help it forward. So there!...” And having delivered herself of this piece of oration Diana got up, pushed her chair back with a jerk, and finished, “I’m going out on the terrace. When I think of your back-veldters, and your back-veldt policy of suppressing all individualism and all advance, I need the company of a few worlds and solar systems to regain my equilibrium. No, don’t expostulate,” as he rose in his eagerness to confront her. “I seldom argue. It is not worth while. I merely ‘express an opinion,’ having the good fortune to belong to a race in which women are permitted such an indulgence,” and she threw a laughing glance back at him from the window before she stepped out.

Meryl watched her with a swift look of deep affection in her eyes, and then glanced at her father. Henry Pym’s face was expressionless, but his eyes seemed to reply to her unspoken question, and tell her that he, too, recognised a little more thoroughly that under the surface flippancy and light raillery there was depth. In the meantime, feeling she had not been quite fair to her opponent, to go off without allowing him to defend himself, he purposely discussed the language question a little more openly than was at all his wont with such prickly subjects, speaking a few quiet truths in a way that even a firebrand like van Hert could not possibly resent. When they joined Diana she was sitting on a table, swinging her feet, and singing a new music-hall ditty.

“Touching that slander of yours,” van Hert began, good-humouredly, for few could ever be seriously annoyed with Diana, “I should like to say ...”

“No, I forbid it,” she interrupted. “Arguments bore me. Have you heard that little song before that I was singing? It’s a ripping little ditty. Chain Aunt Emily to the drawing-room sofa and I’ll sing it all through to you; but if she were to hear it she might faint, and that is so tiresome.”

He laughed, and sat on the table beside her, and the rabid sectarian politician, so given to raising storms and creating scenes in that most remarkable of parliaments, the South African Union Assembly, forgot his pet injustices and prejudices, and was quickly the versatile, virile, engaging social man. Meryl sat a little apart, with some dainty crochet-work in her delicate fingers, and though the visitor chatted with Diana, his eyes were almost always upon her.

They had purposely put out the electric light after their coffee was served, preferring only the lights in the rooms behind them and the splendour of the night before. And in the dimness Meryl’s fair skin gleamed unusually white beside her dusky hair, and the velvety, blue-grey eyes, when she looked up, had caught the dreaming darkness of the heavens. Only now and then she glanced round. Mostly she sat with her eyes on the shadowy darkness and her work in her lap. And the Dutchman, gazing, felt with a sort of fierce reluctance that there were no women in the world for calmness and strength quite like the Englishwomen, nor more delicately, entrancingly fair.

Then, suddenly, Meryl heard her name and looked up.

“Why in the world do you want to go to Rhodesia?” he had said; and Diana answered, “I don’t know that we do want to go; but Meryl has suddenly developed into a violent Imperialist, and we go at her desire.”

“What to do?” and he asked the question a little sharply of the dark eyes now turned to theirs. Quite suddenly and unaccountably he resented their going; resented, at any rate, that she, Meryl, should go. There had been so much “Rhodesia” of late. Everyone seemed bitten with a kind of silly craze for the place. Now it was gold; now it was land; now it was union or no union; now it was annexation and “twenty pieces of silver”; such a lot of fuss about some square miles of wilderness, containing odd outcrops of gold-bearing reef.

“There is nothing worth seeing in Rhodesia, except the Victoria Falls,” he asserted; “and you can run up there and see all you want to and get back in a week!” And still he looked enquiringly at Meryl.

“We want to see the people,” she said, half turning. “The pioneers, who went first to investigate, the settlers who followed, the women who went forward with their husbands into the wilderness.”

He got off the table and came and leaned against a verandah-post beside her with folded arms, looking down. “But that is what you won’t see; how should you? You will only see dusty, upstart towns, with horrible corrugated-iron hotels, where you will swelter in heat and flies and eat abominable tinned stuffs. It is a barren, comfortless land at present, with a possibility of being useful some day. They want money, energy, brains to develop it thoroughly; and they won’t accept them when they are offered, because a few stiff-necked Englishmen happen to be in power. It is absurd to go there at present. You will only get typhoid and malaria, and be excruciatingly uncomfortable.”

“It sounds a pretty rotten sort of place! What do you and your colleagues want it for so badly, anyway?...” asked Diana, throwing her head back and narrowing her eyes as she looked at him with a shrewd questioning air.

He coloured slightly under the sunburn on his cheeks. “We want a United South Africa. Why should one country stand aloof!”

“Meinheer van Hert,” said she, coming down from her table and taking a step forward to confront him, “for any man with your political views to talk about including Rhodesia in the Union solely for the sake of a United South Africa and for her own good, is the veriest cant. There’s gold up there, and perhaps tin; and there’s land for farming, and land for ranching, and hunting grounds, and a big river. In your United South Africa you want your people to be ‘top dog’ always, and as long as Rhodesia stands out there’s a menace in the north. That’s one reason why you want her! Rumour tells us there’s a fine race of men up there, who don’t mean to have any tongue but Cecil Rhodes’s tongue taught in Cecil Rhodes’s country, so it certainly is no place for you! You’ve got to learn more thoroughly what an Englishman means by ‘cricket’ before your overtures will be considered; and we’re all hoping you’ll learn it quickly, because we want to be friends, good friends, just as soon as ever we can.”

He bit his lip and looked angry, but she was already laughing the moment’s tension aside. “You didn’t know I was a politician, did you?... As a matter of fact, I’m not!... I’m sick of the whole bag of tricks, and the Empire that fills Meryl with heaves and swells isn’t half so much to me as winning a tennis tournament or a golf championship. But when you Hollanders are bursting with pride of place and achievement, and offering energy and brains to help Britishers along, I just feel as if you’d got to be told a few home-truths for your good. Now I’m going to liven the meeting with a little operatic music,” and she tripped indoors to the piano. Van Hert shrugged his shoulders expressively, and then stood silently beside Meryl for some moments looking into the night. And as he stood he became conscious of a vague sort of dissatisfaction with himself. It was a sensation he knew only at rare moments, and those moments were chiefly at the Pyms’ house. He admired the two cousins more than any women he knew; he admired Henry Pym; he loved the homyness of their household; and he had to remember that they were English. There must, of course, be many others like them. Were there many like them among his own countrymen? When Diana told him his people had yet to learn more thoroughly what was meant by “cricket” she had hit him hard. He would never have admitted it for one moment, but, nevertheless, when he was at the Pyms’ house he wondered.... Densely, stubbornly patriotic to his own people and his own tongue he might be, but he had travelled enough to recognise certain traits in the English “old public-school boy” which it was good for a country there should be in her young men, and which were not noticeably present in his countrymen of the back veldt.

Then his eyes rested on Meryl, and all his pulses throbbed with her nearness. He had known for many months now that he loved her, yet he had never actually told his love. At first there had been a disinclination to marry an Englishwoman because of the unbending, resolute policy he had identified himself with in the Union Parliament. No one spoke of anti-British and anti-Dutch nowadays. It was impolitic. But whereas certain men genuinely tried to ease the forced situation and meet with fairness and justice upon common ground, others still kept the flag of discord in their hands, though they hid it under the table, so to speak, and only produced it when, as they chose to assert, some pet foible of their countrymen was overruled or some indignity threatened.

And of this section in Parliament van Hert was the leader. If he then married an Englishwoman, not even South African born, would he not be held up to ridicule by his colleagues? And then he would see Meryl again, and all his feelings would merge into one great longing for her; not for her money she had been right when she said such a charge was unjust, indeed, he almost wished she had been poor but her quiet dignity and calm strength and the exquisite fairness that held all his senses.

And as he stood beside her now he hated more and more, without knowing why, that she should go to Rhodesia. Whatever he had said to the contrary, he knew that there was a romance about that far land that might fascinate her. He knew that up there there were some of the cream of England’s men. “The second son’s country,” he had heard it called, and that meant very often the well-born, high-bred gentleman who was not afraid to work, who had never been pampered, and was full of the best sportsman’s spirit. The man of all others to attract such a woman as Meryl Pym. The mere thought of it seemed to fill him with a growing alarm, and presently, almost before he knew it, he found himself pouring into her ears the story of his love.

Meryl was startled and taken aback. She had known perhaps that he had a special liking for her; seen it often in his eyes when he gazed at her. But that he should speak now was a little sudden, and she wished Diana had not left them alone. She tried to meet his eyes, but something a little too ardent in them abashed her, and she looked out into the darkness, nervously twisting and untwisting the thread of her work.

He saw that she was taken aback, and tried somewhat to curb the eager intensity that he felt was unnerving her.

“You are going away up there, and I shall be very anxious about you,” he pleaded. “If you would only give me your promise before you go, and let me have the right to follow at once if you are ill or anything, it would make it so much easier.”

She stood up, agitated, still gazing wistfully into the night.

“It is very sudden.... I did not know.... I hardly thought.... Have you ... have you ... remembered everything?...”

“That you are English and I am Dutch?... What of it, Meryl?... I may call you Meryl, mayn’t I?... Are we not both South Africans?...”

He tried to take her hand and draw her to him, but she shrank away and he did not urge it.

“Have you remembered it long enough?... Thought it out thoroughly?... It all seems somehow so sudden.”

“I have known long that I loved you. Does anything else really matter if you can love me in return?”

“Ah!...” she breathed and stopped short.

She had liked him long. She had always liked him. Away from his politics he was liked by most people. Huguenot blood was in his veins, and it showed itself in a French charm of manner that came to him naturally when he could get away from that bigoted, narrow obstinacy that marred him. She felt he was a man who might be led to many things, though driven to none. Because he attracted her she felt she half loved the Huguenot side of him already. If only the other side did not so insistently repel! Could it perhaps be overruled? Could she love him truly enough to hold his love for ever, and through it lead him to heights he might never even sight without her? Yet her eyes were wistful, gazing out there at the dreaming stars, and her face gleamed whiter and whiter.

This was not the love that whispered to her when she looked to the far blue hills. This was not the consummation the high stars in far infinities told her vaguely might some day bless her life.

And then he pleaded again in low-voiced eagerness, and in distress she turned to him. “I’m so sorry. I can’t bear to think of perhaps making you unhappy. But ... but ... I’m afraid I don’t love you in the way you want. I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I have been too sudden.” He drew himself up, and his eyes followed hers out to the darkness. And a touch of latent nobility seemed to come out in him; a quiet dignity like her own that appealed to her strongly. “I won’t take your answer to-night. I shall come to you again when you come back. Perhaps then ... when you have thought about it ...” He broke off abruptly. “May I write to you?... Will you sometimes write to me?... Perhaps I could follow ...”

They heard steps and voices coming towards them from the drawing-room where Diana had wearied of her operas, and in sudden haste he caught her hand and raised it to his lips.

“I think I have to thank you for a good deal,” he told her a trifle huskily. “Men of all nations are better for being admitted to the friendship of women like you. If there were anything I could do to serve you?...” and he waited for her to speak.

“Serve South Africa,” she breathed tensely. “I could ask no more of any man.”

His hand tightened upon hers.

“Serve her with me. Together we could do so much.”

He saw her waver.

“Let me tell you when I come back. Yes ... together we might do so much....”

“When you come back ...” he said, and pressed her hand in understanding.

Then Diana stepped out of the brightness of the drawing-room.

“How can you two stay sleepily there, looking at the stars like two cats, when I am trying to lure you indoors with the latest comic-opera music! Meinheer van Hert, Mister Pym says, will you drink with him?...”